CHAPTER 3

ARE YOU THE DAUPHIN OF FRANCE?

ONCE MARY HAD BEEN CHRISTENED, KATHERINE ENTRUSTED HER care to the staff of the royal nursery. Katherine carefully selected each of them: a lady mistress, Lady Margaret Bryan, formerly one of Katherine’s ladies-in-waiting, headed the small establishment; a wet nurse, Katherine Pole, suckled the young princess; three “rockers” took it in turn to soothe her; and a laundress performed the endless task of washing the infant’s clothes. In the inner room of her nursery suite, Mary slept in an “everyday” cradle. In the outer chamber, she received visitors in a specially constructed “cradle of estate,” draped in a quilt of ermine and framed by a canopy embossed with the royal arms.¹ Courted by princes from around the world, she was at once dependent infant and esteemed European princess.

Her father doted on her. According to Sebastian Giustiniani, one day the king showed him the Princess Mary, then two years old, in her nurse’s arms. “He drew near, knelt and kissed her hand, for that alone is kissed by any duke or noble of the land.” Henry then said proudly to the envoy, “Domine Orator, per Deum immortalem, ista puella nunquam plorat”—this child never cries—to which Giustiniani replied, “Sacred Majesty, the reason is that her destiny does not move her to tears; she will even become Queen of France.” These words pleased the king greatly.²

The twenty-five-year-old King Henry looked to hold his own against Francis I, the young new king of France, and Charles, duke of Burgundy, just sixteen, who had become king of Spain weeks before. Mary would increasingly become a pawn in their European rivalry.

Francis had triumphed in the latest conflict over Milan in Italy, and the warring kings had come to terms in the Treaty of Noyon. With neither side looking to England for an offensive alliance against the other, Thomas Wolsey, Henry’s chief minister, sought to preserve England’s status by becoming champion of peace. The Treaty of London, brokered by Wolsey in early October 1518, bound all the great powers to perpetual concord, to maintain peace and act together against any aggressor.³ Sponsored by Pope Leo X, its declared aim was a European crusade against the Ottoman Turks, but for Henry and Wolsey it was a means of countering the growing threat of France. The treaty was underpinned by an Anglo-French rapprochement that hinged on a future marriage between Mary and the French dauphin, François, then just a few months old.⁴ Although Mary was not to be delivered to France until she was sixteen and the dauphin fourteen, the betrothal sealed a new era of Anglo-French relations, which was to be celebrated the following year at a meeting of the two kings.

AT EIGHT O’CLOCK on the morning of Tuesday, October 5, 1518, Mary, just two and a half years old, was taken to her mother’s chamber at Greenwich Palace in preparation for her betrothal. There her parents, the papal legates, Cardinal Wolsey and Cardinal Lorenzo Campeggio, the queen dowager of France, and numerous French dignitaries headed by the lord admiral, Guillaume Bonnivet, gathered to receive her. As Giustiniani described it, “all the court were in such rich array that I never saw the like either here or elsewhere.”⁵ Dressed “in cloth of gold, with a cap of black velvet on her head, adorned with many jewels,” Mary was a vision of royal extravagance.⁶ When Cuthbert Tunstall, the bishop of Durham, delivered his sermon in praise of marriage, she grew restless and was picked up and “taken in arms” by her lady mistress, Margaret Bryan.⁷ Her betrothed, the six-month-old François, was spared the monotony of the ceremony, the lord admiral acting in his place.

After the vows were exchanged, Wolsey “placed on her finger a small ring in which a large diamond was set,” leaving to Bonnivet, the proxy groom, the symbolic task of slipping it down over the second joint.⁸ In spite of her young age, Mary did, it seems, know something of the meaning of the occasion. “Are you the Dauphin of France?” she was reported to have said to Bonnivet. “If you are, I wish to kiss you.”⁹ With the ceremony finally concluded, the party moved to the chapel for a celebratory Mass followed by a sumptuous banquet. The dancing continued long into the night, many hours after the young bride-to-be had been put to bed.

As a condition of the marriage alliance, the French had insisted that Mary be recognized as her father’s heir. It was the first acknowledgment of her right to the throne.¹⁰ At the time it seemed a relatively insignificant concession. Katherine was pregnant, and Henry held out great hope for the imminent birth of a son. But once again, to the “vexation of everyone,”¹¹ disappointment followed. On November 9, a month after the betrothal ceremonies, Katherine gave birth to a stillborn daughter. “Never had the kingdom desired anything so passionately as it had a prince,” Giustiniani wrote. “Perhaps had the event taken place before the conclusion of the betrothal, that event might not have come to pass; the sole fear of this kingdom, that it may pass through this marriage into the power of the French.”¹² By the beginning of 1519, Princess Mary, betrothed to the French dauphin, was the sole heir to the throne of England.