Author Tony Riches dropped by the podcast to talk about Charles Brandon. And look, I’ll admit it, I’m not a huge fan of Charles Brandon. He’s not my favorite. But I *am* a huge fan of Tony Riches, and so I decided to give Charles a chance. And I’m happy to say that while he’s still not my favorite Tudor guy, I do have a bit more positive attitude to him now.
After listening to the podcast about Charles Brandon, get Tony Riches’ books here:
Brandon, Tudor Knight here:
https://amzn.to/2LgdJjA
And if you want to start from the beginning with the Tudor Trilogy, here are the links for that:
Book One: Owen
https://amzn.to/2Ll8AH6
Book Two: Jasper
https://amzn.to/2LhxcAn
Book Three: Henry
https://amzn.to/2EwFN1k
Thanks so much to Tony for dropping by, and I’m excited to see what characters he chooses to write about next. We’ll be sure to get him back once we see.
[advertisement insert here: if you like this show, and you want to support me and my work, the best thing you can do (and it’s free!) is to leave a rating or review on iTunes. It really helps others discover the podcast. Second best is to buy Tudor-themed gifts for all your loved ones at my shop, at TudorFair.com, like leggings with the Anne Boleyn portrait pattern on them, or boots with Elizabeth I portraits. Finally, you can also become a patron of this show for as little as $1/episode at Patreon.com/englandcast … And thank you!]
Transcript of A chat with Tony Riches on Charles Brandon:
Heather:
Hello, and welcome to the Renaissance English History Podcast. I’m your host, Heather Teysko, and I’m a storyteller who makes history accessible because I believe it’s a pathway to understanding who we are, our place in the universe, and having a deeper connection to our own humanity. So this is Episode 115. And it is an interview with Tony Riches. He is an amazing historical fiction author. If you’ve not read his work, I highly recommend it and you can start out with this book on Charles Brandon, his newest book, but you should definitely go back and read the older books too.
So we talked about Charles Brandon, who is somebody who I will admit I had a negative perception of but we talked a lot and in his book, he gives a very different perspective of Charles Brandon and really humanizes him, which I think is great. So he has expanded my Charles Brandon horizons.
So before we get into that, and before I introduce him, I want to remind you that there’s still time to get some amazing Christmas presents over at Tudorfair.com which is my online shop. The treasures from best Christmas box, which is a box that’s similar to the popular subscription service, but it’s a more festive version and it is just a one-off so there’s no commitment required. It’s for those of you who might be a little bit commitment-phobic. That’s okay, this is a festive version of Treasures from Beth and it’s basically like five gifts in one so it makes a really great Christmas gift.
And then we also have tickets on sale for Tudorcon. So I would like to invite you to spend three days with me and 120 of your new best friends in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, at a newly restored winery adjacent to the Pennsylvania Renaissance Fair from October 18th to 20th 2019, where we are going to have three days of amazing fun with feasting and partying but also a lot of learning. So we’re going to have guest speakers similar to what we have with the Tudor Summit and we’re going to have about 10 speakers and we’re going to have period musicians, demonstrations of things like fiber arts and spinning.
It’s going to be a really brilliant mix of learning and socializing and making new friends and dressing up and listening to period music and we’re going to end it with a medieval feast and some time in the Renaissance Fair. So check out Tudorcon.info. It’s a very basic bare-bones website right now that I just set up but it’ll get you all the basic information and links to buy your seat.
We have a very limited amount of tickets available and they will sell out. You can still get the early bird price up until the end of the year so check out Tudorcon.info for that and then we still have the Tudor Planner so you can still get a Tudor Planner in time for Christmas and start off planning with the Tudors in 2019. Tudorfy your 2019. Right so with that all out of the way.
Let me introduce you to Tony Riches. Tony riches was born in Pembrokeshire, in West Wales, UK and he spent part of his childhood in Kenya. He got a BA degree in psychology and an MBA from Cardiff University. He wrote several successful nonfiction books and then he decided that his real interest was in the history of the 15th and 16th century. And now his focus is on writing historical fiction about the lives of the key figures of medieval history. His Tudor Trilogy, which starts with the book Owen, traces Owen, Jasper and then Henry Tudor. It’s become an international bestseller and he is in regular demand as a guest speaker about the lives of the early Tudors.
He was a finalist in the 2017 Amazon storyteller awards and is listed 100 and 30th in the 2018 Top 200 list of the most influential authors. He’s now returned to Pembrokeshire, an area full of inspiration for his writing where he lives with his wife. In his spare time, he enjoys sailing and sea kayaking.
So we’re going to start it off by talking about how we got from his early interest or the earlier books starting with Owen Tudor, going right the way through to Charles Brandon and where he’s going to go from here.
Thank you so much for being here. We talked once before for the Tudor Summit about your early books. Owen and Jasper and Henry, and I wonder whether for people who haven’t heard that, if we can just go back a little bit because this new book on Charles Brandon is not of course your first. And I’d like to kind of trace the story of how you went from Owen to right the way through going in telling Charles Brandon’s story a little bit.
Tony:
Yeah, sure. Well, the thing is, I was born in Pembroke, and that’s of course where Henry Tudor was born. And I’d already written several books, one of which being a best seller in the US. And I decided to write a book about Henry Tudor, because at the time, I couldn’t find any books about the whole of Henry’s life that weren’t dry, dusty, historical, not textbooks almost. And so I decided to start collecting as much information as I could. And I spent a couple of years and I ended up with enough for at least three or four books. So I had to decide what to leave out, when to start his life and everything like that. And I knew that there were no books about his grandfather Owen Tudor. Owen’s story was fascinating to me.
He’s a Welshman that suddenly found himself alone with a widowed young queen. And so the idea of the Tudor trilogy occurred to me that Henry could be born in the first book, and come of age at the second book, and become king at the third book. And I really enjoyed researching and writing those. And I’m pleased to say they’ve been a great success in the US and the UK, and surprisingly, Australia.
Surprisingly, a lot of Australians came from here originally, didn’t they? So it was a question of how do you follow that, you know, you can’t have a fourth book of the trilogy. But in the final book, I’d really enjoyed writing the part of Mary Tudor, who was Henry VII’s youngest daughter, who kind of nursed him in his last few months. I did a lot of research about her. And again, there were no books really exploring her adventures in her life, which was intriguing. So I wrote Mary Tudor Princess, which is actually my bestselling book this year. In fact, this month, this outsold all of the others put together, which is pretty encouraging. And I kind of call it the sequel to the trilogy.
So it’s like the secret fourth book of the three-book trilogy. And as I was writing it, I became more and more fascinated by the character of Charles Brandon, who I only really knew before from the television series The Tudors. And that was outrageous, they merged Mary and her sister Margaret into a single character. It’s unforgivable. I mean, I was enjoying it up to that point. And, you know, you could forgive the way they portrayed Henry and stuff, but you couldn’t forgive them merging his sisters.
And so anyway, never mind. It came to me that what I could do is, I could research Charles Brandon while I was also researching Mary, and then I could write a book, which told pretty much the same story from his point of view, which is very different, of course, because she wasn’t his first wife, and she wasn’t his last.
And so that’s what I’ve been doing. And that was published just in time for Christmas on the third of this month. And I really enjoyed writing that because it’s got everything you could hope for. He was a champion jouster. He was Henry VIII’s best friend. And he went on Henry’s behalf, fighting battles against the French on the sea and on the land. And he was quite a romantic character as well. What amused me, he was always in debt. And even when he died, he was like, 4000 pounds in debt, much to everybody’s amazement. How can one of the biggest landowners in the country be so hopeless with money? So there were lots of intriguing things. And I enjoyed writing that.
And then what I’m actually working on now, some people know because I’ve already shared it with some people, is that his last wife, Katherine Brandon, Katherine Willoughby, if you like. She is just an amazing woman. And not only did she live through Henry VIII’s reign, I’ve got the book which talks about that she could have been his last wife. You know, there was talk that he was going to marry her. But that of course, she carried on through the life through the reign of his son and then the horror of Queen Mary. And then right through to the crowning of Elizabeth I. So what I realized was it offered me the perfect way of rounding off the story of the early Tudors and leading into the court of Elizabeth I.
So that’s what I’m doing now. And I hope to have that published this time next year because I’m already well into the research. And we visited Framlingham Castle a little while ago. That’s was where she grew up, that area. And of course, is where Charles’ Westhorpe Hall as well. Yeah, that’s quite a long answer to a short question.
Heather:
No, I like it. And I’ll be interested to read your book on her. I’ve always been interested in her and certainly about her… like, didn’t she have a dog that she named after Stephen Gardiner?
Tony:
That’s right. And everybody knew about it, which was worse. Yes. She deliberately called the dog’s name in public so that people know the contempt that she had gotten. And nothing he could do about it. There’s no law about naming your dog.
Heather:
I love it.
Tony:
Get a dog and call it Donald Trump.
Heather:
I would like that. That would be great. We should set a new kind of trend for people doing that. That would be that would be fun.
So your title with Charles Brandon is a Tudor Knight. I would like for you to talk to me a little bit about what you see a Tudor knight being because this was really a period going away from the medieval ideas of courtly love and all of that and you know, actual real-life knights and Agincourt and everything and moving into a period where we have guns and later on towards the end of battles at sea and it becomes much, you don’t have this knight in shining armor anymore. And he kind of straddles this period, I guess. And so I was wondering if you could talk to me a little bit about what that means to be a Tudor knight.
Tony:
That’s a really good question because Charles Brandon, I could make an argument, he was the last of the two true knights. I mean, these days, they give knighthoods to popstars and things like that, don’t they? He was a knight in shining armor because he was the only one really that regularly wore gilded armor. So if you look at the cover he’s wearing the average steal underneath but it’s gilded with gold leaf, which must have been an amazing sight in bright sunshine, can you imagine what effect that must have created.
But you mentioned courtly love as well. And of course, Henry VIII was fascinated by this whole game of courtly love. So it’s so well documented that he was almost obsessed. And it ended with him because neither his nor Mary Tudor, Queen Mary I, she wasn’t really obsessed with courtly love, I don’t think. It was the end of an era. And he was a true knight because he had very chivalric values.
When you read his letters, and when you look at how he conducted himself, he saw himself as a kind of Arthurian Knight. Of course, it was all a charade really because he was a champion jouster and that’s an amazing skill when you think, a great being warhorse jousting, … charging at full tilt with a heavy lance. But it was all for entertainment. It was all a game with rules to try and keep them safe, which didn’t always work. And he suddenly found himself actually leading an army of like 5000 men into battle and realize he didn’t have a clue about, he’d never killed anybody. And he never raised his sword in anger. He had blunted swords with tips, you know?
It was all a bit of a, it was an entertainment to sport. After Brandon’s death, it was never quite the same again. I know there was some jousting going on these days, but it’s a completely different game now. In those days it was the kingly pastime.
Heather:
Right. And it’s interesting that you talk about seeing himself as this Arthurian figure and the idea of courtly love to coming into that with from my perspective, he’s a bit of a cad sometimes or that’s always how I’ve seen him. And so I wonder you know, you showed early on in the book that he has feelings for his wife.
Tony:
Yeah. It’s easy to dismiss him as a bit of a cad. Because there’s a real danger of applying present-day standards to it. And in fact, I don’t want to give away any spoilers to the book by the way. If I hesitate, it only means that I’m just quickly thinking through whether it would spoil it for readers that aren’t familiar with his story. It’s quite well documented that after Mary’s death, three months later, he married his ward, Katherine Willoughby, who was 14.
Heather:
And hadn’t she been actually engaged to his son?
Tony:
Absolutely. That was … was that his son Henry was going to marry this beautiful wealthy heiress Katherine Willoughby and Charles Brandon, he got into a lot of trouble to secure her … from the king, paying over 2000 pounds for it, which he didn’t have by the way. He borrowed and borrowed the money. And when Mary died, if we just look at it for through, modernize, simply his wife dies, and three months later, this 48-year-old man marries a 14-year-old girl and immediately gets pregnant. He’d be imprisoned, won’t he? That’s by modern standards.
But if you put yourself back to just Brandon’s time, it made perfect sense, in that she’d already let him know that she wouldn’t be unhappy with the arrangement, let’s put it like that. And in fact, Anne Boleyn’s reputed to have started a rumor that he was in some kind of relationship with his daughter. And some historians have said that whether that happened at all is debatable, but let’s imagine that a rumor spread at court. It wasn’t his daughter, it was his ward. That’s much more believable, isn’t it?
Let’s imagine that his wife is an invalid, who is bedridden, and quite often out of her mind on various drugs from the pain and things like that. He’s got this very attractive, witty, intelligent, well-educated young ward. And he is, dare I say it, a bit of a cad, but don’t tell anybody. And so when his wife died, by Tudor’s standards, it’s perfectly acceptable to get married in fairly short order, particularly because he was getting older. And if he waited much longer, he might not be able to father more children. But she was also a very wealthy heiress with huge–
Heather:
–Tracts of land?
