Henry VIII's Last Victim (2 page)

The following morning there was ‘a great clamour’ in the City and a strong civic determination to hunt down the vandals and bring them to justice. Many suspected they were members of the ubiquitous vagabond community; others thought they were apprentices, tight on cheap ale. But few were prepared for the name that emerged. For the ringleader, it transpired, was no apprentice and certainly no vagabond, but an earl, and not only an earl, but the heir to England’s premier peer, a Knight of the Most Noble Order of the Garter and, so it was thought, a sensitive and refined poet.

Back in Mistress Arundel’s inn, Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey, was beginning to regret his night of hell raising. He was, he told his friend George Blagge, ‘very sorry’ and wished for ‘all the good in the world it were undone’. Maybe twenty years ago Henry VIII would have smiled benignly at Surrey’s antics, but age and infirmity had made him capricious and cruel. The prospect of him finding out was not one that Surrey relished. ‘But,’ he concluded with a smirk, ‘we will have a madding time in our youth.’
¹

^fn1
Light crossbows that shot stones

INTRODUCTION

HENRY HOWARD, EARL
of Surrey, was born into one of the most powerful families in England. He was the son and heir of the third Duke of Norfolk and the first cousin to two queens: Anne Boleyn and Catherine Howard. By the age of thirteen his precocious talents had earned him a place of honour in the household of Henry VIII’s illegitimate son. While still in his teens he spent a year in France as a guarantor for Henry VIII’s friendship with Francis I. At twenty-four Surrey was installed as a Knight of the Garter. He served as the King’s cupbearer, as a Steward for the Duchy of Lancaster, as joint Steward of Cambridge University and, in the country, as a Justice of the Peace. While still only twenty-eight he became Henry VIII’s supreme military commander. Just over a year later he was dead.

Despite having had his portrait painted more often than any other Tudor courtier, the Earl of Surrey is today an unfamiliar figure. To the extent that he is recognised at all, it is usually for one of two reasons: as an innovative poet who created several new verse forms in English – most notably blank verse and the ‘English’ or ‘Shakespearian’ sonnet – and as the last person to be executed for treason in Henry VIII’s reign.

I first came across him at university while studying a paper on the literature and politics of early modern England. The course covered all the great writers of the time: More and Wyatt, Sidney and Spenser, Shakespeare, Marlowe and Milton, but it was the rawness of Surrey’s voice that most struck me and it was to his poems that I found myself returning. They revealed a witty, passionate man who dared to write about ‘aged kings, wedded to will, that work without advice’. At a
time when it was said that ‘for fear no man durst either speak or wink’, Surrey defied convention. Cromwell was a ‘foul churl’, Paget a ‘mean creature’ and the problems that beset Henry VIII’s realm were, Surrey hinted, ‘the bitter fruit of false concupiscence’.
¹
For his candour alone he warrants attention.

Surrey witnessed and was inextricably caught up in all the major events of Henry VIII’s reign: the Break with Rome, the Reformation, the Pilgrimage of Grace, the wars against Scotland and France, and the brutal power struggle at the end of the reign to which he fell victim. Biographies can offer thicker descriptions than general histories and provide new perspectives. Through Surrey it is possible to glimpse the rarefied world of the noble household and experience both the headiness of the Court and the violent antipathies that underlay it. We can sit in with Surrey at the trial of Anne Boleyn, hurtle through the streets of Tudor London and march across the battlefields of France. And we can find out what it was like to feel the favour of a king like Henry VIII and, ultimately, also his wrath.

