House Of Treason: The Rise And Fall Of A Tudor Dynasty Page 7

  On 22 June, the second Duke of Norfolk began his last journey to the Cluniac abbey at Thetford for burial in a new vault already prepared by him there. Although the monastic house was only twenty-four miles (38.6 km.) away from Framlingham, the procession was so huge and progress so slow that it had to stop at Diss and was there met by Richard Nykke, the Bishop of Norwich, dressed in his full pontifical vestments, to escort the coffin into the choir of the church for its rest overnight.

  It was an astonishing spectacle and a funeral worthy of a king. Crowds in their thousands must have lined the hot, dusty roads of Norfolk and Suffolk as the cortège passed slowly by, the silence broken only by the chants of the accompanying friars and the priests who left their churches en route to offer up prayers for the departed - and the steady clipclopping of more than five hundred horses.

  Six gentlemen attended the chariot carrying the coffin, followed by four hundred hooded men carrying torches. The bier supporting the coffin was surmounted by one hundred wax effigies of heraldic beasts and ‘weepers’ - little figures with rosaries and other objects of reverence. The Howard household included Norfolk’s chamberlain, carrying his staff of office and the master of his horse, leading a ‘sumpter horse’58 draped with a glittering cloth of gold, blazoned with heraldry. There were another five hundred black-clad mourners, riding behind two by two, lords, ladies, knights and gentry, in order of carefully considered precedence. Among the hobbledehoy that followed were representatives of the apprentices of London, who were there in grateful remembrance of Norfolk’s efforts to persuade the king to show mercy after the riots of seven years before.

  The third Duke of Norfolk joined the funeral party at Diss, taking back the role of chief mourner from his half-brother, and the next day the winding procession plodded on to Thetford, where the coffin, covered by a ‘cloth of majesty’ was laid on a catafalque within a hearse, bedecked with eight bannerols and one hundred pencils (small heraldic pennants), together with seven hundred flickering candles.

  Beginning at five o’clock the next morning, two Masses were heard, culminating in a high requiem, sung by Nicholas West, Bishop of Ely, which included the dramatic entry into the nave of the church of a mounted knight, wearing the duke’s own armour, his visor closed to hide his features, escorted by Thomas Hawley, Carlisle Herald, who as Rouge Croix had served at Flodden.59 The armoured man carried a battleaxe in his right hand, with the blade head down to symbolise the death of its owner. Dismounting at the screen before the choir, the knight presented it to the bishop who reverently laid the weapon, with the duke’s heraldic achievements, on the high altar.60

  The hour-long funeral sermon that followed was preached by Dr Matthew Mackerell, the abbot of Barling Abbey in Lincolnshire, who took his text from the Book of Revelation, chapter five, verse five: ‘Behold the lion of the tribe of Judah has triumphed . . .’

  His was no tedious or bland homily. The abbot’s fearsome, ferocious words sparked immediate apprehension in the hearts and minds of the congregation and many mourners fled the abbey church in terror, leaving him standing alone with the corpse.61

  Order restored, six gentlemen carried the coffin from the hearse in the choir and lowered it into the vault before the high altar, as the bishop intoned the stark words of the burial service. The officers of the duke’s household snapped their staves of office and threw the halves into his grave. Carlisle Herald stepped forward, and with his voice rising, clear and ringing to the roof vaulting above, declared:Of your charity, pray for the soul of the right noble and mighty prince Thomas Duke of Norfolk, Marshal of England and late Treasurer of the same; Counsellor to the King, our Sovereign Lord, Knight Companion of the Garter.

  Then followed a ‘magnificent entertainment’ involving the feeding of nearly 1,900 mourners. Generous alms were distributed to the eagerly waiting poor. In all, the funeral had cost a staggering £1,300, or £540,000 in today’s monetary values.

  Thomas Howard was the first Duke of Norfolk to be laid in the new dynastic vault at Thetford Abbey. He was also the last.

  As the mourners left the church, no one could guess that his bones would not lie there peacefully for very long.62

  PART 2

  THE STRUGGLE FOR POWER

  3

  THE KING’S ‘GREAT MATTER’

  ‘By the Mass, Master More, it is perilous striving with princes . . .’

