House Of Treason: The Rise And Fall Of A Tudor Dynasty Page 14

  Despite Norfolk’s earlier boasts that he had crushed sedition in East Anglia, there were still worrying signs of unrest and agitation. Cromwell received a report later that month of an itinerant fiddler called John Hogan who was going around Norfolk, drawing the crowds with his witty, tuneful treasons. In the butcher’s home at Diss, on the ‘Thursday after Ash Wednesday’ he sang a ditty mentioning Norfolk, his son Surrey and the Earl of Shrewsbury. When he finished, a cautious soul called John James told him:Beware how you sing this song in Suffolk. [Hogan] asked [him] why, for he had sung it twice before my lord of Surrey at Cambridge and at Thetford Abbey at which Thomas Beck replied if he had sung before [Surrey] he would have set him by the feet for slandering him.

  Hogan steadfastly maintained that if the Duke of Suffolk had allowed the Lincolnshire rebels to ‘join the Northern men, they would have brought England to a better stay [state] than it is now’.56

  Henry’s patience had long since ebbed away. The king, who loathed even the thought of negotiating with rebellious subjects, now demanded blood. Norfolk was the man to wreak pitiless retribution on the north. On 22 February, Henry sent him a chilling instruction: he must now impose martial law in the north and mercilessly slaughter all traitors.

  You shall cause such dreadful execution upon a good number of the inhabitants, of every town, village and hamlet that have offended in this rebellion, as well as by the hanging of them up on trees, as by the quartering them and setting their heads and quarters in every town, great and small, as may be a fearful spectacle to all hereafter that would practice any like matter.

  The king required the duke to kill them ‘without pity or respect . . . Remember that it shall be much better that these traitors should perish in their wilful, unkind, and traitorous follies, then that so slender a punishment should be done upon them as the dread [of it] should not be a warning to others.’

  Henry also thanked Norfolk for his loyalty:We shall not forget your services and are glad to hear also from sundry of our servants how you advance the truth, declaring the usurpation of the Bishop of Rome [the Pope] and how discreetly you paint those persons that call themselves religious57 in the colours of their hypocrisy and we doubt not but the further [that] you wade in the investigation of their behaviours, the more you shall detest the great number of them and the less esteem the punishment of those culpable.58

  The duke had some old grudges, and he cuttingly wrote to Cromwell: ‘Now shall appear whether for favour of these countrymen I forbore to fight with them at Doncaster as, you know, the king’s highness showed me it was thought by some I did. Those that so said shall now be proved false liars.’59

  At Carlisle there were so many prisoners that Norfolk did not know how to incarcerate them all: ‘You will hardly believe the trouble I have to keep the prisoners, there are so many,’ he lamented. There was not a lord or gentleman of Cumberland or Westmorland whose servants and tenants had not joined the insurgency. He informed the Privy Council that he would ‘proceed by the law martial, for if I should proceed by indictments, many a great offender might fortune [to] be found not guilty, saying he was brought forth against his will’.60 In a postscript, he jocularly told Sir William Paulet, Comptroller of the Household:

  And good Mr Comptroller, provide you of a new bailiff at Embleton for John Jackson your bailiff, will be hanged Thursday or Friday at the [latest] and I think some of your tenants will keep him company.

  On 24 February, he ordered that seventy-four ‘principal offenders’ should be hanged, pointing out ‘had I proceeded by the trial of twelve men, I think not the fifth . . . of these should have suffered, for the common saying here [is that] “I came out of fear of my life . . . I came forth for fear of burning of my house and destroying of my wife and children”. [Such] a small excuse will be well believed here, where much affection and pity of neighbours does reign.’61 As normal, their bodies were hung up and displayed until they rotted or were picked clean by carrion crows. But the number of executions was so great that the local chain manufacturers could not fulfil Norfolk’s order in time, so several corpses were left hanging on gibbets by rope.62 When Henry heard that several wives and mothers had cut down the bodies to give them Christian burial, he was enraged and insisted on the women being rooted out and punished.63 He was also disappointed that Norfolk had not quartered the corpses.64

