Henry VIII's Last Victim (9 page)

The King has entrusted to me the education of his bastard son, the Duke of Richmond, of whom my own son may become in time preceptor and tutor, that he may attain both knowledge and virtue, so that a friendship thus cemented promises fair to be very strong and firm.
²⁹

It was time for Surrey to put his training to good use.

^fn1
strange
: foreign.

^fn2
Deriving from the Latin
laxus
(loose), ‘the lax’ was commonly used to denote a looseness of the bowels.

^fn3
I am much indebted to Matthew Fletcher MS FRCS, Medical Director and Consultant Urologist, Brighton and Sussex University Hospital Trust, for reading Norfolk’s exhaustive complaints and giving me his views. As he points out, the fact that Norfolk survived to the age of eighty-one suggests that his condition could not have been that severe. Certainly any serious liver or bowel disease would have carried him off long before then.

^fn4
The quotation comes from Surrey’s poem, ‘If care do cause men cry’ (
Poems
, 17). The following couplet suggests that he had witnessed the effects of the disease:

   
And in those cares so cold I force myself a heat,

   
As sick men in their shaking fits procure them self to sweat.

^fn5
Wards were minor heirs (girls under fourteen; boys under twenty-one). By buying their wardships, the Duke of Norfolk assumed control of their estates during their minority. In return, he became their guardian and supervised their upbringing. Norfolk’s wards included William Temperley, George Blount and Elizabeth Marney, eldest daughter of Lord Marney. Norfolk also had the right to arrange his wards’ marriages and, in 1533, he married Elizabeth Marney to his second son Thomas.

^fn6
The lute was a plucked stringed instrument with a curved back; the virginals, a keyed instrument resembling a spinet and set in a box.

^fn7
soote
: sweet.

^fn8
eke
: also.

^fn9
turtle
: turtle-dove;
make
: mate.

^fn10
smale
: small (I have kept the original spelling to preserve Surrey’s rhyme scheme).

^fn11
mings
: remembers.

^fn12
sight
: sighed.

4

WITH A KING’S SON

NORFOLK HAD BEEN
in high spirits at that supper. Only a few weeks earlier he had celebrated the fall from grace of his chief rival, Thomas Wolsey. For well over a decade Norfolk had been fighting, and losing, the battle for pre-eminence at Court. Wolsey may have been an ‘upstart from the dung-cart’, as the Poet Laureate John Skelton had put it,
¹
but he had proved a wily politician and an administrative genius. Crucially, he had also been able to gain the trust of Henry VIII, something that Norfolk, even at the height of his power, was never quite able to achieve. Wolsey’s success had lain quite simply in giving the King exactly what he wanted. No obstacle had seemed too great, no command too absurd. ‘He was,’ his gentleman usher recalled, ‘most earnest and readiest among all the Council to advance the King’s only will and pleasure without any respect to the case.’
²
But when Henry VIII called on Wolsey to put on his cardinal’s hat and secure the annulment of his marriage to Catherine of Aragon, it proved a bridge too far.

Henry VIII’s doubts about the validity of his marriage to Catherine of Aragon had, by 1529, hardened into firm resolution. They had married twenty years earlier, two months after the death of Henry VII. An affinity already existed between Catherine and Henry – she was the widow of his elder brother Arthur – but that had been a minor impediment, easily swatted by a papal dispensation. Two weeks later, on Midsummer Day 1509, with Henry VIII only four days shy of his eighteenth birthday, the couple was jointly crowned at Westminster amid great fanfare and jubilation. Thomas More’s coronation poem captured the mood of English men and women everywhere: ‘They rejoice, they exult, they leap for joy and celebrate their having such a king.’ Lord Mountjoy, writing
to Erasmus, echoed these sentiments in his own inimitable style: ‘Heaven smiles, earth rejoices; all is milk and honey and nectar.’
³

