Henry VIII's Last Victim (54 page)

At the time, though, few had the temerity, or the inclination, to lament Surrey’s fate. A notable exception was the humanist scholar and tutor to Prince Edward, John Cheke, who was a great admirer of Surrey’s lyrics. In an elegy, written in Surrey’s blank hexameters, Cheke focused on Surrey the poet for ‘uncertain is the rest which shame will not descry / nor rage with stroke of tongue that bittrest egg to bite.’
⁴⁴
Others may have also found the episode unappetising, but most were more concerned with their own futures. The Bishop of Westminster was astonished when he first heard about the treason charges, but sensibly condemned ‘those two ungracious, ingrate and inhuman
non homines
, the Duke of Norfolk and his son’.
⁴⁵

On 18 January 1547 a bill of attainder against Norfolk and Surrey was introduced in the House of Lords. It adjudged them ‘high traitors’ and forfeit of all lands, chattels, titles and offices.
⁴⁶
But long before it was passed, before Surrey’s trial even, the vultures had begun to circle. From Boulogne, Lord Grey of Wilton petitioned the King for one of Norfolk or Surrey’s offices, while the Earl of Rutland, whose wedding Surrey had attended, busied himself with enquiries into potential
acquisitions of Howard land.
⁴⁷
In Reformed Strasbourg, where the rumour was that the Howards had sought to restore papal authority in England, it was hoped that the ‘agreeable’ news of their fall would be a fillip for the cause of reform: ‘God grant,’ Richard Hilles wrote, ‘that all these things may be subservient to the glory of His name and the propagation of evangelical doctrine, as many of our friends think it will be!’
⁴⁸

The response was more measured among the Imperialists. When, in mid-December 1546, the Emperor’s man in London, Francis Van der Delft, was fed the official line about a Howard
coup d’état
, he repeated the details in his dispatch but was careful to add the qualifier ‘though I know not with what truth’. In another report, written ten days later, Van der Delft readily admitted that Surrey had invited the suspicion of all his countrymen, but refused to believe that his arrest had come about organically. After reporting the ascendancy of Seymour and Dudley – ‘nothing is now done at Court without their intervention’ – he concluded that ‘the misfortunes that have befallen the house of Norfolk may well have come from the same quarter.’
⁴⁹

King Francis I of France was also sceptical when told the news by the English ambassador at his Court, Nicholas Wotton. ‘
If
the Duke of Norfolk and his son, the Earl of Surrey, have gone about or have enterprised those things that [Wotton] had declared to him,’ Francis replied, then ‘they worthily deserved punishment for it’. He was, he carefully added, ‘well assured that no private affection or passion’ would cause so ‘wise, just and virtuous’ a king as Henry VIII to proceed against the Howards ‘otherwise than right and justice requireth’. Was the matter, Francis had then asked, ‘already sufficiently proved?’ Told the lie that Surrey had confessed, ‘and yet . . . the matter was in examination still’, the Gallic brow had raised and ‘he wondered much’.
⁵⁰

Wotton may have found it so hard to convince Francis I of the Howards’ ‘most execrable and most abominable’ crimes because he doubted the veracity of the charges himself. The following March he gave a more honest appraisal to Jean St Mauris, his Imperial counterpart in Paris. If Surrey had been permitted to survive Henry VIII, Wotton told St Mauris, ‘he would have given the government trouble’. According to St Mauris, Wotton ‘greatly censured’ Surrey for his ‘insolence’ and ‘hinted that he had been put out of the way because it had been feared he might stir up some commotion’.
⁵¹
This, surely, was the real reason for Surrey’s fall: not envy or hate or because he was somehow
too virtuous for his age, nor because of any popish plot or conspiracy to seize the reins of government. He was ‘put out of the way’ because of his ‘insolence’, his regal pretensions, his volatility and his intolerance of the ‘new men’. He was simply, Wriothesley told the juror Heydon, ‘an unmeet man to live in a commonwealth’.

