Henry VIII's Last Victim (45 page)

Surrey was rebuked by the Privy Council either for this ‘frank’ attack upon Grey’s honour or, more likely, for his earlier letter of ‘parables’ to Dudley. On 15 July the Duke of Norfolk wrote to the Lords of the Council asking them ‘to give the King thanks that it hath pleased His Majesty to will you to advertise me of my foolish son’s demeanour’. The admonition of the Council, Norfolk wrote, ‘may do him much good . . . and much more if His Majesty be pleaded to cause the same to be spoke on his behalf’. Norfolk was ‘glad’, he said, that on this occasion Surrey had ‘used himself humbly and repentantly, which I pray God he may often remember and not trust too much to his own wit’. But the old Duke knew that he could no longer control his heir: ‘I desire you that my son may be so earnestly handled that he may have regard hereafter so to use himself that he give His Majesty no cause of discontent.’
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Had Henry VIII read the paraphrases of the first five chapters of Ecclesiastes that Surrey probably composed around this time, he would have had far greater cause for concern. On lines 44–6 of chapter three, Surrey paints a terrifying picture of a tyrant:

I saw a royal throne whereas that Justice should have sit;

Instead of whom I saw, with fierce and cruel mode,

Where Wrong was set, that bloody beast, that drunk the guiltless blood.
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The similarities here with a ballad attributed to Anne Askew are striking.

I saw a royal throne,

Where justice should have sit,

But in her stead was one

Of moody, cruel wit.

Absorbed was righteousness,

As of the raging flood:

Satan, in his excess,

Sucked up the guiltless blood.
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It is impossible to say for sure who originated this image, as Surrey’s Ecclesiastes poems cannot be dated with precision.
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The lines from the Vulgate
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– ‘I saw under the sun impiety in the seat of judgement and evil in the place of justice’ – suggest that although Surrey was translating very freely, he was ‘following the thought and the sequence’ of the original.
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Surrey had previously shown, in his poem about the tyrant Sardanapalus, who ‘had lost his honour and his right’ to rule, that he did not shy away from accusatory imagery and he had written about ‘guiltless blood’ before, in a poem about Wyatt.
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Askew admitted she was a literary novice – ‘not oft use I to write / in prose nor yet in rhyme’
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– and her poem is not particularly accomplished. Surrey frequently polished and improved upon the work of others and had strong empathy for the voice of female complaint. Nor was he averse to reworking phrases and images that appealed to him, as his borrowings from Gavin Douglas (for the
Aeneid
) and Johannes Campensis (for
his biblical paraphrases) show. When, in his version of chapter three of Ecclesiastes, Surrey writes about ‘the slipper top of worldly wealth’, he is echoing Wyatt’s ‘slipper top of Court’s estates’.
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Therefore the possibility, however remote, exists that Surrey could have appropriated Askew’s poem, rather than the other way around.
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Either scenario begs the question: how did the one get hold of the other’s work? Anne’s ballad was written in Newgate prison and then smuggled to Germany, where it was published by John Bale. Could Surrey’s poem have been slipped into Anne’s cell in order to provide comfort and support in her hour of need? Or had Surrey’s contacts (perhaps his sister Mary, who sheltered John Bale on his return to England) helped him get hold of a copy of Anne’s ballad before it was shipped abroad? Whatever the exact provenance of the image of the satanic beast feeding on ‘guiltless blood’, both Anne and Surrey claimed it as their own. But only the one had nothing to lose. On 16 July 1546 Anne Askew, ‘so racked that she could not stand’, was burned alive as a heretic.
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The story of what would be the last full year of Henry VIII’s reign cannot be told without reference to the religious differences at the Council board and in the Privy Chamber. Foreign ambassadors often reported events in terms of religious factionalism, and so did many domestic commentators. Staunch conservatives like Bishops Gardiner of Winchester and Bonner of London (‘puffed up porklings of the Pope’ according to John Bale
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) were determined to destroy reform and, in targeting their enemies, they utilised the heresy card again and again. Ardent reformers like Blagge were equally determined to spread the Word of God and work towards a reforming protectorate for Prince Edward following his father’s death. But little was black and white at Henry’s Court. Most politicians rated power above religion, or at least appreciated that their beliefs were best protected and advanced from a position of authority. Other factors such as kinship, clientage, local issues, financial considerations, foreign policy and personality shaped allegiances at Court. Nor should the instinct for self-preservation be underestimated. Bets were hedged and unholy alliances forged for the sake of survival.

Thomas Wriothesley was the archetypal Court chameleon. He emerged on the scene in the 1520s as one of Stephen Gardiner’s protégés, but very quickly entered the Cromwell camp. During the chief minister’s
fall, Wriothesley aligned himself with leading conservatives and throughout the summer of 1546 he was the principal persecutor of evangelicals. It was Wriothesley who tried to destroy both Catherine Parr and George Blagge and it was Wriothesley who turned the rack on Anne Askew till ‘the strings of her arms and eyes were perished’.
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By the end of the year, though, having noted in a list of memoranda ‘things in common: Paget, Hertford, Admiral, Denny’, he had drifted towards that camp.
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Wriothesley was accused of being a ruthless opportunist, but he was the King’s loyal servant and the path he chose was well trodden.

Of the four men noted by Wriothesley to be in the ascendant, Paget was Henry VIII’s trusted Secretary, Edward Seymour, Earl of Hertford, was Prince Edward’s uncle and, like Lord Admiral Dudley, the King’s military darling, while Anthony Denny of the Privy Chamber was Henry VIII’s chief confidant. All four seemed to embrace reform, but each was careful, outwardly, to cut his beliefs according to Henry VIII’s protean cloth. Whether each man’s end game was the dissemination of the Word of God throughout the country or the mastery of government was a question of priority and a matter of conscience. If all went to plan, no differentiation would be necessary. The two goals were inextricably linked.

Like Wriothesley, the Duke of Norfolk was prepared to compromise when necessary. In 1538 he had proposed a marriage between his daughter Mary and Edward Seymour’s younger brother Thomas.
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Nothing came of it then but in June 1546 Norfolk tried again. The Seymours were amenable to the idea and so was the King. In order to consolidate the alliance Norfolk also proposed a ‘cross-marriage’ between several of Surrey and Edward’s children.
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The Seymours were linked by blood to the future King; the Howards were the figureheads of the old nobility. A dynastic alliance would fare well for both families in the reign to come.

Surrey saw things differently. His relationship with the Seymours had always been ambivalent. In the 1530s he had enjoyed Seymour hospitality numerous times and, over the past three years, he had nominated Thomas Seymour to the Order of the Garter.
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On the other hand, his scathing beast fable had attacked Edward Seymour’s wife and left no doubt as to his opinion of the craven ways of her ‘kind’ in general. More recently, Surrey had suffered the ignominy of being replaced by Edward as Lieutenant General on Land in France. According to his
sister Mary, Surrey took Seymour to be ‘his enemy’ and was ‘so much incensed’ against him that the Duke of Norfolk feared ‘his son would lose as much as he had gathered together’.
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Mary was also hostile to the union because ‘her fantasy’ – or, as we would today term it, fancy – did not incline her to Thomas. According to Gawain Carew’s later testimony, Mary told him that summer that she had consulted Surrey about the marriage and that he had proffered the following advice: she should feign indecision about the Seymour match so that the King would send for her. At the ensuing interview, ‘she should in nowise utterly make refusal’ of Thomas, but ‘should leave the matter so diffusedly that the King’s Majesty should take occasion to speak with her again’. And again and again until, ‘by length of time’, Henry VIII might ‘take such a fantasy’ to her that she might rise to the status and attain the power that Francis I’s mistress enjoyed in France. Mary told Carew that she had been horrified by her brother’s suggestion and had screamed at him that ‘all they should perish and she would cut her own throat rather than she would consent to such a villainy’.
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At his trial half a year later Surrey ‘emphatically denied the truth of the allegation’, and when he was presented with Mary’s written statement confirming the story, he exclaimed: ‘must I, then, be condemned on the word of a wretched woman?’
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Surrey’s apologists have long maintained that he should not have been. He was, they argue, incapable of such ignoble advice; his words were not intended literally, but sarcastically; they were uttered in a fit of pique at the thought of the Howard–Seymour union and were subsequently distorted by his malicious sister and her evangelical friends. Without any evidence, Edmond Bapst, Edwin Casady and their followers argue that Mary had probably been keen on the marriage and that her enthusiasm had provoked Surrey’s outburst. These writers even went so far as to submit their own versions of the episode. ‘Go to!’ Casady’s Surrey shrieks at Mary, ‘such would be a grand farce of a marriage.’ Apparently ‘in tones of bitter scorn’, the Earl continued: ‘You had best conclude your marriage quickly, while your husband-to-be is in such high favour. Then you can profit from your position to insinuate yourself into the good graces of the King. If you can submit yourself to such a husband, why not make the most of your chance?’
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Such an interpretation gets Surrey off the hook. His virtue is preserved and Mary becomes the villain of the piece. It is convenient, but is it
plausible? If Mary deliberately distorted Surrey’s words, then she did not do so after his arrest in December, when it would have been expedient for her to distance herself from him, but in August, when she told Sir Gawain Carew all about it. That month Surrey was ostensibly still in favour, or at least not conspicuously out of favour. He participated in the reception of the Admiral of France, who had come to Hampton Court to ratify the Anglo-French peace treaty, and he was ranked above Hertford and the rest of the earls in the order of precedence drawn up for the accompanying celebrations.
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Mary and Surrey had a volatile relationship and just recently they had quarrelled about religion, but it seems highly unlikely that she would deliberately seek to undo her brother (as any kind of fabrication of the story would necessarily imply), not least because her own status would be affected by the fall-out.

Another argument put forward is that Mary genuinely and guilelessly mistook her brother’s sarcasm for literalism.
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Yet she was a bright lady – ‘too wise for a woman’ according to her father – and if Surrey had adopted a sarcastic tone, it is hard to imagine her not picking up on it. Might Sir Gawain Carew, then, be the one who wilfully misconstrued Surrey’s ‘ironic’ outburst when he retold the story to his friend Edward Rogers in August? This cannot entirely be discounted. Carew was a reformer and was related by marriage to Sir Anthony Denny. But surely if he had conspired to discredit Surrey in August, he would have informed Denny and others about the conversation then rather than passed it on to Rogers as a piece of juicy gossip.

It is neither necessary nor helpful to bend over backwards to exonerate Surrey in this affair. Carew’s detailed testimony has a ring of authenticity to it, as does the corroborative deposition provided by Rogers and, though Mary’s testimony is at times confusing, it too appears genuine. Besides, if Mary had actually wanted to marry Thomas Seymour, as Surrey’s apologists suggest, then it would have been in her interests to say so in December as the Seymours had by then emerged as the likeliest contenders for the regency government. It seems more reasonable to conclude that it was neither Mary nor Carew, but Surrey’s apologists, who later twisted his words, that Surrey was as ambitious as the next man, that he was desperate, as he had already shown to Blagge, to gain a footing in the next reign and that he was not above proposing the use of female bait to catch the King as his own father and the Seymours had so successfully done before. Surrey had probably
not thought his proposal through – Mary was, after all, Henry VIII’s son’s widow – and it is unlikely that he pursued it further. His servant Hugh Ellis later testified that he knew nothing about it.
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It was probably as rash and unthinking as Surrey’s riotous behaviour in London had been in 1543, but it was no less real, nor any less shameful, for that.

The Duke of Norfolk had always been adept at sensing changes in the political climate. As the year progressed and the days shortened, he must have rued the failure of the Howard–Seymour alliance. War with France had put the reformers on the back foot. Its prosecution relied, at the very least, on Imperial neutrality and, in his vigorous courtship of Charles V, Henry VIII had been at pains to display his religious orthodoxy. The June peace lifted these restrictions and it was no coincidence that the heresy hunts began to peter out once Seymour and Dudley had wrapped the negotiations and resumed their residence at Court.
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On the last day of August 1546 Anthony Denny was granted access to the King’s dry stamp. This was a device that created an impression of Henry VIII’s signature, which could then be filled in with ink. Denny had, in effect, a licence to forge the King’s signature on all public documents with the only proviso being that the King would sign a monthly schedule listing the documents stamped.
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