[To face p. 20
HENRY VIII AT THE AGE OF 53
(From National Portrait Gallery)
This silly prank on the English king’s part was, no doubt, the final cause of the rupture of the proposed alliance between Mary Tudor and the Archduke Charles of Castile. Be this as it may, it was at Tournay that Mary was reported to have first fallen a victim to the blandishments of Suffolk, who, while fooling the regent, was covertly courting his dread patron’s sister. He flattered himself that the king, loving him so tenderly as a friend, would readily accept him as a brother-in-law. In this he was mistaken. Henry had other views for Princess Mary’s future; and no sooner was the Austro-Spanish match broken off,[20] thanks to certain political intrigues too lengthy and intricate to recapitulate here, than he set to work to arrange a marriage between Mary and King Louis XII,[21] who, although generally described as “old,” was at this time not more than fifty-three years of age. His appearance, however, was most forbidding; he suffered from the deformity of elephantiasis, and was scarred by some scorbutic disease, “as if with small-pox.”[22]
[CHAPTER II]
THE FRENCH MARRIAGE
The negotiations for this incongruous marriage, which united, for the first time since the Norman Conquest, a British princess to a French king, proceeded very slowly, for Henry knew well that his sister would reluctantly sacrifice her youth to so ugly and sickly a bridegroom: thus, according to the late Major Martin Hume, the first intimation of the proposal Mary received was not until after a tournament held at Westminster on May 14, 1514.