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manhefnawi

Good Friends and Brothers? Francis I and Henry VIII | History Today - 0 views

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Tudor France England Henry VIII Francis I Political

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  • One was of Henry VIII of England and the other was of Francis I of France. Their symbolic presence at the beginning of an ambitious project designed to link England and France was especially appropriate. Henry VIII is often called a 'Renaissance prince' and is popularly remembered for his ebullience and the extraordinariness of his reign
  • influenced by his relationship with that other 'Renaissance prince', Francis I
  • France and England been so drawn together by some higher ideal or imperative
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  • The Angouleme family was a cadet branch of the royal house of Valois. Francis' father, Charles, died on January 1st, 1496, and in 1498, the boy became heir presumptive to the reigning monarch, Louis XII
  • Louis XII died leaving no surviving son and Francis succeeded him as king on January 1st, 1515. Francis's accession was greeted favourably by the French nobility
  • His mother, Louise of Savoy
  • He was determined to avenge the defeats which Louis XII had suffered there and to capture the duchy of Milan which he regarded as his inheritance
  • On September l4th, 1515, at the Battle of Marignano, Francis defeated a large Swiss army allied to the duke of Milan and so regained the duchy. He secured his prize by a concordat with Leo X and, later, by treaties with the Swiss, with Charles of Spain and with the Holy Roman Emperor, Maxmillian
  • In 1533, Francis concluded a marriage alliance with Clement VII which he hoped would detach the pope from his allegiance to Charles V and thus help both him and Henry VIII
  • The young Tudor's great role-model was Henry V and he regarded northern France as his inheritance, rather in the way Francis saw Milan
  • In 1513, Henry had invaded France in alliance with the pope, the emperor and the king of Spain
  • Nevertheless, these victories and the subsequent peace treaty with Louis XII, allowed Henry to feel that controlling France was a great way of demonstrating his own impressive royal power
  • In England, Francis found an ally in the person of Anne Boleyn who virtually replaced Wolsey as the lynch-pin in Anglo-French contacts
  • Like Wolsey before her, Anne encouraged continued exchanges between the two monarchs and she also patronised English scholars in France
  • Henry VIII's accession in 1509 had generated the same kind of excitement as witnessed in France in 1515. The two kings did indeed have many personal similarities and rivalry between them was almost inevitable
  • Henry then allowed himself to believe, incorrectly, that Francis approved of these claims
  • Against this background and despite the difficulties, Anglo-French contacts were maintained and Francis constantly sought Henry's financial and military support against Charles V
  • Francis spent increasing amounts of time in Paris and at Fontainebleau where his steadily expanding artistic collections and library were shown to all important visitors
  • During the 1540s, Henry VIII also insisted, more than ever, that his was an imperial kingship
  • Much of this augmentation work was undertaken by the same John Leland who had witnessed Bude's work for Francis in the 1520s
  • Francis discussed Henry's building ideas with his ambassador, Sir John Wallop, to whom he also gave a guided tour of his private gallery and baths at Fontainebleau.
  • Henry's personal Psalter, in which he is depicted as King David, his second great role-model after Henry V, was produced by Jean Mallard who had been Francis I's court poet in the 1550s
  • In July 1544 thirty-one years after his first invasion, Henry once again crossed the Channel to set about the conquest of France. He managed to capture Boulogne
  • Francis I died on March 51st, 1547, barely two months after Henry VIII's death in January
  • that of the king as the warrior-leader whose greatness lay in military success and the distribution of largesse to his elite companions
  • Henry VIII's concept of his kingship was centred on the same ideal and his efforts to make his monarchy conform to it, partly through competition with France, pre-dated the start of Francis I's reign
  • This sophistication was particularly evident in Francis's artistic and intellectual patronage and it is here that his 'Renaissance' influence on Henry VIII is most apparent
  • On May 6th, 1994, after opening the Channel Tunnel jointly with President Mitterand, the Queen observed that Britain and France, 'for all their ages-long rivalry, complement each other well, perhaps better than we realise'
manhefnawi

Louis XII: Medieval King or Renaissance Monarch? | History Today - 0 views

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Louis XII Monarch France Renaissance Medieval Political Kingship 1500

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  • Early in the afternoon of April 7th, 1498, Charles VIII of France escorted his queen, Anne of Brittany, to an antiquated gallery at his chateau of Amboise, to watch a game of tennis
  • After the travails of Valois France during the Hundred Years War and the kingdom's subsequent recovery under Charles VII and Louis XI, few magnates any longer felt inclined to contest the title of a mature heir apparent.
  • Louis himself had been brought up in relatively impecunious circumstances, thanks partly to the antipathy of the late Louis XI towards him and his house. There were nobles who had felt that the ruler's treatment of them and their kind as well as his alleged general misgovernment warranted conspiracy and even revolt against him. Although Louis d'Orleans had been far too young to engage in that reign's most concerted expression of magnate resentment, the War of the Public Weal, he had rationalised in comparable terms his own behaviour under Charles VIII.
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  • And in all this he had invoked a version of medieval constitutionalism rooted in feudal law: that, regardless of the will of Louis XI, it was his right with his fellow princes to control the royal council and to exercise powers of regency during Charles VIII's minority
  • Such judgements spring partly from the impact of French incursions upon Italy itself, closely followed as they were by interventions from a Spain newly unified under its Catholic kings.
  • 'For France', according to Henri Lapeyre, 'a new destiny opened with the expedition of Charles VIII'. And according to Roger Doucet, although 'neither Charles VIII nor Louis Xll had any great gifts of government', during their reigns 'a great change took place, a change which may be regarded as a transformation of the monarchical system itself'
  • Whilst noblemen languished in rural penury or occupied themselves with court intrigues, the monarch held sway through the agency of his new men over a territory which, thanks not least to the acquisition of Brittany, was more unified under the Crown than ever before
  • So some jurists and humanists were ready to avow; and in propagating the ideology of monarchy, scholars were joined by artists who gave it visual expression through images pregnant with symbolism
  • On Louis XII's council nobles continued, as they had under his immediate predecessors, to rub shoulders with members of commoner extraction
  • Feudal independence might be long since gone; royal policy might no longer be susceptible to the dictates of magnate coalitions, as Louis d'Orleans had discovered to his cost. But royal resources and royal government remained very much the preserve of oligarchs amongst whom the nobility more than held their own
  • When economic recovery eventually got under way, hard on the heels of military revival under Charles VII, the conditions for reconstituting noble fortunes were not automatically restored
  • A notable instance is the house of La Tremoille, based mainly in western France, whose income from all sources fell by two-thirds between the end of the fourteenth century and the death of Louis XI, only to rise within two generations beyond its former level, owing not least to the efforts and system of estate-management developed by Louis II de La Tremoille, head of his house under Louis XII
  • Louis II de La Tremoille took care to cultivate royal favour. His distinguished service to Charles VIII in the wars of the 1480s which Louis d'Orleans helped to precipitate did not prevent his enjoying the patronage of the latter, once king
  • The phenomenon is obscured by the prominence in public affairs of some of Louis XII's best-known servants.
  • Personal secretary in due course to Louis XII, Robertet held numerous fiscal offices and married into the circle of Tours-based financiers upon whom successive monarchs relied to find them funds
  • and towards the 'absolutism' of the following centuries. Its formation, we are assured, was at least in some degree the achievement of Louis XII, for all that ruler's personal deficiencies and youthful waywardness
  • Confronted with economic difficulties, the nobles of Renaissance France rallied to the service of the Crown and were rewarded accordingly. What the kingdom experienced, in Bernard Chevalier's view, was 'not the rise of the bourgeoisie, but the triumph of the nobility'
  • Apanage after apanage had reverted to the Crown while, under Louis XII, the princes of the blood happened to be unusually young and the heads of other major dynasties to be preoccupied with affairs in their lands on the fringes of the kingdom
  • The most sensational domestic episode of Louis XII’s reign was the fall of one of his principal councillors and commanders, the notoriously grasping Marshal de Gie, accused in 1504 of crimes amounting to treason, owing in good measure to the machinations of the queen and her associates against him. Yet such incidents were exceptional
  • So much is evident from the legislative record of Louis XII's reign
  • Despite his advocacy of the role of the Estates-General under his predecessor, only once, in 1506, did Louis XII convene that assembly, and on that occasion as a device to extricate himself from a dilemma in his foreign affairs
  • Louis XII issued his most ambitious legislative act within his first regnal year: the ordinance of Blois on the 'justice and police' of the realm.
  • Shortly before his death Charles VIII had declared 'that there is no more clear and evident proof of custom than that which is made by the common agreement and consent of the Estates' of the relevant communities. Louis XII proceeded in a similar spirit, dispatching commissioners from his sovereign courts to consult with such Estates and so to record their customs in written form
  • The Renaissance monarchy as exemplified by Louis XII was aristocratic in its complexion, consultative in its methods and also, in a sense, popular. The reputation for benignity with which Du Moulin credited him echoed the appellation which the Estates-General of 1506 plucked from classical precedent to confer upon this monarch. Louis was the 'father of the people'; much later, the citizens of eighteenth-century Paris would remember him aw such when trying to rouse their king Louis XVI to a livelier sense of monarchical duty.
  • o far as the extant evidence will allow historians to judge, the average annual yield of direct taxation in his reign was significantly less than in Charles VIII's, and Iess than one half of Louis XI's demands in the early 1480s
  • How, then, are we to account for beliefs that Renaissance monarchy as exemplified in this reign paved the way for the authoritarianism and splendour associated with 'absolute' monarchy in the following centuries? The answer scarcely lies in the personal attributes of Louis XII
  • Despite – or because of – his excesses, he failed to beget a legitimate heir. His ultimate attempts to do so provoked ribaldry a good deal more overt than the rumours and suspicions that had accompanied his succession to the throne. Nine months after the death of Anne of Brittany in January 1514, Louis, in his fifty-third year, married Mary Tudor, teenage sister of Henry VIII of England
  • Exactly twelve weeks after his wedding, Louis XII died
  • But the impact of monarchy and interpretations of its nature did not depend upon the physical capabilities of its incumbent. The king had two bodies. Whatever the frailty of his body natural, his body mystical, epitome of the realm itself, existed before him and did not perish with his death
  • Under Louis XII, however, such propaganda reached fresh heights, with some infusion of new themes often of Italian inspiration, but above all through intensified and diversified use of traditional symbolism whereby artists and scholars cultivated portentous images of monarchy
  • Replete with time-honoured allusions, such images proliferated to an exceptional degree in the reign of Louis XII. They obliterated all impressions of the questionable character of Louis d'Orleans and his suspect biological antecedents. They elevated royal power to divine status. And they contributed significantly to clear the ground for the growth of the ideology of absolutism to full flower in the era of the Sun King
manhefnawi

