In this episode Melita Thomas from Tudor Times talks about Mary, the French Queen. Here are the resources we talked about:
Books: (Amazon Associate links – you pay the same price, and the podcast gets a commission – hooray!)
La Reigne Blanche: A Life in Letters from Sarah Bryson
The French Queen’s Letters from Erin Sadlack
Mary, Tudor Princess from Tony Riches (historical fiction)
Mary Rose: Tudor Princess, Queen of France by David Loades
TudorTimes resources:
http://tudortimes.co.uk/people/mary-queen-france-life-story
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Visiting Mary’s tomb
Transcript of Mary Tudor, Queen of France:
Heather:
Hello, and welcome to the Renaissance English History Podcast, a member of the Agora Podcast Network. I’m your host, Heather Teysko, and I’m a storyteller who makes history accessible because I believe it’s a pathway to understanding who we are, our place in the universe, and deepening our connection to our own humanity.
This is Episode 108. It’s another joint episode with Melita Thomas from Tudor times on Mary the French Queen. Henry’s sister, who famously married for love. But first, I want to thank the lovely patrons of this show who helped to keep it independent. Thank you to Elizabeth, Kathy, Cynthia, Juergen, Sarah, Megan, Melissa, Lady Anne aka Jessica, Olivia, Al, Ashley, Kendra, Cynthia, Judith, Renee, Katie, Mara, Emily, Celine, Lara, Ian, Barbara, Sharkiva, Amy, Alison, Joanna, Kathy, Christine, Anetta, that’s my mama, Susan, Andrea, Katherine, Rebecca from Tudors Dynasty, Shandur, Philip, and John.
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So now let me introduce you to Melita Lena Thomas. She is a co-founder and editor of Tudor Times a website devoted to Tudor and art history in the period from 1485 to 1625. You can find it at Tudortimes.co.uk. Melita who has always been fascinated by history ever since she saw the 1970’s series Elizabeth R with Glenda Jackson also contributes articles to BBC History Extra and Britain Magazine.
I really don’t know much about Mary, it seems like there’s a lot, a lot of recent stuff, a couple of books, and stuff that have come out about her. So it seems like she’s becoming more popular, I suppose. or at least I don’t know, maybe I’m just finally noticing.
Melita:
Well, sort of. I mean, I think these things go through fashions, don’t they? People become interested in somebody in particular, and they’ll be a spate of books about them, and then the attention turns to somebody else. Mary’s always been considered quite a romantic figure, I think. So there were a couple of sort of romance books about her during the Victorian period. And because she chose to marry without a formal consent from Henry VIII and she married for love, which was very unusual in those days. She’s always been considered rather romantic. And she was also particularly beautiful, apparently, which I know all princesses are called beautiful, but Mary seems to have been, you know, outstandingly good looking.
Heather:
Yeah. So what can you tell me about her early life as a princess and before the first marriage in her childhood?
Melita:
Well, her early childhood, it started out, she was born in 1495/6? Check that. Yeah, she was born in March. And it was just in the period when Henry VII was beset by the Perkin Warbeck troubles. So one of Mary’s earliest memories will have been being taken to the tower as a protection when the Cornish rebels were encamped at Blackheath. So Elizabeth of York and her children went to the tower to keep them safe. Whether Mary will remember that is, she was very young, but Henry VIII is thought to have been quite badly traumatized by it.
So her very early childhood, she was surrounded with love and affection. She had two parents, she had several brothers and sisters. She spent most of her time at Elton Palace with Henry and Margaret. Prince Arthur was brought up separately. Her mother was probably closer to her than most royal mothers are. There’s quite a few examples of Elizabeth visiting the children and sending presents for them. And Henry VII to was quite a doting father. He paid for her Luton and yeah, I mean, obviously he paid for everything for it because he was a father and the king, but there are elements of sort of personal touch in the accounts.
And then it all started to go sour in 1499. There was the first death. Her little brother Edmund died at age 18 months, so he died in 1500, I think. Then there was the spectacular marriage of her brother Arthur to Princess Catherine. So that was a bit of a high point. Mary, who was seven by the end. She had a couple of new dresses for the occasion, you can imagine she had one of crimson velvet and one of rosette velvet. But then Arthur died within a few months, and the following year, Mary’s mother died in childbirth.
