Mary Rose (7 page)

The European situation was also moving in his favour. The League of Cambrai, which Julius II had formed against the Venetians in 1508 was breaking up, as the focus of the Pope’s anxiety moved from Venice to France. In 1510 he began to prepare a new league, directed this time against Louis, and the King of France responded by calling a council of the French bishops to make traditional Gallican noises. He then went further and attempted to call a schismatic General Council to meet at Pisa in May 1511, for the specific purpose of deposing Julius.
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The council never met, but the result was a full-on confrontation between the Pope and the King of France, and the former now began to call his alliance a ‘Holy’ League, designed to defend the unity of the Church. This League was duly signed at Rome in October 1511, the original signatories being the Pope, the Emperor and the King of Spain. Within a month Henry had persuaded his Council to abandon a neutral position, and to take advantage of the opportunity which the League presented. War with France was decided upon, and was formally declared at the end of April 1512.
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Preparations had been under way for some time, and Henry’s navy was at sea within days of the declaration being made. At the beginning of June, in accordance with a prearranged strategy, the Marquis of Dorset also led an expeditionary force of some 12,000 men to Guienne, to co-operate with Ferdinand’s proposed invasion of southern France. The result was a fiasco, because the King of Spain provided none of the logistical back-up which he had promised, and when Dorset proposed to advance from San Sebastian to attack Bayonne, Ferdinand declined to co-operate. Instead he used the English presence as a cover for an attack on Navarre, a move in which the English had no interest. Without action and marooned in a hostile environment, Dorset’s men became sick and mutinous; the council of officers was rent with quarrels, and the Marquis himself became ill. Eventually, in October, the surviving men commandeered ships and returned to England, a sad remnant of the proud host which had set forth only four months earlier.
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Dorset had no option but to return also, and might have expected a rough reception. However all Henry’s anger was directed against Ferdinand, who had so conspicuously failed to honour his obligations. For the time being the alliance held, but it was greatly weakened.

