The House of Tudor (20 page)

They were publicly married at Greenwich on 13 May and Suffolk duly distinguished himself in a tournament held in honour of the wedding. But although the full Court was present and there was all the customary feasting and dancing, it was kept very much a family affair with none of the civic celebrations usual on such occasions. According to the Venetian ambassador, this was because ‘the kingdom did not approve of the marriage’ and the ambassador himself, who could not understand how the Duke had managed to keep his head on his shoulders, hesitated to offer congratulations until he was sure they would be acceptable.

It is true that there was a body of opinion which considered Mary had been thrown away on Suffolk but ‘the wisest sort’ were content, pointing out that another foreign marriage would have meant another expensive outfit and wedding journey, while as things were the Queen-Duchess was bringing money into the country. The Duke’s easy-going amiability, good looks and athletic prowess made him a popular figure and few people, apart from his political rivals, 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 (said to have been composed by the bridegroom himself) which appeared beneath the double portrait of the happy pair painted about the time of their marriage:

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.

After the wedding the King went off on a summer progress to the West Country and the Suffolks retired to their East Anglican estates - partly to rest after all the excitement of the past six months and partly as an economy measure. The Duke’s visit to France had cost him a lot of money and in present circumstances he could scarcely apply to his brother-in-law for financial assistance. By the autumn, though, they were back at Court and attended a great banquet held at York House to celebrate the arrival from Rome of Thomas Wolsey’s cardinal’s hat. They were also much in evidence at the launching of a new warship, christened the
Virgin Mary
but more often called the
Princess Mary
. Mary herself was guest of honour at a dinner given on board at which the King presided, dressed in a sailor suit of cloth of gold, with an enormous boatswain’s whistle hung round his neck on a gold chain which he blew as loudly as a trumpet on the least provocation. Everyone was in the highest spirits. Henry was never happier than when he was with the Navy and the French Queen, as she continued to be known, having got everything she had ever wanted, was radiant.

The Suffolks expected their first child in the spring - Mary’s supposed pregnancy in Paris the previous March had turned out to be a false alarm- and Queen Catherine, too, was pregnant again. After so many disappointments, no one felt very optimistic of the outcome but hopes of a Prince of Wales could not be wholly discounted. In fact, on this occasion the Queen went her full time and at Greenwich, on 18 February 1516, she gave birth to a living child. True, the baby was a girl but at least it was healthy and gave every promise of survival. The new princess was christened with ‘great solemnity’ at the Friars’ Church and given the name of Mary as a compliment to her aunt. Henry was apparently delighted with his daughter -his fondness for babies and small children was one of his more attractive traits - and when the Venetian ambassador ventured to commiserate with him over the baby’s sex, he replied philosophically: ‘The Queen and I are both young. If it was a daughter this time, by the grace of God the sons will follow.’ Catherine was thirty-one now and Henry twenty-five.

Mary Brandon was to be more fortunate than her sister-in-law. Her baby, a healthy boy, made his appearance on Tuesday 11 March between ten and twelve o’clock at night and the same thought must have crossed the minds of everyone present in the birth chamber - the King’s sister had succeeded where the King’s wife had failed. Certainly the Brandon baby, named after his Uncle Henry, was given a princely christening. The ceremony took place at Suffolk’s town house in Southwark with the King and Cardinal Wolsey as godfathers and Katherine Courtenay, once Katherine Plantagenet, as godmother.

It was a good year for babies and for family occasions. To Lord Dacre’s unspeakable relief, Queen Margaret had at last recovered enough strength to leave her bed at Morpeth Castle. She reached London at the beginning of May, with her six-month-old daughter but without her husband - Angus had gone back to Scotland. Henry met his elder sister at Tottenham and escorted her in procession through the city to Baynard’s Castle. Later he installed her at Scotland Yard, just below Charing Cross, the traditional lodging of Scottish kings, and a lavish series of entertainments was planned in her honour.

