Authors: Jessie Childs

Henry VIII's Last Victim (55 page)

Three months later, following two rebellions (one centred in Norfolk where the rebels quartered at Surrey House), Somerset was toppled in a
coup d’état
. He was executed two years later. John Dudley assumed the reins of power, created the Dukedom of Northumberland for himself and dominated for the rest of the reign.

On 6 July 1553 Edward VI died of tuberculosis at the age of fifteen. During his illness he and Northumberland had conspired to alienate Mary Tudor from the succession in favour of Henry VIII’s great-niece (and Northumberland’s daughter-in-law) Lady Jane Grey. On 10 July Jane was proclaimed Queen. Her reign lasted just nine days. The English people rallied round their rightful heir at Kenninghall, where Mary initially based herself, and then at the Howard castle of Framlingham. On 19 July Northumberland’s cause collapsed. He was arrested two days later and executed the following month.

After Mary had entered the City of London in triumph, she visited the Tower, where the Duke of Norfolk had been lingering since his arrest. The new Queen received the eighty-year-old on his knees, bade him rise and kissed him. An act passed by her first Parliament proclaimed the innocence of the Howards and reversed the ‘pretended’ attainder against them.
⁸Norfolk retired to Kenninghall, where the following August, ‘weak with age and sickness’, he died. On his deathbed he gave his blessing for his granddaughter (Surrey’s daughter Katherine) to marry Henry, Lord Berkeley. They duly married a month later at Kenninghall.
⁹Surrey’s two other daughters also married well: Jane to the Earl of Westmorland and Margaret to Henry, Lord Scrope of Bolton.

The children had been reunited after their father’s execution and placed in the care of their aunt, Mary Howard. They were tutored by the reformer John Foxe, who was later made famous by his
Acts and Monuments
(popularly known as the
Book of Martyrs
). Despite his and Mary’s best efforts, not all the children turned out to be perfect Reformed Christians. Mary herself remained committed to her faith and gained renown as a patroness of evangelical writers and churchmen. She never remarried and was to die childless in her late thirties.

Frances, meanwhile, returned to the quiet life she had always seemed to favour. By 1553 she had remarried. Her new husband was an unremarkable country squire called Thomas Steyning, and she seems to have lived comfortably with him in East Anglia, only venturing to Court for the requisite christenings and funerals. We do not know what happened to the child she was carrying when Surrey was arrested. The commissioners had mentioned that it was due in February 1547, but there is no record of the birth. Perhaps the shock of Surrey’s execution had made her miscarry.
¹⁰By her second husband she had two children. One was a son. They named him Henry. After her death in June 1577, Frances was reclaimed by her Howard family and buried in the church of St Michael’s, Framlingham.
¹¹

Thomas (Little T.) became the fourth Duke of Norfolk on the death of his grandfather and was, for a time, a favourite of Queen Elizabeth. He married three times, first to the Earl of Arundel’s daughter and heiress, Mary Fitzalan. It is from the only son of that marriage that Edward Fitzalan-Howard, the eighteenth and present Duke of Norfolk, descends. Thomas, like his father, ultimately flew too close to the sun. He was beheaded in 1572 for his support of, and secret betrothal to, Mary, Queen of Scots. ‘Beware of high degree,’ he advised his son in a poignant letter from the Tower. ‘To a vainglorious, proud stomach, it seemeth as the first sweet. Look into all chronicles and you shall find that, in the end, it brings heaps of cares, toils in the state and, most commonly, in the end, utter overthrow.’
¹²One of his last requests was that his mother be kept away from London, for ‘he greatly feareth that if she should happen to be in town at the time of his execution, the sudden news thereof might happen to be the death of her, whose life he chiefly desireth.’
¹³