One of the results of this failure was that it became easier for the King to keep his alliance with Maximilian separate from that with Spain, and to maintain friendly relations with the elusive Emperor. He even advanced him 100,000 crowns with which to hire Swiss mercenaries on the understanding that Maximilian would invade France as a part of his obligation to the League. However, at the end of 1512 he had done nothing, and it was not until 5 April 1513 that a further treaty was signed, binding the Emperor (in return for another 125,000 crowns) to make war upon Louis at the head of 30,000 men. As a result of this, when Henry himself arrived in Picardy at the head of an Army Royal in July 1513, Maximilian did actually join him in the campaign, although with far fewer men than he was committed to.
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Meanwhile Margaret had been doing her best to keep his attention focussed on the marriage, which she saw as offering a more binding commitment than any treaty of friendship. During the summer of 1509 she persuaded Charles to send a jewel as a further token of his affection, and Mary sent him a ring in return. By the end of the year she had suggested a visit to the Low Countries to enable her to meet her intended husband and to learn something of German fashions.
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This did not happen, but in February 1510 she persuaded the Emperor to appoint a gentlemen-in-waiting to her. This gentleman did not apparently come to England, but in the autumn of 1511 she tried again, this time sending a Fleming named John Cerf over to serve her. Henry accepted this initiative and gave Cerf an annuity until such time as the marriage was consummated, which he was clearly still expecting to be in the near future.
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He was not alone in that expectation. Margaret was puzzled by Mary’s failure to respond to her invitation, but did not think that that affected the contract, and Erasmus wrote on 6 February 1512, ‘happy is our Prince Charles to have such a spouse. Nature never formed anything more beautiful, and she excels no less in goodness and in wisdom …’ Over a year later, on 13 April 1513 Mary wrote a letter to Margaret, which she signed as ‘Princess of Castile’, and it was being rumoured at that time that Henry would bring his sister with him when he invaded France later in the summer.
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The Princess seems to have believed these rumours herself, because in the letter mentioned to her ‘bonne tante’ she expressed the hope that she would learn of Flemish fashions and would be able to introduce them in England. However the Army Royal arrived at the end of July, and Mary was not with it. The victory celebrations which followed the capture of Therouanne on 24 August were conducted without her, much to Margaret’s regret. However, once Henry had returned to England she did succeed in extracting from him a joint declaration that the marriage would take place before 15 May 1514 – in other words within the forty days of Charles’s fourteenth birthday, as specified in the original treaty.
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Meanwhile the war effort stuttered. In March 1512 Julius II had stripped Louis of his title to France, and conferred it on Henry. This was less significant than might appear, because it was made clear that the grant was conditional upon the King of England actually conquering France, which he was in no position to do. In fact it was a mere gesture, intended rather to express the Pope’s deposing power than to bring about any change in the military situation. More importantly, early in 1513 Ferdinand signed a one-year truce with Louis, and thus effectively withdrew from the League. At about the same time, in February 1513 Julius II died, and his successor Leo X had no desire to continue his predecessor’s feud with the French. There was even talk of a defensive alliance between Spain and France, which could have brought Ferdinand into the war on the other side. That did not happen, but by the time that Henry and Maximilian were conducting their campaign in Picardy in the late summer, they were doing so without Spanish support, and the possibility of a southern front against France had evaporated.
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At the same time James IV of Scotland intervened on the French side. He had no particular quarrel with his brother-in-law, but the opportunity created by the King’s absence in France seemed too good to miss. His adventure came to a bloody and fatal end at Flodden on 9 September, but not before it had caused considerable anxiety to the regency government of Catherine of Aragon, who had been left to ‘mind the shop’ in Henry’s absence.
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All these considerations meant that when a nuncio from the new pope arrived early in 1514 to persuade him to make peace, he was disposed to listen. He was also moved in that direction by his new chief adviser, Thomas Wolsey. Wolsey had made his mark in 1513 when he had organised the logistics of the Tournai campaign, and had managed to get men and supplies where they were needed in time to be of use – no mean achievement in sixteenth-century conditions. He was hugely efficient, and the King was most impressed, but he was also disposed to follow the Pope’s lead and argue for peace in the difficult circumstances of 1514. Consequently although arrangements for the marriage were pressed ahead, and by the middle of February had got as far as the lodging provision for Mary’s train, an air of uncertainty was beginning to prevail on both sides. On the 25th of that month Margaret inquired rather belatedly what would happen to the English succession if Henry were to die without a son. Perhaps she was unable to believe that the King would risk giving his sister to a Habsburg, who notoriously extended their territories by matrimony.
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At the beginning of April the Prince’s health was giving cause for concern, and Mary was warned to be careful because all the arrangements were in the hands of his entourage. At the end of April the ever-optimistic Margaret wrote to the Emperor that all the preparations were complete, and that Mary would be arriving on 2 May.
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Where she got her information from is not clear, because on 4 June she received a letter from Henry, excusing his sister, and wanting both the timetable and the place altered. He regretted that the marriage could not go ahead as planned. On 23 July the King was reported to be angry with the Emperor for the delay over the marriage, but by that time it was effectively dead. Since early April Henry had been toying with the idea of sealing a peace with France by marrying his sister to Louis, and on 30 July she formally renounced her engagement to Charles, citing as a reason the fact that he had not ratified the treaty of which it had been a part within two months as had been agreed in 1508.
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The Prince’s reaction to this rejection is hard to gauge. Although he had written to her in December 1513 as ‘votre bon mari’, that appears to have been out of a sense of duty (or perhaps on instruction) rather than from any real conviction. Whereas Mary’s professions of affection for him were numerous, he is not known to have reciprocated. Ferdinand, similarly, although he professed himself in favour of the marriage was privately gratified because he did not want any move which would strengthen his grandson in his claim on Castile. He still had hopes of issue by Germaine de Foix. Maximilian was affronted, but he had only himself to blame, because he had blown hot and cold on the project, and was seeking delays right up to the last minute. The person who was most genuinely upset was Margaret of Savoy, who had worked tirelessly to bring the marriage about, seeing it as the surest way to cement an alliance between England and the Low Countries. However, Margaret was at odds with her Council over this issue, most of the latter favouring a settlement with France. Henry, got in first, and was self-righteous about his choice. He had been deceived by both Ferdinand and Maximilian, and felt perfectly entitled to take his revenge. He did not see, he told the Venetian ambassador, ‘any faith in the world save in me, and therefore God Almighty, who knows this, prospers my affairs.’
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He might also have added that he had found in Thomas Wolsey a diplomat whose skill and lack of scruple more than made up for his own innocence, but it was typical of him that he should reserve the credit for himself.

