Game of Queens (11 page)

When Henry VII died, on 21 April 1509, Margaret Tudor (once again pregnant) was now the heir to the English throne. While James and the new king Henry VIII confirmed the Treaty of Perpetual Peace, Margaret’s baby, born in October at Holyrood, was christened Arthur, a name of great significance in recent and legendary English history. This Arthur was to die at a year old but of course, there was by that point every reason to hope that Henry VIII and his new queen would have children of their own.

When Henry VII of England died, his son Henry VIII instantly marked his accession by marrying Katherine of Aragon, his brother’s widow. Henry wrote to Margaret of Austria in the Netherlands, truly or falsely, that this was by the dying Henry VII’s ‘express command’. The wedding took place quickly and privately but their joint coronation, less than a fortnight later, was huge and public. That ceremony took place on 24 June 1509 and although a sudden shower forced the drenched queen to shelter under the awning of a draper’s stall, Katherine’s dreary years were at an end – for the moment, anyway.

Her world had gone from darkness into light. It was, on the surface, a fairy-tale piece of romanticism. Katherine, at twenty-four, still had the sunny good looks noted when she first came to England. She was described by ambassadors as being buxom, amiable and lively, inclined to smile even in adversity. Interestingly, however, letters between Katherine of Aragon and her father Ferdinand before the marriage suggest a more pragmatic agenda behind the love match, and a more active role for Katherine. Ferdinand urged his daughter to use ‘all your skill and prudence’ so as swiftly to ‘close the deal’.
¹
And Katherine, once safely wed, told Ferdinand that she loved her new husband so well firstly because he was the ‘so true son of your highness’, who desired to serve Ferdinand ‘with greater love and obedience’ than even a blood son might. This identification of Katherine of Aragon with Spain’s interests was a potential source of danger. But for the moment, this marriage gave the young Henry a partner more experienced in the ways of the world than he.

Perhaps there was a hint of trouble to come when in January 1510 Katherine suffered her first miscarriage. But this was in itself not an uncommon occurrence. More worrying, in hindsight, with our knowledge of both Katherine’s and her daughter Mary’s gynaecological history, was the fact that her doctors seem to have convinced Katherine she had miscarried one of twins and was still pregnant, although even the Spanish ambassador reported she had resumed her menstrual cycle. She remained in seclusion, preparing for childbirth, until forced to emerge, discreetly, in the spring. By that time, however, she was able to announce that she was pregnant once again.

On the morning of New Year’s Day 1511, Katherine gave birth to a boy, christened Henry, amid great rejoicing. After just seven weeks, the baby died, but again, such misfortunes were not uncommon in the sixteenth century. Certainly Katherine of Aragon’s relationship with Henry remained strong; strong enough so that by 1513 she was able to influence her husband and steer his country in the direction of an alliance with the Habsburgs and her birth family. She had obviously not forgotten her connection with Margaret of Austria, who had been one of the godparents of that short-lived baby boy.

Margaret of Austria’s role as Governor of the Netherlands was not always easy; indeed, she wrote that she often wished herself back in her mother’s womb. She had to tread carefully around her father: ‘I know that it is not my business to interfere in your said affairs, as I am an inexperienced woman in such matters, nevertheless the great duty I have towards you emboldens me to beg of you . . . to take care whilst there is still time’, she wrote on one occasion. (‘Rude and ungracious’ was how he described the advice so carefully hedged around.) She had, moreover, to stand up for the needs of the Netherlands themselves, as distinct from her father’s grandiose policies. But she scored an early victory for those Netherlands when she succeeded in overturning a trade agreement with England that was highly detrimental to its interests: the ‘
Malus Intercursus
’.

