The Tudors - 2007

Born: 1484
Acceded: 1 Feb 1514
Died: 22 Aug 1545, Guildford Palace, Surrey
Buried: St. George's Chapel, Windor Castle, England
Notes: Knight of the Garter. The Complete Peerage, Vol.XIIpI,p454.
Father: William BRANDON (Sir)
Mother: Elizabeth BRUYN
Married 1: Anne BROWNE Bethroated AFT 25 Sep 1505
Married 2: Margaret NEVILLE BEF 7 Feb 1506 ANNULMENT 1507
Married 3: Anne BROWNE ABT 1508
Children:
1. Anne BRANDON (B. Grey of Powis)
2. Mary BRANDON (B. Monteagle)
Married 4: Elizabeth GREY (5° B. Lisle) Bey May 1523 ANNULMENT
Married 5: Mary TUDOR (Queen of France/D. Suffolk) 3 Mar 1515, Paris, France
Children:
3. Henry BRANDON (1° E. Lincoln) (b. 11 Mar 1515)
4. Frances BRANDON (D. Suffolk)
5. Eleanor BRANDON (C. Cumberland)
Married 6: Catherine WILLOUGHBY (B. Willoughby of Eresby/D. Suffolk) 7 Sep 1534
Children:
6. Henry BRANDON (2° D. Suffolk)
7. Charles BRANDON (3° D. Suffolk)

Brandon, Charles, first duke of Suffolk (c.1484–1545), magnate, courtier, and soldier, was the second but only surviving son of Sir William Brandon (d. 1485) and his wife, Elizabeth Bruyn (d. 1494) of South Ockendon. The manner of Sir William's death, killed at Bosworth bearing Henry VII's standard, prepared the way for his son's fame. Charles's grandfather, Sir William Brandon of Wangford and Southwark, survived to 1491, a trusted figure in the government of Suffolk; but more important for Charles's advancement was the career of his uncle, Sir Thomas Brandon, one of Henry VII's leading courtiers. Charles probably grew up in his household, moving on naturally to serve the king.
Rise to power
By about 1503 Charles Brandon waited on Henry VII at table and by 1507 he was an esquire for the body. More excitingly, by 1505–6 he was one of the company of king's spears, martial young gallants active in jousts and courtly display. By the end of the reign he was also master of the horse to Henry Bourchier, earl of Essex, one of the most prominent nobles at Henry's court. Though he first jousted publicly at the tournament to celebrate Prince Arthur's marriage to Katherine of Aragon in 1501 and waited on the prince the morning after his wedding, he does not seem to have held a post either in Arthur's household or in that of Prince Henry. This did not prevent him from forming close bonds with Henry, nor did the difference in their ages. Henry normally chose his friends from his coevals; Brandon was unusual in that although he was some seven years older than Henry VIII, and eventually predeceased him, he remained his lifelong intimate. Prince Henry watched Brandon and his friends joust at court in his father's last years and on his accession soon made them central to the tournaments and revels of his own court. The all-gilt armour Brandon wore as one of the six challengers at the coronation tournament of 1509 was a sign of things to come.

In the first three years of Henry's reign Brandon shared the limelight at court with a number of contemporaries who also joined him in financial and romantic ventures: Edward Howard, Thomas Knyvet, Henry and Edward Guildford. Howard's and Knyvet's deaths in the war of 1512–13 left Brandon increasingly alone at the head of their circle and he took an ever more distinctive part in the king's entertainments. In revels he began to be the only participant dressed identically with the king, in jousts to be the king's sole partner in challenging the rest of the court. By 1513–14 contemporaries recognized him as the king's principal favourite, a complementary figure to the rising minister Thomas Wolsey.

Favour brought rewards and responsibilities. At Brandon's uncle's death in January 1510 he succeeded him as marshal of the king's bench and in November 1511 he added the parallel post of marshal of the king's household. This gave him control over the prisons of both jurisdictions in Southwark and made him an influential figure in the borough, where he continued to live in the house that had been his grandfather's and uncle's. In October 1512 he became master of the horse in succession to Knyvet, giving formal shape to his close involvement with the king's horses, hunting, and jousts. Stewardships of royal estates, keeperships of royal houses, and offices in Wales were all steadily added to his portfolio. His status rose in leaps and bounds: knighted on 30 March 1512, elected a knight of the Garter on 23 April 1513, created Viscount Lisle on 15 May 1513. Promotion into the peerage was made possible by his betrothal to Knyvet's eight-year-old stepdaughter, Elizabeth Grey, heir to the barons Lisle, whose wardship he had purchased from the crown. The title was also intended to facilitate his exercise of increasingly responsible military commands.

In the naval campaign of 1512 Brandon and Henry Guildford had captained one of Henry's largest ships, the Sovereign, but watched helplessly as another, the Regent, burnt with Knyvet aboard. The following spring Brandon was chosen to lead a landing force to Brittany, but the expedition was aborted. His chance for glory came that autumn, as Henry invaded France in person. Brandon raised a large retinue of 1831 men, mostly through his offices in Wales. He served as high marshal of the army, in charge of discipline, and led the vanguard of the king's ward, some 3000 men. He took no great part in the fighting of the early part of the campaign, but at the siege of Tournai he led a successful assault on one of the city gates which was instrumental in persuading the citizens to surrender to Henry. When handed the keys of the city, the king passed them to Brandon, who led his troops in to occupy it. Soon afterwards Henry granted him the outlying castle of Mortain. No wonder Margaret of Austria's agent with the English army reported that Brandon was a ‘second king’ (LP Henry VIII, 1/2, no. 2171).

Charles Brandon's rise was capped on 1 February 1514 with his creation as duke of Suffolk. On the same day Thomas Howard, earl of Surrey, became duke of Norfolk, the reward for his victory at Flodden. In this context Brandon's creation may have been as much a celebration of Henry's victories in France as of his favourite's merits. Some contemporaries found it shocking. Erasmus compared the over-promoted master of the horse to a drunken stable-hand in a satire of Persius, in a comment he prudently edited out of the 1519 edition of his letters. Others thought the promotion was intended to equip Brandon to marry Margaret of Austria, regent of the Netherlands, with whom he had flirted during Henry's visits to her court in 1513. When rumours spread around Europe and betting on the likelihood of such a match opened in London, Margaret was shocked. She demanded Henry scotch the rumours and cancel Brandon's projected visit to the Netherlands to raise troops for the next year's campaigning, and the king complied.

The strength of Margaret's reaction owed much to the frailty of her political position in the Netherlands and much to her own tragic experience of marriage, but it probably also reflected Brandon's murky and reprehensible marital history to date. Not only was he currently contracted to marry young Lady Lisle; between 1503 and 1510 he had married twice under controversial circumstances. His first wife was Anne Browne, daughter of Sir Anthony Browne and gentlewoman to the queen. He contracted to marry her and she became pregnant, but in summer 1506 he abandoned her to marry her widowed aunt, Dame Margaret Mortimer. On 7 February 1507 he had licence of entry on Dame Margaret's lands, which he rapidly began to sell. By the end of the year, probably £1000 or more in profit, he was negotiating the annulment of this marriage on the multiple grounds of his consanguinity with Dame Margaret, the consanguinity of his two wives, and the consanguinity of his grandmother with Dame Margaret's first husband. Early in 1508 he secretly married Anne Browne in Stepney church, later repeating the ceremony publicly in St Michael Cornhill. At some point between 1506 and 1509 they had a daughter, Anne, whose legitimacy was later questioned, depending as it did upon the exact sequence of events. In the summer of 1510 their second, indisputably legitimate, daughter, Mary, was born. Her mother died shortly afterwards. At this time or later Brandon also fathered three bastards, Charles, later Sir Charles Brandon of Sigston (d. 1551), Mary, who married Robert Ball of Scottow, and Frances, who married successively the Lincolnshire gentlemen William Sandon and Andrew Bilsby. His reputation in such matters was thus scarcely unspotted when he embarked on a still more spectacular marital venture.
Marriage to the French queen
In summer 1514 Wolsey brokered peace between Henry and Louis XII of France, a peace sealed by Louis's marriage to Henry's sister Mary (1496–1533). In the autumn Suffolk led a jousting embassy to the wedding celebrations. Louis's death in January brought him to France again, charged with escorting Mary home. At Paris, in mid-February, without Henry's permission, they wed. Many at the English court were outraged. Henry was angry, though perhaps not surprised: Mary had apparently asked him for a free choice of husband should Louis die, Suffolk had discussed the possibility of a marriage before he left England, and once in France they asked the king's permission to marry on their return. Mary took the blame on herself, Suffolk excused himself with the consideration that he ‘newar sawe woman soo wyepe’ (BL, Cotton MS Caligula D. vi, fol. 186r), and early in May the king met them at Birling in Kent as they travelled home. On 13 May at Greenwich they married in public. Henry's displeasure was mollified by the surrender of Mary's jewels and plate, half her dowry, the wardship of the now redundant Lady Lisle, and a further £24,000 payable over twelve years from the profits of Mary's dower lands in France.

