Henry VIII's Last Victim (20 page)

The preamble to the act stated that Thomas, ‘being led and seduced by the Devil’, had ‘contemptuously and traitorously contracted himself by crafty fair and flattering words to and with the Lady Margaret Douglas’, because, ‘
it is vehemently suspected and presumed
’, he ‘maliciously and traitorously’ intended ‘to put division in this realm and to interrupt, impedite and let the said succession of the Crown’.
⁷
Writing from the sanctuary of Venice, Reginald Pole could observe the rank injustice of Thomas’ conviction, ‘condemned only on an
ex post facto
law’.
⁸
The death sentence against Thomas was not carried out, possibly because the marriage had never been consummated, but he was kept in the Tower, where he continued to dream of Margaret and hope for freedom:

My love truly shall not decay

For threatning nor for punishment;

For let them think and let them say

Toward you alone I am full bent:

Therefore I will be diligent

Our faithful love for to renew,

And still to keep me trusty and true.

Thus fare ye well my worldly treasure,

Desiring God that of his grace

To send us time his will and pleasure

And shortly to get us out of this place:

Then shall I be in as good case

As a hawk that gets out of his mew,

And straight doth seek his trust so true.
⁹

It was not to be. At the end of October 1537 Thomas caught a fever and died. He was buried ‘without pomp’ at Thetford Priory.
¹⁰

To Surrey, increasingly disillusioned by the goings on at the Tudor Court, his half-uncle had suffered a terrible injustice. In a later poem that trumpeted the spotless honour of the Howards, Surrey cited Lord Thomas as a manifestation of his family’s values:

It is not long ago

since that for love one of the race did end his life in woe.

In towre both strong and high, for his assured truth,

where as in tears he spent his breath, alas, the more the ruth.
^fn2

This gentle beast likewise, who nothing could remove,

but willingly to seek his death for loss of his true love.
¹¹

On 18 July 1536, the same day that Lord Thomas Howard was attainted for treason, John Husee wrote to his master Lord Lisle: ‘My Lord of Richmond [is] very sick. Jesu be his comfort.’ Five days later, at St James’s Palace, Surrey’s best friend ‘departed out of this transitory life’.
¹²

Richmond’s death was the cruellest blow in a year that had dealt many. He was only seventeen and relatively robust considering the age in which he lived. Indeed it had been Surrey, not Richmond, who had suffered from poor health when they had been together in France. Only a month before his death, Richmond had been well enough to attend the first session of the new Parliament, but thereafter he had fallen into ‘a state of rapid consumption’.
¹³
He should have gone down in his armour to the hero’s death that he and Surrey had enacted so many times in the tiltyard at Windsor. Instead he had succumbed, swollen and scabbed in his bedclothes, to an unworthy assailant. As if to drive Surrey’s grief home, another link from his past was severed the following month when the Dauphin François died, probably of pleurisy, after gulping down a glass of freezing water following a vigorous game of tennis in the French sunshine.

Richmond was buried at the end of July by his adoptive family at Thetford Priory. Surrey rode along on his friend’s jennet, Richmond’s favourite horse, which had been delivered to him, along with its saddle and a harness of black velvet, from Richmond’s stable.
¹⁴
The King, who, it seems, had wanted to keep Richmond’s death quiet for as long as possible, had ordered that his son’s body be wrapped in lead, covered with straw and ‘conveyed secretly in a close cart unto Thetford’, where he was to be buried without any pomp. After the event, though, he regretted his decision and, blind to his first order, blamed Norfolk for not according Richmond due honour – this despite the fact that Norfolk had actually buried Richmond with more ceremony than Henry VIII’s instructions had originally allowed.

When, on the night of 5 August 1536, rumours reached Norfolk that he was in disgrace and soon to be sent to the Tower of London, he penned an angry letter to Cromwell. ‘When I shall deserve to be there, Tottenham shall turn French!’ If only, he continued, he could challenge the man who had first slandered him to a duel, then all would see ‘who should prove himself the more honest man’. Despite his bluster and the lateness of the hour, Norfolk set at once to the composition of his last will and testament. Already in poor health, ‘full, full, full of choler and agony’, the sixty-three-year-old Duke was perhaps mindful that a spell in the Tower could finish him. He had two copies drawn up, one for the King and the other for Cromwell. ‘If I die, and when I shall die,’ he wrote, ‘I doubt not ye both will consider that to the one I have been a true poor servant and to the other a true faithful friend.’
¹⁵
Norfolk was under no illusion that it was Cromwell who had initiated the whispering campaign against him, but as the Duchess of Norfolk observed, ‘he can speak fair as well to his enemy as to his friend’.
¹⁶

The rumours about Norfolk’s arrest proved unfounded, but the Howards remained deep in the King’s disfavour. On 10 September 1536 Norfolk complained to Cromwell that, despite his many petitions, he had not received any spoils from the dissolution of the monasteries: ‘the time of sowing is at hand, and every other nobleman hath already his portion.’ Six days later he persisted in his suit: ‘I know no nobleman but hath their desires, and if I shall now dance alone my back friends shall rejoice.’
¹⁷
He needed an opportunity to prove his loyalty to the King and on 2 October it arrived, when a revolt broke out in Lincolnshire and soon spread into Yorkshire and throughout the North of England. The rebels – largely peasants, artisans, tenants and churchmen – had risen spontaneously and then enjoined, sometimes forcibly, sympathetic lawyers and lords to lead them. As was to be expected from such an eclectic group, their grievances were disparate. Some complained about high taxes and swingeing rents; others called for the repeal of the Statute of Uses
^fn3
and the Act of Treason; some wanted Princess Mary restored to the succession; still others bayed for the blood of Cromwell and his fellow upstarts. The Lincolnshire rebels had already lynched two of Cromwell’s servants. The first they had hanged; the second they had wrapped in the hide of a newly killed calf
and thrown to a pack of dogs trained in bull baiting. Once the unfortunate man had been savaged to death, the rebels vowed to ‘do as much for his master’.
¹⁸

An aversion to the new religion and fear of further reform was the glue that held the rebels together. The past few months had seen monasteries that had adorned the landscape for centuries crumble as royal commissioners rampaged down the altars, defiling sacred objects, seizing gold plate and stripping the roofs of their lead. The nobility and gentry had few qualms about the dissolution as their coffers were fed in the ensuing ‘sowing time’, but to Robert Aske, the mouthpiece of the Yorkshire rebellion, the suppressions led ‘greatly to the decay of the commonweal of the country’.
¹⁹
Monks and nuns were not isolated anomalies, but people’s brothers and sisters who interacted with their community. They provided healthcare, education, hospitality and charity. They generated employment and financed local initiatives. They lent money, as Surrey had found to his relief when he had petitioned the Prior of Bury St Edmunds for a loan, and some, like Thetford Priory, provided the final resting-place for generations of families.

People now began to fear that the whole fabric of traditional religion would be rent. On 11 July 1536 the government had issued a doctrinal statement in an attempt to clarify matters, but the ‘Ten Articles of Faith to Establish Christian Quietness’ did nothing of the sort. The Articles tended towards evangelicalism. Prayers for the dead and the veneration of saints were demoted as permissible practices, but unnecessary for salvation, and only three sacraments (baptism, the Eucharist, penance) were sanctioned. But there were too many ambivalent clauses and compromise articles for a coherent message to be discerned. No further clarification was offered. The next day sermons were forbidden for two months and thereafter preachers were discouraged from interpreting the Articles ‘after their fantastical appetites’. Instead the parish clergy were directed by a set of royal injunctions to preach four times a year against the usurped authority of the Bishop of Rome and to recite the Lord’s Prayer, the Creed and the Ten Commandments in English, when previously they had only been rehearsed in Latin.
²⁰

Rumours soon abounded – that a tax would be levied on christenings, weddings and burials, that the remaining sacraments would be abolished, that churches would be amalgamated and their goods confiscated – and such was the state of confusion that many believed them. As each region rose in revolt, others were encouraged to do the same
until, by mid-October, Henry VIII faced the largest English rebellion since the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381.

Immediately denouncing the rebels as arrant traitors, Henry threatened to effect their ‘total destruction and utter ruin by force and violence of the sword’.
²¹
He did not have a standing army and so had to rely almost entirely on the nobility for men and munitions. The Howards, with their extensive network of East Anglian clients, were essential, but the King still had his doubts about the Duke of Norfolk. Only after summoning him to Court and examining him very closely on his religion and his allegiance to the Tudor dynasty did Henry allow the Duke to go home and raise troops.
²²
According to the Bishop of Carlisle, who dined with Norfolk before he set off for East Anglia on 7 October, the Duke was happier than he had ever seen him. Perhaps, Chapuys speculated, Norfolk’s spirits had been raised by his recent reconciliation with the King. But perhaps too by ‘the pleasure he feels at the present commotion’, which might succeed in destroying Cromwell and arresting the cause of reform.
²³
Chapuys was not the only one to doubt Norfolk’s loyalty. Similar suggestions that he, and Surrey too, were rebel sympathisers would become a constant refrain over the next few months.

Back at home, Surrey helped his father with the musters. Despite a scarcity of uniforms and bows and arrows, father and son managed to raise, so Surrey bragged, ‘a company of so able men and so goodly personage as I do think the like in such number upon so sudden warning assembled hath not been seen, as those here do judge which have seen many musters.’
²⁴
The King’s original plan was to send Surrey up in command of these troops, with Norfolk remaining in East Anglia ‘to stay the country’. Norfolk vigorously protested; he could not, in all honour, ‘sit still like a man of law’.
²⁵
The Council acquiesced; Norfolk could go north, but would have to leave Surrey behind. On 11 October Norfolk begged that Surrey be allowed to join him, and by the night of the 25th, both father and son had crossed the Trent and lay at Welbeck, fourteen miles from Doncaster. At their disposal were around five thousand men. The Earl of Shrewsbury, encamped at Doncaster, commanded another seven thousand. The rebels had perhaps as many as forty thousand in position around Doncaster and Pontefract. At midnight, ‘in bed and not asleep’, Norfolk tacked up his horse and prepared to journey towards Doncaster with a party of just seven men that did not include Surrey.

Before he departed, he wrote a letter to the King. ‘Sir, I trust the sending for me is meant to good purpose, and if it chance to me to miscarry, most noble and gracious master, be good to my sons and to my poor daughter.’ Until he was joined by the rest of the royal forces, he warned that he might have to play for time by negotiating with the rebels: ‘Sir, I most humbly beseech you to take in good part whatsoever promise I shall make unto the rebels (if any such I shall by the advice of others make), for surely I shall observe no part thereof . . . thinking and reputing that none oath nor promise made for policy to serve you, mine only master and sovereign, can disdain me, who shall rather be torn in a million of pieces than to show one point of cowardice or untruth to Your Majesty.’ Henry VIII replied assuring Norfolk that he would trust to his strategy and promising to look after his children – ‘your lively images’ – in the event of the Duke’s death.
²⁶

The next day Surrey caught up with his father at Doncaster, where they stayed in the house of a local friar. All around them the plague raged and ten to twelve houses were infected ‘within two butts’ lengths’ of their host’s dwelling.
²⁷
On 27 October Norfolk and Surrey met the rebels’ representatives on Doncaster Bridge.
²⁸
Their cause, the rebels opined, was a pilgrimage, a Pilgrimage of Grace. They were loyal subjects of the King and wished only for him to hear and resolve their grievances. If he refused, then they would have no choice but to use force. Norfolk duly held out the prospect of a royal pardon and promised the rebels that, if they agreed to a truce, he would provide a safe escort for two of their representatives to come to Court and air their grievances to the King. They accepted and both armies dispersed.