THE LADY FRANCIS BRANDON, DUCHESS OF SUFFOLK, AND HER SECOND HUSBAND, ADRIAN STOKES, ESQ.
PROBABLY BY CORVINUS. PROPERTY OF COL. WYNN FINCH
The Duchess of Suffolk, Lady Jane’s strange and untender mother, did not, as might have been expected, even in those unfeeling times, go into retirement after the bloody deaths of her daughter, son-in-law, husband, and brother-in-law, but within a fortnight, and on the very day that Lord Thomas Grey was arraigned (9th March 1554, not, as some writers say, the day he was executed), she married her late husband’s Groom of the Chambers, a red-haired lad of middle-class origin, fifteen years her junior, one Mr. Adrian Stokes. She received a reminder of “the dear departed” on this her wedding-day, in the shape of a demand to deliver, “unto the Lord-Admiral the Parliamentary robes, lately belonging to the Duke her husband; or, if she had them not, to let the Lord-Admiral understand where they remain, to the end he may send for the same.” This widow of Ephesus was not in the least disturbed by the message, and after returning the paraphernalia in question, gaily proceeded with her nuptial preparations! To account for so extraordinary and apparently heartless a proceeding, we must remember the position in which the Lady Frances now found herself. She realised that unless she was married, and that speedily, to some one much beneath her station, she might be proposed by the Protestant party as one of its candidates for the succession, and her life and tranquillity be thus endangered. Her marriage with one who was little better than a menial[324] rendered this impossible; and besides (she was a Tudor), she may have been really in love with her red-haired Mr. Stokes. That Queen Mary did not resent the match is evident, for throughout her reign the Lady Frances occupied a towering position at Court, with precedence of all other peeresses, sometimes even of Princess Elizabeth herself. Her daughters, the Ladies Katherine and Mary Grey, were appointed Maids-of-Honour to the Queen who had so lately signed the death-warrants of their father, sister, brother-in-law, and uncles, and seem to have been very much attached to their mistress. They probably convinced themselves that the recent tragedies had been purely political, and not the least domestic or personal. The lives of these two young ladies were not a jot happier than that of their sister; but this was due to Queen Elizabeth, who played with them both much as a cat plays with a mouse, and literally worried them into early graves. Lady Frances and her youthful husband had their portraits taken the very year of their marriage, both in one panel; the picture was lately in the possession of Colonel Wynn Finch. The Duchess appears as a buxom, puffy-looking dame of thirty-six,—the age given on the margin of the picture,—whilst her sheepish-looking, ginger-headed husband is put down as twenty-one. He is represented in a superb costume of black velvet, edged with ermine and sparkling with jewels. The lady wears black satin cut somewhat after the fashion of the year 1830. Her garment is edged with ermine, and she wears two wedding-rings on the fourth finger of her fat hand, and several handsome chains and carcanets about her short neck. A close examination of this picture reveals the extraordinary breadth of the Duchess’s face. Divested of her feminine head-dress, and with a very little “make up,” she might easily be the very image of her uncle, King Henry VIII. Lady Jane’s mother lived happily enough with Mr. Stokes, to whom she bore a daughter so soon after her marriage—a little under nine months—that if she had visited her husband in the Tower (which she did not) the question of her paternity might have been raised. This child, baptized Elizabeth, died the day it was born. The Lady Frances herself died in October 1559, leaving most of her fortune—by this time considerably reduced—to her husband, and very little to her two surviving daughters. She was buried in Westminster Abbey in great pomp on 5th December 1559. Elizabeth, out “of the great affection she bore the Duchess and because of her kinship,” ordered that the Royal Arms should be borne at her funeral, which was attended by Garter-King-at-Arms and by Clarencieux. Her monument, still in existence, occupies the exact site of the shrine of St. Edmund in the chapel of that saint, and is a fine specimen of the early and best period of Elizabethan art. The inscription is in old English, and, modernised, runs as follows: “Here lieth the Lady Frances, Duchess of Suffolk, daughter to Charles Brandon, Duke of Suffolk and Mary the French Queen; first wife to Henry, Duke of Suffolk, and after to Adrian Stokes, Esq.” This is followed by a few lines of high-flown panegyric in Latin. After the death of his Duchess, Mr. Stokes obtained a new lease of twenty-one years of “her Highness’s manor of Beaumanor,” in Leicestershire. About 1571 he was returned as M.P. for Leicestershire, and took as his second wife Anne, relict of Sir Nicholas Throckmorton. Mr. Adrian Stokes died on 30th November 1586, leaving his brother William as his heir.[325]
The widow of the once all-powerful Duke of Northumberland spent some months with her daughter, Lady Mary Sidney, endeavouring to restore her shattered health and to recover some shreds of the property taken from her at the time of her husband’s condemnation. It was mainly through the instrumentality of Don Diego de Mendoza, or “Damondesay,” as she styles him, whose imprudent conduct had brought such misfortune on her luckless son, that Philip II was led to solicit the restoration of a considerable part of the Duchess’s fortune. She also obtained permission to inhabit the empty Manor House at Chelsea, where she endeavoured to collect some of the magnificent furniture which had once adorned the royal mansion, Durham House, in the Strand, recovering, amongst other things, a set of green curtains shot with gold thread and certain carved chairs and tables. But peace and shelter, even combined with a measure of comfort and independence, availed not to restore her broken health, and on 22nd January 1555 the famous Duke of Northumberland’s widow died broken-hearted at Chelsea Manor in her forty-sixth year. Her will is one of the most curious extant. After declaring it written entirely in her own hand, without the advice of one learned in the law, she bequeaths to “the Lord Diegoe Damondesay, that is beyond the sea, the littell book clock that hath the moon in it, etc.,” and her dial, “the one leaf of it the almanac and the other side, the Golden Number in the middle.” What would we not give for a glimpse of this curious little clock or dial? To Sir Henry Sidney she leaves the gold and green hangings in the gallery at Chelsea; to her daughter, Mary Sidney, her gown of black barred velvet, furred with sable; to her daughter, Katherine Hastings, a gown of purple velvet, and a summer gown; to the Duchess of Alva, her green parrot, “having nothing else worthy of her”; to Elizabeth, wife of Lord Cobham, a gown of black barred velvet, furred with lizards. The document ends with the following quaint directions: “My will is earnestly and effectually, that little solemnities be made for me, for I had ever have a thousand folds my debts to be paid, and the poor given unto, than any pomp to be showed upon my wretched carcase; therefore to the worms will I go, as I have afore written in all points, as you will answer it afore God; and you break any one jot of it, your will hereafter may chance be to as well broken.... After I am departed from this world, let me be wound up in a sheet, and put into a coffin of wood, and so laid in the ground with such funerals as pertaineth to the burial of a corpse. I will at my year’s mind (i.e. anniversary of her death) have such divine service as my executors shall think meet, with the whole arms of father and mother upon the stone graven; nor in any wise to let me be opened after I am dead. I have not loved to be very bold afore women, much more would I be loth to come into the hands of any living man, be he physician or surgeon.” She was buried in Chelsea Parish Church on 1st February 1555, two heralds attending the funeral, at which there was a brilliant display of escutcheons and banners, etc. Her tomb is against the south wall of the church, and is under a Gothic canopy, supported by pillars of mosaic. It bears a long inscription, together with effigies of the Duchess and her five daughters, kneeling: a similar plate with her eight sons on it has been torn off.[326]
The Duchess of Somerset, the Protector’s widow, followed the example of my Lady of Suffolk, and ensured her personal tranquillity by contracting a mésalliance with Mr. Newdigate, son of that Mr. Newdigate to whom, as recorded in an early chapter of this work, Lord Latimer, Katherine Parr’s second husband, used to let his house furnished. The Duchess had been released from the Tower with other notable prisoners when Mary first entered its precincts. She was much beloved by that Queen, who used to address her as “my good Nan,” and this despite the fact that the Duchess was an ardent Protestant. She died in her ninetieth year, and was laid to rest under a monument which is reckoned as one of the finest in Westminster Abbey.
Katherine, Dowager Duchess of Suffolk, Charles Brandon’s fourth and last wife and Lady Frances’ stepmother, had followed the prevailing custom and married her secretary, Mr. Bertie or Bartie, “a gentleman of fair family and little means.” Her Grace was one of the first Englishwomen of noble birth to embrace the principles of the Reformation, and greatly incensed Queen Mary by doing so. This lady’s mother, Lady Willoughby d’Eresby, was Queen Katherine’s closest friend, and a staunch Catholic, a fact that probably increased the Queen’s resentment against the Duchess and her second spouse; and a hint that he might be arrested on a charge of heresy sent Mr. Bertie flying to Flanders. He had not the kindness to inform his wife of his intended flight, and she, feeling herself forsaken and in danger in London, escaped one foggy morning from her house in the Barbican and followed in the wake of the truant, whom she found at Wesel, where their famous son, Peregrine, the brave Lord Willoughby, was born. After Elizabeth’s accession, the Duchess returned to London with her children by Mr. Bertie and that gentleman himself. She was favourably received by the Queen, who saddled her, however, with many unwelcome obligations among them the custody of her step-granddaughters, the Ladies Katherine and Mary Grey. The Duchess, who was on friendly terms with Cecil, kept up a constant correspondence with him; and even after the lapse of nearly five hundred years, her humorous descriptions of people and things raise not a smile only, but a hearty laugh—she was, in fact, considered the wittiest woman of her day. Katherine, Dowager Duchess of Suffolk, died late in the reign of Elizabeth.
Queen Jane’s Secretary, Sir John Cheke, was arrested on 27th or 28th July 1553 (Strype says, “together with the Duke of Suffolk”) and committed to the Tower. There he remained a close prisoner. On 12th or 13th August an indictment as a traitor was made out against him, which brought forth a private letter to him from Cranmer, with whom he was on intimate terms. In this epistle Cheke is described as “one who had been none of the great doers in this matter [i.e. of the accession of Jane] against her [Queen Mary].” In 1554 Sir John Cheke was, after his estates had been confiscated, released from the Tower and given a licence by the Queen to travel abroad,[327] whereupon he made no delay in getting to Switzerland and thence to Italy.[328]