On 9 January 1514 Anne of Brittany, the queen of Louis XII, died. In a very important sense she had failed in her royal duty, because she had borne him no son, but only two daughters, Claude and Renee, the former of whom was her heir in respect of the Duchy of Brittany. At that time the failure of male heirs was always deemed to be the fault of the woman, and deeply though Louis may have mourned her, he still believed himself capable of repairing that omission. St Thomas Aquinas had written:

As regards the individual nature, woman is defective and misbegotten, for the active force, the male seed, tends to the production of a perfect likeness in the masculine sex; while production of woman comes from defect in the active force …
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In spite of his age (he was fifty-two) and uncertain health, he was therefore keen to marry again. Meanwhile, in order to secure the personal union of Brittany and France he married Claude to his prospective heir and kinsman, Francis of Angoulême, in a quiet ceremony at St Germain-en-Laye on 18 May. The twenty-year-old Francis, who was a notorious womaniser, was consoled for his sweet-natured but physically unattractive bride by being able to assume the title of Duke in the right of his wife. In June 1515 Claude made over her rights in Brittany to her husband, and he continued to administer the duchy after her death in 1524 in the name of their son Francis, who was a minor. It was not until August 1532, and with the consent of the estates, that he finally issued the decree which annexed the duchy in perpetuity to the Crown of France.
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If Louis had succeeded in begetting a son in the winter of 1514/15, and the child had lived, Francis would therefore presumably have remained Duke of Brittany and the institutional union would never have taken place. Such is the importance of royal fertility in the politics of the renaissance.

Meanwhile the allied war effort had petered out. At the New Year of 1514 Henry was talking of his new campaign, preparing his navy and collecting munitions. Then, at the end of February, suspicious rumours began to emerge from both Spain and the Low Countries that both Ferdinand and Maximilian were thinking of opting out. A week or two later these fears were confirmed. Ferdinand had signed another truce with France, not only in his own name, but in those of the Emperor and the King of England also.
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He justified this extraordinary action with a story about an elaborate conspiracy by the Pope and others to drive both him and Maximilian out of Italy, and alleged that the initiative had come from the Emperor. Maximilian would, he claimed, have consulted Henry as a matter of course before adding his name to the signatories. Only the Emperor had done no such thing, and the King was left bitterly chagrined by this act of betrayal.
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For the time being, Henry continued to talk as though he intended to fight on. It would be, he alleged, ‘a very great dishonour’ to hold back because his allies had defected. Troops were mustered and warships put to sea. In June an English force ravaged the French coast near Cherbourg, in revenge for French attacks on Brighton earlier in the year, and as late as the beginning of August a league was entered into with the Swiss for putting an army into the field against France at English expense.
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Yet there was an air of unreality about these warlike posturings, because at the end of January Gianpietro Caraffa had arrived as a papal nuncio in England in an endeavour to persuade Henry to make peace. His reception was at first ambivalent, but he was assisted in his efforts by the Duc de Longueville, who under the guise of negotiating his own ransom became an unofficial representative of the French King. He had been taken prisoner at the Battle of the Spurs but was always treated more as guest than a captive and was allowed a good deal of freedom. His efforts for peace were ably seconded by Fox and Wolsey, who, in spite of the strenuous opposition of some members of the Council, gradually persuaded the King of the validity of their point of view.
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Wolsey was only slightly exaggerating when he claimed later, ‘I was the author of this peace.’