Henry VIII's Last Victim (43 page)

It was no accident that William Paget had risen from humble beginnings to become Henry VIII’s Principal Secretary. He was an astute observer, an excellent judge of character and an extremely subtle manipulator. In an age of suspicion, Paget was trusted. Both conservatives and reformers claimed him as one of their own. As one contemporary put it, he ‘will have one part in every pageant if he may by praying or paying put in his foot’.
²⁸
Paget knew exactly how to handle people, empathising with their problems one moment, playing on their insecurities the next. Even when he had to get tough – and as Henry VIII’s mouthpiece this was fairly often – he did so with such reluctance and proceeded to offer such sound advice that his recipients were usually persuaded that he had their best interests at heart. All these techniques are evident in the above-cited letter and they were deployed again on 20 February 1546, when Paget wrote to inform Surrey of Seymour’s appointment as Lieutenant General. The two extant drafts of Paget’s letter are full of crossings-out and insertions, revealing that considerable care was taken in its composition. Initially, he empathises with Surrey: ‘I fear your authority of Lieutenant shall be touched for I believe that the later ordering of a Lieutenant taketh away the commission of him that was there before.’ Then he works on the Earl’s sense of honour:

Now, my Lord, because you have been pleased I should write mine advice to your Lordship in things concerning your honour or benefit, I could no less do than put you in remembrance how much in mine opinion this shall touch your honour if you should pass the thing over in silence until the very time of my Lord of Hertford’s [Seymour’s] coming over thither, for so should both your authority be taken away, as I fear is Boulonnais,
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and also it should fortune ye to come abroad without any place of estimation in the field, which the world would much muse at and, though there be no such matter, think you were rejected upon occasion of some either negligence or inexperience or such other like fault – for so many heads so many judgements.

Instead, Paget advises, Surrey should apply to the King for a post in the new army – ‘the Captainship of the foreward, or rearward, or to such other place of honour as should be meet for you, for so should you be where knowledge and experience will be gotten.’ Indeed, Paget continues – and here we see him at the height of his skills – with a position of command in the army, ‘you should the better be able hereafter to serve and also have peradventure occasion to do some notable service in revenge of your men at the last encounter with the enemies, which should be to your reputation in the world’.
^fn2
Hitherto, Paget states, Surrey has been regarded as ‘a man of a noble courage and of a desire to show the same to the face of your enemies’. But, he warns, ‘if you should now tarry at home within a wall, having I doubt [not] a show of your authority touched, it would be thought abroad, I fear, that either you were desirous to tarry in a sure place of rest or else that the credit of your courage and forwardness to serve were diminished and that you were taken here for a man of none activity or service.’ Of course Surrey will ever remain Paget’s ‘special good Lord’. The King’s Secretary will fight Surrey’s corner and ‘if it shall please you to use me as a mean to His Majesty, I trust so to set forth the matter to His Majesty as he shall take the same in gracious part and be contented to appoint you to such a place as may best stand with your honour.’
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Surrey took the bait, as Paget knew he would, and five days later he was named Captain of the Rearward.
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The theatre of conflict would soon move north to the port of Ambleteuse, where the English were preparing a camp, and to Marquise, where the French planned to erect a new fort. Seymour was expected towards the end of March and Surrey kept up a stream of correspondence informing the King and Council
of enemy movements. Otherwise it was business as usual in Boulogne. Surrey continued to petition the King for the payment and provisioning of his men; he persevered with the fortification of the Old Man, Base Boulogne and High Boulogne and he persisted in his efforts to prevent supplies from entering the French fort. But it was a wretched time for him and St Etienne never strayed far from his mind. On 13 February he wrote to the King, ‘assuring Your Highness that the service here is more accident to losses than in any other place where Your Majesty is served’. The following month, having reported a successful skirmish against the French, Surrey concluded wryly: ‘now I see that the Frenchmen can run as fast away up the hill as the Englishmen not long ago ran down.’
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There were sure signs now that he had lost favour with the King. His renewed petition for Frances to be allowed to join him in Boulogne was denied on the grounds that the King thought the new campaign ‘will bring some trouble and disquietness unmeet for women’s imbecilities’.
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Increasingly Surrey was isolated from the decision-making process. On 10 February he recommended one Crofts as Lieutenant of the Old Man, ‘assuring Your Highness that his service hath been such, both for his diligence and hardiness, that he meriteth’ such a post. It went to Thomas Audley.
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On 8 March Surrey was informed that because of the ‘uncertainty’ of his opinions, he would henceforth have to relinquish control of all the fortifications in Boulogne to the surveyor John Rogers.
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In a letter to the Council of Calais on 2 March, Surrey admitted that ‘I have received from His Majesty no letters of like effect as you have done’, and a week later he wrote to the Privy Council, informing them that one thousand sappers had arrived in Boulogne ‘and we, having none advertisement from your good Lordships thereof, know not how to use the same’.
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To his credit, Surrey continued to serve the King with zeal, but it was increasingly apparent that he was deemed a liability, especially now that Henry VIII was considering the prospect of peace. When once Paget had ended his letters to Surrey with a hearty flourish – on 25 September 1545, for example, he prayed to God for Surrey ‘to be as good a captain as ever was and as good a man withal’ – now he signed off with weary dispassion: ‘And now, having answered to all your things, I take my leave of you and pray God to send you to do no worse than I do wish you.’
³⁶

On 22 March 1546 Seymour landed in Calais. A day or two later
Surrey received a letter from the Privy Council recalling him to England. He had previously expressed some concern about the state of the fortifications in Boulogne and this was used as the pretext for the summons – ‘considering that you cannot be so well able in writing to express your mind in these matters to the understanding of His Majesty as if you were here present to say, and hear again, what can be said in that behalf.’
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The news of Surrey’s imminent return was greeted with joy at Kenninghall, still his main residence despite his attempts to get Surrey House up and running. Hadrianus Junius, the children’s tutor, set one of them the task of composing a welcoming epistle in Latin. The result is highly stylised and reveals the strong influence of Junius, whose own letters are cloyed with floridity and hyperbole. But there is also a childlike sweetness to the letter and a touching reverence undiminished by recent events. As it is the only surviving letter addressed to Surrey from his children, it is worth quoting in full:

I do not know what words or what expressions to use in describing the enormous joy experienced by us, your children and dearest objects of your affections, by your most illustrious and heroic father, by your sister, the renowned Duchess, by that most glorious woman our mother, your wife, and finally by all your dependants and your whole household, at your unexpected but so greatly desired return, my most honoured father. Certainly our joy is so great that the strength of this little body of mine is inadequate to express it. In order to bear witness to it even these walls of our house would break into speech, unless this were forbidden by nature, and so it is that they reluctantly remain silent.

We try, without succeeding as much as we would wish, but at least to the limits of our abilities, to express the sure signs of our undoubted joy with words, gesture and facial expression and so to reveal the hidden seeds of our feelings. There are very proper reasons for us to do this: the demands of duty require it and our love towards our most deserving father calls for it in its own right. And so we all congratulate you on your return, you, my most loving father and the bravest of commanders, who have so many times killed and routed the French and emerged as victor over the most bitter enemies of the English race. In the words of all it is said that you have preserved the King’s interests with the greatest good faith that you could have applied.

You have battled hitherto against the stormy waves of war with amazing success to your own great glory, with great spirit, unbelievable bravery, equal prudence, the utmost toil and an outcome worthy of so great a hero, by opposing yourself to our enemies and driving them back by, as it were, thrusting your body against them like an invincible rampart guarding altars and hearths. We also congratulate the King, the father of our country, who, by his very act of choosing you as his Lieutenant in preference to all others, readily revealed how much he values your qualities; and now he rejoices that his judgement has been vindicated and that he has not been disappointed in his expectations. We also congratulate the whole Kingdom, because, resting as it does on the shoulders of Henry, our invincible and greatest King, and defended by his arms, it appears to have won a most illustrious name among foreign nations thanks to the efforts of you, a second Henry, whilst leaving nothing for the French except envy, lamentation, and a dread of yourself. I have spoken.
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,
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At Court, the reaction to Surrey’s return was less fulsome. On 28 March 1546 the special Imperial emissary recorded that ‘the Earl of Surrey, formerly Captain of Boulogne, arrived at Court yesterday, but was coldly received and did not have access to the King.’ Although Surrey had been demoted from his Lieutenancy, he was officially still Captain of Boulogne. But the reference to Surrey as ‘formerly Captain of Boulogne’ suggests otherwise. Sure enough, Surrey was ‘revoked’ two days later ‘from his late charge at Boulogne’.
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He was still confident of returning to the town after his audience with the King. He had left it in a hurry and needed to clear his ‘raw and uncertain’ accounts before the arrival of his successor as Captain, Lord Grey of Wilton. On 30 March Paget wrote to Seymour in France, informing him that ‘my Lord of Surrey shall within a day or two repair thither for five or six days for the ordering of his things there.’ Surrey
was also the nominal Captain of the Rearguard of the new army and the Council, after announcing Surrey’s revocation from Boulogne, confirmed that the Earl was ‘appointed otherwise to serve His Highness there’.
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But it was a charade. Surrey was not allowed to return to France and his position in the new army was conveniently forgotten.

On 7 April 1546 Surrey was granted, ‘for his services’, the manor of Wymondham, which he had previously only held for the duration of his father’s life.
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Yet he was far from placated. His restless lyrics, reckless behaviour and constant protestations of ‘the zeal that I bear to His Majesty’s service’
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all testify to an energy that could not be bridled. Now he was going to have to ‘tarry at home within a wall’ and, as Paget had insinuated in February, the Earl of Surrey deprived of command in France might no longer be seen as ‘a man of a noble courage’, but as ‘a man of none activity or service’.
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‘It may be here,’ Lord Herbert of Cherbury suspected, that ‘began his discontent which after undid him.’
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^fn1
Boulonnais
: the county to which the town of Boulogne belonged.

^fn2
Paget reworked this passage considerably. Originally it read: ‘you should the better be able hereafter to serve and also have peradventure occasion to do some notable service in revenge
OF THE LOSS
of your men at the last encounter
YOU HAD
with the enemies, which should be
BOTH GREATLY TO THE SATISFACTION OF HIS HIGHNESS AND THE REST HERE AND ALSO TO THE RECOVERY OF REPUTATION
in the world.’

^fn3
This letter was probably written by Jane who was nine years old. She was Surrey’s eldest child and the one who most clearly inherited his linguistic skills. When John Foxe took over from Junius as the children’s tutor the following year, he was so impressed by Jane’s knowledge of Greek and Latin that he thought ‘she might well stand in competition with the most learned men of that time, for the praise of elegancy in both’ (Foxe, I, p. 24).

   The congratulatory tone of the epistle has led some to suspect it was written before the Battle of St Etienne. However, Surrey is not known to have returned home before then. Some passages in the letter are perhaps suggestive of recent events – ‘your unexpected but so greatly desired return’; ‘you have battled hitherto [
hactenus
] against the stormy waves of war with amazing success’; ‘in the words of all it is said that you have preserved the King’s interests with the greatest good faith that you could have applied’. It is hardly surprising that there is no direct reference to St Etienne – even Paget was wary of mentioning it (see his letter of 20 Feb. 1546) – and it probably would have been downplayed to the children at the time.