Henry VIII's Last Victim (34 page)

At eight o’clock on Sunday, 21 January 1543 the bell of St Mary-le-Bow was rung, signalling the evening curfew. Apprentices put down their tools, shopkeepers packed away their wares, taverns were cleared, candles were snuffed out and the city gates were locked. An hour later Surrey, Wyatt, Thomas Clere, Shelley and Pickering put on their cloaks, armed themselves with stonebows and ventured into the darkness. They strode purposefully through the alleys west of their lodging and arrived in a matter of seconds at Milk Street, an affluent neighbourhood lined
with the sumptuous houses of the more successful members of London’s merchant community.
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Sir Richard Gresham lived here. He was a Norfolk man by birth, but had made his fortune in the capital through trade and usury and had served a term as Lord Mayor in 1537. A few well-aimed shots from Surrey’s stonebow put paid to Gresham’s expensive glass windows.

Surrey’s gang then ran amok through Cheapside, the Poultry and the Stocks Market, abusing passers-by as they went. Continuing east, they hurtled along Lombard Street and onto Fenchurch Street, where a mercer by the name of William Birch resided. His windows went the way of Gresham’s, as did those of other merchant dwellings and even some churches. Their next port of call was the Thames, where they commandeered some boats and rowed along the river, shouting obscenities and shooting missiles at the prostitutes who plied their trade on the South Bank. When they eventually tired of their sport, they headed back to their lodgings, leaving a trail of broken glass in their wake. According to one of the maids, ‘it was two of the clock in the morning ’or that they came in again.’
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The following night, in response to a reprimand from George Blagge, Surrey admitted to the folly of his deed. ‘He had liever [rather] than all the good in the world it were undone,’ he said, not because he felt any guilt, but because ‘he was sure it should come before the King and his Council’. There was already ‘a great clamour’ over the vandalism ‘and the voice was that those hurts were done by my Lord and his company’.
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Within days Surrey was the subject of a municipal enquiry headed by the Lord Mayor, but on 13 February he was granted a royal licence ‘to alienate the manor of Larlingforth’.
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The Earl of Surrey, it seemed, was untouchable and so he might have remained had Henry VIII not then authorised a new heresy commission. One line of attack, co-ordinated by Stephen Gardiner, Bishop of Winchester, was to target all those who had disobeyed the fasting laws. Surrey, who had flagrantly eaten meat not only over Lent but also on other proscribed days, was caught in Gardiner’s net. As Easter approached, a full investigation was launched into his misconduct.

On 24 March Alice Flaner, a maid of Mistress Arundel, was examined by the Privy Council. Four days later it was the turn of her mistress, who was recalled on 2 April along with another maid by the name of Joan Whetnall. Their revelations uncovered further transgressions,
including the Earl of Surrey’s regal pretensions. Joan claimed that she thought that the armorial bearings above Surrey’s bed ‘were very like the King’s arms’. Surrey’s rage over his ill-advised cloth purchase was also brought up and it was remembered that Mistress Arundel had called him a prince. There was nothing particularly unusual in a nobleman being referred to thus, but the maids had followed it up with questions about Surrey’s status.

‘Is he a prince?’

‘Yea,’ Mistress Arundel had replied, ‘and if ought should come at the King but good, his father should stand for King.’ By this she meant that if Henry VIII should die before Prince Edward had reached his majority, then the Duke of Norfolk deserved to be regent. However, the maids soon confused her words. Joan Whetnall thought that ‘if ought came at the King and my Lord Prince, then [Surrey] would be King after his father’, while Alice Flaner had announced at the butchers that ‘if ought came to the King otherwise than well, [Surrey] is like to be King’. ‘It is not so,’ challenged a merchant-tailor. ‘It is said so,’ Alice had retorted.
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Such chatter was dangerous in the extreme. Discussing the succession, if only hypothetically, was potentially treasonous as it presupposed – ‘imagined’ in the language of the day – the King’s death. The three deponents denied ‘that ever they heard any other person speak of this or any like matter’, but Mistress Arundel’s statement reflected Surrey’s own sentiments as his words, uttered three years later, would reveal.

