So, I messed up. I posted the Killinger piece, which is obviously a further discussion of the events Kee relates, first. So, I'm going to delete the Killinger and repost it identically in proper order, so people aren't confused. Sorry for any inconvenience.
The Extra Girl: For the first heaven and the first earth were passed away.
- Thread starter Dr. Waterhouse
- Start date
Sigismunda Killinger, Lecture Record, March 9, 1999 Charpentier-Synthtranslate Edition.
DR. KILLINGER:
Who would like to tell me the problem for the state in what has just transpired with respect to the Estates-General placing the matter of the country’s now-complex web of laws concerning worship within the exclusive purview of the prince?
Student: “Well, maybe this is just our anachronistic application of a modern sensibility, but it doesn’t seem right for an issue as fundamental to an individual’s personhood as religious freedom to rest solely with the whim of the ruler—"
That’s not wrong! That’s not wrong! Of course, neither is it what I’m looking for.
Student: "It just seems that even when you’re using it to defend what is in its substance a system of individual rights, this whole structural argument of the prince as the head of the state just as the father is the head of the family strengthens the hand of monarchical authority outside structures of law and accountability. Not to mention, as was said, it makes it just that much easier for a subsequent prince to come along and, with a different mind, produce a totally different regime of religious liberty, or perhaps even end it completely."
And that is closer to what I’ve had in mind. But it’s still not quite it. Allow me to explain. I fear you are all much more high-minded defenders of spiritual freedom than myself. What I specifically asked about was not the system of arguments in how the new laws pertaining to religious observance in Saxony were explained and justified, nor the practical matters of how easily they could be subsequently changed. What I asked about was not the problem for freedom of religion.
What I asked about was the problem for the state. To a certain extent, Alexander’s, and Diermissen’s, and the Estates-General’s, goal is creating a system of settled legal authority governing religious life. What the Letter of Kindly Obeisance had done was to throw open the possibility of perpetual dispute pertaining to what observances would be allowed in Saxony and the rules they would follow. And there was a widespread realization that inevitably this would lead to civil war, to a state of affairs within Saxony shockingly close to the situation in the wider empire during the Spanish War. Instead, the whole matter had to be set outside any kind of nascent political process, or else the peoples of Saxony would most likely inevitably go after each other like rats in a sack, and the noble experiment of Friedrich IV, and now his son, would resolve itself into bloodshed and horror. Which would be far from an undesired result for some of the players involved, even within Saxony, even among Saxon Lutherans.
The real problem with doing this is that the office of elector is not beyond politics, disputation, or even violent conflict. It does not exist in the ether. It is not beyond the flaws and accidents of our quotidian world. And when you take the matter of the religious settlement and you make that solely determined by who the elector is, you have not eliminated the struggle over the religious settlement, you have just combined it with matters of princely legitimacy and succession. And of course in 1579, with Saxony’s electoral dignity having been passed down to first-born sons for the past hundred years, that may not seem like an immediate worry. Wettins in this period, apparently, do not have the same problem making legitimate heirs that Tudors do. But every new head wearing the coronet is not just a role of the dice as to whether Friedrich IV’s regime of liberality will be maintained, it is a new chance for the people unhappy with this regime to find the means to bring it down by bringing down the prince himself.
For the time being, both the inclination of the individual princes to defend the patrimony of “Friedrician liberties”, and the claims of those princes to the electoral dignity, are solid and unquestioned. But what Alexander has done has placed a bet on this always being the case. And when that bet is finally lost, and time to collect comes due, all the vulnerabilities of what we have come to call the Diermissen Settlement will be revealed. And when that happens, to Alexander’s descendants this business about the prince as the sole repository of authority over religious life will seem like so many dragon’s teeth.
Yes yes, I know I am mixing metaphors. You do this for an hour three times a week and see how well you fare—
DR. KILLINGER:
Who would like to tell me the problem for the state in what has just transpired with respect to the Estates-General placing the matter of the country’s now-complex web of laws concerning worship within the exclusive purview of the prince?
Student: “Well, maybe this is just our anachronistic application of a modern sensibility, but it doesn’t seem right for an issue as fundamental to an individual’s personhood as religious freedom to rest solely with the whim of the ruler—"
That’s not wrong! That’s not wrong! Of course, neither is it what I’m looking for.
Student: "It just seems that even when you’re using it to defend what is in its substance a system of individual rights, this whole structural argument of the prince as the head of the state just as the father is the head of the family strengthens the hand of monarchical authority outside structures of law and accountability. Not to mention, as was said, it makes it just that much easier for a subsequent prince to come along and, with a different mind, produce a totally different regime of religious liberty, or perhaps even end it completely."
And that is closer to what I’ve had in mind. But it’s still not quite it. Allow me to explain. I fear you are all much more high-minded defenders of spiritual freedom than myself. What I specifically asked about was not the system of arguments in how the new laws pertaining to religious observance in Saxony were explained and justified, nor the practical matters of how easily they could be subsequently changed. What I asked about was not the problem for freedom of religion.
What I asked about was the problem for the state. To a certain extent, Alexander’s, and Diermissen’s, and the Estates-General’s, goal is creating a system of settled legal authority governing religious life. What the Letter of Kindly Obeisance had done was to throw open the possibility of perpetual dispute pertaining to what observances would be allowed in Saxony and the rules they would follow. And there was a widespread realization that inevitably this would lead to civil war, to a state of affairs within Saxony shockingly close to the situation in the wider empire during the Spanish War. Instead, the whole matter had to be set outside any kind of nascent political process, or else the peoples of Saxony would most likely inevitably go after each other like rats in a sack, and the noble experiment of Friedrich IV, and now his son, would resolve itself into bloodshed and horror. Which would be far from an undesired result for some of the players involved, even within Saxony, even among Saxon Lutherans.
The real problem with doing this is that the office of elector is not beyond politics, disputation, or even violent conflict. It does not exist in the ether. It is not beyond the flaws and accidents of our quotidian world. And when you take the matter of the religious settlement and you make that solely determined by who the elector is, you have not eliminated the struggle over the religious settlement, you have just combined it with matters of princely legitimacy and succession. And of course in 1579, with Saxony’s electoral dignity having been passed down to first-born sons for the past hundred years, that may not seem like an immediate worry. Wettins in this period, apparently, do not have the same problem making legitimate heirs that Tudors do. But every new head wearing the coronet is not just a role of the dice as to whether Friedrich IV’s regime of liberality will be maintained, it is a new chance for the people unhappy with this regime to find the means to bring it down by bringing down the prince himself.
For the time being, both the inclination of the individual princes to defend the patrimony of “Friedrician liberties”, and the claims of those princes to the electoral dignity, are solid and unquestioned. But what Alexander has done has placed a bet on this always being the case. And when that bet is finally lost, and time to collect comes due, all the vulnerabilities of what we have come to call the Diermissen Settlement will be revealed. And when that happens, to Alexander’s descendants this business about the prince as the sole repository of authority over religious life will seem like so many dragon’s teeth.
Yes yes, I know I am mixing metaphors. You do this for an hour three times a week and see how well you fare—
For well over the first hundred years of its existence, the Estates General met in various churches, castles and city halls, with no formal home. This was widely seen as a deliberate slight, a way of denying the new legisature respect commensurate with its immense power. So when Erste finally took it upon himself to build them a place to meet, confer, and hold offices, he determined to do so on a grand scale. At this time, sketches of Bernini's abandoned plans for the Louvre--squelched by the clash of personalities between Bernini and Louis XIV--were circulating widely throughout Europe. For Erste, this design was just barely pagan and baroque enough. Eventually he managed to procure copies of Bernini's plans and undertook to use them as the design for the Palace of the Estates General. Construction of the actual Palace of the Estates General in Wittenberg took far longer than his lifetime, and the completed edifice was only dedicated in 1701. Hence, Elevations for a new Palace of the Louvre, by Gian Lorenzo Bernini, as The Palace of the Estates General, Wittenberg.
Sigismunda Killinger, Lecture Record, March 12, 1999 Charpentier-Synthtranslate Edition.
As we left matters, Heidersdorf on his first trip to the castle in his fancy new clothes had delighted the elector. One can imagine him, received at the schloss, refreshments in hand, parrying amused questions from the Electress Maria Eleonora and bouncing young Duke Mark Anton on his knee. Even if there were no signs of the much-needed funds as yet, Heidersdorf had ebulliently explained that any delay was out of care that the new Estates-General not outrun its remit, but instead act with caution and in keeping with the Elector's wishes. It was a performance of perfect, humble, submission: "Have I told you, most serene highness, the story of how my father died in vain to defend the land from Bohemian hussars in the Spanish War?"
Heidersdorf's second visit at Schloss Hartenfels coincided with the Feast of the Epiphany in January 1580. With high hopes, Alexander had graciously purchased gifts for Heidersdorf's children and grandchildren, and looked forward to more of the vertreter's country wisdom, albeit after receiving the long-desired money to save the country.
Instead, these are what Vertreter Heidersdorf brought his Elector. Each of these draft laws are significant to the subsequent constitutional history, so we must go into some detail. Just as the bomb previously lobbed at the Elector by the previous Elector was the Letter of Kindly Obeisance, and the first missive sent by this new Estates General was the Disclaiming Letter, I give you the Letter of Common Service, and the nine laws enclosed with it for the Elector's assent:
1. Though nothing in this law ends the requirement that the Elector assents to all laws and acts by the Estates General, the Estates General alone makes the rules by which it operates. Henceforth, the Elector does not call the Estates General, does not dismiss it, cannot take any practical step to frustrate its work when it is lawfully convened. The authority of any given Estates General begins from the moment its members are seated, and lasts until the moment the next Estates General's members are seated, without interruption. Even the deaths of every single member of the Estates General necessitating the election of a new Estates General, would not terminate the legal authority of the Estates General. If one studies the comparative history of constitutions, one eventually gets the hang of what sort of people write each one. Sometimes, it is soldiers bent upon Caesarism. Sometimes, it is the indolent landed gentry content to leave everything vague, so that their descendants brawl over their every utterance for hundreds of years. In this case, it is the negotiators of commercial contracts in a society rife with fraud, so few details are left to chance. No longer in Saxony would the Estates be convened and dismissed as if they were mere servants, nor could they be dispensed with through mere trickery or low violence and thuggery.
2. The Elector's assent to a draft law passed by the Estates General functions as an oath before God to execute that law of the Estate's General. Moreover, with his assent he submits himself to the judgment of his own magistrates in determining when he is bound to execute a law to which he has previously given his assent, who will then be empowered to ordered his compliance with the execution of the laws to which he has assented. In short, the Elector cannot provide his assent to a law and then ignore it as inconvenient, not even when circumstances change. Perhaps even more importantly, though theoretically all judges in Saxony hold their office by derivation of the feudal rights of the Elector, now the Elector explicitly and voluntarily submits himself to their authority. Even if this is for the narrow matter of making sure he consistently enforces a law he has heretofore agreed to, this represents a momentous evolution in the legal relationship of the sovereign to the polity.
