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.