Henry VIII's Last Victim (49 page)

By referring to Wyatt’s use of the proverb, Surrey alerts Radcliffe to the urgency of his plight. Like Wyatt, he seems to be saying, he is innocent, but also has secrets. These must not be betrayed, for though a wound may heal, its scar is indelible. It is the threat of a desperate man. And it may well have worked. There is no record of Radcliffe in any of the surviving documents relating to Surrey’s fall. Whatever secrets
the two men shared, they were probably taken to the grave.

Another sidelight on Surrey’s clandestine activities is provided by a treatise that his younger son Henry wrote in 1583.
A defensative against the poyson of supposed Prophesies
is, as the title suggests, a tirade against the sixteenth-century vogue for prophecy, astrology and divination. The previous year Henry had been forced to deny all knowledge of ‘a certain painted treatise’, containing prophecies about Queen Elizabeth.
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The
defensative
, dedicated to his examiner, the Queen’s spymaster and principal secretary Sir Francis Walsingham, was thus a politic and timely exercise. Yet the venom Henry directs at his subject – ‘the froth of folly, the scum of pride, the shipwreck of honour, and the poison of nobility’ – is considerable and gives credibility to his claim that his treatise was engendered by ‘a mortal malice against prophecies in respect of some progenitors and ancestors of mine, which smarted for presuming overmuch upon their hopes’.
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Henry’s beheaded great-grandfather, the Duke of Buckingham, had listened to prophecies that he would be King, and a prognostication on the overthrow of Queen Elizabeth was introduced at the trial of Henry’s elder brother Thomas, who was found guilty of conspiring with Mary, Queen of Scots.
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Yet Henry claimed to have conceived his ‘mortal malice’ in his teenage years, long before his brother’s execution. Twice in the 1580s, Henry wrote about his father’s demise, and he leaves broad hints in the
defensative
that he was referring to him again. Not only does his reference to family members ‘presuming overmuch upon their hopes’ echo his statement that Surrey composed
Sat Superest
‘upon the breach of a distressed hope’, but he also recalls circumstances that sound very similar to Surrey’s own:

The last but notwithstanding the most pestilent and bitter root from whence the prophecies have drawn their head and received, as it were, their life and soul is curiosity: to search and hunt for deeper knowledge of the future causes and affairs of the commonwealth than it pleaseth God to discover and reveal by ordinary means. As how long the Prince shall reign? Who shall succeed and by what mean? What houses shall recover or decay? Of what quality the Prince shall be? with such like mysteries. And the reason why this fountain is more pestilent than any of the rest is chiefly because it pierceth and approacheth nearer to the quick of man’s delight insomuch as I myself have been acquainted with some godly persons and such as neither doubted of God’s sure defence, nor lent their ears to winds of light report, which were notwithstanding wonderfully ravished and bewitched with this enticing humour.
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Elsewhere in the
defensative
Henry writes:

It hath been an ancient practice of discoursing sycophants, sometime by figures, sometime by pedigrees, sometime by popular reports and rumours, to bring that person whom they most detest and fear into so deep mistrust and jealousy of those that bear rule as none but he must be regarded, watched, and observed by the spies of the State, while they bring things to pass according to the compass of their own intent, and cover drifts of treason with a mask of hypocrisy.
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In June 1546 a servant of Surrey called Robert Barker was examined for discussing ‘prophecies and other things stirring to commotion against the King’s Majesty’. The Duke of Norfolk’s secretary, John Clerke, who dedicated several books to Surrey, was known to dabble in necromancy. Surrey’s friend, Thomas Wyatt junior, was another dilettante of the dark arts as, later, would be Surrey’s daughter Katherine. Surrey himself, and Henry VIII too, it must be said, were fascinated by astronomy.
⁵⁰
It is possible, therefore, as his son strongly implies, that Surrey had indulged a soothsayer and presumed ‘overmuch’ on his hopes. His final portrait could have been the context for some kind of prophecy, especially if one credits the unsupported statement in the
Spanish Chronicle
that the motto ‘till then thus’ was also inscribed upon it.
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Several of his comments might also be interpreted prophetically. Apparently there were friends ‘to whom in figure he had promised the coming of a fair day’, while his enemies ‘he trusted one day to make . . . very small’.
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The ravenous ‘Friowr’, who ‘feeds the wealth with lies’, may even have been a false prophet in the literal sense as opposed to one of Surrey’s back-stabbing friends. An anonymous seventeenth-century manuscript also suggests that ‘diabolical divination’ played a part in Surrey’s fall.
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But there is nothing in the surviving skeleton of official evidence to suggest this. It is a ghost of a possibility, one that dissolves as soon as it is investigated too closely.