3. Though these laws, like all laws, will require the Elector's assent, the Estates General shall henceforth by laws it will make will determine its composition. This will include the number of seats, their distributions in different bodies, the apportionment of members among cities, towns and regions, the qualifications to hold office, and the means by which members are chosen. No other schemes or systems for determining the composition of the Estates General will have legal effect, nor will any members of the Estates General chosen by other means be recognized. Essentially what the Elector has done once, he cannot do again. Though Alexander dissolved the previous estates with its consent, plainly this draft law conceives of a situation in which the Elector would try to amend the rules for who are represented, or how, on his own. This makes clear only the Estates can do that. Whereas other drafts herein represent perhaps distant hypothetical situations, this evinces a pressing need. A practical limit on the number of members of the Estates, an apportionment regime acceptable to all the appended states, a permanent set of rules governing the elections, all are pressing necessities at the time of this law's passage.
4. As the Elector shall continue to have exclusive control over the management of his property and the spending of the proceeds therefrom, so shall the Estates General have the responsibility for the levying of taxes on the people of Saxony through the making of laws, which laws the Elector may give or withhold his assent. No tax or fee upon a person of Saxony may be imposed by other means, and any purported tax or fee not passed by the Estates-General shall be null and void. Likewise, the Estates will control the spending of the proceeds of all taxes and impositions on the people of Saxony operating by force of law. With respect to these rules, the people of Saxony shall include all those who have resided in the country longer than one year and one day. Perhaps the most momentous of all these draft laws, the Fourth Law would permanently, and explicitly, invest the taxing power of the state in the Estates-General. Previously, Electors could conceivably impose taxes on their own, though it was highly frowned on and impopular. Notably, whereas in the other laws the Estates-General are very careful to use absolute and expansive language, here the language allows some loopholes. For one, there is no mention of fees or rents, meaning that these can still be imposed and managed by the Elector without recourse to the Estates-General. For another, there is no mention of taxes on imports, which for a body including an over-representation of manufacturers and tradesmen, is hardly accidental. In times of shortfall and crisis, these exceptions to the rule by which the Estates General exclusively conducted tax policy would be critical to Alexander and future princes.
5. With respect to state enterprises and schemes, the Elector may start them as he wishes, run them as he wishes, and dissolve them as he wishes, when, and to the extent, they are funded from his own wealth and the proceeds of his own lands. Using the tax proceeds of the Saxon state for the founding and operation of any such enterprise or scheme brings it within the law-making power of the Estates General. For such schemes and enterprises the Estates General shall impose the following rules: the appointment of professional management to whose discretion the decision-making power with respect to the enterprise is wholly and completely given, with the approval of the Estates General; the conduct of business for the economic purposes and benefits for which the enterprise was chartered, without respect to any objective of the prince or his government; and the requirement for prior approval by the Estates General as a body before any commercial arrangement is entered into with a sovereign which may default on its debt and not be subjected to the remedies of Saxon civil law. Plainly, no less for Calvinists than for Lutherans, no less for those passionately reminiscing over the triumphs of Friedrich IV than those who feared his son was going to turn over the country to the Church of Rome, no less for the enthusiasts for the new finance system than for those who believed it was an instrument of Satan, the idea of bankrupting the country through a massive loan to the Habsburgs for them to win the Polish throne, which they subsequently defaulted on, as they had to other lenders countless times before, was pure madness. And any notion of bailing out the Electorate of Saxony and righting its finances without making sure such nonsense would never happen again, pure folly. This draft law, and there is no other way to put it, is nothing less than the Elector getting spanked and sent to bed without his supper, the humiliation all the worse given that this measure was the only one to pass the Estates General with unanimous support.
6. The Estates General recognizes the Elector, whether with our sovereign Emperor, the other princely states of the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation, or with those of other nations and empires, to conduct all relations and communications on behalf of the state. Moreover, he shall have the exclusive authority to make and end war; send embasses; and regulate the conduct of the relations of Saxons and all foreign persons. Moreover, he shall have the exclusive power to order the religious life of the nation as he sees fit, as was previously recognized in the law of 31 October, 1579. And the Elector may order his household and hire and fire his advisors, agents and servants without approval by the Estates-General. However, the Elector may not further circumscribe or limit the subject matter about which the Estates-General will make laws. On the surface this draft appears deferential, its initial posture and tone similar to the provisions of the prior laws described by the Disclaiming Letter, but the concessions it makes were all generally recognized as prerogatives of the Elector, to which it adds nothing. By contrast, its single term restraining the elector from acting to limit the subject matter about which the Estates General may legislate is sweeping and absolute. In some ways, by its very open-endedness, this is the most powerful thunderbolt the new Estates General wields at the personal sovereignty of the Elector.
7. The Elector holds his lands by virtue of his lordship of Saxony, lawful since time immemorial, and supported for generations by the taxes paid by the Saxon people. Thus he may not alienate his lands, whether by gift, sale or trade, without the approval of the Estates-General. Likewise, the Elector may not occupy the lands of any other person, dispossess them, or deprive them of any right or estate in land, without either that person's consent through an ordinary sale or lease, or by an act of the Estates-General. From time immemorial, medieval princes had used the liquidation of their holdings in land, whether by feudal grants, by the exchanges associated with marriage and other family relations, and by outright sale, in order to get money, military support and other goods needed when their feudal estates would not oblige them the imposition of the desired taxes. Over time this practice would then only make them more dependent on the funds accumulated by taxation, given that they no longer had the real estate to produce the annual rents to provide their needs. Therefore, definitely relative to many of the restraints on the Elector's power the Estates General were insisting on in these drafts, limits on the power of the prince to alienate his lands through various means is nothing new. Likewise, this draft law creates limits on his ability to enlarge his lands using duress, which interestingly enough he was still able to do so long as he had the Estates-General's approval. Crucially, this also meant the Elector Alexander would not have been able to use the Black Plot of Meissen as the excuse to strip Duke Johann of his wealth and lands, at least not without the Estates-General's say-so.
8. From time to time, the Estates General will name a representative from its body to convey draft laws and whatsoever other instruments, bills and letters to the Elector. Such representative will be the exclusive means the Estates-General will communicate with the Elector as a body. And the Elector will likewise charge the same representative with the completed and effective laws bearing his assent, and any other instruments, bills and letters which he would direct to the Estates-General. Any communications by any other means or party between the Elector and the Estates-General can have no legal effect, any putative laws transmitted by other ways shall be null and void, and by neither the Elector nor the Estates-General can the said representative be threatened, detained, imprisoned or suffer any injury to his person or property by the operation of either the Elector or the Estates-General. Believe it or not, from the slim reed of this legal authority grew the trunk of the German head of government. Of course this is as attributable to the shrewd, if transactional and improvisatory, efforts of Heidersdorf and his successors as much as it is to any plan of government.
9. All the princes of Saxony shall be chosen by the existing succession laws of the Saxon state. Their elevations, investitures and the incidents thereof shall require the approval of the Estates General. All this may seem obvious and self-explanatory, but the past fifty years had seen the electoral dignity treated as a prize to be dangled by the emperor in front of any number of persons in exchange for the return of Saxony to the Catholic Church. Even within the Wettins, expelling the Albertines and nullifying the partition of Leipzig had thrown open quite a few doors to non-regular successions. The Estates General knew that investing in them an unrestricted power of approval would trigger outrage from Alexander, and so this was why they specified such approval could only occur in the application of the existing succession law, which of course favored himself and his children. Thus it became in essence an act in defense of his and his successors' rights against usurpers, interlopers and other outside claimants, while at the same time making explicit the Estates General's role in succession, essentially of all princely offices in the Electorate, but most importantly that of the Elector himself.
Hearing all this, one can only imagine how the initial smile must have vanished from the Elector Alexander's face, replaced by mute, implacable fury. Stonily, he asked Heidersdorf about the money, the immense funds Heidersdorf had promised he would return with on this visit with which Alexander would at last remedy the financial crisis and end this whole nightmare once and for all. "Why your serene highness," Heidersdorf answered, the smile not vanishing from his face, taking no note at all of Alexander's suddenly icy tone, "the money will as I said be yours, we merely need you to assent to these our draft laws, most humbly submitted for your consideration, first."
Last edited:
Banking Scene, Part of the Allegory of Trade, by Jost Amman
Clarence Kee, Lecture, October 12, 2006
Once again, we find ourselves at a bizarre intersection of the history of finance and the history of constitutional government. It's of course tempting to think of this combination as somehow peculiar to this odd hybrid creature, the Saxon Electorate of the late-sixteenth century. But in truth the history of state finance is the story of what states can accomplish with means beyond their immediate possessed economic resources at the time. And the history of constitutions is the history of the powers available to the state and the limits imposed on the state by its people, by law, by custom, and by external circumstance. So really, it is only natural that when a state is pushed to the limit, it begins both to cast about for more innovative ways to access resources outside itself, and to try to change the rules by which it operates. Adapt, or die.
From the time Alexander first found himself cornered by the Letter of Obeisance, his attitude toward some other remedy to his money problems not involving the Saxon Estates at all changed dramatically. Fairly immediately, even before he had composed the Letter of Princely Care, Duke Julius had been dispatched to Augsburg to negotiate with the firm of Marx Fugger and Brothers. Markus Fugger was happy to receive the chancellor of Saxony, despite the Fuggers' long history of supporting the Habsburgs through all the threatened and actual warfare between Empire and Electorate at midcentury, and despite the fact the Saxon system had been developed to provide a domestic alternative to the Catholic Fuggers.
After some initial inquiries, representatives of the Fugger bank secretly met with Alexander at the incomplete hunting lodge at Schloss Moritzburg--Alexander already had enough problems from his subjects thinking he was a secret Romanist, and receiving the Fuggers in Wittenberg or Torgau would only make them worse. There, the Fuggers' representatives announced a deal much different than what Alexander had imagined, and much closer to several offers his father had received earlier in his reign. None other than the King of Spain would assume his debts, gratis. All Alexander had to do was convert, along with his wife and children, return Saxony to Rome, and permit the Catholic religious orders into the country.
Alexander's answer was to quip that he could use the loan proceeds to establish his new residence in Spain, because there was no way he would be able to stay in Saxony if he did any of that.
The Fuggers' second proposal, delivered about the same time the Estates General first convened, essentially would trade a very low rate of interest for the end of the Saxons' experiment in state-managed lending. Essentially, the Fuggers would buy the exit of the Saxon state from the banking industry, and expand into the market the Saxon state bank would leave behind. It says something about Alexander's values and character that he was even less enthusiastic about this than converting to Catholicism. The goal for which he was putting himself and the country through all this was preserving the state scheme, not ending it and turning the business over to the hereditary enemies.
After Alexander's second refusal, the Fuggers, who were themselves no slouches when it came to negotiation, made the decision to make no more counter-offers. They wanted the Saxon state bank out of business, they wanted access to the Saxon market, and would insist on that in any deal with Alexander, even if they were willing to make concessions on other terms like rates of interest, penalties and the collateralization of tax revenues. Alexander for his part also decided to hang tight. After all, he had just gone to immense trouble to rig a friendly Estates General, and that still just might work out in his favor.
