House Of Treason: The Rise And Fall Of A Tudor Dynasty Page 11

  Another attempt at reconciliation followed in December 1536 when Elizabeth was again urged to return to Norfolk’s bed and board. This unlikely plan was predictably rejected by the spurned wife, who later told the Lord Privy Seal that she could never bring herself to agree to this,

  for no ill-handling that he [Norfolk] can do to me - nor for no imprisonment. So I pray you show it to my lord my husband that he may [believe] it, seeing that I will not do it at the king’s commandment, nor at your desire.

  I will not do it for [any] friend nor kin I have living. Nor, from this day forward, I will never sue to the king, or to none other, to desire my lord my husband to take me [back] again.

  I have made much suit to him . . . and I made him no fault, [aside from] declaring . . . his shameful handling of me.19

  Even if he took her back, it would be more ‘for the shame of the world than for any love he bears me’. After all, she now preferred a solitary existence at Redbourn: ‘I have been well used, since I have been from him, to a quiet life, and if I should come to him, to use me as he did [it] would greet me worse now than it did before, because I have lived quiet these three years without brawling or fighting.’20

  Her ‘quiet life’ also included estrangement from her elder son, Henry, and her daughter, Mary, who took their father’s side in the protracted and bitter dispute. Elizabeth angrily branded them both as ‘ungracious’ and ‘unkind’ and in one letter, perhaps revealingly, referred to her offspring as ‘his children’.21

  The following year she returned to the attack over her pitiful income. On 26 June, she wrote to Cromwell asking both him and the king to speak to her husband about releasing funds from her jointure. ‘My trust’, she told the minister, ‘is in you, next [to] God.’ There was also the nagging matter of the settlement for the unconsummated marriage of her daughter with the king’s bastard son (who had died in July 1536) and the 2,000 marks paid out at her own wedding by her father, the Duke of Buckingham,

  which . . . my husband has forgotten now he has so much wealth and honours and is so far in doting love with that queen [Anne Boleyn] that he neither regards God nor his honour.

  He knows that it is spoken of far and near, to his great dishonour and shame.

  Then the old, irrepressible burning resentment at her lost marriage to Ralph Neville welled up again: Norfolk ‘chose me for love and I am younger than him by twenty years and he has put me away [three] years and a quarter at this midsummer’:I have lived always a good woman, as it is not unknown to him. I was daily . . . in the court sixteen years together, when he has lived from me more than a year in the king’s wars.

  The king’s grace shall be my record how I used myself without any ill name or fame and [was] the best in the court. There were at that time both men and women [who] know how I used myself in my younger days.

  Here is a poor reward I have in my latter days for my well doing!22

  - a less than subtle reference to the notorious promiscuity among the ladies of Henry’s court. Her husband had confiscated all her jewels and clothes and left her like a prisoner - as no one could visit her without his express permission.

  I know, my lord, my husband’s crafty ways of old. He has made me many times promises . . . never [fulfilled]. I will never make more [pleas] to him.

  Norfolk kept ‘that drab . . . that harlot’ Bess Holland in his house at Kenninghall, Norfolk, and once had ordered his ladies to attack and to bind her, until her fingers bled from her frantic scratching at the wooden floorboards, in her anger and frustration. The ladies

  [chained] me and sat on my breast until I spat blood and he never punished them.

  All this was done for Bess Holland’s sake.

  I know well, if I should come home again, my life should be but short.23

  Elizabeth had heard how kind Cromwell had been to Princess Mary ‘in her great trouble’: could he not now help her by increasing her own lowly income? ‘I live in Hertfordshire and have but £50 a quarter and keep twenty persons daily, besides other great charges. I could live better and cheaper in London than I do here.’24

  Norfolk was notoriously mean. He may well have handed out alms and food to two hundred poor people every day - this was part and parcel of noblesse oblige, after all - and owned more than fifty jewelled rosaries, but he habitually refused to pay anything but the smallest pittances both to his estranged duchess and to his own son and heir, Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey.25 Thus, poverty and penury came high on Elizabeth Howard’s ever-growing list of grievances and became the most pressing of her complaints. In the same letter, she told Cromwell:

  I have but £50 [every] quarter and here I lie in a dear country. I have been from my husband, come Tuesday in the Passion week three years. Though I be left poor, yet I am content with all, for I am out of danger from my enemies and of the ill life that I had with . . . my husband since he loved Bess Holland first . . . [who] has been the cause of all my trouble.

  I pray you my lord when you have leisure, write me an answer whether I shall have a better living or not.

  She was determined never to write to Norfolk again ‘however poorly I live’ as he had never bothered to answer her letters, even though they had been written by the king’s commandment. (In this, she was a little harsh, as Norfolk was away, suppressing the Pilgrimage of Grace rebellion in the north.) She was, however, not to be diverted from the justice of her arguments:

  If he shall take me again, I know well it is more for the sake of the world than for any love he bears me, for I know well, my life shall be as ill as ever it was.

  Elizabeth ended this letter to the Lord Privy Seal with fervent prayers for God to send him ‘long life and health, as I would myself’ and, finally, added a very barbed desire for divine intervention to help him to ‘overcome your enemies’.26

  No doubt she meant her husband.

  Despite his best efforts, Cromwell could not get the parsimonious Norfolk to relent, even after Elizabeth came to London in yet another attempt to convince him and Henry to press her case. Norfolk quickly heard of her visit to the court and wrote immediately to the minister:It has come to my knowledge that my wilful wife is come to London and has [been] with you yesterday night . . .

  I assure you as long as I live I will never come into her company . . .

  Over the years, the scandal seemed to wash off egotistical Norfolk’s back, but one of Elizabeth’s claims clearly nettled him - her allegation about his ‘cruel’ treatment of her during the birth of their daughter, Mary. It does seem unlikely that the duke, anxious for a second male heir, would risk the life of the child by attacking his wife at such a time. In his denials, he also did not mince his words. ‘She has untruly slandered me in writing and saying, that when she had been in childbed of my daughter of Richmond two nights and a day’,

  I [pulled] her out of the bed by the hair of her head, about the house, and with my dagger gave her a wound in her head.

  Battered and insulted, Norfolk was aghast at the claim. ‘My good lord,’ he told Cromwell, ‘if I prove not by witness, and that with many honest persons, that she had the scar on her head fifteen months before she was delivered of my daughter and that the same was cut by a surgeon of London, for a swelling she had in her head, [after pulling] two teeth, never trust my word after.’

  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 15361

  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.