Henry Brandon, 2nd Duke of Suffolk

Who was Henry Brandon, 2nd Duke of Suffolk?

Henry Brandon, 2nd Duke of Suffolk, styled Lord Henry Brandon before 1545, was an English nobleman, the son of the 1st Duke of Suffolk, by his fourth wife, 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 and the death of his son, the Earl of Lincoln, he had married Lady Willoughby de Eresby, who had been intended as the bride of his son Henry.

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

Lord Brandon succeeded his father as 2nd Duke of Suffolk on 22 August 1545. He and his younger brother were both minors and continued their education by going up to St John's College, Cambridge. During an epidemic of the sweating sickness, the two youths died, Suffolk first and his younger brother about an hour later. They died at the Bishop of Lincoln's Palace 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. The humanist intellectuals Thomas Wilson and Walter Haddon wrote a life of Suffolk and his younger brother shortly after their death.