The Last White Rose (52 page)

During the last years of Henry’s reign, two factions competed for his favour. One consisted of those who had followed the late Thomas Cromwell, including evangelicals such as Archbishop Cranmer and Edward Seymour, Earl of Hertford. Opposing them were the Catholics led by the Duke of Norfolk, although by now he was suffering from chronic ill health and very much feeling his age. For a time, however, the old duke appeared to be in the ascendant after the king married his niece.

She was the tiny, auburn-haired Katherine Howard, more than thirty years younger than Henry, who became besotted with her. But in November 1541 Archbishop Cranmer broke the news to him that she was ‘a whore’. Kind-hearted, empty-headed, oversexed and completely out of her depth, the poor girl was one of the most pitiful figures in Tudor history. She had taken at least one lover before her marriage and was now having a full-blooded romance with a gentleman of the Privy Chamber, Thomas Culpeper. At first the king refused to believe Cranmer, but then, shedding tears of self-pity, he told the embarrassed council he had been betrayed. The charges were soon proved, the queen’s lovers being executed within a month. (In their indictment she was described as ‘a common harlot’.) Only seventeen, Katherine was beheaded in February 1542 after a Bill of Attainder avoided a trial that would have made the squalid details public. She was lucky to die beneath the axe instead of being burned alive for treason.

Abroad, despite vast expenditure, Henry’s foreign policy was ineffective on every front. Although English troops routed the Scots at Solway Moss in 1542, they were defeated at Ancrum Moor, and the following year the betrothal of Prince Edward
to the little Queen Mary, on which Henry had set his heart – in what contemporaries called the ‘Rough Wooing’ – was broken off by the Scots. Three years of ruinously expensive war with France ended in 1546, having gained nothing.

As for religion, Henry continued to regard even the slightest disagreement with the ‘true doctine’ he had decreed as a blasphemous denial of his role as head of the Church. For, as he saw it, the law of God was in his personal care. This extraordinary assumption was evident in the Askew case.

In 1544 Mrs Anne Askew, a wealthy young Lincolnshire lady who had quarrelled with her husband over her ‘sacramen tarian’ views, came to live in London, seeking a divorce. The year after, having joined a group of evengelicals in the city, she was arrested and frightened into recanting. As she was a friend of the latest queen, Catherine Parr, of whose own religious opinions Henry was suspicious, he took a personal interest in the case. Rearrested in 1546, Anne was questioned by the council and, despite being a gentlewoman, so cruelly racked during her interrogations that she lost the use of her limbs and even of her eyesight. In July, unable to walk, she was taken to Smithfield in a litter to be burned at the stake with other evangelicals.

The perpetually suppurating ulcer on the king’s leg had turned into one among many, all giving him excruciating pain whenever the bandages were changed, which presumably happened several times a day. Sometimes he was in such agony that he could not speak. Because of his monstrous obesity (it was said that three men could have fitted inside his doublet) he needed a ramp if he wanted to mount a horse. He found walking difficult, having to lean on a stick, and in his palaces had to be carried about in a special chair. He suffered regularly from exhausting ‘fevers’ caused by the ulcers.

Yet although he had been hated by large sections of the population only a few years earlier – and even now the North could never forgive him – this rotting, moribund hulk of a man had become idolized as a benevolent colossus by many of his
subjects, who turned a blind eye to his selfishness, cruelty and tyranny. Part of their veneration came from his having reigned over them for so long, yet most of it was due to the overwhelming impact of his extraordinary personality, shallow as it may have been. Clearly, he knew how to assume a grave and kindly air when necessary. Describing the king’s last speech to Parliament, Richard Grafton (continuing Hall’s chronicle) said his address gave ‘his subjects there present such comfort that the like joy could not be unto them in this world’. There is no reason to doubt Grafton.
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Because of his ailments, Henry’s temper had grown more dangerous than ever. Aware that he might have only a very short time left to live, he worried even more about what was going to happen when his young son – still only nine in 1546 – succeeded him as a minor. Although he had ensured that no more Yorkist pretenders were left in England, he was afraid that some other magnate might try and seize the throne. Richard of Gloucester’s example can never have been very far from his mind.

In particular, he did not trust the aged Duke of Norfolk. A pleasant-spoken and sly little man, always blandly reassuring while lying through his teeth, Norfolk could never forget what Bosworth, fought when he was a boy of twelve, had meant for his family: his grandfather was killed and his father taken prisoner, while the Howards forfeited their duchy.
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It had taken them years to recover their position. In consequence, no one possessed a keener sense for survival or for the main chance than Thomas Howard, who was completely without principles. ‘It was merry in England afore the New Learning came up,’ he famously declared in 1540. ‘Yea, I would all things were as hath been in times past.’ Yet despite his Catholic instincts, he was the man who had put down the Pilgrimage of Grace so mercilessly. Loathing Cromwell as he did, he had treated him with oily subservience, and then played a major part in destroying him.

Having employed Norfolk so often, Henry had no illusions about his lack of scruples, while he blamed him for the disastrous
marrage to his niece Katherine Howard. Nor could the king fail to have been aware that Norfolk filled the place once occupied by Buckingham as the last remaining duke and the richest man in England, with an income verging on
£
4,000. He lacked Plantagenet blood, but through marrying Buckingham’s daughter had acquired it for the Howards. Worse still, he possessed an alarmingly dangerously unstable son.
⁴

What made the situation explosive was that the Howards stood in the way of a man who was secretly determined to rule England during the looming minority. Brother of the late Queen Jane and uncle to the Prince of Wales, Edward Seymour, Earl of Hertford knew how to make the most of his relationship to the king’s favourite wife. The duke tried to defuse the situation by offering Seymour’s brother the hand of his daughter Mary, the late Duke of Richmond’s widow. She declined, however, while her brother Lord Surrey proclaimed his contempt for so low a marriage. What made matters worse was that Surrey had made advances to Seymour’s wife. He began whispering into Henry’s ear that the Howards had designs on the throne; he understood exactly how to drop hints of disaffection that the king would interpret as clear proof of treason.

