Henry VIII's Last Victim (16 page)

Elizabeth was banished to Redbourne, a manor in Hertfordshire that Norfolk rented from the Crown. Although she was permitted twenty servants and an allowance of three hundred marks (£200) a year, she found the conditions unbearable: ‘I am a gentlewoman born, and hath been brought up daintily and not to live so barely as I do.’
⁹
Elizabeth effectively lived under house arrest. Time and again she referred to her ‘imprisonment’. She was not allowed to ‘come abroad and see my friends’, nor was anyone permitted to visit her ‘but such as he appointeth’.
¹⁰
Twice she attempted reconciliation. Twice she was rebuffed. In the summer of 1535 she rode to Dunstable where the King was holding Court. Henry VIII, who had little sympathy for her, commanded her to write a third ‘gentle’ letter to Norfolk and when this was reciprocated with ‘cruel messages and threatenings’, Elizabeth’s resolve hardened: ‘From this day forward, I will never sue to the King, nor to none other, to desire my Lord, my husband, to take me again; for I have made much suit to him and nothing regarded and I made him no fault, but in declaring of his shameful handling of me.’
¹¹

‘Shameful’ or not, Norfolk had been quite within his rights to handle Elizabeth as he did. Sixteenth-century wives were legally subordinate to, and financially dependent upon, their husbands. ‘As it is a part of your penance, ye women, to travail in bearing your children,’ Hugh Latimer bellowed from the pulpit, ‘so it is a part of your penance to be subjects unto your husband; ye are underlings, underlings, and must be obedient.’
¹²
Norfolk enjoyed almost complete physical power over Elizabeth. He could control her movements and her contacts and was allowed to limit her resources and restrict her lifestyle as much as he saw fit. The law even permitted him to punish her physically and it seems he was only too happy to exercise his rights.

Strewn amidst Elizabeth’s impassioned appeals for support in the many letters with which she bombarded Thomas Cromwell are accusations of abuse. Four times she referred to an incident when Norfolk ‘set his women to bind me till blood come out at my fingers’ ends, and pinnacled me, and sat on my breast till I spat blood’. Ever since, she claimed, ‘I am sick at the fall of the leaf and at the spring of the year’. Repeating these allegations in another letter, Elizabeth concluded ‘that if I should come home again I should be poisoned for the love that he beareth to that harlot Bess Holland’.
¹³

Norfolk retaliated by denouncing Elizabeth as a vengeful shrew of questionable sanity, who dealt in ‘false and abominable lies’.
¹⁴
When she accused him of having assaulted her as early as 1519 during the birth of Surrey’s sister Mary, now Duchess of Richmond, he fired off an angry rebuttal to Cromwell:

She hath untruly slandered me in writing and saying that when she had been in childbed of my daughter of Richmond two nights and a day, I should draw her out of her bed by the hair of her head about the house and with my dagger give her a wound in the head. My good Lord, if I prove not by witness, and that with many honest persons, that she had the scar in her head fifteen months before she was delivered of my said daughter and that the same was cut by a surgeon of London for a swelling she had in her head, of drawing of two teeth, never trust my word after; reporting me to your good Lordship whether I shall play the fool or no, to put me in her danger, that so falsely will slander me, and so wilfully stick thereby. Surely I think there is no man on live [living] that would handle a woman in childbed of that sort, nor for my part would not so have done for all that I am worth.
¹⁵

Even if here, as seems likely, Elizabeth had been caught out in a lie, it is instructive that Norfolk’s indignation stemmed not from the alleged abuse itself, but from its circumstances. He would not strike his wife when pregnant; he would not jeopardise the life of his unborn child.

There can be no doubt that Norfolk was prone to flashes of temper. His treasurer in Ireland, John Stile, complained that his master ‘was sometimes more hasty than needeth’, and during Wolsey’s fall from grace, Norfolk had threatened to ‘tear’ the Cardinal ‘with my teeth’. The Tudor historian, Polydore Vergil, noted that the Duke could be quick with his fists, and perhaps this is borne out by Norfolk’s own
threat at the end of his letter of spluttering denial: if Elizabeth was ever to come into his company again, he warned, she ‘might give me occasion to handle her otherwise than I have done yet’.
¹⁶
Elizabeth took the threat seriously: ‘I know well, if I should come home again, my life should be but short.’
¹⁷

Ultimately, though, one can only speculate on the veracity of Elizabeth’s accusations. It was her word against his, and the law was on his side. Had her formidable father not been executed in 1521, Elizabeth may not have been so isolated.
¹⁸
But she did still have one power. Norfolk needed her consent for a ‘divorce’.
^fn2
This Elizabeth would not grant, not even when Norfolk attempted to bribe her with ‘all my jewels and all my apparel and a great part of his plate and of his stuff of household’. Norfolk resorted to threats, but Elizabeth vowed never to relent ‘neither for less living nor for imprisonment, for I have been used to both’.
¹⁹

Elizabeth’s stand was championed by another discarded wife, the self-proclaimed prophetess, Mistress Amadas. After her husband, the King’s goldsmith Robert Amadas, abandoned her, she directed her energies towards foretelling the destruction of Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn. Among her many pronouncements was the claim ‘that there was never a good married woman in England except Prince Arthur’s dowager [Catherine of Aragon], the Duchess of Norfolk and herself’.
²⁰
However, the rest of society was horrified by Elizabeth’s behaviour and readily acquiesced in her ostracism. Her children also sided with their father. For Surrey, brought up on a diet of Howard honour and duty, his mother’s subordination of her family’s interests to those of her own may have appeared selfish. It was bad enough that his parents’ marriage had been exposed as a sham, but for his mother to have confided in the one man whom his father detested more than any other was surely the ultimate betrayal.

‘Notwithstanding all their efforts to dissemble’, the mutual antipathy
between the lowborn Cromwell and the Duke of Norfolk was an open secret at Court.
²¹
Each sought the other’s downfall and Cromwell, it seems, had used his position as Elizabeth’s confidant to probe her for incriminating information. ‘My Lord,’ Cromwell later admitted to Norfolk, ‘ye are a happy man that your wife knoweth no hurt by you, for if she did, she would undo you.’
²²
Had Norfolk been ‘undone’, his children would have been also.

Nevertheless, Surrey may have had some sympathy for his mother. He certainly seemed to resent his father’s mistress. Bess herself claimed that ‘the Earl of Surrey loved her not’ and once, when he was short of cash and petitioned his father’s treasurer for funds, the reply came back that Norfolk was ‘so straight girt that there will be gotten nothing of him . . . except it be by Mrs Holland, whom I think ye will not trouble for the matter’.
²³
Whatever Surrey’s sentiments, there was little that he could have done. His father held the purse strings tightly and, according to a letter that Surrey sent around this time to the Prior of Bury St Edmunds, he could ill afford to lose his chief source of income:

My Lord, notwithstanding that aforetime I have borrowed off you to the sum of 30
li
. pound sterling, having not yet repaid it, yet by very need & extreme necessity I am again constrained, my known good Lord, at this present affectuously to desire you to show yourself so much my cordial friend as to lend some over & above 20
li
. pounds in such haste as I may have it here tomorrow by 8 of the clock for such is my present need . . . ye might & may it well believe my Lord my father will not so see your hearty kindness uncontented . . . Displease you not so though my Lord [Norfolk] being out of the country in this my necessity I rather attempt to assay you his ancient friend than other farther off.
²⁴

So Surrey, to his mother’s evident distress, tolerated Norfolk’s
maîtresse en titre
. Although his younger brother Thomas is not mentioned in the correspondence, Surrey’s sister Mary also supported her father and, in fact, formed a firm friendship with Bess. ‘I may say,’ Elizabeth wailed, ‘I was born in an unhappy hour to be matched with such an ungracious husband and so ungracious a son and a daughter.’ Showing scant regard for her children’s predicament, Elizabeth branded them ‘unnatural’ and, in one heartbreaking sentence that reveals the full extent of her eventual alienation from Surrey and Mary, she referred
to them as
his
children. She did later admit that ‘I have always love unto them’, but there is no evidence to suggest that Surrey or Mary ever saw or communicated with their mother again.
²⁵

Some time in 1535, as Bess settled into the palatial lodgings, replete with Turkish carpets, tapestries and silk curtains, that Norfolk had established for her at Kenninghall, the Countess of Surrey moved in. Since their marriage three years earlier, Surrey had seen very little of Frances and one can only guess at the awkward nature of their first few months together. The unhappy precedent set by Surrey’s parents can have done little to assuage their anxiety. But they were both eighteen, healthy and active, and conjugal relations were soon established. It was not long, though, before their domesticity was interrupted by the affairs of the realm.

At the end of January 1536 Frances was summoned to Peterborough Abbey to serve as one of the chief mourners at the funeral of Catherine of Aragon.
²⁶
Even as the cancer that eventually claimed her ravished Catherine’s body, she had continued to fight for her cause. Although Henry VIII had commanded that she only be known as the Dowager Princess of Wales, many persisted in regarding her as their rightful Queen and Anne, as one Suffolk spinster memorably put it, as a ‘goggle-eyed whore’.
²⁷
On 23 August 1533 two London women, one ‘big with child’, had been stripped to the waist and nailed by their ears to the Standard at Cheapside where they had been soundly thrashed. Their crime: ‘they said Queen Catherine was the true Queen of England, & not Queen Anne.’
²⁸

Catherine’s death may have eased the pressure on the King from the Papacy and the Empire, but it produced a further wave of revulsion towards Anne. People recalled her spite in seizing Catherine’s jewels for the French interviews and in appropriating and defacing Catherine’s barge for her coronation. They remembered her violent language – Anne had once shrieked ‘that she wished all Spaniards were at the bottom of the sea’
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– and they were appalled when they heard that Henry and Anne had celebrated Catherine’s death by wearing yellow and dancing the night away. It was Anne, many now believed, who had, directly or indirectly, caused Catherine’s death. And it was Anne who was blamed for the latest wave of draconian legislation that made even words spoken against her union with Henry treason and ordered Englishmen to swear an oath renouncing the Pope and endorsing their marriage.
³⁰

Three monks of the London Charterhouse, one of whom had once served as a Howard chaplain, were among the first to be sacrificed on the altar of Anne’s ambition. For refusing to acknowledge the King’s supremacy over the English Church, they were dragged on hurdles from the Tower to Tyburn. There they were hanged from the gallows and cut down before they lost consciousness. They were stripped of their habits, and their bowels and private parts were ripped from their bodies and burnt before their eyes. Then their heads were cut off and their bodies were hacked into quarters. The severed limbs were parboiled in a cauldron and stuck on spikes throughout London. The Dukes of Norfolk and Richmond both witnessed the butchery, reportedly displaying themselves ‘openly and quite close to the victims’.
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Catherine’s elderly stalwart, John Fisher, Bishop of Rochester, was next. Once his head was off, Henry VIII ordered that it be placed in a small iron cage and displayed on London Bridge, a gruesome showcase to the might of the King.
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‘What must we feel,’ the new Pope, Paul III, wrote to Francis I on hearing the news, ‘when the Church of Christ is thus lacerated!’
³³
Then it was the turn of Thomas More, Saint Thomas More, the man with whom Henry had once chosen to stroll, arm in arm, through his garden discussing astronomy and geometry and mathematics. ‘The wrath of the King is death’, Norfolk had warned. ‘Is that all, my Lord?’ More had replied. ‘Then in good faith is there no more difference between your grace and me, but that I shall die today and you tomorrow.’
³⁴

Anne was also blamed for infecting the Court with heresy and giving sustenance to a nest of Lutherans. As long as there had been an official religion in England, there had been dissent. But the first few decades of the sixteenth century witnessed a change. Throughout Western Europe, an intense ‘spirit of enquiry’ that engendered and was, in turn, stimulated by the Renaissance and the discovery of new worlds and peoples spread, inevitability, to religion. The humanists had let out a clarion call for a return
ad fontes
and fertile minds soon thought they had found, in the pristine Christian texts, the key to revelation. Adherents to the Reformation, as it became known, were convinced that true Christianity could only be taught by the Word of God as revealed in its purest form by the Scriptures, not by the muddying edicts of Rome. They emphasised the overriding importance of a living, unifying relationship with God. Papal indulgences, pilgrimages, prayers for the dead, fasting, the veneration of saints and the whole panoply of Roman
Catholic custom could not, the reformers preached, atone for sin. Christ’s work, not man’s, had earned salvation and only by faith in his merits and in God’s charity could a man receive grace.
Sola Fide
,
Sola Scriptura
: this was the bedrock of the reformers’ message.