Certainly, that first visit of Heidersdorf to Torgau and the contents of the Disclaiming Letter gave Alexander hope that he wouldn't need the Fuggers after all. Then came Heidersdorf's second visit to Schloss Hartenfels in January 1580, and with it yet another delay in coughing up the money, and worse still, the Letter of Common Service. Its terms, and those of the nine draft laws accompanying it, would have been like throwing scalding water on any self-respecting prince of the late-sixteenth century. The permanent concession of so many of the core powers of government to a body dominated numerically by tradesmen and merchants, with essentially the powers to define its membership and its rules in perpetuity would have been unheard-of. There is no question that Alexander's forbears on the Habsburg and Oldenburg side would have reacted to such a letter by declaring its authors rebels and hunting them for their lives, simply as that.
It is worth noting here the sheer radicalism of the key formulation of the Letter of Common Service's first paragraph, from which the whole thing takes its name: "For, Most Serene Highness, even as we are servants to you, so are you are in common service with ourselves to the Nation." Even in Tudor England, this sort of talk would have been an invitation to the gallows. Dorothea of Denmark, Maria Eleonora, and many others in the Elector's inner circle counseled the time had now come for violent repression, the imposition of a direct tax without use of the Estates as a justifying mechanism at all but with brute force, and for the speedy disposal of the Johannines. Do it, do it all at once, don't look back. Even Alexander conceded this was probably what dear old dad would have done, if faced with the same circumstances.
But it is worth noting that Alexander had neither the tolerance for bloodshed or the apparent delight in subterfuge that his father had. The heir to Friedrich the False had determined that he would be, if anything, Alexander the True, and would live by his promises. Moreover, though Alexander's English relations were quick to note the many provisions of these nine laws that granted the Estates General powers that would seem outlandish to an English Parliament, Alexander knew that the Tudor kings had lived with many of these same restrictions, and nonetheless been able to prosper.
In the end, his hesitation to resort to force had less to do with mere queasiness than with his actual doubts as to the outcome. He feared the Johannines could still make the controversy out to be over the matter of the religious minorities in Saxony, and that if Saxon society were divided along those lines he would have the weaker position. Also, they would likely have the support of, if not the emperor, the Catholic princes of the empire eager to stamp out what they saw as the more offensive heresy afflicting the country. And finally, with the Johannine dukes being members of the Estates General, he did not know whether an effort to extinguish the Estates would not be precisely what the Johannines had wanted, and planned for.
Alexander had ended his crucial interview without saying anything, or even taking the offending papers from Heidersdorf's hand. It was only the next day, after a marathon session with his counselors, that Alexander summoned the carriage-maker back. Still calm, still friendly, Heidersdorf begged to leave the papers for the Elector's close perusal before they spoke further, or the Elector gave any definitive answer. Alexander, struck by the common sense of the notion, relented. It was then Heidersdorf passed to him the papers, back side up, with a loose, half-literate scrawl in his own rough hand across the whole sheet.
"It is no matter to us whether the Sons of Johann are dukes, or whether they live or die at all."
Now, Heidersdorf had no authority to venture into any of these matters. No instructions had been given him by anyone, certainly not by the Estates General or any of its officers, to make pronouncements about the thorny internal matters of Wettin family politics. And speculation has raged, over the centuries, over whether Julius, or Maria Eleonora, or some minor functionary, whispered into his ear about the Elector's misgivings. But nonetheless from that moment, the relationship of Alexander and Heidersdorf changed, and Alexander realized that the Estates General could be not just a way to blunt the weapons the Johannines had directed against him, but a weapon he could use against them.
Nonetheless, Alexander wanted to make a point in a way more powerful than mere words would permit that he had no intention of waiting further for his money. So, as he finally signified he would give his assent to the nine laws of the Letter of Common Service, he would send a guard of 300 cavalry back with Heidersdorf to back Leipzig, in a threatening manner reminiscent of one of Friedrich IV's escorts to the Imperial Diets. To make sure his message was not lost, he informed Heidersdort these were to guard him safely, and to make sure nothing happened to the legal instruments setting forth the new appropriations on the way back.
In addition, Alexander finally just happened to let it slip he had been in negotiations with the Fuggers, that they were close to a deal on very favorable terms, and that further delay on the Estates General's part would necessitate that he contract with them, no matter how distasteful he found it, or what the consequences to the Electorate would be.
Thus, it was done. On January 15, Heidersdorf returned with the Elector's assent. On January 17, the Estates General passed the largest one-time tax in the history of Saxony to resolve all remaining shortfalls in public accounts. The crisis was over. Saxony had, in the interlocking and reciprocal structure of the Disclaiming Letter, the Acclaiming Letter and the Letter of Common Service, a constitution that was written, enforceable, which limited the power of the sovereign, and which all the parties understood it could not be easily undone. At the same time, Saxony had preserved the brave experiment of its new public banking system, the Elector had seen off the challenge of the Johannines, and could now expect the Estates General to act as his ally in any renewed contest with them.
What has been remarkable, considering the shakiness of these beginnings, was the trust and the flexibility that quickly began to emerge between the Elector and the Estates General. Of course, certainly over the next fifty or one-hundred years, there would be no end to the shocked back-and-forths between the two: "You want to go to war against the who for the what again? And for this you need how much? Right now, and for every year after, until wait and see?" And there would be times, deep in the self-created crisis of the First General War, the system would be pushed to the very edge of destruction. But the Saxon Estates General had by then already come to be regarded in Grotius's memorable words as "the proud diadem of a free people", and necessary to the Saxons' understanding of their state as one superior to the "orientalesque tyrannies" of Spain and France.
There was no going back.
Last edited:
As much as I enjoy writing the "interesting facts about" series and other present-day or recent history digressions, to be honest, right now they're taking a backseat as I'm just trying to get as far as I can with the main story. Like I told Cate13, it's basically 1603 or bust. We're now going to break from the hard slog of the German political and institutional history to really start setting up the story of the Brandons. Of all the things I felt I did that were slight or half-assed the first time I tried to write a timeline, their rise to power was some of the worst. And I've read enough early modern British history by now I think I can put some flesh on those bones and make it more realistic.Again, it's great to see this back. Gotta say, for 16th century German parliamentarian scenarios, this is quite a happy ending.
Will there be more vignettes from the "current day" of this TL?
And I've now realized there's an innate problem in alternate history about the Stuarts. How do you write an alternate history as wild as half the stuff they actually got up to?
Livinius de Vogelaare. The painting depicts James VI, kneeling by the body of his slain father, Lord Darnley. Behind him is Darnley's parents, his grandparents, the Earl and Countess of Lennox, with their surviving son, Charles. In the painting in the corner is depicted the defeat of Mary, Queen of Scots' army at Carberry Hill, essentially of her overthrow as the Queen of Scotland. Inset on the raised tomb on which Darnley rests are scenes of him being pulled from his bed the night of his murder and his body being found the next day. In the banner over James VI's head is the words "Arise, O Lord, and avenge the innocent blood of the king my father and, I beseech you, defend me with your right hand." The painting was commissioned by the Lennoxes as a gift to their royal grandson so that "he may have a memorial from them in order that he shut not out of memory the recent atrocious murder of the king his father, until God should avenge it through him." Grandparents are so sweet.
Prefatory Note VI: Three Families Under Elizabeth I
In order to lay a foundation for the alternate history treatment of a male line of the Brandon family during the reigns of Edward VI, Mary I and Elizabeth I, it's helpful to consider the lives of the actual cousins of the children of Henry VIII and what became of them. In actual history, this means the descendants of Margaret Tudor and Mary Tudor. For the most part, I'm going to exclude the events of the rules of James V, Mary Queen of Scots and James VI in Scotland, because our focus is really more on the treatment of the cousins by the crown. Note in particular what tends to happen when they try to marry and procreate during the reign of Elizabeth.
The Stewarts
Margaret Douglas was the daughter of Archibald Douglas, Earl of Angus, and Margaret Tudor, Queen of Scotland. When Margaret, widow of James IV, married the Earl of Angus, her political position quickly disintegrated and she was forced to flee across the border into leaving behind her infant son, James V. Pregnant at that time with Margaret, she gave birth to Margaret in England. Because convention at the time held that rulers of England must be born within its borders, it was held that this made Margaret preferable in the succession as compared to her older brother James V. Queen Margaret later returned to Scotland with her young daughter. When Margaret was 13, dangerous political circumstances in Scotland again led her to be sent into England. This time she was raised alongside her cousin Mary, daughter of King Henry VIII, with whom she became close friends. Mary during this period was close to her royal uncle, and was heavily involved in the life of the English court. Margaret became an especially significant figure during this period because, with the bastardization of the surviving daughters from his first two marriages, she was a potential successor to Henry. Henry also sought to use her to negotiate a politically advantageous alliance. This was complicated in 1536, when Thomas Howard, a younger son of the duke of Norfolk, attempted to wed Margaret without the king's permission. Both Thomas and Margaret were committed to the Tower. Margaret was freed, and spent a while in honorable confinement at Syon Abbey, whereas Thomas was sentenced to death. He was not executed though, but died of natural causes. Margaret then had another affair in 1540 with Charles Howard, brother of Queen Katherine Howard.
In 1544 she married Matthew Stewart, 4th Earl of Lennox, who as a great-grandson of James II, had a claim to the Scottish throne in the event of the death of the then-infant, Mary, Queen of Scots. Henry VIII had sought this marriage to strengthen Lennox's claim. It was even mooted that Margaret might succeed in some circumstance to the throne of England, and James to the throne of Scotland, and they rule both kingdoms in a marital union, which would in their heirs become a personal union. Margaret's place in the succession though was complicated by the blanket exclusion of all the descendants of Margaret Tudor from succession to the English throne in Henry VIII's will. It was also made more difficult by the fact that Margaret remained a Roman Catholic. However, it was partly for this reason she enjoyed great favor again during the reign of Mary I. Though Margaret gave birth to a total of eight children, only two sons survived to adulthood.
The elder was Henry Stewart, called Lord Darnley as this was the courtesy title for the heir of the earldom of Lennox. Immediately from his birth in 1546 Darnley was the objects of conspiracies to raise him to the throne as a male born in England descended from the eldest daughter of Henry VII, despite being excluded from the throne by Henry's will. One such plot resulted in his family's arrest at the very beginning of Elizabeth's reign. After their release, they were more or less restored to their previous position. Margaret and Mary Queen of Scots exchanged letters, and at length the Earl of Lennox was invited back to Scotland. Darnley followed, and he was immediately introduced to the Queen of Scotland. However, Elizabeth was never notified of any intent for Darnley to wed Mary Queen of Scots. Meeting on February 17, 1565, on July 29 they were married, and on June 19, 1566, the future James VI was born. In the interim, Darnley and Mary's relationship had soured when she had refused to make him co-ruler and declare him her heir in the event she died without issue. Famously, Darnley and some co-conspirators murdered the Queen's secretary David Riccio in front of her while she was six months pregnant, Mary believing he had done this to cause a miscarriage and perhaps her own death. Then on the night of February 7, 1567, Darnley was himself murdered. Casks of gunpowder had been set off in the room immediately under his bed. Darnley himself was found outside in his nightshirt, suffocated.
