The man who would become the most scandalous figure of the Tudor court, a commoner who rose to become a duke and brother-in-law to King Henry VIII, has died at the age of approximately 61. Charles Brandon, the Duke of Suffolk, passed away at 4:00 PM on August 22, 1545, at his estate, leaving behind a legacy of breathtaking ambition, marital chaos, and a survival instinct that defied the bloody logic of the Tudor regime. His life was a masterclass in navigating the treacherous waters of a king who had a habit of discarding those closest to him, often with their heads separated from their shoulders.
Brandon was born around 1484 to Sir William Brandon and Elizabeth Bruyn, but his father was killed at the Battle of Bosworth in 1485, serving as Henry VII’s standard-bearer. The boy was orphaned by his mother’s death in 1494, leaving him with no great inheritance. He grew up in the household of his paternal uncle, Sir Thomas Brandon, whose court connections introduced young Charles to the arena of royal service.
He was present at some of the most crucial moments in Tudor history, including waiting on Prince Arthur the morning after his wedding to Catherine of Aragon in 1501.
By the time Henry VIII ascended the throne in 1509, Brandon and the young king were fast friends, despite Brandon being seven years older and lacking the wealth to even qualify for a knighthood. Their friendship would become the longest personal relationship Henry VIII would have with anyone. They shared a love of jousting, and Brandon was a member of the king’s company of the King’s Spears.
He often competed against the king in tournaments, but as one biographer noted, he had the wit to let Henry win.
Brandon’s military career got off to a rocky start when he witnessed the destruction of a ship belonging to Sir Thomas Knyvet, a close friend of the king, during an engagement with the French in 1512, with the loss of nearly all on board. The following year, another friend, Edward Howard, also died at sea. This left Brandon as the king’s closest companion, and he began to accumulate titles at a dizzying pace.
He was knighted in 1512, made a Knight of the Garter in 1513, and was created Viscount Lisle on May 15, 1513.
This last creation was tied to Brandon’s already messy marital career, a pattern of behavior that would define his life and make him a figure of deep controversy. He was contracted to marry a woman named Anne Browne, and in 1506 she became pregnant with his child. A marriage contract plus consummation should have made that union unbreakable, but Brandon succeeded in dumping them both.
Instead, he married Anne’s aunt, Margaret Mortimer, a woman about two decades older than him. He then began to sell off her lands, and once he had taken her money, he annulled the union and went back to Anne, whom he married in 1508.
They had a daughter named after her mother, and another daughter, Mary, was born in 1510. Anne Browne died soon after, leaving Charles free once again. He then became engaged to his ward, the eight-year-old stepdaughter of Sir Thomas Knyvet, the friend who died in the naval disaster in 1512.
This little girl, Elizabeth Grey, was Baroness Lisle in her own right and a substantial heiress, which is why Brandon was created Viscount Lisle in 1513. There were also three illegitimate children, though the dates of their births are unclear. This kind of behavior is why many historians view Brandon with deep suspicion, as he did not improve with age.
His ascent seemed complete by February 1, 1514, when after a successful military campaign in France, he was created Duke of Suffolk, still aged only about 30. It was a remarkable achievement for a boy from modest beginnings by aristocratic standards. Contemporary historian Polydore Vergil wrote of widespread shock at the appointment, while scholar Erasmus said that Brandon was like a drunk stable hand whose new position did not hide what he really was.
Foreign diplomats referred to him as a second king, and there were rumors that Henry had ennobled him in the hopes of getting him married off to Margaret of Austria, Regent of the Netherlands.
Brandon and Margaret had met and flirted during the campaign of 1513, with Brandon even stealing a ring off her finger as a love token. But she had no intention of marrying him and quickly demanded that all such rumors be squashed. Whatever the reason, the king had raised him high, yet barely a year later, Brandon would push his friendship with Henry to the extreme by going after an even bigger prize and doing something incredibly reckless.
Henry VIII had two surviving sisters. The elder, Princess Margaret, had been married off to the King of Scotland in 1503, but the younger Princess Mary, born in 1596, had stayed in England. In 1514, Henry decided to marry this famous beauty, then aged 18, to the 52-year-old Louis XII of France to improve relations between the two countries.
Mary set off to France on October 2, and the wedding took place on October 9. Brandon was among those who escorted her to her new home and took part in the jousts held to celebrate the union, but he returned to England before Christmas. Louis died on New Year’s Day 1515, and Charles was quickly sent back to retrieve the widowed queen of France and return her to her brother.
Charles and Mary seemed to have already been enamored of each other before Mary married Louis, and the possibility of a marriage between them was apparently discussed between Charles and King Henry before Charles returned to France. However, it was on the understanding that no such wedding would take place until they were back in England and had Henry’s permission. If this really was the agreement, then Henry was naive to think that he could trust his friend or his sister.
Instead of waiting, they married in secret in Paris in the middle of February, with the support of the new French King Francis I.
Henry was livid. Brandon claimed that he had only gone through with the marriage because Mary had forced him to through emotional blackmail and with many tears, but few believe this. He married Mary because as the dowager queen of France, she was filthy rich thanks to the massive jointure she was going to receive from the French, and because she was young and beautiful and would make him part of the English royal family, with his children in line for the throne.
The couple returned to England in April, and with the intercession of men like Thomas Wolsey, another of Henry’s great favorites, Charles and Mary were able to mollify the king. It came at a heavy price, though.
The Monarch took all the jewels that Louis had given to Mary, as well as half her dower and 2,000 pounds per annum for 12 years out of her French jointure income. Charles had to surrender the wardship of his former little fiancee, Elizabeth Grey, who died in her early teens. He and Mary accepted a bond of 100,000 pounds to stick to the agreement, an astronomical sum.
The Duke and his new wife, who was always called the French Queen, never the Duchess of Suffolk, were publicly married in England on May 13, and King Henry and Queen Catherine attended.
Brandon had been granted large swathes of the duchy of Suffolk estates just before his marriage, and the need to secure his control over them provided a good excuse to step away from court life and go to East Anglia, letting the furor around his marriage settle down. Their first child, a son called Henry after his royal uncle, was born on March 11, 1516. Their daughter Frances arrived on July 16, 1517, then Eleanor between 1518 and 1523, and another Henry in 1522, because the first boy had by then died.
Mary outranked her husband and was often paid greater attention and compliments by those around them. Local dignitaries were known to send her gifts and make visits to her and not him. This was a very unusual setup for a 16th-century marriage and no doubt grated with Charles.
Their dependence on her French income was a political liability, which meant Suffolk could not really be trusted to give impartial advice when it came to dealings with that country. This made his extended absences from court all the more expedient for the king and Wolsey.
In the Autumn of 1523, Brandon was sent to head up an army in France, but thanks to failures by England’s allies and bad weather, the expedition was a failure. Suffolk had made competent command decisions, though, and was not blamed for the disappointment. On March 10, 1524, he nearly killed the king during a joust when Henry forgot to put his visor down and Suffolk’s lance splintered into the Monarch’s helmet.
Henry did not blame his friend for the incident.
By the late 1520s, Henry was seeking to have his marriage to Catherine of Aragon annulled, ostensibly because it was invalid due to her brief marriage to his brother Prince Arthur, though in fact Henry was largely driven by the desire to marry his mistress Anne Boleyn and sire a legitimate son. Steven Gunn, one of Brandon’s biographers, rejects the idea that Suffolk initially engaged in or promoted attacks on Cardinal Wolsey, saying that he only came out against him when Henry himself was very clearly criticizing his former right-hand man. Brandon and his wife actively disliked Anne, who had briefly been Mary’s lady-in-waiting in France.
There was a rumor in 1530 that Charles had been spreading a story that Anne had had a prior relationship with the poet Thomas Wyatt that made her unsuitable to be Queen. Whether that was true or not, Suffolk certainly had a frosty relationship with the king’s beloved and resented his missions to go see Queen Catherine and make her life more difficult. As for his religious beliefs, while raised a Catholic, he seems to have been flexible enough to go with the flow as Henry got the English Reformation underway.
Mary, Queen of France, Princess of England, and Duchess of Suffolk, died on June 25, 1533, at the age of just 37. Charles responded with a 𝓈𝒽𝓸𝒸𝓀𝒾𝓃𝑔 lack of sentimentality. Barely two and a half months later, on September 7, the day Elizabeth was born, and at the age of about 49, he married his 14-year-old ward, Catherine Willoughby, the girl who had been intended for his son, the Earl of Lincoln.
The following March, Lincoln was dead too. The loss of Mary and their son seems to have weakened his relationship with the King, for Henry forced Charles into surrendering large swathes of land and manors to him in 1535.
Brandon and his new teenage Duchess had two further boys in 1535 and 1537 to replace the two he had lost by Mary. They were called Henry and Charles. By the late 1530s, much had changed at Henry’s Court.
Catherine of Aragon died in January 1536, then Anne Boleyn fell from grace and was executed in May that year. Suffolk was not directly involved in destroying her, but once the wheels were in motion, he oversaw her trial, was present at her death, and benefited financially as some of her jointure lands were given to him.
Later that year, the Duke was involved in suppressing the Lincolnshire Rebellion, which was the precursor to the Pilgrimage of Grace that swiftly followed. Thousands rose up in protest at the ongoing religious and economic changes that Henry was enforcing on the country, and Charles had to spend months putting the rebellion down and dealing with its leaders afterwards. The king ordered him to make Lincolnshire his main residence to better enable the Duke to control it on Henry’s behalf.
By 1538, the 54-year-old Suffolk was described as sickly and half lame, but he was still working away for the king. He had a prominent role in the christening of Prince Edward in October 1537 and shortly afterwards at the funeral of the child’s mother, Queen Jane. He attended Council meetings, met with ambassadors, sat as a judge on treason trials, was named as Lord Steward of the royal household in 1539, assisted in negotiating the marriage of the king to Anne of Cleves during that year, and met the soon-to-be Queen with his wife when she arrived in England that December.
The Cleves marriage barely lasted six months, and its collapse also led to the downfall and execution of one of its chief architects, Thomas Cromwell, with whom Charles Brandon had always worked well. Brandon avoided the same fate. He negotiated with Anne to secure a quick and clean end to the marriage.
In the final five years of his life, Brandon was highly active in military matters, attending far more Council meetings than usual and being given tasks such as serving as the king’s lieutenant in the north for more than a year between early 1543 and spring 1544.
His last great hurrah was in the summer and autumn of 1544 when he led the siege of Boulogne, which was captured in September. All the while, his health deteriorated, and less than a year later, at 4:00 PM on August 22, 1545, he died at the age of about 61. He was buried at St.
George’s Chapel at Windsor.
So how did Charles manage to survive being at the Tudor court and even married into the Tudor royal family where so many others had failed? It was a combination of factors. For one thing, he simply was not at court a lot of the time, meaning that Henry never got too tired of him and that Charles was often not heavily involved in the running of the country in the way that the likes of Cardinal Wolsey and Thomas Cromwell were.
This left him less open to recriminations when things went wrong.
Second, even when he was at court, he frequently did not attend Council meetings, something Gunn puts down partly to laziness, but which again limited how much blame he could attract. Third, the other way great families fail was by becoming entangled in the king’s marital affairs, but Suffolk found his way into the royal family not by offering Henry a potential wife but via a sister instead, and at a much earlier period of Henry’s life when he was less likely to dole out beheadings as a punishment.
Fourth, he seems to have been good at handling Henry. He soothed the king’s ego by letting him win at tournaments, and he filled his coffers by paying huge fines for marrying Mary and doing what he was told even when it was not advantageous to him. Finally, he was also one of the few people Henry had real affection for.
He offered a link back to the king’s youth and was a rare thread of continuity for a man who killed or abandoned most of the other people who could have offered a similar link.
These factors are why Charles, unlike the mythical Icarus, managed to fly in the sunlight provided by Henry without getting close enough to ruin his wings and fall. His motto could have been close but not too close. The Duke of Suffolk, the Tudor bad boy who married a queen, survived a king’s wrath, and left a trail of broken marriages and 𝒔𝒄𝒂𝓃𝒹𝒶𝓁 in his wake, has finally met his end.
His life was a testament to the brutal, unpredictable, and utterly fascinating nature of the Tudor court.
