Henry VIII's Last Victim (46 page)

The following month Henry had another health scare. He was reportedly ‘in great danger’ and his doctors gave ‘very little hope of his recovery’. He rallied, but his condition worsened at the end of October when he was at Windsor.
⁵⁴
Access to him was restricted and the reformers, including the royal doctors and a nexus of Privy Chamber companions, further tightened their grip. Denny was now appointed first Chief Gentleman of the Privy Chamber, while his vacancy in the secondary post was filled by another reformer, the Queen’s brother-in-law Sir William Herbert. The Imperial ambassador filed unhappy reports on ‘the evils and dangers threatened by these sects’. Only those ‘specially sent for’ were now allowed at Court. Howard affiliates like Sir Francis Bryan and Sir Nicholas Hare found themselves excluded and Norfolk himself complained that he was no longer part of the King’s ‘privy Privy Council’.
⁵⁵

At a Council meeting at the end of September, John Dudley astounded his colleagues by striking Stephen Gardiner, the conservative Bishop of Winchester, across the face. He was absented from Court for a month
but retained the King’s favour. Gardiner, Henry VIII protested, had a ‘troublesome’ nature and the Bishop’s reluctance at the end of November to exchange some land with the Crown was enough to secure his exile from Court. Gardiner wrote desperate letters begging to be allowed to return, but was tersely told by the King not to ‘molest us any further’.
⁵⁶
Affairs ‘change almost daily’, ambassador Van der Delft noted late in December 1546, but though they still centred on the King, increasingly they revolved around the reformed axis.
⁵⁷

It is possible that the Duke of Norfolk might have been tolerated by these men. He had taken a back seat in the summer persecutions and his overtures to the Seymours had shown a willingness to adapt. He was an old man now, in his eighth decade, and the autumn and winter months saw him attend the Council board only twice.
⁵⁸
His daughter Mary was a zealous reformer and his younger son Thomas had been censured by the Privy Council in May for his ‘indiscreet proceedings touching talking of Scripture matters’.
⁵⁹
Surrey’s children’s Dutch tutor, Hadrianus Junius, complained incessantly about his distasteful lifestyle at Kenninghall. He despaired of the ‘wanton and precipitate behaviour’ of Surrey’s ‘insolent’ sons and claimed to be engulfed by ‘an unpleasant and almost depressing loneliness’. Above all, he was ‘disgusted’ by the anti-Imperial taunts directed at him by those who sympathised with Charles V’s Lutheran enemies.
⁶⁰
If the Duke of Norfolk was unable to control the beliefs within his own household, the reformers might have mused, then he might not pose a threat to their plans for a godly commonwealth.

The Earl of Surrey was a different matter entirely. There had been a time back in 1543 when he was seen as a champion of the reformed faith. His translations of Ecclesiastes, with their emphasis on ‘simple faith’ and disavowal of ‘outward works’, suggest that privately he still valued the Word of God and the principle of
Sola Fide
.
⁶¹
They also revealed some kind of association with the evangelical heroine, Anne Askew. Further, in October 1546 Surrey justified his request for the belfry and dormitory of a former monastery in Norwich on the grounds that they were ‘unserviceable’ remnants of ‘the old superstition’. But he had also erected an altar at Boulogne; he had counselled Mary against ‘going too far in reading the Scripture’ and, as he later admitted to Blagge, his faith had faltered.
⁶²

Politically and personally, Surrey was an even greater liability. As Henry’s Lieutenant in France, he had valued honour (his own and the
King’s) above the financial security of the realm. ‘Who so doth, at length shall get small thanks,’ Norfolk had warned, and so it now seemed. In his belligerence, Surrey had alienated the Privy Council. Had he only acquiesced to the dynastic union with the Seymours, things could have been very different. But Surrey’s ‘defiant aristocratic singularity’ disqualified him from any kind of alliance.
⁶³
He envisaged no other way after the King’s death than a noble protectorate headed by the Howards. As far as Surrey was concerned, the ‘new erected men’ had no right to govern. They ‘loved no nobility,’ he said, ‘and if God called away the King, they should smart for it’.
⁶⁴
Snobbish jibes were one thing but overt threats, in this environment, were quite another.

