“MONSIEUR MON BON FRÈRE,--Je aye receu par le Sr de la Pomeraye, voz lectres & aveques sa charge entendu la singulere benevoleme & amytié que me portés, dont je suys très consolée & vous en remercie de tout mon cueur, vous priant de tousjours ainsi continuer comme c’est la ferme confiance de celle que est & à jamays serra.
“Vostre bonne seure, cosine & allyée, “ANNE.”[304]
In June they met at Estampes and agreed to marry each other as soon as Louis could get his divorce. Anne went back to Paris, and later in the summer she went to Laval to stay with the Queen-dowager of Sicily, after which she returned to Bretagne, where she was received with great state and universal joy. Delighted to be once more in possession of her own duchy she resolved now that she had recovered the reins of government never again to let them slip out of her hands. Under her supervision a history of Bretagne was written by a learned priest, her almoner, from the papers and records in different monasteries.
She ruled Bretagne as a sovereign princess with much wisdom and capacity, and being generous and charitable she made various excellent laws for the good of the people. Her own household she arranged on a magnificent scale, and appointed a guard of a hundred Breton gentlemen who escorted her wherever she went.
While she was at Nantes her old governess, Madame de Laval, died, to her great sorrow.
The question of the King’s divorce was heard before an ecclesiastical tribunal, and the marriage dissolved by Alexander VI. (Borgia).
Louis made Jeanne Duchesse de Berry and gave her a splendid appanage of lands and money. She retired to Bourges, founded the order of the Annonciades, became Superior of it, and died in 1500, after a life of charity and devotion. The dissolution of a marriage to which he had always had an unconquerable repugnance cannot be considered surprising, but at first many of the people were indignant and pointed at the judges, saying, “There is Caiaphas, there is Herod, there is Pontius Pilate; they have judged against _la haute dame_ that she is not Queen of France.”[305]
Alexander VI.,[306] of the noble Spanish family of Borgia, had in his youth a natural daughter, the famous Lucrezia, Duchess of Ferrara, and four sons. The eldest and youngest he married to daughters of the King of Naples, the second, Giovanni, Duca di Gandia was supposed to have been murdered by his next brother, the Cardinal Cesare, or Cæsar, who had become a soldier and who surpassed most of his contemporaries in the enormity of his crimes. The Pope now sent him to France with a Cardinal’s hat for George d’Amboise, the King’s favourite minister, and the bull for the dissolution of his marriage, Louis promising him the duchy of Valentinois, a large pension and one of his relations in marriage.