Page:The Queens of England.djvu/287

 ELIZABETH OF YORK. 247 Calais, to avoid a pestilence then raging with great fury in England. While there, he had an interview with Philip, arch- duke of Austria and sovereign of Burgundy and Flanders, in which both sovereigns were so well satisfied with each other that a marriage was proposed by them between the eldest son of Philip, subsequently so celebrated as Charles the Fifth, and the Princess Mary, then a child. So gratified was Henry by the flattery of Philip, who called him "Father and protector," that he sent a full detail of the interviews to the mayor and aldermen of London. The pestilence being over, the king and queen returned to England in June. In this year the treaty of marriage between Prince Arthur and Katharine of Arragon was concluded, and the following one the marriage took place. In January, 1502, the betrothment of the Princess Margaret with King James the Fourth of Scotland occurred ; and these were the last festivities in which Elizabeth took a part for a considerable time ; for the unexpected and untimely death of Prince Arthur, which followed five months after his nuptials, plunged his fond mother in such grief as greatly to affect her health, never strong, and to exercise a great influence on her spirits. But, even while overwhelmed by her own grief, Eliza- beth was not unmindful of her widowed daughter-in-law, to whom she showed the utmost kindness and sympathy under her bereavement. Already had the queen given birth to six children: Arthur, her first, born the 20th of September, i486; Margaret, the eldest daughter, born on the 29th of November, 1489; Mary, 1490; Henry, born in 1491 ; Elizabeth, the 2d of July, 1492, and Edmund, 1495. Of these, one had died in childhood, namely, Edmund ; and Prince Arthur, who expired in his sixteenth year. And now the queen's accouchement of her seventh child drew near. This event took place in the Tower of London, in February, 1503, when she gave birth to a daughter named Katherine, who survived but a few days, and on the nth of the same month the lovely and gentle Eliza- beth yielded up her life in the thirty-seventh year of her age, to the general regret of all her subjects. That Henry felt not her loss as her virtues deserved is best proved by the desire he evinced to supply her place soon after ; and if his matrimonial speculations were not carried into effect, the fault lay not in his want of a desire to wed. The Queen-dowager of Naples, to whom his views were first directed, he gave up on ascertain- ing that her dower, which he believed to be very large, was