It was not long before this divine confection began to curdle. Despite becoming pregnant around seven times, Catherine could only manage one surviving heir for the Tudor dynasty, a daughter, Mary. Miscarriage, stillbirth and infant mortality had claimed the rest, while the early onset of menopause put paid to the possibility of any more. Henry did not doubt his virility; he had sired an illegitimate son – Henry Fitzroy, soon to be Surrey’s new companion – in 1519 by his mistress Bessie Blount. If God could bless this sinful union with a healthy son, then surely, Henry reasoned, his marriage to Catherine must be even viler, even more deserving of God’s punishment, than adultery. He turned to the Bible for confirmation. According to Leviticus 20:21, ‘If a man shall take his brother’s wife, it is an unclean thing; he hath uncovered his brother’s nakedness; they shall be childless.’ Advised by the Hebraist Robert Wakefield that ‘childless’ should be read as ‘sonless’, Henry became convinced that his marriage was cursed.

But there was another, perhaps even stronger reason why Henry VIII wished to dispense with Catherine.
⁴
Anne Boleyn was Surrey’s first cousin, the daughter of Norfolk’s sister Elizabeth and Thomas Boleyn. She was, according to one of her favourite clerics, ‘competement belle’ rather than beautiful. Her looks were unconventional; she was a brunette rather than the preferred blonde and had a dark – some said ‘swarthy’ – complexion that did not conform to the English rose stereotype so admired at Court. However, her glossy hair, delicate bone structure and long, graceful neck contrasted favourably with the features of Catherine of Aragon, who had lost her lustre and her figure through successive pregnancies. Anne was well aware of her sexuality and having spent her formative years at the libidinous French Court, she had mastered the art of seduction. One admirer described her in action. She had, he noted,

eyes, always most attractive

Which she knew well how to use with effect,

Sometimes leaving them at rest,

And at others, sending a message

To carry the secret witness of the heart.

And, truth to tell, such was their power

That many surrendered to their obedience.
⁵

By the end of 1526 so had Henry VIII. But Anne, unlike the other ladies of the Court, who had willingly serviced Henry’s carnal appetite, refused to be bedded. She maintained her resistance the following year, even after Henry asked her to marry him. Only when they were officially man and wife, Anne vowed, would she surrender her body as well as her heart. Henry’s letters to Anne have survived and now rest, rather inappositely, in the Vatican archives. They testify to the simple, deep-seated love that he bore her; they also provide details of his frustrated lust – ‘wishing myself (specially an evening) in my sweetheart’s arms, whose pretty dukkys
^fn1
I trust shortly to cusse
^fn2
.’
⁶
Divorce from Catherine had become a matter of great urgency.

But the ‘Great Matter’, as the annulment campaign
^fn3
came to be known, was not running smoothly. Henry VIII had fully expected Wolsey to work his usual magic. He was, after all, not only a cardinal but also, as legate
a latere
, a papal emissary of the highest rank. In May 1527 Wolsey convened a secret court to try the marriage, but it soon became tangled in some very determined briers. For one thing, there was a passage in Deuteronomy (25:5–6) that could be set up in contradiction to Leviticus, for it stated that a man was duty bound to marry his brother’s widow, the resultant children being necessary for the continuance of the family line. Then there was the issue of jurisdiction. Henry argued, provocatively, that divine law worked in his favour, that it overrode canon law and that the original Pope had acted
ultra vires
in dispensing with it. The Vatican’s present incumbent, Pope Clement VII, did not take kindly to an English King questioning the judgement of his predecessor. Only the institution of the Papacy, Clement argued, had the right to interpret and, ultimately, arbitrate upon God’s Word. Betwixt and between these opposing standpoints was a myriad of complex legal and theological issues, the consideration of which ultimately engaged over a hundred and fifty contemporary scholars.
⁷

Henry never wavered. He was adamant that his marriage was invalid in the eyes of God. ‘If an angel was to descend from heaven,’ the papal legate Cardinal Campeggio wrote, ‘he would not be able to persuade him to the contrary.’
⁸
Catherine, for her part, was equally convinced of the sanctity of the marriage and the legitimacy of her daughter. She
rose to the challenge magnificently. Impervious to bribes or threats, she refused to co-operate or compromise in any way. She won the battle for hearts and minds hands down, playing the part of the wronged wife to perfection, while Anne was cast as a scheming temptress. Indeed, feelings ran so high against Anne in London that the Venetian ambassador reported a story about a mob of seven to eight thousand women, and men disguised as women, who had apparently tried to lynch her at a Thames-side villa. It was said that she only just managed to escape by crossing the river in a small boat. This is the only account of this strange incident and it is probably apocryphal, but the fact that the Venetian ambassador thought it worth reporting suggests that he for one deemed it plausible.
⁹

In addition to the groundswell of popular support, Catherine also had influential allies. In England these included Sir Thomas More, Nicholas Carew, John Fisher, Bishop of Rochester and Surrey’s mother, the Duchess of Norfolk, who refused to toe the family line against her mistress and friend. On the Continent Catherine had the powerful backing of her nephew, Charles V. He was the Holy Roman Emperor, the King of Spain and the Duke of Burgundy. His empire stretched from Mexico to Naples and encompassed much of present-day Germany, Belgium, Holland, Austria, Hungary and Spain. At war with France over the control of Northern Italy, Charles had so far only been able to support his aunt from afar. But on 6 May 1527 his hungry, mutinous troops entered Rome and rampaged through the city. ‘Right pitiful were the cryings and lamentations of the women of Rome,’ wrote the chronicler Raphael Holinshed,

and no less worthy of compassion, the calamity of nuns and virgins professed, whom the soldiers ravished . . . No age, no sex, no dignity or calling was free from the violation of soldiers, in whom it was doubtful whether bare [which bore] more rule: the humour of cruelty to kill, or the appetite of lust to deflower, or lastly, the rage of covetousness to rob and spoil.
¹⁰

The ‘Sack of Rome’, as it became known, was a shocking affair and Charles immediately condemned it, but he and Catherine did welcome one unexpected outcome: languishing under house arrest in the Castel Sant’ Angelo was Pope Clement VII. Although Charles allowed Clement to ‘escape’ in December, he maintained his grip on the Papacy and any hopes that the French might be able to loosen it were dashed on 21
June 1529, when they were routed by the Imperial army at the Battle of Landriano. It was these unfavourable winds that blew their way towards London, and into the court of Blackfriars, just as the second phase of the divorce proceedings reached their dénouement.

Summoned to present her case to Wolsey and the Pope’s emissary Cardinal Campeggio, Catherine walked calmly across the courtroom towards Henry VIII. Then she threw herself at his feet and begged him to consider her honour, his own honour and the honour of their child. Still kneeling in front of her squirming husband, Catherine questioned the impartiality of the court and called for the case to be tried in Rome. Then she rose to her feet, curtsied to the King and strode out of the court. The crier repeatedly tried to recall her, but to the jubilation of the public gallery, he was defiantly ignored. It was a winning performance. On 16 July a committee of cardinals authorised by the Pope upheld Catherine’s appeal and ‘advoked’ the case to Rome. A fortnight later Cardinal Campeggio adjourned the Blackfriars trial.

Henry VIII was apoplectic with rage. He had been publicly humiliated by Catherine and played for a fool by Clement and Charles. The past two years had been a complete waste of time; he was no closer to resolving his Great Matter than he had been from the outset. Anne, far from assuaging Henry’s wounds, poured salt into them, accusing him of being too soft on Catherine: ‘I have been waiting long,’ she harped, ‘and might in the meanwhile have contracted some advantageous marriage, out of which I might have had issue, which is the greatest consolation in the world. But, alas! Farewell to my time and youth spent to no purpose at all.’
¹¹
Henry needed a scapegoat and Wolsey, who had staked everything on a papal solution, was the obvious candidate. On 9 October 1529 he was indicted for
praemunire
– the illegal application of papal authority to matters under English jurisdiction. The Duke of Norfolk, having bided his time against his old enemy, now revelled in his distress. Indeed, such was the power that Wolsey had once exerted, and so great was the fear of a possible comeback, that Norfolk, Anne and their allies eventually hounded him to his death.
^fn4