Charles Brandon, 1st Duke of Suffolk

• 1. Introduction

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  Charles Brandon rose from the household of a dead standard-bearer to become the most powerful man in England outside the royal family itself. His father, Sir William Brandon, was cut down on the field of Bosworth in 1485 while carrying Henry Tudor's banner into battle. Charles was barely a year old. That single act of loyalty, which cost his father his life, set in motion a chain of events that would bring Charles Brandon closer to the Tudor crown than almost anyone else in the kingdom.

  He grew up in the court of Henry VII, became Henry VIII's closest companion, married a queen of France in secret, survived charges that amounted to treason, commanded armies in France, and died on the sixtieth anniversary of the very battle that had killed his father. How a man of no royal blood navigated forty years inside the most volatile court in English history, and why a king known for destroying those around him never once turned on Charles Brandon, is a story worth hearing.

• 2. A Father's Shadow

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  Sir William Brandon died at Bosworth on the 22nd of August 1485, and the date would echo through his son's life in ways neither could have anticipated. Charles was described as the second but only surviving son of William, and his mother, Elizabeth Bruyn, died in March 1494 when he was still a child. Orphaned young, he was taken into the court of Henry VII, the very king his father had died serving.

  At court, Brandon grew into what William Dugdale later called "a person comely of stature, high of courage." He became an excellent jouster, a gifted courtier, and something of a model for the young Prince Henry, who was about seven years his junior. When Prince Arthur died and young Henry became heir to the throne, Brandon's role as an older companion and role model only deepened. He held a succession of household offices, becoming Master of the Horse in 1513. The grants of land that came with royal favour accumulated steadily. When Henry VIII created him Duke of Suffolk on the 4th of March 1514, there were only two other dukes in the entire kingdom.

• 3. A Secret Marriage, A Royal Scandal

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  Mary Tudor, the younger sister of Henry VIII, had been married off to the elderly King Louis XII of France as a diplomatic prize. Louis died in January 1515, and Brandon was dispatched to France to negotiate Mary's return and to offer congratulations to the new king, Francis I. What Henry did not expect was that Brandon would come back married to his sister.

  Love between Mary and Brandon had existed before her marriage to Louis. In France, Francis I had briefly pursued the young widow himself in the first week of her widowhood. Mary, she later said, had confided in Francis only to deflect his advances. Henry had made Brandon promise, before sending him to France, that he would not propose. Brandon gave his word. In France, Mary persuaded him to break it. The couple wed in secret at the Hotel de Clugny on the 3rd of March 1515, in the presence of just ten people, among them Francis I himself.

  Technically, marrying a royal princess without the king's consent was treason. The privy council urged imprisonment or execution. Brandon was saved by two things: the diplomatic skill of Thomas Wolsey, who was both a kinsman and a friend of Brandon's, and the genuine affection Henry held for his sister and his closest companion. The fine imposed was severe. Brandon and Mary were charged £24,000 payable to the king at £1,000 a year, plus the entirety of Mary's dowry from Louis XII, valued at £200,000, along with her plate and jewels. Henry later reduced the fine. They were then publicly remarried at Greenwich Hall on the 13th of May 1515, in the presence of the king and his court.

• 4. The Politician in the Field

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  Brandon was not only a courtier. He had already proven himself a military commander during the French campaign of 1513, distinguishing himself at the sieges of Thérouanne and Tournai. One agent of Margaret of Savoy, governor of the Netherlands, told her that Brandon was a "second king" and advised her to write him a pleasant letter. The comparison was noted at every court in Europe.

  Henry VIII had at that point been privately urging Margaret to consider marrying Brandon. The manoeuvre was delicate. Henry was careful to deny any involvement to Margaret's father, the Holy Roman Emperor Maximilian I. Nothing came of the match, but the episode illustrated how Henry used Brandon as a diplomatic instrument, projecting English ambition through a man whose charm opened doors that formal envoys could not.

  In 1523, Brandon was sent to Calais to lead an invasion of northern France alongside Floris d'Egmont, Count of Buren, commanding Flemish forces. They laid waste to the north of France before Brandon disbanded his troops with the onset of winter. He was appointed Earl Marshal of England in 1524, a position previously held by Thomas Howard, the 2nd Duke of Norfolk. When he relinquished it in 1533 to Thomas Howard, the 3rd Duke of Norfolk, the formal reason given was that Norfolk's ancestors had long held the office. The real dynamics of power at Henry's court were rarely stated plainly.

• 5. Wolsey's Fall, Brandon's Rise

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  Cardinal Wolsey's disgrace in 1529 opened space at the centre of English power, and Brandon moved into it. Henry sent Brandon and Thomas Howard, the 3rd Duke of Norfolk, to demand the Great Seal from Wolsey, the physical symbol of his authority as Lord Chancellor. The errand was pointed. It may have been chosen in part because Brandon and Wolsey were kin.

  Brandon then served as High Steward at the coronation of Anne Boleyn. He was also appointed as one of the commissioners tasked with dismissing Catherine of Aragon's household, a duty he found distasteful. Both he and his late wife Mary had quietly supported Catherine against Anne Boleyn. The task of stripping Catherine of her title and staff fell to a man who privately opposed it.

  At the end of 1533, Henry dispatched Brandon to Buckden Towers to inform Catherine that she would be moved to Somersham Palace and stripped of the title of Queen, to be called instead the Dowager Princess of Wales. Catherine refused both. She locked herself in a room. Brandon was caught between the king's orders and a former queen who happened to share his own sympathies. The resolution came not from confrontation but from suggestion: Catherine was moved instead to Kimbolton Castle, which was healthier, and which Catherine agreed to accept. Kimbolton was owned by Brandon's family, the Wingfields. Whether Brandon proposed it as a way of placating Catherine is not recorded, but the outcome removed him from an impossible position.

• 6. The Last Years

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  Mary Tudor died on the 25th of June 1533, and Brandon's position at court shifted. He was no longer Henry's brother-in-law. Henry pressed him to move his base from East Anglia to Lincolnshire, partly to ease tension with the Howard family, the dominant power in that region. Katherine Willoughby, whom Brandon had married in September 1533, owned her father's former castle at Grimsthorpe in Lincolnshire. Henry gave the couple Vaudey Abbey on their marriage but asked Brandon to surrender Westhorpe Hall, as well as Wingfield Castle and Henham Hall, properties tied to his family for generations.

  Brandon found a different kind of life in Lincolnshire. He lived at Tattershall Castle, spent time at Grimsthorpe, and built a new manor house at Spilsby. In London, he kept Suffolk Place or the Barbican as his base. Henry made him Lord Steward of the Royal Household in 1539. In the early 1540s, Brandon was drawn into skirmishes with the Scots, including the Battle of Solway Moss and the campaign known as the Rough Wooing. In 1544, he commanded an English army in France for the second time, and was involved in the Siege of Boulogne.

  Charles Brandon died at Guildford, Surrey, on the 22nd of August 1545. It was his sixtieth year, and it was the sixtieth anniversary of the Battle of Bosworth, the day his father had been killed. The king was openly grieved. At the Privy Council meeting where Brandon's death was announced, Henry said that throughout their long friendship, Brandon had never tried to harm an adversary and had never said a word to hurt anyone. He asked his councillors whether any of them could say the same. Brandon had requested a quiet funeral at Tattershall. Henry paid for an elaborate ceremony at St George's Chapel, Windsor, where Jane Seymour was already buried, and where Henry himself would be laid to rest in 1547, beside his lifelong friend.

• 7. Lives After Death

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  Brandon's descendants carried forward a story that did not end with him. His daughter Frances Brandon, born on the 16th of July 1517, married Henry Grey, 1st Duke of Suffolk, and became the mother of Lady Jane Grey, the nine-day queen of England. Brandon's two youngest sons by Katherine Willoughby, Henry and Charles, were created Dukes of Suffolk but died of the sweating sickness within an hour of each other on the 14th of July 1551.

  The romance between Brandon and Mary Tudor captured the imagination of later writers. The American author Charles Major, writing under the pseudonym Edwin Caskoden, published When Knighthood Was in Flower in 1898. It proved an enormous success and eventually inspired at least three films, including a 1922 adaptation in which Brandon was played by Forrest Stanley. Richard Todd portrayed him in the 1953 Disney picture The Sword and the Rose. Henry Cavill played the role in the Showtime series The Tudors, though the series incorrectly paired Brandon with Margaret Tudor rather than Mary.

  Hilary Mantel placed Brandon inside the world of Wolf Hall, her Man Booker Prize-winning novel, and its sequels Bring Up the Bodies and The Mirror and the Light. Richard Dillane portrayed him in the BBC dramatisation of those books. The repeated return to Brandon across centuries of fiction reflects the quality that Henry VIII himself identified at the Privy Council on the day Brandon died: a man who moved through one of the most dangerous courts in history for forty years without, apparently, ever making a true enemy.