Henry VIII's Last Victim (14 page)

Surrey was also exposed to Renaissance art and sculpture, the likes of which he had never before seen. Francis fancied himself as a connoisseur. He employed a team of agents to source pieces from all over the Continent and his collection included works by Michelangelo, Raphael and Leonardo da Vinci. Dotted throughout the Loire valley and the Île de France were testaments to French Renaissance architecture. Old Gothic châteaux were refashioned along classical lines and new ones were erected to project the imperial magnificence of the French King. None was more impressive than Fontainebleau, forty miles south-east of Paris, which the French Court visited in the spring of 1533.

Ever since 1528, when Francis I had announced that he wanted to spend more time in the region, workers had begun to rebuild the original medieval castle. By the end of Francis’ reign, although still not complete, Fontainebleau had become a sumptuous Renaissance palace. The pièce de résistance, completed in 1539, was the Galerie François Premier. Francis treasured his gallery and kept the keys to its door safely on his person. The walls were horizontally divided, the lower part containing carved wainscoting, and the upper part a combination of frescoed panels and high-relief stucco that projected a complex iconographical schema. Its chief designer was Giovanni Battista Rosso, a Florentine artist whose distinctive Mannerist style, also reflected in Francesco Primaticcio’s decorative work in the royal apartments, became the defining component of a new school of art, L’École de Fontainebleau. Below the gallery there would be baths and saunas, and in the courtyard, atop a fountain designed by Primaticcio, would stand Michelangelo’s marble sculpture of Hercules. In time Fontainebleau became, according to Vasari, ‘a kind of new Rome’. Tourists flocked there to gaze in wonder at Francis I’s new aesthetic. ‘All this house,’ wrote the Englishman Sir Thomas Cheyney in July 1546, is ‘to me a thing incredible, unless I had seen it myself.’
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Fontainebleau, like Paris, broadened Surrey’s horizons. It taught him that the Italian Renaissance could be assimilated into other cultures and it revealed the awesome power of visual spectacle. However, it would be unwise to overemphasise Fontainebleau’s influence on the young Earl. While Surrey was there it was little more than a building
site. The gallery, cluttered with internal scaffolding and board cloths, was probably out of bounds and there is no record of any painting being done there until August 1533, that is, after Surrey had moved on. In the early 1530s Francis did not yet have a unified vision for Fontainebleau. It evolved piecemeal, according to the changing needs of the royal family and Court.
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In fact Surrey spent less than a week at Fontainebleau
⁴²
and he would have enjoyed a good part of it in the neighbouring forest, hunting red deer and wild boar. Perhaps one of his strongest memories of the place, more reminiscent of medieval England than Renaissance Italy, was the ceremony held on 23 April in celebration of the Order of the Garter. Francis had been made a Companion of the Order by Henry VIII in 1527, but St George’s Day was not usually a high point in his calendar. On this occasion, however, in honour of his English guests and in particular his fellow Companion, the Duke of Richmond, the feast day was conducted ‘with much ceremony’.
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The next day the Court packed up and began a long, leisurely journey towards Provence, where Francis planned to meet the Pope at the end of July and celebrate the marriage of Prince Henri to Catherine de’ Medici. This gave Francis three months, enough time to visit the most important towns along the route. As each was approached, King and Court were trumpeted at the gates by the citizens, who then escorted them in procession through newly gravelled streets. Gifts and pledges of faith were exchanged and banquets and pageants laid on for the Court’s delectation. From Fontainebleau they travelled to Montargis, from Montargis to Gien, then through Bourges and Issoudun and on to Moulins, where the
entrée
was staged ‘with all possible honour’, and Francis was presented with a silver mill worth one thousand crowns.
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By the end of May they had reached Lyons, where Francis received word that Clement VII had postponed their meeting until autumn. Francis decided to stay in the town over June and then conduct a tour of the Auvergne and Languedoc. Lyons was a thriving commercial centre whose proximity to France’s borders lent it a truly cosmopolitan flavour. Its women were reportedly among the most beautiful in France. It was vibrant and licentious, opulent and alluring – the kind of town, so it was said, where kings forgot their duties. According to Clément Marot:

C’est un grand cas voir le mont Pélion,

Ou d’avoir veu les ruines de Troye:

Mais qui ne voit la ville de Lyon,

Aucun plaisir à ses yeux il n’octroye.
^fn1
,
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Unfortunately, Lyons was also overpopulated and cramped. It soon became apparent that it would not be able to cater for the needs of the thousands who made up Francis’ travelling Court. ‘This town,’ the Venetian ambassador groused, ‘cannot accommodate so many men and horses.’ There was a scarcity of lodging and stabling and the bread, which was ‘very coarse and bad’, had trebled in price. ‘Should the Court remain here some days longer,’ he moaned, ‘the cost will become unbearable.’
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The Court therefore split. Queen Eleanor and the French princes departed south to Nîmes; Surrey and Richmond stayed behind with Francis. Any sadness Surrey might have felt about bidding farewell to the boys with whom he had lived at close quarters for the past six months was soon lifted by the news that he would shortly see his father.

Much had happened in England during Surrey’s absence. Not long after the Calais interview, Anne Boleyn had finally relented to Henry VIII’s incessant appeals for sex. To his joy, she fell pregnant almost immediately. The Great Matter, so he now felt, was vindicated in the eyes of God. Matters assumed a new urgency – the child could not be born out of wedlock – and in two secret ceremonies, one in November 1532 and the second the following January, Henry committed bigamy and married Anne. In March her brother Lord Rochford sailed to France to deliver the news. He returned with messages of congratulations and a wedding present of ‘a most beautiful and costly’ horse litter.
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Parliament continued to pass Acts that bolstered the King’s authority vis-à-vis the Pope. The most revolutionary so far was the Act in Restraint of Appeals, entered into the statute book just before prorogation on 7 April 1533. Taking away the right of Henry’s subjects – including, of course, Catherine of Aragon – to make judicial appeals to Rome, the Act provided the clearest declaration so far of the supremacy of the Crown over the English Church. ‘By diverse sundry old authentic histories and chronicles,’ the preamble stated, ‘it is manifestly declared and expressed that this realm of England is an Empire . . . governed
by one Supreme Head and King.’ God had invested Henry VIII ‘with plenary, whole and entire power, pre-eminence, authority, prerogative and jurisdiction’ to govern his subjects, without interference from ‘any foreign princes or potentates’.
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Thenceforth the King, not the Pope, was the de facto head of the English Church.

On 23 May 1533 the new Archbishop of Canterbury, Thomas Cranmer, pronounced from a courtroom in Dunstable Priory that the marriage between Henry VIII and Catherine of Aragon was ‘against the law of God’.
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Five days later he validated Henry’s marriage to Anne Boleyn and on 1 June, two days after the Duke of Norfolk landed in Calais, a heavily pregnant Anne was crowned Queen of England at Westminster. Pope Clement VII now began to make ominous noises about excommunication. Although Henry had flagrantly defied Clement, he was keen to avoid public censure and was fearful of invasion: something the Vatican had the power to license. It was out of the question for Henry to join Francis at his meeting with Clement. Indeed the English King was now uneasy about the whole enterprise. He needed his French ally more than ever and it would not augur well for the security of England if Clement and Francis were seen to be cosying up together.

Thus Henry had dispatched the Duke of Norfolk to France with strict instructions. Norfolk had to remind Francis of his English alliance and convince him that Clement was still under the Emperor’s sway. He was to appeal to Francis’ sense of pride by encouraging his indignation at Clement’s postponement of their meeting. ‘We be not a little troubled, and moved in our heart,’ Henry VIII wrote, ‘to see our said good brother and us, being such Princes of Christendom, to be so handled with the Pope, so much to our dishonours, and to the Pope’s and the Emperor’s advancement.’ Henry’s concern was less for his own personal matter, so Norfolk would have to convince Francis, than for the French King’s divine rights. Popes had no right ‘to play and dally with kings and princes; whose honour ye may say is above all thing, and more dear to us, in the person of our good brother, than is any piece of our cause at the Pope’s hand.’ By these and other insinuations, which Norfolk was to ‘often times repeat and inculk’, Francis should be persuaded to cancel the interview. If Francis remained intractable, then Norfolk should at least ‘devise for the certainty of our aid at his hand’.
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Replying to this letter nine days later from Brière, Norfolk confirmed
suspicions that ‘the interview is clearly determined to take effect’, and conveyed his fears that ‘it shall be very difficult to dissuade the French King therefrom’.
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Despite optimism in some quarters that the Franco-papal meeting could be frustrated, Norfolk’s mission was little more than damage limitation. And yet, according to the Imperial ambassador in London, he had been remarkably buoyant at the prospect of going to France: ‘I cannot say whether he will come back in such high spirits, but he certainly appears very desirous and even impatient of setting out on his journey.’
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Once in France, Norfolk outpaced his younger colleagues on the ride south. Peter Vannes noted that the sixty-year-old ‘excels us all in sustaining the labours of the journey and the heat’.
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Could it be that this dour old Duke was looking forward to seeing his son? Surrey, for his part, was genuinely enthused. Having received word on the morning of 10 July that his father was approaching the French Court at Riom, Surrey, with Richmond at his side, galloped out of the town to greet him, outstripping the official French welcoming party by half a mile.
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Sir William Paulet, one of the ambassadors in Norfolk’s train, claimed that the French welcomed them ‘in the best and most friendly manner’. This is confirmed by the Imperial ambassador to Rome, who was uneasy about the ‘splendid and flattering reception’ given to Norfolk and his party.
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But while Francis was only too happy to play the gallant host, he made it clear that he would not cancel his meeting unless Clement ‘innovated’ against Henry VIII in the meantime.
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Having delivered his message, Francis resumed his progress through the blistering heat towards Provence with Surrey and Richmond still in tow. Norfolk and his embassy planned to rest in Lyons for a few days and then proceed to Nice for the interview. But events soon overtook them as news broke that, on 11 July, the Pope had pronounced in Consistory that Henry VIII must renounce Anne Boleyn and take back Catherine of Aragon on pain of excommunication. According to one French onlooker, ‘the poor Duke was so astonished that he nearly fainted.’
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This was undoubtedly an ‘innovation’ by the Pope against Henry, but Francis reneged on his promise and remained determined to meet Clement.

Back in London, the Imperialists received the news from France with schadenfreude. The originators of Norfolk’s embassy, Chapuys crowed, ‘must now feel ashamed of themselves for all their presentiments have led to nothing else but disappointment and confusion, being now the
laughing stock for all parties.’
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Henry VIII flew into one of his notorious rages. Norfolk, he fumed, must return to England at once and bring Surrey and Richmond back with him. Although Norfolk diplomatically claimed that the boys’ removal from the French Court was due to the fact that Richmond was now of age to contract his marriage to Surrey’s sister, no one was fooled.
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Recent events had rendered these two symbols of the Anglo-French alliance obsolete.

Surrey and Richmond’s farewells must have been somewhat strained. Norfolk rode ahead of them post-haste, averaging over sixty miles a day.
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On 24 August 1533 he was at Moulins, four days later Amiens, and on 29 August he arrived in Calais and immediately sailed for England. He made it to Court in time for the birth of Henry VIII’s longed-for heir. It was a girl, Elizabeth. The celebratory joust was cancelled and the word ‘Prince’, so confidently inscribed in the preprepared document announcing the birth, was hastily altered to accommodate the new heir’s unfortunate gender. Surrey and Richmond assumed a more leisurely pace homewards, only arriving in Calais on 25 September.
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Two months later Surrey attended the marriage of his sister to his friend at Hampton Court. It changed the dynamics of his relationship with Richmond, for the Duke no longer required an
incitateur
. Although their paths would continue to cross at various intervals, the days of daily interaction and chamber companionship were over.