Game of Queens by Sarah Gristwood Page A

Duc d’Alençon, thus settling a longstanding territorial dispute between the house of Alençon and Marguerite’s house of Angoulême.
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    In 1513 it was not Marguerite of Navarre but the English who crossed the Channel. And not for matters of love but of war. In theory at least England’s efforts were directed at regaining the power and the territories it had held on the continent for much of the Middle Ages, and lost only in the fifteenth century. But in fact war was recognised as the main business, as well as pleasure, of the ruler – Machiavelli had very explicitly said as much – and Henry VIII was delightedly flexing his muscles as a warrior king when his alliance with the pope and Emperor Maximilian against France brought him abroad at the head of a mighty army.
    That August, the fall of the town of Thérouanne, near the borders of France and the Netherlands, was followed by the siege and triumphant capture of the wealthy walled city of Tournai. And when the treaty she struck between her father Maximilian and Henry VIII brought Henry across the English Channel, Margaret of Austria was there. Her father, quixotically, had declared his intention of serving as a volunteer in the English army. When he asked her to join him at the besieged town of Tournai, she replied that she would do so if it were really necessary, ‘but otherwise, it is not fitting for a widow to be trotting about and visiting armies for pleasure . . .’ Was she protesting too much? Perhaps.
    Later, Margaret of Austria did take her nephew Charles to meet her father and Henry VIII at Lille, and went on to Tournai, with notable consequences. Although it might not be considered worthy of record in the chronicles of great European events, the small drama played in the summer of 1513 and the following months is worth anatomising, not only for the insight it gives into the protagonists (Henry VIII included) but as a test case of the way a powerful woman could be manipulated through her sexuality; the way in which, particularly where women were concerned, the personal became part of the political.
    The Tudor chronicler Edward Hall described how Henry received Charles and Margaret outside Tournai and brought them into the town ‘with great triumph. The noise went that the Lord Lisle made request of marriage to the Lady Margaret . . . but whether he proffered marriage or not she favoured him highly.’ Lord Lisle was the recently ennobled Charles Brandon, a man on the make and already a man with a colourful marital history.
    Born in the gentry, Brandon had been raised at court. His father died at Bosworth, bearing Henry’s standard on the battlefield that gave Henry VII his crown. This sacrifice on the father’s part ensured favour for the son. A star of the tiltyard, he first jousted publicly on the occasion of Katherine of Aragon’s marriage to Henry VIII and had, crucially, quickly become the boon companion of the younger man. Contracted in youth to one of Elizabeth of York’s gentlewomen, he made her pregnant before repudiating the match to marry her wealthy widowed aunt instead. He sold many of the aunt’s lands before having that marriage annulled, on the grounds of consanguinity, and returning to marry the younger woman, who then died in 1510, leaving Brandon free. Made a Knight of the Garter in April 1513, he was created Viscount Lisle in May, when he was also betrothed to the eight-year-old Elizabeth Grey, heir to the Lisle barony.
    He had raised fifteen hundred men for the 1513 campaign and, at the siege of Tournai, led a successful assault on one of the city gates, in reward for which Henry handed him the keys of the surrendering city. Margaret of Austria’s agent with the English army reported to her that he was ‘a second king’; but he was someone she would, in any case, have been watching carefully.
    Margaret and her nephew Charles spent ten days with the