The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 08: The Later Renaissance: from Gutenberg to the Reformation
History
The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 08: The Later Renaissance: from Gutenberg to the Reformation
World history
and had wine and victuals furnished them in every inn without any payment
being demanded.
This treaty did very little honor to either of these monarchs. It
discovered the imprudence of Edward, who had taken his measures so ill
with his allies as to be obliged, after such an expensive armament, to
return without making any acquisitions adequate to it. It showed the want
of dignity in Louis, who, rather than run the hazard of a battle,
agreed to subject his kingdom to a tribunal, and thus acknowledge the
superiority of a neighboring prince possessed of less power and territory
than himself. But Louis thought that all the advantages of the treaty
were on his side, and that he had overreached Edward by sending him out
of France on such easy terms.
The most honorable part of Louis' treaty with Edward was the stipulation
for the liberty of Queen Margaret, who, though after the death of her
husband and son she could no longer be formidable to Government, was
still detained in custody by Edward. Louis paid fifty thousand crowns for
her ransom; and that Princess, who had been so active on the stage of
the world, and who had experienced such a variety of fortune, passed the
remainder of her days in tranquillity and privacy till the year 1482,
when she died; an admirable princess, but more illustrious by her
undaunted spirit in adversity than by her moderation in prosperity.
She seems neither to have enjoyed the virtues nor been subject to the
weaknesses of her sex, and was as much tainted with the ferocity as
endowed with the courage of that barbarous age in which she lived.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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