Henry VIII's Last Victim (5 page)

At Court Buckingham was outspoken in his criticism of the King’s policies. He dismissed the Field of the Cloth of Gold – the Anglo-French extravaganza of 1520 at which Henry VIII had attempted, at considerable expense, to outshine his French counterpart – as ‘a conference of trivialities’. Once ordered to attend, however, he had made sure that he was the best dressed there. Above all, he derided the King’s chief minister, Cardinal Wolsey, and his carnificial background, labelling him a ‘Butcher’s Cur’.
²⁷

Henry VIII attempted to keep the nobility in line by following his father’s policy of containment. He needed their vast resources in order to wage wars, maintain law and order and project magnificence at Court, but he subjected them to strict regulation. The distribution of livery was limited, the retaining of followers licensed and ‘recognisances’ were imposed. These were bonds designed to ensure good behaviour on the part of the nobleman. If the King ruled that the bond had been broken, he could exact a monetary penalty. The Howards fell into line. Buckingham did not. In November 1520 he enraged the King by poaching one of his servants. When, in the same month, he requested permission to lead several hundred armed retainers into Wales, ostensibly to quell disorder there, it was suspected he might be planning
his own rebellion. When a servant, who had just been dismissed by Buckingham, stepped forward with information concerning the Duke’s treasonous muttering – notably that he threatened to stab and depose the King – his testimony was taken at face value.

Buckingham was charged with the treason of intending to assassinate the King, but the threat he had posed to Henry VIII had been less to his person than to the future of his dynasty. In 1521, after twelve years on the throne, the King still had no legitimate male heir. The Wars of the Roses were not so long ago that people had forgotten the havoc an insecure succession could wreak. Buckingham, a descendant of Edward III through both Thomas of Woodstock and John of Gaunt, was Henry VIII’s nearest living male relative in the Lancastrian line. For some time it had been whispered that ‘were the King to die without heirs male, he might easily obtain the Crown’.
²⁸
Buckingham’s real crime lay in stoking these flames when he should have sought by all means possible to quench them. He was executed on the morning of Friday, 17 May 1521. From the scaffold, he warned his fellow noblemen to take heed of his fate. Then the axe was wielded and, in three clumsy strokes, his head was severed from his body.
²⁹

Elizabeth Howard was devastated by her father’s death, made all the more painful because she had been marooned in Ireland at the time. She may also have felt betrayed by her husband’s family. In November Buckingham had written to the Duke and Duchess of Norfolk (Elizabeth’s parents-in-law), seeking guidance and support because ‘we have as great trust in them as any child they have’. But it had been Norfolk, as Lord Steward, who, with tears in his eyes, had pronounced the death sentence at Buckingham’s trial.
³⁰
It is likely, too, that Elizabeth blamed her husband. Buckingham himself certainly did. From the bar of the courtroom, he had launched a devastating attack on his son-in-law, stating, as Thomas Howard later recalled, ‘that of all men living he hated me most, thinking I was the man that had hurt him most to the King’s Majesty’.
³¹
It is hard to conceive how Thomas could have done much in Ireland to affect events in London, but he certainly would have had little inclination to help the man who so detested him. Elizabeth grieved alone, then, in the wilds of Ireland. When, the following year, both her father-in-law and her husband received a substantial portion of her father’s estate, it must have seemed as if they were dancing on his grave.
³²

Upon the execution of Buckingham, Elizabeth lost not only a father
but also a powerful protector. Consequently she had no one to fight for her when her marriage later disintegrated. The breakdown of the Howard marriage would become public only in 1534 when Thomas threw Elizabeth out of the house. Thenceforth the couple exchanged a devastating volley of insults. She accused him of sustained physical and mental abuse; he retorted that she was a hysterical fantasist. Amid all the accusations and counter-accusations, it is very difficult to ascertain the truth. Up until 1526, when Norfolk began to flout a mistress in front of his wife, there is no evidence of marital breakdown. Henry’s parents ate, travelled and appeared in public together. Towards the end of 1524, following a lengthy posting for Thomas in the North, both husband and wife wrote to Wolsey expressing their agitation at the prolonged separation.
³³
From the outside, then, it seemed as though the Howards had a perfectly conventional marriage. From within, however, it is possible that there had been tension from the outset.

