Henry VIII's Last Victim (24 page)

Thy presence bringeth forth a truce betwixt me and my care’.

Then lively doth he look, and salvith me again,
^fn8

And saith, ‘My dear, how is it now that you have all this pain?’

Where with the heavy cares, that heaped are in my breast,

Break forth, and me dischargeth clean of all my great unrest.

But when I me awake and find it but a dream,

The anguish of my former woe beginneth more extreme.
³¹

‘T. his little son’ is surely Thomas; the absent lover, Surrey; the singer, Frances. But it is not Frances’ historical voice that is heard here, but Surrey’s fictive representation of it. In Surrey’s ventriloquism we may be no closer to the real Frances, but at least we can see how Surrey himself chose to view and hear her: pining for him dreadfully and dependent on him for her happiness. That Surrey saw himself as Frances’ knight in shining armour is typical of him; far more remarkable is the intimacy of his imagined homecoming and the touching details that enliven it: Frances rushing towards the nursery, kissing him before she even speaks, his ‘lively’ look and soothing words and the shuddering sobs that overcome her. The scene is so vivid and natural that it seems entirely credible, just as it did to the dreaming lady herself.

According to the little evidence that remains, and by the standards of the day, Surrey was an attentive father. His children’s education clearly mattered to him and he employed the eminent Dutch humanist, Hadrianus Junius, to teach them, paying him double the wage that the royal tutor, Roger Ascham, received from Henry VIII.
^fn9
,
³²
Of the five children, Surrey was understandably most mindful of ‘T. his little son’ and heir. The picture of the two of them playing together in the above poem is one of its loveliest details and it is possible that Surrey addressed another poem to Thomas which counselled moderation in life, something that Surrey himself could seldom achieve.

Henry, the younger son, was a month shy of his seventh birthday when Surrey was executed, but it was he who would be the most curious about his father and the circumstances of his fall. It was also Henry who eventually removed Surrey’s remains from the churchyard near the Tower and buried them alongside Frances beneath a magnificent tomb in St Michael’s Church, Framlingham.
^fn10
All three daughters impressed contemporaries with their learning, especially Jane, who was named by her brother’s secretary as one of the most learned ladies of the realm. ‘Few men may compare with her,’ he wrote, and ‘all the world doth acknowledge her a worthy daughter of a most worthy father.’
³³
But it
was Katherine, later Lady Berkeley, who more closely resembled her father. She was a tomboy who loved archery, hunting and hawking, the latter so much that she kept merlins in her chamber even though their droppings destroyed some of her finest gowns. She was profligate and constantly in debt. She adored poetry and music and often a horde of servants could be found pressing their ears against her chamber door in order to hear her singing. She had a certain star quality that prompted Queen Elizabeth to label her ‘her golden lady’. Katherine could be haughty and was proud of her lineage, but she was also kind and considerate towards her servants.
³⁴

John Smyth, the steward of the Berkeley household, related a charming anecdote about Katherine in his history of the family. One day, not long after the teenaged Smyth had entered the household, he was ordered to deliver breakfast to her son. Rushing through the gallery with the covered dish in his hands, he encountered Katherine and only managed to present her ‘with a running leg or curtsy’ before speeding off. Katherine promptly recalled him and attempted to teach him how to curtsy properly,

and such was her great nobleness to me therein (then a boy of no desert lately come from a country school and but newly entered into her service) that to show me the better how, she lifted up all her garments to the calf of her leg that I might the better observe the grace of drawing back the foot and bowing of the knee.
³⁵

Katherine inherited some of this easy charm from her father. Hadrianus Junius wrote in 1545 that ‘the Earl of Surrey, my patron, shows enormous favour towards me; he congratulates me, feels for me, loves me.’ According to Thomas Eynus, who had once served the Duke of Richmond and who Surrey helped find a place in Prince Edward’s household, Surrey had a ‘noble heart, naturally inclining to all humanity and gentleness’.
³⁶
Thomas Churchyard, an Elizabethan poet who spent four years in Surrey’s service, was so grateful to the Earl for taking the time to teach him the skills of verse and for building up his self-esteem that he wrote a poem in his honour:

As told I have, this young man served, this master twice two year.

And learned therein such fruitful skill, as long he held full dear.

And used the pen as he was taught, and other gifts also,

Which made him hold the cap on head, where some do crouch full low.
³⁷

It should be remembered, moreover, that the Duke of Norfolk justified his summoning of Surrey to the North after the Pilgrimage of Grace on the grounds that his presence would raise the spirits of the servants there and make them ‘less desirous to ask leave to go home to their wives and friends’.
³⁸

But all these positive reactions came from servants who presented no threat to Surrey. At Court, on the other hand, where he perceived himself, often with good reason, to be surrounded by men who bore him ill will, Surrey put on an aggressive front and carried himself with an air of superiority that frequently rankled. Whenever he sensed a challenge to his honour, he lashed out, both verbally and physically. At his most defensive he would refer to himself in the third person, a habit that hardly endeared him to his colleagues. Even Junius – and he meant this as a compliment – thought him ‘a truly royal young man’.
³⁹
Surrey’s abiding sin was his pride in his blood. He had been brought up on tales of Howard heroism and his father, a stickler for etiquette, had taught him the importance of deference. But the Duke of Norfolk also recognised the value in making the right friends at Court, whatever their station in life.

The presence of arrivistes at the Court was hardly a novelty. English kings had always had their favourites and noblemen had ever grumbled about the curtailment of their rights. In the sixteenth century, though, the reassertion of monarchical power was particularly pronounced. Henry VIII and his father largely succeeded in checking the activities of ‘overmighty subjects’ like Surrey’s maternal grandfather, the Duke of Buckingham. The threat of attainder and bonds of recognisance, the restriction in the number of personal followings and the expansion of royal influence in local government encouraged interdependence with the monarch rather than independence of him.

