Robert Brandon - Marriages and Progeny

Marriages and Progeny

Brandon married twice:

• Firstly to Katherine Barber (d.1574, buried at St Vedast), at St Mary Woolnoth in 1548. By her he had issue including:
  • Alice Brandon (1556–1611), who married on 15 July 1576 at St Vedast, Foster Lane, London, to Nicholas Hilliard, later goldsmith and portrait miniaturist to the queen. Hilliard had served an apprenticeship of seven years to Brandon in the 1560s, and was elected a freeman of the Goldsmiths' Company in 1569.
  • Mary Brandon (b. 1566), who married on 23 May 1586 at St Vedast Captain John Martin, son of Richard Martin, a member of the Goldsmiths' Company and later Lord Mayor of London, who had commanded the Benjamin during the 1585–86 expedition of Sir Francis Drake to harass the Spanish ports in the New World. In 1607 John Martin became a Councilman of the Jamestown Colony of Virginia and was the proprietor of Martin's Brandon Plantation on the south bank of the James River, apparently named after his wife's family.
• Secondly to Elizabeth Osborne (d.1588), widow of a certain Chapman, by whom he had issue including:
  • Lucy Brandon (d.1652), who married Sir Richard Reynell (d.1633) who built Forde House, Wolborough, Devon. Her recumbent effigy, next to that of her husband, exists in Wolborough parish church. Lucy was the subject of a book published in 1654, The Life and Death of the Religious and Virtuous Lady, the Lady Lucie Reynell of Ford by her nephew Edward Reynell, which recorded Lucy's strict manners, and her charitable works, including her almshouses of 1640, the successors to which still exist in Newton Abbot.