I think there is no man alive that would handle a woman in child-bed of that sort, nor, for my part, would I have done for all that I am worth.
He bemoaned the fact that she had written to Cromwell and had washed all his family’s dirty linen in public: ‘Whether I play the fool or no, [she has] put me in her danger, which so falsely will slander me.’ The duke pleaded that the minister should not disclose his whereabouts to his wife - he was staying at Buntingford in Hertfordshire and was perhaps too close to his wife’s home for comfort - ‘for the same shall not . . . put me to more trouble than I have (whereof I have no need)’.
He added, ominously, that if their paths should cross, it ‘might give me occasion to handle her otherwise than I have done yet’. This was a man not unknown to use his fists freely in a heated argument, so his threat should be taken seriously.
Norfolk then made what he saw as a handsome offer of conciliation.
If she first write to me, confessing her false slander and thereupon sue to the king’s highness to make any deed, I will never refuse to do that his majesty shall command me to do. But before, assuredly never.
27
After he returned from his brutal repression of the northern counties, the tenacious Elizabeth renewed her pleas to the Privy Seal:
I pray you my lord, now my . . . husband is coming home, that you will be in hand with him for a better living [for me] . . . , seeing he has taken away all my jewels and my apparel and had with me two thousand marks, which is more, by times, than ever [he had].
He had but little to take to when he married me first but his lands and he was always a great player.
My lord, I have been his wife twenty-five years and have borne him five children. But because I would not be content to suffer the harlots that bound me to be still in the house . . . and all for speaking against the woman in the court, Bess Holland. Therefore, he put me out of the doors.
It is [three] years come the Tuesday in Passion week that he came riding all night and locked me up in a chamber and took away my jewels . . .
She added: ‘By means of you, a word [from] the king’s mouth, [and] my husband dare not say “nay”.’
Elizabeth had lived ‘very poorly’ during the last three years and had suffered ‘much sickness . . . at the fall of the leaf and at the spring’ because of the physical effects of the earlier attacks upon her.
28
On 10 November 1537, Elizabeth sent Cromwell ‘a fair present’ (or bribe) of ‘partridges, twelve cocks and one hen’. Her ‘special good lord and friend’ learned of more complaints at her treatment. Darkly, she told him: ‘They rule, my lord, as they lust.’ Cromwell must have sighed with frustration as all the old grievances were trotted out again, as if brand new and freshly bleeding wounds.
This time, however, the duchess recalled that after she had been thrown out of her house Norfolk had sent two of his chaplains, called Burley and Thomas Seymour, to urge her to divorce him. In return for her assent, she would receive her confiscated jewels, ‘a great part of his plate’ and some of his household goods.
I rebuked his priests and then he wrote with his own hand on the next day. Though my children are unkind to me I have always loved them for I know well . . . my husband did it but to provoke to put me to shame . . .
His love I will never trust. He has deceived me so many times. He can speak fair as well to his enemy as to his friend and that I perceive by them that be dead and them that be alive.
29
But not even Cromwell’s famed powers of diplomacy, nor his considerable skills of manipulation, could bring the warring couple together.
Norfolk himself appealed to Cromwell in January 1538: ‘I require you by your wisdom to find [the] means that my wife may sojourn in some honest place [?a hapless nunnery] and I shall help her with some better living if she so do - and surely if she does not and continues in her most false and abominable lies and obstinacy against me, if God bring me home again, I shall not fail, (unless the king’s highness command me to the contrary), to lock up her.’ The duke added that never had been such lies contrived by a wife of her husband.
30
The duchess remained adamant. The following March, she told Cromwell: ‘They shall not rule me as long as I offend not the king. I pray you show my last letter to my husband and write me an answer, which I shall trust.’ Norfolk had again suggested that she moved in with her brother, or with Lord Bray. ‘I would not be in my Lord Bray’s houses of all the houses I know, and if I were disposed to
suggyn
[fall silent] as I am not, my husband would have sent to me two years ago . . . that I would not do’:
I am of an age to rule myself as have done these five years since my husband put me away.
