otnote 497: _Ven. Cal._, ii., 329.]

[Footnote 498: _L. and P._, i., 5192.]

Domestic griefs were now embittered by political resentments. Ferdinand
valued his daughter mainly as a political emissary; he had formally
accredited her as his ambassador at Henry's Court, and she naturally
used her influence to maintain the political union between her father
and her husband. The arrangement had serious drawbacks; when relations
between sovereigns grew strained, their ambassadors could be (p. 176)
recalled, but Catherine had to stay. In 1514 Henry was boiling over
with indignation at his double betrayal by the Catholic king; and it
is not surprising that he vented some of his rage on the wife who was
Ferdinand's representative. He reproached her, writes Peter Martyr
from Ferdinand's Court, with her father's ill-faith, and taunted her
with his own conquests. To this brutality Martyr attributes the
premature birth of Catherine's fourth son towards the end of 1514.[499]
Henry, in fact, was preparing to cast off, not merely the Spanish
alliance, but his Spanish wife. He was negotiating for a joint attack
on Castile with Louis XII. and threatening the divorce of Catherine.[500]
"It is said," writes a Venetian from Rome in August, 1514, "that the
King of England means to repudiate his present wife, the daughter of
the King of Spain and his brother's widow, because he is unable to
have children by her, and intends to marry a daughter of the French
Duke of Bourbon.... He intends to annul his own marriage, and will
obtain what he wants from the Pope as France did from Pope Julius
II."[501]

[Footnote 499: _L. and P._, i., 5718.]

[Footnote 500: See above p. 76.]

[Footnote 501: _Ven. Cal._, ii., 479. The Pope was
really Alexander VI.]

But the death of Louis XII. (January, 1515) and the consequent
loosening of the Anglo-French alliance made Henry and Ferdinand again
political allies; while, as the year wore on, Catherine was known to
be once more pregnant, and Henry's hopes of issue revived. This time
they were not disappointed; the Princess Mary was born on the 18th of
February, 1516.[502] Ferdinand had died on the 23rd of January, but
the news was kept from Catherine, lest it might add to the risks (p. 177)
of her confinement.[503] The young princess seemed likely to live, and
Henry was delighted. When Giustinian, amid his co