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As a final cement to the new friendship between Burgundy and France, it was also agreed at Arras that the heir of the former should wed a daughter of Charles VII. When the Count of Charolais was five years old, the Seigneur of Crèvecoeur, "a wise and prudent gentleman" was despatched to the French court on divers missions, among which was the business of negotiating the projected alliance.
In order to be safe in the direction of Burgundy as well as that of Brittany, Louis had entered into negotiations with Edward IV., King of England, and had made him offers, perhaps even promises, which seemed to trench upon the rights ceded by the treaty of Conflans to the Duke of Burgundy, as to certain districts of Picardy.
Saddles were emptied, archers were cut down or speared ere they could draw bows, the Burgundians were spurring for their lives, many cried mercy, and were taken to ransom, of whom I had my share, as I shall tell. But a few men made a right good end. Thomas Kyriel, a knight of England, stood to his banner, his archers rallied about it, with three or four knights of Burgundy.
Even after the unification of the fifteenth century, when the country came under the rule of the Dukes of Burgundy, the notion of a distinct nationality, such as the French or the British, remains hidden to the superficial student, the Netherlands forming merely a part of the rich possessions of the most powerful vassals of France.
In 1340 the gigantic ruins came into the hands of the powerful Benedictine Abbey of Cluny, near Macon, in Burgundy; and about 1480, the abbots began to erect on the spot a town mansion for themselves, which still bears the name of the Hotel de Cluny. The house was mostly built by Jaques d'Amboise, abbot, in 1490. The style is late Gothic, with Renaissance features.
He read of the room that was prepared at the palace at Rheims for the use of Queen Joan of Burgundy, and was decorated with "thirteen hundred and twenty-one parrots, made in broidery, and blazoned with the king's arms, and five hundred and sixty-one butterflies, whose wings were similarly ornamented with the arms of the queen, the whole worked in gold."
Charles raised the siege and marched on Rouen, hoping to meet the Duke of Brittany; but that Prince had his hands full, for Louis had overrun his territories, and had reduced him to terms. The Duke of Burgundy saw that the coalition had completely failed; he too made fresh truce with Louis at Senlis , and only, deferred, he no doubt thought, the direct attack on his dangerous rival.
In the empty watches of the night, in the blistering daytime, under the white sky or the deep violet, Des Barres remembered his struck face, De Gurdun his stolen wife, Saint-Pol his dead brother, and the Duke of Burgundy his forty pounds. It must be said that Richard stretched his authority as far as it would go.
With such a train as this there was little fear of any trouble with bands of marauders, and as the road lay through a country devoted to Burgundy there was small chance of their encountering an Orleanist force. They travelled by almost the same route by which Dame Margaret had been escorted to Paris.
There exists a sort of analogy between celebrated men and celebrated places; it was not, therefore, an uninteresting spectacle to see Bonaparte surveying the field of Morat, where, in 1476, Charles the Bold, Duke of Burgundy, daring like himself, fell with his powerful army under the effects of Helvetian valour.
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