Okay, I'm gonna skip the internal dialogue, and just go straight to it:
Name: Henry IX Tudor-Brandon
Date of Birth/Date of Death: 1537 | 1591
Title(s): King of England, France & Ireland (1545-1591); Duke of Suffolk; Earl of Lincoln
Parents: Mary Tudor, called Princess of Wales | Henry Brandon, Duke of Suffolk Earl of Lincoln
Spouse (if any): m. 1548 Anna of the Palatinate (1537-1602), dau. of Friedrich II ‘der Weise’, Elector Palatine (1482-1556) and Dorothea of Denmark (1520-1580)
Children (if any): Elizabeth (1552-); Miscarriages (1553), Mary (1556-); Edward VI,
King of England, France & Ireland (155

, Dorothea (1561-)
Biography and Any Other Information You Wish to Share:
It is truly one of history’s ironies that Queen Anne Boleyn’s failure to leave a son to her lord and husband, Henry VIII, was the driving force behind that man to marry his elder daughter, the lately bastardized Mary, to the only Tudor candidate for the throne who possessed the twin qualifications of being male and being English – Lord Henry Brandon, Earl of Lincoln (1516-1553).
While Queen Anne certainly have preferred Mary to be married off abroad, the fact remained that from the birth of Henry, duke of Cornwall (Anne’s son) in 1534, the succession was rather murky as to who was the boy’s heir presumptive. Naturally, the boy’s death in 1536, led to the impetus for the marriage. Anne’s miscarriages weighed heavily on Henry’s mind, and while he toyed with the idea of discarding Anne as he had discarded Katherine, the birth of another short-lived son in 1539 to Anne (and the queen’s resulting death in childbed) left Henry with no heir-male except his grandson-great-nephew.
A third marriage of the king in 1540, to the dowager duchess of Milan, Christina of Denmark, remained childless – mostly attributed to the king, since her subsequent marriage following Henry’s death (to the duke of Lorraine) saw six children born in short succession.
However, the marriage of the Earl and Countess of Lincoln produced five children, starting with the birth of the future Henry IX, as if by post-order. Finally, making peace with the fact that he would have no son, and his line would die with him, Henry VIII drew up plans to have his grandson succeed him – much as Henry I had intended for Matilda’s eldest son to succeed him.
And so, when Henry VIII died (and the queen-dowager caused a brief scandal through her hasty remarriage (which was more of the designs of her uncle, Emperor Charles V, than her own)), his grandson was crowned king. This was the first time since Richard II that a king had succeeded his grandfather. There were those who whispered that this was an illegitimate succession because it bypassed both his parents (who had better claims to the throne than he), and there were several rebellions between 1545 (when the twelve year old king succeeded) and 1553 (when his father died; England had never had a successful queen-regnant, so not many people considered Mary as a viable candidate.)
The subject of the young king’s marriage was on every one’s lips, since from the day he was born (and his first betrothal to the Infanta Juana of Spain (b. 1537)), until Henry had a son of his own, there were enough willing to follow his grandson’s banner. The betrothal to the Spanish infanta lasted until 1542, when the young queen of Scots was born. Thereafter Henry threw his all into marrying his grandson to the Scots’ queen (she succeeded shortly after she was a week old). Unfortunately, the queen-mother of Scots (a French princess), had little desire to marry her daughter south of the border. The engagement of Juana broken, and that with the Scots’ having failed by Henry’s death, when the young king succeeded (under the nominal regency of his mother and his bastard half-uncle, the Duke of Somerset), a new match was sought for him.
And the queen-dowager played the game as good as any other, when she suggested her niece – the only surviving daughter of her sister’s three children by the Elector Palatine – Anne. At first Somerset baulked at the idea of an imperial marriage, favouring the idea of a French bride (to this end, the Princess Elisabeth de Valois was courted). But after the failure of that endeavour, by 1548, the ink was dry on the marriage contract to link England and the Palatinate.
To this day, no one is really sure where Henry IX stood on the matter of religion (a paramount matter of the day). His parents were both devoted Catholics (his mother reviled as the ‘slavish devotee of the Devil of Rome’ by the Protestant persuasion), his wife was at least nominally Catholic (however she was known to have attended sermons as well as mass), and, yet, the king willingly accepted the title of ‘Head of the Church of England’ (in clear defiance of the pope – his mother had attempted to persuade him to restore England to Rome, something his Tudor stubbornness refused to do).
