Eleanor Clifford: Henry VIII’s often overlooked niece

Eleanor Clifford, Countess of Cumberland, may not be a household name in Tudor history, but her life was anything but ordinary. Born Eleanor Brandon, she was the niece of King Henry VIII and daughter of Princess Mary Tudor and Charles Brandon, Duke of Suffolk. Married young into the powerful Clifford family, Eleanor became entangled in one of the most dangerous uprisings of the Tudor period—the Pilgrimage of Grace—where she was taken hostage by rebels threatening brutal violence.

Despite her royal blood, Eleanor Clifford lived far from the spotlight, navigating political unrest, personal tragedy, and courtly expectations with quiet resilience. Her story offers a rare and compelling glimpse into the life of a Tudor woman who stood at the edge of power—and sometimes, at the center of danger.

Transcript of Eleanor Clifford: An often overlooked niece of Henry VIII

In October 1536, the north of England was in open revolt. Tens of thousands of rebels had taken up arms under the banner of the Five Wounds of Christ, calling themselves pilgrims and demanding a return to the old ways. The king’s new religious policies had stirred up more than sermons. This was war.

And Eleanor Clifford, Countess of Cumberland, found herself caught right in the middle of it. She was at Bolton Abbey, a quiet monastic retreat about 10 miles from Skipton Castle. With her were her young son and two of her sisters-in-law. It was supposed to be a safe place, far from court, far from trouble.

But Eleanor, unfortunately, was not just any noblewoman. She was a niece of Henry VIII, and the rebels knew it. When they found her, they made zero effort at politeness. Eleanor and her family were taken hostage. The insurgents sent word to her father-in-law at Skipton Castle: surrender the fortress, or we will hand these women over to the camp followers. And the implication was not subtle.

It was violence against women as a political threat. And Eleanor, despite her royal blood, was expendable. The standoff did not last long. Her father-in-law, furious and alarmed, rode straight into the rebel camp and negotiated their release. Eleanor, her sisters-in-law, and her child were brought safely back to Skipton.

The siege was lifted five days later. She did not write about it. There is no first-person account, no dramatic testimony. But the fact that the rebels saw her as valuable enough to threaten, and the Earl risked so much to get her back, tells us something. Eleanor Brandon mattered, even if history has largely forgotten her.

So today, my friend, we are going to talk about Eleanor Brandon, a niece of Henry VIII who has been largely forgotten. Eleanor Brandon was born into the very heart of Tudor royalty, but her name rarely makes it into the footnotes, let alone the spotlight.

She was the daughter of Princess Mary Tudor, the king’s beloved younger sister, and Charles Brandon, Duke of Suffolk. That, of course, made her Henry VIII’s niece. Her sister Frances went on to be the mother of Lady Jane Grey. Her cousin, Margaret Douglas, caused scandals and flirted with treason. But Eleanor? Eleanor got married, moved north, and vanished from the courts’ daily drama. Good for her, I say.

But when you look a little closer, her life actually was not particularly quiet at all. She was married at fifteen in a ceremony attended by the king himself. She nearly died in a rebellion. She buried two of her three children, tragically. She lived far from the glitter of court, but she was close enough to its politics to appear in the king’s will.

She left behind one letter, just one that survives. But it is so intimate, so physical, and so immediate that you can practically hear her voice. And through that voice, we glimpse something rare: a woman at the edge of power, dealing with illnesses, marriage, motherhood, and mortal fear with zero spotlight on her.

She was not trying to change the world, but the world kept trying to press in on her anyway. So let’s talk about Eleanor Brandon, Countess of Cumberland, the king’s niece, and a Tudor woman that history has largely, mostly forgotten.

Eleanor Brandon was born sometime between 1519 and 1521, most likely at Westhorpe Hall, the Suffolk estate of her parents. Her mother, of course, was no ordinary duchess. She had once been the Queen of France, married briefly to the aging Louis XII, before returning to England and marrying Charles, the king’s closest friend, in secret.

Eleanor was their second daughter after Frances, and her name stood out. Tudor royal women were usually named Mary, Elizabeth, Anne, or Jane. But Eleanor’s name may have been a diplomatic nod to Eleanor of Austria, she was the sister of Charles V, Queen of Portugal, and later became the Queen of France.

If that is true, it was a name loaded with imperial significance and maybe a quiet signal of alliance, given that her father had been involved in negotiations with Charles V around the time of her birth. Like her sister, Eleanor would have received a very elite humanist education. Girls in families like theirs were expected to learn French and Latin, to read scripture, and to play music, perhaps the virginals or the lute.

There is evidence that Eleanor could write in French, and she seems to have inherited her mother’s sharp intelligence. Her sister Frances married Henry Grey in 1533, and that same year Eleanor was betrothed to Henry Clifford, heir to the Earl of Cumberland.

