The Last Days of Henry VIII: Conspiracy, Treason and Heresy at the Court of the Dying Tyrant (27 page)

In a hastily scribbled letter, he plaintively protested his past loyalty to the crown:

Who tried out the falsehood of the Lord Darcy,
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Sir Robert Constable,
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Sir John Bulmer,
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Aske
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and many others – but only I?

Who showed his majesty the words of my mother-in-law
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for which she was attainted of misprision – but I?

I have always shown myself a true man to my sovereign and, since these things done, have received more profits of his highness than before.

Who could now think that I should now be false?

Poor man as I am yet, I am his near kinsman. For whose sake should I be untrue?
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These are the frantic ramblings of a man still in shock and petrified by his numbing fear of the unknown – again, what exactly were the charges made against him? Who was accusing him? What was the evidence?

Unknown to Norfolk at this stage, it was not heresy that had undone him: treason was the steely weapon of choice for his determined enemies,
the Seymours, uncles to young Prince Edward. Surrey, for his part, was still naïvely unaware of the seriousness of the conspiracy against him. In a letter to the Privy Council written from the Tower, he protested about ‘mine old father brought in[to] question by any stir between Southwell and me’. Norfolk’s arrest, he complained, ‘sore enfeebled me’.
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Henry’s case against the Howards became clear when Wriothesley sent a message to van der Delft on 16 December, disclosing that the cause of Norfolk and his son’s imprisonment ‘was that they planned by sinister means to obtain the government of the king, who was too old now to allow himself to be governed’ and

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.
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The government’s propaganda machine grew still more vocal. Nicholas Wotton, the English ambassador to the court of the French king, told Francis I of the ‘most execrable and abominable intent and enterprise’ of Norfolk and Surrey. Francis replied simply that if their guilt was clearly proved, they should both be put to death.
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The courts of Europe were stunned by news of the arrests. Thomas Thirlby, Bishop of Westminster, on a diplomatic mission at the court of Charles V, wrote to Paget on 25 December of

those two ungracious and inhuman
non homines
,
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the Duke of Norfolk and his son, of whom I did confess that I did love, for I ever supposed him a true servant to his master. Before God, I am so amazed.
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There is a romantic story, from only one source, of Surrey attempting an escape from the Tower, involving a break-out from his privy window, arming himself with a dagger smuggled to him by his servant Martin and climbing out of the window of a room overlooking the Thames, where a boat was waiting in St Katherine’s Dock. But according to the writer – Antonio de Guaras, a Spanish merchant in London at the time – the earl was surprised by his guards and recaptured.
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The legal proceedings for Surrey’s downfall gathered momentum.
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Lord Chancellor Wriothesley was once a staunch ally of Norfolk but, like Paget, after sensing the shift in political power at court, had almost overnight become a resolute enemy. He changed and counter-changed the main thrust of the indictments as the evidence was pieced together, much of it mere hearsay hardly worthy of the name. But there was still plenty of damning information to be garnered and evaluated. Mistress Arundell, a central character in Surrey’s drunken escapades of 1543, had told of conversations in her household when the earl stayed there that now seemed very incriminating indeed:

Once, when my lord of Surrey was displeased about buying of cloth, she told her maids in the kitchen how he fumed and added, ‘I marvel they will thus mock a prince.’

‘Why,’ said Alice, her maid, ‘is he a prince?’

‘Yes, marry he is, and if aught should come at the king but good, his father should stand for king.’

Another maid, Joan Whetnall, ‘talking with her fellow touching my lord of Surrey’s bed, she said the arms were very like the king’s.’
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No doubt this testimony was triumphantly retrieved from the Privy Council’s files and added to the pile of evidence lying before Wriothesley.

