In the first instance, Henry’s inclinations were very strongly set upon Marie of Lorraine, the eldest daughter of Claude, Duke of Guise, and the young widow of Charles d’Orléans, Duke of Longueville, although she had been promised to James V of Scotland before Jane Seymour’s death. Henry knew quite well that this arrangement had been made, but he would not listen to the names of other ladies which were suggested to him, and maintained with great pertinacity to Castillon that the match with Scotland had not yet been settled, and that Madame de Longueville had not herself agreed to it. “He is so amorous of Madame de Longueville,” wrote Castillon to Francis, on December 30, 1537, “that he cannot refrain from coming back upon it.” “I asked him,” he goes on, “who caused him to be more inclined to her than to others, and he said Wallop was so loud in her praises that nothing could exceed them. Moreover, he said that he was big in person, and had need of a big wife—that your daughter was too young for him, and as to Madame de Vendosme, he would not take the King of Scots’ leavings!”[289] Footnote 289: _C.L.P._, vol. xii. pt. ii. 1285. Either in December 1537 or early in the following January, Henry sent over Peter Mewtas, of the Privy Chamber, to see the Duchess secretly, and to find out from her whether she considered herself bound to James; and as a result of this mission he appears to have convinced himself that, whatever Francis I might have arranged, the lady herself and her parents were attracted by his offer, considering an alliance with so powerful a sovereign to be preferred to one with the “beggarly and stupid King of Scots,” as Henry termed his nephew to Castillon. There was a political attraction, also, about the proposal, from Henry’s point of view, for if he succeeded in taking James’s bride from him it would tend to alienate the Scots from France. Formal articles of marriage, however, between the lady and James V were drawn up in January; but in spite of this Henry stuck to his point, and about the 1st of February Peter Mewtas was again despatched by Cromwell to find out definitely if she were still free, and also to obtain her portrait. The instructions given him need not be quoted here. They concluded by saying that if he perceived any towardness in the lady, he was, if possible, to get and bring with him “her picture truly made and like unto her.”[290] Footnote 290: _C.L.P._, vol. xiii. pt. i. 203. _St. P._, viii. 10. [Sidenote: PIERRE QUESNEL AND HIS SONS]