A Royal Marriage and Life in the North

The Cliffords were a well-connected northern family, and there was also a touch of Plantagenet blood running through Eleanor’s future mother-in-law, Margaret Percy. We actually just did a YouTube video this week on the Percy family and how they could not stop themselves from rebelling, so you can check that out.

Henry Clifford himself was tall, dark-haired, and unusually intellectual. He built an impressive personal library and dabbled in alchemy and astrology, which, of course, were eccentric hobbies for a man who was expected to lead border defenses.

They were married in 1535 at St. Mary Overy in Southwark, now Southwark Cathedral, Henry VIII actually went himself. Not every niece gets a king at her wedding, but Eleanor did, and her new life in the North was about to begin.

For most noble couples in the Tudor world, marriage did not mean immediate independence. You were usually tucked into your in-laws’ household until the title passed down, if it ever did. But Eleanor Brandon and Henry Clifford had something different.

In the months leading up to Eleanor’s arrival, Henry’s father, the first Earl of Cumberland, ordered a rapid-fire renovation to Skipton Castle in North Yorkshire. He added a long gallery and two new towers, one of them octagonal, which was a fashionable and expensive architectural choice at the time. The construction was finished in under four months.

It was not just practical, it was symbolic. The king’s niece was coming north, and the family meant to show that they were ready to receive her in royal style. It was rare, almost unheard of, for a young couple to have their own establishment while their parents were still alive. Henry and Eleanor were given real autonomy. They did spend some time at Skipton, but they seemed to have lived primarily at Brougham Castle in Westmorland, closer to the Scottish border.

It was a quieter location, far from court, farther still from the endless maneuvering of London politics, but it seems to have suited Eleanor, who even in those early years may have already been struggling with poor health.

This marriage was more than just a dynastic win. It seems to have been a functional, even affectionate match. Eleanor’s father, Charles Brandon, stayed closely involved, writing to the Earl of Cumberland about his daughter’s well-being and sometimes even stepping in to manage financial arrangements on her behalf.

He once gently complained that Eleanor and her husband were living in an unhealthy country house and pushed for them to be moved back to Brougham, where she seemed to thrive a bit better. This was a woman who was building a life on the edge of the kingdom, with real challenges lying ahead for her.

So Eleanor, like we said, may have been living far from court, but she was still expected to show up when duty called. In early 1536, just a few months after her wedding, she was summoned south to serve as Chief Mourner at the funeral of Katherine of Aragon. This was a political role. Choosing who stood where, who carried which banners, who wept in which pews—this all sent a message. So it is telling that Eleanor, and not her older sister Frances, was the one who represented the family that day at Peterborough Castle.

Frances may have been pregnant at the time or recovering from a recent birth, but there is still another possibility. Henry might have considered Eleanor the right level of royal for the occasion. Frances, as the senior niece, was perhaps tied too closely to court ambition. Eleanor was quieter, less politically entangled, more neutral—an acceptable presence at a queen’s funeral without making it feel like a dynastic statement.

Remember, at this time Henry was married to Anne Boleyn. Katherine was not on his good list. He did not want Katherine to have a state funeral that was too fancy, too much, because he was still really mad at Katherine and might have been a bit happy and relieved that she was gone. But he still needed to honor her as what he saw as the Princess Dowager, the Dowager Princess of Wales, and someone who was the aunt of Charles V. So he needed to give her a certain amount of pomp and circumstance—but maybe not enough for the senior niece, right?

After this visibility, Eleanor’s name actually vanishes from the official court record. She is not listed among the ladies at Prince Edward’s christening in 1537. She did not attend Jane Seymour’s funeral. She also was not among the elite women who welcomed Anne of Cleves in 1540. Her sister Frances, by contrast, was there for all of it.

Now, one explanation might be Eleanor’s health. Her father wrote more than once about her frequent illnesses and made specific requests to her in-laws for healthier accommodations. So it is possible that her absence was not her shirking duty or anything like that. It might have just been physical.

While her sister stayed close to court, Eleanor was increasingly rooted in the north, settled into a rhythm of family life, letter writing, and, as we will see next, moving through some devastating personal losses.

Then, in the autumn of 1536, Eleanor’s life took a terrifying turn, which we talked about in the opening. England’s north was rising up in protest against the king’s reforms. Monasteries were being dissolved. Traditional faith was under threat, and resentment toward the central government had reached a boiling point.

The Pilgrimage of Grace

It was called the Pilgrimage of Grace, and it became the largest rebellion of Henry VIII’s reign. Eleanor was now about 17, staying at Bolton Abbey, about 10 miles from Skipton, along with her young son and two of her sisters-in-law. The idea was to keep them out of harm’s way while Skipton was fortified. But it didn’t work, because the rebels found them.

