Henry VIII's Last Victim (18 page)

Yet lurking beneath the surface frivolity was an undercurrent of menace. One contemporary described the Court as a ‘queasy’ and ‘unstable’ place where ‘every man here is for himself’.
⁴⁸
The mercurial personality of Henry VIII dictated the rules of the game. His favour was often instantaneous, reactive to a problem solved or a joke shared. Courtiers could be raised higher than in their wildest dreams, but if they slipped up or Henry’s suspicions were aroused, they could be dispatched to oblivion or the executioner’s block just as swiftly. The glint in Henry’s eye revealed instability and unpredictability. ‘You often boast to me that you have the King’s ear,’ Thomas More once wrote in a satirical epigram to a courtier, ‘and often have fun with him, freely and according to your whims. This is like having fun with tamed lions – often it is harmless, but just as often there is the fear of harm. Often he roars in rage for no known reason, and suddenly the fun becomes fatal.’
⁴⁹

This was no place for weakness or naivety. The more experienced courtiers had sharpened instincts, finely tuned to the blustery winds of the King’s will. Often they had no choice but to be swept along with them, but sometimes they could subtly alter their path. To dissuade the King from bad policy by providing good counsel was, in theory, the duty of every courtier. But to challenge the royal will was treason. It was a fine line and, if crossed, the penalty was death. Access to the King was crucial and competition fierce. Rivals had to be ousted and friends advanced. In this seamy environment factions flourished and, with the increase in religious controversy, they operated with a savagery previously unknown. Only fools were sure of their friends. Alliances were fluid and easily betrayed and everyone, it seemed, wore a mask. As John Husee warned his master Lord Lisle, there were men at Court ‘which beareth your Lordship fair face and a double dissembling heart’.
⁵⁰

The collective noun for courtiers was a ‘threat’. According to the ‘Vicar of Hell’, Sir Francis Bryan, ‘many there be that will do off their bonnet to you that gladly would see your heads off by the shoulders; and such there be that makes reverence unto you that would have his leg broken to see you dead and carried to your grave.’
⁵¹
The Howards, as figureheads of the old aristocracy and traditional religion, were more vulnerable than most. Throughout his long career, the Duke of Norfolk faced constant attempts to undermine him or destroy him altogether. He had learned to play the game well. But nothing in Surrey’s upbringing in East Anglia or at Windsor or France had fully prepared him for the Court. He had been taught the chivalric values of honesty and fidelity. The Court encouraged dissimulation and betrayal. In order to survive, Sir Thomas Wyatt observed in his satire on the Court, one had to ‘use virtue as it goeth nowadays / in word alone to make thy language sweet’.
⁵²

In one of Surrey’s many undated poems, written to sympathise with a young man whose nobility has been ‘devoured’ by a fickle lady, Surrey reveals his own distaste for the false environment in which she operates:

Too dearly had I bought my green and youthful years,

If in mine age I could not find when craft for love appears;

And seldom though I come in Court among the rest,

Yet can I judge in colours dim as deep as can the best.
⁵³

Unfortunately for Surrey his ability to spot ‘colours dim’ – that is, dark deceits or false practices – was never as assured as he supposed.

Surrey had not been summoned to Court just for the experience. At the beginning of March 1536 a meeting was mooted between Henry VIII and James V of Scotland. It was to take place at York and, once an alliance was brokered, Surrey, Richmond and the eldest son of the Marquis of Dorset were to remain behind as surety. It would be France mark two, only colder and less glamorous. All was arranged by 10 March and it was agreed that the English would go north straight after Easter.
⁵⁴
But the plans soon fell through and before he had time to pack for home, Surrey was called to attend an even more important event – the trial of his cousin, and Queen, Anne Boleyn.
⁵⁵

The feisty, wilful spirit that Henry VIII had found so thrilling in Anne when she was his mistress soon proved galling and overbearing once she was Queen. Henry had sacrificed much for her: he had broken with Rome, incurred the enmity of Charles V, executed dear friends and transformed his public image. In return, he expected gratitude and subservience, and did not take kindly to Anne’s jealous rages when his eye began to wander towards other ladies at the Court. Henry demanded a Queen who would reflect his majesty, not a tantrum-prone termagant. The passion was still there, but as the years progressed, it increasingly found expression in tempestuous quarrels and, after each angry scene, a little of Henry’s fondness for Anne died. Her worst crime by far, though, was her failure to produce a male heir.

