The Tudor Rose Read online

  The Tudor Rose

  Princess Mary, Henry VIII's Sister

  Jennifer Kewley Draskau

  STA BOOKS

  Revised edition The Tudor Rose

  Published by STA BOOKS 2015

  www.spencerthomasassociates.com

  First published by The History Press 2013

  Cover image: Mary Tudor c. 1520,

  daughter of Henry VII (1498-1533)

  sister of Henry VIII

  (Photo by Hulton Archives/Getty Images)

  Copyright © Jennifer Kewley Draskau 2013

  The right of Jennifer Kewley Draskau to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise) without the prior written permission of the publisher. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.

  Editor Vicki Villers

  For Fiona

  CONTENTS

  1. The Young Tudors

  2. Betrothals

  3. Charles Brandon

  4. From Esquire to Duke

  5. ‘That New Duke’

  6. Queen of France

  7. La Rose Vermeille

  8. La Reine Blanche

  9. Duchess of Suffolk

  10. Married Bliss

  11. Field of the Cloth of Gold

  12. Doubts and Divorce

  13. The Great Whore

  14. The Fatal Inheritance: Lady Jane

  15. The Fatal Inheritance: The Stanleys

  16. The Fatal Inheritance: Lady Katherine

  17. ‘The Least of all the Court’: Lady Mary

  18. Alas!

  Abbreviations

  Bibliography

  1 THE YOUNG TUDORS

  A quiver of excitement ran through the chamber. Silken robes rustled as the courtiers craned for a better view. The musicians struck up a merry tune and out he strode, head high, the personification of England’s hopes and dreams, handsome as a young god, the teenage King of England, leading his beautiful younger sister Princess Mary Rose, by the hand. The young King’s wife, dumpy little Queen Katherine looked on, graciously smiling. After a quick glance to check that the Queen approved, the courtiers broke into spontaneous applause.

  Katherine, daughter of the Catholic Kings, Ferdinand of Aragon and Isabella of Castile, knew that even her best features, her long auburn hair, her fair, healthy complexion and cool grey eyes, were outshone by her gorgeous sister-in-law. At twenty-four, Katherine’s face retained a childish roundness, but her expression was serene and demure.

  Katherine had long practice of smiling even in adversity. Left an impoverished widow by the death of her first husband, Prince Arthur, when her young brother-in-law and husband-to-be, Prince Henry, succeeded to the throne, nothing had been settled. Her own future was still unsure.

  Now she had at last achieved her destiny, cherished from childhood: she was Queen of England, bride of the splendid new eighteen-year-old King. Tall and muscular, young Henry VIII attacked life like a lion. He moved with the easy swagger of the trained athlete. His auburn hair was cut straight in the French fashion. Despite his aquiline nose, Henry favoured the Yorks, his mother and his handsome maternal grandfather, King Edward IV, with his broad face, small, sharp eyes and sensual little mouth. Described in 1516 by a Venetian envoy as ‘the handsomest prince ever seen’,1 at this early stage of his career, Henry was also idealistic, liberal and generous. The arrogance and brutality that would tarnish his later years were not apparent. Even his vanity and susceptibility to flattery were effectively masked by his natural charm and genial manner.

  Katherine, by nature more reflective than these flamboyant Tudors, lacked their animation and energy. Indulgently she looked on as Mary Rose stole the show. Katherine and the Tudor Princess would remain lifelong friends.

  Radiant Mary Rose revelled in the limelight, conscious of her own grace and skill. She had inherited her mother’s delicate features, belying the passion, wilfulness and charisma that were the legacy of her father’s Tudor ancestors. Glowing with health and high spirits, splendidly clad, jewels flashing, dipping and swaying in the rhythm of the dance, the glamorous Tudor siblings epitomised the new tide of optimism sweeping through England after the horrors of a protracted and bloody civil war. If ever, since the mythical days of King Arthur, the English court recaptured the fabled glory of Camelot, it was for those few glorious years in the early 16th century when Henry VIII came to reign.

