House Of Treason: The Rise And Fall Of A Tudor Dynasty Page 20

  The Privy Council became curiously interested in the case and questioned Mistress Arundel. She disclosed a baleful tale of wanton vandalism and hooliganism in the streets of London. On 21 January, Surrey, together with Thomas Clere and Thomas Wyatt, had left her house at about nine o’clock at night armed with crossbows (used to shoot stones in hunting birds). Their servants carried cudgels. Every one of them was probably drunk or at least tipsy. They did not return until after midnight.

  Next day was a great clamour of the breaking of glass windows, both of houses and churches, and shooting of men in the streets, and the voice [word] was that those hurts were done by my lord and his company . . .

  She heard Surrey ‘the night after, when Mr [George] Blagge rebuked him for it, say that he had [rather] than all the good in the world it were undone, for he was sure it would come before the king and his council.

  ‘But we shall have a maddening time in our youth and therefore, I am very sorry for it.’72

  Surrey and his fellow roisterers had smashed the windows in the home of a former Lord Mayor, Sir Richard Gresham, in Milk Street, off Cheapside, and then had moved east, via Lombard Street, to Fenchurch Street, where they had broken the windows of the merchant Alderman William Birch. What jolly japes! They rounded off their exciting and enjoyable evening by taking a boat out on to the Thames and firing their crossbows at the whores plying their trade on Bankside, Southwark. She also testified that Surrey, and his two servants, Thomas Clere and William Pickering, together with Norfolk’s treasurer, Hussey, had eaten meat during Lent.

  Surrey’s enemies on the Council, particularly Hertford, were not going to turn a blind eye to such mischief. In later evidence, Mistress Arundel talked about the earl’s anger over the purchase of some cloth. She had told her kitchen maids ‘how he fumed’ and added: ‘I marvel they will thus mock a prince.’ ‘Why’ asked Alice, her maid, ‘Is he a prince?’ ‘Yes . . . he is . . . and if ought to come at the king but good, his father [Norfolk] should stand for king.’73

  Another maid, Joan Whetnall, testified that the coat of arms above the earl’s bed ‘were very like the king’.

  Surrey was summoned to a Privy Council meeting at St James’s Palace on 1 April 1543. Fortunately, he appeared before Bishop Gardiner, Wriothesley, John Russell and Anthony Browne, then his father’s close allies at court. He was charged

  as well as eating of flesh [in Lent], as of a lewd and unseemly manner of walking in the night about the streets and breaking with stone bows of certain windows.

  The earl claimed he had permission to eat the meat, but ‘touching the stone bows, he could not deny but that he had very evil done therein, submitting himself to such punishment as should to them be thought good’. So he was packed off to the Fleet Prison again, as were Clere and Pickering the next day.74 Gardiner had focused on the religious issue of breaking the Lenten fast and, strangely, there was no mention of Surrey’s dangerous aspirations on the crown. After eight days, he was free again.

  The earl was still struggling with his burden of debt. In October 1546, he sought the award of a cloister and dorter (dormitory) of a Norwich monastery which was ‘unserviceable to their church, saving for a memory of the old superstition and will . . . discharge me out of the misery of debt’. If Henry agreed to the grant, ‘I will faithfully promise never to trouble his majesty with any suit of profit to myself hereafter and spend the rest [of his life] in his majesty’s service with the old zeal that I have served with always.’75

  As the day of Henry’s death grew nearer, the conspiracies at court became more fevered and intense. Who would control the realm as regent to the boy king, Edward?

  Norfolk and Gardiner’s faction held sway for the first nine months of 1546, instituting fierce crackdowns on religious reformers, although the duke attended few council meetings. One of those to die in the heretic’s fire on 16 July was John Lassells, who had earlier exposed Catherine Howard’s teenage promiscuity. At one point in late June or early July, Henry’s sixth queen was herself in danger of arrest for heresy but only escaped through her feminine guile.76 Norfolk’s younger son, Thomas, was admonished by the Privy Council at Greenwich in May for ‘disputing indiscreetly of Scripture with other young gentlemen of the court’. He was offered mercy if ‘he would frankly confess what he said in disproof of sermons preached in court last Lent and his other talk in the Queen’s chamber and elsewhere in the court concerning Scripture’. After meekly promising to ‘reform his indiscreet ways’, he was dismissed.77

  The tensions between the traditionalist and evangelical factions culminated in the admiral John Dudley, Viscount Lisle, quarrelling with Gardiner during a Council meeting at the beginning of October and angrily striking him full in the face.78 Hertford and Lisle also used ‘violent and injurious’ words to Wriothesley and Sir William Paulet, Lord St John, the Lord Steward of the Household.79

  Norfolk’s great ally, Bishop Gardiner of Winchester, was the first casualty, being banished from the Privy Council over a simple misunderstanding about an exchange of episcopal land, which the king wanted to tidy up the boundaries of one of his many estates. Gardiner refused him, overconfident of his relationship with his royal master. He realised his enemies had exploited the situation and rushed to soothe Henry’s anger:If for want of circumspection, my doings or sayings be otherwise taken in this matter of lands wherein I was spoken with, I must and will lament my own infelicity and most humbly, on my knees, desire your majesty to pardon it.

  I never said ‘nay’ . . . to resist your highness’ pleasure, but only . . . to be a suitor to your highness’ goodness, as emboldened by the abundance of your majesty’s favour heretofore shown to me.

  Because I have no access to your majesty, not hearing of late any more of this matter, I cannot forebear to open truly my heart to your highness with a most humble request to take the same in the most gratuitous part.80

  Gardiner feared this letter would be intercepted by Hertford and Lisle so begged his old friend Paget to deliver the note personally to Henry and pass on his request for an audience for the bishop.

  But Paget had turned against him. The king responded with a cold and unforgiving letter on 4 December:Had your doings . . . been agreeable to such fair words as you have now written . . . you should neither [have] had cause to write this excuse nor we to answer it.

  But we marvel at your writing that you never said ‘nay’ to any request for those lands, considering that to our chancellor [Wriothesley] secretary [?Paget] and chancellor of our court of augmentations [Sir Edward North], both jointly and apart, you utterly refused any conformity, saying that you would make your answer to our own person.

  Henry told Gardiner with dreadful finality: ‘We see no cause why you should molest us further.’81

  With the bishop exiled to his palace at Southwark, Hertford held the Privy Council meetings at his own home. He and his allies could now shift their sights on to Norfolk and his son, who had become rivals for the looming regency of England.

  First to fall was Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey.

  He had come to court sometime in November to press his case for the Norwich monastic site. He seemed oblivious to the king’s declining health or the change in the balance of power among his councillors.

  At the beginning of December, the Privy Council received damaging information about him from the courtier and Member of Parliament (MP) Sir Richard Southwell, a former friend to the earl and his comrade-in-arms at Boulogne.82 Southwell told them ‘he knew of certain things of the earl that touched his fidelity to the king’.83 They detained the MP for further questioning and ordered Surrey’s arrest, by Sir Anthony Wingfield, captain of the king’s guard. The next day, Thursday 2 December, after dinner, [Wingfield] saw the earl coming into the palace [of Westminster] whilst he was walking in the great hall downstairs.

  He had a dozen halberdiers waiting in an adjoining corridor and approaching the earl, said: ‘Welcome, my lord, I wish to ask you to intercede for me with the duke y
our father in a matter in which I need his favour, if you would deign to listen to me.’

  So he led him to the corridor and the halberdiers took him . . . without attracting notice.84

  Surrey was taken to Lord Chancellor Wriothesley’s house at Ely Place in Holborn, opposite the church of St Andrew, for questioning.85 The new French ambassador, Odet de Selve,86 heard whispers that the earl faced two charges: ‘that he had the means of attempting the [French] castle of Hardelot when he was at Boulogne and neglected it; the other that he said there were some who made no great account of him, but he trusted one day to make them very small’.87 His accuser was also held at Wriothesley’s house and Surrey wanted to fight him as a matter of honour. True to form, the earl ‘vehemently affirmed himself a true man, desiring to be tried by justice, or else offering himself to fight in his shirt with Southwell’.88

  But this was no time for duels.

