House Of Treason: The Rise And Fall Of A Tudor Dynasty Read online

  It was then that Sir William Stanley finally showed his hand.

  If he ever nursed any doubts - he was already branded a traitor by Richard - he now chose to back Henry Tudor. He led his horsemen in a thundering charge along the eastern edge of the marsh, and wheeled right up Ambion Hill, cutting off both Norfolk’s troops and Richard from any chance of reinforcement or rescue by Percy’s now undecided and timorous reserve. Seeing the Stanleys’ commitment to battle, Oxford renewed his attack and the fighting inevitably became more confused as opponents feverishly hacked at each other in a desperate mêlée, sometimes fatally tripping over the dead and wounded already littering the ground. Norfolk realised with horror that he and his troops were isolated and that he must cut his way to safety before he was completely overrun from front and rear.

  Norfolk was distantly related to Oxford - his first cousin, Elizabeth Howard, was the earl’s mother.18 Not only did they have kinship, but they also enjoyed close ties of friendship - such is the dreadful tragedy of divisive civil war. Almost simultaneously in the tumult of combat, both captains recognised each other’s identifying heraldic device - Oxford’s rayed star embroidered on his standard and Norfolk’s silver lion blazoned on his shield. Any memories of their happy times together instantly evaporated in the heat and sweat of battle.

  Norfolk must have been desperately weary by this stage of the struggle. He was aged about sixty-three, more than twenty years older than his enemy. But the adrenalin of battle - the ruthless imperative to kill or be killed - enabled him to conquer his exhaustion and continue the fight. Like Oxford, he levelled his heavy fluted lance, and they both charged, almost a ton of horse and man hurling themselves at their adversary. Each weapon splintered with a crack on the other’s armour, and the riders swayed back with the force of the blows.

  This was no gallant joust with blunted lances in a festive, courtly tournament and there were no obsequious heralds present to award points in deciding the heroic victor. In the parlance of the day, both noblemen were fighting a‘ outrance - to the bitter end.

  Discarding their shattered lances, they drew swords and manoeuvred their warhorses closer in for the kill. Norfolk wounded Oxford, who had lost his shield in the charge, with a sweeping, cutting blow, the blade sliding off his helmet and slicing into his left arm. Almost at once, he lost his visor, as Oxford slashed across his bascinet, leaving his face exposed. The coded rationality of chivalry suddenly doused the fury of battle: Oxford refused to continue combat - shouting, above the din, that he now enjoyed an unfair advantage over Norfolk.19

  Fate decided that this was no time for debate, or valiant niceties.

  An arrow - was it a stray or deliberately aimed? - struck Norfolk in the face and pierced his brain. He slowly toppled out of his saddle, falling dead beneath the feet of his enemy’s charger.20

  His son, the Earl of Surrey, fighting close by, saw his father’s death and swore immediate and bloody vengeance.

  He spurred his horse towards the nearest group of enemy soldiers on the Tudor right wing, but was soon surrounded and fighting furiously for his life - ‘Howard single, with an army fights’.21 Two royalist knights, Sir Richard Clarendon and Sir William Conyers, tried to rescue him but were cut to pieces by Sir John Savage (a nephew of Lord Stanley) and his retainers. Surrey, now badly wounded, exchanged blow for blow with the grizzled veteran knight Gilbert Talbot who urged him to yield, but he refused to accept any quarter and fought on doggedly, even though unhorsed.

  A foot soldier tried to capture him, but Surrey swung his sword high and severed the man’s arm in one final blow.

  Weak from loss of blood, he sank to his knees on the ground and surrendered himself to Talbot, begging him to kill him then and there, as he feared an ignominious and lonely death that night from some cut-throat looter searching for spoil among the dead and wounded on the battlefield. Talbot spared him and had him carried off the field to safety.22

  No such mercy was shown to King Richard III.

