Louis XII of France

Born Louis of Orléans, Louis XII succeeded his cousin Charles VIII in 1498. After obtaining the annulment of his marriage to Joan of France, he married the widowed Anne of Brittany in 1499.

His reign continued French intervention in Italy, including campaigns in Milan and Naples, while the succession centred increasingly on his daughter Claude. His marriage can be presented as both a political settlement and a partnership, but the private character of that relationship remains partly interpretive.

Rozsa Gaston’s Anne and Louis follows Louis XII as he secures an annulment and marries Anne of Brittany, joining personal affection to the political need to retain Brittany and pursue French ambitions in Italy. Anne and Louis: Forever Bound shows the later couple confronting repeated pregnancies, the absence of a male heir and the succession through their daughter Claude while the League of Cambrai reshapes France’s alliances. Anne and Louis: Rulers and Lovers focuses on their disagreement over Claude’s marriage and the competing claims of Brittany, Habsburg diplomacy and Francis of Angoulême. Marguerite and Gaston places Louis’s court and Italian wars behind the imagined relationship of Marguerite of Angoulême and Gaston de Foix. In The Queen’s Maid, Louis is the ageing king who marries Mary Tudor in 1514, bringing the young Anne Boleyn into a French succession crisis that changes abruptly with his death.