Tony:
Absolutely enormous quantities, whole counties of them.
Heather:
Did you get my little Monty Python joke in there?
Tony:
What have the Tudors ever done for us? Seriously, it made perfect sense. And Henry would have obviously agreed to it. He wouldn’t have done anything without having sort of run it past people that mattered. And I think he would have got a few knowing winks in the corridors of power, they would have thought he did quite well for himself, actually. And he would have enjoyed that, and we must remember, I mean, I’ve studied the life of Katherine Willoughby before I started writing… There’s nothing anywhere that says she was anywhere unhappy with the arrangement.
In fact, they seem to be very happily married. And so this is one of the most important things that I’ve got to somehow get across in the new book is, how it was perfectly okay in the standards at the time. And I can tell you that when my editor was going through the first draft of Brandon, she did ask me to tone down the scenes between them, Charles Brandon and Katherine Willoughby. She thought it might upset some readers.
So I don’t know how do you deal with this sort of thing? You know, it’s hard enough to deal with the love scene in a book anyway, because my readership ranges from schoolchildren who are actually using them to get their heads around the Tudors right through the whole range of ages to me. Some people are looking for a little bit more of a love scene and some really are not so it’s treading that fine path, you know?
Heather:
Yeah. And then having with modern standards and more–
Tony:
I know, I didn’t want it to be salacious. But you know, it was just a thing of timing, wasn’t it? And it was. We mustn’t forget that. If we go back to the earlier Tudors again, Henry VII’s mother, Margaret Beaufort, she was that age when she gave birth to Henry.
Heather:
Yeah, but wasn’t it kind of seen at the time as even being a bit that she was she was still seen as a bit young and then later when she was negotiating the marriage for her granddaughter she asked to have them wait?
Tony:
What I think is the story on that is that Edmund Tudor, Henry’s father realized that he would automatically inherit the Beaufort estates if the marriage was consummated. It wasn’t consummated. And definitely he was still living in the tail end of the Wars of the Roses and actually died in Carmarthen jail, and possibly murdered in Carmarthen jail, and never saw his son. But he didn’t waste any time consummating the marriage and making jolly sure there was evidence of it.
Heather:
Yeah, poor Margaret Beaufort though nearly died with that.
Tony:
And in Pembroke castle, there’s a tableau. Have you’ve ever been to–
Heather:
I’ve been to Cardiff, but I haven’t been to–
Tony:
You’d have to give me a shout when you come to Pembroke and I’ll give you the guided tour. So in the castle, and in the tower, where they used to think that Henry was born, is a tableau, which shows like figures of Henry’s birth, and now the birth is represented as a middle-aged woman. That is, at the time when that was put together, they thought it might offend people to share a 14-year-old girl with it obviously a newborn baby in her arms.
Heather:
Isn’t it funny how you can tell so much about history, not just by what’s written, but the time. You can tell so much about a time period when it was written based on–
Tony:
Yeah, if you look at the way the Victorians’ … the historical record–
Heather:
Agnes Strickland and all of those early ones..
Tony:
I think the challenge for the modern authors for present-day writers is to do our very best to go back to the original documents, to the original locations, the actual locations, and to get a real feel for them. And to try and strip away some of those layers that have gone on top of it, and we’re still doing it because like I said, The Tudors representation of Charles Brandon is really for entertainment purposes. Whereas I’d like to think that anybody reading my account, can take any of the events that are in my book about Brandon, and go back, and they will find that they’re brought out by the historical record.
Heather:
So I want to get back to his story and his perspective of something that is well documented. I don’t think you’re giving away any spoilers and just the relationship with Mary. And that, of course, is the way most people remember him through that relationship and the marriage. And you show in both the story of Mary and now in Brandon, that she did seem to have a thing for him even when she was quite young. And I wonder if you could just kind of talk us through the relationship and how it progressed. And what you’ve found about? How it worked out?
Tony:
Well, once again, you see, it’s intriguing that she would have been one of the young princesses in the grandstands watching this handsome knight in burnished gold armor, charging and winning against all … He didn’t use the joust only, he would also take on skillet arms, which would be to fight with swords and things like that with all … And it must have been quite impressive. And I can easily imagine how he would have been a figure that would have caught her attention and vice versa because at the end of the day, she was an attractive young princess.
If you look at any of the pictures of her as a young woman, I took about by modern standards now she’s not unattractive. The chroniclers, ambassadors from France and Spain, all describe her as really one of the fairest princesses they’ve ever seen. They call her the jewel of England and things like that. So then you imagine she’s got a very strong sense of duty, of course. So you imagine then that her brother suddenly announces to her good news and the bad news. The good news is you’re going to get married, sister. The bad news, it’s to the ancient elderly king of France, who’s actually got all sorts of ailments and diseases.
As far as I can tell from the record, she accepted it as a duty in good faith, and decided to make the best of it. There’s no evidence anywhere of her being appalled at the idea. I think she might have been a bit unhappy with the way that the wedding was consummated in the absence of the king, because I find it hard to imagine that having a stronger sense of duty, any young girl would enjoy that.
But when she got to France, she really got into the idea of being Queen of France, and in fact, insisted on being referred to as the Queen of France, to her last days, and she was never happy. We never allowed anybody to call her the Duchess of Suffolk, by the way, so that if you ever see that as Mary, Duchess of Suffolk, that’s actually wrong. Catherine was perfectly happy with it, but not Mary. And, of course, when the king died after some 90 days, who was immediately on the scene consoling her, was Charles Brandon.
And I did wonder for a while, I mean, Henry VIII, he knew that there’s something between the two of them, so of all the people he could choose to send across, he sent Charles Brandon, who, at the time was single. And it’s almost like, part of his games of courtly love, isn’t it? But when he arrives there, he does know what an enormous risk he’s taking.
Not really because he thinks that Henry will flip. But he has lots of enemies at court who are very powerful men. And I’m thinking of people like Norfolk and others, definitely old families. And they look on Brandon as an upstart, really, although his father gave his life really, Bosworth, for Henry to become king. That was a long time ago, from that point of view. And they still used to refer to him as the stable boy, because he was the master of the horse, which was actually a great job being Henry VIII’s master of the horse because he loved his horses, and it meant you could have privileged access to him a lot of the time.
But when he secretly married Mary in France, he knew exactly what he’s letting himself in for, because if he was lucky, he would get away with his life. There are people calling for him to be executed for heaven’s sake. And at the very least, they would strip him of all of his lands and have every penny here and it was high risk. Now, would somebody like Charles Brandon take such an enormous risk, if he didn’t actually love Mary in the first place? So that’s my line of reasoning. And I think they did love each other. And that it was quite a powerful thing.
There was also a coincidence of timing really, that if the King of France lived a lot longer, for example, I think Charles Brandon would have married somebody else. But it’s a bit like the way Owen Tudor was thrown together with Catherine of Valois, it was almost an accident of timing. But once they’re together and alone, in difficult circumstances, that a bond forms very quickly, isn’t it?
Heather:
Sure, sure. And it’s interesting. I also want to touch on his, you mentioned his enemies at court, and you show him struggling with trying to very early on being part of the group, but not being still outside and even going to others who are more experienced and trying to form alliances and realizing that he needs to play the political game, but he doesn’t really know how. And I just wondered if you could touch a little bit on that, his journey, because when I think about him, too, I think of, you know, quite a savvy guy who figured out the court politics and found himself, not losing his head through all of the tumultuous years, even coming out in taking some different kinds of stands that maybe were unpopular. And I just wonder if you can talk a little bit about how he became this political operator.
Tony:
I think, one of the things in his favor was, he was what we read these days called quite streetwise. And he also had this relationship with Henry VIII that went back to boyhood. They kind of grew up together, although there was an age difference between them. They knew each other so well, that nobody would ever know Henry better. No other man would know Henry better than Charles Brandon did. And so that was on the plus side. On the downside, he couldn’t compete with the noble families with all their wealth, and they all had private armies. And they were very politically astute.
Frankly, he seems to struggle to even understand what was going on in Parliament, not like now. I mean, parliament, so easy to understand that. But in those days, it was very complex. And, of course, you had the powerful church there. And there’s a fascinating, honest relationship between the Brandons and Cardinal Woolsey, who used to lend them money at extortionate rates, and have them over a barrel merely because he had the power to say, you have to pay back all of your loans tomorrow, or you’ll go to the tower. Or he could say, I’ll tell you what, I’ll waive those loans. So there’s a kind of game that went on of keeping on the right side of Cardinal Wolsey. And even Brandon used to struggle a bit with.