It is impossible to determine exactly when the decision was first taken to target Surrey, and by whom, if such a decision was ever so baldly stated. The deposition of Sir Edward Warner, made in December 1546, suggests that Surrey’s argument with Blagge had been the catalyst:

In summer last past Master Devereux did tell me upon certain communi cations of the pride & vain glory of the said Earl that it was possible it might be abated one day & I asked what he meant thereby & he said:

‘What if he be accused to the King that he should say if God should call the King to his mercy, who were so meet to govern the Prince as my Lord his father?’

I asked then if there were any such thing & he said, ‘It may be so’. Whereupon I gathered that it was so.
⁶⁵

Warner and Devereux had both been in trouble in the spring for their reformist views, as had Sir Gawain Carew and Edward Rogers.
⁶⁶
All four men had escaped with a warning and all four now seemed very interested in the Earl of Surrey. At the August reception of the French Admiral, Carew had told Rogers about Surrey’s recent contretemps with Mary, and Rogers had reciprocated with details of the Earl’s quarrel with Blagge. It was not long before Surrey’s every move was being watched. His aggressive behaviour, impolitic utterances, boasts about his pedigree, flamboyant manner, flashy house and even his ‘gown of gold’ and his habit of ‘riding with many men in the streets’ were noted.
⁶⁷
Each instance of Surrey’s ‘pride and vainglory’ fed the ailing King’s paranoia about the succession. A few whispers in Henry VIII’s ear easily poisoned his mind against the Earl who had let
him down in France. ‘It was notorious,’ Lord Herbert of Cherbury noted a century later, ‘how the King had not only withdrawn much of his wonted favour, but promised impunity to such as could discover anything concerning him.’
⁶⁸

Although Surrey’s arguments with Mary and Blagge reveal astounding political naivety, he was sensitive enough thereafter to appreciate the need for a little caution. The grandiose, avant-garde portrait that he had commissioned in France was still a work in progress. Its depiction of the Earl emerging from a ruined landscape (the classic symbol of degeneration) and leaning on a broken pillar (a sign of endurance) could be seen as a defiant, perhaps even treasonous, gesture.
⁶⁹
But the inclusion on the plinth of the pillar of the image of the Duke of Richmond, with all that could be read into it in terms of Surrey’s ambition for Henry VIII’s other son, was deemed too risky now even by Surrey. He therefore sent a note from Kenninghall to his servant Hugh Ellis at Lambeth, with instructions for the artist ‘to leave out the tablet where my Lord of Richmond’s picture should stand’.
⁷⁰
Instead, the place was filled by a Latin motto,
Sat Superest
– Enough Survives. Exactly what Surrey meant by this pithy epithet has been the subject of endless debate. Its most likely derivation is from Seneca’s
Epistulae Morales
(I:5): ‘Non puto pauperem, cui quantulumcumque superest sat est’ – ‘I do not regard a man as poor, if the little which remains is enough for him.’
⁷¹

Hugh Ellis claimed that he had heard Surrey say that ‘if he survived his father he should have enough and that he would never covet more’, and in Wriothesley’s list of memoranda is the phrase: ‘they will let me alone as long as my father lives and after I shall do well enough.’
⁷²
Surrey’s younger son Henry later appropriated the phrase in the context of his own loss of royal favour. In the dedicatory epistle of a translation to Queen Elizabeth, Henry assured his monarch of his loyalty:

Angels bathe themselves, as St Basile writes, in streams of sinners’ tears and happy is that subject’s face, which you vouchsafe to look upon with pity when it is most richly garnished with pearls of this water. Wherefore, if the dew of my devotion may be drawn up by the beams of your remorse,
Sat Superest
as once my father wrote upon the breach of a distressed hope; if not yet such is my belief in your administration of right as with the daughter of Darius, while I live, I will deem me
captum esse quamdui
[
sic
]
Regina vixerit
. [I will consider myself a prisoner as long as the Queen shall still live]
⁷³

