Henry VIII's Last Victim (26 page)

Tournaments in the sixteenth century were not just a bit of sport before supper. They were magnificent theatrical productions, rich in drama and steeped in symbolism. This event, coming so soon after the royal marriage, would prove to the European Courts that Englishmen could, in fact, behave like Knights of the Round Table and that outward courtesy, at least, would be extended to the Queen that Henry VIII was so keen to dump. For Surrey the event was of great import. The rule of entry requiring combatants to prove their noble ancestry over a number of generations was no longer strictly applied, but to Surrey the tournament still belonged to the social élite. The tiltyard at Westminster would have evoked memories of ‘the gravelled ground’ at Windsor where he and Richmond had trained, ‘with sleeves tied on the helm, /
on foaming horse, with swords and friendly hearts’.
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This was no place for Richard Cromwell, nephew of Thomas, and the other career courtiers who had issued the challenge. Victory would validate Surrey’s own sense of nobility. Defeat, on the other hand, would imply dishonour and disgrace.

The first day was scheduled for jousting. Competitors aimed to shatter their lances on their opponents or, better still, to unhorse them; he ‘who striketh his fellow clean out of the saddle is best worth the prize’.
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As the illustration in the Great Tournament Roll of Westminster of Henry VIII jousting in 1511 reveals, the two contestants were separated by a wooden barrier (plate 24). This had been introduced in the 1420s in order to prevent collision. Each man wore full armour. Not only did this restrict his mobility – jousting armour being far heavier than field armour – but it also impaired his ventilation and reduced his line of vision to a tiny slit in the visor. This was a necessary inconvenience. When Henry VIII forgot to close his visor for a joust in March 1524, he received a helmet-full of splinters from a shattered lance that only narrowly missed his eye. Francis I’s son Henri, whom Surrey had befriended in France, would not be so lucky. He died in 1559 after a lance was drilled into his half-open visor and glided through his eye and into his brain.

A successful jouster had to be an expert horseman, physically strong and possessed of a fine sense of balance. It was hard enough to hold out a long, heavy lance in one hand and a cumbersome shield in the other, but to wield these objects on a galloping horse against an opponent hell-bent on destruction was a skilled undertaking indeed. Surrey would have been extremely nervous, therefore, as he made his way into the stadium at Westminster. As the highest ranked competitor he had the honour – and the added pressure – of opening the proceedings. The noise from the grandstands was deafening. Long pennons of arms, including the Howard silver lion, flowed down from the royal tower where Henry VIII and Anne of Cleves took their seats. Surrey led the ‘Defendants’ to the royal box, where they formally received permission to compete. Then he took up his position at one end of the barrier. His squire secured the fastenings on his armour, handed him his lance and closed his visor. Waiting for Surrey at the opposite end, upon a horse trapped in white velvet, was Sir John Dudley, Captain of the Challengers. He was the son of Empson Dudley, arguably the most despised minister of the previous reign. Over a decade older than Surrey,
John Dudley was tall, sturdy and battle hardened, having earned his spurs and a knighthood in the 1523 campaign against France. His prowess at the tilts was well known and he was famous, at home and abroad, for ‘high courage’.
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Surrey, at twenty-three years of age and with no battle experience to speak of, was making his debut at the public joust.

The trumpets sounded. Surrey dug his spurs into his horse and took off, thundering through the sand towards Dudley’s charge. Just as the horses began to draw level, Surrey couched his lance and attempted to crunch it into Dudley’s breastplate. Whether he succeeded, or Dudley beat him to it, is unknown. The scorecards have not survived, but the chroniclers did record every instance of unhorsing and neither Surrey nor Dudley managed to inflict that particular ignominy on the other.
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Surrey ran in the lists seven more times. Never once was he thrown off his horse, but nor did he succeed in unseating his opponent. After a day of rest on Sunday, he returned to the field for the tourney, where the Defendants and Challengers fought on horseback with blunted swords.
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Once again Surrey was pitted against Dudley and the two men clashed with such ferocity that they lost their gauntlets.
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The outcome was honourable as both men remained on their mounts for the duration of the contest. Surrey had done well – very well, in fact, considering his opponent was a man of greater age, bulk and experience. Whether he was satisfied with his performance is another matter. He certainly would have cast envious glances in the direction of Richard Cromwell, who had overthrown two of his opponents and was the undoubted star of the tournament. For the chroniclers, the displays of individual prowess were not as important as the chivalric values of courtesy and largesse that the tournament as a whole had engendered:

After the said jousts were done, the said Challengers rode to Durham Place, where they kept open household; which said Place was richly behanged, and [there were] great cupboards of plate; where they feasted the King’s Majesty, the Queen’s Grace and her ladies, with all the Court, and for all other comers that would resort to their said place; where they had all delicious meats and drinks so plenteously as might be, and such melody of minstrelsy, and were served every meal with their own servants after the manner of war, their drum warning all the officers of household against every meal which was done to the great honour of this realm.
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Two months later Henry VIII divorced Anne of Cleves.
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Anne had enjoyed the May festivities seemingly unaware of her impending fate. One of her ladies-in-waiting was more knowing. Catherine Howard was the daughter of the Duke of Norfolk’s younger brother Edmund, a wastrel who had squandered all his money by the time of his death in 1539. Catherine’s mother had died in the late 1520s and, before she had reached her teens, Catherine had been packed off to live with her step-grandmother Agnes, the Dowager Duchess of Norfolk. Agnes owned two great mansions, one at Horsham in Sussex and the other at Lambeth, where Surrey and Norfolk tended to stay when they were in London.

Catherine first appeared at Court at the end of 1539, when her uncle, the Duke of Norfolk, secured a place for her in the Cleves household. Her pretty features and petite frame immediately attracted the King, who was said to have ‘cast a fantasy’ towards her the moment he saw her.
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Norfolk realised that Catherine, like Anne Boleyn before her, could be used to revive Howard fortunes at Court. Her looks clearly appealed to the King and she had age on her side. She was naturally vivacious, devoid of guile and pliable in a way Anne Boleyn had never been. She also seemed to be the embodiment of virginal innocence, brought up away from the Court and, so it was thought, unsullied by its vices.

All was not left to chance. Henry VIII was invited to a series of ‘feastings and entertainments’ at Lambeth and at Stephen Gardiner’s home in Southwark. Catherine was given new clothes and a tutorial in ‘how to behave’ and ‘in what sort to entertain the King’s Highness’. Henry was smitten and he didn’t care who knew. In April 1540 he granted Catherine all the goods and chattels of two indicted criminals and, as the summer approached, the talk at Court was of little other than the prospect of a second Howard Queen.
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Norfolk was finally in a position to manoeuvre against Cromwell.
Their rivalry was not just about policy; it was personal, it was deadly and it was dirty. Cromwell had tried on several occasions to engineer the destruction of the Howards, most dangerously during the Pilgrimage of Grace and most recently after the execution of the Marquis of Exeter in December 1538, when news had reached Norfolk that Cromwell had examined Exeter’s wife ‘more straitly of me than of all other men in the realm’.
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Outwardly Norfolk bore the face of friendship. Indeed he was shamelessly unctuous, assuring his enemy in 1535 that ‘you shall ever find me a faithful, assured friend, grudge who will’, while in March 1539 he informed Cromwell that it was no longer necessary for him to address him as ‘Your Grace’ in his letters ‘for surely it is not convenient that one of your sort should so do’.
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All the while, though, Norfolk was biding his time.

Building on the King’s keen sense of betrayal over the Cleves match and his suspicions over Cromwell’s motives in promoting it, Norfolk and Stephen Gardiner (who hated Cromwell just as much, if not more, than the Duke) laid charges of religious radicalism at Cromwell’s door. Had Cromwell’s Injunctions, they enquired, not led to dangerous iconoclasm and radical preaching? Was not Cromwell protecting, nay patronising, heretics in Calais and at home? At first it seemed as though Cromwell would escape. On 18 April the King made him Earl of Essex and Lord Great Chamberlain. But the seeds of doubt had been planted in Henry’s mind; Gardiner and Norfolk cultivated them with further poison and Catherine Howard did her part, mingling a little sweetness with the gall.