Did he like Cardinal Wolsey? Did he trust him? Sometimes he would think yes, of course. Because that’s what he’d like to believe. And then something would happen. And he would think, hang on a minute, this isn’t good, you know, this old-fashioned chivalry would come to the fore. And he would then be in turmoil. And he would sit down with Mary, and see what she thought of it. And those conversations would be fascinating if, when they invent time travel, and I’m allowed to choose wherever I can go, I think I’ll go to Westhorpe at the time that they were both there together. And when they were arguing about whether they should support Henry’s marriage to Anne Boleyn or oppose it publicly, that would have been interesting.
Because my wife and I went to Westhorpe this year, expecting to find no trace of it. This is their house in Suffolk by the way, their manor house, and we were absolutely blown away by it because there’s the Tudor branch and then the house that’s on the site. Similar footprint but there’s like Mary’s chapel and the owner of the house said would you like to see this stonework that we salvaged from the mountains? The original mount is still there by the way.
He took me to a barn. The barn was Tudor, as well, by the way, but he had all these rubble really. But it had things like Charles Brandon’s crest, and roses and stuff like that. He took us to his house and above the fireplace set into the stonework. This is the owner of the place now. He’s got Charles Brandon’s crown lion from the manor house, and you could put your hand on it. I think Charles Brandon probably did the same. He probably ran his hand over that carving, you know? It’s … it is. So it would have been pressed into a mold and then fired faster.
I felt the years strip away when I did that. And that’s what I’m saying is this, there’s no substitute for standing in the grounds of Westhorpe which have changed very little, by the way, it’s in the Suffolk countryside. And the birds that you can hear and the wind in the trees and the moat, Charles Brandon would immediately recognize all of that. You get the kind of all the senses.
Heather:
Yeah, isn’t that amazing? I grew up in a house, which is not old by English standards. But by American standards. It was about 300 years old. And it had been a toll house on an original turnpike that went from Philadelphia to Lancaster, Pennsylvania. And, you know, I just would be in the living room and think about all the people who would stop there to pay the tolls, who were traveling this road and it was such an interesting thing to think about. And you could almost feel them, you know, they’re with you all of these people who had stopped and been in that space where I was sitting and watching TV or whatever.
Tony:
I’m so lucky because I actually live 20 minutes from Pembroke castle. Yes, I can go there any time and just get it. I can stand up on the battlements and look out across the river. That’s exactly what Owen Tudor would have done, what Jasper Tudor would have done, what Henry Tudor, as a boy would have done. And, you know, I think one of the most amazing things like that is when we went to Brittany where Henry was in exile, and we visited his Chateau in the forest. And …anybody has been because it was full of cobwebs, my wife said you’re covered in cobwebs. Because we just had to, like brush the cobwebs aside, and I was able to stand in the room that Henry Tudor lived in until the age of 28, you know, agonizing over whether he’s dead, or the temerity to take on Richard the third. Felt like, you could almost sense his presence, you know?
Heather:
Yeah. Isn’t that so amazing, when you’re in places like that, and you think that you’re right there with the place that they were at, seeing the views, hearing the sounds, and the only thing that separates you is his time, which Einstein showed us is all relative anyway, right? So, for all you know, they’re right there with you, because maybe all times are happening at once, you know?
Tony:
Oh, yes. And I think that, I think that’s why I love what I do. It took me a little while to find my sort of niche, if you like. And I wrote books about my time in Africa and stuff like that. But the truth is, I probably got the best collection of books about the Tudors in the UK now. Our house is groaning under the weight of Tudor books. And of course, every time anybody spots when they send it to me and publishers send the new ones to me. But it’s, it’s actually visiting the locations that really does it for me, I think. Any book that you put your hands on.
Heather:
Interesting. So, I want us to wrap the conversation up then with you telling me something about Charles Brandon, that we don’t know. That kind of for people like me who were skeptical of him before we read your book, something that we don’t know about him that could perhaps endear him a little bit more to us.
Tony:
Yes. There are so many things. I mean, right.
Heather:
And I know you don’t want to give away any spoilers.
Tony:
When I can say that he was so flattered to be made the commander of Henry’s army invading France, that he kind of forgot that he didn’t have any skills as a military commander. And the whole thing went horribly wrong. And he ended up nearly dead in a ditch. You know, the army was mutinying and people were slipping away in the night. And he caught some fever, which could have been typhoid, or, you know, they were drinking water out of ditches. He became quite delirious. And I think that changed him forever, because he somehow managed to limp back to Calais.
