3 - The emergence of a Catholic dynasty: the Brownes of Cowdray

Summary

The Browne family was very much a newcomer in the ranks of the sixteenth-century nobility. But the Brownes had, for some years, been notching up marriages with peerage families, old and new, and continued to do so. Elizabeth, the eldest daughter of Sir Anthony Browne, Henry VII's standard bearer who had died in 1506, married Henry Somerset, earl of Worcester. Lucy, the second daughter, married Sir Thomas Clifford, the third son of the earl of Cumberland; and the third daughter, Anne, married Charles Brandon, duke of Suffolk. As the family rose to prominence, the aristocratic marital networking carried on. Sir Anthony Browne (Henry VII's standard bearer's son), who was a close friend of Henry VIII and father of the first Viscount Montague, remarried, shortly before his death, Elizabeth, daughter of the ninth earl of Kildare. The first viscount himself married first the daughter of Robert Radcliffe, earl of Sussex, and secondly Magdalen, daughter of Lord William Dacre of Gillesland. Mary, the first viscount's sister, married Lord John Grey of Pirgo, son of the marquis of Dorset.

What was the family's aristocratic self-image? The Brownes, perhaps wisely, hardly ever spoke explicitly about their ambitions and their view of themselves. And on many contemporary political questions they may actually not have had a great deal to say. In the British Library's Harleian manuscripts, however, there is a hastily drawn pedigree, dating from 1615, of the Brownes and their relatives.