Margaret, who had been imprisoned again for her role in marrying off her son without Elizabeth's permission, was released when Darnley was murdered. For her part, she believed Mary had been responsible, and for a time she worked implacably against Mary both at Elizabeth's court and with Mary's enemies in Scotland. Margaret's husband, Matthew, Earl of Lennox, later briefly became regent of Scotland for the young James VI, Mary having been forced from the throne by civil war, but he was then assassinated in 1576. Margaret resumed her correspondence with Mary Queen of Scots while she was in honorable confinement in England, and eventually they even reconciled. All Margaret's dynastic hopes now rested with her last surviving son, Charles. Charles was born in 1557. After some legal wrangling, Charles was recognized as Earl of Lennox. More importantly, he now carried both Lennox's potential claim to the throne of Scotland and Margaret's claim to the throne of England. Margaret again negotiated a marriage for one of her sons without the queen's permission, this time to Elizabeth Cavendish, the well-placed daughter of the Countess of Shrewsbury. When Elizabeth discovered this marriage, Margaret was again sent to the Tower.
Charles and Elizabeth Cavendish were married in 1574. Their marriage produced one child, Arabella, in 1575. Charles died in 1576 at the age of 19, at which point Elizabeth pardoned the now sonless Margaret Douglas and released her from the Tower. Margaret herself died in March 1578, with rumors at the time she was poisoned. Elizabeth Cavendish died in January 1582 at the age of 26. From that point on, Arabella was raised by her maternal grandmother, the Countess of Shrewsbury, also known as Bess of Hardwick Hall. The Countess of Shrewsbury gave Arabella an education commensurate with a potential heir to the English throne. In the last months of Elizabeth's reign, it came to her attention that Arabella was considering marrying without her permission Edward Seymour, a son of Katherine Grey, who herself had inherited a potential claim to the English throne derived from Henry VII's youngest daughter, the Princess Mary. Arabella denied the charges.
During the reign of James I, Arabella married in secret William Seymour, Lord Beauchamp, Edward Seymour's brother, in 1610. Imprisoned, she attempted to escape to France in disguise as a man. She was captured and sent to the Tower of London, where she starved herself to death in 1616.
The Greys
Henry Grey, Marquess of Dorset, was descended from Edward IV's queen Elizabeth Woodville through her first marriage to Sir John Grey. He married Frances Brandon, eldest daughter of Charles Brandon, Duke of Suffolk and Mary, Queen of France, in 1533. They had three daughters: Jane, born in 1537, Katherine, born in 1540, and Mary, born in 1545. Because Brandon's sons by Mary Tudor were all dead by 1534, this meant that the daughters, beginning with Jane, were all in the line of succession, and were that much closer because the terms of Henry VIII's will excluded the descendants of his elder sister Margaret. Jane in particular was recognized by a reluctant Edward VI as his heir, to the exclusion of Edward's half-sisters Mary and Elizabeth. To secure an alliance that would strengthen Jane's claim to the throne, Henry and Frances acceded to the efforts of John Dudley, Duke of Northumberland to marry Jane to his son Guildford. But Mary I successfully advanced her claim, Jane was deposed, and eventually Jane, her husband, and her father, were executed.
Despite her role, Mary allowed Frances her freedom, and even permitted Frances to retain some of the family's property. Frances then, perhaps more out of a need for physical, legal and economic security than anything else, married her master of the horse, Adrian Stokes. She became pregnant by him three times, each time resulting in stillbirth or a death while the child was in infancy. In 1559, Frances Brandon herself died.
Frances left behind two daughters from her marriage to Grey, Katherine and Mary. Katherine Grey had been married in 1553 to Lord Henry Herbert, heir to the Earl of Pembroke, at the same ceremony by which Jane had married Guildford Dudley. After the accession of Mary and the execution of Jane, the earl was able to get his son's marriage to Katherine annulled on the grounds of nonconsummation. Thereafter, in 1560, Katherine married Edward Seymour, first Earl of Hertford, without royal assent. Edward Seymour's sister, Jane Seymour (not the queen), was sole witness to the ceremony. Not long afterwards Elizabeth sent the Earl of Hertford on a long tour of Europe, but he gave Katherine a written instrument testifying to their marriage, which she then lost. Then in 1561, Edward's sister Jane died, and the marriage was without evidence or witnesses of ever having happened. Eight months pregnant and on a royal progress with the queen, she confessed everything to Elizabeth's favorite Robert Dudley, who then in turn told the queen. With some factions arguing that Katherine Grey had a superior claim to the throne to Elizabeth because of Henry VIII's will and Edward VI's device for the succession, Elizabeth took the step of sending Katherine Grey to the Tower. The Earl of Hertford was also imprisoned there on his return, and though they were kept separately, they were allowed occasional visits, with the result that Katherine bore two sons, Edward and Thomas. In 1562, to remove any doubt, the marriage of Edward and Katherine were annulled on the grounds of fornication and the sons were declared bastards. Released from the Tower in 1564 into the custody of relatives, Katherine died in 1568. One report related that she had starved herself to death.
On Katherine's death, the Earl of Hertford was released, returned to court, and married two more times. During Elizabeth's reign the Earl's sons by Katherine were widely considered illegitimate, but the elder, Edward was allowed to hold the courtesy title of the successor of the earls of Hertford, lord Beauchamp. He married Honora Rogers, who bore him four children who lived to adulthood, Edward in 1586, William in 1588, Francis in 1590, and Honora in 1594. Their marriages and issue occur during the reign of James I and later, though eventually they succeed to the dukedom of Somerset vacated during the reign of Edward VI. However the second-born son, William, is the one who married Arabella Stuart in secret. Unlike Arabella, William had escaped abroad. The year after Arabella's death he was knighted and eventually allowed to succeed to his father's lands and titles.
Mary Grey, the younger of the two surviving daughters of Henry and Frances Grey, herself married without royal assent on July 19, 1565. She married, in secret, Elizabeth's serjeant porter, Thomas Keyes, a member of the gentry. Mary did have three witnesses to her wedding, rather than just the one that Katherine did. Once discovered, Mary and Keyes were separated. Keyes was sent to the Fleet prison, and Mary placed under house arrest, eventually coming to live with her step-grandmother, Katherine Willoughby. Mary Grey during this time lived in relative poverty, until upon her sister's death in 1569 she became senior surviving potential claimant to the throne among the heirs of Mary Tudor. At this point she was sent to live with Thomas Gresham in better material circumstances than previously. Released in 1569, Keyes died in 1571. Mary begged for the opportunity to raise his still minor children from a prior marriage, but was denied. Finally in 1572 she was released in house arrest, but had no resources with which to make a home for herself, and so was still more or less passed around to the households of more affluent distant relations. She died in 1578.
The Cliffords
Eleanor Clifford was the younger of the two daughters of Charles Brandon and Mary Tudor. In 1535 she married Henry Clifford, heir to the Earl of Cumberland, with her uncle the king present at the ceremony. They had three children, of which two died in infancy. The survivor was Margaret Clifford. Margaret, born in 1540 became significant in early life because, with the exclusion of the Stewart heirs under Henry VIII's will, and the fact that the Greys had produced no legitimate heirs, she could still inherit the throne or pass on a claim herself. During the reign of Mary Margaret Clifford was at court and married Henry Stanley, Earl of Derby in 1555. Their marriage was difficult, until Henry finally left her. Burdened with his debts, she lived in poverty. She was disgraced for criticizing the proposed marriage of Elizabeth I to the duke of Alencon, which if it resulted in offspring would put an end to her ambitions to succeed Elizabeth. Moreover, she was found to have used sorcery to try to predict when Elizabeth would die. The sorcerer in question, whom she claimed was merely her personal physician, was executed. She was not charged. Margaret Clifford died in 1594, having outlived two children who died in childhood and her eldest son, Ferdinando Stanley.
Ferdinando Stanley inherited his father's earldom of Derby in 1593. He was a generous supporter of Elizabethan poets including Shakespeare, Marlowe and Spenser, and supported the Lord Strange's Men, later Derby's Men, who performed plays by Shakespeare. He was rumored to be involved with Roman Catholic plots involving the succession. Stanley was approached by a man named Hesketh, from a family formerly attached to Stanley's, and was urged to advance the claim to the throne descending through his mother. Eventually, Ferdinando reported the matter to Burghley, and expected advancement from the show of loyalty, but was disappointed by this. Not long afterwards he died, and the cause of death was rumored to be poison. Ferdinando Stanley in turn had married Alice Spencer. They had three daughters. These included Anne, in 1580, Frances, in 1583, and Elizabeth, in 1588. Anne Stanley, who would have inherited the throne of England in 1603 if it had descended under the terms of Henry VIII's will, did not marry until 1607. Frances Stanley married one John Edgerton in 1602. Elizabeth Stanley married Henry Hastings, son and heir of the Baron Hastings, in 1601.
Ferdinando Stanley's younger brother William in 1595 married Elizabeth de Vere, daughter of the Earl of Oxford and his wife, Anne Cecil. Anne Cecil's father, William Cecil, Lord Burghley, and brother Robert Cecil, being the architects of much of the carnage on this page. Elizabeth was rumored to be unfaithful, with lovers including Robert Devereux the Earl of Essex and Sir Walter Ralegh. Nonetheless, eventually after twelve years of marriage William and Elizabeth began having children in 1607.
Last edited:
By the way, with this additional context, does the hesitation of our Brandon heirs to go back to England without some firm and explicit promises, and dear cousin Jane's refusal to do so under any circumstances, make more sense? Especially given the events they would be getting informed of in letters from Frances, Katherine, Mary and Margaret in the 1560's?
Portrait of a man, by Francesco di Rossi, as Henry Brandon, while Duke of Suffolk
Englandless Brandons, Brandonless England
Abigail Graham
In 1533 the Elector Friedrich IV of Saxony and his mother, the Electress Dowager Elizabeth, visited his uncle, King Henry VIII of England. During this visit, Henry and Friedrich signed the Treaty of Windsor, which included several terms which would have momentous effects over the next century, including Friedrich's renunciation of any rights to the English succession, including Henry's grant of a generous subsidy to Saxony, and including a defensive alliance by which either prince agreed to help the other in the event of an attack by a third party. Originally, the whole point of this trip, certainly in the mind of the Electress, had been to secure for Friedrich a bride among his relations in the English court. This had run aground for several reasons, but the principals of the treaty nonetheless wanted to conclude some marriage that would unite the two houses and show solidarity.
Elizabeth proposed, somewhat oddly given her relentless and deeply personal feud with Charles Brandon, that his son by her beloved sister the French Queen marry her daughter, Katarina. Now the boy in question, Henry Brandon, was only eleven, and Katarina a headstrong girl of seventeen. However, Mary Tudor the French Queen had died just months before the arrival of the Elector and his mother, bringing to ruin Elizabeth's plans for a reunion with Mary after more than twenty years apart. Because Elizabeth was such a prodigious writer of letters, we do not need to speculate as to her motives: Mary's insistence on the validity of Henry VIII's first marriage to Katherine of Aragon, and unyielding opposition to the rise of Anne Boleyn, and put her in danger, in Elizabeth's view. And though Mary's death has usually been attributed to cancer, Elizabeth was suspicious. In fact, she only became more so when she found out she was forbidden from visiting the exiled queen, now styled "Princess Dowager of Wales", Katherine of Aragon, who was also ailing.
Moreover, though the marriage of the Duke of Suffolk and the French Queen had been, obviously, a love match, Elizabeth believed that Brandon may have been somehow complicit in that Mary, because of her efforts against the Boleyns, had become a liability to his all-consuming ambition. Three months after Mary's death, Brandon married his next wife, Katherine Willoughby, during Elizabeth's visit, and was talking ebulliently about the prospects of the children Katherine would bear. At the same time, Henry Brandon now stood as a potential successor to Henry in a way that would make the Boleyns, and their adherents at court such as Thomas Cromwell, especially uncomfortable if the child Anne was then carrying (the future Elizabeth I) turned out to be a girl. So, Elizabeth pushed with all her might not just for the match between the young Henry Brandon and Katarina, but for Henry Brandon to leave the English court and go to Saxony.
How much of this was paranoia on the Electress's part we can only wonder. But what we know that she did not is that the English side of the negotiations acceded to her wish only on the inclusion of a secret term in the Treaty of Windsor not disclosed to anyone on the Saxon side but the Elector Friedrich himself. That on the occasion of Henry Brandon's death in the Elector's care he would receive an enormous payment, ostensibly to settle any debts, wages, and funeral expenses for the young prince. In practice though, this would be five times as much as the military stipend he would receive from his uncle in any given year. Plainly, though ostensibly the young Henry Brandon's journey to Saxony would be to fetch his bride, learn the latest in European war-making, and visit the courts of the continent, the idea was for Friedrich to expeditiously find the means to kill him, and thus simplify Henry's succession. Now, we do not know whether Henry personally agreed to this term, or whether it was inserted by Cromwell without his knowledge. But Friedrich had no qualms relating what he remembered of this affair to various ambassadors towards the end of his life, and made it no secret that he actually had to provide to the English negotiators assurances Henry Brandon would not see the shores of England again.
We can only imagine how Henry, or Cromwell, thus received the news in in 1536 that the marriage beween the Earl of Lincoln and Katarina had been solemnified, and in 1539 that young Henry Brandon, still only seventeen, had fathered his first son with Katarina, naming him Henry as well, after his dear, loving great-uncle.
By 1542 however, Katarina's disruptive presence at the court of Wittenberg was making it necessary to find some other arrangement for the couple. This was during the time the Elector was preoccupied with the opening phases of the Spanish War in the far west of the empire, and had left his mother the Electress Dowager as regent in Wittenberg, so all the decision fell to Elizabeth. Henry VIII's health was becoming ever worse, and it was a foregone conclusion he would not last much longer. On the surface, the succession question had been resolved by the birth of Edward the Prince of Wales in 1536. For all anyone knew at that time, Prince Edward could succeed his father and then reign fifty years, begetting ten children himself, and all they would be sending Henry Brandon back to was the indolent life of the rural English nobility. And even if circumstances did provide a way for Henry to ascend the throne, everyone with an understanding of English succession politics in Wittenberg knew that Henry would have to be in England, and moreover would have to be sufficiently English in his manners, to be acceptable. He needed to return, and readjust himself, before could present himself as a potential king at some future point.
Also by this point, the threats Elizabeth had so deeply feared in 1533 were apparently all vanquished: the Boleyns were all dead, for which she was abundantly thankful for several reasons; Henry VIII's illegitimate son the Duke of Richmond had also died, and with him the chance for advancement in his coronation would provide to the family of his Howard wife; and Cromwell himself had been executed in 1540. Elizabeth's distrust did not extend so far that she believed Henry would himself hatch plots to kill his nephew, nor did she think Charles Brandon would conspire against his own offspring and heir, however long they had been apart. Brandon himself was of course aging, and for Henry to be absent at the time of his father's death would risk his place in the inheritance of his lands and titles. For all these reasons, it was time to go back.
If there was a problem, it was the character of Henry Brandon himself. Now still barely twenty, he displayed his father's love of the hunt and all its accoutrements, a passion which he happily shared with his Johannine cousins, but he had shown no particular intellectual skills, no curiosity, no aptitude for rule or for war-making, and been almost happy to be overshadowed by his older, spirited, and somewhat domineering, wife. Not that he particularly loved her. Though they had just the one son together, Henry Brandon had fathered nine bastards in Saxony in eight years, and it was now common knowledge around the court that Katarina denied the Earl of Lincoln her bed, which was as much a precaution to protect her health as it was a protest against her husband's adultery. No, Henry Brandon was just that content to let someone else do the work.
One can only imagine as she sent them packing, that however much Elizabeth told them this was for their own protection, given that the whole land of Saxony was now menaced by the emperor, in truth she just wanted to get rid of Henry before the court of her son was saddled with paying for any more of his natural children.
Last edited:
Quite so.
And if anyone is wondering why all those marriages were taking place without Elizabeth's consent, the logic is unfortunately plain: there was exactly zero chance she would ever approve of them marrying.
Any male heir they had would have a claim upon the throne of England, with the unfair advantage of being XY in their genetics and no interest in defending her legitimacy as the queen since if she wasn't legitimate then as a male descendent of Henry VII their own claims would be unquestionably superior. Therefore the only acceptable male heir would be one of her own body (whose legitimacy would depend on hers). And Elizabeth would have to marry to produce a legitimate male heir... which would dilute her own power.
So no Tudor descendant would be permitted to wed until she did and she wasn't going to. (Granted, there was widespread belief that she would eventually, but it's understandable that anyone knowing her better or just impatient would jump the gun... and that Elizabeth would never treat that as permissible. It was tantamount to plotting against her.)
Self-Portrait, by Anibale Caracci, as Frederick Brandon, while Earl of Lincoln.
Englandless Brandons, Brandonless England
Abigail Graham
Though born in the Saxon Electorate in 1539, Henry Brandon the younger spent most of his childhood in England. From the family's return to the kingdom in 1542 to 1545, he was the grandson of the king's powerful favorite, Charles Brandon, Duke of Suffolk, and from 1545 was the son of the Duke of Suffolk and held the courtesy title Earl of Lincoln. From the beginning of Edward VI's reign in 1547, he was second in line for the throne, behind his father.
In every way, the power and influence of the Brandon family in these years defined his life. Only two years' younger than the new king, he was proposed as a playmate, perhaps in the hope of recapturing in subsequent generations the lifelong cameraderie of Henry VIII and Charles Brandon. However, this was not to be, as the young Earl of Lincoln proved too unwilling to offer the necessary deference to Edward for him to be accepted into the king's company. And from virtually the time his family took up residence in Westhorpe Hall in Suffolk and Southwark House in London, he was perhaps the most desired prospective husband for daughters of noble blood in the whole country, the king himself being most likely reserved for a prestigious foreign match. Henry's mother Katarina, now Katherine, Brandon, in fact created a minor diplomatic crisis when the French ambassador inquired about Henry as the match of a French princess, and she tartly replied that she would not consider a Catholic match for her son, and that she would prefer he marry the washerwoman to a daughter of Henri II's.
Simultaneously, it attracted notice given the young earl's proximity to the throne that no special efforts were made towards his education. Frances Brandon, Marchioness of Dorset, and Henry Brandon's eldest sister, displayed no small intellectual talent, knowing Greek herself, and had embarked on an energetic program of education for her daughters, who were about the same age as Henry. Inquiring as to whether Henry might join them for tutoring, she was rebuffed on the notion that she wanted merely to get close to the potential future king and insinuate one of her daughters as a potential match for the young Earl of Lincoln. It was widely believed that the duke was steering his son towards the bluff life of soldiering and hunting, hoping he would imitate the interests and talents of his grandfather, the first Duke of Suffolk. For the family had not arrived at this position in the first place by means of letters, so what did it need them for now?
In 1553, the death of Edward VI brought an end to these years of ease, and perhaps even arrogance. The legal machinery that had been erected since Henry VIII first drafted his will excluding his daughters and the descendents of Margaret Tudor sprung into operation. Henry was declared king as Henry IX, and at first it seemed to the Brandon family as if it would be a seamless transfer of power, marred only by the inability of the new king's lawful authorities to lay hands on the Lady Mary, bastardized elder daughter of the late king. Then came word of "Henry IX"'s defeat north of London, occasioning Katherine's speedy flight from the city into Kent and the chartering of a boat to Calais. It was only there, five days later, as members of the putative court was finally catching up to them, that Katherine discovered her husband had been not only defeated and captured but executed by the new queen regnant, Mary I.
It took months for mother, son and the few servants accompanying them to reach the safety of the only place they could imagine as their refuge, Wittenberg. At first, authorities tried to detain them in Calais, and it was only a bribe consisting of a huge portion of the valuables they had been able to take with them that allowed them to leave the English enclave for France. The great game of European diplomacy at that point might have led the French king to offer assistance to the enemies of the new Habsburg-aligned Queen of England, but Katherine's jibe about the washerwoman was not so easily forgotten. Thus the family wandered through northern France for several weeks, in ever greater penury and disorder, until they spent virtually the last of their resources on a ship bound for Hamburg. It was Saxon merchants in that city appalled by the state of the Elector's own sister who paid for the final leg of their journey home.
Though Katherine, now back to being Katarina, had begun the journey in the pose of the royal woman indefatigable in the face of reversals, by the time of her arrival in Wittenberg she was broken, and would never be truly well again. The young Earl of Lincoln advanced himself as the head of the family, but quickly found that the Saxon court paid more attention to the counsel of his step-grandmother Katherine Willoughby, and to the commoner he had always thought of as a mere servant, Ralph Sadler, than to himself and his mother. Beyond a certain point, he even noticed that greater respect was paid to Jane, the daughter of the Marchioness of Dorset and next in line after him among the Brandon claimants to the throne, than to himself.
At length, the young Earl demanded to speak to his uncle the Elector to know his plan for restoring the Brandons to the throne of England. He asked about what contribution the Elector intended to make in terms of the numbers of horse and infantry. Moreover, he wanted to know what the Elector wanted in return, and planned to offer the Elector the succession to the English throne itself, in the event he died without issue, thus excluding his cousins from the throne. Eventually the Elector's man Duke Julius of Braunschweig relented, and agreed to schedule an audience just between uncle and nephew. The young Henry Brandon entered having closely rehearsed his speech, and planned to give it with sufficient conviction to inspire confidence that he could indeed, even at only fifteen, recover his throne.
Instead, Friedrich made him read a passage from Cicero, explain a verse from the Gospel of Matthew, and relate how his claim to the English throne derived from Henry VII. Dumbfounded, Henry found himself unprepared for any of this, and angrily denied its relevance to the matter at hand. Calmly, Friedrich replied that while he would offer the Earl and his mother refuge indefinitely as his family, his resources were not sufficient to permit him to overthrow an English monarch, and that if Henry ever wished to be a king, it would be by virtue of studying the examples of those similarly placed to himself and imitating them.
In private, his observations of the meeting were much sharper. As he related to Katherine Willoughby later, he found the boy "absolutely unsuitable, in intellect and temper, to be a Christian monarch," and that "if that were all that mattered, and the incidents of birth were of no consequence, we would be better off with the girl" as the claimant, meaning Jane Dudley. Simultaneously, efforts to tutor Henry alongside his much younger cousin, the Duke Alexander, only embarassed him more. Eventually, he was reduced to attending classes at the Leucorea and receiving lessons there from some of the professors in classics and history, but he still showed little interest or aptitude. He only excelled at hunting and outdoor pastimes.
Henry wanted badly to demonstrate his military prowess, partly in the hope that this would finally justify enough faith in him to warrant giving him an army to invade England and recover his throne, but in this he was frustrated first, by the end of the Spanish War and its opportunities for martial heroism, and second, by the fact that his significance as a claimant to a major European throne would make him an attractive target. In particular, Friedrich noted that sending Henry on the imperial-mandated expedition to capture Albert Alcibiades would likely only present Albert with the possibility of an enormous ransom.
Just about the only thing Henry was permitted to do that would advance or even maintain the viability of the Brandon family's claim was to marry and beget a child. But even this proved far from easy under the circumstances. Since the era in which the first emperor Maximilian was outfitting Perkin Warbeck for his expeditions against the first Tudor king, continental Europe well understood the eventual fates of most claimants to the English throne who showed up railing about usurpers and begging for the resources to recover what was rightfully theirs. No one wanted to risk the marriage prospects, much less the life, of a daughter on such an uncertain outcome. Certainly the princes of no other Protestant realms in Germany did. Even within Saxony and its adjacent principalities, no one wanted to take the chance of a marriage with the young Earl. If anything the English nobility who had accompanied the Brandons into exile were even more reluctant. And of course, the fact that Henry now had the reputation of being callow and impetuous only made matters worse.
There was, really, only one option, unless he wanted to reduce himself to marrying one of the Elector's natural children. In 1547, not long after Henry VIII's death, Thomas Seymour, Baron Sudeley, brother of the deceased Jane Seymour and uncle to the young king, married Henry VIII's widow, Katherine Parr, and the next year they had a daughter, Mary. Katherine Parr died from childbed fever six days after the girl's birth. Not long thereafter, Seymour was executed for treason, and Mary Seymour was sent to live with Katherine Willoughby, who had been close friends with Parr and shared her enthusiasm for learning and the reformed faith. Willoughby had then brought the five year old girl with her when she and her husband fled England. Though the girl had a scant inheritance owing to her father's treason conviction and her mother's property having gone to other members of her family, Mary had the necessary pedigree for a Protestant English queen, and would link Henry to the Seymour, Parr and Wentworth families. For the most part, the rest of these still had lands and titles, though for obvious reasons they were not waiting to deluge the young couple with wedding gifts. It was of course also the case that with Parr and her husband Peregrine Bertie in impoverished exile, they eagerly wanted to be free of the necessity of feeding another mouth.
Thus, all other possibilities being exhausted, Henry acquiesced, and in 1557 the marriage contract was concluded between himself and Mary Seymour. Consummation would of course have to wait a significant time, as the bride was still not even ten years old.
Friedrich had never shown the first hesitation about recognizing Mary as the legitimate queen, no matter the pain this created for his sister and nephew. But almost immediately Mary went further, demanding the return of the "traitors and renegades" harbored at the elector's court. In his replies to Mary, most of them recognizably in the hand of one of those traitors, one Ralph Sadler, Friedrich foreswore ever trying to use the Earl of Lincoln to destabilize Mary's reign, reminded her that he had some twenty years ago renounced his own claim to the English throne and with it any interest in English succession politics, and sought only to permit his sister and her son a quiet life. Especially coming from someone who had broken his word so many times before, on so many different occasions, the court of Mary I found this unconvincing.
What followed were numerous offers of compromise, including one offer to let him keep "Queen Katherine" if he would return the Earl, and even a few threats, to the effect that Mary might prevail upon the Emperor to take up arms against Friedrich, if he did not surrender the rebels. Of course, Friedrich knew Ferdinand was not Charles, and moreover had built, with much trouble and effort, a relationship of trust with Ferdinand that the Emperor would not risk by taking sides in a dispute in which his relations had for all intents and purposes already won. Lincoln himself had even gone hunting with Ferdinand and the Elector on a few occasions.
The death of Mary and the accession of Elizabeth in 1558 of course brought changes. In the letters from the English court, talk of fugitives and the duty of sovereigns to each other was replaced by the language of forgiveness and warm familial reconciliation. Yet the Elector Friedrich knew the end goal of both queens was the same, that of strengthening their hold on the throne by getting legal, and even physical, control over possible alternate claimants. At the same time, England's role in international relations whipsawed. No longer was it a loyal ally of Spain, even to the point of its own detriment. Instead it was back among the nations of Protestant Europe, and once again as in the time of Henry VIII and Edward VI, looking for allies on the continent. Elizabeth's first cousins in Saxony were a natural choice, and soon it began to be implied England's stipend to Saxony might be restored, if certain obstacles were removed.
Friedrich badly wanted the stipend back, but understood fully by this point in his career how leverage worked: once the Brandons and their relatives and adherents were returned to England, perhaps kicking and screaming, for all anyone knew perhaps immediately vanishing into the Tower never to be seen again, it would be a small matter for Elizabeth to then end the stipend again. For this reason, Friedrich, and Johann during his regency, and eventually Alexander, all insisted for their part that even if it was for the restoration of the stipend, only the male line of the Brandons could return, but the Dudleys would stay. This, they were informed, were wholly unsatisfactory.
It was Duke Johann, during his regency after Friedrich's death in 1560, who hit upon the idea of making Henry Brandon a prince of the empire, perhaps of a very small sliver of land severed from Saxony for this express purpose, so that if the Earl of Lincoln received rough treatment upon his return to England it would be an issue not just for the relatively small and distant state of Saxony, bur for the entire empire and the Emperor himself. Alternately, the same effect could be achieved through simpler means by naming Henry an imperial ambassador. For his part the Emperor Ferdinand was more supportive of these notions than one might think, happy to help drive a wedge between the Protestant princes. But the English were adamant that if Henry were to be a foreign subject, which either of these options would require, there could be no talk of him holding lands as an English lord, and no possibility of him in the succession.
While these maneuverings over the Brandons' return to England continued, new Brandons were being born. Between 1558 and 1566 Jane Dudley bore five children, of which Katherine (1558) and Edward (1564) made it to adulthood. The English treated each new successful Dudley pregnancy in Wittenberg like it was a state crisis, triggering ever more elaborate promises as to what the returning members of the Brandon court in exile could expect. But of course even the threat of Jane Dudley's fecundity were a small matter compared to the alarm created in 1567, when Mary Seymour, now 19 years of age, gave birth to Katherine (named after three grandmothers--Parr, Willoughby and Wettin) and in 1568, when she bore Henry a son, whom they named Frederick.
Several other factors had contributed to this long wait. Friedrich had hoped that years in Wittenberg might calm Henry and improve his judgment. It was not even that at this point Friedrich, and Johann and and Alexander after him, saw Henry as unprepared for rule in terms of his education. There was an ever greater fear at the Wettin court, shared by Katherine Willoughby and others, that Henry did not possess the calm, or the ability to dissimulate, necessary to survive in an environment as dangerous as the English ruling class. In fact, they doubted his ability to make it a full year without offering some grave insult to the queen, or inadvertently letting slip he, no less now than he did in 1553, believed himself the rightful king. This had been another benefit of the marriage to Mary Seymour: the wait for the marriage to be consummated also bought time for Henry himself to mature. It came as a crushing disappointment as this window of opportunity came to a close he was still proud, impetuous, and temperamental, as if, as Alexander himself noted in a letter to Jane, he "possesses all the Tudor vices, and none of their virtues."
In fact, when the letter arrived in 1571 offering Brandon the official return of the earldom of Lincoln and a portion of the lands originally held by his grandfather, the first Duke of Suffolk, most of the Brandon circle in Wittenberg, as well as the Elector Alexander, urged him to refuse and stay put. Less because the offer was attractive (it was somewhat less than what he had hoped for, which was the dukedom of Suffolk), than because after almost twenty years in Germany he felt his position was absolutely unendurable, he accepted, and in 1572, Henry Brandon returned to England, with Mary and the two children.
While reports are sparse, we know that his first and only meeting with Elizabeth I at Whitehall went very badly. He made no errors of etiquette, he maintained all the proper forms of address and showed the necessary deference to a sovereign. But there was none of the obliging cheer and affability that a skilled courtier would have shown on the occasion. There was a deeply solemn, almost broken, acceptance, but there was no smile, and definitely no charm. As Elizabeth later remarked to Robert Cecil about the occasion, "I believe there was a stiffness to my lord's knee that I mislike."
It is easy to attribute Henry's behavior at Whitehall to ignorance or stupidity on his part. But in considering it, one must first understand that his mother Katherine during his childhood had wrote of the Lady Elizabeth as the bastard child of Thomas Wyatt and Anne Boleyn, and had spurned talk of a marriage between them, with he the king and she the consort, as being unsuitable on the ground of her illegitimacy and a waste of the opportunity for a marriage alliance that would bring benefit to the country. Most likely, she would have repeated such views around Henry. Then, in the nightmare of 1553, he later learned Elizabeth had rode in the coach with her sister as they entered London in state, with Mary having freshly ordered the death of Henry's father. And then, Elizabeth and her agents had pursued Henry Brandon for fourteen years to return to England, not all the means they had used to do so having been pleasant. That he hated Elizabeth on a deep and personal level was almost unavoidable. And no matter how many years the Earl of Lincoln had lived at court, and no matter how many sovereigns he had met, that hatred was a bone in his throat.
Of course, though the elector's lawyers had done their work well and extracted every guarantee possible from the English, now that the Earl of Lincoln was back in England, the crown and its agents began chipping away at his inheritance through fees, assessments and indemnities, making use of the family's long absence and the substantial legal trouble their flight in 1553 had created. Soon, though the family clung to the houses in Westhorpe and Southwark, Henry no longer had the rents to support himself in the manner required of the English aristocracy. Servants were let go, clothes became worn and tattered, meals became simpler, and without guests of equal standing to theirs in society, and in the most grievous indignity imaginable for any Brandon, the hunting dogs were all sold. Then in 1573 the elder child, Katherine, died, and in 1574 Mary died, trying to give birth to another boy, who was stillborn.
Later in life, Frederick Brandon would report this would be the darkest time he would ever know. His father had always been a bit of a bully toward him. But Frederick had been protected by his mother, and a bulwark of relatives and servants eager to keep father and son apart and shield the boy from the Earl's worst moods. Katherine Willoughby, still about, for one offered to take Frederick outright on his mother's death., only to be rebuffed. But with Mary gone and the staff dwindling, their were fewer and fewer barriers for young Frederick to hide behind, and his father's treatment of him became worse.
At the same time, the family was falling into greater desperation. Henry Brandon cast about for a new wife, perhaps hoping for a dowry and family connections that could revive his failing fortunes, but he found as his chief problem not even the matter of a royal assent, but that the fact that any even vaguely suitable prospective brides were fearful, both of his dangerous position as Elizabeth's closest male heir valid under the will of Henry VIII, and his reputation as being, to put it mildly, unkind. It seemed, inevitably, one of the two sprawling and expensive houses would have to be sold. But losing Westhope and its land in the country would mean Henry parting with the last succor he had left in the world, and parting with Southwark House would lose the family its vital foothold in London.
On February 10, 1579, Henry Brandon, Earl of Lincoln, was found stabbed to death in the streets of Southwark. There were no obvious clues as to the perpetrators. In the inevitable historical guessing game as to the culprits, possible murderers include agents of Elizabeth, assassins in the pay of James VI of Scotland's regents, Catholics seeking to prevent a possible Protestant succession, or even kinspeople of Mary Seymour, upset over rumors of his mistreatment of her before her death. Even frustrated creditors could not be excluded as a possibility, given that the Earl of Lincoln by this point had more than his share. In the end, it could have been as simple a matter that Southwark in the sixteenth century was a dangerous place, famous for its stews and criminal enterprises, and that the Earl of Lincoln was a violent, and increasingly, unwell, man. Whatever the case, his funeral was conducted with the minimum of ceremony, and was attended mostly by German merchants from the Steelyards. His first cousin, Margaret Clifford, Countess of Derby, was chief mourner.
As to Frederick Brandon, orphans in his circumstances would have normally found themselves under the jurisdiction of the Court of Wards, which would have assigned them to a guardian who would have leeched the rents from their lands until they reached adulthood and otherwise despoiled them of as much of their assets as possible. Ironically, Charles Brandon had made great use of the wardships granted him by the court in building his fortune and family, in fact twice becoming engaged to be married to minor girls entrusted to his care. One of these had been Katherine Willoughby. But because of the sensitivity involved when the ward in question was a potential heir to the throne, Elizabeth intervened directly. Frederick Brandon was sent to live with relatives on his mother's side, specifically his first cousin once removed through his grandmother Katherine Parr, Henry Herbert, Earl of Pembroke.
The Earl's most important qualification for the position though was not his family relationship, but the level of trust he enjoyed with the queen. Herbert had participated in the trial of the Duke of Norfolk, leading to his execution, and would later be involved in the prosecution of Mary, Queen of Scots. Brandon was to be kept at Herbert's estates in Wiltshire and Wales. He was to be denied contact with his English relations on his father's side, and most certainly with any parties from the court of Wittenberg, or from Saxony generally. In Wittenberg, the Elector Alexander was apoplectic, and Jane Dudley despaired that she would receive news of the boy's death any day. But there was nothing any of them could do now.
Last edited:
Mary Sidney, Countess of Pembroke, by Nicholas Hilliard
I am Keepsake St. John, and this is Dynasty.
So it was in March of 1580 a poor little orphan boy arrived here at Wilton House, in Wiltshire, in the west of England, there to meet Henry Herbert, Earl of Pembroke, the new guardian appointed for him by his first cousin twice removed, Elizabeth I. The Herberts were, all-in-all, new arrivals to the upper echelons of English society. On the day the young Earl of Lincoln stood at this front door, the Herberts had held the earldom of Pembroke just thirty years. And only just over twenty years before, since at the end of Mary's reign, the first Earl of Pembroke had expelled the nuns from this, the house that would become his new country seat, howling "Out ye whores, to worke, to worke--ye whores, goe spinne!"
The current earl, his son, had been appointed to the lord lieutenancy of Wiltshire in 1571 in addition to his earldom, in which position he performed various military functions on behalf of the crown. As yet his most notable services to Elizabeth were yet to come, but already he had demonstrated himself the sort of trustworthy and industrious courtier the queen would value, and advance. And, true to form, once the young Frederick, Earl of Lincoln became his ward, Pembroke moved quickly and competently, selling the Brandon family's urban redout of Southwark House in order to settle the debts of the late earl and provide funds with which to pay for the last remaining Brandon's upkeep. So now all that remained was to introduce Frederick to his own household, keep him safe, by which was meant chiefly preventing any contact with anyone who might try to conspire to advance his claim for the throne or marry him, and provide him with the basics of the useful education that had proved so elusive for Frederick's absolute ogre of a father.
But of course, the real story here ismost definitely not the somewhat dour Earl of Pembroke. The story, rather, is his Countess.
After two marriages, the first to none other than Frederick's cousin Katherine Grey, which was annulled way back in the reign of Mary, and the second, which had ended in the wife's death before she could provide the earl any children, Pembroke had married Mary Sidney, daughter of the courtier Sir Henry Sidney and Mary Dudley. Though the Countess was descended on her mother's side from the dukes of Northumberland who had held such sway during the reign of Edward VI, the Sidneys were as yet a family of the gentry, with nowhere near the standing of the Herberts. Which was one reason why Mary, who as a lady-in-waiting had been particularly adored by Elizabeth, had been paired off with Herbert, who was 23 years her senior, so that she could provide him the heirs which had so far eluded him, and the Sidneys could get the leg up in society the connection with the Herberts would provide.
Thus, the 12 year old boy who had endured what we can only think of as an unhappy, if not outright brutal, childhood, came to find himself in the care of a pretty, kind, and fantastically intelligent woman who was only seven years older than himself. Seriously, what did they think was going to happen? The throes and vigors of burgeoning manhood, and all that?
What is beyond a doubt is that from the very beginning, it was complete infatuation on the young Frederick's part. Beyond that, it's all been over 400 years of speculation, much of it rather lurid. Perhaps the most direct insight into whether there was ever eventually a physical nature to the powerful connection between Frederick and the Countess was offered by Mary herself. Tasked some time later with some very consequential marriage negotiations on behalf of Frederick with Bess of Hardwick Hall, Countess of Shrewsbury, Mary had expected to face the usual inquiries over real estate, money, and titles for the prospective bride's relatives, only to instead get the question, straight from Bess, that has been on everyone's mind since virtually the day young Frederick found himself on the doorstep of Wilton.
The Countess of Shrewsbury, who of course was far from naive about these matters, would later write that Mary was so surprised and revulsed by the accusation, that she believed however obviously romantic Frederick's feelings were, and however much Mary loved him back, no physical relationship existed between them, and the Countess had remained faithful to her Earl. Of course, cue the skeptics who would point out that Bess was far from uninterested in creating and maintaining that the love between Frederick and Mary was the chaste province of some real-world chivalric romance.
And of course, no sooner was Mary Sidney involved in raising, and restoring the spirits of the young boy, but her brother was, too. At this point in his life Philip Sidney was a tempestuous 25 year old courtier, who had once already been exiled from court for improvidently writing against Elizabeth's prospective marriage to the duke d'Alencon. Sidney had also already begun his friendship with Edmund Spenser, who had dedicated to Sidney the Shepherd's Calendar. And Sidney was involved in these years with Penelope Devereux, who in his famous sonnet cycle would be the Stella to his Astrophil. And with the Earl of Pembroke preoccupied with affairs of court, the young Philip quickly emerged as the most important man in Frederick's life, both something of a mentor and something of an elder brother.
Young Frederick had never been exposed to anything like the world in which he now found himself. His father had barely managed English, and now he was around a brother and sister translating Psalms from the Hebrew, and for whom Neoplatonism was casual conversation. Of course, all the eventual jokes about "Freddie Sidney" aside, he was still a Brandon, a creature of the outdoors, and there may have been perhaps only two or three times in his whole life someone walked in on Frederick with him sitting quietly with an open book in front of him. But hearing them talk about all these exotic and fanciful things bewitched him, and there was no doubt Philip and Mary (one other surviving brother, Robert, being away on the continent during these years, and the other, Thomas, being younger than even Frederick) sparked in him a life of the mind that had completely eluded Frederick's father, grandfather, and even great-grandfather.
But the fascination went both ways. Philip and Mary were two of the most wildly appreciative lovers of chivalric romance there has ever been, and now dawdling in their parlors, and carving his name on the good furniture, was the great-grandson of Charles Brandon and the French queen. It was like all their enthusiasms had been given flesh, hose and doublet. For his part, until now, most likely Frederick Brandon had only experienced the saga of his family over the previous hundred years, from William Brandon's famous death defending Henry Tudor at Boswell on, as a millstone about his neck, the source of all his father's, and thus his, misery. Now, hearing these stories told to him with such giddy adoration, Frederick showed the first signs of believing in the Brandon family romance himself. And this was perhaps the first step in what he would called his "little long project."
For indeed, these two lovers of chivalric romance, and as faras they were concerned, the more grandiose, the better, now found themselves entrusted with an actual poor lad who had been dispossessed of his actual kingdom. Here, as before, what did anyone think was going to happen?
One question that has always transfixed historians about these pivotal years in the lives of Frederick and the Sidneys is that of how much of this interest on the Sidneys' part was a true, sincere response to this boy, and how much was naked opportunism. For there inevitably was another dimension to it all. What the Sidneys had in 1580 was youth, vigor, money, spectacular educations and to varying extents, Mary more than Philip certainly, the affection of the Queen. In the way of crucial ingredients necessary for advancement in the Tudor world, what they did not have was the blood. But in that same poor boy they were having to teach that there were certain places in the house one just doesn't piss on the floor, there was the blood of the Tudor kings of England, not to mention the Wettin electors of Saxony, and various Seymours and Parrs besides.
Thus in 1581, Mary took little Frederick with her on a visit to her father at Ludlow Castle. Sir Henry Sidney had been at one time a man whose star was rising at Elizabeth's court. But his, ahem, controversial tenure as lord deputy of Ireland had led him to be sidelined. So now, as president of the Welsh marches, he found himself stuck at Ludlow Castle, far from the seat of power, and with that, from any convenient means of further advancement. Until, that is, his daughter brought for dinner the boy with the best claim to the English throne in the whole country, that much better given that the potential Stuart claimant, the Earl of Lennox, had just died. Whereas Philip and Mary's deep enthusiasm for the boy's future may have had some foundation in their emotional attachment to him, Sir Henry was just the sort of kraken-like cynic who had only to see an opportunity, to exploit it, and knew in this instance just what screws to turn. Meeting Frederick at Ludlow with his wife, Sir Henry embraced the boy, weeping: "Look how God in his kindness has granted us a new son!" Freddie Sidney, indeed.
It might seem as if all this emotional manipulation trained squarely on the shoulders of a sensitive young man might be a bit much for him. And indeed, it does seem as if the claws were getting sunk in the early 1580's quite deep. But here too, historical perspectives vary. In the 1990 award-winning film Minotaur, the young Frederick Brandon is played very differently from the hale-and-well-met blunt honesty we associate with the historical figure. Instead, the movie depicts Freddie even in his younger days as something of an Iago, alternating between conniving simplicity and displays of feeling when necessary to get what he wanted from the adults around him. The young actor who plays Frederick himself narrates the story through occasional dead-eyed speeches to the camera. Even the relationship with Mary Sidney is not depicted as the breathless, almost spiritual obsession usually shown, but on his part, simple pubertial lust. And the scene at Ludlow? After breaking off from the tearful kisses and hugs, the actor playing young Frederick Brandon turns to the camera: "They think it so easy to purloin my heart. Whatever will they do when they find I have none?"
He was, after all, a Brandon. And as the English saying goes, throw a Suffolk in the river, and it will swim back up with a crown between its teeth.
