|
|
"Let Me be Buried Amongst the Good Fellows of Waterford, Who Were Good Drinkers"
With Henry’s death Bryan’s own career entered its last point: no longer a court favorite he remained a considerable figure, not least by reason of his landed wealth which was assessed for subsidy of £888 in 1547. In May he was granted for life the keepership of six royal parks in Bedfordshire. The following year he received the bishop’s palace at Norwick and was given the tenancy of extensive lands in Blackfriars near London. He was not, however, elected to the first Edwardian Parliament for Buckinghamshire, as the two seats went to gentlemen Bryan had sat with earlier.
Shortly after Henry’s death events in Scotland again necessitated Bryan’s presence in the royal army. Edward Seymour, who became Protector Somerset for the young Edward VI in February 1547, assumed power at a time when Scotland was governed by Mary of Guise, regent of Scotland and mother of Mary Queen of Scots, then five years of age. At her behest French troops were sent against St. Andrews Castle, the last stronghold of the English faction in Scotland, which had been responsible for the assassination of Cardinal Beaton the previous summer. Furthermore a French expedition was making ready to descend upon the coast and carry off the young Scottish queen with the intention of marrying her to the dauphin. Although Somerset would have preferred to unite the two countries peacefully by consent and the marriage of Mary Stuart to Edward VI, the threat of French troops on England’s northern border and Scotland’s belligerent response to the protector’s proposals caused him to draw up plans for an invasion of the country.
By the end of summer preparations were almost completed, and Bryan was directed to assemble a company of cavalry and one of foot soldiers at the border town of Berwick in the county of Northumberland. Somerset’s army eventually numbered 12,000 men, as well as 2,000 horsemen, over whom Bryan was given command. The Chronicle and Political Papers of King Edward VI, W. K. Jordan (New York 1966) p. 7 The troops were well furnished with artillery and heavy cavalry as they advanced into Scotland on 4 September. Marching close to the coast, the army sacked the castles of Dunglass and Harbinston before arriving at the outskirts of the town of Musselburgh on the Esk River six miles east of Edinburgh. There, however, Somerset was opposed by a considerable Scottish force.
On sight of the English army a detachment from Musselburgh attempted to gain possession of a high ridge overlooking the town. But Bryan and his horsemen intercepted the advancing troops, and after a short violent skirmish, forced them to flee. Before Somerset could attack Musselburgh, the Scottish army abandoned it and retreated. Many Scots were killed and fifty-one English horsemen were slain. For their part in the action, Bryan and two other gentlemen were made knight bannerets.
Somerset’s army then marched toward the town of Pinkie where, on 10 September, it encountered a Scottish force of 23,000. Although they offered stiff resistance, the Scots were poorly equipped and very weak in cavalry. The resounding victory for Somerset’s forces resulted in 10,000 Scotsmen killed and 1500 captured.
Following the Battle of Pinkie the English began establishing garrisons in Scotland. These strongholds were considered the solution to a serious problem of the past; armies, sent into the northern kingdom at great expense, defeated the Scots but failed to subdue them. With garrisons planted on Scottish soil, Somerset believed he could maintain control of the country.
A year after the Scottish campaign, Bryan was sent to Ireland. Since the twelfth century England had controlled the Pale, an area fifty miles in length, which centered around the city of Dublin. Outside the Pale the chieftains and their clans formally recognized the authority of the English king, but sought to maintain their traditional independence and were left relatively free by the English to resolve their rivalries among themselves. However, at the beginning of Somerset’s protectorate, a new and vigorous policy was pursued that sought to impose a more direct rule than had existed in the past. The symbol of England’s presence became the garrisons, established within and outside the Pale with the object of opening the rest of Ireland to greater royal control, curbing the disturbances arising from clan hostilities, and insulating the Pale form Irish raids.
As an adjunct to these strongholds, alliances were sought with Gaelic chieftains, princes, and the Anglo-Irish lords, some of whom like the Butlers supported English authority. In the summer of 1548 an opportunity arose for Somerset to assert a greater influence in Irish affairs when James Bulter earl of Ormonde died of poisoning while visiting London. Possibly to prevent his widow, Lady Butler, from marrying one of the Desmonds, a family of the Anglo-Irish nobility which frequently opposed English rule, Bryan was induced by the Privy Council to wed her. Since his previous wife Phillippa had died sometime after 1542, Bryan was willing to accept this political match and married Lady Butler in the summer of 1548. In November he was granted a commission as lord-marshal to assist Lord-Deputy Edward Bellingham, the king’s representative in Ireland. The same month Bryan and his wife embarked for Dublin.
However he was not well received by some English officials there. Bellingham, an arrogant man of great administrative ability, paid him and his wife a brief visit. In a letter to Somerset shortly after their meeting, the lord-deputy indignantly declared that he had "hated him (Bryan) form the first", since he believed that he himself ought to have been granted the hand of Lady Butler, and that her marriage to Bryan was likely to restrict his authority in Ireland. Sir John Allen, the Irish Chancellor, expressed his low opinion of Bryan, declaring that he was unable to understand what Henry VIII had seen in him worthy of advancement. Possibly he considered him a mere courtier and literary dilettante rather than a serious man of affairs.
