ABSTRACT
The year 1477 had just opened and the king of England was taking his ease at Westminster Palace or Greenwich when he received the shocking news that, on 5th January, the Duke of Burgundy had been killed in the midst of his troops besieging Nancy. As Mary of Burgundy was twenty years of age and the Dauphin only six, the marriage Louis had proposed to Charles’s daughter was so preposterous that her acceptance of it was almost unthinkable. The king of France, the Englishmen began by saying, has twice sent Monsieur de Vienne and others to propose to the king of England that he should assist him against the daughter of the late Duke Charles of Burgundy and that they should divide between them the lands they conquered. Edward, who had so little reason to trust his brother, made it perfectly plain that he would never permit Clarence to make so great a marriage.
