It was Shrovetide in the year 1512, and there was a new face at the Duke of Buckingham’s dinner table. Lord Thomas Howard had travelled all the way from London to visit the family at Thornbury Castle in Gloucestershire, and he was here because he wanted to marry Elizabeth Stafford, the duke’s eldest daughter.
The Howards were a family firmly on the rise again. In 1485 they had made a poor choice by fighting for the doomed King Richard III and had been stripped of their dukedom of Norfolk by the victorious Henry VII. Since then they had been doggedly clawing back royal favour until now the Earl of Surrey, this man’s father, was lord treasurer of the realm, and Thomas and his brothers were among Henry VIII’s closest companions.1 It would not be a poor match. Thomas Howard was not particularly handsome, being small, more wiry than square, but he had an air of powerful determination. He looked out at the world from shrewd black eyes, and his peers were learning that it did not do to underestimate him. But Elizabeth was already betrothed. She and young Ralph, the future Earl of Westmorland, had grown close in the two years that he had been her father’s ward, and she looked forward to marrying him later that year.2
Marriage, though, was not about emotions. The early modern aristocracy would have found our obsession with ‘the one’ unfathomable. Romantic love was even frowned upon and considered a dangerous obstruction to the things that really mattered. Girls like Elizabeth were raised to value the things that would give them the best future life and the most stability: wealth, property and position. Marriage was a business contract between two families, with financial terms quite literally drawn up in writing and signed by those who held the purse strings. Though Elizabeth’s consent to the marriage was nominally required according to Church law, her signature on the secular agreement was not. Things were arranged for women, not by them.3
Twenty years later Elizabeth’s letters reveal a forthright woman of strong character, uncompromising and sometimes fiery-tempered. In 1512, though, it was her father’s opinion that was important, and Thomas Howard would brook no opposition to his suit for Elizabeth’s hand. Immediately after his first wife’s death in the winter of 1511 he had sent word to the duke’s household, and now he was here to press his suit; ‘he would have none of my sisters’, Elizabeth later recalled, ‘but only me’.4 Howard was almost forty. Elizabeth was in her late teens.5
They may well have met before. Elizabeth’s aunts, Elizabeth and Anne, were both ladies-in-waiting to Queen Catherine of Aragon, and the duke himself was regularly at court. Though there is no evidence that Elizabeth herself was yet in service with the queen, she will have visited and could easily have been introduced to Howard on such an occasion. This might explain why his mind turned to her when he was widowed. For teenaged Elizabeth, Howard’s possessiveness was a sign of true love. Twenty years later she continued to insist that ‘he chose me for love’, proven by his refusal of her younger sisters.6 Perhaps this was the only way in which she could come to terms with losing Ralph, her original betrothed. Howard, though, was almost certainly operating from a more practical, less romantic, standpoint. The legacy of his first marriage was a row of small graves and he had no surviving children.7 He had seen first-hand the effect that this could have on a dynasty: King Henry VIII had just lost his own first son and heir, Prince Henry, after only fifty-two days, and the pressure on him and Queen Catherine was intense.8 At forty years old, Thomas Howard needed a young wife to give him a healthy male heir as quickly as possible. Elizabeth was one of the most eligible brides in England, and she came with a dowry of 2,000 marks.9 Of course he would not tell her any of this: any sensible girl would have known it already.
Howard’s forceful approach was successful. By the end of the year they were married. Since it wasn’t yet a legal requirement for churches to record marriages, we don’t know exactly when the wedding took place, only that by mid-December 1512 she was referred to as ‘Lady Howard’ in a contemporary source.10 The deed was probably done as soon as possible, because Howard knew that he was about to risk his life in the service of the realm. The king had been champing at the bit to make war on France since the moment of his accession, and finally he had what he wanted. Spain, Venice and the Pope had created an alliance, a Holy League, to put a stop to King Louis XII of France’s intrusions into Italy, and Henry had joined that League in 1511. Alongside this, he had signed a treaty with King Ferdinand of Aragon to jointly invade Gascony.11 Howard, an experienced military leader, was appointed second-in-command of the entire army. By early June of 1512 he was in San Sebastian in the north of Spain, not to return until November.12
No sooner wedded than abandoned by her new husband, Elizabeth’s introduction to married life must have been disorienting in the extreme. At least she was not alone. She later wrote that she had served Queen Catherine of Aragon for sixteen years, off and on, and this is probably when her service began.13 Though Elizabeth hadn’t yet spent much time at the royal court, it was a logical place for her to be while her husband was away fighting. Stafford women had a history of royal service. Various women from her new marital family, the Howards, were also there to keep an eye on her. Many of the queen’s women were in the same situation as Elizabeth: their courtier husbands had turned soldier with alacrity. War turned out to involve nearly as much waiting around as court service. The Holy League allies could not agree on an objective for the English army after their initial victory at Bayonne, and they were not given the food supplies or transportation promised by King Ferdinand. Forced to camp through a miserably wet summer, it was soon clear to them that the campaign was not conspicuously successful. Elizabeth’s husband, writing to the king’s advisors, warned of plague, and even mutiny.14 The wives waiting at court feared widowhood.
Those fears were not unfounded. Elizabeth’s new sister-in-law Muriel Howard, Viscountess Lisle, a courtier of many years’ standing, had already been widowed once and was now married to Sir Thomas Knyvett, one of the king’s jousting companions. Knyvett had been given command of the king’s largest ship, The Regent, under the admiralship of his friend and brother-in-law Sir Edward Howard in the naval campaign designed to distract the French from the land assault in the south. In early August 1512 he was killed in action during a skirmish near the port of Brest. One hopes that Muriel never learned just how he died. Grappling with a French ship, somehow one of the powder magazines was set alight, causing an explosion so violent that 1,600 men burned to death or drowned. Admiral Sir Edward Howard was so distressed by his friend’s death that he vowed to avenge it before he saw the king again.15 But women had no scope for such violent retaliation. Pregnant, with small children to raise, all that Muriel could do was mourn.
Four months later on a cold winter’s night, Muriel went into labour at the family’s London home, Norfolk House in Lambeth, across the river from Westminster Palace. This time something went wrong. Amid the blood and the pain, she urgently dictated her last will, all her thought for her children: she bequeathed her three sons to the king and her two daughters to the queen, ‘beseeching her grace to be a good lady to them’.16 At the funeral ten days later, the procession took a deliberate detour so that the queen and her women might pay their respects to their colleague from the windows of Greenwich Palace, which overlooked the churchyard of Muriel’s final resting place, the Greyfriars Monastery.17 For Elizabeth, dressed in black and walking in the procession as one of the chief mourners, it must have been a sobering reminder that her new married life was by no means risk-free.
If Elizabeth had hoped that her own husband’s part in the conflict was over, she was soon disappointed. The king intended to reinvigorate the campaign by joining it in person, and Thomas Howard was made Admiral in his dead brother Edward’s place. Keen to prove himself worthy of a naval command, he chafed at restrictions laid on him and protested that he could think of no better service he could offer, unless the Scots or the Danes invaded.18 Only a few months later he must have rued his apparent talent for prophecy. By June 1513 Henry VIII was in France, and he had left Queen Catherine as regent in England in his stead. On 12 August a Scottish herald delivered a formal ‘defiance’ to Henry VIII: King James was going to invade.19
Elizabeth will have known that it was a woman’s task to defend her husband’s property in times of conflict, but she may not have seen this first-hand. Now she had her chance. Though many months pregnant once again, Queen Catherine barely broke a sweat. Rather than let the Privy Council take the lead, she immediately took stock of supplies and signed warrants for armour, weapons and ordnance.20 Thomas Howard sailed with part of the fleet to join his father on the Scottish border. Queen Catherine and – presumably – some of her female attendants prepared to journey northwards, but had only made it as far as Buckingham when news reached them of the decisive battle at Flodden.21 Elizabeth’s husband was covered in glory: according to some sources, it was he who had proposed the strategy to outflank the Scottish king, and it was certainly he who led the vanguard.22 As was often the case for women, Elizabeth benefited from her husband’s heroism. The queen had been careful to attribute the victory at Flodden to God, aware that the king had expected to be at the centre of any military glory and would not enjoy ceding that place to his wife. Inevitably, though, there was no getting away from the fact that she and the Howards had won a far bigger victory than the army in France. With the Scottish king dead and only his baby son on the throne, the threat from the north was effectively neutralised for a generation.
By February 1514 the survivors from both fronts were home. On Candlemas Day, in the Archbishop of Canterbury’s red-brick palace at Lambeth, the leaders had their reward. Amid a crowd of nobles in their scarlet robes of estate, the queen and her ladies looking on, Elizabeth’s father-in-law was elevated from the earldom of Surrey to the dukedom of Norfolk, the title that the family had lost back at Bosworth in 1485. In an attempt to equalise the two conflicts, the king made his friend and commander in France, Charles Brandon, Duke of Suffolk. To date, Elizabeth’s own father, the Duke of Buckingham, had been the only duke in England: now there were three, and the balance of power would shift accordingly.
The ceremony wasn’t finished. Elizabeth’s own husband, Thomas Howard, stepped up and knelt in front of the king in his turn, to be created Earl of Surrey.23 The glory was his, but Elizabeth was affected too. No longer Lady Howard, she was now the Countess of Surrey, and consequently higher in every procession, every list, every banquet. Elizabeth’s star was firmly on the rise.
Wars and treaties were not only for boys with toys. Jane Vaux, Lady Guildford had seen their impact on women too, many times, for Jane was now past fifty. She had watched her own French mother flee into exile with Queen Margaret of Anjou, wife of Henry VI, as a direct result of war.24 A trusted royal confidante and chaperone in her turn, she had escorted Princess Margaret to Scotland to marry King James IV in 1503. Beset by financial troubles after the death of her husband in 1506, Jane had retired from court service, and the generous bequests of her late friend – perhaps lover – Sir Thomas Brandon in 1510 had meant she could live quietly at Blackfriars.25 She had raised her children and stepchildren to become courtiers in their turn: her son Henry and stepson Edward had just been at the king’s side on the battlefield in France.
Jane might have thought that her days of formal service were over, but fate and the king decreed otherwise. This war had shifted Europe’s diplomatic landscape. By 1514 ties to Spain had weakened and Charles, Prince of Castile had broken his betrothal to Jane’s former charge, the king’s younger sister Mary. This wasn’t as inconvenient for England as it appeared, though, since now the peace treaty with France could be sealed in the most time-honoured fashion: eighteen-year-old Mary would marry the ageing French king, Louis XII. Princesses crossing borders to marry always took a complement of ladies-in-waiting with them, and it was usual for this to include an older woman, a mother-figure in the guise of governess. Jane was half French, and probably spoke the language. Either Mary asked, or the king had the thought by himself: Jane, Mary’s ‘mother Guildford’, was told to leave her peaceful retirement and return to service.
Naturally, Mary already had her own household as a princess of England, and one might assume that sending her existing attendants to France with her was the easiest and most obvious course of action. This, though, was rarely what happened. A queen’s household should reflect her new status, not her former position; it should include those of appropriate rank and experience, since this was one way in which the value placed on a diplomatic marriage was communicated. The nature of the surviving records makes it difficult to be sure who had been in Mary’s service between 1509 and 1514, since there aren’t any accounts for Mary’s own establishment, but other records do provide some insight. Many of the women in Mary’s service in 1509 had previously been her mother’s ladies-in-waiting, and a number of them had continued to receive regular wage payments from Henry VIII: Elizabeth Catesby, Elizabeth Burton and Elizabeth Saxby, for instance.26 It has sometimes been assumed that these women were Queen Catherine of Aragon’s ‘maids of honour’ – young, adolescent women at court to finish their education and gain a degree of social polish – largely because the payments they received were the same as the salary of a maid of honour later on in the reign.27 But the position of maid of honour doesn’t seem to have existed in any formal sense yet, and even if it had they would have been paid by the queen, not the king, so these women must have belonged to Mary and not to the queen.28 Most of them were also too old and too married to have been maids of honour in any case.29 Their age and status is probably why they were not considered suitable to accompany Mary to France. In September 1514, a month before Mary’s departure, the king granted them annuities – pensioned them off – ‘for service to the late Queen Elizabeth of York, and to Mary Tudor’.30 It was time for a changing of the guard.
It must have been stressful for Mary to start this new phase of her life with a new complement of ladies around her, particularly since she was not permitted to keep everybody that she wanted. The final choice was probably made collectively. While the king had the power of veto, it’s reasonable to think that he was guided by Mary herself, perhaps also by the queen, and by those of the delegation seeking to place their own relatives in influential positions. A number of Mary’s new companions were relatives of the Grey family, Marquesses of Dorset, who were prominent in her escort, and young Mistress Boleyn – probably Mary – was the daughter of the king’s favourite diplomat, Sir Thomas Boleyn.31 Mary’s fiancé the French king also made his views felt. There was particularly heated debate about the inclusion – or rather, exclusion – of one of Mary’s existing women: Jeanne Popincourt, a Frenchwoman, who had been in service with the English royal household since 1498, hired to teach the princesses French. From 1504 she was with Princess Mary exclusively, and from 1509 was paid her wages by the king along with the rest of Mary’s women.32 As a native speaker Jeanne was a natural choice for the trip to France, and Mary evidently wanted her there, since the Earl of Worcester wrote that Mary ‘loved and trusted her above all the gentlewomen that she had about her’.33 In 1513, though, Jeanne had begun a romantic affair with the Duke of Longueville while he was awaiting ransom in England as a result of the French war. The French king was horrified at the thought of a woman of such ‘evil life’ serving his new wife and reportedly said that he ‘would she were burnt’ rather than allow it. Mary had no choice but to give in.34
At least she had ‘mother Guildford’, who spent September sorting out the princess’s wardrobe ahead of the journey.35 The two surviving lists suggest that Mary also kept two of her chamberers, Anne Jerningham and either Alice Denys or Jane Barnes.36 After elaborate preparations on both sides of the Channel, Mary and her party crossed to France at the unholy hour of four in the morning on 2 October 1514. They were formally received by King Louis in Abbeville on 8 October, and the marriage took place there the next day. That night it was, allegedly, consummated, despite the ill-health of the groom.37
The next morning, shock, for both Mary and Lady Jane. Without warning, King Louis peremptorily dismissed all of his new wife’s male English household, plus Jane and some of the other women, without discussion or explanation. This was highly irregular. Louis himself had approved the list of household staff intended to remain in France with Mary, and it was not a vast number by comparison with other queens. Why put everybody through those delicate negotiations if he intended to dismiss them immediately anyway?
The dispute quickly became focused on Jane. Mary was distraught at the loss of her ‘mother Guildford’, but in response to the English ambassador’s entreaties King Louis claimed that Jane was interfering: ‘She began to take upon her not only to rule the Queen, but also that she [Mary] should not come to him but she [Jane] should be with her; nor that no lady nor lord should speak with her [Mary] but she should hear it and begin to set a murmur and banding among ladies of the court.’ If Mary needed counsel, he retorted, he could give it to her himself. He would not have either of them ruled by a woman.38
Louis’ declaration says more about the political situation in his court and the perceived power of ladies-in-waiting to affect that than it does about Jane’s behaviour. If Jane had been continually at Mary’s side, she was simply doing her job. Everybody knew that Mary faced opposition at the French court. The dauphin Francis, heir to the throne, was the king’s son-in-law and would therefore be supplanted if the king had his own son with Mary. His faction was so anxious over the prospect that they set women to spy; Francis’ wife Claude was to remain outside Mary’s chamber during the day, and Madame d’Aumont, a lady-in-waiting, was to sleep there at night.39 Small wonder that Mary wanted the advice of someone like Jane who knew the French court, who spoke the language and who had English interests at heart, and small wonder that King Henry and his advisors had wanted her to have it.
