Charles Brandon, 3rd Duke of Suffolk

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Charles Brandon, portrait miniature by Hans Holbein the Younger, 1541

Charles Brandon, 3rd Duke of Suffolk (12 October 1537[1] – 14 July 1551), known as Lord Charles Brandon until shortly before his death, was the son of the 1st Duke of Suffolk and the suo jure 12th Baroness Willoughby de Eresby.

His father had previously been married to Mary Tudor, sister of King Henry VIII. Following Mary's death, he had married Lady Willoughby de Eresby, who had been originally intended as the bride of his son Henry.

In 1541, Lord Charles Brandon and his older brother Lord Henry Brandon had their miniatures painted by Hans Holbein the Younger.[2]

He died of the sweating sickness one hour after the same disease claimed his elder brother Henry (who had succeeded their father as 2nd Duke of Suffolk in 1545), and because of this holds the record for the shortest tenure of a British peerage. (The 2nd Baron Stamp may claim a shorter tenure, but merely through a legal fiction.) Suffolk died without issue and his title became extinct. They died at the Bishop of Lincoln's Palace, Buckden, in the village of Buckden near Huntingdon, Huntingdonshire, where they had fled in an attempt to escape the epidemic.

A solemn celebration of the funerals of the two Dukes, called a 'Month's Mind', was held on 22 September 1551 with all the funeral equipment in duplicate.[3] The humanist intellectuals Thomas Wilson and Walter Haddon wrote a life of Suffolk and his older brother shortly after their death.

Further reading[]

  • The Life and Career of Charles Brandon, Duke of Suffolk, c. 1484–1545, by S. J. Gunn (on his father)
  • Catherine Willoughby, by Evelyn Read (on his mother)

References[]

  1. ^ erenow.net The Six Wives of Henry VIII (biography): It was obvious by early October that the birth was imminent, and the courtiers were telling each other to 'look daily for a prince'. The King was so certain that his child would be a boy that he gave orders for a Garter Stall to be made ready in St George's Chapel for 'the Prince hoped for in due season'. On 7 October, as the Queen showed no signs of going into labour, the Lady Mary went briefly back to Hunsdon to attend the christening of the child of one of her tenants; when she returned, Jane was still up and about. In Leicestershire, at Bradgate Manor, the King's niece, Frances Brandon, Marchioness of Dorset, gave birth to a baby girl and named her after the Queen; this child grew up to be the ill-fated Lady Jane Grey, who would lose her head before her seventeenth birthday. And in London, the young Duchess of Suffolk bore a healthy son.
  2. ^ "Royal Collection". Archived from the original on 6 February 2012. Retrieved 22 December 2010.
  3. ^ Strype, John, Ecclesiastical Memoirs, vol. 2 part 1, Oxford (1822), 496.
Peerage of England
Preceded by
Henry Brandon 		Duke of Suffolk
1551 		Extinct
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