Henry VIII's Last Victim (21 page)

At the beginning of December Norfolk, this time without Surrey, prepared to meet the rebels again. They had drawn up a more detailed set of demands, which they expected Norfolk, in the King’s name, to accept. But Henry VIII was not willing to hear their grievances. In fact, he had listened only to Norfolk’s ‘back friends’ at Court, who insinuated that the Duke was a rebel sympathiser. The pilgrims’ articles, they suggested, particularly those calling for the restoration of the old religion and the expulsion of ‘all villein’s blood and evil counsellors’, chimed with Norfolk’s own goals.
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He had exaggerated their threat. The rebels lacked numbers and commitment. Had Norfolk really wanted to suppress them, his enemies implied, he could have done so with ease.

On 2 December Henry VIII wrote to Norfolk accusing him of misinformation and inaction. ‘It is much to our marvel,’ he wrote, ‘to receive
so many desperate letters from you, and in the same no remedies.’ Should the rebels, ‘by your negligences’, now march forward, Henry warned, ‘we should have just cause to think ourself evil served, and our commandments less regarded than appertained.’ With regard to the upcoming meeting, Henry forbade Norfolk to address any of the rebels’ specific demands. Instead he was to lecture them on the sin of rebellion. Only in the last resort, and after stalling them for at least a week, would he be permitted to grant certain concessions. But Henry was confident that the rebels were repentant and would willingly disband.
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Yet Norfolk, on the ground, could see what Henry could not. He had no army beyond his own retinue, while the rebels were in the field with the majority of their original force. They were highly agitated and, as Norfolk wrote in a series of increasingly desperate missives to both Cromwell and the King, they had resolved that if no agreement could be reached, they would proceed in their Pilgrimage and willingly die for their cause.
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Norfolk met them at Doncaster on 4 December 1536. The only way that he could prevent a blood-bath and at the same time avoid the discussion of specific grievances was by granting a universal free pardon on the spot and promising the rebels that the next Parliament would be held in the North for the redress of their grievances. In addition, Norfolk seems to have made other assurances, including the coronation of Jane Seymour at York and the temporary restoration of the dissolved monasteries. Confident of the word of such an honourable nobleman – the man, after all, who had helped his father save them from a Scottish invasion at Flodden – the pilgrims disbanded and went home. The rebellion had been liquidated.

Norfolk was well aware that he had exceeded his brief and that the concessions he had granted in the King’s name would never be honoured. When, early in 1537, a few trouble spots in Yorkshire and Cumberland flared up, the Duke seized the opportunity to redeem himself and declared Martial Law on the region – ‘Now shall appear whether for favour of these countrymen I forbore to fight with them at Doncaster.’
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Having rounded up more than two hundred former rebels, Norfolk had them publicly hanged from the trees and steeples of their villages. When grieving mothers and widows attempted to cut the bodies down for burial, they too were punished.

Some time in March Norfolk summoned Surrey to help him subjugate the region.
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As the Earl rode through the villages, he would have seen
the mouldering bodies swaying gently in the spring breeze. The work was arduous and Surrey and his father rarely stayed in the same place for long. Stray rebels had to be ferreted out and executed, inquests held, monasteries suppressed, and border fortifications inspected and strengthened. By the end of the season, though, Norfolk could report that their work was done: ‘These countries, thanked be God, be in such order that I trust never in our life no new commotions shall be attempted. And surely I see nothing here but too much fear, which His Majesty may remedy when it shall be His pleasure so to do.’
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Although Henry VIII declared himself thrilled with Norfolk’s bloodlust – ‘you have done unto us such thankful and acceptable service as we shall never put in oblivion’– the rumour mill continued to grind at Court. ‘Here goeth so many lies and tales,’ John Husee reported to Lord Lisle, ‘that a man knoweth not whereunto to trust.’
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As Norfolk had himself observed, few of his soldiers had believed in their mission and most had been reluctant to fight their countrymen. According to a report of 29 November, many of Norfolk’s men did in fact defect to the rebel camp. John Fowberry, a servant of Surrey, had taken part in the first insurrection, though he later redeemed himself by informing on the rebels’ plan to take Hull. More worrying was a report claiming that Surrey himself had twice listened to a song in support of the Pilgrimage and had refrained from punishing the singer. The Howards also had known links with some of the rebel leaders. Dr Mackeral, the Abbot of Barlings, who was executed for his part in the Lincolnshire uprising, had preached at the Flodden Duke’s funeral and Lords Darcy and Hussey, who were implicated in the rebellions in Yorkshire and Lincolnshire respectively, had discussed the possibility of a rising as early as 1534 and had suggested then that Norfolk might be willing to join them.
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One man in particular, Thomas Pope, a follower of Cromwell well known for his mendacity, now determined to hound Norfolk out of favour.
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John Freeman, Pope’s colleague in the Court of Augmentations, who had witnessed Norfolk’s first meeting with the rebels, told Pope that the Duke had sympathised with their grievances and had told two or three hundred of them that he supported their opposition to the Statute of Uses. Pope ordered Freeman to write everything down and, though he could find no other signatories, presented the charges to Lord Chancellor Audley.

Norfolk immediately sent long letters of denial to Cromwell and the
King: ‘Fie, fie on them that so falsely will report a true gentleman.’ Pope’s charge was ludicrous, he argued. Never had he seen even as many as a hundred rebels together, ‘and I doubt not all that were there will testify they never heard like words pass my mouth’. Another allegation, levelled by ‘some false malicious men’, charged Norfolk with having denounced the Papacy and the monasteries ‘with so heavy cheer and countenance’ that he appeared to mean quite the opposite to what he had said. On the contrary, Norfolk countered, everyone who had heard him champion the King’s religious policies had been impressed by his vehemence and frankness. Indeed, he wrote, ‘they think my words did more good than the sermons of any six bishops of your realm should have done.’
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Another charge concerned Surrey. Why, people asked, had Surrey joined Norfolk in the North without the King’s permission or even knowledge? The common rumour, as Norfolk heard it, was ‘that I sent for him to the intent I might bring him up here with me to be trained in the affairs of these parts that I might depart hence and leave him to occupy here as my deputy.’ ‘Sir,’ Norfolk protested to the King, ‘on the troth I owe to God and you my Sovereign Lord, I never had such thought.’
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Yet there was substance to this charge. On 7 March Norfolk had suggested that the wild borderers would not respect the governance of ‘mean men’, but that ‘some man of great nobility should have the rule’. But whenever a nobleman was suggested, he had raised doubts about his suitability.
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Governance of the North was something of a Howard rite of passage; both Norfolk and his father had cut their teeth there and it is likely that Norfolk desired a similar experience for his son.

Once confronted, Norfolk protested with his usual bluster. ‘On my faith,’ he spluttered, no such thought had crossed his mind. He was, he argued, hoping shortly to come to Court but doubted his servants would remain in the North without him ‘unless my said son had tarried here with them until my return’.

Another cause was that of truth I am very affectionate unto him and love him better than all my children and would have gladly had him here with me, both to have kept me company in hunting, hawking, playing at cards, shooting & other pastimes, and also to have entertained my servants to the intent they should have been the less desirous to ask leave to go home to their wives and friends.

