On 9 October 1514, an 18-year-old English princess married a 52-year-old French King in Abbeville, France. The bride was Mary Tudor, younger sister of Henry VIII. A renowned beauty, Mary’s red-gold hair glowed beneath a coronet of precious stones, worn long and loose as a symbol of purity. Her groom, Louis XII of France, was dressed to match, resplendent in white and gold, and hopeful that his youthful bride would provide him with the heir he so desperately needed.
This was no ordinary union; it was a cunning political move orchestrated by Henry VIII, though the real architect behind the match was the King’s advisor, Cardinal Thomas Wolsey. Although Louis XII had been married twice already, neither union had produced a living son needed to succeed him (his second wife, Anne, may have given birth in 1503, but the child did not survive). Though a popular King, and hailed as a father to the people, Louis was beyond his prime, inflicted with gout, and, bizarrely, claimed to be hexed from performing sexual acts by his first wife, Joan of France. Following Anne’s death, the need to produce an heir became paramount for the continuation of the Valois dynasty.
The youngest surviving daughter of Henry VII and Elizabeth of York, Mary Tudor had been previously betrothed to Charles V, but that engagement had been broken in favour of a more promising match with Louis. Departing from England on 2 October 1514 after spending the night at Dover Castle with her sister-in-law Catherine of Aragon, Mary allegedly struck a deal with her brother Henry as he led her down the beach: in the likely event that Louis should predecease her, she could marry whom she chose. It was with this promise that Mary set off to France, her ships packed with treasures, white palfreys, precious jewels and carriages.
When Mary arrived in her new country, the Venetian ambassador reported that she was ‘very handsome, and of sufficiently tall stature. She appears to me rather pale, though this [I] believe proceeds from the tossing of the sea and from her fright’.1 (While crossing the Channel, Mary and her attendants had been detained for several days by high winds and unruly weather.) The ambassador continued, ‘she does not seem a whit more than 16-years-old, and looks very well in the French costume. She is extremely courteous and well mannered, and has come in very sumptuous array’.
Another account described Mary as ‘handsome and well favoured, were not her eyes and eyebrows too light; for the rest it appears to me that nature optime suplevit: she is slight, rather than defective from corpulence, and conducts herself with so much grace, and has such good manners, that for her age of 18 years—and she does not look more—she is a paradise’.2
Both the princess and her ladies had dressed to impress for their arrival into Abbeville. Some of her ladies rode through the city on horseback, whilst others were drawn by carriages ‘of purple and crimson velvet’, narrowly escaping the sudden deluge of rain. Mary herself was safely perched under a white canopy, threaded throughout with bouquets of roses and lilies, and arrayed in several ‘rich trappings’, a robe of white cloth of silver, and a ‘coif blazing with jewels’.
Interestingly, among the maids-of-honour appointed to serve Mary was a mysterious “Marie Boulonne”, which may have indeed been a young Mary Boleyn.3 It is thought that Mary accompanied the Queen on the journey from England to France and that her sister, Anne, joined the royal party at a later date.
When the new Queen arrived at the Notre Dame de la Chapelle, an early 15th century church demolished during the French Revolution, she was greeted by a throng of admiring crowds. An English chronicler observed that she ‘looked more like an angel than a human creature,’ and that her French subjects ‘so gazed at their new queen’s beauty, as they could not cast their eyes from her attractive rays’.4
On the following day, the 9th of October, Louis and Mary were wed in the grand hall of the Hotel de la Gruthuse, Louis XII’s royal residence in Abbeville, where several English monarchs had been received on French soil. A splendid place for a wedding, the palace was plastered with mosaics, the ceiling gilded, the walls hung with lavish cloth of gold, and the windows painted with luminous depictions of St. Wuffran, the patron saint of Abbeville. Mary was given away by the Duke of Norfolk and the Marquis of Dorset in place of her brother, the King.
The queen, glittering in cloth of gold and a coronet of costly gems, was noted to look ‘pale’ and continued to show signs of fatigue after the tumultuous journey.5 Behind her, a retinue of noblemen followed, and in turn, Mary’s gentlewomen and maidens, all dressed in lavish brocade, came forward, creating a ‘streak of moving gold’.6 The congestion at the door was ‘very great’ until attention shifted to Louis, dressed in cloth of gold and ermine, seated in a chair near the altar. As Mary advanced toward him, ‘the King doffed his bonnet and the Queen curtseyed to the ground’ before being seated beside him under a rich canopy held by the princes of France.7
Louis’ treasurer then presented the King with a sumptuous necklace featuring ‘a great pointed diamond with a ruby almost two inches long’. After Louis placed it around Mary’s neck, the ceremony, officiated by the Bishop of Bayeux, began. Afterward, Mary made another ‘graceful curtsy’ to the King, her husband, and departed the hall to dine in her own apartments, attended to by her ladies, French officers, and the Duke of Albany.
That evening, Queen Mary again ‘arrayed herself in the French fashion’ and impressed her husband and his subjects with her graceful dancing as courtiers made merry in the hall and French and English dignitaries vied for preeminence. The court enjoyed a rich spread and made ‘good cheer’ to celebrate the royal nuptials, with Mary being served by Englishmen who, also clad in cloth of gold, knelt for the entire feast. When darkness finally fell over the palace, the Queen ‘was taken away from the entertainment by Madame [Louis’s eldest daughter, Claude of France] to go and sleep with the King’.8
The moment had arrived for Mary to fulfill a queen’s most sacred duty.
The next morning, the King appeared ‘very jovial and gay and in love by his countenance’, unwilling to be parted from his young bride for long.9 Tragically, the marriage would prove childless, and Mary’s time as Queen of France would last fewer than one hundred days. The ‘antique and debile’ King Louis XII died three months later, on New Year’s Day 1515, at the Hôtel des Tournelles. Rumours would soon abound that it was overexertion in the bedchamber that killed the King, although it most probably was a mixture of chronic illness and crippling gout.
A contemporary account recorded that the King knew he was on the verge of death and had travelled to Tournelles in search of cleaner air as ‘terrible’ weather raged over Paris. He died soon after and was succeeded by his son-in-law, Francis I of France, the husband of Claude of France.
Despite their significant age gap, Mary and Louis’ marriage had been mostly happy. Just a few days before his death, Louis had written to his brother-in-law Henry VIII in praise of his queen and extolling the benefits of married life: ‘my wife, your good sister, [has] so conducted herself toward me, and continues so to do daily, that I know not how I can sufficiently praise and express my delight in her. More and more I love, honour and hold her dear; therefore you may be certain that she is, and ever will continue to be, treated in such a manner as shall content her, and you likewise’.
Fearful that either her brother or Francis would wrest her in another political union, Mary would go on to marry the man of her choice, Charles Brandon, Duke of Suffolk, only weeks after Louis’ death.
The Marriage Tapestry
Sources
- Calendar of State Papers Relating to English Affairs in the Archives of Venice, Volume 2: 1509-1519, 508
- Ibid.
- The Life and Death of Anne Boleyn by Eric Ives
- The Lives of the Princesses of England by Mary Anne Everrett Green, pg. 41
- Mary Tudor, Queen of France as Mary Croom Brown
- Ibid.
- Ibid.
- Mary Tudor, Queen of France as Mary Croom Brown
- Ibid.
References
- Mumby, Frank Arthur; The Youth of Henry VIII, A Narrative in Contemporary Letters; page 305-306