Elizabeth had only been fifteen when she was courted by the recently widowed Thomas Howard. And she was in love with another. Ralph Neville, Earl of Westmorland, was one of her father’s wards. ‘He and I had loved together two years,’ she later claimed, and had it not been for Thomas sniffing about, ‘I [would have] been married afore Christmas to my Lord of Westmorland.’ Buckingham had tried to lure Thomas away from Elizabeth using his other daughters as bait, but Thomas ‘would have none of my sisters, but only me’.
³⁴
His persistence eventually paid off and in 1512 Elizabeth forsook her sweetheart and married her suitor.

Thomas’ relentless pursuit of Elizabeth had convinced her that ‘he chose me for love’.
³⁵
Despite the considerable age gap – at thirty-nine, he was older than her own father – she fully expected romance to blossom. Elizabeth was passably pretty, with soft features, light colouring and a distinguished forehead. Thomas may well have taken a fancy to her, but for him her chief assets lay elsewhere. Union with the Duke of Buckingham’s eldest daughter (her sisters being too young for childbirth) brought Howard wealth, power and prestige. That is why he married her and why, possibly even before the mistress came on the scene, Elizabeth felt cheated.

None of this was explained to their son Henry. Sixteenth-century children, especially aristocratic children, were not expected to ask intrusive personal questions, and certainly not of their parents. When they were both at home, Henry would join them for meals in his father’s
chamber. Sitting in obedient silence, he learnt how to gauge the mood from a subtle vocal inflection, a raised eyebrow, furrowed brow or frozen smile. As an adult Henry was hypersensitive both to his environment and the people within it. This trait could manifest itself creatively, as it did in his lyrics, but it also incurred self-destructive side-effects: he could be introspective (often seen as self-absorption) and frequently overreacted to perceived slights.

For vast tracts of his childhood, though, Henry’s parents were away from home. As Lord Admiral, Thomas Howard spent much of 1522 harrying the French coastline and between 1523 and 1524 he served against the Scots as the King’s Lieutenant in the North.
³⁶
One surviving household account, revealing all the comings and goings of the Howards from April 1523 to January 1524, shows that in that nine-month period, Henry’s father was home for only twenty-three days.
³⁷
His mother could boast a better record, but she too was absent for almost three months. As lady-in-waiting to Queen Catherine, she was frequently required at Court and, as Countess of Surrey, she had local duties to fulfil. On Saturday, 8 August 1523, for example, she ‘rode after breakfast’ from Tendring Hall, and returned in time for supper the following Tuesday. On such trips, she usually visited neighbouring estates, joined hunting parties or went on pilgrimages to East Anglia’s famous shrines.
³⁸

When his mother was home, Henry had daily contact with her, the two of them taking their breakfast together in her chamber. She was only twenty in 1523, but the lessons of life – notably, marriage to a man more than twice her age, the hardship of Ireland and the execution of her father – had forged a worldliness beyond her years. Like her father, she was high-minded and independent, sometimes recklessly so, but these were not traits that she wished to see in her children. A letter from Elizabeth to her brother, written in the 1540s, tells us something of her approach to parenting. In response to his request that one of his daughters be brought up in her household, Elizabeth replied:

I pray you to send me my niece Dorothy, for I am well acquainted with her conditions already, and so I am not with the others; and she is the youngest too; and if she be changed, therefore, she is better to break as concerning her youth.
³⁹

A strict disciplinarian, then, who believed in the suppression of wilfulness from an early age, but also someone committed to child rearing,
who wanted to be ‘well acquainted’ with their ‘conditions’. Thus, although Elizabeth’s duties at Court and in the county often precluded regular interaction with her children, this does not mean that she was not devoted to them. Years later, following the children’s decision to side with their father in the marriage dispute, Elizabeth complained of their ‘unnatural’ behaviour towards her.
⁴⁰
Her choice of word implies the prior existence of an innate bond that, for her part, she claimed always to have upheld.

