Henry VIII's Last Victim (44 page)

15

MY FOOLISH SON’S DEMEANOUR

HENRY VIII’S NATURE
was such that some of his subjects were able to extricate themselves from positions of disfavour with a certain amount of politic handling. The old master of the game was the Duke of Norfolk, who had suffered temporary disgraces throughout his long life of service. The secret to clawing one’s way back was to absorb the King’s abuse, profess one’s innocence, make grand, and in Norfolk’s case oleaginous, protestations of loyalty and liaise with those in high favour.

Such tactics were especially requisite in 1546. The health of the King, who turned fifty-five in June, had deteriorated dramatically. The ulcers on his legs kept flaring up and throughout the year he was struck by a series of debilitating fevers. After each attack he would assure the foreign ambassadors that he was fully recovered, but his appearance revealed the lie.
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He was unable to climb stairs without the aid of a winching device and was frequently carried through his palaces on a velvet chair like some kind of living effigy. The lack of exercise led to further weight gain for a man already so fat in 1543 that it was said that ‘three of the biggest men that could be found could get inside his doublet’.
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Ambassadors gave regular updates on the King’s physical decline. They also noted his ‘continued melancholy’.
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It was apparent to all but perhaps Henry himself that he was coming to the end of his days. Nothing terrified him more than the prospect of his own mortality and he ‘was loath to hear any mention of death’.
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In 1540 he had been confident that ‘with God’s help’ he would leave his Kingdom ‘in as good case to his son as his father before left it unto him, and better’.
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Six years on and his coffers were empty, his Church was schismatic and his counsellors divided. Prince Edward, aged eight
at the beginning of 1546, was a long way off his majority. It was hardly a secure legacy and Henry grew increasingly fearful of threats to the succession, and correspondingly vulnerable to intrigue. Like the medlar fruit that he gorged upon at state banquets, Henry seemed only to ripen with his own corruption. As his physical health deteriorated, he evolved into the worst kind of tyrant: paranoid, vindictive, unpredictable and desperate to prove his ‘absolute power and independence of everyone’.
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Although he had put in an impressive performance at the prorogation of Parliament on Christmas Eve 1545, moving people to tears with his calls for ‘charity’, ‘Christian fraternity’ and ‘perfect love and concord’,
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the fissures that ran through his Court were largely of his own making. Sometimes he appeared to be toying with his factions, teasing them into thinking they had their victim, only to offer a last-minute reprieve. At other times it seemed that ‘the impressions privately given him by any court-whisperer were hardly or never to be effaced.’
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For the first half of 1546 the conservatives were on the offensive, searching out heretics ‘as well of the Court as of the City’.
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Some, including John Lascelles, the man who had uncovered Catherine Howard’s adultery in 1541, were burnt at the stake. Many more fled abroad to escape the same fate.
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But Henry did not allow the conservatives to have it all their own way. He foiled their plan to destroy Queen Catherine Parr
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– ‘Arrant knave! Beast and fool!’ he bellowed at Lord Chancellor Wriothesley when he arrived with an armed guard to arrest her
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– and he also extended his protection to his Privy Chamber companion, George Blagge.

Blagge, it will be remembered, was Surrey’s portly friend who had rebuked him for rampaging through London in 1543 and then accompanied him to the trenches of Landrecy. Blagge had been an ardent reformer then, and in the three years since, his commitment had crystallised. On 9 May 1546 he uttered some derisory comments about the Mass. Two months later he was arrested, arraigned for the heresy of denying the Real Presence in the Sacrament of the Altar and sentenced to death by burning. However, the King, ‘sore offended’ by the probing into his Privy Chamber, intervened to save Blagge, who received a full pardon on 17 July. ‘Ah! my pig,’ Henry exclaimed on Blagge’s return to Court; ‘Yea,’ Blagge replied, ‘if Your Majesty had not been better to me than your bishops were, your pig had been roasted ere this time.’
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Anne Askew was not so fortunate. In June she was arrested, arraigned and condemned without trial for the same sacramentarian heresy that had been levelled at Blagge. Still only in her twenties, Askew was a Lincolnshire gentlewoman who had been deliberately targeted because of her links with reformers at the heart of the Court. For the next two weeks she was interrogated and put to the rack – ‘a strange thing’, it was said, to be inflicted upon a woman of her status.
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Who shared her beliefs, Askew’s interrogators enquired; who supported her? The wives of some very powerful men were implicated. She admitted that a man in a blue coat had given her maid ten shillings and another, wearing a violet coat, had passed on a further eight. The former claimed to have been sent by the Countess of Hertford, the latter by Lady Denny, but ‘whether it were true or no, I cannot tell’. She refused to say any more, even when Richard Rich and Thomas Wriothesley rolled up their sleeves and turned the rack themselves.

