Henry VIII's Last Victim (15 page)

Nothing has survived to reveal exactly what the two boys thought of France, but within a year of their return Richmond, having heard that Henry VIII was soon to cross the Channel, was vigorously petitioning Cromwell for a place in the party.
⁶²
Surrey’s experience seems to have influenced him in a number of ways. Although Richmond’s page stated that he himself had ‘learned the tongue, though nothing readily’, the presence of French idioms in Surrey’s lyrics reveals an easy familiarity with the language. His later experiments with Italian and classical verse forms were surely encouraged by the spirit of imitation and adaptation alive in France, and portraits reveal him to be a dedicated follower of continental fashion.

Whether or not Surrey had become ‘a Frenchman at heart’, as the Imperial ambassador supposed, is a matter of opinion. Certainly when the time would come to take up arms against France, Surrey’s patriotism was never in doubt. Yet when he was forced to explain how the
whole back line of an army under his command could desert the field of battle, Surrey tellingly referred to ‘a humour that sometime reigneth in Englishmen’.
⁶³
According to his cousin Sir Edmund Knyvet, Surrey ‘loved to converse with strangers [foreigners] and to conform his behaviour to them’.
⁶⁴
This was not intended as a compliment. Indeed Knyvet’s words have only survived because they formed part of a deposition taken down by the Council after Surrey’s arrest for treason.

If Surrey did return from France with new airs and graces, it is likely he would have faced the sharp edge of a few barbs. As Knyvet’s testimony illustrates, Englishmen were suspicious of anyone who betrayed a fondness for foreign customs. This was particularly the case if those customs happened to be French. When Henry VIII’s egg-hurling minions had arrived home from their frolics in 1519, they were disparaged by contemporaries as ‘all French in eating, drinking and apparel, yea, and in French vices and brags’.
⁶⁵
Shakespeare and Fletcher brilliantly capture the attitude of their countrymen towards the French in
King Henry the Eighth
. Act One, Scene Three, finds the Lord Chamberlain and Lord Sands in an antechamber of the palace, railing against Henry VIII’s minions:

CHAMBERLAIN
:

Is’t possible the spells of France should juggle

Men into such strange mysteries?

SANDS
: New customs,

Though they be never so ridiculous –

Nay, let ’em be unmanly – yet are followed.

CHAMBERLAIN
:

As far as I see, all the good our English

Have got by the late voyage is but merely

A fit or two o’th’ face. But they are shrewd ones,

For when they hold ’em you would swear directly

Their very noses had been counsellors

To Pépin or Clotharius, they keep state so.

Sir Thomas Lovell soon enters and announces the introduction of a new proclamation:

CHAMBERLAIN
: What is’t for?

LOVELL
:

The reformation of our travelled gallants

That fill the Court with quarrels, talk and tailors.

CHAMBERLAIN
:

I’m glad ’tis there. Now I would pray our
messieurs

To think an English courtier may be wise

And never see the Louvre.

LOVELL
: They must either,

For so run the conditions, leave those remnants

Of fool and feather that they got in France,

With all their honourable points of ignorance

Pertaining thereunto – as fights and fireworks,

Abusing better men than they can be

Out of a foreign wisdom, renouncing clean

The faith they have in tennis and tall stockings,

Short blistered breeches, and those types of travel –

And understand again like honest men,

Or pack to their old playfellows. There, I take it,

They may,
cum privilegio
,
oui
away

The lag end of their lewdness and be laughed at.

SANDS
:

‘Tis time to give ’em physic, their diseases

Are grown so catching.
⁶⁶

Sands’ final comment neatly encapsulates the paradox: while Englishmen were ostensibly contemptuous of French frivolities and fashions, they inwardly yearned for a measure of Gallic sophistication and for the
sprezzatura
that Francis I so confidently displayed. ‘I have much wondered,’ mused Henry Peacham in
The Truth of Our Times
, ‘why our English above other nations should so much dote upon new fashions, but more I wonder at our want of wit that we cannot invent them ourselves, but, when one is grown stale, run presently over into France to seek a new, making that noble and flourishing Kingdom the magazine of our fooleries.’
⁶⁷
Perhaps Surrey’s silence about France is
an indication that he absorbed her culture almost osmotically. Everybody in England was striving to ape French customs. Surrey, like Anne Boleyn before him, never had to try.
⁶⁸

Seventeen years after Surrey’s sojourn in France, the two surviving French princes, Henri and Charles, praised him ‘as well for his wisdom and soberness, as also good learning’. Henry VIII also seemed impressed by Surrey’s performance in France, for in the New Year of 1534 he presented him with a silver ewer. The Duke of Norfolk deemed his heir’s internship so successful that he was ‘determined’ to send his second son Thomas there ‘for one year at the least’.
⁶⁹
Evidently the Earl of Surrey was showing all the signs of being a dutiful heir and subject.

When Surrey had been in Paris, Richmond’s physician, David Edwardes, had dedicated an anatomical treatise to him as a New Year’s gift. Bound with this work under a common title-page was a treatise on medical prognostication, which Edwardes had dedicated to Richmond – an indication of the two boys’ close association. The author’s address to Surrey is revealing, not only in its praise of the fifteen-year-old, but also in highlighting the pressures that he faced as heir to the Howard dynasty. Having extolled ‘the honourable achievements’ in peace and at war of Surrey’s grandfather and father, Edwardes continued:

I cannot sufficiently admire your family, but not so much for those reasons as because I see you established above what can be said for many other young men in this age, and turning your mind so seriously to those things which will render it better.

I am by no means certain whether I ought to ascribe this to the benefit of that stock from which you have been brought forth to us, whether to the gods, who through you smile upon and favour us English. However it may be, let us hope what has occurred will be to the advantage of our commonwealth and that the more so since you have pursued worthwhile things for so long a time. Thus you will approach the next age better prepared and good habits will meanwhile strengthen your mind so that later you will not easily fall into worse. But the more you may be strengthened by counsel and prudence, with confidence placed in your family, so much the better guidance will Norfolk have when you succeed as heir to your father’s estates. Meanwhile how much more useful you will be to your people as Earl of Surrey, and finally so much the more will all Englishmen desire you to undertake the affairs of the commonwealth. There is no doubt that you can achieve all these things, which will be to the increase of your honours and to the honour of your family.

As your talent and gravity of character promise, so we have great hope that you will be like your father and grandfather. I wish you both the greatest successes and the most fruitful increase of all the best things.
⁷⁰

By contrast, Edwardes’ dedication to Richmond is neither personal nor expressive in its praise; it is merely the vehicle for a diatribe against contemporary doctors. Also curious is the nature of the two works. Richmond’s treatise follows medieval tradition on symptoms and prognostication and is of little import, whereas Surrey’s is an original, avantgarde study. It employs the new humanistic nomenclature; it contains the first reference to a human dissection in England; it is the first work published in England to be devoted solely to anatomy. One might have expected Edwardes to dedicate the more exciting work to his patron Richmond, who also, of course, outranked Surrey. But it is the Earl who receives the honour and the eulogy, and it is tempting to speculate that the author’s decision may reflect his views on the comparative qualities of his two dedicatees. Whatever the reason for Edwardes’ decision, it is clear that Surrey had distinguished himself as a young man with a bright future.

^fn1
‘It is a great thing to see Mount Pelion, / or to have seen the ruins of Troy: / but he who does not see the city of Lyons / bestows no pleasure upon his eyes.’

PART TWO

POLITICS

6

BLOODY DAYS

SURREY RETURNED TO
an England that had a new Queen, a new heir and a new Church, over which Henry VIII now reigned as Supreme Head. Thomas Cranmer, a man of minor gentry stock with evangelical inclinations, now held the Archbishopric of Canterbury and Thomas Cromwell, the son of a Putney tradesman, was the King’s new favourite.

Even greater change confronted Surrey on the domestic front. Returning to Kenninghall, he discovered that his father’s mistress, Bess Holland, had effectively displaced his mother as lady of the house. Although Elizabeth denigrated Bess as ‘a churl’s daughter’, a ‘washer of my nursery’, a ‘drab’, a ‘quean’
^fn1
and a ‘harlot’, she was in fact the daughter of John Holland, Norfolk’s chief steward, a position unlikely to have been acquired without a degree of gentility.
¹
Bess had caught Norfolk’s eye in 1526 and he had lavished love and clothes and jewellery on her ever since.
²
This was not particularly shocking. Aristocratic male adultery was relatively common and, despite the Church’s official censure, tacitly accepted.
³
What really scandalised polite society was the Duchess’ response. Instead of biting her lip and turning a blind eye as other wives had learned to do, Elizabeth chose to fight.

Like her father before her, and her son after, Elizabeth was proud, self-righteous and outspoken. Once it had dawned on her that her husband had not, as she had assumed, married her for love, Elizabeth unleashed her fury. She quarrelled with Norfolk over Surrey and Mary’s marriages, both of which she disapproved, mainly on account of Anne Boleyn’s meddling.
⁴
At Court, in open defiance of her husband and
King, she sided with Catherine of Aragon. Elizabeth held a strong affection for her Queen, whom she had served as a lady-in-waiting for over sixteen years and, as a spurned wife herself, she identified with Catherine’s cause, especially as her nemesis, Bess, supported Anne.

From 1530 Elizabeth had begun to spy on her husband, turning over any useful information regarding the Great Matter to Catherine. On one occasion she had even sent her secret communications from the papal emissary hidden in an orange. On 30 January 1531, she reportedly ‘sent a message to the Queen to say that those of the opposite party were trying hard to win her over to their opinion, but if the whole world were to set about it they would not make her change. She was and would continue to be one of her party.’ Elizabeth was true to her word. Four months later ambassador Chapuys informed the Emperor that, in order to ‘please’ Anne Boleyn, Elizabeth had been banished from Court ‘owing to her speaking too freely and having declared in favour of the Queen much more openly than these people like.’
⁵

If Anne and her supporters had intended to teach Elizabeth a lesson in humility, then they had quite underestimated her. If anything, she felt empowered by her exile and, on her return, she redoubled her opposition to the divorce. She refused to bear Anne’s train at her investiture as Marchioness of Pembroke; she ignored the summons to the French interviews of 1532; she absented herself from Anne’s coronation the following summer and took no part in the christening of Princess Elizabeth. All the while she persisted in her excoriation of Norfolk and Bess. Elizabeth was proving not just an embarrassment to her husband, but a dangerous liability.

By the spring of 1533 Norfolk had had enough. He wanted Elizabeth out of his house and wrote several letters to her brother, Henry Stafford, asking him to take her in. Stafford’s reply on 13 May made it quite clear that he wanted nothing to do with his sister: ‘Her accustomed wild language . . . lieth not in my power to stop, whereby so great danger might ensue to me and all mine though I never deserved it.’ All Stafford would do, he wrote, was pray that God would ‘send my Lady a better mind’. With that, he signed off.
⁶

While Surrey had no doubt been conscious from an early age of the frost in his parents’ marriage, he would not have grasped the full extent of their estrangement. The last time he had been at home for any length of time was over three years ago. Now he returned from France to find
conditions arctic. A few months later he probably witnessed the final straw. On Tuesday of Passion Week, 1534, the Duke of Norfolk rode home from Court. He was in a foul mood, having failed in his mission to coerce Mary Tudor into acknowledging her illegitimacy.
⁷
Consequently his relationship with Anne Boleyn, already sour, had deteriorated further. After ‘riding all night’ to Kenninghall, the weary Duke arrived to find Elizabeth in a frenzied rage, slandering his mistress and her cronies. He ‘can lay nothing to my charge,’ Elizabeth later insisted, ‘but for because I would not be contented to suffer the bawd and the harlots.’ It was enough. According to Elizabeth, Norfolk promptly ‘locked me up in a chamber, and took away all my jewels and all my apparel’.
⁸