"The king my master," said the ambassador, "doth propose to assert by arms his plain rights over the kingdom of Naples, now occupied by some usurper or other, a bastard of the house of Arragon.

He doth consider, moreover, the conquest of Naples only as a bridge thrown down before him for to take him into Greece; there he is resolved to lavish his blood and his treasure, though he should have to pawn his crown and drain his kingdom, for to overthrow the tyranny of the Ottomans, and open to himself in this way the kingdom of Heaven." The King of England gave a somewhat ironical reply to this chivalrous address, merely asking whether the King of France would consent not to dispose of the heiress of Brittany's hand, save on the condition of not marrying her himself.

The ambassadors shuffled out of the question by saying that their master was so far from any such idea, that it had not been foreseen in their instructions.
Whether it had or had not been foreseen and meditated upon, so soon as the reunion of Brittany with France by the marriage of the young duchess, Anne, with King Charles VIII.

appeared on the horizon as a possible, and, peradventure, probable fact, it became the common desire, aim, and labor of all the French politicians who up to that time had been opposed, persecuted, and proscribed.

Since the battle of St.Aubin-du-Cormier, Duke Louis of Orleans had been a prisoner in the Tower of Bourges, and so strictly guarded that he was confined at night in an iron cage like Cardinal Balue's for fear he should escape.