er and constable; her brothers and
sisters were matched with great nobles and heiresses; the heiress of the
Duke of Exeter, Edward's niece, whose hand Warwick sought for his
brother's son, was betrothed to Elizabeth's son by her former marriage.
The king's confidence was given to his new kinsmen, and Warwick saw
himself checked even at the council-board by the influence of the
Woodvilles. Still true to an alliance with France, he was met by their
advocacy of an alliance with Burgundy, where Charles of Charolais through
his father's sickness and age was now supreme. Both powers were equally
eager for English aid. Lewis despatched an envoy to prolong the truce from
his camp on the Somme, and proposed to renew negotiations for a marriage
treaty by seeking the hand of Edward's sister, Margaret, for a French
prince. Though "the thing which Charles hated most," as Commines tells us,
"was the house of York," the stress of politics drew him as irresistibly
to Edward. His wife, Isabella of Bourbon, had died during the war of the
League, and much as such a union was "against his heart," the activity of
Lewis forced him at the close of 1466 to seek to buy English aid by
demanding Margaret's hand in marriage.

[Sidenote: The two Alliances]

It is from this moment that the two great lines of our foreign policy
become settled and defined. In drawing together the states of the Low
Countries into a single political body, the Burgundian Dukes had built up
a power which has ever since served as a barrier against the advance of
France to the north or its mastery of the Rhine. To maintain this power,
whether in the hands of the Dukes or their successors, the Spaniard or the
Emperor, has always been a foremost object of English statesmanship; and
the Burgundian alliance in its earlier or later shapes has been the
constant rival of the alliance with France. At this moment however the
attitude of Burgundy was one rather of attack than of defence. If Charles
did not aim at the direct conquest of France, he looked to such a
weakening of it as would prevent Lewis from hindering the great plan on
which he had set his heart, the plan of uniting his scattered dominions on
the northern and eastern frontier of his rival by the annexation of
Lorraine, and of raising them into a great European power by extending his
dominion along the whole course of the Rhine. His policy was still to
strengthen the great feudatories against the Crown. "I love France