House Of Treason: The Rise And Fall Of A Tudor Dynasty (30 page)

He may have watched in smug satisfaction as Sir Thomas Seymour was marched out of the Tower for execution for treason on 20 March 1549 and, better yet, on 22 January 1552, the same lonely walk undertaken by his brother Somerset, who took his death ‘very patiently’.
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The duke’s sufferings finally ended after the death of Edward VI and the accession of his Catholic half-sister, Mary, in August 1553, who swept aside the Protestant candidate for the throne, Lady Jane Grey. On the evening of 3 August, Mary arrived at the Tower after a triumphal progress through London, escorted by 1,000 retainers dressed in velvet coats. She was met at the gates by Sir John Gage and, arriving at the green, she saw Norfolk and Gardiner (who had also been imprisoned during Edward’s reign) kneeling humbly on the grass, amidst the joyful salvoes of gunfire ringing out from the fortress. Mary kissed them, declared ‘these be my prisoners’, and bid them rise up and stand.
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The following day Norfolk and Gardiner were formally freed.

Norfolk’s revenge on his captors was swift and ruthless.

On Friday 18 August, Norfolk, as High Steward of England, sat beneath a canopy of gold cloth of estate in Westminster Hall in judgement on Sir John Dudley, now first Duke of Northumberland, his eldest son John, Earl of Warwick, and Sir William Parr, Marquis of Northampton, on charges of treason. Northumberland objected, claiming there was no crime in him having supported Lady Jane Grey as his sovereign, but Norfolk declared the charges just.
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But after the indictments were read, they meekly pleaded guilty and ‘without passing of any jury of their peers, had judgement to be drawn, hanged and quartered’. The duke was among the official witnesses at Northumberland’s execution on 22 August
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and a month later had the satisfaction of recovering his gold ducal coronet, the collar and badge of the Garter and his jewels and plate from Northumberland’s estate.
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The duke also presided over the trials of Cranmer, Lady Jane and her husband.

As Earl Marshal, he organised Mary’s coronation at Westminster Abbey on 1 October. As his customary fee, he claimed ‘the queen’s horse and palfrey, with all the furniture that is on the horse and he claimed to be high usher on the day of the coronation and to have the table cloth of the high dess [desk] and the cloth of estate that was behind the queen’.
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Norfolk’s attainder was reversed in October and his grandson Thomas Howard, now the Earl of Surrey, was restored in blood.
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He had trouble reclaiming his forfeited lands, which had been disposed of by Edward VI. Eventually, two-thirds were restored, worth £1,600, and early in 1554 he held a manorial court at Framlingham.
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The duke’s warlike duties were not over - and his last campaign was probably his most ignominious. In January 1554, Kent rose in rebellion, under Sir Thomas Wyatt, over Mary’s plans to marry Philip of Spain, the son of Charles V. Norfolk, as an eighty-one-year-old Lieutenant General of the army, was despatched to Kent to assault the rebel headquarters at Rochester with a small force of 1,000 white-coated London troops. From Gravesend, he confidently promised the Privy Council: ‘I doubt not you shall shortly hear of their repulse out of . . . Rochester.’
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His confidence was misplaced.

Without securing his lines of communication, Norfolk hastened on to Strood and opened fire with his artillery on Rochester Bridge. One of his captains, called Bret, suddenly turned to face his 500-strong battalion and drew his sword. He shouted:

The troops responded by crying ‘A Wyatt, a Wyatt’ and ‘We are all Englishmen’. They turned their cannon on the remainder of Norfolk’s little army and the duke, sensing discretion to be the better part of valour, hastily departed, leaving behind him eight brass guns and his honour.
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Fortunately for him, perhaps, Wyatt’s rebellion foundered in Fleet Street at the gates of the city of London in early February.

Norfolk attended his last Privy Council meeting on 7 May but was too ill to be present at the preparations for his grandson Thomas’s marriage to Mary Fitzalan, daughter of the Earl of Arundel, a fortnight later.

Back at Kenninghall on 21 July, he dictated his last will to George Holland, his secretary:

His grandson Thomas was named heir ‘to all and singular, my manors, lands, tenements, possessions . . . whatsoever which I have within the realm of England’.
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Among the other bequests was £500 to Mary, Duchess of Richmond, for bringing up her brother’s children and ‘her great costs and charges in making suit for my deliverance out of my imprisonment’. Each of Surrey’s daughters were also to receive £1,000 on their marriage or when they reached the age of twenty-one.

There was no mention of his wife, or Bessie Holland. But there was one surprise: £100 was left to his lawyer and steward ‘Sergeant [Thomas] Gawdy and John Gosnold’, to bring up ‘the child which [is] in my house now commonly called Jane Goodman’ - quite probably his bastard daughter.
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A clue to this may lie in a document detailing his properties which includes the annuities paid by the duke. Among them is: ‘Item. To Thomas Goodman, gentleman, out of the manor of Shelfhanger, £20.’
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His last act was to give his blessing to the wedding of his granddaughter Katherine and Henry Lord Berkeley, who were married a month later at Kenninghall.
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Norfolk died in his bed on 25 August 1554 at Kenninghall. There were many who would say there was no justice in his peaceful end. But after all his conspiracies, intrigue and the tumult of his life, he ended up the great survivor.