They stormed the abbey and took the women and child captive. They sent this message to Eleanor’s father-in-law: surrender Skipton or your daughter-in-law, her child, and the other women will be handed over to the camp followers. The language was clear and brutal. The threat was to “violate and enforce them with knaves unto my lord’s great discomfort.”

There is zero ambiguity in that phrase. This was violence against women, deliberately threatened as a weapon of humiliation. These rebels knew exactly who Eleanor was. She was the king’s niece, and that made her valuable—symbolically and strategically.

This was not empty bluster. These same rebels had already dragged abbots from their monasteries and forced local landowners to swear oaths at knifepoint. There is a harrowing scene in Wolf Hall where Cromwell learns of a man he had sent north who was tied in pigskin and thrown to the dogs as punishment. While this is fictional, it is not out of step with the kind of brutality people were experiencing in the north at the time.

A lot of times we hear about things like rebellions and think, oh, that might have been like a protest or something. It was not like that at all. This was real violence, threatened and often enacted, and a lot of people experienced it. That is not to say I do not understand what the Pilgrimage of Grace was about. Clearly, I understand. They had a lot of good points, and there was a great deal of legitimate motivation behind it. But it was also a very violent rebellion. The reprisals were equally violent. Around 200 people were executed, and the leader was hanged in chains. It was not a good time for anybody.

So the Earl of Cumberland did not hesitate. He rode straight into the rebel camp at Bolton and demanded their release. Somehow, possibly thanks to his local connections and his status, he was able to pull it off. The women and the child were freed and returned to Skipton, and the rebels gave up their siege just five days later.

Eleanor never left a written account of what happened, but the records speak volumes. The rebels used her as leverage, and her father-in-law risked everything to save her. When her own father, Charles Brandon, heard the story, he wrote immediately to the Earl: if there was any way to bring Eleanor south to his household, “I trust she shall be out of danger.” She didn’t go south. She didn’t return to court. But this episode proved just how much her presence, even so far from London, still mattered.

Eleanor’s Later Years and Legacy

By the early 1540s, Eleanor had faded from the royal spotlight, but her role as wife and mother had taken center stage. She gave birth to three children. Her first two were sons, Henry and Charles, and both died young. Charles died in infancy, and Henry lived only to about age three. They were buried side by side in the Clifford family vault at Holy Trinity Church in Skipton, the same church where Eleanor herself would be buried just a few years later.

Only her daughter Margaret, born in 1540, survived into adulthood. It is likely that Eleanor named her after her mother-in-law, Margaret Percy. Margaret would go on to marry Henry Stanley, the future Earl of Derby, and have four sons. But despite the promise of that match, the marriage broke down, and Margaret later came under suspicion for allegedly predicting Elizabeth I’s death through astrology. But we will have to save that story for another time.

In 1542, Eleanor’s father-in-law died, and her husband officially became the second Earl of Cumberland. That made Eleanor the Countess, though it likely did not change much about her daily life. They were already well established at Brougham Castle and had long since taken on the responsibilities of the title.

She suffered another major loss in 1545 when her father, Charles Brandon, died. In his will, he left both Eleanor and Frances 200 pounds’ worth of plate. A decent sum, but not an extravagant one. He had, of course, remarried after Mary Tudor’s death and had other children, other sons, to consider at this point. But the fact that he left her this amount of plate still showed that Eleanor, for all her distance from court, was still very much his daughter.

She also remained on good terms with her stepmother, Katherine Willoughby. While her sister Frances pursued court favor and was very politically ambitious, Eleanor’s connections stayed domestic, rooted in family, in correspondence, and in gifts. A quieter version of Tudor womanhood.

The only surviving piece of Eleanor Brandon’s voice comes to us from a letter she wrote on February 14, 1547—Valentine’s Day—though she was not feeling at all romantic. She was sick and scared and writing from her lodge at Carlton.

She writes, in sincere departure from me, to her husband Henry: “I have been very sick and at this present my water is very red, whereby I suppose I have the jaundice and the ague both.” It is a blunt, physical letter. No courtly language, no flourishes. She describes pain in her side and her back, a total lack of appetite, and pleads with him to send for Dr. Stevens, “for he knoweth best my complexion for such causes.” She signs it simply, “By your assured loving wife, Eleanor Cumberland.”

It is the letter of a woman who has already felt the bite of life: childbirth, rebellion, the deaths of two sons. But the letter is personal. No servant speaks for her, and no title softens her plea. Just Eleanor, asking her husband to act quickly because she knew instinctively that this was not just a passing illness.

