"My lord,[ [511] in my most hearty wise I recommend me unto you. So it is divers of my rights and duties concerning my dot in France have been of late time stent and restrained, in such case as I ne mine affairs may not have ne receive the same as they have done in times past being to my damages therein. And so thereat great trouble many ways, as my trusty servant George Hampton, this bearer, shall shew unto you, to whom I pray you to give credence in the same. And my lord in this and in all others I evermore have and do put mine only trust and confidence in you for the redress of the same. Entirely desiring you therefore that I may have the King's Grace's, my dearest brother's, letters unto France to such as my said servant shall desire. And by the same I trust my said causes shall be brought to such good conclusion and order now, that I shall from henceforth enjoy my estate there in as ample use as I have heretofore. And so it may stand with your pleasure, I would gladly my dearest brother's ambassadors being in France now, by your good means should have the delivery of the said letters with them, furthermore of the contents of the same to that they may do. And thus my lord I am evermore bold to put you to pains without any recompense unless my good mind and hearty prayers, whereof ye shall be assured during my life to the best of my power, as knoweth the Lord."
Suffolk's letter a month later is just as friendly. He says, "The said French Queen and I do not only put this matter in your hands, but at all times hereafter shall do in the same as shall be thought good by your Grace, as we be bounden to do, seeing the great kindness that your Grace doth daily shew unto the said French Queen and me by the which you bind us during our life to do your Grace such pleasures as shall lie in our powers."[ [512] For the last few years of her life Mary's income was paid regularly, thanks largely to Wolsey, to whom she and her husband had cause to be grateful, as they both said.
But the Cardinal was upsetting the old order, and life in the county of Suffolk was not as pleasant as it had been. The people had banded and murmured against the subsidies for the French war. The master cloth-workers (Suffolk was the centre of the woollen trade) said if they paid the King they could not pay their hands; the work-folk said, No work, no paying of the subsidy; and they rioted. Suffolk, aided by the new Duke of Norfolk, no friend of his or of Wolsey's either, had to put down the insurrection. Then Wolsey was suppressing some of the smaller monasteries and founding Ipswich College. Some of Mary's friends among the clergy were suffering, notably the Abbot of St Benets,[ [513] and she and her husband had to relinquish to the use of the new college their title deeds to the Priory of Snape, of Sayes Court (Deptford), and of Bickling. There were changes all round and Wolsey was blamed for all. Still, it seems almost incredible that the Duke who wrote so gratefully to the Cardinal in 1525 should be using in 1528 or earlier every art to poison the King's mind against him. Suffolk had the reputation of being grasping and avaricious, he never dropped a noble unless he took up a royal for it, and his gratitude and his dislike were perhaps both rooted in his pocket. The disaster of the divorce wrecked the frail ship of Tudor court morality. All through the year's struggle with Wolsey [1528-9] Suffolk sang treble to Norfolk's bass, and it was his incorrigible courtier habits which tuned his voice so harmoniously to Howard's, for the burden of their song was that the King's matrimonial wishes were being secretly frustrated by Wolsey. The Dukes used Mistress Anne, as she was generally called, as a lever to hoist their enemy out of office, and when Suffolk was sent on an embassy to France to prevent any rapprochement between Francis and Charles V. which would have heartened the Pope into refusing point blank a bull of divorce, the report was that by his conversations he had put Wolsey out of favour with the French King. Mary did not exile herself entirely from her brother's Court, where his mistress ruled, and a bastard took precedence of all nobles, and where her niece was disregarded, but one would like to think that she did not second her husband in his hunting of the Cardinal. However, there is no evidence one way or the other.
Once the great man down, and the seals of office in the hands of Norfolk, with Suffolk as his lieutenant, the heinousness of the proceedings against Queen Katharine struck both Dukes, and they agreed that "the time was come when all the world should strive to dismount the King from his folly." Suffolk withstood Henry at least once to his face, and he summed up the situation "in two words and said that the Queen was ready to obey him [Henry] in all matters, but there were two that she must first obey. The King, thinking he meant the Pope and your Majesty [Charles V.], inquired immediately who these two were. He replied that God was the first and her conscience the other, which she would not destroy for him or for any other."[ [514] Henry turned away and made no answer. The same writer, Chapuys, the Imperial Ambassador, said that "Suffolk and his wife if they dared would offer all possible resistance to this marriage," and in an age when the Archbishop of Canterbury refused to give Queen Katharine advice because, he said, "ira principis mors est," how can one blame the Suffolks for not daring? Mary was beloved by the Londoners,[ [515] who were heart and soul for Katharine, and her well-known sympathy with her sister-in-law and her niece is attested by that ridiculous figure which appeared in Lincolnshire after her death claiming to be the Princess Mary, and retailing conversations with her aunt the French Queen.[ [516]
Mary's health had for long been far from good. This mysterious and recurring disease in her side constantly demanded physicians, with which the Court swarmed, for Henry was a great drug-master. In one letter [undated] she implores the King's permission, to come up to consult his physician, Master Peter, than whom no other in her opinion can give her relief, and her husband seconds her request in a letter in which he says she sits and weeps all day long, and is generally very ill as anyone can see. But here again the searcher draws a blank. There is no information, and one is suddenly confronted with a line in a letter of Chapuys' to his master, "the Duchess of Suffolk, late Queen of France, is dead," and he adds, touching the keynote to Mary's claim to publicity in her later life, "by which the French King will gain 30,000 crowns a year of dower." She died on Midsummer's Day, says Hall; on June 26, says the Heralds' College, at Westhorpe in Suffolk.
Her funeral was deferred for nearly a month to allow time for the representatives of France to be present, and finally took place at Bury St Edmunds on Tuesday, July 21. The strange thing about it is that not Mary's husband, nor her son the Earl of Lincoln, but her eldest daughter, Lady Frances, was the chief mourner, followed by her second daughter, Lady Eleanor, and, in fact, the cortège was chiefly made up of ladies. The abbey was draped in black, and, after the coffin had been lowered, the chief officers of her household brake their staves of office, and, weeping, cast them into the grave, and the French herald cried aloud, "Pray for the soul of the right high excellent princess and right Christian Queen, Mary, late French Queen, and for all Christian souls." Then they left her lying under the device which had blazed so gloriously in Abbeville and in Paris,
LA VOLONTÉ DE DIEU ME SUFFIT.
APPENDIX
I. Papers relating to the preparations for the marriage of Princess Mary to the Prince of Castile at Calais in May 1514.