In the last couple of decades, scholars have developed a complex vision of the authority and political savvy of Early Modern queens; publishers Palgrave Macmillan have devoted a whole series to “queenship and power,” and Erin A. Sadlack’s The French Queen’s Letters: Mary Tudor Brandon and the Politics of Marriage in Sixteenth-Century Europe is one of their most recent publications. Sadlack successfully enlarges the mainly romantic vision of Mary, creating a portrait of a woman who learned how to acquire and wield authority in the courts of her father, Henry VII, her first husband, the French king Louis XII, and her brother, Henry VIII.

Sadlack notes that Mary Tudor Brandon is either ignored or romanticized in much critical study of the period. Like his father, Henry VIII sought to increase England’s power base in Europe through political marriages, and after the termination of his sister’s first betrothal to Charles of Castile, Mary was married in 1509 to Louis XII of France, more than thirty years her senior. Mary’s marriage was short-lived, however, as the sickly Louis XII died less than three months after their marriage. Mary’s second marriage is the focus of most historical and literary interest; two months after the death of Louis XII, she secretly married Charles Brandon, an English duke, despite Henry VIII’s insistence that they not marry. This titillating scandal has overshadowed the skilled political manoeuvring on Mary’s part that ensured that she and Brandon retained positions of power once they returned to Henry’s court.

While Sadlack does not deny the romantic image of Mary—indeed, she shows how Mary herself made use of it—she builds a convincing portrait of Mary as a woman who learned how to negotiate female authority as a young girl, honed it in her role as the French queen, and maintained it on her return to England. Much of this renegotiated image is based on a detailed examination of Mary’s letters and her clever use of the rhetoric of chivalry; Mary maneuvered her way round the shifts at court and in her own life through a careful crafting of rhetorical positions that ensured her own authority while accommodating the power of others.

The French Queen’s Letters is organized chronologically: Sadlack first of all establishes the young Mary’s “education,” both her formal education and what she learned through her own marriage arrangements and those of Catherine of Aragon and others at court. Sadlack carefully establishes Mary’s thorough grounding in the rhetoric of chivalry, not only through the pageantry of the courts of Henry VII and VIII but through the literature available to her. Essential to this education is letter writing as a means to female empowerment. Sadlack references a variety of fictional epistolary examples that Mary would have had access to, to reveal the many ways women employed letters to develop their own authority and influence.

Mary’s own letters are central to Sadlack’s argument about the establishment and continuation of Mary’s political power. Sadlack argues that Mary was very aware of a letter’s role as both private communication and public performance and that Mary was extremely careful in crafting her relationships with her correspondents. Through the language of affection, familial ties, and service, with frequent reminders of her own positions as the French queen and an English princess, Mary could emphasize her own subordination or privilege, her own indebtedness or demands. The meticulous construction of the letters, which were often written in collaboration, highlights Mary’s political acumen. For example, Sadlack provides a detailed examination of a letter Mary wrote to Henry VIII seeking forgiveness for her marriage to Charles Brandon and permission to return to England. It is a formal defense of her marriage, and thus is meant to persuade her brother of the moral and political rightness of her actions; before she sent it to Henry, however, she enlisted the editorial help of the Archbishop Thomas Wolsey, trusted counselor of both Mary and Henry. Working on Mary’s draft, Wolsey emphasized the political situation at the time of Mary’s marriage and the virtues of Brandon, and he also inserted a tone of humility and subordination not apparent enough in the original.

This kind of detailed analysis enables Sadlack to make a persuasive case that Mary, like her brother, was acutely aware of the importance of self-presentation. That her authority was less than her brother’s does not diminish the fact that she did, indeed, wield a significant amount of influence. The French Queen’s Letters is a useful corrective to discussions of Mary that continue to focus on an image of an overwrought romantic or to gloss over her influence at court entirely. Sadlack provides a very helpful appendix of letters and thoroughly supports her arguments with an abundance of documented primary and secondary texts.