Henry VIII's Last Victim (11 page)

The gravelled ground, with sleeves tied on the helm,

On foaming horse, with swords and friendly hearts,

With cheer as though the one should overwhelm,

Where we have fought and chased oft with darts.

With silver drops the meads yet spread for ruth,

In active games of nimbleness and strength

Where we did strain, trailed by swarms of youth,

Our tender limbs, that yet shot up in length.

. . . .

The wild forest, the clothed holts with green,

With reins availed and swift y’breathed horse,

With cry of hounds and merry blasts between,

Where we did chase the fearful hart a force.

At night, exhausted, they would hang up their spurs and retire to their shared chamber, where they would talk together frankly and freely:

The secret thoughts imparted with such trust,

The wanton talk, the diverse change of play,

The friendship sworn, each promise kept so just,

Wherewith we passed the winter nights away.
²⁸

It is hard to imagine a more intimate evocation of friendship in any period, let alone the Tudor age, when such glimpses are rarely afforded.

Surrey composed his poem at a later, uncertain time, when Windsor had become a ‘cruel prison’ and Richmond had been tragically taken from him. He wrote with the conviction that the core values that defined his and Richmond’s sense of honour were being undermined by the arrivistes of the Court. Surrey’s poem is an elegy, whereby the Windsor of his ‘childish years’ is viewed through a rosy gauze as an idyll, a ‘place of bliss’, a haven ‘where all my freedom grew’. His recollections are idealistic and selective. He provides us with no scenes from the classroom. We hear nothing of the sudden death from the plague of his elder sister Katherine.
²⁹
Nor does he mention the frequent visits of Henry VIII and his Court, or the day in August 1531 when Catherine of Aragon, who was staying at Windsor with her daughter Princess
Mary, received a brutal message from the King ordering her out of the castle. Henry VIII was arriving there shortly with Anne Boleyn and Catherine, the message demanded, was to depart forthwith to The More while Mary was to ride to Richmond.
³⁰
Catherine would never see her daughter again. Surrey would have been a witness to her distress, but there is no sign of this dark cloud in his Windsor poem. Instead, all is wonderful and playful, innocent and brilliant. In Surrey and Richmond’s Windsor even complaints are ‘pleasant’ and sighs ‘easy’. It is as if they were living in a parallel universe, where nothing and no one could touch them.

But is it too good to be true? How much of the actuality of life has Surrey rendered in his art? Has he portrayed real events as he remembered them, or has he, as his nineteenth-century French biographer, Edmond Bapst, believed, composed ‘un tableau tout imaginaire’?
³¹
Poetry cannot be examined with the forensic tools that can be applied to other historical sources. We can affirm that Surrey and Richmond both loved hunting and military training, that they were at Windsor together (though Surrey occasionally returned to Kenninghall and Richmond sometimes travelled to his father’s other residences) and that there were ladies at Windsor who the pubescent boys would have seen. But we cannot verify Surrey’s memories with precision. We might speculate that they could have happened as he described them, give or take a few rhetorical flourishes, or we may conclude that they are too epic in scale and too sentimental to belong to the realm of fact.

But therein lies the beauty of Surrey’s art. The moment it is subjected to cross-reference, broken down and scrutinised, the essence of that beauty is undermined. Surrey’s tableau,
tout imaginaire
or not, is how he chose to remember his time at Windsor. It represents, if not the truth, then a distillation of a certain kind of truth, a poetic truth: a truth about the speaker. It reveals Surrey’s tastes and values, his aspirations and ideals. He was reviving the past in an attempt to distract himself from the present. Just as in the poem cited in the previous chapter, where Surrey’s speaker wants to trudge to every little boy and tell them that their childhood is their happiest time, so here Surrey marvels with hindsight at the innocence and vitality of youth. It is intentionally idealistic, a reaction to the cynicism and pragmatism of the Court, a defence of an ideology that he held, and still holds, dear.

It has been suggested that Surrey’s elegy can also be read as a love poem.
³²
He adopts romantic language and applies Chaucerian subtexts
in order to convey the strength of his feelings for Richmond. He wants to express the power of their ‘sweet accord’ and emphasise the uniqueness of a relationship that transcended all others. This sentiment is extremely powerful and very real. Surrey longed for close companionship and a friendship based on trust and mutual attraction, not kinship or service. His exultation at finding a soulmate, an alter ego, is contrasted with his isolation and pain at his subsequent separation from Richmond – ‘Give me account where is my noble fere
^fn6
. . . To other lief,
^fn7
but unto me most dear.’ Surrey defined himself in terms of his relationship with Richmond; together they were Priam’s sons whose destiny was intertwined and even in his last portrait, Surrey chose to depict his friend alongside him. His poetry, here and elsewhere, provides us with one more dialectic of the past and in many ways it tells us more about him, and with greater authenticity, than a letter or a chronicle or an ambassador’s observation ever could.

In the late spring of 1532 Surrey, now fifteen, sat to the great Court portraitist Hans Holbein. The final oil painting has not survived, but the preparatory drawing has and now forms part of the Royal Collection at Windsor (plate 4). Surrey is sketched on pink paper in coloured chalks, reinforced by pen and ink. His face, framed by a high-necked lace collar, is the same oval shape as his father’s, but he has inherited the lighter colouring of his mother. Under his plumed hat, Surrey’s fine, auburn hair is cut into a very correct pudding-bowl style. He is an attractive, almost cherubic boy, with hazel eyes and full, pink lips, but he appears awkward and apprehensive. And well he might, for it is likely that this drawing was the preliminary study for a portrait intended to commemorate a very special event: the wedding of the Earl of Surrey to Lady Frances de Vere.
³³

After Richmond had become engaged to Mary Howard, Surrey inherited the mantle of England’s most eligible bachelor. His marriage was big business and, true to form, the Duke of Norfolk determined to make as much political and financial capital out of it as possible. At first he angled for the greatest catch of them all, Princess Mary, Henry VIII’s only legitimate child. As with his daughter’s marriage, Norfolk was assisted and guided by the hand of Anne Boleyn, who saw Surrey as a way of absorbing the threat posed by Mary Tudor to herself and
her future children. ‘I have just heard from a very good source,’ Eustace Chapuys revealed to Emperor Charles V on 8 October 1529, ‘that this King is so blindly and passionately fond of his Anne that he has, at her persuasion, consented to treat of a marriage between the Princess Mary his daughter, and the son of the Duke of Norfolk.’
³⁴

A couple of months later, though, Anne changed her mind. Under no circumstance, she now resolved, should Surrey be permitted to marry Mary. Her volte-face probably stemmed from her distrust of Norfolk. She realised that her wily uncle would only support her for as long as she offered the most attractive path to Howard advancement. If Surrey married Mary, then Norfolk would have a very strong incentive to uphold the Princess’ legitimacy and defend Henry VIII’s marriage to Catherine of Aragon. Her suspicions were well founded. On 13 December 1529 Chapuys confided in Charles V that he had ‘no doubt’ that Norfolk could be won over to Catherine’s side ‘by means of some promise of help and assistance in the marriage of his son to Princess Mary’. The match, Chapuys continued, ‘is so much spoken of here that I consider myself perfectly justified to urge it on by pointing out the mutual advantages to be derived from it, as well as the troubles and anxieties it would remove.’
³⁵

The following month Chapuys was more blunt. ‘I told him plainly,’ he wrote, that a future marriage between Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn would be ‘more detrimental to him than to anyone else, for it was generally reported that the King wished to marry the Princess to his eldest son, who would then, for want of male issue, become the heir to the throne.’ By now, though, Norfolk had bowed to Anne’s wishes. He was well aware of his niece’s influence over the King and the fate of his father-in-law had taught him the folly of venturing too close to the throne. So he backtracked, protesting to Chapuys that the rumours of his son’s marriage to Mary Tudor were ‘pure invention’. ‘Such a thought,’ he added, ‘had never entered his mind and he would much prefer to see his son drowned than to have him in such a position.’
³⁶
Anne was not content with mere denials. On 13 February 1532, in order ‘to remove all suspicion of his aiming at a marriage between his son and the Princess’, Norfolk affianced Surrey to Lady Frances de Vere.
³⁷

Chapuys was not at all impressed with Norfolk’s choice of daughter-in-law: ‘The Duke must have had very urgent reasons for acting thus . . . the Lady is neither rich nor a very desirable alliance otherwise.’
³⁸
In fact Lady Frances de Vere had impeccable credentials. She was the daughter of John, fifteenth Earl of Oxford, by his second wife Elizabeth Trussel. Oxford, ‘a man of valour and authority’, came from ancient noble stock; he had a strong landed interest and, as hereditary Lord Great Chamberlain of England, he held considerable sway at Court.
³⁹
On 13 February 1532 the deal was struck. According to sixteenth-century custom, the bride’s father had to provide her with a marriage portion, or dowry, which she would surrender to the groom. In return, his family would bestow on the couple a landed settlement, customarily ten per cent of the total dowry, the income from which would form the bride’s ‘jointure’ or living should she survive her husband. A thousand marks (just over £666) was considered a generous dowry in this period for the daughter of a nobleman.
⁴⁰
Frances was endowed with four times that sum, two hundred marks to be paid on the day of the marriage, and the rest in regular instalments. In return, Norfolk promised to settle on the couple lands that yielded a yearly rent of £300. The stakes were high. This was not a marriage that could be allowed to fail.
⁴¹

Nevertheless Norfolk was at pains to assure Chapuys that, had his hand had not been forced, he would not have betrothed his son to Frances ‘even had she thirty thousand crowns more revenue than she actually had’.
⁴²
The Howards and the de Veres had a long and chequered past and, although there was a tradition of mutual dependence and intermarriage between them, there was also a history of conflict. They had fought on opposing sides during the Wars of the Roses and it had been John de Vere, the thirteenth Earl of Oxford, who had slain Surrey’s great-grandfather at Bosworth. Norfolk’s half-sister, Anne, had been married to the fourteenth Earl of Oxford, but he had treated her so appallingly that in 1524 Wolsey had ordered him to handle her ‘lovingly, familiarly and kindly’.
⁴³
On the Earl’s death two years later his cousin, Surrey’s future father-in-law, became the fifteenth Earl and immediately broke the terms of Anne’s jointure. With a mob of five hundred armed retainers, Oxford had rampaged through her lands and slaughtered over a hundred of her deer. After a week of escalating intimidation, she had written to Wolsey in despair: he ‘hath broken up my house, and beaten my servants, and taken all my goods.’
⁴⁴
Expelled from her lands, Anne had sought refuge at Tendring Hall, where she became a permanent, if rather forlorn feature of the Howard household.

Norfolk and Oxford also clashed over religion. While Norfolk, the
foremost Catholic peer in the country, was committed to the defence of traditionalism, Oxford fully embraced the beliefs that were flooding in from the Continent. He patronised several evangelical writers and his personal troupe of actors regularly performed plays designed to popularise the reformers’ programme.
⁴⁵

Surrey and Frances had little say in the matter of their marriage. Their paths had probably crossed before – the de Veres had attended the Flodden Duke’s funeral and the Howard household books reveal occasional visits from de Vere family members – but it is unlikely that the two children would have made more than a passing acquaintance. Not that it mattered. Love and mutual attraction were luxuries that few aristocratic families could afford. With luck, such feelings would develop but, as one contemporary put it, the tradition was to ‘marry first, and love after by leisure’.
⁴⁶

When Surrey caught his first glimpse of Frances in her bridal attire (probably a colourful gown, the ‘white wedding’ being an eighteenth-century innovation), with her hair covered in jewels and flowers and hanging loose to symbolise her virginity, he may have mused that he could have done far worse. The Holbein drawing of Frances (plate 5), almost certainly produced at the same time as that of Surrey, reveals an attractive young lady. She was the same age as her groom and had lovely brown eyes with long lashes and a sweet, snub nose. But her clenched jaw and clasped hands betray her anxiety and her nervous, somewhat dazed, expression is very similar to Surrey’s own.