The Venetian, Dominic of Treviso, was quite right; Louis XII. was “of unstable mind, saying yes and no.” On such characters discouragement tells rapidly. In order to put off the struggle which had succeeded so ill for him in the kingdom of Naples, Louis concluded, on the 31st of March, 1504, a truce for three years with the King of Spain; and on the 22d of September, in the same year, in order to satisfy his grudge on account of the Venetians’ demeanor towards him, he made an alliance against them with Emperor Maximilian I. and Pope Julius II., with the design, all three of them, of wresting certain provinces from them. With those political miscalculations was connected a more personal and more disinterested feeling. Louis repented of having in 1501 affianced his daughter Claude to Prince Charles of Austria, and of the enormous concessions he had made by two treaties, one of April 5, 1503, and the other of September 22, 1504, for the sake of this marriage. He had assigned as dowry to his daughter, first the duchy of Milan, then the kingdom of Naples, then Brittany, and then the duchy of Burgundy and the countship of Blois. The latter of these treaties contained even the following strange clause: “If, by default of the Most Christian king or of the queen his wife, or of the Princess Claude, the aforesaid marriage should not take place, the Most Christian king doth will and consent, from now, that the said duchies of Burgundy and Milan and the countship of Asti, do remain settled upon the said Prince Charles, Duke of Luxembourg, with all the rights therein possessed, or possibly to be possessed, by the Most Christian king.” [_Corps Diplomatique du Droit des Gens,_ by J. Dumont, t. iv. part i. p. 57.] It was dismembering France, and at the same time settling on all her frontiers, to east, west, and south-west, as well as to north and south, a power which the approaching union of two crowns, the imperial and the Spanish, on the head of Prince Charles of Austria, rendered so preponderating and so formidable.
It was not only from considerations of external policy, and in order to conciliate to himself Emperor Maximilian and King Ferdinand, that Louis XII. had allowed himself to proceed to concessions so plainly contrary to the greatest interests of France: he had yielded also to domestic influences. The queen his wife, Anne of Brittany, detested Louise of Savoy, widow of Charles d’Orleans, Count of Angouleme, and mother of Francis d’Angouleme, heir presumptive to the throne, since Louis XII. had no son. Anne could not bear the idea that her daughter, Princess Claude, should marry the son of her personal enemy; and, being more Breton than French, say her contemporaries, she, in order to avoid this disagreeableness, had used with the king all her influence, which was great, in favor of the Austrian marriage, caring little, and, perhaps, even desiring, that Brittany should be again severed from France. Louis, in the midst of the reverses of his diplomacy, had thus to suffer from the hatreds of his wife, the observations of his advisers, and the reproaches of his conscience as a king. He fell so ill that he was supposed to be past recovery. “It were to do what would be incredible,” says his contemporary, John de St. Gelais, “to write or tell of the lamentations made throughout the whole realm of France, by reason of the sorrow felt by all for the illness of their good king. There were to be seen night and day, at Blois, at Amboise, at Tours, and everywhere else, men and women going all bare throughout the churches and to the holy places, in order to obtain from divine mercy grace of health and convalescence for one whom there was as great fear of losing as if he had been the father of each.” Louis was touched by this popular sympathy; and his wisest councillors, Cardinal d’Amboise the first of all, took advantage thereof to appeal to his conscience in respect of the engagements which “through weakness he had undertaken contrary to the interests of the realm and the coronation-promises.” Queen Anne herself, not without a struggle, however, at last gave up her opposition to this patriotic recoil; and on the 10th of May, 1505, Louis XII. put in his will a clause to the effect that his daughter, Princess Claude, should be married, so soon as she was old enough, to the heir to the throne, Francis, Count of Angouleme. Only it was agreed, in order to avoid diplomatic embarrassments, that this arrangement should be kept secret till further notice. [The will itself of Louis XII. has been inserted in the _Recueil des Ordonnances des Bois des France,_ t. xxi. p. 323, dated 30th of May, 1505.]