Henry VIII's Early Foreign Policy, 1509-29 | History Today - 0 views

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Tudor Medieval England Political

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  • Firstly, that Henry VIII failed to achieve his primary goal, which was to recover the French empire which had been conquered by Henry V
  • his foreign policy was often incoherent, thus allowing more wily operators, such as King Ferdinand of Aragon and the Emperor Maximilian, to manipulate him
  • He only succeeded in capturing the towns of Therouanne and Tournai in northern France in 1513, and these were soft targets
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  • Further, Ferdinand and Maximilian signalled their gratitude to Henry by signing separate treaties with Franc
  • This pattern was repeated later in the 1523-25 campaign which saw Henry VIII allied with the Emperor Charles V against Francis I
  • The campaigns of 1511-14 were, according to Richard Hoyle, largely funded from the wealth which Henry VII bequeathed to his son
  • Wolsey hoped to use the enmity between Charles V and Francis I to secure the best diplomatic deal for England from one or other of them in return for English support
  • England could not compete with France, even with the support of Charles V
  • Henry VIII was indeed, unlike his father, a warlike monarch, seeking gloire and prestige and pursuing his dynastic rights, just like any other Renaissance prince
  • the costs of Henry’s wars were indeed considerable: they drained his private resources and those of his subjects
  • Charles V combined his power as Holy Roman Emperor with his rulership of Spain and Burgundy
  • However, Wolsey’s diplomatic genius saw even greater opportunities and he was able to persuade the Emperor Maximilian, as well as Spain, Scotland, Venice and a host of others, including Leo X himself, to agree to a non-aggression pact under the aegis of Henry VIII. For a brief while, Henry VIII was the arbiter of Europe and London was its foremost capital
  • Where Henry VII had been able to resort to economic warfare against Burgundy, this avenue was closed to Henry VIII, due to the fact that the profitability of English cloth was dependent on the rising economic strength of Flanders
  • Wolsey was playing a double game, but only ever with the intention of putting pressure on Charles V
  • Henry’s frustration over Charles V’s utter obduracy in this matter led him to turn his back on the Habsburg alliance. Instead, after 1526, Wolsey hoped to use French ambitions to destroy Habsburg power in Italy and either break Charles V’s power over the pope or, at the very least, to cajole the Emperor into negotiations
  • relations with France became more binding after the sack of Rome in 1527 by a mutinous Imperialist army which obliged Pope Clement VII ‘to live and die a Habsburg’.
  • In January 1528 a reluctant Henry found himself at war with Charles V with the only accessible Habsburg target being England’s trading partner, Burgundy
  • no contemporary monarch weighted up military gains against an artificial measure of financial expenditure, as the dismal legacy of incipient financial crises which Francis I, Henry II, Charles V and Philip II variously bequeathed underlines
manhefnawi

Louis XII of France: The Unlikely Lad | History Today - 0 views

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Louis XII France Political

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  • Louis XII became king of France by accident. Or, more precisely, because of an accident. On April 7th 1498, his cousin, the reigning monarch Charles VIII, stumbled and hit his head on the lintel of a doorway through which he was passing on his way to watch a tennis match in the royal chateau at Amboise. The king had recently been ill. He seemed to be recovering but this final blow in a life full of hard knocks finished him off. Having no surviving male heir, the crown passed to his nearest male relative, Louis duke of Orleans, who was crowned king in Rheims cathedral on 27 May 1498
  • Louis ended his reign having reformed the French legal system, reduced taxes, having enjoyed some military success in Italy and bearing the loving accolade, 'Father of the People'. In many respects he stands comparison with his contemporary, Henry VII of England
  • Louis was born in 1462 during the reign of his second cousin Louis XI. His father was Charles duke of Orleans, a celebrated poet and the head of a cadet branch of the royal house of Valois. Louis XI was succeeded by his son, Charles VIII, in 1483
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  • his first priority was political security. This is the first respect in which his reign parallels that of Henry VII. The first Tudor had also rebelled against his sovereign, ultimately seizing the crown itself from Richard III in 1485
  • Within six months of his accession Louis had his first marriage, to Louis XI's daughter, Jeanne, annulled. He then married Charles's widow, Anne of Brittany, the daughter of duke Francis. Louis thereby retained the French crown's hold on Brittany. Like Henry VII's marriage to Elizabeth of York, Louis's marriage to Anne also enabled him to extend his domestic power base beyond his immediate family and those favoured by the previous monarch.
  • Henry did besiege Boulogne in October 1492, ostensibly to assert his claim to the crown of France following Anne of Brittany's marriage to Charles VIII in 1491. To buy him off, Charles offered Henry a pension of 745 000 crowns under the treaty of Etaples.
  • Like Henry VII, Louis was expected to ‘live off his own’. He was reasonably successful at this task. He did not make the monarchy profitable in the way Henry was able to, but neither did he impoverish it. Louis inherited a deficit of about 1.4 million livres and left Francis I a deficit of about the same amount – and this despite several very expensive military campaigns of the kind which Henry VII studiously avoided and Louis’s reduction of the taille
  • There was nothing in France to parallel the renowned English system of 'Chamber' finance begun by Edward IV and adopted by Henry VII to increase control over the collection and disbursement of domainal revenues.
  • This suggests that the system worked well enough until the end of his reign, but it was overhauled substantially by Francis I.
  • Louis was less innovative than Henry VII in developing legal machinery and institutions with which to control the nobility. Bonds and recognizances or institutions such as the Council Learned at Law were once seen as evidence that Henry VII was a 'new' monarch whose regime was dominated by lawyers and financial officials upon whom he depended to marginalise the unreliable nobility, the traditional royal servants
  • Louis continued Henry's pension conducted relatively warm relations with him, although he worried about England's ties with the Holy Roman Empire and Spain. He had good cause to after Henry VIII's accession in April 1509
  • Louis's fortunes began to fade in 1510. The new pope, Julius II, was determined to recover the papal lands which Borgia predecessor, Alexander VI, had with French help, alienated to his son Cesare
  • Then in August the Swiss invaded Burgundy and besieged the city of Dijon. They only withdrew on Louis's promise to relinquish his claim to Milan and to pay then a sizeable indemnity. On top of all of this, Queen Anne died in January 1514 leaving Louis no surviving male heir
  • Maximilian and Ferdinand of Spain followed suit, deserting their erstwhile ally Henry VIII, who was furious. Under pressure from Leo X, Henry dramatically reversed his isolation by becoming Louis's ally. His young and very beautiful sister Mary married Louis in October 1514.
  • Compared with that of his successor, Louis' artistic and intellectual patronage was not exceptional. He did not influence Henry VII in the direct way that Francis I did Henry VIII
  • Louis XII died on New Year's Day 1515. Despite his apparently fatal vigour with which he took to his third marriage, it provided him with no son. He was succeeded by Francis of Angouleme, during whose reign Louis's was oevrshadowed on every count except. perhaps, popularity among commoners. His various campaigns against Milan were disparaged by the new regime. However, Francis's campaigns may have been more glamorous but ultimately they were no more successful. It would be idle to claim Louis as one of France's great military commanders, but for 12 of his 16 years as king he did practise successful warfare, outdoing the deeds of Maximilian, Ferdinand and Henry VII
  • Louis's ambitions were to secure his kingdom politically and to enhance the glory of his dynasty. For him, as for Henry VII, increased financial or judicial controls over the kingdom were means to these ends, not ends in themselves, As the founder of a new dynasty Henry's task was undoubtedly more difficult than Louis's and he showed greater ingenuity in developing methods of making his subjects accountable to him
  • Having begun uncertainly, both quickly projected a strong sense of their authority, but the efforts of some historians to characterise Louis as a 'proto-absolutist', anticipating the supposed ambitions of Francis I or even Louis XIV to centralise the state, were wide of the mark. Louis's 'good government' was essentially traditional
manhefnawi

Henry VIII | Biography, Wives, & Facts | Britannica.com - 0 views

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England Foreign Policy Henry VII Tudor

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  • Henry was the second son of Henry VII, first of the Tudor line, and Elizabeth, daughter of Edward IV, first king of the short-lived line of York. When his elder brother, Arthur, died in 1502, Henry became the heir to the throne; of all the Tudor monarchs, he alone spent his childhood in calm expectation of the crown, which helped give an assurance of majesty and righteousness to his willful, ebullient character.
  • More serious was Henry’s determination to engage in military adventure. Europe was being kept on the boil by rivalries between the French and Spanish kingdoms, mostly over Italian claims; and, against the advice of his older councillors, Henry in 1512 joined his father-in-law, Ferdinand II of Aragon, against France and ostensibly in support of a threatened pope, to whom the devout king for a long time paid almost slavish respect.
  • The cardinal had some occasional ambition for the papal tiara, and this Henry supported; Wolsey at Rome would have been a powerful card in English hands. In fact, there was never any chance of this happening, any more than there was of Henry’s election to the imperial crown, briefly mooted in 1519 when the emperor Maximilian I died, to be succeeded by his grandson Charles V.
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  • In Charles, the crowns of Spain, Burgundy (with the Netherlands), and Austria were united in an overwhelming complex of power that reduced all the dynasties of Europe, with the exception of France, to an inferior position.
  • at Pavia (1525), for the moment, destroyed the rival power of France.
  • It provoked a serious reaction in England, and Henry concluded that Wolsey’s usefulness might be coming to an end.
  • Since Henry knew how to work with parliaments, the immediate effect was to make him appear more dominant than ever and to give to his reign a spurious air of autocracy—spurious because in fact the rule of law remained to control the sovereign’s mere will.
  • Between 1538 and 1541 the families of Pole and Courtenay were destroyed by the axe for treasons linked with efforts abroad to reverse the course of events in England but mainly because they could claim royal blood and represented a dynastic danger to the unprolific Tudor line.
  • from Cromwell’s fall (which he regretted too late), the only maker of policy. Policy in the hands of a sick, unhappy, violent man was not likely to be either sensible or prosperous, and so it proved. Left to himself, Henry concentrated on keeping the realm united, despite the growing strife between the religious factions, and on keeping before the world his own image as the glorious monarch of the age. The first resulted in frequent explosions against the ingratitude of his subjects and against his councillors. The second brought him back to his first love—war and conquest, the sport of kings.
  • In 1542 the emperor and the king of France resumed hostilities. After a pretense of independence, Henry again joined the former; the Scots promptly joined the French.
  • But the Scottish dream quickly collapsed as Henry’s crude handling of that nation gave control to a pro-French party, determined to resist even an alliance with England; physical conquest was beyond the king’s means.
  • As king of England from 1509 to 1547, Henry VIII presided over the beginnings of the English Reformation, which was unleashed by his own matrimonial involvements, even though he never abandoned the fundamentals of the Roman Catholic faith.
  • Henry VIII has always seemed the very embodiment of true monarchy. Even his evil deeds, never forgotten, have been somehow amalgamated into a memory of greatness.
manhefnawi

