House Of Treason: The Rise And Fall Of A Tudor Dynasty (31 page)

The duke and his new duchess, together with his four-year-old son, Philip, Earl of Surrey, attended a magnificent feast laid on by William Mingay, the mayor of Norwich, on 5 June 1562 for members of the nobility visiting the duke’s home in the city. The twenty-two guests, the last named being Sir Richard Fulmerston, the old family retainer now made good, sat down to a meal of truly Johnsonian proportions. Certainly, no one went home hungry, unless they were vegetarians. The toothsome menu included 112 lb (50.8 kg.) of beef, four collars of brawn, a hind quarter of veal, a leg, breast and loin of mutton, six pullets, four brace of partridges, two guinea fowl and two mallard ducks, together with thirty-four loaves. To wash all this down were a barrel of double-strength beer and two gallons of white wine.
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Margaret provided him with three children: firstly a daughter, Margaret (or Meg), then two sons, Thomas, on 24 August 1561 and William, born on 19 December 1563. The tragedy of his first wife was now repeated: three weeks after William’s birth, on Sunday 9 January, she too ‘departed this transitory world’ at ‘about seven of the clock [in the] afternoon’ in Norwich.
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Kenninghall remained a popular country home and his principal seat, and there were also several houses owned by the Howards in Norwich, then the prosperous second city in England. But as the premier peer of the realm, Norfolk felt the need for another palatial home to firmly stamp his mark as a regional magnate, if not a prince. Indeed, he had inherited his father’s and grandfather’s overweening pride in his own dynasty, calling himself in legal documents ‘the right honourable and noble prince, Thomas, Duke of Norfolk . . .’.
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Sometime around 1561, he began to build a huge new ducal palace on the banks of the River Wensum, in the parish of St John Maddermarket in Norwich,
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using building materials brought by river from the demolished Benedictine abbey of St Benet’s at Holm.
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It was to become the greatest house outside London, equipped with its own bowling alley, 188 feet (55.4 m.) long, a covered real tennis court and a theatre - the duke had his own company of actors.
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He was not content with the old ancestral home at Lambeth and so sold it in 1558 to Richard Garth and John Dister for £400.
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The fourth duke purchased the former Carthusian monastery of the Charterhouse, on the northern outskirts of London, from Edward, first Baron North, for £2,000 in 1564 and embarked on an extensive rebuilding programme. It was proudly renamed Howard House.
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With his exalted position and ancestry, it was inevitable that he would be called upon for military service. Like his great-grandfather and grandfather before him, he accepted the appointment of Lieutenant General of the north in 1559, in his case somewhat reluctantly. Norfolk’s mission was to prosecute Elizabeth’s government’s policy of ousting the French military and political presence from Scotland by defending the border town of Berwick and striking up alliances with the Scottish Protestant lords. He was not happy in his work. Although he played no part in the fighting, he wrote of his fervent desires, both to return south, ‘because this country and I can ill agree’
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and an earnest wish ‘to finish this war now begun’.
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Norfolk also amply demonstrated his Protestant credentials by his disapproval of the old religion’s remaining deep roots in the border area. ‘I find the town and country hereabouts far out of order in matters of religion, the altars still standing in the churches, contrary to the queen’s majesty’s proceedings,’ he reported to Sir William Cecil, on 10 January 1560, and recommended that James Pilkington, Bishop of Durham, should make some urgent reforms.
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Just over six weeks later, he signed a military agreement with the Scots and, later, the Treaty of Edinburgh in July 1560 ensured the withdrawal of French troops from Scotland.

Norfolk returned to London soon afterwards. He had lost nothing of the Howards’ love of showy pomp and circumstance. A contemporary diarist records the duke and duchess’s grand entry into the capital on 8 October 1562:

The following month, he was appointed a member of the Privy Council. Like the third duke, he soon acquired a taste for political intrigue and a thirst for power. Ranged against him at court, however, were some powerful adversaries: Cecil, Elizabeth’s omnipotent minister, and Robert Dudley, who was created Earl of Leicester in 1564. Norfolk and Leicester soon clashed over the seemingly eternal question of Elizabeth’s marriage - the duke opposed Leicester’s own ambitions for the queen’s hand and instead promoted the diplomatic benefits of her marrying Archduke Charles of Austria, inconveniently a Catholic. He wrote a three-page letter to the queen from Norwich in November 1567, about ‘my opinion in these matters’ as sickness had prevented him coming to London; he may have had an infected hand. He was hesitant to commit his ideas to paper:

He knew the Archduke’s request to practise his religion privately after marriage to Elizabeth was a ‘matter of such weight . . . nor yet how [a] great difference there is for your highness’ husband, upon whom all men’s eyes [would] be set, to keep a contrary religion to yourself and your realm’.

Norfolk believed that the Archduke ‘is not very careful of religion’ and he nursed high hopes that she ‘may persuade him afterwards to change [his faith]’. Norfolk underlined his hopes that ‘she may marry soon, [as] the people desire it’.
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But, like all other suitors for the hand of Elizabeth, the Archduke was not found suitable as a consort for the Virgin Queen.

