Henry VIII's Last Victim (27 page)

Immediately after his election, Surrey was invested with the Garter. He gave a short speech of thanks, took the cross that was offered to him and kissed it. Then the Garter was buckled to his left leg with the words:

Sir, the most friendly Companions of this Order denominated from the Garter have now admitted you their Friend, Brother and Companion, in faithful testimony of which, they impart and give you the Garter, which God grant that you deservedly receiving it, may rightly wear and use to the glory of God, the honour of the most famous Order and of your own.
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Before Surrey could become a fully fledged Knight Companion, he had to take possession of his stall at St George’s Chapel. This involved an elaborate ceremony scheduled for 22 May. In the interim, ‘for their pastime and disport’, he and Sir Thomas Seymour were sent across the Channel to observe Sir William Fitzwilliam, Earl of Southampton, and Lord John Russell quell a border dispute.
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Niggling squabbles between the French garrison at Ardres and the English garrison at Guisnes were commonplace, but on this occasion the ‘taunts and bravadoes’ between
the two camps threatened to get out of hand. It had flared up at the end of 1540 when, according to one English chronicle, ‘the French King made a strong castle at Ardres, and also a bridge over into the English Pale, which bridge the crew of Calais did beat down, and the Frenchmen built it up again, but the Englishmen beat it down again.’ Henry VIII and Francis I both sent reinforcements and soon rumours abounded of great armies arrayed throughout the region.
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Surrey and the English delegation arrived in Calais at four o’clock on 5 May 1541. They immediately began to inspect the town’s fortifications, raise musters and send men and munitions over to Guisnes. Two days later they rode to Guisnes themselves and made a great show of armed strength. Further inspections were made, the castle and town were surveyed and a small military parade was held in the town ‘in two bands, with standards, drums and fifes’. Having shown that they had no intention of shying from battle should the French so provoke them, the English then made friendly overtures to the French governor, Monsieur du Biez. Gifts of venison and bacon were exchanged, hunting and dinner parties were arranged and, one evening, du Biez’s servant was treated to an impressive display of English wrestling. ‘We wished Your Majesty had been there to see them,’ Southampton and Russell wrote to Henry VIII; ‘you should have seen one give another such a hard thwack and fall to the ground that for the time the breath would out of the body. And yet when he came to himself again, he was ready.’ Within days the status quo was restored. ‘Where nothing but war was talked of,’ the French ambassador in London enthused, now ‘there is no mention but of wishing to live at peace.’
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On his return to England Surrey went shopping. For his formal installation into the Order of the Garter he needed a blue ceremonial robe (the mantle), a black velvet cap with feathers, a gold chain of knots and roses (the collar) and an image of St George designed to hang from the collar. He also had to buy a helm, crest, surcoat and banner of his arms to be set over his stall, a stall plate, and a cushion to lay his mantle and collar upon. Surrey was determined to look good and, despite his miserable finances, bought a collar that was suitably flamboyant. It weighed thirty-six ounces, six more than the maximum prescribed by the Statutes of the Order, and the appendant George was encrusted with ten diamonds.
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The day before the ceremony Surrey attended a dinner at Sheen. It was hosted by Edward Seymour, who had been elected to the Order
earlier in the year. His guests included Surrey’s fellow Knight Elect Sir John Gage, the King’s deputy for the following day the Earl of Sussex, and the Earl of Rutland, who was charged with assisting Sussex. Over a meal of stockfish, ling, pike, sole, salmon, whiting, plaice and mackerel, Surrey was talked through the following day’s proceedings.
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After dinner they all rode to Windsor Castle.

The next day Surrey was led in procession to St George’s Chapel. After the deputy’s commission was read out, Surrey was conducted into the Chapter House, where his cloak was removed and replaced with a surcoat ‘in token or sign of the most honourable Order you have received’. He was then girded with his sword and led, bareheaded, into the quire. Standing in the lower stalls and supported on either side by a Knight Companion, Surrey placed his right hand on the New Testament and took the oath of allegiance. He swore to ‘help, keep, defend and sustain . . . the honour, quarrels, rights and dominions of the King’ and to ‘well and truly accomplish, and keep, and entertain all the statutes, points, articles and ordinances of the said Order’. This done, he ascended to his stall, which was the fifth on the sovereign’s side. The supporting Knights received Surrey’s mantle from the Garter herald and placed it over the Earl’s shoulders. Then they took his collar and hung it over the mantle with the words:

To the increase of your honour, and in token of the Honourable Order you have received, take this collar about your neck with the Image of the Holy Martyr and Christ’s Knight, St George, by whose aid you, being defended, may pass through the prosperities and adversities of this world; that having here the Victory, as well of your ghostly as bodily enemies, you may not only receive the glory and renown of temporal Chivalry, but also at the last the endless and everlasting reward of Victory.

Finally, Surrey was handed the Book of Statutes and was allowed to put on his cap. He made a low bow to the altar, then to the King’s stall, and was formally placed by his supporters into his own stall. The Earl of Surrey was now a full Knight of the Order of the Garter. All that remained was the great Feast of St George held later that day in the castle.
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During this period of advancement Surrey was also made cupbearer to the King.
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He shared the post with Lord Hastings and Sir Francis
Bryan and they took it in turns to attend upon Henry at his meals, ensuring that his cup was always full. It was not a menial role, but a highly valued ceremonial position. Henry VIII was, after all, God’s representative on Earth and Supreme Head of the Church of England. Attendance on his person, his ‘sacred flesh’, was seen as a privilege and an honour.
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As a member of the King’s dining service, Surrey was entitled to a wage and ‘bouche of Court’ – lodgings wherever the Court happened to be and a provision of candles, fuel, food and drink. Given his perennial lack of funds, this was a welcome perk, but even more valuable was the entrée it gave him to the Court. When previously he had had to rely on royal licence to come to Court, now he had regular access not only to the Court but also to the King and, hopefully, his ear.

Surrey was not the only Howard to be honoured. His sister Mary became a member of Catherine’s household, receiving bouche of Court in her own right. Catherine’s brother, Charles Howard, was made a gentleman of the King’s Privy Chamber and the Duke of Norfolk’s brother-in-law by marriage, Robert Radcliffe, Earl of Sussex, succeeded Cromwell as Lord Great Chamberlain. Norfolk himself was increasingly at the King’s side, though the French ambassador overstated the case when he claimed that the Duke ‘nowadays has the chief management of affairs’.
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Henry VIII did not allow Norfolk to fill the vacuum left by Cromwell. He had resolved never again to allow one man to achieve the status of a Wolsey or a Cromwell. Instead he kept a much closer eye on the government of his realm. The Act of Precedence of 1539 and the conciliar reforms of 1540 may have increased the aristocratic composition of the Privy Council, but they also emphasised the nobility’s reliance on royal favour and succeeded in harnessing noble power ever more tightly to that of the Crown. Thus the Howards were more than ever dependent on the favour of the King at a time when Henry was at his most volatile. On 18 January 1541 the French ambassador, Charles de Marillac, submitted a report to Francis I:

I do not recollect having ever seen these people so crestfallen as they are at present, for they do not know whom to trust, and the King himself, having offended so many people, mistrusts everyone. There is still another unfortunate circumstance mixed up with the King’s irresolution and despondency, which is that whenever he conceives the least suspicion he will go on dipping his hands in blood, from which no good can come in the end.
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The most extreme manifestation of this ‘irresolution and despondency’ had occurred only two days after Cromwell’s beheading when three reformers and three conservatives were executed on the same day, the former for heresy, the latter for the treason of remaining faithful to the Pope. ‘It was wonderful to see adherents to the two opposing parties dying at the same time,’ Marillac wrote, ‘and it gave offence to both . . . It is difficult to have a people entirely opposed to new errors which does not hold with the ancient authority of the Church and of the Holy See, or, on the other hand, hating the Pope, which does not share some opinions with the Germans. Yet the Government will not have either the one or the other but insists on their keeping what is commanded, which is so often altered that it is difficult to understand what it is.’ According to Marillac, Henry was now so unpredictable that he was changing his mind from breakfast to dinner. He was even said to be blaming his councillors for the destruction of Cromwell, ‘saying that, upon light pretexts, by false accusations, they made him put to death the most faithful servant he ever had’.
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All this was encouraging news for Cromwell’s old followers. Their master may have gone, but the years he had spent packing the royal household ensured that a strong core survived his fall. These men were appalled by the thought of a Howard ascendancy. On 15 September 1540 John Lascelles met with two friends called Jonson and Maxey in the King’s Great Chamber. All three were favourers of ‘God’s holy word’ and together they lamented the loss of Cromwell, ‘so noble a man which did love and favour it so well’. They discussed Norfolk and Stephen Gardiner’s opposition to reform and Maxey exclaimed that the Duke ‘was not ashamed to say that he never read of Scriptures nor never would read it and that it was merry in England afore the New Learning came up [and] that he would all things were as it hath been in times past’. Lascelles pondered the implications of these revelations for a while and then approached Mr Smithwick, a colleague who was impatient for reform. ‘Be not too rash or quick in maintaining the Scripture,’ Lascelles advised, ‘for if we would let them [the conservatives] alone and suffer a little time, they would (I doubt not) overthrow themselves standing manifestly against God and their Prince as by manifest conjectures I might perceive.’ Lascelles then filled Smithwick in on what Maxey had told him and added another story that he had heard about the Duke. Apparently Norfolk had rebuked a man in the Exchequer for having married a nun. ‘My Lord,’ the man had replied, ‘I know no
nuns nor religious folk in this realm nor no such bondage seeing God and the King have made them free.’ Norfolk had reacted angrily. Clapping his hand to his heart, he reportedly spluttered: ‘By God’s body sacred, it will never out of my heart as long as I live!’ The implication, as Lascelles and Smithwick took it, was that Norfolk had declared against the dissolution of the monasteries.

The following morning, as Lascelles had no doubt intended, Smithwick scurried to one ‘Mr. Hare’ and asked him if there might be a case for verbal treason against the Duke. Hare replied ‘that it were meet and convenient to declare [Norfolk’s words] to the King’s Majesty’s Council’. Then, as Lascelles later testified, Smithwick came to him ‘forthwith’ and said ‘that if I would not declare them to the King’s Council, he would’. Lascelles replied that ‘I was as ready to do my duty of allegiance as he’ and accordingly submitted his report.
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Nothing came of this attempt to destroy Norfolk. In getting Smithwick to do his dirty work, Lascelles had probably feared as much. But he continued to intrigue against the Duke and the conservatives and his conniving eventually paid off, for it was Lascelles who first triggered the enquiry into the behaviour of Catherine Howard.

Catherine had initially revelled in her status as Queen. The gifts, the clothes, the jewels, the new respect, the demands that were actually met, the sycophants, the adoration, the adulation – this was heady stuff for a girl just out of her teens. But with the privileges had come the duties, not least the sharing of the King’s bed. Henry was fat, balding and lecherous and his body was in a state of decay. Catherine had to lie beneath this wheezing, sweating hulk as the foetid bandages, saturated with pus from his suppurating ulcers, sponged her legs. Nor was this all she had to endure. Henry’s intense mood swings could be frightening. In the spring of 1541, following complications with his ulcers and a nasty fever, Henry fell into a black depression and took himself off to Hampton Court. Not even Catherine was granted access and the music and entertainments arranged for the Lenten festivities were cancelled.

The new season heralded a new disposition. Exhilarated by the prospect of a summer progress to the North of England, Henry became as jolly as he had been at the beginning of the marriage. Catherine, though, had already begun to stray. Throughout the progress she held clandestine meetings with Thomas Culpepper, a Gentleman of the Privy Chamber. Once the King was safely in his bed, Catherine’s maid would
usher Culpepper up the privy stairs and into her mistress’ Chamber. One assignation was even conducted in that most intimate of places, the Stool Chamber, where the Queen’s lavatory was housed. Catherine knew she was taking great risks; on one occasion she and Culpepper were almost discovered by the night-watchman. But she persisted with the trysts and even teased Culpepper that ‘she had store of other lovers at other doors as well as he’.
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That Catherine was so brazen may have had something to do with the fact that she had succeeded in deceiving Henry long before Culpepper came onto the scene. For unbeknownst to her husband, Catherine’s past had been far from innocent.