Free Game of Queens by Sarah Gristwood Page B

son; however, stillborn, he was no threat to my Caesar’s rise to power.’ There continued to be no sign of a living boy. In 1499 Louise and her children were at Romorantin, where Queen Anne joined their seclusion to avoid the plague, and there gave birth to a daughter, Claude. Was the idea of a match between this royal daughter and Louise’s son François also born at Romorantin?
    Perhaps neither mother wanted the match: Anne of Brittany because she secretly hoped to marry Claude, Brittany’s heiress, to the imperial Habsburgs (Anne had always kept in touch with Margaret of Austria) and thus maintain her duchy’s independence, while Louise of Savoy may have reflected that Claude came from a family with a poor record of fertility and was, like so many of her inbred clan, including Louis’s first wife Jeanne, mildly deformed. Louise and Anne of Brittany were always in enmity, although in 1504 they had briefly collaborated to rid themselves of the overbearing Seigneur de Gié.
    But in 1505, when Louis XII fell desperately ill, it made imperative what had long been discussed: the marriage of twelve-year-old François, the heir, to King Louis’s seven-year-old daughter Claude. Louis’s will placed the guardianship of Claude with her mother Anne but gave Louise a seat alongside her on the regency council. Both women swore to execute the will with their hands resting on a piece of the True Cross. King Louis recovered but the betrothal ceremony went ahead, with the pair then separating to grow up. The following spring another formal ceremony acknowledged François as Louis’s heir.
    Margaret of Austria and Louise of Savoy were now both young widows. But while Margaret was again plunged into uncertainty, Louise’s path lay clear ahead.
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    * Again it will often be convenient to speak of ‘Spain’, although official unification of the Spanish kingdoms would not happen until the eighteenth century.
    * Impossible not to think, in comparison and contrast, of the ‘heart and stomach of a king’ and Elizabeth I at Tilbury.

5
    Princess Brides
    England, Scotland, 1501–1505
    A princess’s fate was to be married for her family’s benefit. Her own happiness, or otherwise, was a matter of fortune. Across the Channel, in England and in Scotland, two other royal girls were feeling the force of that lesson.
    Katherine of Aragon finally arrived in England in 1501. Her marriage to its heir Prince Arthur was celebrated with extraordinary festivities. Isabella of Castile and her husband had displayed some qualms at sending their youngest to distant England, where the Tudor regime was still a fragile new arrival but Isabella was not the woman to let sentiment stand in the way of dynastic advantage.
    Any foreign princess faced a terrifying prospect as she arrived, exhausted and travel-worn, on the shores of a foreign land after a long and dangerous journey, knowing her entire future depended on pleasing the man (or boy) she was about to meet, and that, at best, she faced a future of juggling her loyalties to him and her responsibilities to her native country. It must have taken all the festivities – the tournaments and the tumblers, the pageants and the parades between the river palaces – to pin the ritual smile on Katherine of Aragon’s face. And she may, as Isabella’s daughter, have been taken aback to discover the limitations on a royal Englishwoman’s power.
    True, Henry VII’s mother, Margaret Beaufort – ‘My Lady the King’s Mother’ – exercised a good deal of influence but the same could not be said of his wife, Elizabeth of York. Moreover, both Margaret Beaufort and Elizabeth of York had been required to set aside their blood rights to let Henry ascend his throne. There was no thought that a woman could rule in England, as she could in Castile, although Katherine could not have known how this assumption would come to haunt her.
    In January 1502 the