CHAPTER EIGHT
‘As long as King Henry lived, no man could do me hurt.’
LETTER FROM STEPHEN GARDINER TO THE DUKE OF SOMERSET, JUNE 1547.1
The collapse of the devious and audacious plot against the queen left the conservative faction at Henry’s court in disarray and only too vulnerable to royal retribution. Gardiner himself was shortly to taste the king’s displeasure. Henry had always mistrusted this egotistical but talented churchman and might have ‘used extremity against him’ if his own life had not been rapidly running out. But Henry believed he could always exercise a degree of power over the testy bishop because he possessed secret, and probably damning, information that held the key to Gardiner’s obedience or, more likely, would justify a timely charge of treason against him. Perhaps to reassure himself of that hold, the king several times asked Paget ‘for a certain writing touching the said bishop, commanding him to keep it safe, that he might have it when he called for it’.2 What this weapon was can only be a matter of prurient conjecture, as no such document has yet been discovered.
Gardiner was born around 1483 in Bury St Edmunds, Suffolk, educated at Trinity Hall, Cambridge, and subsequently trained as a lawyer. He started his long career in government as secretary to Wolsey, but after the cardinal’s downfall he faithfully served the king up to 1534 in the same capacity and thereafter was employed on important diplomatic missions overseas. Although Gardiner had supported the difficult question of Henry’s supremacy over the Church in England – writing a lengthy oration, De verá Obedientiá(The True Obedience), in favour of secular or princely control of religion in 1535 – the latest evangelical reforms in doctrine led him into direct and successful conflict with Cromwell and Cranmer and, later – disastrously for him – the Seymours and John Dudley, Viscount Lisle.
A portrait of the bishop at Hardwick Hall, near Chesterfield, Derbyshire, shows an image of a man with a double chin and full, almost sensual lips, the eyes staring out of the painting directly and inquisitively. His quick anger – his ‘sanguinary temper’ – was notorious for its vitriol and fire. Gardiner’s successor at the see of Winchester, the staunchly Protestant John Ponet who was Cranmer’s chaplain before 1547 and thus clearly no friend to Gardiner, described him as having frowning brows, deep-set eyes, a ‘nose hooked like a buzzard’ and ‘great paws (like the devil)’.3Certainly, in Catholic Mary’s reign when he became Lord Chancellor, Gardiner showed little mercy for those he saw as enemies of the state, whether political or religious. The seventeenth-century divine Thomas Fuller wrote of Gardiner: ‘His malice was like … white [gun] powder, which surely discharged the bullet, yet made no report, being secret in all his acts of cruelty.’ Thomas Mowntayne, Protestant rector of St Michael Tower Royal in London, described a public bout of Gardiner’s anger later on during Mary’s reign. Mowntayne saw Gardiner riding with the queen and her husband King Philip through Cheapside on 26 August 1555, resplendent all in scarlet, blessing bystanders as he passed:
He was greatly laughed to scorn. Gardiner [was] sore offended … because the people did not put off their caps and make curtsey to the cross that was carried before …
[He said] to his servants: ‘Mark that house,’ ‘Take this knave and have him …’
Such a sort of heretics he [n]ever saw that will neither reverence the cross of Christ, no[r] yet once say so much as ‘God save the king and queen.’
‘I will teach them to do both, [as] I live.’4
That night, one of Gardiner’s spies reported seeing Mowntayne watching the procession. ‘Here he fell into a great rage, as was told to me by one of his own men, as was unseemly for a bishop, and with great speed sent for the knight marshal.’ When he arrived, Gardiner asked him how he
handled himself in his office? Did I not send you one Mowntayne that was both a traitor and a heretic to this end that he should have suffered death? This day, the villain knave was not ashamed to stand openly in the street, looking the Prince [Philip] in the face. I would counsel you to look him up and that there be diligent search made for him this night in the city, as you will answer before the Council.
In his book A Detection of the Devil’s Sophistry, first published in 1546, the bishop railed against the Anabaptists and the Sacramentarians who
have with devilish pertinacity manifested their heresies, whose wilful death in obstinacy, if it could serve as an argument to prove the truth of their opinion, the truth of God’s Scripture should be brought into much perplexity.
If such as lately suffered … there may appear tokens sufficient … to declare their zeal not to have proceeded of the spirit of God, but of arrogant pride and presumption and the spirit of the devil.5
Later in the book, Gardiner recalls with some nostalgia the days when the realm lived in ‘faith, charity and devotion, when God’s word dwelt in men’s hearts and never came abroad to walk in men’s tongues’. Now, says the bishop scornfully, ‘jesters, railers, rhymers, players, jugglers, prattlers and simpering parrots take upon them to be the administrators and officers to set forth God’s word’. We shall see later that Gardiner did not have much patience with actors anyway, but his book was widely circulated ‘and received in many places more reverently than the blessed Bible’ amongst the still largely conservative population.
One letter the bishop wrote later, on the evening of 11 February 1554 to Sir William Petre, graphically illustrates his ruthless and uncompromising determination to root out treason. In the immediate aftermath of Sir Thomas Wyatt’s failed uprising against Mary that month, a number of prisoners were captured and interrogated. Gardiner writes from Southwark:
Tomorrow at the Tower be earnest with little [Edward] Wyatt,6 prisoner there, who may tell all.
He is a bastard and has little substance.
It might stand with the Queen’s pleasure were no account made whether you pressed him by sharp punishment or promise of life.
These words would send a chill down anyone’s spine. ‘Sharp punishment’ is a phrase that leaves little to the imagination regarding what Gardiner was urging Wyatt to be subjected to in the dark, sweat-soaked rooms beneath the Tower. The words resound coldly like a metal torture instrument dropped on the stone-flagged floor.
But for Gardiner, possession of such life-or-death power lay some years in the future, after the return of England to Catholicism under Mary. Now he and his fellow conservatives faced the reformers’ determination to seize political supremacy as Henry’s life drew inexorably to a close.
To his great chagrin, Sir Thomas Heneage, Chief Gentleman of the Privy Chamber and Groom of the Stool, was suddenly ousted in October 1546 after a decade in the post and twenty years’ faithful service to the king. Denny succeeded him and William Herbert, brother-in-law to the queen, took over the number-two position in the Privy Chamber. The reformist party had now grasped all the levers of power within the court.
Gardiner’s own sudden, catastrophic fall came as a result of a simple misunderstanding about an exchange of episcopal land, which was quickly exploited by his waiting enemies. Henry, always obsessively keen to acquire choice lands, wanted the property to tidy up the boundaries of one of his many royal estates but was refused. In this unwise decision, Gardiner was too confident of his good standing with the king, but later scented a strong whiff of royal displeasure in the unexpected denial to him of access to the Privy Chamber. A probably apocryphal story relates how the king spotted Gardiner lurking amongst his fellow Councillors at Windsor.
When Henry saw him, he turned to Wriothesley [and said:] ‘Did I not command you that he should come no more among you?’
[The Lord Chancellor replied:] ‘My lord of Winchester has come to wait upon your highness with the offer of a benevolence [a voluntary tax] for the clergy.’
Mollified by the prospect of cash flowing into his coffers, the king accepted the offer.7 But still the bishop was excluded from court. Gardiner wrote respectfully to the king from London on 2 December 1546:
having had no opportunity to make humble suit to your highness’ presence as the trouble of my mind enforces me, I am so bold to molest your majesty with these my letters.
Gardiner desired ‘a continuance of favour’ and had always valued the benefits given to him by the king:
If for want of circumspection, my doings or sayings be otherwise taken in this matter of lands wherein I was spoken with, I must and will lament my own infelicity and most humbly, on my knees, desire your majesty to pardon it.
I never said ‘nay’ … to resist your highness’ pleasure, but only … to be a suitor to your highness’ goodness, as emboldened by the abundance of your majesty’s favour heretofore shown to me.8
He adds:
Because I have no access to your majesty, no hearing of late any more of this matter, I cannot forebear to open truly my heart to your highness with a most humble request to take the same in the most gratuitous part.
Suspecting that this letter would inevitably be intercepted by his reformist enemies in the Privy Chamber, he also wrote to Paget, begging him to deliver his letters personally to Henry and seeking permission to come to court to see the king himself, as ‘I have no access’ to the Privy Chamber:
I hear no speciality of the king’s majesty’s discontentment in this matter of lands but confusedly, that my doings are not well taken and [I] am sorry, for I care only for this, that it should be thought I wanted discretion, to neglect the king’s majesty’s goodness towards me, which, as you know, I ever esteemed only and thereupon made my worldly foundation. I pray you send me some word.9
It is clear that the king did safely receive Gardiner’s letters, but his earnest pleas did him no good. Unknown to him, Paget, his erstwhile ally, had suddenly turned against him. Henry, then staying at Otelands, was swift and brutal in his response on 4 December:
Had your doings … been agreeable to such fair words as you have now written in your letters of the 2nd., you should neither [have] had cause to write this excuse nor we to answer it.
But we marvel at your writing that you never said ‘nay’ to any request for those lands, considering that to our chancellor [Wriothesley], secretary [?Petre] and chancellor of our court of augmentations [Sir Edward North], both jointly and apart, you utterly refused any conformity, saying that you would make your answer to our own person.10
A Henry thwarted in his designs, particularly over his relentless acquisition of property, was a dangerous, malevolent king. He did not mince his words: ‘We see no cause why you should molest us further’ – a phrase that has a note of awful finality. Significantly, perhaps, his letter was signed by means of the royal dry stamp, duly witnessed by Denny and Gates, and thus the bishop, rightly or wrongly, detected a plot against him by his enemies, spelt out in the letter’s sharp, uncompromising words of rejection.
But proud Gardiner could not bring himself to quit the precincts of the Palace of Westminster. To do so would be to admit that he had fallen from the king’s grace. Shamefaced, he loitered miserably in the outer chambers near the king’s secret apartments, waiting for the summons into the royal presence that never came. He listened to the whispers and the gossip of the court as he impotently watched the comings and goings of those on official business. He made a point of leaving the palace in the company of more favoured courtiers in a pathetic attempt to maintain the public image of his continued power and influence. The bishop could not acknowledge that he had been out-manoeuvred and effectively neutralised, probably by Hertford and Dudley.
The tensions between the two factions in the king’s Council had been rising throughout 1546, culminating a few weeks before with Dudley angrily striking Gardiner full in the face during a torrid, ill-tempered Privy Council meeting,11 a blow that caused the admiral ‘trouble and danger’ from the king, who always condemned violence within his court precincts.12 However, the tide of royal disfavour had turned and Dudley ‘now seemed well received’. Shortly afterwards, there were also ‘violent and injurious words’ exchanged again between Dudley and Gardiner and by Hertford to Wriothesley.
Those who sought a Protestant succession – and with it the power, status and wealth attached to regency governing a malleable young boy on the throne – also had their sights firmly fixed on the powerful house of Howard, led by Gardiner’s ally, the Duke of Norfolk. His sudden downfall was also not long in coming.
Norfolk’s son Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey, is, like his father, an unattractive character to modern eyes. Surrey was arrogant, vain, impetuous, resentful of the merest slight discerned by him and, most of all, contemptuous of any who lived in, or came from, a lower station in life. He was an extraordinary paradox: a distinguished, sensitive, very talented poet, but also a rowdy hooligan and a proud coxcomb whose conceited behaviour and beliefs easily nettled those around him. The king, however, loved this ‘most foolish proud boy [in all] England’13 for in his youth, Surrey had spent two very happy years at Windsor at his lessons with Henry Fitzroy, Duke of Richmond, the king’s bastard son, who later married Surrey’s sister, Mary.14 The two youths became great friends there, a relationship that later flourished during their further studies together in France. Surrey wrote a poem about one of their tennis matches, which were continually disrupted as they were distracted by the charms of young ladies watching them near by:
The palm-play15 where, despoiled for the game
With dazzled eyes oft we by gleams of love
Have missed the ball …16
This hothead was inevitably often in trouble, even after his arranged marriage in 1532 to Frances de Vere, daughter of the Earl of Oxford, and the birth of a son, Thomas, on 10 March 1536.17 Later that year, the nineteen-year-old was imprisoned at Windsor Castle for two weeks for striking Edward Seymour, then Viscount Beauchamp, in the face within the precincts of the royal court after Seymour rashly suggested that Surrey was sympathetic to the cause of the Pilgrimage of Grace rebels in the North. An intervention by Cromwell prevented a worse punishment under court ordinances. That was not, however, the end of the earl’s hot-tempered escapades. In July 1542, he recklessly challenged a member of the royal household, Sir John Leigh, to a duel and was again jailed, this time in the Fleet Prison, but was accompanied by two servants to look after him. He wrote to the Privy Council:
I have of late severally required [from] each of you, by my servant Pickering, [indications] of your favour, from whom as yet I have received no other comfort than my past folly has deserved. I have yet thought it my duty again, as well as [to] renew my suit, as humbly to require you rather to impute this error to the fury of reckless youth than to a will not conformable and contented of the just reward of my folly.18
He asked the Councillors to help restore the king’s esteem for him, so that he could be freed
from this noisome prison, whose pestilent airs are not unlike to bring some alteration of health. If your good lordships judge me not a member rather to be clean cut away, than reformed; it may please you to be suitors to the king’s majesty on my behalf, or else, at the least, if his pleasure be to punish this oversight with the forbearing of his pleasure (which unto every loving subject, specially unto me, from a prince cannot be less counted than a living death), yet it would please him to command me into the country, to some place of open air, with like restraint of liberty, there to abide his grace’s pleasure.19
Surrey’s flowing, honeyed words resulted in his freedom on 7 August, but only after his payment of the huge sum of £6,666 as a surety for future good behaviour (‘to bridle my heady will’) – more than £2,400,000 at today’s prices. The ‘grave heads’ of the council were not fooled by his fluent, graceful phrases. Nor should they have been. After military service in Scotland, his next brush with royal authority came in February 1543, when he and a party of young, rich bucks, including Thomas Wyatt the Younger20 and William Pickering, took part in ‘a riot’ in the City of London.
Armed with hunting crossbows firing pebbles, they drunkenly broke the windows of houses (including those of Sir Richard Gresham’s home) and those of churches. From a rowing boat on the Thames, they amused themselves hugely by firing at the prostitutes plying their trade outside the brothels on seedy Bankside, in Southwark. Lord, what a lark! But it was a lark that once again brought Surrey, now aged twenty-six, to the attentions of the Privy Council following a complaint from the Lord Mayor of London, and they diligently rooted out a Mistress Millicent Arundell of St Lawrence Lane, Cheapside, at whose house Surrey and his friends had spent the night of the riot. She testified
that the earl of Surrey and other young noblemen frequented her house, eating meat in Lent and committing other improprieties. At Candlemas, they went out with stone bows at nine o’clock at night and did not come back till past midnight. The next day there was a great clamour [about] the breaking of many glass windows both of houses and churches and shooting at men that night in the street. And the voice [word] was these hurts were done by my lord and his company …
That night, or the night before, they used the same stone bows, rowing on the Thames and Thomas Clere told how they shot at the queans [whores] on the Bankside.21
Appropriately on 1 April, Surrey was hauled up before the Council at St James’s Palace and charged with eating flesh during Lent and on Fridays and walking about the streets in a ‘lewd and unseemly manner’, firing the crossbows. In his defence, Surrey told them that he had a special licence to eat meat during the religious fast, but pleaded guilty to the second charge, saying lamely in mitigation that he only broke the windows of papists. Furthermore, he said, he was astonished at the licentious behaviour of the London citizens, which ‘resembled the manners of Papal Rome in her corrupted state’. Typically, it was a justification of extraordinarily arrogant bravura but it did not wash with the Privy Council. Surrey found himself back in the Fleet Prison, where he passed the long hours by writing a poem, A Satire Against the Citizens of London, in which he reiterates that his unruly behaviour was designed purely to punish them for their many crimes:
From justice rod no fault is free
But that all such as work unright
In most quiet, are next ill rest [sleeping]
In secret silence of the night.
This made me, with a reckless breast
To wake thy sluggards with my bow
A figure of the Lord’s behest
Whose scourge for sin the Scriptures show
That as the fearful thunder’s clap
By sudden flame at hand we know
Of pebble stones the soundless rap
The dreadful plague might make thee see
Of God’s wrath, that doth thee enwrap.22
By May he was free again. His father, Norfolk, no doubt wanting him both out of the way and to dissipate his energies in more useful directions, in October sent him off to the wars in Europe to join the English and Spanish operations in the Low Countries. The Spanish Emperor Charles V was much taken with the poet-soldier, writing to Henry:
As to what we have written in commendation of the son of our cousin the duke of Norfolk for his eagerness in learning the arts of war, he is shown such an excellent example of your men that he cannot fail to profit thereby.
All of our side respect … his person and deservedly so, the courage of the father and the noble nature of the son.23
He also distinguished himself during Henry’s campaign in France, being badly wounded in an assault, under artillery fire, during the siege of Montreuil in 154424 and after convalescence in England, in September 1545 he succeeded his father as commander-in-chief of the English land and naval forces in France and captain of the captured town of Boulogne. His frequent, overly optimistic dispatches home impressed Henry, now back in England, with his courage and continually nurtured the king’s hopes of both military glory and victory in France.
But Boulogne was an expensive place to defend, the exchequer was rapidly running out of money and Henry’s hard-pressed Council in London were now anxiously seeking any method to abandon the town without losing face – or, more pertinently, without antagonising the glory-seeking king. Wily Norfolk warned his son:
Have yourself in await [beware] that you animate not the king too much for the keeping of Boulogne, for who so doth at length shall get small thanks. Look well to what answer you make to the letter from us of the council. Confirm not the enterprises contained in them.25
Surrey’s martial fame was short-lived, however. On 7 January 1546, he intercepted a large French resupply force of 3,000 foot soldiers and 600 cavalry at St Etienne, near Boulogne, and was roundly defeated, largely through his own incompetence and impetuosity, losing fourteen of his captains amongst the 205 English dead (including his own second-in-command) and, shamefully, a number of standards or flags.26 He instantly fell out of Henry’s favour and two months later, when he wrote seeking permission for his wife to join him on campaign, he received a peremptory ‘no’ – the king pointing out, with some asperity, that ‘time of service, which will bring some trouble and disquiet, [and] not meet for women’s imbecilities, [now] approaches’.27 On 21 March, he was relieved of his command as lieutenant-general and Captain of Boulogne, being replaced by the Earl of Hertford (the former Viscount Beauchamp) of all people. Sir William Paget, the king’s secretary, wrote helpfully to Surrey:
The latter part of your letter, touching the intended enterprise of the enemy, gives me occasion to write to you, frankly, my poor opinion; trusting your lordship will take the same in no worse part than I mean it.
As your lordship wishes, so his majesty wants to do something for the damaging of the enemy and for that purpose has appointed to send over an army shortly and that my lord of Hertford shall be his highness’ lieutenant general … whereby I fear your authority … shall be touched.28
Wise Paget urged Surrey to seek another appointment to regain Henry’s favour:
In my opinion, you should do well to make sure by times to his majesty to appoint you to some place of service in the army, as to the captainship of the forward or rearward [forces] or to such place of honour as should be meet for you, for so should you be where knowledge and experience may be gotten. Whereby you should be better able hereafter to serve and also to have … occasion to do some notable service in revenge of your men, at the last encounter with the enemies, which should be to your reputation in the world.29
The choice of Hertford as the new military supremo could not have been more unfortunate. Surrey had long nurtured a deep grudge against the Seymours, whom he regarded as hardly of noble blood and mere loud upstarts. This disdain had not prevented his earlier foolhardy attempts to woo, despite her vigorous objections, Anne Stanhope, wife of Sir Edward Seymour, then Viscount Beauchamp, now Earl of Hertford and a brother of the dead queen. This incident, which lay behind the unseemly fisticuffs at Windsor described earlier in this chapter, merely poured fuel on the fire of hatred burning deep within Surrey’s heart, flames that were again fanned by Hertford’s brother Thomas urging harsh punishment upon him when he came up before the Privy Council in 1543 for his nocturnal jolly japes in the streets and alleys of the City of London. To cap it all, after Hertford’s appointment in France displacing Surrey, Hertford announced allegations against Surrey of corrupt misuse of office in Boulogne and immediately purged many of his appointees.30 ‘There are in Boulogne,’ Surrey wrote, angrily denying the claims, ‘too many witnesses that Henry of Surrey was never corrupted by personal considerations and that his hand never close[d] upon a bribe.’ Those slights and prejudices were still uppermost in Surrey’s mind and he rejected Paget’s helpful advice and returned home in June 1546, vengeful and full of angry spleen.
But the Seymours struck first. Now or never, they had to make their bid for absolute power and finally eliminate the threat posed by the conservative faction at court, led by Norfolk and Surrey since Gardiner had been neutralised. It was the earl’s scarcely suppressed ambition to become protector of Prince Edward after Henry’s approaching death and to restore the nobility of England to its rightful place next to the throne that had to be smothered. With Henry ailing and his end clearly not far off, it was time to make a move, but still utilising the king’s failing power and ruthlessness. As reformers, they were unlikely to use the charge of heresy to silence Surrey. The means was found in Sir Richard Southwell, an MP for Norfolk and former crony of Cromwell’s, who told the Privy Council on 2 December that he had information about Surrey ‘that touched his fidelity to the king’.
Why Henry acted so suddenly now against Surrey and Norfolk remains something of a mystery. A seventeenth-century writer pointed out that ‘it was notorious how the king had not only withdrawn much of his wonted favour, but promised immunity to such as would discover anything concerning [Surrey]’.31 Henry’s desire to destroy him had become passionate and despite his deteriorating health, he took an avid personal interest in the proceedings against father and son (if not directing them), sometimes from his sickbed. Possibly it was a combination of the veiled threat posed to the Tudor succession by the Howards’ royal ancestors and the allegations that they would seek the regency of the kingdom after his death that stirred Henry’s dark suspicions, awakened fears about what his young son would face after ascending to the throne and led him to listen attentively as the poisonous rumours were whispered in his sometimes fevered ear.
The inevitable arrest came a few days later. Henry ‘very secretly’ ordered Sir Anthony Wingfield, Captain of the Royal Guard, to seize Surrey as he was coming to the Palace of Westminster:
The next day, after dinner, [Wingfield] saw the earl coming into the palace whilst he was walking in the great hall downstairs.
He had a dozen halberdiers waiting in an adjoining corridor and approaching the earl, said: ‘Welcome, my lord, I wish to ask you to intercede for me with the duke your father in a matter in which I need his favour, if you will deign to listen to me.’
So he led him to the corridor and the halberdiers took him and without attracting notice put him into a boat.32
Surrey was taken to Ely Place, Wriothesley’s house in Holborn, on the western edge of the city, for interrogation, initially about a letter written by him to a gentleman that was ‘full of threats’, according to Francis van der Delft, the Spanish ambassador. Southwell was also being held there – the hot-headed earl said he would fight him ‘in his shirt’ over his accusations – before Surrey was moved publicly through the streets, under close guard, to the Tower of London on Sunday 12 December. During that painful journey, his escort pushing aside the crowds, he was reported – understandably – to be ‘much downcast’. Norfolk, who was out of London when Surrey was arrested, hastily wrote letters to Westminster to establish why his son had been taken into custody. These were naturally intercepted and closely scanned for possible evidence against him. He did not have long to wait for an answer. A death warrant was plainly writ large on the walls of the Tower for him, too.
Norfolk was duly summoned to court and later that Sunday also committed to the grim fortress on the eastern side of London. He was taken by river, after suffering the humiliation of his Garter insignia and white staff, or wand of office, as Lord High Treasurer being ceremoniously removed – ironically the same disgrace he had inflicted on Thomas Cromwell more than six years earlier. The duke ‘both in the barge and on entering the Tower’ publicly declared ‘no person had ever been carried thither before who was a more loyal servant [of the king] than he was and always had been’. His vociferous pleas were politely noted but pointedly ignored.
The fall of the house of Howard had been very carefully planned, timed and executed. That same Sunday, between three and four in the afternoon, Henry’s trusted courtiers – the brutish John Gates of the Privy Chamber and his brother-in-law Sir Wymond Carew – tellingly joined by a released Southwell, had departed London post-haste for Norfolk. Their mission was firstly to seek out damning evidence against father and son, and secondly the securing and careful listing of their possessions for later seizure by the crown. They arrived at Kenninghall, Norfolk’s richly furnished home set in 700 acres of deer park, at daybreak on the Tuesday morning after a ride of about eighty miles via Thetford. Gestapo-like, they hammered on the doors of the sleeping household to gain admission to the great house. Their dawn arrival and their harsh, barked orders came as a terrible shock to the occupants: news of the incarcerations in the Tower had not yet reached Kenninghall. Gates reported to Henry that night:
As the steward was absent taking musters, we called the almoner and first taking order for the gates and back doors, desired to speak with the Duchess of Richmond and Elizabeth Holland who were only just risen but came to us without delay in the dining chamber.
We can easily guess the horrified reaction of Surrey’s sleepy sister and Norfolk’s tousled, blowsy mistress at the sight of the mud-stained and armed men standing breathless before them in this dawn raid, determined to extract incriminating information.
On hearing how the matter stood, the duchess was sore perplexed, trembling and like to fall down, but recovering, she reverently upon her knees humbled herself to the king, saying that although constrained by nature to love her father … and her brother, which she noted to be a rash man, she would conceal nothing but declare in writing all she could remember.
Gates advised her to use truth and frankness in her answers and, rather disingenuously, not to despair. The three men then examined her coffers and closet ‘but found nothing worth sending, all very bare and her jewels sold to pay her debts’. Norfolk’s long-time mistress was a different matter, however.
We then searched Elizabeth Holland and found girdles, beads, buttons of gold, pearls and rings set with many stones, whereof they are making a book [inventory].
‘Trusty men’ were sent on to other houses owned by the family in Norfolk and Suffolk ‘to prevent embezzlement’ and were told not to forget ‘Elizabeth Holland’s house, newly made’. The steward and almoner at Kenninghall were made responsible for all the plate and ‘such money as remains of his last account’.33 In his next letter, Gates promised the king, he would report ‘further of these matters and also of the duke’s jewels and lands’. Tudor royal investigations were nothing if not thorough and searching.
Back in his room in the Constable’s lodgings at the Tower, a puzzled, frightened and lonely Norfolk wrote a grovelling letter to Henry the day after his incarceration, on 13 December. He complained:
Some great enemy has informed the king untruly, for God knows, he [Norfolk] never had one untrue thought against the king or his succession and can no more guess the charge against him than a child born that night.
The duke did not know against whom he had offended, ‘unless it were such as are angry with me for being quick against such as have been accused for sacramentaries’ (the religious radicals). And, whilst on the subject of religion,
I have told your majesty and many others that knowing your virtue and knowledge, I shall stick to whatever laws you make and for this cause many have borne me ill will, as do appear by casting libels abroad against me.
Significantly, then, he believed that his sudden incarceration stemmed from his conservative religious beliefs.34 Pathetically, Norfolk also begged that he should recover Henry’s favour – the king could now take all his lands and possessions – and asked to be told of the charges he faced.
His early suspicions must have been confirmed by his initial interrogation, which focused on politico-religious issues. As for the pope, declared Norfolk,
if I had twenty lives, I would rather have spent them all than he should have any power in this realm … And since he has been the king’s enemy, no man has felt and spoken more against him both here and in France and also to many Scottish gentlemen.35
The ghost of Cromwell and his horrible fate haunted the duke, sitting alone in the heart of the forbidding Tower: ‘My lords, I trust you think Cromwell’s service and mine are not [to] be like … He was a false man and surely I am a true poor gentleman,’ he told the Council. Time and again, Norfolk desperately repeated his plea to meet and face down his still unknown accusers, ‘for I will hide nothing. Never gold was tried better than [by] fire and water than I have been’.
He conjured up in his lugubrious mind the faces of all his many enemies during the long, turbulent reign of Henry Tudor. There was Wolsey, who ‘[for] fourteen years [sought] to destroy me’; Cromwell, of course, his great adversary; Edward, Third Duke of Buckingham,36 ‘of all men living, he hated me the most’; Thomas Boleyn, Earl of Wiltshire, husband of his sister, who ‘confessed the same and wished he had found means to thrust his dagger in me’. Then there was the ‘malice borne me by both my nieces whom it pleased the king to marry’, a malice remembered by those still in authority in the Tower.37
In a hastily scribbled letter, he plaintively protested his past loyalty to the crown:
Who tried out the falsehood of the Lord Darcy,38 Sir Robert Constable,39 Sir John Bulmer,40 Aske41 and many others – but only I?
Who showed his majesty the words of my mother-in-law42 for which she was attainted of misprision – but I?
I have always shown myself a true man to my sovereign and, since these things done, have received more profits of his highness than before.
Who could now think that I should now be false?
Poor man as I am yet, I am his near kinsman. For whose sake should I be untrue?43
These are the frantic ramblings of a man still in shock and petrified by his numbing fear of the unknown – again, what exactly were the charges made against him? Who was accusing him? What was the evidence?
Unknown to Norfolk at this stage, it was not heresy that had undone him: treason was the steely weapon of choice for his determined enemies, the Seymours, uncles to young Prince Edward. Surrey, for his part, was still naïvely unaware of the seriousness of the conspiracy against him. In a letter to the Privy Council written from the Tower, he protested about ‘mine old father brought in[to] question by any stir between Southwell and me’. Norfolk’s arrest, he complained, ‘sore enfeebled me’.44
Henry’s case against the Howards became clear when Wriothesley sent a message to van der Delft on 16 December, disclosing that the cause of Norfolk and his son’s imprisonment ‘was that they planned by sinister means to obtain the government of the king, who was too old now to allow himself to be governed’ and
their intention was to usurp authority by means of the murder of all members of the council and the control of the prince [Edward] by them alone.45
The government’s propaganda machine grew still more vocal. Nicholas Wotton, the English ambassador to the court of the French king, told Francis I of the ‘most execrable and abominable intent and enterprise’ of Norfolk and Surrey. Francis replied simply that if their guilt was clearly proved, they should both be put to death.46 The courts of Europe were stunned by news of the arrests. Thomas Thirlby, Bishop of Westminster, on a diplomatic mission at the court of Charles V, wrote to Paget on 25 December of
those two ungracious and inhuman non homines,47 the Duke of Norfolk and his son, of whom I did confess that I did love, for I ever supposed him a true servant to his master. Before God, I am so amazed.48
There is a romantic story, from only one source, of Surrey attempting an escape from the Tower, involving a break-out from his privy window, arming himself with a dagger smuggled to him by his servant Martin and climbing out of the window of a room overlooking the Thames, where a boat was waiting in St Katherine’s Dock. But according to the writer – Antonio de Guaras, a Spanish merchant in London at the time – the earl was surprised by his guards and recaptured.49
The legal proceedings for Surrey’s downfall gathered momentum.50 Lord Chancellor Wriothesley was once a staunch ally of Norfolk but, like Paget, after sensing the shift in political power at court, had almost overnight become a resolute enemy. He changed and counter-changed the main thrust of the indictments as the evidence was pieced together, much of it mere hearsay hardly worthy of the name. But there was still plenty of damning information to be garnered and evaluated. Mistress Arundell, a central character in Surrey’s drunken escapades of 1543, had told of conversations in her household when the earl stayed there that now seemed very incriminating indeed:
Once, when my lord of Surrey was displeased about buying of cloth, she told her maids in the kitchen how he fumed and added, ‘I marvel they will thus mock a prince.’
‘Why,’ said Alice, her maid, ‘is he a prince?’
‘Yes, marry he is, and if aught should come at the king but good, his father should stand for king.’
Another maid, Joan Whetnall, ‘talking with her fellow touching my lord of Surrey’s bed, she said the arms were very like the king’s.’51
No doubt this testimony was triumphantly retrieved from the Privy Council’s files and added to the pile of evidence lying before Wriothesley.
Surrey’s embittered sister also recounted how he had vilified the Seymours and ‘these new men [who] loved no nobility and if God called away the king, they should smart for it’. Norfolk’s mistress ‘Bess’ Holland also related how her lover had complained that few on the Privy Council loved him ‘because they were no noblemen born themselves’ and how he had forecast the demise of the ailing Henry. Sir Gawen Carew described a very public row between Surrey and his sister in the Long Gallery of the Palace of Westminster over his violent opposition to her planned marriage to Thomas Seymour, which he objected to because of Seymour’s supposed low birth. Surrey suggested, said the witness, that she should come to court to ‘delight the king’ with her body, so that she could control him as Madame d’Estampes, Francis I’s mistress, governed the French king,
which should not only be a means to help herself but all her friends should receive a commodity by the same. Whereupon she defied her brother and said that they all should perish and she would cut her own throat rather than she would consent to such a villainy.52
Edward Rogers told the investigators of an argument between the earl and his friend George Blagge, one of Henry’s favourites and a notorious religious reformer, about a regency to govern England during Prince Edward’s minority, after the king’s death:
The earl held that his father was meetest, both for good services done and for estate.
Blagge replied that then the prince should be but evil taught and in multiplying words, said, ‘Rather than it should come to pass that the prince should be under the government of your father or you, I would bide the adventure to thrust this dagger into you.’
The earl said he was very hasty.53
Sir Edmund Knyvett54 was another eager witness. He had told Surrey that ‘because of his father’s and his unkindness I would go from my country and dwell there and wait, so unable to bear their malice’. The earl had contemptuously replied: ‘No, no, cousin Knyvett, I malice not so low; my malice is higher – my malice climbs higher.’ He repeated: ‘These new erected men would, by their wills, leave no noble man in life.’
Surrey himself was interrogated in the Tower, and the list of twenty-three sharp questions that were put to him by the Privy Council still survives. The devious Wriothesley drafted the ‘interrogatories’ personally and their content shows that the royal hounds were firmly on the scent of their hapless quarry, based on the evidence already gathered. These questions included: ‘If the king should die in my lord prince’s tender age, whether you have devised who should govern him and the realm?’ This had been amended from the original: ‘Who ought, within the realm, to be protector and governor of him during nonage [minority]?’ More pointedly: ‘Whether you have said that in such case you or your father would have the rule and governance of him, or words to that effect?’ Another – ‘whether you procured any person … with the intent the same might grow [in the king’s] favour for the better encompassing of your purposes’ – had been altered from ‘procuring your sister or any other woman to be the king’s concubine’. In those long, hard days for Surrey, such euphemistic niceties seem out of place. The questions also home in on the issue of his wilfully bearing the royal arms of King Edward the Confessor and ‘whether you are next heir or kin to St Edward and if so, how?’ And: ‘To what intent do you put the arms of St Edward in your coat?’ Finally, the ‘killer’ questions of his interrogators: ‘Do you acknowledge yourself the king’s true subject?’ and ‘Have you at any time determined to fly out of the realm?’55 One can almost hear proud Surrey’s angry denials and bluster when questioned repeatedly by his enemies.
As the Privy Council scurried about taking witness statements, the draft charges against both Norfolk and Surrey were drawn up and presented to the king who read them carefully, despite his rapidly deteriorating medical condition, his spectacles on the end of his nose. He was taking a great personal interest in the case: ‘he is deeply engaged and much perplexed in the consideration of this affair,’ reported van der Delft.
It is understood that he will thus be occupied during the holidays and some days in addition, the queen and all the courtiers having gone to Greenwich, though she has never been known before to leave him on solemn occasions like this. I do not know what to think or suspect.
The king was ‘keeping himself very secluded at court, all persons but his councillors and three or four gentlemen of his chamber being denied entrance’.56
Henry made copious handwritten notes in the margins of the charge sheets. They demonstrate great clarity of thought, despite his poor state of health, and must indicate his grim single-mindedness to see his noble prisoners brought safely to the block. He may have been physically weak, but he was as cold-blooded as ever. The king’s annotations show that he reinforced the case against both men for heraldic misdemeanours. Some of the evidence may have triggered painful echoes of the past and two unfortunate marriages into the old king’s mind. He wrote:
If a man compassing with himself to govern this realm, do actually go about to rule the king and should, for that purpose advise his daughter or sister to become his harlot, thinking thereby to bring it to pass and so would rule both father and son, as by this next article doth more appear; what this importeth?
Then, putting his finger on the crux of the issue, Henry asked pointedly:
If a man says these words: ‘If the King dies, who should have the rule of the Prince but my father or I’ – What it importeth?57
The cynical van der Delft strongly suspected that the Council’s feverish investigations were a cunning stratagem to hide yet another relapse in the king’s health, so he sent one of his men to see John Dudley, the Lord Great Admiral, at Westminster:
Whilst he was at court, where he slept that night, he learnt from a friend that the king was not at all well, though he had seen him dressed on the previous day.58
The astute ambassador pointed out in a dispatch to Charles V on Christmas Eve 1546 that
four or five months ago, great inquiries and prosecutions were carried out against the heretics and sacramentarians, but they have now ceased, since the earl of Hertford [Seymour] and the Lord Admiral have resided at court. The publicly expressed opinion, therefore, [is] that these two nobles have obtained such influence over the king as to lead him according to their fancy.59
Van der Delft had warned of ‘the evils and dangers threatened by these sects’ in conversations with some of the leading councillors and they asked him to pass on his opinions to Henry.
I find them [the councillors] now of a different aspect and much inclined to please and entertain the earl and the Admiral …
As regards the diversity of religion, the people at large are to a great extent on their side, the majority being of these perverse sects and in favour of getting rid of the bishops.
They do not indeed conceal their wish to see the Bishop of Winchester and other adherents of the ancient faith sent to the Tower to keep company with the Duke of Norfolk.60
Norfolk made his confession on 12 January 1547 in the Tower of London, signing it, of course, ‘without compulsion or counsel’. Despite that preposterously unlikely disclaimer, the statement would certainly have been written for him by his accusers, as every ‘i’ is dotted, every ‘t’ crossed:
I, Thomas duke of Norfolk do confess and acknowledge myself to have offended the king in opening his secret counsels at diverse times to sundry persons to the peril of his highness and disappointing of his affairs.
Likewise I have concealed high treason in keeping secret the false acts of my son, Henry, Earl of Surrey, in using the arms of St Edward the Confessor which pertain only to kings of this realm, whereto the said earl could make no claim.
Also I have without authority borne in the first and principal quarter of my arms, ever since the death of my father, the arms of England with a difference of three labels of silver, which are the proper arms of my lord the prince.
I confess my crime no less than high treason and although I do not deserve it, humbly beg his highness to have pity upon me. I shall daily pray to God for the preservation of his noble succession.61
The usual suspects in such circumstances signed the confession as witnesses, amongst them Wriothesley, Lord St John – Lord President of the Council, the Earl of Hertford – Lord Great Chamberlain, Dudley – Lord High Admiral, Secretary Paget and Sir Anthony Browne, Master of the King’s Horse. It was too late to expect mercy from Henry, the Seymours or Dudley.
If there were ever any futile, lingering doubts about the foregone conclusion to Surrey’s trial at the Guildhall the next day, Thursday 13 January, they were destroyed by his father’s craven and prejudicial confession.
Surrey was popular in London, despite his previous hooligan escapades, and his downfall was to damage irretrievably the public perception of the Seymours. The Spanish merchant de Guaras, who recounted the story of the earl’s escape attempt, reported that ‘it was fearful to see the enormous number of people in the streets’ watching as Surrey was escorted,62 under guard by 300 halberdiers, by the Constable of the Tower Sir John Gage, who was responsible for delivering him safely to his trial. Always a dandy, the prisoner wore a new coat of satin purchased especially for the occasion, paid for by Walter Stonor, the new Lieutenant of the Tower.63
The servile twelve-man jury, made up of Norfolk knights and squires, had been handpicked to include some of his enemies. Surrey pleaded ‘not guilty’ to the indictment, which ran as follows:
Whosoever, by words, writings, printing or other external act, maliciously shall procure anything to the peril of the king’s person or give occasion whereby the king or his successors might be disturbed in their possession of the crown, shall be guilty of treason.64
And whereas Henry VIII is true King of England and Edward, formerly king of England, commonly called Saint Edward the Confessor in right of the said realm of England used certain arms and ensigns, namely, azure, a cross fleury65 between five merletts66 gold, belonging to the said king Edward and his progenitors in right of the crown of England, which arms and ensigns are therefore appropriate to the king and no other person.
And whereas Edward, now prince of England, the king’s son and heir apparent, bears … the said arms and ensigns with three labels called three labels67 silver.
Nevertheless, one Henry Howard, late of Kenninghall, knight of the Garter, otherwise called Henry Howard, earl of Surrey, on October 7, 1546, at Kenninghall, in the house of Thomas duke of Norfolk, his father, openly used and traitorously caused to be depicted, mixed and conjoined with his own arms and ensigns, the said arms and ensigns of the king, with three labels silver.68
The earl stood defiantly at the bar facing his justices, three of them the very architects of his downfall: alongside Lord Mayor Hobberthorne sat Wriothesley, Hertford and Dudley. Their number also included the Earls of Arundel and Essex and professional judges like Sir William Shelley, there to lend legal verisimilitude to the proceedings. Paget and Sir Anthony Browne were also present as commissioners.
The king’s lawyer opened his prosecution:
My lords, for either of the offences the earl has committed he deserves death. First for usurping the royal arms which gives rise to suspicion that he hoped to become king and the other for escaping from prison, whereby he showed his guilt.69
Surrey, ‘with manly courage’, interrupted:
You are false and to earn a piece of gold, would condemn your father. I never sought to usurp the king’s arms, for everybody knows that my ancestors bore them. Go to the church in Norfolk and you will see them there, for they have been ours’ for five hundred years.70
Paget, fearing Surrey’s eloquence and the impact on public opinion of what was rapidly becoming a strong defence, shouted at Surrey:
Hold your peace, my lord! Your idea was to commit treason and as the king is old, you thought to become king.
The earl snapped back:
And thou catchpole! What hast thou to do with it? Thou had better hold thy tongue, for the kingdom has never been well since the king put mean creatures like you into government.
The jibe was born out of Surrey’s uncontrollable contempt for the nouveau riche who had come to power, displacing the rightful role of the nobility. ‘Catchpole’ was street slang at the time for a bailiff and the stinging insult was hurled at Paget because his father was said to have been a humble constable. Whatever the truth of his parentage, Paget was now suddenly silenced, ‘very much abashed’. Dudley then questioned Surrey about why he had attempted to escape from the Tower. Surrey replied:
I tried to get out to prevent myself from coming to the pass in which I am now and you my lord know well that however right a man may be, they always find the fallen one guilty.71
Hard, realistic words from a man despairing of his certain terrible fate. Surrey was also accused of possessing a painting of himself that demonstrated ‘malicious thoughts’ and that he proposed his father to be Lord Protector of the young king after Henry’s death. His sister, the Duchess of Richmond, also signed one of the depositions, or witness statements. After her husband’s death, which left her a penniless widow, she had harboured deep resentment against both father and brother for her painful impecuniosity. Now she told how Surrey had altered his arms and placed over them the cap of maintenance,72 with the royal crown with the king’s cipher ‘H. R.’ for Henricus Rex beneath. When this was read out in court, Surrey burst out: ‘Must I then be condemned on the word of a wretched woman?’73
After six hours of hearing the depositions, Paget hurriedly left the court to see the king at Westminster. When he returned hotfoot, probably with the royal order for Surrey’s condemnation tucked safely inside his doublet, the jury dutifully retired to consider their verdict. One wonders what they talked about. After a decent interval – the niceties had to be observed – they returned and Hertford stood up to speak for them all. Asked whether they found Surrey guilty or not guilty, Hertford replied in a loud voice: ‘Guilty’ – a brief pause – ‘And he should die.’74
He hardly finished speaking before the court erupted in a tumult ‘and it was a long while’ before the people in the court could be silenced.
Even with death staring him in the face, Surrey’s irrepressible prejudices burst out. The prisoner at the bar spat out:
Of what have you found me guilty? Surely you will find no law that justifies you! But I know the king wants to get rid of the noble blood around him and employ none but low people.75
Wriothesley, his voice rising above the excited babble, then pronounced sentence: that Surrey was to be ‘taken back to the Tower and thence led through the city of London to the gallows of Tyburn and hanged and disembowelled’ and his body quartered, the traitor’s usual ignominious death. He was led out of the Guildhall under heavy guard, with the axe turned towards him as a sinister sign of his condemnation. It was, commented the Spanish merchant de Guaras, ‘shocking to hear the things that he kept saying and to see the grief of the people’.
The Bill of Attainder against Norfolk and Surrey was introduced into Parliament on Tuesday 18 January, presaging their deaths and, as usual, forfeiting their lands and fortunes to the crown, backdated to 7 October 1546. No details of their high treason were mentioned within the Bill.
There were many at Westminster who cast envious eyes on the Howards’ ample estates, vastly augmented by the proceeds of dissolved religious houses, and no doubt the vultures were already circling, waiting for the rich pickings to be distributed after the deaths of Surrey and Norfolk. Henry promised Paget that these assets would be ‘liberally disposed and given to his good servants’, no doubt with the Seymour clan at the front of the line of those waiting to be enriched. The king said he had drawn up a list of beneficiaries, which he had put ‘in the pocket of his nightgown’. Ironically, it was not found after his death, despite frantic searches by those self-seeking men at Westminster who surrounded the king during his last hours. This may have been Henry’s last laugh at his senior courtiers.
Surrey’s downfall was predicated on a heraldic technicality, a dubious charge at best. His father’s confession was vague and tenuous, much of the substance being only the swift abandonment of his son to the axeman. What truly destroyed the Howards was the testimony of the Duchess of Richmond – Norfolk’s daughter and Surrey’s sister – and Norfolk’s mistress ‘Bess’ Holland. The family was a house divided against itself. Both women harboured grudges, even hatred, against one or other of the men and it was these volcanic domestic tensions that enabled the destruction of probably the richest, the proudest and, at times, the most powerful noble family in England.
On 19 January 1547, Henry having generously commuted the sentence of his ‘foolish proud boy’ to mere beheading, Surrey was executed on Tower Hill and was buried immediately in the Church of All Hallows, Barking, close by in Upper Thames Street.76 On the scaffold ‘he spoke a great deal but said he never meant to commit treason. They would not let him talk any more.’77
Just over a week later, on 27 January, Wriothesley presided over a joint session of both Houses of Parliament and announced the Royal Assent to the Bill of Attainder, as Henry was too ill to attend in person. The last legal hurdles before the father’s execution had been jumped. For Norfolk, still in the Tower, it seemed only a matter of hours or days before his own lonely march to the scaffold. At least he was relatively comfortable, lodged in the Constable’s apartments. The accounts of Walter Stonor, the Lieutenant of the Tower, for 12 December to 6 February show £210 (£56,000 in today’s money) spent on the board and lodging of the duke and his attendants, including the cost of coals and candles.78
Away from the drama and excitements of this intense jockeying for power and position within the court, as the king’s health slowly worsened, at least a public face of normality was being maintained by other members of the royal family.
Edward dutifully wrote to his father from Hertford on 10 January, thanking him for his New Year’s gift and promising to follow his example in ‘virtue, wisdom and piety’.79 He also politely wrote to the queen and to Princess Mary, thanking them for their presents – Katherine’s was a miniature portrait of Henry and herself. She was
gratified by his appreciation of her little … gift, hoping that he will meditate upon the distinguished deeds of his father, whose portrait he is so pleased to have, and to consider [Henry’s] rare virtues, whenever he should examine it, with rare attention.80
Edward also wrote belatedly (on 24 January) to Archbishop Cranmer, thanking him for his present of a cup, which bore testimony ‘that his loving godfather wishes him many happy years’ and for his letters exhorting him to the study of good, no doubt Protestant, literature ‘which may be useful to him in manhood’.81