House Of Treason: The Rise And Fall Of A Tudor Dynasty (18 page)

Unsurprisingly, Norfolk’s punitive progress through the north made him an unpopular figure. The thirty-two-year-old widow Mabel Brigge began a three-day ‘Black Fast of St Trynzan’ (St Trinian) in Yorkshire in March 1538 to cast a curse on the king and the duke. She had done it once before ‘for a man and he broke his neck and so she trusted [the same would happen] to the king and this false duke’. It did not work and she was executed at York in early April that year.
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Despite the slaughter he had inflicted, there was still malicious gossip at Henry’s court about Norfolk’s self-interest in doing his duty for the king. One malevolent rumour suggested he had brought his twenty-four-year-old son Surrey north in order to train him as his deputy in ruling the region - not such a far-fetched idea, given the Howards’ earlier experience on the borders. Heaven forfend! Norfolk was disingenuously aghast and protested to Henry: ‘Sir, on the troth I owe to God and you my sovereign lord, I never had such a thought.’ Surrey was there merely to keep him company during those dark, cold nights in the northern counties:

Norfolk vowed to lay down his ‘poor body’ to defend his reputation against these ‘false caitiffs’
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that were too afraid to show their faces.
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Surrey returned to court at the beginning of that August and almost immediately came up against a courtier who suggested, mischievously, that he was sympathetic to the pilgrims’ cause. The hot-headed and proud Howard heir struck the man viciously in the face with his fist. Legend has it that the other protagonist was Edward Seymour, Viscount Beauchamp, one of the queen’s brothers, but there is no real evidence to support this identification. Violence, or the shedding of blood within the precincts of the king’s court, was a serious felony, normally punished by the loss of the right hand in a gruesome ceremony.

Norfolk was horrified at the incident, but even more so at the prospect of how justice against his son would be meted out. He immediately wrote to Cromwell on 8 August, his heart pierced ‘by a multitude of pricks’ especially the fear of Surrey’s maiming. The ‘informations [about] my son [are] falsely imagined, no man knows better than you . . .’ and he sought reassurance ‘to amend the [fear] in my heart by chance of likelihood to be maimed of his right arm’. Norfolk added in his own handwriting: ‘The loss of a finger would not cause me as much sorrow.’
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The Lord Privy Seal duly intervened and Surrey was packed off to Windsor Castle for two weeks’ imprisonment to cool his heels, and his temper.
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There he consoled himself by writing the poem
When
Windsor Walls Sustained my Wearied Arm
and the elegy
So Cruel Prison
, which recalled his friendship with Richmond.

Norfolk, who was feeling the effects of his punishing itinerary on his advancing years, frequently asked permission to return to London - but each time was refused. In September, Henry thanked him for his congratulations on Jane Seymour’s pregnancy, and asked him to stay just a little longer in the north:

The king’s letter was double-edged. Norfolk’s recall may have become imminent, but any dreams he had of becoming the powerful magnate controlling the north of England had vanished. The ‘Council of the North’ with Cuthbert Tunstall, Bishop of Durham, as its president, was duly created and Norfolk returned to London in time for the long-awaited birth of a lawful son to Henry and his queen Jane, on 12 October 1537.

He was one of the godfathers to Prince Edward at the christening at midnight on Sunday 15 October in the splendours of the newly decorated Chapel Royal at Hampton Court.
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But three days later, the queen fell ill. Her condition rapidly worsened and, during the evening of 24 October, Norfolk dashed off a hasty note to Cromwell, still at Westminster:

She died just before midnight that night, aged twenty-eight.

With the queen scarcely cold in her coffin, on 3 November the duke pressed the king to take another wife as quickly as possible during a conversation at Hampton Court - advice that carried, unspoken, the need for a ‘spare heir’, a Duke of York. But Norfolk had another critical matter to settle with the grieving Henry: his personal share of the wealth and lands of the Cluniac priory of St Pancras, in Lewes, East Sussex, one of the richest monasteries in England.

One might think that Norfolk was insensitive, grasping, even bovine, in raising this issue when Henry had just lost a wife he genuinely loved. Truthfully, he could be all that and more. Certainly, he risked the king’s unpredictable and violent temper, which may be a measure of his greed. The next day the duke wrote to Cromwell, who also had an interest in the proceeds from the same religious house:

Henry distractedly replied: ‘As you showed to me’ - a vital indication of royal approval, Norfolk surmised, that the priory’s property was ‘well bestowed’.
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Three months later, the duke got his wish: he was granted the priory’s valuable properties at Castleacre in Norfolk and a total of 126 manors and lordships, together with the rectories and advowsons
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of twenty-nine parishes in the same county. Cromwell got the priory site itself and some other properties.

Norfolk, as Earl Marshal, should have been concentrating on the arrangements for Queen Jane’s funeral on 12 November at St George’s Chapel, Windsor. A funeral for a ‘lawful’ queen had not been held since that of Henry’s mother, Elizabeth of York, in 1503. Then, Norfolk told Cromwell, there were seven marquises and earls, sixteen barons, sixty knights and ‘forty spirituals, besides the ordinary of the king’s household. Therefore, we have named more persons that you may choose from . . .’
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He no doubt ensured that Surrey, now rehabilitated at court, was one of the principal mourners in the procession. The duke also issued instructions for 1,200 Masses to be said in the city of London churches for the soul of Queen Jane.
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Norfolk, for all his enthusiasm in delivering the king’s brutal revenge on the north, was no nearer to regaining real political influence. The Privy Council seat still eluded him because the powerful figure of Thomas Cromwell blocked his advancement at court.

The sentence of death was never carried out on Norfolk’s half-brother Lord Thomas Howard. Tradition speaks of another poisoning, but he died of an ague, or fever, in the Tower on All Hallows Eve, 31 October 1537,
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and his body was given to his mother, the Dowager Duchess of Norfolk, for burial ‘without pomp’ at Thetford Abbey.

Lady Margaret Douglas remained in the Tower until her former lover’s death, was pardoned, and despatched for a time to the Bridgettine house at Syon Abbey, at Isleworth on the banks of the River Thames, for her physical and spiritual health. In 1544, she married Matthew, fourth Earl of Lennox, and gave birth to a son, Henry Stuart, Earl of Darnley, who grew up to become the distinctively unattractive husband of Mary Queen of Scots, who was to have her own dire impact on the House of Howard.

‘When so ever two false knaves . . . secretly accuse a man . . . , he must die. Death, death, [comes] even for trifles, so that they follow the high priests in crucifying Christ’

 

 

The crisis of the northern rebellions safely and bloodily resolved,
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the way now lay clear for the king’s chief minister, Thomas Cromwell, to pursue the three policy priorities at the top of his agenda: enriching still further Henry’s revenues by still more dissolutions of monastic houses; continuing religious reform in England, and, after the premature death of Jane Seymour, finding a suitable new queen for his royal master.

The easiest to implement (and most pleasantly profitable) was the total eradication of monastic life from the English landscape. The surrenders of abbeys, priories and nunneries had continued unabated and the larger, wealthier houses fell after a second act of suppression was passed by Parliament in the spring of 1539.
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This process was much more than recycling monastic wealth into hard cash, to the benefit of the king, the noble houses and an emerging breed of gentry. Cromwell’s policy was also gratuitous, wanton vandalism on a grand scale. At many of the more remote abbey sites, such as Tintern, Fountains and at Rievaulx, the great churches were stripped of the commercially desirable lead from their roofs and left open to the skies in a deliberate act to deny permanently their use as places of worship. Swept away on a tide of brutish iconoclasm were also their works of art and the monastic libraries of incalculable intellectual value. The brooding stone ruins to this day remain eloquent witnesses to Tudor governmental greed and ruthlessness.

As the dissolutions progressed, Norfolk continued to eye the potential spoil as greedily as anyone else of his class. While in the north during the bleak aftermath of the Pilgrimage of Grace, he spoke approvingly of the Augustinian priory at Bridlington, East Yorkshire, which had ‘a barn all covered with lead, [with] the largest, widest and deepest roofs that I ever saw’. The richness of its shrine of St John excited him still further: ‘If I [dared] be a thief I would have stolen [three carved retables
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] to have sent . . . to the Queen’s grace.’
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At long last, he had been granted the Benedictine nuns’ house at Bungay, which fell like an over-ripe plum into his lap on 18 December 1537, at a modest rental of £6 4s 3d per year - only a tenth of its regular annual income. But the duke’s hopes had been frustrated at Woodbridge, where the priory site was granted to Sir John Wingfield and his wife Dorothy, of Letheringham, Suffolk.
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At least he had the consolation of the prime catch of Lewes Priory’s substantial possessions in East Anglia, notably Castle Rising, another huge bargain.
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Other houses also came Norfolk’s way: he was keen to secure the Franciscan friary in Norwich and told Cromwell on 21 September 1538 that he had intended to ride into the city from Kenninghall the previous day to take the surrender of the house, but fell ill and so sent Surrey instead. The duke took pity on the ‘very poor wretches’ he had expelled and gave the grey friars forty shillings each to buy clothes for their new secular life.
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He systematically demolished the friary buildings, sold off the materials for a quick profit and left the site barren and empty.
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His receipts for 1537 show considerable profits. Cash that ‘remains to me clear’ totalled £2,638 (or more than £1 million at 2009 prices) after deductions of £400 to his estranged wife and son and other costs. That year, he sold lands worth £568 and purchased new property worth £1,739.
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Norfolk, however, was faced with the uncomfortable problem of the Cluniac priory of Our Lady at Thetford, the resting place of his ancestors, which faced an uncertain future after its surrender. In 1539, the duke suggested its conversion into ‘a very honest parish’ church of secular canons, governed by a dean and chapter. He proposed the first dean should be the existing prior, William Inxworth. With an eye to the religious reforms under way, with its focus on the importance of God’s Word, Norfolk also suggested the appointment of a doctor or bachelor of divinity to act as a preacher in the new church, to be paid an annual stipend of £20.

He petitioned Henry for approval of his plans, astutely pointing out that the priory church held the remains of the king’s natural son, the Duke of Richmond; Norfolk’s first wife Lady Anne (Henry’s aunt), as well as the tombs of his own father (the second duke) and his grandfather. Norfolk was at pains to point out that he was spending £400 in erecting an impressive monument for Richmond and another for himself, ready for when he shuffled off his own mortal coil.

His arguments struck a chord of pious resonance in Henry’s normally grasping heart, and Thetford was included in a list of five new collegiate churches to be created by the king himself. But then Henry unexpectedly changed his mind and insisted that the priory should, like all the others, be dissolved.