Henry VIII's Last Victim (33 page)

On entering this wretched place, Surrey erupted with ‘the fury of reckless youth’. Without delay he dispatched his servant, William Pickering, to every member of the Council with a demand for his immediate release. The Council made it clear they had no truck with Pickering and that Surrey’s lack of humility would only impair his prospects of liberty. On 25 July Surrey tried again, this time with a formal letter to the Council. Ostensibly it was a humble petition for release. He assured the Council that his will was ‘conformable and contented with the quiet learning of the just reward of my folly’. He accepted ‘that a Prince offended hast none other redress upon his
subject but condign punishment,
without respect of the person
’. Here Surrey betrays his feigned contrition, his inference being that the Earl of Surrey should not in fact be so treated. Evidently he considered it somewhat infra dig to have to submit to the Council and there are strong undertones of mock sincerity and self-justification throughout the letter. ‘My Lords,’ Surrey continued,

if it were lawful to persuade by the precedent of other young men reconciled, I would affirm that this might sound to me a happy fault: by so gentle a warning to learn how to bridle my heady will, which in youth is rarely attained without adversity. Where might I, without vaunt, lay before you the quiet conversation of my passed life, which (unstained with any unhonest touch, unseeming in such a man as it hath pleased God and the King to make me
^fn1
) might perfectly promise new amendment of mine offence.

Whereof, if you doubt in any point, I shall humbly desire you that during my affliction (in which time malice is most ready to slander the innocent) there may be made a whole examination of my life; wishing, for the better trial thereof, rather to have the time of my durance redoubled and so (declared and well tried as unsuspected) by your mediations to be restored to the King’s favour than condemned in your grave heads [and] without answer or further examination to be quickly delivered; this heinous offence always unexcused, whereupon I was committed to this so noisome prison whose pestilent airs are not unlike to bring some alteration of health.

Surrey then beseeched the Council to petition the King ‘as well for his favour as for my liberty’ or, failing that, for a transfer ‘into the country, to some place of open air’. He added that separation from the King was ‘unto every loving subject,
specially unto me
’ no less than ‘a living death’.

Finally, albeit no part of this my trespass in any way to do me good, I should yet judge me happy if it should please the King’s Majesty to think that this simple body [that] rashly adventured in the revenge of his own quarrel, shall be without respect always ready to be employed in his service.
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This profession of fidelity and zeal for active service seems to have softened Henry VIII’s heart. Four days later the Warden of the Fleet was ordered to deliver Surrey to the Court at Windsor Castle. On 1 August 1542 the Earl was bound by a recognisance of ten thousand marks against committing ‘by himself, his servants or any other at his procurement, any bodily displeasure either by word or deed to Jhon a Legh esquire or to any of his’.
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A few days later Surrey was formally released and, the following month, he found himself on the road to Scotland.
¹⁸

Ever since the Wars of Independence (1296–1328), English kings had squabbled and fought with their northern counterparts. Henry VIII and his nephew, James V of Scotland,
^fn2
were no different. The English looked down on their neighbours with undisguised contempt. A stanza from Richard Grafton’s verse dedication of Harding’s
Chronicle
(1543) to the Duke of Norfolk is typical of the English attitude to the Scots:

For the Scots will aye be boasting and crakyng,

Ever seeking causes of rebellion;

Spoils, booties and preades ever taking,

Ever sowing quarrels of dissension;

To burn and steal is all their intention

And yet as people, whom God doth hate and curse,

They always begin, and ever have the worse.
¹⁹

In January 1537 James V had cemented the ‘auld alliance’ with the French by marrying Francis I’s daughter Madeleine; following her early death, he wed Marie, daughter of the duc de Guise. In 1541 Henry VIII attempted reconciliation but was publicly snubbed when James refused to meet him at York. A year later, after a spate of border raids and the capture by the Scots of an English March Warden, Henry announced that the blood between himself and James V had been ‘frozen with the cold air of Scotland’. Safe in the knowledge that Francis I was too busy fighting Charles V on the Continent to assist his Scottish allies, Henry declared war on his nephew. He appointed the Duke of Norfolk as his Lieutenant General and ordered him to lead an army across the Border and perform ‘some notable exploit’.
²⁰

‘
Spite drave me into Boreas’ reign’, Surrey announced in one of his poems,

Where hoary frosts the fruits do bite,

When hills were spread and every plain

With stormy winter’s mantle white.
²¹

In spite of the cold and a scarcity of bread and beer, despite the ‘poor and feeble’ carriages, ‘exceedingly foul’ roads, the collapse of a bridge, the drowning of five men and the wounding of many more, Surrey, his father and an army of over twenty thousand crossed the Tweed at Berwick on 21 October 1542.
²²
Scotland was traditionally the arena in which Howard reputations were made. According to Richard Grafton, the House of Howard was ‘appointed by God, to be to the Scots a sharp scourge and rod’.
²³
But if Surrey was hoping for his own Flodden, he would be sorely disappointed.

Norfolk had vowed to shock and awe the Scots into submission: ‘We shall do as much as is possible for men to do to make the enemies speak according to the King’s pleasure, or else to make them such a smoke as never was in Scotland these 100 years.’ In the space of eight days his men destroyed over twenty towns and villages, ‘utterly devastating all the corn about the same,’ Norfolk bragged, ‘in such sort as they shall not be able to recover this displeasure many years hereafter.’
²⁴
On 25 October they met with some resistance around Kelso, but it was easily suppressed by Norfolk’s gunners.
²⁵
The following day Surrey and his servant Thomas Clere stood together and watched as the town and abbey of Kelso were put to fire and reduced to smouldering embers. But there was no ‘notable exploit’ and before October was out, a combination of appalling weather, inadequate supplies and infirmity had forced Norfolk to abort the campaign and withdraw to Berwick.

Henry VIII was less than impressed. On 2 November he sent Norfolk and his fellow commissioners a letter full of barbs about ‘the loss of this enterprise’ which was ‘not of such sort as we did trust and desired’.
²⁶
Howard pride received a further blow on 24 November when the Warden of the West Marches, Sir Thomas Wharton, achieved what the Howards could not. On the western edge of the border at Solway Moss, Wharton routed a Scottish retaliatory force and claimed over a thousand prisoners. Within a month James V was dead. The future of his kingdom rested on the tiny shoulders of his one-week-old daughter Mary, Queen of Scots.

Surrey returned to England more restless than ever. His instinctive aggression, always simmering near the surface, had been unleashed by the authorised hooliganism that was the Scottish campaign, but not sated by it. Adrenaline pumped through his veins and so he headed for the one place where it could best be expended.

Tudor London was only a fraction of the size of the city we know today. A thick defensive wall enclosed an area of about one square mile that stretched from the Greyfriars in the west to Aldgate in the east and Moorgate in the north down to the Thames. But it was growing fast. Mansions and tenements soon overtook the open spaces within the city walls and further housing sprawled across the green suburbs. London’s population, around fifty thousand at the beginning of the sixteenth century, had quadrupled by the beginning of the next.
²⁷
Each street had its own peculiar character and was named accordingly. Competitors for the tourneys traditionally rode down Knightrider Street before exiting the city. The entrails of butchered animals were cast out of the scalding houses and swept down Pudding Lane towards the dung boats on the Thames. Fenchurch Street once had a river running through it and used to be little more than marshland. Pissing Lane, set between St Paul’s and Paternoster Row, needs no explanation, though even that quintessential Londoner, Thomas More, was revolted by the sight of a ‘beastly body’ shamelessly defecating ‘in the open street’.
²⁸

The throbbing heart of the city was Cheapside, where market traders hawked their wares and cutpurses drifted numinously through crowded stalls. There was nothing that could not be found here: malmsey wine from Crete, oil from Calabria, Turkish carpets, buttons, hats, spices, strawberries, gemstones, medicine, candles, horseshoes, quills, woodcuts, playing cards, hawks’ bells, birchrods, the services of porters and water carriers, fish and meat at the Stocks (a covered market in East Cheap) and yet more cuts of meat from the butchers of St Nicholas Shambles in the west. In the wider streets bands of apprentices played football with stuffed pig bladders and down the alleys, darkened by the overhang of the houses, gangs of sturdy beggars lurked with menace. Writing a century later, Henry Peacham observed that London was ‘like a vast sea, full of gusts, fearful dangerous shelves and rocks, ready at every storm to sink and cast away the weak and unexperienced.’
²⁹

