House Of Treason: The Rise And Fall Of A Tudor Dynasty (36 page)

His questioning began on Christmas Eve, 1583 and concerned his alleged involvement in the Throgmorton conspiracy and about sheltering another fugitive Jesuit priest, Jasper Heywood.
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His other secretary, John Keeper, was also interrogated
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as a suspected priest, by Sir Christopher Hatton, Elizabeth’s Vice-Chamberlain.

The interrogations produced nothing that either Burghley or Walsingham could use against him. Arundel was eventually released in April 1584 and his wife was freed from her confinement at Wiston House the following September.

The earl decided on a second attempt to flee England in April 1585 and made secret plans - not even telling his wife, who was heavily pregnant with his heir. He wrote a letter to Elizabeth explaining the reasons for his flight and entrusted it to his half-sister Meg Sackville until he arrived safely in France, when it could be delivered. He hired a small ship at Littlehampton, at the mouth of the River Arun, south of Arundel, and made several attempts to leave. Each time his departure was thwarted by adverse winds, according to the crew.

This may have been an excuse, a delaying tactic. Walsingham had laid a trap for the earl and his two companions, a servant called Burlace, and William Bray, who was a member of the covert network that smuggled Catholic priests and religious tracts into England. Bray was probably under surveillance and may have been the unwitting cause of the drama that now unfolded.

After a two-day delay, the ship finally put to sea at night and, after an hour, had made good headway out into the English Channel.

Arundel must have fondly believed that he was at last safe. In his delight, he probably did not notice that the crew had hoisted a lantern to the top of the ship’s single mast.

It was a signal.

Soon afterwards, a small warship came alongside and its captain, Francis Kellway, clambered aboard Arundel’s vessel. He ‘pretended to be a pirate . . . known to be a man of notorious, infamous life’ and offered to permit the earl to continue his voyage - on payment of £100. He swore

Arundel believed him. On the swaying deck he scribbled a few lines to his sister, asking her to speak to Edward Bridges, his chaplain at Arundel House, and to arrange for him to hand over the cash, once the ‘token’, or password - ‘black is white’ - was given to him.

Kellway read through the note approvingly and then revealed his true colours.

He was no common pirate. He had been stationed on Walsingham’s orders to intercept Arundel’s ship and arrest him.

Patience and fortitude may well be true Christian virtues. However, given the circumstances, it is difficult to swallow entirely this generous account of Arundel’s unruffled calm, particularly when Kellway relieved him of ‘his money and all those things he had about him, [such] as jewels and the like’.
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Such events could test anyone’s sense of humour and find it wanting. Not only was he heading straight for the Tower - rapidly becoming almost a second home for successive generations of the Howards - but he had been robbed by the rascal Kellway.

Once landed, Arundel was escorted under waiting heavy guard to London, sleeping overnight in Guildford, Surrey. He was taken straight to the grim fortress and committed as a prisoner there on 25 April 1585. His siblings William and Meg were also arrested and put into the custody of Roger, second Lord North. So was the usual suspect, his uncle Henry Howard, who once again faced his all too familiar inquisitors in the Tower.

Bridges, the earl’s chaplain, immediately published the four quarto pages of the earl’s unsigned and self-justifying letter to the queen. It told the story of his past service at court, but, recently, ‘the malice of my adversaries, by reason of your majesty’s good countenance towards me, began to be greater . . .’

He heard of the queen’s ‘bitter speeches’ and felt the finger of blame pointed at himself as a ‘person whom you deeply suspect’.

After his house arrest and questioning, ‘I remained in the same estate fifteen weeks at the least, no man charging me with the least offence, nor my conscience being able to accuse me of the smallest fault’.

At best, this was a pedigree of misfortune, and, at worst, one of hereditary treason. Arundel had grim forebodings when he considered ‘the fortune of these three . . . I called to mind my own danger and did not think it impossible that . . . I might as well follow them . . . , as I succeeded them in their place’.

It is not known whether Elizabeth actually read this eloquent and piquant letter, but it provided Walsingham with some potent ammunition to use against the earl. The spymaster initially employed a tried and tested ruse for extracting information from unwilling prisoners - a forged and incriminating letter in handwriting that ‘very much resembled’ Arundel’s own. Its three pages were triumphantly waved before him but the earl was allowed to read only the first few paragraphs. The letter, addressed to his steward William Dix, began with a warning:

It went on to say that, although he departed England ‘poorly, he would return in glory and land in Norfolk with a great power of men to trouble both the queen and state’. The note passed on to more mundane matters of business, such as instructions about a recent sale of cut timber, inserted to add credence to its content. Arundel was told the letter had been intercepted by Walsingham’s agents ‘at the very time of his going to sea’.
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The earl vehemently denied writing it but the Council threatened him with arraignment for treason on its contents. Unconsciously echoing the words of his great-grandfather, the third duke, when he was in similar danger, Arundel said he was innocent of that ‘all kinds of treason, as a child newly-born’.

His nerve was not shaken and the letter mysteriously disappeared. The ruse had failed.

The interrogations in the Tower continued. On 1 May, Walsingham wrote to Hatton, suspecting there was someone, still more dangerous, that Arundel was concealing and drawing comfort from. He insisted that the earl’s courage should be

Arundel himself wrote to Hatton on 7 May, acknowledging that he had written to Dr (later Cardinal) William Allen, the
de facto
leader of exiled English Catholics abroad. But he protested:

Arundel added: ‘I must confess I was slipping, but not fallen. I call to God to witness she [the queen] has raised many that have slipped more and therefore I cannot despair but that she can raise me.’
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A bewildering variety of questions were put to him: How much did he know of the Throgmorton plot? What was the true reason behind his departure from England? For what purpose did he inspect Langstone Harbour, near Chichester - plainly, they believed he was reconnoitring possible south coast invasion sites. His half-brother William, who had joined the earl in the Tower, was also interrogated: was Bridges a priest? - ‘he denies that ever he heard him say Mass’. How was he going to live overseas? - ‘as he hoped . . . [supported] by the earl his brother’.
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His uncle Henry was reluctantly and regretfully acknowledged as probably innocent, as his inquisitors could ‘find nothing to condemn him justly’.
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On 14 May, the earl’s household of forty-six servants at Howard House were discharged, some of them going to ‘my lady’s house at Romford’ in Essex.
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Probably because of failure to uncover hard evidence against him, Arundel had to wait another year before he faced any legal proceedings. He appeared in the Court of Star Chamber, within the Palace of Westminster, on 15 May 1586, to face three charges: that he tried to flee England without permission; he had been reconciled to the Church of Rome; and, finally, that he had been plotting with foreign powers in order to be restored as Duke of Norfolk.

John Popham, Attorney General, produced the letter that Arundel had written to Elizabeth and claimed it accused her ‘very contemptuously and injuriously of partiality, alleging her highness had countenanced and protected his enemies to do him injury’. Among the earl’s possessions when he was arrested was a ‘clock bag wherein . . . was a paper [on which] was written these words “Philip, Duke of Norfolk, Earl [of] Arundel”’. The earl, however, ‘gave such sufficient answers to everything that was objected against him and behaved himself so discreetly, with such cheerfulness and alacrity, that he got that day much credit and reputation to his person and cause’.

Such demeanour could not go unpunished. The court fined him £10,000 and ordered that he ‘shall return prisoner to the Tower of London from whence he came, there to remain prisoner at her majesty’s pleasure’.
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Perpetual imprisonment! During his first thirteen months in the Tower, he had no servants of his own and was not allowed out of his room in the Beauchamp Tower or to walk in the Queen’s Garden, in the south-east corner of the fortress, unless he was accompanied by a guard. Afterwards, he was allowed one or two servants, but they had to suffer the same strict regime and become prisoners as well. Walsingham’s secretary, Francis Mills, complained that Arundel’s friends ‘daily resort to Tower Hill and as near to the view of him ( . . . walking on the [roof] leads and the battlements) almost as [near] as a man may throw a stone’.

The Lieutenant of the Tower, Sir Michael Blount, was under orders to make life as uncomfortable as possible for the earl. Arundel complained that ‘his injuries to me . . . are intolerable, infinite, daily multiply, and to those who know them not, incredible’. He became ill and scratched on the wall over the fireplace of his room in the Beauchamp Tower the graffito: ‘
Quanto plus afflictionis pro Christo in hoc saeculo tanto plus gloriae
cum Christo in futuro
Arundell, June 22 1587’ - ‘The more suffering for Christ in this world, so much more the glory with Christ in the next.’
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