Lady Jane Grey

by Plowden, Alison

  If 1514 marked a decisive stage in the saga of the Brandon family, it was also notable for an abrupt change of direction in English foreign policy. The king had fallen out with his European allies, having belatedly realised the extent to which they had been making use of him for their own ends, and that summer he concluded an alliance with France to be sealed by the marriage of his sister Mary to the French king, Louis XII.

  Nineteen-year-old Mary Tudor, the youngest surviving child of Henry VII and Elizabeth of York, was the beauty of the English royal family – with her elegant figure, perfect complexion and wonderful red-gold hair, she was generally conceded to have been one of the loveliest women of her day. High-spirited, wilful and more than a little spoilt, in the five years since her father’s death she had been enjoying a most unusual amount of fun and freedom for an unmarried princess; but the king was fond of his sister, who shared his exuberant delight in dancing, party-going, dressing up and showing off, and he liked having her around and encouraged her to play a full part in the hectic social life of the court. The dangers inherent in this sort of permissiveness were obvious enough – it was not for nothing that royal brides were normally shipped off to their husbands the moment they became nubile. Mary was a warm-blooded young woman surrounded by the pick of the eligible men in the kingdom, and inevitably she had formed an attachment of her own, the object of her affections being no less a person than the controversial new duke of Suffolk. She would, of course, have known him from a distance since childhood, but by 1514 what may perhaps have begun as a little girl’s hero-worship for one of her brother’s lordly friends had ripened into something altogether more mature.

  There was no scandal. No gossip linking the princess’s name with the duke had yet reached the outside world, but within the family the affair seems to have been a pretty open secret. Mary herself had confided in her brother, telling him that she loved Charles Brandon and would only agree to marry the king of France – a widower in his fifties and a martyr to gout – on condition that, as soon as she was free again, Henry would allow her to make her own choice as her own heart and mind should be best pleased. ‘And upon that your great comfort and faithful promise’, she wrote later, ‘I assented to the said marriage; else I would never have granted to, as at the same time I showed unto you more at large.’5

  On this understanding, it seems, the bargain was struck and Mary sailed from Dover at the beginning of October, slightly cheered by the magnificence of her trousseau. Her beauty and charm made an excellent impression on the French, and at her first meeting with Louis he threw his arms round her neck and ‘kissed her as kindly as if he had been five-and-twenty’. Not surprisingly such an ill-assorted couple were made the butt of unkind jokes in some quarters – in Spain it was being predicted that his young wife would soon be the death of a bridegroom in his dotage. To the outward eye, however, Louis appeared very jovial and in love. He had temporarily quite thrown off his invalidish habits, boasting that on his wedding night he had ‘crossed the river’ three times and would have done more had he chosen. Apart from a brief unpleasantness over the dismissal of some of Mary’s English attendants, he proved an indulgent and generous husband and by the time Charles Brandon paid a visit to France in November the newly-weds had established quite a cosy relationship.

  Suffolk had come over with Thomas Grey, 2nd marquess of Dorset, who had succeeded his father back in 1501. A military man and another notable performer in the jousts, he and the duke were to take part in a tournament celebrating Mary’s forthcoming coronation, but Suffolk had also been entrusted with certain confidential matters to be discussed with the French in private. He had an audience with the king and queen at Beauvais, where he found Louis lying on a couch with Mary sitting beside him, and was able to report ‘that never queen behaved herself more wisely and honourably, and so say all the noblemen of France’.6 Charles Brandon was clearly impressed by her dignity and restraint which, he told Henry, ‘rejoiced me not a little’, adding significantly, ‘your grace knows why’. It sounds rather as if he had been afraid Mary might embarrass him in public, but he need not have worried. The queen of France knew what was due to her position and she received her brother’s envoy with perfect sangfroid.

