It is a remarkable fact that, although Charles Brandon, Duke of Suffolk, was, after Thomas More, Wolsey and the king himself, the most conspicuous personage at the court of Henry VIII, no authoritative biography of him exists, unless indeed it be a short, but very unimportant, monograph (written in Latin, at the end of the sixteenth century) now in the King’s Library at the British Museum. Suffolk outlived nearly all his principal contemporaries, except the king and the Duke of Norfolk, and his career, therefore, runs almost parallel with that of Henry VIII, whom he attended in nearly every event of importance, from boyhood to death. Brandon predeceased the king by only a few months. In person, he bore so striking a resemblance to Henry, that the French, when on bad terms with us, were wont to say that he was his master’s bastard brother. The two men were of the same towering height, but Charles was, perhaps, the more powerful; at any rate, King Henry had good cause, on one occasion, to admit the fact, for Brandon overthrew and slightly injured him in a wrestling match at Hampton Court. Both king and duke were exceedingly fair, and had the same curly, golden hair, the same steel-grey eyes, planted on either side of an aquiline nose, somewhat too small for the breadth of a very large face. In youth and early manhood, owing to the brilliancy of their pink-and-white complexions, they were universally considered extremely handsome, but with the advent of years they became abnormally stout, and vainly tried to conceal their fat, wide cheeks, and double chins, with beards and whiskers. A French chronicler, speaking of Charles Brandon at the time that he was in Paris for the marriage of Mary Tudor to Louis XII, says he had never seen so handsome a man, or one of such manly power who possessed so delicate a complexion—rose et blanc tout comme une fille. And yet he was not the least effeminate, for of all the men of his day, he was the most splendid sportsman, the most skilful in the tilt-yard, and the surest with the arrow. He danced so lightly and so gracefully that to see him was a sight in which even Henry VIII, himself an elegant dancer, delighted.
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CHARLES BRANDON, DUKE OF SUFFOLK
(From an engraving, after the original in the collection of His Grace the Duke of Bedford)
Unfortunately, so many physical advantages were not allied to an equal number of virtues; and here again, the resemblance between King Henry and his bosom friend is extraordinary. Both were equally cruel, selfish and unscrupulous, and both entertained the same loose ideas as to the sanctity of marriage—with this difference, however, that whereas King Henry usually divorced one wife before he took another, Charles had two wives living at one and the same time, from neither of whom was he properly divorced! What is most singular, too, is that he ventured to marry the king’s sister whilst his first wife was still living, and not as yet legally separated from him, whereby he might easily have been hauled before a justice as a bigamist, and his offspring by a princess of the blood royal of England, and dowager queen of France to boot, been declared illegitimate.
In addition to his great strength and exceptional ability as a commander, both on land and sea, Suffolk possessed a luxuriant imagination, which delighted in magnificent pageantry. In the halcyon days of Henry’s reign, long before the fires of Smithfield had shed their lurid glow over the city, Suffolk and his master devised sports and pastimes, masques and dances, to please the ladies.[9] Once he entered the tilt-yard dressed as a penitent, in a confraternity robe and cowl of crimson velvet, his horse draped in cardinal-coloured satin. Assuming a humble attitude, he approached the pavilion in which sat the king and Queen Katherine, and in a penitential whine, implored her grace’s leave to break a lance in her honour. This favour being granted, he threw back his cloak, and appeared, a blaze of cloth of gold, of glittering damascened armour and sparkling jewels, to break sixteen lances in honour of the queen. Again, when Queen Mary was his bride, and the court went a-maying at Shooters Hill, he devised a sort of pastoral play, and with Jane Grey’s paternal grandfather, Thomas, Marquis of Dorset, disguised himself and his merry men as palmers, in gowns of grey satin with scallop-shells of pure gold and staves of silver. The royal guests having been duly greeted, the palmers doffed their sober raiment and appeared, garbed in green and gold, as so many Robin Hoods. They then conducted their Majesties to a glade where there were “pastimes and daunces,” and, doubtless, abundant wine and cakes. Much later yet, Brandon went, in the guise of a palmer, with Henry VIII, to that memorable ball given by Wolsey at Whitehall, at which Anne Boleyn won the heart of the most fickle of our kings.
The last half of the fourteenth century witnessed the beginning of the decline of feudalism in England. The advance of education, and consequently of civilization, had by this time largely developed the commercial and agricultural resources of the country, and the yeoman class, with that of the country gentry, had gradually come into being. At the Conquest, the majority of the lands owned by the Saxons—rebels to Norman force—were confiscated and handed over to the Conqueror’s greater generals: to such men as William, Earl of Warren, or Quarenne, who seated himself in East Anglia, having, as his principal Norfolk fortress, Castleacre Castle, on the coast, not far from East Dereham. Its picturesque ruins still tower above those of the magnificent priory that the great William de Warren raised, “to the honour of God and Our Lady,” for monks of the Cluniac branch of the Benedictine Order. This Earl of Warren, who was overlord of a prodigious number of manors and fiefs in East Anglia, numbered, among the bonny men who came out of Picardy and Normandy in his train, two stalwart troopers: one haled from Boulogne-on-the-Sea, so tradition says—and is not tradition unwritten history?—and was known as “Thomas of Boulogne”; he settled at Sale, near Aylsham, in Norfolk, and was the progenitor of the Boleyns or Bullens, whose surname is an evident corruption of de Boulogne; the other dropped his French patronym, whatever it was, and assumed the name of Brandon, after a little West Suffolk border town, in the immediate vicinity of the broad and fertile lands he had acquired.
These Brandons, then, had lived on their farm near Brandon for about four centuries, deriving, no doubt, a very considerable income from the produce of their fields and from their cattle. It is certain that they sent several members of their family to the Crusades; that one of them followed the Black Prince to Poitiers, and that yet another, a trooper, it is true, died on the field of Agincourt.[10] Somewhere in the last quarter of the fourteenth century, William, the then head of the family, apprenticed his son Geoffrey to a rich mercer of Norwich, a great commercial centre in those days, next to London and Bristol in importance, and doing what we should now call a “roaring trade” with Flanders, and through Flanders, with Venice and Florence, and even with the East. This Norwich Brandon having made a fortune, was seized with an ambition to attain still greater wealth and station for his son and heir William; and hence it came about, that near the time King Henry VI ascended the throne, young Brandon arrived in London, apprenticed to a firm of mercers established near Great St. Helen’s, Bishopsgate Street. He was a pushing, shrewd, energetic, and very unscrupulous knave, who soon acquired great influence in the city and amassed corresponding wealth. Finally, he became sheriff, and was knighted by Henry VI. He purchased a large property in Southwark, and built himself a mansion, later known as Suffolk Court. During the Wars of the Roses he allied himself at first with the Yorkists, and lent Edward IV considerable sums of money, which, according to Paston, that monarch dishonestly refused to repay. This drove William to cast his fortunes with the Lancastrians and largely assist Henry VII, then simply Earl of Richmond, both with money and men, and so was held in high esteem by that monarch till his death, in the twelfth year of Henry’s reign. William Brandon married Elizabeth, daughter of Sir Robert Wingfield of Letheringham, whose mother was the daughter and co-heir of Sir Robert Goushall, the third husband of the dowager Duchess of Norfolk, widow of the first duke, who, dying in exile in Venice, was buried in the magnificent church of San Giovanni e Paolo. Even thus early, we see a Brandon, the great-grandson of a Suffolk farmer, connecting himself with the noble houses of Wingfield, Fitzalan and Howard.[11]