Mary Rose (19 page)

As we have seen, the Treaty of the More restored Mary’s dower payments. After an interval of three years and nine months, they were duly paid in November 1525, and thereafter every six months. The Queen, however, was not satisfied with the farming arrangement, and tried through Wolsey to gain full control of her dower lands, including the right to appoint her own officers, which seems to have been the main point. Without that right she had no patronage in France, and had a number of French clients whom she wished to reward.
³⁵
One of these was Nicholas de St Martin, who had been her secretary until 1520, when he had been persuaded to enter the service of Francis I. In 1526 Mary got her brother to write to Louise of Savoy asking that he return to her service, and that eventually happened. However St Martin came back to England to his original post, and her attempts to secure control of her lands appear to have come to nothing. Attempts to induce Francis to give the administration of the dower to her servant George Hampton came to nothing, and Hampton was reduced to travelling backwards and forwards on this business, which was quite considerable owing to the extent of the lands.
³⁶
By 1528 he and Mary were working increasingly through Anne de Montmorency, the constable, who was the dominant influence there, but her lack of real influence was exposed by the case of Antoine du Val, who was a clerk in her household, whom she tried unsuccessfully for several months to place in the service of Francis. Montmorency replied politely, but his mind was not on the job, and nothing happened. Du Val turned elsewhere for the necessary patronage, but it is not clear that he succeeded.
³⁷
Mary never entirely got the message, but her attempts to exercise influence in France were thereafter conducted through Cardinal Wolsey, and ceased after his fall in 1529.

Through the summer months of each year, when they were not at court, the Suffolks tended to be peripatetic, visiting their manors in Suffolk, Essex and Oxfordshire on a regular basis. They also visited various towns in East Anglia, such as Great Yarmouth and King’s Lynn, where they were received with generous gifts, and royal honours for her.
³⁸
Suffolk in addition undertook occasional and somewhat fleeting trips to his more remote manors in Cheshire and Yorkshire, which were not always welcomed by the men on the spot, but which were necessary to prevent a terminal decline of revenue. They spent weeks at a time at Butley Priory near Bury St Edmunds, enjoying the hospitality of the canons there in what looks suspiciously like a cost-cutting exercise, because Butley is only a few miles from their principal residence at Westhorpe. Sometimes, when the Duke was about his business, Mary stayed there alone. They put in a regular appearance at the Bury St Edmunds Easter fair every year, bringing prestige, and no doubt additional business while they received the hosts of hopeful clients who invariably followed them there. The Duchess was noted as being particularly gracious on these occasions.
³⁹
All this was necessary for the Duke to maintain his status as a local magnate, and a means of keeping in touch with the gentlemen who formed his natural affinity. It also helped him when he discharged his duty by sitting on county commissions, although his service as a Justice of the Peace was more honoured in the breach than in the observance. In 1524 he was named to the commissions for Middlesex, Berkshire and Oxfordshire as well as for Suffolk, but given his other commitments it is unlikely that he was active in any of them.
⁴⁰
Because of his position at court, men (and women) appealed to him for help from all over the country, but he seems to have felt a particular obligation to those from his home county. His increasing honour is reflected in the titles accorded to him in the Norwich Episcopal registers. In 1517 he was just ‘the Duke of Suffolk’, but by 1524 he had become ‘the man of vigour, Charles, Duke of Suffolk’. In June 1527 he was ‘the most powerful man, Charles Duke of Suffolk, great marshal of England’, and by September of that year ‘the noble and most powerful prince, Charles Duke of Suffolk and great marshal of England’.
⁴¹
These commitments meant that he was often apart from his Duchess, who occupied herself with bringing up her children, running her own clientage network, and undertaking pilgrimages to Walsingham.