  Mary’s marriage to King Louis lasted for just eighty-two days and when he collapsed and died on New Year’s Eve 1514 her situation changed abruptly. Much to her dismay, she found herself obliged to endure the forty days of strict seclusion imposed by French custom – a period of mourning or, more accurately, quarantine, designed to ensure that if a widowed queen proved to be pregnant, there should be as little doubt as possible as to the paternity of her child. Mary’s protests that to the best of her knowledge she was not pregnant were disregarded, and she was bundled off to the Hotel de Cluny to spend six weeks behind drawn curtains in a stuffy, black-draped mourning chamber. Here, cut off from the outside world, she began to panic in case Henry might already be planning another foreign match for her while she was helpless to stop him. Terror that he meant to break his word is apparent in every line of a letter written from Cluny in January:

  Sir, I beseech your grace that you will keep all the promises that you promised me when I took my leave of you by the waterside. Sir, your grace knoweth well that I did marry for your pleasure at this time and now I trust you will suffer me to marry as me liketh for to do … wherefore I beseech your grace for to be a good lord and brother unto me.7

  Exactly what the king was planning for his sister’s future remains a trifle unclear. If he did not intend to honour his famous promises of the previous autumn, it was perhaps not very wise to appoint the duke of Suffolk as head of the mission charged with the task of winding up her affairs in France. But Henry trusted his friend. He had no reason not to do so. Charles Brandon was, after all, his own creation, dependent on royal favour and bounty for his very existence. He did, however, take the precaution of asking the duke for a solemn undertaking that he would keep his relations with Mary on a strictly formal basis while they were abroad. There may quite possibly have been some kind of understanding that if he succeeded in extricating the queen dowager on satisfactory financial terms, the king would be prepared to give them his blessing – rumours of a marriage were already going round – but Suffolk was probably less concerned just then with thoughts of romance than with the daunting prospect of having to drive a bargain with the French over Mary’s plate and jewels and dower rights. He was, therefore, seriously taken aback when he arrived in France at the end of January to discover that the new king, Louis’s big foxy-faced cousin François d’Angoulême, apparently knew all about his personal affairs.

  Brandon’s first interview with Mary was even more unnerving. As soon as they were alone together the distracted widow proceeded to unloose on him all the pent-up emotion of the past few weeks. The more she thought about it the more convinced she had become that his mission was a trap to lure her back to England to be forced into another loveless political alliance and she would rather be torn in pieces – either that, or his enemies on the council would find some way of preventing their marriage. Nothing her harassed sweetheart could say would pacify her, and in floods of tears – according to the duke he had never seen a woman so weep – she presented him with an ultimatum: either he agreed to marry her there and then, while they had the chance, or he ‘might never look to have the same proffer again’. With his promise to Henry weighing heavily on his conscience, Suffolk tried to evade the issue (or so he said later) but his protests were swept aside. Mary reminded him that she had her brother’s promise that next time she might marry as she pleased and they might never have such an opportunity again. She would almost certainly have added that he couldn’t really love her if he was not willing to take so small a risk for her sake.

  All this put Charles Brandon in an appalling quandary. His whole career had been founded on his commitment to the Tudor family and now he was fairly and squarely caught between the Scylla and Charybdis of Tudor passion and Tudor despotism. He
was genuinely devoted to his sovereign lord and stood in very healthy awe of him, but it is hard for any man to stand like a stone while the loveliest princess in Europe is literally begging and praying him to take her to his bed. And there was something else. Although it was not tactful to draw attention to it, the fact remained that after nearly six years of marriage Henry’s Spanish wife Catherine of Aragon had not yet given him a living heir. It was by no means impossible that his younger sister might found a new royal line and visions of fathering a future king of England must surely have passed through Suffolk’s head – for all his bluff, easy-going exterior he was an ambitious man. Forced into the unaccustomed exercise of thinking on his feet, Mary’s tears and intimations of dynastic immortality overcame considerations of trust and honour, self-restraint, even of self-preservation, and on an undisclosed date in February 1515 Charles Brandon and Mary Tudor, queen of France, were married very quietly indeed in the chapel at Cluny, with only a handful of the bride’s personal servants as witnesses.

  Confession could not long be postponed. By the beginning of March reports of that furtive ceremony at Cluny were circulating freely in Paris and on the 5th of the month Charles Brandon sat down to write a difficult letter to his friend Thomas Wolsey, now archbishop of York, explaining that ‘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 lyen with her, insomuch that I fear me lest she be with child. My lord,’ he went on, ‘I am not in a little sorrow lest the king should know of it and be displeased with me, for I assure you I had rather have died than he should be miscontent.’ He ended by begging for Wolsey’s ‘especial help’ in breaking the news to Henry, for ‘I have as heavy a heart as any man living and shall have till I may hear good tidings from you.’8

  There followed a fortnight’s painful suspense and Wolsey’s reply when it came was not encouraging. The king’s first reaction had been one of utter disbelief that the man he had loved and trusted best could have so wantonly betrayed his confidence. Wolsey had had to show him Suffolk’s letter before he would give it credence and now he was bitterly hurt and angry. ‘Cursed be the blind affection and counsel that hath brought you hereunto,’ wrote the archbishop grimly, ‘fearing that such sudden and unadvised dealing shall have sudden repentance.’ Let Charles Brandon make no mistake, by his acts and doings he had put himself ‘in the greatest danger that ever man was in’.9

  Shaking in their shoes, the culprits now hastened to throw themselves on the king’s mercy, acknowledging their fault and beseeching forgiveness. ‘Sir, for the passion of God’, cried the duke, ‘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.’10 For her part, Mary did her best to take the blame on herself. She knew she had constrained my lord of Suffolk to break his promise, but it was only because she had been thrown into such terrible ‘consternation, fear and doubt’ that their marriage might somehow be prevented. She, too, begged for forgiveness, ‘and that it will please your grace to write to me and to my lord of Suffolk some comfortable words’.11

  No such words were forthcoming, but all the same it was soon obvious from Wolsey’s letters that Henry’s wrath could be assuaged at a price – and a heavy financial penalty was imposed on the lovers, who were ordered to repay all the costs of Mary’s first marriage – her dowry, her trousseau and her wedding journey. Suffolk also had to surrender his wardship of Elizabeth Grey (he had broken off his engagement to her some time in the previous year) but he was allowed to keep his other offices and estates.

  It was the beginning of May before Mary and her new husband were finally free to return to England and they had a grand wedding at Greenwich on the 13th in the presence of the whole court, apparently fully restored to royal favour. The Venetian ambassador was amazed and hesitated to offer congratulations until he was quite sure they would be acceptable. But in spite of all the accounts of his dire displeasure relayed by Thomas Wolsey, it is pretty clear that the king had never intended to proceed to extremes against his best friend and his favourite sister. It is true that some of the older, more conservative members of the Privy Council disapproved of the marriage, but Suffolk’s genial good fellowship and athletic prowess made him a popular figure and, apart from his political rivals, few people seriously grudged him his good fortune. Few people, after all, could resist a romance, especially one with a happy ending – a rare enough event in royal circles. No one denied that it was an unequal match, but the general feeling on this aspect of Mary Tudor’s love story was neatly summed up in the quatrain which appears beneath the portrait of the happy pair painted at about the time of their marriage and said to have been composed by the bridegroom himself:

  Cloth of gold, do not despise,

  Though thou be match’d with cloth of frieze.

  Cloth of frieze, be not too bold,

  Though thou be match’d with cloth of gold.

  In February 1516, after a long history of miscarriages, babies stillborn or living only a few weeks, Queen Catherine of Aragon finally gave birth to a healthy child – a girl, christened Mary. The king was apparently delighted, saying to an ambassador who ventured to commiserate with him over the baby’s sex that ‘if it was a daughter this time, by God’s grace the sons will follow’. A month later the Suffolks’ first child was born – a boy, christened, naturally, Henry. The king’s daughter survived, but his nephew did not, dying some time before his fifth birthday. The duchess of Suffolk (or the French queen, as she continued to be styled by everyone, including herself) went on to produce two daughters – Frances, born on St Francis’s Day, 16 July 1517, and Eleanor two years later – then, in 1522, another son, also christened Henry. But there was still no prince of Wales and it was clear by this time that the queen would have no more children. All the same it was another five years before Henry first applied to Rome for a divorce or, more accurately, an annulment of his marriage, convinced, so he said, that he and Catherine were living in incestuous adultery and that was why God, whom he always regarded very much in the light of a senior partner, was refusing to give him sons. Quite a number of his subjects were equally convinced that the king’s famous scruple of conscience had more to do with his infatuation for one of his wife’s maids of honour, the fascinating brunette Anne Boleyn, than with any very pressing anxiety over the succession.

  The divorce, or the king’s Great Matter as it became known, was to dominate the English political scene for the best part of a decade and its ramifications would destroy the lives of many good men and women (Thomas Wolsey, cardinal archbishop, was one of its first casualties), but the Grey and Brandon families were not at first directly affected. Thomas Grey and Charles Brandon were both, of course, committed king’s men, although the Suffolks were believed privately to disapprove of his proceedings and the French queen in particular was known to sympathise with her unfortunate sister-in-law. But by 1527 the Suffolks were themselves beginning to worry in case the legality of their own marriage might be called into question. The duke’s erstwhile ward and fiancée, Elizabeth Grey, had died in 1519 but Dame Margaret Mortimer, the same who had once lived briefly as Brandon’s wife, although a very old lady was still alive, and if now the legitimacy of the king’s daughter and heir presumptive were to be challenged, the status of the Suffolk children would become a matter of considerable constitutional and personal importance.

  The duke therefore consulted canon lawyers, who applied to Rome for a ruling on the matter and in May 1528 received the answer they wanted – a papal bull ratifying the original sentence of the archdeacon of London’s court given in 1507 annulling the Brandon–Mortimer marriage. Margaret Mortimer died about this time, thus helpfully tidying up any loose ends; all the same in August 1529 the Suffolks took the additional precaution of having the new decree notorially attested before the bishop of Norwich and a posse of official witnesses.

  The anxious parents could now begin to look round more con
fidently for husbands for their daughters. Their first choice for Frances was the duke of Norfolk’s son Henry, earl of Surrey, but the Howards turned down the match because, it seemed, the dowry offered was too small. Then, in October 1530, Charles Brandon’s old friend and comrade in arms Thomas Grey, marquess of Dorset, died, to be succeeded by his fourteen-year-old son Henry. The earl of Arundel was in the bidding for the wardship of the young marquess with a view to marrying him off to his daughter, Lady Katherine FitzAlan; but for reasons not disclosed, the young marquess chose to reject Lady Katherine and consequently Arundel withdrew from the competition. This opened up a window of opportunity for the duke of Suffolk and, with the king’s approval, he stepped in to acquire the wardship for himself and with it a husband for his daughter.12 Frances’s future was thus honourably secured and her wedding, marking the union of two of England’s leading families, was a suitably grand affair.

  It also marked the last public appearance of Mary Tudor, the French queen. Mary had been very little at court during recent years, preferring to spend most of her time at Westhorpe Hall, the Suffolks’ principal country seat in East Anglia, some 12 miles from Bury St Edmunds. Her absence seems to have been partly due to a natural reluctance to yield precedence to Mistress Anne Boleyn, and partly to her increasingly poor health. So as soon as the wedding festivities were over, she travelled back to Westhorpe alone with her younger daughter. Her husband was too busy running the king’s errands to go with her and, although he paid a brief visit to his ailing wife some time early in May, he does not seem to have been with her when she slipped quietly away between seven and eight o’clock on the morning of 25 June. She was thirty-eight years old and the exact nature of her long wasting illness, of which the only recorded symptom was a pain in the side, is not known. It may have been cancer or, perhaps more likely in view of the Tudor family’s medical history, tuberculosis.