Henry VIII's Last Victim (40 page)

Swept away by the thrill of it all, Surrey sometimes took unnecessary risks. On 25 September the King’s Secretary William Paget wrote to him warning him not to ‘admit any light ruffians to be of counsel with you, or be persuaded by any of them to put yourself at any skirmish further in danger than were expedient either for the Earl of Surrey or the King’s Lieutenant there to enter into.’ Paget knew how to play on Surrey’s sense of honour. His letter was supremely tactful:

His Majesty thinketh your Lordship hath right well showed your courage and likewise your dexterity and wisdom and trusteth that, by over too great adventure, you will not commit anything that shall detract [from] that which is passed. You must now, my Lord, think that you are in every man’s eye. Men before this time hoped well of you and, by these your happy and wise proceedings, you have given them occasion to look for greater and better every day. . . Wherein fear not but you shall be able to answer to all.
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But neither this letter, nor another written two days later by the Duke of Norfolk, could temper Surrey’s zeal. On 6 November he was upbraided for venturing too close to the French lines. ‘The King’s Majesty,’ Surrey read, ‘took it in very ill part that ye should adventure your presence in
standing upon the bridge of the fortress for the better viewing of the same.’
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But even if the King was genuinely annoyed by Surrey’s ‘negligence’, he was heartened by his passion. Henry VIII and Surrey were at one in their vision for Boulogne. To them it was not a French town under English occupation, but an honourable conquest that had to be conserved. Henry called Boulogne ‘his daughter’ and Surrey was equally sentimental, referring to it as a ‘jewel’.
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Both were die-hard hawks, committed to further success in arms and desperate for lasting glory. So Surrey continued to send his jingoistic letters. Henry VIII, beguiled, spurred him on and Surrey wrote back, urging his King to share in the honour of the enterprise by coming in person: You should have seen, If only you could see, When you come soon you will see: the courage of your men, the desperation of the French, ‘how easy it is to keep the strait’. Each swept the other along upon a tide of hubris.

Practically everyone else touched by the war lamented its prolongation. Morale in the camp was very low. Those who had been in the garrison before Surrey’s arrival had not been paid for several months. Of the five thousand men that Surrey had brought over from England many, especially those from London, ‘who were delicate and disliked lying on the ground and on planks’, found the privations of war intolerable. According to Elis Gruffydd, who served in the Calais garrison and considered himself a hardened professional, the men who arrived from England at this time were a motley crew – ‘among them many a flatfooted, crooked ankled, squint-eyed, crooked shouldered, skew headed, unshapely man, unfit to carry arms; in fact many admitted they had never carried any.’
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As winter approached and the camp became colder, wetter and increasingly diseased, the mood of the men darkened. There were not even enough fresh supplies. According to Gruffydd, his colleagues in Boulogne had to rely on the mouldy old provisions of the King’s storehouses:

The bread was hard and baked with corn and meal, which had lost its taste and savour, and the salt beef stank when it was lifted out of the brine. The butter was of many colours and the cheese dry and hard, and this was the best they could get from the King’s stores, which made most of the soldiers miserable and reckless.
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To make matters worse, the foreign mercenaries, who formed an essential part of the Boulogne garrison, were paid more, and more regularly,
than the Englishmen. This caused considerable resentment. As Paget explained, an English horseman on a wage of ninepence a day, ‘if his horse is killed, is not able to buy another, and seeing a stranger have £3 a month, and he but 20 shillings, his heart is killed.’
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The mercenaries were an ongoing headache for Surrey. Whenever their high wage demands were not met, they threatened to up weapons and leave or, worse still, to join the French. If the majority of English complaints are to be credited, the mercenary captains were little more than conmen. They knew how to siphon and pilfer and embezzle. They concocted wild stories about how the King’s money had managed to go missing and, on occasion, they even held the King’s agents to ransom. ‘Happy is he that hath no need of Almains [Germans]’, Stephen Vaughn, the King’s financier, wrote from Antwerp, ‘for of all the nations under the heavens, they be the worst, most rudest and unreasonablest to deal withal.’ For Paget, the Italians were just as bad, if not worse, because they set such ‘naughty examples’ to the rest of the men. The English captains, Paget wrote despairingly, were now following them ‘in deceiving of the King’s Majesty in their musters and other encroachments of wages and polling and nipping of their poor soldiers’ wages’. The Italian proverb, he concluded sadly, ‘is now true’:
Ung Inglese Italianato e ung diavolo incarnato
.
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Surrey took his pastoral responsibilities very seriously and showed genuine concern for his men. His letters to the King and Council were full of enquiries into the wage and food situation. After the King had agreed to waive the customs duties on all the victuals entering Boulogne, Surrey wrote on behalf of his ‘poor men’ who still ‘complain they are much exacted by the customers’ and went on to request that ‘there may be redress had in that behalf accordingly’. Having noticed that the goods of his dead men were running ‘to the common sack and not to the heir’, he requested that a commissioner learned in the law be sent to supervise his men’s wills.
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Surrey also made a point of commending individuals for exceptional work, as the following extract from a letter to the King, dated 4 December 1545, illustrates:

I beseech Your Highness to be good and gracious Lord to this bearer, Mr Dudley, who, for his towardness and good will to serve hath few fellows in this town and hath a brother in the Old Man, a gentleman of as good a sort and as serviceable as I have much seen. Mr Arden also, both now and at sundry times for his service, hath deserved to be humble commended by me unto Your Majesty. Mr Adrian Poynings, I assure Your Majesty, is a man for his discretion and hardiness of great service.
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On 14 September Surrey wrote on behalf of Thomas Norwick of London and Richard Songar of Dover, whose supply boats had been captured by the French. In Surrey’s opinion each ‘poor man’ deserved ‘some reasonable recompense’. So did three ‘maimed men’ for whom Surrey wrote separate letters in February.
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He showed similar kindness to ‘poor Sir Andrew Flammock, whose service, as I observed in the town and field, hath been always of such sort, as me thinketh he hath well deserved to be defended from poverty now in his old days.’ Another case that received Surrey’s support was that of Sir Richard Wingfield. He had been held hostage by the French for seventeen months and ‘is now returned, ransomed so high, that scarce all that the poor gentleman hath to be sold will suffice to redeem him.’ Surrey’s concern here was not just for the individual. As he explained when he interceded for Wingfield, if the King would be gracious enough to show the man favour, the rest of the men shall be encouraged ‘to adventure their lives in the service of so noble and thankful a Prince as never yet left acceptable service unrewarded.’
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But no matter how hard Surrey tried to rally the troops, morale remained low. The tough conditions, the rotten food, even the unpaid wages might have been bearable had the men been stimulated by the cause. But there was little sense of this. Not even the garrisons at Calais and Guisnes were particularly supportive and Surrey had real difficulty gaining reinforcements from the commanders there.
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Back at home, Henry VIII’s financial impositions ensured that patriotic fervour was in short supply. ‘Touching the public opinion of the English regarding the war,’ the Imperial ambassador reported on 18 June 1545, ‘so far as I can learn – and I have heard it from innumerable people – there is not a soul with any wit in England who does not blaspheme at the war.’
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Around Henry VIII’s Council table the hostility to the retention of Boulogne was even greater. Just after the English had won the town, Paget had estimated that the cost of war for the next six months would be £90,000. In fact the military expenses for the year following Michaelmas 1544 amounted to £560,000 and the majority of this was spent on operations in France.
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Every source of revenue had been drained. Even the coinage was reminted with a lower precious metal content. On 11 November 1545 Lord Chancellor Wriothesley presented
Paget with a detailed assessment of the King’s finances. It made depressing reading. ‘If you tarry for more money to be sent to Boulogne at this time,’ he wrote, ‘you may percase tarry too long before you have the sum desired . . . I assure you, Master Secretary, I am at my wits’ end how we shall possibly shift for three months following, and specially for the two next. For I see not any great likelihood that any good sum will come in till after Christmas.’
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The Council implored their King to relinquish Boulogne. He would strike a very good peace deal, they argued, if only he agreed to put the town on the table. But Henry was immovable: ‘He had honourably won the place at the sword’s point and he meant to keep it.’
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There seemed to be only one possible way by which the King might be persuaded to abandon his dream, and that was through the mediation of his fellow-visionary, the Earl of Surrey. But hitherto Surrey had proved as blinkered and stubborn as his King, perhaps even more so.