By Christmas 1546 the Court was seething with rumour: that Surrey had established an illegal power base in Norwich; that the cannon that
adorned the pavilions at Surrey House were not ornamental; that he had given weapons to strangers; that he had had traitorous talks with the Emperor at Landrecy; that his portrait had been ‘inspired by evil thoughts’; that he and Norfolk had planned to assassinate Henry VIII and Prince Edward; that he had secretly sought to surrender Boulogne to the French. To the last, patently absurd, charge, Hugh Ellis had retorted: ‘as God shall be my judge, I did never see in him a spot of any likelihood thereof.’
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Surrey’s reputation was submerged in gossip and innuendo, but it must be said that he himself had opened the gates to the flood. Henry VIII might not have read his recent paraphrases of Ecclesiastes, with their references to bloody beasts and ‘aged kings wedded to will that work without advice’,
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but he was well aware of the Earl’s inflammatory behaviour. In his argument with Blagge, Surrey had exposed his ambition for the protectorate and, to Mary, he had implied that the King was little more than a manipulable roué. This was particularly offensive in light of the Howards’ previous successes with Anne Boleyn and Catherine Howard.

In spite of ‘a sharp attack of fever’ in December, which ‘lasted in its burning stage for thirty hours’ and left him ‘greatly fallen away’, Henry VIII was ‘deeply engaged and much perplexed in the consideration of this affair’.
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Just how engaged is revealed by a set of charges against Surrey and Norfolk drawn up by Wriothesley. In a tremulous hand, Henry carefully edited the text. His annotations can be seen in the following extract:

If a man compassing
to govern the King
^{with himself to govern the realm, do actually go about to rule the King and}
should, for that purpose, advise his daughter, or sister, to become his harlot,
what it importeth?
^{thinking thereby to bring it to pass, and so would rule both father and son, as by this next article doth more appear, what this importeth?}

If a man
should
say these words: ‘If the King die, who should have the rule of the Prince but my father or I’, what it importeth?
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If proven, these charges might import treason according to a law that stipulated that ‘imagining’ the King’s death and seeking to deprive the King, the Queen or the heir of the ‘dignity’ of the royal estate were
capital offences. A case against Surrey based on these charges would rest solely on words rather than deeds, but the statute of 1534 had made words treason, and even before then words had been ‘constructed’ as treasonable by the courts. Surrey’s maternal grandfather had been executed on the basis of a servant’s testimony, while his cousin Anne Boleyn had been convicted of treason according to hearsay and innuendo. Subjects could also be condemned by
ex post facto
rulings, as the act of attainder hurried through Parliament to deal with Surrey’s half-uncle, Lord Thomas Howard, had shown. Given the elasticity of the treason legislation, the current climate and the King’s paranoia about the succession, Surrey’s reported comments might be construed as treason by those determined to make him a traitor.

‘I hear,’ ambassador Van der Delft wrote on 27 December, ‘that the councillors have been several times, and indeed go daily, to the Tower to examine the two prisoners.’
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But no confessions had yet been extracted. Perhaps the evidence was deemed too circumstantial. Perhaps Surrey and Norfolk’s denials, backed up by the testimonies of Fulmerston and Ellis, were thought too convincing. Perhaps Henry VIII balked at the thought of his sexual appetite being debated as a key issue in open court. Whatever the reason, neither of these charges, nor others drawn up by Wriothesley – vilifying members of the King’s Council, exceeding manorial rights, giving arms to strangers – were to feature in the indictment against Surrey.

In fact it contained just a single charge and it applied, not to the Act of Treason, but to the Second Succession Act of 1536. Surrey was accused of the
lèse-majesté
of bearing the arms of Edward the Confessor. This is not as extraordinary as it may sound. In sixteenth-century England, where the majority of the population was illiterate, the power of image was tremendous. The Flodden Duke’s funeral, Holbein’s portrait of Henry VIII at Whitehall, the tournament of May 1540 and the ceremonies and insignia of the Order of the Garter are just a few instances of the potency of symbolism and spectacle in this age. Coats of arms were not just adornments, but vivid expressions of lineage, identity and power. The image of Edward the Confessor symbolised sanctity, legitimacy and majesty. Most English kings were crowned (using his regalia) and buried at Westminster Abbey, where his shrine lay. Five English kings had been named after him and Henry VIII maintained the tradition with his heir. An unlawful display of the Confessor’s arms could therefore be
interpreted, especially in these perilous times, as a sign of ambition, perhaps even as a threat to the succession.

The armorial charge against Surrey had not originally been considered. Neither the Duke of Norfolk nor Richard Fulmerston was questioned about it, but when Southwell, Gates and Carew had searched for evidence against the Howards in Norfolk, they had also looked into the possibility of heraldic violation. Their initial target was the Duke of Norfolk, whom they suspected, wrongly, of bearing an illegal version of his ancestor, Thomas of Brotherton’s arms. However, at Thetford Priory, the burial place of the Howard Dukes of Norfolk and their Mowbray ancestors, the inspectors stumbled across an instance of the display of Edward the Confessor’s coat of arms.
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When Bess and Mary gave their depositions in mid-December, both confirmed that there was nothing untoward in the Duke of Norfolk’s coat of arms, but both spoke out against Surrey’s. Bess had been vague, only specifying that Surrey had placed the Norfolk arms in the wrong quarter and, though Mary’s statement was more detailed, she had been careful to add caveats – ‘to her judgement’; ‘which she took to be’. Surrey’s ‘seven rolls’ that Mary claimed to have seen were never found or, if they were, they were subsequently destroyed. In any case, they hardly amounted to a case for public heraldic display. But it was a start and Wriothesley soon focused the investigation.

Surrey, it will be remembered, had experimented with a new coat of arms in the summer of 1545 and a few months later, when he was at Boulogne, ‘he devised the same to be painted amongst other his coats in scutcheons, which were sent from thence to Norwich’. According to Hugh Ellis, Surrey did not do this sneakily, but openly ‘in the presence of the King’s Highness’ Council there’.
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On his return to England Surrey sent the glaziers and silversmiths of Norwich patterns of his arms and on 7 October, he displayed them ‘in full public view’ at Kenninghall. This last instance was the only one cited in the indictment.
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Surrey’s new coat of arms was certainly controversial. Originally, he had wanted to bear the arms of Edward the Confessor and Geoffrey Plantagenet, Count of Anjou, but it seems that Christopher Barker, the Garter King of Arms, had successfully dissuaded him from the latter.
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Surrey had, however, persisted with St Edward’s arms with the difference, on the upper portion of the shield, of a silver label of
three points.
^fn6
This is confirmed by a heraldic drawing of a shield in the British Library entitled ‘Howard Earle of Surry, for which he was attainted’ (plate 35). There is no sign here of the arms of Anjou (which were not mentioned in the indictment or at the trial), but in the fifth quarter are the arms of Edward the Confessor with a label of three points.
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Surrey was incredibly foolish to tinker with royal quarterings at a time when the King was increasingly suspicious of threats to the succession. He was even more foolish to cross over into the realm of myth, as he did when he told Hugh Ellis that his predecessors had been granted the arms by King Edward himself.
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Surrey was probably drawing on the spurious tradition within the Howard family that their ancestor was Hereward the Wake, the Saxon hero who had rebelled against William the Conqueror. But even if Surrey could have traced his Howard roots back to Hereward – which he could not – it was still absurd to claim that Edward the Confessor had given Hereward his arms because Edward had never actually borne them himself. The Confessor lived in an age before the science of heraldry had been established. The arms attributed to him were modelled on a stamp used on his coins and were awarded posthumously in the thirteenth century.
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Nevertheless, some of the early Howards had asserted this mythical claim as their display of St Edward’s arms at the church of East Winch in Norfolk showed.
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