  Despite being cut off from his troops and impossibly outnumbered, he refused to flee for his life. The king must have been enraged to look east to see Northumberland’s reserve still occupying the top of Ambion Hill,23 having taken no part in the battle and probably never intending to. Hence his anguished and angry cries of ‘Treason! Treason!’ His last stand was probably in a bog on the edge of Redemore Heath. Surrounded, he was finally felled by a Welsh halberdier,24 killed ‘fighting manfully in the thickest press of his enemies’.25 His body was stripped and taken stark naked to Leicester, trussed to a horse ‘like a hog or a calf, the head and arms hanging on the one side . . . and the legs on the other . . . all sprinkled with mire and blood’.26 It was taken to the town’s Greyfriars church ‘and lay like a miserable spectacle . . . and [after two days] buried’ without pomp or funeral rite in an unmarked grave in the choir of the church.27

  Richard had reigned for just two years, two months and one day. Like so many other defeated foes in history, he has been vilified to this day.28

  Norfolk’s corpse was treated with greater respect - no doubt due to Oxford’s intercession, after he finished mopping up the last stubborn vestiges of royalist resistance at Bosworth. It was taken via Northampton and Cambridge to the Cluniac Abbey of Our Lady at Thetford, in Norfolk, and there given decent Christian burial one week after the battle29 among the tombs of the earlier Mowbray Dukes of Norfolk.30 The chronicler Richard Grafton wrote that Norfolk

  regarded more his oath, his honour, and his promise made to King Richard, like a gentleman and a faithful subject to his prince, absented not himself from his master. But as he faithfully lived under him, so he manfully died with him to his great fame and laud.31

  An exultant Henry Tudor was crowned with the circlet of gold worn on Richard III’s helmet by Sir William Stanley, with the words: ‘Sir, here I make you king of England.’ Lord Stanley was reunited with his son, safe and well. Victory had been achieved against a numerically superior and battle-hardened army. The road to London and a glittering coronation as King Henry VII now lay open before him. He knelt in the bloody grass and gave ‘almighty God his hearty thanks . . . beseeching His goodness to send him grace to advance and defend the Catholic faith and to maintain peace and concord amongst his subjects and people’.32

  About 1,000 of Richard’s soldiers were killed in the two hours of fighting, compared with three hundred in Henry Tudor’s army. Prisoners vastly outnumbered the dead, among them Northumberland, who quickly changed sides33 and the badly wounded Surrey, who was committed to the Tower of London.

  Henry Tudor was duly crowned in Westminster Abbey on 30 October and wasted little time in wreaking retribution on the nobles who had fought for Richard. Both the dead Norfolk and his son were among those attainted for treason on 7 November34 and their estates confiscated by the impecunious crown. Many Howard properties were shared out among the new king’s cronies to reward their loyalty while he was in exile.35 Oxford, now appointed Great Chamberlain, received one of the plums - the castle, lordship and manor of Framlingham and other properties in Suffolk and Bedfordshire, once owned by Norfolk.36

  Surrey, now recovering from his wounds, was stripped of all titles and degraded from the Order of the Garter.37 But amid the Howards’ adversity there was some kindness. His wife Elizabeth told John Paston on 3 October that she had found Oxford a ‘singular, very good and kind lord to my lord and me . . . for him I dreaded most and yet in him I found the best’.38 At the beginning of December, she was in London staying modestly at St Katherine’s hospital,39 near the Tower, while she anxiously awaited news of her husband’s fate. Sir John Radcliff, Steward of Henry VII’s household, had tried to seize their manor at Ashwell Thorpe in Norfolk but was thwarted, as it was part of her own inheritance. Even so, he dismissed many of her servants, leaving her to maintain her household of four children with just three or four retainers.40

  As he sat drearily in his room in the Tower - he was allowed £8 a month for his board and three servan
ts, costing 3s 6d a week - he must have reflected bitterly on the complete downfall of his family, coming so soon after the triumph of his father being created first Duke of Norfolk.

  Its proud line could be traced back to the reign of Edward I in the thirteenth century, to the tiny village of East Winch, six miles (9.7 km.) north-west of King’s Lynn in windswept north Norfolk. This was the birthplace of Sir William Howard, the founder of the dynasty, who became Chief Justice of the Common Pleas in 1297 and died in 1308.41 By loyal and accomplished military and naval service, coupled with a number of judicious marriages with rich heiresses, the Howards rapidly clambered up the greasy pole of aristocratic status throughout the next two centuries. In about 1420, Sir Robert Howard married Lady Margaret Mowbray, elder daughter of Thomas Mowbray, Duke of Norfolk, Earl Marshal of England and the great-great-grandson of Edward I. Their son, John Howard, was born around 1422 and had fought on the Yorkist side in the second Battle of St Albans, Hertfordshire, on 17 February 1461, and at Towton, North Yorkshire, on Palm Sunday, 29 March, the same year.42 Edward IV ennobled him as Lord Howard some time in the late 1460s.

