A Journey Through Tudor England (32 page)

Faced with the prospect of returning to England and yet another political match, Mary remembered the promise she had extracted from her brother that if she outlived Louis, she could marry after her own heart. Fortunately, her heart chose the very man who had been sent from England to fetch her: the man who
had impressed her with his skill in the tiltyard, her brother’s best friend, Charles Brandon, Duke of Suffolk. She persuaded him to marry her in an immediate, clandestine ceremony in mid-February.

Henry was furious when he heard the news — after all, it was a capital offence to marry a blood relation of the King without his permission, and both Mary and Suffolk had sworn not to marry (suggesting that Henry and Wolsey had noticed some earlier attraction between the two). Oaths had been broken. Yet, Henry evidently thawed, for he allowed them a second, public wedding in Paris in March, and on their return to England in May, he attended their — third — wedding at Greenwich. He could no longer remain angry at two people whom he held so dear. He did, however, make them promise to pay the vast annual fine of £2,000 (the equivalent today of roughly £759,000) for twelve years.

After a year of five weddings and a funeral, the Duchess of Suffolk retired from court to a quieter life at her house of Westhorpe in East Anglia, and bore Suffolk four children, three of whom survived: Henry, Frances and Eleanor Brandon. Frances would go on to become the mother of Lady Jane Grey.

The notable exception to Mary’s country life was her radiant appearance at the Field of Cloth of Gold in 1520. Legend has it that her former fiancé, Charles, now the Holy Roman Emperor, wept at the sight of her great beauty, and even Francis I continued to hold a candle for his former step mother-in-law.

Mary differed with her brother on just one count: she did not approve of Anne Boleyn. Some even thought that it was the shock of her brother’s marriage to Anne that killed her on 25 June 1533, twenty-five days after Anne’s ostentatious coronation.

It was not intended that Mary should have so modest a grave. Her body lay in state for three weeks, and was borne in a grand funeral procession to be interred in Bury Abbey. Henry VIII also ordered a Requiem Mass to be said for her at Westminster Abbey.
Six years later, after the dissolution of Bury Abbey, her body was moved next door to St Mary’s for protection, where just the top of her original tomb remains today: a simple, unadorned ledger slab. It was in 1784 — in the age of morbid curiosity — that her tomb was dismantled and reduced, her coffin opened and her embalmed body plundered for locks of her famously long fair hair (Kateryn Parr received the same treatment, see S
UDELEY
C
ASTLE
).

It is perhaps with this dishonour in mind that in 1881 Queen Victoria commissioned a stained-glass window, in the south chapel of St Mary’s, to chart the momentous story of Mary’s life and its year of five weddings and glittering fame.

Other Tudor sights to see: look out for the grave of John Reeve, who conducted Mary’s funeral, was the last abbot of Bury Abbey and died just four months after the dissolution. Next door, the former neighbouring parish church of St James is now St Edmundsbury Cathedral: the nave was built by the Tudor architect John Wastell, who also designed King’s College Chapel in Cambridge. Also worth visiting are the beautiful gardens in the ruins of the Abbey grounds, which are vast: Bury was once the fourth largest Benedictine monastery in Europe.

‘The late Duke of Richmond, our only bastard son.’

T
he quiet Suffolk market town of Framlingham seems an unlikely resting place for some of the most important figures of the Tudor age but, in fact, this is just one of its two claims to Tudor fame.

The large parish church of St Michael in Framlingham dates from the twelfth century. The fourteenth-century font and wall painting in the nave and beautiful fifteenth-century fan-vaulted oak and chestnut roof testify to its medieval heritage. But you’re here for the chancel, which was built in the mid-sixteenth century as a mausoleum for tombs that had to be moved from their original place in Thetford Priory in Norfolk after the priory’s dissolution in 1540. Buried here are members of a family at the centre of power in Tudor England: the Howards, dukes of Norfolk.

The Howard family started the Tudor period on the back foot: John Howard, the first Duke of Norfolk fought and died for Richard III — the losing side — at the Battle of Bosworth in 1485, but Thomas Howard, second Duke of Norfolk compensated by fighting for Henry VIII against the Scots at the Battle of Flodden
Field in 1513. The helmet he wore at Flodden can be seen high on the south wall of the chancel.

His son, grandson and great-grandson are among those buried here too. His son, also named Thomas Howard, the third Duke of Norfolk, was a powerful machinator during Henry VIII’s reign, and succeeded in putting two of his nieces into the royal bed [see A
RUNDEL
C
ASTLE
for more on the Howards]. He lies here in effigy, with a fantastically pointed beard, beside his first wife Anne Plantagenet (who, as a royal princess, and thus his superior in rank, lies, unusually, on the right). Their tomb is one of the finest examples of Renaissance sculpture in northern Europe, decorated as it is with figures of the saints carved into Italianate shell niches.