Elizabeth’s approach to discipline was entirely in keeping with the age. God-fearing parents believed that wilfulness in children was a sign of the devil and that measures should be taken to lead them away from temptation. Parents were warned not to ‘let your children go whither they will, but know whither they go, in what company, and what they have done, good or evil’. They were discouraged from showing ‘much familiarity’ and were advised to ‘labour how to make them love and dread you, as well for love as for fear’. The Lord’s Commandments were drummed in from a very early age, none more so than the Fourth: ‘Honour thy father and thy mother’. When his parents were home, Henry would fall to his knees every morning and ask for their blessing. Only once they had made the sign of the cross – ‘In the name of the Father, Son and Holy Ghost, Amen’ – would he be permitted to rise.
⁴¹

The Howard household was linked by chains of hierarchy. Just as Henry had a duty of obedience to his parents, so did the servants to him. A gentleman usher – the sixteenth-century equivalent of a valet – slept on a pallet-bed outside Henry’s door and was ready to jump to attention when called. In one contemporary manual for servants, there is an entry on ‘How to order your master’s chamber’:

When your master intendeth to bedward, see that you have fire and candle sufficient. Ye must have clean water at night and in the morning. If your master lie in fresh sheets, dry off the moistness at the fire . . . In the morning, if it be cold, make a fire, and have ready clean water, bring him his petticoat warm, with his doublet and all his apparel clean brushed, and his shoes made clean, and help to array him, truss his points,
^fn7
strike up his hosen, and see all thing cleanly about him.
⁴²

Henry barely had to lift a finger. Not only did his servants dress him, they also combed his hair, prepared his pew twice daily for Mass and Evensong (‘beads and book, forget not that’), and maintained his lavatory:

See the privy-house for easement be fair, soot,
^fn8
and clean;

And that the boards thereupon be covered with cloth fair and green;

And the hole himself, look there no board be seen;

Thereon a fair cushion, the ordure no man to teen
^fn9

Look there be blanket, cotton or linen to wipe the nether end,

And even he clepith,
^fn10
wait ready and entende,

Basin and ewer, and on your shoulder a towel.
⁴³

There was no privacy at bath time. Henry would sit in a tub as his usher lathered him in soap and then sponged him down with rose water.
⁴⁴
But bathing was a rare occurrence, as it was regarded by many as a risky activity. Andrew Boorde, a doctor who was sometimes consulted by Henry’s father and who dedicated his
Dyetary of Helth
to him, pronounced that bathing ‘allowed the venomous airs to enter and destroyeth the lively spirits in man and enfeebleth the body’. Somewhat paradoxically, medicinal baths were sometimes prescribed, which were as hot as possible and mixed with various herbs including hollyhock, St John’s Wort, wildflax and camomile.
⁴⁵
Servants were to be well presented at all times and strict regulations governed their behaviour. Those drawn up by John Harington of Stepney ordered ‘that no servant be absent from prayer, at morning or evening, without a lawful excuse’, ‘that no man make water within either of the courts’, ‘that no man teach any of the children any unhonest speech or bawdy word or oath’ and ‘that none toy with the maids’. However, the imposition of fines for each offence shows that whatever the ideal, the reality must have been somewhat different.
⁴⁶

Meals were taken three times a day: breakfast at six, dinner between ten and twelve and supper around six in the evening. In the Howard household, where guests were frequently entertained, the ritual associated with the serving of food was the fullest expression of a nobleman’s
status. On a normal day around twenty servants were involved. Before the guests were seated, the table was laid with exactitude and the salt cellar set in its correct position to the left of the principal diner. During the meal a team of cupbearers, carvers and waiters attended. Once the customary two courses had been consumed, bowls of water were produced and the servants ceremonially washed the diners’ hands. The table was then cleared with as much ritual as it had been laid and the leftovers were gathered up and distributed amongst the poor.