IT is a remarkable fact that, although Charles Brandon, Duke of Suffolk, was, after Thomas More, Wolsey and the king himself, the most conspicuous personage at the court of Henry VIII, no authoritative biography of him exists, unless indeed it be a short, but very unimportant, monograph (written in Latin, at the end of the sixteenth century) now in the King’s Library at the British Museum. Suffolk outlived nearly all his principal contemporaries, except the king and the Duke of Norfolk, and his career, therefore, runs almost parallel with that of Henry VIII, whom he attended in nearly every event of importance, from boyhood to death. Brandon predeceased the king by only a few months. In person, he bore so striking a resemblance to Henry, that the French, when on bad terms with us, were wont to say that he was his master’s bastard brother. The two men were of the same towering height, but Charles was, perhaps, the more powerful; at any rate, King Henry had good cause, on one occasion, to admit the fact, for Brandon overthrew and slightly injured him in a wrestling match at Hampton Court. Both king and duke were exceedingly fair, and had the same curly, golden hair, the same steel-grey eyes, planted on either side of an aquiline nose, somewhat too small for the breadth of a very large face. In youth and early manhood, owing to the brilliancy of their pink-and-white complexions, they were universally considered extremely handsome, but with the advent of years they became abnormally stout, and vainly tried to conceal their fat, wide cheeks, and double chins, with beards and whiskers. A French chronicler, speaking of Charles Brandon at the time that he was in Paris for the marriage of Mary Tudor to Louis XII, says he had never seen so handsome a man, or one of such manly power who possessed so delicate a complexion—_rose et blanc tout comme une fille_. And yet he was not the least effeminate, for of all the men of his day, he was the most splendid sportsman, the most skilful in the tilt-yard, and the surest with the arrow. He danced so lightly and so gracefully that to see him was a sight in which even Henry VIII, himself an elegant dancer, delighted. [Illustration: [_To face p._ 4 CHARLES BRANDON, DUKE OF SUFFOLK (_From an engraving, after the original in the collection of His Grace the Duke of Bedford_)]