Immediately after the jousts, Mary Tudor learnt, to her exasperation, that her hand was destined, not for the Spanish prince, the future Emperor Charles V, nor for the Suffolk gentleman, but for the decrepit and doomed King of France. She was too much of a Tudor to accept her fate with meekness, and King Henry soon found he had set himself a difficult task to conciliate his sister, and obtain her consent to what was even then considered a monstrous match. She swore she would not marry his French majesty, unless her brother gave her his solemn promise that she should marry whom she listed when she became a widow. The king answered that, by God! she might do as she listed, if only she pleased him this time. He urged that King Louis was prematurely aged, and not likely, so he had been told, to live many months. Besides, he was passing rich, and the princess would have more diamonds, pearls and rubies than she had hairs on her head. Henry even appealed to her patriotism. England needed peace; the prolonged wars between France and England had exhausted both, and it was deemed advisable that the French should be made to understand, by this happy event, that the enmity which had existed so long had ceased at last. It was to be a thorough _entente cordiale_ on both sides. None the less, when they got to know of it, both the English and the French cracked many an indelicate jest over this unnatural alliance. The bride, it will be remembered, was still in her teens, and beautiful: the bridegroom-elect was fifty-three and looked twenty years older, the most disfiguring of his complication of loathsome diseases being, as we have seen, elephantiasis, which had swollen his face and head so enormously that when, on her arrival in France, Mary first beheld her future consort, she drew back, with an unconcealed cry of horror. For some days Mary seemed obdurate, despite Henry’s promise that, on the death of the French king, she might marry whom she listed. But at last she allowed her brother’s persuasive arguments to prevail, so that, dazzled by the prospect of becoming the richest and grandest princess in Europe, she finally, but reluctantly, consented to marry King Louis. The “treaty of marriage” between Louis XII and Mary Tudor was signed at London by the representatives of both parties on August 7 (1514); and the marriage by proxy, according to the custom of the time, took place in the Grey Friars’ Church at Greenwich, before Henry VIII, Katherine of Aragon, the Archbishop of Canterbury, the Dukes of Norfolk and Suffolk, the Bishops of Winchester and Durham, and others, on August 13. The recently liberated Duc de Longueville represented the French king, whereas the Duke of Orleans gave the bride the ring; afterwards the primate pronounced a brief panegyric of the young queen’s virtues, and those of her august spouse, whom he described as the best and greatest prince in Europe.