  Norfolk had been at Kenninghall since the beginning of November and word quickly reached him of his son’s arrest. On 3 and 4 December he wrote urgently to friends at court for news, including Gardiner, who he did not know had been disgraced.The Duke was also unaware that his letters were intercepted, read and held as potential evidence against him. He hastened to London and on his arrival, on Sunday 12 December, was arrested and humiliatingly degraded of his rank as Lord Treasurer. His white wand of office and the Garter insignia on his gown were removed from him at Westminster. Memories of his own similar treatment of Cromwell in the same palace must have troubled even his insensitive mind. He was taken by boat down to the Tower, and Norfolk ‘both in the barge and on entering the Tower’ publicly declared ‘no person had ever been carried thither before who was a more loyal servant [of the king] than he was and always had been’. His protests were ignored.

  The Seymour coup against the Howards had been carefully planned. At the same time that his father was making his forlorn journey down the river, Surrey was marched under close guard through the crowded streets of London from Ely Place to the Tower, his progress marked by his anger and ‘great lamentation’.89

  The king must have been a party to their arrests and, in the knowledge that he would soon meet his Maker, wanted to remove the last surviving dynastic threat to his nine-year-old son’s succession. He now believed the Howards’ vast feudal resources and ambitions made them potential risks for the security of his son’s forthcoming reign. Like Buckingham and others before them, they had to be cold-bloodedly snuffed out.90

  Between three and four that Sunday afternoon, a small group of horsemen left London and rode post-haste for Norfolk. The party was led by John Gates, the thuggish fixer who undertook many unpleasant tasks for those who now controlled Henry’s Privy Chamber, his brother-in-law Sir Wymond Carew, and Sir Richard Southwell, who, tellingly, had been freed from custody. Their destination was the Howard palace at Kenninghall. They reached Thetford on Monday night and were at the gates of the duke’s mansion, seven miles (11.3 km.) away, by dawn the next morning.

  News of the arrests had not yet reached the pastoral calm of Norfolk. They hammered on the doors of the sleeping palace and eventually were admitted. The steward, Robert Holdish, was away ‘taking musters’, and the trio instead met Henry Symonds, the duke’s almoner, ‘a man in whom [Norfolk] reposed a great trust for the order of his household and expenses of the same’. All entrances being secured, they ordered Symonds to summon Mary, Duchess of Richmond, and the duke’s mistress, Bessie Holland, who had been awoken by the clamour, down to the dining room for interrogation.

  Mary was ‘sore perplexed, trembling and like to fall down’, they reported to Henry that evening. She fell on her knees and ‘humbled herself to your majesty’, saying:Although nature constrained her sore to love her father, whom she had ever thought to be a true and faithful subject and also to desire the well-[being] of his son, her natural brother, whom she noted to be a rash man, yet, for her part, she would, nor will, hide or conceal any from your majesty’s knowledge.91

  Gates and his colleagues, ‘perceiving her humble conformity’, advised her not to despair. The polite niceties over, they demanded to see her chambers and coffers, but they discovered ‘no writings worth sending’. Her possessions were not worth much: clearly, her mean father had not dipped into his purse to brighten her life:Her coffers and chambers so bare, as your majesty would hardly think. Her jewels, such as she had, [all] sold or [pawned] to pay her debts . . .

  Then the searchers turned their attentions on the blowsy Bessie Holland, who had benefited considerably from Norfolk’s doting largesse. She possessed a wealth of pretty trinkets and baubles, including a number of gold brooches bearing pictures of ‘Our Lady in Pity’, the Holy Trinity, and, a nice touch this, Cupid:92

  We have found girdles, beads, buttons of gold, pearl and rings set with stones of diverse sorts, whereof, with all other things, we make a book to be sent to your highness.

  Both the Duchess of Richmond and Bessie were told to travel to London for further interrogation ‘in the morning or the next day at the latest’.

