SIR FRANCIS BRYAN* (d. 1550), poet, translator, soldier, and diplomatist, was the son of Sir
Thomas Bryan, and grandson of Sir Thomas Bryan, chief justice of the common pleas from
1471 till his death in 1500. His father was knighted by Henry VII in 1497, was 'knight of
the body' at the opening of Henry VIII's reign, and repeatedly served on the commission of the
peace for Buckinghamshire, where the family property was settled. Francis Bryan's mother was Margaret, daughter of Humphry Bourchier, and sister of John
Bourchier, lord Berners. Lady Bryan was for a time governess to the princesses Mary and
Elizabeth, and died in 1551-2. Anne Boleyn is stated to have been his cousin; but we have been unable
to discover the exact genealogical connection.1
Bryan's prominence in politics was mainly due to the lasting affection which Henry VIII conceived
for him in early youth. Bryan is believed to have been educated at Oxford. In April 1513 he received his first official appointment, that of captain of the
Margaret Bonaventure, a ship in the retinue of Sir Thomas Howard, afterwards duke of
Norfolk, the newly appointed admiral. In the court entertainments held at Richmond (19 April 1515), at Eltham (Christmas 1516), and at Greenwich (7 July 1517),
Bryan took a prominent part, and received very rich apparel from the king on each occasion. He became the king's cupbearer in 1516. In December 1518 he was
acting as 'master of the Toyles,' and storing Greenwich Park with 'quick deer.' In 1520 he attended Henry VIII at the Field of the Cloth of
Gold, and took part in the jousts2 there under the captaincy of the Earl of Devonshire; and on 29 Sept. he received a pension from the king of
33l. 6s. 8d. as a servant and 'a cipherer' [i.e., one proficient in cryptography and able to encrypt and decrypt coded
messages].
He served in Brittany under the Earl of Surrey in July 1522, and was knighted by his
commander for his hardiness and courage. He was one of the sheriffs of Essex and Hertfordshire in 1523, and accompanied Wolsey on his visit to Calais (9 July 1527), where he remained some days. A year later he escorted
the papal envoy Campeggio, on his way to England from Orleans, to Calais. In November 1528
Bryan was sent to Rome by Henry to obtain the papal sanction for his divorce from Catherine. Bryan was especially instructed to induce the pope [Clement VII] to withdraw from his friendship with the emperor, and to discover the instructions originally given to Campeggio. Much to his disappointment,
Bryan failed in his mission. Soon after leaving England he had written to his cousin, Anne
Boleyn, encouraging her to look forward to the immediate removal of all obstacles between her and the title of queen; but he subsequently (5 May 1529) had
to confess to the king that nothing would serve to gain the pope's consent to Catherine's divorce.
On 10 May 1533 Bryan, with Sir Thomas Gage and Lord Vaux, presented to Queen Catherine
at Ampthill the summons bidding her appear before Archbishop Cranmer's court at Dunstable, to
show cause why the divorce should not proceed; but the queen, who felt the presence of Bryan, a relative of Anne Boleyn, a new insult, informed the messengers that she did not acknowledge the court's
competency. In 1531 Bryan was sent as ambassador to France, whither he was soon followed by Sir Nicholas Carew, his sister's husband, and at the time as
zealous a champion of Anne Boleyn as himself. Between May and August 1533 Bryan was
travelling with the Duke of Norfolk in France seeking to prevent an alliance or even a
meeting between the pope [Clement VII] and the king of France, and he was engaged in similar negotiations, together with Bishop Gardiner and Sir John Wallop, in December 1535.
Bryan during all these years remained the king's permanent favourite. Throughout the reign almost all Henry's amusements were shared in by him, and he
acquired on that account an unrivalled reputation for dissoluteness.3 Undoubtedly Bryan retained his place in the king's affection by very
questionable means. When the influence of the Boleyn family was declining, Bryan entered upon a convenient quarrel with Lord Rochford, which enabled the king
to break with his brother-in-law by openly declaring himself on his favourite's side. In May 1536 Anne Boleyn was charged with the offences for which she suffered on the scaffold, and Cromwell - no doubt without the knowledge of Henry VIII - at first suspected Bryan of being one of
the queen's accomplices. When the charges were being formulated, Cromwell, who had no
liking for Bryan, hastily sent for him from the country; but no further steps were taken against him, and there is no ground for believing the suspicion to
have been well founded.
It is clear that Bryan was very anxious to secure the queen's conviction (Froude's History, ii. 385, quotes from Cotton MS. E. ix. the
deposition of the abbot of Woburn relating to an important conversation with Bryan on this subject. [link]), and he had the baseness to undertake the
office of conveying to Jane Seymour, Anne's successor, the news of Anne Boleyn's condemnation (15 May 1536). A pension vacated by one of Anne's accomplices
was promptly bestowed on Bryan by the king. Cromwell, in writing of this circumstance to
Gardiner and Wallop, calls Bryan 'the vicar of hell' - a popular nickname which his
cruel indifference to the fate of his cousin Anne Boleyn proves that he well deserved. Bryan conspicuously aided the government in repressing the rebellion
known as the Pilgrimage of Grace in October of the same year. On 15 Oct. 1537 he
played a prominent part at the christening of Prince Edward. In December 1539 he was one of
the king's household deputed to meet Anne of Cleves near Calais on her way to
England, and Hall, the chronicler, notes the splendour of his dress on the occasion. At the funeral of Henry VIII, on 14 Feb. 1546-7, Bryan was assigned a chief place as 'master of the henchmen.'
As a member of the privy council Bryan took part in public affairs until the close of Henry VIII's
reign, and at the beginning of Edward VI's reign he was given a large share of the
lands which the dissolution of the monasteries had handed over to the crown. He fought, as
a captain of light horse, under the Duke of Somerset at Musselburgh 27 Sept. 1547, when
he was created a knight banneret.
Soon afterwards Bryan rendered the government a very curious service. In 1548 James Butler, ninth earl of Ormonde, an Irish noble, whose powerful influence was
obnoxious to the government at Dublin, although there were no valid grounds for suspecting his loyalty, died in London of poison under very suspicious
circumstances. Thereupon his widow, Joan, daughter and heiress of James FitzJohn Fitzgerald, eleventh earl of Desmond, sought to marry her relative, Gerald
Fitzgerald, the heir of the fifteenth earl of Desmond. To prevent this marriage, which would have united the leading representatives of the two chief Irish
noble houses, Bryan was induced to prefer a suit to the lady himself. He had previously married (after 1517) Philippa, a rich heiress and widow of Sir John
Fortescue; but Bryan's first wife died some time after 1534, and in 1548 he married the widowed countess. He was immediately nominated lord marshal of
Ireland, and arrived in Dublin with his wife in November 1548. Sir Edward Bellingham, the haughty lord-deputy, resented his appointment, but Bryan's
marriage gave him the command of the Butler influence, and Bellingham was unable to injure him. On Bellingham's departure from Ireland on 16 Dec. 1549 the
Irish council recognised Bryan's powerful position by electing him lord-justice, pending the arrival of a new deputy.
But on 2 Feb. 1549-50 Bryan died suddenly at Clonmel. A postmortem examination was ordered to determine the cause of death, but the doctors came to no more
satisfactory conclusion than that he died of grief, a conclusion unsupported by external evidence. Sir John Allen, the Irish chancellor, who was present at
Bryan's death and at the autopsy, states that ' he departed very godly.' Roger Ascham, in
the ' Scholemaster,' 1568, writes: 'Some men being never so old and spent by yeares will still be full of youthfull conditions, as was Syr F.
Bryan, and evermore wold have bene.'