  The death of the last of the Mowbray line, the young Lady Anne, only daughter of the fourth and last Mowbray Duke of Norfolk in 1481, left Howard, as her cousin, the senior co-heir to their extensive estates throughout England. But his very substantial inheritance had been blocked by her precocious marriage to Edward IV’s younger son, Richard, Duke of York. No doubt, it was a cause of some celebration to Lord Howard when Richard, Duke of Gloucester, bastardised York and his elder brother, Edward V,43 and they both mysteriously disappeared after entering the Tower of London. He certainly had no interest in them living. No surprise, then, that Howard enthusiastically supported Gloucester and he was handsomely repaid by being created first (Howard) Duke of Norfolk and Earl Marshal of England on 28 June 1483, a week after Richard had grabbed the throne. His first duty was to officiate at Richard III’s coronation and, less than a month later, he was appointed Lord Admiral of England, Ireland and Aquitaine.

  But he had picked the wrong side and paid the ultimate price on Bosworth field.

  His son languished for three and a half years in the Tower. Its Lieutenant offered to arrange an escape for him in 1487, during an abortive rebellion by John de la Pole, Earl of Lincoln, but he wisely declined the use of ‘the key to go out at his pleasure’44 and this may have begun to convince Henry VII of his loyalty.

  Thomas Howard stepped out of the gloom of the Tower into the bright new light of the Tudor age. He was firmly to bind his family’s fortunes to those of the Tudor dynasty but over the next century, the raw ambition and unashamed lust for power of his descendants would imprison many of them within the walls of that grim fortress alongside the River Thames. Another would suffer appallingly for his religious faith.

  Some never came out alive.

  PART 1

  BACK FROM THE BRINK

  1

  REBUILDING THE DYNASTY

  ‘Sir, he was my crowned king. Let the authority of Parliament set the crown on that stake and I will fight for it. As I fought then for him, I will fight for you, when you are established by the same authority’

  Thomas Howard, Earl of Surrey, to King Henry VII, 14851

  Thomas Howard, Earl of Surrey, was already middle aged when he saw his father die amid the din and slaughter of Bosworth. After recuperating from the serious wounds he suffered at the Battle of Barnet on Easter Sunday 1471, the following year, like many Howards before and after, he had married a carefully selected wealthy heiress. Elizabeth was the daughter of the minor Norfolk magnate Sir Frederick Tylney and the widow of Sir Humphrey Bourchier, a comrade-in-arms who had been slain during that same battle. She brought him twelve prosperous manors in East Anglia, as well as five surviving children,2 one of whom was destined to play a momentous role in shaping the monarchy in sixteenth-century England: Thomas junior, born in 1473, was the uncle of two of Henry VIII’s queens and, arguably, the principal political survivor of the bloody tumult of three Tudor reigns.

  After the disaster of Bosworth and his imprisonment in the Tower, Howard was released in early 1489 by Henry VII, and the attainder for treason against him was reversed on 3 March that year by Parliament - although most of the lands he had lost were cannily withheld until he could demonstrate fully his loyalty to the crown.3 In May, however, he celebrated his restoration to the title of Earl of Surrey.

  He became the archetypal Tudor nobleman who maintained full allegiance to whoever sat on the throne, whatever policies they pursued. If God was in His heaven, and the king ruled with a firm but fair hand, the Howards were perfectly content. This deeply held fidelity to the crown - also destined to become his son’s watchword - was born out of the family’s intense desire to preserve social order and cohesion in the realm. The Howards were Tudor aristocratic anachronisms, with an inbred conservatism which led them to worship devoutly at the altars of hierarchy, autocracy, status and power. Over the next three generations, they kept one foot firmly grounded in the old confident and arrogant attitudes and beliefs of fifteenth-century noble England, despite the storm of change that raged all around them and which, several times, nearly brought them down.

  Henry VII had no such luxury of certainty in the scheme of things. His claim to the crown was at best slender and secured only by right of conquest at Bosworth. He adroitly married Elizabeth of York, the eldest daughter of King Edward IV, on 18 January 1486 in an attempt to implant political unity into a still divided realm but was always apprehensive about the insecurity of the Tudor grip on regal power. A spate of rebellions (and a dangerous pretender to the throne) justified fully his fears. Later, these were to return again and again to haunt his descendants who wore the crown of England. A king’s prime duty is to prolong his dynasty and, in this, Henry was in an almost indecent haste. Almost nine months to the day after the wedding, his lineage was safeguarded by the birth of a prince, at Winchester, christened Arthur. A second son, Henry, was born at Greenwich Palace on 28 June 1491.

