On Brandon’s return, Henry VIII, probably with a view to facilitating a possible alliance between his favourite and the dowager of Savoy, to universal surprise and some indignation, created his “well-beloved Charles Brandon,” Duke of Suffolk, a title until quite recently held by the semi-regal, but dispossessed house of de la Pole,[16] and further presented him with the vast territorial apanage of that family, which included Westhorpe Hall, near Bury St. Edmunds; Donnington Castle, the inheritance of Chaucer’s granddaughter, the first Duchess of Suffolk; Wingfield Castle, in Suffolk; Rising Castle in Norfolk; and Lethering Butley in Herefordshire.[17] In the summer of 1513, while the king was sojourning at Tournay, he received a visit from the Archduke Charles of Castile and Austria, and his aunt, the Dowager Duchess of Savoy, Regent of the Netherlands. These august personages came to congratulate the English monarch on the capture of Tournay from their mutual enemy, Louis XI of France. At this time the Austro-Spanish archduke still hoped to secure the hand of the King of England’s handsome sister, Mary Tudor, who had accompanied her brother to France. Henry did his best to ingratiate himself with the regent, a handsome lady with a foolish whimpering expression, who, if we may judge her by her portrait in the Museum at Brussels, was most apt to credit anything and everything that flattered her fancy. The king and his favourites, indeed, to amuse her, behaved less like gentlemen than mountebanks. Henry danced grotesquely before her and played on the giltrone, the lute and the cornet for her diversion, and his boon companions followed their master’s example and exhibited their accomplishments as dancers and musicians. The contemporary _Chronicle of Calais_ contains a most amusing account of the way Henry and Charles made game of the poor dowager, who betrayed her too evident partiality for the latter. Brandon actually went so far on one occasion as to steal a ring from her finger; “and I took him to laugh,” says Margaret of Savoy, describing this incident,[18] “and said to him that he was _un larron_—a thief—and that I thought the king had with him led thieves out of his country. This word _larron_ he could not understand.” So Henry had to be called in to explain it to him. His Majesty next contrived a sort of love-scene between the pair, in which he made Duchess Margaret a very laughing-stock, by inducing her to repeat after him in her broken English the most appalling improprieties, the princess being utterly ignorant of the meaning of the words she was parroting. To lead her on, Suffolk, who was not a good French scholar, made answer, at the king’s prompting, to the princess’s extraordinary declarations, in fairly respectable French. At last, however, the good lady realized the situation, and, rising in dudgeon, declared Brandon to be “no gentleman and no match for her,”[19] and thus he lost his chance, though he never lost, as we