By this point, two new faces had joined the regular roll call of inquisitors—Richard Rich, the middle-aged chancellor of the Court of Augmentations, a man unencumbered by any discernible principles and never too far away from charges of corruption, and the King’s solicitor general, Henry Bradshaw. Rich, Bradshaw, and the councillors had heard enough examples of the Dowager’s titanic idiocy, including jokes she had allegedly made about Dereham fleeing to Ireland “for the Queen’s sake” in front of the Queen’s servants, to see her as easy prey, an impression apparently confirmed when they arrived at Norfolk House “as if only to visit and comfort her” and found that the Dowager was nowhere near as ill as she had pretended—until they told her that the Lord Chancellor wanted to question her and she immediately began to complain of pains in her chest. Honeyed lies persuaded Agnes to order her barge prepared to call on Lord Chancellor Audley, and the men left her for Sir Thomas Wriothesley’s house, also in Lambeth, where they waited by a window until they saw the Duchess sail by. They immediately sent men over to Norfolk House to shutter it and make arrangements for the disbanding of the household on the assumption that Agnes would never return.15
At the lord chancellor’s, the Dowager showed a magnificent gravitas. There was no sign here of the twittering gossip making ill-advised bons mots in front of servants. Instead, the councillors wrote to the King’s secretary with an apologetic request that “you signify unto the King’s Majesty, that, according to our last advertisement, we travailed all yesterday in the examination of my Lady of Norfolk; who made herself so clear from all knowledge of the abomination between the Queen and Dereham, that she would confess no mistrust or suspicion of their love, or unseemly familiarity.” They gave “her scope and liberty, without interruption, to say what she would,” but she took that opportunity to deny everything. Only a day before, the council had wrung three or four sheets of affidavits from her gentleman William Ashby and received a set of questions to put to her, annotated by the King himself, none of which seemed to perturb the Duchess.16 No, she had never suspected anything improper between her granddaughter and Francis Dereham. She had only opened the latter’s coffers in November to provide her stepson the Duke with evidence to help the Privy Council’s inquiries. Her desire to send a word of warning to her son William in France had not been to obfuscate, but rather to alert him of an unhappy turn of events. She had never made jokes about Francis Dereham’s sojourn to Ireland, and she had no idea why he had gone there in the first place. She had never been overly generous to Francis; rather, she was munificent with all her servants, despite the fact that her wealth had in fact been exaggerated. No, she had never sent her grandson to fetch legal advice about possible loopholes that would free them all from suspicion of treason.17 Agnes’s performance was one-part poor widow to one-part great lady; it, and “her extreme denial,” riled and reluctantly impressed her opponents, who described her as “old and testy” and immovable, regardless of the small mountain of contrary evidence they could put in front of her.18
Similar admiration was not generated by Lord William Howard, who, like his predecessor, Sir John Wallop, had been lured back to London with everyone who met him under specific instructions not to inform him that he was under suspicion. William mirrored his mother in denying any knowledge of his niece’s romance with Francis. What made his story credible was not the fact that it was the truth, more that there was just enough truth in it to raise doubts in the councillors’ minds. It was plausible for an uncle, even one in the same household, to have missed how far his niece’s love affairs had progressed. He had confronted Henry Manox for his anonymous note to the Dowager. Could that not have been the result of anger at Manox stirring up trouble on what Lord William presumed then to be a false premise? They had evidence from Alice Restwold and other servants that the Dowager had worried about her son finding out, which indicated either that he did not know or she did not know that he knew. The council had leapt down the rabbit hole with the Howard investigation by trying to give precise, ascertainable meanings to half-remembered conversations, truths, lies, differing interpretations, and genuine mistakes, when in fact any number of conclusions were possible. Lord William’s “stiff manner” irked Wriothesley, who perhaps expected the same kind of fear and contrition shown by William’s wife, Margaret, who tottered on the verge of full collapse. The councillors began to pity the “simple woman” as she endured a horrible epiphany, that the gossip she remembered from her visits to Norfolk House had come to constitute treason.19
Her sister-in-law did not buckle. Instead, at her interrogation at Westminster on the Feast of the Immaculate Conception, the Countess of Bridgewater gave the impression of a woman who, staring down the barrel of a loaded gun, shrugged. Ten men sat opposite her—the Archbishop of Canterbury, Lord Chancellor Audley, the Duke of Suffolk, the Earl of Southampton, into whose custody she had been placed until they had enough evidence to send her to the Tower, the earls of Hertford and Sussex, the constable of the Tower, Wriothesley, and Rich. Bishop Gardiner was also there.20 Norfolk was not. The woman who had once incited large parts of southern Wales into quasi-rebellion to protect her family was unfazed by the censorious lineup on the other side of the table. The councillors had recently taken her maid, Mistress Philip, and one of William’s gentlemen to arm them with more information, which they fired at the Countess in the form of twenty-six questions about Catherine’s upbringing.21 Had the Countess ever heard talk of late-night romps or picnics in the maidens’ chamber? Had she ever seen anything in Catherine’s attitude to Dereham that might have indicated a romance? Had she ever rebuked Catherine or given her advice about her behavior at Chesworth House or Norfolk House? Had she ever witnessed something that she had considered wanton between the young couple? They wanted her to admit to the role she had played in persuading Catherine to take Dereham into her service, that she had known about a precontract between them and taken steps to cover it up since the Queen’s wedding, that she had aided her mother’s surreptitious attempts to seek legal advice, and that she had known of, or helped, with the smashing of the controversial caskets at Norfolk House. With every answer, “she sheweth herself to be her mother’s daughter; that is, one that will by no means confess anything that may touch her.”22
The reports went to Oatlands, where the King had retreated to end his marriage in the same place it had been solemnized. On the same day as the Countess’s interrogation, the King’s team at Oatlands wrote to the councillors in London. Lord Russell, Sir Anthony Browne, Sir Ralph Sadler, and Sir Anthony Wingfield had spoken to the King about the council’s assessments of the Dowager Duchess, her two children, and her daughter-in-law, and their conclusion that even further torture would bring no new revelations from Dereham.
Touching Culpepper and Dereham, if your Lordships do think that ye have gotten as much of Dereham as would be had, that then ye shall (giving them convenient respite and warning of the time, that they may prepare themselves to God for the salvation of their souls,) proceed to their execution, in such sort as hath been signified unto you before, accordingly.
Thus the Holy Trinity preserve Your good Lordships in long life and good health.
At Oatland, this present Feast of the Conception of Our Lady. By your Lordship’s loving friends . . .
The next day, fourteen people were shipped to the Tower because “misprision of treason is proved against” them. The gates opened through the murky, freezing river water for the Dowager Duchess of Norfolk; the Countess of Bridgewater; Lord William Howard and his wife; Katherine Tilney; Alice Restwold; Joan Bulmer; William Ashby; the ex-queen’s sister-in-law Anne Howard; the Dowager’s former maid Margaret Benet; Agnes’s sister-in-law Lady Malyn Tilney; Edward Waldegrave; and even the original informant, Mary Hall. A broken Robert Damport was, of course, already incarcerated. Every single one was expected to have their worldly goods and possessions confiscated as a prelude to “their bodies [sentenced] to perpetual prison.”23 The Countess of Bridgewater’s children w
ere taken from their grandmother and one another to be committed to separate wardship—her daughter, Anne, was sent to the Countess of Oxford’s household; the eldest boy, Gruffydd, was passed to Archbishop Cranmer’s household; and his younger brother, Thomas, went north to the Bishop of Carlisle’s.II24 Faced with the confiscation of his goods, William claimed that his best plate and silver had been washed overboard on his return voyage from France. His mother’s claims that her wealth had been magnified by rumor had already been dented by the discovery of £800 in silver hidden in Norfolk House, and the old lady’s panic at the thought she would be put in a dungeon when she reached the Tower. A prisoner had to pay for their own upkeep, which prompted the frightened revelation from the Dowager that she had at least a further £1,000 than she had admitted to. There had been storms in the Channel that prompted sailors on one boat to kill Lord William’s poor horses and toss their bodies into the swell in a desperate attempt to keep the ship afloat, yet in light of his mother’s brazen mendacity, the King and the Privy Council suspected that William was trying to swindle Henry out of what would soon be rightfully his—“Word was brought unto the King’s Majesty,” wrote the Privy Council, “that all of Lord William’s stuff, plate, and apparel, which he had with him in France, should now be perished and lost on the sea; which, whether it be matter of truth or (the case standing as it doth) devised by some crafty means to embezzle the same” would be resolved by their inquiries.25 Men were sent to search every castle and house William had stayed at on his way back from France to see if he had hidden the treasure there. It was never found.
One person immune to grief, horror, revulsion, and pity that winter was Anne of Cleves. Three days after Catherine was shipped off to Syon, Anne set up residence at Richmond Palace. Richmond had been the greatest prize tossed at her during the annulment bonanza of the previous year, and it was also the house closest to the Hampton Court Chase, where the King was moving from house to house in wounded, prickly sorrow. Although it was one of the seven great English royal palaces, by the time Richmond was signed over to Anne of Cleves it was infrequently visited by the court. It had been built on the orders of Henry VIII’s father in the first decade of the century as one of the finest examples of Renaissance architecture in northern Europe.III Its many towers and three storeys overlooked the Thames, and galleries intersected its orchards and gardens, stuffed full of carved and gilded heraldic beasts. A fountain splashed in its stone-and-marble inner courtyard; gold or stone crests dotted its glass-windowed corridors. It had fallen out of favor not because it lacked splendor or luxury, more because its style seemed hopelessly outdated by the 1530s. The layout of the rooms still reflected the decade of its construction, when there had been a large royal family with king, queen, and titled, unambiguously legitimate children. In Richmond’s chapel, the closets for a king, a queen, and their progeny sat empty.26 If their emptiness stung to Anne, she did not always hide it well. In the last decades of the twentieth century, a myth grew up about Anne that became as convincing, in its own way, as the old canard of her as the repellent “Flanders Mare.” Anne of Cleves has been presented as the great survivor in a world organized to kill, the one who got away, the lady who had the last laugh in a story that saw a “narcissistic buffoon foiled by a woman with common sense.”27 Unfortunately, this inspirational Anne is the product of projection rather than reality. Incredible as it might seem to us, especially in the light of what was happening to Catherine and the harsh crudities that had been used against Anne herself a year earlier, the ex-queen or, to be legally precise, the queen-who-never-was was poised and eager for Henry to take her back.28
London buzzed with speculation that she would be restored, and one woman was even imprisoned when a conversation was reported in which she had suggested Queen Catherine’s adultery was God’s punishment on the King for divorcing the virtuous Anne of Cleves.29 Eustace Chapuys was somewhere between distressed and irate at the rumors, and his mood was hardly helped by de Marillac’s public taunt that “the young duke of Cleves would soon be one of the most highly connected princes in the world.” The Emperor was emphatic on what Chapuys’s response should be on the subject of Anne—“You must watch the affair, since you know how injurious it would be for Us were the King to effect a reconciliation with her. If it be so, you must try all means in your power to dissuade the King from it, and, if possible, prevent him from taking her back.”30 Chapuys’s informants managed to get him some of de Marillac’s correspondence and codes to his cyphers. From what he knew of Henry’s personality, Chapuys did not think he could ever reunite with someone he had discarded, but nonetheless he agreed with the Emperor that “means ought to be found to prevent it.”31 Those means, whether intentionally planted by the imperial embassy or simply the product of idle unfounded gossip, soon broke in London with a story that Anne had recently given birth to a bastard child.32 A housewife called Frances Lilgrave was imprisoned for suggesting that the father was the King, and officers from Anne’s household were summoned to court to answer the Privy Council’s questions on the matter after the King was told of the rumors on the Feast of the Immaculate Conception.33
Chapuys, who forgot it was poor form to continue punching after the fight was won, characterized Anne as a plump, garish, over-the-hill alcoholic in his conversations with Henry’s courtiers, in which he turned Anne’s postmarital rejuvenation of herself on its head by arguing that in light of “her being fond of wine, and of indulging in other excesses, as they might have had occasion to observe, it was natural enough to suppose that she had failed” as a suitable candidate for queenship.34 De Marillac had initially written to King François for instructions on whether or not to promote Anne’s candidacy in light of Catherine’s ruin, but on the day that Catherine was stripped of her title he penned a letter advising the French government that, in his opinion, Anne’s fortunes were unlikely to change.35