On 29 January 1536, only five days after Henry’s near-fatal tumble from his horse, Anne suffered her second miscarriage. It would have been a boy. To a distraught Anne, crumpled in her bed, Henry showed no concern. Instead of soothing her grief, he spat out a few staccato words that must have stabbed at her heart: ‘when you are up, I will come and speak to you.’ To one of his principal courtiers Henry now murmured ‘as if in confession’ that his marriage was cursed, that he had been duped into it ‘by means of sortileges and charms’ and that he would relieve himself of God’s displeasure by taking a third wife.
⁵⁶

Just days later Eustace Chapuys reported that Henry had ‘une nouvelle amour’.
⁵⁷
Jane Seymour, the daughter of Sir John of Wolf Hall, Wiltshire, was one of Anne Boleyn’s waiting ladies. She could not have been more different from her mistress. Jane was meek, sweet-tempered and bashful. Her motto was ‘bound to obey and serve’; her religion,
orthodox. She also – and this would not have gone unnoticed by a king desperate for a male heir – hailed from a family with a high quota of male offspring. Sir Nicholas Carew, Henry Courtenay Marquis of Exeter, and a group of Court conservatives, who had supported Catherine of Aragon and remained true to Princess Mary, observed Henry’s interest in Jane with mounting excitement. If Anne could be replaced by Jane, then the flood of reform might be dammed, an aristocratic Council established and Mary restored to the succession. But the King’s fancies were notoriously fickle. For their campaign to succeed, the King’s attraction for Jane would have to be made permanent. They therefore allied with the Seymours, and Carew began to instruct Jane in the art of ensnaring her King.

Anne Boleyn had already given the masterclass. All Jane had to do was follow her example. Carew told her to offer enough of herself out to Henry to keep him lusting after her, but not, under any circumstances, to surrender her body. Not until they were married. So, when Jane was presented by Henry’s messenger with a purse full of sovereigns and a letter, she kissed the letter but did not open it. Instead, she returned it to the messenger and fell to her knees, begging him to entreat the King in her name that she was a gentlewoman born who trusted only to her honour, that she would not sacrifice it for a thousand deaths and that if the King wished to give her money in the future, she hoped it would be at such time as God would be pleased to send her some advantageous marriage.
⁵⁸

Henry’s attraction to Jane was not just a matter of frustrated lust. It stemmed, too, from the fact that he was surrounded by toadying schemers. He had once told the French ambassador that as he himself spoke what he meant, he would have others speak plainly to him too.
⁵⁹
The idea that people could be themselves with him, that they could see him as a man, as well as an omnipotent king was, when it suited Henry, rather charming. But Jane was not, of course, being herself and, after her well-choreographed performance, she had Henry, the Supreme Head of the Church of England, dancing to her, or rather her supporters’, tune. Anne was queen bee no more and it became increasingly apparent that it might suit the King well if someone swatted her.

By the end of March 1536 Thomas Cromwell, ever the vigilant courtier, had noted these developments with alarm. Although his recent quarrels with Anne over religion and foreign policy had led to an
increasingly strained relationship, he knew that he was still seen as one of her chief allies – in Chapuys’ words, ‘Anne’s right hand’
⁶⁰
– and he had no wish to be dragged down with her. When, on 2 April, Anne used the sermon of her almoner, John Skip, to voice her disapproval of Cromwell, he resolved to join the conservatives. But their aims were not his. He did not want to revive Mary’s legitimacy or see an aristocratic caucus in power or allow his hard-fought reform programme to be derailed. He wanted Anne and all her supporters not just repudiated but destroyed altogether. That way there could be no comeback and no counter-attack and he would be free to deal with the conservatives on his own terms. He therefore hijacked the proceedings against Anne. Two months later he could boast that he ‘had planned and brought about the whole affair’.
⁶¹

