Note (back) — Chapter IV

The edifice which Wolsey had so laboriously built up was, however, based on no surer foundation than the feeble life of a sickly monarch already tottering to his grave. In the midst of his preparations for the conquest of Milan and his negotiations for an attack upon Spain, Louis XII. died on 1st January, 1515; and the stone which Wolsey had barely rolled up the hill came down with a rush. The bourgeois Louis was succeeded by the brilliant, ambitious and warlike Francis I., a monarch who concealed under the mask of chivalry and the culture of arts and letters a libertinism beside which the peccadilloes of Henry or Charles seem virtue itself; whose person was tall and whose features were described as handsome; but of whom an observer wrote with unwonted candour that he "looked like the Devil".[178] The first result of the change was an episode of genuine romance. The old King's widow, "la reine blanche," was one of the most fascinating women of the Tudor epoch. "I think," said a Fleming, "never man saw a more beautiful creature, nor one having so much grace and sweetness."[179] "He had never seen so beautiful a lady," repeated Maximilian's ambassador, "her deportment is exquisite, both in conversation and in dancing, and she is very lovely."[180] "She is very beautiful," echoed the staid old Venetian, Pasqualigo, "and has not her match in England; she is tall, fair, of a light complexion with a colour, and most affable and graceful"; he was warranted, he said, in describing her as "a nymph from heaven".[181] A more critical observer of feminine beauty thought her eyes and eyebrows too light,[182] but, as an Italian, he may have been biassed in favour of brunettes, and even he wound up by calling Mary "a Paradise". She was eighteen at the time; her marriage with a dotard like Louis had shocked public opinion;[183] and if, as was hinted, the gaieties in which his youthful bride involved him, hastened the French King's end, there was some poetic justice in the retribution. She had, as she reminded Henry herself, only consented to marry the "very aged and sickly" monarch on condition that, if she survived him, she should be allowed to choose her second husband herself. And she went on to declare, that "remembering the great virtue" in him, she had, as Henry himself was aware, "always been of good mind to my Lord of Suffolk".[184]