The princesses were waiting in great anxiety when they were told that Rieux and Comminges had both gone to Nantes, where they had joined Albret. Anne was very angry, all the more as she suspected that they would try to influence the people against her and her friends by making them believe that Dunois intended to deliver up both her and the town to the King of France. She set off from Rhédon on horseback with Isabelle and the Chancellor Montauban, with a bodyguard of ten Bretons as an escort, and rode to La Pasquelay, about three leagues from Nantes, where she was joined by Dunois at the head of some troops. She sent a message to Nantes ordering the gates to be opened for her entry, but the reply was that she was welcome to enter with her household and private guards, but not with Montauban, Dunois, or the troops; and seeing that the plan was to throw her into the power of Rieux and Albret, she angrily refused, upon which they marched out of the town with a large force to compel her to enter as they proposed. With undaunted courage Anne mounted on horseback behind Montauban and rode forward, while Dunois and the troops prepared for battle. But the townspeople no sooner saw her than they forbade any force to be used against her, but obliged the nobles to go back into the town. For some days negotiations went on, but Anne sent word that she would only enter Nantes as its sovereign, and turning away after a perilous journey took refuge at Rennes, where the people had begged her to come, and where they received her with bursts of enthusiastic loyalty and abuse of the traitors of Nantes.[284]
Her cousin, Jean de Châlons, who was taken prisoner with the Duc d’Orléans, but had been released,[285] was Anne’s great friend and supporter against Albret; and in March, 1490, it was decided to place her under the protection of the Emperor, by marrying her to his son, the King of the Romans. Negotiations were accordingly carried on with profound secrecy. Madame de Laval, seeing that her efforts were vain, abandoned the cause of her brother; Maximilian, King of the Romans, sent the Baron Volfan de Polhaim, with several other nobles, to Bretagne, and a few days after the ceremony of betrothal was gone through, and the marriage celebrated without any one knowing the day on which it took place. According to the old German custom in such cases, the young princess was placed in her bed into which Polhaim, as proxy for Maximilian, put his bare leg up to the knee in presence of the three other envoys, Madame de Laval and some members of the household of the Duchess, and declared the marriage to be consummated.