France, Burgundy and England | History Today - 0 views

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England France 16-18THC

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  • The treaty of marriage between Henry V of England and Catherine of France, daughter of Charles VI, sworn in the Cathedral of Troyes on May 21st, 1420, marks the darkest hours of the French monarchy in the fifteenth century. In thirty-one short articles, the treaty made Henry the son of Charles VI and heir, with Henry's own heirs, to the Crown of France. It also made Henry regent until the king's death and gave him the government of the kingdom of France. The 'so-called' dauphin, Charles, was thought to be definitively isolated, having already forfeited his rights after he had had John the Fearless, Duke of Burgundy, assassinated at Montereau on September 10th, 1419
  • On the borders of the territories where he strove to impose his authority as regent and heir to France, the Dukes of Brittany (John V) and of Burgundy (Philip the Good), contrived to safeguard their de facto independence
  • The unexpected death of Henry V on August 31st, 1422, and the long-awaited death of Charles VI (October 21st, 1422), the brutal regency of the Duke of Bedford, and the Amiens alliance of April 1423 between the three dukes (Bedford, Brittany, Burgundy), all contributed, to different extents, to aggravate the political conflict
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  • The recovery of Orleans and the coronation of Charles VII at Reims on July 17th, 1429 mark a turning point for the future also because, by that time, a real national feeling and the concept of patriotism had gained ground
  • Furthermore, the result of Henry V's and Bedford's policy of granting newly conquered land to the English soldiers, was that those who had nothing in England stayed in France to defend and increase their new possessions. For those who already had land in England, the time came when holding estates on both sides of the Channel became impossible and they had to make their choice.
  • Never did Henry VI acknowledge the Duke of Burgundy's claims on the French monarchy and, for his part, the Duke obstinately refused to meet Henry VI during the period the latter was in France from April 1430 to February 1432. Excluded from any participation in the control of the government of France, Philip the Good was able, at leisure and under cover of this alliance, to increase his possessions in the Low Countries
  • In an article published in England and her Neighbours 1066-1453: Essays in Honour of Pierre Chaplais edited by M.C.E. Jones and M.G.A. Vale (Hambledon Press, 1989), Maurice Keen offers a stimulating explanation of the English disaster in the 1450s.
  • Armstrong has drawn attention to the close cultural links between England and Burgundy in the early fifteenth century and has shown that the real instigator of the treaty of Troyes was Philip the Good. For his part, Andre Legay (Poitiers colloquium) developed the idea that, if the Anglo-Burgundian alliance did last until the reconciliation of Charles VII and Philip the Good at the treaty of Arras (September 21st, 1435), it remained nevertheless fragile and limited
  • After Formigny (April 15th, 1450) and Castillon (July 17th, 1453), the inglorious truce agreed upon by Edward IV and Louis XI at Picquigny on August 29th, 1475, was yet another injury to England's pride. However, as Charles Ross in Edward IV (Methuen, 1974) points out, 'the days when England, even in alliance with Burgundy, could seriously challenge the most powerful and wealthy state in Europe were long since past
  • The very title of the colloquium, 'La France de la Fin du XV' siecle: Renouveau et Apogee' (published in 1985 by Editions du CNRS), shows to what extent the fundamental research carried out over the last twenty years has improved our understanding of the kingdom of Louis XI, Charles VIII and Louis XII, and has altered the old image of a France lacking any real identity and torn between the waning of the Dark Ages and the emergence of modernity
  • The incorporation of the ducal apanage of Burgundy was one of the major preoccupations of Louis XI
  • Therefore, Louis XI and Charles VIII had to battle against a real state, which had its own institutions and an efficient and organised army, and which was the mainstay of all the French and foreign oppositions (particularly English) to the progression of the French monarchy. It was only at the end of the 1487-91 war, and after the marriage of the Duchess Anne to Charles VIII (December 6th, 1491) and later to Louis XII (January 8th, 1499) that Brittany was united with France
  • The custom was first followed in France in the case of the funeral of Charles VI, a few weeks after the funeral of Henry V of England where this practice had been followed, and it is likely that the English presence in Paris influenced French custom in this respect
  • The failure of Richard II who, in the 1390s, instead of building up a retinue which reflected, and therefore drew strength from the realities of local politics, 'tried to establish local power-structures which reflected the image of his own court', is similar to the one Richard lII suffered in 1483-85
  • The monarchs were able to rely on a more numerous and permanent administration, loyal to the continuation of the State, and therefore they were less dependent upon their network of patronage. Peter Lewis (Tours colloquium, 1983) refutes the idea that Louis XI's pensioners could have formed a royal clientage: 'they did not represent a monarchical clan, but were para-administrators carrying out para-administrative tasks
  • a group of men, most of them closely related, who monopolised the most eminent functions and offices and who behaved as the masters of the realm (Recherches sur le personnel du Conseil du Roi sous Charles VIII et Louis XII, Librairie Honori Champion, 1980)
manhefnawi

Francis the First of France: Le Roi Chevalier | History Today - 0 views

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Political France Francis I 1547

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  • This was the reputation acquired by Francis the First in his own time and reverently preserved by subsequent generations. His mother, Louise of Savoy, laid its foundation even before it was certain that he would inherit the throne of his second cousin, Louis XII. In 1504 she had a medallion engraved in honour of the ten-year-old Duke of Valois
  • While Francis I has been remembered as the chivalrous leader who sustained a long and unequal struggle against the Hapsburg Emperor, Charles V, he has also been described as the King of the Renaissance
  • There are, however, other aspects of Francis I that are less consistent with the popular impression. He was the autocrat who built upon the work of Louis XI in creating the despotism of the new monarchy.
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  • He was the “most Christian King” who entered into an alliance with the enemy of Christendom. He was the destroyer of the integrity and tradition of the Gallican Church. He was the voluptuary who allowed his court to be divided into factions
  • His father, Charles of Angouleme, resembled his namesake and uncle, the graceful lyric poet, Charles of Orleans
  • The group accepted the easy guardianship at Amboise of Louis, Duke of Orléans, who two years later became King as Louis XII.
  • The adulation of his mother and sister shielded him from the hatred of Anne of Brittany. The Queen had borne Louise XII an only child, the Princess Claude, who was heiress of Brittany in her mother’s right
  • Francis was heir-presumptive to the French Crown. A marriage between Francis and Claude seemed a natural arrangement, which would prevent the alienation of the Duchy of Brittany from the French royal house. But the Queen was firmly opposed to it, and the marriage took place only after her death in 1514
  • the future of the heir-presumptive remained in doubt. In October 1514, Louis XII
  • married Mary of England, the sister of Henry VIII. Francis was less distressed than his mother
  • Bonnivet was made Admiral of France, and the long-vacant title of Constable was bestowed upon his cousin, Charles of Bourbon
  • The election of Charles V marked the beginning of a two-hundred-year conflict between the French monarchy and the Hapsburgs
  • In February 1516, the grandson of the Emperor, Charles of Austria, inherited the thrones of Aragon and Castile. Six months later, he recognized the French conquest of Milan. At this time there was no hostility between him and Francis I.
  • Political responsibilities were not neglected in the flush of military success.
  • opposed to a rival whose encircling dominions included Spain, the Netherlands, Germany and southern Italy, and whose strength was augmented by the wealth of the New World
  • The contrast between the ebullient King of the Renaissance and the melancholic Emperor has always attracted the attention of historians
  • The one reliving the ancient myths of the universal monarchy and the crusade against the infidel: the other replacing the symbolic attitudes of the past with the realistic values of the nation state
  • The two Kings were too much alike in age and temperament to allow common interests to still the spirit of mutual competition
  • Henry VIII, reading through the terms of a declaration, obligingly omitted his title of King of France
  • When hostilities began in the following year, the Tudor King, after making some show of mediation, aligned himself with the Emperor. The war went badly
  • For a year Francis I remained the captive of the Emperor in Madrid, while Louise of Savoy rallied national sentiment for the continuation of the war
  • The great-grandfather of the Emperor was Charles the Bold of Burgundy. It was as a Burgundian that Charles V claimed the lands that had been seized by Louis XI. The release of the King was not secured until a pledge had been given for the cession of Burgundy
  • The subsequent death of Catherine of Aragon removed the cause of English disagreement with the Emperor. In the last two wars of the reign Henry VIII reverted to the imperial alliance
  • In the course of the war, Bourbon was killed during the ferocious assault of his mutinous forces on Rome in May 1527
  • In the sack of Rome Henry VIII saw an opportunity to win the favour of Clement VII and obtain the annulment of his marriage with Catherine of Aragon. For several years he remained the ally of France
  • Even after the revelation of the marriage with Anne Boleyn, Francis pleaded the English case during his meeting with the Pope at Marseilles in October 1533
  • The King had never intended to observe the terms of the Treaty of Madrid. Fresh allies were found in Italy, notably Pope Clement VII
  • Turkish armies were threatening the eastern imperial marches. In his league with the Sultan Sulaiman he inaugurated one of the most enduring of French policies
  • a vast Turkish army had erupted into Hungary and overwhelmed the Emperor’s Hungarian allies
  • The infidel was regarded with mingled curiosity and horror
  • The Ottoman alliance appalled the conscience of Europe; but the King found it difficult to resist the temptation offered by the expeditions of Charles V to North Africa and the campaigns of his brother, Ferdinand, upon the Bohemian border
  • Although the King’s diplomacy with the Papacy, the Turk, England and the Princes of the Empire, contained many failures and much duplicity, it was pursued with a realism and a flexibility that offset his lack of strategic ability in war
  • By June 1538, when Paul III personally negotiated the truce of Nice, it appeared possible to achieve a genuine reconciliation
  • The significant campaigns of the future were not to be fought in Italy, but on the frontiers of France
  • The altered texture of French society in the first half of the sixteenth century was, in part, a response to the demands of the monarchy
  • Francis I never summoned a full Estates-General
  • In July 1527, in the presence of the King, the Parlement heard from the lips of secretary Robertet a statement so imperious and unequivocal that it represented an unprecedented declaration of monarchical absolutism. The King, like Louis XII before him, was called the father of his people; but, whereas Louis earned his patriarchal status through his benevolence, Francis claimed it as his right
  • His sister, Marguerite, now Queen of Navarre, was scarcely less influential
  • Factions long concealed within the court became more apparent after the death of the Dauphin in 1536
  • The plain and modest Queen Eleonore, sister of Charles V, whom the King had married five years after the death of Claude in 1525, became the centre of the pro-Hapsburg party at the court
  • He held the office once occupied by de Boisy and, finally, that which the traitor Bourbon had forfeited
  • the King’s death in 1547
  • In the last years of the reign the glories of the new monarchy seemed tarnished and outworn
  • bowed to the zealots of the Sorbonne and aped the gallant ways of his youth
manhefnawi

James IV: Renaissance Monarch | History Today - 0 views

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Scotland James IV Henry VIII France Kings England Queen Margaret

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  • In June 1488, just three years after Henry VII’s unlikely victory in the English Midlands, James IV became king on the battlefield of Sauchieburn south of Stirling, close to the spot where Robert Bruce had won his great victory over the English at Bannockburn in 1314.
  • James IV was brought up at Stirling Castle by his mother, Margaret of Denmark, alongside his two younger brothers. The queen had produced three healthy sons but she and James III led separate lives after an earlier rebellion in 1482. The king, who had managed to alienate all of his siblings, believed that his wife had sided with his brother, the Duke of Albany, when the duke returned from exile in France and invaded Scotland with the future Richard III of England. James III seems also to have felt that his eldest son was tainted by contact with Albany and perhaps considered barring the boy from the succession
  • James IV was ruler of a land famously described in a letter written by its own nobility in 1320 to Pope John XXII as ‘the tiny country of Scotia lying on the very edge of the inhabited world’. Scotland was poor, cold and wet. Edinburgh, its capital, held only 12,000 citizens, in contrast to London’s 50,000. Yet, like its new monarch, the country was not inward-looking.  Difficulty of travel by road over rugged terrain meant that it had long relied on sea routes for transport and communication with the wider world. The kings of Scotland were determined not to be overlooked in Europe. They forged trade and political alliances with Scandinavia and were long-standing allies of the French, who viewed Scotland as a brake on the ambitions of England. The two countries that occupied the island of Britain were natural enemies, nowhere more so than in the Borders, where centuries-old feuds and the violence that fuelled them were adjudicated by special courts composed of English and Scots. But James III had attempted a policy of conciliation with England that was unpopular with his aristocracy and Henry VII, a cautious man, did not relish constant war with his northern neighbour. It remained to be seen how James IV would approach Anglo-Scottish relations and how he would develop his ambition to make Scotland a European power.
  • ...18 more annotations...
  • His first years on the throne of Scotland were as troubled and insecure as those of Henry VII in England. In the early 1490s the threat of rebellion was never far away. James’ experience of life outside Stirling Castle was limited but he was a young man of keen intelligence and a shrewd observer of court politics
  • Foreign policy was traditionally the king’s preserve and it was here he would first show his mettle. He chose to do so in a way that had potentially grave repercussions for Henry VII.
  • In November 1495 the imposter Perkin Warbeck, who claimed to be Richard, Duke of York, the younger son of Edward IV, was warmly welcomed to Stirling by James IV
  • Henry VII was also looking for a wife for his son, Arthur, in Spain and James knew that the stability of Anglo-Scottish relations was important for the marriage negotiations to succeed.
  • He was sending a clear message to Henry VII that he had the means to threaten the Tudor throne. In the summer of 1496 he backed this up with military might when he and the Scottish host crossed the river Tweed into England with ‘Richard IV’ in their midst.
  • A proxy marriage took place at Richmond a few months after the wedding of Prince Arthur and Katherine of Aragon. The new Queen of Scots did not, however, go north to live with her husband until the summer of 1503. She was still several months short of her 14th birthday when, after a magnificent and demanding progress north, intended to showcase the splendour of the Tudor regime, she finally met James IV in early August at Dalkeith Castle
  • Over time, considerable affection grew between them and a mutual commitment to establishing their line and enhancing Scotland’s prestige. Once she reached the age of 16 Margaret did her duty valiantly, producing children most years, though none survived for long before she gave birth to the future James V in 1512. The king and queen kept a cultured Renaissance court, encouraging the flowering of Scottish literature, enjoying their mutual love of music and attracting artisans, intellectuals and men of science from all over Europe
  • Establishing Scotland as a European power cost money and James’ exchequer was constantly challenged once Margaret Tudor’s substantial dowry had been paid
  • James was also interested in medicine and dentistry, practising his skills on courtiers who gamely allowed themselves to have teeth extracted. Thomas Wolsey, then a rising prospect in Henry VII’s administration, was once kept waiting for an audience with the king because James was busy making gunpowder
  • In the summer of 1506 James wrote to his ally, Louis XII of France, setting forth his determination to develop a fleet that would be the key to defending Scotland from her enemies. He wanted it to be able to stand comparison with that of much bigger European powers. A northern ally with a substantial naval presence was music to the ears of the French king.
  • As his stock rose in Europe it became apparent that this would lead to tensions with his wife’s brother. Henry VIII was irritated by what he saw as the pretentions of James IV and Queen Margaret. The rivalry that soon became apparent was fuelled not just by a boy’s contempt for an older man but by the long-standing resentment that Henry felt for Margaret, who had briefly taken precedence over him before she left for Scotland.
  • Henry and Katherine remained childless and the uncomfortable truth, which Henry studiously ignored, was that his sister was his heir. If he were to die, James IV would effectively rule both kingdoms of the British Isles. His dynastic ambitions at home unfulfilled, Henry aspired to play a greater role in Europe. The main prize for Henry was not Scotland, but France. Yet it was in pursuit of this dream, a yearning to go back to the glory days of Henry V, that he would come into conflict with his brother-in-law and the Treaty of Perpetual Peace would be destroyed
  • Our husband knows it is witholden for his sake and will recompense us
  • By 1512 this family feud formed part of the wider backdrop of European war, as Henry VIII, in alliance with the Holy Roman Emperor, Maximilian, declared war against Louis XII of France
  • James visited Margaret and their son at Linlithgow in early August 1513 before he left for Edinburgh to oversee military preparations, praying for success in the beautiful church of St Michael just outside the palace gates. On August 13th the Scottish host, sporting the latest artillery technology, 20 pieces of cannon made of brass and supported by European experts in field warfare, left Edinburgh in a mighty procession of men and arms.
  • The old Earl of Surrey, a veteran of the Wars of the Roses, who accompanied Margaret Tudor on her journey to Scotland ten years previously, had moved rapidly north and now stood in James’ way
  • The Scots were stunned by their loss, though they did not fall apart. Henry VIII, fighting a desultory and vainglorious little war in France, had neither the interest nor the ability to follow up Surrey’s unlikely victory and James V grew up to carry on his father’s rivalry with the English monarch as the prolonged struggle between the Tudors and the Stewarts continued
  • The belief that Scotland as an independent kingdom died with James IV developed well after the event and has damaged his reputation. But it also fails to recognise his achievements. A true Renaissance monarch, he had made Scotland into a European power and his people mourned him greatly.
manhefnawi

Francis I, the Greatest French King | History Today - 0 views

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Francis French Monarch

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  • 'This Big Boy will ruin everything', so Louis XII of France is reported to have said, on more than one occasion, of his own son-in-law and putative successor: not exactly a ringing endorsement
  • Yet, 500 years after his accession, if there is one king of France before Louis XIV that the French people remember – and with affection – it is Francis I
  • Francis was betrothed to Louis XII's eldest daughter, Claude de France, in May 1506. Two years later he moved to court, was acknowledged as heir presumptive with the courtesy title of 'dauphin' and soon attracted attention throughout France and beyond
  • ...16 more annotations...
  • Francis married Claude in May 1514 and, in October of the same year, Louis XII married the young and beautiful Mary Tudor, the sister of Henry VIII. Had she conceived a son, all Francis' hopes would have been dashed. Yet, less than three months after his marriage, Louis XII was dead and the 20-year-old Francis was proclaimed king of France on January 1st, 1515
  • He inherited Charles VIII's claim to the Kingdom of Naples, which included Sicily and most of southern Italy. He claimed certain territories along the ill-defined border between France, the Netherlands and the Holy Roman Empire, whose Habsburg overlord was the future emperor, Charles V. Francis also wanted the city of Tournai, conquered by Henry VIII in 1513, to be returned to France. For roughly 20 of his 32 years as king, Francis was preparing for war, active in it, or managing its consequences in expensive and convoluted diplomacy
  • Barely nine months after his accession, in September 1515, Francis conquered Milan, after defeating a Swiss mercenary army at the battle of Marignano
  • He secured this prominence through peace treaties and alliances, culminating in his inclusion in the 'Universal Peace' of 1518, agreed in the name of Pope Leo X but actually organised under the auspices of Henry VIII, who felt a keen and life-long rivalry with Francis
  • Francis had hoped to impress and intimidate Henry into committing himself as an ally against Charles V, whose power in Italy unnerved Francis
  • appreciated that securing and maintaining the support of interest groups, particularly the nobility, was vital to effective kingship
  • Francis was taken to Spain as the emperor's prisoner. France was left vulnerable to its enemies and to internal dissent, which Louise de Savoie, as her son's regent, had much to do to overcome while trying to secure Francis' release. She immediately sought the assistance of the English and sympathetic Italian states, who were wary of the immense power of Charles V in the wake of his triumph at Pavia
  • Disappointed by Charles V's lack of support for his own claim to France, Henry once more turned the tables on the emperor. A renewed Anglo-French alliance enabled Francis to repudiate the treaty of Madrid and led indirectly to a more acceptable agreement
  • Francis maintained peace with his English counterpart until 1542
  • He never finally secured Milan from Charles but he did, nevertheless, maintain his dynastic rights against the emperor's potentially overwhelming power. This he did in part by allying with the papacy, with various Italian states, with the heretical Henry VIII and with the Ottoman sultan Süleyman the Magnificent. These last two alliances scandalised Catholic Europe, but keeping Charles' enemies close for as long as he could assisted Francis in projecting royal power well beyond the borders of the French state throughout his reign
  • Another important factor in Francis' capacity to project this power was his widespread reform of crown fiscal administration after his return from Spain in 1526. These were prompted first and foremost by the need to pay huge debts incurred in the war and in securing peace with Henry and Charles
  • His sale of judicial offices set up long-lasting difficulties for the monarchy
  • He made an ill-advised pre-emptive strike against imperial territory in the Netherlands and Spain in early 1521
  • Daily life there was never as elaborately choreographed under Francis as it would be under his successors. He is perhaps second only to Henry IV in his reputation for informality and spontaneity as a French king.
  • The 'big boy' had come close at times to ruining everything, but had also made France a power to be reckoned with and made his own mark on its history
  • Under Francis, the court of France was at the height of its prestige and international influence during the 16th century.
manhefnawi

The Two Tudor Queens Regnant | History Today - 0 views

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Tudor Early Modern England Queens

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  • The Tudor monarchs, who ruled England from 1485 to 1603, have always attracted a great deal of historical attention; the most studied of them all have been Henry VIII (1509-1549) and Elizabeth I (1558-1603).
  • Mary has a strong claim to being the most reviled monarch in English history. Whether that is justified or not, the point remains that Elizabeth’s path to the throne was made much easier after Mary’s reign
  • his has not been commonly understood by later historians, however, for ever since Mary I died in 1558, and her half-sister Elizabeth I succeeded her, historians have focused on the many differences between them, stressing the Catholicism and religious persecution of Mary’s regime, and the Protestantism and (comparative) religious tolerance of Elizabeth’s
  • ...21 more annotations...
  • There were, however, always a few who ruled their kingdom in their own right even when, like the fifteenth-century Isabel of Castile, they were married. When she died, Isabel was still independent enough to will her kingdom not to her husband, but to her eldest daughter
  • Yet from 1553 to 1603 two English queens ruled the kingdom, between them reigning for half a century. This happened because despite his six marriages, when Henry VIII died in 1547, only one young male heir, and his two daughters, Mary and Elizabeth, survived him
  • Faced with the proclamation of ‘Queen Jane’, and despite having no visible support from any of the great men of the realm, Mary proclaimed herself as the true queen
  • Henry had arranged that if his son, Edward VI, died without an heir, then his elder daughter Mary would succeed him. If she had no heirs, then Elizabeth should take the throne.
  • As the next brief reign was ending, and to defend the more advanced Protestantism established during his rule, the dying Edward VI (1549-1553) made a will excluding both his sisters from the throne
  • The installation of Queen Jane also had the support of the French
  • As a result of the new religious regime, and although Mary had been brought up a Catholic, the much younger Elizabeth was reared within the independent Church of England. Both, however, appeared to be content with the church order Henry VIII had established by the end of his reign
  • Once on the throne, Mary found that the transition from male to female monarchy in 1553 produced some obvious and some unexpected problems. She was, however, well placed to address them. Her mother had always believed Mary had the strongest claim to the English throne, and her father seems to have shared this view at least until the mid 1520s
  • Although Edward was personally much closer to Elizabeth than he was to Mary, he believed she was an equally unsuitable heir. After all, her mother, Anne Boleyn, had been disliked by many within and beyond the royal court, and had been scandalously executed on the (admittedly highly improbable) charge of having committed adultery with several men, including her own brother
  • The initiative for the challenge had come from Mary, and without her actions the Janeite coup would almost certainly have succeeded
  • But she was also aware that since the contemporary prescriptive literature consistently taught the importance of very clear gender differentiation between the expected roles of men and women, there were inevitably going to be problems for England’s first queen regnant
  • Yet with Mary, as yet unmarried, the rituals had to represent a monarch who was, as contemporaries remarked, both king and queen. Mary’s coronation saw her accepting all the regalia of a male monarch, even though she went to her coronation dressed as a queen consort, with her hair down
  • Tudor historians are now much more aware of the importance of magnificence in Tudor royal theatres of power. But that was for kings. Surviving accounts – and portraits – also stress the subordinate role and demure postures in which royal wives were habitually portrayed, and so images of queens consort provided a very limited model for representations of power for queens regnant
  • French and English monarchs had long been famous for their claims to be able to heal certain illnesses by a power called ‘the royal touch’
  • As well as helping her subjects through them, she even sent such cramp rings to, among others, the Emperor Charles V, the Queen Dowager of France and the Duchess of Lorraine. In the face of explicit French polemics to the contrary, and a great deal of implicit opposition from conventional beliefs about the necessarily masculine nature of any priestly power, every time she exercised her healing powers Mary demonstrated that female monarchy was as sacred as male. This was another precedent Elizabeth was pleased to follow
  • Parliamentary statutes were also used to further clarify the status of a female monarch. For reasons still not fully understood, a rumour spread that Queen Mary, unlike any English king, had completely unlimited power, because all statutes aimed at limiting royal power referred only to kings
  • In other matters, Philip was to be effectively political wife to the monarch of England. Most coinage, charters, seals, and other representations to the two monarchs showed Philip seated on his wife’s left (subordinate) side, just as he was accommodated in what had always been the ‘queen’s’ quarters in royal palaces. The treaty left little doubt who was actually monarch of England, however the married couple might subsequently redefine their relationship.
  • Mary’s unpopular marriage to Philip of Spain provided Elizabeth with polemical ammunition for many years, whenever she wished to resist yet another proposed foreign match for herself
  • for many of her subjects, the rather scandalous princess of the Edwardian era was finally transformed into a demure, pious, courageous Protestant, a much better model for the woman soon to become England’s first Protestant queen
  • But it was only one of the many debts which Elizabeth owed to Mary
  • In public performance, public speaking, embodied female regality, and royal enactment of conventionally gendered public roles, Mary set an example which prepared the way for her sister’s much celebrated public performances. Perhaps it is time all those precedents were taken more seriously in reassessing Elizabeth’s achievements as second queen regnant of England
manhefnawi

Francis I | king of France | Britannica.com - 0 views

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Francis I Charles V

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  • the first of five monarchs of the Angoulême branch of the House of Valois.
  • he waged campaigns in Italy (1515–16) and fought a series of wars with the Holy Roman Empire (1521–44).
  • Francis was the son of Charles de Valois-Orleáns,
  • ...20 more annotations...
  • On the accession of his cousin Louis XII in 1498, Francis became heir presumptive and was given the Duchy of Valois.
  • Louis XII, distrustful of Francis, did not allow him to dabble in affairs of state but sent him off at the age of 18 to the frontiers
  • The pomp of the Reims coronation, the sumptuous cortege of the solemn entry into Paris, and the lavish feasts revealed his love of ceremony and also pleased the people of Paris, who had been disheartened by a long succession of morose and sickly sovereigns.
  • Ambitious for glory and urged on by turbulent young nobles, he made sure of peace with his neighbours, entrusted the regency to his mother, and galloped off to Italy.
  • He also signed a perpetual peace treaty with the Swiss and bought back Tournai from Henry VIII of England.
  • Princess Louise, was affianced to the Habsburg prince Charles, heir to the Netherlands and, at 16, the new king of Spain.
  • Everything forecast a great reign. Francis I formed a brilliant and scholarly court at which poets, musicians, and learned men mingled
  • he was the most powerful sovereign in all Christendom when, in 1519, the German emperor Maximilian died. The election as emperor of Maximilian’s grandson Charles spelled ruin for Francis I, for Charles, who was already king of Spain, now encircled France with his possessions.
  • the Emperor had his mind set on a universal monarchy. His chief obstacle was the King of France. A mortal hatred emerged from this rivalry
  • In 1520, on the Field of Cloth of Gold near Calais, where both displayed unprecedented magnificence, Francis vainly sought an alliance with Henry VIII.
  • The King, unconcerned, arose late, paid little attention to his council, and gave orders without seeing that they were carried out. Money disappeared into thin air. A few paymasters were hanged, though in vain.
  • In 1523 the King demanded the return to the French state, according to law, of the vast provinces that the great feudal duke Charles de Bourbon thought he had inherited from his wife.
  • the French, weary of the prodigality of their sovereign, would rise up on an appeal from him.
  • At the Battle of Pavia in 1525, defeated and wounded, he was taken prisoner.
  • As the price for the King’s freedom, the Emperor demanded one-third of France, the renunciation of France’s claim to Italy, and restitution to Bourbon of his fiefs
  • Although Francis finally recovered, he did not cease to suffer.
  • Their raging hatred impelled Charles and Francis to challenge each other to a duel, which was, however, prevented. During one of the King’s relapses, his mother reached an agreement with Margaret of Austria, the Emperor’s aunt, to stop this deadly struggle.
  • His foolish expenditures had emptied the treasury, and the ransom was collected only with difficulty.
  • In 1531 the King’s mother succumbed to the plague. Marguerite, having married the King of Navarre, lived at some distance.
  • The war with Charles V was resumed in 1536.
manhefnawi

The Succession and Foreign Policy | History Today - 0 views

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Elizabeth Philip II Mary Queen of Scots France Spain

