Very frequently, the “best” marriages were negotiated by intermediaries more or less obliging, relatives or friends. Princes and princesses were married through the good offices of diplomatists. Indeed, ladies and gentlemen of the Court did quite a respectable trade in match-making, for a consideration. But, after all, the task of marrying his daughter was essentially and especially one for the father. For the most part, the father would be only too glad to wash his hands of the business. In every case he was in a hurry to bring matters to a head, and believed that in losing no time he was acting in the interests of his child. She was to belong wholly to another household, since it was a woman’s lot to belong to her husband, and so it was well for her to enter upon her new life as early as possible, before she had formed ideas of her own, and at an age when the paternal household would not yet have set its stamp indelibly upon her. In this respect the betrothals, the “marriages for the future”—marriages, that is, solemnised in infancy for future consummation—were of great service, and the higher the position occupied in the social scale, the earlier such marriages were. Kings have even been known to marry their daughters two days after birth, but such a compact, it is true, was in the end declared by the lawyers to be immoral and hardly serious. Indeed, later on, when the time for carrying out the bargain came, some princes and princesses felt constrained to protest against this arbitrary disposal of their persons. Happily, such engagements were not of the most stable kind, and, often enough, political considerations were sufficient to upset them before any harm was done.[20] In distinguished families, betrothal was by no means unusual at the age of two or three. At this tender age Vittoria Colonna[21] was betrothed to the Marquis of Pescara.