Once the great man down, and the seals of office in the hands of Norfolk, with Suffolk as his lieutenant, the heinousness of the proceedings against Queen Katharine struck both Dukes, and they agreed that "the time was come when all the world should strive to dismount the King from his folly." Suffolk withstood Henry at least once to his face, and he summed up the situation "in two words and said that the Queen was ready to obey him [Henry] in all matters, but there were two that she must first obey. The King, thinking he meant the Pope and your Majesty [Charles V.], inquired immediately who these two were. He replied that God was the first and her conscience the other, which she would not destroy for him or for any other."[514] Henry turned away and made no answer. The same writer, Chapuys, the Imperial Ambassador, said that "Suffolk and his wife if they dared would offer all possible resistance to this marriage," and in an age when the Archbishop of Canterbury refused to give Queen Katharine advice because, he said, "_ira principis mors est_," how can one blame the Suffolks for not daring? Mary was beloved by the Londoners,[515] who were heart and soul for Katharine, and her well-known sympathy with her sister-in-law and her niece is attested by that ridiculous figure which appeared in Lincolnshire after her death claiming to be the Princess Mary, and retailing conversations with her aunt the French Queen.[516]
Mary's health had for long been far from good. This mysterious and recurring disease in her side constantly demanded physicians, with which the Court swarmed, for Henry was a great drug-master. In one letter [undated] she implores the King's permission, to come up to consult his physician, Master Peter, than whom no other in her opinion can give her relief, and her husband seconds her request in a letter in which he says she sits and weeps all day long, and is generally very ill as anyone can see. But here again the searcher draws a blank. There is no information, and one is suddenly confronted with a line in a letter of Chapuys' to his master, "the Duchess of Suffolk, late Queen of France, is dead," and he adds, touching the keynote to Mary's claim to publicity in her later life, "by which the French King will gain 30,000 crowns a year of dower." She died on Midsummer's Day, says Hall; on June 26, says the Heralds' College, at Westhorpe in Suffolk.