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

  One of the first witnesses to supply information to the Council was Surrey’s steward, Richard Fulmerston,3 who had recently been repaid all but £140 of the money he lent to his master. The Howards’ ‘most earnest drudge and servant’ provided faithful testimony on their behalf:I have searched my conscience and knowledge to answer you what I knew of my lord of Norfolk . . . and the Earl of Surrey . . . in anything that might prove treason to the king, my lord prince, the Council or the commonwealth of this realm.

  I cannot accuse either of them, nor ever mistrusted either’s truth [honesty].

  Knowing the king’s goodness and justice and your lordships’ discretion, I cannot but think that [something] is amiss. Before their last coming to the city, I never heard . . . them talk [of ] any of these matters.4

  No luck there, then, for the industrious investigators. The blandness of his statement was hardly surprising: Fulmerston realised that if he acknowledged his masters’ treason, he would be vulnerable to charges of misprision himself.

  Norfolk was questioned in his two rooms in the Tower by Sir William Paulet, the Lord Steward of the Household, and Sir William Paget, the king’s secretary. Their interrogation left him no wiser as to what lay behind his arrest. He emphatically denied writing his own letters in code or that he supported the Pope: ‘If I had twenty lives, I would rather have spent them all, than that he should have any power in this realm, for no man knows better than I . . . how his usurped power has increased. Since he has been the king’s enemy, no man has felt and spoken more against both here and in France and also to many Scottish gentlemen.’

  That night, he penned an impassioned six-page letter to the Council, pleading to know ‘what the causes [against him were]’, adding defiantly, ‘if I do not answer truly to every point, let me not live one hour . . .’. He remembered the terrible fate of others close to the king: ‘My lords, I trust you to think [that] Cromwell’s service and mine [be] not alike . . . He was a false man and surely, I am a true poor gentleman.’ Repeatedly, the duke demanded to confront and face down his accusers: ‘I will hide nothing. Never [was] gold tried better by fire and water than I have been, nor have had greater enemies about my sovereign lord than I have had and yet, God be thanked, my truth has ever tried me as, I doubt not, it shall do in these causes.’

  The faces of his many enemies down the years appeared in his mind’s eye like so many spectres, as he wrote his letter in the spluttering candlelight, each page brimming with pathos. Cardinal Wolsey had ‘confessed to me at Esher’ that for ‘fourteen years’ he had sought ‘to destroy me . . . [and] unless he put me out of the way, I should undo him’. Cromwell was his most implacable foe who, when eliminating the last survivors of Plantagenet nobility, had questioned the wife of the Marquis of Exeter ‘more strictly’ about Norfolk’s loyalty ‘than of all other’. There was his discarded and spurned wife, of whom Cromwell had often slyly told him: ‘My lord, you are a happy man that your wife knows no hurt [of] you, for if she did, she would undo you.’ Her father, the Duke of Buckingham, had confessed at the criminal bar so long ago, ‘my father [the second Duke of Norfolk] sitting as a judge, that of all men living, he hated me the most’. His brother-in-law, Thomas Boleyn, Earl of Wiltshire, also ‘confessed the same and wished he had found means to thrust his dagger in me’. Finally, the ‘malice borne me by both my nieces, whom it pleased the king to marry’, was well known to those ladies who attended them in their last hours in the Tower.

  This was a veritable litany of hate directed at just one man and some of it came from those once close to him. In the face of such relentless odium, some may have pondered the shortcomings in their own characters or even become quite paranoid. However, Norfolk was not like other men: his blood, his ambition, his lust for power all smothered any frail, human sensitivity. But apart from his wife, all these adversaries were dead. Who was now his secret enemy in the shadows? Who had struck him down? And why? The duke’s bafflement was palpable: his abundant loyalty and fidelity to the crown was evident for all to admire. After all, who was it who had diligently hunted down all those traitors during what he called the ‘commotion time’ - the ‘Pilgrimage of Grace’ rebellion? It was, of course, Norfolk. He asked:Who showed his majesty of the words of my [step]mother [Agnes, Dowager Duchess of Norfolk] for which she was attainted of misprision but I?

