Mary Rose by David Loades

Author:David Loades [Loades, David]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Amberley Publishing
Published: 2012-06-18T00:00:00+00:00

6

MARY, SUFFOLK & THE KING

Suffolk’s marriage to Mary brought about significant changes in his life. Any child born to the couple would have a claim to the throne, and that inevitably enhanced his status. It also carried with it the automatic right to be housed in the court, wherever that was located, including Henry’s temporary palace at the Field of Cloth of Gold. 1 However, there were disadvantages in being consistently outshone by his wife. Technically, she needed his authorisation to dispose of her goods, but in their joint agreement with the King, it was her name which appeared first, and her seal was twice the size of his. When her jointure was determined by Act of Parliament, it included not only all of the de la Pole manors which had been granted to Suffolk, but also a number which he held only in reversion. 2 Between 1515 and 1519 his landed income was around £3,000 a year, but he lost the lands of the Lisle wardship by 1519, and those of Corbet and Sayle in 1522, reducing his income by about half. Of course he also enjoyed the income from his various offices, but this is hard to calculate and would not have been as much as £1,500. His financial affairs were complicated by the fact that he borrowed £12,000 from the Crown in 1515 and 1516. For this he managed to secure the backing of Italian bankers on the strength of his royal connections, and he seems to have used those connections to ensure that he was not pressed for repayment. He stalled on other creditors, and between 1513 and 1523 borrowed an additional £3,000 from the revenues of North Wales, to which he had access by virtue of his offices. From all this it appears that Suffolk was living beyond his means, or would have been if it had not been for the £4,000 a year which derived from Mary’s dower lands in France, and the fact that her repayments to the King were not strictly enforced either. For these and other reasons, the Duke felt himself deeply indebted to the King of France, and consistently argued for the meeting between the monarchs which came to fruition in 1520. 3 This was all very well when relations between them were good, but when they became strained in 1516 and 1517, Suffolk became something of an embarrassment.

Mary kept her own establishment, complete with ladies and gentlewomen of the Privy Chamber, and various chamber servants to the number of about 100, which must have absorbed a fair amount of her income, but rather surprisingly only a handful of them appear to have been French. One who was was Martin Dupin, who had been an English denizen from 1512, and who appears to have been a double agent. In 1515 he was in Suffolk’s service in Paris, ostensibly buying wines for Wolsey, but in 1517 he was in receipt of a French pension of 300 crowns a year for some

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