“3. Inventory of the horses, carriages, and their furniture, Abbeville, 12th Oct., 1514.”
There is also a minute of an agreement, in the Rolls Office, by which document Louis XII agrees to receive jewelry and furniture to the value of 200,000 crowns, as the dowry of Princess Mary, reserving certain conditions as to their restoration. What these conditions were we learn from letters of acquittance (R.O. Rymer xiii. 462) given on the delivery of Mary Queen of France, with her jewels, etc., of the 400,000 gold crowns promised as her dower by Henry VIII, provided that, in the case of restitution, the king and his heirs shall only be bound to restore what she brought with her into France, with the expenses of her passage. Subscribed, Abbeville, 13th August, 1514.
[36] An anonymous writer to Margaret of Savoy, in a letter dated April 9, 1514, says: “I think never man saw a more beautiful creature [than Mary], or one possessed of so much grace and sweetness.” Gerard de Pleine writes: “I assure you that she [Mary] is one of the most beautiful young women in the world. I think I never saw a more charming creature. She is very graceful. Her deportment in dancing and in conversation is as pleasing as you could desire. There is nothing gloomy or melancholy about her.... I assure you that she has been well educated.... I had imagined that she would have been very tall; but she is of middling height....” (Lettres de Louis XII, tome iv., p. 335; State Papers, 5203, p. 833.)
[37] Cavendish’s Life of Wolsey; also, a slightly different version, in Galt’s Life of Cardinal Wolsey, p. 164.
[38] In 1603, James I took a fancy to Theobalds Park at Cheshunt, the seat of the Cecils, where he stopped on his progress from Edinburgh to London to ascend the English throne, and exchanged Hatfield for Theobalds, where he died in 1625. Hatfield has ever since remained in the possession of the illustrious family of Cecil.
[39] The Lady Anne Boleyn above mentioned was not the lady who became famous as the second queen of Henry VIII, but her aunt, a daughter of the Earl of Pembroke and wife of Sir William Boleyn of Blickling Hall, Norfolk.
[40] Clement had been driven from Rome by the Spanish troops, and had taken refuge at Orvieto, in a ruinous palace. The envoys say “the furniture of his bed and all was not worth twenty nobles.”
[41] It is not at all improbable that this, the generally received version of what we should call the affaire Mortimer, is incorrect. Cokayne says she married, after her separation from Brandon, a gentleman named Downes—the Baronagium calls him Horn. In this case she was already out of court, and the action of Brandon and Wolsey for a papal absolute nullification of the former’s marriage was to make the position of the queen-duchess and her children entirely unassailable. (See the Baronagium Angl.; also, Brooke’s Catalogue, p. 141.) The third marriage of Lady Mortimer seems to have been overlooked by historians. Had Lady Mortimer’s marriage with Brandon been confirmed by the pope, both she and Brandon would have been liable to the charge of bigamy, and the succession to the throne claimed by the daughter of the queen-duchess by Brandon would have been ipso facto invalid.
[42] “The xiij day of January was bared at (Westminster) in sant Margerett parryche my lade Powes, (daughter) to the duke of Suffoke Charles Brandon, (with two) whytt branchys, xij torchys, and iij grett (tapers), with xij skochyons of armes.”
[43] Lady Monteagle, who bore her husband six children, died in 1544. Her husband, Thomas Stanley, succeeded his father as Viscount Monteagle, 1522, and was made K.B. at the Coronation of Anne Boleyn. His second wife was Helen Preston of Livens. (See Dugdale’s Baronagium, Machyn’s Diary, etc.) These dates prove conclusively that the lovely woman in the sketch by Holbein, inscribed “the Lady Monteagle,” is intended for the daughter of Charles Brandon, and is not the second Lady Monteagle, who was married long after Holbein’s death.