Henry VIII's Last Victim (25 page)

In addition to raising musters and gathering munitions, Surrey drew up lists of all the ships and mariners in each port and surveyed and fortified the seaboards, repairing beacons, digging trenches and erecting bulwarks and forts wherever necessary. The same work was carried out throughout the country and across the Channel at Calais and Guisnes. Henry VIII toured the coastal defences and inspected his navy at Portsmouth. ‘Nothing left he undone,’ observed the chronicler, Raphael Holinshed, ‘that tended to the foreseeing and preventing of a mischief to ensue.’ On 8 May 1539 a parade of over sixteen thousand troops was held in London. It was, Holinshed wrote, ‘a beautiful sight to behold, for all the fields from Whitechapel to Mile End, and from Bethnal Green to Radcliffe and Stepney, were all covered with armour, men and weapons, and especially the battle [battalion] of pikes seemed to be as it had been a great forest.’
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Then, nothing. The Imperial fleet at Antwerp began to disperse and the invasion threat, probably never more than that, promptly died out.

Damp squib it may have been, but the prospect of his shores being
violated had been sufficiently alarming for Henry to introduce a number of important changes. Above all, he recognised the need to strengthen his realm internally. This meant religious concord and greater participation with the estates of the realm. The nobility had proved their value as agents of the Crown and Henry knew that he could not rule without their resources, just as they could not survive without his favour. In May 1539 Parliament passed the Act of Precedence. This established a defined hierarchy for the eleven ‘great offices of state’. Of these, six were originally military or household positions and could only be held by peers of the realm. The remaining five offices were administrative, and in practice only the Principal Secretary was a commoner. Early the next year the holders of all eleven ‘great offices’ were made members of the Privy Council. There was nothing stopping Henry from raising commoners to the peerage, thus qualifying them for these posts. The act also displaced the previous order of precedence by ruling that those nobles who held the ‘great offices’ outranked those who did not, and this put some aristocratic noses out of joint (though not Norfolk’s; he kept his position by virtue of his role as Lord Treasurer). Nevertheless the reforms conveyed the message that the nobility still mattered, and was in fact crucial, not only to the defence, but also to the governance of the commonwealth.
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Surrey was one of the beneficiaries of the King’s reconciliatory mood. At the end of February 1539 he was appointed Master Forester of Ashdown Forest in Sussex. On 1 December he was granted, for the duration of his father’s life, the reversion and rent of the house and certain lands formerly belonging to Wymondham Abbey in Norfolk. Five days later he was appointed Steward for the Duchy of Lancaster in Norfolk, Suffolk and Cambridgeshire.
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Throughout 1539 Surrey was prominent at Court. He was frequently entertained at Beauchamplace, where he dined with the Seymours ten times in October alone.
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On the weekend of 7 and 8 June he was an official mourner at the services held at St Paul’s to commemorate Charles V’s wife, the Empress Isabella, who had died in May. Once the obsequies were over, Surrey and the rest of the mourners went to Baynards Castle, ‘where they dined and had a great dinner with many delicate meats and subtleties’.
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The memorial weekend, a conventional display of piety with dirges, requiem masses, bell-ringing, incense and images of the saints, was regarded by many as a sign of the King’s new diplomatic and religious priorities. Yet only weeks later the royal artist Hans Holbein was dispatched to Düren with orders to produce a likeness of a lady called
Anne of Cleves. For some time the King’s counsellors had been urging him to remarry. Christina, Duchess of Milan, had been a favourite for a while, but her representatives had proved obstructive and Christina herself, mindful of the fates of Henry’s previous wives, had been actively opposed to the idea.
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Several French ladies were then mooted, but Henry VIII offended Gallic sensibilities by insisting that they parade before him for inspection. They were not horses to be trotted out at a fair, the French had sniffed. Castillon, Francis I’s ambassador in London, then rounded on Henry for his lack of courtesy and succeeded, as very few could, in making the King blush. ‘Your Majesty,’ he said, ‘would perhaps like to try them all, one after the other, and keep the one that suits you best. It was not thus, Sire, that the Knights of the Round Table treated their ladies.’
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So it was that hopes eventually rested on Anne of Cleves, the sister of Wilhelm, Duke of Cleves. The Duchy of Cleves was a strategically important state located along the Rhine between the Low Countries and the German Imperial territories. It had not joined the Lutheran League of Schmalkalden against the Emperor, but was considered progressive in religion and Wilhelm’s brother-in-law, Duke Johann Friedrich of Saxony, was one of the League’s most vocal members. The Cleves match was a controversial choice, therefore, and very much the brainchild of Cromwell, who saw it as a vehicle for the advancement of reform in England. Holbein soon returned with his portrait of Anne and it pleased Henry VIII enough for him to authorise official negotiations with the Duchy.

The proceedings with Cleves and the commemoration of Empress Isabella were typical of the mixed signals that Henry VIII was giving out at this time. The year 1538 had been a triumphant one for reform. The Observant friar, John Forest, had been burnt at the stake and a Lutheran delegation had been officially welcomed in England. This was also the year of Cromwell’s Injunctions. Sacred images and shrines were condemned as objects of false worship and destroyed. According to the Injunctions, ‘the King’s Highness graciously tendering the weal of his subjects’ souls, hath in part already, and
more will hereafter
, travail for the abolishing of such images as might be an occasion of so great an offence to God, and so great a danger to the souls of his loving subjects.’
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Some of Henry’s ‘loving subjects’ responded to the Injunctions with more zeal than sense. The resultant iconoclasm, the invasion scare and the return from a three-year embassy of Stephen Gardiner, the fiercely
traditional Bishop of Winchester, all combined to stall the progress of reform. During Easter 1539 Henry VIII made a very public show of traditional piety. On Good Friday he crept to the cross, a custom which most reformers deemed superstitious. He also received the holy bread and water every Sunday in accordance with ancient custom and forbade, ‘upon pain of death’, the criticism of controversial ceremonies in London.
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Then, in June, the Act of Six Articles was introduced.