On Bellingham’s departure from Ireland on 16 December 1549 Bryan was appointed lord justice, temporarily taking his place until a new lord-deputy could be appointed. During this brief time in this post Bryan faced the growing danger of Irish insurrection and the threat posed by French and Scottish intervention. On receiving instructions from the Privy Council to fortify the eastern coast ports of Munster and Ulster, he set out on an expedition into County Tipperary where, On 2 February 1550, he died at the port town of Clonmel. Three weeks later Richard Scudamore, financial agent of Philip Hoby, the king’s gentleman usher, wrote a somewhat disparaging comment to his master concerning Bryan’s death:
sitting at a table leaning on his elbow, none perceiving any
likelihood of death in him. He said these words, "I pray you let me
be buried amongst the good fellows of Waterford, who were good
drinkers", and upon those words immediately died. God send all
Christian men better departure.
Scudamore’s choice of words may reflect a puritanical viewpoint that he knew would appeal to a committed Protestant like Hoby. However, the Irish Chancellor Allen, who was present both at Bryan’s death and autopsy, contradicted this account, professing that "...whatever Bryan died of, he departed very godly". The doctors, who detected no physical ailment, declared that Bryan had died of grief, although we are not told why. The royal tutor Roger Ascham, in his book The Scholemater (1568), described Bryan’s energy and spirit during his final years of life in Ireland: "Some men being never so old and spent by years will still be full of youthful conditions, as was Sir Francis Bryan, and evermore would have been". If he made a will it has not been found and nothing is known of the disposition of his lands and personal property. His illegitimate son, whose name has not survived is mentioned as carrying a dispatch to London in 1548 from the French admiral.
Bryan, like some of Henry VIII’s courtiers, interested himself in literature. Intimate with
the circle of Thomas Wyatt and Henry Howard earl of Surrey, he had a high reputation as a poet,
although his work is now undiscoverable. He was one of a number of anonymous contributors to
the Songs and Sonnets, some of which were written and edited by Lord Henry Howard in 1577
and usually known as Tottel’s Miscellany; but it is impossible to distinguish his work there from
that of the other anonymous writers. Of the high esteem in which his poetry was held in the
sixteenth century there is abundant evidence. In Thomas Wyatt’s satire on the contemptible
practices of court life, he notes Bryan’s fine literary taste. The poet Michael Drayton , in
England’s Heroicall Epistles (1629), claims that Bryan wrote a number of poems, although he
cannot identify them:
And famous Wyatt who in numbers sings,
To that enchanting Thracian Harpers strings,
To whom Phoebus (the Poet’s God) did drink,
A bowl of Nectar filled unto the brink,
And sweet-tongued Bryan (whom the Muses kept,
And in his Cradle rocked him whilst he slept,)
In sacred verses (so divinely penned, )
Upon thy praises ever shall attend.
Furthermore, in his account of The Battle of Agincourt, (1627), Drayton explicitly mentions
Bryan’s share in the Songs and Sonnets:
They with the Muses which conversed , were
That Princely Surrey, early in the time
Of the Eight Henry, who was then the prime
Of England’s noble youth; with him there came
Wyatt; with reverence whom we still do name
Amongst our Poets, Bryan had a share
With the two former,....and the authors were
Of these small poems, which the title bare,
Of songs and sonnets, wherein oft they hit,
On many dainty passages of wit.
Bryan is also named along with Wyatt, Surrey, and other in Francis Mere’s Palladis Tamia (1958) as "....the most passionate among us to bewail and bemoan the perplexities of love".
In 1548 Bryan anonymously translated a collection of stories and sayings by the Spaniard Anthony de Guevarra, bishop of Mondonent, under the title of A Dispraise of the Life of a Courtier and a Commendation of the Life of the Laboring Man.. In dedicating the work to William Parr, marquess of Northampton, Bryan declared in his prologue that he had found it so enjoyable that, partly at Parr’s request, he had decided to translate it into English.
The book compares the spiritual dangers of a court life with the superior virtue of one spent in the country away from worldly temptation. As a courtier of Henry VIII, Bryan was probably well-known as a drinker, a womanizer, and for his ribald wit. At first it seems odd therefore that he would stress the important of the pietistic tradition in the courtly world and approve of such a sententious passage as this:
O world unclean, I conjure thee thou filthy world, I pray O thou
world, and protest against thee thou world, that thou never have
cast in me, for I demand nor desire nothing that is in thee...I have
finished worldly cares, therefore hope and fortune farewell.
This rereleasable expression of disillusionment, so unlike Bryan’s characteristic exuberance, may imply that he occasionally suffered from melancholy or ill-health in old age. It may also indicate he was giving more thought toward religion, or that he had grown weary of a lifestyle in which he had been an enthusiastic participant for the last thirty-five years. At any rate shortly after writing this work he departed for Ireland where he died fifteen month later. But one should not forget the "sweet-tongued" Bryan, a man whose easy going geniality made him such a pleasant companion.