Mary Rose (17 page)

This last was important, because Charles V and Margaret were keen for Henry to try again, and looked to Brandon to lead any such attack. However, English councils were divided, and neither the Emperor nor his niece had the money to pay for such a expedition. Henry wavered. Early in 1524 he was bellicose, talking of leading an army to France in person, and of enforcing his claim to the French throne, but by the spring as the financial realities began to become apparent, his ardour cooled. By the summer Wolsey was conducting secret peace negotiations with emissaries of Louise of Savoy, and welcoming overtures from Clement VII. He must have done this with Henry’s knowledge, but by the late summer the King was blowing hot again. In August he was planning another army of 9,000 foot and 1,500 horse, which Suffolk was to command, and the Duke set about making preparations.
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He chose councillors and captains, and discussed arrangements for supplies and the recruitment of mercenaries. All this came to nothing, again because the money was simply not available, and there are signs that the Duke and Duchess of Suffolk were moving in different directions. Desperate to recover her dower revenues, she was supporting the peace initiative, and there were rumours of lavish gifts to induce her to intervene with her brother. If she did so, her intercessions were of no lasting effect. The Duke, on the other hand, was an Imperial pensioner, and his payments were up to date, so he had less to lose by continuing the war, and more to gain by shadowing the King as he changed his mind. His appearances at the Council in 1524 and 1525 were erratic, but on the whole his interests lay in continuing the conflict, and that was what his continental friends in the Imperial camp expected.
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At the beginning of 1525 Henry had virtually given up; then came the news of the Battle of Pavia. On 14 February Francis’s army had been destroyed, and the King himself captured. His kingdom now appeared to be open to attack as never before, and Henry’s enthusiasm for forceful intervention was immediately revived. ‘Now is the time,’ he said to an embassy from the Low Countries, ‘for the Emperor and myself to devise the means of getting full satisfaction from France. Not an hour is to be lost.’
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The Great Enterprise was to be revived. Unfortunately, Charles was unmoved. He had his own agenda for exploiting his victory, and replied that if Henry wanted a piece of France, he was welcome to conquer it for himself. This, it soon transpired, was beyond the King’s means. Wolsey had succeeded in getting a very grudging subsidy out of Parliament in 1523, but that was nowhere near enough to cover the costs of a large military expedition, and an attempt at a new exaction, called the Amicable Grant, in 1525 failed completely.
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Disappointed by the Emperor’s response, and frustrated of his purpose by lack of means, the King veered round again and accepted Wolsey’s proposal to resurrect the peace negotiations of the previous year. In the present circumstances, any such initiative was bound to be welcomed by Louise of Savoy, acting as regent during her son’s captivity. John Joachim, her envoy of the previous year, returned to London in June, and on 30 August a solemn treaty was signed at the More, Wolsey’s residence in Hertfordshire.
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The Cardinal’s policy at this juncture was complicated, but seems to have been aimed at restoring a balance of power between France and the Empire, which meant putting together an anti-Imperial alliance. The papacy and several Italian states were involved in this plan, which eventually took shape in the form of the League of Cognac in 1526. This involved taking advantage of Henry’s disillusionment with the Emperor, and hopefully restoring him to the kind of mediating position which he had enjoyed in 1518. Such a bait was necessary because by the terms of the Treaty of the More, France had ceded no territory to England, and that had been one of Henry’s declared war aims. The King’s honour required significant concessions, and Louise agreed to restore his pension, originally conceded by Louis XII in 1514, together with the payment of Mary’s dower. On 22 October Lorenzo Orio, a Venetian envoy in London, reported that his colleague Giovanni Giaochino had gone to Calais to fetch the 50,000 ducats which were due on the pension, together with 10,000 ‘for Madame Mary, the King’s sister, Queen Dowager of France’, to whom also were restored her dower lands. The latter were farmed to Giovanni, in an arrangement which had still to be confirmed, for 29,000 ducats a year. If this worked, and there is good reason to suppose that it did, this would have given Mary an income of almost £10,000 a year.
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Even with the necessary deductions, this would have made her one of the wealthiest peers in England, significantly richer than her husband, whose debt repayments she was now in a position to assist. It is not surprising that Suffolk, for all his military ambitions, should have been an enthusiastic supporter of the Treaty of the More.

Despite the rumours of her pregnancy, and the fears of the Duke in that respect, it was 11 March 1516 before Mary gave birth to her first child.
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This suggests conception in June or July of 1515, well after their final marriage, and given the passion of their early relationship, indicates that she may have had some contraceptive knowledge, which no well-brought-up young lady was supposed to possess. The birth put her in good company, because her sister Margaret, the Dowager Queen of Scots and now the wife of Archibald, Earl of Angus, although estranged from her husband and a fugitive in England, had been delivered at Harbottle Castle in Northumberland on 8 October 1515; and Queen Catherine, after years of stillbirths and cot deaths, had at last produced a healthy infant on 16 February.
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Mary had the advantage, however, because whereas both Margaret and Catherine had borne daughters, the Duchess of Suffolk had borne a son, who, given the fact that Henry had no male heir, might one day stand in the succession to the throne. The birth took place, not at Suffolk Place, but in a house belonging to Cardinal Wolsey just outside Temple Bar, called Bath Place, which suggests that labour may have come upon her unexpectedly. She and the Duke were understandably elated. Mary had now justified her existence in the most traditional fashion, and he was able for the time being to forget the mounting burden of debt which would one day have to be faced.

The child was christened Henry, after the King, and the fact that he was pleased to accept that indicated another stage in the reconciliation between brother and sister. The ceremony was performed by John Fisher, Bishop of Rochester, assisted by Thomas Ruthall of Durham, and the King and Cardinal Wolsey stood as godfathers. Catherine, the Dowager Countess of Devon, and a daughter of Edward IV, was godmother, completing the royal credentials of this most welcome addition to the family.
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The christening took place in the hall at Suffolk Place, with all the splendour of a state occasion, and the Duke was immensely gratified by this unmistakable sign of his rehabilitation. The font was specially warmed for the occasion, and torches lit up the wall hangings with their motif of red and white Tudor roses. The only absentee from this splendid occasion was Mary herself, who had not yet been churched and who sat in the nursery to receive her baby and his presents, together with the congratulations which were appropriate. When the ceremony was over, the procession moved from the hall to the nursery along a specially fenced and gravelled path, with various members of the Suffolk household carrying the basin, chrisom and other impedimenta. Lady Anne Grey, suitably attended, bore the infant himself, and Sir Humphrey Banaster, Mary’s vice-chamberlain, his train. Spices and wine were then served by the Duke of Norfolk and other attendant peers, and the sponsor’s gifts were presented. The King gave a salt cellar and a cup of solid gold, and Lady Catherine two silver gilt pots, which were none the less welcome for not being of the slightest interest to the young prince, who presumably slept soundly through this part of the proceedings.
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The Duke could ill afford the expense of a London season, but Mary had her own resources, and in any case he could hardly deny her the pleasure of a reunion with her sister, who was due to visit the court at the end of April. They had not met since 1503, when they had both been children, and their meeting was expected to be the cause of much celebration. In fact they might have had difficulty in recognising each other, because although Mary was still exceptionally beautiful, thirteen years and several pregnancies had coarsened Margaret, who had never matched her sister for looks, and now retained little of her youth beyond her passionate nature. She was vain, and inconsiderate of others, with a fierce temper – more like her brother, in fact. Her vanity took the form of an extraordinary fondness for fine apparel, and Henry was told that the dresses which he had sent as a present to Northumberland after the birth of her daughter had done her health more good than all the medical attention which she had received.
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Altogether she had collected more than forty fine gowns for her visit to the court, which she was eagerly anticipating. Margaret travelled south in easy stages during April 1516, spending Ascension (1 May) with the Duke and Duchess of Norfolk at Enfield, and reaching the capital the following day. Henry rode out as far as Tottenham to meet her and escorted her to the temporary lodgings which had been provided at Baynard’s Castle. Her reception began with a state dinner, hosted by William Warham at Lambeth, and was followed by a succession of entertainments provided by the King either at Westminster or Greenwich.
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Both Mary and Catherine were pleased to see her, and they had thirteen years of gossip to catch up on, to say nothing of their babies which must have formed a basis of common interest. Given her estrangement from her husband, and the complex political situation in Scotland, neither the King nor Wolsey expected Margaret’s present marriage to survive, and no sooner had she arrived in London than the latter was hinting that she might be available on the international marriage market. He even went so far as to suggest to the Imperial ambassador the possibility of a match with the Emperor Maximilian, who conveniently happened to be a widower.
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The Queen Mother of Scotland was not consulted about these proposals, which remained just that. She was concerned to gain her brother’s support to re-establish her position in Scotland, and would not have been interested in any alternative partner. Wolsey’s suggestion was in fact more to do with his desire to secure control of the Council than with any destiny for the Queen of Scots. He was concerned at this stage to balance England’s relations with the Emperor against those with France, and was concentrating on persuading the King of the wisdom of this course. He therefore did not want men with strong views, like the Duke of Suffolk, confusing the issue in Council.
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Suffolk was not out of favour with the King. He had challenged with him at the jousts held at court on 19 and 20 May, and distinguished himself as usual. Altogether there were thirty-five contestants at this celebration, all gorgeously dressed, and on the second day Henry and the Duke ran at all comers, ‘which was a pleasant sight to see’. Margaret, Mary and Catherine presided together and Catherine presented the prizes. However, Wolsey’s desire to have a clear run at the Council, together with his own straitened circumstances, dictated that Suffolk found it prudent to withdraw to his estates after the tournament, and he remained away for the rest of the year. As we have seen, Henry visited them at Donnington in the course of his summer progress, and conferred various other marks of favour on the Duke, but he did not summon them back to court. He also seems to have ignored Mary’s fulsome letters, in which she expressed her devotion to him and his interests. ‘I account myself as much bounden,’ she wrote,

unto your grace as ever sister was to brother, and according thereunto I shall to the best of my power during my life endeavour myself as far as in me shall be possible to do the thing which shall stand with your pleasure.
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For the time being his pleasure was that they should remain in the country caring for their infant son, but that was probably more out of consideration for the Duke’s finances than out of any reluctance to see him. Before the end of the year he had been chosen to lead a possible expedition against France, and ironically enough, was being accused with Wolsey of exercising undue influence on the King, ‘whether by necromancy, witchcraft or policy no man knoweth’.
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By the end of 1516 Suffolk’s personal debt to the King stood at more than £12,000, but at about that time he was given an extension, and the terms were favourably renegotiated as we have seen in the spring of 1517. Meanwhile Mary’s much larger debt stood respited until her French revenues were resumed. If this was being out of favour, then the Suffolks could clearly have done with more of it. The Duke and Duchess were never unwelcome at court, and their failure to appear had more to do with the need for economy than any coldness on Henry’s part. It was probably due to subtle changes in the Cardinal’s foreign policy that he reappeared at Council meetings in February 1517. Wolsey was clearly confident that he could stall their debt indefinitely if the need arose, and in effect did so later in the year.

In the spring of 1517 Catherine made a pilgrimage to the shrine of Our Lady at Walsingham, and the Suffolks, who were in Norfolk at the time, accompanied her, entertaining her on the return journey. So generous was their hospitality that the Queen felt bound to return it in the following month. However, during Catherine’s brief stay with them occurred an incident which Brandon feared might well ruin his credit with the King. Ann Jerningham, an attendant of the Queen’s, who must have been appealed to by one or other of the parties, brokered a betrothal between John Berkeley, one of Suffolk’s wards, and Lady Anne Grey, of Mary’s Privy Chamber. This was a technical offence without the King’s consent, and the Duke was properly alarmed. He wrote hastily to Wolsey, ‘I had lever have spent a thousand pounds than any such pageant should have been within the Queen’s house and mine.’ He disclaimed all responsibility, and the Cardinal succeeded in nipping the engagement in the bud, which seems to indicate that there had been no personal falling out with Wolsey during the previous year, or at least that it had been repaired by April 1517.
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For the rest of that year, Charles and Mary divided their time between the country and the court. Mary was highly decorative, and it was at about this time that she attracted the compliment from Guillaume de Bonnivet that she was the ‘rose of Christendom’ and should have remained in France to be admired.
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Brandon meanwhile resumed his role in the jousts and the revels as though he had never been away. At the end of April they visited the court, which had removed to Richmond on account of the plague, a regular migration because of Henry’s intense fear of the disease. While they were there the Evil May Day riots erupted in the city, spreading fear and confusion among the foreign community. This demonstration of xenophobic fury attracted swift retribution, and a dozen of the chief offenders were quickly tried and condemned. The story then runs that it was the three queens, acting together, who interceded for them with the result that only one offender was executed.
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This may have been so, because they were all within reach at the time, and Henry was susceptible to the pleas of women, especially as two of them (Catherine and Mary) were pregnant at the time, and the King was hoping desperately for a male heir. He might well have felt that mercy would be pleasing to God. It was later when Henry pardoned the 400 delinquents on the intercession of Cardinal Wolsey, and there is no mention of Catherine or Mary being present, in spite of the legend which attaches to that occasion. ‘Then were all the gallows within the city taken down, and many a good prayer said for the king,’ as one chronicler observed. The fact that many gallows had been necessary indicates that far more than the original victim had been hanged. We do not know the actual number, but it seems to have been around forty or fifty.
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