  In all times past unto this time, I have shown myself a most true man to my sovereign and since these things done, have received more profits of his highness than before.

  Alas! Who can think that I, having been so long a true man, should now be false to his majesty?

  Poor man as I am yet, I am his . . . near kinsman. For whose sake should I be untrue?

  Piteously, the duke appealed to the Council to show ‘this scribbled letter’ to the king and ‘beg him to grant its petitions and remit out of his noble, gentle heart, the displeasure conceived against me’. He signed it ‘By his highness’ poor prisoner, T. NORFOLK’.5 A poor prisoner indeed: he was aged seventy-three and suffered from bouts of indigestion and acute rheumatism, the latter made worse by the damp, dank conditions of the Tower.

  What is more, he was a badly frightened old man.

  The emotional shock of his arrest must have dulled his senses and blunted his normally astute political instincts. Norfolk knew of Henry’s rapidly declining health - van der Delft had seen the king at Oatlands Palace at Weybridge, Surrey, on 5 December when the king told him he had suffered ‘a sharp attack of the fever which lasted in the burning stage for thirty hours, but now he was quite restored’. The ambassador doubted Henry’s chances of recovery: ‘His colour does not bear out [this] statement and he looks to me greatly fallen away.’6 It was only too obvious that the fifty-five-year-old king had few days remaining to him and that time was running out for Edward and Thomas Seymour to seize the regency of England when their nephew ascended the throne.

  The Howards should have recognised their peril. They were clear targets for the king, worried over his son’s succession, and for those who now made their bid for supremacy. Norfolk’s and Surrey’s dynastic pride and inbred arrogance had spawned an absurd complacency. In Henry’s dangerous court of conspiracies, no man - no matter how important, how influential - was entirely safe from being suddenly and unexpectedly cut down.

  Outside the walls of the Tower, their fate was being sealed. The government propaganda machine cranked up a gear. Lord Chancellor Wriothesley sent a helpful message to van der Delft on 16 December disclosing that Norfolk and Surrey ‘planned by sinister means to obtain the government of the king, who was too old to allow himself to be governed’ and that

  their intention was to usurp authority by means of the murder of all members of the council and the control of the prince [Edward] by them alone.7

  It was deplorable, said Wriothesley, that ‘persons of such high and noble lineage should have undertaken so shameful a business as to plan the seizure of the government of the king by sinister means’. The courts of Europe were stunned by the arrests. Nicholas Wotton, English ambassador to the court of Francis I, told the French king of the ‘most execrable and abominable intent and enterprise’ of Norfolk and Surrey. Francis - while frankly surprised at the news - replied merely that if their guilt was proved they should both be put to death.8 Thomas Thirlby, Bishop of Westminster, abroad on a diplomatic mission to the court of Charles V, was horrified:Those two ungracious, ingrate and inhuman non humines,9 the Duke of Norfolk and his son, the elder of whom I do confess that I did love, for I ever supposed him a true servant to his master. Before God, I am so amazed!

  He had informed one of the Emperor’s chief secretaries, Josie Bauar, of the development, ‘not forgetting’ to mention ‘the great benefits which these two ungracious men had received’. The Spanish official, during their discussion, talked of ‘the busy head of the father and the pride of the son’. The bishop felt he should write a consoling letter to Henry, but prudently had second thoughts, believing it ‘unwise to renew the memory
of this great malice’.10

  Inevitably, garbled versions of the alleged plot circulated. The Protestant refugee John Bourchier wrote triumphantly from Strasbourg: ‘The news is agreeable . . . Norfolk, whose authority extended to the north of England - a most bitter enemy of the Word of God - has been imprisoned with his son, with whom he made a secret attempt to restore the Pope and the monks, but their design was discovered. Nothing is wanting now but that [Gardiner, Bishop of] Winchester be caught, without which evangelical truth cannot be restored.’11

