By the autumn of 1513 Viscount Lisle was clearly Henry’s leading courtier, yet he was living from hand to mouth because of the expensiveness of life at court. He had owed Henry VII £70 on the latter’s death, and had to exploit the offices he held for all they were worth – £300 a year from his Welsh holdings, £100 a year from the Mastership of the Horse, and so on, down to £6 13
s
4
d
as an annuity on part of his ward Elizabeth Grey’s estate. Of course his proximity to the King brought him patronage, and encouraged inducements from potential suitors, even extending as far as a ‘retainer’ of £100 a year from the Countess of Salisbury. However, most of these gifts were unpredictable assets, and Brandon’s regular income was never quite sufficient to cover his increasing commitments.
45
The fact is that he did not command a large and coherent landed inheritance, and the lands that he did hold were on insecure tenures or the result of wardships which would soon come to an end. Henry gave him 20 marks a year when he created him Viscount Lisle, but that was an insignificant sum, and for some reason the King was not generous with grants of real estate. Many were therefore surprised, and indeed shocked, when Viscount Lisle was raised to the dukedom of Suffolk on 1 February 1514. The King gave him an additional annuity of £40, but that was little enough to support his new dignity, and it may well be that the Earl of Surrey, created Duke of Norfolk at the same time, regarded him with a certain contempt. Surrey had been elevated as a reward for his victory at Flodden, and Suffolk ostensibly for his role in the King’s victory in France, but there was no comparison between their resources. Norfolk was a peer of the old school, with lineage and wide estates; Suffolk was a creation of a different kind, for services to the King in his personal capacity as a friend and companion.
46
It is highly unlikely that Henry had considered repairing his friend’s fortune by marrying him to his sister, whatever the popular voice may afterwards have said. His power, moreover, remained that of a courtier and confidant, very much to the fore in ceremonies, but not conspicuous for his attendance at the council. That aspect of service he was content to leave to Thomas Wolsey, who had risen spectacularly in the King’s confidence as a result of his handling of the logistics in 1513. This division of responsibility suited both of them very well, and in spite of disagreements over the Tournai campaign, they apparently worked in close co-operation. This relationship was to prove very useful to both of them when Brandon was sent in embassy to France in the autumn of 1514.
47
Meanwhile the Duke of Suffolk’s matrimonial history was colourful and complicated; indeed it was not entirely clear that he was free to marry Mary when the opportunity presented itself. He had set off in this direction in 1503, when at the age of nineteen he had confessed his love for Anne Browne, the daughter of Sir Anthony Browne. Charles and Anne were betrothed before the council of his then patron the Earl of Essex, and she became pregnant. A marriage so entered into and consummated should have been binding, but within months Brandon had abandoned his bride and married Dame Margaret Mortimer, a woman twenty years his senior and well endowed with property. On 7 February 1507 he had licence to enter upon her lands, which he promptly began to sell.
48
Having apparently got what he wanted out of this relationship, he then had the marriage annulled on the grounds of consanguinity, and returned to Anne, by that time the mother of his daughter. He married her secretly early in 1508, but her family were not satisfied that he would not take advantage of this secrecy to use her as he had before, and insisted upon a public ceremony. This was held after Easter at St Michael’s Cornhill in the presence of a substantial number of responsible witnesses – just to be on the safe side. Anne bore Brandon a second daughter, but died of the after-effects in the summer of 1510. Charles then entered into a contract of marriage,
per verba de futuro
, with Elizabeth, Lady Lisle, whose wardship he had been granted.
49
However, Elizabeth was only eight, and it seems unlikely that the twenty-seven-year-old Brandon intended to wait for her to grow up, so the contract between them was not binding. When the army was in Picardy in the late summer of 1513, he commenced a flirtation with no less formidable a lady than the Regent of the Netherlands, Margaret of Austria. This was taken seriously by some continental observers, who noted that he had proffered his services to her, without explaining exactly what that meant. She spent lavishly in entertaining him; they danced all night and exchanged rings in the classic mode of the courtly love ritual. On one occasion he filched a ring from her, and declined to return it, which was another courtly love device. Although she was only slightly older than Brandon, she was a tough widow and never had the slightest intention of marrying him.
50
However, their games were widely misinterpreted, much to her embarrassment, and the anger of her father, the Emperor Maximilian. Henry was forced to threaten death to anyone who spread such rumours in England, and cancelled Brandon’s commission to raise troops in the Low Countries in 1514. What he was not prepared to do was to order Charles to honour his contract with Lady Lisle, in spite of having conferred the viscountcy on him in her name.
51
It may be that by early 1514 he had a different matrimonial destiny in mind for his friend.
By the time that Suffolk married Mary in February 1515, his power was great, and his influence greater still, but its base was fragile. He controlled relatively little land, and most of that was linked to Elizabeth Lisle’s wardship which he had to surrender as part of his deal with the King. Nor was he in any position to create an affinity, being seriously short of
manred
. His position in Wales was strong in theory, but only in the marches did he hold any effective authority. His offices paid well, but gave him no
gravitas
in council, and his influence in government depended entirely upon his relationship with the King, and that favour was a mixed blessing. His success as a courtier had raised jealousy and enmity, and he needed good marriage to consolidate his position. That, for a variety of reasons he had managed to obtain by May 1515. Unfortunately one of Mary’s last actions as Queen Dowager before she left France had been to seal an instrument transferring all her jewels and other possessions to her brother, which left her in theory penniless.
52
In practice it made her dependent on Francis for the payments from her dower lands, which for the time being he maintained in full, making her husband dependent upon her for the bulk of his income, which was not a situation conducive to his peace of mind. For a while, following their third wedding, the couple kept a relatively low profile, perhaps as a result of emotional exhaustion, as much as by conscious choice. However, Mary was twenty years old, and by nature resilient, while the Duke needed to demonstrate the extent to which he had recovered the King’s favour. So before the end of the year their chief concern was to resume their normal position in the life of the court.
53
This they largely succeeded in doing, Brandon taking his accustomed place in the lists in October and November, and Mary decorating the revels as she had been wont to do before her French adventure. Henry’s attitude towards his favourite was curiously ambivalent, because in spite of the severity of the financial settlement, and the very evident signs of his anger, in February 1515 he had granted him almost the whole of the de la Pole estates, and made no attempt to cancel that grant when the fact of his marriage became known.
54
In fact this meant mainly reversionary rights, because the King had already granted many of the manors for terms of lives or years, and if Brandon wanted to gain immediate access, this meant buying out the holders. This his agents had begun doing before he returned from France, borrowing heavily in the process, so that he was forced to slow down on this acquisitive process after he came back. However, establishing himself as a magnate in the place of the de la Poles became a major concern of Brandon’s during the summer of 1515, and he took advantage of the fact that Henry was hunting in Suffolk in July, both to visit the court and to conduct a personal progress around East Anglia.
55
In this he was accompanied by his wife, who made something of a triumph of the tour, being met with royal honours at Butley Priory, and a receiving a huge array of presents at both Norwich and Great Yarmouth. The Duke’s status was further enhanced when Nicholas West, the Bishop of Ely made him Steward of the estates of the diocese in December 1515. Suffolk deliberately set out to replace the de la Poles and by early 1516 was well on his way to success.
56
He featured regularly on royal commissions in East Anglia, and may well have felt that time spent away from the court in the autumn of 1515 had not been wasted. Whether the French Queen shared this sentiment is not known, but within a year of their return to England in virtual disgrace, Mary and Brandon had settled down in London as before, and had resumed their life at court as though they had never been away. ‘Henry,’ as was commented at the time, ‘loved a man’, and no one reflected the King’s glory as efficiently as the Duke of Suffolk. On 9 September 1516 Mary wrote to her ‘Right dear and right entirely beloved brother’ expressing her pleasure that the King was planning to visit the Duke’s manor of Donnington, and that he had willed the Duke and Duchess to be there to receive him, ‘much comforted that it hath pleased your grace to be pleased’ to show them that especial mark of his favour. The clouds of the previous year had been thoroughly dispersed, and the sun shone again on Henry’s favourite sister.
57
Suffolk’s marriage to Mary brought about significant changes in his life. Any child born to the couple would have a claim to the throne, and that inevitably enhanced his status. It also carried with it the automatic right to be housed in the court, wherever that was located, including Henry’s temporary palace at the Field of Cloth of Gold.
1
However, there were disadvantages in being consistently outshone by his wife. Technically, she needed his authorisation to dispose of her goods, but in their joint agreement with the King, it was her name which appeared first, and her seal was twice the size of his. When her jointure was determined by Act of Parliament, it included not only all of the de la Pole manors which had been granted to Suffolk, but also a number which he held only in reversion.
2
Between 1515 and 1519 his landed income was around £3,000 a year, but he lost the lands of the Lisle wardship by 1519, and those of Corbet and Sayle in 1522, reducing his income by about half. Of course he also enjoyed the income from his various offices, but this is hard to calculate and would not have been as much as £1,500. His financial affairs were complicated by the fact that he borrowed £12,000 from the Crown in 1515 and 1516. For this he managed to secure the backing of Italian bankers on the strength of his royal connections, and he seems to have used those connections to ensure that he was not pressed for repayment. He stalled on other creditors, and between 1513 and 1523 borrowed an additional £3,000 from the revenues of North Wales, to which he had access by virtue of his offices. From all this it appears that Suffolk was living beyond his means, or would have been if it had not been for the £4,000 a year which derived from Mary’s dower lands in France, and the fact that her repayments to the King were not strictly enforced either. For these and other reasons, the Duke felt himself deeply indebted to the King of France, and consistently argued for the meeting between the monarchs which came to fruition in 1520.
3
This was all very well when relations between them were good, but when they became strained in 1516 and 1517, Suffolk became something of an embarrassment.
Mary kept her own establishment, complete with ladies and gentlewomen of the Privy Chamber, and various chamber servants to the number of about 100, which must have absorbed a fair amount of her income, but rather surprisingly only a handful of them appear to have been French. One who was was Martin Dupin, who had been an English denizen from 1512, and who appears to have been a double agent. In 1515 he was in Suffolk’s service in Paris, ostensibly buying wines for Wolsey, but in 1517 he was in receipt of a French pension of 300 crowns a year for some undisclosed service, so that suspicions which focussed on the Suffolks’ establishment appear to have had some justification.
4
Mary’s English servants were also often in France, and William Fellowe was actually there attempting to sell off some of the 200 or more judicial offices which were at her disposal through her dower lands, when the outbreak of war forced his hasty retreat. For his part, Suffolk made no secret of his Francophilia, and cut his links with Margaret of Austria immediately after his marriage, recalling Anne, his twelve-year-old daughter, from her service. In his new circumstances he was naturally keen to draw a line under the rumours of a liaison with the Archduchess which his behaviour in 1513 had provoked.
5
Francis naturally used him as a point of contact within the English Council, and the Duke seems to have undertaken this role willingly enough. When the news of the Battle of Marignano arrived in September 1515, Henry was furious at having been so comprehensively upstaged, but Suffolk assured the messenger that he was ‘as glad of the prosperity of the king my master as any man in the kingdom of France’, and invited him to his house in Southwark. There he assured the envoy that the English threats of war were a sham, and in other ways undermined the King’s foreign policy, to Wolsey’s acute indignation.
6
He was not excluded from the Council when it was discussing anti-French policies, and was even critical of the French on some occasions, but when he began to interfere in Scottish affairs he did find himself cut out of the decision-making process. By the autumn of 1515 the pro-French Duke of Albany was established as Regent there, and Mary and Suffolk wrote to him jointly to encourage a peaceful settlement of the troubled affairs of that kingdom. This was innocuous enough, but Albany took to sending his envoys into England to visit them first, and even informed Wolsey that he should seek the truth of border disputes from the Suffolks rather than from the English officials there.
7
The Cardinal objected to this interference, and Brandon found himself excluded. His wife’s role was simply ignored, although it was probably decisive in forming his attitude to Scotland, no less than to France. The fact that Mary’s dower payments out of France were received erratically, even before the outbreak of war in 1522, necessitated the constant renegotiation of the Suffolks’ agreement with Henry VIII. Without a regular income of £4,000 from her dower lands, there was no way in which Mary could afford the £2,000 which was due. Consequently in December 1516 the terms were modified, so that the repayments were reduced, and could cease altogether if the dower were interrupted, in spite of (or perhaps because of) the fact that none of the original payments had yet been made.
8
However, Wolsey clearly used these regular renegotiations as a means of political control, and in May 1517 he tightened up the arrangement. Mary’s payments stayed at 2,000 marks (assuming her dower had arrived), but the Duke was now required to pay 500 marks towards his own debt, irrespective of what was received from France, and Mary was constrained to bequeath all her jewels and plate to the King in the event of her death, instead of to her husband. Two thousand marks’ worth of jewels were handed over when the agreement was sealed, in earnest of good intentions, and the Suffolks’ indebtedness was subtly increased by charging them £600 for lodgings at court, although whether the King was aware of this tariff on his hospitality remains unclear.
9