“I was invested Archbishop of York, though I saw precious little of my see while Hal remained alive, or during the first few years of Arthur’s reign. You’ll have heard the tale of Hal’s death, I’m certain, of a broken neck while hunting. It’s the way he would have preferred, I trow, for he had a very terror of a slow, lingering final illness, God bless his gallant old soul.
“So Arthur II became king at the age of twenty-five; he was then a recent widower with two young sons and an infant daughter, but he quickly rectified that marital situation by taking to wife the Princess Astrid _of Denmark ans she bore him two more sons before she died.”
“He’s beginning to sound,” remarked Foster, “a bit like the Henry VIII of my—of our—own world.”
“Not so,” replied the Archbishop. ‘That Henry put aside one wife, executed two, and annulled his marriage to another. Arthur’s bereavements were none of his deliberate doing; both Catherine and Astrid died in childbirth, and Brigid of Tara, his third wife, died shortly after a birthing, of what I strongly suspect was puerperal fever. On the twentieth anniversary of his coronation, Arthur was once more a widower; so too was his brother, Duke Henry of Aquitaine . . . and that situation spawned the War of the Three Marriages.”
“That was the war in which Henry was killed, right?” asked Foster.
“Well … in a manner of speaking, Bass,” answered the old man. “He was badly wounded in one of the last battles and, before he could regain his strength, he died of Priests’ Plague … but that is all getting ahead of the tale, again.
“Francois III was then King of France, and a widower, too. He made overtures for the hand of Marie, daughter of the Duke of Burgundy, but Burgundy and France are trajdi-tional enemies and the old Duke saw in these French overtures a hidden plot to gain a claim to the duchy by the French king, so he married his daughter to Arthur of England. Only a few months later, Duke Henry of Aquitaine became the son-in-law of his neighbor, the King of Navarre-Aragon, and at almost the same time, a match was arranged between the Grand Duke of Savoy-Corsica and Arthur’s once-widowed eldest daughter, Camilla Tudor. Whereupon Francois III began to feel threatened.”
“I can’t imagine why he should have felt threatened,” chuckled Foster, picturing the situation on a mental map. In this world too, England and France were age-old enemies. Only a couple of centuries before the time of which the Archbishop was speaking, the Kings of England had held more French territory than had the Kings of France and, though they had then lost all save Aquitaine and the bare sliver of territory around Calais, Francois III must have lived in mortal dread of a fresh English invasion of Nonpandy and Brittany, especially at a time when his armies might be occupied with difficulties on other borders.
No doubt the unhappy French monarch had suffered waking and sleeping nightmares of English foemen pushing out from Calais, Aquitaine-English and Navarrenos marching up from the southwest while Aragonese ships harried and raided the Mediterranean coast, Savoyards coming from the southeast, and Burgundians from the west and north, all intent upon slicing sizable chunks out of the French pie.
“Of course, I cannot speak for the aims of Savoy or Na-varre-Aragon or Burgundy or even, really, for Henry—who was always a warhorse champing at the bit—but I assure you that Arthur II had no immediate designs upon France,” the old man went on. “For a Tudor, Arthur was a singularly peaceable, unacquisitive man.
“But Francois chose to anticipate the worst and commenced to levy troops, fortify his borders, and try to foment trouble for everyone involved, especially for England. He first approached the High King, but Arthur’s third wife had been the half-sister of Brien IV and he likely would not have Joined France in attacking England even had he not had a plentitude of home-grown problems to occupy him and his army.
“Then the Scots were sounded out. Ailpein Stewart, the grandson of that King Robert whom Hal had aided against the Balderites, was then on the throne . . . but just barely. He was a young and a foolish man and a very weak monarch.”