Henry VIII's Last Victim (48 page)

A few days later Mary and Bess arrived in London for their interviews. Their depositions have not survived, but they were seen in the seventeenth century by Lord Herbert of Cherbury, who abstracted them into his
Life and Raigne of King Henry the Eighth
:

Mrs Elizabeth Holland, being deposed, confessed that the Duke had told her that none of the King’s Council loved him because they were no noblemen born themselves as also because he believed too truly in the Sacrament of the Altar.

Moreover, that the King loved him not because he was too much loved in his country, but that he would follow his father’s lesson, which was that the less others set by him, the more he would set by himself.

As also that the Duke complained that he was not of the most secret (or, as it is there termed, the privy Privy) Council and that the King was much grown of his body and that he could not go up and down the stairs, but was let up and down by a device. And that His Majesty was sickly and could not long endure, and the realm like to be in an ill case through diversity of opinions.
²¹

This was little more than pillow talk, hardly evidence of a
coup d’état
. The Council seems to have suspected Norfolk of bearing an illegal coat of arms. Questioned about this, Bess denied that she had heard the Duke speak of his own arms, but admitted he had ‘found fault’ with his son’s heraldic experiments. ‘He liked them not,’ Bess said, and ‘knew not from whence’ they came. He had said that Surrey had ‘placed the Norfolk arms wrong’ and had told Bess to refuse to ‘work them with her needle’. In conclusion, ‘she confessed that the Earl of Surrey loved her not’ and that his sister Mary loved him not and that Bess ‘addicted herself much’ to Mary.

The Council then turned to Mary. She admitted that she had argued
with her brother over her proposed marriage to Thomas Seymour and that he had advised her ‘to endear herself so into the King’s favour as she might the better rule here as others had done’. She also confessed that Surrey had been ‘much incensed’ against Edward Seymour and that he had once said: ‘these new men loved no nobility and, if God called away the King, they should smart for it.’ Ever since his confinement at Windsor Castle in 1537, Mary continued, Surrey had ‘hated’ all new men. Norfolk, on the other hand, ‘seemed not to care for their ill will, saying his truth should bear him out’.

Like Bess, Mary was ordered to declare anything strange or untoward in her father or her brother’s armorial bearings. According to Herbert’s abstract, Mary ‘said that she thought that her brother had more than seven rolls’. She claimed that he had added the arms of Anjou and Lancelot du Lac to some of his escutcheons and had also assumed his attainted grandfather’s Woodstock arms. Furthermore, he had ‘put to his arms a cap of maintenance, purple with powdered fur, and with a crown, to her judgement, much like to a close crown and underneath the arms was a cipher, which she took to be the King’s cipher,
HR
’. Mary added that ‘her father never said that the King hated him, but his councillors’, though Surrey had said that ‘the King was displeased with him (as he thought) for the loss of the great journey [at St Etienne], which displeasure he conceived was set forward by them who hated him for setting up an altar in the church at Boulogne.’ She also claimed that Surrey had ‘dissuaded her from going too far in reading the Scripture’, that he had said ‘God long save my father’s life for, if he were dead, they would shortly have my head’ and that ‘he reviled some of the present Council’. According to Herbert, Mary repeated other ‘passionate words of her brother’ and also ‘some circumstantial speeches little for his advantage; yet so, as they seemed, much to clear her father’.
²²

More depositions soon followed.
²³
Sir Edmund Knyvet, whose late mother Muriel was the Duke of Norfolk’s younger sister, claimed to know ‘no untruth directly by the Earl of Surrey, but suspected him of dissimulation and vanity’. He recalled that he had recently left Kenninghall after his ‘unnatural’ uncle had refused to support him in a private quarrel. Surrey had subsequently enquired into his absence and, when told by Knyvet that ‘the burden of their malice’ was too hard to bear, Surrey had replied, ‘No, no, cousin Knyvet, I malice not so low; my malice is higher; my malice climbs higher.’ Knyvet added
that Surrey felt threatened by the ‘new erected men’ of the Court, that he kept Italians in his household and ‘loved to converse with strangers and to conform his behaviour to them’. In this, Knyvet suspected, ‘he had therein some ill device’.
²⁴

Sir Edward Warner was next. Like Knyvet and Southwell, he hailed from Norfolk. Unlike them, he was the dedicatee of one of Surrey’s poems, one of his best in fact: a beautiful translation of Martial’s epigram advocating the ‘happy life’, the ‘quiet mind’ and the ‘equal friend’.
²⁵
Warner was ordered by Secretary Paget to reveal all he knew about Surrey’s armorial bearings and ‘to put in writing all such words and communications as hath heretofore been betwixt me and the Earl of Surrey that might in any wise touch the King’s Highness and his posterity, or of any other person, what I have heard of the said Earl that might in any wise tend to the same effect.’ Warner recalled that Richard Devereux had told him the previous summer that Surrey’s championing of his father’s right to the protectorate might be reported to the King – ‘whereupon, I looked every day to see him in the case that he is now in which, me thought, with those words, he well deserved.’ But Warner stressed that he had never heard anything from Surrey himself ‘that was any prejudice to the King’s Majesty or his posterity’.
²⁶

Edward Rogers also lacked first-hand evidence against Surrey. He did, however, reveal the substance of the Earl’s arguments with Blagge and Mary. The former he claimed to have heard from Blagge himself, the latter from Sir Gawain Carew, who confirmed the story in his own deposition. Carew added that Surrey had once said to him: ‘Note those men which are made by the King’s Majesty of vile birth hath been the distraction of all the nobility of this realm’ – a statement that the Earl reinforced by claiming that both Cardinal Wolsey and Thomas Cromwell had ‘by diverse means sought the death of his father’.
²⁷

Next a spy called John Torre, who had defected to Francis I in the 1530s and had been attempting to prove his allegiance to Henry VIII ever since, testified that the
Duke of Norfolk used to pay secret nocturnal visits to the French ambassador.
²⁸
There was nothing sinister here. Norfolk had gone to the French ambassador’s house in the past, but with the full knowledge, indeed on the orders, of Henry VIII.
²⁹
That this testimony was taken down and placed in the records suggests a certain amount of straw-clutching on the part of the Council. According to Lord Herbert of Cherbury, Thomas Pope’s allegation against the Duke of Norfolk from the time of the Pilgrimage of Grace was also dredged up and even Surrey’s mother, who offered up all her old grievances against her estranged husband, ‘was not unwillingly heard’.
³⁰

‘When a man is imprisoned in the Tower,’ the French ambassador once observed, ‘there is no one living that dare meddle with his affairs or open his mouth, unless to speak ill of him, for fear of being suspected of the same crime.’
³¹
Despite this, and the fact that he had a young family to protect, Surrey’s servant Hugh Ellis refused to buckle under the pressure of Wriothesley’s interrogations.
³²
To the charge that Surrey had counselled his sister to become the King’s concubine, Ellis quipped: ‘I never knew them so great together [for Surrey] to wish her so good a turn’, adding ‘by my faith and truth to God and the King’s Majesty, that in my remembrance I did never see with him the countenance of any such purpose.’ Nor, Ellis insisted, had he ever heard Surrey mention the King’s death or the future protectorate, nor had Surrey spoken against any of the Lords of the Council, except for John Dudley, to whom ‘he did write his mind in a letter’, and Richard Rich, who had earned Surrey’s scorn by turning up at Hardilot Castle in France ‘in his best apparel’. Asked ‘whether you have heard him say that the King’s Majesty loved him not or such like words and what purpose he held of the same’, Ellis replied candidly that ‘after the overthrow of the great skirmish at St Etienne, if ever I heard him say he had the King’s Majesty’s displeasure or disfavour, it was then; for the which, ever since, he hath taken great thought.’
³³

Although the Public Record Office only contains the original depositions of Knyvet, Rogers, Torre and Ellis (the two given by Warner are unsigned and Carew’s is in a modern hand), we can be sure that more were taken down at the time. Apart from Torre’s, all the original depositions are numbered. Knyvet’s was 7, Ellis’ 19 and Rogers’ 22. Others have clearly been lost or removed. Mary Howard, Bess Holland and Richard Southwell definitely gave statements. One would assume that George Blagge would have been questioned over his quarrel with Surrey. Mary Shelton, too, was surely worth investigating after Southwell’s tip that she knew ‘many secrets’ of Surrey’s. A page also seems to have been expurgated from Richard Fulmerston’s statement and there is no longer any sign of the ‘two chests full of evidence and other writings of the Duke’ that were discovered in a closet at Kenninghall.
³⁴
There was also once a ‘bag of books . . . wherein were contained writings
concerning the attainder of the Duke of Norfolk and the Earl of Surrey’. An entry in the Privy Council register for 5 July 1547 reveals that the bag had been given to the Master of the Rolls ‘to peruse’. He had then delivered it, ‘sealed with his seal’, to the members of the Privy Council, who ordered that it ‘be bestowed in the Study at Westminster Palace, where other records do lie’.
³⁵
It was never seen again. It is interesting, and perhaps instructive, to note that the Master of the Rolls at this time was Sir Robert Southwell, brother of Richard.

Surrey was convinced that he was the victim of a conspiracy. ‘Rein those unbridled tongues!’ he wrote from the Tower in his paraphrase of psalm 55, ‘break that conjured league!’
³⁶
But he too had secrets at which we can now only grasp blindly. Who, for example, is ‘Friowr’, who appears at the end of the same paraphrase, but is nowhere in the Vulgate?

Friowr, whose harm and tongue presents the wicked sort

Of those false wolves, with coats which do their ravin hide,

That swear to me by heaven, the footstool of the Lord,

Who though force had hurt my fame, they did not touch my life:

Such patching
^fn2
care I loathe as feeds the wealth with lies.
³⁷

It is usually supposed that Surrey was referring either to a friar from one of the dissolved orders or to someone whose surname was Friowr, or Fryer, as it would more commonly be spelt. Yet no conclusive identification has been made.
³⁸
Surrey’s reference could be to any one of the turncoats who had abetted his fall. It was commonplace in medieval and early modern literature for friars to be represented as hypocrites, wolves in sheep’s clothing, and ‘the image of disguised wolves who “raven” the innocent sheep has its source in Christ’s warning against “false prophets” in Matthew 7.15’.
³⁹
Surrey may have had the same person in mind when he wrote twenty lines earlier:

It was a friendly foe, by shadow of good will,

Mine old fere
^fn3
and dear friend, my guide, that trapped me;

Where I was wont to fetch the cure of all my care,

And in his bosom hide my secret zeal to God.
⁴⁰

Other mysteries are contained in Surrey’s verse letter to Sir Thomas Radcliffe – a friend and cousin of his, but also the son-in-law of Chancellor Wriothesley – who remained at Court over Christmas.
⁴¹
Surrey begins his six-line poem with some advice drawn from his own bitter experience:

My Ratclif, when thy reckless youth offends,

Receive thy scourge by others’ chastisement;

For such calling, when it works none amends,

Then plagues are sent without advertisement.

But the final couplet harbours a warning:

Yet Solomon said, the wronged shall recure
^fn4
;

But Wyatt said true, the scar doth aye
^fn5
endure.
⁴²

This precept alerts Radcliffe to a
strambotto
written by Sir Thomas Wyatt in 1541 to his fellow ambassador and friend, Sir Francis Bryan. It was penned in the Tower following Wyatt’s sudden, and probably unjust, arrest for treason (‘Innocency is all the hope I have’). Wyatt and Bryan had liaised closely on their respective embassies to Spain and France and shared many secrets. ‘Sure I am, Bryan,’ Wyatt wrote, ‘this wound shall heal again / But yet, alas, the scar shall still remain.’
⁴³
Bryan was a poet himself and, like Wyatt, he knew his proverbs and his Bible. Wyatt’s message, drawn from the Book of Ecclesiasticus, was therefore clear:

As for wounds, they may be bound up again and an evil word may be reconciled: but who so bewrayeth the secrets of a friend, there is no more hope to be had unto him.
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