Henry VIII's Last Victim (22 page)

One day, within the confines of the Court, someone said something that offended Surrey. Unwinding like a tightly coiled spring, he struck the man in the face. Despite a persistent and groundless tradition that the recipient of Surrey’s blow was Queen Jane’s brother, Edward Seymour, the only reference that so much as hints at his identity comes from Surrey’s sister Mary. She later claimed that ever since this incident, Surrey harboured a mortal grudge against ‘all’ the ‘new men’ of the Court.
⁵⁰
This hardly narrows the field. In Surrey’s opinion anyone who lacked noble blood was a new man. But he did reserve special venom for Cromwell and his cronies, the newest of the new men, and it is possible that the victim of Surrey’s assault came from that camp. If one is looking for candidates, then Thomas Pope seems the most likely. He had taken his allegation of misconduct against Norfolk right up to the Lord Chancellor and, even when it was dismissed, he refused to give it up. Ten years later he would repeat the same charge.
⁵¹

Whoever it was that provoked Surrey, he could be satisfied that his taunt had elicited the desired response. Shedding blood within the confines of the Court disturbed the King’s Peace and was punishable by the loss of the right hand. A team of ten men was required for the operation and it had to be administered according to strict protocol:

First, the sergeant surgeon with his instrument appertaining to his office; the sergeant of the woodyard with the mallet and a block whereupon the hand should lie; the master-cook for the King, with the knife; the sergeant of the larder, to set the knife right on the joint; the sergeant ferrer with his searing irons to sear the veins; the sergeant of the poultry, with a cock, which cock should have his head smitten off upon the same block and with the same knife; the yeoman of the chandry, with sear cloths; the yeoman of the scullery, with a pan of fire to heat the irons, a chafer of water to cool the ends of the irons, and two formes
^fn4
for all officers to set their stuff on; the sergeant of the cellar, with wine, ale and beer; the [sergeant] of the ewery . . . with basin, ewer and towels. Thus every man in his office ready to do the execution.
⁵²

It was a sentence designed to mete out pain and shame in equal measure, for a man was no use to anyone if he could not hold his sword. On 8 August 1537 Norfolk wrote to Cromwell from the North about ‘the multitude of pricks of agony that are in my heart’, the chief being the thought of Surrey being ‘maimed of his right arm’.
⁵³
He begged Cromwell to show his letter to the King and to plead for his case. Norfolk’s tone was sufficiently subservient. Surrey did not go under the knife. Instead he was banished to Windsor Castle, where he was left to ruminate over the folly of his deed.

It was during this rustication that Surrey is thought to have composed two elegiac poems. Both expose the ephemerality of life by contrasting the present Windsor of 1537 to the earlier Windsor of his ‘childish years’ with Richmond. Then, as we have seen, it was the scene of adolescent delight, the setting for a constant round of tennis, jousting, hunting, dancing and flirting, all invested with ‘lust and joy’. Above all, it was the site of an intimate bond forged in accordance with the code of chivalry: ‘the friendship sworn, each promise kept so just’. Now Surrey surveys the ‘large green courts’, the ‘gravelled ground’, the ‘secret groves’ and the ‘wild forest’ and ‘each sweet place returns a taste full sour’. Windsor has become a ‘cruel prison’; its ‘void walls’ loom over him. The memory of his fellowship with Richmond haunts him until ‘the blood forsakes my face / the tears berayne my cheek of deadly hue’. Finally, the poet Earl can restrain his awkward grief no more. In an anguished apostrophe, he cries out,

O place of bliss, renewer of my woes,

Give me account where is my noble fere,
^fn5

Whom in thy walls thou didst each night enclose,

To other lief,
^fn6
but unto me most dear.

Only the walls are listening and they amplify Surrey’s grief:

Each stone, alas, that doth my sorrow rue,

Returns thereto a hollow sound of plaint.

Thus I alone, where all my freedom grew,

In prison pine with bondage and restraint.

