y Edward to transmit his portrait to Anne at
Rouen; and from him, probably, came to Oxford the suggestion which that
nobleman had hazarded to Montagu; and now that it became his policy
seriously and earnestly to espouse the cause of his kinswoman Margaret,
he saw all the advantage to his cold statecraft which could be drawn
from a boyish love. Louis had a well-founded fear of the warlike spirit
and military talents of Edward IV.; and this fear had induced him
hitherto to refrain from openly espousing the cause of the Lancastrians,
though it did not prevent his abetting such seditions and intrigues as
could confine the attention of the martial Plantagenet to the perils of
his own realm. But now that the breach between Warwick and the king had
taken place; now that the earl could no longer curb the desire of
the Yorkist monarch to advance his hereditary claims to the fairest
provinces of France,--nay, peradventure, to France itself,--while the
defection of Lord Warwick gave to the Lancastrians the first fair hope
of success in urging their own pretensions to the English throne,
he bent all the powers of his intellect and his will towards the
restoration of a natural ally and the downfall of a dangerous foe.
But he knew that Margaret and her Lancastrian favourers could not
of themselves suffice to achieve a revolution,--that they could only
succeed under cover of the popularity and the power of Warwick, while
he perceived all the art it would require to make Margaret forego her
vindictive nature and long resentment, and to supple the pride of the
great earl into recognizing as a sovereign the woman who had branded him
as a traitor.

Long before Lord Oxford's arrival, Louis, with all that address which
belonged to him, had gradually prepared the earl to familiarize himself
to the only alternative before him, save that, indeed, of powerless
sense of wrong and obscure and lasting exile. The French king looked
with more uneasiness to the scruples of Margaret; and to remove these,
he trusted less to his own skill than to her love for her only son.

His youth passed principally in Anjou--that court of minstrels--young
Edward's gallant and ardent temper had become deeply imbued with the
southern poetry and romance. Perhaps the very feud between his House and
Lord Warwick's, though both claimed their common descent from John of
Gaunt, had tended, by the contradictions in the human heart, to endear
to him the recollection of the g