And if I minded any other thing in sending for him than these, and specially if ever I thought the other false surmises matter, God let me shortly die the most shameful death that ever man did.
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How much Norfolk actually meant this is difficult to tell. He had never been so affectionate towards his son before, nor would he be again, and it is perhaps sad to conclude that a certain amount of policy dictated his love for Surrey on this occasion. On the other hand, Surrey’s personal magnetism must have been powerful enough for Norfolk to deem it a convincing excuse. In his reply, Henry declared himself satisfied that Surrey would not have been sent ‘for any purpose than should not be to our good contentment. Nevertheless,’ he continued, ‘we marvelled that without our knowledge you would send for him into those parts whereby you may perceive what occasion you ministered to men to divine evil of it.’ The King concluded by assuring Norfolk of his trust in him and advising him against crediting ‘such light tales’ in the future.
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The following month more weighty accusations were hurled at the Howards when Lord Darcy, the nobleman implicated in the Yorkshire rebellion, began to squawk from within the Tower of London. Norfolk, he claimed, had favoured many of the rebels’ articles at his first meeting with them. Darcy had every reason to hate Norfolk. It was the Duke who had gathered evidence against him and who had branded him ‘the most arrant traitor that ever was living’, and the two had exchanged harsh words on Doncaster Bridge, when Darcy had refused to defect to the royal forces. According to Norfolk, once again forced to defend his honour, Robert Aske, before his execution at York, had warned him that Darcy bore him ‘ill will’ and ‘was pricked to say against me’.
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Not only did Darcy accuse Norfolk of complicity with the rebels, but he also made a ‘false surmise’ against Surrey. The specific allegation was not recorded but it was serious enough to compel Norfolk to seek Cromwell’s intervention. On Sunday, 8 July 1537 Norfolk followed this up with an obsequious message of thanks ‘for your most loving fashion so friendly showed at this time in trying out of my troth and my son’s’.
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Even if one takes into account the number of men at Court who would have willingly perjured themselves in order to destroy the Howards, the accumulation of charges against them does imply that something must have been said in favour of the rebels at the time of the first meeting on Doncaster Bridge. Considering the delicate nature of the negotiations, this is hardly surprising. Norfolk had had to placate
the representatives of forty thousand angry men. He had to convince them that he, and the King, thought their grievances worthy of consideration. Norfolk had warned as much in his letter to the King of 25 October. But whatever sympathy Norfolk or Surrey may have expressed for the rebels’ ends, they had shown by their actions that they abhorred the means. Henry VIII was satisfied and no action was taken against either father or son.

The summer of 1537 saw Surrey back at Kenninghall, where he grew ‘very weak, his nature running from him abundantly’. According to Norfolk, he had been in the same state ‘a great part of the last year’ whenever he ‘thought of my Lord of Richmond’.
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His friend’s death had hit Surrey hard, but excessive grief was considered unnatural and subversive. A period of mourning was permissible, but anything beyond that was thought to challenge God’s ordinance. The sixteenth-century attitude to mourning is best illustrated by a letter of ‘consolation’ written by Catherine Parr (later Henry VIII’s sixth wife) to Lady Wriothesley on the death of her only son:

What is excess sorrow but a plain evidence against you that your inward mind doth repine against God’s doings and a declaration that you are not contented that God hath put your son by nature, but his by adoption, in possession of the heavenly Kingdom? . . . If you lament your son’s death, you do him great wrong, and show yourself to sorrow for the happiest thing there ever came to him, being in the hands of his best Father. If you are sorry for your own commodity, you show yourself to live to yourself . . . Wherefore, good my Lady Wriothesley, put away all immoderate and unjust heaviness.
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Surrey was too sensitive and passionate a person to be able to turn off his grief according to convention. Norfolk found this incomprehensible. He promptly sent for the King’s physician to diagnose Surrey’s ‘disease’ and then petitioned for him to be summoned to the North, presumably in the hope that some virile service might banish his weak, effeminate behaviour. His son, Norfolk mused, couldn’t possibly still be mourning Richmond; his condition must have returned ‘by some other thought’. Maybe it had. The last few months had certainly given Surrey much to worry about. But perhaps Norfolk was missing the point. Surrey became withdrawn in July. Richmond had died the
previous July. What Surrey was experiencing may well have been an ‘anniversary reaction’ exacerbated by the strain of recent events.
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Unsurprisingly, Norfolk’s petition was refused, but Surrey did try to keep up appearances and, much to his father’s chagrin, hosted a series of costly parties at Kenninghall. ‘His being there,’ Norfolk complained from York, ‘doth not only cause many to resort to him to my charge, but also doth cause my deer not to be spared.’
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Some time at the end of July or beginning of August 1537 Surrey ventured to Court. There, at Hampton Court, he heard for himself the charges levelled against him and his father. He saw his father’s enemies whispering in corners and then raising their voices as he passed and he observed the smug delight on their faces as they revelled in his discomfort. Norfolk had vowed to ‘adventure my poor body’ in defence of his reputation against the ‘false caitiffs’, who were ‘loath to show their faces’.
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Surrey, having now seen them, was ready to honour his father’s pledge.