[14], In the late 1520s, relations between King Henry VIII and his sister Mary were strained when she opposed the King's attempt to obtain an annulment of his marriage to Catherine of Aragon, whom Mary had known for many years. A requiem mass was held at Westminster Abbey. Mary raised the girls with her own children. [1], Mary had been unhappy in her marriage of state to King Louis XII, as she was almost certainly already in love with Charles Brandon, 1st Duke of Suffolk. Dona Maria de Salinas had come to the English court with Henry VIII's Queen consort, Catherine of Aragon, and was one of the Queen's ladies-in-waiting and closest friends. A privy seal bill dated from midsummer 1496 authorizes a payment of 50 shillings to her nurse, Anne Skeron. Charles Brandon was the second but only surviving son of Sir William Brandon, Henry Tudor's standard-bearer at the Battle of Bosworth Field, where Richard III was slain. This progress later became notorious for the Queen's alleged adulterous trysts with her kinsman, Thomas Culpeper, though the Duke and Duchess's home at Grimsthorpe Castle was "one of the very few places on the route ... where Katherine Howard had not misbehaved herself".[19]. [1] Her Governess was Joan Vaux, whom she called mother Guildford; the two shared a close relationship and Mary was furious when Joan was sent back to England upon her arrival in France. They died at the Bishop of Lincoln's Palace, Buckden, in the village of Buckden near Huntingdon, Huntingdonshire, where they had fled in an attempt to escape the epidemic. A pair of French friars went so far as to warn Mary that she must not wed Charles Brandon because he "had traffickings with the devil."[1].

The Duke and Duchess of Suffolk officially greeted Anne of Cleves when she arrived in England in 1539 to marry the King, and in 1541 they helped arrange a royal progress for the King and his next wife, Catherine Howard. [10] Thus Henry was outraged, and the privy council urged that Charles be imprisoned or executed; Mary, as royalty and the King's favourite sister, was safe from execution. Four months afterwards, attempting to reconcile herself to this tragedy, Catherine wrote to Sir William Cecil that 'truly I take this [God's] last (and to the first sight most sharp and bitter) punishment not for the least of his benefits, in as much as I have never been so well taught by any other before to know his power, his love, and mercy, my own wickedness, and that wretched state that without him I should endure here'. These titles became forfeit when the duke was attainted in 1554. There were no further creations of the dukedom. She became a close friend of Henry's last queen, Catherine Parr, particularly after the Duke died in 1545, and was a strong influence on the Queen's religious beliefs. [22] She regularly took part in masques at her brother's court, and enjoyed "hearing singing, instrumental music, and dancing". Mary suffered multiple bouts of illness, requiring treatments over her lifetime. As such, he played an important role in quelling the Lincolnshire rebellion in 1536,[16] and built an imposing residence at Grimsthorpe,[6] which came into Catherine's possession at the death of Elizabeth de Vere, Dowager Countess of Oxford, widow of the 13th Earl.