Henry VIII's Last Victim (52 page)

At the beginning of the poem, in abrasive alliterative diction, Surrey heightens the sense of urgency by depicting the persecuted psalmist as hunted prey:

My foes they bray so loud, and eke threpe on
^fn3
so fast,

Buckled to do me scathe,
^fn4
so is their malice bent.

Care pierceth my entrails and travaileth my sprite;

The grisly fear of death environeth my breast;

A trembling cold of dread clean overwhelmeth my heart.

‘O’, think I, ‘had I wings like to the simple dove,

This peril might I fly, and seek some place of rest

In wilder woods, where I might dwell far from these cares.’

What speedy way of wing my plaints should they lay on,

To scape the stormy blast that threatened is to me!
¹²

The image of flight from care and peril is not Surrey’s invention. It occurs in the Vulgate. But if the
Spanish Chronicle
is to be credited, Surrey strongly identified with this impulse. Before his trial, the chronicler narrates, the Earl of Surrey attempted an audacious escape from the Tower. The story goes that Surrey ordered his servant, a man named Martin, to smuggle a dagger into his cell. Martin duly delivered the weapon, which he had concealed in his breeches. Surrey then said to him: ‘Go to St Katherine’s and take a boat, no matter what it costs, and wait for me there. I hope to be with thee at midnight.’ According to the
Chronicle
, ‘the Earl was confined in a chamber overlooking the river and he saw that he could escape through a retiring room if he killed the two men who slept in it. The tide came up under it, but at low
water it was dry, and that night at midnight the tide was out.’
¹³

There was once a room at the Tower of London that fitted the chronicler’s description. It was on the first floor of the western half of St Thomas’ Tower. Built in 1275 to form the new royal lodgings, St Thomas’ was positioned on the outer curtain wall and straddled the moat. Between 1532 and 1533 it was refurbished and partitioned in order to accommodate the Lord Great Chamberlain and Lord Chamberlain of the Household for the coronation of Anne Boleyn. One of the well-appointed suites would have been fitting for a man of Surrey’s status, though it must be said that only one record has ever been found of a prisoner having been kept at St Thomas’.
¹⁴
Within the west wall was a large shaft that ran vertically through the building and emptied into the moat. This serviced the garderobe (lavatory) and the currents of the Thames would have acted as a natural flush. Part of the shaft is clearly visible today and, in its current form, is just large enough for a man of Surrey’s slight build to fit into.

The
Chronicle
continues:

When the night came, the Earl said that he was unwell and wished to go to bed and the guards that slept in his chamber at night said, ‘Your Lordship can go to bed; we have to go on the rounds and cannot come until past midnight.’ It may well be imagined whether the Earl was sorry when he heard this, for he thought that when they were gone, he could the more easily escape, and every moment seemed a year.

He arose from his bed and went to see whether the tide was low and found that it would be quite midnight before it was low water. So, when midnight came, he went and took off the lid of the closet and saw that there was only about two feet of water. So, as he would not wait any longer, he began to let himself down. But, at that instant, the guards came in and, seeing that he was not in the bed, ran to the closet and one of them just reached his arm. The Earl could not help himself and the guards cried out and other guards came.

It is to be believed that if they had taken him in the chamber instead of in the closet, he was so courageous that he would have killed them both before anyone knew of it; and, if he had waited for another night, he would certainly have killed the guards. The other guards came and put some shackles of his feet and the next day the news was all over London. The servant who had taken the boat went away with the money and nothing more was heard of him.
¹⁵

Surrey would not have been the first, or the last, to attempt escape from the Tower. In the fortress’ history there have been at least thirty successful breakouts. Warders have been bribed and drugged, walls have been scaled with knotted sheets, male inmates have disguised themselves as women or servants and, most famously, the Jesuit priest John Gerard escaped in 1597 by means of a rope suspended between the wharf and his cell in the Cradle Tower. This, like St Thomas’, was located opposite the Thames on the outer curtain wall where the moat was at its narrowest. Thirteen years before Surrey’s imprisonment, a thief called Alice Tankerville effected an escape from the roof of St Thomas’ Tower (but was seized by the nightwatchmen at St Katherine’s Wharf) and only three months before Surrey joined him at the Tower, Edward Courtenay informed on a fellow inmate, a Spaniard, ‘who has often tried to persuade me to break prison’.
¹⁶

But is the story of Surrey’s attempted escape credible? No other contemporary source describes it and, although the
Spanish Chronicle
states that the issue was raised at Surrey’s trial, no other trial witness mentions it. The
Chronicle
was written by an anonymous Spaniard around 1550. The author was probably a merchant or mercenary captain and he seems to have had a good knowledge of the goings on at St Katherine’s Wharf, but he is notoriously unreliable. Time and again he gets his facts wrong. To cite just one glaring error, he placed the King’s marriage to Anne of Cleves (his fourth wife) after his marriage to Catherine Howard (his fifth wife). The credibility of the
Chronicle
is also undermined by its frequent resort to detailed dialogue, citing conversations to which the author could never have been privy. At times, though, the
Chronicle
is demonstrably accurate and sometimes, as in the case of Thomas Wyatt’s witnessing of the execution of Anne Boleyn’s alleged lovers, recollections previously dismissed have been verified by the emergence of new evidence.
¹⁷

Although no contemporary chronicle corroborates the Spaniard’s story of Surrey’s escape, there are two pieces of evidence to suggest that he might just have been telling the truth. Admittedly, neither is wholly satisfactory. When Surrey’s servant, Hugh Ellis, was interrogated about his master’s alleged treasons, he was asked ‘whether you have heard him devise at any time upon his flying out of the realm and what his purpose was that he held touching that matter?’ Ellis’ testimony is undated, so it is impossible to tell whether the question referred to a plan concocted before Surrey’s incarceration in the Tower, or after. Ellis’ reply is also
ambivalent: ‘For his flying out of the realm, I take God to record, I never knew him go about it, but have heard him say if he survived his father he should have enough and that he would never covet more.’
¹⁸

In the Public Record Office there is a manuscript entitled
Account of the Lieutenant of the Tower of money due to him for the expenses of certain prisoners
. The entry for the Duke of Norfolk includes the cost of his lodgings, food, fuel and other necessaries. That for Surrey is similar though the final item is curious: ‘To have allowance for the said Earl’s irons – 13
li
. 6
s
. 8
d
.’
¹⁹
Could this be a reference to the ‘shackles’ that the Spanish chronicler claimed were secured to Surrey’s feet after his attempted escape? There are other references in the Lieutenant’s accounts to ‘irons’ and other recorded instances elsewhere of prisoners in the Tower being chained. Anne Boleyn’s alleged lover, Mark Smeaton, for example, was kept in irons during his time in the Tower, as were the Carthusian monks following their refusal to acknowledge the Royal Supremacy. Such treatment, though, was practically unheard of for prisoners of Surrey’s status.

It is possible that Surrey was being treated as the commoner that he really was and that the irons were part of the deliberate campaign of humiliation that had begun with his forced march through London and would continue with his trial by twelve commoners at the Guildhall rather than by his peers at Westminster. As we have seen, though, the courtesies due to a nobleman – gilt plate, tapestries, soft bedding, writing materials – were extended to Surrey during his tenure in the Tower. Thus it seems likely that if he was physically chained, something had warranted such a stringent measure. An escape attempt would certainly provide a suitable reason, especially if Surrey was armed with a dagger, as the
Spanish Chronicle
claims.

A note of caution must be added, though, as it seems that not all prisoners who were registered for ‘irons’ were actually chained. The Lieutenant of the Tower could claim a number of perquisites from his office. In addition to fees for bed, board, heating and lighting, he would also, on occasion, charge prisoners for an exemption from being chained, thereby making entries to ‘irons’ ambiguous in all records that lack external corroboration.
^fn5
In the Lieutenant’s Accounts, Surrey’s
irons cost £13 6
s.
8
d
., while ‘irons due’ for Mr William Conningham cost less than £4 and those for a servant called George Scot were only forty shillings.
²⁰
These sums seem to reflect a variable scale of fees dependent on the status of the prisoner rather than the actual cost of irons; over £13 does seem astronomical for a simple pair of leg irons. Another document, containing accounts for the Tower in the reign of Edward VI, shows that this charge was sometimes levied on members of the nobility. The Countess of Sussex, arrested for dabbling in treasonous prophecies and imprisoned in the Tower for five-and-a-half months in 1552, was charged ‘for fees of irons’ and the sum was exactly the same as Surrey’s: ‘13
li
. 6
s
. 8
d
.’
²¹

The Earl of Surrey had the motive and the opportunity to escape from the Tower. Noble inmates were allowed their own servants – though nowhere is there any record of Surrey having had a servant called Martin
²²
– and Tower security was sufficiently lax for a dagger to have been smuggled without much difficulty.
²³
The shaft at St Thomas’ Tower also provided a viable escape route, though Surrey would then have had to have found a way to hoist himself out of the moat and onto the wharf. The story is plausible, then, but without firmer corroborative evidence, it cannot be verified. But even if the Spanish chronicler fabricated the tale or based it on unfounded rumour, he did so in the knowledge that many would believe it. The Earl of Surrey’s reputation as a courageous, risk-taking, swashbuckler was widespread. If anyone could have attempted such a daring escape, it was he.

On 12 January 1547, the day before Surrey’s trial, Wriothesley, Seymour, Dudley, Paget, four other members of the Privy Council and the two Chief Justices rode through the gates of the Tower of London and headed for the Duke of Norfolk’s cell. They left it with a signed confession. Norfolk admitted to having passed on state secrets ‘to the great peril of His Highness’. He also confessed that in bearing, in the first quarter of his shield, the arms of Thomas of Brotherton – the three lions of England with three labels silver – he had not only acted ‘against all right, unjustly and without authority’, but also treasonably, as the arms ‘are the proper arms of my said Prince [Edward] to be borne for this realm of England only’.

The arms of Brotherton had been legitimately borne by the Lords of Norfolk since the early fourteenth century. The Duke of Norfolk,
as he knew perfectly well, had a lawful right to them. He would also have known that, since 1340, the royal arms of England were not, in fact, the three lions, but the lions and lilies quartered. Norfolk realised the absurdity of the charge, but he confessed to it anyway ‘without compulsion, without force, without advice or counsel’. He was willing to admit to anything that might placate Henry VIII, anything that might elicit his ‘most gracious pity and mercy’, even, as another of his statements revealed, if it meant sacrificing his own son:

Also, I likewise confess that I have concealed high treason in keeping secret the false and traitorous act most presumptuously committed by my son, Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey, against the King’s Majesty and his laws in the putting and using the arms of St Edward the Confessor, King of the realm of England before the Conquest, in his scutcheon or arms; which said arms of St Edward appertain only to the King of this realm and to none other person or persons; whereunto the said Earl by no means or way could make any claim or title, by me, or any of mine, or his, ancestors.
²⁴

It is likely that the councillors then hastened to Surrey’s cell and waved his father’s signed statement before him in an attempt to extract his own confession. Surrey refused to buckle. The following day, a Thursday, he rose early and put on the black satin coat furred with cony that the Lieutenant of the Tower had bought him for his trial.
²⁵
His jailers led him out of his cell, across the bridge over the moat, past the King’s menagerie at the Lion’s Tower and through the gate, where an armed guard was waiting to take him to the Guildhall.

The location of the trial was another sign of Surrey’s degradation. Peers of the realm were commonly tried at Westminster, but Surrey’s Earldom was no longer recognised and there was no mount for him to ride through the city. ‘It was fearful,’ the Spanish chronicler observed, ‘to see the enormous number of people in the streets.’
²⁶
Surrey was marched past them, through his old stamping ground at Cheapside, and into the eerie silence of Guildhall Yard. Looking down on him from the elaborate porch façade of the civic building were statues of Christ in Majesty, two bearded men symbolising Law and Learning and four female figures representing Discipline, Justice, Fortitude and Temperance.
^fn6
He would need them all in the hours ahead.
²⁷