June, 1512] "FELIX AUSTRIA NUBE"
When, in 1512, Maximilian came to Brussels, and Charles was sent to meet him, he begged Margaret to bring the three Princesses, without delay, to "amuse themselves in the park at Vueren," and sent the haunch of a stag which he had killed that day as a present to his "dear little daughters." At the children's urgent entreaty, the Emperor himself rode out to join them at supper, and invited them to a banquet in the palace at Brussels on Midsummer Day. When the English Ambassador, Sir Edward Poynings, came to pay the Emperor his respects, he found His Majesty in riding-boots, standing at the palace gates, with the Lady Regent, the Lord Prince and his sisters, looking on at a great bonfire in the square. The Ambassador and his colleague, Spinelli, were both invited to return to the palace for supper, and had a long conversation with the Lady Margaret, in whom they found the same perfect friend as ever, "while the Prince and his sisters danced gaily with the other young folk till between nine and ten o'clock."[6]
But this merry party was soon to break up. Before the end of the year Maximilian Sforza crossed the Brenner, and entered Milan amidst the acclamations of his father's old subjects, and eighteen months later two of the young Archduchesses were wedded to foreign Kings.
II.
May, 1514] MARRIAGE-MAKING
While her nieces were still children Margaret was busy with plans for their marriage. Her views for them were ambitious and frankly expressed. "All your granddaughters," she wrote to her father, "should marry Kings." The old Emperor himself was an inveterate matchmaker, and the House of Austria had been proverbially fortunate in its alliances. Tu felix Austria nube had passed into a common saying. By his marriage with Mary of Burgundy, Maximilian entered on the vast inheritance of Charles the Bold, and his grandson was heir to the throne of Spain by right of his mother Juana. In 1509 proposals for two of the Archduchesses came from Portugal, and Margaret urged her father to accept these offers, remarking shrewdly that King Emanuel was a wealthy monarch, and that there were few marriageable Princes in Europe. If both Madame Leonore and Madame Marie were betrothed to the two Portuguese Princes, there would still be two of her nieces to contract other alliances. But Maximilian's thoughts were too much occupied with his war against Venice to consider these proposals seriously, and the matter was allowed to drop.[7] Meanwhile Madame Isabeau's hand was in great request. In March, 1510, Maximilian received offers of marriage for his second granddaughter from the King of Navarre's son, Henri d'Albret, but this project was nipped in the bud by the jealousy of Isabella's other grandfather, Ferdinand of Aragon, and Francis I.'s sister, Margaret, Duchess of Alençon, became Queen of Navarre in her stead. A new and strange husband for the nine-year-old Princess was now proposed by the Regent herself. This was none other than Charles of Egmont, Duke of Guelders, the turbulent neighbour who had been a thorn in Margaret's side ever since she became Governess of the Netherlands. It is difficult to believe that Margaret ever really intended to give her beloved niece to the man whom she openly denounced as "a brigand and a felon," but it was necessary to cajole Guelders for the moment, and conferences were held in which every detail of the marriage treaty was discussed, and the dowry and fortune of the bride and the portions of her sons and daughters were all minutely arranged. But when the deputies of Guelders asked that Madame Isabeau should be given up to the Duke at once to be educated at his Court, the Regent met their demands with a flat refusal. The negotiations were broken off, and war began again.[8] Another matrimonial project, which had been discussed ever since King Philip's lifetime, was the union of the Archduchess Eleanor with the young Duke Antoine of Lorraine. Maximilian seems to have been really eager for this marriage, which he regarded as a means of detaching a neighbouring Prince from the French alliance, but was so dilatory in the matter that Margaret wrote him a sharp letter, asking him if he ever meant to marry his granddaughters. Upon this the affronted Emperor rebuked her for these undutiful remarks, and asked peevishly "if she held him for a Frenchman who changed his mind every day."[9] But in spite of these protestations he took no further steps in the matter, and in 1515 Duke Antoine married Renée de Bourbon, a Princess of the blood royal of France.
The marriage of Louis XII. to Henry VIII.'s handsome sister Mary was a more serious blow. Six years before the English Princess had been wedded by proxy to the Archduke Charles, and Margaret, whose heart was set on this alliance, vainly pressed her father to conclude the treaty. Meanwhile, in January, 1514, Anne of Brittany died, and the widowed King sent offers of marriage, first to Margaret herself, and then to her niece Eleanor.[10] A few months later news reached Brussels that Louis had made a treaty with Henry, and was about to wed the Princess Mary. So the Archduke lost his promised bride, and his sister was once more cheated of a husband. The Lady Regent was deeply hurt, but found some consolation for her wounded feelings in the double marriage that was arranged in the course of the same year between the Archduke Ferdinand and Anna, daughter of Ladislaus, King of Hungary, and between this monarch's son Louis and the Archduchess Mary. In May, 1514, the little Princess was sent to be educated with her future sister-in-law at Vienna, where the wedding was celebrated a year afterwards.[11]
At the same time marriage proposals for another of his granddaughters reached Maximilian from a new and unexpected quarter. The young King of Denmark, Christian II., on succeeding to the throne, declined the French marriage which had been arranged for him by his father, and conceived the ambitious design of allying himself with the Imperial Family. In March, 1514, two Danish Ambassadors, the Bishop of Schleswig and the Court-Marshal Magnus Giœ, were introduced into Maximilian's presence by Christian's uncle, the Elector of Saxony, and asked for the Archduchess Eleanor's hand on behalf of their royal master. The prospect of an alliance with Denmark met with the Emperor's approval, and could not fail to be popular in the Low Countries as a means of opening the Baltic to the merchants of Bruges and Amsterdam. Accordingly the envoys met with a friendly reception, and were told that, although the elder Archduchess was already promised to the Duke of Lorraine, the Emperor would gladly give King Christian the hand of her sister Isabella. The contract was signed at Linz on the 29th of April, 1514, and the dowry of the Princess was fixed at 250,000 florins, an enormous sum for those times. Only three-fifths of his sister's fortune, however, was to be paid by Charles, and the remainder by her grandfather, the King of Aragon.[12]