  Thomas Howard, third Duke of Norfolk, to Sir Thomas More1

  On 9 October 1529 all the angry frustration and bitterness that poisoned Henry VIII’s heart after the continual failure to annul his marriage to Catherine of Aragon finally burst out. Cardinal Thomas Wolsey, proud prince of the Church and Lord Chancellor of England, was accused by a Bill of Indictment for Praemunire of the treasonable offence of serving a foreign dignitary, in this case, Pope Clement VII.

  Although the Bill was entered in the Court of King’s Bench in Westminster Hall by the Attorney General, Sir Christopher Hales, the grubby fingerprints of Wolsey’s greatest enemies, the third Duke Norfolk and Charles Brandon, now Duke of Suffolk, were all over the criminal indictment.2

  He was accused of treason, but the Cardinal’s true felony was his own abject failure: the broken promise to give the king what he wanted. And what an obsessed Henry desired most in the entire world was for Norfolk’s niece, the vivacious and assertive Anne Boleyn, to be his loving wife - and the mother of strong, healthy male heirs to the crown of Tudor England.

  The king’s living nightmare was the lack of sons from his present marriage to Catherine of Aragon, aunt to the Imperial Emperor, Charles V of Spain, and the pious widow of his elder brother Arthur, who had died at Ludlow on 2 April 1502, another victim of tuberculosis, at the age of fifteen, supposedly without consummating the match with the Spanish princess. Their marriage was duly annulled by a dispensation of Pope Julius II in 1503, but the diplomatic imperatives of a union between the ruling houses of Spain and England remained: Catherine was therefore betrothed to the younger brother on 25 June that year. She declared that she had come to Henry, now crowned king, on their wedding night, on 11 June 1509, a ‘virgin and an immaculate woman’.

  Since then a succession of children had been born to the royal couple, but of the boys only Henry, Prince of Wales, survived his birth at Richmond Palace in 1511 and, tragically, he died seven weeks later. Hopes rose when a healthy daughter, Mary, was born at Greenwich on 18 February 1516, and the king declared cheerfully to the Venetian ambassador, Ludovico Falieri: ‘We are both young; if it was a daughter this time, by the grace of God the sons will follow.’ But his optimism remained unfulfilled. Catherine was six years older than Henry, and by now physically worn out by her many pregnancies.3 In desperation, the king even solemnly promised God that he would crusade against the infidel Turks, in return for a male heir being born in wedlock. But as the years passed and Catherine, now growing stout, approached the menopause, any chance of safeguarding the uncertain Tudor dynasty with a set of lusty boys looked increasingly slender.

  What redoubled the king’s disappointment was his success in siring a bastard son with Bessie Blount, the willowy teenage daughter of a Shropshire knight and a maid of honour - the title seems oddly inappropriate - to Catherine of Aragon. The child, conceived when the queen was approaching her confinement (her pregnancies frequently triggered a bout of promiscuity by Henry), was born in June 1519. For decency’s sake, Bessie was brought to childbed far away from the court, at the Augustinian priory of St Lawrence, at Blackmore, near Ingatestone, Essex.4

  Such discretion was not to the euphoric king’s taste, who may have felt his manhood and virility should be publicly vindicated, but he fully made up for this six years later. On 18 June 1525, Henry ennobled the child at a bizarre ceremony in Bridewell Palace on the western edge of the city of London. Henry, surrounded by Wolsey, Norfolk, Suffolk and other nobles, sat resplendent on a richly gilded throne as the little boy was tenderly ushered into the royal presence by his ladies-in-waiting. He proudly created hi
m Earl of Nottingham, and moments later, Duke of Richmond and Somerset - significantly, the title once held by his father, Henry VII, with lands worth £4,845 a year. Offices of state were later showered upon the innocent, tousled head of the youngster by his proud father. The lad, declared Henry, ‘is my worldly jewel’.

