The Dukes (10 page)

Orders had been given for the people to stay indoors until ten
o'clock, when the execution would already be over, but they were
wasted words. Tower Hill was crowded. The Duke addressed a few
words to the people before he placed his head on the block. He said
that he was glad to have advanced the cause of religion. Then he
was beheaded. The crowds rushed to dip their handkerchiefs in his
blood. At least one woman still had her handkerchief two years later.

When the Duke of Northumberland was led through the city in
chains in 1554 for his opposition to Queen Mary, the woman shook
her blood-stained handkerchief in front of him. "Behold the blood of
that worthy man, that good uncle of that excellent King," she said,
"which was shed by thy treacherous machinations, now, at this
instant, begins to revenge itself upon thee."
¹⁶
Contemporary accounts
have perhaps adorned the lady's prose a little, but that was no doubt
the gist of what she said. The "excellent king" meanwhile, now four­teen years old, recorded his uncle's death in his diary in the manner
of a dispassionate news item. "The Duke of Somerset had his head
cut off upon Tower Hill between eight and nine o'clock in the
morning."
¹⁷

It was time for the Howards to re-emerge. The Seymour family,
consigned to political oblivion, were never again to attain such
heights. They now entered a century of comparative obscurity. The
old Duke of Norfolk, 3rd of the Howard line, who had been saved
from the scaffold by the perfect timing of Henry VIII's death, was
reinstated by Mary Tudor, half-sister and successor of the child
Edward VI, and allowed to die of old age, a rare privilege for the
dukedom. His grandson the 4th Duke of Norfolk (.1536-1572), son
of the beheaded poet Surrey, succeeded in 1554 at the age of
eighteen. He married Lady Mary Fitzalan, daughter and heiress of
the Earl of Arundel, and she died in childbirth at the age of sixteen.
The earldom of Arundel, one of the most ancient titles in the land,
passed to her son Philip, and has been held by the Dukes of Norfolk
ever since. This marriage marks the first alliance of the Howards and
Fitzalans, the first joining of the titles of Norfolk and Arundel, an
alliance commemorated in the family name of the present Duke,
Miles Fitzalan-Howard.

Norfolk's career was tragic and tempestuous. He married three
times, and was three times a widower. On each occasion his grief was
hardly compensated by the wealth and lands he inherited from suc­cessive wives. By 1570, he was not only the richest man in England,
and the loneliest, but the only duke in the realm, respected and
revered as the head of English nobility, and living representative of
an illustrious family whose past was already part of distant history.
It was a virtually impregnable position, almost divine in its antiquity
and in the veneration it inspired. The unique situation of the
Howards was demonstrated at the coronation of Queen Elizabeth,
when not only was Norfolk the Earl Marshal in charge of arrange­ments, but his father-in-law, Arundel, was Lord High Steward, his
great-uncle, Lord Howard of Effingham, was Chamberlain of the
royal household, and his wife the Duchess was one of the two principal
ladies of honour. Elizabeth herself may have been the centre of
attraction, but she was the only member of the Tudor family present,
whereas around her, in front of her, and behind her were quantities
of Howards who dominated the proceedings. She was even the
daughter of a Howard.

All this was cast to the winds by the Duke's ineffaceable ambition
and inexpungeable pride. He resented his role as stage manager of
State ceremonial occasions, denied the high political office which his
name deserved. Not satisfied with being a cousin of the Queen, he
dreamed of the day when a Howard would sit on the throne of
England.

The seed of his misfortune was once again the Howard arrogance.
Just as his father and grandfather had despised Seymour on account
of his low birth, and his great-grandfather the 2nd Duke of Norfolk
had despised the butcher's son Wolsey, so the Elizabethan Duke
turned his nose up at the Earl of Leicester, the Queen's favourite
companion, lifelong friend, and flirtatious admirer. Norfolk was in­capable of understanding that the Queen could possibly take
Leicester's part against him. He had been eleven years old when his
father was beheaded by the Seymours, who had thereby deprived
his family of their rightful positions as protectors of the realm. He
saw Leicester as the reincarnation of the perennial impudent upstart,
and he smarted with indignation at the Queen's preference for him.
He rebuked Leicester in a high-handed manner for behaving
familiarly with the Queen, and for "kissing the Queen's majesty
without being invited thereto".
¹⁸
Eventually, Norfolk was led to
imagine that the only way of protecting the throne from the per­nicious influence of such ne'er-do-wells was to look after the succes­sion himself.

The Queen was not married, and showed no signs of remedying
the situation. There was no obvious heir to the throne. The loudest
claimant was Mary Queen of Scots, descended from Henry VII, and
recognised by the French as the rightful Queen of England. But
Elizabeth could not envisage such a claim. The two queens never met
(to the eternal regret of biographers and dramatists), but they
impinged upon each other's lives almost every day. Elizabeth was the
obstacle to Mary's designs and the chief cause of her unhappiness;
Mary was the sorest thorn in Elizabeth's flesh, and the one problem
over which she prevaricated. Moreover, Elizabeth was Protestant, and
Mary was Roman Catholic. The one man who might mediate
between the two, it was suggested, was the Duke of Norfolk, nomi­nally a Protestant, but belonging to an ancient Catholic family whom
the Catholics still regarded as theirs. The question of the succession
must be settled, but it could not be as long as the two women
glowered at each other. Norfolk was the only man with the prestige
to solve the issue. His mistake was to try to solve it without the
Queen's knowledge or consent, and to allow himself to be talked into
solving it by advancing himself. He would marry the Queen of the
Scots.