In the years that followed, Suffolk and his new duchess spent long periods away from court. On 1 February 1515 Henry had granted him what remained of the confiscated estates of his predecessors, the Pole dukes of Suffolk, situated in East Anglia with outliers in Oxfordshire, Berkshire, and other counties. Now he had to set about reconstituting the landed basis of the Poles' power by buying out the grantees to whom Henry VII and Henry VIII had alienated many of their manors, and making that power effective by his presence. Charles and Mary alike were welcome in Norfolk and Suffolk, fêted by towns, monasteries, and gentlemen. Their presence was also encouraged by Henry and Wolsey, concerned at the treasonable activities of Richard de la Pole, an exile patronized by the French as a Yorkist pretender. But Suffolk never managed to reconstruct the entire Pole estate, and his following among the local gentry was too heavily dependent on the loyalty of his extended but not very powerful cousinage, especially the Wingfield clan.

Mary's French connections also complicated Suffolk's political life. Her dower income from France, when it could be made to flow freely, amounted to some £4000, even after Henry's share had been deducted, and as such was probably larger than his income from all other sources, certainly more than his net landed income of about £1500 in 1523. French ambassadors thus tended to treat him as a hired spokesman at the English court, and his unguarded enthusiasm for Anglo-French amity led to his exclusion from the making of foreign policy at sensitive moments. Worse, Wolsey and Henry used his chronic indebtedness as a political leash to ensure that he did not help the French too much. But although he was no longer the ‘second king’ he had been, he had not lost the king's favour. At court he continued to star in the king's jousts, from 1517 as Henry's leading opponent rather than his team-mate. In 1520 he played a prominent role alongside the king in the jousting that formed part of the festivities at the Field of Cloth of Gold. Meanwhile he sued successfully for various grants, most notably the reversion to the office of earl marshal, national arbiter in matters of heraldry and chivalry, which he filled from the death of the second duke of Norfolk in 1524. By the early 1520s he seems to have learned to distance himself from French interests and in 1523 Henry had no qualms about appointing him to command an army of more than 11,000 men to invade northern France.
War and local power
Brandon was to co-operate with an army from the Habsburg Netherlands under Floris, count of Buren, to strike deep into France with the aim of exploiting the rebellion of Charles, constable of Bourbon. He reached Calais on 24 August, but problems of supply, plague, and co-ordination with his allies delayed the junction of the armies and the effective start of the campaign until 1 October. Thereafter progress was stunning. On 18 and 20 October Ancre and Bray fell, opening the way across the Somme. On 28 October Montdidier surrendered. French sentries at Pont-Ste Maxence, halfway from Montdidier to Paris, saw Suffolk's outriders. Chains were strung across the streets of Paris, the rich evacuated their goods to Orléans, and the bells of the city fell silent, ready to signal the English attack. But Suffolk and Buren, under orders to meet with Bourbon, headed not south but east towards Champagne, where the constable's campaign had petered out long before. They took more towns and castles, but by 11 November they were at Prémont, almost back on the borders of Habsburg territory. Then the coldest night in living memory froze their tired army into mutinous retreat. Suffolk stopped at Valenciennes, hoping to resume the campaign in the spring, but it became evident that his allies' priorities lay elsewhere. By mid-December he was at Calais and early next year he was home.

