Mary Tudor, Queen of France

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  Mary Tudor was cheerful by nature. When she met King Louis XII of France for the first time, she greeted him by blowing him a kiss. Louis was fifty-two years old; she was eighteen. She had never wanted to marry him at all.

  The humanist scholar Erasmus had visited the royal nursery in 1499-1500 and found her four years old. He wrote afterward that "Nature never formed anything more beautiful." By 1514, her beauty had become the prize in a peace agreement between England and France. Mary accepted the match, but not without a condition she was determined to honor.

  Three months after the wedding, Louis XII was dead. What she did next, and what it cost the man she truly loved, are the questions at the heart of her story.

• 2. The Making of a Princess

  ›

  Mary was born at Shene Palace on the 18th of March 1496, the youngest of Henry VII's children to survive infancy. She may have been named after the Virgin Mary. Another possibility is her maternal aunt, Mary of York, who died at the age of fourteen in 1482.

  A privy seal bill from midsummer 1496 records a payment of fifty shillings to her nurse, Anne Skeron. By the time she was six, she had her own household, complete with a staff of gentlewomen, a schoolmaster, and a physician. She received instruction in French, Latin, music, dancing, and embroidery.

  Her governess was Joan Vaux, whom she called "Mother Guildford." The two were deeply close. When Mary traveled to France for her royal marriage, Joan accompanied her as principal lady-in-waiting. Mary was furious when Joan was sent back to England not long after her arrival.

  Bills paid to her apothecary between 1504 and 1509 suggest her health was fragile during childhood. She shared a close friendship with her brother, the future King Henry VIII. He later named his first surviving child, the future Queen Mary I, in her honor. In 1506, she was called to entertain Philip I of Castile at court, playing the lute and clavichord. Philip died that September. On the 21st of December 1507, Mary was betrothed to his son Charles, the future Holy Roman Emperor. That engagement was called off in 1514. By October of that year, Mary was married to the King of France.

• 3. A Queen for Three Months

  ›

  On the 9th of October 1514, Mary married King Louis XII of France at Abbeville, in a match brokered by Cardinal Wolsey. For her Royal Entry into the city, she wore a gown of cloth of silver and an English-style Gable hood.

  French observers at Abbeville described her as conducting herself with "so much grace" that she was likened to a paradise. Louis XII, who had been married twice before without producing a living son, called her a "nymph from heaven." A retinue of English maids of honour traveled to France with her.

  Louis died on the 1st of January 1515, less than three months into their marriage. Contemporary accounts suggested he was worn out by his bedchamber exertions; more measured assessments point to gout as the likelier cause. Their union produced no children.

  King Francis I, who inherited the French throne upon Louis's death, made several attempts to arrange a second marriage for the widowed Mary. She later said that she had given Francis her confidence only in order to deflect his overtures. The man she had in mind was not among Francis's candidates.

• 4. The Secret in Paris

  ›

  Before her departure for France in 1514, Mary had secured a promise from her brother King Henry VIII. According to her own letters written in 1515, she had agreed to wed Louis XII under one condition. If she survived him, she would marry whoever she chose.

  Henry VIII was aware of his sister's feelings for Charles Brandon, the 1st Duke of Suffolk. The King's Council opposed the match; they did not wish to see Brandon gain further influence at court. Rumours circulated that Mary would marry Antoine, Duke of Lorraine, or Charles III, Duke of Savoy. Antoine married Renee of Bourbon on the 26th of June 1515. A pair of French friars went so far as to warn Mary that Brandon had "traffickings with the devil."

  Henry sent Brandon to France in late January 1515 with a specific instruction: he was not to propose to Mary. Once in France, Mary persuaded Brandon to break that pledge. Brandon later wrote to the King that he "never saw a woman so weep."

  At the Hotel de Cluny in Paris, on the 3rd of March 1515, the couple married in secret. Just ten people were present, among them King Francis I of France. Technically, this was treason; Brandon had married a royal princess without the King's consent. Henry VIII's privy council urged that Brandon be imprisoned or even executed. Mary, as royalty and the King's own sister, was never in danger of execution. Henry would eventually pardon the couple. The price would be almost everything Mary had inherited from Louis XII.

• 5. The Price of a Marriage

  ›

  Thomas Wolsey's intervention, combined with Henry VIII's genuine affection for both his sister and Charles Brandon, produced a settlement. The couple were required to pay a fine of £24,000 to the King, in yearly instalments of £1,000. They also forfeited Mary's entire dower from Louis XII, valued at £200,000. With it went the gold plate and jewels Louis had given or promised her.

  The £24,000 was later reduced by the King. On the 13th of May 1515, the couple married officially at Greenwich Palace, in the presence of Henry VIII and his courtiers. In 1528, Charles secured a papal bull from Pope Clement VII legitimising the marriage.

  Charles Brandon had two daughters from his previous marriage to Anne Browne, who had died in 1510 or 1512. Anne and Mary, as the girls were named, were welcomed into the household. Mary raised them alongside her own children. Mary was legally entitled to the title Duchess of Suffolk. At the English court, however, she was known throughout her life as the Queen of France.

  Mary and Charles had four children together. Their first son, Henry, was born on the 11th of March 1516 and died in childhood in 1522. Their eldest daughter, Frances, was born on the 16th of July 1517. A second daughter, Eleanor, followed in 1519. Their younger son, Henry Brandon, was created Earl of Lincoln and died in March 1534, also in childhood. Both boys bore the same name; they are regularly confused for one another. Frances would one day become the mother of Lady Jane Grey, who briefly held a claim to the English throne in 1553.

• 6. A Sister's Defiance

  ›

  In the late 1520s, Henry VIII's effort to annul his marriage to Catherine of Aragon began to strain his relationship with his sister. Mary had known Catherine for many years and opposed the annulment.

  Anne Boleyn, whom Mary had known in France and strongly disliked, was now the King's intended new wife. Mary made no effort to conceal her feelings. Anne had been among the maids of honour who accompanied Mary to France for her wedding to Louis XII. Their acquaintance had not, by any account, been warm.

  In March 1532, the Venetian Ambassador Carlo Capello wrote to his superiors about a violent incident at the English court. A chief gentleman in the service of the Duke of Norfolk attacked Sir William Pennington in the sanctuary of Westminster, bringing twenty followers with him. Pennington was a kinsman of the Duke of Suffolk and did not survive the attack. The whole court was in an uproar.

  Capello was privately "assured it was owing to opprobrious language uttered against Madam Anne by his Majesty's sister, the Duchess of Suffolk, Queen Dowager of France." Anne Boleyn was the niece of the Duke of Norfolk whose man had done the killing. Carlo Capello's March 1532 dispatch stands as the last detailed record of Mary engaged in court politics. She was thirty-five or thirty-six years old when he wrote it.

• 7. Death at Westhorpe Hall

  ›

  Mary died on the 25th of June 1533 at Westhorpe Hall, Suffolk, at the age of thirty-seven. She had caught the sweating sickness in 1528 and never fully recovered from it. Physicians and later historians have speculated that the cause of death was tuberculosis, appendicitis, or cancer; no definitive answer has emerged.

  Westhorpe Hall served as the site of her lying in state for three weeks after her death. On the 21st of July 1533, a delegation from France joined the English delegation for the funeral ceremony. The procession included a hundred torchbearers, clergy carrying the cross, six horses pulling the hearse, and a hundred of the Duke's yeomen.

  A requiem mass was followed by burial at Bury St. Edmunds Abbey. Her daughter Frances served as chief mourner, accompanied by her husband and siblings. Neither Mary's husband nor the King attended, as was the custom for funerals of this kind. Before the coffin was lowered into the crypt, Mary's step-daughters Anne and Mary Brandon pushed themselves to the front of the procession. Their half-siblings were not pleased.

  St. Mary's Church in Bury St. Edmunds received Mary's remains when the monastery was dissolved five years after her burial. In 1784, her coffin was opened and her remains were disinterred. Horace Walpole, Dorothy Bentinck, Duchess of Portland, and several others took locks of her hair as souvenirs.

  Lady Jane Grey was proclaimed queen in July 1553 and held that title for nine days. Frances Brandon was her mother and Mary Tudor's eldest daughter. Mary Tudor had been dead for twenty years by the time her granddaughter's nine days of queenship began.