Bloody Mary Read Free Page B

to do, while the aging French king Louis XII saw in his inexperienced young English counterpart no threat to his ambitious designs. At the opening of the year 1511 the battleground of Europe was Italy, where for a generation the armies of France and Spain had fought over the spoils of the Renaissance city-states. For the moment, France had triumphed, but the peninsula’s other great territorial lord, the pope, was determined to drive the French out. Even now, in midwinter, Julius was leading his soldiers through the snow in a futile campaign against the French in the north of Italy.
    If he lacked a military or diplomatic reputation, Henry did possess one enviable political asset: a full treasury. The costs of his extravagant costumes, tourneys and court revels had not even begun to deplete the wealth his father had left him. And the continental powers were not slow to capitalize on that wealth. Already he had become a sort of royal pawnbroker, making loans secured by diamonds and other jewels and, in one instance, by the armor of the great fifteenth-century duke Charles the Bold. Four months earlier the Venetian ambassador wrote his home government that the English king had agreed to loan the Signory 150,000 ducats on jewels.
    Of course, the infant prince gave Henry a further bargaining counter. As soon as possible, English diplomats would begin negotiations at all the European courts for his betrothal. The diplomatic credit to be gainedfrom a marriage alliance with France, Portugal or the Austrian Haps-burgs was wonderful to contemplate, and by no means out of reach. The prince was certain to be a handsome and promising child, heir to a stable throne; these benefits, plus Henry’s flowing coffers, would surely lead to a splendid match. Already the diplomats were spreading news of the elaborate christening ceremony of the young Henry, and of the organization of his personal household and his Council of State. They would describe the tournament, too, expanding on its grandiose pageantry and the king’s well-known prowess.
    Henry’s pleasurable speculations about his son were understandable, for since his marriage he had had ample reason to doubt whether his wife could give him a son at all. Katherine’s childless first marriage, the frailty of her health and a miscarriage the previous year had all pointed to the possibility of barrenness.
    Katherine of Aragon had come to England ten years earlier, when Henry was a boy, to marry his older brother Arthur. The joining of the Tudor heir to a younger daughter of Ferdinand and Isabella of Spain raised England’s prestige abroad, but only temporarily. Katherine did not become pregnant—indeed she was to swear later that the marriage had not been consummated—and the death of the consumptive prince left her widowed at sixteen. Kept in England as a hostage until her father paid the final installment of her dowry, something he showed no inclination to do, Katherine spent the next eight years uncertain of her status and her prospects. Apart from the title Princess Dowager she had nothing to show for her time in England. She had no money, no friends outside her small retinue of Spanish servants, and she was an obvious nuisance both to her father-in-law Henry VII and her father Ferdinand. Her beloved mother, the valiant Isabella, was dead; her favorite sister, Joanna, wrote at first infrequently and then not at all.
    In her anxious isolation Katherine turned to God. By the time she was twenty she had apparently decided to renounce worldly things and subject herself to the harsh demands of an ascetic life. Someone at the court became concerned enough about the harm this relentless praying and fasting might do to write to the pope. Julius wrote back ordering that her regimen be relaxed, and stating specifically that it threatened to hamper her ability to conceive and bear children in the future. It must certainly have made worse the ailments that had afflicted her since reaching