Henry VIII's Last Victim (36 page)

English munitions were by no means the most impressive in Europe. The Imperial army at Landrecy contained an assortment of Germans, Dutchmen, Burgundians, Spaniards and Italians, who all took advantage of the increasingly sophisticated technology. On 22 October 1543 Sir John Wallop described a German mortar that he had seen at the camp. It was ‘the fairest that ever I saw, made of cannon metal, and shooteth the greatest bullet that ever I saw; diverse of them made of stone and the others artificial, full of wild fire and a forty or fifty shot of guns within them, every one of them able to kill a man.’ Indeed, Wallop assured the King, ‘in all the wars that I have been in, I have not seen such another time for youth to learn.’
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Much to Wallop’s approbation, Surrey immediately strove to familiarise himself with his new environment. On 26 October Wallop wrote to Paget, ‘praying you to make my humble recommendations to my good Lord of Norfolk, showing him that my Lord of Surrey hath lost no time sithen [since] his being here, for he visiteth all things that be meet for a man of war to look upon for his learning.’ Surrey liaised with the various camps and toured the trenches, though on one occasion he strayed too close to the enemy lines and was ‘somewhat saluted’ by their fire. Another time he stayed up through the night to witness the operation of the mortar that had so impressed Wallop and ‘it was a strange and a dreadful sight to see the bullet fly into the air, spouting fire on every side.’
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On 27 October ‘a certain foolish letter’ of Surrey’s was leaked to Eustace Chapuys, Charles V’s ambassador in London. It has not survived, but it seems to have been critical of some of the Imperial officers. Henry VIII was piqued and Surrey was ordered ‘to abstain in future from making such reports’.
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But this was the only blot on an otherwise faultless copybook. A few days earlier Charles V had met Surrey and been so impressed by what he had seen that he mentioned the Earl in his next dispatch to Henry VIII:

As for your recommendation that the son of our cousin the Duke of Norfolk be initiated into the arts of war, he is such a good example of your race that he cannot fail to profit thereby. All our men will respect him as he deserves, for the valour of his father and for his own noble heart and we thank you for your recommendation.
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Henry was delighted by Charles’ letter, while the Duke of Norfolk, Chapuys informed Charles V, was ‘so grateful at this show of kindness on Your Imperial Majesty’s part that he has been heard to say in public that nothing would be so agreeable to him as to find an opportunity of risking his person, his family and his property for Your Majesty’s service.’
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These are more than the sentiments of a proud father. If Norfolk’s gratitude is palpable, then so too is his sense of relief.

Wallop’s dispatches for the end of October 1543 were confident of victory. On the 22nd he reported that Landrecy would fall in twelve days, on the 26th that parts of the city were on fire and on the 29th that ‘a practicable breach’ had been made in the city walls.
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But all the while Francis I had been marching towards them with a great army and on 29 October he was encamped at nearby Cateau-Cambrésis. ‘Verily,’ the English chronicler, Raphael Holinshed, recorded, ‘it was thought that two such powers as were there at that time so near together, should never have departed without battle.’
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Charles V assumed as much. He immediately raised the siege and began to commit his men to the field. On the morning of 4 November Charles summoned his Imperial generals, along with Sir John Wallop, Sir Francis Bryan and the Earl of Surrey, to a council of war. It was agreed that they would advance the next day and give the French battle.

Francis had no intention of engaging his foes. Having lured them away from Landrecy, he replenished the town with men, munitions and provisions. On the day that Surrey and the others sat in the Emperor’s tent discussing battle plans, Francis prepared to withdraw. As night fell, he and his army crept away. ‘Trumpet there blew none,’ Wallop noted bitterly ‘ne yet stroke with drum.’ As soon as they received news of the retreat, the Anglo-Imperial army gave chase. They were, Holinshed tells us, ‘as eager as tigers’, but the French had made too much ground. A few days later, with ‘the weather waxing extreme foul and contrary to an army that should lie in the fields’, it was agreed that camp should be broken and the armies sent home.
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On Sunday, 18 November 1543 Surrey took his formal leave of the Emperor. Charles V ‘handled him after a very gentle sort’ and entrusted him with some delicate information concerning the latest overtures of the French to treat for peace. Then he placed a sealed letter in Surrey’s hands and asked him to deliver it personally to Henry VIII.
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Surrey returned to the English Court in good time for the Chapter of the Order of the Garter held at Hampton Court on Christmas Eve.
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Although the enterprise at Landrecy had ultimately proved disappointing, Surrey himself had never been in higher favour. The letter that Charles V had asked him to deliver to Henry VIII feted him as a rising star of the allied army. The Earl of Surrey, his King read,

has provided good witness in our army of whose son he is and how he does not wish to falter in following his father and his ancestors. With so noble a heart and such dexterity there has been no need for him to learn anything. In fact, you cannot command him anything he does not know how to do.
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The foolish proud boy, it seemed, might finally have grown up.

On 14 January 1544, the same day that Holinshed’s
Chronicles
recorded an eclipse of the sun,
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the third session of Henry VIII’s fourth Parliament was opened. One of the acts passed confirmed a land indenture between Henry VIII and
the Duke of Norfolk, his heir and daughter-in-law.
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Just under two years earlier Surrey had signed a ninety-nine-year lease for the house, buildings, orchards, grounds and woods appertaining to the dissolved priory of St Leonard’s, within the manor of Thorpe, Norwich.
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Now, in exchange for some properties in Suffolk, Henry VIII granted the Howards the manors of Gaywood, Rising and Thorpe. The Duke of Norfolk handed St Leonard’s Priory over to Surrey and Frances. Much work needed to be done to make it fit for their habitation, but finally they could plan a future away from Kenninghall.

The following month Henry VIII broadcast his new-found confidence in Surrey by sending him ‘to visit and offer compliments on his part to the Duke’. Don Juan Estaban Manrique de Lara, third Duke of Najera, had served at Landrecy and was one of Charles V’s most respected generals. His visit was unofficial but Henry VIII determined to honour him with a formal reception. Surrey met him in London on 12 February 1544 and was told to divert him for five days until the King was ready to receive him. During this period the Duke’s secretary kept a diary in which he recorded his impressions of London. The city, he decided, was ‘one of the largest in Christendom’, and the Thames one of the greatest rivers: ‘It is not possible, in my opinion, that a more beautiful river should exist in the world . . . The bridge on this river is the finest I ever beheld, or have heard of; nor do I believe its equal is to be found.’ Never, he concluded, ‘did I see a river so thickly covered with swans’.

The Duke’s party visited the Tower of London, where ‘we saw four lions, very large and fierce, and two leopards, confined within wooden railings’. But it was the entertainment at Paris Garden that most amused the Spaniards:

We saw seven bears, some of them of great size. They are led out every day into an enclosure where, being tied with a long rope, large and intrepid dogs are thrown to them in order that they may bite and make them furious. It is not bad sport to see them fight and the assaults they give each other. To each of the large bears are matched three or four dogs, which sometimes get the better and sometimes are worsted, for besides the fierceness and great strength of the bears to defend themselves with their teeth, they hug the dogs with their paws so tightly that, unless the masters come to assist them, they would be strangled by such soft embraces.

Into the same place they brought a pony with an ape fastened on its back, and to see the animal kicking amongst the dogs, with the screams of the ape, beholding the curs hanging from the neck of the pony, is very laughable.
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On Sunday, 17 February Surrey and the Queen’s brother Lord William Parr dined with the Duke of Najera and then escorted him to Court, where he had his audience with Henry VIII. The formalities dispensed with, Surrey and Parr accompanied the Spanish party to the Queen’s Chamber where they were entertained for the rest of the evening with music and dancing. At the end of May Surrey performed a similar role when he rode out ‘with a gallant and numerous suite’ to meet the Duke of Albuquerque, another Spanish luminary, who had come to England to finalise plans for the invasion of France.
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By now the soldiers had been mustered and the generals appointed. Henry VIII’s army was the largest body of English troops ever sent across the Channel, four times the size of that at Agincourt and twice the number of men sent into France in 1522. Including the German and Burgundian auxiliaries sent by the Emperor and the English militiamen summoned in September, Henry VIII had some forty-eight thousand men at his command.
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The Duke of Norfolk, now entering his seventy-second year, was appointed Captain of the Vanguard and the Earl of Surrey, at only twenty-seven, was made Marshal of the Field.

Surrey’s excitement over his first posting and the imminent invasion
was tempered by the fear and uncertainty of the enterprise. He knew that there was a chance that he might not see his wife and children again. His squire Thomas Clere, ‘now being ready to pass into the realm of France to serve the King, my sovereign Lord, in his wars there’, made his will on 6 June 1544. Lord Mountjoy also made provisions. His will contained orders for his tombstone to be laid ‘in the place where I am slain’ and engraved with his autobiographical epitaph, which he hoped would serve as ‘a monument to my children to continue and keep themselves worthy of so much honour as to be called hereafter to die for their master and country’.
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Neither Clere nor Mountjoy would survive the war.

Surrey’s emotions may be gleaned from two poems that he is thought to have composed around this time. The first (cited in
chapter 8
) depicts Frances pining after her husband and fondly imagining him in the sanctuary of the nursery, ‘playing where I shall find him with T. his little son’.
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The second poem, ‘O happy dames’, was inscribed by Surrey’s sister into the Devonshire Manuscript and explores similar themes of absence, longing and uncertainty. The speaker of this poem is also a woman – possibly, though not necessarily, Frances – who watches from her window as her lover sails away. ‘Good Ladies,’ she implores her companions, ‘help to fill my mourning voice’:

Alas, how oft in dreams I see

Those eyes that were my food,

Which sometime so delighted me,

That yet they do me good;

Wherewith I wake with his return

Whose absent flame doth make me burn.

But when I find the lack, Lord how I mourn!

When other lovers in arms across

Rejoice their chief delight,

Drowned in tears to mourn my loss

I stand the bitter nights

In my window, where I may see

Before the winds how the clouds flee.

Lo, what a mariner love has made me!

And in green waves when the salt flood

Doth swell by rages of wind,

A thousand fancies in that mood

Assails my restless mind.

Alas, now drenches my sweet foe,

That with spoil of my heart did go,

And left me; but, alas, why did he so?

And when the seas wax calm again,

To chase from me annoy,

My doubtful hope makes me to plain

So dread cuts off my joy.

Thus is my mirth mingled with woe,

And of each thought a doubt doth grow,

Now he comes, will he come? Alas, no, no!
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Surrey crossed the Channel in June 1544 and joined the thousands of soldiers amassing at Calais. The strike on Paris was ostensibly still on, but, Henry VIII reasoned, supply lines and strongholds had to be secured before such an assault could be attempted. In fact, Henry had no intention of venturing beyond the Somme. On previous campaigns he had acted as little more than a stooge for his self-interested allies. This time he resolved to make his own way in the war, on his terms and with his own conquests. The plan, therefore, was for the Duke of Suffolk to lay siege to Boulogne with the ‘King’s Battle’, the largest division of the army, while the vanguard under Norfolk, the rearguard under Lord John Russell and a division of Imperial cavalry commanded by the Count de Buren would besiege Montreuil, a fortress town just over twenty miles south of Boulogne.

The logistics for the Montreuil campaign were complex and daunting and a great part of the responsibility for them lay with the Earl of Surrey as Marshal of the Field. It was a remarkable first posting, especially for one so young. ‘The Lord High Marshal,’ Barnabe Rich wrote in 1587, ‘ought to be a man of such perfection and knowledge that of his own experience he may as well instruct inferior officers in their duties as correct and chastise them for their misdemeanours.’