The Nine Days' Queen, Lady Jane Grey, and Her Times. Richard Davey
Some writers say he was simply “contracted,” not married, to this lady, who never demanded her marriage rights, but retired into a dignified obscurity. None the less her family resented the affront offered their kinswoman, and it was Thomas, Earl of Arundel, this discarded lady’s brother, who acted as Dorset’s Nemesis, and at last betrayed him into the hands of his enemies.
Lady Jane Grey’s maternal grandfather was, as he wrote himself in the famous quatrain referring to his marriage with the King’s sister, descended from “cloth of frieze.” He was the grandson of a London mercer who had married a lady allied to the great houses of Nevill, Fitzalan and Howard, and his father had fought and fallen at Bosworth Field in the cause of Henry VII. In recognition of his services, Henry attached young Charles Brandon to the person of his younger son, Prince Henry, who was of similar age to himself. Thus began a friendship which was only severed by death. In appearance the Prince and his comrade were singularly alike: both were tall and stalwart, both with red hair and fair complexions, and they were equally skilful and agile in sport and manly pastimes. Charles was more intellectually gifted than Henry, but there was little to choose between them as regards their execrable views of moral responsibilities and their laxity in respect of their marriage vows.
As this last characteristic of Charles Brandon, Duke of Suffolk, touches somewhat upon the legitimacy of Lady Jane Grey’s descent, a short summary of his matrimonial vagaries may be pardoned here. He was contracted in marriage early in life to Anne Browne, a daughter of Sir Anthony Browne, Governor of Calais, by his wife Lady Lucy Nevill, daughter of George Nevill, Duke of Bedford, brother of Richard, Earl of Warwick, “the King maker.” In 1513 he was bold enough to flirt most outrageously with, and seek in marriage, one of the greatest ladies in Europe, Margaret of Austria, the widowed Duchess of Savoy, aunt of the Emperor Charles V. But though Margaret fell in love with him, such a match was soon seen to be impossible, even by the lady herself, and Brandon came out of the affair most ungallantly. For this or some other reason never clearly explained, Brandon set aside his contract with Anne Browne, notwithstanding that by the laws of the period it was considered as binding as the completed marriage ceremony. We next learn that a probable reason for his unchivalrous conduct was a chance that suddenly offered itself to him of marrying the Lady Margaret, the rich widow of Sir John Mortimer of Essex. Charles and his mature consort—there was a difference of nearly thirty years between them—did not abide long together, for he presently endeavoured to annul this marriage on a plea of consanguinity, the Lady Margaret being sister to the mother of his neglected bride, Anne Browne, and consequently her aunt, a complication which surely ought to have been discovered at an earlier stage of the proceedings. Having settled this matter for the time being to his own, but certainly not to the lady’s, satisfaction, he remarried his discarded wife, Anne Browne, in the presence of a great concourse of relations and friends. By this lady he had two daughters: Mary, who became the wife of Lord Mounteagle; and Anne, who married a connection of the Greys, Viscount Powis. Their mother died in 1515, and Brandon soon afterwards contracted himself in matrimony with the Lady Elizabeth Grey, daughter and heiress of Viscount de Lisle. Whether through the interference of Lady Mortimer or not it is impossible to say, but it is certain that Lady de Lisle refused to carry out her side of the contract, and the match was broken off. Brandon, with the consent of Henry VIII, filched from the poor lady her title of Lisle, which he forthwith assumed. In due time the lady gave her hand to Edmund Dudley, father of the fateful Duke of Northumberland. It was probably when in France, and in attendance upon King Henry, at the time of the negotiations for the marriage of the King’s youngest and most beautiful sister, Mary, to the prematurely aged Louis XII, King of France, a hideous victim to elephantiasis, that Charles made so strong an impression upon that ardent Tudor princess that she swore by all the saints that she would not wed the French King unless it was thoroughly understood she was to marry whom she chose after his death, which took place within eighteen months of the marriage. The romantic story of how Brandon, now created Duke of Suffolk, wooed and married the royal widow within a fortnight of the King’s death, and whilst she still wore the white widow’s weeds of a French King’s Consort, is too well known to need recapitulation here, nor need we enter into the details of the gorgeous ceremonies of remarriage