House Of Treason: The Rise And Fall Of A Tudor Dynasty (28 page)

This last question had been amended. Wriothesley’s first attempt read: ‘. . . procured your sister or any other woman to be the king’s concubine or not?’
²⁸
Was he being prudish - or did he believe such a starkly posed question would simply push Surrey into a rage and stop any further useful interrogation?

The Lord Chancellor also jotted down some thoughts in an
aide-mémoire
to himself. The tantalisingly brief notes included: ‘My lord of Surrey dissembling [lying or deceiving].’ ‘Fulmerston.’ ‘Mr Paget.’ ‘. . . Surrey’s pride and his gown of gold. Departure of the king’s apparel.’ ‘The duke’s will.’ In most cases, we can only guess at their true import and, unfortunately, the earl’s probably blustering answers in his interrogation have not survived. The reference to the king’s secretary, Sir William Paget, could relate to claims that Surrey had already been distributing high offices of state on the promise of his regency and had offered Paget the Lord Chancellorship.
²⁹
Another note - ‘Riding with many men in the streets’ - refers to the earl’s habit of travelling around London at the head of a considerable number of mounted retainers, sparking suspicions of possible insurrection.
³⁰

Wriothesley was a busy man. He ordered inquiries into Norfolk’s annuities from a host of sinecure jobs: ‘By the king for the Office of High Treasurer, £365. Earl Marshal, £20. Steward of Suppressed [monastic] Lands on this side [of the river] Trent, £100.’ The list included stewardships awarded by various bishops and nobles. The duke’s total income from all these various offices was more than £700 a year, or £190,000 in 2009 purchasing power. Surrey’s, by comparison, was more modest: just £20 a year for the stewardship of the Duchy of Lancaster; the same amount for his earldom, and £50 as the king’s cup-bearer at court.
³¹

Henry arrived back in London from Windsor, via his huge new palace at Nonsuch, near Ewell, Surrey, on 23 December, still suffering from ‘some grief of his leg’ and the fever it caused.
³²
The next day, Christmas Eve, van der Delft reported to Mary, the Dowager Queen of Hungary, and his master, Charles V:
³³

Henry, said the ambassador, was ‘deeply engaged and much perplexed in the consideration of this affair’. He noted the ascendancy of the evangelical Seymours at court, ‘and it is even asserted here that the custody of the prince and the government of the realm will be entrusted to them’. Their supporters also

Wriothesley presented his summary of the charges against father and son to Henry. The king, spectacles perched on the end of his nose,
³⁵
struggled with the arcane complexities of heraldic law, custom and practice. He amended and corrected the document in a faltering hand, but his thoughts were as incisive as ever:
³⁶

As evidence of conspiracy against Norfolk and Surrey became less credible, the charges concerned with purely heraldic offences became the focus of the indictments.

Meantime, the duke, in another letter, asked the privy councillors for some homely comforts as he awaited his fate. He requested that some books should be brought from his library in his Lambeth house ‘for unless I may have books to read ere I fall on sleep and after I awake again, I cannot sleep, nor did these dozen years’. Other titles could be purchased in London - St Augustine’s
de Civitate Dei
(City of God),
³⁸
Flavius Josephus’s
de Antiquitatibus ac de bello Judaico
³⁹
and another by Eduard Wilhelm Sabell ‘who doth declare most of any book, how the Bishop of Rome [the Pope] from time to time has usurped his power against all princes, by their unwise sufferance’.
⁴⁰
Norfolk also asked for a priest (a ‘Ghostly Father’) to say Mass for him but he promised ‘upon my life to speak no word to him that shall say Mass which he may do in the other chamber and I to remain within’. Could he also have more freedom of movement to ease his aching old limbs?

Finally, and pathetically, he requested some clean sheets.
⁴¹

With events (and the Seymours) conspiring against him, Surrey must have been desperate with frustration and fury, pacing up and down in his room, possibly located in the western section of St Thomas’s Tower. Within its west wall was a vertical shaft, built as a garderobe, or lavatory, that emptied into the tidal moat.
⁴²
One contemporary report suggests he attempted a daring escape. The source - Antonio de Guaras, a Spanish merchant in London - says that the earl asked his servant, Martin, to smuggle a dagger into his room, hidden in his breeches. Surrey told him: ‘Go to St Katherine’s [dock] and take a boat, no matter what it costs and wait for me there. I hope to be with you at midnight.’

The accounts of Walter Stonor, the Lieutenant of the Tower, include an ‘allowance for the said earl’s irons - £13 6s 8d’ - possibly the shackles mentioned in the story. They also cover the cost of his board: attendants, candles, coals and a small sum for hangings and plate in his room, totalling £24. This also included the cost of a new coat of black satin, trimmed with rabbit fur, purchased by Stonor ‘against his arraignment’.
⁴⁴

Norfolk and Suffolk were indicted for treason at a hearing at Norwich Castle on 7 January 1547.

Five days later Norfolk confessed, ‘without compulsion, without force, without advice or counsel’. But his statement would either have been dictated to him, or written beforehand - all he had to do was to sign it.

Those who witnessed the confession included Hertford, Wriothesley, Paget and Sir Anthony Browne, Master of the King’s Horse. To add legal respectability, the two chief justices, Sir Richard Lister and Sir Edward Montague, also subscribed their names.

His first offence - disclosing state secrets - probably emanated from the testimony of a spy named John Torre who had claimed that Norfolk and his half-brother William had paid secret visits at night to the home of the French ambassador Charles de Marillac.
⁴⁷
Norfolk was notoriously pro-French in his political beliefs and, indeed, received an annuity from France over many years. But these meetings, between May 1541 and late 1542, were made on the king’s orders and everyone knew about them.
⁴⁸
The second offence - bearing the three lions of England with a label on his arms - is even more nonsensical, as the Howards had used this coat for centuries.
⁴⁹

Norfolk was neither a fool nor a coward, but he was patently too old and sick to fight his enemies any longer. Despite the very long odds, he gambled his last card from the poor hand destiny had dealt him: that his past loyalty would prompt a generous act of mercy from his sometimes malevolent sovereign. However, his confession also deliberately prejudiced his son’s fate, due to be decided the following day, 13 January.

Because he was not a lord of Parliament, Surrey was to be humiliatingly tried by a common court at the Guildhall.
⁵⁰
The earl was popular in London, despite his previous hooligan escapades. An eyewitness reported it was ‘fearful to see the enormous number of people’
⁵¹
watching as Surrey was taken through the capital’s early morning streets guarded by 300 halberdiers, commanded by Sir John Gage, Constable of the Tower, who was responsible for delivering him safely to trial.
⁵²

The earl was brought to the bar of the packed court at nine o’clock, preceded by the black-coated headsman, carrying the execution axe, its sharp edge turned away from the prisoner. Surrey directly faced his judges sitting alongside Lord Mayor Hobberthorne - they included his enemies Hertford and Wriothesley and the king’s secretary Paget, sitting as a commissioner. The earl would also have recognised many of the twelve-man jury, as its membership of knights and gentlemen were drawn from an area twelve miles (19 km.) around his father’s palace at Kenninghall.

His indictment was then read out - the first time Surrey would have heard the charges against him. It was based on section twelve of the Second Succession Act of 1536: