Young Henry: The Rise of Henry VIII by Hutchinson Robert

Author:Hutchinson, Robert [Hutchinson, Robert]
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: St. Martin's Press
Published: 2012-10-29T23:00:00+00:00

ought to forget Spain and everything Spanish in order to gain the love of the king and of the English. She had become so much accustomed to this idea that she will not change her behaviour unless some person … near her tells her what she ought to do in order to be useful to the king her father.31

Perhaps she had heard of the rumours circulating in Rome that Henry planned to repudiate her and put her away in a distant nunnery.32

Suffolk, supposedly in France to attend Mary’s coronation, caught up with the newly-weds at Beauvais on 25 October. He found Louis lying down, with Mary sitting shyly by the royal bedside. The French king embraced him ‘and held me a good while and said I was heartily welcome’. The duke said Henry ‘recommended himself to his entirely beloved brother and thanked him for the great honour and [love] that he showed to the queen, his sister’. Louis in turn reported that no queen had ever ‘behaved herself more wisely and honourably’ and had ‘a loving manner’.33

Suffolk handed over his secret letter and after due consideration, the French king promised he ‘was most willing to render all the services he has in his power’. But with Louis, there was always a sting in the tail: in return for his help against Spain, he required an English loan of 200,000 crowns and military assistance to seize the duchy of Milan the following March.34

Mary was crowned Queen of France in St Denis just over a month later. Three days of celebratory jousts followed when Mary ‘stood so that all men might see her and wonder at her beauty’ but her husband was ‘feeble and lay on a couch for weakness’.35

On 1 January 1515, Louis XII died, some whispered, from eighty-three days of over-exertion on the marriage bed with his teenage bride. With the demise of this tired old roué died also any hopes Henry had for French military support in punishing Spain.

At the very hour of his death, Mary announced that she was not pregnant, so Louis was immediately succeeded by his son-in-law, the twenty-year-old Francis, Duke of Angoulême. He was ‘inexpressibly handsome and generous … he rises at eleven, hears Mass, then remains for two or three hours with his mother and afterwards visited his sweethearts or [goes] out hunting’.

The young widow sat in her quarters, ‘dressed all in black, with a white kerchief on her head and under her chin like a nun. [She] is never still [and] moves her head.’36 Patently her agitation suggested that she had other things on her mind than mourning a depraved, diseased husband.

Mary now felt liberated to marry Suffolk – given Henry’s earlier promise of her freedom of choice – but both inevitably feared Henry’s angry reaction. In March the duke wrote to Wolsey for help.

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