Henry VIII's favourite sister made him a promise before she agreed to anything. He kept it. She collected on it the moment the old king of France was cold. Mary Tudor was born on 18 March 1496 at Sheen Palace, the fifth child of Henry VII and Elizabeth of York, the youngest of their children to survive infancy, and by the time she was a teenager the Venetian ambassador had described her as a paradise.
Erasmus, who visited the royal nursery when she was four years old, wrote that nature had never formed anything more beautiful. She grew up knowing what she looked like and understanding exactly what it meant in the world she inhabited, which was a world in which the beauty of a royal daughter was a diplomatic instrument and nothing more.
She had watched what happened to her sister Margaret. She had her own conclusions.
In 1507 Henry VII opened negotiations with the Holy Roman Emperor Maximilian I for Mary to marry his grandson Charles, the future Charles V. Mary was eleven. Charles was seven. The betrothal was formalised in 1508 and then quietly dissolved in 1513 when Henry VIII decided a French alliance was more useful than a Habsburg one.
Mary was not consulted about the original arrangement or the cancellation of it. She was a piece being moved on a board and the board had changed.
In 1514 Henry VIII negotiated a peace with Louis XII of France. The mechanism of the peace was Mary. Louis XII was fifty-two years old, gouty, in poor health, and had been twice widowed. Mary was eighteen years old and the most admired princess in Europe. Henry VIII proposed the match. Louis XII accepted it with a speed that required no deliberation. Before Mary agreed to it she extracted a promise from her brother that if she submitted to this marriage, her next husband would be her own choice. Henry VIII gave her his word. She went to France.
She married Louis XII at Abbeville on 9 October 1514. She was eighteen. He was fifty-two. The marriage was consummated that night and Louis reportedly told the French court the following morning that he had performed marvels. Mary did not record her own account of it.
The French court noted that she appeared composed throughout the ceremonies. She had understood what the ceremonies required and she delivered it, the same way she had delivered everything the Tudor court had ever required of her, completely and without visible objection, because she had the promise and the promise was the point.
Louis XII died on 1 January 1515, eighty-two days after the wedding. He was fifty-two years old and had been in poor health before the marriage. Mary was a widow at eighteen, Queen Dowager of France, and in possession of a promise her brother owed her.
She waited eleven weeks, the minimum period required to confirm she was not pregnant with a French heir, and on 3 March 1515 she secretly married Charles Brandon, Duke of Suffolk, Henry VIII's closest friend and jousting companion, the man she had been in love with before the French marriage and had told Henry she intended to marry when Louis was gone. Henry VIII had sent Brandon to France specifically to escort his widowed sister home. Brandon and Mary were married in Paris before Henry knew it had happened.
Technically it was treason. Marrying a royal widow without the king's permission carried the death penalty. Henry VIII was furious in the specific way he was furious when people he loved did things he could not publicly forgive and privately could not bring himself to punish. He fined them heavily. He raged at Brandon in letters. He summoned them home.
He forgave them within weeks, because Charles Brandon was his closest friend and Mary was his favourite sister and the anger, however genuine, was not stronger than that. They were married publicly at Greenwich on 13 May 1515 and the court attended and nobody mentioned France.
Mary and Charles Brandon had four children. She spent the rest of her life at their estate at Westhorpe in Suffolk, away from the court she had navigated so carefully for so long, in a house in the English countryside with the man she had chosen herself. She watched from Suffolk as her brother dismantled his marriage to Catherine of Aragon, as Anne Boleyn rose, as the court she had grown up in became something she did not entirely recognise. She died on 25 June 1533 at the age of thirty-seven, before Anne Boleyn's fall, before the executions, before the worst of what the court became. Her brother wept at her funeral.
She had made him a promise and he had kept it and she had collected on it and she had spent the last eighteen years of her life exactly where she had chosen to be. Of all the women in this series, Mary Tudor was the one who got out.
