333. Henry's Politic Marriages.
Henry accomplished more by the marriages of his children and by diplomacy than other monarchs had by their wars. He gave his daughter Margaret to King James IV of Scotland, and thus prepared the way for the union of the two kingdoms in 1603. He married his eldest son, Prince Arthur, to Catharine of Aragon, daughter of the King of Spain, by which he secured a very large marriage portion for the Prince, and, what was of equal importance, the alliance of Spain against France.
Arthur died soon afterward, and the King got a dispensation from the Pope, granting him permission to marry his younger son Henry to Arthur's widow. It was this Prince who eventually became King of England, with the title of Henry VIII, and we shall hereafter see that this marriage was destined by its results to change the whole course of the country's history.
334. The World as known at Henry's Accession (1485).
The King also took some small part in certain other events, which seemed to him, at the time, of less consequence than these matrimonial alliances. But history has regarded them in a different light from that in which the cunning and cautious monarch considered them.
A glance at the map (opposite) will sho how different our world is from that with which the English were acquainted when Henry was crowned. Then the earth was generally supposed to be a flat body surrounded by the ocean. The only countries of which anything was certainly known, with the exception of Europe, were parts of western Asia, together with a narrow strip of the northern, eastern, and western coasts of Africa. The knowledge which had once existed of India, China, and Japan appears to have died out in great measure with the travelers and merchants of earlier times who had brought it. The land farthest west of which anything was then known was Iceland.
335. First Voyages of Exploration; the Cabots, 1497.
About the time of Henry's accession a new spirit of exploration sprang up. The Portuguese had coasted along the western shores of Africa as far as the Gulf of Guinea, and had established trading posts there. Later, they reached and doubled the Cape of Good Hope (1487). Stimulated by what they had done, Columbus, who believed the earth to be round, determined to sail westward in the hope of reaching the Indies. In 1492 he made his first voyage, and discovered a number of the West India Islands.
Five years afterward John Cabot, a Venetian residing in Bristol, England, with his son Sebastian, persuaded the King to aid them in a similar undertaking. They sailed from that port. On a map drawn by the father after his return we read the following lines: "In the year of our Lord 1497, John Cabot and his son Sebastian discovered that country which no one before his time had ventured to approach, on the 24th June, about 5 o'clock in the morning." That entry is supposed to record the discovery of Cape Breton Island; a few days later they set foot on the mainland. This made the Cabots the first discoverers of the American CONTINENT.
As an offset to that record we have the following, taken from the King's private account book: "10. Aug. 1497, To him that found the new isle 10 pounds."