So from a sort of very sunny, early childhood, It then became quite depressing as Henry VII, I mean, who wouldn’t suffer from depression if they lost two children and their wife, and then Margaret, the older daughter went off to Scotland. So everything became really rather somber. Matters picked up a bit in the middle years 1504 to 1507. And Mary became the focus of attention as she was betrothed to the Archduke Charles. He was later Emperor Charles V.
So it went through the usual negotiations for these kinds of marriages, there was a treaty and there were proxy marriages. And finally, a huge ceremony where Mary was the center of attention. She kept the audience waiting apparently for three hours until she came in dressed in her golden frock, and was married by proxy to the Archduke Charles. So she could anticipate that one day she would be Queen of Spain, Duchess of Burgundy, and probably Empress, so she was then referred to from that time forward from 1507 as the Princess of Castile. So all of the court papers refer to her as the Princess of Castile.
The other thing around that period, there were a number of different banquets and jousts and all those sorts of things to celebrate. And she was, she would preside as the Lady of the Joust and give the prizes. And it’s probably around that sort of time that she first became aware of a young man at court, Charles Brandon, who was a very fine jouster.
Heather:
Hmm. So, so then tell me about what happened after Henry VII’s death and how did the Castile marriage kind of fall apart then to how did we get to France?
Melita:
Well, Henry VII died in 1509. And he left orders that the marriage should go ahead and if it didn’t, he made separate arrangements for her dowry, and so forth. And for the first few years of Henry VIII’s reign, Mary spent her time at court with Henry and Catherine, she was on very good terms with her sister-in-law, and they seem to have been quite had a jolly time, the three of them dancing and jousting and so forth.
Then, in 1513, Henry allied to Catherine’s father Ferdinand of Aragon, Maximilian of Austria, who was Archduke Charles’s grandfather, as was Ferdinand and Margaret, who was Charles’s aunt and regent for him in the Netherlands. They formed an alliance to invade France. So Henry thought this was a hell of a fine idea. And off he went to France and he captured a couple of towns, later referred to by Thomas Cromwell as “ungracious dog holes”. He was quite proud of himself. So that all seems to be going swimmingly, and it was agreed that Mary and Charles will be married the following year.
But then, as happened to Henry on more than one occasion, Ferdinand and Maximilian double-crossed effectively. They each made a secret alliance with France or a secret piece. And Henry was, well see, he found out about this, and he started pushing for the marriage for Mary and Charles to take place as had been agreed. And Archduchess Margaret, she was very keen as well, and Mary was fitted out with all her clothes and her jewels, and Henry spent a fortune on it. But Maximilian and Charles just dragged their feet, and they wouldn’t come to the party. They kept putting it off.
So Henry then thought, “Okay, well, I know how to get by my own.” So he made a separate treaty with Louis of France for Mary to marry him. And Mary, there she was, she was 18 by now, and used to thinking of herself as Princess of Castile. But you know, the humiliation of the situation must have been quite stinging for her really. She was being treated very badly. So she publicly renounced her betrayal to Charles, and was betrothed by proxy to Louis. Now, Charles was four years younger than Mary, but Louie was 40 years older than he was. He was 52. And she was 18.
Heather:
But before we have her go to France, though, what was her relationship like with Catherine of Aragon? Do we have any kind of idea of when they were close? I’m thinking if they both would have been from that Spanish– Princess of Castile and everything like that, were they close friends?
Melita:
It seemed to have been, yes. I mean, obviously, you don’t know about sort of people’s personal emotions. But Mary, Mary was always with Catherine and Henry. I’m presuming that if Catherine hadn’t liked her, she would have made other arrangements. Because Henry, at that time would have done anything to please his wife. So Mary was, I think they probably thought of themselves as sisters. I mean, Mary probably could hardly remember a time before Catherine had been in her life. She’d only been six or so when Catherine arrived. So yeah, I would guess they thought of themselves more or less as sisters since, yeah.
Heather:
Yeah. I just I often, I often think about when Henry was double-crossed, the awkward position that put Catherine in, and Mary was in the same kind of position from a different perspective. Before oh, I’m looking at your website here. And going into the story about Charles Brandon. And Margaret, can you give a little backstory on that?
Melita:
Well, Charles, we have to think that Charles was probably quite a good-looking and attractive chap. But he was certainly a man who was ambitious. And he was perfectly happy in the way of the times – to marry to secure his ambitions. And he’d had a bit of a checkered marital career. He had been betrothed to a woman called Anne Brown. And they’d had a child, but then apparently not being married. But then he threw her over for her aunt, who had an inheritance.
Then that marriage was dissolved, and he married Anne, and so yeah. And then after the death of both, and her sister or aunt Margaret, he was betrothed to a young girl, Elizabeth Grey, who was Viscountess Lisle And he went off to the court of Archduchess Margaret, and they began, what you might call a court flirtation. Presumably, it became serious enough for there to be rumors that Margaret would marry Charles.
Now, Margaret, she’d been twice widowed. Her first marriage had been to Catherine of Aragon’s brother, but he’d died young, and then she’d married the Duke of Savoy, and he had also died fairly young and she’d had no children. So she was only, I suppose, in her 30’s. So she probably liked the sight of a young man as much as anybody. But of course, she wasn’t going to marry one of Henry VIII’s friends with no background, no breeding, no fortune, no title, no name.
It was around this time that Henry made him a Duke, which was a leap from plains to Charles, and he was born just playing Mr. Right up to the top of the aristocratic tree. It’s possible he thought that that might tempt Margaret to marry his friend. Margaret’s father, Maximilian was absolutely outraged at the idea. Yeah, apart from anything, he seems to have accepted that his daughter didn’t want to remarry anybody in particular at all. And the very idea that she might change her mind and marry some upstart, just horrified the Emperor. Yeah. So Margaret was clearly embarrassed by the whole thing, and she asked Henry to make sure that Charles didn’t come near her court until he was married to his fiancé, Lady Lisle. Yeah, but yes, scandal rocked a lot of the…
Heather:
And Anne Boleyn potentially would have seen that, huh?
Melita:
Yes, possibly, yes. So Anne was obviously one of Margaret’s ladies-in-waiting or were Maids of honor. So aged about 14 at the time, 13 or 14, so she would have seen this chivalry, sort of codes of honor and people pretending to be in love, and sighing at each other, and giving each other poems, and all that sort of thing. So whether she then saw how badly it could go wrong, or if people overstepped the mark, which, of course, is what happened to her when she overstepped the mark with what she said to Norris.
Heather:
Yeah, okay, so then let’s take her to France. And, this, like you said, it’s such a romantic story. And this is a story that certainly people who watched a particular series know her by a different name and a different country and all of that, but might have been familiar with the story of it at least, even though the names have been changed, and the countries have been changed. But what can you tell me about the whole French debacle? And how it all happened, how it played out?
Melita:
Yeah, well, it started out very, I mean, from the point of view of what it was intended to do, it went very well. So Mary arrived in France, having extracted apparently from her brother, a promise that if she was widowed young, that she could choose a second husband herself. And it was fairly widely known that Louis wasn’t in the pink of health. So I think she had a fairly good chance of being widowed.
Heather:
Why would Henry have agreed to that?
Melita:
I’m guessing he agreed to it, just to keep her quiet.
Heather:
I would have thought whether he actually given that he didn’t have an heir yet. It seems like women were valuable for their marriage negotiation or relationships internationally, and things like that. Seems like a really big thing for him to have promised that she could choose her own husband, given that he didn’t have many children to play the marriage game with.
Melita:
Yeah, it’s an interesting question. I think in his younger days, he was perhaps more romantically minded. And he was almost certainly assuming that he would have sons because it was 1514. Catherine had lost two, possibly three children by this point, but he was still optimistic that more children would come along. Yeah. I think he probably thought that the situation would never actually arise. I mean, if Mary had had children in France, she’d have been the mother of the Queen of France, or the King of France. You know, the likelihood that she would then have married? It probably wouldn’t have been his concern, in a sense if she’d had children.
I think Mary was, you get the impression she was quite as impulsive as her brother and sister were, Henry and Margaret. And Henry seemed to have been fond of Mary. A marriage couldn’t take place without consent. It’s possible, although it doesn’t seem very likely that Mary said she would absolutely refuse to publicly consent unless he had promised, made this promise. Perhaps he thought she might cause embarrassment. It’s a combination of things, probably. I guess, ultimately, in a weak moment, he saw his sister and promised her whatever she wanted to just to get her to do what he wanted.
Heather:
And they would have been close then, having grown up together, it would have been a different kind of relationship than some royals. For example, if he would have been raised in Wales as the Prince of Wales, it might have been different.
Melita:
Yeah. I think that’s true. And she, as I said, before, she lived with Henry and Catherine. They saw each other every day, all the time. And they were clearly attached to each other.
Heather:
Yeah. Okay. So there she is, and she’s going to France and it all looks like it’s going to be good.
Melita:
It is good as Queen of France. When she arrives in France, Louis meets her. It was the usual story of having come across her accidentally whilst out hunting and they just happened to have the same colored outfits on. In the French fashion was to wear matching his and hers outfits for the king and queen.
She impressed all. Everybody who saw her saw how beautiful she was, how gracious she was, how lovely she was to her fiancé. And they got married quite quickly near Advil. And yeah, she was an absolute model of good behavior as the Queen of France. She sat beside her husband when he was ill. She sort of fed him with her own hands, all that sort of care that she took care of him. She was crowned as Queen of France at Saint-Denis. You know, had Louis lived, she would have gone on being Queen of France and being admired for her looks.
Louis seemed to dote on her, part from the fact that he sent away most of her ladies-in-waiting because, in particular, he didn’t like her chief lady Gifford who was sort of the maternal figure, that head of the ladies-in-waiting, and Louis felt that she hovered about far too much when he wanted to be very…with his wife. Yeah, so that upset Mary, she wrote home to Wolsey and to Henry saying, please, could they talk to the king and have Lady Gifford reinstated? But if they did, they didn’t, they didn’t press the point because she wasn’t.
So yeah, so I mean, it all could have gone well, I mean, hovering on the edges were Louis’ daughter Claude and her husband Francois, who was Louis’ heir because Claude, who was Anne of Brittany‘s daughter couldn’t inherit the crown of France. She had been married to Louis’ heir and much to her mother’s disappointment as we discussed previously. So Francois was champing at the bit to be king, and Claude was probably champing at the bit to be queen consort even if she couldn’t be queen regnant. Had Mary had a son, of course, they would have been demoted.
But Louis, besotted with his wife, sat up late at night eating and drinking, and making merry and wore himself out, and he was dead within a couple of months or three months. He died on New Year’s Day. So from that perspective, it went badly in that having been three months Queen of France, she was now widowed. And in a very vulnerable position because Francois, although he couldn’t immediately be proclaimed as King, because had Mary been expecting a child that have had to wait and to see if it had been a boy.
Francois effectively became king, and he wasn’t quite sure how to handle her. She went into her 40 days of mourning as the White Queen. But Francois was eager to know if she was pregnant. And he apparently took the opportunity to make suggestions to her. But Mary complained to her brother, were not to her honor. Francois was a notorious lecher, so we can imagine what the suggestions were.
And he then also tried to put pressure on her to marry up one of his French nobles. He wanted her to marry the Duke of Savoy. But she got letters from Henry and Wolsey, saying, “Don’t even think about getting involved in a French marriage”, which she wrote back. Well, she was quite cross that they thought she was so foolish as to get involved in Francois’ schemes for she could see through it.
Heather:
So then, how do we get Charles Brandon in here?
Melita:
Well, Charles had been one of the people who accompanied Mary in the first place to France. So Charles, and also Mary’s cousin, Thomas Grey, Marquess of Dorset. And the various other royals and nobles had come to France with her, and gone to a couple of tournaments, and generally shown themselves, often made friends with the French court. Louis had spoken very highly of Charles, saying that he was a very good servant to Henry and deserved to be favored. And obviously, the man made a good impression.
And then Henry decided to send Charles to go and fetch Mary again. It seems like an odd decision to make if, I mean, the whole thing sort of centered around how much Henry knew about the fact that Mary was attached to the Duke of Suffolk. I’m not convinced it was entirely a two-way street, but Mary was certainly, you could even say she had a crush on him when she was 18 and he was 30. No doubt he did think she was attractive. So Henry sent him to France, but he made him promise that he wouldn’t propose to Mary. He didn’t make a promise not to marry her, but he made him promise not to propose.
Heather:
So where would that have even come from? Say, having him make that promise?
Melita:
So obviously, yes, shows that then it must have been an open secret that there was some kind of relationship or affection between Charles and Mary. Henry must have known about it. But so then, you put those things together, you put the fact that Henry had promised she could marry a man of her choice. He sent Suffolk to her knowing that she was in love with him. Get you to think that Henry thought it might happen. And yet, as you said before, why would he allow his sister who could be useful to him to marry Charles?
I mean, perhaps he wanted to show his power over Charles by saying, “Don’t propose to her.” It’s an interesting conundrum. Or perhaps he just did love his sister and want her to be happy. It’s not the picture we necessarily have of Henry, but maybe she was one of his weak points. I mean, he was very, he could be very affectionate towards his family.
Heather:
And so tell me, where did they get married, and what happened? What happened when it all came out?
Melita:
So Charles raced over to France, having promised that he wouldn’t propose. And at the same time, Mary was under pressure from Francois to pick a French husband. And she panicked possibly, she thought that Francois would actually hold her in France. So she pleaded with Charles to marry her. And according to his report, he never saw a woman weep so and said that if he wouldn’t marry her, she would actually take the veil and become a nun, and then she wouldn’t be able to marry anybody. And at the same time, she obviously thought, “What’s the best way to get my own way here?” And she thought, “Well, if I can get Francois on the side, that would help.”
So thinking that Francois mainly wanted her to marry one of his supporters so that Henry wouldn’t marry her to somebody important. She persuaded Francois to support a marriage to Charles, and Francois while thinking that he was now getting one over on Henry and also taking Mary kind of off the table as a pawn said, “Okay, I’ll help you out.” So he attended a second secret marriage between the two, and promised to write to Henry on their behalf to mitigate whatever punishment Henry came up with.
Heather:
What was it like when they went back then?
Melita:
Well, Henry apparently threw his toys out of the plan completely when he was told about it, so yeah, it’s very, it is all very hazy, and it’s quite difficult to see a clear motivation from Henry. He seems to be vacillating about the whole thing. But anyway, he was persuaded. Mary deluged him with letters, Charles deluged him with letters, Wolsey, for whatever reason was, he had decided that he would speak for them. And Henry was talked around. And the way they talked him around was that old favorite – money. Yeah.
Mary had a huge dower as Queen Dowager of France. Henry said, “Well, okay then. I’ll accept your marriage but you’re going to have to give me two-thirds of your income as Dowager Queen of France and all your jewels. And all the other debts that Charles already owes me for this certain and the other.” Yeah. So they bought their pardon.
Heather:
And so then they were able to return to court.
Melita:
Yes, had yet another marriage ceremony. Henry, and probably Catherine were concerned, to make sure that it didn’t look too much like some sort of hole in the corner affair, and that the marriage was a public event and couldn’t be questioned. And the worst thing would be if they hadn’t married and had a child and people had questioned the legitimacy of the marriage, because there’d been no public ceremony. So there was a third marriage at Greenwich. Okay, and then they were married.
Heather:
Yeah, for real. So then tell me about what their relationship was like. After they came home and again, in that particular television series, you see a lot of stuff. There’s a lot of drama sometimes with them in terms of like, Charles Brandon not being a very nice husband and having a lot of affairs, and leaving Mary back home and all of that, like, what, what was it like? For real?
Melita:
Well, of course, you never know the inner state of people’s emotions, it would appear as far as you can detect from the evidence from the first few years. So say 1514 to say, maybe 1520, 21? They seem to have spent a fair bit of time together quite often in London. They were still members of the court and although they were harder up and didn’t live there permanently, they attended most of the big ceremonies they went on. They were there at the betrothal of Princess Mary in 1518 to the Dauphin of France. They were part of the entourage that went to the Field of Cloth of Gold, where Mary, of course, is Dowager Queen of France. She played quite an important role in that.
So during those years, they appear to have been quite close. Mary started to suffer from ill-health quite soon. She had four children in total, the first one, Henry, Earl of Lincoln was born about a year after their marriage. Then she had two daughters, Frances and Eleanor. And then the young Earl Henry, he died in 1522. And she had another son the following year, also confusingly called Henry of Lincoln. Yeah.
And there’s a couple of mentions where Charles is right into walls and saying, well, “I was going to come to see you, but my wife was sick. And she felt so ill she called me back because she didn’t want me to leave her side, because she was too ill, again.” You certainly get the impression that she was very keen on him. You just don’t know what his situation was emotionally.
Then after, say, 1520 to 23, they seem to spend less time together. Possibly the death of their son was a factor in that. I mean, it’s a terrible thing. And it wasn’t like a very young baby. I mean he was six or seven. So you can imagine, not that I’m saying that losing a baby is terrible. But yeah, six or seven, it must have been particularly difficult, because you’d have thought, mostly by that age that will pass the most dangerous years thereafter.
As I say, she had another child. But then her health seems to have deteriorated, he spent more time at court. And then of course, the whole annulment issue started to raise its ugly head from sort of 1526 or 1527 onwards. The indication seems to be that neither Charles nor Mary liked Anne Boleyn at all. And, yeah, and that Mary in particular probably, it’s hardly surprising that she was going to side with Catherine.
Now, Anne Boleyn had probably been one of her own ladies or own maids of honor. So you can imagine that she wasn’t terribly pleased at the thought of her underling replacing her sister-in-law. Yeah, so you get the impression that there was a long, lingering slow decline in Mary’s health through the late 1520’s. She spent quite a lot of time going to various religious establishments, and being quite perhaps a more religious woman than her husband, and you get the impression they just grew apart.
Heather:
Yeah. And so then. So when did she die? And how did it end?
Melita:
So Catherine and Henry’s annulment finally was legislated for in England in April or May of 1533, by which time Mary was terminally ill. Again, we don’t know what she had. It was over a long period. Even from the early 1510, the late 1510. So they note tuberculosis, possibly cancer? So yeah, so Catherine was finally cast off and Anne Boleyn was proclaimed as Queen. Charles was Lord Steward. And he had some significant responsibilities around arranging and correlation, which Mary didn’t attend, probably quite apart from anything else she would, she would have been too ill by the first of June.
Charles paid her a visit in May. But he didn’t come back in June. And he wasn’t there when she died. He didn’t attend the funeral. But that was normal. Husbands didn’t attend their wives’ funerals. That was pretty standard. But he consoled himself within six weeks by marrying Katherine Willoughby, right? 14-year-old ward, who was betrothed to the young of Lincoln.
Heather:
Isn’t that convenient?
Melita:
Yeah, I know. It must have been tough for him, that one.
Heather:
Yeah.
Melita:
I mean, it’s not like I mean, many people married quite quickly, but this does seem particularly tasteless, especially since she was betrothed to his son who did in fact, die young but hadn’t died by that point.
Heather:
What did people think about it when that happened? Like was it awesome?
Melita:
Yeah, there were a couple of snarky remarks on some of the ambassador’s reports. But possibly because Mary had been away from court for so long, people didn’t really talk about it that much. And there is one quite interesting throwaway remark that it seldom seems to be picked up on. Anne Boleyn at one point, and I think it must have been about 1530 to 1531 or 32, apparently accused Charles of molesting his daughter. She doesn’t say who but of course, Katherine Willoughby would have been called Charles’s daughter because she was due to marry his son. And it seems to be more likely I mean, who knows that Katherine had been the lucky recipient of her future father-in-law’s attention rather than Charles’ own daughters. But who knows?
Heather:
He’s horrible.
Melita:
Well, we don’t know that. That’s true. Anne Boleyn said some pretty harsh things about quite a few people. She had a knack for Photoshop remarks. So she might, but it isn’t. It’s an odd thing to come up with, completely out of the blue. Yeah, so that would be my guess, that he’d already shown an interest in the girl.
Heather:
Yeah, yeah. Well, where can people learn more about Mary if they want to dig deeper into her life?
Melita:
There’s the latest biography by a lady called Sarah Bryson. There’s one. One published a few years ago, a joint biography with her sister Margaret, Queen of Scots by Maria Perry. There’s a very, very detailed Victorian one, but still very good, Mary Anne Everett Green who wrote some very good stuff. She did a lot of historical research. And it’s contained in a volume called Lives of the Princesses of England, I think. Aaron Sadler, an American academic has done an academic study of her letters, you know, brought them all together and catalog them and, very detailed study of those. There’s a biography by Steven Gunn published a couple of years ago, I think on Charles. But that’s very much about Charles and his political role. And I think Mary gets, half a dozen mentions, doesn’t talk about their relationship.
Heather:
Yeah. And of course, your Tudor Times. What’s like her legacy? Why is she worth learning about?
Melita:
Oh, I think she’s interesting, because it did show that a woman who could stand up against the convention of the time, and choose a husband, if she was prepared take a gamble and go through with it. I mean, it was a huge gamble, Henry might have taken far more drastic action than he did. Although, we have to think of Henry in his early days. See, although the…the time that Mary, married Charles.
I suppose she’s interesting, because that makes her a real person with real emotions and real feelings about her life. And it’s probably a fairly early example of people thinking that love is a good basis for marriage. You know, the convention was that you married somebody, and then you fell in love with them. And that you were supposed to, that was it. You were supposed to love your spouse, but you didn’t love your spouse until after you married them. So she’s a very early example of saying “No, actually, I’m going to marry the person I love.”
Heather:
Good honor.
Melita:
Well, yeah. So I wonder, you know, later when she’s hard up for cash, because they’re always hard up because of, I mean, in relative terms, she certainly didn’t live as a Queen Dowager. Whether occasionally when she made the visits to court she thought that she’d made the right decision. I don’t know. But especially when in the later years when Charles perhaps didn’t treat her that well. Although, as I say, we can’t know. We can only infer and I think the hasty remarriage gives an idea ‘cause she could have been an empress. And it’s what they say, love flies out the window when poverty comes in the door.
Heather:
Thank you again to Melita Thomas for taking the time to tell us about Mary, the French queen. For more information, go to Tudortimes.co.uk or see the resources available on the Englandcast site at Englandcast.com and remember to please support the Tudor planner, if you love planning and Tudors. You can get the links to that Indiegogo campaign at Englandcast.com or on the Facebook page, which is facebook.com/Englandcast. Thank you so much in advance. I’ll be back again in about two weeks. The next episode I’m going to do is on the menagerie at the tower, if you knew, there was a zoo at the Tower, right? With gifts of exotic animals from foreign dignitaries and kings, everything like that. So I’m going to do an episode on the menagerie at the TAower. Something I’ve always wanted to know about. So, there we go. Alright, thanks so much for listening. I will be back in two more weeks. Bye!
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Heather Teysko is the creator, writer, and producer of The Renaissance English History Podcast, the original Tudor history podcast, started in 2009. She's been writing about history online for over 25 years, since her first site on Colonial American history became number one in history on Yahoo in 1998. In 2019 she created Tudorcon, which is now a yearly event, in addition to writing books, and running TudorFair.com - a whimsical Tudor Merch shop.
She has been passionate about Tudor England since she first read Alison Weir's The Six Wives of Henry VIII 30 years ago, and subsequently moved to London after college to spend her time immersed in Tudor history (how exciting when she got to interview Alison for the first time!). In addition to history, she is passionate about travel, and has lived in 3 countries and 4 states (not counting her perpetual state of confusion), and her family (who help her host her YouTube channel occasionally).