Initially proposed as a way of resolving the chief points of difference between the two religious camps, the act, in its final form, bore the stamp of orthodoxy. The real presence of the body and blood of Christ in the Eucharist was asserted, priests were ordered to uphold their vows of celibacy and private masses were endorsed. Harsh penalties were prescribed for all those who dared to challenge these tenets. But the Act for the Abolishing of Diversity of Opinion, to use its official, wildly optimistic title, also contained clauses that could be read ambivalently. Auricular confession, for example, was described as ‘necessary according to the law of God’ in the original draft, but in the final wording of the act it was only considered ‘expedient and necessary to be retained and continued, used and frequented in the Church of God’, the implication being that it was not enjoined by the Scriptures.
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Nor could Henry’s subjects be sure of the act’s durability, for it was not easy to trust to the King’s determination. He may have had his doubts about the existence of purgatory and the efficacy of many traditional customs, but he did not subscribe to the reforming principle of
Sola Fide
either. What this meant, in effect, was that the Supreme Head of the Church of England was unsure about how to attain salvation.
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One moment he was sanctioning the dissolution of the remaining monasteries and labelling traditional practices as idolatrous, the next he was creeping to the cross and issuing proclamations against heresy; at one stage, priests were being ordered to display an English Bible in their churches and to ‘expressly provoke, stir, and exhort every person to read the same’; at another, the King was drafting a proclamation against Bible-reading in public.
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Little wonder, then, that at around this time Surrey began to question his own faith and respond positively to reform.

There was much about the new religion that was appealing. Whereas Roman Catholicism was full of uncertainties – how many good works were required to escape purgatory? How long would one’s spell there be if the quota were not met? – the reformers could guarantee salvation through faith alone. The New Learning, as it was known, had also
gained a reputation as a youthful, exciting religion, favoured by those who sought freedom from the constraints of the previous generation. In spite, or more likely because of the Duke of Norfolk’s staunch traditionalism, Surrey’s sister and brother embraced reform and Surrey may well have been attracted to the independence it seemed to offer. Whatever his reasons, by the summer of 1539 the reformist camp felt that he was ripe for the picking.

At the end of August two notable evangelicals, George Constantyne and John Barlow, rode together from Bristol to Slebech in South Wales. The journey was long and their conversation took many turns before it eventually rested on the negotiations with Cleves. ‘I may tell you,’ Constantyne confided, ‘there is good hope yet that all shall be well enough if that marriage go forward, for the Duke of Cleves doth favour God’s Word.’
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By now, though, Henry VIII’s reputation was such that Anne’s people requested guarantors for her safety. ‘If there should be any pledges sent into Cleves,’ said Constantyne, ‘in good faith I would the Earl of Surrey should be one of them.’ Barlow, a dour redhead, who was ‘very moderate in eating and drinking’ and shunned the pleasures of the Court in his single-minded pursuit of reform, was taken aback:

‘It is the most foolish proud boy that is in England!’

‘What, man, he hath a wife and a child and ye call him boy?’

‘By God’s mercy me think he exceedeth.’

‘What then? He is wise for all that, as I hear, and as for pride, experience will correct well enough. No marvel though a young man, so noble a man’s son and heir apparent, be proud for we be too proud ourselves without those qualities. But I would wish that he should be one to be sent thither for that he should there be
fully instructed in God’s Word
and of experience. For if the Duke of Norfolk were as fully persuaded in it as he is in the contrary, he should do much good, for he is an earnest man, a bold man and a witty [
sic
] in all his matters.’

‘It is true,’ Barlow conceded, ‘and ye say well in that.’
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In the event, the English avoided having to send pledges to Cleves. The marriage treaty was signed on 6 October 1539 and within three months Anne had landed at Deal. Her reception was staged at Greenwich, where the streets had been newly gravelled. Surrey was one of the select group of lords chosen to ride before the King in an ‘imposing and honourable’
procession.
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Henry VIII played the host with as much bonhomie as he could muster but inside he was seething. ‘I see no such thing in her,’ he confided in Lord Russell, ‘as hath been showed me of her, and am ashamed that men have so praised her as they have done, and I like her not.’
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Anne did not sing or play any musical instruments and she only spoke German. Her dark colouring and rough complexion were not to Henry’s liking. Nor, he noted with disgust, was ‘the hanging of her breasts, and the looseness of her flesh’.
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But it was too late to back out. ‘My Lord,’ Henry growled at Cromwell before the solemnisation of the marriage on 6 January 1540, ‘if it were not to satisfy the world and my realm, I would not do that I must do this day for none earthly thing.’
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Henry could not bring himself to consummate the marriage. This was not, he assured his doctors, for want of ability. He had, after all, recently experienced ‘duas pollutiones nocturnas in somne’ (two wet dreams). Rather he found Anne’s body ‘in such a sort disordered and indisposed to excite and provoke any lust in him’.
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Within days of the marriage, Henry was instructing his counsellors to find a way to liberate him from Anne. Cromwell had staked his reputation on the Cleves match; its failure marked the beginning of the end of his supremacy, his religious campaign and, ultimately, his life.

In the meantime, it was important to keep up appearances. In the early spring a proclamation was published throughout Europe. Under the licence of Henry VIII, six gentlemen of England – John Dudley, Thomas Seymour, Richard Cromwell, Thomas Poynings, George Carew and Anthony Kingston – challenged all comers to a tournament to be held at Westminster from the first day of May.
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It was just the kind of enterprise Surrey relished and he immediately signed up.