House Of Treason: The Rise And Fall Of A Tudor Dynasty (12 page)

Her fears were entirely justified - and not long in being fulfilled.

A few weeks later, on 26 January, Henry met with a terrible accident in the royal tilting yard at Greenwich Palace. ‘The king, mounted on a great horse to run at the lists, both fell so heavily that everyone thought it a miracle he was not killed, but he sustained no injury,’ reported an eyewitness.
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In reality, the accident was far more serious: the heavy charger rolled over on to Henry, crushing him, and afterwards, he lay ‘for two hours without speech’ probably because of severe concussion.

Five days later, Anne miscarried of a heavy male foetus, aged about three and a half months, after Norfolk had insensitively blurted out news of Henry’s accident. The shock, she claimed, caused the loss of her son.
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The king had little sympathy for her plight. He now wanted rid of this fractious, haughty and overbearing tartar who had failed in her promise to give him his heirs. Chapuys happily seized on second-hand court gossip that Henry had apparently told a courtier

Thomas Cromwell was just the man to arrange it for him and together with Norfolk, led a commission established to find fault in both the Queen’s character and behaviour.

Anne was arrested at Greenwich on 2 May and taken to the Tower of London, accused of adultery with five of Henry’s courtiers, as well as plotting Henry’s death. One was her brother, George, Viscount Rochford, charged with committing incest with the queen. Norfolk led her interrogation and, after all the recent slights he had suffered at her hands, clearly enjoyed the experience. During the questioning, he regretfully shook his head three or four times, pursed his fleshy lips and tut-tutted in mock despair as he considered her chances of survival.
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Anne was tried in the king’s hall of the White Tower, within the fortress, on 15 May. Two thousand prurient spectators crowded in to hear the salacious details of her love life. Cromwell’s key witness was Lady Jane Rochford, wife of the Queen’s brother, who discreetly wrote down on a slip of paper Anne’s unwise words about Henry’s inadequate performance between the sheets: ‘Que le Roy n’estait habile en cas de soi copuler avec femme, et qu’il n’avait ni vertu ni puissance’ - ‘The King was not skilful when copulating with a woman and he had not virtue or power.’ The damning paper was silently passed among the twenty-six peers sitting in judgement and each decided that if the Queen could not have a child by the King, she would have looked elsewhere to father her child and pass it off as heir to the throne. Norfolk, with crocodile tears streaming down his face, sentenced his niece to death:

It was all very neat and tidy. Two days later, the five courtiers and Rochford were executed and Cranmer declared that Princess Elizabeth was illegitimate. Anne’s turn came on 19 May. Henry had decided she should be beheaded in the French manner, and a French executioner was brought over from St Omer, in the Pale of Calais, to perform the deed, with a two-handed Flemish sword.

He earned his fee of £24 well. One stroke swept her head off as she knelt on the scaffold, watched by Norfolk, the king’s illegitimate son, Richmond, and a crowd of 1,000 people.

On 20 May, Jane Seymour was brought to Westminster and ten days later she became Henry’s third wife in another secret ceremony, this time in the Queen’s Closet in the palace there.

After Cromwell’s cleverly engineered fall of Anne Boleyn, Norfolk’s influence waned as a new breed of competent and ambitious courtiers, many of them evangelicals, made their mark at court. He tried hard to redress the balance by adopting the traditional tactic of the Howards - marriage. He had earlier sought to arrange one between Princess Mary and his heir, Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey, at the end of 1529. But the king was having none of it, and in April 1532 Norfolk agreed to a union for his son with the de Veres, the Earls of Oxford. Frances, the daughter of the fifteenth earl, married Surrey formally in the spring of the following year, although they did not live together until 1535 because of their tender age. At Anne Boleyn’s urging, Norfolk had also achieved his aim of marrying close to the Tudor line on 26 November 1533, when his daughter Mary wed Henry Fitzroy, Duke of Richmond, the king’s illegitimate son, now aged fourteen. They were also too young to cohabit, and the marriage was never consummated.
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His children, Henry and Mary, were later to threaten everything Norfolk strived for - and, indeed, his life.

I know . . . my husband’s crafty ways of old. He has made me many times promises . . . never [fulfilled]

 

 

The perils of matrimony, both royal and personal, must often have loomed large in the mind of the third Duke of Norfolk during the late 1520s and into the next decade. His three surviving children by his wife Elizabeth had been born despite the marriage having irretrievably broken down soon after the wedding, because of her anger at this loveless match being forced upon her by political and dynastic expediency. She claimed, for example, that Norfolk had displayed ‘great cruelty’ to her at the time of the birth of their second child, Mary, in 1519.
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Throughout her life, the shrewish Elizabeth declared to all that would listen: ‘I was born in an unhappy hour to be matched with such an ungracious husband.’ Norfolk, in return, complained bitterly of her ‘false and abominable lies’ and craftily questioned her sanity.

The couple drank deeply from their brimming cups of hatred for each other and their frequently noisy and heated rows in public embarrassed even the red-blooded courtiers strutting around them.

In May 1520, the Howards and their young family had been sent to Dublin after he had been appointed Lord Lieutenant, or viceroy, of Ireland. Within weeks, the plague was claiming hundreds and the duke reported to Wolsey that ‘the bodies lie like swine unburied’ and appealed for permission to send his family to safety:

This heartfelt plea to be recalled to London - together with frequent subsequent appeals - was ignored. For four months in the summer of 1521 Surrey had been afflicted by a bad dose of dysentery and he asked Henry to come home on 16 September:

The Howards were eventually allowed home later that year. Henry took Surrey at his word; he then served in northern France and on the Scottish borders,
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creating absences from home drearily familiar to any army wife. During the rare times they were together and not in the north, they lived in their houses at Stoke-by-Nayland in Suffolk, and Hunsdon in Hertfordshire, or at the Howards’ main London base in Lambeth. Documents preserved in the Arundel Castle archives
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show the lavish entertaining they laid on for visitors between 1513 and 1524 at their country manors. Dinner was eaten at ten in the morning and supper at five in the afternoon. The food provided at their table cost anything up to £6 a week, and consisted of simple, sound country produce: beer and bread; meat, fish and fowls. Their visitors not only included the many great and good, but, as befits a pious household, ‘priests of London and Colchester’, as well as monks and hermits, and also glovers, tailors, bakers and brewers - all tradesmen seeking to sell their wares.

No doubt a heroic front of normality was presented to their noble visitors at their houses for the sake of propriety, but below the surface the bad blood between husband and wife was already building a veritable volcano of hate.

On 20 February 1516 both attended the christening of Princess Mary in the chapel at Greenwich, with their little son Henry Howard bearing the ceremonial taper during the service.

In the sixteenth century wives were, by law, little more than chattels of their husbands who were free physically to punish them. They controlled their wives’ finances, their freedom of movement and their contact with the world outside the marriage. The legal doctrine of
coverture
enforced women’s subordination to their husband’s every whim and prevented them, in their own right, from signing contracts, writing wills or initiating or defending a case in law. Wives also were denied reciprocal rights in their spouse’s property.
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The evangelical fire and brimstone preacher Hugh Latimer, Bishop of Worcester from 1535, had a black and white view of the state of marriage, and taught wives from his pulpit that it was ‘part of your penance to be subjects unto your husband. You are underlings, underlings, and must be obedient.’
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Norfolk and his fellow nobles doubtless shared this rather fundamentalist view, so his wife’s vocal antagonism at her treatment at the hands of the duke scandalised the court and publicly shamed him.

Behind the king’s own fickle form in the marriage stakes, the Norfolks were probably the most infamous married couple in mid-sixteenth-century England.

By 1527, their relationship was completely dead, mainly because Norfolk had sought love and comfort elsewhere in the willing arms of the voluptuous Bessie, sister to his secretary and chief steward, John Holland - the girl whom Elizabeth contemptuously dismissed as ‘a churl’s daughter . . . of no gentle blood’ and for eight years ‘the washer-woman of her nursery’.
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It was a bitter, obnoxious pill for her - and one she would not swallow meekly. She had never wanted to marry her husband and now he had deserted her for another woman; worse still, a woman of low birth. She became incandescent with rage, particularly when the mistress became a lady-in-waiting to another concubine - Anne Boleyn.

Her father’s execution for treason isolated Elizabeth from help or sympathy from the crown, or from relatives with any influence or standing at court.
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Norfolk, never an individual noted for his sensitivity and tolerance, acted decisively to resolve his marital crisis - simply by throwing his irate wife out of his house.

He signed a legal document which blandly stated that the duchess, ‘at the instance and device of the said duke, has departed with all such right and title . . . interest and possession which she . . . had in the name’.
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The indenture, dated 20 June 1529, between the ‘right high and mighty prince Thomas, Duke of Norfolk’ and Henry Percy, sixth Earl of Northumberland, and Elizabeth’s brother Henry, Lord Stafford, appointed them overseers of various properties, including the manor of Kelsale, near Saxmundham in Suffolk, and enabled her to recover her marriage jointure.

This unsubtle bribery may have been an unsuccessful attempt at ousting an unwanted termagant from his life; it was not until five turbulent years had elapsed that she was finally discarded. Norfolk must have looked on Henry’s tumultuous attempts to achieve an annulment of his unwanted marriage with Catherine of Aragon with grave misgivings and considerable sympathy. The duke knew his wife only too well - and his forebodings were entirely justified.

Elizabeth, a lady blessed with great passion, pride and strong, unbending opinions, was not going to go quietly, even though two of her surviving children took their father’s side in the bitter marital dispute that followed her shameful expulsion from her home. Social ostracism mattered little to her, because she shared her father’s and husband’s disparagement of the evangelical upstarts now increasingly acquiring royal office - and she cared not one jot for their harsh opinions of her.

Like some other women of the old noble houses, she had not behaved in a politically correct manner at the court of Henry VIII and thus became a continual and dangerous liability to the duke. She had been a faithful lady-in-waiting to Queen Catherine since 1509 and loudly supported her case in the king’s ‘Great Matter’. According to the gossipy Chapuys, in early 1530 she sent a message to Catherine pledging her absolute loyalty, despite some impassioned attempts, probably including some earnest appeals by her husband, to persuade her to switch sides in the royal
cause célèbre
:

Elizabeth was eventually dismissed from the court in May that year for speaking ‘too freely and declaring herself, (more than they liked), for the queen’.
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Her removal became necessary to placate an increasingly irritated Anne Boleyn.