Suffolk was named to command armies again in 1524 and 1528, once against France and once against the Netherlands, but both campaigns were cancelled. Instead he made his contribution to Henry's foreign adventures by working with Thomas Howard, third duke of Norfolk, to maintain good order in East Anglia. In spring 1525 they negotiated for a generous contribution to the amicable grant to fund a new campaign in France, then confronted protesters against the levy. Similarly, in 1528 they worked to regulate grain supplies in a year of famine and appease unrest caused by the suspension of the cloth trade to the Netherlands. Meanwhile, a rapprochement with the French, whose support Henry sought in his bid for the annulment of his marriage to Katherine of Aragon, gave Suffolk a role in Anglo-French diplomacy. This culminated in an embassy to France in May–June 1529, though he was unable to prevent the treaty of Cambrai between France and the Habsburgs.

Friendship with France made Mary's dower revenues flow more freely than ever before. The money was welcome for several reasons. Suffolk's profits from royal office were declining. He had surrendered the mastership of the horse and the marshalcies in the wake of his marriage. Then, in 1525, in the reorganization of Welsh government associated with Princess Mary's sending to Ludlow, he lost the chief justiceship of north Wales, the constableship of Caernarfon Castle, and the receiverships and chief stewardships of the marcher lordships of Bromfield, Yale, and Chirk, offices he had collected between 1509 and 1513. He had exercised the offices largely through deputies, mostly local men like Sir William Gruffydd of Penrhyn, but had used the revenues under his control as a liberal source of credit, a source choked off in 1525.

Meanwhile Suffolk had a growing family. His children from his marriage to Mary were still young: Henry, born on 11 March 1516, had died by 1522, but there followed Frances, born on 16 or 17 July 1517, Eleanor, born between 1518 and 1521, and another Henry, born in 1522 and created earl of Lincoln in 1525. The daughters of his marriage to Anne Browne, in contrast, were old enough to need husbands. For Anne he had purchased the wardship of Edward Grey, fourth Baron Powis, in 1517, and they were married by March 1525. For Mary he managed to buy the marriage of Thomas Stanley, second Baron Monteagle, and they were married in late 1527 or early 1528. In November 1527 he concluded negotiations with Wolsey and other councillors for a still more important match. For £2666 13s. 4d., payable over nine years, he bought for his son and heir the marriage of the king's ward Katherine Willoughby (1519–1580) [see Bertie, Katherine], daughter and heir to the lately deceased William, eleventh Baron Willoughby de Eresby, whose estates in Lincolnshire and East Anglia would prove a splendid addition to the Brandon patrimony.

A final expense was Suffolk's ambition to build notable houses. Already in the years after his creation as duke he had rebuilt his uncle's house in Southwark as Suffolk Place, a large brick palace decorated with fashionable terracottas. In the late 1520s and early 1530s he built its counterpart in East Anglia, Westhorpe, a moated brick courtyard house of considerable size with terracotta plaques and battlements, ornate chimneys and painted glass, oak-panelled rooms, a statute of Hercules, and well-stocked parks and gardens. He later claimed it cost him £12,000. Only fragments of either house survive.
Political and personal troubles
By February 1529 ambassadors were naming Suffolk as one of Wolsey's enemies at court. He seems not to have opposed the cardinal as vigorously as Norfolk and the Boleyns, but on his embassy to France he was certainly happy to enquire of François I whether he thought Wolsey was obstructing the king's divorce. As Wolsey fell from power in October, Suffolk took up the role as a leading councillor for which his status and the king's confidence fitted him, being appointed president of the king's council. But as the new regime settled down from 1530, his attendance in council and parliament was erratic, his influence limited, and his position uncomfortable. He found the missions Henry sent him on to humiliate Katherine of Aragon distasteful, his relations with Anne Boleyn were poor, and his son's powerful claim to the throne as the only legitimate and English-born grandson of Henry VII drew unwelcome attention. In spring 1533 Norfolk demanded that Suffolk relinquish to him the office of earl marshal and Henry made Suffolk comply. Followers of Norfolk murdered Suffolk's client Sir William Pennington in the Westminster sanctuary in 1532, but were readily pardoned. This seems to have been part of a wider rivalry in East Anglia between the affinities of the two dukes which exposed the continuing weaknesses of Brandon's local following.

Personal setbacks mounted in this period too. Suffolk's wife, Mary, died on 25 June 1533 at Westhorpe and was buried in Bury St Edmunds Abbey. His son Henry, earl of Lincoln, died on 8 March 1534. One son-in-law, Baron Monteagle, turned out so feckless that Suffolk had several times to take over his lands and pay his debts, while the other, Baron Powis, found his wife so adulterous that he kidnapped her lover in a night-time raid and ended their marriage by a formal separation. On the other hand, more promising marriages were arranged for his younger daughters, Frances to Henry Grey, marquess of Dorset, and Eleanor to Henry, Lord Clifford, heir to the earldom of Cumberland. And, startlingly, Suffolk himself married again in September 1533: his fourth wife was the fourteen-year-old Katherine Willoughby, originally intended as his son's bride. More romantic commentators thought it was the shock that killed young Lincoln, but Suffolk had ensured that the Willoughby estates would not leave his line, an assurance confirmed by the birth of a son, again named Henry, on 18 September 1535, and of another, Charles, in 1537 or 1538. Katherine's lands were all the more significant because Mary's death necessitated a financial reckoning with the crown, one which cost the duke all his Oxfordshire and Berkshire estates and Suffolk Place in Southwark.
Lincolnshire magnate
The fall of Anne Boleyn in spring 1536 drew Henry's senior councillors into renewed prominence, but what brought Suffolk back to the forefront of national affairs was the outbreak of the Lincolnshire revolt in October and the ensuing Pilgrimage of Grace. Appointed the king's lieutenant to suppress the Lincolnshire rebels, he advanced fast from Suffolk to Stamford, gathering troops as he went; but by the time he was ready to fight, the rebels had disbanded. On 16 October he entered Lincoln and began to pacify the rest of the county, investigate the origins of the rising, and prevent the southward spread of the pilgrimage, still growing in Yorkshire and beyond. Only two tense months later, as the pilgrims dispersed under the king's pardon, could he disband his 3600 troops and return to court. There the king commanded him to move his home to Lincolnshire, and from spring 1537 he set about doing so.

The Willoughby estates and the close-knit following of gentlemen who had administered them for the duchess's father and widowed mother formed the core of Suffolk's power in the county. Establishing himself as the dominant local magnate required much more. In April 1537 the king gave him Tattershall Castle as an imposing base. By late summer Suffolk was preparing for a wholesale exchange of his East Anglian estates, including the lands of Leiston Abbey and Eye Priory granted to him in April 1537 in reward for his service against the rebels, for monastic property and other crown land in Lincolnshire and elsewhere. Negotiations took until September 1538 but the result was to make Suffolk indisputably the greatest landowner in Lincolnshire, with a dense belt of estates spread across the centre of the county. The lands he had been granted in other counties he sold off, ready to invest in more Lincolnshire land as it became available in the years ahead. Effective lordship also required the duke's presence, and after spending May and June 1537 in East Anglia he spent much time in Lincolnshire. He oversaw Lord Hussey's execution in July 1537, moves against vagabonds in 1538, and musters in spring 1539.

Activity in Lincolnshire did not mean alienation from the court. Suffolk seems to have worked effectively with Thomas Cromwell. He served on the increasingly well-defined privy council. In the household reforms of 1539 he was appointed to the great mastership of the household, an upgraded version of the lord stewardship. He led both the party which met Anne of Cleves on her arrival at Dover on 27 December 1539 and the team which negotiated with her the terms of her divorce from the king in July 1540. He took no great part in the politics of Cromwell's fall but, as ever, increased in prominence as a symbol of stability at a time of political turmoil.
Last years
Suffolk's health was poor at times in the 1540s but this did not prevent his taking a major part in Henry's last wars against France and Scotland, while between campaigns he sat more regularly in the privy council than ever before, as a senior statesman and military expert. Although he does not appear to have been a notably imaginative general, he won the praise of several of his contemporaries; the verdict of Ellis Gruffydd, that ‘he was the flower of all the captains of the realm and had the necessary patience to control soldiers’, at least hints at qualities of leadership (Davies, 25). In October and November 1542 he guarded the northern border while Norfolk and others invaded Scotland. From January 1543 to March 1544 he was the king's lieutenant in the north. Based mostly at Darlington, from there he supervised regional government and border warfare, dealt with the Scottish nobles sympathetic to Henry's plans to marry Prince Edward to the infant Mary, queen of Scots, and planned for a major invasion which he never had the chance to command. Nevertheless, his work laid the basis for the capture of Edinburgh by Edward Seymour, earl of Hertford, in May 1544.

