Henry VIII's Last Victim (38 page)

Norfolk’s relief was short-lived. The reinforcements did not leave Boulogne until 25 September, by which time it was too late. On 18 September Charles V had made his peace with Francis I, independently of Henry VIII and in breach of the Anglo-Imperial treaty, which stipulated that neither ally could treat for peace without the consent and inclusion of the other. Francis I, now able to concentrate solely on the North of France, sent his son, the Dauphin Henri,
^fn2
to raise the siege of Montreuil. Henri had once shared apartments with Surrey in the Louvre. Now he marched against him with a force of some fifty thousand men. On 26 September his advance guard was spotted only ten miles away.

With the Dauphin so close and England’s erstwhile allies withdrawn from the war, the only viable option was retreat. On 28 September the camp at Montreuil was broken. Few carriages were operable as so many horses had succumbed to disease and starvation. Mills, ovens and tents were therefore destroyed in order to prevent the incoming French from taking them. As Marshal of the Field, Surrey bore the responsibility for the evacuation and upon him also devolved the dangerous task of bringing up the rear. It is to his immense credit, therefore, that the retreat over the river, ‘across hill and dale’, through waterlogged fields and ‘freezing wind’, with the French constantly snapping at their heels,
was executed with precision and efficiency. On 30 September 1544 the English arrived at Boulogne ‘safe and sound’, if somewhat bedraggled. The same day Henry VIII took ship back to England.
⁵⁰

The Dauphin stalked the region until the night of 9 October, when he launched a surprise attack on the garrison at Boulogne. The English managed to repel their assailants and thereafter the Dauphin lost heart and soon retired to Paris. Boulogne had been won and retained, but Henry VIII was under no illusion that the French would seek to avenge it at the next opportunity. For the first time in his reign, thanks to the perfidy of the Emperor, he was going to have to face them alone.

Surrey was back in England in good time for Christmas, but the effects of the war lingered well into the following year. The appalling weather, especially the relentless storms of mid-September, the scarcity of victuals, which had driven men to eat rotting food and drink polluted water, and the inadequate living conditions, made worse by ‘the stink of the carrion of the mares and horses that died among the host’, had created a breeding ground for disease. Dysentery, plague, typhus, cholera, malaria and fevers ‘so fierce that they took away people’s memory and senses’ had cut swathes through the allied camp.
⁵¹
Some had died instantly; others made it out of Montreuil, only to succumb later. As Gruffydd powerfully recalled,

the soldiers coming from Calais and Boulogne were dying along the road from Dover to London and along the roads from London to every quarter of the Kingdom while trying to go to their homes. After they had come home, those who were well fell sick and those who were sick got worse and from this sickness and feebleness and pest they died in every part of England, mostly the people who had been in the camps by Montreuil among whom both before and after there was the greatest pest that ever was among people.
⁵²

One of the late casualties was Surrey’s squire Thomas Clere, who died the following April. He was the same age as Surrey and had served him for many years. He had fought alongside him in Scotland and at Landrecy and had rampaged with him through London. The two had hunted, hawked, gambled and played tennis together. Clere had fallen in love with Surrey’s close friend Mary Shelton, and he had served his master throughout with faith and constancy. Surrey’s grief for Clere
was comparable only to that which he had felt for his childhood companion the Duke of Richmond, and just as he had honoured Richmond’s memory in verse, so now he honoured Clere’s.

Surrey’s elegy, or more accurately his epitaph, was later engraved on a tablet above Clere’s tomb in the Howard chapel at St Mary’s, Lambeth. It is one of Surrey’s most moving poems and bears witness to a sensitivity and generosity of spirit that was all too frequently hidden from his contemporaries:

Norfolk sprang thee, Lambeth holds thee dead,

Clere of the County of Cleremont though
^fn3
hight;

Within the womb of
^fn4
Ormonde’s race thou bred,

And sawest thy
^fn5
cousin crowned in thy sight.

Shelton for love, Surrey for lord thou
^fn6
chase:

Ay me! While life did last that league was tender;

Tracing whose steps thou sawest
^fn7
Kelsall blaze,

Laundersey
^fn8
burnt and battered Bullen render.

At
^fn9
Muttrell gates, hopeless of all recure,

Thine Earl, half dead, gave in thy hand his will;

Which cause did thee this pining death procure,

Ere summers four times seven thou couldest fulfil.

Ah Clere, if love had
^fn10
booted, care or cost,

Heaven had not won, nor Earth so timely lost.
⁵³

From the first end-stopped line to the last, an elevated strain runs through Surrey’s sonnet. Clere is emblazoned with all the virtues of a chivalric knight: gentility (both of manner and birth), loyalty, liberty, self-sacrifice, courage and constancy. The exact cause of his death is unknown, but the suggestion that he might have died from a wound
he had picked up while saving Surrey’s life during an assault on Abbeville Gate – an assault that is nowhere mentioned in the records and almost certainly never happened – is unlikely. More convincing is the argument that Clere could have been felled by one of the diseases that ravaged the camp.
⁵⁴
He may even have contracted something from Surrey himself, who claims that he lay ‘half dead’ at one point of the siege and with little chance of recovery. Surrey’s rendering of Clere’s death is ambiguous. What mattered to him was not so much its nature as what it represented. For Surrey it is the ultimate realisation of a ‘tender league’, a league that tied Surrey to Clere as strongly as it tied Clere to his lady. When Surrey places his ‘will’ in Clere’s hands – literally his last will and testament but also perhaps his instructions or, more broadly, his aspirations – he reveals, in this act of giving, the mutual bond of trust that underlay that league.

Thomas Clere’s descendants were rightly proud of him and proud, too, of Surrey’s tribute. When Sir Edward Clere found himself slandered in 1606 by the Earl of Salisbury, one of Surrey’s own descendants, he referred his accuser to Surrey’s poem. That ‘your honourable ancestor, the noble Earl of Surrey’, he wrote, had been pleased ‘to grace my ancestor with an epitaph wherein his great honour and my ancestor’s faithful service and ancient lineage’ were set forth, was surely, Edward Clere argued, sufficient testimony ‘of the worth of our poor house’. Surrey’s inscription of honour had proved to be, in the words of his grandson Lord William Howard, ‘an argument of special eloquence’.
⁵⁵

But Surrey’s epitaph, like his Windsor elegies, has another effect. In trumpeting the values of chivalry, Surrey draws attention to the gulf between theory and practice. His nostrils still smarted from the stench of rotting flesh and his ears rung with the pitiful pleas of the roadside peasants. He had seen death dealt out indiscriminately by disease and shot. He had witnessed the iniquities of his Imperial allies and his own King’s celebrations at Boulogne as the rest of his men died in their hundreds twenty miles away. Surrey’s elegy is a celebration of the pristine virtues of his squire, but it acts too as a kind of reverse foil for the gritty realities of Henry VIII’s wars.

^fn1
Water was commonly polluted and only ever drunk when the beer ration dried up.

^fn2
Henri was Francis I’s second son. He became Dauphin on the death of his elder brother François in 1536.

^fn3
hight
: named. The sense of the first two lines is:
Although your name is Clere, you were born in Norfolk and lie buried in Lambeth
. The rest of the poem justifies Clere’s place of honour in the Howard chapel.

^fn4
the Cleres claimed descent from the Irish Earls of Ormonde.

^fn5
a reference to the coronation of Anne Boleyn, both Surrey’s and Clere’s cousin (Anne’s father, Thomas Boleyn, was Clere’s uncle; her mother, Elizabeth née Howard, was Surrey’s aunt).

^fn6
chase
: chose.

^fn7
Kelsall
: Kelso: one of the towns burnt during the 1542 campaign in Scotland.

^fn8
Laundersey
: Landrecy;
Bullen
: Boulogne.

^fn9
Muttrell
: Montreuil;
recure
: recovery.

^fn10
booted
: availed.

13

IN EVERY MAN’S EYE

WAR WAS A
costly business, especially for the nobility. Unlike Francis I, Henry VIII had no standing army and, although he made use of mercenaries and militiamen, the vast bulk of his force was recruited on a ‘quasi-feudal’ basis whereby the nobility were obliged to supply as many able-bodied men as they could muster from their tenantry.
¹
For the 1544 campaign, Norfolk and Surrey had provided one hundred and fifty horsemen and five hundred footmen.
²
Each soldier was paid sixpence a day by the King, ninepence if he had a horse, but the cost of equipping him was usually borne by his lord, as was the inevitable shortfall in farming revenue caused by the reduction in labour, livestock, horses and wagons.

According to
A Supplication to . . . Henry the Eyght
, printed in 1544, men who were ordered to perform military service were often ‘compelled to sell their lands or else to burden their friends or else to danger themselves in debt to many’. This was not empty rhetoric. Sir George Blount claimed that he had been forced to sell one of his manors in order to gather ‘some store of money for his ready furniture and provision of horses and other things necessary’ to fulfil his duty.
³
Even someone as parsimonious as Norfolk found it hard to balance the books in wartime. Complaints about his ‘decayed purse’ were a refrain in every campaign he served.

Surrey, by contrast, was unconcerned by the pecuniary effects of the war and continued to spend, and borrow, with reckless abandon. The folding bedstead adorned with arms and Garter insignia that he commissioned ‘for the wars’ or the brand-new suit of armour that had cost him £8 might be considered permissible extravagances.
⁴
The huge sums
he poured into rebuilding and furnishing his new house in Norwich were less easy to justify.

The estate of St Leonard’s Priory, which Surrey had received the previous year, stood on a hill that rose steeply from the bank of the River Wensum. Surrey House, as it was re-christened (the hill becoming ‘Mount Surrey’), became the Earl’s pet project between the wars and he made no secret of his vision for the place. When he later made a translation of chapter two of Ecclesiastes, he rendered the lines
Magnificavi opera mea. Edificavi mihi domos et plantavi vineas
(‘I made me great works; I builded me houses; I planted me vineyards’) so freely that his own aspirations for Surrey House can surely be read into them:

To build my houses fair then set I all my cure:

By princely acts thus strave I still to make my fame endure.
⁵

Surrey House was intended as a vehicle for magnificence. No one leaving its gates was to be allowed to forget the power of its owner. The grounds commanded spectacular views of the thriving city of Norwich
^fn1
and contained three pavilions designed to resemble forts, replete with military insignia and ornamental cannon. In Surrey’s vision for the house, the Howard lion would be everywhere, stalking the windows and plate that he would commission in 1545 and flying from the flag of the crenellated tower. In the inventory of Surrey House, taken in December 1546, there is an entry for ‘the Lord of Surrey’s picture’. This would have been hung in a position of prominence, reminding guests that it was Surrey, not his father, who represented the future of the dynasty.
⁶

By modern standards the interior of the house might sound gaudy, but in Surrey’s time it was the height of style. Reds and yellows and blues all vied for attention amidst a profusion of royal purple. Surrey’s curtains and quilts were paned with purple and yellow silk. His chair of state was upholstered in purple velvet and satin, as was the canopy over his bed, which was ‘embroidered with white lions of silver and passement lace fringed gold and silver’. Surrey’s taste for the exotic was indulged by Turkish carpets, Spanish blankets and bedsteads from Flanders. Tapestries were an indication of status; a set of around ten, woven with silver and gold yarn, could cost ‘more than a fully rigged
and armed warship’.
⁷
By the end of 1546 Surrey owned at least one set of hangings, though probably not of the finest quality, and over fifteen other pieces, bordered with garlands of flowers, pomegranates, cucumbers, grapes and birds.
^fn2