On Wednesday, 19 January 1547 the Lieutenant and Constable of the Tower led the Earl of Surrey out of his cell for the last time. Mercifully, Henry VIII had commuted the dreadful sentence pronounced at Surrey’s trial to death by the axe. At the drawbridge, the prisoner was transferred to the custody of two London sheriffs. They marched him up to Tower Hill and made him climb the steep wooden steps of the scaffold. The executioner begged for forgiveness. A priest administered the last rites. Surrey’s gown and doublet were removed. He was given the option of wearing a blindfold – an offer that he, like his son after him, probably declined.
⁵²
Then Surrey lay down, stretched out his arms and placed his neck upon the block. The axe rose and fell.

Two contradictory accounts survive of Surrey’s last words on the scaffold. According to the Chronicle of Anthony Anthony, an Officer of the Ordnance of the Tower, Surrey subscribed to the formulaic ending taken by so many of the King’s victims:

The said Henry Howard, submitting himself to the law, saying that he was justly condemned by the law & was come to die under the law & humbly desired God to forgive him his offences & also requiring of the King’s Majesty to forgive him his trespasses & so made his petition to God & so he was beheaded.
⁵³

The
Spanish Chronicle
, on the other hand, recorded that Surrey ‘spoke a great deal’ in his own defence, until ‘they would not let him talk anymore’.
⁵⁴

Both calm and panic rise from a poem that Surrey’s younger son Henry claimed was ‘the last thing that he wrote before his end’.
⁵⁵
It begins, as some of his other poems had ended, with a stoical acceptance of his fate. Pondering the evil of the outside world, he finds serenity in the sanctuary of his mind. But angry, vengeful thoughts soon force their way in and Surrey’s lines eventually splinter in anguish as he finds no respite from the rage that wells within him against the enemies – and one craven ‘wretch’ in particular – that had ruined him. The poem
expresses the anguish of a man on the brink of violent death. But it also testifies to a lifelong struggle to find the right pose, to hide insecurity and mask weakness, to fulfil expectations and to survive in a turbulent world. The poem gives us Surrey’s true last words and forms a tragic, though fitting, epitaph:

Bonum est mihi quod humiliasti me

[It is good for me that you have humiliated me]

The storms are past, these clouds are overblown,

And humble cheer great rigour hath repressed;

For the default is set a pain foreknown,

And patience graft in a determed breast.

And in the heart where heaps of griefs were grown

The sweet revenge hath planted mirth and rest;

No company so pleasant as mine own.

[missing line]

Thraldom at large hath made this prison free;

Danger well past remembered works delight.

Of lingring doubts such hope is sprung
pardie
,

That nought I find displeasant in my sight

But when my glass presented unto me

The cureless wound that bleedeth day and night.

To think, alas, such hap should granted be

Unto a wretch that hath no heart to fight,

To spill that blood that hath so oft been shed

For Britain’s sake, alas, and now is dead.
⁵⁶

^fn1
‘Their eyes can scarce be seen for fatness, all things prosper with them more than they can desire.

   Every man that meeteth them is afraid of them by reason of their power, which is waxen so great, that they give no force whether their wickedness and violence (whereby they oppress the poor) be known or no, but speak openly and boast themselves of such.’

   (
A Paraphrasis upon all the Psalmes of David, made by Johannes Campensis . . . and translated out of Latin into Englysshe
, 1539, sig. K.2v)

^fn2
in dread to drench
: in dread of being drowned.

^fn3
eke threpe on
: also press on.

^fn4
buckled to do me scathe
: armed to hurt me.

^fn5
I am grateful to Brett Dolman, Curator of Collections, Historic Royal Palaces, for pointing this out. According to him, the story of Surrey’s escape from St Thomas’ garderobe ‘doesn’t sound completely unfeasible’ (Letter to the author, 7 May 2004). See too Bellamy,
The Tudor Law of Treason
, p. 100.

