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

by Hutchinson, Robert

  62. Barr, Flodden, pp. 133-8.

  63. Grafton, Chronicle, vol. 2, p. 275.

  64. Laing, Flodden, p. 150.

  65. Barr, Flodden, pp. 167-8.

  66. Brooks, Battlefields, p. 287. The bagpipe lament ‘Flowers of the Forest’, written c. 1750, to commemorate the Scottish dead at Flodden, is still played at military funerals.

  67. Hall, Chronicle, p. 564.

  68. They are now held by the College of Arms in London, although some doubt has been raised about their authenticity.

  69. James’s head was later buried in St Michael’s church, Wood Street, London. The antiquary John Stow reported later in the sixteenth century that, after the dissolution of the Carthusian house, the king’s body, still wrapped in lead, was thrown into a lumber room ‘amongst the old timber and rubble. Since [such] time, workmen there, for their foolish pleasure, hewed off his head. Lancelot Young [Master Glazier to Elizabeth I] feeling a sweet savour to come from thence and seeing the same dried from all moisture, and yet the form remaining with the hair of the head and [red] beard, brought it to London to his house in Wood Street, where for a time he kept it for the sweetness. In the end [he] caused the sexton of that church to bury it amongst other bones, taken out of their charnel house.’ John Stow, Survey of London (two vols, Oxford, 1908), vol. 1, p. 298.

  70. Margaret, Henry’s sister, and wife to James IV, had given birth to a son, seventeen months before. The infant was crowned James V of Scotland on 21 September 1513 at Stirling Castle.

  71. BL Cotton MS Vespasian F, iii, fol. 15. This detailed French aid to Scotland: 25,000 gold crowns, forty cartloads of gunpowder; 400 handguns and 6,000 spears, the same number of maces and the tactical assistance of French military advisers, led by a knight called d’Aussy. The same day Catherine wrote to Wolsey, ‘a post has come with news from Lord Howard which she has sent the king’. She repeated: ‘I think it is God’s doing that his subjects should gain such a victory in his absence.’ See BL Cotton MS, Caligula, B, vi, fol. 35.

  72. BL Egerton MS 2,014, fol. 2. Reprinted in part, Byrne, Letters, Henry VIII, pp. 20-21.

  73. BL Cotton MS Vitellius, B, ii, fol. 50.

  74. The ceremony of Howard’s creation as [second] Duke of Norfolk is in BL Egerton MS 985, fol. 59.

  75. Copies of the Letters Patent creating Thomas Howard [second] Duke of Norfolk for his services to the crown in Scotland and granting the augmentation of arms, is in Arundel Castle archives, G1/83.

  76. Head, Ebb and Flows, p. 41.

  77. Ellis, Original Letters, first series, vol. 1, pp. 116-17.

  Chapter 2: Guardians of England

  1. Vergil, Anglica Historia, p. 6.

  2. The blue-grey stock dove, Columba oenas, is similar to a pigeon.

  3. See John Holmes, ‘A Catalogue of French Ambassadors in England’, Gentleman’s Magazine, vol. 169 (1840), p. 484. Two letters from de la Guiche are in BL, Cotton MS Caligula E i, fol. 59 and Caligula E ii, fol. 116.

  4. From the Old English cnafa, originally a term for a male servant but by the early sixteenth century the word had become a taunt, meaning a deceitful and unreliable scoundrel.

  5. He sold second-hand clothes.

  6. Formerly called the ‘Priory of the Blessed Virgin without Bishopsgate’. The area of Spitalfields in London’s East End is a corruption of ‘hospital’. For more information on the priory, see: Survey of London, vol. 27, Spitalfields and Mile End (London, 1957), p. 22. The hospital had 180 beds for the poor. Twenty years later the priory church was in decay and the roof fell in during August 1538. (See a letter from the Lord Mayor of London, Sir Richard Gresham, to Thomas Cromwell, in National Archives SP1/135/7.) The priory was dissolved in 1539.

  7. Walter Thornbury, Old and New London, vol. 2, p. 149 (London, 1878). The house and the preaching cross can be seen on a copperplate map of London, engraved c. 1553-9, the relevant section of which is illustrated in Adrian Prockter and Robert Taylor, A-Z of Elizabethan London (London, 1979), p. 30.

  8. Grafton, Chronicle, vol. 2, p. 290.

  9. Or ‘Fight for your neighbourhood’.

  10. Grafton, Chronicle, vol. 2, p. 291.

  11. For a description on how ‘Bucklers’ was played, see Sally Wilkins, Sport and Games of Medieval Cultures (Westport, 2002), p. 131.

  12. Grafton, Chronicle, vol. 2, p. 292.

  13. Vergil, p. 245.

  14. Wriothesley, vol. 1, p. 11. These trials - from the French Oyer et Terminer, ‘to hear and determine’ - were presided over by justices commissioned by the crown.

  15. Grafton, Chronicle, vol. 2, p. 293.

  16. Then called ‘Gracious Street’.

  17. Grafton, Chronicle, vol. 2, p. 293.

  18. Ibid.

  19. Holinshed, Chronicles, vol. 3, p. 624.

  20. Ibid., p. 625.

  21. Grafton, Chronicle, vol. 2, p. 294. A large number of interlopers had appeared among the rioter prisoners, a group later called ‘the black wagon’. Holinshed, Chronicles, vol. 3, p. 625, reported that ‘Diverse offenders that were not taken, hearing that the king was inclined to mercy, came well [dressed] to Westminster and suddenly stripped them[selves to] their shirts, with halters, and came in among the prisoners willingly to be partakers of the king’s pardon. One John Gelson, yeoman of the crown, was the first that began to spoil [loot] and exhorted others to do the same. Because he fled and was not taken, he came in with a rope among the other prisoners and so had his pardon.’

  22. She had been promised by her father to Philip, the son of Maximilian, Archduke of Austria, under a treaty of 5 August 1480.

  23. This included an allowance of twenty shillings a week for food and drink and the wages of a household of two women, a young maid, a gentleman, a yeoman and three grooms. She was also allowed £15 11s 8d a year for the upkeep of seven horses.

  24. Bapst, p. 153, confirms that three children were born to Howard and his first wife and names the first two as Lady Muriel and Lady Catherine but does not provide any authority for this statement. Robinson, p. 25, says she had four sons who all died in infancy. They were buried in the Howard chapel of St Mary’s church, Lambeth.

  25. Complete Peerage, vol. 12, p. 554.

  26. Monetary calculations have been derived from a model available on the Inter-net. See: Lawrence H. Officer’s ‘Comparing the Purchasing Power of British Pounds from 1264 to 2006 ...’ URL: http://www.measuringworth.com. A jointure is the property and income settled on a wife to support her if she outlives her husband.

  27. Lords Journal, vol. 1, pp. 18-23.

  28. Pollard, Wolsey, p. 76.

  29. Vergil, p. 285.

  30. Pollard, Wolsey, p. 107, and Vergil, pp. 262-5.

  31. Vergil, pp. 262ff. An angry Wolsey swore that Buckingham would ‘sit upon [his] skirts’ for this insult, and the next day Buckingham appeared at court, insolently wearing a short coat and explained to the king that this simple stratagem would foil Wolsey’s plans for revenge against him.

  32. Starkey, Personalities ... , p. 65.

  33. He claimed descent from Thomas of Woodstock (1355-97), seventh and youngest son of King Edward III, Earl of Buckingham and Duke of Gloucester.

  34. The roll file of the court of the Lord High Steward is in the National Archives, KB/8/5.

  35. LPFD, vol. 3, pt i, pp. cxxxi-iii.

  36. Gilbert’s confession is in BL Harleian MS 283, fol. 70. It includes the allegation that Buckingham wished that God ‘would not suffer the king’s issue to prosper as appears by the [death o]f his son and that his daughters prosper not and that the king’s [grace] has no issue male ...’

  37. The chaplain, Delacourt and Knyvett were jealous of the favour shown to Hopkins in Buckingham’s household. Henry Corsley, the prior of the Carthusian house, wrote a letter, signed by all eight of his community, protesting their innocence of any involvement in the prophecies and urging that Hopkins should be sent to some other Carthusian house for appropriate punishment. In the event, Hopkins is believed to have
died in the Tower, broken-hearted at the fate of his patron. See VCH: Somerset, vol. 2 (ed. William Page), (London, 1911), pp. 118-23.

  38. BL Stowe MS 164, fol. 3.

  39. Hall, Chronicle, p. 624, and LPFD, vol. 3, pt i, p. cxxxiv.

  40. 14/15 Henry VIII, cap. 20. The Act talks of Buckingham’s ‘many treasons in the counties of Gloucester, Somerset, the City of London, the counties of Kent and Surrey ...’ A late sixteenth-century copy of the attainder is in National Archives, SP 30/28/209.

  41. The countess later told Thomas Cromwell she provided Norfolk with five children.

  42. While in Ireland, eighteen of his bored soldiers planned to steal a ship and engage in a little lucrative piracy in the Irish Sea. Surrey was disappointed to discover that legally he could not hang them. ‘If I shall make a proclamation, upon pain of death, as it shall be needful many times to do, I have no authority to put any of them to death that shall break the same,’ he complained. Eventually, this authority was granted to him but those of noble rank escaped capital punishment. See State Papers, vol. 2, pp. 42-5.

  43. For example, between April 1523 and January 1524, he spent only twenty-three days at home. See Childs, p. 27.

  44. Skelton was born c. 1460 and died on 21 June 1529 and was buried in the parish church of St Margaret’s Westminster, alongside the Abbey. He was tutor to Prince Henry when he was Duke of York and later rector of Diss in Norfolk, when he enjoyed the patronage of the Norfolks, particularly that of Agnes, second wife of the second Duke of Norfolk and the countess’s mother-in-law. The Garland poem is more than 1,600 lines long. He also wrote a poem praising the Earl of Surrey after his military raid on northern France at the end of 1522. See Greg Walker, John Skelton and the Politics of the 1920s (Cambridge, 1988), p. 26.

  45. Surrey was rarely a happy general. At this time he wrote of being ‘decayed in body as well as being worn out in purse by these four years’ of continuous military service.

  46. His attacks on Wolsey are contained in his somewhat sarcastic poems Speak Parrot (c. 1521), Colin Clout (1521-2) and Why Come ye not to Court? (1522). See H. L. P. Edwards, Skelton: The Life and Times of an Early Tudor Poet (London, 1949), pp. 204-8, and Melvin Tucker, ‘The More-Howard Connections of John Skelton’, Moreana, vol. 37 (1973), pp. 19-21.

  47. See Walker, John Skelton and the Politics of the 1920s (Cambridge, 1988), pp. 29-30.

  48. She would have been about twenty-six when the poem was written. She died on 18 September 1534.

  49. The few remains of Bourchier’s monumental brass - an inscription in Latin, six decorative elbow-cops with Bourchier knots, and four shields - are in St Edmund’s chapel in Westminster Abbey. He was chief carver (‘cironomon mense’) to Elizabeth, the queen of Edward IV. The effigy, once depicted in armour, was stolen from his Purbeck tomb, probably during the Edwardian reformation in the mid-sixteenth century.

  50. See Gentleman’s Magazine, new series, vol. 23 (1845), p. 261. Muriel is sometimes recorded as a sister to Surrey, but she died in 1513 at Lambeth and was buried at Greenwich.

  51. The average male life expectancy during this period was around forty years.

  52. Brenan and Statham, vol. 1, p. 109.

  53. Tucker, p. 141.

  54. Arundel Castle Archives, G¼, and Tucker, pp. 141-2.

  55. National Archives, PCC, PROB/11/21. A certified copy is in Arundel Castle Archives, T1.

  56. Martin, History of Thetford, Appendix VIII, p. 38.

  57. Hearses in the sixteenth century were not the modern-day funeral vehicles but temporary structures beneath which the coffin rested while Masses were said for the soul of the departed.

  58. A Middle English term for a pack animal, from the Old French sometier.

  59. Carlisle Herald was one of the earliest titles for an English herald, mentioned in Edward III’s expedition to Scotland in 1327. See Wagner, p. 20 and p. 177.

  60. Robinson, p. 22, and Clare Gittings, Death, Burial and the Individual in Early Medieval England (London, 1988), p. 177.

  61. Martin, pp. 122-3, and Tucker, p. 142.

  62. A monumental brass to the second duke, showing him full-face in armour and Garter robes, with four shields, was laid over the grave. It is drawn by Lilley and is in Arundel Castle MS 1638 and is illustrated by Robinson, p. 14. It is now lost. Another drawing is in BL Add. MS 45,131, fol. 85.

  Chapter 3: The King’s ‘Great Matter’

  1. Singer, pp. 68-9, and Routh, p. 205.

  2. The indictment alleged that Wolsey ‘being not ignorant of the premises, had obtained certain Bulls from Clement VII by which he exercised jurisdiction and authority legatine to the deprivation of the king’s power established in his courts of justice’. Specifically, ‘he had given away the Church of Stoke-[next]-Guildford [Surrey] to one James Gorton ... to the contempt of the king and his crown ... and had caused the last wills and testaments of many ... to be exhibited and proved in his court and their goods and chattels to be administered by such as he appointed’. Wolsey also ‘made diverse visitations out of his dioceses and drawn diverse pensions from abbeys to the contempt of the king and his laws’. The court sentenced him as ‘he was out of the king’s protection, and his lands, goods and chattels forfeit and that his person might be seized upon’. See Cobbett, vol. 1, pp. 370-71.

  3. Catherine had at least six pregnancies over the nine years 1509-18. A daughter was still-born on 31 January 1510; Henry, Prince of Wales, who lived just fifty-two days; another son, also called Henry, who lived for just a few hours after being born in November 1513; Mary, born in 1516; a still-born boy in the autumn of 1517 and a daughter also born dead, on 10 November 1518.

  4. The child was also said to have been born in a building on the north side of the churchyard, formerly called ‘Jericho’ - a cover name for a ‘house of pleasure’ owned and allegedly utilised by Henry VIII. See the Revd Alfred Suckling’s Antiquities and Architecture . . . of the County of Essex (London, 1845), p. 27. He adds: ‘It is a very remarkable situation to have chosen for the purposes of debauchery as it not only abuts upon the churchyard but is actually within a stone’s [throw] of the residence of the monks.’

  5. See Garrett Mattingly’s Catherine of Aragon (London, 1950), p. 173, and Scarisbrick, p. 152.

  6. In 1533, Sir George Throgmorton (or Throckmorton) had a painful conversation with Henry, with Cromwell standing by. He related how he told the king, ‘I feared if you did marry Queen Anne [Boleyn] you [would] have meddled both with the mother [Lady Elizabeth Boleyn] and the sister [Mary Boleyn]. And his grace said “Never with the mother.” And [Cromwell] ... said: “Nor with the sister either - and therefore put that out of your mind.’” See LPFD, vol. 12, pt ii, pp. 332-3. Mary Boleyn had married William Carey (c. 1500-28) a Gentleman of Henry’s Privy Chamber, on 4 February 1520. He was the happy recipient of a number of royal grants of property from 1522, doubtless in return for his acquiescence in the affair.

  7. Cavendish, p. 389.

  8. There is probably no truth in the story that she had a stunted sixth finger on one hand. See N. Sanders, Rise and Growth of the Anglican Schism (London, 1877), p. 25.

  9. The castle, complete with battlements, was made of wood, covered with green canvas. From each end tower hung a banner emblazoned with ‘lovelorn hearts’. The entertainment was probably organised by William Cornish, Master of the children of the Chapel Royal, who died the following year. See Anglo, pp. 120-21.

  10. LPFD, vol. 4, pt ii, p. 1504.

  11. State Papers, vol. 1, p. 278.

  12. Wilson, p. 245.

  13. Crapelet, pp. 102-5.

  14. Crapelet, pp. 124-5.

  15. LPFD, vol. 4, pt ii, p. 1507.

  16. LPFD, p. 2003.

  17. Scarisbrick, p. 160. Did Wolsey try bribery to stave off disaster? On 4 October 1529, William Capon, Dean of one of the Cardinal’s new colleges, at Ipswich, leased the Benedictine priory at Felixstowe to Norfolk and others at a rent of £20 a year. See National Archives, E 24/23/27.

&nb
sp; 18. National Archives E 30/1456. Depositions taken at Stanstead and Thetford, 16 July 1528.

  19. Scarisbrick, p. 247.

  20. Years later, Chapuys was described by Sir William Paget, then one of Henry’s secretaries of state, as ‘a great practicer, with which honest term we cover tale-telling, lying, dissimulating and flattering’. See State Papers, vol. 10, p. 466.

  21. Scarisbrick, p. 233.

  22. BL Cotton MS Vitellius B, xii, fol. 171, and State Papers, vol. 1, pp. 343-4.

  23. Cavendish, pp. 92-100ff.

  24. LPFD, vol. 4, pt iii, p. 2675.

  25. Froude, p. 121.

  26. LPFD, vol. 4, pt iii, p. 2681.

  27. LPFD, vol. 4, pt iii, p. 2679.

  28. Singer, p. 39.

  29. LPFD, vol. 4, pt iii, p. 2681; Chapuys to Charles V, 25 October 1529.

  30. Singer, pp. 68-9.

  31. BL Cotton MS Cleopatra E, iv, fol. 178, and Merriman, vol. 1, pp. 67-8.

  32. ‘The same lord Cardinal, knowing himself to have the foul and contagious disease of the great pox, broken out upon in diverse places of his body, came daily to your grace [Henry, whispering] in your ear and blowing upon your most noble grace with his most perilous and infective breath to the marvellous danger of your highness.’ See MacNalty, p. 161.

  33. Hutchinson, Thomas Cromwell, p. 35, and Merriman, vol. 1, p. 69.

  34. Oedema, once known as dropsy, is a swelling of an organ or tissue through the accumulation of fluid, sometimes caused by heart or kidney disease.

  35. CDP Spanish, vol. 4, pt i, pp. 449-50.

  36. Cawood was a manor of the Archbishopric of York.

  37. The pallium, a mantle, normally richly embroidered with three bands in the shape of the letter ‘Y’.

  38. Vergil, p. 333.

  39. Merriman, vol. 1, p. 327. Cromwell to Wolsey, 17 May 1530.

  40. LPFD, vol. 4, pt iii, p. 3013.

  41. Pollard, Wolsey, p. 288.

  42. See London Topographical Record, vol. 10 (1916), pp. 77-8. The house, opposite the parish church of St Mary Somerset, had originally been built in the thirteenth century by the Bigod family and was held by the dukes of Norfolk until the third duke sold the property to the Lord Mayor, Sir Richard Gresham. In 1542, John Cooke bequeathed ‘the Duke of Norfolk’s place’ to the Corporation of London. It was purchased in 1583 by Thomas Sutton, later founder of the Charterhouse charity.