at Abbeville on the 9th of October. The bridegroom was a broken man of fifty-two; the bride a beautiful, well-educated and charming girl of eighteen, whose heart was already engaged to Charles Brandon, duke of Suffolk, her future husband. The political marriage was, however, no long one. Mary was crowned queen of France on the 5th of November 1514; on the 1st of January following King Louis died. Mary had only been induced to consent to the marriage with Louis by the promise that, on his death, she should be allowed to marry the man of her choice. But there was danger that the agreement would not be kept. In France the dukes of Lorraine and Savoy were mentioned as possible suitors, and meanwhile the new king, Francis I., was making advances to her, and only desisted when she confessed to him her previous attachment to Suffolk. The duke himself was at the head of the embassy which came from England to congratulate the new king, and to the detriment of his political mission he used the opportunity to win the hand of the queen. Francis good-naturedly promised to use his influence in his favour; Henry VIII. himself was not averse to the match, but Mary feared the opposition of the lords of the council, and, in spite of Suffolk’s promise to the king not to take any steps in the matter until after his return, she persuaded him to marry her secretly before he left Paris. On their return to England in April, Suffolk was for a while in serious danger from the king’s indignation, but was ultimately pardoned through Wolsey’s intercession, on payment of a heavy fine and the surrender of all the queen’s jewels and plate. The marriage was publicly solemnized at Greenwich on the 13th of May 1515. Suffolk had been already twice married, and his first wife was still alive. He thought it necessary later on (1528) to obtain a bull from Pope Clement VII. declaring his marriage with his first wife invalid and his union with Mary therefore canonical. Mary’s life after this was comparatively uneventful. She lived mainly in the retirement of the country, but shared from time to time in the festivities of the court, and was present at the Field of the Cloth of Gold. She died on the 24th of June 1533. By the duke of Suffolk she had three children: Henry, born on the 11th of March 1516, created earl of Lincoln (1525), who died young; Frances, born on the 16th of July 1517, the wife of Henry Grey, marquess of Northampton, and mother of Lady Jane Grey (q.v.); and Eleanor.
See Lettres de Louis XII. et du cardinal Géorges d’Amboise (Brussels, 1712); Letters and Papers of Henry VIII. (Cal. State Pap.); M. A. E. Green, Lives of the Princesses of England (vol. v., 1849–1855); Life by James Gairdner in Dict. Nat. Biog.
MARY OF LORRAINE (1515–1560), generally known as Mary of Guise, queen of James V. and afterwards regent of Scotland, was born at Bar on the 22nd of November 1515. She was the eldest child of Claude of Guise and Antoinette of Bourbon, and married in 1534 Louis II. of Orleans, duke of Longueville, to whom in 1535 she bore a son, Francis (d. 1551). The duke died in June 1537, and Mary was sought in marriage by James V., whose wife Magdalene died in July, and by Henry VIII. after the death of Jane Seymour. Henry persisted in his offers after the announcement of her betrothal to James V. Mary, who was made by adoption a daughter of France, received a papal dispensation for her marriage with James, which was celebrated by proxy in Paris (May 1538) and at St Andrews on her arrival in Scotland. Her two sons, James (b. May 1540) and Robert or Arthur (b. April 1541), died within a few days of one another in April 1541, and her husband died in December 1542, within a week of the birth of his daughter and heiress, Mary, Queen of Scots. Cardinal David Beton, the head of the French and Catholic party and therefore Mary of Lorraine’s friend and ally, produced a will of the late king in which the primacy in the regency was assigned to himself. John Knox accused the queen of undue intimacy with Beton, and a popular report of a similar nature, probably unfounded, was revived in 1543 by Sir Ralph Sadler, the English envoy. Beton was arrested and the regency fell to the heir presumptive James, earl of Arran, whose inclinations were towards England and the Protestant party, and who hoped to secure the hand of the infant princess for his own son. Mary of Lorraine was approached by the English commissioner, Sir Ralph Sadler, to induce her to further her daughter’s marriage contract with Edward VI. She informed Sadler that Arran had asked her whether Henry had made propositions of marriage to herself, and that she had stated that “if Henry should mind or offer her such an honour she must account herself much bounden.” Sadler further learnt that she was “singularly well affected to Henry’s desires.” The marriage treaty between Mary, not then one year old, and Edward VI. was signed on the 1st of July at Greenwich, and guaranteed that Mary should be placed in Henry’s keeping when she was ten years old. The queen dowager and her daughter were carefully watched at Linlithgow, but on the 23rd of July 1543 they escaped, with the help of Cardinal Beton, to the safer walls of Stirling castle. After the queen’s coronation in September Mary of Lorraine was made principal member of the council appointed to direct the affairs of the kingdom. She was constantly in communication with her kinsmen in France, and was already planning to secure for her daughter a French alliance, which was opposed on different grounds by all her advisers. She made fresh alliances with the earl of Angus and Sir George Douglas, and in 1544 she made a premature attempt to seize the regency; but a reconciliation with Arran was brought about by Cardinal Beton. The assassination of Beton left her the cleverest politician in Scotland. The English invasions of 1547, undertaken with a view to enforcing the English marriage, gave Mary the desired pretext for a French alliance. In June 1548 a French fleet, with provisions and 5000 soldiers on board, under the command of André de Montalembert, seigneur d’Essé, landed at Leith to reinforce the Scots army, and laid siege to Haddington, then in the hands of the English. The Scottish parliament agreed to the marriage of the young queen with the dauphin of France, and, on the plea of securing her safety from English designs, she set sail from Dumbarton in August 1548 to complete her education at the French court.
Mary of Lorraine now gave her energies to the expulsion of the English and to the difficult task of keeping the peace between the Scots and their French auxiliaries. In September 1550 she visited France and obtained from Henry II. the confirmation of the dukedom and revenues of Châtelherault for the earl of Arran, in the hope of inducing him to resign the regency. On her way back to Scotland she was driven by storms to Portsmouth harbour and paid a friendly visit to Edward VI. Arran refused, however, to relinquish the regency until April 1554, when he resigned after receiving an assurance of his rights to the succession. The new regent had to deal with an empty exchequer and with a strong opposition to her daughter’s marriage with the dauphin. The gift of high offices of state to Frenchmen lent to the Protestant opposition the aspect of a national resistance to foreign domination. The hostility of Arran and his brother Archbishop Hamilton forced Mary into friendly relations with the lords who favoured the Protestant party. Soon after her marriage miners had been brought from Lorraine to dig for gold at Crawford Moor, and she now carried on successful mining enterprises for coal and lead, which enabled her to meet the expenses of her government. In 1554 she took into her service William Maitland of Lethington, who as secretary of state gained very great influence over her. She also provoked a dangerous enemy in John Knox by her expressed contempt for a letter which he had written to her, but the first revolt against her authority arose from an attempt to establish a standing army. When she provoked a war with England in 1557 the nobles refused to cross the border. In matters of religion she at first tried to hold the balance between the Catholic and Protestant factions and allowed the Presbyterian preachers the practice of their religion so long as they refrained from public preachings in Edinburgh and Leith. The marriage of Francis II. and her daughter Mary in 1558 strengthened her position, and in 1559 she relinquished her conciliatory tactics to submit to the dictation of her relatives, the Guises, by falling more into line with their religious policy. She was reconciled with Archbishop Hamilton, and