Last edited:
St. Bartholomew's Day Massacre, by Francois Dubois, Detail
Makers of the New Realm: Short Biographies of Pivotal Germans, 1517-1640
Martin Xu
One of the principal figures of the first two decades of the Elector Alexander's rule was his French secretary, Hubert Languet. A native of Vitteaux, in Burgundy, Languet had studied at the Universities of Poitiers, Padua and Bologna, when he discovered the works of Melanchthon. Inspired, he came to Wittenberg where he became an informal student of Melanchthon's in 1549. Languet refused to accept the disunity of the Protestant churches and strove to resolve theological differences between the Calvinist and Lutheran communities of belief. It was for this reason he was not offered a formal teaching position at the Leucorea. Nonetheless, the violent repression of Calvinism in France contrasted with the tolerant policies of the Elector Friedrich led him to permanently settle in Wittenberg. During this time, it's believed Melanchthon used Languet to express syncretist positions he could not publicly articulate himself, since the elector had invested in Melanchthon so much authority as a public voice of orthodox Lutheran doctrine. Given the favor Friedrich showed Melanchthon in these years, and Melanchthon's frequent presence at court and in the elector's travels, he would have met Languet almost immediately, and it seems entirely possible Languet was working for the elector in an informal role by the later part of the 1550's. Simultaneously, Languet was becoming a leader of the expatriate Huguenot community in Wittenberg (a situation which was complicated no less than his position at the Saxon court by his inability to define himself as completely Lutheran or Calvinist), and Languet contributed towards the founding of the prestigious Neue Franzoesische Schule in 1561.
From 1559, Languet served as the Elector's French secretary, a role made necessary by Friedrich's increasing exhaustion in his final years. His death in 1560 and the Johannine regency brought Languet's role in the Saxon government to a quick and decisive end. Then in 1562 with the conclusion of the regency and the expulsion of the Johannines from power Languet just as quickly returned to prominence. His role was primarily managing Alexander's French correspondence. In this his function was parallel to Alexander's English secretary Ralph Sadler, but with the added, crucial difference that Languet engaged in vigorous, personal diplomacy, traveling in person to Paris and to the courts of the French nobility. However, like Sadler, there was a multi-functionality to Languet's office that escapes mere diplomacy or even foreign policy. Languet was the semi-official voice of the elector to the Saxon Huguenots, and of the Huguenots to the Saxon elector. But as the Elector's representative to the court of France, inevitably Languet was also the voice of the Huguenot emigres, and beyond a certain point, of the Huguenots who had remained in France, making use of his ambassadorial status as official protection. This role on Languet's part allowed Alexander to burnish his claim to be the protector of Europe's Protestants, regardless of sect. Languet at the same time aggressively built diplomatic back-channels with other reform-minded diplomatists, including Elizabeth I's ambassador in Paris, Francis Walsingham. He also became an enthusiastic backer of William, Prince of Orange, and would remain so for the rest of his life.
This is not to say Languet had an easy or uncomplicated relationship with Alexander. While Languet's syncretism had excited the intellectual curiosity (and more to the point, the political ambition) of Alexander's father, Alexander's distaste for theology and fear of further alienating Lutheran opinion made him unreceptive to any notion of trying to forge ahead with any union of the Protestant churches. Moreover, while Alexander took a strong stance in defense of the Protestant churches outside Saxony in his diplomacy, he was hesitant to deploy military or financial assistance to aid beleaguered Protestant minorities elsewhere. The resources which Friedrich had been able to access to make trouble against the Emperor Charles V were gone with the accession of Mary I and the end of the English stipend to Saxony in 1553. Alexander, faced with the resulting and inevitable atrophy of Saxon military power, believed any action that could lead him to being labeled a breaker of the peace in the empire could lead to the imperial ban, and so he fastidiously committed to keeping the peace. He was especially cautious where the Habsburgs were concerned. Whether as a result of his personal closeness to the Emperor Maximilian II, his and his wife's status as cousins of the Habsburgs more generally, or the mere desire not to alienate the ruling dynasty of the empire, Alexander steered clear of providing any assistance to rebels, or even to the Protestant Churches themselves, in either the Spanish Habsburg lands like the Netherlands or the Austrian Habsburg territories like Bohemia and Hungary. Oddly enough, this gave Languet and Duke Johann the rare opportunity to make common cause, as the aging younger brother of the Holy Prince desired little more than the opportunity to ride to Holland with an army at his back to free the Netherlands from the Spanish.
Ironically, it was a threat to Languet personally which seemed to bring Alexander closest to making war on behalf of Protestants outside Saxony. In 1571-2, Languet was on a diplomatic mission at the court of Charles IX, arguing for the official recognition of the Protestant Church, alongside the Catholic, in France. In fact, Languet's reports back to the Elector brimmed with confidence of imminent success. Then suddenly, word reached Wittenberg of the St. Bartholomew Day's Massacre, simultaneous with which all written contact with Languet was lost. Alexander angrily made demands of the king of France as to his ambassador's safety and whereabouts, hinted at consequences if his ambassador had been killed, and refused to accept that the king and the French court were not implicated in the bloodbath. For the better part of twenty years, since Friedrich's betrayal of the League of Chambord and reconciliation with Charles V, the object of Saxon policy with respect to France had been to once again court the French king as a counterweight to the Emperor. But now as in the era of Merindol, that project had run aground on the matter of the French king's treatment of his Protestant subjects. Finally, in November 1572 Languet, having been in hiding until he could escape in safety, returned to Wittenberg, and Alexander's fears that he had been murdered were laid to rest. It was not with any frustration at Languet's work, but rather the sense that he should not be put to any further personal risk, that Languet was henceforth allowed to maintain at the Elector's court and not be sent on any further missions. Instead of France, his portfolio now focused on the Netherlands and the Prince of Orange.
It was ironic then that what finally ended Languet's long service to Alexander was the treatment of Calvinists in Saxony. During 1573 and 1574 word reached Wittenberg that the Johannines were flouting the Elector Friedrich's religious laws and engaged in the violent repression of non-Lutheran Protestants in their lands. Most of the Huguenot immigrants had settled in Saxony's major towns, like Wittenberg and Magdeburg, but some had reclaimed previously abandoned farms and cleared new fields, and some of that was in areas held by the Johannines. But even though most of those directly caught up in the Johannine repression were native Saxons, Languet complained vehemently that the Elector had to act to vindicate the law and protect the Calvinists, using many of the same arguments a few years previously he had made to Charles IX, and which Alexander himself had made to Charles IX, on behalf of religious tolerance. But Alexander saw the Johannine policy as an effort to draw him into a civil war in which they would be able to make use of majority-Lutheran support to depose him, and refused to take what he saw as the bait that would lead to his overthrow. Less because he did not believe Alexander's characterization of the Johannines' strategy to be true than because he could not morally square himself with Alexander's refusal to act, he asked to be released from Alexander's service. This Alexander did, but he awarded Languet a handsome pension nonetheless. From 1575 Languet was associated with the Neue Franzoesische Schule, and from 1576 served in the position of chancellor. He also worked tirelessly in advancing the Protestant cause throughout Europe, albeit now in a capacity unconnected with the Elector's court. However, there were some people who still believed Alexander was acting and speaking through Languet, just unshackled from the accountability of Saxony's official foreign policy. It was in this private capacity that Languet wrote his book Vindiciae Contra Tyrannos, a vehement statement of an individual's right, and duty, to rebel against an unjust ruler.
With no small amount of relief, Languet lived to see the new Estates General, and with it, the Grosse Demuetigung of the Johannines. By 1581, the question of the peaceful tolerance of the Calvinists in Saxony had been put to rest, and with it Languet was received at the Elector's court. He died early the next year at the age of 63.
Last edited:
Yes. And worst of all, did so in a way in which I had to rewrite, not merely repaste. Hopefully it all makes sense now.
In any case, I actually ran across Languet in the biography of Sidney I'm reading. He seemed like a fascinating character, who was the actual Saxon Elector's (the Albertine Elector Augustus II) ambassador to France in this period, and it had seemed odd to me that we had had no treatment of all of one of the most important events in the religious conflicts of the last half of the sixteenth-century, so here we are. Next installment will get us back to Frederick Brandon's angsty pimply teenage years.
from Enthusiast: A Magazine of Royal History
The Natural Children of Frederick Brandon
Non-marital children are usually produced without ulterior motives. But in the case of Frederick Brandon, Earl of Lincoln, people have steadfastly refused to be satisfied with the obvious explanation. One set of historians have believed Lincoln, in light of Queen Elizabeth's refusal to permit his marriage, went to extravagant lengths to demonstrate he had no disinclination to marry, and no natural defect to his ability to beget lawful children, if given the chance. Another, more recent school has considered the possibility that Brandon used the streams of payments to various women to disguise bribes, purchases of armaments and the payment of off-books mercenaries, guards and other agents. Of course, it is unlikely Lincoln used a ruse the first time he fathered a child, with a maid in the household of the Earl of Pembroke when he was 16. And it is even more unlikely he learned such strategies from the Herberts, Sidneys or their tutors. Most probably, some mixture of ordinary lust, a desire to show off his virility and the concealment of illicit dealings undertaken with the ultimate goal of winning back what he considered "his" throne explains his claim to have fathered these children, true or not. Whatever the case, later in life many of them would present their own political and practical challenges, and would in fact necessitate parliamentary legislation on the matter.
by Marge Prewett
Dorothy (1584)
by Magdalena Negra
Elisabeth (1587)
Philip (1588)
by Annie Stearns
Albert (1592)
Maurice (1593)
Augustus (1595)
Margaret (1596)
by Beth Carter
Anne (1595)
Mary (1597)
Eleonore (1598)
Frederick (1599)
Charles (1600)
by Liz Sporle
Philip (1598)
Arapacis (1599)
Alexander (1600)
James (1601)
Thomas (1603)
by Annie Orton
James (1602)
Janet (1603)
The Natural Children of Frederick Brandon
Non-marital children are usually produced without ulterior motives. But in the case of Frederick Brandon, Earl of Lincoln, people have steadfastly refused to be satisfied with the obvious explanation. One set of historians have believed Lincoln, in light of Queen Elizabeth's refusal to permit his marriage, went to extravagant lengths to demonstrate he had no disinclination to marry, and no natural defect to his ability to beget lawful children, if given the chance. Another, more recent school has considered the possibility that Brandon used the streams of payments to various women to disguise bribes, purchases of armaments and the payment of off-books mercenaries, guards and other agents. Of course, it is unlikely Lincoln used a ruse the first time he fathered a child, with a maid in the household of the Earl of Pembroke when he was 16. And it is even more unlikely he learned such strategies from the Herberts, Sidneys or their tutors. Most probably, some mixture of ordinary lust, a desire to show off his virility and the concealment of illicit dealings undertaken with the ultimate goal of winning back what he considered "his" throne explains his claim to have fathered these children, true or not. Whatever the case, later in life many of them would present their own political and practical challenges, and would in fact necessitate parliamentary legislation on the matter.
by Marge Prewett
Dorothy (1584)
by Magdalena Negra
Elisabeth (1587)
Philip (1588)
by Annie Stearns
Albert (1592)
Maurice (1593)
Augustus (1595)
Margaret (1596)
by Beth Carter
Anne (1595)
Mary (1597)
Eleonore (1598)
Frederick (1599)
Charles (1600)
by Liz Sporle
Philip (1598)
Arapacis (1599)
Alexander (1600)
James (1601)
Thomas (1603)
by Annie Orton
James (1602)
Janet (1603)
Last edited: