Game of Queens (17 page)

 

Of the three queens in England, even Katherine of Aragon had her problems, despite the birth of her daughter. Katherine had long suffered from the policy of her relatives on the continent; the English alienation from Ferdinand and Emperor Maximilian that had seen Henry marry his sister into France. The Spanish ambassador found that ‘strange words' were said to him as he went through the town and complained he felt like a bull at whom everyone threw darts. Katherine herself had been horrified by her father's ruthless shifts of loyalty. Or (so the Spanish ambassador hoped), found it prudent to pretend she was:

The reason the queen is behaving so strangely is that her confessor, Friar Diego, has told her to act as though she has forgotten Spain and everything Spanish in order to win the English king's love and the love of the English. She has become so accustomed to doing this that she will not change.

In due course, political necessity brought Ferdinand and Henry VIII back into a somewhat edgy alliance and Katherine of Aragon once again found herself in the position of mediator, trying to explain the one to the other. But in January 1516, just weeks before Katherine gave birth to her daughter, Ferdinand died, his life shortened by his recklessness in ‘following more the counsel of his falconers than of his physicians'. By then, however, Katherine's political stance was perhaps becoming less important than once it had been.

King Henry had always looked for support in the daily business of politics and now he found it in the portly shape of Thomas – or as he had become in the autumn of 1515, Cardinal – Wolsey. Wolsey's rise had been meteoric and he was now, in his early forties, reaching the position of power he would hold for more than a decade.

Born the son of a butcher, Wolsey was ordained after studying at Oxford and entered the service of Henry VII, who appointed him royal chaplain and then Dean of Lincoln. Henry VIII, on his accession, appointed him his almoner but even that did not explain what lay so close ahead. His rise in the church was dazzlingly rapid: Dean of York, Bishop of Tournai (for his work in organising Henry's army there), Bishop of Lincoln in March 1514 and Archbishop of York that September. A year later he was made a cardinal and appointed lord chancellor four months after that. Just six years after Henry's accession, he had a pudgy finger in every international as well as domestic pie. And already it was clear that Wolsey's view of England's interests would not always accord with Katherine of Aragon's naturally pro-Spanish policy.

Wolsey, inevitably, had been prominent in the negotiations with the Scottish lords carried out on Margaret Tudor's behalf, hammering out the arrangement by which, just a year after she arrived at her brother's court, Margaret would return north. But first, there was a dramatic scene to play. The spring of 1517 saw what came to be known as ‘Evil May Day', when several hundred London apprentices, whipped up into a xenophobic frenzy by an irresponsible preacher, rioted through the streets attacking members of London's foreign community.

The riots were quickly put down and more than a dozen of the rioters hung, drawn and quartered but several hundred more remained in London's gaols. Popular pity was aroused by the fact that some of the ‘poor younglings' were as young as thirteen. They were brought to trial on 7 May, in Westminster Hall, bound and haltered, expecting to have to face a dreadful fate. When Wolsey asked the king for mercy for them Henry sternly refused (as no doubt it had been agreed he would do) and then Katherine of Aragon, with both her Tudor sisters-in-law, dramatically made the same plea. Three queens on their knees before him. As Henry agreed and the tearful prisoners were set free, it was a scene straight from the pages of chivalry. An intercessory function, of course, had been traditional for queens, from the biblical Esther and Bathsheba to the Virgin Mary.

 

A week or so later, Margaret Tudor left the city; propelled in part by her brother's reluctance to maintain her forever and partly by her optimistic conviction that she could get back all the power she had lost in Scotland. Her hopes were the higher for the fact that, almost as she reached the Scottish border, her nemesis Albany was sailing back to France to visit his wife. Before he left he had agreed with Henry VIII and Wolsey that (for the next few months, at least) Margaret would have Stirling Castle and free access to her son. Greeted at the border by her husband Angus, and the nobleman who was carrying out Albany's duties, she must have felt optimistic about her return.

