Becoming the Queen

Abstract

By including clauses in the treaty imposing heavy fines in the event either Mary or Prince Charles defaulted on their marriage, Henry VII, Maximilian, and Ferdinand tacitly acknowledged the possibility that the union would not be consummated, all marital rhetoric to the contrary. Yet surely none of them anticipated the speed with which events would shift on the European political stage. For seven years Mary had been the Princess of Castile; it took less than three months to exchange that title for that of the Queen of France, a monarch whom poets such as Pierre Gringore would celebrate as a bringer of peace comparable to the Virgin Mary. And instead of a teenaged boy, Mary’s husband would be a fifty-two-year-old man whose repeated pleas for her to set sail as soon as possible contrasted sharply with the fickle Spanish-Hapsburg allies and their repeated and humiliating delays.