The London mercer and undertaker Henry Machyn recorded the duke’s funeral at Framlingham on 2 October:

That marital thorn in Norfolk’s side, Elizabeth Howard, died at Kenninghall during the evening of Thursday 4 September 1558, aged sixty-five - no doubt delighted that she had outlived her much despised husband.
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Her will, signed when she was ‘sick and diseased in body’, asked that she should be buried in the Howard chapel at St Mary’s church, Lambeth, in Surrey. Even in death, her proper status as widow of a duke must be observed, even though she hated most of her Howard in-laws.

She left her brother’s wife Ursula her jewels and most of her clothes, and her grandson, now the fourth Duke of Norfolk, some tablets carved with religious iconography. A ‘gown of crimson velvet’ went to his wife. Her granddaughter, Margaret, was bequeathed ‘two gowns of taffeta’ and her younger son, Thomas, created Viscount Bindon in 1559, was left a silver gilt cup and cover. After a few gifts to her servants, the rest of her ‘goods, cattle and debts’ she left to her brother Henry, Lord Stafford.
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After years of her husband’s parsimony, there was not much for her to bequeath.

Elizabeth was buried at Lambeth in December and an epitaph, written by Stafford, was erected over her grave:

It ends: ‘God thy soul preserve from pain.’
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Elizabeth’s effigy was placed incongruously on her husband’s tomb at Framlingham when it was completed in 1559.
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In life, they were noisily divided. In death, they were reunited, if only for the sake of appearances.

‘She wept and blubbered, saying “Woe is me! That [noble] house [of Howard] has suffered so much for my sake” ’

 

 

Thomas Howard, fourth Duke of Norfolk, was aged just eighteen when he inherited the title from his grandfather - together with a handsome bequest of fifty-six manors, thirty-seven advowsons and ‘many other considerable estates’, to make him probably the greatest landowner in the realm.
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His legacy also included the hereditary title of Earl Marshal of England.
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The Howard lands in East Anglia were lumped together as ‘the Liberty of the Duke of Norfolk’ administered by the duke’s own courts and covering four hundreds,
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together with fourteen other manors in Norfolk and nine parishes in Suffolk. The fourth duke also owned the rapes
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of Lewes and Bramber in Sussex, the Surrey manors of Dorking and Reigate, and other estates in Devon, Shropshire and in Ireland and even a coal mine in South Wales.
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These were happier, golden times for the Howards. After the arrest of his father, the Earl of Surrey, Howard had been placed in the custody of Sir John Williams and lived at his sumptuous Tudor palace at Rycote, near Thame in Oxfordshire.
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Then, after Surrey’s execution, his aunt, Mary, Duchess of Richmond, had taken responsibility for the ten-year-old and his siblings at Reigate Castle and placed him in the care of the Protestant polemicist John Foxe, as tutor. Later, after the accession of the devout Mary, he joined Bishop Gardiner’s household at Southwark - something of a contrast in religious ambience - and his education was completed by the pious Catholic John White, Bishop of Lincoln, in 1554-6. Little wonder that doubts about his religious allegiance dogged him throughout his life.

As the new duke was underage, he became a ward of the queen and required royal permission to marry Mary, the daughter of Sir Henry Fitzalan, twelfth Earl of Arundel, on 30 March 1555, who became his heir when her brother died in 1556.

Young Thomas had lost nothing of the Howard flair in picking an appropriate wife: Mary added Arundel Castle and substantial estates in Sussex to her young husband’s bulging portfolio of property.
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In the same year as his wedding, a private Act of Parliament was passed empowering Norfolk to make sales and grants of his own property in his own right, but under the guidance of the Lord Chancellor (now Gardiner, who died shortly afterwards), the Earl of Arundel and Thomas Thirlby, Bishop of Ely since 1554.
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The Norfolks enjoyed high favour at Mary’s court. A month after Mary’s accession, Thomas was restored to the title of Earl of Surrey,
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created a Knight of the Bath and in July 1554 he became the first gentleman of the chamber of King Philip, the queen’s new Spanish consort, and he attended their wedding at Winchester Cathedral on 25 July 1554, just two days after the royal couple’s first meeting.

The duke survived an unfortunate accident on 26 June 1557 when he was riding in Stamford Hill, London. His pistol, ‘hanging on his saddle bow . . . by misfortune’ was fired ‘and hit one of his men’ whose horse panicked, threw him, and the retainer ‘was hanged by his stirrup, so that the horse knocked his brains out with flinging out of his legs’.
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The new king was godfather to the Norfolks’ child, Philip, born two days later, and named after him.
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Sadly, the duchess died eight weeks afterwards, aged only seventeen, and was buried in the church of St Clement Danes in London.
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With the continuation of his dynasty resting precariously on the life of a young baby, he moved smartly to find another wife to produce other heirs, and found a suitable candidate in his cousin, Margaret, Lady Dudley. She was the daughter and sole heiress of Lord Audley of Walden
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and the eighteen-year-old widow of Lord Henry Dudley, who had died without issue in 1557. The fourth duke needed a papal dispensation for the marriage, and his lawyers predictably spent months in Rome negotiating to win the necessary permission. However, after Queen Mary’s death at St James’s Palace on 17 November 1558, and the accession of her Protestant half-sister Elizabeth, the Vatican’s authority over his prospective nuptials vanished like a puff of incense.
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His second marriage was duly ratified by the new queen’s first parliament in 1559 and it brought him yet another fine mansion - Audley End in Essex.