La Reine Blanche by Mary Hoffman

The "other" Mary Tudor

No, not England's first  Queen Regnant but Henry the Eighth's favourite sister.

If this new biography had its title translated into The White Queen, readers might think it was fiction, like Philippa Gregory's novel of the same name, about Elizabeth Woodville.

As it is, the subject's life is so extraordinary that Sarah Bryson might well have presented it as fiction. (The subtitle is a bit misleading: it's not just a collection of letters, though these are drawn on.)

I have written about the first Mary Tudor on here before. I am particularly interested in her and her second husband, Charles Brandon, at least partly because one of my sons-in-law is their descendant. I know, I know. It's only two days since Katherine Roberts told us that 1 in 200 men in the world is directly descended from Genghis Khan.

But I look at my son-in-law's hooded eyes and a Plantagenet looks back at me. I have his family tree going back to Frances Brandon and can see back to Henry Vll beyond that. Another ancestor helped that same Henry become king by rallying to his side at the Battle of Bosworth.

Family connections aside, Mary Rose, sister of Henry the Eighth, would be a fascinating subject to anyone. Henry Vll and his wife, Elizabeth of York famously married both to legitimate his rather shaky claim to the throne and to bring an official end to the "Wars of the Roses," or Cousins' War. They had four children who survived infancy: two boys and two girls. The boys were Arthur, who died as a teenager a few months after marrying Katherine of Aragon, and Henry whose marital history is all too often rehearsed.

The older daughter was Margaret, named for her formidable grandmother Margaret Beaufort, and married to James lV of Scotland  (Mary Queen of Scots was her granddaughter). She came between the two sons. The last surviving daughter was Mary Rose, five years younger than the brother who would become king.

This portrait suggests she shared the red-gold hair of her brother and niece Elizabeth. Prized as sons were, the royal couple had two already and no reason to anticipate Arthur's early death so perhaps they were relaxed about the new baby's being a girl. Because royal princesses had their own advantages: they could be married off to other European royals.

Mary had her first marriage proposal when she was three; it was rejected. But then the proposed husband was "only" the son of a Duke. The royal toddler knew nothing about it of course; such matters were sorted out by fathers. Her older sister was to be married to a king and her father intended nothing less for his second daughter.

In fact Mary was first "married" at the age of five to Charles, who would not only go on to be King of Spain but Holy Roman Emperor too. Her father would not have known this for certain at the time of their proxy wedding and indeed Charles - an infant himself - was also "only the son of a duke"  but that dukedom was Burgundy, one of the richest and most influential in Europe.

So Mary Rose could have become Empress but settled for Duchess. But not until she had first been a queen.

Her life was filled with all the little luxuries her brother could give her, especially rich fabrics for clothes. He became king when Mary was only thirteen and seems always to have favoured her, sending her letters and presents whenever she was not at court. And of course Mary had gained a sister-in-in-law, Katherine of Aragon, to whom she became very close.

Her brother became impatient with the way that negotiations for Mary's marriage to Charles, now Prince of Spain, were being dragged out, by Charles's father Ferdinand and grandfather Maximilian, who was Holy Roman Emperor . So Henry started to cast around for another suitable husband for her.

His choice fell on Louis Xll of France, aged 52, who had been married twice before. His first marriage had been annulled and his second ended in the death of his wife, Anne of Brittany, who was worn out by stillbirths and miscarriages both with Louis and her first husband.

Mary was eighteen when this marriage was suggested to her and this is the point when she leaps out of the pages of history and becomes a real woman, just as fearless as her brother. This is when she famously extracts the promise from him that, if she "did marrie for our pleasure at this time ...that you will suffer me to marry as me liketh to do." This is how she puts it in the letter she sends Henry after Louis' death.

And straightaway we can imagine these redheaded siblings facing off and the teenager telling her big brother (who happens to be king of England)  "I'll marry this old guy to please you, but when he dies I get to choose my next husband."

It is inconceivable that she didn't already have her eye on Charles Brandon, lately made Duke of Suffolk, as a candidate for spouse number two. He was a dashing figure at court and the nearest thing Henry had to a best friend. He was very attractive to women and had already been married twice, in slightly scandalous circumstances and was now an eligible 30-year-old widower (albeit betrothed to his ward!).

But if we think that Mary was anything other than a compliant and obliging wife to the man who was over thirty years her senior, Sarah Bryson puts us right. She seems to have behaved in relation to her husband King Louis and his court with exemplary modesty and courtesy. She was equipped with the most gorgeous clothes and jewels - a sop to her vanity from her brother to sugar the pill of marrying this much older man?

Whatever their marriage was like, it lasted only three monhs and then Louis was dead. It was at this time that Mary was dubbed "La Reine Blanche."

I imagine the calumny that Louis died because of over-exerting himself in the bedchamber with his teenage bride started almost immediately. He was more likely to have fallen victim to the gout that plagued him. But whatever the cause of his death, it seems clear that Louis doted on his young wife and treated her with great favour and kindness.

Mary had got off lightly. A wonderful trousseau, loads of bling and only three months of having to submit to an old man's embraces. But now she had to extricate herself from France. And who was sent to bring her home? Why, none other than Charles Brandon, Duke of Suffolk.

Henry must have known what a risk he was taking in sending his glamorous friend. He even extracted a promise from Brandon that he would not marry Mary without the king's permission. And such permission would not have been forthcoming, since Mary was now back on the marriage market, still young and beautiful and with the added advantage now of having been a queen. And Charles was of a far inferior social rank.

But Mary was no longer a pliant child or even a bargaining teenager; she took matters into her own hands and proposed to Brandon herself! Within days of his arrival in France they were married.

To marry in secret, without the king's permission, was very dangerous but Henry was caught in a trap. This was his beloved younger sister and his best friend. Although he was furious and stung them with a huge fine, of course he took them back into his confidence and favour.

It took a lot of hard work for the errant couple to regain Henry's trust . There were letters full of flattery, there were tears and protestations, self-abasement and promises for the future. And a whopping great diamond, known as The Mirror of Naples, given to Mary by Louis on their marriage and now offered to the English king.

They returned to England together 503 years ago, almost to the day, on 2nd May 1515. Mary had to hand over all her returned dowry to her brother but she must have thought her new husband worth the financial sacrifice.

They lived mainly at Suffolk Place. Mary was the second-highest ranking lady in England after her sister-in-law, Queen Katherine, and by February 1516, Charles Brandon was restored to all his roles at court. Katherine gave birth to a daughter in February 1516, after Mary's unsanctioned marriage, and the child was named after her aunt. This little girl became the woman the world knows as Mary Tudor.

Just under a month later Mary and Brandon had their first child, a boy, whom they named Henry. By such reciprocal gestures was the reconciliation sealed. Their second child, Frances, was born in the following year. Another daughter, Eleanor, was born in 1519.

In 1520, Mary, still only 24, twice-married and mother to two children, attended with her husband the fabulous Anglo-French encounter known as the Field of Cloth of Gold. But  before that, she met for the first time the man who had been her  fiancé, now King Charkles V of Spain. It makes her seem a woman we can recognise when Sarah Bryson tells us she ordered a whole new wardrobe for this occasion.

In France, Brandon was the star of the jousts and how Mary must have rejoiced at his prowess. Here she was, a Dowager Queen, married to the man of her choosing, sister of a king and dressed and bejewelled in splendour while her handsome, athletic husband shone in the lists. In the five years since she had last been in the country her life had changed much for the better.

But then two years later Mary and Charles's son Henry died. And the next decade showed a decline in her happiness. Another son, also called Henry, was born but lived until only eleven years of age.

By 1527 Henry was trying to get an annulment of his marriage to Katherine and was focused on marrying Anne Boleyn and fathering a legitimate male heir. Until such time as he had one, little Henry Brandon, Earl of Lincoln  was a candidate for the English throne.

Mary was horrified. Not at the thought of her son losing his place in line to the throne but because Katherine was genuinely her friend and she thought her brother's behaviour reprehensible. She developed a hearty dislike for Anne Boleyn, whom she had known in France.

And how painful it must have been for Mary that her brother enlisted her husband to take messages to to the stricken queen, telling her of her fate. In 1533, shortly after Anne's coronation, Mary died. She was only 37 years old.

Her little son died the following year but by then Charles Brandon had re-married. Three months after Mary's death he married his 14-year-old ward (no not the one he was engaged to before he married Mary). Catherine Willoughby, a great heiress, had been picked out to be little Henry's bride but Charles decided he would be the more suitable husband, especially because he was greatly in need of money.

Sarah Bryson makes it clear that, although it was a love match, Charles and Mary had their burdens to bear. With the return of her dowry to Henry and the huge fines they had to pay the king because of their unauthorised marriage, the couple was always strapped for cash. They had to keep up the most lavish of appearances at court and Brandon often had to seek loans.

They lost both of their sons (albeit the second after Mary's death), Mary missed a good friend in Katherine of Aragon and she herself suffered many episodes of an unspecified illness throughout her life. She retained the title Queen of France for the rest of her days and was clearly proud of it. But for eighteen years she was married to a man whom, for all his faults, she clearly loved.

The daughter, wife and sister of kings and grandmother of the queen with the shortest reign in English history, the first Mary Tudor has at last found a worthy biographer in Sarah Bryson, who has done her subject a great service in this vivid and absorbing book.

Sarah Bryson

(All photos public domain)

The first Mary Tudor by Mary Hoffman

Mary Tudor by an unknown French artist

There are many obscure figures in British history, often women, who have been treated only by novelists (see Anne Rooney's post on Filling the Cracks with Gold a couple of days ago).

In recent years historians, mainly women historians like Helen Castor, Sarah Gristwood and Leanda de Lisle, have done a splendid job of bringing into the foreground subjects from Matilda to the Grey sisters, Jane, Katherine and Mary.

But there is one person whose life story still deserves more attention - Henry the Eighth's younger sister Mary Rose.

Henry was very fond of her and named his first daughter after her, who went on to become the much more famous Mary Tudor, the first Queen Regnant of England. Indeed an Internet search for Mary Tudor will take a long time before it reaches the woman above, reputed by contemporaries to be the most beautiful woman in the land. The unknown artist of the portrait above has captured something of this with the red gold hair that was characteristic of her brother too.

We know far more about Henry's other sister Margaret Tudor, who married James lV of Scotland and became grandmother (twice over!) to the most famous Mary of all, the Queen of Scots.

But this Mary was, like her older sister, a useful piece in the game of royal marriages, a dynastic pawn that could be made a queen. And she was, at the age of eighteen.

A sketch of Mary during the brief period when she was Queen of France (now in the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford

Her husband was Louis the Twelfth of France, a man more than thirty years older than Mary and one desperate to sire an heir (yes, that motif again.) Legend has it that he tried so hard in their bedchamber that it caused his death three months later, but to no avail.

We don't know anything about their relationship, except what can be inferred from what happened next, but it does seem likely that it was a relief to Mary to be widowed so swiftly.

However, Louis had not been Henry's first choice for an advantageous marriage for his nubile sister. She had been betrothed at the age of about thirteen to Charles of Castille, who was Katherine of Aragon's nephew and later became the Holy Roman Emperor, which certainly trumps a French king. But Henry tired of delays in the negotiations and called it off in 1513. We don't know how Mary felt about that either but Charles was four years younger than her and, from his portraits as an adult, had inherited the undershot Habsburg jaw. (His personal disadvantages didn't stop him having six children by his eventual wife and at least four illegitimate ones, but that's another story.)

The newly free Mary soon turned her mind to her next husband. Even during the marriage negotiations with Louis, she had written to her brother, saying that "if she survived him, she should marry whom she liked." And "whom she liked" was Charles Brandon, the first Duke of Suffolk. In fact Heny was quite aware of the couple's mutual attraction and had discussed a possible marriage with Brandon, who was a very close friend, only stipulating that they should wait to return from France before Brandon proposed to Mary.

Brandon was dispatched to bring Mary home - somewhat unwisely considering Henry's reservation - but the young woman who was strong-minded enough to tell the king her brother that she would marry an old man to please him only if she could choose her next husband soon swept aside the restriction and married Charles Brandon in secret some time in February 1515, a matter of weeks after King Louis' death.