Ironically, it was in King Louis’ best interests for Mary to withstand the plotting of the dauphin’s faction, but his fears about English interference were greater. Diplomatic marriages were as much about suspicion and distrust as they were about union. This was true on the English side as well. King Henry had begun his reign with a council made up of many of his father’s advisors. By 1514 some of these were still on the roster, but other, newer ministers had since come to the fore, and among these was Thomas Wolsey. Now in his mid-forties, Wolsey was a large, meaty man with a keen eye, considerable administrative ability and a gift for networking. He’d risen through the ranks of the clergy to become royal chaplain, almoner and now cardinal, and this was matched by secular promotion as diplomat, royal councillor and, effectively, chief minister. There were no pies in which Wolsey did not have a finger, and few aristocrats who did not resent this. The son of a butcher, they felt, should never have risen so high.
Princess Mary fully understood these undercurrents and how to manipulate them. She wrote to both Cardinal Wolsey and to her brother King Henry asking them to secure ‘mother Guildford’s’ return, and she blamed the Duke of Norfolk, the leader of the delegation to France, for allowing this to happen and for not acting in her interests: ‘My lord of Norfolk hath neither dealt best with me nor yet with her at this time.’40 She openly wished that Wolsey had been sent in his place. Wolsey and Norfolk were not on the best of terms and others there also saw this as a plot engineered by Norfolk to separate Mary from her political allegiances. If the match failed, Wolsey, as its architect, would be blamed, and this could serve Norfolk.41 Such were the wheels within wheels of European court politics, all expressed through the treatment of one single lady-in-waiting: Lady Jane, ‘mother Guildford’.
Wolsey immediately appreciated the gravity of the situation. He told Jane to stay where she was in Boulogne, and he wrote to the French king. He told Louis in no uncertain terms that ‘you should for some time retain her in the queen’s service and not so suddenly discharge her; for the king took her out of a solitary place, which she had meant never to leave, that she might go in the queen’s service, and you will find her wise and discreet, whatsoever report may have been made to the contrary’.42 It was rude, he implied, for the French king to so disregard the choice of the English king here, and discommode a woman who had come out of retirement to be of service. But Louis remained immovable. Jane was not permitted to return. Mary was forced to give way with as good grace as she could muster.
Missing from the sources are Jane’s own feelings on the matter. We can’t be sure that she had ever really wanted to re-enter royal service and go to France, but surely she cannot have been happy to be so summarily dismissed and to leave her charge alone to face the ravening she-wolves of the French court. The near-contemporary chronicler Edward Hall, indeed, tells us that some of the English women dismissed were so upset that ‘some died by the way returning, and some fell mad’.43 Jane was, at least, well rewarded. Mary had spent 600 French crowns on jewellery for the women that Louis had discharged, and she also asked Wolsey to ‘be good lord’ to Jane, which meant financial recompense.44 Sure enough, on 21 November she was granted an annuity of £20, and in June the following year £40, ‘for her services to the late King and Queen, and to Mary queen of the French and Margaret queen of Scots’.45 She would not suffer for her service to the Tudors.
Jane’s experience of suspicion, distrust and political faction in France was not unique to the French court. María de Salinas would have recognised it in England too, and not only from the English. Luis Caroz de Villaragut had been King Ferdinand of Aragon’s ambassador in England since 1509, and he must have known María well. There were so few Spaniards left in the queen’s household that one would have thought they would naturally gravitate towards one another, and that Spanish ambassadors would have greeted their compatriots with pleasure. Not so. In December 1514, Caroz wrote to an Aragonese official complaining – not for the first time – that he couldn’t get a decent foothold within Queen Catherine’s household, that she wouldn’t listen to him, and that she was therefore not aiding the Spanish cause. He was treated, he claimed, ‘like a bull, at whom everyone throws darts’.46
One of the people he blamed for this was María. Hers was ‘the worst influence on the Queen’, and the queen loved her ‘more than any other mortal’. This on its own would have been an issue if María blocked his access to the queen, but her connections made it worse; Caroz wrote that ‘by means of Juan Adurza and Doña María de Salinas, Juan Manuel is able to dictate to the Queen of England how she must behave’.47
Spain, too, had its factions, and they had seeped beyond its borders. Like everybody else, Caroz understood that neither marriage nor distance lessened a woman’s ties to her natal family, and the activities of certain of María’s family members were not to the taste of the Spanish Crown. Her immediate family, the Salinas, were not the problem. They remained in service with Queen Juana of Castile and with King Ferdinand of Aragon. María’s cousin Juan de Adurza, though, was a figure of suspicion.48 The Adurza family also came from Vitoria, and were merchants and financiers like the Salinas. The relationship between the two families was well known; Juan Martínez de Adurza, a well-respected merchant and citizen, was in charge of managing María’s own investments back home.49 Around the same time as María left for England in 1501, her cousin Juan de Adurza had moved to the Low Countries, to operate as a financial reference point for Spanish merchant families running trading businesses.50 While there he had fallen in with Juan Manuel, whom we have met before. The brother of Catherine of Aragon’s former governess Doña Elvira Manuel and advisor first to Philip of Burgundy and after his death to his son Charles, Prince of Castile, he had long been on King Ferdinand’s list of unwanted persons because he encouraged the Burgundian dukes in their aspirations for the Castilian crown.51 Through his sister, Elvira, he had once manipulated Catherine of Aragon into declaring support for Philip of Burgundy against the interests of her father King Ferdinand, causing a diplomatic crisis and damaging her own situation in England.
Eight years on, times had changed, but Caroz was clearly worried that this could happen again and that María was now Manuel’s mouthpiece in Queen Catherine’s household. In 1514 Prince Charles of Castile was fourteen years old and starting to choose his own advisors, and his own opinions. King Ferdinand naturally hoped to take the boy under his wing and inculcate a pro-Spanish, pro-Aragonese attitude, but there were others around Charles with a different agenda, and one of these was Juan Manuel. Now openly anti-Aragonese, Manuel was both hated and feared by King Ferdinand, who had spent much of 1513 and 1514 looking for legitimate ways to have him extradited to Castile and imprisoned.52 It was Caroz’s job in England to engender good relations between Henry VIII and King Ferdinand, but Henry’s recent alliance with France was not good news for Spain. Naturally, he had an eye out for anybody who might be poisoning the English king against the Spanish.
There’s no direct evidence that María was doing any such thing. If she were indeed in contact with her cousin Adurza, there is nothing to show that he and Manuel were explicitly or deliberately using her to influence the queen of England, nor that she was consciously complicit in such an enterprise. That Caroz thought it to be true, though, shows that this perception of the power of women to influence monarchs behind the scenes was a Europe-wide phenomenon: ladies-in-waiting were not considered mere decorative extras. Caroz was also worried that ‘the few Spaniards who are still in her [Queen Catherine’s] household prefer to be friends of the English, and neglect their duties as subjects of the King of Spain’.53 But María’s and the other Spaniards’ survival in England depended on their relationships here. This was a loyalty tug-of-war that they were never going to be able to win.
Catherine of Aragon herself helped to cement the impression of María as someone of consequence when she wrote to her father at the end of 1515 asking him to aid María as one who had ‘faithfully served her, and who has always comforted her in her hours of trial’.54 Though she didn’t say what María needed from him, later events make it fairly certain that this was to do with María’s next adventure. She needed her legacy from the late Queen Isabella, her dowry money, because she was finally and belatedly going to get married.
We don’t know why it hadn’t happened sooner. María’s surviving letters don’t reach beyond 1509; there’s no way to tell whether her family had continued to try to arrange a Spanish match for her after this time, or whether they and she had simply accepted that she would remain in England indefinitely. Marriages could certainly take time to enact. María’s brother-in-law Ochoa de Landa had been trying to get her younger sister Inés married since at least 1508, and had only succeeded in 1513.55 How had María felt, hearing about the endless negotiations and eventual success from a distance? By 1513 she was about thirty years old, well beyond the age at which most ladies-in-waiting were married. She must have watched most of her peers at court fret over the safety of their husbands in the conflicts with France and Scotland and felt both thankful and self-conscious about the stark void between their lives and hers. She must, too, have wondered what on earth her future might look like without a husband and children; there was not much scope for single noblewomen who were not widows.
The queen’s letter, though, suggests that by the winter of 1515 the winds of change were blowing. Not much is known about María’s intended husband. His name was William, Baron Willoughby of Eresby. He and María were of an age, but he had already been married and widowed once and had no surviving children. Like many nobles, he had fought in the war with France over the last couple of years, but he wasn’t one of the king’s especial friends, perhaps because he did not generally take part in jousts or other celebrations in London. His life revolved primarily around his estates and networks in Lincolnshire and East Anglia, where he seems to have been well liked and respected.56 María, as we know, had her priorities firmly in order where marriage was concerned, and must have felt that this was a match of sufficient financial and social status to guarantee her the security and stability that she needed as a woman in the sixteenth century. In turn, her court networks would be useful to him.
Their marriage took a little time to arrange, perhaps because Catherine of Aragon was pregnant once again and went into confinement in January 1516. Since that first terrifying experience of premature stillbirth in January 1510 – dreadful for both the queen and for María, who was almost certainly one of the three people to witness it – they and the rest of the queen’s women had become unhappy experts in matters of early pregnancy and its loss. By this point Catherine had carried and lost at least five children, and the anxiety surrounding each pregnancy must have been almost intolerable.57 Reaching the stage of confinement was itself a cause for celebration, but everybody was well aware that things could still go horribly awry. This birth, though, was blessedly straightforward. Queen and court were at Greenwich, and a healthy baby girl, Princess Mary, made her appearance at four in the morning on Monday, 18 February 1516.58
María was no doubt engaged in helping to care for the queen around this time, and this might have delayed her marriage, particularly if she needed Catherine to advocate with the Spanish royal treasury for her. There was, too, another equally pressing question about María’s future. If she were going to marry an Englishman, it was tantamount to admitting that she was never going back home to Spain. This was not a small thing to come to terms with. Almost all of the other Spanish women who had come to England with them in 1501 had since returned home and married there. Even now, in late May 1516, French lady-in-waiting Jeanne Popincourt – she of ‘evil life’ whom King Louis had refused to allow in his wife’s household – returned home with a handsome parting gift of £100.59
At some stage in early 1516, though, María paid a fee and swore an oath of allegiance, and on 29 May she received letters patent – signed by, or on behalf of, the king – declaring her official denization in England.60 This was something akin to the status of permanent residency today, and it meant that she was not quite an English subject, and not considered naturalised English, but likewise no longer officially an ‘alien’ – a foreigner – in the eyes of the law. This was necessary in order for her to marry an Englishman. She now had rights that foreigners did not under English law, including the right to hold land, which she would need in order to survive if she were widowed.
This secured, the wedding could go ahead. The match was sponsored by the monarchs; Queen Catherine gave María a dowry of 1,100 marks, and Henry VIII granted the pair the manors of Grimsthorpe, Southorpe and Edenham in Lincolnshire.61 The king himself attended their wedding on 5 June 1516, which makes it likely that the queen was there too.62 Married at long last, María’s whole identity underwent a nominal shift. No longer María de Salinas, Spaniard, she was now Mary, Lady Willoughby, English wife. María’s future finally seemed secure.