Most of this time she spent at Westhorpe, which was an agreeable country retreat where the Duke joined her when he could. There he bred horses, ran a herd of mules, and hunted assiduously in the park, or in nearby Haughey Park. He had purchased the house in 1515, perhaps with a view to his wife’s comfort or convenience, and decided in 1527 to rebuild it on a grand scale. It became a brick courtyard house, decorated with terracotta figures and impressive (although totally ornamental) battlements. Work started in that year, and was still not finished in 1538, but the house seems to have been in use throughout, and was managed by Mary, who no doubt filled her days in residence there with the multifarious tasks of a large household.
⁴²
It may have been the pressures of this lifestyle, to say nothing of the need to dodge the building workers, which caused her to take herself off to Butley Priory from time to time. When the subsidy commissioners visited Westhorpe in 1526 they credited Mary with fifty servants, forty-three men and seven women, but these appear to have been the domestic staff only, exclusive of the officers. If Wolsey’s comparable assessment is anything to go by, it was a considerable underestimate, and the true figure should have been nearer 100.
⁴³
It was necessary for any early Tudor nobleman to be careful about the number of servants he declared, because of the livery legislation, and although Mary’s retinue posed no threat to anyone, she would have been scrupulous to observe the law. Nor would such a list have included the young ladies and gentlemen being brought up in the household. Some of these, like George Heveningham and William Tyrell, were kindred of the Duke, while others such as Elizabeth and Anne Grey had served Mary since her time in France. Altogether there were probably about a dozen of these at any one time, of various ages, some of the younger ones acting as ‘schoolfellows’ for the Brandon’s own children. The Duke himself was credited in 1524 with fifty-one servants, but this was also an underestimate for the same reason. At a time when the Earl of Northumberland kept 166 servants in his livery, and the Duke of Buckingham claimed that it was reasonable for him to travel with an escort of 400, it is unlikely that the Duke of Suffolk retained fewer than 200, which would have included his chapel staff, and the grooms of his stables, as well as the more strictly domestic establishment.
⁴⁴
In the early 1520s the Duke’s household was costing him £1,000 a year in wages and food, which also points to a substantially larger number than the fifty-one declared. It is unlikely that even a great house such as Westhorpe could have accommodated more than a small proportion of this multitude, particularly during the building works, so presumably the rest were either stood down or billeted out in the surrounding villages – which are not numerous in that part of Suffolk.

No inventory survives for Westhorpe, and the only one for Suffolk Place dates from 1535, so it is not easy to judge the style of their housekeeping, but Mary would have found it necessary to retain something of the regal splendour of her days in France, which would not have come cheaply and helps to explain her desperation when her French revenues were suspended. The operational costs of lesser manors, such as Ewelme, were much lower because only a skeleton staff would have resided normally, and the ducal couple would have brought their ‘stuff’ with them when they visited. Nevertheless, expenditure was not negligible, because gifts and rewards were expected from the Lord and Lady whenever they were there; the neighbours expected to be entertained and the local churches anticipated charitable donations.
⁴⁵
Hospitality was particularly onerous, because on it depended the Lord’s influence in that part of the country, and if the manor was seldom visited, the expectation would have been so much higher. Consequently it only needed a report of the Duke and Duchess’ appearance to attract a horde of the expectant and the needy. Figures do not survive for the Suffolks, but their situation would have been similar to that of the Duke of Norfolk at Framlingham in 1526 when he entertained 244 people to dinner, 200 of whom were ‘persons of the country’.
⁴⁶
Life away from the court may have been less stressful, but it was not necessarily much cheaper, and the extravagant lifestyle required by the honour of such a couple constantly outran their resources. When Mary’s French revenues arrived on time, they could manage, but at other times their only recourse was to borrow from the King or from the bankers at a rate which neither of them could afford. Hence the constant recourse to Wolsey to renegotiate their agreements with Henry, who preferred to keep them dependant in this fashion rather than granting the Duke adequate lands to provide him with sufficient income. It is not surprising that they welcomed invitations to attend the court, because that provided them both with opportunities to keep their favour bright and fresh, and to remind the King how fond he was of them both.

Another use of Westhorpe was as a house of refuge from the plague and the sweating sickness. Plague was endemic, and many years saw the court on the move to escape its attentions, the King taking his ‘riding household’ as far afield as Wallingford, Abingdon and Woodstock, because of his deadly fear of infection.
⁴⁷
The sweat was less lethal, but caused almost equal panic, being particularly severe in 1517 and 1528. ‘Multitudes are dying all around us,’ Thomas More wrote to Erasmus in the former year; ‘almost everyone in Oxford, Cambridge and London has been ill lately’.
⁴⁸
Nor was the King’s fear unreasonable. In 1528 the disease invaded the court, carrying off William Carey and Sir William Compton, the latter as Groom of the Stool, being particularly close to Henry. The medical profession was baffled, and the King came up with his own strange nostrum.