Surrey’s younger son Henry lived under a cloud of suspicion for the rest of Elizabeth’s reign, but his fortunes changed on the accession of James I. He was made a member of the Privy Council, created Earl of Northampton and, in 1608, appointed Lord Privy Seal. In 1614 he transferred his father’s body from the church of All Hallows, Barking, near the Tower, where it had been buried after the execution, to the Howard mausoleum at St Michael’s Church, Framlingham. There Surrey was reunited with his wife and laid to rest in a splendid alabaster tomb.
^fn2

The Jacobean monument is instantly recognisable on the left of the chancel. Not only does it differ radically in form and style from the Renaissance tombs, but it is also the only one with any colour. Surrey and Frances recline together in effigy, their hands clasped tightly in prayer. Their three daughters kneel at their heads and their two sons at their feet. Surrey’s figure, with darker, thicker hair than he ever possessed in life, is decked out in armour, the collar of St George and a red robe of estate trimmed with ermine. Escutcheons and military insignia adorn the plinth and a Latin inscription bears witness to Surrey’s illustrious life and premature death. Modern visitors will also notice a framed print of Surrey’s elegy on Thomas Clere carefully propped up against the base of the tomb. The monument thus commemorates Surrey’s literary, military and dynastic roles. But there is another symbol there too: a golden coronet that lies, not on Surrey’s head, but next to his right thigh. It reminds us that for all his honours, Surrey died in disgrace, a condemned traitor and the last person to be executed by Henry VIII.

Like many extraordinary people, Surrey was riven by contradiction. He could be witty, urbane, innovative, generous, gracious and gentle. He was also petulant, brutish, reactionary, vain, haughty and uncompromising. He was born into immense privilege, but found it hard to sustain the accompanying pressures. He was defensive of his status and sensitive to criticism. Many of his servants revered him; few at the Court could suffer him. His more personable qualities were only apparent to the few who knew him well – if anyone could ever really be said to have known him. People thought him outspoken and predictable, yet he kept his innermost thoughts and fears hidden behind a many-layered mask.

We will probably never know exactly what Surrey meant when he ordered the artist of his final portrait to add the motto ‘Enough Survives’. In his lyrics and letters, in external representations like his portraits, his coat of arms and Surrey House, in his imprisonments and
appointments and in the reactions that he elicited from his peers, there survives something of his personality. That it is not enough is a testament to the allure of the man whom his contemporaries judged a ‘hero’, ‘a worthy and ingenious gentleman’, a ‘poet without peer’, a ‘God of spirit’, and ‘the most foolish proud boy that is in England’.
¹⁴

^fn1Few tears were shed when Wriothesley eventually died amid rumours of suicide. ‘This dog is dead,’ George Blagge wrote with savage glee, ‘the soul is down to hell’ (
AH
, I, no. 295).

^fn2By 1974 the tomb was suffering from ‘considerable settlement’ and was beginning to crack. It was fully restored and, on 9 July 1977, an ecumenical rededication service was held at the church. In what Philip Howard of
The Times
called ‘a roll-call of feudal grandeur’, the seventeenth Duke of Norfolk invited the Earls of Carlisle, Effingham, Suffolk and Berkshire, and

Wicklow, and Barons Howard of Penrith and Strathcona, along with other members of the various cadet branches of the family. Around five hundred turned up to hear the Earl of Arundel and Surrey (now the eighteenth Duke of Norfolk) read his ancestor’s verse translation of Martial on ‘the happy life’ and ‘the household of continuance’. In his sermon, the Rt. Rev. Alan Clark, Bishop of East Anglia, stressed the importance of ‘forgetfulness, forgiveness and thankfulness: forgetfulness of religious differences, forgiveness of Tudor injustice and thankfulness for the sheer brilliance of Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey’ (Arundel Castle MS MD 2586–8;
The Times
, 14 March and 11 July 1977).

Surrey’s parents, Thomas and Elizabeth Howard, third Duke and Duchess of Norfolk. ‘He can speak fair as well to his enemy as to his friend,’ Elizabeth once noted of her husband.