We have already noticed Louis XI.’s desire to establish his influence over Navarre, as shown in his support of Eleanor, Countess of Foix, and her French husband, and in the marriage of his sister Madeleine with their son Gaston.[7] His hopes were realized by Eleanor’s accession to the throne on the death of her father, John II. of Aragon in 1479, though she did not live to enjoy for more than a few weeks the sovereignty she had purchased at the price of a sister’s blood. She was succeeded by her grandson, Francis Phœbus, and he on his death in 1483 by his sister, Catherine. Footnote 7: See page 43. Ferdinand and Isabel at once suggested the marriage of this eligible heiress of thirteen with their five-year-old son; but her mother Madeleine of Valois, infinitely preferred to ally her child with one of her own race; and Catherine carried her inheritance to the French House of Albret. Spain was for the moment foiled; but a wedding many years later, its more than doubtful claims on Navarre enforced by arms, was yet to gain for Ferdinand the southern half of the mountain kingdom, whose double outlook across the Pyrenees had been the source of so much crime and bloodshed. Another alliance proposed for Prince John was with Anne of Brittany, heiress of a duchy, whose independence had always threatened the peace of France. It would have been a fitting revenge for French interference in Navarre and Aragon; but here again Spain was forestalled; and Anne of Beaujeu, regent of France on the death of her father Louis XI., succeeded in marrying her younger brother, Charles VIII., to Anne of Brittany thus linking to the French Crown the most important of its great provincial dependencies. As it happened, this marriage was to set free a bride for the Spanish Infante, Margaret of Hapsburg, daughter of Maximilian, King of the Romans, a Princess betrothed in her early youth to the Dauphin Charles and even sent to France for her education, but now repudiated in favour of a more advantageous match. Maximilian was by no means a proud man, but even his careless nature burned with resentment at his daughter’s return home under such circumstances; and he welcomed the idea of her union with a son of Ferdinand the Catholic, France’s antagonist for so many years. To make this Hapsburg-Aragonese friendship the more obvious and complete, the wedding became a double one; and Philip, Archduke of Austria and Count of Flanders, Maximilian’s son and heir, took as his bride the Spanish sovereigns’ second daughter, Joanna.