Alt-Tudor scenario: what would happen?

Is it spooky that if Henry did get elected HRE he would be the 8th Henry of Germany as well as England :eek: It was made for him :cool:

And with a P.O.D of 1502, Ferdinand I, Holy Roman Emperor was only born in 1503 so you could kill him off too.

Depending on how the chips fall, there's a possibility that Maximillian and Margaret might want to divide some of the combined Haspburg and Trastamara domains between the 4 sisters. I think Eleanor will still get Castille and likely Aragon unless they reject her for John III of Portugal. They might try to divide Burgundy and HRE between the second and third daughters i.e. Isabella and Mary respectively. Perhaps the second girl will be given the Duchy of Burgundy before she marries. I wonder if sometime down the road, Eleanor will get a challenge from her youngest sister and her husband John III of Portugal for Aragon as John would be Ferdinand's senior male heir and at least grew up in the Iberian peninsula.
 
Depending on how the chips fall, there's a possibility that Maximillian and Margaret might want to divide some of the combined Haspburg and Trastamara domains between the 4 sisters. I think Eleanor will still get Castille and likely Aragon unless they reject her for John III of Portugal. They might try to divide Burgundy and HRE between the second and third daughters i.e. Isabella and Mary respectively. Perhaps the second girl will be given the Duchy of Burgundy before she marries. I wonder if sometime down the road, Eleanor will get a challenge from her youngest sister and her husband John III of Portugal for Aragon as John would be Ferdinand's senior male heir and at least grew up in the Iberian peninsula.

I cant see the Princes of Germany, wanting their empire split, they would elect on of the four husbands. Louis II of Hungary, might be the best option, Henry VIII and John III of Portugal would be the next best , while Christian II of Denmark would have to stay Catholic though.

If you do have the land split this is the likeliest option:
- Eleanor, Queen consort of England would gain the main part of the HRE, being Cologne, Trier, Reims, Aragon and part of Mainz.
- Isabella , queen consort of Denmark, Norway and Sweden, gains Bremen, Magdgeburg, Gniezno, Besancon and the other part of Mainz
- Mary, queen consort of Hungary and Bohemia, given Salzburg and Prague
- Catherine , queen consort of Portugal, is the best option for Castile and some Italian states, while the rest goes to the Pope.
 
However, that depends on Henry, the political situation and Catherine herself. Marrying a woman who claims to be a virgin is one thing, but marrying one who obviously isn't is another. Catherine's dowry would be gone by this point as well, so money could also play a role in this. Finally, there's Catherine herself. She'd be a Queen Dowager, with her own properties, lands and independent, guaranteed status. She might not want to give that up, in which case she could remain single.

Just out of curiosity, do you happen to know what the position of canon law was at this time regarding a man in minor orders marrying a widow? I know that after the Council of Trent (but before the reforms of the twentieth century), men in minor orders were allowed to marry without dispensation so long as they married only once and to a virgin (though any benefices that they held were automatically forfeit). Not that this would be a problem if it were required at this time, as it could still be easily dispensed with by the pope, but it would be interesting in the sense that it could affect the terms of any papal dispensation issued for Henry's marriage to Catherine in this scenario.

So this is technically not true. The English dispensation was based on non consummation. However Isabella of Castille had gotten a Spanish dispensation for her daughter which kept the issue of consummation between Catherine and Arthur ambiguous. The second dispensation was not focused on in England, but it still existed. Regardless I could see who Catherine of Aragon believed she was covered.

From my understanding there were two papal dispensations issued by Pope Julius II: a formal bull that granted the dispensation based on Catherine's oath that the marriage wasn't consummated and a papal brief that provided a supplemental dispensation for any 'defects' that may or may not have existed regarding her marriage to Arthur. If memory serves, it was procured by Isabella for two reasons: first, because the expedition of a papal brief was much faster than that of a bull and she was eager for her daughter to be betrothed to secure the Anglo-Spanish alliance; and second to ensure that any oversight of a possible impediment (such as the marriage actually having been consummated) was covered.

The problem was that the papal brief only arrived in Castile and no copy of it was sent to England for the Crown's own records. The English didn't even know of its existence until the Spanish delegation brought it up at the time of the Great Matter. It also wasn't recorded in the papal registers--although this was not in itself unusual for the time for papal briefs. Even private bulls were not regularly registered until much later, unless the petitioner was willing to pay extra fees and could afford to wait the amount of time for the document to be copied.

The English even originally considered the brief to be spurious. Later, it had the effect of shifting the legal arguments in the debate. Wolsey argued that Henry VIII had been too young to understand what he was getting into when the betrothal had been agreed upon (he was twelve at the time). Later, Henry VIII pushed the envelope even further: it was not that the dispensation of the pope was invalid because it didn't cover the situation (which given the existence of the Spanish brief, it would have), it was that the pope did not have the authority to dispense with the impediment at all.
 
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