  Sir Thomas More celebrated Henry’s coronation:

  Now the nobility long since at the mercy of the dregs of the population, lifts its head… and rejoices in such a King, and with good reason. Among a thousand noble companions, the King stands out the tallest and his strength fits his majestic body…There is fiery power in his eyes, beauty in his face, and the colour of twin roses in his cheeks…’2

  More’s coronation ode contains no portent of his bitter quarrel with the King that would culminate in More’s death on the block.

  In April 1509, Henry and Mary Rose’s father, King Henry VII, worn beyond his fifty-two years by his long struggle to hold the throne, had succumbed to tuberculosis, the curse of his dynasty. Few mourned his passing. That Henry had brought peace to the land after the bitter War of the Roses was long forgotten. With the selective memory of afterword, people chose to remember the first Tudor King as tight-fisted and rapacious.

  When his seventeen-year-old son was proclaimed as King Henry VIII on 22nd April, a spirit of rejoicing, powered by an outpouring of love for the charismatic young prince, swept through England. The handsome teenager appeared to embody all the knightly virtues. Surely his reign would usher in a ‘golden world’. The undisputed star of young Henry’s glittering court was his sister, the beautiful fourteen-year-old Mary Rose, famed throughout Europe as ‘the Rose of Christendom’.

  Nobody watching this radiant pair, brimming with joyous life, could have foretold that their Prince Charming would become a diseased tyrannical monster, or that the Princess would die young, and that violence and tragedy would stalk her descendants, because they had been chosen by her adoring brother to inherit the throne of England, should he fail to produce an heir. These dynastic devices would prove a lethal inheritance.

  The task of a monarch was to secure the throne, through battle, genocide and fratricide if necessary, to consolidate the seat of power through a politically advantageous marriage, and then to secure the succession though the procreation of a sufficient number of male offspring to counteract the dangers of infant mortality. An heir and spare were not always sufficient. Prince Henry was the last chance the newly fledged Tudor dynasty had of surviving, even though the young Tudors’ parents, Henry VII and Elizabeth of York, had embraced the important task of securing the succession and celebrating the reconciliation of their two warring houses by producing several offspring.

  Henry VII, as the first Tudor King, was determined to found a dynasty where the throne of England would be passed from father to son, rather than usurped by a series of random claimants. By the time their third daughter, Princess Mary Rose, was born, the royal couple already had two promising sons, Princes Arthur and Henry.

  In an age of widespread infant mortality, even the birth of a princess – a useful political bargaining chip – could invoke celebration. However, this princess was born into a climate of intrigue and suspicion. Establishing the dynasty was a brutal business: visitors gaped at the grisly spectacle of decaying severed heads, lopped off traitors and reb
els, and now adorning London Bridge.

  Only Mary Rose’s formidable paternal grandmother, Lady Margaret Beaufort, Countess of Richmond, recorded the birth of a new Tudor Princess in her exquisite Book of Hours on 18 March: ‘Hodie nata Maria tertia filia Henricis VII, 1495’.3 Not much escaped the extraordinary Lady Margaret. During their formative years, she would be a major influence on her royal grandchildren.

  Tall, severe, and imposing, Lady Margaret was generally regarded as a phenomenon mysteriously elevated above the well-known weaknesses of her gender. The ‘Great Chain of Being’, the organizational principle of the whole western medieval and therefore the Tudor world, which originated in Aristotelian thought and was later adopted by Christian philosophers, conceived of the universe as being ordered in a strictly hierarchical linear sequence. Inanimate rocks were the lowest order; God was the pinnacle. As for women, they ranked lower on the chain than, not only men but also horses, the argument being that, whereas one could live perfectly adequately without a wife, one could certainly not live without a good horse. Until the Renaissance, this view was accepted, without question, by most educated men. According to Aristotle, women were less emotionally stable, ‘more jealous, more querulous, more apt to scold and to strike[,] ... more prone to despondency and less hopeful[,] ... more void of shame or self-respect, more false of speech, more deceptive, of more retentive memory [and] ... also more wakeful; more shrinking [and] more difficult to rouse to action’.4

  Strict, devout and cultured, and now having achieved the height of her worldly ambition as Queen Mother to the first Tudor monarch, Lady Margaret was the principal power at court. She it was who prescribed rules of conduct and enforced their observance. Margaret let no-one forget her exalted descent from King Edward III, through the illustrious John of Gaunt, Duke of Lancaster, and his illegitimate Beaufort line. This insistence on her ancestry was more than a matter of personal pride: it reinforced the Tudor claim. Unlike many of her relatives, Lady Margaret had managed to survive the brutal Wars of the Roses – a considerable achievement, in view of the fact that she had been an inveterate intriguer during the conflict, displaying a shockingly unfeminine flair for Realpolitik.

  Now, after a turbulent personal life, she had accumulated land holdings second in importance only to those of the King. Her first husband, Edmund Tudor, Earl of Richmond, to whom she had been married off as a child, had died within a year of their nuptials. Although dynastic marriages were often contracted when the parties concerned were barely out of the cradle, it was usual to postpone consummation until the couple were mature – generally around age fourteen. But Edmund Tudor, desperate for an heir, had been reluctant to wait. Margaret, a slight twelve-year-old, was widowed and also pregnant. She struggled through the winter storms to Pembroke Castle, where Edmund’s brother Jasper Tudor gave her shelter.

  Not yet thirteen, little Margaret was quickly married off again, with no consideration for her own feelings. Her second husband, Henry Stafford, second son of the Duke of Buckingham, also died few years after the marriage. After his death, Margaret vowed never to admit another man to her bed. Her chastity has been ascribed by some to her piety, but it is at least equally probable that the horrors of childbirth, delivering her son when she was a mere child herself and almost dying in the process, contributed to her reluctance to engage in intimacy.

  None the less, like others of her sex, Margaret had to work through men to gain her objectives. Her third marriage, to Thomas, Lord Stanley, first Earl of Derby, was a marriage of convenience. According to legend, it was Stanley who placed the crown on the head of his stepson, Henry Tudor, on Bosworth Field, having, despite his family motto ‘sans changer’ successfully changed sides on this and several other occasions. Thereafter, Henry was known as King Henry VII. Lord Stanley, who had once been poleaxed by one of Richard III’s men, and bore the scars to his dying day, was created Earl of Derby.

  Having seen her son established in his divinely ordained place as King, Lady Margaret devoted her remaining years to the very necessary task of shoring up the Tudor claim, and supervising the education of her welcome grandchildren, who had secured the Tudor succession. Her love of learning was unquestioned. A generous benefactor of scholarship, she founded both Christ’s College and St John’s College and became the patroness of William Caxton. Her religious piety bordered on the ascetic. She wore a severe widow’s barbe up to her chin and, next to her skin, a flesh-mortifying hair shirt.

  Nevertheless, on state occasions she donned her golden coronet and, gritting her teeth against her crippling rheumatism, hobbled proudly behind her daughter-in-law, Edward IV’s beautiful daughter, Elizabeth of York, whose gentle personality she overshadowed with her regal presence.

  In December 1483, while still in exile in Brittany with his uncle Jasper, Henry Tudor had sworn in Rennes Cathedral to marry Elizabeth, recognising that a marriage between himself and the Yorkist Princess would resolve England’s political turmoil. Most of his relatives having suffered violent deaths, Henry was the closest legitimate male claimant to the throne on the Lancastrian side. But, like Edward IV himself and many previous sovereigns, he would not accede without a bitter and bloody struggle.

  On the death of Edward IV, the King’s younger brother, Richard of Gloucester, [1452-1485], appointed Lord Protector of England in 1483 on behalf of his nephew, the twelve-year-old Edward V, envisaged consolidating his claim to the throne by marrying his niece Elizabeth himself. Initially prepared to face down the scandal this consanguinity would cause, he eventually dismissed the notion. Much has been made of a putative romance between Elizabeth and her uncle. His subsequent actions would appear to give the lie to the rumour. Recognising Elizabeth’s dangerous potential as the focus of rebellions, he decided to neutralise the threat by marrying her off to someone sufficiently insignificant to preclude any claims on the throne. His choice fell on a young naval officer, a son of his Chancellor, Robert Stillington, Bishop of Bath and Wells, to whom Richard owed a huge favour. (The plan miscarried when the prospective bridegroom was captured by the French off the coast of Normandy, later dying in prison in Paris.)

  Richard was in Bishop Stillington’s debt, for he it was who had raised the crucial question of the legitimacy of young Edward V and his brother Richard, Duke of York, on the grounds that Edward IV had been betrothed, or possibly even married, to another woman, Lady Eleanor Talbot, before his unexpected and widely resented marriage to their mother, the widowed beauty, Elizabeth Woodville. On June 25, a jury declared the young Edward V illegitimate. Richard promptly had himself proclaimed king and was crowned two weeks later on 6 July. To Lady Margaret, grimly putting a good face on it, fell the honour of bearing the train of the usurper’s sickly Queen, Anne Neville.

  Neither the boy King Edward V, nor his younger brother Richard, were ever seen again. As discontent with Richard III’s rule grew, sinister rumours that the young princes had been secretly murdered in the Tower on Richard’s orders gained credence.

  Learning of the darkening popular mood, Lady Margaret’s son, the exiled Henry Tudor, and his allies moved in to strike. In 1485, although outnumbered, Henry, with French support and the superior ability of his superb Welsh archers, triumphed at Bosworth. Richard was the last King of England to die in battle. During the melee, Henry reputedly snatched the Crown from a thorn-bush where he discovered it hanging.

  Losses on both sides were heavy; casualties included Henry’s faithful standard-bearer, killed in brutal close combat, apparently at the hand of Richard himself. This standard-bearer, William Brandon, already a widower, left behind a young son. The orphaned Charles Brandon would rise to unimagined prominence; his close friendship with a monarch would gain him a dukedom. He would also win the love of a Queen.

  Richard III’s defeat at Bosworth effectively rang down the curtain on the bloody Wars of the Roses. Henry now implemented his plan of uniting the warring factions through his marriage to Edward IV’s oldest legitimate child, Elizabeth of York – hardly an one
rous duty: beautiful blonde, blue-eyed Elizabeth was celebrated as the flower of Yorkist womanhood. The marriage had the full approval of the couple’s influential mothers, Elizabeth Woodville, widow of King Edward IV, and Lady Margaret. (Despite their mutual antipathy, popular opinion credited the two mothers-in-law with masterminding the whole arrangement…)

  Henry wanted records to show that he had won the crown by military conquest, not by merely marrying into the Yorkist Royal family; he insisted on being crowned before wedding Elizabeth. Their marriage set the official seal on the reconciliation between the houses of York and Lancaster, even if it did not succeed in stilling all the seditious murmurings. Henry VII commissioned the collar of the Order of the Garter, in which the bride’s emblem, the white rose of York, is embedded within his own, the red rose of Lancaster, symbolizing their union in the heraldic device of the Tudor Rose.

  As arranged dynastic marriages went, it was surprisingly successful. Elizabeth, kind and gentle, immersed herself in her charity work and her duties as wife and mother, bearing the King several children, four of whom survived infancy. Worn out by repeated pregnancies, she died six years before her husband.

  The baptism of the last of Elizabeth’s children to survive infancy, her second daughter, Princess Mary Rose, in 1495, had been overshadowed by the climate of civil sedition and dissention in the country. But Lady Margaret Beaufort insisted that her grandchildren’s christenings should follow traditions observed for Edward IV’s many offspring, including the prescribed height of the dais on which the silver-gilt font was mounted. An impressive circular canopy was erected, but there were no curtains. Royal babies must be christened in full view of the congregation. Infant princesses were carried by a duchess, another duchess bearing the richly embroidered chrisom cloth. A countess bore the train, of cloth-of-gold furred with ermine. This depended from the infant’s shoulders and was so long that the countess needed the assistance of a gentleman usher to hold up the middle section and stop it dragging on the ground.