Five years before Anne Boleyn arrived in the Netherlands, moreover, Margaret of Austria had been a major player in the League of Cambrai, trusted in 1508 to represent her father, Emperor Maximilian, and her former father-in-law Ferdinand to negotiate an alliance with the French to aid the papacy against the encroachments of Venice. Maximilian wrote to advise her to engage all the houses on one side of Cambrai,
²
leaving the other to the French king’s representative. Meanwhile the French king, Louis, himself wrote chattily to remind her of how he had played with her when she was a little girl at Amboise. Even the pope, another partner in this alliance against the encroachments of the Venetian republic, was in the habit of sending Margaret devotional objects and relics of great value, while Henry VII ordered his ambassador to speak to Margaret about English interests. As her court poet Jean Lemaire put it: ‘Madame Margaret has seen and experienced more at her youthful age . . . than any lady on record, however long her life.’

Commentators spoke of her ‘courteous and caressing manners’. Although Margaret wrote to her ambassador in England that the negotiations gave her a headache and that she and her opponent frequently ‘got into each other’s hair’, she was willing to bring all her various abilities to the fight. Was it at Margaret of Austria’s court that Anne Boleyn learnt that her gender – femininity, sex itself – could be a weapon; could be a gambit in the great game that would set her against another woman – another queen – as surely as black and white face across the chessboard?

But the League of Cambrai did not long endure after the pope decided that France itself represented more of a threat than Venice. The year 1511 saw the pope organising a Holy League against France, to which he recruited Maximilian and Ferdinand, Venice and Henry VIII. Margaret’s father wrote that French perfidy would teach her a lesson: ‘We have more experience of the French than you have . . . and we would rather you were deceived by their fair speeches than ourselves, so that you would take more care in future.’

Faced with a long-running problem (the revolt of the Duke of Guelders, striving to win back the independence of his territory), at the end of 1510 Margaret wrote in agitation to her father: ‘you know I am a woman and that it is not my place to meddle in war . . . I beseech you my lord to have good advice over all this . . .’ Yet a few months later: ‘My Lord, I am readying myself . . . in order to march before our army. The army makes a very good sight, together with the artillery . . .’ Her father told her that she had fought ‘with the courage of a man and not that of a woman’.

The year 1512 was particularly wearing. Guelders gained the backing of the French and Margaret had no money to fight either her own or her father’s various campaigns. But in 1513 the new anti-French coalition was confirmed and Margaret was as central to the process as its very name, the Treaty of Mechelen, suggests. Margaret (in contrast to her former sister-in-law Juana) was at the heart of European diplomacy.

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There she was to bring up not only her nephew Charles but also three of his sisters. Charles’s younger brother Ferdinand, however, was raised in Spain by the grandfather for whom he was named, while a younger sister Catalina, born after Juana had returned to Spain, shared her mother’s captivity.

*
He paid those who allowed him to take out their teeth, rather than the reverse; a practice that might endear him to many today.

7

‘False imputations'

France, the Netherlands, 1513

‘A woman', Castiglione wrote, ‘has not so many ways of defending herself against false imputations as has a man.' Margaret of Austria was one of several women about to prove the truth of that dictat. The first six years of Margaret's regency had left her looking like a woman with her hands very firmly on the reins. Anne de Beaujeu's perfect pupil, you might say; the sort of woman Anne meant when she wrote that noblewomen were, ‘and should be, a pattern and an example for others in all things'.

But a great deal of Anne de Beaujeu's advice centred on one particular theme:

Suffer no man to touch your body, no matter who he is . . . not one in a thousand escapes without her honour being attacked or deceived, however ‘good' or ‘true' her love. Therefore, for the greatest certainty in such situations, I advise you to avoid all private meetings, no matter how pleasant they are . . .

Even the slightest slip could incur blame. Or, as Anne de Beaujeu had written in an uncomfortable prophecy:

There is no man of worth, however noble he may be, who does not use treachery, nor to whom it does not seem good sport to deceive or trick women of rank . . . there is no man so perfect who, in matters of love, is truthful or keeps his word.