  Surrey began his long, careful journey back to power and status with an appointment as Chief Justice in Eyre North of the Trent in 1489. The following year, rioting and disorder broke out in Yorkshire after the king’s imposition of new taxes and Surrey, at the head of a small royalist force, swiftly and efficiently quashed any opposition. As a grim public demonstration of his effectiveness in this police action, he summarily strung up the ringleaders at York. The main protagonist - the ‘firebrand’ John à Chambre - was executed ‘in great state’ as ‘a traitor paramount’ on specially constructed gallows high up on a stage, with fellow malcontents hung on ‘the lower story round about him’.4 Surrey was rewarded for his efforts on 20 May 1490 when Henry VII made him Vice-Warden of the East and Middle Marches on the borders of Scotland, as the operational deputy to the infant Prince Arthur who nominally held the top job.5 He was granted power to negotiate with the Scottish king James IV over any breaches of a fragile Anglo-Scottish truce and to investigate ‘all persons who have covin [treacherous dealings] with the enemy and [to] punish them’. Within two days, he published a proclamation warning the ‘great numbers of Scots [who have been] applying themselves to idleness and begging [and have] over-run the realm’ to immediately return home ‘under pain of punishment’.6

  He continued in the north as the king’s lieutenant, administering law and order,7 collecting taxes, suppressing dissent - such as further riots in the spring of 1492 at Acworth, near Pontefract, Yorkshire, over tax8 - and handling the sometimes Byzantine diplomatic relations across the Scottish border. His first two sons, Thomas and Edward, the latter born in 1476, were educated as pages in Henry’s household but they were, to all intents, being held hostage to guarantee his good behaviour as the king’s viceroy in the north.

  Surrey was increasingly regarded as Henry VII’s best soldier and he was soon to prove his military mettle. In 1497, with a force of Yorkshire levies, he relieved a five-day Scottish siege of Norham Castle9 whi
ch controlled a strategic ford over the River Tweed in Northumberland. Then he launched a retaliatory punitive expedition into the Scottish border country which destroyed Ayton Castle in Berwickshire before the onset of ‘extraordinarily foul and stormy’ weather drove him back into England.10 Thomas and Edward accompanied him on the raid, both of whom he knighted at Ayton on 30 September. Surrey later concluded a new truce and began negotiations for the marriage of Henry’s daughter, Margaret, to James IV of Scotland.

  His wife Elizabeth died on 4 April that year at their newly built mansion at Lambeth, across the Thames from Westminster, but he did not wait long to find a second spouse. On 8 November, Surrey swiftly married Elizabeth’s cousin, Agnes Tylney, the daughter of Hugh Tylney of Skirbeck and Boston in Lincolnshire,11 in the chapel of the castle of Sheriff Hutton, near York.12 She was to become a long-lived and formidable matriarch of the Howard clan, bearing him six surviving children. Through his brood of five living sons and six daughters from two wives, Surrey was to build marital unions with most of the prominent noble families in England. For example, his daughter Muriel13 married John Grey, second Viscount Lisle, sometime before June 1503.14 Before he died on 9 September 1504, aged twenty-four, substantial properties in Somerset, Berkshire and Gloucestershire had been settled upon her.15 Around May 1506, she took as her second husband Thomas Knyvett, one of the brash cronies who now surrounded young Prince Henry at Greenwich.

  Surrey returned to court in 1499 and, two years later, became an influential member of Henry VII’s Privy Council, joining a group of courtiers ‘of singular shrewdness’. On 16 June 1501, he was appointed Lord Treasurer of England, a post the Howards were to make their own suzerain for the next four decades.16 He thus became the third in importance of the king’s ministers. Richard Fox, Bishop of Winchester, had been Lord Privy Seal since Henry’s accession - so loyal, it was said, that he was willing to sacrifice his own father’s life to save that of his sovereign. And William Warham, Bishop of London, was appointed Lord Chancellor and Archbishop of Canterbury in 1504. Under Surrey’s careful management, royal revenues grew from £52,000 a year to £142,000 by the end of the reign in 1509.17