alternatehistory.com

In Rome Pope Sixtus IV was not happy at all to receive the letter of the Emperor (who, in truth was more an order to investigate the matter of King Edward’s wedding than a request to doing it) and was seriously tempted to do nothing about it (presents heard him cursing ”that damned bishop Stillington“ but also the Holy Roman Emperor, Richard III and the late Edward IV more than once) he had enough troubles in Italy without any need to placate the Emperor. Only the intervention of the powerful Vice Chancellor of the Holy Roman Church persuaded the Pope who not investigating the matter would be a very bad idea as the Papal States right now had more than enough enemies (that without adding who most of that enemies were rulers angered by the Pope himself but with a remind who a cardinalate to a certain bishop would likely help in Italy). Thus the Pope resigned himself to what needed to be done and quickly prepared an embassy for England with full power to investigate the matter putting the English Cardinal Thomas Bourchier, Archbishop of Canterbury as head of the commission but with the obligation to send all the documents and finding to Rome before the verdict as he reserved the final judgement for himself....
Leaving Rome in July they would arrive late in that year in England, where King Richard was not happy to see them but still had other, bigger, troubles and was already taking some countermeasures to the actions of the Emperor, while bishop Stillington was clearly irate for that unnecessary Papal interference.
Cardinal Bourchier (who was a relative of the royal family and had crowned Richard) while not exactly happy for that Papal investigation would do his part (and burn the letter with instructions of the Vice Chancellor just after reading it, not who that letter contained anything different from that he was already thinking to do of his own on that matter)...
The year 1483 would end amid rumors who something happened to Edward V and Richard of Shrewsbury, with Queen Dowager Elizabeth Woodville and her daughters still in sanctuary, Richard III and Anne Neville celebrating Christmas as King and Queen but worried for the bad turn taken by the health of the Prince of Wales, their only child, and the news who Archduke Maximilian, returned in Burgundy a couple of months earlier and waiting for something still mysterious, and Archduchess Elisabeth now had a son, Archduke Edward, born in Vienna and who apparently mother and son were in very good health (and Richard had received that news so quickly only thanks to a letter of his sister Margaret... and remained at the obscure of the fact who the same messenger who brought him that urgent letter had already delivered some other messages, that ones from Archduke Maximilian, in England)....
Meanwhile Anne de Beaujeu, regent of France was waiting to see what would be happen but pretty intentioned to stay out of that... the death of her father had galvanized all the vassals who disliked taking orders from Paris, the Duke d’Orleans was surely conspiring something, other than supporting so vocally his own brother-in-law to make her impossible sending any help to her aunt Madeleine and cousin Catherine, the rightful Queen of Navarre, for defending her Crown from her uncle and only God knew what the Duke of Brittany was planning and cursed Maximilian had not yet consigned to them his daughter Margaret, her brother Charles’ fiancé, promising to send the girl in the next spring ...