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  • the diplomatic nightmare of the trial and execution of Mary, Queen of Scots
  • the French crown maintained the only permanent embassy of Elizabeth’s reign
  • The Spanish embassy was a stormy one, suspended between 1572 and 1578 and permanently terminated in 1584
  • ...23 more annotations...
  • Rivalries within the royal family lay at the heart of English politics between the reigns of Edward III (1327-77) and Henry VII (1485-1509), not least the Wars of the Roses. This was also the case in France and Scotland in the second half of the sixteenth century. The Habsburgs provide the exception: with only a few lapses, they were almost the model of family loyalty
  • As an heir of Henry VII, Mary could not challenge the legitimacy of the Tudor line as a whole
  • If Anne Boleyn was as promiscuous as was charged, then Henry VIII’s paternity was in doubt
  • Illegitimacy was used to justify the removal of Elizabeth and Mary from the succession in Edward VI’s settlement of the crown on Lady Jane Grey in 1553. This was of major significance. If the events of 1553 united Mary and Elizabeth in common defence of their rights as heirs to Henry VIII, they also brought the Queen of Scots to the fore as a rival to both. The basis of Mary Stuart’s claim from this point on was that she was the one descendent of Henry VII untainted by either illegitimacy or heresy
  • The Wars of the Roses effectively destroyed the male members of the House of Lancaster (the descendants of John of Gaunt) and Henry VII and Henry VIII completed the process. By Edward VI’s death in 1553 all the main claimants to the English crown were women, and such men as had a claim owed it to a female descent. This was the case with Henry VII himself, and moreover his mother (Lady Margaret Beaufort) was descended from John of Gaunt’s illegitimate family
  • Philip of Spain had a strong claim as descendant of the legitimate daughters of Gaunt’s second marriage
  • The events of 1553 made Elizabeth’s place in the succession an international issue.
  • Elizabeth’s ability to turn to France on her accession was hampered by Mary Stuart’s position as Dauphine and, after July 1559, Queen of France. Until her death in 1587, Mary was the pole around which Elizabeth’s foreign policy revolved
  • The furthest concession Elizabeth appears to have made to Mary was to offer a new settlement that would have circumvented the treaty of Edinburgh in the months following James VI’s birth in June 1566.
  • The revelation of Mary’s understanding with Philip II and their plans for Elizabeth’s deposition marked the next stage in Elizabeth’s foreign relations
  • Elizabeth’s alienation from Philip also inspired a reconciliation with France that effectively lasted for the rest of her reign
  • Elizabeth’s hesitation over the Netherlands was overcome by the arrival of Don Juan of Austria as the new Governor General in late 1576
  • Throughout the ensuing negotiations she made no secret of the fact that what she really wanted was an alliance with Henry III. What she could not control was the decision of William of Orange in the winter of 1579-80 (partly on the strength of the marriage negotiations) to break with Spain and offer the lordship of the Netherlands to Anjou
  • Enterprise of England she could not allow Philip II to regain the Netherlands, whatever Henry III did
  • She now had the opportunity to form a new relationship in defence of his claim to the succession
  • Navarre was heir to the childless Henry III under the Salic Law, but bitterly opposed on account of his religion. This – it was now appreciated in England – was something that Henry III was trying to circumvent. In 1589 the two kings allied and following Henry III’s assassination in July, Navarre succeeded him as Henry IV
  • Throughout the 1590s, even if the war with Spain was not as successful as was occasionally hoped, defeat was not an issue
  • Henry IV may have converted and then made a separate peace with Philip II in 1598, but he remained an ally
  • If there was an ironic aspect to Elizabeth taking Mary’s place as James’s mother, this was also the case with Essex
  • However, Elizabeth, James and Henry formed a triumvirate of monarchs
  • She is a haughty woman, falling easily into rebuke, and above all when any speak of the king [Henry IV] whom she considers for a long time to have been greatly beholding to her
  • Philip II’s last years were embittered by disparaging comparisons
  • These last twenty-one years that the queen of England has spent in the service of the world will be the most outstanding known of in history
manhefnawi

Anne de Montmorency: Great Master, Great Survivor | History Today - 0 views

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Montmorency Crown Loyalty Francis I Henry II

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  • On Louis’ death in January 1515 Francis duly became king of France at the age of twenty
  • In September 1515 Francis I once more asserted the French claim to Milan
  • In the spring of 1537, once more under Montmorency, the French attacked Artois in the Netherlands and a number of towns were captured before a truce was agreed with Charles’s regent, Mary of Hungary
  • ...13 more annotations...
  • Savoy was allied to the Emperor and Francis’s real intention was to pressure Charles V (d.1558) into returning Milan to him.
  • Montmorency worked closely with Cardinal Wolsey in establishing a ‘perpetual alliance’ between Francis and Henry VIII in 1527.
  • Henry II was dead and the authority of the monarchy was threatened by dissension and religious conflict between the great noble families of France.
  • He returned to England as a special envoy later that year as relations between Francis I and Charles V began to deteriorate
  • He acted as an intermediary between the King in captivity, Louise of Savoy who was regent in France
  • On February 10th, 1538, he was made Constable of France, the highest military officer in the realm under the King
  • Montmorency exercised a strong but never uncontested influence upon the King
  • Yet like his English contemporary Wolsey, with whom he stands comparison on a number of grounds, Montmorency’s power depended entirely on his sovereign’s continuing trust and approval. Charles V’s decision over Milan in 1540 fatally undermined Francis’s confidence in Montmorency and therefore his power in the King’s regime
  • Francis embarked on his final war against the Emperor, who quickly allied himself to Henry VIII. The English took Boulogne and the allies threatened Paris before Francis and Charles agreed to the Peace of Crépy in September 1544. Francis I died on March 31st, 1547. On his deathbed he was reconciled to Henry
  • They pressed continually for war against the Habsburgs and in 1552 the Duke of Guise defended Metz from Charles V with great valour
  • On April 24th, 1558, Mary Queen of Scots, the niece of the Duke of Guise, who had been at the French court for almost ten years, was finally married to Henry II’s eldest son Francis. Just over a year later Henry died of injuries received in a tournament to celebrate the Franco-Habsburg peace of Cateau-Cambrésis and the fifteen-year-old Francis became king (r.1559-60). Montmorency lost influence, symbolised in the fact that the office of Great Master was taken from him and conferred upon the Duke of Guise
  • Francis II died in December 1560 and was succeeded by his brother Charles IX (r.1560-74), a minor, who was strongly influenced by his mother Catherine de’ Medici. This fact led members of the Bourbon family, headed by Anthony, King of Navarre and his brother Louis of Condé (1530-69), to assert their right and duty as princes of royal blood to guide the young king
  • These qualities were useful in serving Francis I and Henry II, both of whom sought to extend and consolidate royal authority within the kingdom of France
manhefnawi

Henry VII and the Shaping of the Tudor State | History Today - 0 views

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Tudor Medieval England Henry VII

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  • Shakespeare's later Tudor view of Henry VII changed very little between the first study of the reign by Francis Bacon in 1622 and Henry's last academic biography, by Stanley Chrimes, in 1973
  • Henry Tudor could not understand the problems he faced, and was essentially a bad medieval king. He could only have changed their policies after he had learned how to be an effective king. However, this interpretation takes little account of Henry's particular circumstances in 1485. It was precisely because of his unique upbringing and disconnection from England that Henry Tudor was able to bring new ways of doing things to his kingdom. Between about 1480 and 1520 England was certainly transformed from what Nicholas Pronay described as the 'merry but unstable England ruled by Edward IV to the tame, sullen and tense land inherited by Henry VIII'
  • It was control of personal relationships and mental attitudes among the people who represented the king that Henry VII saw as the key to forcing change upon the medieval ruling structures he inherited
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  • What Henry VII did have great expertise in also grew from the circumstances of his exile
  • Henry's power base of support did cut across existing and inherited allegiances. This was an advantage if it could be transformed into Tudor loyalty.
  • That Henry VIII became such a gross figure of monarchy must be due partly to the freedom given to ministers like Cardinal Wolsey and Thomas Cromwell to direct royal policy
  • Henry VII also began to free the crown from the direct influence of the aristocracy
  • Fifteenth-century kings, dukes and earls were royal cousins with a common descent from Edward III (1327-77). They held a shared elite outlook. Henry VII arrived from relative obscurity in 1485 and began to rule more like a landlord than the first among aristocratic equals.
  • Henry VII stayed closely involved in the daily tasks of ruling because he had a suspicious personality and was obsessed with the security of his Tudor dynasty
  • It removed the politically active gentry from the king's personal chambers, although over time figures such as the groom of the stool, Hugh Denys, became important because they had the ear of the king
  • Henry's permanent adult exile separated him entirely from England's ruling elite, both literally and in terms of his outlook and experiences. On the one hand, this gave Henry an opportunity to unlock the closed network of personal service that had surrounded medieval royal heirs as Princes of Wales or royal nobles. On the other, it created a great dependence upon the advice and skills of others. Some, like Sir Giles Daubeney and Sir Edward Poynings, had joined Henry after 1483 in opposition to Richard III. Others, like John de Vere, earl of Oxford, followed Henry because he was the only chance they had of recovering their lands and influence. Henry could not fully trust them to remain loyal if political circumstances changed again.
  • Henry VIII's early years, with a vibrant youthful court and military glory in France and Scotland, were certainly more like those of Edward IV's second reign (1471-83) than the more sombre final years of Henry VII's
  • To keep their status these men became agents of the Tudor crown
  • Henry pressed these prerogative rights to the very edge of the law, and many subjects complained of injustice. But the ability of the crown to intervene in their life became much more apparent
  • By regulating their roles as JPs, sheriffs, escheators and jury members, the Tudor crown further encroached upon the political and social freedoms of the ruling elite. Under weak leadership in Henry VI's reign (1422-61), they had been partly responsible for the descent into lawlessness and civil war. The Tudor king sought to remedy both deficiencies
  • Henry created few new nobles and was reluctant to promote or reward his servants excessively.
  • Henry also kept the personal estates of the crown (the demesne lands) in his own hands
  • The king's men soon learned that they could still wield great power: Sir Thomas Lovell's retinue, based on a number of scattered crown stewardships, was as large as any noble connection during this period. But Henry's knights were closely monitored. In another case, the king was willing to sacrifice Sir Richard Guildford's influence in Kent, when it became clear after 1504 that he could no longer represent the crown's interests effectively.
  • Towards the end of Henry VII's reign, members of the elite were competing for office and influence within a clearly defined structure of crown service. They were not challenging independently for resources of land and men that could threaten Tudor stability. Nobles could still be great landowners, courtiers or commissioners, like the restored earl of Surrey in the north before 1500
  • Henry VII's reliance on the policies of his Yorkist predecessors is well known
  • No historian has so far explained how Henry VII gained a foothold on power long enough to exploit the few advantages he held in 1485, or how he withstood the very serious early threats to his dynasty.
  • Henry VII began to use these tools on a large scale to enforce loyalty during the conspiracies of the first decade of Tudor rule. The backlash to the Tudor accession arose in the heartland of Richard III's support in Yorkshire
  • This was most obvious with the pretender Perkin Warbeck's call upon the loyalty of former servants of Edward V for most of the 1490s. Henry did try to heal the factionalism that had prevented a harmonious resolution of the civil wars in earlier reigns, and he did this by reshaping the political loyalties of the ruling classes
  • If the system worked as Henry VII intended it to, then little revenue would be generated from this source. The extent to which this aspect of the use of bonds was developed has been hidden from most Tudor historians
  • Henry VII's reign therefore remains an intriguing period to study. With several historians now working exclusively on Henry, we can expect a major growth in our level of understanding of the first Tudor reign in the near future
manhefnawi

