House Of Treason: The Rise And Fall Of A Tudor Dynasty

by Hutchinson, Robert

  He then advanced four miles into our realm. There the noble lord, the Earl of Surrey, to whom we had committed the charge of repelling the Scots . . . met with them in a battle which was long and fiercely contested . . . With the Almighty . . . aiding the better cause, our forces emerged victorious and killed a great number of the enemy and many of their nobles and put the rest to flight.

  In a postscript, Henry added: ‘Since these were written, we have received certain news that the King of Scots himself was killed . . . so he has paid a heavier penalty for his treachery than we would have wished.’72 He celebrated the victory with a feu de joie, a rippling salvo of 1,000 cannon, declaring: ‘I will sing him a soul knell with the sound of my guns.’

  In Rome there was initial news of a catastrophic English defeat, with Surrey a prisoner with fifteen other lords, and 30,000 Englishmen dead. In war, first reports are frequently wrong and this was no exception. Cardinal Christopher Bainbridge, Henry’s ambassador to Rome, recounted gleefully how the ‘French and Scots [in the city] were sought greatly but when the king’s letter came all their joy was turned to shame’.73

  Surrey received his just reward on Candlemas Day, 1 February 1514, at Lambeth Palace, when the earl, resplendent in crimson robes, was ‘honourably restored unto his right name of Duke of Norfolk’.74 Sir Thomas Wriothesley, Garter King of Arms, presented him with the engrossed patent of the dukedom and an augmentation to his coat of arms, an escutcheon bearing the lion of Scotland pierced through the mouth with an arrow, to mark his victory at Flodden.75 A grateful king presented him with forty manors spread across Berkshire, Derbyshire, Hertfordshire, Kent, Nottinghamshire, Oxfordshire, Shropshire, Staffordshire, Warwickshire and Wiltshire, together with an annual pension of £40.

  His eldest son Thomas was created Earl of Surrey in his place and also granted an annuity of £12 for life and sixteen manors and two castles, yielding a handsome annual income of £333 6s 8d.76

  At the end of that September, and with peace declared, the second Duke of Norfolk escorted Henry’s young sister Mary to France for her marriage to the elderly and sickening Louis XII. The journey was a chapter of unfortunate accidents. The newly ennobled Surrey, as Lord Admiral, had to shepherd the wedding party across the English Channel, but bad weather kept them at sea for four days of sickness and misery. The princess’s ship became separated and finally it ran aground on a sandbank outside Boulogne, forcing her to be rowed ashore through the surf. She was less than pleased at the danger and the insult to her dignity.

  Her marriage took place on 9 October, and, almost immediately, Norfolk was involved in a row over the dismissal of her English servants (who had been selected by Wolsey) and their French replacements. A fuming Mary wrote to her brother: ‘I marvel much that my lord of Norfolk would at all times so lightly grant everything at their requests here . . . Would [to] God, my lord of York [Wolsey] had come with me in the room of Norfolk, for then I am sure I should have been left much more at my heart[’s ease] than I am now.’77 There was only one saving grace for the princess. The marriage only lasted eighty-three days before her husband died (reportedly through overexertion on the marital bed, unwise for a man of his years and poor health) and she was free later to marry secretly her true love, Sir Charles Brandon.

  Norfolk had gradually been edged out of the king’s inner councils by Wolsey and it must have been a tedious duty for him to escort him during the ceremony in Westminster Abbey on 18 November 1515 in which he received his cardinal’s hat, awarded by Pope Leo X two months earlier. Worse was to come: on Christmas Eve, Henry appointed Wolsey his Lord Chancellor.

  It would be left to his son, Thomas, to neutralise the threat posed by the Cardinal.

  2

  GUARDIANS OF ENGLAND

  ‘A man of the greatest wisdom, reliability and loyalty’

  The historian Polydore Vergil’s description of

  Thomas, second Duke of Norfolk1

  It began, as many such riots begin, with a small, trifling incident - merely a row over the purchase of two birds for an Englishman’s simple dinner. But this was a spark that set alight a powder keg of resentment, hatred and violence in the narrow, filthy and stinking streets and lanes of London.

  Add rampant xenophobia, envy and the pain of declining wages all together and you have a heady recipe for civil disorder. The chronicler Richard Grafton described how, by 1517, French, Genoese and other foreign merchants had flocked to London, attracted by the rich pickings offered by Henry VIII ’s free-spending and glittering court. ‘The multitude of strangers was so great . . . that the poor English artificers could scarce get any living. Most of all, the strangers were so proud that they disdained, mocked and oppressed the Englishmen,’ he reported.

  In early April that year, a carpenter called Williamson bought two stock doves2 at a stall in London’s Eastcheap. As he paid with a few coins from the purse at his belt, a passing Frenchman snatched the birds out of his hand and told him that they were too grand a dish for such a low-born tradesman. Despite his angry protests, the Frenchman insisted the birds would make a perfect meal for his master, the French ambassador Pierre de la Guiche,3 and carried them off - but not before he had called Williamson a ‘knave’.4 Diplomatic complaints followed about the carpenter’s manners and he ended up in prison, with the envoy declaring ‘by the Body of God, that the English knave should lose his life, for no Englishman should deny what a Frenchman required’.

  Meantime, another Frenchman was banished from the realm for killing a man and had a cross branded on his right hand to identify him as a malefactor. As one of the city constables led him away, they were jostled and shoved by the Frenchman’s friends who taunted the officer: ‘Sir, is this cross the price to kill an Englishman?’ Another shouted: ‘On that price, we would all be banished, by the Mass!’

  Rumours spread of more incidents involving foreigners, which fanned the smouldering fires of resentment burning in Londoners’ hearts. John Lincoln, a broker,5 who was ‘sore grudged’ by the foreigners’ behaviour, consulted a Dr Beal (alias Bell), a monk from the Augustinian priory and hospital of St Mary Spitalfields,6 just outside the city walls, and told him: ‘You were born in London and see the oppression by the strangers and the great misery of your own native country. Exhort the citizens to [unite] against these strangers, ravagers and destroyers . . .’

  Easter sermons at the priory were renowned throughout the city and were delivered from an outdoor pulpit, or preaching cross, within an enclosure near its churchyard. Immediately opposite was a small, two-storey building in which the Lord Mayor and aldermen of London gathered to hear the pious words.7 On the Tuesday after Easter, Beal mounted the pulpit and urged his congregation:Take compassion over the poor people, your neighbours, and also of the great hurts, losses and hindrances . . . [and] the extreme poverty [of ] all the king’s subjects that inhabit this city . . . The aliens and strangers eat the bread from the poor fatherless children and take the living from the artificers and the [business] from all merchants, whereby poverty is much increased [and now] every man bewails the misery of another, for craftsmen are brought to beggary and merchants to need...8

  As the monk warmed to his theme, his voice became edged with righteous anger:This land was given to Englishmen. As birds defend their nest, so ought Englishmen cherish and defend themselves and hurt and grieve [the] aliens for the common good.

  He turned to his text for that day - pugna pro patria (‘Fight for your country’)9 -and emphasised that under God’s law this was wholly legitimate. Beal then ‘subtly moved the people to rebel against the foreigners and break the king’s peace’.

  The following Sunday, in the king’s gallery at Greenwich Palace, the courtier Sir Thomas Palmer was chatting to some Lombardy merchants, among them Francis de Bard, who was enjoying considerable notoriety for successfully enticing and seducing an Englishman’s wife and, what’s more, stealing his plate. Laughing coarsely, the Lombards boasted that now ‘if they had the mayor’s wife, they wou
ld keep her’. Some English merchants were within earshot and the crude jests piqued them. One angry mercer, William Bolt, stalked over to the group and snarled: ‘Well, you whore’s son Lombards, you [may] rejoice and laugh, [but] by the Mass, we will one day [have you], come when it will.’10

  Tempers were up and it was time for vengeance on the streets.

  A few days later, on 28 April, foreigners were attacked in the city by apprentices and other young men - ‘some were struck, some buffeted and some thrown into the canal’ - but the Lord Mayor, John Rest, quickly arrested some of the ringleaders and threw them into prison.

  He hoped he had contained the unrest but this was merely the harbinger of worse violence to come.

  Dark rumours quickly spread across London that the whole city would rise up as one on May Day and that all aliens found within the walls would be cruelly slaughtered. Word of the uprising reached Cardinal Thomas Wolsey, the Lord Chancellor, and he ordered the city authorities on 1 May to ban people from the streets from nine o’clock in the evening until seven the next morning and to increase patrols by the watch.

  That night, as Alderman John Moody was hurrying home, he found apprentices playing the game of ‘Bucklers’11 - a mock fight with wooden swords and shields - in Eastcheap, watched by ‘a great company of young men’. It was after the new curfew, although admittedly word of its imposition ‘was scarce known’. He ordered the crowd of youths to disperse immediately but when one young man impertinently questioned his instruction, the alderman caught his arm and told him menacingly: ‘You will know.’ With that, he started to march him off to the nearest jail.

  But his companions quickly tore him away and they shouted out a rallying cry: ‘’Prentices and clubs . . . ’prentices and clubs!’

  It must have been a pre-arranged signal for commotion. Instantly, the doors of houses along Eastcheap opened and angry young men poured out, armed with wooden cudgels. The alderman ran to save his municipally corpulent carcase and the disturbance rapidly spread west throughout the city:More people arose out of every quarter and out came serving men, watermen . . . and by eleven of the clock, there were in Cheap[side] six or seven hundred.

  Out of [St] Paul’s [Cathedral] churchyard came three hundred and so of all places they gathered and broke [open] the counters [prisons] and took out the prisoners.

  The mayor and sheriffs were there present and made proclamation in the king’s name - but nothing was obeyed.

  The people of St. Martin’s [le Grand] threw stones and bats [wooden sticks] and hurt many honest persons that were persuading the riotous people to cease and they bade them hold their hands, but still they threw out bricks and hot water.

  Then all the misruled persons ran to the doors and windows of St. Martin’s [le Grand church] and spoiled all they found [there] and cast it into the streets and left few houses unspoiled.12

  The mob ran back eastwards, headlong into Cornhill and Leadenhall streets, and broke into the house of a French merchant called Meutas, who was particularly loathed by the Londoners. If the rioters had found him ‘in their fury, they would have struck off his head’ but they had to be content with murdering his servants. Houses were set alight and watermen raided foreigners’ homes at Whitechapel and threw their boots and shoes into the Thames. Sir Thomas Parr galloped through the violent, noisy streets, west out of the city, to Wolsey’s home at York Place in Westminster, to warn him that the commotion was getting out of hand. The Lord Chancellor summoned help from the nobles living around the capital and prudently fortified his home, drafting in extra troops and artillery. Sir Richard Cholmley, the Lieutenant of the Tower of London, in ‘a frantic fury’, opened fire on the city with several guns on his ramparts. Little damage was done but at least the thunder of the salvoes made him feel better.

  The disorder continued until about three in the morning when most rioters returned home, happy with their night’s work. As they broke up into smaller parties, the apprentices were picked off by the city’s watch and detained. More than three hundred were arrested and marched off to the Tower, to Newgate and other prisons. Two hours later, reinforcements arrived in London, led by the experienced generals Thomas Howard, Earl of Surrey, and George Talbot, fourth Earl of Shrewsbury and Lord Steward of the royal household, who had speedily mustered what forces they could gather in order to suppress the revolt. The apprentices13 ‘scattered by sudden fright, just like sheep at the sight of the wolf’ under the hooves of Surrey’s heavily armed horsemen.

  Lincoln and Beal were immediately arrested. Soon after, the second Duke of Norfolk arrived with 1,300 armed retainers from East Anglia, which he rapidly deployed at strategic street corners throughout the capital, ready to quash any fresh outbreak of civil disobedience. His soldiers, ingrained with the countryman’s traditional disdain for ‘townies’, spoke ‘many opprobrious words to the citizens, which grieved them sore’. Many in that now nervous city were convinced that Norfolk had nurtured a deep grudge against its inhabitants since one of his chaplains was murdered in Cheapside the previous year. Then he had angrily declared: ‘I pray God I may have the citizens in my danger [at my mercy].’ They feared his pitiless reprisal for their night of sweet revenge upon the foreigners in what was now being called the ‘Evil May Day’ riots.

  Norfolk issued strict proclamations that ‘no women should come together to babble and talk, but that all men should keep their wives in their houses’. Was this bizarre edict an indication of the duke’s opinion on the cause of the riots?

  Then he moved on to inflict legal retribution for the mayhem. Three hundred of the captured rioters were arraigned before an oyer and terminer trial on 4 May at the Guildhall, presided over by Norfolk, his son, and Rest, the Lord Mayor.14 Another 224 followed them on indictment. The prisoners were herded through the hushed streets to the court, tied together by ropes, between files of halberdiers:Some men, some lads, some children [aged only] thirteen. There was a great mourning of fathers and friends for their children and kinsfolk. Among the prisoners were many not of the city; some were priests and some husbandmen and labourers and they were all arraigned for treason.15

  Common law treason was a convenient, ill-defined crime in England which could involve many types of offences, grave or minor, but woven into most cases was the common thread of displeasing the monarch. The principle upon which the law rested was allegiance to the crown, due from every subject of fourteen years and above.

  Henry VIII, who could never stomach any kind of opposition, believed the apprentices had damaged the amity he enjoyed with his fellow Christian princes and therefore, according to the king, they were traitors.

  The next day, the court found thirteen guilty and ordered them to be publicly hanged, drawn and quartered - the barbaric method of execution reserved for those condemned for high treason, whereby the victim was hanged until half dead, cut down from the gallows, then castrated, his vital organs ripped from the still living body and burned before his eyes. Finally, the corpse was beheaded and chopped into four quarters by the axe-wielding headsman. Such places of execution must have resembled a gory butcher’s shop.

  Twenty-two gallows were erected in the London streets where the offences were committed: at Aldgate, Whitechapel, Gracechurch Street,16 Leadenhall and in front of the city’s prisons at Newgate, St Martin le Grand, Aldersgate and Bishopsgate. The prisoners were brought out and

  executed in the most rigorous manner, in the presence of the Lord Edmund Howard, son to the Duke of Norfolk, and knight marshal, who showed no mercy but extreme cruelty to the poor young[sters] in their execution.

  And likewise, the Duke’s servants spoke many opprobrious words, some bade: ‘hang’ some bade: ‘draw’ and some bade: ‘set the city on fire’ but all was suffered.17

  The severed heads and body quarters were prominently displayed to deter future transgressors against the king’s peace.

  Two days later, on 7 May, Lincoln, two brothers called Bets, another man Shirwin, and ‘diverse others’ were als
o sentenced to death. Lincoln pleaded ‘not guilty’ and defiantly told his judges:My lords, I meant well. If you knew the mischief that is issued in this realm by strangers, you would remedy it. Many times I have complained and then I was called a busy[body]. Now our Lord have mercy on me.18

  The condemned men were tied to sheep hurdles and dragged and bumped through the foul mire of the streets to the Standard in Cheapside, a water conduit then frequently used as a place of punishment for serious offenders. As the hangman’s noose was roughly looped over one prisoner’s neck, a horseman galloped up and halted further executions. He carried a message from Henry to reprieve the malefactors but he was too late to save Lincoln, who had been the first to die. The crowd, packed into the narrow street, down from the Eleanor Cross, cried out: ‘God Save the King’, as, of course, they were intended to do, as a result of Henry’s populist gesture.

  On 11 May, the king returned to Greenwich Palace from Richmond where he had been safely ensconced during the riots. Vengeance soured his heart but Queen Catherine pleaded with him to show mercy to the remaining prisoners. Others, including Norfolk and some of the London aldermen, also urged compassion, but he sternly told the city fathers:Truly, you have highly displeased and offended us and you ought to [be]wail and be sorry for the same. And where you say that you, the substantial persons were not consenting to the [riots], it appears to the contrary. For you never moved to let [hinder] them nor stirred once to fight with them . . .

  At this time, we will grant to you neither our favour nor goodwill, nor to the offenders mercy.19

  Three days later the king came to Westminster Hall, attended by Wolsey, Norfolk, Surrey and many other nobles. What followed was a carefully timed and orchestrated demonstration of the generosity of the royal prerogative. The mayor and aldermen had been kept waiting, dressed in the finery of their best livery, since nine that morning. At the upper end of the twelfth-century hall had been suspended a gold cloth of estate and the walls were hung with rich tapestries. Against this magnificent backdrop stood the grim-faced king, who commanded that the surviving prisoners should be brought into his presence. The royal guards, pushing and shoving, lined up the wretches in rows to face their sovereign and their fate:Then came in the poor [youngsters] and old false knaves, bound in ropes all along, one after the other in their shirts, and every one a halter about his neck, to the number of four hundred men and eleven women.