After his month in Newgate with the hangman's noose about his neck all because of Mary's cruel neglect, I wondered if her beauty would so easily atone for her faults. I may as well tell you that he changed his mind concerning this particular doctrine of atonement.
CHAPTER XI[ToC]
Louis XII a Suitor
As soon as I could leave Brandon, I had intended to go down to Windsor and give vent to my indignation toward the girls, but the more I thought about it, the surer I felt there had, somehow, been a mistake. I could not bring myself to believe that Mary had deliberately permitted matters to go to such an extreme when it was in her power to prevent it. She might have neglected her duty for a day or two, but, sooner or later, her good impulses always came to her rescue, and, with Jane by her side to urge her on, I was almost sure she would have liberated Brandon long ago—barring a blunder of some sort.
So I did not go to Windsor until a week after Brandon's release, when the king asked me to go down with him, Wolsey and de Longueville, the French ambassador-special, for the purpose of officially offering to Mary the hand of Louis XII, and the honor of becoming queen of France.
The princess had known of the projected arrangement for many weeks, but had no thought of the present forward condition of affairs, or she would have brought her energies to bear upon Henry long before. She could not bring herself to believe that her brother would really force her into such wretchedness, and possibly he would never have done so, much as he desired it from the standpoint of personal ambition, had it not been for the petty excuse of that fatal trip to Grouche's.
All the circumstances of the case were such as to make Mary's marriage a veritable virgin sacrifice. Louis was an old man, and an old Frenchman at that; full of French notions of morality and immorality; and besides, there were objections that cannot be written, but of which Henry and Mary had been fully informed. She might as well marry a leper. Do you wonder she was full of dread and fear, and resisted with the desperation of death?