^fn6
The façade was demolished at the end of the eighteenth century, but the four female statues were preserved and can now be viewed at the Museum of London.

EPILOGUE

Henry VIII survived Surrey by nine days. He breathed his last at two o’clock in the morning on Friday, 28 January 1547. Had he not died that day, the Duke of Norfolk may well have done, for only the day before, his death warrant had effectively been signed by the ratification of the act of attainder against him. Royal assent had been granted by a special commission authorised by the dry stamp, the King being too ill to attend Parliament or even to sign his own name.
¹
As it was, Norfolk was saved by Henry VIII’s death. It was not deemed propitious to begin a new reign with the shedding of blood.

Practically everyone involved in Surrey’s fall was rewarded in the next reign. Barker, Devereux, Rogers and Wymond Carew received knighthoods.
²
Richard Southwell was appointed to a number of offices, including the Keepership of Kenninghall and the Stewardship of the Duke of Norfolk’s lands in Norfolk. Knyvet was presented with the lease of Surrey’s manor of Wymondham. Warner received a £50 annuity, a warship, an export licence and over five hundred sheep from the Howard flock. Sweeteners also went to several members of Surrey’s jury. And Bess Holland got her jewels back.
³

A bizarre and controversial clause in Henry VIII’s will allowed for the posthumous bestowal of unspecified gifts that Henry had allegedly promised, but not yet delivered. Paget, Denny and Herbert swore that they had been made privy to the King’s intentions and at the beginning of February they drew up a book detailing his ‘unfulfilled gifts’. Edward Seymour was accordingly elevated to the Dukedom of Somerset, his brother Thomas was made Baron Seymour of Sudeley; Dudley and Wriothesley were made Earls. All four also received generous cash
legacies, as did many others, some of whom were also raised to the peerage.
⁴

Henry VIII’s will had provided for a Regency Council of sixteen men to govern the country during Edward’s minority. There was to be no dominant voice in Council, no
primus inter pares
. The will stated that individual councillors could only act if ‘the most part of the whole number of their coexecutors do consent and by writing agree to the same’. Three days after the King’s death, the spirit, if not the letter, of the will was jettisoned when the Council, ‘by one whole assent, concord and agreement’, elected Edward Seymour Governor of the King’s Person and Lord Protector of the Realm. Within two months Seymour had assumed sole control over the membership of the Privy Council.
⁵

Protector Somerset, as he was henceforth known, ruled autocratically for the next two-and-a-half years. He committed the country to a ruinous war with Scotland and introduced a prayer book so ambiguous that it satisfied no one. He continued the Great Debasement (the reminting of the coinage with a lower precious metal content, begun by Henry VIII to alleviate the costs of the French wars), so that by 1549 it was said that the silver coins were so discoloured by the copper in them that they ‘blushed for shame’.
⁶
Inflation, already at dangerous levels throughout Europe, soared in England. Subjects complained of escalating prices, swingeing taxes and exploitative landlords. Somerset, playing up to his image as ‘The Good Duke’, authorised a series of enclosure commissions to investigate the abuse of commoners’ rights. This aroused hope and, when it was frustrated, deep resentment.

The Protector grew increasingly imperious and aloof. He brooked no opposition and refused all advice. When Wriothesley showed early signs of recalcitrance, he was forced out of Chancery and dumped from the Council.
^fn1
In March 1549 Somerset committed fratricide when Thomas Seymour revealed himself to possess an ambition that rivalled his own. By the summer of 1549 even Somerset’s closest ally, William Paget, was lamenting the state of affairs and, in particular, his own role as a Cassandra. On 7 July he reminded Somerset of broken pledges:

Remember what you promised me in the gallery at Westminster before the breath was out of the body of the King that dead is. Remember what you promised immediately after, devising with me concerning the place which you now occupy, I trust, in the end to good purpose, howsoever things thwart now. And that was to follow mine advice in all your proceedings more than any other man’s. Which promise I wish Your Grace had kept, for then I am sure things had not gone altogether as they go now.
⁷