Mary Tudor - Anna Whitelock [11]
During this time privy councillors visited the young princess frequently and sent reports to her parents in France. As one letter explained, “We have sundry times visited and seen your dearest daughter the princess, who, God be thanked, is in prosperous health and convalescence; and like as she increaseth in days and years, so doth she in grace, wit and virtue.”4 Another of June 13, 1520, described Mary as “right merry … and daily exercising herself in virtuous pastimes and occupations.”5
As she was the betrothed wife of their dauphin, the French also monitored Mary’s health and development. Queen Claude, Francis’s wife, sent gifts of a jeweled cross “worth six thousand ducats” and a portrait of her son.6 Anxious to see that she was fit and well after a rumor of her death, Francis sent three gentlemen to visit Mary.7 On Saturday, June 30, the French delegation arrived by barge at Richmond and found Mary surrounded by a throng of lords, ladies, gentlemen, and gentlewomen, as befitted the heir to the throne and future queen consort of France.8 As the envoys reported, she welcomed them “with most goodly countenance, proper communication and pleasant pastime in playing at the virginals, that they greatly marvelled and rejoiced the same, her young and tender age considered.”9 She was, of course, only four.
AFTER THE ANGLO-FRENCH entertainments were concluded, Henry rode to meet Charles V at Gravelines, Flanders, and returned with him to Calais the following day to begin negotiations. Meanwhile, Francis had taken advantage of the Comuneros revolt in Spain to reconquer Spanish Navarre. The emperor appealed to Henry for help under the Treaty of London, which had provided against such acts of aggression, and asked that he repudiate the French match and now accept him as a suitor for Mary. But Henry was keen to maintain his advantage and, though agreeing not to make any fresh treaty with the French, was reluctant to commit fully to an alliance with the emperor.
By the following year, Charles had made extravagant promises to secure an alliance, and Henry promised to declare war on France if the fighting continued until November and to mount a joint invasion within two years.10 In these changed circumstances, Mary would be betrothed to her cousin the emperor.11 Mary was five; Charles was twenty-one. He would have to wait eight years for Mary to be of marriageable age. As Henry acknowledged to his envoy, Cuthbert Tunstall, bishop of Durham, their agreement would “not prevent the Emperor from marrying any woman of lawful age before our daughter comes to mature years, as he will only be bound to take her if he is then at liberty.” However, in order to win favorable terms from the emperor, “it is to be considered that she is now our sole heir and may succeed to the crown.”12 If Charles proved “intractable,” Tunstall was instructed to warn him of what was likely to happen if the alliance was not concluded and the French marriage went ahead:
If the match goes on between Mary and the Dauphin and he becomes King of France, and in her right, King of England, the navies of England and France will shut [the emperor] out of the seas. If he made his abode in Spain, the Low Countries will be in danger, and the French King, having these two realms and the duchy of Milan, might do him great mischief in Naples and soon attain the monarchy of all Christendom. Whereas by this alliance the Emperor might get that power to himself, and put France in such perplexity as to be no longer able to trouble him.13
With both France and Spain seeking an English alliance, Mary was at the very center of European affairs. Katherine particularly favored the