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House Of Treason: The Rise And Fall Of A Tudor Dynasty Page 10


  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.82

  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:Because you have offended our sovereign, the king’s grace, in committing treason against his person and here attainted of the same, the law of the realm is this: that you shall be burnt here within the Tower of London on the Green, else to have your head smitten off, as the king’s pleasure shall be further known.83

  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. 84

  His children, Henry and Mary, were later to threaten everything Norfolk strived for - and, indeed, his life.

  4

  A WOMAN SCORNED

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

  Elizabeth Howard, Duchess of Norfolk, to

  Thomas Cromwell, Lord Privy Seal1

  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 1519.2 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:Three of my household folks have sickened in my house and died in the town within seven days past . . . I am fain to keep my wife and children here still for I know no place in this country where to send them in clean air. Most humbly, I beseech your grace to give me leave to send my wife and children into Wales or Lancashire to remain near the seaside until . . . it shall please God to cease this death here.

  And I shall take such fortune as God will send, for whilst I live, fear of death, nor other thing, shall cause me to forbear to serve my master, where it shall be his pleasure to command me.3

  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:I have be[en], am, and ever shall be, ready to serve your grace in whatever place so ever your pleasure shall be to command me. Beseeching your most noble grace so to look on me, your poor servant, that once, or I die, I do your highness’ service in such business in your own presence.4

  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,5 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 archives6 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.7 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 penanc
e to be subjects unto your husband. You are underlings, underlings, and must be obedient.’8 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’.9 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.10

  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’.11 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:Those of the opposite party were trying hard to win her over to their opinion, but if the whole world were to set about it they would not make her change. She was and would continue to be one of her party.

  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’.12 Her removal became necessary to placate an increasingly irritated Anne Boleyn.

  The following November, the duchess sent Catherine a present of a volaille - a tempting dish of glazed chicken - and an orange, and also a letter from the English representative in Rome, Sir Gregory Casale. Such was the atmosphere of intrigue and mistrust surrounding the whole question of the annulment that Chapuys doubted the queen’s own belief that Elizabeth’s gift was merely an act of kindness: ‘I fear it was done with the knowledge of her husband, as a means of entering into some secret communication with her majesty more easily,’ he reported to his master, Charles V, enclosing Casale’s note.13

  Her banishment from court did nothing to subdue her.

  Elizabeth stubbornly refused to carry Anne’s train when the king’s mistress was created Marchioness of Pembroke in that sumptuous ceremony at Windsor Castle in September 1532 and it had to be borne, instead, by her thirteen-year-old daughter, Mary. She also unashamedly refused to attend Anne’s coronation in June 1533,14 although the queen’s step-grandmother, Agnes, Dowager Duchess of Norfolk, was the chief lady among the royal attendants. She pointedly stayed away from the christening of Princess Elizabeth at Greenwich in September that year. Elizabeth also (unsuccessfully) opposed the new queen’s ambitions to marry off her own daughter to Henry Fitzroy, Duke of Richmond, and was later to protest volubly about the king’s failure to pay up the due marriage jointure to Mary.

  Sometime after August 1533, the king sent Elizabeth’s brother-in-law, Lord Bergavenny, to ‘make an arrangement between her and the duke, her husband’. Norfolk, who had just arrived back from a mission in France, was warily reluctant to meet his wife before Bergavenny could instil some sweet reason in her bitter heart. He failed, probably after pledging, more in hope than expectation, that the duke ‘should henceforth be a good husband’. Both Elizabeth and her husband knew he had no intention to giving up the warmth and ample, bawdy comforts that Bessie Holland provided in his magnificent ducal bed.15

  Before the Norfolks formally separated just before Easter 1534, the duke had cast around for somewhere comfortably distant where his wife would now live. Even he could not be seen to throw her out on the street, much as he would have liked to. He pleaded with her brother to house her (and a small number of her immediate attendants), but Henry, Lord Stafford, sensibly refused to become involved. Who could blame him? He was only too familiar with the ‘sensual and wilful’ character of his formidable sister and had tasted a full measure of her fearsome temper. Stafford prayed piously to God to ‘send my Lady a better mind’ but, more realistically, confessed to Norfolk: ‘Her accustomed wild language does not lie in my power to stop, whereby great danger might ensue to me and all mine, though I never deserved it. In this matter, you know, by long experience, I can do no good,’16 he plaintively added.

  The same day - 13 May 1533 - Stafford also wrote to Cromwell.

  I received your letter today, by my lord of Norfolk’s servant, touching the taking of my lady of Norfolk into my house, whereby you reckon that with my good counsel, tranquillity may be established between my lord and her.

  To be assured of that, I would not only receive her - but fetch her on my feet [from] London.

  The only viable solution, he steadfastly maintained, lay not among her family, nor in ‘the pitiful exclamations of her poor friends, praying her to remember what honour she has come to by her husband’, or even through the king, ‘who has showed her so great favour as might have won any alien’s heart’. No, her own uncompromising attitude towards her husband had to change dramatically.

  What more could her enemies wish than this continual contention with her husband, which makes him forsake her company, and besides the obloquy of this word, brings her into the king’s displeasure, which to every true heart is death.

  Despite all this, ‘and the gentleness of her husband, she cannot be induced to break her sensual and wilful mind, and she takes me, and all others who have advised her to conformity, to be flatterers and liars’. Stafford added: ‘I trust you will not reckon that I can do any good in this matter, but I should incur great jeopardy from her wild language.’ Soberly, he concluded: ‘It is my shame and sorrow, being her brother, to rehearse all this.’17

  In the end, Elizabeth was ignominiously packed off to a bleak manor
house, rented by Norfolk from the crown, at Redbourn in Hertfordshire, and permitted a twenty-strong household to display some small semblance of status for someone of such high, noble birth. Here she fruitfully occupied her time venting her ample spleen at her unfaithful husband through a series of virulent and sadly repetitive letters written to the king, his Council and, deviously perhaps, to Norfolk’s arch-enemy in the king’s administration, Thomas Cromwell.

  She spared no blushes.

  Heaven has no rage like a love turned to hatred, nor hell a fury like a woman scorned. The slights and humiliations allegedly inflicted upon her over many years by Norfolk were always as fresh and as painful as if they had been suffered only minutes before. Her vitriolic words tumbled off page after page as she angrily dictated to her clerk, although, at times, strong emotions clouded her memory for dates and places. It would have been a waking nightmare to find oneself sitting next to Elizabeth at a banquet.

  Cromwell, who had usurped Norfolk’s position as the king’s closest councillor, seems happily to have assumed the improbable role of marriage counsellor. In appearing to be a sympathetic friend to the duchess, he doubtless envisaged sweet opportunity both to deflate the duke’s rampant pride and profitably exploit his personal difficulties in the constant infighting for influence at Henry’s court. In late August 1534, Elizabeth wrote to him, seeking his assistance to procure some venison for her table, ‘as none was sent to her since her lord’s displeasure’.18 This was the beginning of a prolonged correspondence lasting until 1539 and its vituperative contents would be all too familiar to a divorce lawyer of today.

  In the summer of 1535, the duchess journeyed to Dunstable, Bedfordshire, where the king was staying, to plead with a clearly unsympathetic Henry to order Norfolk to grant her ‘a better living’, or more simply, more cash for her to live on.