  In London, the witnesses were stumbling over themselves to tell all. Norfolk’s conceited and free-spending nephew, Sir Edmund Knyvett (the son of the naval commander killed at Brest), had fallen out with the duke and, in protest, had quit Kenninghall. He met Surrey soon after and ‘declared that because of his father and his unkindness, I would go from my country and dwell here and wait as [I am] unable to bear the burden of their malice’. Surrey had hastened to reassure Knyvett that he bore him no ill will: ‘No, cousin Knyvett, I malice not so low; my malice is higher - my malice climbs higher.’ After Cromwell’s death, ‘whom he and his father suspected [to be] my friend against the duke, he said: “Now is that foul churl dead, so ambitious of others’ blood [nobility]”.’ When he was sharply reminded it was a sin to speak ill of souls departed, Surrey retorted: ‘These new erected men would by their wits leave no noble man a life.’ Knyvett was also suspicious of the Italians in his cousin’s household and believed the earl’s conversations with them ‘had therein some ill device’. One of Surrey’s servants had been with the traitor Cardinal Reginald Pole in Italy ‘and was received again on his return’. He also kept an Italian jester called ‘Pasquil’, who ‘was more likely a spy, and so reputed’.12

  Surrey’s friend Sir Edward Warner, a ‘king’s servant’ from Norfolk,13 testified that during the summer, ‘Master [Richard] Devereux [son of Lord Ferrers] did tell me . . .’

  of the pride and vain glory of the said earl [but] that it was possible it might be abated one day. I asked what he meant thereby and he said: ‘What if he be accused to the king that he should say if God should call the king to his mercy, who were so meet to govern the Prince as my lord, his father?’

  I asked then if there were any such thing and he said ‘It may be so.’ Whereupon I gathered it was so and looked every day to see the earl in the case that he is now in, which, I thought, with those word[s] he well deserved.14

  This was all hearsay, but was doubtless welcomed by the Privy Council. More evidence at second hand came from another friend, Edward Rogers, who recalled a conversation with George Blagge, an esquire of the body to Henry,15 about nine months before. Blagge had recounted a talk with Surrey when he told him that the king should appoint regents ‘to rule the prince’ after Henry’s death. The earl held that his father ‘was the meetest’ for the job, ‘both for good services done and for estate’. Blagge, who opposed everything that Norfolk stood for in religion, retorted that if that happened,

  then the Prince should be but evil taught . . . Rather than it should come to pass that the Prince should be under the government of your father or you, I would bid the adventure to thrust this dagger in you.

  Surrey suggested he was very hasty and, using an aphorism much favoured by his father, added: ‘God send a shrewd cow short horns.’

  Yes my lord (quoth Blagge) and I trust your horns also shall be kept so short as you will not be able to do any hurt with them.

  Afterwards, Surrey - who was unarmed during what had become a noisy quarrel - ‘took sword and dagger and went to Blagge’s house’ and repeated menacingly ‘that of late he had been very hasty with him’. Unfortunately, Rogers could not remember what happened next.16

  Sir Gawen Carew was a bemused witness to Surrey’s unseemly row with his sister at Westminster, and gaily reported the heated words that passed between them. He added:The Earl of Surrey has said to me, place and time now out of my remembrance, ‘Note those men which are made by the king’s majesty of vile birth have been the distraction [undoing] of all the nobility of this realm’ and again that the Cardinal and Lord Cromwell sought the death of his father. Mr Edward Rogers has told me of the earl’s saying: ‘If God should call the king’s majesty to his mercy (whose life and health the Lord long preserve) that he thought no man so meet to have the governance of the Prince as my lord, his father.’17

  All this contributed little to the case against the Howards, save perhaps a tenuous charge of ‘maliciously wishing, willing or desiring by words’ the death of the king, which had become treason under Cromwell’s Act of 1534.18 It merely confirmed, if it was a surprise to anybody, the depth of Surrey’s contempt and hatred for those not born of the old aristocratic blood.

  Then Mary, Duchess of Richmond, and Bessie Holland, Norfolk’s long-standing mistress, were called in and examined.

  Norfolk’s daughter had longed to savour the sweet taste of revenge for Surrey’s treatment of her. She confirmed her father’s plan to marry her off to Sir Thomas Seymour and her brother’s vehement opposition to it. Mary said the duke had tetchily warned Surrey that if the wedding did not go ahead, he ‘would lose as much as he had gathered together’.

