All the accumulated evidence, however, points in a very different direction. The almost inescapable conclusion is that no such elaborate conspiracy theory is needed or justified to explain the events of the last months of Henry VIII’s life, and his will was quite literally his will: the product of his volition alone.
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When Henry VIII revised his will for the last time on 26 December 1546, one of the major changes he made was to remove certain people from among those whom he had previously nominated to make up a regency council to govern the country after his death and during Edward’s minority. One of the names he purged was that of Stephen Gardiner. One interpretation therefore is that Gardiner’s actions against the queen had turned the king against him, and from that point on the bishop was out of Henry’s favour.6
Stephen Gardiner, Bishop of Winchester. A brilliant lawyer, Privy Councillor and ambassador, the conservative Gardiner (c.1483–1555) accused the queen, Kateryn Parr, of heresy. He was later struck out of the list of executors and regency councillors that Henry VIII included in his last will and testament.
This view does not, though, hold up. To begin with, Wriothesley was probably as involved as the bishop. But more than that, Gardiner continued to serve the king after the Parr affair – negotiating with the French ambassador at the end of July, being closely involved in the administration of the realm through his presence on the Privy Council in August and October, and visiting the king at Windsor throughout the autumn.7 There was no immediate disgrace, for either Gardiner or Wriothesley. In fact, there is evidence of a curious incident at some point over these months indicating that Gardiner was in more favour than Lord Lisle. The French ambassador, Odet de Selve, records that Gardiner said something so offensive to Dudley that it made him retaliate with violence, striking the bishop full across the face in a council meeting; Lisle, we are told, was expelled from court for a month.8 De Selve may have been wrong about his facts: he wasn’t present, and the Imperial ambassador noted only that violent words had been exchanged – and did not mention Lisle’s expulsion.9 The event certainly indicates the personal animosity between Gardiner and Lisle; and, if true, it confirms that Henry VIII continued to support his bishop, at least ostensibly, by ordering Lisle’s absence.
Indeed, Henry supported Gardiner until his own final months, despite the fact that he had never much liked ‘wily Winchester’.10 In later testimony (1551) during Edward’s reign, when Gardiner was put on trial for refusing to adopt the latest innovations in religion, Henry’s erstwhile secretary, Paget, noted that Henry had ‘misliked the said bishop ever the longer the worse’, so much so that Gardiner was ‘abhorred [by Henry] more than any man in his realm’. Paget was convinced that if Henry had lived longer he would have destroyed Gardiner, and he claimed that the king kept a dossier of damning evidence against the bishop, ready to deploy when he needed it.11 This probably related to allegedly treasonous negotiations between Gardiner and a papal legate when the bishop was an ambassador in Regensburg. Henry VIII may always have suspected, despite Gardiner’s protestations, that the bishop remained secretly opposed to Henry’s position as Supreme Head and keen to seek a reunification with the Roman Catholic Church.12
All this evidence came from those who might be construed as Gardiner’s enemies, so one might discount it – except that Gardiner himself inadvertently confirmed something of the same. In June 1547, he told Edward Seymour that the late king used to send him letters ‘whetting’ (scolding) him, ‘which was not all the most pleasant unto me at the time’. Gardiner also related that Henry would often ‘square’ with him, and was once ‘vehement’ with him in the presence of the Earl of Wiltshire, before taking Gardiner aside, comforting him, and explaining that he could ‘more boldly direct his speech’ to him than to someone like Wiltshire.13 Henry’s apparent displeasure, the king reassured Gardiner, was just a sign of their close relationship. The bishop seems to have swallowed this bait hook, line and sinker, and taken all Henry’s future outbursts as evidence of his special favour and invulnerable status, rather than recognizing that Henry found him especially irritating.14 Yet, despite all this, Henry kept Gardiner close because of his linguistic and diplomatic talent, confident that he could manage him should the bishop act up.
The king’s annoyance, however, did reach boiling point at the end of November 1546. Gardiner was invited to ‘exchange’ some lands with the king, but he refused, asking instead to meet Henry to discuss the matter – presumably in the hope of persuading him from the notion, on the basis of his assumed special rapport with Henry. ‘Exchanging’, or more properly giving up, lands to the Crown in return for some form of minimal payment was not an uncommon request: between 1533 and 1547, Archbishop Cranmer surrendered thirty-six manors to the king, the Archbishop of York even more – seventy-four.15 Gardiner had only ever, grudgingly, lost one. His truculence in response to what was a normal, if tyrannical, demand by the king was therefore enough to anger Henry, who perceived it as disloyalty. The bishop’s request to meet the king was stonewalled.
Realizing he had messed up, Gardiner wrote to Henry on 2 December, mourning his lack of opportunity to make a humble suit to the king in person, but with a mind so troubled that he was ‘bold to molest Your Majesty with these my letters’. He desired the king to continue to have a good opinion of him, for ‘I would not willingly offend Your Majesty for no worldly thing. This is my heart, afore God’. Above all, he asked pardon if the king had taken badly his ‘doings or sayings… in this matter of lands’.16 Henry’s response was an absolutely scorching letter of reprimand, its contained aggression brimming over the finely wrought sentences, which make for excruciating reading. Henry could not ‘but marvel’ at Gardiner’s temerity in denying that he had refused to hand over the lands. Henry noted that everyone else, in such matters, had ‘dealt both more lovingly and more friendly with us’ than Gardiner had done. Now, unless Gardiner wished to conform to the Crown’s wishes, Henry could see ‘no cause why you should molest us any further’.17 Gardiner was in the royal doghouse.18
Was this a situation created by Gardiner’s enemies, ‘a trumped-up quarrel’ where Gardiner was made to look deceitful and thankless through ‘misleading whispers’ in Henry’s ear?19 If so, Sir William Paget would have been the person best positioned to implement any such conspiracy against Gardiner. The masterful Paget had transcended his undistinguished background to climb to the position of principal secretary in 1543. In the intervening three years, he had established himself as the most intimate of Henry’s confidants, and he could boast to the Council soon after the king’s death that ‘as it is well known he [the king] used to open his pleasure to me alone in many things’.20 Paget was extremely capable, shrewd and circumspect, given to wise consideration and wary moderation. Gardiner himself had encapsulated Paget’s attitude to religion in writing to him: ‘you told me once you love no extremities and the mean is best’.21 Gardiner knew this of Paget, because the bishop had been Master of Trinity Hall, Cambridge, when Paget studied there, and afterwards had become both his friend and his patron. It was Gardiner who had introduced Paget into royal service; Paget was, in other words, Gardiner’s protégé. In February 1534, he had written to Gardiner: ‘I esteem myself more bounden to your mastership than to all other’.22
This is not to say that Paget was slavish in his devotion: in December 1545, Paget wrote to Henry VIII that it was just as well Gardiner was kept ‘out of the way for a while’ as ambassador to France, or else he might try to thwart Henry’s policies.23 He had also earlier expressed concern about Gardiner’s severity towards those whom he disliked. But, after cataloguing his mentor’s shortcomings, he ended with the indulgent words ‘God amend all our faults!’, recognizing that everyone has defects. We cannot conclude that he had rejected his former patron: to have plotted his downfall would have been an act of great and unanticipated disloyalty.24 So, while Paget had the means to carry out a conspiracy – as Henry’s secretary, writing the words of Henry’s perempt
ory letter, for instance – nothing up to this point makes this plausible. Moreover, Henry’s note to Gardiner mentions that the bishop had debated the land-exchange matter with Wriothesley and the new Chancellor of the Court of Augmentations, Sir Edward North, neither of whom would have been involved in any religiously motivated plot.25 Any notion of Paget trying to bring about Gardiner’s downfall through the unreliable business of Gardiner’s lands seems highly fanciful.
Thomas Howard, 3rd Duke of Norfolk, painted by Hans Holbein. The most senior member of the powerful Howard family and one of the premier noblemen in the country, Thomas Howard (1473–1554) bears, in the portrait, the symbols of his position as Earl Marshal of England. Norfolk was arrested on charges of high treason in December 1546 and was excluded from Henry VIII’s last will and testament.
Instead, as Occam’s razor states, the simplest explanation is often the most likely. Gardiner was proud and obstinate, he upset the king, and it was the king who took his revenge: Henry alone decided to remove Gardiner from the list of members of the regency council for Edward’s reign, despite all later entreaties to include him. Henry’s reasoning? The Imperial ambassador thought it must be to do with Gardiner’s religion, but he wasn’t an eyewitness.26 Those who were present heard Henry’s explanation directly, even if they remembered his words slightly differently – Gardiner was ‘too wilful and heady to be about his son’, he was ‘a wilful man and not meet to be about his son’, or he was ‘wilful and contentious, you shall never be quiet, if he be among you’. One word was constant: ‘wilful’. Foxe adds that Henry concluded that ‘he would [en]cumber you all, and you should never rule him, he is of so troublesome a nature… Marry… I myself could use him and rule him to all manner of purposes, as seemed good unto me, but you shall never do so.’ Gardiner was stubborn and pig-headed, and not suitable to rule over the young prince.27 Henry wanted him out. There is no need to look for a plot to explain Gardiner’s fall from grace and omission from Henry’s last will.
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The other obvious name that Henry did not include in the regency council was that of Thomas Howard, Duke of Norfolk. By the time that Henry amended his will to its final iteration, on 26 December 1546, both Norfolk and his son, the Earl of Surrey, had been arrested on charges of treason.
The seventy-three-year-old Norfolk, the most senior member of the powerful Howard family, had been a familiar face at the Tudor court for decades. Astute and experienced, but with a violent temper, the old battle-axe was also obsequious and fawning, ruthlessly obedient, keeping – as Burnet described it – ‘his post by perpetual submission and flattery’.28 As one of the premier noblemen in the country, he had always longed to be at the heart of power – he was described in 1532 to Charles V as a man who ‘would suffer anything for the sake of ruling’. But he had been obstructed from achieving the ultimate position as pre-eminent in Henry’s estimation by, he believed, Cardinal Wolsey, Thomas Cromwell and many other imputed enemies.29 This perpetual sense of resentment was matched, in 1546, by his son’s freshly forged rancour, following the debacle at St Etienne, towards Hertford and other low-born men at court.
Just as with Gardiner, some commentators have construed the dramatic downfall of Surrey and Norfolk as the product of a conspiracy by the supposed evangelical faction of Paget, Hertford and Lisle in a bid to gain possession of power.30 It is true that Norfolk himself was convinced, as he wrote to Henry, that ‘some great enemy of mine hath informed Your Majesty of some untrue matter against me’, while in the Tower Surrey may have been reflecting a similar belief in his injunctions to ‘Rein those unbridled tongues! break that conjured league!’ in his gorgeous and apt paraphrase of Psalm 55, which is all about betrayal by former friends.31 The Imperial ambassadors Van der Delft and, in early 1547, Eustace Chapuys also considered that the hostility of a reformist faction may have caused the undoing of the House of Howard.32
Yet, the actual evidence for this evangelical cabal is remarkably slim. We really have just two main pieces to go on. The first is an enigmatic memo in Wriothesley’s files from the end of 1546, which states simply: ‘Things in common: Paget, Hertford, Admiral [Lisle], Denny’.33 This seems to imply some sort of alliance between them, but it contains nothing of substance on which to build a case. The second, supposedly pivotal, piece of evidence is the assertion by Van der Delft that in the crucial month of December 1546, when the Howards’ downfall was secured, ‘nothing is now done at court without their [Hertford and Lisle’s] intervention, and the meetings of the Council are mostly held in the Earl of Hertford’s house’.34
Several historians have followed Van der Delft to his conclusion: that the evangelicals were meeting at the house of their leader, in order to arrogate power.35 Yet, Van der Delft was wrong. The minutes of the Privy Council clearly state that the councillors did not meet at Hertford’s town house, but instead, between 8 December 1546 and 2 January 1547, at Ely Place in Holborn – the town house of Thomas Wriothesley, the arch conservative.36 Whatever the Council’s reason for meeting away from court, it therefore seems unlikely to have been anything to do with a consolidation of reformist power. Perhaps it was simply because Surrey was arrested and detained at Wriothesley’s house for five or six days from 6 or 7 December, or because, until late December, the king was travelling constantly from house to house.37 Wriothesley remained at the heart of government – not because he was now suddenly a key player in a reformist faction, but because he simply continued to do his job as lord chancellor. It was business as normal.38 It is not necessary, and neither is it historically persuasive, to conjure up a conspiracy theory to explain why Surrey and Norfolk were arrested for treason. The reckless, proud Surrey created the circumstances of his own disgrace.39
Much mud could be thrown at Surrey. It emerged, for one thing, that he had tried to manipulate the king by encouraging his sister to prostitute herself to him, ‘as she might the better rule here as others had done’. Looking beyond Henry’s reign, he had also sought the position of regent for his father – which neatly implicated Norfolk in his treason. Surrey had, too, complained against the dominance at court of men ‘of vile birth’ and the lack of opportunity for the nobility. Above all, he had quartered the royal arms of Edward the Confessor with his own.40 This last heraldic misdemeanour might not seem terribly significant today, but in a predominantly pre-literate age, the visual crime of bearing royal arms was considered a powerful form of lèse-majesté: it was treason, and it comprised the one charge eventually included in Surrey’s indictment.41
The historian Thomas S. Freeman has written: ‘Henry Howard’s reckless arrogance hit Henry’s paranoia like a dentist’s drill striking an exposed nerve and provoked the king into a destructive, unthinking rage’.42 Henry’s response to Surrey’s egotism was his usual reaction to perceived betrayal: revenge, no doubt sharpened, in this instance, by the haste and horror of his sickness. Henry’s imprint is over the whole investigation and trial: the list of questions to be asked at Surrey’s interrogation was personally edited and amended by Henry himself. And Henry’s additions are important: ‘If a man compassing to govern the king should, for that purpose, advise his daughter, or sister to become his harlot, what it importeth?’ reads the original. Henry amended this to: ‘If a man compassing with himself to govern the realm, do actually go about to rule the king and should, for that purpose, advise his daughter, or sister to become his harlot, thinking thereby to bring it to pass, and so would rule both father and son… what it importeth?’ reads Henry’s version.43 ‘Govern’, ‘rule’, ‘rule’ – it beats insistently. If Surrey thought he or his father would rule the king and by proxy wear the Crown, they would not be long in having heads to think with.
Rather than evangelical machinations, it was, therefore, sheer arrogant idiocy on Surrey’s part that dragged him and his father into the Tudor quicksand. But the revelations had to come from somewhere. The source seems to have been the very opposite of a reformist coup. The disclosure came from Surrey’s old friend
, and a staunch conservative, Sir Richard Southwell, after some sort of falling out between the pair. This is known because Surrey wrote to the Council seeking to extricate his father from any implication caused by the ‘stir between Southwell and me’.44 Perhaps Southwell was the ‘friendly foe’ whose betrayal Surrey mourned in the poetry he wrote while imprisoned in the Tower. Indeed, it may be that the main reason Surrey fell out with Southwell was a matter of religion. Surrey seems to demonstrate considerable evangelical zeal in his poetry. Indeed, the similarity between verses by Surrey and those of Anne Askewe are astonishing – one of them was certainly copying the other.45 This was no evangelical conspiracy against the conservative Howards; by contrast, it is likely to have been a conservative implicating an evangelical friend after a quarrel.
Just as with his grandfather Edward Stafford, Duke of Buckingham (in 1521), and later his son Thomas Howard, 4th Duke of Norfolk (in 1572), Surrey’s display of hubristic conceit in an age of personal monarchy and capital punishment was enough to spell his ruin. Pride, treason – and execution – seemed to run in the family. Surrey’s foolishness now meant not only his own destruction, but that of his father – yet it is hard to feel sorry for the old man. On the day before Surrey’s trial, Norfolk confessed to concealing ‘high treason… most presumptuously committed by my son Henry Howard Earl of Surrey’, thereby dictating the judicial outcome for his son.46 At the trial – a long and public affair on 13 January 1547, which ran from nine in the morning until five at night – Surrey defended himself with wit and courage, but all in vain.47 In fact, in an age when prosecution and the judiciary were one and the same, and where an indictment could create a crime, the result of Surrey’s trial was probably never in doubt: he was found guilty. An Act of Attainder passed through Parliament on 24 January and condemned Surrey and Norfolk to forfeit their lands, chattels, titles, and offices – and lives – to the king.48 This was a mere rubber stamp to secure the Howard lands. On 19 January 1547, Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey had already been beheaded.
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