House Of Treason: The Rise And Fall Of A Tudor Dynasty (13 page)

The following November, the duchess sent Catherine a present of a
volaille
- a tempting dish of glazed chicken - and an orange, and also a letter from the English representative in Rome, Sir Gregory Casale. Such was the atmosphere of intrigue and mistrust surrounding the whole question of the annulment that Chapuys doubted the queen’s own belief that Elizabeth’s gift was merely an act of kindness: ‘I fear it was done with the knowledge of her husband, as a means of entering into some secret communication with her majesty more easily,’ he reported to his master, Charles V, enclosing Casale’s note.
¹³

Her banishment from court did nothing to subdue her.

Elizabeth stubbornly refused to carry Anne’s train when the king’s mistress was created Marchioness of Pembroke in that sumptuous ceremony at Windsor Castle in September 1532 and it had to be borne, instead, by her thirteen-year-old daughter, Mary. She also unashamedly refused to attend Anne’s coronation in June 1533,
¹⁴
although the queen’s step-grandmother, Agnes, Dowager Duchess of Norfolk, was the chief lady among the royal attendants. She pointedly stayed away from the christening of Princess Elizabeth at Greenwich in September that year. Elizabeth also (unsuccessfully) opposed the new queen’s ambitions to marry off her own daughter to Henry Fitzroy, Duke of Richmond, and was later to protest volubly about the king’s failure to pay up the due marriage jointure to Mary.

Sometime after August 1533, the king sent Elizabeth’s brother-in-law, Lord Bergavenny, to ‘make an arrangement between her and the duke, her husband’. Norfolk, who had just arrived back from a mission in France, was warily reluctant to meet his wife before Bergavenny could instil some sweet reason in her bitter heart. He failed, probably after pledging, more in hope than expectation, that the duke ‘should henceforth be a good husband’. Both Elizabeth and her husband knew he had no intention to giving up the warmth and ample, bawdy comforts that Bessie Holland provided in his magnificent ducal bed.
¹⁵

Before the Norfolks formally separated just before Easter 1534, the duke had cast around for somewhere comfortably distant where his wife would now live. Even he could not be seen to throw her out on the street, much as he would have liked to. He pleaded with her brother to house her (and a small number of her immediate attendants), but Henry, Lord Stafford, sensibly refused to become involved. Who could blame him? He was only too familiar with the ‘sensual and wilful’ character of his formidable sister and had tasted a full measure of her fearsome temper. Stafford prayed piously to God to ‘send my Lady a better mind’ but, more realistically, confessed to Norfolk: ‘Her accustomed wild language does not lie in my power to stop, whereby great danger might ensue to me and all mine, though I never deserved it. In this matter, you know, by long experience, I can do no good,’
¹⁶
he plaintively added.

The same day - 13 May 1533 - Stafford also wrote to Cromwell.

The only viable solution, he steadfastly maintained, lay not among her family, nor in ‘the pitiful exclamations of her poor friends, praying her to remember what honour she has come to by her husband’, or even through the king, ‘who has showed her so great favour as might have won any alien’s heart’. No, her own uncompromising attitude towards her husband had to change dramatically.

Despite all this, ‘and the gentleness of her husband, she cannot be induced to break her sensual and wilful mind, and she takes me, and all others who have advised her to conformity, to be flatterers and liars’. Stafford added: ‘I trust you will not reckon that I can do any good in this matter, but I should incur great jeopardy from her wild language.’ Soberly, he concluded: ‘It is my shame and sorrow, being her brother, to rehearse all this.’
¹⁷

In the end, Elizabeth was ignominiously packed off to a bleak manor house, rented by Norfolk from the crown, at Redbourn in Hertfordshire, and permitted a twenty-strong household to display some small semblance of status for someone of such high, noble birth. Here she fruitfully occupied her time venting her ample spleen at her unfaithful husband through a series of virulent and sadly repetitive letters written to the king, his Council and, deviously perhaps, to Norfolk’s arch-enemy in the king’s administration, Thomas Cromwell.

She spared no blushes.

Heaven has no rage like a love turned to hatred, nor hell a fury like a woman scorned. The slights and humiliations allegedly inflicted upon her over many years by Norfolk were always as fresh and as painful as if they had been suffered only minutes before. Her vitriolic words tumbled off page after page as she angrily dictated to her clerk, although, at times, strong emotions clouded her memory for dates and places. It would have been a waking nightmare to find oneself sitting next to Elizabeth at a banquet.

Cromwell, who had usurped Norfolk’s position as the king’s closest councillor, seems happily to have assumed the improbable role of marriage counsellor. In appearing to be a sympathetic friend to the duchess, he doubtless envisaged sweet opportunity both to deflate the duke’s rampant pride and profitably exploit his personal difficulties in the constant infighting for influence at Henry’s court. In late August 1534, Elizabeth wrote to him, seeking his assistance to procure some venison for her table, ‘as none was sent to her since her lord’s displeasure’.
¹⁸
This was the beginning of a prolonged correspondence lasting until 1539 and its vituperative contents would be all too familiar to a divorce lawyer of today.