Nearby is the colourful alabaster tomb of his son: the poet, Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey and his wife, Lady Frances de Vere, surmounted by their effigies. Surrey was executed by Henry VIII in 1547 on a charge of high treason, and this monument was built by his second son, Henry Howard, Earl of Northampton, in 1614. His first son, Thomas, who became the fourth Duke of Norfolk, was also executed for treason in 1572 [see A
RUNDEL
C
ASTLE
], and this Thomas’s first two wives (who both died in childbirth) and daughter are buried here too.

The most important tomb in the church is, however, deceptively plain, though it is carved with a simple decorative frieze of Old Testament scenes, including Noah’s Ark. This is the resting place of Henry Fitzroy, Duke of Richmond and Somerset, Lord High Admiral of England, head of the King’s Council in the North and Lord Lieutenant of Ireland. He was also Henry VIII’s illegitimate son and, for years, his only male heir.

Henry Fitzroy was born to Henry VIII’s mistress, Elizabeth ‘Bessie’ Blount, in 1519. As his surname indicates (meaning ‘son of the king’), the King openly acknowledged him and, during his entire lifetime, Fitzroy was the King’s only son. He was also
Henry’s only recognised illegtimate child: in a letter in April 1538, Henry VIII referred to Fitzroy as ‘the late Duke of Richmond, our only bastard son’.

Fitzroy evidently looked like Henry VIII, with the same red hair and good looks, and he was probably brought up in the royal nursery. At the age of six, in 1525, he was awarded the double dukedom of Richmond and Somerset, making him the highest-ranking nobleman in the land. The title ‘Somerset’ was particularly notable, as it had been given in 1397 to John Beaufort, a royal bastard who was later legitimised.

Throughout his early teens, Richmond (as he was now known) regularly spent time at court with his father, who was observed by the French ambassador to be very fond of him. Henry spent money on his son’s hobbies, buying him new arrows for archery and a lute for music-making: pursuits that must have reminded Henry of himself as a youth. Henry VIII also chose his son to represent him at important occasions, including a feast in honour of a visiting French admiral in 1534, and the execution of the three Carthusian monks in May 1535 [see C
HARTERHOUSE
].

Richmond had a close relationship with the Howards. When he was eleven years old, he was entrusted to the care of Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey who was a couple of years older than him, and the two became bosom friends. They even spent a year together at the court of King Francis I of France. Surrey would later recall his years spent ‘with a king’s son’ and their true ‘friendship sworn, each promise kept so just’. In 1533, Richmond married Surrey’s sister, Lady Mary Howard, the daughter of the second highest peer in the realm (after himself).

It is probable, as the Imperial ambassador Eustace Chapuys firmly believed, that in the spring of 1536, Henry VIII was seeking to make Richmond his heir. His two other children, Mary and Elizabeth, had both been declared illegitimate, and the 1536
Succession Act did not confine succession to the legitimate line, but granted Henry VIII the right to choose his successor.

Even without these considerations, it must have been devastating for the King when Richmond took ill and died suddenly and prematurely, on 23 July 1536, of a pulmonary infection. He was seventeen years old. The Duke of Norfolk was entrusted with the plans for his funeral, which was carried out privately, with minimal pomp (Henry VIII would later berate Norfolk for this). The King’s son was buried with the Howards at Thetford and later moved with them here to Framlingham.

Some 600 feet away from the Church of St Michael is Framlingham Castle. In 1547, after the arrest of the third Duke of Norfolk, Framlingham Castle passed from the hands of the Howards to Mary Tudor, Henry VIII’s daughter.

In 1553, when her brother Edward VI died, and the Duke of Northumberland moved to put Lady Jane Grey on the English throne [see G
UILDHALL
], Mary fled to Cambridgeshire and Norfolk, before securing herself at Framlingham. It was here, at this castle, in the week of 12—19 July 1553, that Mary amassed armies that would be willing to fight for her right to rule. Thousands of troops gathered under her standard in this, her moment of greatest crisis.

Yet, the battle never came. On 19 July 1553, news reached Framlingham Castle that Northumberland had surrendered and the Privy Council in London had acknowledged her as queen. So, it was here at Framlingham that England’s first crowned Queen regnant discovered that she was indeed queen. The presence of the Tudors can be powerfully felt in this apparently peaceful town.