The strength he drew from his wide possessions, from his vast wealth (for his official revenues alone were estimated at eighty thousand crowns a year), from his warlike renown and his wide kinship, was backed by his personal popularity.

Above all the Yorkist party, bound to Warwick by a long series of victories, looked on him rather than on the young and untried king as its head.
[Sidenote: Lewis the Eleventh] The policy of Warwick pointed to a close alliance with France.

The Hundred Years War, though it had driven the English from Guienne and the south, had left the French Monarchy hemmed in by great feudatories on every other border.

Britanny was almost independent in the west.

On the east the house of Anjou lay, restless and ambitious, in Lorraine and Provence, while the house of Burgundy occupied its hereditary duchy and Franche Comte.