Young Edward was, indeed, a prince on whom a mother might well look with pride. Every thing had been done to make him worthy of the throne he had been born to inherit. Fortescue had instructed the royal boy in the duties necessary for his enacting the part of "a patriot king;" and, while engaged in studies so grave, the prince had not neglected those accomplishments essential to his rank. Ere leaving Verdun he had become a handsome and interesting youth. His bearing was chivalrous; his manner graceful; his countenance of almost feminine beauty, shaded with fair hair, and lighted up with a blue eye that sparkled with valor and intelligence. Such, arrayed in the short purple jacket trimmed with ermine, the badge of St. George on his breast, and a single ostrich feather--his cognizance as Prince of Wales--in his high cap, was the heir of Lancaster, whom Margaret of Anjou presented to the devoted adherents of the Red Rose, who, having lost every thing else, came to the French court to place their swords at his disposal. Louis was now in his element; and to reconcile the Yorkist earl and the Lancastrian queen, he exerted all his powers of political intrigue. His task, indeed, was not easy. Warwick had accused Margaret of plotting against his life, and murdering his father. Margaret had charged Warwick--whom she hated more bitterly even than she had hated the Duke of York--with depriving her of a crown, and destroying her reputation. The earl's wish, in the event of deposing Edward, still was to place Clarence on the throne; and, even since quarreling with the Yorkist king, he had taken part against the Lancastrians. The queen was, on her part, utterly averse to friendship with her ancient adversary. "My wounds," she exclaimed, "must bleed till doomsday, when to GOD'S justice I will appeal for vengeance!" Most men would have regarded the case as desperate. But Louis viewed it in another light. Between the queen and the earl, indeed, there was a wide gulph, in which ran the blood of slaughtered friends and kinsmen; but one sentiment the queen without a crown and the earl without an earldom had in common--an intense antipathy to Edward of York. Moreover, the Prince of Wales had, on some festive occasion, seen Anne Neville, the earl's daughter, and the sight had inspired him with one of those romantic attachments which call into action the tenderest sympathies and the noblest aspirations. A fear that Margaret and Warwick would never consent to a union might have daunted young Edward, but Louis had seen more of the world. He knew that Warwick could hardly see the prince without being covetous to have him as a son-in-law; and he knew that Margaret would be prompted by the ambition of a queen, and the tenderness of a mother, to recover by compromise the crown which she had been unable to gain by force. In one important respect the mind of Louis was made up--that, on all points, he would intrigue and negotiate with an eye to his own profit.