France - France, 1490-1715 | Britannica.com - 0 views

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16TH Century France

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  • When Charles VIII (reigned 1483–98) led the French invasion of Italy in 1494, he initiated a series of wars that were to last until the Peace of Cateau-Cambrésis in 1559.
  • organization appeared during the Wars of Religion of the 16th century and survived until the time of Louis XIV.
  • In the later part of the 17th century, the reforms of the army by Michel Le Tellier and his son the marquis de Louvois provided Louis XIV with a formidable weapon.
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  • The growth of a large royal army, however, was only one effect of the increased level of military activity. The financial administration of the country also underwent a drastic reorganization
  • By the reign of Francis I, the king, even in times of peace, was unable to make do with his ordinary revenue from rents and seigneurial dues. In 1523 Francis established a new central treasury, the Trésor de l’Épargne, into which all his revenues, ordinary and extraordinary, were to be deposited.
  • Successive monarchs were forced, therefore, to seek additional revenue. This was no simple matter, because French kings traditionally could not tax their subjects without their consent.
  • The early Valois kings had negotiated with the Estates-General or with the provincial Estates for their extra money; but in the middle of the 15th century, when the Hundred Years’ War with England was reaching a successful conclusion, Charles VII was able to strike a bargain with the Estates. In return for a reduction in overall taxation, he began to raise money to support the army without having to seek the Estates’ approval.
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Louis XI | king of France | Britannica.com - 0 views

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Louis XI Burgundy Charles VII Foreign Policy

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  • Louis was the son of Charles VII of France
  • Louis was married to Margaret, daughter of James I of Scotland
  • Louis took part in his father’s campaigns of 1440–43 against the English, and in 1443 he forced the English to raise their siege of Dieppe. When the Anglo-French truce of 1444 left numbers of mercenary troops unemployed, he led a large body of them to attack Basel, in ostensible support of the German king Frederick V (later Holy Roman emperor as Frederick III) in his quarrel with the Swiss confederacy. Failing to take Basel, Louis attacked the Habsburg possessions in Alsace since Frederick would not grant him the promised winter quarters.
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  • Exercising full sovereignty, he pursued a foreign policy sometimes at variance with his father’s. After concluding a secret alliance with Savoy for a partition of the Duchy of Milan, Louis, recently widowed, married Charlotte, daughter of Duke Louis of Savoy, despite Charles VII’s prohibition (1451).
  • Installed as Philip’s guest, Louis could acquaint himself thoroughly with the working of the great Burgundian state, the ruin of which he was later to seek.
  • His first act was to strike at Charles VII’s ministers.
  • Louis XI’s major preoccupation was with the princes and great vassals of the kingdom, who were ready to form alliances with one another or with England against him. Former officers of Charles VII stirred up hostility against the King’s new men; Jean II, duc de Bourbon, and Francis II of Brittany emerged as the leaders of the malcontent nobility; Philip the Good’s son and future successor, Charles the Bold of Burgundy, supported the King’s enemies; and the King’s own brother, Charles de France, at first duc de Berry, became a tool of the rebels.
  • During the negotiations Charles learned of an insurrection in Liège, fomented by the French king’s agents.
  • Having already attacked Burgundy, Louis found himself facing a new host of enemies, including not only Charles the Bold, Edward IV, and Francis of Brittany but also, in the southwest, Charles de France, to whom Louis had granted the Duchy of Guyenne in 1469, Jean V d’Armagnac, and John II of Aragon, who hoped to recover Roussillon.
  • After 1475 it remained for Louis to destroy the power of Burgundy.
  • by the Treaty of Arras (1482), Louis retained full sovereignty over the Duchy of Burgundy, Picardy, and Boulonnais and possession of Franche-Comté and Artois as the dowry of Margaret of Austria, daughter of Mary and Maximilian, fiancée of his infant son and heir, the future Charles VIII.
  • Louis regarded war as a precarious enterprise and made it only with reluctance, though he maintained the standing army that Charles VII had instituted.
  • After Charles the Bold’s death there was no one to prevent Louis from exercising a virtual protectorate over Savoy, where his sister Yolande was regent, and he made himself the arbiter of the affairs of northern Italy.
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    Philip the Good
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King Philip of England | History Today - 0 views

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King Philip II of Spain and England Queen Mary Elizabeth

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  • Philip, the only legitimate son of the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V (r. 1530-56), and known to history as Philip II of Spain (r.1556-98), was King of England for rather more than four years. He achieved that dignity when he married Queen Mary (‘Bloody Mary’, r.1553-58) in July 1554, and surrendered it when she died in November 1558
  • Philip of Spain, he was the bitter enemy of Elizabethan England, against whom a twenty-year war was fought
  • potentially his reign was one of huge significance. Had Mary borne him children, particularly a healthy son, the entire subsequent history of England could have been different
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  • Elizabeth would never have come to the throne, the country would have remained Roman Catholic, and England would have been linked for an indefinite period with the Netherlands in a dynastic union
  • Charles V’s ambition and Mary’s suggestibility
  • Both the Ottoman threat and the schism would go (he thought) with Germany to his brother Ferdinand, but the French rivalry would remain to Spain
  • A marriage to the Queen of England provided the perfect solution – a powerbase in the north from which the Netherlands could be secured
  • Mary secured the English succession in July 1553
  • Throughout Edward’s reign (1547-53) she had attempted to defend her father’s religious settlement, and when her brother died young in July 1553 she was the heir by law, and a notorious religious conservative
  • She also owed, and willingly acknowledged, a debt of gratitude to Charles, who had defended her by diplomatic means over many years
  • There were only three candidates: Dom Luis of Portugal, the brother of King Juan; Edward Courtenay, son of the Marquis of Exeter (executed in 1539) and related through his mother to Edward IV; and Prince Philip
  • Neither he nor his courtiers knew much about England
  • Although his support remained, there is no evidence that the Queen ever had any intention of marrying him
  • There were protests in Parliament which Mary brushed aside, and a briefly serious rebellion in Kent in January 1554, which was with some difficulty suppressed
  • As a result, the prince found himself with little more than the title of King of England
  • had no authority in England independent of the Queen, and must surrender his title if she should die childless
  • Their numerous titles had been officially proclaimed, and ‘King and Queen of England, France and Ireland …’ duly took precedence.
  • Whether by calculation or oversight, he found that he had two households, one Spanish, one English, and in spite of fair-minded attempts to divide his service between them, he was besieged with complaints on all sides
  • The Queen consorts of Henry VIII had all been given generous settlements, but Philip got nothing
  • If Henry’s settlement was reversed, the whole process of dissolution could be declared invalid, and the land reclaimed by the Church, at the cost of immense disruption. Such a situation would be unacceptable to the English Parliament
  • Philip therefore used Habsburg clout in Rome to persuade Pope Julius III to do a deal. If he waived the Church’s claim to these lands, the King and Queen would reconcile England to his ecclesiastical authority
  • By the middle of January 1555, Philip had performed his first major service to the realm of England
  • Mary’s much heralded pregnancy turned out to be an illusion
  • The Queen was sick, bewitched, even dead; there was a substitution plot in which Philip was implicated
  • On August 3rd the royal couple removed to Oatlands, and on the 5th, as soon as he could decently leave her, Philip departed for the Netherlands
  • Within a few weeks he had taken over his father’s authority in the Low Countries, and the real test of Charles’s intentions had arrived
  • Charles V abdicated in Brussels in September 1555, and handed over the Crowns of Spain to Philip in January 1556
  • There was talk of the council being divided into King’s men and Queen’s men, and the Duke of Alba urged him to get a grip on the appointments to English offices
  • The war with France, temporarily suspended by truce in February 1556, flared up again in the autumn, and Mary’s increasingly desperate pleas for Philip’s return were met with professions of affection, and bland excuses
  • Both his honour and his shortage of resources necessitated that England join him in his war against France. Mary was only too anxious to do something to gratify him that would not compromise her authority in England, so she was keen to oblige
  • Philip had left in July, and when in January 1558 the Queen announced that she was again pregnant, no one believed her. This was not only immensely sad, it was also a warning that there was something seriously wrong with her health, and Philip got the message. Ever since he had abandoned his campaign for a coronation in 1556, the King had had his eye upon Elizabeth
  • At first the King sought to neutralise Elizabeth by marriage to one of his loyal dependents, the Duke of Savoy
  • The princess was the heir by English law – the same law which had brought Mary to the throne – but the heir in the eyes of the Catholic church should have been Mary Stuart, the granddaughter of Henry VIII’s sister, Margaret. Mary was in France and betrothed to the Dauphin, so that neither Philip nor Mary wanted her on the English throne
  • As her health deteriorated in the early autumn of 1558, to Mary’s intense distress, her husband concentrated on ensuring that Elizabeth’s succession would be as smooth as possible
  • Mary’s death was a relief to Philip. The affection in their relationship had been all on her side, and he urgently needed a fertile wife who would bear him more children. In the event he had failed to transcend the limitations of his marriage treaty, and his power in England had remained extremely limited. In the course of time, the country became a liability
  • he also brought it into the war which cost Calais; but he protected Elizabeth during the latter part of the reign, and made sure that she came safely to the throne. Paradoxically, that was his most lasting achievement as King of England
manhefnawi

The Tirol's Last Knight | History Today - 0 views

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Maximilian Habsburgs Rulers Charles V Holy Roman Emperor

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  • Habsburg rulers, the 'last knight', Maximilian I, Holy Roman Emperor from 1493 to 1519
  • The central starting point for the Trails is the city of Innsbruck which Maximilian made the centre of his rule and from where he set about fulfilling his ambitions to establish a complex scheme of dynastic and marital alliances The result of these enabled his grandson, Charles V, (nephew of Katherine of Aragon – the connection caused Henry VIII much grief when he was trying to persuade the pope to give him a divorce while Rome was under Habsburg occupation) to become by far the greatest ruler of sixteenth-century Europe with a travelling schedule that would be familiar to any chief executive of a multinational company today
  • His indecisive father, Frederick lll. King Arthur, Godfrey the first Crusader king of Jerusalem and his wife’s father Charles from the Bold of Burgundy (from who the Hapsburgs took over the order of the Golden fleece and a patchwork of rich low countries territories
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  • Maximilian also put new technology to good effect with his Zeughaus, or armoury, back in Innsbruck where the same expertise that was lavished on coins and memorial sculpture was used to produce state-of- the-art artillery to protect the scattered Habsburg possessions
  • His life was streaked by tragedy: his first wife, Mary of Burgundy, was killed by a fall from her horse while out hunting, pregnant with his third child; his son 'Philip the Fair' died in his twenties; Philip's wife, Joanna, mother of Charles V, earned her epithet of 'the Mad' by carrying her husband's embalmed body around with her on her travels, with frequent inspections. But Maximilian was, nevertheless, a man who enjoyed life – as the rollicking reliefs on the Golden Roof illustrate
  • Like England's 'Merry Monarch', Charles lI, one feels he would have been a convivial dinner companion
  • For all its splendour, Maximilian's tomb is empty
  • his heart is not in Austria at all
manhefnawi