On 10 June 1540 Cromwell entered the Council Chamber for the last time. He was arrested by the Captain of the Guard. The Duke of Norfolk, who had been calmly awaiting Cromwell’s arrival, rose from his seat, approached his foe and triumphantly ripped the badge of St George from his collar. Then the King’s chief minister, his Vice-Gerent in Spirituals, Chancellor of the Exchequer, Lord Privy Seal and Lord Great Chamberlain, was bundled into a boat and swept off to the Tower. He was charged with the treason of threatening to take up arms in defence of his faith and of Sacramentarianism (the denial of the real presence in the Eucharist), a crime ‘which is, if anything can be worse, more heinous than treason’.
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Other accusations exposed the rank snobbery of the traditional nobility. Cromwell was accused of subverting the natural order by assuming a level of power inappropriate for one of ‘very base and low degree’. He had then compounded that crime by
treating his social superiors with ‘great disdain’ and was thus guilty of
scandalum magnatum
, the abuse of the nobility.
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Writing from the Tower with a ‘heavy heart and trembling hand’, Cromwell protested his innocence and begged the King for ‘mercy, mercy, mercy’.
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He did not even get a trial. Condemned by an act of attainder, the method of persecution that he himself had so favoured, Cromwell was executed at Tower Hill on 28 July 1540. Surrey refused to mask his jubilation: ‘Now is that foul churl dead, so ambitious of other blood; now is he stricken with his own staff!’ Rebuked by his cousin, Sir Edmund Knyvet, for speaking ill of the dead, Surrey retorted that ‘new erected men’ like Cromwell deserved no respect, for they ‘would, by their wills, leave no nobleman on life’.
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The same day that Cromwell lost his head, Henry VIII married Catherine Howard. A frisky young filly had replaced the frumpy ‘Flanders Mare’, and Henry was said to be ‘so amorous of her that he cannot treat her well enough and caresses her more than he did the others’. The French ambassador was stunned by the transformation in Henry: ‘I, for one, have never seen the King in such good spirits or in so good a humour as he is at present.’ There was a new spring in his step, he woke up earlier than usual and hunted every day. In the evenings there was singing and dancing and great feasts; ‘nothing is talked of except rejoicings and amusements.’
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Catherine behaved, and was treated, like a spoilt child. ‘The King,’ it was said, ‘had no wife who made him spend so much money in dresses and jewels as she did.’ Every day Catherine had ‘some fresh caprice’ and every day Henry indulged it.
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Nor did Catherine forget her family. Innocently scattered among her requests for clothes and jewels were petitions for treats and favours for her kin. Finally Surrey began to reap what he felt was a long-delayed harvest. On 21 July 1540 the King gave him a purple jacket and doublet, woven with gold and silver tinsel. On 8 September Surrey and his father were appointed conjointly to the stewardship of Cambridge University and in October, he was made a Justice of the Peace for Norfolk. The following spring Surrey was dubbed a Knight.
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Soon afterwards an even greater distinction was bestowed upon the twenty-four-year-old Earl. On 23 April 1541 he was elected to the Order of the Garter.

Founded in 1348 by Edward III, the Order of the Garter embodied the chivalric ideals of King Arthur’s Knights of the Round Table. It
comprised twenty-five ‘noble and valiant Knights’ and the English sovereign. Their patron saint was St George and their motto, which was inscribed on the garter worn around the left leg, was ‘Honi soit qui mal y pense’ (evil be to him who evil thinks). Windsor Castle was the seat of the Order and in the quire of the Chapel of St George there were twenty-six stalls, thirteen on either side. Each bore the arms of its possessor and was hung with his banner, sword and helmet. To be a Knight of the Most Noble Order of the Garter meant being a ‘chevalier sans reproche’ and a ‘friend, brother and companion’ of the King. There was no greater honour in England.

Every year on St George’s Day a Chapter of the Order was held and whenever there was a vacancy (by death or disgrace), each Knight proposed nine men for election. The candidate with the most nominations usually qualified for the empty stall, but the ultimate arbiter was the King, who ‘shall pronounce him elected who is supported by the most votes
or
whom the sovereign himself shall judge more worthy, more honourable, more useful and more fit for his Kingdom and Crown’.
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In Surrey’s case, every single Knight nominated him and the King, no doubt encouraged by his wife and perhaps also mindful of Surrey’s recent exploits at the May tournament, was only too happy to ratify the vote.
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