Abstract
This chapter examines Jean de Préchac’s 1677 novel, La princesse d’Angleterre, ou La duchesse-reyne, a novel that perpetuated the love story of Mary Tudor and Charles Brandon and helped to distort the facts of their courtship and marriage into the myth that it has become. Préchac’s novel, although only printed in France once and in England twice, was the version of Mary’s mythologized past that was told in the seventeenth century. It demonstrates that Mary remained a popular female figure in both France and England, and the numerous historical and literary sources published about her, both before and after Préchac’s novel, show the popularity and relatability of her love story with Brandon.
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Notes
- 1.
Jean de Préchac, La princesse d’Angleterre, ou La duchesse-reyne (Paris: Estienne Loyson, 1677).
- 2.
Erin A. Sadlack, The French Queen’s Letters: Mary Tudor Brandon and the Politics of Marriage in Sixteenth-Century Europe (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 27.
- 3.
Sadlack, The French Queen’s Letters, 50.
- 4.
Letter from Brandon to Wolsey dated 3 February 1515. Letters and Papers, Foreign and Domestic, Henry VIII, Vol. 2, 1515–1518, ed. J.S. Brewer (London, 1864), entry 106.
- 5.
See British Library, MS Cotton Caligula D.VI, fol. 255r-156v and British Library, MS Cotton Caligula D.VI, fol. 253r-254v for letters written by Mary to Henry on her potential marriage of her choosing after the death of Louis. See also Sadlack, The French Queen’s Letters, 91–117.
- 6.
Sadlack, The French Queen’s Letters, 2, 13.
- 7.
Walter C. Richardson’s biography of Mary argues that she “has never been properly assessed” as a typical Renaissance princess, yet at the same time denies her any dynastic importance. Richardson, Mary Tudor: The White Queen (London: Peter Owen, 1970), vii.
- 8.
Sadlack, The French Queen’s Letters, 1–3, 13, 15, 91, 96–97, 119–120, 160.
- 9.
Sadlack, The French Queen’s Letters, 10, 91.
- 10.
Sadlack, The French Queen’s Letters, 160.
- 11.
Sadlack, The French Queen’s Letters, 160.
- 12.
Sadlack, The French Queen’s Letters, 160. David Loades, Mary Rose: Tudor princess, Queen of France, the extraordinary life of Henry VIII’s sister (Stroud: Amberley, 2014), 13. Loades notes that the “real woman has been largely lost sight of among these stories and legends.”
- 13.
François Gevrey, Contes Moins Contes que les autres: Précédés de L’illustre Parisienne (Paris: Société des Textes Français Modernes, 2012), 5. Lewis C. Seifert, “Jean de Préchac,” in The Oxford Companion to Fairy Tales: The Western fairy tale tradition from medieval to modern, ed. Jack Zipes (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 400.
- 14.
- 15.
Patricia Meyer Spacks, Imagining a Self: Autobiography and Novel in Eighteenth-Century England (Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press, 1976); Michelle M. Dowd and Julia A. Eckerle, Genre and Women’s Life Writing in Early Modern England (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007); Felicity A. Nussbaum, The Autobiographical Subject: Gender and Ideology in Eighteenth-Century England (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989); Sybil Oldfield, Collective Biography in Britain, 1550–1900: A Select Annotated Bibliography (London: Mansell, 1999).
- 16.
Jean de Préchac, The English Princess, or the Dutchess-Queen. A Relation of English and French Adventures. A Novel. In Two Parts (London: Printed for Will. Cademan and Simon Neale, 1678).
- 17.
Préchac, The Illustrious Lovers, or Princely Adventures in the Courts of England and France. Containing Sundry transactions relating to the love intrigues, noble enterprises, and gallantry: being an historical account of the famous loves of Mary sometimes Queen of France (daughter to Henry the 7th) and Charles Brandon the renown’d Duke of Suffolk: discovering the glory and grandeur of both nations. Written original in French, and now done into English (London: Printed for William Whitwood, 1686).
- 18.
This printing includes both parts of the novel and the postscript.
- 19.
All quotations from Préchac’s novel come from the 1678 English translation. Page numbers for quotations will be noted within parenthetical references after each quote.
- 20.
Secret love children of royal birth were also frequent tropes used in fictional portrayals of Queen Elizabeth I. Michael Dobson and Nicola J. Watson, England’s Elizabeth: An Afterlife in Fame and Fantasy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 26–27.
- 21.
Sadlack, The French Queen’s Letters, 91–117. Sadlack has demonstrated how Mary crafted letters to both Wolsey and Henry that show her political awareness of her marital situation, her know-how to manipulate her brother into forgiveness for marrying without his permission, and her recognition of her value as a queen dowager of France.
- 22.
NA SP 1/10/79-80. Reprinted in Sadlack, The French Queen’s Letters, 182–184.
- 23.
Sadlack, The French Queen’s Letters, 114.
- 24.
Sadlack, The French Queen’s Letters, 113.
- 25.
Letters and Papers, Foreign and Domestic, Henry VIII, Vol. 1, 1509–1515, ed. J.S. Brewer (London: 1920), entry 1050.
- 26.
See Sadlack, The French Queen’s Letters, 112. British Library, Cotton Vespasian F.XIII, fol. 80r.
- 27.
Pietro Carmeliano, Hoc presenti libello…Honorifica gesta solemnes cerimonie et triumphi…Pro sponsalibus matrimonio inter prefatum illustrissimum principem Karolum, et illustrissimam ac nobilissimam principem Dominam Mariam (London, 1508).
- 28.
Bodleian Library, Douce MS 198, fols. 145–57. See James Gairdner’s introduction to “the Spousells” for print history. Gairdner, “Spousells of Princess Mary,” in The Camden Miscellany. Vol. 9 (New York: Johnson Reprints, 1895). See Letters and Papers, Vol. 1, entry 6 for confirmation that Ferdinand received a copy of Carmeliano’s poem, which he ordered to be translated into Castilian.
- 29.
Sadlack, The French Queen’s Letters, 30.
- 30.
Mary’s presentation copy is British Library, Cotton Vespasian B.II. Charles Read Baskerville, ed., Pierre Gringore’s Pageants for the Entry of Mary Tudor into Paris (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1934). Cythia Brown, ed., Les entrées royales à Paris de Maria d’Angleterre et Claude de France (Geneva: Librairie Droz, 2005).
- 31.
Richardson, Mary Tudor, 119. Steven Gunn, Charles Brandon: Henry VIII’s Closest Friend (Stroud: Amberley 1988, 2015, 2016), 34–35.
- 32.
Guillaume Crétin, Les poesies de Guillaume Crétin (Paris, 1723), 191–198.
- 33.
Jean Bouchet, Epistres Morales et Familieres du Traverseur (Poitiers, 1545), letter 14.
- 34.
Michael Drayton, Englands Heroical Epistles (London: Printed by I.R. for N. Ling, 1597), fol. 61v–65v.
- 35.
Drayton, Englands Heroical Epistles, fol. 66r to 69v.
- 36.
Loades, Mary Rose, 13.
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———. The English Princess, or the Dutchess-Queen. A Relation of English and French Adventures. A Novel. In Two Parts. London: Printed for Will. Cademan and Simon Neale, 1678.
———. The Illustrious Lovers, or Princely Adventures in the Courts of England and France. Containing Sundry transactions relating to the love intrigues, noble enterprises, and gallantry: being an historical account of the famous loves of Mary sometimes Queen of France (daughter to Henry the 7th) and Charles Brandon the renown’d Duke of Suffolk: discovering the glory and grandeur of both nations. Written original in French, and now done into English. London: Printed for William Whitwood, 1686.
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Seifert, Lewis C. “Jean de Préchac.” In The Oxford Companion to Fairy Tales: The Western fairy tale tradition from medieval to modern, edited by Jack Zipes, 400. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000.
Spacks, Patricia Meyer. Imagining a Self: Autobiography and Novel in Eighteenth-Century England. Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press, 1976.
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Schutte, V. (2019). Princess, Duchess, Queen: Mary Tudor As Represented in a Seventeenth-Century French Love Story. In: Paranque, E. (eds) Remembering Queens and Kings of Early Modern England and France. Queenship and Power. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-22344-1_3
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