Henry VIII's Last Victim (10 page)

His fall left a power vacuum at Court that Norfolk was initially tipped to fill. The Imperial ambassador documented the Duke’s rising star. On 25 October 1529 he noted that ‘the whole government of this country was fast falling into the hands of the Duke of Norfolk.’ Two weeks later: ‘the Duke of Norfolk is now the personage who enjoys most credit and favour with the King’, and on 13 December 1529: ‘the Duke of Norfolk’s influence and power are daily increasing.’
¹²
His triumph would prove short-lived. While he was an expert handler of people – be they friends or foe – Norfolk possessed neither the intellect nor the imagination to break the impasse with Rome. Very soon, Henry VIII would look elsewhere for solutions to his Great Matter. But in the meantime Norfolk had created for himself a window of opportunity through which he was able to obtain control over the education of the King’s illegitimate son. Thus it was, in the spring of 1530, that the Earl of Surrey found himself on the road to Windsor, sent by his father to become the best friend to a boy he had never before met.
¹³

Henry Fitzroy was eleven in 1530, two years younger than Surrey. He was the product of a dalliance between the King and his erstwhile mistress, Bessie Blount, ‘a fair damsel’ of the Court.
¹⁴
Despite his bastardy, Henry Fitzroy was, as his name suggests, a source of pride for his father – as well as welcome proof of his virility. Indeed Henry VIII was inordinately fond of his son. He showered him with gifts, not only on New Year’s Day, when it was conventional to give ostentatiously, but also at random times throughout the year. On one occasion he paid his fletcher twenty shillings for arrows to supply Fitzroy’s bow; in 1531 he bought him a lute; another time saw Fitzroy being presented with a gold collar, enamelled with white roses, ‘sent from the King’s Highness for a token’.
¹⁵
Fitzroy was Henry VIII’s ‘worldly jewel’, and the King loved him, so the Venetian ambassador observed, ‘like his own soul’.
¹⁶

On 18 June 1525 Henry VIII had bestowed on his then six-year-old son the Dukedoms of Richmond and Somerset and the Earldom of Nottingham. It was the first time since the twelfth century that a king of England had raised his illegitimate son to the peerage and it precipitated a whispering campaign that he might one day name him as heir. The rumours were fanned seven days later when the new Duke of Richmond was installed as a Knight of the Garter, and even more so
the following month, when Henry VIII made him Warden General of the Scottish Marches and Lord High Admiral of England. Soon after these investitures, Richmond was sent to the North as the nominal head of its regional government. He was furnished with £88 worth of new clothes, his own Council and a princely household that included Henry VIII’s physician Doctor Butts.
¹⁷
Whatever the King’s plans for the succession in 1525, it is clear that he envisaged a role for his son at the highest level of public office.
^fn5

The Duke of Norfolk was well aware of this and had planned accordingly. If, as he hoped, Surrey could ‘cement’ a ‘strong and firm’ friendship with Richmond, then the rewards could be very great. In order to consolidate this Howard–Richmond association, Surrey’s younger sister Mary was roped in as Richmond’s future bride. This latter coup owed much to the influence of Anne Boleyn, who, Surrey’s mother later wrote, ‘got the marriage clear for my lord, my husband’.
¹⁸
Had Richmond married any one of a number of foreign princesses that were mooted for him – an impressive list that included Catherine de’ Medici – then he would have been in a stronger position to threaten Anne’s future children’s claims to the succession. But married to Mary Howard, Richmond would effectively be assimilated into Anne’s family and his threat neutralised. That Anne managed to persuade the King to allow his son to be betrothed to Mary Howard, without any kind of dowry payment, shows how strong her influence was at this time.

