Anne was enough like her father in the hardness and crafty resoluteness of her character to win his confidence. We see her intrusted with the care of one of the most important of those noble wards whom Louis loved to bring to his court and keep under tutelage, Marguerite, the little daughter of Maximilian and Marie de Bourgogne. When the fear of assassination had driven the king to immure himself in Plessis-lez-Tours, and to hedge himself about with such fantastic and intricate defences that none but his favored lowborn servants could enter with ease and hope of return, he would sometimes admit this favored daughter. And when, in the imminence of death, he determined that the silly dauphin, jealously guarded at Amboise, should learn something and should know that the power of the sceptre was soon to pass to him, it was Anne de Beaujeu again on whom he relied. He enjoined the dauphin Charles to keep about him the faithful servants who had made France; especially did he recommend "Master Oliver," without whom, he said, "I should have been nothing." But, before all others, the dauphin was to honor and obey his wise sister, Anne de Beaujeu, the least foolish woman in the world. In spite of astrologers; in spite of liberal doses of that expensive panacea, potable gold, administered by his insolent physician, Jacques Coictier; in spite of a second anointing from the sacred _ampulla_, brought from Rheims for that special purpose; in spite of all the silver saints stuck on the rim of his cap the spirit went out of the body of Louis XI, and France welcomed his death as a deliverance. In his zeal for the destruction of feudalism and the upbuilding of a national government, he had become a tyrant. But the work he had begun must go on, if France was not to step back fifty or a hundred years in progress. The new king, Charles VIII, was but a boy of fourteen, and deplorably immature. He could hardly read and write, nor did natural intelligence supply the defects of education; for he was weak in mind, weak in body, and easily influenced for good or for ill. With such a tool ready for the hand of any ambitious noble who would destroy France, the outlook was not cheering. But it was the good fortune of France to find a ruler who could and did control the king till such time as the fruits of the wise despotism of Louis could be safely gathered; and this ruler was a woman. As Charles had already attained the legal majority prescribed for the heir to the throne, there could be no regency. But Anne de Beaujeu and her husband had been named by the late king as the tutors of Charles, to the exclusion of Louis d'Orléans, who, as first prince of the blood royal, had a prescriptive right to the guardianship. And just as Blanche de Castille, under different conditions and by different means, had managed to displace Philippe Hurepel, so Anne now managed to outwit and supplant Louis d'Orléans.