House Of Treason: The Rise And Fall Of A Tudor Dynasty (25 page)

A few months later Norfolk hit upon a plan to defuse the growing hostility between the Howards and the Seymour brothers, Edward and Thomas, who were uncles to Henry’s precious heir to the throne, Prince Edward. Given Surrey’s vocal hostility to these arrivistes, the duke’s design was hopelessly optimistic, or, more likely, his insensitivity towards others’ feelings, plus his overarching ambition, blinded him to his son’s predictable objections.

He played the marriage card again.

On the Tuesday of Whitsun week, Norfolk proposed to marry his daughter Mary, the flirty widow of the Duke of Richmond, to Hertford’s younger brother, the roguish soldier of fortune Sir Thomas Seymour, an idea he had unsuccessfully raised in 1538.
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He also suggested marrying off Surrey’s two sons to Sir Edward’s daughters to secure a powerful alliance between the old nobility and those close to the throne during the last years of Henry’s reign and the next.
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The king smiled upon Norfolk’s plan, doubtless because his sixth wife, the matronly widow Katherine Parr, had previously been head over heels in love with Seymour and Henry wanted him safely married off and out of harm’s way.
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Surrey was enraged when he heard the news and searched the Palace of Westminster for his father to remonstrate with him. He came across his sister Mary in one of the anterooms and, unforgivably, urged her to lure Henry into a liaison with her. ‘Thus by length of time it is possible the king should take such a fancy to you that you shall able to govern like Madam d’Estampes’ (the French king’s mistress) in France, he told her.
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Mary was disgusted at her brother’s suggestion and screamed angrily that all the Howards should ‘perish and she would cut her own throat rather than . . . consent to such a villainy’.
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With a dysfunctional family such as the Howards, it is hardly surprising that the Seymours were uninterested in Norfolk’s marriage plans. Well aware of the king’s increasing bad health and that his end was drawing nigh, they had their own agenda for the future.

Surrey, known as the ‘Poet Earl’, may have been capable of writing some of the most poignant and touching verse in the English language, but his genius also possessed a darker side. From a teenager, he was always a hothead: impetuous, swift to anger, prickly and intensely jealous of his rank and lineage. It was small wonder that John Barlow, the Dean of Westbury in Wiltshire, described him in 1539 as ’the most foolish proud boy that is in England’.
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So it continued throughout his short adult life. Following his imprisonment at Windsor for striking a courtier in 1537, he was in trouble again in July 1542 for challenging a member of the royal household, John Leigh, to a duel. He was promptly clapped in the Fleet Prison,
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with two of his servants to look after him. Seemingly penitent, he sought the Privy Council’s help in restoring him to the king’s grace, writing ‘from this noisome prison, whose pestilent airs are not unlike to bring some alteration of health’.

After pledging that he would ‘bridle my heady will’, freedom came on 7 August but only after his punitive payment of almost £7,000 as a surety for good behaviour. Surrey was bound over from committing ‘neither by himself, his servants or any other at his procurement, any bodily displeasure, either by word or deed [against] John Leigh esquire’.
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The earl returned frustrated from his father’s ignominious campaign in Scotland in the early winter of 1542. The following January, he was accused of rowdy and violent disorder in the capital. Today, he would probably have an anti-social behaviour order slapped upon him. In 1543, he was sent back to prison.

His fresh disgrace - and his eventual downfall - began with a trivial incident. On 24 January, Alice Flaner, a maid servant of one Mistress Millicent Arundel, who ran an inn off St Lawrence Lane, near Cheapside, had complained that a butcher in St Nicholas Shambles
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had ‘deceived her with a knuckle of veal’. In future, she wanted ‘the best for “peers of the realm should thereof eat, and besides that a prince”’. What prince did she mean? She answered: ‘The Earl of Surrey.’ Surely, the earl was ‘no prince, but a man of honour and of more honour like to be?’ The serving girl replied: ‘Yes, and if . . . ought came to the king otherwise than well, he is like to be king.’ She was firmly told: ‘It is not so’, but defiantly, she maintained: ‘It is said so.’
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The Privy Council became curiously interested in the case and questioned Mistress Arundel. She disclosed a baleful tale of wanton vandalism and hooliganism in the streets of London. On 21 January, Surrey, together with Thomas Clere and Thomas Wyatt, had left her house at about nine o’clock at night armed with crossbows (used to shoot stones in hunting birds). Their servants carried cudgels. Every one of them was probably drunk or at least tipsy. They did not return until after midnight.

Surrey and his fellow roisterers had smashed the windows in the home of a former Lord Mayor, Sir Richard Gresham, in Milk Street, off Cheapside, and then had moved east, via Lombard Street, to Fenchurch Street, where they had broken the windows of the merchant Alderman William Birch. What jolly japes! They rounded off their exciting and enjoyable evening by taking a boat out on to the Thames and firing their crossbows at the whores plying their trade on Bankside, Southwark. She also testified that Surrey, and his two servants, Thomas Clere and William Pickering, together with Norfolk’s treasurer, Hussey, had eaten meat during Lent.

Surrey’s enemies on the Council, particularly Hertford, were not going to turn a blind eye to such mischief. In later evidence, Mistress Arundel talked about the earl’s anger over the purchase of some cloth. She had told her kitchen maids ‘how he fumed’ and added:

Another maid, Joan Whetnall, testified that the coat of arms above the earl’s bed ‘were very like the king’.

Surrey was summoned to a Privy Council meeting at St James’s Palace on 1 April 1543. Fortunately, he appeared before Bishop Gardiner, Wriothesley, John Russell and Anthony Browne, then his father’s close allies at court. He was charged

The earl claimed he had permission to eat the meat, but ‘touching the stone bows, he could not deny but that he had very evil done therein, submitting himself to such punishment as should to them be thought good’. So he was packed off to the Fleet Prison again, as were Clere and Pickering the next day.
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Gardiner had focused on the religious issue of breaking the Lenten fast and, strangely, there was no mention of Surrey’s dangerous aspirations on the crown. After eight days, he was free again.

The earl was still struggling with his burden of debt. In October 1546, he sought the award of a cloister and dorter (dormitory) of a Norwich monastery which was ‘unserviceable to their church, saving for a memory of the old superstition and will . . . discharge me out of the misery of debt’. If Henry agreed to the grant, ‘I will faithfully promise never to trouble his majesty with any suit of profit to myself hereafter and spend the rest [of his life] in his majesty’s service with the old zeal that I have served with always.’
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As the day of Henry’s death grew nearer, the conspiracies at court became more fevered and intense. Who would control the realm as regent to the boy king, Edward?

Norfolk and Gardiner’s faction held sway for the first nine months of 1546, instituting fierce crackdowns on religious reformers, although the duke attended few council meetings. One of those to die in the heretic’s fire on 16 July was John Lassells, who had earlier exposed Catherine Howard’s teenage promiscuity. At one point in late June or early July, Henry’s sixth queen was herself in danger of arrest for heresy but only escaped through her feminine guile.
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Norfolk’s younger son, Thomas, was admonished by the Privy Council at Greenwich in May for ‘disputing indiscreetly of Scripture with other young gentlemen of the court’. He was offered mercy if ‘he would frankly confess what he said in disproof of sermons preached in court last Lent and his other talk in the Queen’s chamber and elsewhere in the court concerning Scripture’. After meekly promising to ‘reform his indiscreet ways’, he was dismissed.
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The tensions between the traditionalist and evangelical factions culminated in the admiral John Dudley, Viscount Lisle, quarrelling with Gardiner during a Council meeting at the beginning of October and angrily striking him full in the face.
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Hertford and Lisle also used ‘violent and injurious’ words to Wriothesley and Sir William Paulet, Lord St John, the Lord Steward of the Household.
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Norfolk’s great ally, Bishop Gardiner of Winchester, was the first casualty, being banished from the Privy Council over a simple misunderstanding about an exchange of episcopal land, which the king wanted to tidy up the boundaries of one of his many estates. Gardiner refused him, overconfident of his relationship with his royal master. He realised his enemies had exploited the situation and rushed to soothe Henry’s anger:

Gardiner feared this letter would be intercepted by Hertford and Lisle so begged his old friend Paget to deliver the note personally to Henry and pass on his request for an audience for the bishop.

But Paget had turned against him. The king responded with a cold and unforgiving letter on 4 December:

Henry told Gardiner with dreadful finality: ‘We see no cause why you should molest us further.’
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With the bishop exiled to his palace at Southwark, Hertford held the Privy Council meetings at his own home. He and his allies could now shift their sights on to Norfolk and his son, who had become rivals for the looming regency of England.

First to fall was Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey.

He had come to court sometime in November to press his case for the Norwich monastic site. He seemed oblivious to the king’s declining health or the change in the balance of power among his councillors.

At the beginning of December, the Privy Council received damaging information about him from the courtier and Member of Parliament (MP) Sir Richard Southwell, a former friend to the earl and his comrade-in-arms at Boulogne.
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Southwell told them ‘he knew of certain things of the earl that touched his fidelity to the king’.
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They detained the MP for further questioning and ordered Surrey’s arrest, by Sir Anthony Wingfield, captain of the king’s guard. The next day, Thursday 2 December, after dinner, [Wingfield] saw the earl coming into the palace [of Westminster] whilst he was walking in the great hall downstairs.

Surrey was taken to Lord Chancellor Wriothesley’s house at Ely Place in Holborn, opposite the church of St Andrew, for questioning.
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The new French ambassador, Odet de Selve,
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heard whispers that the earl faced two charges: ‘that he had the means of attempting the [French] castle of Hardelot when he was at Boulogne and neglected it; the other that he said there were some who made no great account of him, but he trusted one day to make them very small’.
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His accuser was also held at Wriothesley’s house and Surrey wanted to fight him as a matter of honour. True to form, the earl ‘vehemently affirmed himself a true man, desiring to be tried by justice, or else offering himself to fight in his shirt with Southwell’.
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