Henry VIII's Last Victim (7 page)

^fn6
alter Salmon
: another Solomon.

^fn7
points
: the laces that tied the breeches or ‘hosen’ to the doublet.

^fn8
soot
: sweet.

^fn9
teen
: annoy.

^fn10
clepith
: calls.

^fn11
Built by Roger Bigod in the late twelfth or early thirteenth century, Framlingham Castle later became the seat of the Mowbray and Howard Dukes of Norfolk. Although little more than the shell of the castle now survives, its thick stone walls, crenellated towers and ornate Tudor chimneys tell of its former glory. Since 1984 it has been managed by English Heritage. The wall-walk affords wonderful views of the town and the Mere.

^fn12
Following the dissolution of Thetford Priory in 1540, the Duke’s body was reburied in the parish church of St Mary’s, Lambeth. The remains of the brick vault are still visible amidst the sad ruins of Thetford Priory.

3

EARL OF SURREY

ON THE DEATH
of the Flodden Duke, Henry’s father became the third Duke of Norfolk and Henry himself, at the age of seven, was styled Earl of Surrey. This was only a courtesy title, the Earldom having previously been invested in his father alone for life, but such technical niceties did not seem to matter in 1524 and from thenceforth everybody, including the King, referred to Henry as the Earl of Surrey.

His father now enjoyed a gross annual income of between £3,500 and £4,000. This was a massive sum at a time when the average taxable income of the peerage was £801.
¹
With the inheritance came an extensive network of the old Duke’s followers and additional responsibilities in local administration, religion, politics and law. The effects were keenly felt at Tendring Hall. The household, previously comprising around sixty people, swelled to nearly a hundred as Norfolk took on many of his father’s retinue. Another addition was Surrey’s half-aunt, Anne, Lady Oxford, who sought refuge with the Howards in 1526 after she was forcibly expelled from her lands by her late husband’s successor, the fifteenth Earl of Oxford, Surrey’s future father-in-law.

Now that theirs was a ducal household, the Howards had a responsibility to entertain greater numbers, and on a more lavish scale, than before. The household book of 1526–7 reveals a steady stream of visitors flowing through their gates. Many were neighbouring gentlemen coming to cement their ties or form new ones, but others came from all walks of life. A random selection, all of whom were given hospitality, includes the goldsmith of Ipswich, a priest of Oxford, the bailiff of the town, a man of Lynn, a friar of Ipswich, a pursuivant of the King, a scholar
of Cambridge and a ‘a strange
^fn1
priest’.
²
Lower down the social scale, the Norfolks upheld their Christian duty to bestow charity on the poor. Hermits and gypsies were as welcome at their table as lords and ladies, Norfolk having reportedly said ‘that he would eat grasses and drink water rather than he would be at a banquet with the heavy heart and curse of the poor’. An Irish chronicle reported that during the Howard sojourn there, he ‘commanded his officers that no man should depart from his gates without meat and drink, in so much the poor and simple people thought he was the King’s son.’
³
Not everyone agreed with this assessment. Norfolk was one of the few landlords to retain villeinage on some of his estates and there were complaints from his bondmen that he treated them with ‘much more extremity than his ancestors did’.
⁴

The Christmas season of 1526–7 could not have been more different for Surrey than the drab affair of three years before. Now, in a grand gesture of magnificence, the gates were flung open and hundreds of people were fed and entertained in an orgy of conspicuous consumption.
⁵
Tendring Hall soon groaned under the pressure of so many people and parties and the Duke of Norfolk took steps to transfer the household to Kenninghall. Situated in the heart of East Anglia, only twenty miles from Norwich, and set amid seven hundred acres of parkland, Kenninghall was the ideal site for the ducal headquarters. Having pulled down the original medieval manor house, Norfolk enlisted an army of builders, carpenters, joiners, plasterers and glaziers to turn his ambitious construction programme into reality. The result was a spectacular H-shaped red-brick palace, built in the latest style of Bridewell or Hampton Court, where the lodgings were arranged vertically rather than horizontally.
⁶

There was much in the seventy-odd rooms at Kenninghall for a small boy to explore. In the Great Chamber, Surrey could feast his eyes upon a splendid set of eight tapestries depicting the feats of Hercules. In the Long Gallery, he was met by a vast painting of the recent siege of Pavia, where Imperialist troops had inflicted a crushing defeat on the French and captured King Francis I himself. On the second floor of the Ewery Court were Surrey’s lodgings: one outer chamber, dominated by a huge fireplace, and an inner chamber where he slept. Then there was the Armoury, a treasure trove of weapons and helmets and ‘diverse pieces
of broken harness’. Here Surrey could run his fingers along the cool steel and escape into a world of chivalric fantasy. If he climbed right up to the garret in the turret, Surrey’s efforts were rewarded by the wholesome image of grazing cattle, deer parks and the farmers toiling on his father’s land. At nearby Shelfhanger Farm were the kennels and the stables, where nearly every horse was named after a Howard affiliate. There were fish ponds there too, a real tennis court and a slaughter house, the stench from which competed with the fumes of burning tallow billowing out of the Candle Yard.
⁷