In his late twenties, Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey, was a tall, horse-faced young man with a forked beard, very different from his father. A dazzling if troubled figure, he had spent a year at the French court with his friend the Duke of Richmond (the king’s short-lived son), where he learned not only French but Italian, and became a genuinely great poet – one of the first Englishmen to use the sonnet. Yet despite his brilliance and although basically honourable – unlike his father – there was something shallow about him. He could be childishly frivolous, as in January 1543 when he had led a group of gilded young com panions on a riot through London (shooting stone-firing crossbows at passers-by, smashing windows) that ended in the Fleet prison. Obsessed with display, he liked to ride through the city streets with an escort of fifty horsemen.

Arrogant, hot-tempered and quarrelsome, never hiding his contempt for fellow courtiers who were not nobly born, Henry Howard’s attitude is encapsulated by his comment on Cromwell’s fall: ‘Now is that foul churl dead, so ambitious of other blood, now is he stricken with his own staff.’ People like that would leave no noblemen alive, he added.
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There is also a persistent tradition that, when very young, he had been in trouble for striking in the face Queen Jane’s brother, the recently ennobled Edward Seymour, partly from disdain for his comparatively ignoble origins. Understandably, he had a talent for making enemies. At first, however, his youthful high spirits amused the king, who would have agreed with the verdict of a contemporary cleric, ‘the most foolish proud boy that is in England’.
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Henry would not have been so fond of Surrey, however, had he read Surrey’s sonnet
Sardanapalus
, which almost certainly had the king in mind, although it was probably written after the earl had lost favour.

The Assyrian king – in peace, with foul desire

And filthy lusts that stained his regal heart –

In war, that should set princely hearts on fire,

Did yield for want of martial art …

Who scarce the name of manhood did retain,

Drenchèd in sloth and womanish delight,

Feeble of sprite, unpatient of pain.
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One of those men for whom war offers the best hope of staying out of mischief, Surrey served in France from 1543 to 1546, at one stage as Lieutenant General of the King on Sea and Land – commander-in-chief in the field. He turned out to be a born soldier who quickly established his authority over both starving, ill-paid English troops and tough, mutinous mercenaries, besides displaying a flair for organization. He led from the front, so much so that Henry wrote to chide him for risking his life. To the king’s joy, Boulogne was taken, doubling English territory
around Calais. Although the earl had to abandon the siege of Montreuil, he beat off a determined attempt by the French to recapture Boulogne. However, after his humiliating rout by the French during a skirmish near St Étienne in January 1546, when he lost a fifth of his army and several of his standards, the earl was demoted by Henry to Captain of Boulogne, and then recalled to England. He had forfeited royal favour for good.

Surrey went back to the Tudor court, which was more dangerous than any battlefield. After winning the king’s approval and having wealth and honours heaped upon him, a man could all too easily end up on the scaffold. Shortly after his return, the earl had a disastrous argument with an officer who had served under him at Boulogne. Losing his temper, Surrey insisted that a council could not possibly rule England for the future Edward VI, as Henry wanted; only one man was fit to do so and that was his father Norfolk. The outburst was reported to Seymour, giving him the ammunition he needed to confirm the king’s suspicions. Because the earl was descended from Edward III through his mother, Henry decided that he saw himself as the future King of England.

Surrey was arrested on 2 December 1546. He had just arrived at Whitehall when the Captain of the Yeomen of the Guard, Sir Anthony Wingfield, asked him to come outside, saying he needed his help in persuading his father the duke to intercede in a lawsuit. When he left the room, Surrey was immediately grabbed by ‘halbardiers’ (Yeomen) who manhandled him on board a waiting boat that took him to the city. Here he was held at Ely Place and questioned by the Lord Chancellor, Thomas Wriothesly. On 12 December, St Lucy’s Eve, he was marched from Ely Place through the city streets to the Tower.

Norfolk was sent to the Tower on the same day, stripped of his staff of office and his Garter badge. That evening, he wrote beseeching the king to remember all the good service he had done and not allow him to be destroyed by false accusations,
insisting that he was at one with Henry in matters of religion and offering to surrender his estates. He also wrote to the council requesting permission to send for three books which he needed to help him sleep: St Augustine’s
City of God
, Josephus’
Jewish
Antiquities
and a work attacking papal pretensions. Learning of his arrest, the delighted folk of East Anglia rose and looted all the Howard houses in the area.

Summoned before the council Surrey’s sister, Mary Howard, told them he had urged her to ‘endear herself’ to the king and ‘rule him’, which was more or less what her family had tried to do through the late Queen Katherine Howard. The admission must have infuriated Henry, opening up a very sore wound. Yet there was no evidence of plots against the king’s life. The prosecution fell back on heraldry, arguing that Surrey had deliberately quartered royal arms as a discreet means of asserting his claim to the throne. Mary Howard helped to substantiate the accusation by her testimony that on the cap of maintenance bearing his crest her brother had set a coronet that looked like a closed (royal) crown, with the letters ‘HR’ which she thought must be the king’s cipher.

The prosecution’s case therefore rested entirely on showing that the Earl of Surrey’s intention of making himself King of England was proved by a coat of arms he had recently adopted. His father, to whom it must have seemed that Bosworth had come again, did not fail King Henry. On 12 January, the day before his son’s trial, he cravenly signed a totally untrue confession: