While he was so conscious of his own greatness, present and future, and of his own laudable intentions to do well by his subjects, it is quite possible, too, that Charles was puzzled more or less consciously by his failure to win popularity. For he was quite as unpopular with his courtiers as with his subjects. The former did not like the rigid court rules. There was no pleasure in sitting through audiences silent and stiff "as at a sermon," and exposed to personal reprimands from their chief if there were the slightest lapses from his standard of conduct. They did not know on what meat the duke was feeding his imagination, an imagination that already saw him as Cæsar. Had he actually attained the loftier rank that he dreamed of, his premature arrogance might have been forgotten, but his pride of glory invisible to the world about him was undoubtedly a bar to his popularity during the years 1470-73. Before this pompous scene passed at St. Omer, Louis had been relieved of anxiety in regard to the stability of his kingdom, and the dangers of an heir like his brother who might easily be used as a tool by some clever faction opposed to the ruling monarch. On June 10th, a son was born to him, afterwards Charles VIII. of France. Complaisant still were his words to his Burgundian cousin, but the moment was drawing near when his efforts to circumvent him were no longer secret. The embassy returned home. Possibly their report of the duke's passionate words goaded the king into discarding his mask of friendship. At any rate, his next steps were unequivocal in showing which side of the fresh English quarrel he meant to espouse. Margaret of Anjou hated the Earl of Warwick, not only because he had unseated her husband but because he had doubted her fidelity to that husband. Nevertheless, under Louis's persuasions, she consented to forget her past wrongs and to stake her future hopes on fraternising with him on a basis of common hate for Edward IV. The alliance was to be sealed by the marriage of young Edward of Lancaster, the prince whose very legitimacy Warwick had questioned, with the earl's younger daughter. It was a singular union to be accepted by the parents, separated as they had been by the wall of insults interchanged during more than a decade of bitter enmity. Louis brought his cousin to this step of concession. She saw her seventeen-year-old son betrothed to the sixteen-year-old Anne Neville, and later she herself swore reconciliation to Warwick on a piece of the true cross in St. Mary's Church at Angers (August 4, 1470).