But, whatever his apprehensions, Louis was not doomed to have his formidable contemporary as a foe or a guest on the banks of the Seine. Edward, doubtless delighted with the prospect of indulging in hunting, carousing, and love-making at Shene or Windsor, recalled, without delay, his soldiers from Peronne, Abbeville, and other places, and, escorted by the Bishop of Evreux, marched back to Calais. Thence he embarked for England, but not without being unpleasantly reminded that he hardly came off with royal honors. In fact, the Constable of St. Pol, apparently enraged that events had taken such a turn as to profit him nothing, wrote Edward a furious letter, calling him "a coward, a pitiful and poor sovereign, for having made a treaty with a king who would not keep one of his promises."[15] The Plantagenet sent St. Pol's epistle to the King of France, and digested the affront; and while Louis, who had already been suspected of poisoning his brother, Charles de Valois, got rid of another enemy by beheading the constable, Edward returned to England to expend the money he had received as a bribe on those pleasures destined to destroy his health and obscure his intellect. Nor did his nobles come home empty-handed. Dorset, Hastings, and Howard, Sir John Cheyney and Sir Thomas St. Leger, had become pensioners of the French king; and the people were left to complain that the expedition for which they had paid so dearly had ended in infamy. Perhaps, under such circumstances, they did drop a tear over the grave of "The Stout Earl," who, had he been alive, would not have stood quietly by while a king of England extracted taxes from English subjects to commence an unnecessary war, and took bribes from a French monarch to conclude a humiliating peace. CHAPTER XXXIX. A DOMESTIC TRAGEDY. At the opening of the year 1477, Charles the Rash, Duke of Burgundy, fell at Nanci, before the two-handed swords of the Swiss mountaineers, leaving, by his first wife, Isabel of Bourbon, a daughter, Mary, the heiress of his dominions. About the same time, George, Duke of Clarence, and Anthony Woodville, Earl Rivers, happened to become widowers. The duke and the earl, in other days rivals for the hand of the heiress of Lord Scales, immediately entered the arena as candidates for that of Mary of Burgundy, and their rivalry produced one of the darkest domestic tragedies recorded in the Plantagenet annals. Clarence appears to have been the first to urge his claims. Almost ere the dust had time to gather on the coffin of his departed wife in the Abbey of Tewkesbury, the bereaved husband of Isabel Neville applied to his sister, the widow of Burgundy, to forward his suit with her step-daughter. The widowed duchess was the reverse of unfavorable to a matrimonial project so likely to advance the fortunes of her family, and the heart of Clarence for a moment glowed with anticipations of a great matrimonial success.