Take a handful of sage of virtue, and handful of herb grace, and handful of elder leaves and a handful of red briar leaves, and stamp them together, and strain them in a fair cloth with a quart of white wine, and then take a quantity of ginger and mingle them all together, and drink of that medicine a spoonful every day …
⁴⁹

Whether anyone was protected or cured by this concoction we do not know, and it was more usual to resort to prayer or to the offices of the church. Hence perhaps the Duchess of Suffolk’s constant visits to Walsingham. However, rural Westhorpe appears to have lived a charmed life, and although the King did not visit it, as far as we know, it provided a safe refuge for the Duke and Duchess. The latter’s ill health, which became increasingly obvious after 1525, had nothing to do with these epidemics, the only description which we have of it attributing it to ‘her old disease in her side’, which could have been a heart condition.
⁵⁰
The agues from which she also suffered from time to time have been diagnosed as malaria, which clung to the low-lying areas of the Thames valley, but was not usually fatal. The Duke seems not to have suffered from any of these ailments, but he was still not welcome at court when the fear was on. Only Cardinal Wolsey worked through these epidemics, often falling ill, but always recovering in a manner which the King can only have envied.

After the reception of the French ambassadors in 1527, Mary no longer attended formal public occasions. The Anglo-French treaty in May of that year, and the betrothal of her namesake the princess to the Dauphin, marked her last appearance at a major political event. This was partly due to her health, but had more to do with disillusionment with her brother, who, having expressed the most rigorous disapproval of their sister Margaret’s divorce from the Earl of Angus in 1528, was set upon repudiating his own wife.
¹
This last was more or less public knowledge after Henry had confronted Catherine in June 1527, and although it was not similarly known that he was intending to replace her with Anne Boleyn, the latter’s position was already causing scandal and concern around the court. Mary had been close friends with Catherine since before her marriage to Henry, when they had shared many girlish secrets, and that friendship had not waned over the years. Until 1531 Henry maintained a correct attitude to his wife, dining with her from time to time, while she accompanied him on formal occasions such as the Christmas and Shrovetide celebrations. As long as that situation appertained, the Suffolks continued to appear occasionally together at the court, and were lodged on the Queen’s side.
²
However, in 1531 Henry announced that he never wished to see Catherine again; she was banished to Buckden and the Queen’s side of the court was effectively discontinued. When the Duke appeared on his own, he had always been lodged on the King’s side, and that continued, but Mary’s infrequent appearances were now made from Suffolk Place, or from one of the Duke’s other houses if the court was not at Westminster.
³

Paradoxically this chill in the relations between brother and sister does not seem to have affected Suffolk’s position at all. He had formed an alliance of convenience with the Boleyns and Norfolk in order to get rid of Wolsey, but he did not share their aspirations for Anne’s future, and quickly distanced himself from Viscount Rochford (Anne’s father) as soon as the Cardinal had been dismissed in October 1529. A more scrupulous man might have withdrawn from the Council while that attack was in hand, because he had much to be grateful to Wolsey for, but he seems to have fallen out with Lord Chancellor over the latter’s failure to eliminate his debt repayments, and may indeed have been hoping to take his place. Such a move was rumoured in diplomatic circles before Sir Thomas More was appointed on 26 October.
⁴
So instead of withdrawing, or expressing his dissent from the prevailing intention of the Council, he worked closely with the Duke of Norfolk to bring about the desired result. It was the two dukes who went to recover the Great Seal from Wolsey, and the latter does not seem to have been surprised or particularly resentful at the role which he had chosen to play. Norfolk was the senior partner in these manoeuvres, but when the office of President of the Council was revived at this time, it was conferred on the Duke of Suffolk, and this may have been on account of his amicable relations with the French.
⁵
Norfolk would have preferred an Imperial alliance, but, given Charles’s hostile attitude towards the King’s annulment proceedings, that was an unrealistic aspiration. The Emperor was Catherine’s nephew, and had no intention of permitting such a slur on his family’s honour, so given the power structure of contemporary Europe, the assistance of France was more or less essential. Thanks to his marriage, Suffolk had all the right connections in the French court, and given her dependence upon French dowry payments to maintain her standard of living, Mary was in no position to object to his using them in the King’s service. When Parliament met on 3 November, the strength of the Duke’s position soon became apparent, because many of those elected had links with him, more than was the case with any other senior peer, although only Sir John Shilston, who sat for Southwark, was a direct client.
⁶
He had taken his share of the spoils after Wolsey’s fall; some manors came to him, and the Cardinal’s prize train of mules, but he resisted the temptation to urge any expropriation of the Church, and in that the King supported him rather than listening to the voices of the Boleyns, whose influence in that direction was to be delayed for several years. By 1530 the Duke of Suffolk and his influence were everywhere to be seen, but his actual power remained problematical, perhaps due to a lack of ambition – or perhaps to a lack of ability for government at the highest level.