Henry VIII's Last Victim (13 page)

The festivities came to an end on 29 October, when the two kings took their leave of each other. The Venetian ambassador to France, furious at being omitted from the guest list, dismissed the interview as ‘a superfluous expenditure – entertainments and pageants and nothing else’.
¹²
But behind the showmanship lay serious issues. A treaty of alliance was signed against the ‘Infidel’ Turk and, more importantly, Francis pledged his support for Henry’s Great Matter. Two French cardinals set off at once for Rome with instructions to promote Henry’s campaign and request a meeting between Francis and the Pope. They were also given the authority to propose a marriage between Francis’
second son, Henri, and Clement VII’s niece, Catherine de’ Medici. If all went to plan, so Francis promised, then he would invite English representatives, perhaps even Henry VIII himself, to the meeting, where they could present a united front to the Pope.

It was a firm espousal of Henry’s cause. Seven years earlier, when Charles V had defeated Francis I at the Battle of Pavia, the French King had been taken hostage and only released in exchange for his two elder sons. On St Peter’s Day, 1530 the French princes were finally ransomed. Their liberation had owed much to the mediation and money of Henry VIII. Now, as a sign of his gratitude for Francis’ support of the divorce, Henry vowed to write off the entire debt that the French owed him. In order to guarantee this pledge in particular, and for the greater security of the treaty as a whole, it was agreed that the Duke of Richmond and the Earl of Surrey would stay behind in France as guests of Francis I and his Court.
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Although there had been talks both before and during the summit about a possible French exchange involving Surrey and Richmond on the one hand and either of Francis’ younger sons on the other,
¹⁴
it is unlikely that the English boys were made aware of their fate until the very end of the Calais interview. Only then did it become clear that the princes would remain at the French Court and that Surrey and Richmond would join them there for an indefinite period. On the eve of their departure, Richmond was busy making last-minute provision for the servants he had left behind in England. Evidently he had not anticipated a lengthy stay.
¹⁵

Just before Surrey and Richmond departed, the weather, so obliging for the summit, took a turn for the worse. A north-westerly gale prevented Henry VIII and his entourage from sailing to England for a fortnight and on 8 November 1532 there ‘rose such a wind, tempest and thunder that no man could conveniently stir in the streets of Calais’.
¹⁶
It was during this time that Surrey contracted a fever that was to plague him for the next month. Although it was serious enough to warrant mention in a dispatch to England, it was not bad enough to preclude travel. A few days later Surrey, Richmond and sixty attendants rode out of Calais towards the French Court. In their retinue was Richmond’s almoner, Richard Tate, who wrote back to England with encouraging news of their progress: ‘My Lord of Richmond and my Lord of Surrey in all their journey toward the French Court hath
been very well welcomed and in all places have had presents of wines with other gentle offers.’
¹⁷

By the end of November they had caught up with the Court at Chantilly on the outskirts of Paris. There, at the château of Anne de Montmorency,
grand maître
of France, Surrey and Richmond received a hearty welcome. As one would expect, it was Francis’ treatment of his English rival’s son that received the most interest. ‘The King,’ Tate reported, ‘at the first meeting of my Lord, embracing him, made him great cheer, saying that he thought himself now to have four sons and esteemed him no less and likewise the Dauphin and his two brethren with all other noblemen after embraced my Lord.’
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A few days later the Court travelled through a bitter frost to Paris. Upon arrival, both Richmond and Surrey were housed ‘at very great expense and very honourably’ within the Dauphin’s lodgings at the Louvre.
¹⁹
A letter from Montmorency of 8 December made it clear that Surrey was to be ‘nurtured’ with the French princes just as much as Richmond, and by 11 December Tate could report that all was well. Surrey’s fever had subsided and, although Tate was not entirely happy with the ‘setting forward of my Lord’s train’, he found the French both ‘tractable’ and ‘willing’.
²⁰

The whole of the winter was spent in Paris, where Surrey and Richmond dined and supped daily with the French princes. Less than three years had passed since the release of the two elder brothers, François and Henri, from their captivity in Spain and they still bore the emotional scars of their four-and-a-half-year ordeal. The Dauphin François, aged fourteen, only ever wore sombre clothes and was reportedly ‘cold, temperate and staid’.
²¹
Henri, Duke of Orléans was thirteen and prone to severe melancholy, but he was more spirited than his elder brother. He had refused to submit to his imprisonment, attempting escape more than once, and when, on his release, one of his captors had sought his forgiveness, Henri had turned his back on him and farted.
²²

Francis I was insensitive to his sons’ subsequent mood swings, declaring that he did not care for ‘dreamy, sullen, sleepy children’.
²³
Instead he showered attention on his youngest son Charles, Duke of Angoulême, who was ten and already a hotheaded extrovert. He would eventually meet his death at the age of twenty-three after entering a house infected with the plague. Slashing the pillows and beds, Charles shouted through the billowing feathers, ‘never yet hath a son of France
died of the plague’. Three days later he succumbed.
²⁴
But all three boys were active sportsmen who loved nothing more than a game of tennis or a spot of hunting; indeed François himself would allegedly die from over-exertion on the tennis court and Henri from a jousting accident. Surrey and Richmond certainly seem to have endeared themselves to their new chamber companions; even eight years after their sojourn, the English ambassador to France wrote that the princes remembered their English friends with great fondness.
²⁵

French culture was a curious amalgam of coarseness and sophistication. One Neapolitan traveller appreciated the generous hospitality, the pretty ladies who danced ‘with supreme grace’ and the banquets, where delicate food and exquisite wines were served. But he was appalled by the French eschewal of chamber pots: ‘For want of any alternative one has to urinate on the fire. They do this everywhere, by night and day; and indeed the greater the nobleman or lord, the more readily and openly will he do it.’
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French customs took some getting used to: men kept their hats on at the table, even in the presence of the King, and it was considered the height of manners to chew with one’s mouth open.
²⁷

Then there were the bizarre pagan ceremonies peculiar to Paris. One such event, which Surrey would have witnessed on 26 December, was held in celebration of the winter solstice. Within the square of the Place de Grève, the town council erected an enormous bonfire comprising a sixty-foot tree stacked with wood and straw. On the top was placed a barrel, a wheel, flowers and garlands and affixed to the tree was a basket containing two dozen cats and a fox to be burned alive ‘for the King’s pleasure’. Trumpets blared as Francis stepped up and sparked the conflagration with a wax torch wrapped in red velvet. An impressive demonstration of fireworks ensued and then Francis and his Court proceeded to the Hôtel de Ville, where they were treated to a confection of dried fruits, scented sweets, tarts and other sugared delicacies.
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At Court, Francis’ lascivious inclinations were given free rein. His marriage to Charles V’s sister, Eleanor, was purely political. She bore the unfortunate Habsburg trait of a large, jutting chin and frankly repulsed her husband. In a moment of indiscretion during the summer of 1533, Francis’ sister Marguerite divulged to the Duke of Norfolk that the King and Queen had not lain together for seven months. ‘Why?’ Norfolk had enquired innocently. Because, Marguerite replied, Eleanor
would not allow Francis to sleep: ‘she is very hot in bed and desireth to be too much embraced.’
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Francis made up for his lack of action in the marital bed elsewhere. He was, according to one traveller, ‘a great womaniser and readily breaks into others’ gardens and drinks at many sources’.
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An annual allowance, paid out of the royal coffers, ensured the upkeep of the ‘filles de joie suivant la court’. Although many of the scabrous stories concerning Francis’ libido cannot be verified, it is almost certainly true that he contracted syphilis, ‘the French disease’, in 1524 and, according to one of his biographers, ‘the King’s philandering appears to have got worse with age.’
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By the time of Surrey and Richmond’s internship, the King’s eye had focused on Anne d’Heilly, whom he later made Duchess d’Étampes. Her political influence over the King was not lost on Surrey, who later encouraged his sister to strive for a similar role at the English Court.

Francis indulged in a boisterous lifestyle and the French annals abound with anecdotes of high jinks and low deeds. He was, ostensibly at least, more accessible and easy going than his English counterpart. He staged mock battles that regularly got out of hand, his own face bearing a scar from one such event, and in 1546 one of his favourites would die when a linen chest was dropped on his head during a snowball fight.
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Abusing the underclasses seems to have been a favourite pastime of the French. In a satire on the English habit of copying all things French, Sir Thomas More lampooned one English courtier who

pays [his] servant nothing like a Frenchman; he clothes him in worn-out rags in the French manner; he feeds him little and that little poor, as the French do; he works him hard like the French; he strikes him often like a Frenchman; at social gatherings and on the street and in the market place and in public, he quarrels with him and abuses him always in the French fashion.
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In 1519 a group of Henry VIII’s favourite young courtiers, his ‘minions’, had run riot through the streets of Paris, encouraged, according to Edward Hall, by Francis I himself: ‘They, with the French King, rode daily disguised through Paris, throwing eggs, stones and other foolish trifles at the people.’
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Surrey and Richmond did not escape these influences. Ten years after
his return from France, Surrey rampaged through the streets of London just as the minions had done. This act of vandalism earned him the dubious honour of being branded ‘a Frenchman at heart’.
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When the life of Richmond’s page, Nicholas Throckmorton, was put to verse, his time in service was portrayed thus:

By parents’ hest, I served as a page

To Richmond’s Duke and waited, still at hand,

For fear of blows, which happened in his rage.

In France with him I lived most carelessly,

And learned the tongue, though nothing readily.
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But if the more unsavoury aspects of the French Court rubbed off on its English guests, so too did some of its polish. Francis and many of his Italian courtiers featured in Baldassare Castiglione’s
Il Libro del Cortegiano
[
The Book of the Courtier
], which ever since its publication in 1528 had become the handbook for all Renaissance Courts.
³⁷
Francis’ nonchalant manner and effortless style seemed the very embodiment of
sprezzatura
, the essential quality espoused by Castiglione. In England many believed that it was Anne Boleyn’s apprenticeship at the French Court that had enabled her to captivate Henry VIII: ‘For behaviour, manners, attire and tongue, she excelled them all for she had been brought up in France.’
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Surrey also benefited from the superior intellectual climate in France. At the beginning of the sixteenth century the number of London’s printing presses could be counted on the fingers of one hand. Paris, on the other hand, could boast no less than eighty-five presses all clanking out exciting new texts.
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Francis revelled in his role as
père des lettres
and by the end of his reign he had built up one of the finest libraries in Europe. He was a generous patron to many eminent humanists, including Guillaume Budé, who encouraged him to found four royal lectureships, two in Greek and two in Hebrew. These formed the origins of the Collège de France.

France’s frequent wars in the Italian peninsula had brought her into close contact with Renaissance culture and when the Republic of Florence fell in 1530, refugees like the poet Luigi Alamanni found a second home at the French Court. There Surrey and Richmond found themselves absorbed into an extraordinarily sophisticated milieu of writers and poets, men like the reformed Christian Clément Marot and
the Dauphin’s almoner Mellin de Saint-Gelais, who introduced the sonnet to France. Francis I even composed his own poetry, and during meals the
lecteur de roi
would stimulate King and Court with readings from innovative works.