Richmond was clearly his father’s son. Not only did he bear a striking resemblance to Henry VIII, but he also shared his passion for outdoor pursuits. By the age of six Richmond had already killed his first buck and, as he travelled north in the same year, he eschewed the horse litter that had been laid on for him at considerable expense, preferring instead to ride his own pony.
¹⁹
Two years later he wrote to Henry VIII asking for a suit of harness ‘for my exercise in arms according to my learning in Julius Caesar’ – a crafty request that downplayed his priorities only to justify them in the end.
²⁰

In 1525 the Archdeacon of Durham wrote that ‘my Lord of
Richmond is a child of excellent wisdom and towardness; and, for his good and quick capacity, retentive memory, virtuous inclination to all honour, humanity and goodness, I think hard it would be to find any creature living, of twice his age, able or worthy to be compared to him.’
²¹
More often than not, though, Richmond neglected his studies in favour of his sport. He was encouraged in this by a phalanx of servants, who consistently sought to undermine the authority of his schoolmasters. Their first victim was the eminent humanist, John Palsgrave, who had previously taught Henry VIII’s sister, Mary. He was impressed by Richmond’s wit, but soon grew exasperated by the contemptuous treatment meted out to him. He lasted six months.

His successor, Richard Croke, a Greek scholar who had taught at the universities of Louvain, Cologne, Leipzig and Cambridge, fared little better. On 26 May 1527 he wrote a long Latin letter to Wolsey complaining of ‘the frenzy of those men who every day endeavour to drive the hearts of my Prince and his young classmates to a hatred equally of study and the clergy by means of some exceedingly cunning deceits.’ The ringleader, Croke explained, was George Cotton, Richmond’s gentleman usher. Not only did Cotton cancel Richmond’s early morning and late evening classes, but he also encouraged truancy, enjoining Richmond and his fellow students to indulge instead in archery and hunting. ‘Yet this fellow,’ Croke continued, ‘who is so diligent in keeping the Prince’s teacher away, happily allows clowns and players to be admitted, to warble ditties fit for a brothel before the Prince in his own private chamber.’ Where Cotton led, his sidekick, a boy named Scrope, was eager to follow:

In the presence of the other boys he vilifies the Latin language and literature to an amazing degree and stirs the boys against me so that they are uncooperative. He says terrible things about me behind my back; in church last Trinity Sunday, he clung to the Prince’s awning and abused me and then boasted that he had done so in such a manner. For in a loud voice, which betrayed a sort of uneducated vindictiveness, he called me a bastard, a good-for-nothing, a villain, a hypochondriac, and a thousand other names of that kind.

The effects of these malign influences were so wholly detrimental to Richmond that Croke feared for his future:

For what will he refrain from doing as an adult when, even now, he is being taught to say to me in jest, ‘Teacher, if you beat me, I shall beat you’. And why should he not think that he may say these things with impunity when he hears his classmates, who are socially far inferior to him, not only slandering me behind my back, while the servants of his own private chamber laugh at me and encourage them, but also abusing me to my face. When the boys come to me for a beating they are pulled from my hands by the grooms, who threaten me and, in the presence of the Prince, noisily assert, ‘Why are you baring the buttocks of the boys in the presence of so great a Prince?’

Croke found himself powerless in the face of such mockery: ‘I have often objected,’ he wrote, ‘and often complained, but I have achieved nothing.’ It was all the more lamentable, he continued, because of Richmond’s potential:

Is it not remarkable that a boy of eight years of age can translate any passage of Caesar into English, and in so doing preserve the grammatical structure and art of the original? Yet impressive though this is, it is as nothing compared with the progress he would already have made in the Latin language without any difficulty, if he had not been obstructed by Cotton’s treachery . . . The Prince’s benefit is at stake; great hopes were entertained that within two years his knowledge of Latin and Greek would be such that he would be attracted to them by themselves and by a sort of affection for them. But now, unless Your Grace lends assistance, I clearly despair of benefiting him.
²²

Croke surrendered his charge in October 1527. Well might the Earl of Surrey have trembled, therefore, as he rode through the turreted gatehouse of Windsor Castle, Richmond’s new home. But Surrey’s role was entirely different to that of Palsgrave and Croke. He was too young to be a conventional schoolmaster – another man was retained for that – rather he was to act, as the Duke of Norfolk had put it, as Richmond’s
précepteur ou incitateur
.
²³
Both words can be translated as ‘tutor’, but the latter, deriving from the Latin
incitare
(to incite), is distinctive and unique. Surrey would, it was hoped, provide an example that Richmond would seek to emulate. Part study companion, part mentor, he was expected to impress, induce and stimulate Richmond so ‘that he may attain both knowledge and virtue’.
²⁴

Surrey was an inspired choice for this difficult role. Similar in age and station to Richmond, his upbringing allowed him to identify with his charge in a way that few else could. Both had grown up under the double-edged sword of high birth, surrounded by privilege, but also immured by the concomitant pressures. Richmond’s motto – ‘duty binds me’ – could just as easily have been Surrey’s. Both were in awe of their powerful fathers and desperate to fulfil their great expectations. Both grew up showered with attention, but without the anchor provided by permanent parental presence. They were the stars of the future, but also outsiders, set apart by their elevated status from the rest of their generation.

In character as well as circumstance, Surrey and Richmond were kindred spirits. They were bright, energetic boys with a low boredom threshold and a clear preference for outdoor activities. Both were hotheaded and highly competitive, constantly striving to better themselves and eager, too, to test the limits of toleration. Both were jealous of their honour and tended to display arrogance and haughtiness towards their social inferiors. In this they were in danger of crossing the fine line between maintaining one’s reputation and station in life (an admirable and essential quality) and displaying pride (a cardinal sin). In many ways, though, Surrey and Richmond were just typical adolescents, doing what all adolescents do: testing boundaries, developing their identities and adapting to the changing needs of their bodies and minds. And, like growing boys the world over, Surrey and Richmond bonded over their two shared passions: women and sport.

Although Richmond was formally betrothed to Surrey’s sister Mary, he would only marry her in 1533. Until then he was free to admire with Surrey the ladies of the Court. In a beautiful poem about their time together at Windsor, Surrey described his and Richmond’s pubescent longing for ‘the ladies bright of hue’ and their clumsy attempts to impress. Loitering around the ‘large green courts’, that afforded a good view of the ‘maidens’ tower’, Surrey and Richmond would steal surreptitious glances at the objects of their desire. Often they played real tennis and, if there were ladies in the spectators’ gallery, the boys would strip to their waists and indulge in horseplay: ‘with dazed eyes oft we by gleams of love / have missed the ball and got sight of our dame’. In the evenings, they would take advantage of the courtly dances, ‘where each of us did plead the other’s right’. Despite frequent knock-backs and ‘looks that
tigers could but rue’, their persistence occasionally paid off, for later these two partners in crime would retreat to ‘the secret groves’, and compare notes with boyish bravado, ‘recording soft what grace each one had found’.
²⁵

Surrey and Richmond were on a surer footing with their second love, sport. They were now of an age to begin their martial education and Windsor Castle provided the perfect training ground. Originally a motte-and-bailey fortress erected by William the Conqueror, Windsor Castle had been radically transformed in the mid-fourteenth century into a vast Gothic palace, designed to celebrate Edward III’s triumphs against the French. Windsor’s new aesthetic projected Edward’s passion for the cult of chivalry and it became the home to his new foundation, the Order of the Garter, a confraternity of knights that embodied the ethos of King Arthur’s Round Table. Within Surrey and Richmond’s own chambers, tapestries and hangings continued the chivalric theme. There was ‘a piece of the Lady Pleasance, accompanied with many Virtues and assaulted with diverse Vices’, while another depicted the story of Paris and Helen.
²⁶

It was imbued with the spirit of this glorified world, this fusion of mythology and reality, that Surrey chose to interpret his own relationship with Richmond. It was in:

. . . proud Windsor, where I in lust and joy

With a king’s son my childish years did pass,

In greater feast than Priam’s sons of Troy.

Surrey employs the word ‘childish’ here not in the modern sense, but with the traditional meaning in mind, signifying that these were the years when he and Richmond had begun their military apprenticeship, but had not yet attained knighthood.
²⁷
They were brothers-in-arms as well as future brothers-in-law, striving towards their destiny as chivalric warriors. They hunted as often as possible and, in the tiltyard, practised their jousting skills, either by running at the ring, when they had to spear a hoop suspended in the air, or at the quintain, a pivoted target against which they had to shatter their lances. They were taught the cut and thrust of swordsmanship, both on foot and on horseback, and grew accustomed to the weight and constriction of armour. Each activity fostered a fierce but friendly rivalry: