Mary Rose (20 page)

He was present everywhere, but it is hard to pinpoint what he actually did. For example, he was a prominent member of the court which tried Wolsey, but made no distinctive contribution to its deliberations, and although he was present at Lord Rochford’s elevation to the earldom of Wiltshire in December 1529, his role was purely that of a spectator. In December he helped, as a member of the Council, in the entertainment of the French and Imperial envoys, and was privately, but somewhat ineffectually, courted by the former, who of course knew about his connections. When Wolsey began scheming to regain favour in the early part of 1530, he bypassed the Duke altogether, preferring to deal directly with his real antagonists, Norfolk and the Boleyns.
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Since the Cardinal was a shrewd judge of political realities, we must assume that Suffolk was not an important cog in the machinery of government. It was not that he had become a nonentity. Petitioners from the country continued to approach him with small bribes and requests for help, but he had no personal or ideological axe to grind, and may well have found the politics of 1530 and 1531 baffling. Whenever called upon to do so, he made supportive noises in the King’s cause, promoted his policy with ambassadors, and was suitably rude about the Pope. However, there is no sign of real conviction about any of these activities, and his conversations were more likely to be held at dinner or in the Privy Chamber rather than in the Council, at which his attendance was so erratic that his nominal presidency never really took effect.
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He sat on the commissions which examined and tried Fisher and More in 1535, but did not ask pertinent questions, and although he was commissioned to oversee the tricky matter of a peacetime subsidy in the country, the only outcome was the receipt of the Stewardship of Oxford town in that same year. In March 1534 the Venetian ambassador did not think that he was worth bribing, and did not name him among those leading personages whom the King most trusted to negotiate a new marriage alliance with France.
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It may well have been that his own lack of energy and application were responsible for this situation, because his friendship with Henry appears to have remained intact. They played bowls and gambled together, but when the King wanted serious business discharged, he now looked to Thomas Cromwell, and the Duke became one of Cromwell’s many clients.

It may even have been that he found his role in the court distasteful, torn as he was between loyalty to the King and disagreement with his policies. On 16 June 1531 Eustace Chapuys wrote to the Emperor:

Suffolk and his wife, if they dared, would offer all possible resistance to this marriage [between Henry and Anne], and it is not two days since he and the Treasurer [the Duke of Norfolk], talking of this matter, agreed that now the time was come when all the world should try to dissuade the king from his folly …
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Chapuys is not an altogether reliable witness, because of his commitment to Catherine and his tendency to hear what he wanted to hear. For instance, in 1530 he reported that Suffolk was out of favour because he had drawn to Henry’s attention that Anne had had an affair with Sir Thomas Wyatt in the 1520s, for neither of which statement is there any corroboratory evidence. However, the above observation is sufficiently consistent with what else we know about the Brandons’ attitude to carry conviction. Suffolk found his role in the progressive demotion of Catherine uncongenial. In April 1533 he was entrusted with the task of informing her that she was no longer Queen, following Cranmer’s decision on her marriage, and the following December was ordered to relocate her to Somersham, and to dismiss some of her servants, because she was now the Dowager Princess of Wales, and could not maintain a regal establishment.
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In fact Henry was not ungenerous to his ex-wife, and her reconstituted household cost him some £3,000 a year, but Suffolk was not to know that, and Lady Mary Willoughby, by then his mother-in-law, told Chapuys that he had confessed and communicated before setting off on this mission, hoping for some accident to prevent its completion – or at least that is what the ambassador said.
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When Catherine died in January 1536, Suffolk’s youngest daughter Eleanor was the chief mourner, supported by his new Duchess, Catherine Willoughby. Understandably Anne Boleyn was consistently hostile to the couple. In July 1531 she actually accused the Duke of having sexual relations with his own daughter, a charge which only the King’s intervention prevented from escalating into a major quarrel. There was an actual affray within the court in April 1532, which resulted in the death of one of Suffolk’s gentlemen, and the Venetian report of the incident went on:

It is said to have been caused by a private quarrel, but I am assured that it was owing to opprobrious language uttered against Madame Anne by his Majesty’s sister, the Duchess of Suffolk, Queen Dowager of France …
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However, Anne herself could only swallow her indignation when the King decided to ignore these slights, and visit the Suffolks at Westhorpe, which he did towards the end of July 1532. Presumably she did not accompany him on this visit! On 1 September, when he conferred on Anne the title of Marquis of Pembroke, Mary was conspicuous by her absence. On 7 September Carlo Capello, the Venetian envoy, reported that when Henry crossed to Calais to meet with King Francis, he would be accompanied by ‘Madame Anne’ and thirty of the chief ladies of the realm, led by the Duchess of Norfolk, but that the King’s sister, the widow of King Louis of France, had ‘stoutly refused to go’.
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Her absence was intended, and was construed as, a snub to Anne, but it was also a reflection on the King’s honour, which he chose to ignore. Mary’s health by that time was so uncertain that excuses were easy to make, and in any case he was so pleased by the outcome of his meeting that he probably chose to overlook the slight.

At the Treaty of the More it had been agreed that the payment of Mary’s dower revenues would be resumed, and that appears to have happened, because at the end of 1526 an indenture was drawn up between the King and his sister ‘with her husband the Duke of Suffolk’ for the repayment of their outstanding debt. This was assessed at £19,333 for the expenses of Mary’s marriage to Louis, and £6,519 for various sums lent to the Duke, and for revenues received and not accounted for. They agreed to pay £1,000 a year in half yearly instalments, two-thirds being for her debt and one-third for his.
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If she died, her outstanding debt would be cancelled, but her jewels and hangings were to be returned to the King. If there were to be any further interruption to her revenues from France, then her repayments were to be suspended until they were resumed. For the time being the payments were being made at the rate of 17,300 livres (about £3,000) per year, but at some time early in 1531 Montmorency, with Francis’s agreement, apparently promised an increase to 20,000 (£3,800). On 18 April Suffolk wrote to Montmorency to remind him of this promise, and was assured that the increase would take effect in the following financial year, it being too late to make the adjustment to current payments.
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Negotiations continued, and at the end of July de la Barre, the Provost of Paris, sent the Bishop of Amiens to the Duchess ‘touching her dowry’, presumably to reassure her that it would be paid. This was not a regular diplomatic mission, and according to Chapuys the Bishop went straight to the Duchess’s lodgings, and then returned immediately to France, without paying his respects at the court.
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There may have been other such private visits which have gone unrecorded. It was a sensitive issue, and one of vital concern to the Suffolks, so that the Duke kept up his contacts with Montmorency for that purpose. For that reason, Brandon was sent on various missions to France during these years, in which he no doubt combined official business with his own private concerns.

At New Year 1533 the Brandons as usual exchanged gifts with the King, although Mary was by then a sick woman. Nevertheless she kept up her intercessions for those who appealed to her for help, writing several time to Lord Lisle, the Governor of Calais, for places which were within his gift. The last such letter was written on 30 March in favour of one John Williams. It was written, as usual, by a secretary, but was signed in what the calendar notes as ‘a very shaky hand’.
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On the whole she had more success with her pleas than the Duke did. Only those whose information was inadequate or outdated tended to appeal to him directly by this time. Admittedly the Earl of Cumberland was one who requested his intercession with the King, but the Duke thought it wise to pass the letter to Cromwell, whose influence with Henry was now markedly greater than his own. His relations with the Secretary were surprisingly good, perhaps more a sign of Cromwell’s tact than his own flexibility, and his dependants frequently appealed to Cromwell for help, with Brandon’s approval. When they clashed over patronage, the Duke was firm but apologetic, and this seems to have been acceptable to the chief minister. They occasionally hunted together, but were never personally close, and Suffolk reacted angrily in 1532 when Cromwell passed on to the King some slanderous rumours which were circulating about him.
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Theirs was a working relationship because the minister knew perfectly well that it would take more than a few rumours to unseat the Duke from a relationship which went back before the beginning of the reign. On 1 June 1533 Anne Boleyn was crowned, and Suffolk was once again called upon to perform an uncongenial duty. He was High Steward and Constable for the day, and since the Duke of Norfolk was away on a diplomatic mission, he had the highlight pretty much to himself – after the Queen, that is, whom no effort was spared to make appear rather more than mortal. He presided over the Court of Claims which preceded the coronation, and over the table of peers at the subsequent banquet.
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The Duchess did not appear, but given her state of health no one was surprised by that, no doubt to the Duke’s relief. The princess Mary (now the Lady Mary) also did not appear at the celebration of her mother’s rival, and that was not commented upon either, but several observers noted the absence of the Duchess of Norfolk, who in the absence of the French Queen should have led the peeresses. Suffolk, however, had one thing on his mind which was not connected with the day’s events, because before he departed on his mission the Duke of Norfolk had requested that he hand over his office of Earl Marshall. Only the King could effect such a change, and Henry accepted Norfolk’s case, requesting Suffolk to stand down in terms that could not be denied. He innocently declared himself pleased that Brandon had shown ‘zeal to nourish kindness and love’ with the senior duke, knowing perfectly well that he had no option.
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The evidence suggests that Suffolk surrendered his position with an ill grace, and that the change did nothing to increase the ‘kindness and love’ between them, as Norfolk was warned during June. The office conferred no status that the Duke did not already possess, and the fee was minimal, but it did stand at the head of the chivalric hierarchy in England, and of the heralds and Kings of Arms, and that conferred a prestige which Suffolk took seriously, hence his disgruntlement over his forced resignation.

During the last years of her life, Mary spent most of her time at Westhorpe, while her family steadily dwindled around her. Anne was married in 1525 and Mary in 1527 or 1528, and although they remained in sense dependent upon the Duke, their membership of the Duchess’s household ceased at that point. Frances was married in London in 1531, an event which tempted Mary out of her seclusion, and only fourteen-year-old Eleanor remained at home when she succumbed to her final illness.
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In spite of her disillusionment over Henry’s treatment of Catherine, her affection for her brother was clearly undimmed. Several months earlier she had written to him as her ‘Most dearest and best beloved brother’.

I humbly commend myself to your grace … I have been very sick and ill at ease, for which I was fain to send for Master Peter the physician for to have holpen me of this disease which I have, howbeit I am rather worse than better, wherefore I trust surely to come to London with my Lord. For if I should tarry here I should never asperge the sickness [and] I would be glad to see your grace the which I do think long for to do. For I have been a great while out of your sight [which is] the greatest comfort to me that may be possible …
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Whether she realised her ambition on that occasion is not known, nor whether it produced any amelioration in her condition. By May 1533 it was clearly too late for any such therapy. Early in the month the Duke made a hasty visit to Westhorpe to see her, but it was to be the last time that he would do so. Preoccupied with the coronation and its aftermath, and perhaps sceptical of the alarming reports emanating from Westhorpe, he did not appear again before she died on 25 June. As far as we know, only Eleanor and Henry were with her at the time, and we have no evidence of the details.
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She had been in a fragile state for some time, but there is no indication that her condition was thought to be terminal. Nor do we know anything of the competence of the physicians who attended her, although they were presumably in the Duke’s employment. The Spanish Chronicle attributed her death to grief over Henry’s behaviour, ‘the sight of her brother leaving his wife brought on an illness of which she died’, but that was voice out of Catherine’s camp, willing to attribute every ill to Anne Boleyn, and need not be taken seriously.
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Perhaps the most likely explanation is angina. In spite of her relative youth (she was thirty-eight) it was several years since she had cut a dash on the courtly scene, and her political opinions, although well known, were important only insofar as they influenced those of her husband. Henry seems to have been genuinely although briefly distressed, and the court went into official mourning, but no one else apart from her family was particularly concerned. A French envoy, writing to Francis I, reported her death on the 27th, and wrote again on the 30th, commenting that she was ‘much beloved in the country and by the common people of [London]’.
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This no doubt had something to do with the generosity of her largesse, but was probably more on account of her well-known sympathy with Queen Catherine, who had a large popular following.