And with remembrance of the greater grief,

To banish the less I find my chief relief.
⁵⁴

But there can be no relief. The lyrical Richmond created by Surrey transcended time, defining both past and present. Richmond alive embodied Surrey’s happiness, his innocence and his ‘freedom’, literally in the sense of liberty, but also according to the early definition of the term: nobility. Richmond dead personified Surrey’s sorrow, his disenchantment and his ‘bondage’, both as a prisoner within Windsor and as a nobleman whose sense of honour – his ‘freedom’ – was steadily being constricted. Surrey now lives in a world where his kinsmen are persecuted by a paranoid king, a world where his father has to sacrifice his word – the most precious asset of any aristocrat – in order to dupe a crowd of rebels, a world where noblemen crouch and fawn to base-born upstarts. This is a world turned upside down, where it is possible for a tradesman’s son to become a Knight of the Most Noble Order of the Garter. Thomas Cromwell’s installation took place at Windsor on 26 August 1537 and it is perfectly possible that Surrey witnessed the procession to St George’s Chapel from his window.
⁵⁵
‘Remembrance of the greater grief’ of Richmond’s death, then, only intensified Surrey’s sense of thraldom within Windsor and within society at large.

The ‘Windsor Elegy’, as it is known, is commonly regarded as Surrey’s first poem. Described as ‘the first great elegy in modern English’,
⁵⁶
it is wrought in a new verse form – the heroic quatrain. Each stanza of four pentameter lines, rhyming
abab
,
cdcd
etc., lends the poem an epic quality that succeeds in restoring to Richmond some of the dignity of
which his wretched death and hurried burial had deprived him. At the same time Surrey injects his verse with a note of pathos and subjectivity never previously realised by an English elegy.

In a second poem, also thought to date from his confinement, Surrey furnishes the sonnet, recently imported from Italy by Sir Thomas Wyatt, with a new rhyme scheme –
ababcdcdefefgg
. This form, so suited to English with its comparative scarcity of collective rhyming words, was subsequently adopted by Shakespeare and so masterful was his handling of it that it is often referred to as the ‘Shakespearian sonnet’. But it was the twenty-year-old Surrey’s creation.

The scene opens with the poet leaning over the castle parapet in a conventional melancholic pose. As the speaker surveys the view, he observes the natural harmony of the landscape until a dramatic break in the sixth line forces his thoughts inward. Fond memories of his ‘rakehell life’ with Richmond stir pain within his heart. He tries to suppress his grief in conformity with society’s attitude to mourning, but emotion breaks out ‘against my will’. Yet it is only in the last, abrupt line that the reader is presented with the full extent of the poet’s torment:

When Windsor walls sustained my wearied arm,

My hand my chin, to ease my restless head,

Each pleasant plot revested green with warm,

The blossomed boughs with lusty Ver
^fn7
y’spread,

The flowered meads, the wedded birds so late

Mine eyes discovered. Then did to mind resort

The jolly woes, the hateless short debate,

The rakehell life that longs to love’s disport.

Wherewith, alas, mine heavy charge of care

Heaped in my breast brake forth against my will,

And smoky sighs that overcast the air.

My vapoured eyes such dreary tears distil

The tender spring to quicken where they fall,

And I half bent to throw me down withal.
⁵⁷

^fn1
She was the daughter of Henry VIII’s elder sister Margaret (the widow of James IV of Scotland) by her second marriage to Archibald Douglas, Earl of Angus. Lady Margaret was born in England in 1515 and spent the next two years there before being taken to Scotland. She returned to England in 1528 and from 1530 lived ‘like a queen’s daughter’ in the households of Princesses Mary and Elizabeth. Lady Margaret’s son, Henry Darnley, would eventually marry Mary, Queen of Scots and father James I of England and VI of Scotland.

^fn2
ruth
: pity.

^fn3
The Statute of Uses (27 Hen. VIII, c. 10) was unpopular because it legislated against the common recourse to uses, or trusts, as a way of evading feudal obligations and the rules of primogeniture.

^fn4
formes
: tables.

^fn5
fere
: companion.

^fn6
lief
: beloved.

^fn7
Ver
: Spring.

8

EN FAMILLE

FORTUNATELY FOR THE
House of Howard, for Surrey’s friends and admirers and for the future of English poetry, Surrey did not leap to his death from the parapet of Windsor Castle. His exile was over by 6 October 1537, when Norfolk wrote to Cromwell requesting permission for himself and Surrey, whom he had arranged to meet at Ware, to come to Court.
¹
Queen Jane was due to give birth and Norfolk wanted to make sure that both he and Surrey would be close to the King for the happy event. On 12 October two thousand salvoes were fired from the Tower of London, a High Mass was sung at St Paul’s, bonfires were lit throughout the city and wine and ale flowed freely in the streets. Jane had given birth to a boy.

Three days later the new heir was christened Edward in the King’s Chapel at Hampton Court. The ceremony was attended by all the great estates of the realm and the Duke of Norfolk stood at the font as the Prince’s godfather.
²
But Surrey was conspicuously absent, his presence at Hampton Court probably deemed inappropriate on account of his recent disgrace there. Within a fortnight the nation’s celebrations turned to mourning as the Queen succumbed to a fever and died in her birthing chamber. On Monday, 12 November Surrey was called to attend her funeral as one of ‘the six assistants about the corpse and chair’.
³
Thereafter he returned to East Anglia.

The next few years of Surrey’s life are as frustrating for his biographer as they must have been for him. He pops up from time to time in the chronicles, usually in reference to some local administration or Court ceremonial, but more often than not, the records are silent as to his activities. Surrey was in thrall to his family’s fortunes. When the Howards
were in favour, so was he. When they were not, he was underemployed and unwelcome at Court. Thomas Cromwell remained very much in the ascendant and, according to the French ambassador, succeeded in blocking the Duke of Norfolk’s access to the King until the spring of 1538.
⁴

Surrey kept his head down for most of this year. He was in London in November 1538, when he dined on four separate occasions at Beauchamplace, the Seymour residence on the Strand,
^fn1
but on the whole he remained in the country, where he was engaged, as a Commissioner of the Sewers, in the maintenance of the watercourses in Norfolk. Occasionally he assisted his father in his ducal business. On 20 September, for example, he oversaw the surrender of the house, church, lands and possessions of the Grey Friars of Norwich.
⁵

During this period – indeed all his life – Surrey was short of ready money. As the son of the richest nobleman in England, he had a duty to display magnificence, but he seems to have used this as justification for reckless extravagance. He spent vast sums on the maintenance of his image, be it on hunting parties, portraits by the King’s artists or, later, on the gorgeous tapestries and furniture that adorned his new home in Norwich. An inventory of his possessions taken on his death reveals a substantial wardrobe, including ‘a hat of crimson satin and crimson velvet with a white feather’, ‘a pair of hose of black velvet laid on with threads of Venice gold’, ‘a doublet of orange velvet embroidered with white satin and silver’ and ‘a gown of cloth of gold furred and faced with sables’.
⁶
Evidently this last item raised eyebrows; in a cryptic list of memoranda drawn up at the time of Surrey’s fall, there is one entry concerning ‘my Lord of Surrey’s pride and his gown of gold’.
⁷

Surrey also fraternised with London’s high-rolling gambling set and was probably, like his father, ‘a great player’.
⁸
One can imagine Norfolk’s restraint, his steady head and inscrutable countenance proving useful at the dicing and carding tables. Surrey’s impulsiveness and inability to dissemble, on the other hand, could hardly have served him well. He could be generous to a fault. When Sir Edward Wotton’s son showed an interest in one of his horses, Surrey immediately handed it over and
promised to send a better one shortly. When he later commanded the King’s army in France, Surrey used his own purse to augment the meagre wages of some of the soldiers and, when one of his servants died, the man’s will revealed that he owed the Earl £200.
⁹
This was money Surrey could ill afford. Despite a sizeable income from his marriage settlement and an allowance from his father, he was almost constantly in debt and had to rely on loans from local dignitaries and even his own servants.
¹⁰
It was surely for this reason that Surrey and his wife Frances continued to reside at Kenninghall. It was hardly an ideal situation. Not only was his father’s mistress, Bess Holland, ensconced as the lady of the house, but Surrey’s sister Mary was also there.