  Moreover, that the earl, her brother, should say ‘These new men loved no nobility and if God called away the king, they should smart for it.’

  Her brother hated them all since his being in custody in Windsor Castle but that her father seemed not to care for their ill-will, saying ‘the truth will bear him out . . .’ [He] never said that the king hated him, but his counsellors.

  And that her brother should say, ‘God save my father’s life, for if he were dead, they would shortly have my head.’ And that he [Norfolk] reviled some of the present Council, not forgetting the old Cardinal.

  Mary repeated some ‘passionate words’ spoken by Surrey, ‘and also some circumstantial speeches, little [to] his advantage, yet they seemed to clear her father’.19

  Mrs Holland’s testimony painted an unattractive portrait of her ageing lover as a self-righteous, conceited prig. If it was pillow talk, it hardly showed him in a good light. She repeated Norfolk’s belief that ‘none of the council loved him because they were no noblemen born themselves, [and] also because he believed too truly in the Sacrament of the Altar [the Eucharist]’.

  The king loved him not, because he was too much loved in his country . . . [Norfolk] would follow his father’s lesson which was that the less [that] others set by him, the more he would set by himself.

  The duke complained he was [no longer] part of the most secret (or as it is there termed, the privy Privy) Council.

  Then came the meat of her evidence - and the most damaging to the duke. He had told her that ‘the king was much grown of his body and that he could not go up and down stairs, but was let up and down by a device’.20

  And that his majesty was sickly and could not long endure and that the realm like to be in an ill case through diversity of opinions.

  She offered a further, telling sidelight about the duke’s religious beliefs: ‘If he were a young man, and the realm in quiet, he would ask leave to see [the] Vernacle, which he said was the picture of Christ given to women by Himself as he went to death.’21 In a burst of honesty, she acknowledged that the earl ‘loved her not, nor the Duchess of Richmond him and that she addicted herself much to the said duchess’.22

  Like his father, the image of Surrey that was emerging was of a bumptious, self-opinionated individual. But the earl did not rely on mere words to buttress his own rarefied status: he had changed his coat of arms to reflect his royal origins, based on an old shield carved in stone he had discovered in a house in Norfolk. One report suggests that his sister had secretly already informed the king of her brother’s new - and potentially treasonous - heraldic pretensions.23 She now told the investigators that on his arms:instead of the duke’s coronet, was put . . . a Cap of Maintenance24 [in] purple, with powdered fur, and with a crown, much like to a close crown.

  Un
derneath the arms was a cipher which she took to be the king’s cipher ‘HR’ [Henricus Rex].25

  Surrey had reassumed the arms of their attainted and executed grandfather, the Duke of Buckingham. These were the royal arms and lilies inherited from Thomas of Woodstock, a younger son of King Edward III. By this seemingly innocuous act, he had implicitly repudiated Buckingham’s attainder and reinstated a claim to the throne.26

  He also included the arms of St Edward the Confessor, which had been granted to Thomas Mowbray, first [Mowbray] Duke of Norfolk, by Richard II, of whom the Howards were heirs and successors. Furthermore, Surrey’s secretary Hugh Ellis remembered the earl saying that the ancient arms of England had been given to his ancestors ‘by King Edward - that is St Edward’.27

  Bessie Holland said the duke did not like his son’s new arms, ‘and that he had gathered them himself knew not from whence . . . He had placed the Norfolk arms wrong and had found fault with him. And therefore, that she should take no pattern of his son’s arms to work with them with her needle in his house . . .’

  This seemingly obscure heraldic issue was to be Surrey’s final undoing. Three years earlier, the Council had heard of his claims to be a prince and the maids’ gossip that if ‘ought came to the king otherwise than well, he is like to be king’. Now he seemed to be publicly flaunting his aspirations to the crown of England.

  Lord Chancellor Wriothesley’s grandfather, father and uncle were all heralds. He immediately realised that Surrey’s heraldic pretensions would provide the strongest case against him. He now drew up some hard questions to be put to the earl: - Whether you bear in your arms the escutcheon and arms of King Edward that was king before the [Norman] Conquest, commonly called St Edward?