On the face of it, this was not such a bad idea. Mary would
succeed Elizabeth on the throne of England, and their offspring
would assure the future of the crown. He was acceptable to both
Protestants and Catholics. Nevertheless, it is astonishing that Norfolk
should have considered for one moment either that Mary would have
been acceptable to the English, or that she would have made a decent
wife. The truth is that he hardly decided anything. He drifted with
the tide, manipulated by his followers. For once, the famous Howard
pragmatism, the ability to change allegiance according to the wind,
was misjudged. Naturally, with her expert intelligence system and her
wary First Minister Cecil, whose antennae were always alert, Eliza­beth found him out. She asked him point blank if he intended to
marry the Queen of Scots. Norfolk denied it. The Queen did not
remind him that anyone with whom Mary contracted a marriage,
or anyone who advised such a course, was
ipso facto
guilty of treason
and would die as a matter of course. Had he forgotten? Typically,
his reaction was to nurse a new resentment, this time against the
career-conscious Cecil.

Whatever he said, Norfolk never relinquished his plan to marry
Mary. For him, it was a question of families, of dynasties, of succes­sions; it cannot have been love (although Mary sent him love letters)
because they had never seen each other. It was a mixture of pride
and politics, assuring the succession to the throne, and assuring that
this succession would come to the Howards.
¹⁹
To this end, he was
prepared to lie and dissemble. He wrote an abject letter to the
Queen, protesting his loyalty, his love, his honour, and claiming that
he had never entertained an intention of marrying the Scottish queen
against Elizabeth's will; but he sent a draft of the letter to Mary for
her approval before laying it before Queen Elizabeth.
²⁰
Twice he pro­mised that he had abandoned all plans of marriage, and twice he lied.

Eventually, Norfolk's amateur conspiracy was exposed; he was
arrested, tried (one of his examiners was the Earl of Bedford,
ancestor of the Duke of Bedford), and imprisoned. He was inevit­
ably condemned to death, but the Queen was a long time making up
her mind to sign the warrant. There had been no state executions
since her reign began fourteen years before, and she had a natural
aversion to the use of the scaffold upon which her mother and step­mother had died. Furthermore, Norfolk was her cousin in blood, and
the only Duke in her realm - the first man among her subjects. But
he was undeniably a traitor, and she was personally affronted that he
had misused her trust. For five long months she allowed him to
tremble within the Tower walls, before she finally signed the docu­ment in the spring of 1572. The scaffold had fallen apart with dis­use, and a new one had to be constructed.
²¹
The Duke was beheaded
on 2nd June, but spared the indignity of having his bowels ripped
out and his head stuck on a spike
011
London Bridge. The Queen

was seen to be very downcast that day, and unapproachable.
²²

 
* *
*

A word must be said about the Howard religion. A chief singu­larity of the Dukes of Norfolk is that they are Roman Catholic. No
other ducal family survives from the Wars of the Roses, which
depleted the ranks of the English aristocracy to a disastrous degree,
so the Dukes of Norfolk may be said to have adhered to the "old"
religion by virtue of historical survival, or because they were of the
"old" nobility. It is misleading to think of them as
always
Roman
Catholic; for reasons of political expediency, there have been a
number of Protestants among them. The 4th Duke of Norfolk lived
as a Protestant, but was still regarded as a Catholic. In the months
before he was beheaded in 1572 he wrote a long letter to his children,
impressive in its dignity and honesty, but containing a disavowal of
the Catholic Church which does not quite ring true. "Upon my
blessing beware of blind Papistry, which brings nothing but bondage
to men's consciences", he wrote. "Perchance you have heretofore
heard, or perchance may hereafter hear, false bruits [rumours] that
I was a Papist. But trust unto it, I never since I knew what religion
meant, I thank God, was of other mind than now you shall hear that
I die in."
^2S
In view of Norfolk's support for the cause of Mary
Queen of Scots, and his tacit acquiescence in the proposed invasion
of Catholic armies which would rid the country of the Protestant
scourge and be welcomed with open arms by the populace (so they
thought), Norfolk's eleventh-hour rejection of papistry comes as a
surprise. Considering also that his wife and son (Philip, Earl of
Arundel) were almost fanatically Catholic, and that this same letter
contains exhortations to avoid pride, to eschew worldly gains, to
embrace modesty and self-denial, and not to be headstrong (advice
he had spent a lifetime rejecting), the exercise appears more like a
strategem to avoid reprisals against the Howards. It reads like a letter
that is intended for publication. As a denial of the Catholic faith by
a Howard, it must be regarded as an aberration.