  Norfolk moved on, hanging as he went. Cromwell drove him on to even greater cruelty, taunting him that he was soft on the suppression of the monasteries and lenient in his punishment of traitors. The duke retorted: ‘Neither here, nor elsewhere, will I be reputed Papist or a favourer of naughty religious persons’ and disclosed that he had been warned ‘to take heed of what he ate or drank in religious houses for fear of poison’ being used against him.65

  Despite Cromwell’s jibes, the king’s harsh injunctions to be ruthless were always in the forefront of Norfolk’s mind. Before moving on to the north-east and Yorkshire, he eagerly reported to Henry: ‘Folks think the last justice at Carlisle great and if more than twenty suffer at Durham and York it will be talked about’ and politely inquired how many the king wanted executed in York.66

  In Durham, while presiding over a commission of oyer and terminer to try twenty-four rebels in March, he discovered that the county palatine was not covered by the legal instrument setting up the process, so he and his fellow judges were ‘driven to the extremity of our simple wits [as to] what we should do’. As Norfolk wanted to arraign thirteen accused the following day, he decided to swear in the jury ‘keeping secret from them our lack of authority and I . . . thought to have proceeded by the law martial and to have taken the indictments as evidence’. But their offences were committed before his appointment as king’s lieutenant, so he could not employ martial law against them. It was all rather embarrassing.67

  At York, William Levening, of Acklam, who was involved in the January rebellion, was acquitted on 23 March 1537, much to Norfolk’s chagrin. Two jurymen - Thomas Delariver and Sir Henry Gascoigne - were empanelled by the duke himself to ensure the right verdict. With four others, Delariver was convinced that Levening was ‘worthy to die’ but seven said he was their neighbour and they ‘knew better his conversation’. The jury debates continued and an impatient Norfolk sent in his usher to ask ‘whether they were agreed or no’. When no unanimous verdict was forthcoming, an angry duke ‘took away from them all that might keep them warm’ and refused them food and water.68 But all was to no avail and Levening was freed after more than thirty-six hours of jury deliberations.69 Norfolk had learned a hard lesson from this second fiasco: in future trials at York, he packed the jury with compliant gentry.

  Overall, Norfolk was thoroughly satisfied with his efforts, ‘though the number be nothing as great as their deserts did require to have suffered, yet I think the like number has not been heard of put to execution at one time’, as he commented at Carlisle. Almost two hundred and twenty had been executed in the north and, in London, forty-four of them from monasteries, including the abbots of Kirkstall, Jervaulx, Fountains, Sawley and Whalley. One of the abbots he executed was Dr Matthew Mackerell70 of the Premonstratensian abbey at Bar-lings, Lincolnshire, who had preached that startling homily at the funeral of his father, the second duke of Norfolk, back in 1524. Robert Aske, the pilgrims’ leader, had been hanged in chains at York Castle. A self-satisfied Norfolk summed things up: ‘These countries, thanked be God, [are now] in such order that I trust never in our life, no new commotions shall be attempted. Surely, I see nothing here but fear.’71

  Unsurprisingly, Norfolk’s punitive progress through the north made him an unpopular figure. The thirty-two-year-old widow Mabel Brigge began a three-day ‘Black Fast of St Trynzan’ (St Trinian) in Yorkshire in March 1538 to cast a curse on the king and the duke. She had done it once before ‘for a man and he broke his neck and so she trusted [the same would happen] to the king and this false duke’. It did not work and she was executed at York in early April that year.72

 
Despite the slaughter he had inflicted, there was still malicious gossip at Henry’s court about Norfolk’s self-interest in doing his duty for the king. One malevolent rumour suggested he had brought his twenty-four-year-old son Surrey north in order to train him as his deputy in ruling the region - not such a far-fetched idea, given the Howards’ earlier experience on the borders. Heaven forfend! Norfolk was disingenuously aghast and protested to Henry: ‘Sir, on the troth I owe to God and you my sovereign lord, I never had such a thought.’ Surrey was there merely to keep him company during those dark, cold nights in the northern counties:I am very affectionate to him and love him better than all my children and would have gladly had him here with me, both to have me company, in hunting, hawking, playing at cards, shooting and other pastimes, and also to have entertained my servants to the intent they should have been the less desirous to ask leave to go home to their wives and friends.

  If I minded any other thing in sending for him than these, and especially if ever I thought other false surmises matter, God let me shortly die in the most shameful death that ever man did.

  Norfolk vowed to lay down his ‘poor body’ to defend his reputation against these ‘false caitiffs’73 that were too afraid to show their faces.74

  Surrey returned to court at the beginning of that August and almost immediately came up against a courtier who suggested, mischievously, that he was sympathetic to the pilgrims’ cause. The hot-headed and proud Howard heir struck the man viciously in the face with his fist. Legend has it that the other protagonist was Edward Seymour, Viscount Beauchamp, one of the queen’s brothers, but there is no real evidence to support this identification. Violence, or the shedding of blood within the precincts of the king’s court, was a serious felony, normally punished by the loss of the right hand in a gruesome ceremony.

  Norfolk was horrified at the incident, but even more so at the prospect of how justice against his son would be meted out. He immediately wrote to Cromwell on 8 August, his heart pierced ‘by a multitude of pricks’ especially the fear of Surrey’s maiming. The ‘informations [about] my son [are] falsely imagined, no man knows better than you . . .’ and he sought reassurance ‘to amend the [fear] in my heart by chance of likelihood to be maimed of his right arm’. Norfolk added in his own handwriting: ‘The loss of a finger would not cause me as much sorrow.’75 The Lord Privy Seal duly intervened and Surrey was packed off to Windsor Castle for two weeks’ imprisonment to cool his heels, and his temper.76 There he consoled himself by writing the poem When Windsor Walls Sustained my Wearied Arm and the elegy So Cruel Prison, which recalled his friendship with Richmond.

  Norfolk, who was feeling the effects of his punishing itinerary on his advancing years, frequently asked permission to return to London - but each time was refused. In September, Henry thanked him for his congratulations on Jane Seymour’s pregnancy, and asked him to stay just a little longer in the north:Touching your suit for your return; albeit your wisdom and circumspection is such as we think we could hardly devise to be so well served there as . . . by your continuance in those parts.

  Yet, minding to grant your desire, for your better quiet, satisfaction and recovery of your health, (which we do more tender and regard than we can almost express), we do purpose shortly to revoke you and to establish a standing Council there for the conservation of those countries in quiet . . .77

  The king’s letter was double-edged. Norfolk’s recall may have become imminent, but any dreams he had of becoming the powerful magnate controlling the north of England had vanished. The ‘Council of the North’ with Cuthbert Tunstall, Bishop of Durham, as its president, was duly created and Norfolk returned to London in time for the long-awaited birth of a lawful son to Henry and his queen Jane, on 12 October 1537.

  He was one of the godfathers to Prince Edward at the christening at midnight on Sunday 15 October in the splendours of the newly decorated Chapel Royal at Hampton Court.78 But three days later, the queen fell ill. Her condition rapidly worsened and, during the evening of 24 October, Norfolk dashed off a hasty note to Cromwell, still at Westminster:My good lord: I pray you to be here tomorrow early to comfort our good master, for as for our mistress, there is no likelihood of her life - the more pity - and I fear she shall not be alive at the time you shall read this.

  At eight at night, with the hand of [your] sorrowful friend.

  T. NORFOLK79

  She died just before midnight that night, aged twenty-eight.

  With the queen scarcely cold in her coffin, on 3 November the duke pressed the king to take another wife as quickly as possible during a conversation at Hampton Court - advice that carried, unspoken, the need for a ‘spare heir’, a Duke of York. But Norfolk had another critical matter to settle with the grieving Henry: his personal share of the wealth and lands of the Cluniac priory of St Pancras, in Lewes, East Sussex, one of the richest monasteries in England.

  One might think that Norfolk was insensitive, grasping, even bovine, in raising this issue when Henry had just lost a wife he genuinely loved. Truthfully, he could be all that and more. Certainly, he risked the king’s unpredictable and violent temper, which may be a measure of his greed. The next day the duke wrote to Cromwell, who also had an interest in the proceeds from the same religious house:Thanks for your venison. By your letter, you [wanted to] know how I sped [fared] with the king yesterday.

