ce with France. The Hundred
Years War, though it had driven the English from Guienne and the south,
had left the French Monarchy hemmed in by great feudatories on every other
border. Britanny was almost independent in the west. On the east the house
of Anjou lay, restless and ambitious, in Lorraine and Provence, while the
house of Burgundy occupied its hereditary duchy and Franche Comte. On the
northern frontier the same Burgundian house was massing together into a
single state nearly all the crowd of counties, marquisates, and dukedoms
which now make up Holland and Belgium. Nobles hardly less powerful or more
dependent on the Crown held the central provinces of the kingdom when
Lewis the Eleventh mounted its throne but a few months after Edward's
accession. The temper of the new king drove him to a strife for the
mastery of his realm, and his efforts after centralization and a more
effective rule soon goaded the baronage into a mood of revolt. But Lewis
saw well that a struggle with it was only possible if England stood aloof.
His father's cool sagacity had planned the securing of his conquests by
the marriage of Lewis himself to an English wife, and though this project
had fallen through, and the civil wars had given safety to France to the
end of Charles's reign, the ruin of the Lancastrian cause at Towton again
roused the danger of attack from England at the moment when Lewis mounted
the throne. Its young and warlike king, the great baron who was still
fresh from the glory of Towton, might well resolve to win back the
heritage of Eleanor, that Duchy of Guienne which had been lost but some
ten years before. Even if such an effort proved fruitless, Lewis saw that
an English war would not only ruin his plans for the overthrow of the
nobles, but would leave him more than ever at their mercy. Above all it
would throw him helplessly into the hands of the Burgundian Duke. In the
new struggle as in the old the friendship of Burgundy could alone bring a
favourable issue, and such a friendship would have to be paid for by
sacrifices even more terrible than those which had been wrenched from the
need of Charles the Seventh. The passing of Burgundy from the side of
England to the side of France after the Treaty of Arras had been bought by
the cession to its Duke of the towns along the Somme, of that Picardy
which brought the Burgundian frontier to some fifty miles from Paris.
Sacrifices even more costly would have to buy the aid o