Aside from separating the illicit lovers, another dynastic worry for Henry was the health of his bastard son Henry Fitzroy, Duke of Richmond, hitherto fit and athletic. He had attended the opening of Parliament on 8 June, but a month later had fallen sick at his apartments in St James’s Palace, just across the deer park from Westminster. His condition deteriorated day by day, and caused mounting concern among his physicians. John Husee wrote to his master, Lord Lisle, in Calais on 18 July: ‘My lord of Richmond [is] very sick, Jesu be his comfort!’
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Then, on the morning of 23 July, he died from what appears to have been a pulmonary infection - a cause of death that finished off many of the Tudors - and one that now claimed Henry’s only living son. He was aged just seventeen. After all the years of his marital travails, the king must have truly believed that God’s hand still lay heavily upon his dynasty.
At the time, many thought Richmond’s death deeply suspicious. The contemporary chronicler Charles Wriothesley commented:
It was thought that he was privily poisoned by the means of Queen Anne and her brother Lord Rochford, for he pined inwardly in his body long before he died. God knows the truth: he was a goodly young lord and [forward] in many qualities and feats.
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He added that Richmond had ‘never lain by his wife, [who was the same age], and so she is maid, wife and now a widow. I pray God send her good fortune.’
The king ordered that Richmond’s goods should be listed and valued and that his only son should be buried secretly, to avoid any speculation over the shaky future of the Tudor line. The arrangements for his funeral were assigned to Norfolk.
Five days after the death, the inventory was completed by one of Cromwell’s henchmen, John Gostwick, who often worked for him on delicate financial matters,
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except for ‘certain parcels which remain with the duchess, delivered long ago by indenture’. The estate was not inconsiderable, and most went directly into the king’s jewel house at Westminster.
I have examined Mr Stringer, almoner to the . . . duke [about] what ready money he has and he confesses to about £300, besides £190 delivered by him on Sunday last to Mr [George] Cotton, controller of the same household.
None of the revenues due at our Lady’s day in Lent were paid to my lord’s use; so that by Michaelmas a whole year’s profit will be due to the king’s use.
Gostwick had some concerns about the substantial holdings of precious metal owned by Richmond.
I have been at the Tower to prove the four wedges of gold, which are so hard and egre,
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they will not abide the hammer and must be new [re]fined.
One of them does not come up to the weight noted by 140 ounces [3.97 kg.] I have caused the Master and Controller of the Minister to weigh and certify every piece. The blocks of silver hold their weight pretty well.
The great chain of seventy-two links, weighing 138.5 ounces, is valued by the Controller at forty shillings . . . I mention this because Ralph Sadler
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tells me the king valued it at £500 or £600.
Let me know your lordship’s pleasure for this gold . . . [that] weighs 538.5 ounces [15.26 kg.] and will weigh less when toughened.
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On 31 July - eight days after his death - Richmond’s body was unceremoniously dumped on a wagon and covered with straw to conceal the nature of what must have become a rather malodorous cargo in the summer heat, for the long journey from St James’s to Thetford, where the duke planned to bury him among the Howards. Only two attendants, dressed in green, followed this strange bucolic cortège, and then only at a distance.
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Norfolk and Surrey hurried to Kenninghall for the funeral,
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which was conducted decently, but quietly, with no pomp or ceremony, at the Cluniac abbey in the Norfolk town at the end of July.
Surrey grieved deeply at the sudden loss of his old school friend. A year later he was still in mourning, ‘very weak, his nature running from him abundantly’, whenever Surrey ‘thought of my lord of Richmond’,
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according to his father, in a rare display of sympathy.
Ever mercurial, Henry was infuriated at what he now saw as the disreputable burial of a royal son, whom at one stage he envisaged as king of Ireland, if not of England, if all else failed, and there were no other royal progeny.
Norfolk very quickly learned at his palace at Kenninghall of the king’s terrible rage over Richmond’s parsimonious funeral and hurriedly dashed off a letter to Cromwell at ten o’clock at night on 5 August, writing with his ‘hand . . . full, full, full of choler and agony’:
This night at eight o’clock came letters from friends and servants about London, all agreeing that the king was displeased with me because my lord of Richmond was not buried honourably.
The king wished the body conveyed secretly in a closed cart to Thetford . . . and so buried. Accordingly, I ordered both the Cottons to have the body wrapped in lead and in a close cart provided, but it was not done, nor was the body conveyed very secretly.
‘I trust the king will not blame me undeservedly,’ he added, probably more in hope than sorrow. Norfolk had heard of the rumour sweeping London that he would shortly be arrested and thrown into the Tower of London to join his half-brother Thomas. He ranted to the newly appointed Lord Privy Seal:
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‘When I shall deserve to be there, Tottenham
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shall turn French!’ What’s more, if the duke ever discovered who invented and spread that story, ‘he being a gentlemen, and I, were only together on Shooter’s Hill,
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[we would] see [who] should prove himself the more honest man’. Presumably, if the rumour-monger was not a gentleman, Norfolk would have found other, less genteel, ways of silencing him.
Despite all the familiar bluster and his threats of duels to defend his honour, troublesome, nagging doubts about his future must have haunted him, and that night he sat down and twice rewrote his will. The king was to supervise its implementation and Cromwell was to be his principal executor: ‘If I die, and when I shall die, I doubt not [that] you both will consider [that] I have been to the one a true poor servant and to the other a true faithful friend,’ he pompously told the minister.
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His fears of imminent royal retribution were increased greatly by two more letters from London the following day from ‘such as would not write without some ground’. Norfolk ordered the immediate packing of his bags in preparation for a hasty journey to court to plead his defence in person. He asked Cromwell to tell him the truth about the king’s opinion of him ‘by this bearer, who shall meet me ere I come to London’.
Spare not to be plain with me. I thank God for His strokes [blows], having deserved infinite more of His Godhead, but never of the king.
On Thursday by noon I shall be in London. Send word where you will then be, for sorry I would be to come to the court, before I spoke with you.
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There was, however, no royal vengeance. Norfolk survived, but he and his family remained firmly destitute of the king’s favour. Cromwell, a self-made man brought up in the hard school of knocks with a violent, drunken brewer for a father, was not someone who would shrink from kicking an opponent when he was down. By timely, malicious comments whispered in the royal ear, probably over the duke’s stance on religious issues, he ensured that Henry’s resentment towards the Howards burned ever brightly. Norfolk was forced to spend the remainder of the summer and autumn in East Anglia, in morose exile from court.
Having been in and out of the king’s esteem all too frequently, after a while he philosophically shrugged off the king’s disfavour. Norfolk knew perfectly well that his fickle sovereign’s moods could swing like a weathercock. He was now more preoccupied with getting his hands on the spoils from the smaller monasteries being dissolved by Cromwell, as a canny means of severing any remaining links with Rome and augmenting the riches of Henry’s always hard-pressed exchequer. As soon as news of the legislation authorising the suppressions spread among England’s devout nobility, Cromwell (who had been appointed Vicar General and Vice-Regent of the king in matters spiritual) was inundated with pleas to grant this or that monastic property. Norfolk was in the vanguard of this unseemly scramble for monastic riches - very anxious not to appear too grasping, but ‘where others speak, I must speak’ - and registering his particular desire for the Benedictine nunnery at Bungay and the Augustinian abbey at Woodbridge, both in Suffolk.
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Therein lies an obvious incongruity. Even in the diverse morality of Tudor England, how could the devout and religiously conservative Norfolk enrich himself on the proceeds of the dissolved monasteries? The answer is twofold: firstly, he was always driven by a need for ever greater power and status and the monastic properties would bring incomes and lands that would enhance his position. Unlike upstarts such as Cromwell and his cronies, his ancestors had piously endowed these religious houses, so he was merely reclaiming his family’s own wealth before it fell into the undeserving hands of the
nouveau riche
. Secondly, on the political front, the duke was a firm believer in authority; if suppression of the monasteries was Henry’s policy, so be it. The old ingrained Howard loyalty towards their monarchs still held sway; as Norfolk held office under the king, he must unswervingly support him. Today we would call it ‘cabinet collective responsibility’, although in the fevered, conspiratorial cockpit of Henry’s court, few others would recognise the concept.
So, as the months went by, the third duke’s claims became more strident as he lost patience at his lack of reward. In September 1536, he wrote to Cromwell complaining that he still had not been favoured by any grant. ‘Where you write to me to take patience till you . . . may perfect my affairs, I have never laboured to any but you. I trust shortly to hear you have obtained my suits, for the time of sowing is at hand and every other nobleman has already [had] his portion. I trust well for Bungay and Woodbridge.’ A few days later came another demand: ‘I know no nobleman but [who] has their desires and if I shall now dance alone, my back friends [enemies] shall rejoice. Help me for my old service to be advanced as soon as those that have yet little served his highness to have farms [leases] for terms of years.’
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Very soon Norfolk would willingly slaughter hundreds of men whose religious and political ideals he passionately shared, in a cynical quest to win back Henry’s favour and re-establish his pre-eminent position at court.
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The monastic dissolutions were hugely unpopular among the majority of Henry’s subjects. In September 1536, Norfolk arrested an organ-master in Norwich who was planning an insurrection over the closure of the monasteries. His companion - a ‘right ill person’, in the duke’s opinion - was also clapped in jail.
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A few weeks later, on Monday 2 October, a far more dangerous rebellion broke out at the prosperous Lincolnshire market town of Louth, triggered by rumours - untrue, as it turned out - that Cromwell was now about to loot the riches of the parish churches. Riots and disorder spread rapidly throughout the county, with the insurgents demanding they should keep their holy days; that suppressed monasteries should be reinstated and that they ‘be no more taxed’.
They also wanted Cromwell dead.
The king had no standing army and his immediate blustering claim that 100,000 royalist troops were on the march to destroy the rebels was merely a psychological warfare weapon against them.
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The truth about his immediately available military power was very different. Charles Brandon, Duke of Suffolk, arrived at Huntingdon on 9 October with ‘neither ordnance nor men enough to do anything: such men as are gathered here have neither harness [armour] nor weapons’.
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Something akin to panic gripped Henry’s administration.
Richard Cromwell, the nephew of the minister, scurried around London gathering men, armour and weapons, and even pressed seventy carpenters and masons into military service who had been working on extensions to his uncle’s palatial home at Austin Friars.
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Having been ordered to commandeer every horse he could find, Sir Ralph Warren, the Lord Mayor of London, went from stable to stable, telling the owners the cover story that their animals were required for a fictitious visit of ‘Count Nassau’ to the capital. Thirty-four small cannon were taken out of storage at the Tower on Sunday 8 October but the poor horses dragging the artillery train gave up the ghost before they had got very far out of London, and thirteen of the guns had to be sent back. Letters were expressed out to the nobility and gentry in the Home Counties and southern England, ordering them to muster their retainers and followers at Ampthill, in Bedfordshire, to form Henry’s army. It was not always easy to obey. Lord William Howard, Norfolk’s half-brother, reported to Cromwell from his house at Chesworth, near Horsham in West Sussex:
I have received the king’s letter to [bring] one hundred men against the 15th. instant, of whom thirty must be archers and all on horseback.
I cannot do it because the land is in division between my lady Russell’s daughter and me and I am sure Mr Russell has taken up the best of them already.
I beg therefore, that my lady, my mother [the Dowager Duchess of Norfolk] may have a letter to furnish me with one hundred men, for I cannot make forty without her help.
31
Henry needed a general to destroy the rebels and, as was the Tudor habit, wreak merciless reprisals upon them. He initially planned to lead them himself - two harnesses, or suits of armour, were sent up the Thames from Greenwich for his use on the battlefield - but was persuaded otherwise. Cromwell, although a mercenary soldier in his youth in Italy, was not an experienced or inspiring military commander. Given his unenviable reputation in the realm, he probably faced assassination by his own soldiers if he was to lead the royalist forces.
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