  Gates and his team confiscated and inventoried all the duke’s possessions, down to the horses in the stable, including one old nag called Button. They also sent ‘our most discreet and trusty servants’ to all Norfolk’s other houses in East Anglia to ensure that ‘nothing shall be embezzled until we have time to see them, among which, we do not omit Elizabeth Holland’s [house] newly made in Suffolk which is thought to be well furnished with stuff’.93 They confiscated all Norfolk’s ‘writings and books, which we shall diligently peruse’, and listed the members of his household.94

  Surrey’s wife, Frances, pregnant with their fifth child, who was ‘looking her time to lie in at this next Candlemas’ (2 February), also lived at Kenninghall with her children and ‘the women in the nursery attending upon them’. What should Gates do with them? Eventually it was decided to break up the household and she was sent away, one of Norfolk’s worthless old nightgowns, ‘much worn and furred with coney and lamb’, draped across her lap for a vestige of warmth during her journey.95 Her eldest son Thomas was placed in the care of Sir John Williams, the Treasurer of the Court of Augmentations, and the others dumped on old Sir Thomas Wentworth, a local magnate.

  Back in London, Surrey had heard of his father’s arrest and wrote to the Privy Council:Since the beginning of my durance [imprisonment] the displeasure of my master, much loss of blood with other distemperance of nature, with my sorrow to see the long approved truth of mine old father brought into question by any stir between Southwell and me has sore enfeebled me as is to be seen.

  Surrey recalled his appearance before the Privy Council of nearly four years before, over his nocturnal high jinks in London, and wanted the same sympathetic quartet of councillors to examine him again.

  My desire is you four and only you may be sent to me, for so it sh[ould be best for his] majesty’s service, to whom I intend to discha[rge my conscience] . . . Trusting in your ho[onourable lordships that] . . . you will make report of my tale to his majesty according as you shall hear.96

  Sadly, he did not know that Gardiner was now out in the cold and Wriothesley had changed sides, deciding that his future prosperity now lay with the Seymour clan.

  Norfolk, in another part of the Tower, also took up his pen and wrote to his sovereign, begging for mercy. He was astonished by his arrest and could not for the life of him understand why he now languished in prison:I, your most humble subject, prostrate at your feet, do most humbly beseech your highness to be my good and gracious lord.

  I am sure some great enemy of mine has informed your majesty of some untrue matter against me.

  Sir, God knows, in all my life I never thought one untrue thought against you, or your succession, nor can no more judge . . . what should be laid at my charge than the child that was born this night.

  Let his accusers confront him in front of his king or before the Privy Council, then, if he was found guilty, he would accept his punishment according to his
just deserts.

  At the reverence of Christ’s passion, have pity on me and let me not be cast away by false enemies’ informations.

  I know not that I have offended any man . . . unless it were such as are angry with me for being quick against such as have been accused for Sacramentaries.

  As for all causes of religion, I say now and have said to your majesty and many others, I do know you to be a Prince of such virtue and knowledge that whatsoever laws you have in past time made . . . I shall to the extremity of my power stick unto them, as long as my life shall last.

  So that if any men be angry with me for these causes, they do me wrong.

  Henry could take all his lands and goods, as long he may ‘know what is laid to my charge’ and ‘may hear some comfortable word from your majesty’.97

  Fear of the unknown is a powerful, nagging emotion. Norfolk had every reason to be worried. Both he and his son now confronted a march to the scaffold.

  8

  THE GREAT SURVIVOR

  ‘Who knows the cares that go to bed with statesmen?’

  Thomas Howard, third Duke of Norfolk1

  While Norfolk and his son sat brooding in the Tower, the Privy Council, now firmly under Hertford’s sway, began an assiduous search to uncover the evidence necessary to support indictments of treason against them. Two days after their imprisonment, the Spanish ambassador, Francis van der Delft, reported the political gossip pervasive at Westminster that ‘they entertained some ambiguous designs when the king was ill at Windsor six weeks ago to obtain control of the Prince [Edward] or the country and their chance of liberation is small . . .’.2