There is an ambivalence in Surrey’s adoption of the phrase. If ‘enough survives’ in the body of Surrey himself, then it could be seen as a defiant, challenging statement: enough survives in the Earl of Surrey to rescue something from the ruins of Tudor England. But if ‘enough survives’ despite Surrey’s poverty, despite the defeat at St Etienne, despite the King’s disfavour, then it may be read as a statement of Senecan stoicism. Considering the context and the fact that Surrey substituted
Sat Superest
for the image of Richmond ‘upon the breach of a distressed hope’, it seems that the latter interpretation is more likely. Surrey, far from vaunting his ambition, may actually have been attempting to play it down: if the King could find it in himself to forgive Surrey, accept his allegiance and allow him to survive his father, then it would be enough for the Earl, and ‘he would never covet more’.

Surrey evidently thought he was protected by his father and that by replacing the miniature with the motto, he would be safe. But he was unaware that the religious conservative Sir Richard Southwell, Surrey’s old East Anglian friend and colleague from Boulogne, had defected.
^fn3

Along with the note Surrey had sent Ellis was a letter for Mary Shelton, the lady whom Thomas Clere had chosen ‘for love’ and who formed the third member of the ‘tender league’ in Surrey’s epitaph for his late squire. Some time after Clere’s death, probably in late 1545 or early 1546, Mary had married Anthony Heveningham. Surrey’s letter for her, Ellis was told, must be delivered ‘with all speed’ and ‘to none but her own hands’. Ellis seems to have handed it over safely, but his own letter from Surrey was seized and at the bottom, in Richard Southwell’s hand, is the message: ‘It may please your good Lordships to examine Mrs Heveningham, late Mary Shelton, of the effect of the Earl of Surrey his letter sent unto her; for it is thought that many secrets hath passed between them before her marriage and sithens.’
⁷⁴

In October Surrey retired once more to Kenninghall and attempted to extricate himself from ‘the misery of debt’. On 19 October he wrote to William Paget asking him to intercede with the King for the belfry and dormitory of Christ Church in Norwich. ‘If it were His Most
Excellent Majesty’s pleasure to give it me,’ Surrey pleaded in what might be seen as another version of
Sat Superest
, ‘I will faithfully promise never to trouble His Majesty with any suit of profit to myself hereafter and [to] spend that and the rest in His Majesty’s service with the old zeal that I have served with always.’ Wishing Paget ‘health and me relief in this necessity’, he signed off ‘your assured loving friend, H. Surrey’.
⁷⁵

Nine months earlier Paget had promised Surrey that ‘I am your poor friend that will honestly stick to you.’
⁷⁶
Surrey clearly believed his word was true. But Paget, like Southwell, Blagge, Wriothesley and so many others, as Surrey would soon find out, had turned. This rather pathetic letter is the last surviving piece of correspondence written by Surrey as a free man.

^fn1
An ardent supporter of reform, Catherine Parr was an influential patroness – and indeed an author herself – of evangelical literature.

^fn2
Surrey’s main source for his biblical paraphrases, the Vulgate was the Latin version of the Bible established by St Jerome in the late fourth century.

^fn3
It is sometimes assumed that Southwell was brought up alongside Surrey in the Howard household. This is unlikely as he was over ten years older than the Earl. They did, however, know each other very well. The Southwells were clients of the Howards and had been regular visitors at Tendring Hall in the 1520s. In 1536, Surrey regarded ‘my friend Mr Southwell’ as one of his chief confidants (California MS, fos. 29, 29v, 82, 96, 96v; Pembroke MS, dinner, 22 September 1527; Bindoff: Richard Southwell; Bapst, p. 220).

16

UNBRIDLED TONGUES

‘WELCOME, MY LORD’,
said the Captain of the Guard as he approached the Earl of Surrey at the palace of Whitehall. ‘I wish to ask you to intercede for me with the Duke your father in a matter in which I need his favour, if you will deign to listen to me.’ Surrey was happy to grace such a deferential request and followed the Captain to a quiet corridor. Suddenly, twelve haldberdiers jumped out of the shadows, seized the Earl and bundled him into a waiting boat. Thus, the
Spanish Chronicle
tells us, was the Earl of Surrey arrested ‘without attracting notice’ on Thursday, 2 December 1546.
¹