  His open flaunting of his bastard son must have wounded Catherine dreadfully, but relations between king and queen improved briefly in the autumn of that year. Courtiers noted that they read a book together and seemed very friendly in their conversations, hardly a panacea for the improvement of marital relations. This was probably the last time Henry slept with his wife.5

  From early in 1522 he had taken another mistress, Mary Boleyn, elder daughter of the third Duke of Norfolk’s sister, Lady Elizabeth, and her ambitious husband, Thomas Boleyn, a soldier and diplomat. He was created Viscount Rochford in June 1525, as a reward for Mary’s liberal bedtime favours.6 But this discreet affair was merely another of Henry’s petty dalliances and the notion of finding another wife to provide the all-important Prince of Wales gripped his mind. Some said it was Wolsey who suggested an annulment to Henry on the unsure biblical grounds of Leviticus, chapter twenty, verse twenty-one: ‘If a man shall take his brother’s wife, it is an unclean thing: he hath uncovered his brother’s nakedness; they shall be childless.’ The Cardinal, however, claimed he had pleaded with Henry not to discard his wife. Kneeling humbly before the king ‘in his Privy Chamber . . . the space of an hour or two, [Wolsey tried] to persuade him from his will and appetite; but I could never bring to pass to dissuade him,’ he said unhappily afterwards.7

  As Sir Thomas More, always ready with a pithy comment, told Thomas Cromwell, Henry’s up-and-coming apparatchik, eight years later: ‘If you follow my poor advice you shall in your counsel [to] his grace, ever tell him what he ought to do, but never what he is able to do . . . For if a lion knew his own strength, [it would be] hard for any man to rule him.’

  First Wolsey and then More would suffer the dire consequences of failing to do just that.

  Henry fell ardently, passionately, hopelessly in love with Mary Boleyn’s younger sister, the twenty-six-year-old black-haired Anne, probably in 1526. To modern tastes, she would not be considered a great beauty: short, rather than tall, with a sallow, if not swarthy complexion, a wide mouth and a long neck. Her black eyes, however, were compelling, if not electrifying. 8 She had returned from a period spent in Paris in 1522 and joined Henry’s court, where her father was at the time Treasurer of the Royal Household. In March that year she took part in one of those spectacular masques so beloved of the king. This one was staged by Wolsey on Shrove Tuesday in March 1522, in honour of some visiting imperial ambassadors. Mary Boleyn, playing ‘Kindness’, and Anne, as ‘Perseverance’, were among eight fair maidens imprisoned in the triple-towered ‘Château Vert’ by the children of the Chapel Royal, disguised as ‘Danger, Disdain, Jealously, Malevolence’ and the like. Despite a storm of dates, oranges and ‘other fruits made for pleasure’ being hurled vigorously in defence of the mock castle, the girls were chivalrously freed by a group of gallant knights, including Henry, performing the prophetic role of ‘Ardent Desire’.9

  Wolsey now became wary of Norfolk’s machinations at court. While on a diplomatic mission to France during the summer of 1527, the Cardinal asked one of his allies, Sir William Fitzwilliam, now Treasurer of the Household, to discover who Henry was keeping company with during Wolsey’s prolonged absence abroad. Worryingly, he was informed that the king ‘usually supped in his privy chamber with . . . the Dukes of Norfolk and Suffolk, the Marquis of Exeter and the Lord of Rochford’.10 All were far from being his friends. Wolsey hurried back to London in September, writing to Henry from Compiègne that he was continuing his journey ‘towards your highness with such diligence, as my old and [cracked] body may endure for there was never lover more desirous of the sight of his lady, than I am of your most noble and royal person’.11

  Behind his sly sycophancy beat a heart of steel. On his return, he arranged for Norfolk’s immediate departure to East Anglia to oversee a series of menial administrative tasks - among them the examination of grain production and North Sea trade - and ensured that the third duke’s pleas to return to court were always refused. Even when Norfolk fell ill in early 1528, he was denied access to his London doctors.12

  Probably based on what her sister told her of her lover’s character and proclivities, Anne adamantly refused to become Henry’s mistress and played a clever psychological game with the king’s emotions. She quickly realised that the way to capturing Henry’s heart was simple: the more unattainable she became, the more he wanted her. How much, in her feminine guile, she was counselled by her family, particularly her uncle Norfolk, must remain a matter of conjecture. He and Boleyn were greedy for the preferment, power and property that would be granted by a happy, contented sovereign to the Howard clan and its allies. However, both made a show of righteous disapproval over the relationship, if only for the sake of appearances.

  The king’s desire for Anne drove him to pen a series of love letters in French - a measure of how much he had fallen for her, as he made no secret of finding writing, in normal circumstances, ‘somewhat tedious and painful’.

  My mistress and friend: I and my heart put ourselves in your hands, begging you to recommend us to your favour, and not to let absence lessen your affection to us . . . Seeing I cannot be present in person with you, I send you the nearest thing to that . . . my picture set in [a] bracelet . . . wishing myself in their place, when it shall please you.13

  When Anne adamantly refused to answer his notes, or come to court, Henry became quite distraught:I send you this letter begging you to give an account of the state you are in. That you may more frequently remember me, I send you by this bearer a buck killed late last night by my hand, hoping, when you eat of it, you will think of the hunter.14

  Then desperate:I have been told you have quite given up the intention of coming to court, either with your mother, or otherwise. If so, I cannot wonder sufficiently - for I have committed no offence against you and it is very little return for the great love I bear you to deny me the presence of the woman I esteem most of all in all the world.

  If you love me as I hope you do, our separation should be painful to you.

  I trust your absence is not wilful on your part, for if so, I can but lament my ill fortune and by degrees abate my great folly.15

  Pathetic, lovesick Henry! In another billet-doux he complained that the short time since parting from her seemed like ‘a whole fortnight’, and that his letter was shorter than usual ‘because of pain in my head’. He ended his cloying missive: ‘Wishing myself specially an evening in my sweetheart’s arms, whose pretty dubbys [breasts] I trust shortly to cusse [kiss].’16

  In the late summer of 1527, the king, urged on by Norfolk and the Boleyns, decided that decisive action to end his unwanted marriage was now essential. Ignoring Wolsey’s advice, he sent the experienced diplomat William Knight to Rome to achieve three very secret objectives. Firstly, he was to seek papal annulment of the marriage to Catherine and, secondly, absolution of the king’s mortal sin (according to Leviticus) in living with her as husband and wife for eighteen years. The third objective was both controversial and damning: Henry was implicitly admitting his adultery and his desire to marry his mistress. In this there was an ironic obstacle. Knight had to acquire papal dispensation for the king to marry Anne Boleyn - ‘a woman related to himself in the first degree of affinity’, as the sister of his former bedmate in illicit wedlock, Mary. No wonder the contents of the letter that Knight was to deliver to Clement VII were kept confidential ‘which no man doth know but they . . . will never disclose it to any man living for any craft the Cardinal or any other can find’.17

  After much diplomatic activity, the desperately prevaricating Vatican could only limply propose a legatine commission to examine the validity of Henry’s current marriage. It was all too frustrating.

&nbs
p; Henry’s chief minister was tasked to gather evidence to support the king’s case for an annulment. Wolsey despatched officials to test the fading and feeble memory of the eighty-year-old Bishop of Winchester, Richard Fox, on whether Catherine and Arthur’s marriage had ever been consummated - or if, indeed, Henry had been coerced by his father into wedding his brother’s widow. Another group badgered more ageing veterans of Henry VII ’s court. Agnes, the Dowager Duchess of Norfolk, widow of the second duke, was closely questioned at Thetford Priory, and Mary, the wife of Henry Bourchier, second Earl of Essex, at Stanstead, Essex. They both produced depositions about the intimate secrets of Catherine’s first marital bed.18

  The Cardinal promised to deliver an annulment on a golden plate to his master but Vatican officialdom continued to grind exceeding slow. Eventually, the legatine court met in the great hall of the Dominican monastery at Blackfriars in London, presided over by Wolsey and the gouty Cardinal Lorenzo Campeggio. Beginning on 31 May 1529, Henry’s lawyers triumphantly produced reams of prurient evidence that Arthur had ‘carnal conversation’ with his blushing bride, but a shamed and humiliated Catherine, in a coup de théâtre, closely attended by four supportive bishops, eloquently appealed for her case to be heard by a higher jurisdiction.

  Some weeks later, the case, still unresolved, was referred to Rome and the labyrinthine bureaucracy of the Curia. An incredulous Henry heard Campeggio’s announcement of an adjournment on 23 July from the gallery above, and left the precincts for the nearby Bridewell Palace, his face black with anger. Suffolk, down in the hall, slammed his fist on a table and cried out: ‘By the Mass! Now I see that the old saying is true! It was never merry in England while we had cardinals amongst us!’