The truth of that was about to be proved by Margaret of Austria herself, and perhaps also in France by the daughter of Anne de Beaujeu's protégée, Margaret's former playmate Louise of Savoy.

The early years of Louise's daughter Marguerite are inevitably known chiefly through accounts of her brother François, on whom centred all the hopes of the family ‘trinity'.
¹
But Marguerite's marriage had long been discussed. While still a child she had been offered as a bride for the future Henry VIII but the offer was declined, since it was felt that England's heir merited a daughter of the King of France, not a mere cousin.

As François's probable accession, and his marriage to King Louis XII's daughter Claude were established, England came back with a counter-offer: the suggestion that Marguerite might indeed marry the younger Henry if Louise of Savoy would marry his father, the widowed Henry VII. But Louis of France feared this double alliance might admit too much English influence into his country. When the English then suggested that Marguerite herself might marry the ageing Henry VII, she is reputed to have given a spirited refusal: ‘When my brother becomes king I will marry a man who is young, rich and noble – without having to cross the Channel!' But in fact, in 1509, Marguerite was married off to the personally unimpressive Charles, Duc d'Alençon, thus settling a longstanding territorial dispute between the house of Alençon and Marguerite's house of Angoulême.

 

In 1513 it was not Marguerite of Navarre but the English who crossed the Channel. And not for matters of love but of war. In theory at least England's efforts were directed at regaining the power and the territories it had held on the continent for much of the Middle Ages, and lost only in the fifteenth century. But in fact war was recognised as the main business, as well as pleasure, of the ruler – Machiavelli had very explicitly said as much – and Henry VIII was delightedly flexing his muscles as a warrior king when his alliance with the pope and Emperor Maximilian against France brought him abroad at the head of a mighty army.

That August, the fall of the town of Thérouanne, near the borders of France and the Netherlands, was followed by the siege and triumphant capture of the wealthy walled city of Tournai. And when the treaty she struck between her father Maximilian and Henry VIII brought Henry across the English Channel, Margaret of Austria was there. Her father, quixotically, had declared his intention of serving as a volunteer in the English army. When he asked her to join him at the besieged town of Tournai, she replied that she would do so if it were really necessary, ‘but otherwise, it is not fitting for a widow to be trotting about and visiting armies for pleasure . . .' Was she protesting too much? Perhaps.

Later, Margaret of Austria did take her nephew Charles to meet her father and Henry VIII at Lille, and went on to Tournai, with notable consequences. Although it might not be considered worthy of record in the chronicles of great European events, the small drama played in the summer of 1513 and the following months is worth anatomising, not only for the insight it gives into the protagonists (Henry VIII included) but as a test case of the way a powerful woman could be manipulated through her sexuality; the way in which, particularly where women were concerned, the personal became part of the political.

The Tudor chronicler Edward Hall described how Henry received Charles and Margaret outside Tournai and brought them into the town ‘with great triumph. The noise went that the Lord Lisle made request of marriage to the Lady Margaret . . . but whether he proffered marriage or not she favoured him highly.' Lord Lisle was the recently ennobled Charles Brandon, a man on the make and already a man with a colourful marital history.

Born in the gentry, Brandon had been raised at court. His father died at Bosworth, bearing Henry's standard on the battlefield that gave Henry VII his crown. This sacrifice on the father's part ensured favour for the son. A star of the tiltyard, he first jousted publicly on the occasion of Katherine of Aragon's marriage to Henry VIII and had, crucially, quickly become the boon companion of the younger man. Contracted in youth to one of Elizabeth of York's gentlewomen, he made her pregnant before repudiating the match to marry her wealthy widowed aunt instead. He sold many of the aunt's lands before having that marriage annulled, on the grounds of consanguinity, and returning to marry the younger woman, who then died in 1510, leaving Brandon free. Made a Knight of the Garter in April 1513, he was created Viscount Lisle in May, when he was also betrothed to the eight-year-old Elizabeth Grey, heir to the Lisle barony.