Why did the Habsburg-Valois Conflict Last so Long | History Today - 0 views

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Valois Habsburgs Kings

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  • The conflict between the Habsburg Emperor Charles V (1500-1558) and the Valois King of France Francis I (1494-1547) commenced in 1521 and came to an end in 1559 in the reigns of their successors, Philip II and Henry II
  • to Christendom as a whole
  • One explanation for the protracted nature of the Habsburg-Valois wars is that the character of warfare was changing
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  • It might fairly be asked why the Emperor Charles V did not dispose of the Valois challenge more quickly.
  • In 1519 he was elected Holy Roman Emperor, ruler of Germany
  • Francis, in turn, harboured a deep-seated resentment against Charles
  • The kingdom had recently been consolidated by the incorporation of great provinces like Burgundy and Brittany
  • This explains why the history of the Habsburg-Valois rivalry is one where intensive periods of bloody fighting were followed so often by stalemate and financial exhaustion
  • The two kings [Henry II and Philip II] realised that if they attempted to mount another campaign in 1559, they might stretch their finances and the loyalty of their subjects to breaking point
  • In waging war he could only really rely on the financial support of the Netherlands and Castile, and as the Habsburg-Valois wars persisted he, and his successor Philip II, found himself plundering both territories to their absolute limits
  • In the mind of the young Charles V, no family ambition loomed larger than that of recovering his ancestral lands of Burgundy from the French
  • Much of the Habsburg-Valois rivalry revolved around rival ambitions in Italy
  • Habsburg-Valois conflict to an end was that the conflict was essentially a dynastic one; the rivalry was between two proud ruling families who were determined to protect the achievements of their forbears and to enhance the reputation and power of their family, or dynasty
  • This helps to explain why the House of Habsburg and the House of Valois persisted for so long in their conflict with such a disregard for the damaging consequences to their lands and peoples
  • Francis's successor, Henry II, had spent three years as a hostage of the Habsburgs in Spain, after the Treaty of Madrid, and as King of France from 1547 he exhibited an animosity to the Habsburgs that perhaps exceeded even that of his father
  • The continuation of the Habsburg-Valois conflict was also a tremendous boon to the Ottoman Sultan. He aimed to extend Muslim Ottoman power into Europe. The major obstacle to expansion were, firstly, the Austrian Habsburg lands in central Europe, ruled by Charles V's brother Ferdinand, and, secondly, the military and naval presence of the Habsburgs in the Mediterranean
  • The impression is often given that Charles abandoned his claim to Burgundy in the Peace of Cambrai in 1529
  • Thus for Charles V his personal rivalry with Francis I was overlaid by a sense of injustice at what he perceived to be the theft of his family's Burgundian inheritance by the Valois kings
  • It was also here that the deeply felt dynastic rivalry between the Houses of Habsburg and Valois was at its most acute. Throughout the long conflict the French chafed at Habsburg control of the kingdom of Naples
  • Charles V consequently acquired Naples when he inherited the kingdom of Aragon in1516
  • Francis and his successor Henry II continued to press French claims to Naples
  • The House of Valois did periodically renounce its claim when peace with the Habsburgs was expedient or unavoidable
  • Francis I's successor, Henry II, continued to uphold the Valois claim and in 1557 launched a final and unavailing assault on the kingdom.
  • The House of Valois felt strongly that they had the strongest dynastic claim to the Duchy of Milan
  • When Charles V had acquired his extensive empire by 1519 he regarded Milan not only as a satellite of the Empire
  • The Habsburg-Valois wars were, then, to a very significant extent, an unremitting struggle for mastery over Milan
  • The conflict between the Habsburgs and the Valois appeared at times to escalate into something approaching a general European war. The German Protestants, the lesser powers of Europe and even the superpower of the Ottoman empire were all drawn into the fray at various times
  • Henry VIII of England took a distinctly opportunistic view of the conflict. When he was anxious to undermine Habsburg predominance in Europe he sided with the French
  • Charles believed that he had triumphantly achieved his great dynastic dream in 1526, when the defeated and captive Francis I agreed to surrender the territory in the Treaty of Madrid
  • the Sultan was brought into an anti- Habsburg alliance by the French firstly in 1536 and, later, in 1542
manhefnawi

Power of the Court | History Today - 0 views

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Inside the Court in s Monarchy Power Positions

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  • Courts are a key to understanding European history. Defined as ruling dynasties and their households, courts transformed countries, capitals, constitutions and cultures. Great Britain and Spain, for example, both now threatened with dissolution, were originally united by dynastic marriages; between, respectively, Ferdinand of Aragon and Isabella of Castile in 1469; and between Margaret Tudor and James IV King of Scots in 1503, leading to the accession a hundred years later of their great-grandson, James I, to the throne of England. 
  • The House of Orange was crucial to the formation of the Netherlands, the House of Savoy to the unification of Italy, the House of Hohenzollern to that of Germany. Dynasties provided the leadership and military forces that enabled these states to expand. As Bismarck declared, while asserting the need for royal control over the Prussian army, blood and iron were more decisive than speeches and majority decisions. 
  • Like previous European conflicts, including the Napoleonic Wars and repeated wars ‘of Succession’, the First World War was in part a dynastic war; between the Karageorgevic rulers of Serbia, whose supporters had murdered the previous monarch from the rival Obrenovic dynasty, and the Habsburgs, determined to oppose Serb expansion, symbolised by another Serbian victim, the assassinated Archduke Franz Ferdinand; and between the Hohenzollerns and Romanovs for domination in Eastern Europe. The fall of four empires in 1917-22 – Romanov, Hohenzollern, Habsburg and Ottoman  – was a European cataclysm comparable to the fall of the Roman Empire 1,500 years earlier. 
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  • The history of capitals, as well as countries, confirms the importance of courts. The rise of Berlin, Vienna, Madrid (often called Corte), St Petersburg and Istanbul cannot be understood except as court cities, apparent in the appearance of their streets and squares or, in Istanbul, mosques. A final, fatal expression of that role occurred in July 1914. Thousands, eager for war, gathered in front of palaces in London, Berlin, Munich (where, in a photograph, the young Hitler can be seen in the crowd) and St Petersburg, to wave hands, flags and hats, cheer and sing the national anthem as their monarch appeared on the palace balcony
  • The Louvre was a royal palace before it became an art gallery, founded by Francis I and principal residence of Louis XIV from 1652 to 1671. After the Revolution Paris again became a court city and remained one from 1804 to 1870.
  • The development of constitutions also owed much to courts. The rise of the House of Commons was helped by disputed royal successions – no monarchy had more of them than England – as well as the needs of royal finances. The founding document of constitutional monarchy in 19th-century Europe was the Charte constitutionelle des francais, promulgated by Louis XVIII (who was one of its authors) on June 4th, 1814. The Charte became the principal model for other constitutions in Europe, including those of Bavaria (1818), Belgium (1831), Spain (1834), Prussia (1850), Piedmont(1848) and the Ottoman Empire (1876). Britain could not have a comparable influence, since it did not have a written constitution to copy
  • A constitution was a royal life insurance policy: when Louis XVIII’s brother Charles X violated it in July 1830 the dynasty was deposed. Nevertheless France finally became a republic, after 1870, only after three dynasties – the Bourbons, Orléans and Bonapartes  – had been tried and found wanting
  • Having helped to finance the struggle against the French Empire, the Rothschilds became financiers to the Holy Alliance. They financed Louis XVIII’s return to France in 1814, Charles X’s departure in 1830, the Neapolitan Bourbons both before and after their exile in 1861 and the Austrian monarchy. As one Rothschild wrote to another, on February 8th, 1816: ‘A court is always a court and it always leads to something.
  • Under Edward VII public ceremonial increased in splendour, the court entertained more frequently than before and there were more royal warrant-holders
  • He wrote admiringly about monarchs, from Henri IV and Louis XIV to Charles XII. In the 19th century Walter Scott was an admirer of George IV, whose visit to Edinburgh he arranged; Chateaubriand was a brilliant royalist pamphleteer and memorialist; Stendhal and Mérimée were convinced Bonapartists
  • Court history also subverts national boundaries. The Tudors came to power with French help: Henry VII, after 14 years of exile in Brittany and France, had French as well as English troops in his victorious army at Bosworth. One aspect of Anne Boleyn’s appeal to Henry VIII was her French education and the skills she had acquired while serving at the French court. The House of Orange was both German and Dutch (and partly English), the Bourbons acquired Spanish, Neapolitan and Parmesan branches. The Habsburgs were  able to switch nationalities and capitals between Prague, Vienna, Budapest, Brussels, Barcelona, Madrid, Lisbon and, in the brief reign of Philip I, London
  • Through the prism of courts and monarchy, Cortes could communicate with Montezuma. The Sunni-Shi’a struggle now destroying Syria and Iraq is another war of succession. It began as a dynastic dispute, between the prophet Muhammad’s Umayyad cousins and his son-in-law Ali over succession to the caliphate: from the start Islam was a state as well as a religion. In 680 the struggle culminated in the murder of Ali’s son, the Imam Hussein, in Kerbela in Iraq. Every year, on the Day of Ashura, this murder is commemorated by Shi’a in mournful flagellatory processions
  • Above all, courts subvert boundaries between the sexes. Because of a European consort’s role in assuring the succession and enhancing dynastic prestige, her household and apartments could rival in size and splendour those of the monarch. Sometimes she controlled her own finances. The court of France was called ‘a paradise of women’. A court was therefore the only arena where women could compete with men, on near equal terms, for power and influence. Hence the decisive impact on national and international politics of, to name only a few consorts, Anne Boleyn, Catherine the Great and Marie Antoinette. Or, among rulers’ mothers: Catherine de’ Medici and Anne of Austria in France; 17th-century Valide Sultans in the Ottoman Empire; and the Empress Dowager in China
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