Henry VIII's Last Victim (58 page)
Read Henry VIII's Last Victim Online
Authors: Jessie Childs
Richard Southwell
Extract from the charges drawn up by Lord Chancellor Wriothesley against the Earl of Surrey and Duke of Norfolk. The annotations are in Henry VIII’s own hand.
Drawing of a coat of arms in the British Library entitled ‘Howard Earle of Surry, for which he was attainted’. The arms of Edward the Confessor with a silver label of three points are in the fifth quarter. Surrey had a right to bear the Confessor’s arms as the shield of his ancestor Thomas Mowbray shows.
Detail of Surrey’s tomb showing the arms more commonly borne by the Howards after 1513.
A contemporary drawing of the Tower of London by Anthonis van den Wyngaerde. St Thomas’ Tower (or ‘Traitors’ Gate’), on the outer curtain wall straddling the moat, was the entrance to the Tower from the Thames.
The west wall of St Thomas’ Tower, photographed during re-presentation work in 1992. Despite much reconstruction, the remnants of part of the garderobe shaft are still visible. If the
Spanish Chronicle
is to be credited, this may have been Surrey’s intended escape route from the Tower.
Sat Superest
– Enough Survives. Surrey’s tomb at St Michael’s Church, Framlingham. His wife Frances reclines in effigy alongside him, while their two sons and three daughters kneel in prayer on the plinth.
Surrey’s great-grandson, Thomas Howard, Earl of Arundel, celebrates his appointment as Captain General of Charles I’s army against the Scots. Holbein’s portraits of Surrey and Norfolk are prominent in this picture of Howard pride and regeneration.
AUTHOR’S NOTE
Dates
are given in the Old Style Julian Calendar, but the year is assumed to have begun on 1 January rather than on Lady Day (25 March), which was taken as the first day of the English calendar year until 1752.
Money
appears in the predecimal form used until 1971. There were twelve pence to a shilling and twenty shillings to one pound sterling. The mark was worth two-thirds of a pound.
The effects of inflation and the changing relative values of commodities throughout the ages render modern equivalents misleading. One sheep, for example, cost less than a pound of cinnamon in Tudor England, but often five times more than the daily wage of a footman in Henry VIII’s army, who received just sixpence a day. In 1527 the royal tailor could charge seven shillings for a yard of black satin, while the suit of armour that the Earl of Surrey purchased in the mid-1540s cost him £8. A building labourer earned less than £4 a year, while the average assessed income from lands per annum for the peerage was £801 in 1523, £921 in 1534 and £873 in 1545.
Spelling and punctuation
have been modernised throughout, except in the titles of printed sources and in poems where a change would have interfered with the rhythm.
NOTES
Details of works given in abbreviated form will be found in the Select Bibliography or in the following list:
| AH | The Arundel Harington Manuscript of Tudor Poetry , ed. R. Hughey (2 vols., Columbus, Ohio, 1960) |
| APC | Acts of the Privy Council of England , ed. J. R. Dasent, vols. 1–4: 1542–1554 (1890–2) |
| Bapst | E. Bapst, Deux Gentilshommes-poètes de la Cour de Henry VIII (Paris, 1891) |
| Bindoff | The History of Parliament: The House of Commons 1509–1558 , ed. S. T. Bindoff (1982) |
| BL | British Library |
| California MS | Bancroft Library, Univ. of California, Berkeley, MS UCB 49 |
| Constantyne | ‘Transcript of an original Manuscript, containing a Memorial from George Constantyne to Thomas Lord Cromwell’, ed. T. Amyot, Archaeologia , 23 (1831) |
| CS | Camden Society |
| CSP | Calendar of State Papers |
| CSP Sp . | Calendar of Letters, Despatches, and State Papers relating to the Negotiations between England and Spain , ed. G. A. Bergenroth et al. (15 vols., 1862–1954) Reference to document number unless otherwise stated |
| CSP Ven . | Calendar of State Papers and Manuscripts relating to English Affairs, existing in the Archives and Collections of Venice , ed. R. Brown, vols. 1–6 (1864–84) Reference to document number |
| DNB | Dictionary of National Biography |
| EETS | Early English Text Society |
| EHR | The English Historical Review |
| Gruffydd I | Extracts from the Welsh chronicle of Elis Gruffydd, transcribed and translated, with commentary, by M. B. Davies, in ‘The “Enterprises” of Paris and Boulogne’, Bulletin of the Faculty of Arts , 11/1 (Fouad I University Press, Cairo, 1949) |
| Gruffydd II | The same, in ‘Boulogne and Calais from 1545 to 1550’, ibid., 12/1 (1950) |
| Gruffydd III | The same, in ‘Surrey at Boulogne’, The Huntington Library Quarterly , 23/4 (1960) |
| Hall | E. Hall, The Union of the Two Noble and Illustre Famelies of Lancastre & Yorke , ed. H. Ellis (1809) |
| Hartman | Surrey’s Fourth Boke of Virgill , ed. H. Hartman (1933) |
| Heale | E. Heale, Wyatt, Surrey & Early Tudor Poetry (1988) |
| Herbert | E. Herbert (Lord Herbert of Cherbury), The Life and Raigne of King Henry the Eighth (1649) |
| HJ | The Historical Journal |
| HMC | Historical Manuscripts Commission |
| Holinshed | R. Holinshed, Chronicles of England, Scotland and Ireland , ed. J. Johnson et al. (6 vols., 1807–8) |
| LP | Letters and Papers, Foreign and Domestic, of the Reign of Henry VIII , ed. J. S. Brewer, J. Gairdner and R. H. Brodie (21 vols. and addenda, 1862–1932) Reference to document number unless otherwise stated |
| Memoir | ‘Inventories of the Wardrobes, Plate, Chapel Stuff. etc. of Henry Fitzroy, Duke of Richmond . . . with a Memoir and Letters of the Duke of Richmond’, ed. J. G. Nichols, Camden Miscellany 3, CS, old series, 61 (1855) |
| Nott | Vol. 1 of The Works of Henry Howard Earl of Surrey and of Sir Thomas Wyatt the Elder , ed. G. F. Nott (2 vols., 1815–16) |
| NRO | Norfolk Record Office |
| Pembroke MS | Pembroke College, Cambridge, MS 300 |
| Poems | Henry Howard Earl of Surrey: Poems , ed. E. Jones (Oxford, 1973) |
| Reference to poem number unless otherwise stated | |
| PPC | Proceedings and Ordinances of the Privy Council of England , ed. N. H. Nicolas, vol. 7: 1540–1542 (1837) |
| PRO | Public Record Office |
| Sessions (1999) | W. A. Sessions, Henry Howard, The Poet Earl of Surrey: A Life (Oxford, 1999) |
| Spanish Chronicle | Chronicle of King Henry VIII of England: Being a Contemporary Record of Some of the Principal Events of the Reigns of Henry VIII and Edward VI, written in Spanish by an unknown hand , tr. and ed. M. A. S. Hume (1889) |
| St. P. | State Papers Published under the Authority of His Majesty’s Commission, King Henry VIII (11 vols., 1830-52) |
| Wriothesley | C. Wriothesley, A Chronicle of England During the Reigns of the Tudors, 1485–1559 , ed. W. D. Hamilton, CS, new series, 11, 20 (1875, 1877) |