She did not recover. According to her descendant, Anne Clifford, Eleanor died toward the end of November 1547 at Brougham Castle. Other records give September 27 as the date. Either way, she was still only in her twenties. She was buried at Holy Trinity in Skipton, in the same vault as her sons. Years later, when the tomb was opened in the 17th century, observers noted that her skeleton was very tall and large-boned, and that her hair had retained the chestnut color so often associated with the Tudors.

That final letter tells us what no chronicle or court roll could. Eleanor Brandon was human, vulnerable, and conscious of her fragility. And in her last known words, she was not looking for any favor or glory, just some relief.

Eleanor’s death hit her husband hard. So hard, in fact, that some believe he died too. Anne Clifford, their descendant and one of the great chroniclers of the Clifford family history, tells us that after Eleanor’s death, Henry Clifford fell into what seemed like a deathly collapse.

He was laid out on a table, covered in velvet, and presumed dead until someone noticed the faintest signs of life. They quickly administered hot cordials inwardly and outwardly, and slowly he revived. But he was far from well. According to the story, he spent weeks being nursed with milk from a wet nurse, literally suckled back to health. Then he lived on ass’s milk for several months after that. It is one of those Tudor stories that sounds a little too strange to be true, but Anne Clifford clearly believed it. And either way, it shows just how deeply Eleanor’s loss affected him.

After that, Henry withdrew. He largely abandoned court life and focused on reading, collecting books, and his rather esoteric hobbies: alchemy and natural philosophy. He kept an impressive personal library at Skipton, and by the end of his life, his interests leaned more towards symbols and spirits than politics and power. Eleanor’s death seems to have changed her husband completely.

Margaret Clifford: Eleanor’s Daughter

Eleanor’s daughter, Margaret Clifford, born around 1540, inherited more than just a noble name. She inherited proximity to the throne, and in Tudor England, that was as much of a liability as it was a privilege. We have talked about that a lot.

After Eleanor’s death, Margaret became a political asset. John Dudley, Duke of Northumberland, tried to arrange a marriage between her and his son Guildford. Yes, that Guildford, who later would marry Lady Jane Grey. When that plan fell through, Margaret was betrothed to Guildford’s uncle, Andrew Dudley. That match also never happened, thanks to the spectacular collapse of the Dudley family after Lady Jane Grey’s nine-day reign.

Instead, Margaret married Henry Stanley, Lord Strange and the future fourth Earl of Derby, in 1555. Mary I and Philip of Spain were actually present at the wedding, which shows that Margaret was still firmly within the fold of royal favor. But the marriage eventually soured. The couple lived apart, and Margaret’s nearness to the throne made her dangerous in Elizabeth’s eyes.

She was actually accused of using astrology to divine the Queen’s death and identify her successor, which was considered treasonous. She spent several years under house arrest, a soft kind of imprisonment. She died in 1596, never fully trusted and never far from suspicion.

So Eleanor Brandon did not scandalize the court. She did not make a bid for the crown or end up in the Tower. She did not convert, flee, or plot. She simply lived and died young. She spent her adult life far from London in the castles of the north, out of the gossip and spectacle that immortalized so many of her relatives.

She left behind no grand political movement, no surviving portraits with firm attribution, and only one personal letter. There is a portrait that a lot of people think is of her. It is disputed. I am going to use it as the cover art for this episode because, when you look her name up and when you look at her on Wikipedia and in other references, that is still the portrait that is used. But I should note that it is disputed as well.

She was remembered more for her death than for anything she said or did while she was alive, but in her lifetime, Eleanor was eighth in line to the English throne. She was held hostage by rebels. Her name appeared in the King’s will. She bore children. She survived sieges, and she died loved.

She might not be a Tudor figurehead. She was part of the machinery that kept the dynasty turning, and her story is worth telling. So we will leave it there for now. Eleanor Brandon, Eleanor Clifford, a really interesting woman, and I hope you enjoyed this little dive into her life.

Heather Teysko is the creator, writer, and producer of The Renaissance English History Podcast, the original Tudor history podcast, started in 2009. She's been writing about history online for over 25 years, since her first site on Colonial American history became number one in history on Yahoo in 1998. In 2019 she created Tudorcon, which is now a yearly event, in addition to writing books, and running TudorFair.com - a whimsical Tudor Merch shop.

She has been passionate about Tudor England since she first read Alison Weir's The Six Wives of Henry VIII 30 years ago, and subsequently moved to London after college to spend her time immersed in Tudor history (how exciting when she got to interview Alison for the first time!). In addition to history, she is passionate about travel, and has lived in 3 countries and 4 states (not counting her perpetual state of confusion), and her family (who help her host her YouTube channel occasionally).

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