The Suffolks were still in town, for although the Duke could ill afford the expense of a London season, he could not very well deny his wife the chance of a reunion with the sister she had not seen for thirteen years and they stayed on for a few weeks after Margaret’s arrival. The Queen of Scotland and the Duchess of Suffolk enjoyed some cosy hours together, reminiscing, swapping experiences and comparing and showing off their babies. But for the elder sister the contrast can only have been painful. Margaret, already regretting her impulsive second marriage and prematurely aged by illness, worry and disappointment, knew that sooner or later she would have to go back to the Scotland she hated to fight for her son’s future among the insolent, uncouth chieftains she hated still more; while Mary, the spoilt baby of the family, her beauty undimmed, was securely established in her own homeland and happily married to the man she loved - no one would ever take Mary’s babies away from her.

The sisters had met with spontaneous pleasure and affection, but their ways had long since parted and they had little in common now apart from some childhood memories. A far deeper bond of friendship and shared experience existed between Mary and her sister-in-law. When, the following spring, Queen Catherine made a pilgrimage to the shrine of Our Lady of Walsingham to pray for a son, Mary went with her and afterwards the Suffolks entertained her ‘with such poor cheer as we could make her grace’.

Mary gave birth to her second child that year - a daughter christened Frances, probably as a gesture to the King of France - and two years later another daughter, Eleanor, was born. But all Catherine’s prayers went unanswered. She miscarried again in the autumn of 1517 and in November 1518 she was delivered of another stillborn child, a girl. It was her last pregnancy.

6: THE KING’S SECRET MATTER

…when we remember our mortality and that we must die, then we think that all our doings in our lifetime are clearly defaced and worthy of no memory if we leave you in trouble at the time of our death.

In the spring of 1519 Henry VIII and Catherine of Aragon celebrated their tenth wedding anniversary and the six years difference in their ages was now cruelly apparent. Constant childbearing had spread and thickened Catherine’s once slender waist and her lovely russet hair, so much admired by Edward Hall, had darkened to an indeterminate muddy brown. She had become a rather dumpy little woman, unshakeably dignified, formidably pious and increasingly preoccupied with the task of bringing up her precious daughter.

As for Henry, his youthful love affair with his wife had long grown cold. Some people dated the beginning of his withdrawal from 15114, the year of Ferdinand’s third betrayal – and the year when rumours of divorce were circulating. Rumours were also circulating that the King of England had vented some of his rage against the King of Spain on his Spanish wife, but there is little hard evidence to support the gossipmongers and Catherine herself made it plain that she disapproved of her father’s behavior.

If Henry was already beginning to turn away from her, the reason is more likely to be found in the rise of Thomas Wolsey. In this burly son of an Ipswich grazier, with his brilliant brain, his unlimited capacity for sheer hard work and his total commitment to his master’s interests, the King had found a councilor after his own heart and it was Wolsey’s opinions which counted now, Wolsey whose advice was sought on all matters foreign and domestic, Wolsey who enjoyed the King’s confidence. The Queen never liked or trusted the Cardinal Archbishop of York, but she never betrayed any personal resentment or jealousy of his steadily increasing influence over her husband.

Catherine showed no sign of jealousy either when, in early in 1514, the King took one of her young maids of honour as his mistress. Not that there was anything remarkable in the King taking a mistress – indeed, by the standards of his day, Henry had been an unusually faithful husband. There may well have been some casual, temporary liaisons during the first five years of their marriage but it was not until the advent of Bessie Blount that the Queen had any acknowledged rival in her husband’s bed.

We know very little about Bessie Blount. Catherine had first known the family, which came from Shropshire, in her Ludlow days. Bessie’s father, John Blount of Kinlet, was related to her Chamberlain, William Blount, Lord Mountjoy, and it was possibly due to him that Bessie got a place at Court. She was very young, certainly no more than fifteen, when she first caught the King’s eye and we are told that she was beautiful - ‘a fair damosel’ according to Hall’s
Chronicle
, who ‘in singing, dancing and in all goodly pastimes exceeded all other’. Lord Herbert of Cherbury, writing in the early seventeenth century, remarks (with a delightfully appropriate but unintentional pun) that Mistress Elizabeth Blount ‘was thought for her rare ornaments of nature and education to be the beauty and mistress-piece of her time.’ But the only really significant fact about Bessie Blount is that, in 1519, she bore the King ‘a goodly man child of beauty like to the father and mother’.

The King acknowledged the infant with pride and pleasure and had him christened Henry, with Cardinal Wolsey once more a godfather. But Bessie Blount did not return to Court. ‘The mother of the King’s son’, as she was now officially styled, had retired on her laurels and a year or so later she reappears in the record comfortably established as the wife of Gilbert Tailbois, a gentleman of substance with estates in Lincolnshire. Her place in the royal bed was taken, for a time at least, by Mary Boleyn, an experienced young woman of rather doubtful reputation who had gone to France with Mary Tudor in 1514 and before that had been in the service of Margaret von Hapsburg, Governess of the Netherlands.

The year 1525 is usually pin-pointed as the time when Henry first became seriously worried about the succession. On 18 June an investiture was held at Bridewell Palace and amongst those honoured were the King’s nephew, Henry Brandon, now nine years old, who became Earl of Lincoln; the King’s first cousin, Henry Courtenay, son of his aunt Katherine Plantagenet, who was raised to be Marquis of Exeter; and Sir Thomas Boleyn, created Viscount Rochford in recognition, it was supposed, of his daughter’s services. But by far the most significant of the titles handed out that Sunday morning were those bestowed on the King’s illegitimate son, Henry Fitzroy.

The six-year-old child had been brought over from Durham House in the Strand at about nine o’clock and taken to a private robing room to be dressed in the robes ‘that pertained to the state of an Earl’. He was escorted into the richly decorated Presence Chamber by the Earls of Oxford and Arundel and solemnly created Earl of Nottingham, his patent being read aloud by Master Thomas More. Then the trumpeters blew a fanfare and the new Earl ‘departed out of the King’s presence in like manner and form as he was brought into it’.

A few minutes later he was brought back again, this time ‘apparelled in the robes pertaining to the state of a Duke’, supported by the Dukes of Norfolk and Suffolk and escorted by Garter King of Arms, the Marquis of Dorset and three earls who bore between them all the trappings of the ducal honour. The little boy stood stiff and uncomprehending as his father invested him with the mantle, the sword, the cap of estate and ducal coronet, before putting the gold rod into his hands. And thus, says a contemporary description of the event, ‘was he created Duke of Richmond and Somerset, and at the conclusion of the ceremonies he stood aside in the King’s presence above all the other peers of the realm’. A week later the Duke of Richmond was installed as a Knight of the Garter, and in July Letters Patent were issued creating him Lord High Admiral of England and Warden General of all the Marches towards Scotland.

Not surprisingly the sudden elevation of Henry Fitzroy caused a flurry of interest, especially among the diplomatic corps. There was talk of a royal marriage for the new Duke; there was talk of a kingdom to be created for him in Ireland and it was freely speculated that this healthy, handsome child, who had already been granted quasi-royal status, might yet ‘be easily by the King’s means exalted to higher things’.

Whatever the King’s future plans, he contented himself in 1525 with granting his son an income of £4,ooo a year and setting up a princely establishment for him at Sheriff Hutton in Yorkshire. The Warden General of the Scottish Marches set off to take up residence in his new domains in August, after bidding a formal farewell to the King at Hampton Court, Cardinal Wolsey’s splendid riverside mansion. The Cardinal had presented his godson with a horse litter ‘garnished with cloth of silver’, but the Duke soon got bored with travelling in it and demanded successfully to be allowed to ride his pony instead. The journey north, which occupied more than a month, took on very much the character of a royal progress and in the privacy of the little Court at Sheriff Hutton my lord of Richmond was usually addressed in royal style; but, as nothing was said officially about exalting him to higher things, international interest in the King of England’s bastard gradually faded.

The affair had, however, caused a certain amount of unpleasantness within the family circle. The honours and attentions showered on Bessie Blount’s son had been too much for Queen Catherine’s self-control, and she had protested angrily at what looked like a deliberate insult to herself and her daughter. Catherine’s protests, though, did her no good and for the first time her husband turned on her, dismissing three of her Spanish ladies-in-waiting who were said to have encouraged her to criticize his actions. This, remarked a Venetian correspondent, was a strong measure, ‘but the Queen was obliged to submit and to have patience’.