None of this perturbed the resilience of the Clevian embassy, who wrote on Anne’s behalf to courtiers whom they erroneously believed to be sympathetic to her cause, including the Earl of Southampton and Archbishop Cranmer, and then to the entire Privy Council.36 Their persistence reached a point where Cranmer had to cut them off mid-conversation with a protestation that he could not discuss something so intimate without the King’s permission. Even with that, the matter was not laid to rest until February, when the King, after pointedly refusing to allow his barge to sail anywhere near Richmond Palace, sent a curt note to Anne asking her to send back the ring from the royal collection that she had received as a Twelfth Night gift from Catherine in 1541.37 A year later, Anne was distraught when Henry married another woman who was not only older than her but also, as she bitterly insisted to her servants, far less attractive.38
The council was dispelling the rumors about Anne of Cleve’s love child at the same time as they reached the decision that Francis Dereham was beyond the point of usefulness following the latest bout of torture. In accordance with the King’s wishes, both men could now be executed. The King had rejected Dereham’s plea that his sentence be commuted to beheading, a mercy which, inexplicably, he had granted to Culpepper who was “only to lose his head.”39 Thomas’s death warrant survives in the National Archives of the United Kingdom, a short and perfunctory piece of parchment that stipulated that in light of how heinous the offense, the men should die publicly at Tyburn. The council signed it on the King’s behalf, their signatures visible in neat black ink—Archbishop Cranmer heads the list, followed by Audley and then everyone else present, in ranking order: the Duke of Suffolk; the earls of Southampton, Sussex, and Hertford; Bishop Gardiner; Sir John Gage; Sir Thomas Wriothesley; and Richard Rich.40 The warrants were signed on the 9th and the sentence carried out the next day when the two men were tied to wooden or wicker hurdles which were pulled from the Tower by horses that dragged them the four miles through the city and its crowds to the Tyburn gallows.
No one recorded their speeches, which indicates that they were short and conventional.
Thomas, standing on the ground in front of the gallows, asked the spectators to pray for his soul. It is tempting to wonder if Dereham was in a fit state to make an eloquent farewell after the torture he had endured in prison, since no account mentions his final words, even in passing. Thomas Culpepper knelt down in the dirt, positioned his neck on the block, and an axe cut through his neck. A noose was placed over Francis’s throat and he was dropped just enough to cut off the air supply. The victim’s legs kicked, the body began to silently scream and spasm against the trauma and then the rope was severed so that Francis, still alive, could be stretched out for the knives to slice into his flesh, first to castrate him, and then for his intestines and other viscera to be drawn from him.41 Only then was his head stricken off like Thomas’s and taken to be impaled on the spikes that jutted out over London Bridge.42 Dereham’s body did not receive a proper Christian burial, since it was hacked into quarters which were also displayed in various parts of the city.43 One would almost certainly have gone to Lambeth, his home parish and the site of his original crimes. Where the others went is not recorded.
Meanwhile, the Tower’s administrators were struggling with the influx of gently born prisoners, since there were not enough appropriate rooms to hold all of them.44 The London mansions and country manors of the Dowager Duchess, Lord William, and the Countess had all been seized, stripped, locked up, and handed over to court-appointed stewards.45 On December 22, Lord William and Lady Margaret Howard, Lady Malyn Tilney, Anne Howard, Katherine Tilney, Alice Restwold, Joan Bulmer, William Ashby, Margaret Benet, Robert Damport, and Edward Waldegrave were arraigned for misprision of treason.46 The King had intervened to pardon Mary Hall, the original informant, on the grounds that she had never sought to work in Catherine’s employment and when confiding the secrets of Lambeth to her brother had expressed “sorrow for His Majesty.” Henry also explained that freeing Mary Hall was to encourage others to report friends or family to the government in the future without fear of collateral retribution. The Dowager Duchess and the Countess were excused from the arraignments since, as the only two members of the group who held aristocratic titles by right of marriage rather than a courtesy lordship given to the sons of noblemen (as was the case for Lord William), they could only properly be tried by their peers. As with Catherine and Lady Rochford, their arraignment would have to wait until Parliament reconvened in January.
Young and Damned and Fair Page 41