Back to the Tudors calendar
We may have moved into a new century but we still had the same king and he still had the same ideas. One of them was to unite
countries by the marriage of children of kings and queens of these countries.. You may remember that he had arranged the marriage of his 3-year-old son, Arthur,
to the 4-year-old Catherine, daughter of the king and Queen of a large part of Spain. By now Arthur was 15 and with amazing mathematical skill I can tell you
Catherine was 16 and so their marriage duly took place.
However Arthur didn’t really help this uniting plan when, six months, later, he died. Henry VII still wanted this alliance with Spain and he didn’t
want to give back the money Catherine’s parents had paid him, so he asked the Pope in Rome to allow his second son, Henry, to now marry Catherine. It was not
normally allowed for a man to marry his brother’s widow under the rules of the Catholic Church.
Then in 1503 Elizabeth of York died and Henry VII became a widower.
This brought a new idea from Henry VII who then asked the Pope to allow him to marry Catherine. However, by now Catherine’s mother had died and she wasn’t heir to
as much of Spain as before and Henry changed his mind about marrying her and indeed about his son marrying her.
The following year, 1502, Henry signed the Treaty of Perpetual Peace with Scotland, hoping to end the wars that had gone on between the two countries.
To make things even better, and unknown to him to completely change English history (wait 100 years or so), Henry arranged that his daughter Margaret should marry
James, the unimaginatively named son of James III of Scotland. This marriage took place in 1503. James was 30 and Margaret 14. All was going averagely well.
