House Of Treason: The Rise And Fall Of A Tudor Dynasty (27 page)

Piteously, the duke appealed to the Council to show ‘this scribbled letter’ to the king and ‘beg him to grant its petitions and remit out of his noble, gentle heart, the displeasure conceived against me’. He signed it ‘By his highness’ poor prisoner, T. NORFOLK’.
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A poor prisoner indeed: he was aged seventy-three and suffered from bouts of indigestion and acute rheumatism, the latter made worse by the damp, dank conditions of the Tower.

What is more, he was a badly frightened old man.

The emotional shock of his arrest must have dulled his senses and blunted his normally astute political instincts. Norfolk knew of Henry’s rapidly declining health - van der Delft had seen the king at Oatlands Palace at Weybridge, Surrey, on 5 December when the king told him he had suffered ‘a sharp attack of the fever which lasted in the burning stage for thirty hours, but now he was quite restored’. The ambassador doubted Henry’s chances of recovery: ‘His colour does not bear out [this] statement and he looks to me greatly fallen away.’
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It was only too obvious that the fifty-five-year-old king had few days remaining to him and that time was running out for Edward and Thomas Seymour to seize the regency of England when their nephew ascended the throne.

The Howards should have recognised their peril. They were clear targets for the king, worried over his son’s succession, and for those who now made their bid for supremacy. Norfolk’s and Surrey’s dynastic pride and inbred arrogance had spawned an absurd complacency. In Henry’s dangerous court of conspiracies, no man - no matter how important, how influential - was entirely safe from being suddenly and unexpectedly cut down.

Outside the walls of the Tower, their fate was being sealed. The government propaganda machine cranked up a gear. Lord Chancellor Wriothesley sent a helpful message to van der Delft on 16 December disclosing that Norfolk and Surrey ‘planned by sinister means to obtain the government of the king, who was too old to allow himself to be governed’ and that

It was deplorable, said Wriothesley, that ‘persons of such high and noble lineage should have undertaken so shameful a business as to plan the seizure of the government of the king by sinister means’. The courts of Europe were stunned by the arrests. Nicholas Wotton, English ambassador to the court of Francis I, told the French king of the ‘most execrable and abominable intent and enterprise’ of Norfolk and Surrey. Francis - while frankly surprised at the news - replied merely that if their guilt was proved they should both be put to death.
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Thomas Thirlby, Bishop of Westminster, abroad on a diplomatic mission to the court of Charles V, was horrified:

He had informed one of the Emperor’s chief secretaries, Josie Bauar, of the development, ‘not forgetting’ to mention ‘the great benefits which these two ungracious men had received’. The Spanish official, during their discussion, talked of ‘the busy head of the father and the pride of the son’. The bishop felt he should write a consoling letter to Henry, but prudently had second thoughts, believing it ‘unwise to renew the memory of this great malice’.
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Inevitably, garbled versions of the alleged plot circulated. The Protestant refugee John Bourchier wrote triumphantly from Strasbourg: ‘The news is agreeable . . . Norfolk, whose authority extended to the north of England - a most bitter enemy of the Word of God - has been imprisoned with his son, with whom he made a secret attempt to restore the Pope and the monks, but their design was discovered. Nothing is wanting now but that [Gardiner, Bishop of] Winchester be caught, without which evangelical truth cannot be restored.’
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In London, the witnesses were stumbling over themselves to tell all. Norfolk’s conceited and free-spending nephew, Sir Edmund Knyvett (the son of the naval commander killed at Brest), had fallen out with the duke and, in protest, had quit Kenninghall. He met Surrey soon after and ‘declared that because of his father and his unkindness, I would go from my country and dwell here and wait as [I am] unable to bear the burden of their malice’. Surrey had hastened to reassure Knyvett that he bore him no ill will: ‘No, cousin Knyvett, I malice not so low; my malice is higher - my malice climbs higher.’ After Cromwell’s death, ‘whom he and his father suspected [to be] my friend against the duke, he said: “Now is that foul churl dead, so ambitious of others’ blood [nobility]”.’ When he was sharply reminded it was a sin to speak ill of souls departed, Surrey retorted: ‘These new erected men would by their wits leave no noble man a life.’ Knyvett was also suspicious of the Italians in his cousin’s household and believed the earl’s conversations with them ‘had therein some ill device’. One of Surrey’s servants had been with the traitor Cardinal Reginald Pole in Italy ‘and was received again on his return’. He also kept an Italian jester called ‘Pasquil’, who ‘was more likely a spy, and so reputed’.
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Surrey’s friend Sir Edward Warner, a ‘king’s servant’ from Norfolk,
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testified that during the summer, ‘Master [Richard] Devereux [son of Lord Ferrers] did tell me . . .’

This was all hearsay, but was doubtless welcomed by the Privy Council. More evidence at second hand came from another friend, Edward Rogers, who recalled a conversation with George Blagge, an esquire of the body to Henry,
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about nine months before. Blagge had recounted a talk with Surrey when he told him that the king should appoint regents ‘to rule the prince’ after Henry’s death. The earl held that his father ‘was the meetest’ for the job, ‘both for good services done and for estate’. Blagge, who opposed everything that Norfolk stood for in religion, retorted that if that happened,

Surrey suggested he was very hasty and, using an aphorism much favoured by his father, added: ‘God send a shrewd cow short horns.’

Afterwards, Surrey - who was unarmed during what had become a noisy quarrel - ‘took sword and dagger and went to Blagge’s house’ and repeated menacingly ‘that of late he had been very hasty with him’. Unfortunately, Rogers could not remember what happened next.
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Sir Gawen Carew was a bemused witness to Surrey’s unseemly row with his sister at Westminster, and gaily reported the heated words that passed between them. He added:

All this contributed little to the case against the Howards, save perhaps a tenuous charge of ‘maliciously wishing, willing or desiring by words’ the death of the king, which had become treason under Cromwell’s Act of 1534.
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It merely confirmed, if it was a surprise to anybody, the depth of Surrey’s contempt and hatred for those not born of the old aristocratic blood.

Then Mary, Duchess of Richmond, and Bessie Holland, Norfolk’s long-standing mistress, were called in and examined.

Norfolk’s daughter had longed to savour the sweet taste of revenge for Surrey’s treatment of her. She confirmed her father’s plan to marry her off to Sir Thomas Seymour and her brother’s vehement opposition to it. Mary said the duke had tetchily warned Surrey that if the wedding did not go ahead, he ‘would lose as much as he had gathered together’.

Mary repeated some ‘passionate words’ spoken by Surrey, ‘and also some circumstantial speeches, little [to] his advantage, yet they seemed to clear her father’.
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Mrs Holland’s testimony painted an unattractive portrait of her ageing lover as a self-righteous, conceited prig. If it was pillow talk, it hardly showed him in a good light. She repeated Norfolk’s belief that ‘none of the council loved him because they were no noblemen born themselves, [and] also because he believed too truly in the Sacrament of the Altar [the Eucharist]’.

Then came the meat of her evidence - and the most damaging to the duke. He had told her that ‘the king was much grown of his body and that he could not go up and down stairs, but was let up and down by a device’.
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She offered a further, telling sidelight about the duke’s religious beliefs: ‘If he were a young man, and the realm in quiet, he would ask leave to see [the]
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, which he said was the picture of Christ given to women by Himself as he went to death.’
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In a burst of honesty, she acknowledged that the earl ‘loved her not, nor the Duchess of Richmond him and that she addicted herself much to the said duchess’.
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Like his father, the image of Surrey that was emerging was of a bumptious, self-opinionated individual. But the earl did not rely on mere words to buttress his own rarefied status: he had changed his coat of arms to reflect his royal origins, based on an old shield carved in stone he had discovered in a house in Norfolk. One report suggests that his sister had secretly already informed the king of her brother’s new - and potentially treasonous - heraldic pretensions.
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She now told the investigators that on his arms:

Surrey had reassumed the arms of their attainted and executed grandfather, the Duke of Buckingham. These were the royal arms and lilies inherited from Thomas of Woodstock, a younger son of King Edward III. By this seemingly innocuous act, he had implicitly repudiated Buckingham’s attainder and reinstated a claim to the throne.
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He also included the arms of St Edward the Confessor, which had been granted to Thomas Mowbray, first [Mowbray] Duke of Norfolk, by Richard II, of whom the Howards were heirs and successors. Furthermore, Surrey’s secretary Hugh Ellis remembered the earl saying that the ancient arms of England had been given to his ancestors ‘by King Edward - that is St Edward’.
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Bessie Holland said the duke did not like his son’s new arms, ‘and that he had gathered them himself knew not from whence . . . He had placed the Norfolk arms wrong and had found fault with him. And therefore, that she should take no pattern of his son’s arms to work with them with her needle in his house . . .’

This seemingly obscure heraldic issue was to be Surrey’s final undoing. Three years earlier, the Council had heard of his claims to be a prince and the maids’ gossip that if ‘ought came to the king otherwise than well, he is like to be king’. Now he seemed to be publicly flaunting his aspirations to the crown of England.

Lord Chancellor Wriothesley’s grandfather, father and uncle were all heralds. He immediately realised that Surrey’s heraldic pretensions would provide the strongest case against him. He now drew up some hard questions to be put to the earl: