The Last Days of Henry VIII: Conspiracy, Treason and Heresy at the Court of the Dying Tyrant (25 page)

One letter the bishop wrote later, on the evening of 11 February 1554 to Sir William Petre, graphically illustrates his ruthless and uncompromising determination to root out treason. In the immediate aftermath of Sir Thomas Wyatt’s failed uprising against Mary that month, a number of prisoners were captured and interrogated. Gardiner writes from Southwark:

Tomorrow at the Tower be earnest with little [Edward] Wyatt,
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prisoner there, who may tell all.

He is a bastard and has little substance.

It might stand with the Queen’s pleasure were no account made whether you pressed him by sharp punishment or promise of life.

These words would send a chill down anyone’s spine. ‘Sharp punishment’ is a phrase that leaves little to the imagination regarding what Gardiner was urging Wyatt to be subjected to in the dark, sweat-soaked rooms beneath the Tower. The words resound coldly like a metal torture instrument dropped on the stone-flagged floor.

But for Gardiner, possession of such life-or-death power lay some years in the future, after the return of England to Catholicism under Mary. Now he and his fellow conservatives faced the reformers’ determination to seize political supremacy as Henry’s life drew inexorably to a close.

To his great chagrin, Sir Thomas Heneage, Chief Gentleman of the Privy Chamber and Groom of the Stool, was suddenly ousted in October 1546 after a decade in the post and twenty years’ faithful service to the king. Denny succeeded him and William Herbert, brother-in-law to the queen, took over the number-two position in the Privy Chamber. The reformist party had now grasped all the levers of power within the court.

Gardiner’s own sudden, catastrophic fall came as a result of a simple misunderstanding about an exchange of episcopal land, which was quickly exploited by his waiting enemies. Henry, always obsessively keen to acquire choice lands, wanted the property to tidy up the boundaries of one of his many royal estates but was refused. In this unwise decision, Gardiner was too confident of his good standing with the king, but later scented a strong whiff of royal displeasure in the unexpected denial to him of access to the Privy Chamber. A probably apocryphal story relates how the king spotted Gardiner lurking amongst his fellow Councillors at Windsor.

When Henry saw him, he turned to Wriothesley [and said:] ‘Did I not command you that he should come no more among you?’

[The Lord Chancellor replied:] ‘My lord of Winchester has come to wait upon your highness with the offer of a benevolence [a voluntary tax] for the clergy.’

Mollified by the prospect of cash flowing into his coffers, the king accepted the offer.
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But still the bishop was excluded from court. Gardiner wrote respectfully to the king from London on 2 December 1546:

having had no opportunity to make humble suit to your highness’ presence as the trouble of my mind enforces me, I am so bold to molest your majesty with these my letters.

Gardiner desired ‘a continuance of favour’ and had always valued the benefits given to him by the king:

If for want of circumspection, my doings or sayings be otherwise taken in this matter of lands wherein I was spoken with, I must and will lament my own infelicity and most humbly, on my knees, desire your majesty to pardon it.

I never said ‘nay’ … to resist your highness’ pleasure, but only … to be a suitor to your highness’ goodness, as emboldened by the abundance of your majesty’s favour heretofore shown to me.
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He adds:

Because I have no access to your majesty, no hearing of late any more of this matter, I cannot forebear to open truly my heart to your highness with a most humble request to take the same in the most gratuitous part.

Suspecting that this letter would inevitably be intercepted by his reformist enemies in the Privy Chamber, he also wrote to Paget, begging him to deliver his letters personally to Henry and seeking permission to come to court to see the king himself, as ‘I have no access’ to the Privy Chamber:

I hear no speciality of the king’s majesty’s discontentment in this matter of lands but confusedly, that my doings are not well taken and [I] am sorry, for I care only for this, that it should be thought I wanted discretion, to neglect the king’s majesty’s goodness towards me, which, as you know, I ever esteemed only and thereupon made my worldly foundation. I pray you send me some word.
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It is clear that the king did safely receive Gardiner’s letters, but his earnest pleas did him no good. Unknown to him, Paget, his erstwhile ally, had suddenly turned against him. Henry, then staying at Otelands, was swift and brutal in his response on 4 December:

Had your doings … been agreeable to such fair words as you have now written in your letters of the 2nd., you should neither [have] had cause to write this excuse nor we to answer it.

But we marvel at your writing that you never said ‘nay’ to any request for those lands, considering that to our chancellor [Wriothesley], secretary [?Petre] and chancellor of our court of augmentations [Sir Edward North], both jointly and apart, you utterly refused any conformity, saying that you would make your answer to our own person.
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A Henry thwarted in his designs, particularly over his relentless acquisition of property, was a dangerous, malevolent king. He did not mince his words: ‘We see no cause why you should molest us further’ – a
phrase that has a note of awful finality. Significantly, perhaps, his letter was signed by means of the royal dry stamp, duly witnessed by Denny and Gates, and thus the bishop, rightly or wrongly, detected a plot against him by his enemies, spelt out in the letter’s sharp, uncompromising words of rejection.

But proud Gardiner could not bring himself to quit the precincts of the Palace of Westminster. To do so would be to admit that he had fallen from the king’s grace. Shamefaced, he loitered miserably in the outer chambers near the king’s secret apartments, waiting for the summons into the royal presence that never came. He listened to the whispers and the gossip of the court as he impotently watched the comings and goings of those on official business. He made a point of leaving the palace in the company of more favoured courtiers in a pathetic attempt to maintain the public image of his continued power and influence. The bishop could not acknowledge that he had been out-manoeuvred and effectively neutralised, probably by Hertford and Dudley.

The tensions between the two factions in the king’s Council had been rising throughout 1546, culminating a few weeks before with Dudley angrily striking Gardiner full in the face during a torrid, ill-tempered Privy Council meeting,
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a blow that caused the admiral ‘trouble and danger’ from the king, who always condemned violence within his court precincts.
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However, the tide of royal disfavour had turned and Dudley ‘now seemed well received’. Shortly afterwards, there were also ‘violent and injurious words’ exchanged again between Dudley and Gardiner and by Hertford to Wriothesley.

Those who sought a Protestant succession – and with it the power, status and wealth attached to regency governing a malleable young boy on the throne – also had their sights firmly fixed on the powerful house of Howard, led by Gardiner’s ally, the Duke of Norfolk. His sudden downfall was also not long in coming.

Norfolk’s son Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey, is, like his father, an unattractive character to modern eyes. Surrey was arrogant, vain, impetuous, resentful of the merest slight discerned by him and, most of all,
contemptuous of any who lived in, or came from, a lower station in life. He was an extraordinary paradox: a distinguished, sensitive, very talented poet, but also a rowdy hooligan and a proud coxcomb whose conceited behaviour and beliefs easily nettled those around him. The king, however, loved this ‘most foolish proud boy [in all] England’
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for in his youth, Surrey had spent two very happy years at Windsor at his lessons with Henry Fitzroy, Duke of Richmond, the king’s bastard son, who later married Surrey’s sister, Mary.
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The two youths became great friends there, a relationship that later flourished during their further studies together in France. Surrey wrote a poem about one of their tennis matches, which were continually disrupted as they were distracted by the charms of young ladies watching them near by:

The palm-play
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where, despoiled for the game

With dazzled eyes oft we by gleams of love

Have missed the ball …
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This hothead was inevitably often in trouble, even after his arranged marriage in 1532 to Frances de Vere, daughter of the Earl of Oxford, and the birth of a son, Thomas, on 10 March 1536.
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Later that year, the nineteen-year-old was imprisoned at Windsor Castle for two weeks for striking Edward Seymour, then Viscount Beauchamp, in the face within the precincts of the royal court after Seymour rashly suggested that Surrey was sympathetic to the cause of the Pilgrimage of Grace rebels in the North. An intervention by Cromwell prevented a worse punishment under court ordinances. That was not, however, the end of the earl’s hot-tempered escapades. In July 1542, he recklessly challenged a member of the royal household, Sir John Leigh, to a duel and was again jailed, this time in the Fleet Prison, but was accompanied by two servants to look after him. He wrote to the Privy Council:

I have of late severally required [from] each of you, by my servant Pickering, [indications] of your favour, from whom as yet I have received no other comfort than my past folly has deserved. I have yet thought it my duty again, as well as [to] renew my suit, as humbly
to require you rather to impute this error to the fury of reckless youth than to a will not conformable and contented of the just reward of my folly.
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He asked the Councillors to help restore the king’s esteem for him, so that he could be freed

from this noisome prison, whose pestilent airs are not unlike to bring some alteration of health. If your good lordships judge me not a member rather to be clean cut away, than reformed; it may please you to be suitors to the king’s majesty on my behalf, or else, at the least, if his pleasure be to punish this oversight with the forbearing of his pleasure (which unto every loving subject, specially unto me, from a prince cannot be less counted than a living death), yet it would please him to command me into the country, to some place of open air, with like restraint of liberty, there to abide his grace’s pleasure.
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Surrey’s flowing, honeyed words resulted in his freedom on 7 August, but only after his payment of the huge sum of £6,666 as a surety for future good behaviour (‘to bridle my heady will’) – more than £2,400,000 at today’s prices. The ‘grave heads’ of the council were not fooled by his fluent, graceful phrases. Nor should they have been. After military service in Scotland, his next brush with royal authority came in February 1543, when he and a party of young, rich bucks, including Thomas Wyatt the Younger
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and William Pickering, took part in ‘a riot’ in the City of London.

Armed with hunting crossbows firing pebbles, they drunkenly broke the windows of houses (including those of Sir Richard Gresham’s home) and those of churches. From a rowing boat on the Thames, they amused themselves hugely by firing at the prostitutes plying their trade outside the brothels on seedy Bankside, in Southwark. Lord, what a lark! But it was a lark that once again brought Surrey, now aged twenty-six, to the attentions of the Privy Council following a complaint from the Lord Mayor of London, and they diligently rooted out a Mistress Millicent
Arundell of St Lawrence Lane, Cheapside, at whose house Surrey and his friends had spent the night of the riot. She testified

that the earl of Surrey and other young noblemen frequented her house, eating meat in Lent and committing other improprieties. At Candlemas, they went out with stone bows at nine o’clock at night and did not come back till past midnight. The next day there was a great clamour [about] the breaking of many glass windows both of houses and churches and shooting at men that night in the street. And the voice [word] was these hurts were done by my lord and his company …

That night, or the night before, they used the same stone bows, rowing on the Thames and Thomas Clere told how they shot at the queans [whores] on the Bankside.
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Appropriately on 1 April, Surrey was hauled up before the Council at St James’s Palace and charged with eating flesh during Lent and on Fridays and walking about the streets in a ‘lewd and unseemly manner’, firing the crossbows. In his defence, Surrey told them that he had a special licence to eat meat during the religious fast, but pleaded guilty to the second charge, saying lamely in mitigation that he only broke the windows of papists. Furthermore, he said, he was astonished at the licentious behaviour of the London citizens, which ‘resembled the manners of Papal Rome in her corrupted state’. Typically, it was a justification of extraordinarily arrogant bravura but it did not wash with the Privy Council. Surrey found himself back in the Fleet Prison, where he passed the long hours by writing a poem,
A Satire Against the Citizens of London
, in which he reiterates that his unruly behaviour was designed purely to punish them for their many crimes:

From justice rod no fault is free

But that all such as work unright

In most quiet, are next ill rest [sleeping]

In secret silence of the night.

This made me, with a reckless breast

To wake thy sluggards with my bow

A figure of the Lord’s behest

Whose scourge for sin the Scriptures show

That as the fearful thunder’s clap

By sudden flame at hand we know

Of pebble stones the soundless rap

The dreadful plague might make thee see

Of God’s wrath, that doth thee enwrap.
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By May he was free again. His father, Norfolk, no doubt wanting him both out of the way and to dissipate his energies in more useful directions, in October sent him off to the wars in Europe to join the English and Spanish operations in the Low Countries. The Spanish Emperor Charles V was much taken with the poet-soldier, writing to Henry: