Henry VIII's Last Victim (35 page)

If all this appears too circumstantial, then there is firmer evidence of Surrey’s evangelical commitment. The Imperial ambassador Eustace Chapuys, who was well informed on such matters, reported that Surrey, Wyatt and Pickering were ‘suspected of professing Lutheranism, to
which heretical sect the above-mentioned Earl is said to belong’.
⁵³
Surrey’s faith had recently been encouraged by his friend’s father, the poet Sir Thomas Wyatt, whose paraphrases of the seven penitential psalms had endorsed the evangelical message – ‘For lo, thou loves the truth of inward heart / Which yet doth live in my fidelity’; ‘thou delights not in no such gloze / Of outward deed as men dream and devise’; ‘Inward Zion, the Zion of the ghost / Of heart’s Jerusalem’. In Surrey’s opinion, Wyatt’s psalms taught ‘the lively faith and pure’.
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One of them may even have been dedicated to him. Inserted in the Arundel Harington Manuscript, just after Wyatt’s paraphrase of psalm 37 and presumably before another psalm, now missing, is a
strambotto
that is commonly thought to be addressed to the Earl:

Sometime the pride of my assured truth

Contemned all help of God and eke of man.

But when I saw man blindly how he go’th

In deeming hearts, which none but God there can,

And his dooms hid, whereby man’s malice grow’th,

Mine Earl
, this doubt my heart did humble then,

For error so might murder innocents.

Then sang I thus in God my confidence.
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On 11 October 1542, as Surrey was marching towards the Scottish border, Sir Thomas Wyatt died. Surrey was distraught and composed several poems lamenting his death. In the sonnet beginning ‘Diverse thy death do diversely bemoan’, he pictures himself kissing the ground where Wyatt’s body lay and weeping tears of true love ‘as Pyramus did on Thisbe’s breast bewail’.
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In another, Surrey defends his excessive grief. ‘In the rude age,’ he begins, ‘when science was not so rife’, pagans erected temples in honour of those who ‘taught / Arts to revert to profit of our life’. Enlightened Christians eschew purgatory and prayers for the dead, but, Surrey argues, they can hardly be blamed for remembering Wyatt, who gave the greatest lesson of all:

In days of truth if Wyatt’s friends then wail

(the only debt that dead of quick may claim)

That rare wit spent employed to our avail

Where Christ is taught, deserve they monnis blame?
⁵⁷

Surrey’s longer elegy on Wyatt, wrought in the heroic quatrains that he had invented for the Duke of Richmond, lauds the late poet as an exemplar of virtue and, in the last lines, as a Christian gospeller, selflessly dedicated to the promotion of the godly commonwealth:

But to the heavens that simple soul is fled,

Which left with such as covet Christ to know

Witness of faith that never shall be dead;

Sent for our health, but not received so.

Thus, for our guilt, this jewel have we lost.

The earth his bones, the heavens possess his ghost.
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Surrey’s implication in these lines is that God took Wyatt from his countrymen as a punishment for their sins. Yet there is hope. Wyatt bequeathed his psalm paraphrases to his evangelical brethren; they are a ‘witness of faith’, a faith everlasting, a faith that true Christians will continue to uphold.

Within weeks of Wyatt’s death, the antiquarian John Leland published his
Naeniae
(‘funeral songs’) in honour of the late poet. He dedicated them to ‘the most learned and most noble young Earl of Surrey’. One, entitled
Unicus Phoenix
, called on Surrey to continue the work of his predecessor:

The world a single Phoenix can contain,

And when one dies, another one is born.

When Wyatt, that rare bird, was taken away

By death, he gave us Howard as his heir.
⁵⁹

It was a calling that Surrey chose to interpret in terms of religion as well as poetry. He would strive to emulate Wyatt and produce works that would stand as a ‘witness of faith’. Thus, after praising Wyatt’s psalms in another poem written around this time, Surrey exhibited his fidelity by warning contemporary rulers of ‘God’s scourge’ and praying that they might ‘awake out of their sinful sleep’.
⁶⁰
Surrey’s apocalyptic, threatening language chimes with that of his London satire. There he made a point of bewailing the heedlessness of Londoners; goodly preachers were, like Wyatt, ‘sent for our health, but not received so’. Unlike his Wyatt elegy, Surrey’s London satire was not published, but
nor was it kept secret. It is an epideictic poem modelled along the lines of a judicial oration, which Surrey dedicated to a public figure, Sir Nicholas Poyntz, and it would resurface three years later when he once again faced investigation.
⁶¹

Surrey’s Wyatt poems identify the speaker as a member of the evangelical brethren – ‘with such as covet Christ’; in his London satire he acts as God’s spokesman. In terms of faith, though not of politics, the son of the foremost Catholic peer in England had proudly and defiantly declared his allegiance to the Opposition.

Henry VIII proved remarkably forgiving. It can be assumed that Surrey was free by 11 May 1543, when he was appointed to the Commission of the Peace for Norfolk.
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The King probably dismissed the rampage as a London matter of little import. He did not even seem unduly concerned by the stories of Surrey’s allegedly royal coat of arms or the loose talk about the succession. Not yet, anyway.

We can only guess at the Duke of Norfolk’s reaction to Surrey’s behaviour. In public he remained tight-lipped. But his son had declared himself a reformer. He had suffered three imprisonments in six years. He had rebelled openly against authority and displayed little contrition thereafter. Surrey seemed to be systematically destroying all the props that defined him as a scion of the Howards. He had come a long way from the dutiful heir praised by the French princes for his ‘wisdom and soberness’. On Surrey’s shoulders rested the future of the House of Howard. Norfolk had already shown that he was willing to destroy Court rivals and sacrifice two nieces and countless cousins for this cause. It remained to be seen if, or for how much longer, he would continue to tolerate his son’s excesses.

^fn1
This is a reminder to the Council that Surrey had recently been installed as a Knight of the Order of the Garter.

^fn2
James’ mother Margaret was Henry VIII’s elder sister. She had married James IV of Scotland in 1503.

^fn3
In all likelihood the arms were Surrey’s own. The Howards were entitled to bear the arms of Thomas of Brotherton – three white lions with three silver labels. This bearing was similar to, but not the same as, the King’s, though it is easy to see how a maidservant, unversed in heraldry, could have confused the two.

PART THREE

WAR

12

NOBLE HEART

ON 11 FEBRUARY
1543 a secret treaty between Henry VIII and the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V was signed. On 27 May Surrey was present at Hampton Court to witness Henry VIII’s pledge to honour the treaty and just under a month later, on 22 June 1543, an Anglo-Imperial intimation of war was presented to the French ambassador.
¹

The Emperor Charles V and Francis I of France were natural foes. As respective heads of the houses of Habsburg and Valois, they fought each other for land, especially in Northern Italy, for honour and for the ultimate ascendancy of Europe. Despite Henry VIII’s best efforts, England could not compete directly with these two superpowers. When, as had happened during 1538 and 1539, Charles and Francis joined forces, England became, in the words of Thomas Wriothesley, ‘but a morsel among these choppers’.
²
But such unions rarely lasted long and Henry’s decisions were sometimes pivotal in upsetting the balance of power. By the summer of 1542 Francis and Charles were once again in open conflict and for the rest of the year Henry found himself in the glorious position of being courted by both rulers.

Despite past clashes with Charles, Henry’s instinct was always to oppose Francis. Their relationship was characterised by an intense personal rivalry and Henry made no secret of his desire to emulate his ancestors, especially Henry V, and revive the ancient English claim to suzerainty over France. In the first two decades of his reign, Henry had launched two major expeditions into France, neither with much lasting success. Since then Francis had kept him at bay with an annual pension, but he frequently defaulted on the payments and by 1543 he owed arrears of a million crowns. At the beginning of 1543, in retaliation
for Henry’s seizure of some French pirate ships in the Channel, Francis arrested all English merchant ships in French ports. This act of aggression, along with Francis’ ‘auld alliance’ with Scotland and his new amity with the Turks, meant that Henry had few qualms about allying with Charles. In 1543 Henry was entering his fifty-third year and, on 12 July, he married his sixth wife, Catherine Parr. War with France provided one more chance, maybe his last, to honour the pledge he had made in 1512, ‘not merely to equal but indeed to exceed the glorious deeds of his ancestors’.
³