  First (peradventure [perhaps] not wisely, yet plainly) I exhorted him to accept God’s pleasure in taking the queen and [to] comfort himself with the treasure sent to him and this realm (namely the prince) and advised him to provide for a new wife.

  After that, I thanked him for being content to give us Lewes, if we might conclude the bargain, rehearsing of your service to him, as I told you in your garden, and saying I was content you should have two parts.

  Henry distractedly replied: ‘As you showed to me’ - a vital indication of royal approval, Norfolk surmised, that the priory’s property was ‘well bestowed’.80 Three months later, the duke got his wish: he was granted the priory’s valuable properties at Castleacre in Norfolk and a total of 126 manors and lordships, together with the rectories and advowsons81 of twenty-nine parishes in the same county. Cromwell got the priory site itself and some other properties.

  Norfolk, as Earl Marshal, should have been concentrating on the arrangements for Queen Jane’s funeral on 12 November at St George’s Chapel, Windsor. A funeral for a ‘lawful’ queen had not been held since that of Henry’s mother, Elizabeth of York, in 1503. Then, Norfolk told Cromwell, there were seven marquises and earls, sixteen barons, sixty knights and ‘forty spirituals, besides the ordinary of the king’s household. Therefore, we have named more persons that you may choose from . . .’82 He no doubt ensured that Surrey, now rehabilitated at court, was one of the principal mourners in the procession. The duke also issued instructions for 1,200 Masses to be said in the city of London churches for the soul of Queen Jane.83

  Norfolk, for all his enthusiasm in delivering the king’s brutal revenge on the north, was no nearer to regaining real political influence. The Privy Council seat still eluded him because the powerful figure of Thomas Cromwell blocked his advancement at court.

  The sentence of death was never carried out on Norfolk’s half-brother Lord Thomas Howard. Tradition speaks of another poisoning, but he died of an ague, or fever, in the Tower on All Hallows Eve, 31 October 1537,84 and his body was given to his mother, the Dowager Duchess of Norfolk, for burial ‘without pomp’ at Thetford Abbey.

  Lady Margaret Douglas remained in the Tower until her former lover’s death, was pardoned, and despatched for a time to the Bridgettine house at Syon Abbey, at Isleworth on the banks of the River Thames, for her physical and spiritual health. In 1544, she married Matthew, fourth Earl of Lennox, and gave birth to a son, Henry Stuart, Earl of Darnley, who grew up to become the distinctively unattractive husband of Mary Queen of Scots, who was to have her own dire impact on the House of Howard.

  6

  ‘PROSTRATE AND MOS
T HUMBLE’

  ‘When so ever two false knaves . . . secretly accuse a man . . . , he must die. Death, death, [comes] even for trifles, so that they follow the high priests in crucifying Christ’

  The London religious radical Henry Brinklow,

  on the Act of the Six Articles1

  The crisis of the northern rebellions safely and bloodily resolved,2 the way now lay clear for the king’s chief minister, Thomas Cromwell, to pursue the three policy priorities at the top of his agenda: enriching still further Henry’s revenues by still more dissolutions of monastic houses; continuing religious reform in England, and, after the premature death of Jane Seymour, finding a suitable new queen for his royal master.

  The easiest to implement (and most pleasantly profitable) was the total eradication of monastic life from the English landscape. The surrenders of abbeys, priories and nunneries had continued unabated and the larger, wealthier houses fell after a second act of suppression was passed by Parliament in the spring of 1539.3 This process was much more than recycling monastic wealth into hard cash, to the benefit of the king, the noble houses and an emerging breed of gentry. Cromwell’s policy was also gratuitous, wanton vandalism on a grand scale. At many of the more remote abbey sites, such as Tintern, Fountains and at Rievaulx, the great churches were stripped of the commercially desirable lead from their roofs and left open to the skies in a deliberate act to deny permanently their use as places of worship. Swept away on a tide of brutish iconoclasm were also their works of art and the monastic libraries of incalculable intellectual value. The brooding stone ruins to this day remain eloquent witnesses to Tudor governmental greed and ruthlessness.