At the west end of Cheapside was St Paul’s Cathedral, where God and money were worshipped in unequal measure. According to the Bishop of Durham in 1561, St Paul’s could be divided thus: ‘the south alley for Popery and usury, the north for simony, the horse fair in the midst for all kinds of bargains, meetings, brawlings, murders, conspiracies, and the font for ordinary payment of money, as well known to all men as the beggar knows his bush.’
³⁰
As Surrey walked east along Cheapside, the first great landmark he encountered was the Eleanor Cross, erected by Edward I in 1290 in honour of his late Queen. Further along was the Standard, a stone fountain, where punishments were meted out and, further still, the Great Conduit, which contained fresh water piped from Paddington. The first street left after the Standard, set between Milk Street and Ironmonger Lane, was St Lawrence Lane and it was here, at the guesthouse of one Mistress Milicent Arundel, that Surrey and his companions raised their temporary quarters.

It was a far cry from the luxury to which Surrey was accustomed – perhaps that was part of its appeal – but the street contained ‘many fair houses’ and Mistress Arundel was an attentive and obliging host. When a knuckle of veal proved unsatisfactory, she dispatched one of her maids to the butcher with a sharp message of rebuke and when Surrey fell into a rage after being conned into buying substandard cloth, she pandered to his ego. ‘I marvel they will thus mock a prince’, she bleated to her maids in the kitchen.
³¹

The following episode of Surrey’s life contains an element of Shakespearian farce. There is the garrulous hostess, the Cheapside inn, the heir determined to evade his responsibilities and a crew of Falstaffian characters more than willing to assist.
³²
Thomas Hussey, the Duke of Norfolk’s treasurer, was ‘a fat-bellied lump of a man’, who could often be found at the carding and dicing tables; in two years’ time, he would endure a spell in the Fleet when an argument over a game of primero got out of hand. Surrey’s servant, William Pickering, another keen gambler with a weakness for high jinks and loose women, would stand accused in six years’ time of breaking the London curfew and bearing a ‘light and evil demeanour’ towards the city constables. William Stafford, who had defied the King a decade earlier by marrying Mary Boleyn, would be committed to the Fleet for affray in 1552.

Surrey had known the Clere brothers from childhood. Thomas, his faithful squire, had been in trouble two years earlier for brawling on the King’s tennis court at Greenwich, while Sir John, the elder brother,
was well known to the officials of the Star Chamber and had been criticised there for his ‘covetous appetite and ungodly disposition’. Davy Seymour seemed content to lurk in the shadow of his famous family. Thomas Wyatt, the son of the poet, had only recently been pardoned for robbery and Thomas Wyndham, whose half-brother had been with Surrey in France, would later become a great explorer. In 1551, he participated in what Hakluyt called ‘the first voyage for traffic into the Kingdom of Morocco in Barbary’ and the following year he was, according to his page, the first Englishman who ‘fairly rounded Cape Verde and sailed into the Southern Sea’. His reputation among the French was less heroic; they knew him as an accomplished pirate. The boisterous troupe was completed by another servant of Surrey’s called Shelley, and George Blagge, a squat man whose frame spawned various nicknames; to Ralph Vane he was Tom Trubbe, while Henry VIII referred to him as ‘my pig’.

The records are silent for their first few weeks, but there was much in the city and its environs to divert them. They could have honed their archery skills at Finsbury fields, tilted at the quintain on Cornhill, enjoyed the wrestling at Clerkenwell or the horse racing at Smithfield. Had they wandered down to the Thames, they might have witnessed the ducking of prostitutes in the river from the ‘cucking-stool’ at the Three Cranes.
³³
They could have ventured east to see the lions and the rest of Henry VIII’s menagerie at the Tower of London or west beyond the walls to Domingo’s, a notorious gambling den favoured by the high-rollers of the Court. Had they felt partial to an afternoon of blood sports, they could have taken a wherry across the river to Paris Garden in Southwark, where bulls and bears were baited by fierce mastiffs. Alternatively, they could have crossed London Bridge, where the heads of traitors were impaled on spikes. According to a Greek envoy who toured London around 1545, the skulls of Catherine Howard’s executed lovers could still be seen there, though somewhat ‘denuded of flesh’.
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