Six Wives (30 page)

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But such realities were for the future. For the present, Catherine was delighted at the new direction of policy. She now had the prospective son-in-law of her dreams. And things were different for Mary as well. At her proxy marriage to the Dauphin in 1518, she had been an infant, oblivious to the real meaning of the event. Now she was six years old, precocious and perhaps a little spoilt, and in love with the idea of being in love. Encouraged by Catherine, she had chosen Charles as her Valentine and wore a golden jewel at her breast, with the name 'CHARLES' picked out in jewels. She also had another, even larger, brooch with letters spelling out the title of her husband: 'THE EMPEROUR'. She wore the brooch when she sat for a portrait miniature, which, almost certainly, was intended as a lover's gift to Charles. If Mary, who had never seen Charles, was in this state already, what would it be like when they met face to face?
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    A meeting in fact was due in the following spring. As part of the Calais settlement, it had been agreed that Charles would come to England on his way back to Spain, to pick up ships and reinforcements. Charles was all for making it a severely practical event and spending the money thus saved on the war. 'We prefer', he protested, 'to visit Henry like a son coming to his father's house . . . and hope that too great pomp and ceremony will not impede the friendly familiarity which we hope will continue, not only throughout our life, but throughout that of our successors.' There is an echo here of his grandmother Isabella, expressing her anxieties about the lavish reception planned for Catherine on her arrival in England, twenty years previously, in 1502. But Charles protested in vain. Henry and Wolsey, like Henry VII before them, wanted a triumph: it was not every day that they had an emperor to parade through London.
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    Catherine also pressed her more sincere hospitality on her nephew. 'Her greatest desire', she told the Emperor's ambassador, 'was to see you here and to receive you with the greatest honour and best cheer possible.' But Catherine had not finished with the ambassador. Before he took leave, she said firmly, he must first see the Princess dance. Mary 'did not have to be asked twice' and performed without a trace of childish shyness or false modesty. First she danced a slow dance and a galliard 'and twirled so prettily that no woman in the world could do better'. Then she shifted to the keyboard and 'played two or three songs on the spinet'. The ambassador was impressed, as was the intention. 'Indeed, sire,' he reported to Charles, 'she showed unbelievable grace and skill and such self-command as a woman of twenty might envy. She is pretty, and very tall for her age . . . and a very fine young cousin indeed.'
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    The ambassador's words were exactly what Catherine had wanted him to write. But did she stop to consider the risks for her daughter in encouraging these performances? Mary was wearing Charles's name, dancing for Charles, living and breathing Charles. Such romantic fantasies were hard enough to sustain even in aristocratic marriages. But Charles was royal. And, though he was Catherine's nephew, his projected marriage with her daughter was a dynastic one. It had been made for reasons of power politics; if the circumstances changed, it could equally be broken for dynastic reasons. Where would that leave Mary, now that Catherine had taught her love along with Latin?

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    Then the two monarchs moved to Windsor, to perform the ceremonies of the Garter and get down to serious negotiation. Here Catherine joined them, and brought Mary too. The representative of Charles's brother, the Archduke Ferdinand, caught sight of her and, blinded by the charms of neither mother nor daughter, delivered a cool assessment. 'She promises to become a handsome lady,' he reported of Mary, 'although it is difficult to form an idea of her beauty as she is still so small.' And that of course was a problem: there was a sixteen-year agegap between Charles and Mary. Was it feasible for him to wait so long? Was it even desirable?
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    From Windsor, Charles went to Southampton, where he embarked for Spain. Henry accompanied him to the coast but Catherine and Mary took their leave of him at Windsor. Charles had become a familiar figure in Catherine's life. She had met him three times within the space of two years. She had also renewed her personal friendship with her former sister-in-law, the Archduchess Margaret. Margaret had continued to act as Regent of the Netherlands for the frequently absent Charles, and had accompanied him to the post–Field of Cloth of Gold summit conference. It seemed, in short, that Catherine's family was reconstituting itself in her own generation. And, thanks to the forthcoming marriage between Mary and Charles, there was hope that it would continue into the next.

    With Charles, her favourite nephew and prospective son-in-law, Catherine had been all smiles. But his brother Ferdinand's ambassador had to deal with a harder, less familiar Catherine. Charles had left Ferdinand as his Regent in Germany and Austria. There he had to confront the growing menace of the Turkish or Ottoman Empire, then at the height of its power. He had sent his ambassador to Windsor to remind Henry and Charles that Christian Europe's south-eastern frontier was about to collapse. He got short shrift, even from Catherine, and even after he had played the family card. The ambassador 'told her that [Ferdinand] regarded her as his true mother, and asked her not to forsake him, but to see that the King of England should send him succour against the Turks'. Catherine replied briskly that 'it will be impossible'. Could anything be done next year, he persisted. She would write her answer, she said. The ambassador then asked Charles to make an approach. And, on this topic, Charles 'had not found her at all gracious'. The ambassador tried again himself. Catherine said she was too much occupied to write.

    Catherine was of course right. Her husband and her nephew had their hands full with France, and France, as Wolsey remarked with his characteristic verve, 'was the real Turk'. 'I know no other Turk,' he added.
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Over the next few years, Catherine had need for her cool political realism, as the new alliance with Spain under her nephew proved almost as problematic as the old, under her father, the slippery Ferdinand.

    The English fleet, under Lord Admiral Surrey, escorted Charles partway to Spain. But, as it cleared the Channel, it broke away and turned to launch a lightning amphibious attack on Brittany in which Morlaix was taken and sacked. Admiral Surrey, as ruthlessly effective on land as on sea, was then launched on France from the east. He left Calais in late August, with two companies of Burgundians among his troops. They marched south, burning and looting the lightly defended towns and villages as they went. Not till they reached Hesdin, which lies mid-way between Agincourt and Crécy, did they encounter serious resistance. Surrey wanted to launch an assault on the castle; his Burgundian co-commanders demurred. The expedition turned back, acrimoniously.
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    It was not the best of starts to Anglo-Spanish co-operation. And a much greater challenge lay ahead. This was the project, to which Henry and Charles had committed themselves, to conquer and dismember France. Known as the 'Great Enterprise', it needed commensurate preparations. With his usual energy and efficiency, Wolsey took matters in hand and in 1522 he carried out the 'Great Proscription'. This was a new Doomsday survey of the nation's population and wealth and it enabled both troop-recruitment and taxation to be put on an up-to-date, accurate footing. But, however effectively England directed its resources, it could not conquer France alone. Nor, under the terms of the treaties, was it expected to. Where, Wolsey and Henry wanted to know, were Charles's troops? The answer, as under Ferdinand, was in the south. Once more, England seemed to be invading France only to provide cover for Spain's aggrandisement in the Pyrenees or in Italy. Once more, the divergent interests of Spain and England bred distrust between the allies. And once more, Catherine found herself caught in the middle.

    But this time she was older, wiser and spoke more bluntly. 'She told us vehemently', Charles's ambassadors reported in January 1523, 'that the only way for you to retain the friendship of this King and of the English was to fulfil faithfully everything you have promised.' But that, Catherine knew, was easier said than done. Charles had promised the moon: how could he deliver? 'It was much better', she continued, 'to promise little and perform faithfully than to promise much and fail in part.' Catherine had put her finger on the essential problem in AngloSpanish relations. But not even she could suggest a solution.
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    Finally, despite constant bickering, the threatened invasion of France was launched in autumn 1523. This was late in the season for so great an undertaking. But the decision to invade had been triggered by the revolt against Francis I of the Constable de Bourbon. He was the premier peer of France and had done what Buckingham had only dreamed of. The enemies of Francis I had great hopes of him. Bourbon himself was to advance through Provence in the south-east; Charles to attack from the south-west into Guyenne; while the English were to march on Paris from Calais.
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    The English commander was Henry's brother-in-law, Charles Brandon, Duke of Suffolk, who had married Henry's sister Mary after the death of Louis XII. Suffolk's reputation (except on the jousting field and in bed) does not stand high. But in 1523 he faced the French alone. He got the English within eighty miles of Paris, then had to turn back. Part of the problem was the weather, which turned viciously cold. But he had also been hamstrung by the failure of Archduchess Margaret to supply the promised transport, victuals and reinforcements. Bourbon's attack had fizzled out in Provence; while in the south-east Charles had not even crossed the frontier. Instead, like Ferdinand a decade earlier, Charles saw his main interests as lying in the Pyrenees and contented himself with recapturing Fuenterrabia.
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After this debacle, relations between Henry and Charles threatened to break down entirely. Catherine was powerless to act: she could only inform, encourage and, above all, warn Charles. As early as January 1524, her warnings became insistent. Henry had been complaining loudly of Charles's failure to meet his financial, let alone his military, obligations. He had not received a penny of the promised indemnity for the French pension; nothing had been paid of the loan of £30,000 which he had made to Charles to speed his return to Spain. 'Matters have gone so far', Charles's ambassador reported, 'that the Queen sent her Confessor to me in secret to warn me of Henry's discontents.'

    At the same time, Catherine renewed her lament that Charles had over-extended himself. 'She is very sorry', the report continued, 'that your Majesty ever promised so much in this treaty, and she fears it may one day be the cause of a weakening of the friendship between you two.' But, above all, the ambassador begged, 'keep this communication of the Queen's secret; it would be regrettable if it came to the ears of certain English'. By which he meant, I suspect, Cardinal Wolsey. By November, the tensions between Wolsey and Catherine were out in the open. The Archduchess Margaret's ambassador explained that he would have communicated more frequently with Catherine, 'but I have been warned by some of her friends that it would not be discreet'. And when he had spoken to her, 'I have often noticed that the Cardinal was very restless . . . and often interrupted our conversation.'
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Henry's disillusionment with Charles meant that no English army left for France in 1524. With no threats to detain him at home, Francis I led a great expedition to Italy in person and at first seemed to carry all before him. But Charles's troops, led by Bourbon, put up unexpectedly strong resistance. Sir Thomas More was with Henry at Hertford when the news was brought and he reported the King's reaction. Whatever Henry's doubts about Charles, he was delighted at Francis's discomfiture. Catherine rejoiced too, with a simple, partisan patriotism. '[She] said that she was glad that the Spaniards had done it somewhat in Italy in recompense of their departure out of Provence'. Wolsey presciently guessed that Francis might have bitten off more than he could chew with his Italian expedition and Henry concurred, 'think[ing] it will be very hard for him to get thence'. He laughed with pleasure at the thought. But he did not lift a finger to help Charles.

    Wolsey's guess proved correct and on 24 February 1525, Charles's troops defeated and captured Francis at the battle of Pavia. Even the plumes of Francis's helmet were plucked off as he lay pinned to the ground under his horse. It was Charles's twenty-fifth birthday. He was now true Emperor of the West. And he no longer needed England.
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    At first, Henry did not realise how the balance had changed. On 31 March he wrote a letter of congratulation to Charles, in his own hand and in French. He would have sent Wolsey in person, he said, if his health had been good enough to stand the journey. Instead he sent an Embassy. Its purpose was to propose the formal partition of France. Since God had punished Francis 'for his high orgule, pride and insatiable ambition' with his defeat and capture, it was Henry's and Charles's divinely ordained duty together to complete the task and strip him of his kingdom. And so forth.
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