The first check came when she went, immediately, to Edinburgh Castle to find the son she had not seen for almost two years. She was denied entrance and told her son had been taken to Craigmillar because there was plague in the city. It was clear, as she finally got a limited measure of access, that some of the lords feared she might try to snatch him back to England.

Albany was far from eager to speed back to the taxing responsibilities of Scotland. He wrote to Margaret, suggesting the lords might allow her to resume the regency. But Margaret's idea was that her husband should rule with her as co-regent, and this the lords absolutely refused. She had once again been given the chance of a measure of power and, once again, her foolish decision threw it away.

And the lords, after all, knew more than she did. While Margaret was in England, her husband Angus had lived with the lady to whom he had formerly been betrothed, Lady Janet Stewart. And he had been doing it on the rents from Margaret's lands of Methven and Ettrick Forest. Nor was he prepared to refund the revenues he had seized and much of Margaret's energy over the next few years would be devoted to trying to reclaim them.

Just three months after she had arrived back in Scotland she wrote to Henry begging to return to England and separate from Angus. Henry's response was to send a friar north, to impress on her the importance of marriage.
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The Scots lords themselves agreed with English observers that she was being badly treated, with ‘no promise kept to her', as Henry's representative Lord Dacre reported. But if, as she complained, they gave her ‘nothing but fair words', the same was true of her brother. Since England's best ally in Scotland was likely to be Angus's Douglas clan, Henry was determined that Margaret should remain his wife.

One moment Margaret seems to be moved more by Angus's iniquities in taking her revenues from Ettrick Forest than by his keeping a mistress. But to complain of that, after all, might meet with scant sympathy, since Katherine of Aragon was by now having to put up with her husband's relationship with one Elizabeth Blount. The revenues were a more concrete grievance.

The feuding of Margaret Tudor and her husband had vital political consequences, the more so since Albany showed no signs of coming back to Scotland, telling the Clarencieux Herald that he wished he had broken both his legs before ever he set foot in the country. In England, Henry and Katherine were both horrified to hear that Margaret now sought a formal separation from Angus, which he opposed, preferring to claim a husband's right to her income.

The following autumn Margaret would write to her brother that she and Angus had not been together ‘this half year' and that she had been forced to pawn her jewels and silver. ‘I am so minded that, an [if] I may by law of God and to my honour, to part with him, for I wit well he loves me not, as he shows me daily.' Her son was kept apart from her; she was personally humiliated and living in poverty. The years ahead would show Margaret Tudor dreaming always of regaining a measure of power, but coupling acts of energy and inventiveness with ones of utter folly.

12

‘inestimable and praiseworthy services'

The Netherlands, France, 1516–1519

In the Netherlands, another Margaret, of Austria, was managing her return to power more skilfully. A series of events would mean that – whether or not she wanted – she was never going to be left long in quietude. The first event had come quickly.

In January 1516 Ferdinand of Aragon died, and his grandson Charles added Ferdinand's territories to the Castile of which (during his mother Juana's enduring incarceration) he was the de facto ruler. As ruler also of the Netherlands, he was faced with the task of trying to govern two separate realms at opposite ends of the continental land mass.

It was imperative that Charles should visit Spain, and quickly, since the Spanish Cortes showed signs of resisting a ruler they had never seen and who did not speak a word of their language. To do so safely he needed to leave the Netherlands not only at peace with their neighbours, both France and England, but in experienced hands. Maximilian, for one, had no doubt whose hands those should be, writing to Charles of the virtues of his ‘so good and virtuous aunt' and writing that Charles, Margaret and Maximilian himself were literally as one: ‘
une mêsme chose correspondant à ung mêsme désir et affection
'. Another trinity, in effect; if not in the passion of emotion the French one shared, then at least in practicality.