The duke was a widower again and on 29 January 1567 married his third wife, Elizabeth, daughter of Sir Thomas Leyburn and the widow of Thomas, Lord Dacre of Glisland, a powerful northern landowner. She already had four children - five-year-old George, Anne, Mary and Elizabeth. Norfolk married off his stepdaughters to his sons by his first two wives, in a less than subtle attempt to secure the substantial Dacre properties for his male offspring. Anne Dacre married his eldest, Philip; Mary, his second son, Thomas (later Earl of Suffolk) and Elizabeth wed William. Unfortunately, little George Dacre died in May 1569 at Thetford after being crushed by a wooden vaulting horse which fell on top of him, and Mary Dacre also died young.

All Norfolk’s marriages, though happy, were blighted by heartbreak. His third wife died in childbirth on 4 September 1567, nine months after their wedding. Her baby was also born dead. The duke was stricken by grief and must have felt his family cursed. He fell ill and did not recover until the spring of the following year.

Events elsewhere were to trigger his downfall.

In May 1568, Mary Queen of Scots fled to England after her defeat in a brief civil war in Scotland, without money, or even a change of clothes. She was the widow of, firstly, Francis II of France, then of Henry Stuart, Lord Darnley, and latterly became the wife of the dashing James Hepburn, fourth Earl of Bothwell. For her personal heraldry she had quartered the arms of England with those of Scotland and France in what was tantamount to a claim to the crown of England, based on her descent from her grandmother, Henry VIII’s elder sister Margaret, who had married James IV of Scotland. Many English Catholics saw her as Elizabeth’s replacement and Mary therefore spent the remainder of her life as a prisoner, sequestered from English politics and public life.

On top of all this, the Scottish queen had arrived as a refugee under a dark cloud of criminal suspicion. Elizabeth was persuaded by her Privy Council to investigate the Scots’ allegations of her complicity in the murder, in February 1567, of her drunken, wastrel husband, the syphilitic Darnley. He had been brutally strangled after escaping from a house at Kirk o’ Field, on the outskirts of Edinburgh, which had been destroyed in an explosion set off in an attempt to assassinate him.
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Norfolk was one of the English commissioners appointed to meet, at York, their Scottish counterparts, sent by James Stewart, Earl of Moray, and Regent to the infant James VI of Scotland, Mary’s son by Darnley.

During a break in the deliberations on 16 October 1568, the duke went hawking with the Scottish Secretary of State, William Maitland. As they rode along the banks of the River Ouse, near Cawood, eight miles (4.87 km.) south-west of York, Maitland suddenly suggested that Norfolk should marry the Scottish queen as a convenient way of uniting the two nations in a powerful alliance, as well as securing her claim as an heir to the English throne. Although the duke suspected that Mary had been culpable in her husband’s murder, the old Howard ambitions for power and status overwhelmed any qualms. The notion had considerable, almost irresistible, allure; marrying Mary could one day make Norfolk king consort, with sovereignty over all the British Isles, wearing the crown imperial.

Not unnaturally, he became sorely tempted by the marriage plan, and suppressed any nagging doubts by the sure knowledge that Elizabeth herself had suggested his name, together with those of Leicester and Darnley, as appropriate husbands back in December 1564, ten months after the duke lost his second wife.

The murder investigation was inevitably adjourned without a decision and Elizabeth summoned her commissioners back to London - telling the duke on 3 November he should ‘repair thither as soon as he may’
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- so they could continue their inquiries away from the machinations of the Scottish delegation. During the conference, resumed at Westminster, Norfolk discussed the possible marriage with Moray during a clandestine meeting in the park of Hampton Court.
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His attempts at secrecy failed dismally. The French ambassador had already reported rumours about the marriage to Paris,
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and Elizabeth herself was becoming suspicious about her cousin’s ambitions. She suddenly asked him point-blank that November whether he intended to marry Mary Queen of Scots, a match, she now believed, which threatened both her sacred person and her crown. Rather too smoothly, Norfolk replied that

These were foolish, rash words that would to return to haunt the fourth duke in the months to come. Daringly, recklessly, he had met Mary on the pretext of visiting his sister Margaret, who was married to Henry Scrope, ninth Lord Bolton, the Scottish queen’s temporary jailer at Bolton Castle, north Yorkshire.
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By early 1569, Norfolk became determined to marry her, even though Mary was still married to Bothwell.

She enthusiastically pledged her love for the duke, seeing him as the key that would free her from perpetual, tedious imprisonment. She petitioned the Pope to annul her union with Bothwell, which was invalid, she claimed, as it was by Protestant rites. Hedging her bets, she also sought more physical means of freedom, secretly writing to the Catholic Earls of Northumberland and Westmorland to seek their help in releasing her, by force of arms if necessary, from her new prison at Tutbury Castle in Staffordshire. She hinted at such an escape attempt in a letter to Norfolk on 31 January 1569:

Mary understood very well that Norfolk could forfeit his vast estates if attainted as a traitor, and sought to reassure him:

These were beguiling, but hazardous words. Mary was said to have an ‘alluring grace, a pretty Scotch speech and a searching wit clouded with mildness’. She was also a natural conspirator, with intrigue running through her very veins.

On 19 March, after a long pause, she wrote again to Norfolk, ‘in respect of the dangers of writing, which you seemed to fear’.