By then Suffolk had been called away to France, where although now aged about sixty he led the siege of Boulogne with conspicuous bravery and skill, from July to November 1544 commanding the king's ward in the huge army which eventually captured the town. Though Henry arrived for the final stages of the siege, it was Suffolk whom he invited to ride in to occupy Boulogne on 14 September. Keeping it in the face of French resurgence was another matter, and Henry was irate when Suffolk and Norfolk retreated to Calais on 3 October, leaving John Dudley, Viscount Lisle, to hold the new conquest. But the king soon relented, and in February 1545 Suffolk got his reward, the lands of Tattershall College for less than half the standard price.

In these years Suffolk worked happily with fellow councillors of various religious and political allegiances, from the conservatives Thomas, Baron Wriothesley, William Paulet, Baron St John, and Sir Anthony Browne, who would all serve as executors of his will, to the reformists Hertford and Lisle. His own religious position remained ambivalent. His personal preferences seem to have been conservative: his chapel was graced by six choristers and statues of saints and he requested dirges in his will. Many of the clergy he patronized were former monks (to whom he would not need to pay pensions from his former monastic lands if he provided them with benefices instead) or were estate or household administrators. Others were clearly conservatives in doctrine and prospered under Queen Mary. But some were committed protestants: the renegade Scottish Dominican Alexander Seton, the future bishop of Norwich John Parkhurst, Archbishop Cranmer's protégés Thomas Lawney and Richard Marsh. Some were favourites of the duchess, who from her husband's last years was moving in the reformist circles at court around Queen Katherine Parr, while yet others were linked to clients of the duke. Suffolk's ambiguous position, like the king's, may well have been adopted in an effort to reconcile the conflicting demands of those who called on his good lordship in a period of increasing religious polarization. The merchants who sold the lead he stripped from monasteries and the artists he patronized—including Hans Holbein, from whom he commissioned various works including delightful miniatures of his sons—gave him other links to the networks of reformist religion.

The consolidation of Suffolk's Lincolnshire estates continued and with it the construction of a following in county society more coherent and powerful than anything he had managed in East Anglia, though several leading knightly families resisted his hegemony. His local eminence was displayed when the king, on his way to York in 1541, stayed with Suffolk at Grimsthorpe, the Willoughby house he had extended with a new court. By 1545 his landed income was higher than it had ever been, at perhaps £2100 net, plus some £900 from the Willoughby estates. When he died of unknown causes at Guildford, on 22 August 1545, fresh from fortifying Portsmouth and still preparing to lead an army to the relief of Boulogne, the financial and political legacy he left to his sons was a strong one. All was owed to the favour of the king, who decreed Suffolk should be buried at St George's Chapel, Windsor, as he was on 9 September, a fitting reward for his dogged fulfilment of his motto, Loyaulte me oblige.
The young dukes
Charles Brandon left two sons, Henry Brandon (1535–1551) and Charles Brandon (1537/8–1551), successively second and third dukes of Suffolk. Aged only ten when his father died, Henry faced a long minority. His wardship was granted to his mother in May 1546 for £1500 and he was set to study at court with Prince Edward, under Richard Coxe, John Cheke, and Roger Ascham. Henry and Charles were knighted at Edward's coronation, where Henry carried the orb. Henry was active at Edward's court, revelling with the king in March 1547, running at the ring in May 1550, and dressing up as a nun in a masque in June. In April 1550 he travelled briefly to France as a hostage for the fulfilment of the treaty of Boulogne. In May 1550 it was suggested he might marry the duke of Somerset's daughter Anne, but his mother dismissed the idea on the grounds that the children should wait until they knew their own minds in such matters. Meanwhile he and his brother pursued their formal education, enrolling at St John's College, Cambridge, in 1549.

When the sweating sickness struck Cambridge in summer 1551, Henry and Charles Brandon moved out to Buckden in Huntingdonshire, but too late. Both had contracted the disease. Henry died on 14 July. Charles survived him by only half an hour and they were buried together at Buckden. Thomas Wilson, Walter Haddon, Parkhurst, Cheke, and three dozen other Cambridge and Oxford scholars praised their learning, piety, and virtues unstintingly and lamented their passing in a volume of Latin and Greek verse and prose, published in 1551. Wilson, who had tutored them, also chose them as the subjects of his exemplary oration of praise in The Arte of Rhetorique (1553). Even allowing for the conventions of such works it seems that they were young men of considerable promise whose loss was keenly felt.

With them their father's direct line expired. The Suffolk title was granted to Brandon's son-in-law Dorset in October 1551, while his daughters and aunts and their respective descendants bickered over his lands. The duchess went on to a new marriage, Marian exile, and Elizabethan fame. The fateful consequences of Charles Brandon's marriage to Mary Tudor were to haunt their granddaughters Jane, Katherine, and Mary Grey in 1553 and beyond. Meanwhile the memory of the duke of Suffolk outlived the extinction of his line, as ‘a duke famous at home and abroad’ (MacCulloch, 245). In the seventeenth century he was remembered as Henry's jousting partner, in the nineteenth and twentieth either as a reprobate—as in Richard Davey's book The Sisters of Lady Jane Grey and their Wicked Grandfather (1911)—or as the French queen's dashing suitor, as played by Richard Todd in the 1953 Disney film The Sword and the Rose. For historians he has long been in the shadow of his wives and his royal master, but has more recently attracted attention as one of the great survivors of Henry's lethal court.

S. J. Gunn
Sources S. J. Gunn, Charles Brandon, duke of Suffolk, c.1484–1545 (1988) · GEC, Peerage, new edn, 12/1.454–62 · LP Henry VIII · S. J. Gunn, ‘The duke of Suffolk's march on Paris in 1523’, EngHR, 101 (1986), 596–634 · S. J. Gunn and P. G. Lindley, ‘Charles Brandon's Westhorpe: an early Tudor courtyard house in Suffolk’, Archaeological Journal, 145 (1988), 272–89 · M. B. Davies, ‘Boulogne and Calais from 1545 to 1550’, Fouad I University Bulletin of the Faculty of Arts, 12 (1950), 1–90 · D. MacCulloch, ‘The Vita Mariae Angliae Reginae of Robert Wingfield of Brantham’, Camden miscellany, XXVIII, CS, 4th ser., 29 (1984), 181–301 · E. Read, Catherine, duchess of Suffolk (1962) · T. Wilson and others, Vita et obitus duorum fratrum Suffolciensium (1551) · T. Wilson, The arte of rhetorique (1553) · M. Dowling, Humanism in the age of Henry VIII (1986) · J. Loach, Edward VI (1999) · The chronicle and political papers of King Edward VI, ed. W. K. Jordan (1966)
Archives BL, Cotton MSS, corresp. and papers · BL, corresp. relating to negotiations with Scotland, Add. MSS 32648–32656 · Lincs. Arch., estate and household records · TNA: PRO, estate and household records
Likenesses attrib. J. Gossaert al. Mabuse, double portrait, panel painting, c.1515–1520? (with Mary Tudor), priv. coll. · L. Hornebolte, miniature, c.1530 (Charles Brandon?), Louis de Wet collection · panel painting, c.1540–1545, NPG [see illus.] · H. Holbein, miniatures, 1541 (Henry Brandon and Charles Brandon), Royal Collection

l'affreuse scène de pendaison, pendant laquelle je l'avoue j'ai eu les larmes aux yeux,

mais bien sûr, c'est tout à fait humain de vouloir se venger de l'homme qui l'a obligé à tuer autant de femmes et d'enfants! Mais Cromwell était lui aussi obligé de suivre les directives du roi et

Hélas oui, exit Cromwell qui termine lui aussi sur l'échafaud et qui a une fin particulièrement atroce . Le fameux cardinal se cache toujours aussi bien pour arriver à échapper aux sbires de Henry, et pourtant le sieur Bryant n'est pas commode. C'est un vrai épisode à rebondissements car il s'agit de la seule opposition encore active contre la politique d'Henry, en-dehors de ses ennemis extérieurs de toujours, François Ier et l'empereur. J'ai hâte de savoir ce que le cardinal devient dans la prochaine saison.