But the Seymours struck first. Now or never, they had to make their bid for absolute power and finally eliminate the threat posed by the conservative faction at court, led by Norfolk and Surrey since Gardiner had been neutralised. It was the earl’s scarcely suppressed ambition to become protector of Prince Edward after Henry’s approaching death and to restore the nobility of England to its rightful place next to the throne that had to be smothered. With Henry ailing and his end clearly not far off, it was time to make a move, but still utilising the king’s failing power and ruthlessness. As reformers, they were unlikely to use the charge of heresy to silence Surrey. The means was found in Sir Richard Southwell, an MP for Norfolk and former crony of Cromwell’s, who told the Privy Council on 2 December that he had information about Surrey ‘that touched his fidelity to the king’.
Why Henry acted so suddenly now against Surrey and Norfolk remains something of a mystery. A seventeenth-century writer pointed out that ‘it was notorious how the king had not only withdrawn much of his wonted favour, but promised immunity to such as would discover anything concerning [Surrey]’.31 Henry’s desire to destroy him had become passionate and despite his deteriorating health, he took an avid personal interest in the proceedings against father and son (if not directing them), sometimes from his sickbed. Possibly it was a combination of the veiled threat posed to the Tudor succession by the Howards’ royal ancestors and the allegations that they would seek the regency of the kingdom after his death that stirred Henry’s dark suspicions, awakened fears about what his young son would face after ascending to the throne and led him to listen attentively as the poisonous rumours were whispered in his sometimes fevered ear.
The inevitable arrest came a few days later. Henry ‘very secretly’ ordered Sir Anthony Wingfield, Captain of the Royal Guard, to seize Surrey as he was coming to the Palace of Westminster:
The next day, after dinner, [Wingfield] saw the earl coming into the palace whilst he was walking in the great hall downstairs.
He had a dozen halberdiers waiting in an adjoining corridor and approaching the earl, said: ‘Welcome, my lord, I wish to ask you to intercede for me with the duke your father in a matter in which I need his favour, if you will deign to listen to me.’
So he led him to the corridor and the halberdiers took him and without attracting notice put him into a boat.32
Surrey was taken to Ely Place, Wriothesley’s house in Holborn, on the western edge of the city, for interrogation, initially about a letter written by him to a gentleman that was ‘full of threats’, according to Francis van der Delft, the Spanish ambassador. Southwell was also being held there – the hot-headed earl said he would fight him ‘in his shirt’ over his accusations – before Surrey was moved publicly through the streets, under close guard, to the Tower of London on Sunday 12 December. During that painful journey, his escort pushing aside the crowds, he was reported – understandably – to be ‘much downcast’. Norfolk, who was out of London when Surrey was arrested, hastily wrote letters to Westminster to establish why his son had been taken into custody. These were naturally intercepted and closely scanned for possible evidence against him. He did not have long to wait for an answer. A death warrant was plainly writ large on the walls of the Tower for him, too.
Norfolk was duly summoned to court and later that Sunday also committed to the grim fortress on the eastern side of London. He was taken by river, after suffering the humiliation of his Garter insignia and white staff, or wand of office, as Lord High Treasurer being ceremoniously removed – ironically the same disgrace he had inflicted on Thomas Cromwell more than six years earlier. The duke ‘both in the barge and on entering the Tower’ publicly declared ‘no person had ever been carried thither before who was a more loyal servant [of the king] than he was and always had been’. His vociferous pleas were politely noted but pointedly ignored.
The fall of the house of Howard had been very carefully planned, timed and executed. That same Sunday, between three and four in the afternoon, Henry’s trusted courtiers – the brutish John Gates of the Privy Chamber and his brother-in-law Sir Wymond Carew – tellingly joined by a released Southwell, had departed London post-haste for Norfolk. Their mission was firstly to seek out damning evidence against father and son, and secondly the securing and careful listing of their possessions for later seizure by the crown. They arrived at Kenninghall, Norfolk’s richly furnished home set in 700 acres of deer park, at daybreak on the Tuesday morning after a ride of about eighty miles via Thetford. Gestapo-like, they hammered on the doors of the sleeping household to gain admission to the great house. Their dawn arrival and their harsh, barked orders came as a terrible shock to the occupants: news of the incarcerations in the Tower had not yet reached Kenninghall. Gates reported to Henry that night:
As the steward was absent taking musters, we called the almoner and first taking order for the gates and back doors, desired to speak with the Duchess of Richmond and Elizabeth Holland who were only just risen but came to us without delay in the dining chamber.