Such was the climate at Court in 1546. The times, Paget later remembered, were ‘too straight’, for ‘then was it dangerous to do or speak though the meaning were not evil’.
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Surrey would have been advised, therefore, to be unobtrusive, circumspect and calm. But his father’s tactics were not his. Surrey returned to England with a point to prove. He was sensitive to any perceived slight and, after the King’s refusal to grant him an audience, he grew increasingly bitter. As ever, when he was feeling defensive he lashed out. Soon after his return from France he had a furious row with his old friend Blagge.

It began with a discussion about ‘the rule and government of the Prince’ in the event of the King’s death. Blagge envisaged a corporate regency government formed by men that Henry VIII ‘should specially thereunto appoint’. Surrey refused to accept this. His father, he announced, ‘was the meetest personage to be deputed to that room as well in respect of the good service that he had done as also for his estate’. The thought of a Catholic aristocrat dominating the kingdom was too much for the rotund reformer. ‘I trust never to see that day!’ Blagge squealed before launching into a savage attack on the Duke’s beliefs and the ‘evil’ influence he would have upon young Edward. ‘Rather than it should come to pass that the Prince should be under the government of your father or you,’ Blagge said as he reached for his scabbard, ‘I would bide the adventure to thrust this dagger in you.’ Surrey had no weapon at hand so he resorted to a proverb that his
father sometimes used to belittle the authority of his critics: ‘God sent a shrewd cow short horns.’
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Quick as a flash Blagge snorted ‘yea, my Lord, and I trust your horns also shall be kept so short as you shall not be able to do any hurt with them.’

Few men had the temerity to stand up to Surrey and fewer, if any, were able to better him in an argument. Surrey flounced off ‘in choler’, but there was no way he was going to let Blagge have the last word. According to the evangelical courtier Edward Rogers, who heard about it from Blagge himself, Surrey ‘put on his sword and dagger and came incontinent to seek Blagge at his own house’. He accused Blagge of being ‘very hasty with him’. ‘But as for the rest of that their second talk,’ Rogers added unhelpfully, ‘I do not call to remembrance.’
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Soon after, Surrey returned to Norfolk, where he was commissioned to collect taxes or, as it was euphemistically termed, ‘to assess a loving contribution to be given by the King’s subjects’.
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During this period, while her husband was tarrying at home ‘within a wall’, Frances became pregnant. But she could do little to mend Surrey’s hurt pride. His resentment festered throughout the spring and into the summer, when he ventured once again to Court.

Twice in July 1546 he looked back in anger at Boulogne. Hostilities between England and France had officially ceased in June on the signature of a treaty that stipulated the return of Boulogne to the French in eight years’ time upon the payment of a hefty indemnity. The peace owed much to Lord Admiral Dudley, Surrey’s old rival from the May tournament of 1540, who had replaced him as Lieutenant General upon the Sea in France. Not only had Dudley handled the peace negotiations alongside Seymour and Paget, but he had also been instrumental in setting the whole process in motion.
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Dudley planned to ratify the treaty at the French Court, but on 12 July, the day before his departure, he received a letter from Surrey that troubled him. The same day he wrote to William Paget:

I do send you herewith a letter which my Lord of Surrey sent unto my lodging this morning, wherein is contained so many parables that I do not perfectly understand it; which letter (if you think it meet), I require you to show unto the King’s Majesty . . . also to send me your advice touching an answer, which I have briefly made unto the same letter, the copy whereof I do send you.
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According to a servant of Surrey called Hugh Ellis, his master’s letter concerned ‘a discord between him and my Lord Admiral’, but as neither Surrey’s letter nor Dudley’s response to it has survived, the circumstances of that discord remain hidden.
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Fortunately another letter, written by Surrey two days later, has survived. It concerned an allegation made by his successor in Boulogne, Lord Grey of Wilton. There were no parables here. On the contrary, Surrey begged his recipient, Paget, to ‘pardon my frankness’. What had caused Surrey to lose his composure again?

The problems between Surrey and Grey had begun the moment the whippersnapper Earl displaced the older, more experienced man in Boulogne. Grey had first been appointed to the Captaincy of the town at the end of August 1545, but had only been allowed to serve there for a week before Henry VIII changed his mind and appointed Surrey in his stead. Grey’s fractious personality was well known in France, as his clashes with Sir John Wallop, Richard Blount and John Rogers revealed.
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The tension between him and Surrey had simmered beneath a veneer of cordiality throughout much of Surrey’s command, but had eventually surfaced in the spring of 1546 over a dispute about foreign mercenaries. Paget had warned Surrey then that the ‘variance’ between him and Grey not only caused the ‘continual torment’ of them both, but also ‘the dangerous hindrance of His Majesty’s affairs’.
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Yet it continued unabated and when Grey eventually took over from Surrey in Boulogne at the beginning of April, he seized for himself the keeper-ship of the tolls, a post held by one of Surrey’s servants.

Surrey was furious when he found out about it in July. The servant in question, he wrote in his ‘frank’ letter to Paget, ‘was placed there for his merits by Mr Southwell and me’ and deserved recompense for what, Surrey implied, was a vindictive and petty action of Grey’s, taken only ‘for some displeasure borne to me’. Worse still, Grey then claimed he was only following the lead of Surrey and his predecessors, who had always pocketed the income from the post. This, Surrey swore, ‘upon mine honour, is untrue’.
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Grey knew that Henry VIII was open to accusations of corruption for they provided a useful diversion from his own reckless expenditure. One of the first orders Surrey had been given when he had arrived in Boulogne was ‘to enquire whether any of the head officers had used to receive any sums of money above their ordinary entertainment and whether the same had used to appoint their household servants to certain
charges, whereby the King’s Highness had ill service.’
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Even Lord Admiral Dudley felt compelled to write in April that ‘I never meddled with His Majesty’s money’ and Grey himself would later stand accused not only of putting the King’s appointees out of office, but also of ‘neglecting’ the King’s accounts in favour of his ‘private commodities’.
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Money was never a priority for Surrey. He seemed to think that it only really mattered to merchants and mercenaries. That is why he was unmoved by his father’s attempts to make him ‘weary’ of Boulogne, why he sacrificed ‘an hundred ducats of mine own purse and somewhat else’ in order to relieve some soldiers that the King had refused to pay and why he emerged from France so indebted that he had to mortgage all the interior furnishings at Surrey House.
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His innocence is also borne out by later events. The Council had all the account books relating to Surrey’s command in Boulogne and, as ‘raw and uncertain’ as they were, they contained no grounds for corruption.
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Had they done so, they would surely have been cited in December when every kind of calumny was hurled at the Earl.

Surrey’s reaction to Grey’s allegation was predictable. In suggesting that he could have risked his reputation for the sake of a few pounds, Surrey wrote to Paget, Grey ‘can have none honour, for there be in Boulogne too many witnesses that Henry of Surrey was never for singular profit corrupted, nor never yet bribe closed his hand.’ Surrey claimed to be, in contrast to his accuser, a true nobleman who understood the values of his class. The ‘lesson’ of integrity, he wrote, ‘I learned of my father and wish to succeed him therein as in the rest’.
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