Brandon’s union with Elizabeth Grey was never consummated, and as part of Suffolk’s punishment for marrying Mary without his permission, Henry revoked the wardship. Brandon’s other title had been bestowed in anticipation of a wedding as well. Henry had made him Duke of Suffolk in February 1514 to groom him for another match that never went anywhere—with Margaret of Austria, the daughter of the Holy Roman Emperor Maximilian.
Brandon’s rise through the ranks of the peerage had many nobles from older and more established families bristling. There were only three dukes in England at the time: Norfolk (the uncle of the Boleyn girls and Kathryn Howard), Suffolk, and the Duke of Buckingham—who wore his disgust on his damasked sleeve, sneeringly commenting that the new duke “was not of a very noble lineage.”
At the time he eloped with Mary in early 1515, Suffolk was thirty-two years old, a handsome man in the prime of life. He had risked his sovereign’s displeasure—and possibly his head—to wed the eighteen- or nineteen-year-old Mary. It was not so much the fact of their marriage that Henry objected to so violently, but that the lovers had wed in secret and without his permission.
By February 20, people were already discussing the scandal. The actual date of the clandestine wedding in the Cluny Chapel remains unknown, but it must have occurred fairly early in February, because by the beginning of March Mary suspected she might be pregnant.
The bridegroom felt guilty after the match had been consummated and confessed as much to Wolsey. “The Queen would never let me 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 insomuch I fear . . . she be with child.” To Henry he wrote, “Sir, for the passion of God, let it not be in your heart against me, and rather than you should hold me in mistrust, strike off my head and let me not live.”
Although her fears of pregnancy turned out to be a false alarm, Mary and Suffolk had a second wedding ceremony in March. Sanctioned by a bishop, it was public enough to cover the couple’s collective derrières.
After receiving Suffolk’s admission regarding the consummation of his marriage to Mary, Wolsey went straight to the king. Henry unleashed the royal wrath. There would be no approval of the match and no forgiveness. Writing to Suffolk on the king’s behalf, Wolsey delivered the coup de grace. “Ye have failed to him which hath brought you up of low degree to be of this great honour; and that ye were the man in all the world he loved and trusted best. . . . Ye put yourself in the greatest danger that ever man was in.”
Although Wolsey had informed Suffolk that there was no chance of clemency, he did mention that there might be a remedy—the only remedy: money. Henry had been hit in the purse by the newlyweds’ disobedience. And he demanded restitution. The financial penalty for the Duke and Duchess of Suffolk was enormous. Reimbursement for Mary’s dowry, which had been forfeited to France, amounted to £200,000, worth six hundred times that sum in today’s dollars. Compensation for the plate and jewels that Louis had bestowed on her was an additional line item. And to repay Henry for the remaining expenses, including the vast sum spent on her wedding to the French king, Suffolk was to tender another thousand pounds per annum for the next twenty-four years.
Suffolk had managed to negotiate the return of Mary’s plate and most of her jewels from François, as well as 200,000 gold crowns in restitution of half her marriage portion, 20,000 gold crowns of which were reimbursement for her travel expenses from England to Abbeville. But every bit of it was immediately tendered to Henry upon their return to English soil. Mary retained her jointure from her marriage to Louis, but the revenues from those lands would be passed along to her brother as well. Her final use of her official seal as Queen of France was to make over every shred of her property and possessions to Henry.
On April 16, 1515, the newlyweds left Paris for Calais, then an English stronghold on the Continent. Mary retained the courtesy title of “the French Queen” for the rest of her life, but from then on would be known as the Duchess of Suffolk. They sailed for Dover on May 2, exactly seven months from the date of Mary’s departure for France. In that time she’d had more weddings than husbands. Apparently placated by his enormous payoff, Henry welcomed the couple back to England, and on May 13, their nuptials were solemnized for a third time, before the entire court assembled at Greenwich. Although the ceremonies were modest, it was a triumph of true love.
Emotionally, Henry had forgiven them, but the Suffolks were to feel the financial sting of His Majesty’s displeasure for the rest of their marriage, frequently unable to make ends meet, which often precluded their appearance at court. Although the duke was cash poor, he was among the kingdom’s largest landowners, and Henry had confiscated none of his property. In fact, within a few weeks of Suffolk’s return to England, he was granted a stewardship of crown land that brought with it an annuity; and by the end of the year Henry awarded him additional land and possessions worth £500 (more than $337,000 today), and cancelled £5,000 of the duke’s £24,000 debt to him.
The official line from the palace was that the kingdom rejoiced at the royal marriage. Certainly, Henry had not remained livid for long. But foreign ambassadors detected a different mood—which might have been propaganda contrived for the benefit of their respective sovereigns, or simply a misunderstanding of events. The Venetians weren’t sure whether to congratulate the bridal couple because the wedding celebration had been so low-key, and no public demonstrations (such as pageants) had followed the ceremony.
Even an English chronicler, Edward Hall, wrote: Against this marriage many men grudged and said that it was a great loss to the realm that she was not married to the Prince of Castile [Archduke Charles of Austria, the future King of Spain]; but the wisest sort was content, considering that if she had been married again out of the realm, she should have carried much riches with her; and now she brought every year into the realm nine or ten thousand marks [her dower revenues as Dowager Queen of France]. But whatsoever the rude people said, the Duke behaved himself so that he had both the favour of the king and of the people.
On March 11, 1516, the first of Mary and Suffolk’s three children was born—a son named Henry. The king and Wolsey were his godfathers. The Brandons’ two daughters, Frances and Eleanor, were born in 1517 and 1519 or ’20, respectively.
Mary and Suffolk did not become permanent fixtures at Henry’s court, preferring the relative sanity and solitude of the duke’s estates, particularly Westhorpe Hall, Suffolk’s country seat. Yet the duke’s power and influence remained as strong as ever, particularly as he was now the king’s brother-in-law. Suffolk was one of the diplomats present at the Field of Cloth of Gold summit between Henry and François I in 1520, where he might have first caught a glimpse of Anne Boleyn, in the train of Queen Claude. He could not have known at the time that the young lady-in-waiting with the dark eyes and sallow complexion would cause a rift with his own wife, and a strained relationship between Mary and her brother.
Mary came to court as infrequently as possible after Anne became Henry’s mistress, and she sympathized with Katherine of Aragon during the protracted Great Matter. Because of her rank, Mary could get away with voicing her strong negative opinions of Anne, though Henry didn’t have to like them. In 1532, she was heard using “opprobrious language” about Anne that literally sparked violence between her husband’s men and those of Anne’s uncle, the Duke of Norfolk. Two of Norfolk’s men, the Southwell brothers, murdered Suffolk’s retainer, Sir William Pennington, as the knight sought sanctuary in Westminster Abbey. Suffolk then “remove[d] the assailants by force” from holy ground.
The court went into an uproar over the incident. Suffolk and Mary retreated to their country estate, but the mood at Whitehall remained so tense that Henry had to smooth things over by riding out to speak with Suffolk directly, and fining one of the Southwells the whopping sum of a thousand pounds (nearly $600,000 today).
At the same time the validity of Henry’s marriage to Katherine was being scrutiniz
ed in Rome, the Suffolks’ union was under papal review. Mary had prodded her husband into securing an airtight acknowledgment of its legitimacy following an incident in which his surviving ex-wife, Margaret Mortimer, had begged for his assistance on a real estate matter. The legality of Suffolk’s marriage to Margaret rested on the adequacy of the original authorization for it—a papal dispensation that had been declared invalid by an English court in 1507. Fortunately for Mary, Margaret Mortimer died in early 1528, and Wolsey correctly assumed that the Pope had bigger fish to fry. A May 12, 1528, papal bull issued at Orvieto proclaimed Suffolk’s divorce from Margaret to be valid, and ratified his subsequent marriage to Anne Browne. As Anne was also dead, and Suffolk was a widower when he wed Mary Tudor, much to Mary’s relief her marriage to the duke was declared to be completely legal.
Whether Rome would proclaim Henry’s marriage to Katherine invalid, leaving him free to wed Anne Boleyn, was another matter. Suffolk didn’t think much of Anne, either, and as late as May 1530, imperial ambassador Chapuys reported that the duke had been banished from court for warning Henry of Anne’s unsuitability to be queen.
