Fortunately, the old French spider, Louis XI, died almost as soon as Margaret reached Paris, and her education was undertaken by his daughter the Princess Anne, who became regent for the Dauphin Charles and was another of those strong and righteous personalities of a time that already had almost exhausted itself by overproduction. Under her able direction the château of Amboise became a kind of “finishing school” for princesses, and here the small Margaret was subjected to a system of training that would stagger the present day. “On a foundation of strong religious principles hewn from the early fathers of the Church and the _Enseignements de Saint Louis_, she built up a moral and philosophic education with the help of the ancient philosophers, especially Plato as studied with the commentary of Boethius,” maintaining a cloisteral simplicity of life and fighting affectation and pretence with an austere ardour that contrasts quaintly with the court life of the time. And all this just before the discovery of America and on the eve of the election of the Borgia, Alexander VI, to the Papacy! In spite of her gorgeous betrothal to the poor little awkward and misshapen prince, the marriage was destined not to come off; political considerations intervened, and Charles married Anne, the heiress of Brittany, out of hand, and the Princess Margaret was unceremoniously returned to Flanders where she was received with enthusiasm by her loyal if turbulent and irresponsible Flemings. The situation was characteristically fifteenth century, which is to say impetuous and fantastic. Maximilian had just been made King of the Romans and heir to the Holy Roman Empire; he had ventured into the nest of unruly Flemings, been captured, and imprisoned for eleven weeks, to the scandal of Europe and of the Pope who put both Bruges and Ghent under the interdict. Maximilian won in the end by promising much and performing little, and then backed Brittany against France, intending to marry the little Princess Anne, but he lost both the battle and his coveted bride with her desirable territories, both being won by his prospective son-in-law Charles who at one blow threw over Margaret, and won the very lady her father had been striving to attain. Maximilian’s irritation was perhaps excusable under the circumstances, but when he found no one who really cared to help him in a war against France he turned to schemes of a new crusade for driving the Turks out of Europe, consoled himself with a Sforza princess from Milan, and worked out a beautiful new scheme of a Spanish alliance by marrying his son Philip to the Princess Juana and Margaret to the royal Infante, Don Juan. Margaret was now seventeen, and after Dona Juana had made her way to Flanders by sea, always in imminent danger of shipwreck, and married Prince Philip, she took the poor storm-tossed ladies-in-waiting back with her by the same uncomfortable route, producing for their