An object of fascination is how much Henry kept England out of foreign wars for most of his fifty year reign. The only war he got involved in (and then only covertly, more financial support than anything else) were the Revolts in the Netherlands and in France by the Protestants against their Catholic lords. But even then, Henry was working both sides of the political street – since while he was bankrolling the rebels, he was involved in negotiations to marry his children off to Spanish infantes or French princesses or making trade treaties with them at the same time.
The most talked of plan was the marriage of his son, the Prince of Wales, to the eldest daughter of France, (Catherine de Valois b. 1558), only child of the short-lived François II, and his Scots’ queen wife. However, after Catherine’s half-brothers were born, this plan faded to a dull memory, and Henry set about finding another bride for his son.
The Habsburgs offered the Archduchess Elisabeth of Austria (but after her marriage to the Crown Prince of Denmark (the queen’s cousin), and her younger sister’s profession to become a nun), the king was left with a distinctly anti-Habsburg taste in his mouth.
The French offered the bewitching Marguerite de Valois, but necessity dictated that she be married off to the king of Portugal to shore up a Habsburg-Valois alliance. At this, being excluded from both the Habsburg and the Valois orchards for apple-picking, the king opened negotiations with the Navarrese queen, Jeanne III, for the marriage of her daughter, Madeleine, to his son.
And so, in a triple alliance between the newly crowned infant James VI of Scotland (son of the former French queen, who had since been deposed and fled back to France), the king of England and the queen of Navarre: her son, Henri, was married to Catherine de Valois and Madeleine of Navarre was married to the prince of Wales.
The marriage of the two girls was slightly easier. During the negotiations for the prince of Wales to marry Marguerite de Valois, his oldest sister, Elizabeth, married her brother, King Charles IX. The next daughter, Mary, after original plans for her to marry Charles’ younger brother, the duc d’Anjou, was married to the duke of Savoy (a half-French, half-Imperial prince who’d been offered as a groom for the King’s aunt, Elizabeth (Anne Boleyn’s daughter and only surviving child).
However, the Anglo-French peace symbolized by Elizabeth Tudor’s marriage to Charles IX, didn’t last long. Elizabeth bore Charles three children during the course of their marriage (1570-1574): a stillborn son in 1571, a daughter, Madame Marie-Élisabeth (b.1572) and a short-lived son, Charles-Henri (1573-1574). Gradually, Charles moved closer to the French camp of the radical Catholics, and was the underlying cause of the massacre of the French Huguenots during the early reign of King Henri III. After Charles’ death from tuberculosis in 1574, Elizabeth retired to the Hotel des Tournelles until 1580.
Mary’s marriage to the two-years-younger duke of Savoy led to England gaining a weak voice in Italian politics. The marriage was fruitful, producing six children, of whom three survived infancy, but Mary’s healthy was undermined by the pregnancies and she died in childbirth, the child also died.
On the other hand, the Prince of Wales’ Navarrese match proved useful (if not particularly loving) both in giving England a Protestant continental ally, as well as ensuring somewhat smoothing the generally rocky relations with Scotland, by virtue of the Navarrese king’s marriage to the French-born Scots’ princess. However, Navarre was generally caught like a nut in a vise between the kingdoms of France and Spain, and there were often appeals by the Princess of Wales to her father-in-law for aid to her native country.
Henry, however, wasn’t too keen on offending his Spanish cousins, mostly because of the threat the Spanish Netherlands posed to England, despite the Revolt that the English king was bankrolling there. That said, when the king of Spain’s long-awaited second son, by his third wife (and niece), Archduchess Anna of Austria, Fernando Maria de las Vitoria, was born in 1571, and a third, Diego Felix, followed in 1573, Felipe II emulated the actions of his father, and began to plan on dividing his empire, so as to prevent the burden of governing all of it from falling on one pair of shoulders.
The son whom he detested from his first marriage, D. Carlos (b.1545) had likewise taken the Biblical slogan of ‘be fruitful and multiply’ to heart after his marriage to Élisabeth de Valois, and had seven children with her: (Felipe (b.1560); twins, Maria Isabel and Catalina Manuela (b.1564); Ana Gregoria (b. 1566), D. Carlos Maria (1567-1568), D. Juan (b.1568) and Juana Margarita (b. 1572), before he died in 1580.
Now, with three heirs to his vast realm, as a way to prevent the internecine squabbles, Felipe partitioned it, with Carlos – the acknowledged heir to the crowns of Spain – being simply replaced by his older son, while Fernando would receive the shorn off chunk of the Burgundian Inheritance when he turned 21 in 1592, while Diego would be left the Italian territories of the king of Spain.
Next door in Portugal, Queen Margarita was widowed in 1578, and was left as regent for her young son, D. Henrique.
Meanwhile, back in England, King Henry was presiding over what is considered by many as a flowering of English culture – the duke of Norfolk, Shakespeare, Marlowe and Spencer wrote their dramas and verse, Tallis, Blow and Byrd composed their music, Hilliard (who was married to a Brandon relative of the king) and others painted (especially the numerous surviving portraits of the royal family, particularly those of the Navarrese Princess of Wales) while other artisans were responsible for the refurbishing and rebuilding at the royal palaces of Richmond, Hampton Court, Whitehall, Oatlands and Greenwich, while the Queen-Mother, Princess Mary, rebuilt her home at Beaulieu Castle into a sumptuous palace, with even the prince of Wales taking part in overhauling his manor house at Hatfield, and the palace at Eltham in ‘the French style’.
The king began to distance himself from King Henri III of France’s policies – particularly after the Bloody Epiphany Massacre of the French Huguenots in 1576 – but it was only in the 1580s that the king decisively jumped ship from the French alliance – much to the chagrin of his daughter, the Dowager Queen of France (who as always endeavoured to bring her native and adopted countries closer), and his sister, Princess Catherine (b.1539), the erstwhile duchess of Ferrara. And Henry jumped ship, not to support Spain against France as England had formerly done in the reign of his grandfather, but rather, to openly support the Protestants against the French king. But, in true double dealing fashion, while Henry was doing so, he was also agreeing to the king of Spain’s idea of that when the current king of France died, since he had no children, and the next claimant by the male line was too far distant (although he was also second cousin of the king in the female line, named Enrique of Navarre who was inconveniently Protestant), that the English support the marriage of the late D. Carlos’ younger son, Juan, his cousin, Princess Marie Élisabeth de Valois, and that Juan be set up as King Jean III of France.
Needless to say, the Princess of Wales was aghast at this, and wrote to her brother in Navarre of the machinations of the thus compiled Treaty of Barcelona. Navarre was understandably put out by it, and when he passed the information
on to his cousin, the King of France, France promptly declared war on England and Spain. Not that that was much of anything besides a flurry of diplomatic papers, since France was already being torn in two by the civil war between the Huguenots under the Bourbons (relatives of the king of Navarre) and the Guises (relatives of the queen of Navarre and the dukes of Lorraine) Catholic party.
Rather than overt foreign intervention, Spain was secretly siding with the Guises and the Ultra-Catholic party against the King. England, on the other hand (and Scotlan,d for what it was worth) were both supporting their coreligionists under the Bourbons. This was in spite of the Treaty of Barcelona by which England agreed to side with Spain.
But, it proved to be a double game as always for Henry, since he managed to get what he wanted out of Scotland, namely a marriage between the Prince of Wales’ eldest son, Edward (b.1572) and the eldest daughter of the Scots’ king, Princess Joan (b.1575) to seal the alliance between England and Scotland, and the promise of England to support the claims of Enrique of Navarre should King Henri die with no heirs.
And in 1588, in a double ceremony, wherein her brother, James, Duke of Rothesay (b.1576) wed Princess Anne of Denmark (b.1578), the Anglo-Scots Treaty of Stirling was born, Princess Joan married Edward. At the same time, Enrique was hoping to shore up his wobbly claim to the French throne by contracting a marriage between his eldest son, Luis, Prince of Viana (b.1575) and one of the king of France’s nieces (preferably a Lorrainer princess in the hopes of defanging the house of Guise).
One of the last things Henry lived to see was the marriage of the duke of Rothesay’s younger brother, Charles, duke of Albany (b.1563) to Emilia (b.1569), the daughter of the Prince of Orange; as well as the birth of Rothesay’s first son, named Henry after the king.
Shortly after Henry’s death, his French namesake was killed in the Battle of St. Jean d'Angely between the Guises and the now-reconciled Henri III and Enrique of Navarre. Henri III had died without surviving issue by Queen Marie de Cleves, and thus Enrique was his successor as Henri IV. However it took a few more years of infighting, plus Enrique’s conversion to Catholicism before the blood-steeped crown of France was acknowledged as belonging to him and thus ushering in the House of Bourbon on the French throne.