And when you look at the accounts of him, before that experience, and after it, he really started to realize his own fallibility as a champion jouster hit one. Whenever he wanted to easily, sometimes he used to, I think, make sure that Henry won, at least as often as he did if they were jousting against each other. But when he was in the real-life battle situation, he realized then that he was just an ordinary man like anybody else.
And that stayed with him because he was a humbler, more sensitive person, I think after that, and it’s not generally known that he lost. All he lost that battle, they were not in any way victorious. And he kind of covered up for it. A handful of people remained with him. And as commander, he was able to reunite them at Calais. And they formed like a little bond of brothers, you know, that they’d all been through this nightmare experience together. And he knighted them and I never forgot that. So he did have a new circle out of that.
The idea of him as a scheming, cad, and things like that. He might have been a bit of that before, a bit of a character, but after that, he settled down. And in fact, towards the end of his life, he would faithfully attend all of the council meetings and really look after Henry’s best in interest, as best as he could. And even the day before he died, he was at a council meeting, trying to do his best. So I’d like to see him not as somebody that exploited his relationship with the king. But who genuinely cared about the future of Henry VIII and his best interests.
Heather:
Yeah, someone who really loved the king unconditionally.
Tony:
Yes, that’s a really nice way of putting it, and was prepared really to lay down his life for that.
Heather:
Alright. Well, like I say, I came into the book skeptical. You just don’t hear an awful lot of nice things about him out there. And I think that you have done a lot to expand my horizons or expand my viewpoints of Charles Brandon and I’m grateful to you for having done so. Thank you for writing the book and for sharing your knowledge and for having done the research and given us this different perspective of Charles Brandon.
Tony:
Yeah. Thank you, Heather. And I’d like to come back once I’ve actually finished my new book
because I’m sure I have some interesting things to say about what happened next. It’s not an area that’s been done to death at all. And Katherine has been described as one of the most intriguing Tudor women. When you think she was a Protestant who took on Mary I.
Heather:
So you’re going to probably have a perspective of Mary I, that’s a little bit, shall we say? Not flattering.
Tony:
I’m going to I always do the same. I’m going to try and be as fair as I can. And try and see it. So if you look at how I’ve described Richard I, for example, I’ve always tried to bear in mind that he had his own priorities in his own life to live and saw the world from a particular perspective, which I’ve tried to respect that rather than just fall into the trap of making him into a villain. He wasn’t a villain.
And it’s the same with Mary is that she had her very strongly hard religious views and had waited and waited her time. And then people like Katherine Willoughby or Brandon or whatever you want to call her, were completely on odds with that. And that’s an interesting one to deal with, isn’t it?
Heather:
Yeah. I’ll be interested to see how you do with that one. Yeah. We’ll definitely have you back then for that. So thank you so much for taking the time. And the book is out now. So it makes a great Christmas present and it’s on all the usual places I suspect. Perfect. Excellent.
Thank you to Tony Riches for being on the show. I can’t wait to have him come back and talk to us more about Katherine Willoughby.
And remember, you can go to Tudorcon.info to learn more about Tudorcan and start planning your trip to Pennsylvania to hang out with us for three days. And you can also go to Tudorfair.com for other great Christmas presents. So you can Tudorfy your Christmas. All right, I will be back with you in another two weeks. And until then, have a wonderful holiday. So I won’t be back with you until after Christmas is over. So whatever you’re celebrating, even if you’re celebrating nothing at all. If you’re celebrating Solstice, Christmas, Hanukkah, whatever you’re doing during this period, I hope you’re enjoying it. I hope you’re having a time of peace and love and light, and I will speak to you again very soon. Thanks for listening. Bye, bye.
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Heather Teysko is the creator, writer, and producer of The Renaissance English History Podcast, the original Tudor history podcast, started in 2009. She's been writing about history online for over 25 years, since her first site on Colonial American history became number one in history on Yahoo in 1998. In 2019 she created Tudorcon, which is now a yearly event, in addition to writing books, and running TudorFair.com - a whimsical Tudor Merch shop.
She has been passionate about Tudor England since she first read Alison Weir's The Six Wives of Henry VIII 30 years ago, and subsequently moved to London after college to spend her time immersed in Tudor history (how exciting when she got to interview Alison for the first time!). In addition to history, she is passionate about travel, and has lived in 3 countries and 4 states (not counting her perpetual state of confusion), and her family (who help her host her YouTube channel occasionally).