Before he had completed even a month in Boulogne, Surrey had received a letter from his father warning him to ‘animate not the King too much for the keeping of Boulogne, for who so doth, at length shall get small thanks.’
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A month later, his letter having had no discernible effect, Norfolk resorted to other measures. Surrey had asked that Frances and the children be allowed to join him in Boulogne. Norfolk now sent a message to his son, informing him that his request had been denied. Norfolk also knew that Surrey was in financial straits and that he owed a lot of people a lot of money, including his own servant, Richard Fulmerston. On 26 October Norfolk’s treasurer, Thomas Hussey, sent Surrey a letter in which he detailed a conversation he had just had with the Duke. ‘What way,’ Norfolk had asked Hussey, ‘taketh my son for payment of his debts?’

‘I answered & saith “I know not”.

“Well,” quod he, “he oweth Fulmerston an honest sum, and what oweth he you?”

I answered: “so much as I can be content to forbear in respect of his necessity.”’

Norfolk had then enquired into a manor that Surrey had been licensed to sell two months earlier.
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Hussey warned Surrey that his father was prepared to ‘make some stop’ in order to sabotage the deal. Norfolk had also made it clear that he was no longer prepared to underwrite any of Surrey’s loans and that the provisions the Earl wanted for Surrey House ‘will not be attained at my Lord’s hand’. Hussey promised to
help by borrowing some money ‘upon my credit in this town’, but ‘to be plain with you, I cannot see how ye can both pay your whole debts and finance your necessities at the present.’ Just in case Surrey had not already guessed the reason for his father’s obstructiveness, Hussey made it perfectly clear: ‘by these means and others ye may be made weary of your will of Boulogne.’ Then, aware of the sensitive nature of the letter and the potential disaster that might ensue if it fell into the King’s hands, Hussey implored Surrey, ‘as my trust is in you, burn this letter’.
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Surrey clearly did not honour Hussey’s request.

Just eleven days later Norfolk felt the need to adopt a more direct approach. Once again, Thomas Hussey was the intermediary. On 6 November he wrote to Surrey:

I see my Lord’s Grace somewhat offended in seeing your private letters to the King’s Majesty of such vehemency as touching the animating of the King’s Majesty for the keeping of Boulogne and in especial considering his diverse letters addressed to your Lordship, to the which, as he thinketh, ye have given simple credence. For what His Grace and the rest of the Council worketh in for the rendry of Boulogne and the concluding of a peace in six days, ye with your letters set back in six hours, such importance be your letters in the King’s opinion at this time. Albeit that my Lord concludeth ye may, by your practices, sustain the same Boulogne for 2 or 3 months, yet he thinketh it impossible that it may continue 6 months, forasmuch as he certainly knoweth the realm of England not possible to bear the charges of the same.

Boulogne had to be abandoned. The King was in debt by four hundred thousand marks. ‘Every councillor saith “Away with it”; and the King and your Lordship saith “We will keep it”.’ Surrey would not, Hussey assured him, receive ‘any recompense out of the King’s coffers’ for his own expenses, but ‘if Boulogne be rendered’, then Norfolk would push hard for Surrey to be granted ‘either the Captainship of the Castle of Guisnes or the Deputyship of Calais’. Having proffered the carrot, Hussey then wielded the stick: ‘Assuring your Lordship that I heard my Lord say that he had rather bury you and the rest of his children before he should give his consent to the ruin of this realm, not doubting but that ye should be removed in spite of your head [obstinacy] work what ye could.’
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Here was the Duke of Norfolk unmasked. Surrey and his siblings were not indispensable. They could be sacrificed, as their cousins had been, for the greater good of the House of Howard. Surrey was useful only for as long
as he played the part of the dutiful heir. If he stepped out of line, or entertained ideas above his station, then he would be on his own.