Mary Rose (12 page)

The origins of the relationship between Mary and Charles Brandon went back some way. He certainly had an eye for a pretty girl, and she may well have been attracted by her brother’s dashing friend. He had been the King’s chosen jousting companion since Henry had first entered the lists in public in 1510, and was well known for his gallantry, in both senses of the word. Whether there had been any discussion of the possibility of marriage between them we do not know, but Polydore Vergil, writing many years later, thought that there had, and attributed Brandon’s promotion to the dukedom of Suffolk to that consideration.

Many people considered it very strange that Charles should be so honoured as to be made a Duke [Vergil wrote] … the dignity was intended, as was apparent afterwards, to enable him more properly to be related to the king in marriage, this future development having already been decided upon by the King …
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This is almost certainly wrong, because she was firmly betrothed to Charles of Castile at that point, and also because it implies a gift of foresight on Henry’s part that he could not possibly have possessed. It may well have been that the possibility had been raised, in which case it would have been raised by the Princess, who may well have been looking for a way out of her commitment to the Prince. It would have been unthinkably presumptuous for Brandon to have broached such a topic to the King. In any case, whatever understanding they thought that they had was set aside when peace with France was on the agenda. Henry apparently dropped hints that his sister was available, and that he favoured a foreign marriage for her, the implication being that he found her existing betrothal unsatisfactory.
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‘This coming to King Louis’ ears, he sought both peace and marriage,’ wrote Vergil, and he added truthfully enough that Pope Leo, who was the leader of the war alliance, was also determined upon peace, ‘so there was no gainsaying it’.
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So Mary repudiated her engagement to Charles, and was betrothed instead to Louis, a man almost old enough to be her grandfather. She was undoubtedly motivated by the thought of becoming Queen of France, but we do not know what other inducements Henry may have offered, or whether Charles Brandon featured in them. What we do know is that when the King went to the waterside in Dover to see his sister off to France, he then promised that in the event of the ailing Louis not lasting long, she would be free to choose her own partner thereafter.
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Brandon’s name does not seem to have been mentioned, but in view of the discussions which had already been held, we may presume that he could be taken for granted.

During the Duke’s embassy to France in November 1514, no mention was made of this relationship, for obvious reasons. Suffolk’s secret mission was to the King, and Mary was not involved in any of the negotiations. When he distinguished himself in the lists, it was in her honour, but that was because she was the Queen, and he does not seem to have worn her favour. By the time that he arrived the ‘bedchamber crisis’ had already been resolved by the Earl of Worcester, and there is no record of them having any private meetings. When he returned to England at the beginning of December, he reported her general well-being and happiness, but nothing more intimate. At the same time he was clear that Louis was a sick man, and although the Duke had secured his agreement to a meeting with Henry in the spring, it was by no means certain that he would last that long.
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So anxious was Wolsey at this that he actually anticipated the news of the King’s death by writing to Mary early in January, urging her not to commit herself to any further marriage if Louis should die, a letter to which she replied on the 10th, as we have seen.

