His father died carrying the Tudor flag before Charles Brandon was old enough to walk. He spent the next sixty years making sure he never had to carry anyone else's.
Charles Brandon was born around 1484, the son of Sir William Brandon and Elizabeth Bruyn of South Ockendon in Essex, and his father was killed at Bosworth Field in August 1485 carrying Henry Tudor's standard against the charge of Richard III. William Brandon was dead before Charles could form a memory of him. Henry VII was not the sort of king who forgot a debt, and the debt he owed William Brandon was specific and irreplaceable.
Charles was brought into the orbit of the royal household, grew up in the vicinity of the prince who would become Henry VIII, and arrived at the young king's court in 1509 already positioned as something that Tudor England very rarely produced: a man Henry would trust not because he had to, but because he wanted to.
The letters and papers of the reign describe Henry's attachment to Brandon as exceeding the bounds of ordinary friendship, and those are the words of a state document, not a private letter. They are worth reading carefully.
Brandon was physically exceptional in a court where physical performance was a political statement. He was large, athletic, and one of the very few men in England who could stand against Henry in a tournament without obvious deference. He jousted against the king as an equal, which Henry required from a partner and tolerated from nobody else.
He was made a knight, then Viscount Lisle after the French campaign of 1513, then Duke of Suffolk in 1514, one of perhaps three men in England to hold a dukedom. He had risen from the son of a dead standard-bearer to one of the three most powerful nobles in the kingdom in the space of thirty years, and he had done it entirely through the maintenance of a single relationship. He knew this. He was not a man who forgot where things came from.
In January 1515, Henry sent Brandon to France to bring home his widowed sister Mary. Mary Tudor had married Louis XII of France the previous year as a diplomatic instrument, under a private agreement with her brother that if she performed this service she would be free to choose her own second husband. Louis died after three months. Mary was eighteen, beautiful, and had been in love with Charles Brandon, by most accounts, for some time before she was sent to France at all.
Brandon arrived at the French court with instructions to bring her home safely. He was specifically and directly told by Henry, via Wolsey, that he was not to propose marriage. He proposed marriage within the week. They were secretly wed in Paris in late February or early March 1515, in a ceremony witnessed by Francis I and a handful of others, before returning to England to face the consequences.
The consequences were, by the standards of Tudor England, minimal. Marrying a member of the royal family without the king's permission was treason. It carried the death penalty. Henry was furious in the way that a man is furious when his closest friend has done the precise thing he was told not to do, and the fury lasted as long as these things last between men who have known each other since childhood, which was not very long. Wolsey managed the immediate crisis. A substantial fine was imposed, a significant portion of which was never actually collected.
Brandon and Mary were formally remarried at Greenwich in May 1515 in the presence of the king and queen, which was Henry's public statement that the matter was closed. It was. Brandon was back at court, back at the king's side, back at the tournament within weeks. He was godfather to Henry's son, the future Edward VI, in 1537. He witnessed Anne Boleyn's execution in 1536 and said nothing about it that was recorded. He helped arrange the annulment of Anne of Cleves in 1540. He accompanied Katherine Howard to the Tower in 1541.
He remained through all of it, intact, trusted, present, the one constant in a court that consumed everyone else who entered it.
Mary Tudor died in June 1533. She was thirty-seven years old. Brandon married his fourteen-year-old ward Katherine Willoughby within three months. Katherine had been betrothed to his son. Brandon was forty-nine. This detail is consistently smoothed over in accounts of his life, because the accounts of his life tend to be organised around his great love for Mary Tudor, which was genuine, and which ended in June 1533, after which he made a rapid and advantageous marriage to a girl less than half his age without apparent distress. He and Katherine had two sons. The sons both died of sweating sickness within hours of each other in 1551, six years after their father was gone.
Brandon died on 22 August 1545 at Guildford, aged around sixty, having outlived four of Henry's six wives, two of his own wives, his royal wife's entire family line, and the Tudor world that had made him. Henry VIII gave him a state funeral at Windsor and paid for it himself. He was buried in St George's Chapel. Henry died eighteen months later. Nobody who had known William Brandon at Bosworth could have predicted any of it, which is perhaps the most Tudor thing that can be said about the whole business.
He was the man who understood, better than anyone at that court, that survival was not luck. It was a skill. He had been watching it practised since before he could walk, and he never once forgot the lesson.