We can easily guess the horrified reaction of Surrey’s sleepy sister and Norfolk’s tousled, blowsy mistress at the sight of the mud-stained and armed men standing breathless before them in this dawn raid, determined to extract incriminating information.
On hearing how the matter stood, the duchess was sore perplexed, trembling and like to fall down, but recovering, she reverently upon her knees humbled herself to the king, saying that although constrained by nature to love her father … and her brother, which she noted to be a rash man, she would conceal nothing but declare in writing all she could remember.
Gates advised her to use truth and frankness in her answers and, rather disingenuously, not to despair. The three men then examined her coffers and closet ‘but found nothing worth sending, all very bare and her jewels sold to pay her debts’. Norfolk’s long-time mistress was a different matter, however.
We then searched Elizabeth Holland and found girdles, beads, buttons of gold, pearls and rings set with many stones, whereof they are making a book [inventory].
‘Trusty men’ were sent on to other houses owned by the family in Norfolk and Suffolk ‘to prevent embezzlement’ and were told not to forget ‘Elizabeth Holland’s house, newly made’. The steward and almoner at Kenninghall were made responsible for all the plate and ‘such money as remains of his last account’.33 In his next letter, Gates promised the king, he would report ‘further of these matters and also of the duke’s jewels and lands’. Tudor royal investigations were nothing if not thorough and searching.
Back in his room in the Constable’s lodgings at the Tower, a puzzled, frightened and lonely Norfolk wrote a grovelling letter to Henry the day after his incarceration, on 13 December. He complained:
Some great enemy has informed the king untruly, for God knows, he [Norfolk] never had one untrue thought against the king or his succession and can no more guess the charge against him than a child born that night.
The duke did not know against whom he had offended, ‘unless it were such as are angry with me for being quick against such as have been accused for sacramentaries’ (the religious radicals). And, whilst on the subject of religion,
I have told your majesty and many others that knowing your virtue and knowledge, I shall stick to whatever laws you make and for this cause many have borne me ill will, as do appear by casting libels abroad against me.
Significantly, then, he believed that his sudden incarceration stemmed from his conservative religious beliefs.34 Pathetically, Norfolk also begged that he should recover Henry’s favour – the king could now take all his lands and possessions – and asked to be told of the charges he faced.
His early suspicions must have been confirmed by his initial interrogation, which focused on politico-religious issues. As for the pope, declared Norfolk,
if I had twenty lives, I would rather have spent them all than he should have any power in this realm … And since he has been the king’s enemy, no man has felt
and spoken more against him both here and in France and also to many Scottish gentlemen.35
The ghost of Cromwell and his horrible fate haunted the duke, sitting alone in the heart of the forbidding Tower: ‘My lords, I trust you think Cromwell’s service and mine are not [to] be like … He was a false man and surely I am a true poor gentleman,’ he told the Council. Time and again, Norfolk desperately repeated his plea to meet and face down his still unknown accusers, ‘for I will hide nothing. Never gold was tried better than [by] fire and water than I have been’.
He conjured up in his lugubrious mind the faces of all his many enemies during the long, turbulent reign of Henry Tudor. There was Wolsey, who ‘[for] fourteen years [sought] to destroy me’; Cromwell, of course, his great adversary; Edward, Third Duke of Buckingham,36 ‘of all men living, he hated me the most’; Thomas Boleyn, Earl of Wiltshire, husband of his sister, who ‘confessed the same and wished he had found means to thrust his dagger in me’. Then there was the ‘malice borne me by both my nieces whom it pleased the king to marry’, a malice remembered by those still in authority in the Tower.37
In a hastily scribbled letter, he plaintively protested his past loyalty to the crown:
Who tried out the falsehood of the Lord Darcy,38 Sir Robert Constable,39 Sir John Bulmer,40 Aske41 and many others – but only I?
Who showed his majesty the words of my mother-in-law42 for which she was attainted of misprision – but I?
I have always shown myself a true man to my sovereign and, since these things done, have received more profits of his highness than before.
Who could now think that I should now be false?
Poor man as I am yet, I am his near kinsman. For whose sake should I be untrue?43
These are the frantic ramblings of a man still in shock and petrified by his numbing fear of the unknown – again, what exactly were the charges made against him? Who was accusing him? What was the evidence?
Unknown to Norfolk at this stage, it was not heresy that had undone him: treason was the steely weapon of choice for his determined enemies, the Seymours, uncles to young Prince Edward. Surrey, for his part, was still naïvely unaware of the seriousness of the conspiracy against him. In a letter to the Privy Council written from the Tower, he protested about ‘mine old father brought in[to] question by any stir between Southwell and me’. Norfolk’s arrest, he complained, ‘sore enfeebled me’.44
Henry’s case against the Howards became clear when Wriothesley sent a message to van der Delft on 16 December, disclosing that the cause of Norfolk and his son’s imprisonment ‘was that they planned by sinister means to obtain the government of the king, who was too old now to allow himself to be governed’ and
their intention was to usurp authority by means of the murder of all members of the council and the control of the prince [Edward] by them alone.45
The government’s propaganda machine grew still more vocal. Nicholas Wotton, the English ambassador to the court of the French king, told Francis I of the ‘most execrable and abominable intent and enterprise’ of Norfolk and Surrey. Francis replied simply that if their guilt was clearly proved, they should both be put to death.46 The courts of Europe were stunned by news of the arrests. Thomas Thirlby, Bishop of Westminster, on a diplomatic mission at the court of Charles V, wrote to Paget on 25 December of
those two ungracious and inhuman non homines,47 the Duke of Norfolk and his son, of whom I did confess that I did love, for I ever supposed him a true servant to his master. Before God, I am so amazed.48
There is a romantic story, from only one source, of Surrey attempting an escape from the Tower, involving a break-out from his privy window, arming himself with a dagger smuggled to him by his servant Martin and climbing out of the window of a room overlooking the Thames, where a boat was waiting in St Katherine’s Dock. But according to the writer – Antonio de Guaras, a Spanish merchant in London at the time – the earl was surprised by his guards and recaptured.49
The legal proceedings for Surrey’s downfall gathered momentum.50 Lord Chancellor Wriothesley was once a staunch ally of Norfolk but, like Paget, after sensing the shift in political power at court, had almost overnight become a resolute enemy. He changed and counter-changed the main thrust of the indictments as the evidence was pieced together, much of it mere hearsay hardly worthy of the name. But there was still plenty of damning information to be garnered and evaluated. Mistress Arundell, a central character in Surrey’s drunken escapades of 1543, had told of conversations in her household when the earl stayed there that now seemed very incriminating indeed:
Once, when my lord of Surrey was displeased about buying of cloth, she told her maids in the kitchen how he fumed and added, ‘I marvel they will thus mock a prince.’
‘Why,’ said Alice, her maid, ‘is he a prince?’
‘Yes, marry he is, and if aught should come at the king but good, his father should stand for king.’
Another maid, Joan Whetnall, ‘talking with her fellow touching my lord of Surrey’s bed, she said the arms were very like the king’s.’51
No doubt this testimony was triumphantly retrieved from the Privy Council’s files and added to the pile of evidence lying before Wriothesley.
Surrey’s embittered sister also recounted how he had vilified the Seymours and ‘these new men [who] loved no nobility and if God called away the king, they should smart for it’. Norfolk’s mistress ‘Bess’ Holland also related how her lover had complained that few on the Privy Council loved him ‘because they were no noblemen born themselves’ and how he had forecast the demise of the ailing Henry. Sir Gawen Carew described a very public row between Surrey and his sister in the Long Gallery of the Palace of Westminster over his violent opposition to her planned marriage to Thomas Seymour, which he objected to because of Seymour’s supposed low birth. Surrey suggested, said the witness, that she should come to court to ‘delight the king’ with her body, so that she could control him as Madame d’Estampes, Francis I’s mistress, governed the French king,
which should not only be a means to help herself but all her friends should receive a commodity by the same. Whereupon she defied her brother and said that they all should perish and she would cut her own throat rather than she would consent to such a villainy.52
Edward Rogers told the investigators of an argument between the earl and his friend George Blagge, one of Henry’s favourites and a notorious religious reformer, about a regency to govern England during Prince Edward’s minority, after the king’s death:
The earl held that his father was meetest, both for good services done and for estate.
Blagge replied that then the prince should be but evil taught and in multiplying words, said, ‘Rather than it should come to pass that the prince should be under the government of your father or you, I would bide the adventure to thrust this dagger into you.’
The earl said he was very hasty.53
Sir Edmund Knyvett54 was another eager witness. He had told Surrey that ‘because of his father’s and his unkindness I would go from my country and dwell there and wait, so unable to bear their malice’. The earl had contemptuously replied: ‘No, no, cousin Knyvett, I malice not so low; my malice is higher – my malice climbs higher.’ He repeated: ‘These new erected men would, by their wills, leave no noble man in life.’
Surrey himself was interrogated in the Tower, and the list of twenty-three sharp questions that were put to him by the Privy Council still survives. The devious Wriothesley drafted the ‘interrogatories’ personally and their content shows that the royal hounds were firmly on the scent of their hapless quarry, based on the evidence already gathered. These questions included: ‘If the king should die in my lord prince’s tender age, whether you have devised who should govern him and the realm?’ This had been amended from the original: ‘Who ought, within the realm, to be protector and governor of him during nonage [minority]?’ More pointedly: ‘Whether you have said that in such case you or your father would have the rule and governanc
e of him, or words to that effect?’ Another – ‘whether you procured any person … with the intent the same might grow [in the king’s] favour for the better encompassing of your purposes’ – had been altered from ‘procuring your sister or any other woman to be the king’s concubine’. In those long, hard days for Surrey, such euphemistic niceties seem out of place. The questions also home in on the issue of his wilfully bearing the royal arms of King Edward the Confessor and ‘whether you are next heir or kin to St Edward and if so, how?’ And: ‘To what intent do you put the arms of St Edward in your coat?’ Finally, the ‘killer’ questions of his interrogators: ‘Do you acknowledge yourself the king’s true subject?’ and ‘Have you at any time determined to fly out of the realm?’55 One can almost hear proud Surrey’s angry denials and bluster when questioned repeatedly by his enemies.
As the Privy Council scurried about taking witness statements, the draft charges against both Norfolk and Surrey were drawn up and presented to the king who read them carefully, despite his rapidly deteriorating medical condition, his spectacles on the end of his nose. He was taking a great personal interest in the case: ‘he is deeply engaged and much perplexed in the consideration of this affair,’ reported van der Delft.
It is understood that he will thus be occupied during the holidays and some days in addition, the queen and all the courtiers having gone to Greenwich, though she has never been known before to leave him on solemn occasions like this. I do not know what to think or suspect.
The king was ‘keeping himself very secluded at court, all persons but his councillors and three or four gentlemen of his chamber being denied entrance’.56
Henry made copious handwritten notes in the margins of the charge sheets. They demonstrate great clarity of thought, despite his poor state of health, and must indicate his grim single-mindedness to see his noble prisoners brought safely to the block. He may have been physically weak, but he was as cold-blooded as ever. The king’s annotations show that he reinforced the case against both men for heraldic misdemeanours. Some of the evidence may have triggered painful echoes of the past and two unfortunate marriages into the old king’s mind. He wrote:
The Last Days of Henry VIII Page 20