Mary Tudor and her second husband Charles Brandon, Duke of Suffolk,

 by Jan Mabuse

Henry was furious and imposed an enormous fine on the couple, which in terms of today's values ran to millions of pounds. In even entertaining a possibility of their union, he probably thought he had already extended favour beyond the bounds due to Suffolk. There is no doubt that Suffolk was one of Henry's nearest intimates, as described in a new biography (the first) by Steven Gunn, Charles Brandon: Henry Vlll's Closest Friend (Amberley.)

But allowing him to marry his sister would put her outside the useful dynastic marriage market and Henry was perhaps not ready to let such prospects go for a royal princess and former queen of not yet twenty.

However, his affection for both of them and the intervention of Cardinal Wolsey caused Henry soon to calm down and he was present at their official marriage in May; he even reduced the fine, though he didn't remove it altogether. Brandon had technically committed High Treason by marrying a royal princess without the monarch's consent and Henry needed to let him know who was boss.

Mary's story is full of "what if?"s - the cracks that a historical novelist longs to fill with gold. What if she had married Charles Castille and become his Empress? What if Louis hadn't so conveniently died and she had borne him an heir? Would Brandon have waited for her?

His own matrimonial history was quite chequered, as Gunn's book shows. He was first contracted to marry Anne Browne, a waiting woman of Queen Katherine, and got her pregnant. But then he broke off the contract to marry Anne's aunt! Dame Margaret Mortimer was twenty years older than Brandon and very wealthy.

Soon after their marriage Brandon had it annulled on grounds on consanguinity but not before he had claimed some of Dame Margaret's dowry. He then married Anne, first secretly and then publicly after pressure from her family, and she bore him a second, legitimate daughter but died soon afterwards in 1510. Nor is that the end of his marital shenanigans as he then became contracted to Lady Elizabeth Lisle, who was his eight year old ward.

But there were rumours that he would marry Margaret of Austria, who certainly liked him. These rumours seem to have been started by Henry himself and soon a book was opened in London betting on their marriage. This was an emabarrassment both to Margaret and Henry, who realised he had gone too far, and Brandon wouldn't scotch the gossip by carrying out the marriage with his ward (which would have been legal.)

What made this man such an irresistible marriage prospect that at least three women were prepared  to marry him, some of them under pressure not to? (He later had three illegitimate children too, by mother or mothers unknown). Charles Brandon is supposed to have been very handsome though there is no portrait evidence of that, very athletic and vigorous, a champion in the lists.

But he was always short of money, not always successful in the many military engagements Henry sent him on and clearly not a faithful lover.

The biggest "what if?" of all in Mary Tudor's history is what would have happened if she had not died in 1533. She bore Charles Brandon four children, two sons and two daughters. The first, Henry, died at eleven.

The second son, born after his brother's death, was also called Henry in an apparently relentless quest to flatter and appease the king, but he too died before he reached manhood. But either of these Henrys would have been strong candidates for the succession after the death of Edward the Sixth, as legitimate nephews of Henry.

Henry Brandon Earl of Lincoln, Mary's second son

The first daughter of Mary and Charles Brandon, Frances, married the Earl of Dorset and became the mother of Lady Jane Grey and her two younger sisters, leading to the tragic short reign and execution of Jane, who was nominated as Edward's heir.

But Mary did die in 1533 and Charles, being Charles, within three months married his fourteen-year-old ward Catherine Willoughby. She was betrothed to young Henry, Charles's son but he was considered too young to marry and Charles didn't want to lose her lands.

Their two sons (another Henry and a Charles) died within hours of each other in 1551, of the sweating sickness. Since Charles had died in 1545, both boys became Dukes of Suffolk, though the younger enjoyed the title for only an hour or so.

So the Duchy of Suffolk, having no legitimate male heirs to the title, went to the husband of Frances, Mary and Charles's older daughter.

Mary Tudor, Duchess of Suffolk, in the National Portrait Gallery

It was not uncommon for women in the first half of the sixteenth century to die before they were forty and being royal was no protection. The second Mary Tudor was forty-two and she had not had any actual pregnancies to weaken her.

The first Mary Tudor had a close relationship with Katherine of Aragon and fell out with Henry over his divorce. And she took against Anne Boleyn, who had been a waiting woman in her retinue when she went to France to marry Louis.

What little we know of her shows the first Mary Tudor to be strong-minded and independent and deserving of more of our attention than she has had to date.


(All images are in the public domain)