Seeing that my lord my husband reckoned me to be so unreasonable, it were better that I kept me away and keep my own house still, and trouble no other body, as I am sure I should so.
Be not displeased that I have not followed your counsel to come home again, which I will never do during my life.
31
Norfolk was unlucky with the women in his life - very much a case of ‘like mother, like daughter’.
Not only did he suffer all those years of stormy abuse from his estranged wife, but his daughter inherited some of her mother’s dogged determination and temper. Her letters to him were often signed ‘your humble daughter’, but she was far from that, and did not hesitate to give him a vocal piece of her mind. In January 1537, she wrote to her father seeking assistance in an appeal to the king to ‘have justice done’ over her maintenance following the death of her husband, Henry Fitzroy.
32
Henry had conveniently forgotten about her jointure and had washed his hands of the issue. Mary was incensed and called in lawyers for advice on how to reclaim her legal entitlement. The marriage may not have been consummated, but they had been man and wife, as far as the law was concerned, she insisted. Norfolk was shocked to discover she had acted on her own initiative ‘and be put in such comfort by learned men that her right is clearly good and that she has delayed so long (so she thinks) for lack of good suit made to the king’s highness by me’. He told Cromwell: ‘In all my life, I never commoned [talked] with her in any serious cause or now, and would not have thought she [would] be such as I find her, which, as I think, is but too wise for a woman.’
33
Perhaps that was the root cause of his problems in the family home.
Mary blamed her father for her failure in enjoying her jointure and, in January 1538, told Cromwell - now weary of the Howards’ family troubles - that she felt little confidence in her father’s efforts and sought his permission for her to appeal to Henry in person. Norfolk was browbeaten by her ‘weeping and wailing’ into agreeing to her ‘following her mind’. His daughter, therefore, came to court in May and the following March the king granted her substantial monastic properties and the reversion of some manors.
34
Meanwhile, Elizabeth moved on resentfully into old age, her hatred and grievances rekindled every time she heard her husband’s name mentioned.
She continued to be restricted in her movements on Norfolk’s instructions. In 1541, she told another brother-in-law, her former love, Sir Ralph Neville, the Earl of Westmorland: ‘I pray God that I may break my [im]prisonment that I have had this seven year and that I may come abroad and see my friends.’
35
Was she hoping to see him again and rekindle her old love?
She became, however, reconciled with her long-suffering brother, who bravely sent his daughters Susanne and Jane to stay with her in the 1540s, when she reported them in ‘good health and merry and deserving your blessings’. Elizabeth also asked him to send ‘my niece Dorothy, for I am well acquainted with her conditions already, and so I am not with the others. She is the youngest too and if she be changed, therefore, she is better to break as concerning her youth.’
36
She added the inevitable plea to speak to her husband ‘that I may have the better living’ before he went up to the Scottish borders yet again.
There is something uncomfortable about the use of that word ‘break’ which suggests that Elizabeth was not a lady to tolerate idly childish pranks or independence. In this may lie her children’s decision to side with their father.
So perhaps we could allow ourselves just a
soupçon
of sympathy for her estranged children - if not for bluff old Norfolk himself, for all his manifold faults and wickedness.
5
‘DREADFUL EXECUTION’
‘[I] shall rather be torn in a million pieces than to show one point of cowardice or untruth to your majesty’
Norfolk to Henry VIII, 25 October 1536
1
After Anne Boleyn turned Norfolk’s dreams and ambitions to bitter ashes, Henry VIII’s bastard son, Henry Fitzroy, Duke of Richmond, had represented another chance for him to forge politically vital family bonds with the Tudor dynasty. Fitzroy had been placed in the duke’s custody after the downfall of Wolsey, and he took care that his son Henry Howard, now Earl of Surrey, and Richmond became inseparable friends. They lived together at Windsor Castle for two years from 1530 and in October 1532 accompanied the king at his meeting with the French king Francis I in Calais and Boulogne. They remained in France afterwards for a year, staying at Fontainebleau and Avignon, and living happily with Francis’s three sons.