Surrey appreciated the seriousness of the situation. He knew that the authorities had called his allegiance into question and he feared for his life ‘notwithstanding mine innocency’. On 1 April 1543 he was examined at St James’s Palace by four privy councillors: Thomas Wriothesley, John Russell, Stephen Gardiner and Anthony Browne. All were, at this stage in their careers, on good terms with Surrey’s father and they proffered a sympathetic line of questioning, so much so that when Surrey later became the subject of a more serious enquiry, he asked that the same four men might conduct it.
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Surrey was not charged with any treasonable muttering about the succession, nor for bearing royal arms above his bed.
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Instead he faced
the two lesser charges: ‘of eating of flesh’ and ‘of a lewd and unseemly manner of walking in the night about the streets and breaking with stonebows of certain windows’. To the first charge Surrey claimed he had a licence, ‘albeit he had not so secretly used the same as appertained’. But he confessed to the second offence: ‘He could not deny but he had very evil done therein,’ the Privy Council recorded, ‘submitting himself therefore to such punishment as should to them be thought good.’
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Two of Surrey’s crew – Wyatt and Pickering – initially denied any involvement in the rampage and when they eventually confessed, they were dispatched to the Tower. Surrey and his other roistering confederates could therefore consider themselves lucky only to be sent to the Fleet.
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Back in the river prison, amid the ‘pestilent airs’ that so offended his aristocratic nose, Surrey raged, brooded, then took up his quill. The result was an extraordinary poem that offered a justification for his nocturnal activities. ‘London!’ the poem begins in shocked tones emphasised by the heavy stresses of the metre, ‘hast
thou
accused
me
/ Of breach of laws the root of strife?’ London, whose ‘wicked walls’ embrace the devil and the seven deadly sins, has the temerity to accuse the Earl of Surrey, ‘whose breast did boil to see / So fervent hot thy dissolute life.’ Indeed, the poet explains, it was the very degeneracy of London, whose citizens had closed their ears to the gentle chastisements of preachers, that had spurred him to express his ‘hidden burden’. As words had failed to rouse the citizens from their torpor, Surrey’s speaker explains, more extreme methods of persuasion had been necessary:

In secret silence of the night

This made me, with a reckless breast,

To wake thy sluggards with my bow:

A figure of the Lord’s behest,

Whose scourge for sin the Scriptures show.

With characteristic hubris, Surrey has fashioned himself as God’s agent on earth. He is the vigilante-prophet sent out with his stonebow to warn the citizens of the ‘fearful thunder clap’ and ‘dreadful plague’ at hand if God’s wrath is not assuaged:

In loathsome vice each drunken wight

To stir to God, this was my mind.

‘Thy windows,’ he tells the city, ‘had done me no spite’,

But proud people that dread no fall,

Clothed with falsehood and unright

Bred in the closures of thy wall.

The poem climaxes with a terrifying vision of London as Babylon, the mystical city of the Apocalypse:

Oh Shameless whore! Is dread then gone

By such thy foes as meant thy weal?

Oh member of false Babylon!

The shop of craft! The den of ire!

Thy dreadful doom draws fast upon.

Thy martrys’ blood, by sword and fire,

In Heaven and earth for justice call.

The Lord shall hear their just desire;

The flame of wrath shall on thee fall;

With famine and pest lamentably

Stricken shall be thy lechers all;

Thy proud towers and turrets high,

Enemies to God, beat stone from stone;

Thine idols burnt, that wrought iniquity;

