Chapter Text
Anne, Duchess of Brittany and Queen of England, was cradling her newborn daughter, a little girl much healthier than Claude or Charles had ever been. She was a little disappointed by the birth of another daughter, who would be behind Claude in the Breton succession, but still little Anne was born ten months after her marriage to Henry and she had still time for birthing an heir for Brittany as her husband, delighted by the little girl who he had named after her, had reminded her, trying to comfort her.
Anne would never blame her daughter for her sex, and she knew that her daughter would have a glittering future as the Burgundian envoy had told Henry that if the child was a girl the Emperor wanted her instead of Princess Mary for his grandson and heir as a girl six years younger was better than one four years older. Anne knew that her husband agreed with the sentiment as he was strongly set against the marriage of his current heir with Catherine of Aragon, five years older than him, independently from the question of the unpaid dowry that had caused the failure of the match, and was instead keen to pair the younger Henry with Eleanor of Austria, seven years younger than him. Well, Anne hoped Henry would be able to find another King for his spoiled daughter as she was sure that Mary would declare eternal hate to her new sister for the switch of betrothal, unless she was presented with another prestigious match soon.
Anne just hoped that, once the engagement between Henry and Eleanor was signed, the King of Aragon would accept the course of the events and send a ship to take back at home his youngest daughter. Catherine was starting to become troublesome between her security, that she would marry the young Henry, her tentatives to poison Henry’s mind against her, and her barely concealed attempts to seduce him… Luckily Anne had been able to unmask Catherine’s lies, persuading Henry that the last thing she wanted was seeing something bad happen to him as her greatest wish and objective, since the death of her father, when she was younger than him, was to preserve the independence of her native Brittany.
Still, Ferdinand of Aragon recently had demonstrated again his total absence of scruples in reaching his objectives, considering that he had pushed his grieving daughter to remarry to his ward, Ferdinand of Calabria, former heir of Naples, barely four months after the death of Philip of Burgundy, and had pushed the Cortes of both Castile and Aragon to settle the succession of both kingdoms on the future children of Joanna‘s second marriage, excluding the issue of her first marriage. Anne suspected that was a consequence of the arrogance of Philip and becauseì he had angered everyone there, starting with Queen Joanna, when he had taken his second son, Ferdinand, whom he had never met before as the boy was born in Castile and had been raised there until the arrival of his parents, and shipped him to Burgundy for being properly raised with his other siblings.
After that he had tried to exclude his father-in-law from the government and at the same time to have his wife declared mad for taking all the power for himself, something that Isabella’s will (that left any kind of regency for Joanna exclusively in the hands of Ferdinand) had firmly excluded, causing a huge break in his wedding as Joanna, while still madly in love with him, had been so scared to search her father‘s protection against him.