Norfolk then joyfully secured Richmond’s marriage with his daughter Mary. As they were considered to be related within the forbidden degrees of consanguinity, he obtained a dispensation for the formal wedding on 26 November 1533 at Hampton Court.
2
Surrey went to live with his wife Frances in 1535 and a son was born in March the following year and christened Thomas.
The third duke could now sit back, content that the Howard line stretched safely forward through his son and heir Surrey, and a grandson. He may have rid himself of Anne Boleyn, but after the marriage of Jane Seymour her family shone brightly in Henry’s favour, and now threatened his political ambitions.
It was to become a bad time for the House of Howard.
Norfolk’s youngest half-brother, the twenty-four-year-old courtier Lord Thomas Howard,
3
had been wooing Lady Margaret Douglas, the daughter of the king’s sister, Margaret, and half-sister to James V of Scotland, since the end of 1535 - two years after he had arrived at court. Theirs was a heady, whirlwind romance and sometime before the middle of 1536, probably at Easter, they married secretly. But her uncle Henry was enraged when he heard of their betrothal in early July 1536. There is no sign of his gently lyrical and courtly ‘
Past-time and Good Company
’ here; Lord Thomas was immediately arrested for treason and both he and his twenty-one-year-old bride were carted off to the Tower.
Their clandestine marriage came at an unquestionably importune time for the Tudor monarchy. As both Princesses Mary and Elizabeth had been declared bastards by Acts of Parliament in 1534
4
and 1536,
5
the children of Margaret Tudor had now become the only legitimate offspring in the dynasty, until the new queen, Jane Seymour, could produce any lawful heirs herself. It is impossible to determine whether, in pursuing the match, Lord Thomas Howard was either being ambitious (a normal family trait) or just simply, stultifyingly stupid in being oblivious of the political implications. As far as Henry was concerned, marrying a niece was too close to his throne and he decided promptly to cut the family down a peg or two.
To legalise Howard’s incarceration, a Bill of Attainder against him was swiftly passed by both Houses of Parliament on 18 July. Its ponderous preamble accused him of having been ‘led and seduced by the Devil, not having God before his eyes, [and] not regarding his duty of allegiance that he owes to . . . our king . . . his most dread sovereign lord’. He had ‘contemptuously and traitorously contracted himself by crafty flair and flattering words to and with the Lady Margaret Douglas’. Moreover, the Act added, it was ‘vehemently suspected and presumed’ that he was ‘maliciously and traitorously minding and imagining to put division in this realm’ and to ‘interrupt, impede and let the . . . succession of the crown contrary to the limitation thereof mentioned in the said act’. The Attainder sentenced him to death.
6
The ever-vigilant Chapuys, while deprecating the licentiousness rampant at Henry’s court, told Charles V that the vengeful king had also planned initially to execute Lady Margaret. But she
for the present, has been pardoned her life, considering that copulation had not taken place. Certainly, if she had done much worse [in being promiscuous] she deserved pardon, seeing the number of domestic examples she had seen and sees daily, and that she has [been] for eight years, of age and capacity, to marry.
Since the case has been discovered, she has not been seen and no-one knows whether she be in the Tower, or some other prison.
7
Lord Thomas, held in atrocious conditions, suffered more the sharp pangs of love and separation than the filth and discomfort of his surroundings. He wrote a number of sad, lovesick poems that survive in a small quarto volume in the British Library, the name of ‘Lady Margaret Howard’ inscribed in her own hand on its flyleaf.
8
Even the charms of poetry cannot always quieten fears for your life. Margaret soon saw sense and renounced her love for him, yet remained in the Tower, albeit in more comfortable conditions than her husband. In August, she thanked Thomas Cromwell for winning back Henry’s favour towards her and sought his wise counsel on ‘how to avoid again incurring his grace’s displeasure’. She reported that two of Lord Howard’s servants still attended her, but she would dismiss them ‘since she is to keep none that belong to him, though she took them in consideration of their poverty’. Margaret begged the minister not ‘to think that any fancy remains in me’ about Lord Howard, and, rather pathetically, added that she now received no visitors except gentlewomen, as ‘it would not become her, as a maid, to keep company with gentlemen’.
9