that took place at Greenwich, in the presence of King Henry, Queen Katherine of Aragon, and their Court, soon after Mary and Suffolk had landed in England. The Duke of Suffolk took his bride to spend their honeymoon in his magnificent mansion in Southwark, known as Suffolk Place, which he had recently inherited by the death of his uncle, Sir Thomas Brandon. It must have been about this time that the friends of the Lady Mortimer, and probably that lady herself, began to spread rumours abroad that made both Charles and his consort anxious as to the validity of their marriage and the legitimacy of their offspring. Indeed, even at the time of his clandestine wedding in the Chapel of the Hôtel de Cluny (now incorporated in the Museum of that name), he had felt very uneasy about the matter, and, foreseeing his peril, wrote to Wolsey, beseeching his assistance and advice on a matter of such vital importance, which, however, was not decided so easily as Charles expected. It was not until 1528 that Wolsey dispatched a somewhat garbled account of the matter to Pope Clement VII, then in exile at Orvieto, where he received Cardinal Campeggio and the English envoys who came to him with the first negotiations for the divorce of Henry VIII from Katherine of Aragon. Trusting in the evidence which Wolsey sent him, the Pope, by a special Bull (dated 12th May 1528), annulled the marriage of Brandon with the Lady Mortimer, on the plea of consanguinity, and at the same time declared valid that of her niece, Anne Browne, and legitimized her two children. The Bull further stated that Lady Mortimer and her friends were “liable to ecclesiastical censure if they made any attempt to invalidate the decree” making valid Brandon’s marriage to Anne Browne and Mary Tudor. The importance of this decree, which was first read out to the people in Norwich Cathedral in 1529 by Bishop Nyx, can readily be imagined when we remember that it was not delivered until after the Queen-Duchess had given birth to two children. Her only son, the Earl of Lincoln, died in infancy, and the Lady Frances became in due time the Marchioness of Dorset and mother of Lady Jane Grey. On the other hand, the legitimacy of the Lady Eleanor Brandon, the younger daughter, who was born after the publication of the papal decree, was never disputed, and moreover, before she entered upon her sorrowful career, the Lady Mortimer was dead. That considerable doubt was entertained as to the validity of Brandon’s marriage with the Queen-Dowager is proved by a variety of facts too numerous to be detailed, but one of which is very significant. Late in the first half of Queen Elizabeth’s reign, the validity of the claims of the Lady Mounteagle and her sister, the children of Brandon and Anne Browne, to be considered legitimate, was ventilated in the Court of Arches, and after much deliberation confirmed. Although the legitimacy of these ladies, both of whom were long since deceased at the time of this trial, had nothing to do with the legal position of Mary Tudor as the wife of the Duke of Suffolk, it was none the less an indirect test of the right to the throne of her granddaughters, the Ladies Katherine and Mary Grey.
From these briefly resumed facts it is not difficult to understand that although King Henry VIII highly approved of his bosom friend’s conduct, his subjects held Charles to be an arrant rascal. His treatment of his beautiful royal wife was on a par with his low conception of his moral obligations. He neglected her, spent her money, and lived openly with a notorious woman known as Mrs. Eleanor Brandon, by whom he had an illegitimate son, Charles, who is said to have been the well-known jeweller to Queen Elizabeth, and whose son, or grandson, Gregory Brandon, was, according to tradition, the headsman who executed Charles I.
Lady Jane’s grandmother, Mary Tudor, was a most amiable and long-suffering princess, who after a somewhat secluded life in Southwark withdrew to Westhorpe Hall. Here she died on 24th June 1533. Her two daughters—the Lady Frances, who had recently married the Marquess of Dorset; and the Lady Eleanor, soon to be the bride of Henry, Lord Clifford, eldest son of the Earl of Cumberland—were with her at the time of her death, but the Duke was absent in London, and so too was the Marquess of Dorset, her son-in-law, attending at the coronation of Anne Boleyn. The Queen-Duchess was interred in Bury St. Edmunds, Henry VIII and Suffolk paying the expenses of a gorgeous alabaster monument to her memory, “full of little saints and angels,” which was destroyed soon after, during the wreck of the glorious Abbey Church at the time of the suppression of the monasteries. The remains of the Queen were then removed to the parish church, where they still rest, a marble tablet put up in the early nineteenth century being the only memorial of Mary Tudor,