Anne was to be accused of adultery, which might be construed as treason as it brought the succession into disrepute. On 24 April 1536 a commission of ‘oyer and terminer’ was set up ‘to hear and determine’ sundry offences in Middlesex and Kent. One of the men appointed to the commission was the Duke of Norfolk. It is not clear at what stage he joined the alliance against his niece, but by now he had good reason to despise her. On New Year’s Day, 1535 Chapuys reported that one of his sources had told how Anne had ‘used more insulting language’ towards Norfolk ‘than one would to a dog, such that he was obliged to leave the room’. In his fury Norfolk had issued a tirade against Anne, calling her, amongst other things, a ‘great whore’. The following summer Chapuys, citing ‘a reliable source’, reported that Anne schemed ‘day and night’ to destroy her uncle.
⁶²
As a religious and political traditionalist, Norfolk naturally inclined to the conservatives, but he had long since burned his bridges with their figurehead, Princess Mary. He had his own motives for conspiring against Anne. If Princess Elizabeth was declared a bastard, then Henry VIII would have three illegitimate children, only one of whom was a son: the Duke of Richmond, Surrey’s best friend and Norfolk’s son-in-law.

By the end of April Henry VIII was, if not entirely convinced of Anne’s guilt, certainly suspicious. On the last day of the month her musician Mark Smeaton was arrested. The same day Anne cradled her daughter in her arms and pleaded with her husband for mercy. Two days later Henry sent his closest companion and groom of the stool, Henry Norris, to the Tower. Both Norris and Smeaton were accused of adultery with the Queen. Norris vigorously proclaimed his innocence,
but Smeaton confessed, probably under torture, to sleeping with Anne. It was enough for the moment.

Anne herself did the rest. Although she denied all the charges at Greenwich when interrogated by Norfolk, who was clearly enjoying the reversal of power – ‘“tut, tut, tut”’ he had said to her, ‘shaking his head three or four times’
⁶³
– once she was a prisoner in the Tower of London, she began to grow hysterical. Speculating as to what her enemies could possibly have against her, she blurted out her own incoherent suggestions. She recalled her rash words to Norris following his innocuous profession of courtly love: ‘You look for dead men’s shoes, for if ought came to the King but good you would look to have me.’
⁶⁴
These details were duly passed on to Cromwell, who added conspiracy to murder the King to Anne and Norris’ charges. Very soon Anne’s remembrances – a spot of flirtation here, some innocent ribaldry there – implicated others. Sir Francis Weston and William Brereton, a former servant of Richmond whose family had strong links with the Howards, were subsequently arrested for adultery, as was Anne’s own brother Lord Rochford, who had the darker stain of incest appended to his charge.

On Friday, 12 May 1536 the four commoners, Smeaton, Norris, Weston and Brereton, were tried for treason at Westminster Hall. All but Smeaton protested their innocence. All were found guilty, condemned, according to Chapuys, who had no reason to favour them, ‘on mere presumption or on very slight grounds, without legal proof or valid confession’.
⁶⁵
The state trials of Anne Boleyn and Lord Rochford were scheduled for the following Monday. They were to take place back-to-back, Anne first and then her brother. As both the accused were peers, they had to be tried by twenty-six lords of the realm under a special tribunal. This was set up under the aegis of the Lord High Steward, a ceremonial office filled for the day by the Duke of Norfolk. The Earl Marshal of England had to preside too, but as Norfolk also held this office, Surrey assumed the role for the day. Deputising for his father would, under normal circumstances, have been a great honour. On this occasion it presented Surrey with the unsavoury side to being a Howard.

As the peers assembled in the Great Hall of the Tower of London, Surrey, dressed in the Earl Marshal’s robes and holding the golden staff of office, took his seat at the feet of his father, who was enthroned beneath the cloth of estate. Above them two thousand spectators jostled
for position in specially erected stands. Silence was demanded. Anne was called. An axe, the blade pointing forwards, was carried into the courtroom. Then Anne appeared with two of her ladies. The Constable and the Lieutenant of the Tower escorted her to the bar and she entered her plea: ‘Not Guilty’.