In February 1517 Maximilian came to the Netherlands in person, to effect a complete reconciliation of aunt and nephew and to discuss the future, since to the huge lands Charles already ruled, more might be added on Maximilian's death; not only his own hereditary Austrian lands but the Holy Roman Empire of which François and Louise also dreamt. When Charles set out in 1517 he left a turbulent Netherlands (northern parts of which were in revolt against Habsburg rule) in the hands of a regency council, nominally led by Maximilian. But one seat on it was assigned to Margaret, who was moving back towards power by slow degrees.

Early in 1518 two members of the Netherlands council, who were Margaret's strong opponents both died. In July, from Saragossa, Charles granted his ‘very dear Lady and Aunt' the right to sign ‘all letters, acts and documents with her own hand, which are issued for us', declaring that she ‘alone' should ‘provide and dispose of the appointments of this our country'. This was still not quite a full regency but Maximilian had every reason to write to Margaret in December of his hopes that ‘as your good nephew he [Charles] will increase your said authority more and more'.

The steady accretion of territories and dignities to Charles and his Habsburg family led to a shift in European diplomacy. Through the years ahead François I and Charles would be great rivals, and this left England a delicate but often rewarding diplomatic game to play, adjusting the balance between the pair. In 1518 however – with the Habsburgs temporarily at peace with France – the most urgent job on England's international calendar was to improve relations between England and England's ancient enemy.

So in October 1518 there was once again an Anglo-French betrothal to be celebrated, as there had been four years earlier. This time the Princess Mary who was to be allied to France was not Henry VIII's sister, but his and Katherine's two-year-old daughter, who would be contracted to François I's son and heir, the seven-month-old French dauphin. Just as Margaret of Austria, four years before, had felt betrayed when her nephew's English alliance was replaced with a French betrothal, so Katherine of Aragon can only have been dismayed when her only daughter was promised to the old enemy of her natal country. But as Henry's wife and England's queen, her task was to put a good face on things, and she did it nobly.

In the Queen's Great Chamber at Greenwich on 5 October, Katherine was asked, as protocol required, whether she approved this match for the toddler Mary, seated in front of her. ‘With great pleasure we give our royal word,' she said doughtily. Perhaps she found comfort in reflecting that any actual marriage would not take place for many years and that slips between cup and lip were a virtual certainty.

The French representatives – led by none other than the same Bonnivet who featured in Marguerite of Navarre's writings – were received with great honour. Wolsey, two days before the official ceremony, entertained them at York House, to a ‘most sumptuous supper, the like of which, I fancy, was never given by Cleopatra or Caligula', wrote the Venetian envoy Giustinian, ‘the whole banqueting hall being so decorated with huge vases of gold and silver that I fancied myself in the tower of Croesus'. George Cavendish, Wolsey's gentleman usher and biographer, noted that the aim was ‘to make the French such triumphant cheer that they might not only wonder at it here but make a glorious report in their country'. As twelve masked gentlemen and twelve masked ladies began to dance after the feast, two were revealed as Henry and his sister Mary; a neat allegory since this was also the King of England partnering the dowager Queen of France. Katherine of Aragon, with the excuse of another visible pregnancy, had gone to bed early.

A meeting was to be arranged in 1519 between the kings of England and France. (It would be postponed until 1520.) But meanwhile Katherine had high hopes; as even the Venetian ambassador wrote, ‘God grant she may give birth to a son'. She and Henry had spent the summer balancing the differing demands of her health: to stay away from London while the sweating sickness was there and yet during (as Henry wrote) ‘her dangerous times', to move her as little as possible. Alas, the high hopes were not to be. In November 1518 Katherine was delivered of a daughter, who was either stillborn or lived only very briefly.

Katherine of Aragon's distress was the greater for another eventuality. In the summer of 1519, Henry VIII at last got his healthy boy. But the mother of his son was not Katherine but his mistress Elizabeth (‘Bessie') Blount. The king acknowledged the boy and named him Henry Fitzroy. It was proof, if any were needed, in a century that assumed the woman's ‘fault', that it was not the king but the queen who could not produce a boy. But it also perhaps gave Henry an option other than the succession of his daughter Mary, should the vexations of gender prove more worrying than those of illegitimacy.