By the time of his death Surrey was as accustomed to the ‘pestilent airs’ of prison as he was to the opulence of palace life. He was imprisoned four times, twice for violent behaviour towards fellow courtiers, once for his rampage through London and once, the last time, for treason. Ever ready to defend the privileges of high birth, Surrey was equally quick to resist its pressures. A man of intriguing contradictions, he was both law enforcer and law breaker, political conservative and religious reformer. He was nostalgic for the ‘rude age’, but eager to imbibe the culture of the Renaissance. He scorned courtiers of ‘vile birth’, but some of his best lyrics express his love for men of inferior lineage. Praised by many, including the Holy Roman Emperor, for his gentility and grace, Surrey was branded by one contemporary as ‘the most foolish proud boy that is in England’.
²

Later generations put their own stamp on Surrey’s reputation. For the Elizabethans he was a pioneer of the English Renaissance:

More heavenly were those gifts he had, than earthly was his form;

His corpse too worthy for the grave, his flesh no meat for worm.

An Earl of birth; a God of sprite, a Tully
^fn1
for his tongue,

Me think of right the world should shake, when half his praise were rung.
³

The Victorians, inspired by Surrey’s romantic editor, George Frederick Nott, saw him as a noble hero. In the last century he has been described as ‘a thoroughbred courser let loose among the shire horses’, ‘a picturesque anomaly in a world that had no time for him’, an ‘infinitely gifted juvenile delinquent’ and as the visionary ‘poet Earl who revolutionised in his own texts and in his own life concepts of honour and nobility’.
⁴
I see a sensitive and sentimental young man who acted more on impulse than design. His haughty exterior confirmed objectionable pride, but also masked loneliness and insecurity.

In 1841 Isaac D’Israeli wrote:

Could the life or what we have of late called the psychological history of this poetic Earl of Surrey be now written, it would assuredly open a vivid display of fine genius, high passions and romantic enthusiasm. Little is known save a few public events but the print of the footsteps show their dimension. We trace the excellence while we know but little of the person.
⁵

The biography of a nobleman born nearly five centuries ago cannot possibly aspire to the intimacy of a modern portrait. Nevertheless, it is true to say that much more is known about Surrey since the time of D’Israeli’s tribute. The Herculean task of cataloguing and abstracting all the major documents of Henry VIII’s reign was completed in 1932 in a work comprising over twenty volumes. Also in print are letters, ambassadorial dispatches, church records, inventories, hunting accounts, treatises and little-known chronicles, like that of Elis Gruffydd, a Welsh soldier whose vivid impressions of the warfront were published in a series of articles in the mid-twentieth century. Our understanding of the Henrician period is continually being challenged and enriched by fresh scholarship and new discoveries. Surrey’s most recent and most successful biographer, W. A. Sessions, unearthed several new finds, including long-forgotten portraits and information about Surrey’s mansion in Norwich. My own research, most memorably among the Bedingfeld manuscripts at Oxburgh Hall, has, I hope, also borne fruit.

Tracing Surrey’s footsteps in not an easy task. His poems are full of images of restlessness, of a questing, a striving: for recognition, contentment, love, lasting friendship, faith and, above all, for a true sense of self. It may be impossible ever to catch up with him, but in researching and writing this book, I hope I have come closer to the man who made those footsteps and the ground over which he trod.

^fn1
Tully
: Cicero.

PART ONE

YOUTH

1

ONLY VIRTUE UNCONQUERED

It is a spur in brave and good spirits to bear in mind those things which their ancestors have nobly achieved.

It transferreth itself unto posterity and, as for the most part, we see the children of noble personages to bear the lineaments and resemblance of their parents, so in like manner, for the most part, their virtues and noble dispositions, which even in their tenderest years will bud forth and discover itself.

Henry Peacham,
The Complete Gentleman

‘
THESE NEW ERECTED
men,’ Henry Howard once wailed in an attack upon the arrivistes of the Court, ‘would by their wills leave no nobleman on life!’
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He was proud of his ancestry and jealous of his honour. All around him, engraved on tableware, carved in the furniture, sewn into tapestries and stained onto glass, coats of arms boasted of his descent from the blood of kings.