Surrey’s embittered sister also recounted how he had vilified the Seymours and ‘these new men [who] loved no nobility and if God called away the king, they should smart for it’. Norfolk’s mistress ‘Bess’ Holland also related how her lover had complained that few on the Privy Council loved him ‘because they were no noblemen born themselves’ and how he had forecast the demise of the ailing Henry. Sir Gawen Carew described a very public row between Surrey and his sister in the Long Gallery of the Palace of Westminster over his violent opposition to her planned marriage to Thomas Seymour, which he objected to because of Seymour’s supposed low birth. Surrey suggested, said the witness, that she should come to court to ‘delight the king’ with her body, so that she could control him as Madame d’Estampes, Francis I’s mistress, governed the French king,

which should not only be a means to help herself but all her friends should receive a commodity by the same. Whereupon she defied her brother and said that they all should perish and she would cut her own throat rather than she would consent to such a villainy.
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Edward Rogers told the investigators of an argument between the earl and his friend George Blagge, one of Henry’s favourites and a notorious religious reformer, about a regency to govern England during Prince Edward’s minority, after the king’s death:

The earl held that his father was meetest, both for good services done and for estate.

Blagge replied that then the prince should be but evil taught and in multiplying words, said, ‘Rather than it should come to pass that the prince should be under the government of your father or you, I would bide the adventure to thrust this dagger into you.’

The earl said he was very hasty.
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Sir Edmund Knyvett
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was another eager witness. He had told Surrey that ‘because of his father’s and his unkindness I would go from my country and dwell there and wait, so unable to bear their malice’. The earl had contemptuously replied: ‘No, no, cousin Knyvett, I malice not so low; my malice is higher – my malice climbs higher.’ He repeated: ‘These new erected men would, by their wills, leave no noble man in life.’

Surrey himself was interrogated in the Tower, and the list of twenty-three sharp questions that were put to him by the Privy Council still survives. The devious Wriothesley drafted the ‘interrogatories’ personally and their content shows that the royal hounds were firmly on the scent of their hapless quarry, based on the evidence already gathered. These questions included: ‘If the king should die in my lord prince’s tender age, whether you have devised who should govern him and the realm?’ This had been amended from the original: ‘Who ought, within the realm, to be protector and governor of him during nonage [minority]?’ More pointedly: ‘Whether you have said that in such case you or your father would have the rule and governance of him, or words to that
effect?’ Another – ‘whether you procured any person … with the intent the same might grow [in the king’s] favour for the better encompassing of your purposes’ – had been altered from ‘procuring your sister or any other woman to be the king’s concubine’. In those long, hard days for Surrey, such euphemistic niceties seem out of place. The questions also home in on the issue of his wilfully bearing the royal arms of King Edward the Confessor and ‘whether you are next heir or kin to St Edward and if so, how?’ And: ‘To what intent do you put the arms of St Edward in your coat?’ Finally, the ‘killer’ questions of his interrogators: ‘Do you acknowledge yourself the king’s true subject?’ and ‘Have you at any time determined to fly out of the realm?’
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One can almost hear proud Surrey’s angry denials and bluster when questioned repeatedly by his enemies.

As the Privy Council scurried about taking witness statements, the draft charges against both Norfolk and Surrey were drawn up and presented to the king who read them carefully, despite his rapidly deteriorating medical condition, his spectacles on the end of his nose. He was taking a great personal interest in the case: ‘he is deeply engaged and much perplexed in the consideration of this affair,’ reported van der Delft.

It is understood that he will thus be occupied during the holidays and some days in addition, the queen and all the courtiers having gone to Greenwich, though she has never been known before to leave him on solemn occasions like this. I do not know what to think or suspect.

The king was ‘keeping himself very secluded at court, all persons but his councillors and three or four gentlemen of his chamber being denied entrance’.
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Henry made copious handwritten notes in the margins of the charge sheets. They demonstrate great clarity of thought, despite his poor state of health, and must indicate his grim single-mindedness to see his noble prisoners brought safely to the block. He may have been physically weak, but he was as cold-blooded as ever. The king’s annotations show that he reinforced the case against both men for heraldic
misdemeanours. Some of the evidence may have triggered painful echoes of the past and two unfortunate marriages into the old king’s mind. He wrote:

If a man compassing with himself to govern this realm, do actually go about to rule the king and should, for that purpose advise his daughter or sister to become his harlot, thinking thereby to bring it to pass and so would rule both father and son, as by this next article doth more appear; what this importeth?

Then, putting his finger on the crux of the issue, Henry asked pointedly:

If a man says these words: ‘If the King dies, who should have the rule of the Prince but my father or I’ – What it importeth?
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The cynical van der Delft strongly suspected that the Council’s feverish investigations were a cunning stratagem to hide yet another relapse in the king’s health, so he sent one of his men to see John Dudley, the Lord Great Admiral, at Westminster:

Whilst he was at court, where he slept that night, he learnt from a friend that the king was not at all well, though he had seen him dressed on the previous day.
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The astute ambassador pointed out in a dispatch to Charles V on Christmas Eve 1546 that

four or five months ago, great inquiries and prosecutions were carried out against the heretics and sacramentarians, but they have now ceased, since the earl of Hertford [Seymour] and the Lord Admiral have resided at court. The publicly expressed opinion, therefore, [is] that these two nobles have obtained such influence over the king as to lead him according to their fancy.
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Van der Delft had warned of ‘the evils and dangers threatened by these sects’ in conversations with some of the leading councillors and they asked him to pass on his opinions to Henry.

I find them [the councillors] now of a different aspect and much inclined to please and entertain the earl and the Admiral …

As regards the diversity of religion, the people at large are to a great extent on their side, the majority being of these perverse sects and in favour of getting rid of the bishops.

They do not indeed conceal their wish to see the Bishop of Winchester and other adherents of the ancient faith sent to the Tower to keep company with the Duke of Norfolk.
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Norfolk made his confession on 12 January 1547 in the Tower of London, signing it, of course, ‘without compulsion or counsel’. Despite that preposterously unlikely disclaimer, the statement would certainly have been written for him by his accusers, as every ‘i’ is dotted, every ‘t’ crossed:

I, Thomas duke of Norfolk do confess and acknowledge myself to have offended the king in opening his secret counsels at diverse times to sundry persons to the peril of his highness and disappointing of his affairs.

Likewise I have concealed high treason in keeping secret the false acts of my son, Henry, Earl of Surrey, in using the arms of St Edward the Confessor which pertain only to kings of this realm, whereto the said earl could make no claim.

Also I have without authority borne in the first and principal quarter of my arms, ever since the death of my father, the arms of England with a difference of three labels of silver, which are the proper arms of my lord the prince.

I confess my crime no less than high treason and although I do not deserve it, humbly beg his highness to have pity upon me. I shall daily pray to God for the preservation of his noble succession.
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The usual suspects in such circumstances signed the confession as witnesses, amongst them Wriothesley, Lord St John – Lord President
of the Council, the Earl of Hertford – Lord Great Chamberlain, Dudley – Lord High Admiral, Secretary Paget and Sir Anthony Browne, Master of the King’s Horse. It was too late to expect mercy from Henry, the Seymours or Dudley.

If there were ever any futile, lingering doubts about the foregone conclusion to Surrey’s trial at the Guildhall the next day, Thursday 13 January, they were destroyed by his father’s craven and prejudicial confession.

Surrey was popular in London, despite his previous hooligan escapades, and his downfall was to damage irretrievably the public perception of the Seymours. The Spanish merchant de Guaras, who recounted the story of the earl’s escape attempt, reported that ‘it was fearful to see the enormous number of people in the streets’ watching as Surrey was escorted,
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under guard by 300 halberdiers, by the Constable of the Tower Sir John Gage, who was responsible for delivering him safely to his trial. Always a dandy, the prisoner wore a new coat of satin purchased especially for the occasion, paid for by Walter Stonor, the new Lieutenant of the Tower.
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