Yet, when all was said and done, Suffolk was a loyal courtier, supporting the king in all he sought. He became enough of a proponent of Anne’s to remain in Henry’s good graces, although he felt awful about some of the unpleasant tasks the king assigned him, such as displacing Katherine of Aragon and dismissing her train. But with one stroke of Henry’s pen an Act of Attainder could wipe away all the honors and titles and accumulated wealth and property that the king had bestowed upon him. So he clenched his fists and sucked it up when, upon Anne’s coronation in 1533, Henry replaced him in the office of Earl Marshal with his archrival, Anne’s uncle, the Duke of Norfolk. From then on, Mary pointedly refused to come to court at all.
She fell dangerously ill that June, and in her dying wishes sought reconciliation with her brother. In her last letter to Henry, she wrote that “the sight of Your Grace is the greatest comfort to me that may be possible.” But her illness was a mere footnote amid the weeks of festivity surrounding Anne’s coronation. Suffolk hurried back to her sickbed with Henry’s reply to her sad little letter, in which the king offered his forgiveness and reconciled her to the royal bosom.
Mary died at Westhorpe Hall on June 25 at the age of thirty-seven. First interred in the abbey at Bury St. Edmunds, in 1784 her corpse was moved to St. Mary’s Church.
Suffolk wasted little time in remarrying. On September 7, 1533, the same day as the birth of Anne Boleyn’s daughter, the Princess Elizabeth, the forty-eight-year-old duke took a fourth wife—his barely fourteen-year-old ward Katherine Willoughby, the daughter of Katherine of Aragon’s trusted friend and lady-in-waiting Maria de Salinas. She had been betrothed to his son, Henry, the 1st Earl of Lincoln, but when the lusty duke became widowed, he broke his son’s contract to marry Katherine himself, exercising his droit du seigneur, so to speak. The scandal it created was not over the age difference between the groom and his new bride, or even their relative haste to the altar, but over the sordidness of the family dynamic. Henry Brandon, who passed away on March 8, 1534, just three days shy of his eighteenth birthday, was said to have died of a broken heart over his father’s betrayal. Although he had been ill for some time, it didn’t stop certain tongues from wagging. Anne Boleyn remarked tartly, “My Lord of Suffolk kills one son to beget another.”
But the marriage turned out to be a great success, and Katherine grew up to be a passionate Reformer, one of the strongest advocates of the burgeoning Protestant faith.
For his role in supporting Henry VIII in the Great Matter and in the subsequent dissolution of the monasteries, Suffolk was greatly rewarded, receiving a share of the confiscated lands. He also remained a trusted military commander. Back in 1523, Henry had dispatched him to Calais as Marshal of the King’s Army. Suffolk’s troops invaded France, routing the French at the Battle of the Spurs. In 1544, the sixty-year-old Suffolk was sent back to the Continent to command the forces that besieged Boulogne.
While the court was in Guilford, Suffolk died unexpectedly on August 24, 1545, at the age of sixty-two. The cause of death is unknown; however, since it came quite quickly, it was possibly the result of a heart attack or stroke, rather than an illness.
Henry VIII’s last will and testament made in 1546 stipulated that Mary’s heirs should take precedence in the line of succession before those of his older sister Margaret, the Dowager Queen of Scotland. Little did he know that his only son, Edward VI, would die young and without issue, and that the boy would declare his half sisters Mary and Elizabeth illegitimate and therefore ineligible to inherit the crown.
In October 1536, the Suffolks’ oldest daughter, Frances Brandon, the wife of Henry Grey and Marchioness of Dorset, had given birth to a daughter whom she named for Henry’s queen, Jane Seymour. Jane Grey would wear the crown before either of Henry’s daughters did so. But on July 19, 1554, this granddaughter of Mary and Suffolk known as “the Nine Days’ Queen” would lose her head in the struggle for succession engendered by the death of Edward VI. Poor Jane Grey would be succeeded on the English throne by Mary, the daughter of Henry and Katherine of Aragon.
In the annals of royal marriages, that of Mary and Charles stands out as a monument not only to true love, but to tenacity. We’ll never know how things might have transpired had Charles Brandon not been Henry’s boon companion; but when all was said and done, a princess of England rejected the role of royal pawn, stuck to her guns, and made one of history’s greatest autocrats keep a promise he surely had never intended to honor, thereby choosing her own happiness and charting her own destiny. Sometimes there’s much to be said for that Tudor stubborn streak.
HENRY VIII
and
ANNE BOLEYN
(“THE MOST HAPPY”)
1500(?)-1536
married 1533-1536
“. . . Never a prince had a wife more loyal in all duty, and in all true affection, than you have ever found in Anne Boleyn. . . .”
—Anne to Henry
SHE IS UNDOUBTEDLY THE MOST INFLUENTIAL QUEEN consort in British history, and she would never have been queen at all had her marriage to Henry VIII not been the result of the most famous divorce in the world. As calculating as she was captivating, equal parts sharp and subtle, both virtuous and vindictive, Anne Boleyn was a legend in her own lifetime and her allure remains as evergreen as the Château Vert, the fantasy castle of wood and tin-foil whose battlements Henry stormed on the day she bewitched his heart.
Anne Boleyn was the younger daughter of Elizabeth Howard and the ambitious ambassador and diplomat Sir Thomas Boleyn. She was not a conventional beauty like her sister, Mary, who was buxom, blond, and blue-eyed—the first of the Boleyn girls to captivate the king. Slender, auburn-haired, and sallow-complected, Anne was of middling stature; her features were angular and fine, though her mouth was considered wide; and her bosom “was not much raised”—according to the Venetian ambassador, who evidently got close enough to evaluate it. Anne’s detractors delighted in depicting her as deformed, with warts all over her body, a huge wen or mole on her throat (she was described as having a large Adam’s apple, but the wen was a gross exaggeration that seemed to grow with the telling of the tale), and a sixth finger on her left hand. Anne probably had a vestigial extra nail on her left pinky, but if she had been even a tenth as malformed as her enemies painted her, the persnickety Henry, with his discerning eye for beauty, would never have looked twice at her, let alone moved heaven and earth to wed her.
Anne spent her teenage years first as an attendant to the Archduchess Margaret of Austria at the Burgundian court in the Netherlands, followed by six or seven years at the French court, initially in the train of Queen Mary, the younger sister of Henry VIII. In 1521, she was recalled to England, possibly because her father wished to arrange her marriage to a distant cousin, Sir James Butler, Earl of Ormonde, which would have brought Ormonde’s wealth and title into their immediate family
.
In the meantime, Anne was placed in Queen Katherine’s household. Her ambition was abetted by a canny mind, a lively intellect, and a quick wit. Some years after Anne’s death, a recusant writer claimed that she’d be remembered as “the model and the mirror of those who were at court, for she was always well dressed, and every day made some change in the fashion of her garments.” Anne did indeed have a love of finery, but more important, she was conscious of projecting an image—practicing the politics of ostentation, which her daughter Elizabeth would eventually raise to an art form. Anne’s cosmopolitan sophistication, her facility with languages, and her skilled repartee made her one of the most popular young women at court, and she soon had several admirers.
By 1522, she had entranced the handsome courtier Henry Percy, the son and heir of the powerful Earl of Northumberland. Although it was later vehemently denied, the two of them may have entered into a secret precontract of marriage, which in the Tudor era would have been as valid as a marriage itself. To violate a precontract by consorting with—or marrying—another, was tantamount to adultery or bigamy. At the time he met Anne, Percy had already been precontracted to Lady Mary Talbot, the daughter of the vastly wealthy Earl of Shrewsbury. So, Cardinal Wolsey—possibly at the instigation of the king—instructed Anne and Percy to sever their ties and Percy was sent back to marry Mary.
Initially angry and disappointed, by the middle of 1525, Anne, whose “excellent gesture and behavior did excel all other,” was in her mid-twenties and had utterly captivated the king with her wit, her grace, and her dark, exotic looks. But not until the Shrovetide merriment in 1526 did people begin to discern the infatuation that Henry had secretly harbored for nearly a year, scarcely daring to confess it to the object herself. Henry was then thirty-five years old, in the seventeenth year of his reign, still vigorous, handsome, and athletically built.
Notorious Royal Marriages: A Juicy Journey through Nine Centuries of Dynasty, Destiny, and Desire Page 12