The spring of 1528 should have been a happy time for the Howards settling into their new home, but the atmosphere was soured by the Duke of Norfolk’s ill-health. Throughout his later life (he was fifty-five in 1528), he was plagued by an ailment that was never properly diagnosed. The Imperial ambassador, Eustace Chapuys, thought that it had something to do with the Duke’s liver, but Norfolk himself only ever made vague references to ‘my disease of the lax’.
^fn2
He was more forthcoming on its effects, frequently describing his bowel movements to the King and his ministers. ‘It is scant credible,’ Norfolk remarked after one session, ‘that any man should have avoided [
sic
] that I did on Friday, from six at night unto ten o’clock in the morning. But now, thanked be Almighty God, I am stopped.’ On another occasion, he complained that ‘my flesh on my body, arms and legs doth so [di]minish that I am not a little afraid my time shall not be long in this world.’
⁸
Both loss of muscle and diarrhoea are compatible with liver disease, but they are also symptomatic of many other medical conditions including chronic pancreatitis. Ultimately, there are not enough specific details for any firm conclusions to be drawn, though it is unlikely that Norfolk’s condition was as severe as he made out.
^fn3
It is probable that he also suffered from a good dose of hypochondria. Frequently, he would complain about the ‘choler and agony’ of his condition, only to saddle up for the hunt or continue with his business a few hours later. He had good reason to exaggerate his infirmity; most of his complaints (especially when he was writing from the North of England) were followed by
requests to come to Court where, he argued, the weather was more temperate and he could be treated by London’s ‘cunning men’ – but where, of course, he would also have access to the King.

Norfolk’s attack in May 1528 was serious enough, though, for Henry VIII to send his prized physician Dr Butts to East Anglia. Without the doctor’s treatment, Norfolk wrote in a letter of thanks to Wolsey on 17 May, ‘I think I should not have recovered’.
⁹
Two weeks later the Duke reported that ‘I am now, thanked be God, something in better case than I was, and may endure to ride a soft pace, but in no wise to walk on foot, the fume doth so arise in my head.’ Every week, he continued,

I have not failed to have one sore fit, nor by no means can have good digestion, nor do not eat in three days so much as I was wont to do at one meal. Wherefore, if it may stand with the Kings Highness’ pleasure, and Your Grace’s, I intend to ride towards London before the beginning of the next term, fearing that I shall not recover perfect health nor bring my stomach again in good order without better advice than can be had in these parts.
¹⁰

But Norfolk could not ride to London as planned, for in June there was an outbreak of sweating sickness. According to all reports, it was even worse than that of 1517. Thousands succumbed in London where, the French ambassador quipped, ‘the priests have a better time of it than the doctors’. The Duke of Norfolk, only just out of his sickbed, immediately began to suffer from the telltale ‘shaking fits’.
^fn4
He was sent back to bed and warned not to stir, for ‘if a man only put his hand out of bed during twenty-four hours, it becomes as stiff as a pane of glass.’
¹¹
The first day was critical; during those hours Norfolk would either rally or die.

As Surrey paced the corridors waiting for news, he could be forgiven for allowing his thoughts to stray towards his own future. If his father were to die, Surrey, at eleven, would become the fourth Duke of Norfolk. As the final hours drew near, and then passed, it became clear that the chaplain twitching nervously at Norfolk’s bedside would not have to
administer the last rites. The Duke had survived. Others in his household were not so fortunate.

In August Norfolk’s stepmother Agnes, the Dowager Duchess of Norfolk, wrote to Cardinal Wolsey detailing her success in combating the disease. ‘I have had the experience daily in my house of all manner of sorts, both good and bad; and, thanked be God, there is none miscarried, neither in my house nor within the parish that I am in. For if they that be in danger perceive themselves very sick, they send for such of my house as hath had it and knoweth the experience, whereby, thanked be God, they do escape.’ Clearly rather pleased with herself, Agnes proceeded to give Wolsey the benefit of her sage advice:

If they be sick at the heart, I give them treacle and water imperial, the which doth drive it from the heart . . . And the best remedy that I do know in it is to take little or no sustenance or drink, until sixteen hours be past . . . Vinegar, wormwood, rosewater, and crumbs of brown bread is very good and comfortable to put in a linen cloth, to smell unto your nose, so that it touch not your visage.

Having informed Wolsey of Norfolk’s recent scare, Agnes divulged that ‘diverse in his house are dead’ and added rather smugly that she thought it was ‘through default of keeping’.
¹²

This is the only surviving record of the tragedy that befell Kenninghall in the summer of 1528. Agnes does not give details. The Howard servants meant little to her. But if any of the casualties had been members of Surrey’s immediate retinue, then their deaths would have cut him deeply. The proximity of Surrey to his servants, both during the day when they dressed and washed him, and at night when they slept outside his bedchamber, forged an intimate bond. Although hierarchy was observed and, at least in public, due deference paid, beneath the surface there was jocularity and friendship. ‘Ay me!’ Surrey would exclaim on the death of one of his squires in 1545, ‘while life did last that league was tender.’
¹³
Surrey may have grown up alongside his siblings and his father’s wards,
^fn5
but it was to his servants that he would later turn for
companionship. And, in the last instance, when his final fate drew near, it was his servants, not his family, who would stay true to him.

Had Surrey been plunged into a premature inheritance in 1528, he could at least have been confident that he was well trained for it. From the moment of his birth, he had been groomed for the eventuality of succeeding his father and serving his King. Up until the age of seven, this largely entailed the inculcation of good manners along with rudimentary instruction in reading and writing. From thenceforth – and this coincided neatly with his becoming Earl – Surrey benefited from the more holistic, regimented curriculum expounded by the humanists.

Humanism was a movement pioneered by scholars like Desiderus Erasmus, Thomas More and John Colet, who sought to rejuvenate the moral, religious and political values of society by drawing on the wisdom of the ancients. Most humanists agreed that high birth was not an automatic qualification for public office, but they did acknowledge that noble men and women possessed a natural propensity to virtue, the
sine qua non
of honourable service. Such fertile soil had to be carefully cultivated. ‘A family tree is nothing,’ wrote Henry Peacham in the dedication of
The Complete Gentleman
, ‘unless you furnish the mind with good manners and take pains by your studies to make yourself worthy of your high birth.’
¹⁴