I pray you as my trust is in you for to remember me to the King my brother for such causes and business as I have to do for as now I have no other to put my trust in but the King my brother and you, and as it shall please the king my brother and his council, I would be ordered, and so I pray you my Lord to show his grace saying that the king my husband is departed to God of whose soul God pardon … I trust I have so ordered myself since that I came hither that I trust hath been to the honour of the king my brother and me since I came hither and so I trust to continue …
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It is a very self-possessed letter, and one which shows that she knew very well what she was about. In an exchange of letters with the King and with Wolsey, she nevertheless revealed the extent of her anxiety. Trapped in the Hotel de Cluny, she felt isolated and vulnerable, cut off from her own people. Her English servants had been dismissed after Louis’ death, and replaced with French women, whom she did not trust. This action had presumably been taken by the Council, or by Louise of Savoy without Francis’s knowledge, because when she retaliated by dismissing her French attendants and reinstating the English, he did not object.
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Her surviving letters from this period present something of a problem, because they all appear to be drafts, full of rewritings and corrections. She certainly used Wolsey as an intermediary with Henry, and sent the Archbishop her thoughts, which he then put into a form which he knew would be acceptable to the King, so these must be her rough versions.
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Henry then responded with smooth reassurances of support. On 14 January he wrote to Francis, expressing his regret for Louis’ death, and congratulations upon his accession. He would, he intimated, shortly be sending a mission consisting of Brandon, Wingfield and West to sort out relations between the kingdoms in the new circumstances, and to negotiate Mary’s future. Francis, whose ambitions were focussed on Italy, was keen to renew the alliance with England, but reluctant to allow Mary to depart for fear that Henry would renew her betrothal to the Archduke Charles, or find some other equally unacceptable partner for her.
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The King may have had some such thought in mind, but Mary was at pains to remind him of his ‘waterside promise’, which she was now insistent that he should honour. Since it would have been inconsistent with his chivalric code to have broken his promise to a lady, Henry now faced a dilemma. He discussed the matter with the Duke of Suffolk before his departure, and he seems to have agreed that he would accept some level of commitment to her on the Duke’s part; enough to persuade Francis to release her, but short of a full marriage. Indeed he extracted a promise from Suffolk that he would not marry her until after their return, perhaps intending to keep his options open in that direction.
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Polydore Vergil’s account of what happened reveals a level of misunderstanding which was generally shared in the court:

The envoys came to Paris and explained to Francis the orders they had been given by Henry. Francis agreed with the greatest alacrity to perform all that was asked, except that it was quite clear that the departure of the girl seemed to be regarded by him with displeasure. Henry had anticipated this and ordered Charles to marry her; this was done in accordance with a decision taken before her French marriage … Francis rejoiced greatly at this since he had feared that she might be given to Charles, King of Castile. So Mary, having lost her first husband, yet returned home a wife …
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The French King’s ‘alacrity’ to pay the sums demanded may be doubted, as there was considerable wrangling over this before an agreement was finally thrashed out, and Suffolk had certainly not been ‘ordered … to marry her’. However an understanding of some kind had been reached, and it was not as secret as it should have been, because when Suffolk reached Paris towards the end of January he was welcomed by Francis on the grounds that he had come to marry the King’s sister, an ambition which the Duke was constrained to deny. However, when he met Mary, perhaps later that same day, he found that her mind was made up. She would ‘have none but me’ as he confessed to the King a few days later, and was quite prepared to accept the responsibility for her own actions. She had, he alleged, besought him with floods of tears, but it is unlikely to have happened in such a fashion.
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Mary was a champion weeper when the occasion demanded, but this was no emotional decision, let alone a ‘hysterical’ one as has been claimed. It was a rational course of action, designed to placate Francis and to secure her release from Cluny. Nor was it a sudden decision, as Suffolk claimed. It was earnestly discussed between them over several days, as the risks of incurring Henry’s displeasure were weighed against the advantages of the French King’s favour. It remains something of a mystery what had passed between Mary and Francis that persuaded her into this drastic course of action. She knew, of course, that he was proposing several French noblemen as her prospective husband, but she also knew that he would be unable to force such a choice upon her without fatally disrupting his relations with Henry VIII. He had visited her at Cluny several times both before and after his coronation, and on one of his early visits she had assured him that she was not pregnant. Louise of Savoy did not trust her assurances, but the King apparently did, and went ahead with the plans for his crowning on that understanding.
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On a later visit, according to Mary, he made some suggestions ‘not conducive to her honour’, which presumably means an offer to make her his mistress. It seems that he felt he owed this to himself, and was not too disconcerted when she rebuffed his advances; indeed they may not have been very seriously intended. On 15 February, some two weeks after her commitment to Suffolk, she wrote to her brother:

Pleaseth it your grace, the French King on Tuesday night last came to visit me, and had with me many divers [discourses], among the which he demanded me whether I had made any promise of marriage in any place, assuring me upon his honour, upon the word of a prince, that in case I would be plain [with] him in that affair he would do for me therein to the best of his power, whether it were in his realm or out of the same. Whereunto I answered that I would disclose unto him the secret of my heart in humility as unto the prince of the world after your grace in which I most trust, and so declared unto him the good mind which for divers considerations I bear to my Lord of Suffolk, asking him not only [to grant] me his favour and consent thereunto, but [also] that that he would of his own hand write unto your grace and pray you to bear your like favour upon me. The which he granted me to do, and so hath done … Sir I most humbly beseech you to take this answer which I have made unto the French King in good part, the which I did only to be discharged of the extreme pain and annoyance I was in by reason of such suit as the French King made unto me not according with mine honour, the which he hath clearly left off …
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This is slightly less than explicit in that it does not actually confess that the marriage had taken place, still less been consummated. Somewhat alarmed at his failure to respond, she reminded him of his promise, and threatened that if he did not approve of her action, she would take herself off to ‘some religious house’, and thus remove herself from the dynastic equation altogether. Eventually it was left to the Duke to explain to Wolsey what had actually happened. Writing on 5 March, about a month after the event, he declared that on his arrival in Paris he had heard many things which put him and the Queen in great fear,

and the queen would never let me be in rest till I had granted her to be married; and so, to be plain with you, I have married her heartily, and have lain with her in so much as I fear me but she be with child.
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He begged Wolsey to break this news to the King as gently as possible, lest he find out by some other route and be displeased. It seems that the Archbishop did not fully comply with this request because it was apparently after that (the letters are undated) that Henry wrote to Suffolk, treating his marriage as a hypothetical possibility, and saying that its successful consummation would depend upon the Duke’s success in getting a favourable financial settlement out of Francis.
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Since her jewels, and particularly the Mirror of Naples, were bones of fierce contention between the English and French negotiators, this was no mere rhetorical reservation. Just when the King actually found out that his consent had been taken for granted, we do not know, but ‘displeased’ would be an understatement of his reaction. He was very annoyed, not so much by the fact of the marriage, which can hardly have come as a surprise to him, as by the manner in which it had come about. Brandon had promised him that he would do nothing in that connection until the couple were safely back in England, and he had broken his word. It did not matter that Mary had solicited him; the responsibility was his. He was a man, and the man was always responsible for the political actions of any woman with whom he might be associated; equally important, by breaking his promise he had broken trust and betrayed the code of honour which he shared with the King.
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Wolsey was even more disconcerted by Suffolk’s confession, because to marry a blood relation of the King without explicit consent was a treasonable offence, no matter what the mitigating circumstances. He wrote condemning the Duke with the full weight of his archepiscopal authority, but at the same time offering a possible way out. Suffolk had no option; faced with the King’s indignation he remitted his case ‘wholly to your [grace’s] discretion’, agreeing in advance to do whatever might be required.
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At about the same time Mary wrote to Henry complaining of ‘her greatest discomfort sorrow and desolation’ at being advertised ‘of the great and high displeasure which your grace beareth unto me and my Lord of Suffolk for the marriage between us’, and protested that it was only the ‘great despair’ brought by the two friars out of England which had persuaded her to that course.
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Meanwhile she had smuggled out the Mirror of Naples as a peace offering to her indignant brother, and accepted whatever financial penalties he might choose to impose. In spite of his anger, Henry did not really want the Duke’s head; he had too high a regard for him, and therefore proved equally amenable to Wolsey’s proffered solution. On 9 March Mary signed a document assigning her whole dowry to Henry as part of a financial settlement with the King of France which was fully satisfactory to the English. Francis had come good on his offer of support, and his negotiators had given way on a whole range of topics. As Mary put it in another letter, ‘The French king speaketh very kind words unto me [because] he hath a special mind to have peace with your grace before any Prince of Christendom.’
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