For the twenty-six-year-old Surrey the war presented a similar prize. ‘My kind,’ he had announced in his beast fable, ‘is to desire the honour of the field’ – and there was no better field than that of France. According to Thomas Churchyard, ‘he was counted nobody that had not been known to be at some valiant enterprise.’
⁴
Here was Surrey’s chance to be a somebody, or rather, to gain renown rather than notoriety. Finally he had an opportunity to prove himself worthy of the name of Howard and relieve the burden that weighed so heavily on his shoulders.

The Anglo-Imperial treaty pledged an ambitious plan. A two-pronged invasion of France would be mounted the following year. The English would march from Calais in the north and Charles’ army from the Low Countries in the east. Both would then drive towards Paris. In the interim, Henry agreed to assist Charles in checking French expansionism in the Low Countries. At the end of July 1543 a force of around six thousand men led by Sir John Wallop crossed the Channel and marched towards Landrecy, a town on the Sambre that had been taken by the French the previous month. Surrey begged the King for permission to join them. Twenty years earlier, when the Scots had been threatening England’s borders, Surrey’s father had written to Wolsey in exasperation:

God knoweth, if the poorest gentleman in the King’s house were here, and I at London and were advertised of these news, I would not fail to kneel upon my knees before the King’s Grace to have licence to come hither in post to be at the day of battle. And if young noblemen and gentlemen be not desirous and willing to be at such journeys and to take the pain and give the adventure – and the King’s Highness well contented with those that will do so and not regarding others that will be but dancers, dicers and carders – His Grace shall not be well served when he would be. For men without experience shall do small service and experience of war will not be had without it be sought for and the adventure given.
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One can assume, therefore, that Norfolk heartily approved of his son’s volunteering. So too did Henry VIII, who was avuncular in his support. Not only did he grant Surrey the necessary licence to go overseas, but he also wrote a personal letter of recommendation to the Emperor: ‘Tres hault, tres excellent, et tres puissant Prince, nostre tres chier et tres ame frere et cousin,’ Henry addressed his ally from Woodstock on 1 October,

Our very dear and most beloved cousin the Earl of Surrey, Knight of our Order, has applied to us for permission to visit Your Majesty’s camp. This petition we have readily granted [so] that we may, through him, have news of your successes, which we hope will continue to be prosperous, [and] that he may at the same time acquire that experience in military affairs that will make him the true heir and successor of his ancestors.

We beg to recommend him most particularly to Your Imperial Majesty, praying you to order the captains and lieutenants of your army to help and assist in all things in which the said Earl may advance and improve his knowledge of military affairs.
⁶

Three days later the Earl of Surrey, flanked by Thomas Clere and George Blagge, joined the camp besieging Landrecy.

The siege was the favoured mode of warfare in this period. Pitched battles were occasionally still fought and lances were still levelled. Sir John Wallop had even attempted to revive the world of Froissart’s
Chronicles
on his march through France by challenging the garrisonners at Théouranne to break a staff ‘for their lady’s sake’.
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Increasingly, though, the enemy was the faceless foe beyond the trench and behind the gun. The changing nature of warfare was a result of developments in ballistics. Gunpowder had been around for some time but its full potential was only just being realised. Large guns and cannon were superior in range, shock and impact, if not yet in rate of fire, to traditional weaponry. The culverin, for example, weighed four thousand pounds, had a calibre of five-and-a-half inches and a range of four hundred and sixty yards when fired horizontally; at a ten-degree elevation the yardage was well over two thousand. It was cumbersome and slow but could smash through walls previously deemed impregnable. Other forms of artillery such as the falcon were lighter and could discharge up to one hundred and twenty rounds a day. By the end of his reign Henry VIII had over two thousand pieces
of artillery in his fortifications and a well-stocked arsenal at the Tower of London.
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