Yet the Howards had been ‘new erected’ once too, and not, perhaps, as long ago as they might have wished. The first Howard of any note was William Howard, a talented lawyer who purchased a manor and lands in East Winch, a small village in north Norfolk near King’s Lynn. He was knighted by Edward I and, in 1297, became Chief Justice of the Common Pleas. The next few generations saw more lawyers and a smattering of fine public servants and military captains. They married well and gradually the Howard patrimony grew, but it was only when Sir William’s great-great-great grandson, Robert, married Lady
Margaret Mowbray around 1420 that the family can really be said to have arrived.

She was the elder daughter of Thomas Mowbray, Duke of Norfolk and Earl Marshal of England. From his side of the family, Margaret descended from Edward I through Thomas of Brotherton, King Edward’s son by his second marriage to Marguerite of France. From her mother (Elizabeth, daughter of Richard Fitzalan, Earl of Arundel, and Elizabeth de Bohun), Margaret could also trace her descent to Edward I, this time through his first marriage to Eleanor of Castile. The Howard–Mowbray marriage thus linked a gentry family of modest proportions to three royal houses and a wealth of English Baronies. Robert and Margaret’s son John (and all his descendants, including his great-grandson, Henry Howard) had the blood of Plantagenet, Capet, Mowbray, Bigod, Warenne, de Bohun, Segrave, Percy and Fitzalan in his veins.

John Howard pinned his colours firmly to the Yorkist mast, fighting for Edward IV in the Wars of the Roses and earning himself a Barony in the late 1460s – one of only eight men to be raised from the gentry in Edward IV’s reign.
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Following the death of the King, John supported the usurpation of Richard III. His loyalty was richly rewarded: on 28 June 1483 he was created Duke of Norfolk and Earl Marshal of England; he received half the Mowbray estate and his heir, Thomas, was elevated to the Earldom of Surrey.
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A month later the first Howard Duke of Norfolk was appointed Steward for the Duchy of Lancaster and Lord Admiral of England, Ireland and Aquitaine.

Thus the fortunes of the Howards were attained by the same means as those of the new men that Henry Howard so abhorred:
advantageous marriage and loyal service. But to Henry there was a difference. Not for nothing was the family motto
Sola Virtus Invicta
– Only Virtue Unconquered. While the upstarts at Court were ‘mean creatures’, well versed in the machiavellian arts of dissimulation and betrayal, the Howards, so Henry grew up to believe, embodied a unique nobility of spirit. They upheld a chivalric code that placed loyalty and trust above all else; ‘the friendship sworn, each promise kept so just’, as the poet Earl would later put it.
³

Such a promise was duly kept by John Howard, Duke of Norfolk, to his King, Richard III, at Bosworth Field on 22 August 1485. The Wars of the Roses – the thirty years of intermittent fighting for the Crown of England – pitted Yorkist against Lancastrian, the White Rose against the Red. With the extinction of the main Lancastrian line in 1471, Henry Tudor, Earl of Richmond, became the chief claimant.
^fn2
He was a little-known Welshman who had spent many years exiled in Brittany, but his pledge to unify the two Houses appealed to many war-weary Englishmen. The extreme unpopularity of Richard III – Shakespeare’s ‘poisonous bunch-backed toad’
⁴
– also aided Henry Tudor’s cause. The Stanleys and the Percys were carefully won over. Lancastrian agents attempted to lure Norfolk too, sending blandishments and threats. It is said that on the night before he left to join the King’s forces, Norfolk found nailed to his gates the warning:

Jack of Norfolk be not too bold

For Dickon thy master is bought and sold.
⁵

The Duke could not be turned. As promised, he led the vanguard into a battle that he must have known he could not win. He charged into the mêlée and fought on as his men were hacked to pieces around him. Soon he was face-to-face with his cousin, the Earl of Oxford. One blow threw off Norfolk’s visor. An instant later an arrow punctured his skull. It was an honourable death according to the Tudor chronicler, Edward Hall:

He regarded more his oath, his honour and promise made to King Richard; like a gentleman and a faithful subject to his Prince [he] absented not himself from his master but, as he faithfully lived under him, so he manfully died with him to his great fame and laud.
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