Increasingly, power depended on the King in Court and competition for his favour was fierce. The development of the printing press, the rise of literacy, the expansion of trade, law and government bureaucracy, and the spread of humanist ideas about virtue and service meant that more people were better educated and had more money and higher aspirations than ever before. In 1536 the Pilgrims of Grace had complained that the King had excluded great men from his inner circle in favour of
‘evil counsellors’ like Cromwell. In response, the government propagandist Richard Morison issued a treatise entitled
A Remedy for Sedition
. ‘True nobility,’ he wrote, ‘is never but where virtue is.’ The King, he continued, should be thanked for ‘giving offices, dignities and honour’ to those endowed with ‘most qualities, most wit, most virtue’. ‘In all other things,’ Morison concluded, ‘it little availeth whose son a man be.’
⁴⁰
Noble birth still provided a stepping stone to high office, but it could not guarantee automatic qualification.

Surrey was either unwilling or unable to accept the
modus operandi
. Instead of reckoning with his own deficiencies, he whined about the proliferation of ‘mean creatures’ in government. According to his sister, he ‘hated them all’ and blamed them for his 1537 confinement at Windsor. He was convinced that the lawyers and university men were machiavellian intriguers, determined not only to usurp the nobility, but to destroy them altogether. ‘Those men,’ Surrey groused, ‘which are made by the King’s Majesty of vile birth, hath been the distraction of all the nobility of this realm.’ They ‘loved no nobility,’ he announced, ‘and if God called away the King, they should smart for it.’
⁴¹
This was fighting talk and it was not appreciated by all those ‘new men’ who had worked hard to get to the top.

Surrey’s comments earned him a less than favourable reputation at Court. There the overriding impression was of an egotistical, obnoxious, haughty young man. After the Earl’s death, Thomas Nashe lampooned him in
The Unfortunate Traveller
. At one stage in the tale, the protagonist Jack Wilton decides to impersonate Surrey on his travels through Italy:

Through all the cities passed I by no other name but the young Earl of Surrey; my pomp, my apparel, train and expense was nothing inferior to his; my looks were as lofty, my words as magnifical.
⁴²

Few, however, had the temerity to criticise Surrey to his face.
⁴³
More often than not his contemporaries brooded on their offended sensibilities. Silent enemies proliferated and many would have been only too happy to see the proud young aristocrat taught a lesson in humility.

^fn1
Following his elevation to the Dukedom of Somerset in 1547, Edward Seymour rebuilt Beauchamplace along classical lines and renamed it Somerset House. It survived the Great Fire of London, but fell into disrepair in the eighteenth century and was demolished in 1775. Construction of the building we see today began the following year and was completed at the turn of the century.

^fn2
Tuscan
: Tuscany.

^fn3
Chambar’s
: Cambria’s (Wales’s).

^fn4
where she tastes ghostly food
: where she partakes in Holy Communion.

^fn5
eyen
: eye.

^fn6
hight
: is called.

^fn7
eburnine
: ivory.

^fn8
salvith me again
: kisses me back.

^fn9
Junius had studied at Harlem, Louvain and Bologna and was a celebrated polymath, variously admired as a physician, historian, poet, philologist and botanist. It was in the latter capacity that he discovered an eye-catching species of fungus, which was named
Phallus Hadriani
in his honour.

^fn10
St Michael’s replaced Thetford Priory as the family mausoleum after the Dissolution. Surrey’s tomb can still be seen there as can the earlier tombs of the third Duke of Norfolk and the Duke of Richmond, two of the finest examples of Renaissance monumental sculpture in England.

9

CHEVALIER SANS REPROCHE

BY THE END
of 1538 England faced a looming crisis. The previous June Francis I of France and the Emperor Charles V had, with the help of papal mediation, put aside their inveterate rivalry and signed a truce at Nice. In December Pope Paul III prepared to promulgate the bull of excommunication against Henry VIII that had been lying dormant in the Vatican since 1535. The final straw had been the desecration of the shrine of St Thomas Becket at Canterbury, the most shocking in a series of iconoclastic measures instituted by Cromwell that year. The bull pronounced Henry VIII a heretic and called on the Catholic rulers of Europe to depose him and return England to Christian obedience.

On 12 January 1539 Francis and Charles entered into a pact by which the one agreed not to ally with Henry VIII without the other’s consent. By the end of February Charles V had ordered the detention of all English merchant ships landing in Flemish ports. He had also withdrawn his ambassador from Henry’s Court and was rumoured to be gathering a great fleet at Antwerp. At the same time Francis I ordered his own ambassador to withdraw from London. Writing to Cromwell from Brussels on 3 March, Thomas Wriothesley reported that ‘it is in every man’s mouth that we shall have war’.
¹

Henry VIII’s response was characteristically bullish. In November 1538 he ordered the arrests, and in December the executions, of the Marquis of Exeter and Lord Montagu, the cousin and brother respectively of the English renegade, Reginald Pole, who was campaigning
vigorously on the Continent for an invasion of England.
^fn1
Having seized all Imperial ships in English ports, Henry turned his attention towards the defence of his realm. In every shire, the ‘aptest and ablest gentlemen to serve the King’ were appointed and placed under the command of ‘a person whom the King’s Highness can best trust’. The Duke of Norfolk was sent to the North to protect the borders against a Scottish invasion and Surrey, at only twenty-two, was put in charge of the Norfolk coastline.
²