In the summer of 1535, the duchess journeyed to Dunstable, Bedfordshire, where the king was staying, to plead with a clearly unsympathetic Henry to order Norfolk to grant her ‘a better living’, or more simply, more cash for her to live on.

Another attempt at reconciliation followed in December 1536 when Elizabeth was again urged to return to Norfolk’s bed and board. This unlikely plan was predictably rejected by the spurned wife, who later told the Lord Privy Seal that she could never bring herself to agree to this,

Even if he took her back, it would be more ‘for the shame of the world than for any love he bears me’. After all, she now preferred a solitary existence at Redbourn: ‘I have been well used, since I have been from him, to a quiet life, and if I should come to him, to use me as he did [it] would greet me worse now than it did before, because I have lived quiet these three years without brawling or fighting.’
²⁰

Her ‘quiet life’ also included estrangement from her elder son, Henry, and her daughter, Mary, who took their father’s side in the protracted and bitter dispute. Elizabeth angrily branded them both as ‘ungracious’ and ‘unkind’ and in one letter, perhaps revealingly, referred to her offspring as ‘his children’.
²¹

The following year she returned to the attack over her pitiful income. On 26 June, she wrote to Cromwell asking both him and the king to speak to her husband about releasing funds from her jointure. ‘My trust’, she told the minister, ‘is in you, next [to] God.’ There was also the nagging matter of the settlement for the unconsummated marriage of her daughter with the king’s bastard son (who had died in July 1536) and the 2,000 marks paid out at her own wedding by her father, the Duke of Buckingham,

Then the old, irrepressible burning resentment at her lost marriage to Ralph Neville welled up again: Norfolk ‘chose me for love and I am younger than him by twenty years and he has put me away [three] years and a quarter at this midsummer’:

- a less than subtle reference to the notorious promiscuity among the ladies of Henry’s court. Her husband had confiscated all her jewels and clothes and left her like a prisoner - as no one could visit her without his express permission.

Norfolk kept ‘that drab . . . that harlot’ Bess Holland in his house at Kenninghall, Norfolk, and once had ordered his ladies to attack and to bind her, until her fingers bled from her frantic scratching at the wooden floorboards, in her anger and frustration. The ladies

Elizabeth had heard how kind Cromwell had been to Princess Mary ‘in her great trouble’: could he not now help her by increasing her own lowly income? ‘I live in Hertfordshire and have but £50 a quarter and keep twenty persons daily, besides other great charges. I could live better and cheaper in London than I do here.’
²⁴

Norfolk was notoriously mean. He may well have handed out alms and food to two hundred poor people every day - this was part and parcel of
noblesse oblige
, after all - and owned more than fifty jewelled rosaries, but he habitually refused to pay anything but the smallest pittances both to his estranged duchess and to his own son and heir, Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey.
²⁵
Thus, poverty and penury came high on Elizabeth Howard’s ever-growing list of grievances and became the most pressing of her complaints. In the same letter, she told Cromwell:

She was determined never to write to Norfolk again ‘however poorly I live’ as he had never bothered to answer her letters, even though they had been written by the king’s commandment. (In this, she was a little harsh, as Norfolk was away, suppressing the Pilgrimage of Grace rebellion in the north.) She was, however, not to be diverted from the justice of her arguments:

Elizabeth ended this letter to the Lord Privy Seal with fervent prayers for God to send him ‘long life and health, as I would myself’ and, finally, added a very barbed desire for divine intervention to help him to ‘overcome your enemies’.
²⁶

No doubt she meant her husband.

Despite his best efforts, Cromwell could not get the parsimonious Norfolk to relent, even after Elizabeth came to London in yet another attempt to convince him and Henry to press her case. Norfolk quickly heard of her visit to the court and wrote immediately to the minister:

Over the years, the scandal seemed to wash off egotistical Norfolk’s back, but one of Elizabeth’s claims clearly nettled him - her allegation about his ‘cruel’ treatment of her during the birth of their daughter, Mary. It does seem unlikely that the duke, anxious for a second male heir, would risk the life of the child by attacking his wife at such a time. In his denials, he also did not mince his words. ‘She has untruly slandered me in writing and saying, that when she had been in childbed of my daughter of Richmond two nights and a day’,

Battered and insulted, Norfolk was aghast at the claim. ‘My good lord,’ he told Cromwell, ‘if I prove not by witness, and that with many honest persons, that she had the scar on her head fifteen months before she was delivered of my daughter and that the same was cut by a surgeon of London, for a swelling she had in her head, [after pulling] two teeth, never trust my word after.’