When none thy ruin shall bemoan,

But render unto the right wise Lord,

That so hath judged Babylon,

Immortal praise with one accord.
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For this poem, Surrey drew on the Scriptural voices of the prophets Jeremiah and Ezekiel, on Juvenal’s invectives against first-century Rome, and on Petrarch’s denunciation of the Papacy at Avignon. But Surrey’s is a poem very much of its moment, pregnant with contemporary issues and loaded with reformed rhetoric. Opinion is divided over his true intentions. Some critics have taken his iconoclastic defence at face value, arguing that the poem, and the rampage, were heartfelt expressions of faith, a faith that was distinctly evangelical and would be endorsed again by Surrey in his biblical paraphrases. Others doubt the Earl’s sincerity, claiming that he appropriated the bombastic language of the pulpits in order to mock his detractors and voice his own personal
outrage at being punished. A third possibility is that the poem, written as it was when London had become the battleground for the Reformation, might convey ‘a protest against the self-righteousness and inflexibility of both confessional sides, certain of their monopoly of truth.’
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It is unlikely, though not impossible, that a religious motive drove Surrey to the streets on the night of 21 January 1543. We do not even know if the church windows that he smashed were under the care of traditional or reforming clerics, and the targeting of Gresham and Birch, who both seemed more reform-minded than otherwise, points to personal antagonism rather than any instance of faith. Gresham and Birch, both ‘new men’ in Surrey’s eyes, had been supporters of Thomas Cromwell and were closely acquainted; Gresham’s wife had attended the christening of Birch’s son (named Thomas after his godfather Cromwell).
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Gresham was a very wealthy man, who enjoyed a lucrative sideline in moneylending. He had risen quickly through the ranks of London society, but not without making enemies. An anonymous poem written after his death in 1549 denounced him as a fraudulent merchant who had sold his own honour for profit and called on all those who had owed him money to rejoice in his death and cast excrement upon his corpse.
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Both Gresham and Birch traded in cloth and it is tempting to speculate that either one or both of them had had a hand in the swindling of Surrey over his purchase of shoddy linen. Even if they had not, Surrey may have decided that as figureheads of the industry that had conned him, they were fair game. Alternatively, many of Surrey’s consorts were, like him, avid gamblers and frequently in debt. Birch the gambler and Gresham the moneylender could easily have made themselves targets.
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Surrey instantly regretted the rampage because it was, he readily admitted, juvenile and reckless. ‘We will have a madding time in our youth,’ he explained to Blagge. One might add that it was probably a far from sober time too. Nor did Surrey present any kind of religious defence during his examination. Instead he once again admitted ‘that he had very evil done therein’.
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Only after the event, languishing in prison, did Surrey devise a justification that attempted to play down his disgrace. But if he was cocking a snook at the authorities in his poem, if he was winking conspiratorially at his friends, if, even, he was partially sending himself up as the lone champion of the Reformation, it does not necessarily follow that his professed zeal was
contrived. Indeed, a mass of cumulative evidence strongly suggests that Surrey’s early flirtation with reform had by now grown into ardent commitment.

First there are his companions: they were all adherents to the new faith, some with the zeal of a fanatic. In three years’ time, George Blagge would be condemned for sacramentarianism and only the personal intervention of the King would save him from the fires of Smithfield. Wyatt would lose his head after his rebellion against Queen Mary in 1554 (for which Pickering was also indicted) and Stafford became a Marian exile in Calvin’s Geneva. Surrey was not the only one to flout the fasting laws; at least eight of his crew had done so too. Traditionalists viewed such defiance as damnable heresy; reformers as an admirable rebellion against a superstitious custom.

Then there is the place: Mistress Arundel and her husband had disobeyed the Lenten laws themselves and their contacts with evangelical butchers had ensured a ready supply of black-market meat at Surrey’s table.
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On the west side of St Lawrence Lane, through an open passage called Duke Street, was All Hallows, Honey Lane, a parish notorious for its radical stance. To the conservatives, well aware that it harboured an illegal trade in reformist literature, the church was a bastion for ‘the secret sowing and setting forth of Luther’s heresies’. One of its rectors, Thomas Garrard, had been burned for heresy in 1540 and at the time of Surrey’s sojourn the curate incumbent was William Reed, soon to be examined for abuses of religion.
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Three other churches within Cheap Ward – St Pancras, St Martin Ironmonger Lane and St Mary Colechurch – employed reforming clerics and St Mary Aldermary, a church in the neighbouring ward, was under the heterodox care of Edward Crome. The sermon given there that Lent landed the reformer, Robert Wisdom, in prison.
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One of those who stood surety for Wisdom was Henry Brinklow, an evangelical campaigner whose
Lamentacyon of a Christen Agaynst the Cytye of London
exhorted sinful Londoners to repent – ‘Awake! Awake! For the Lord sleepeth not.’ His rented tenement between St Lawrence Lane and Ironmonger Lane was only a stone’s throw from Mistress Arundel’s inn.
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