The Tudors (50 page)

That did not, however, turn out to be possible. To the Seymours and other “new men” around the king—men who had not inherited their high places, but had been elevated to them in consequence of winning Henry’s favor—Norfolk was like Gardiner a rival, an obstacle, and a threat. Both had to be neutered, removed if possible, if the Seymour faction were to achieve and maintain control. From about 1544 events began to turn in the Seymours’ favor. Norfolk found himself criticized by the king for not conducting his military operations more aggressively in France. (He replied, not unreasonably, that he had been given neither the men nor the munitions to accomplish what Henry demanded.) Edward Seymour, at almost the same time, was ravaging Scotland and delighting the king with his reports of devastation. Two years later, in the last year of Henry’s life, Norfolk’s son Henry, Earl of Surrey, was replaced by Seymour as commander of the garrison at Boulogne. Upon negotiating his settlement with the French, Seymour returned to court, where he found himself in higher favor than ever with the failing king and therefore easily able to win the friendship of the most well placed of the evangelicals. Among them were William Paget, the king’s principal secretary; Queen Catherine and her brother Essex; second gentleman of the privy chamber Anthony Denny; and—most fatefully for the long term—a hitherto obscure soldier named John Dudley, recently elevated to the Privy Council and to the post of lord high admiral. Even conservatives as prominent as Thomas Wriothesley, the new lord chancellor, sought to establish good relations with Seymour as they saw which way the political winds were blowing, and with what force. Seymour’s importance even before the death of the king is apparent in the fact that the Privy Council began holding its meetings at his home rather than at any of the royal palaces.

Norfolk and his son Surrey found themselves elbowed aside by the very men who wanted to persuade the king that the entire Howard clan
was not to be trusted. The enmity between the two groups was bitter and had deep roots: as early as 1537, Surrey, then only about twenty, had been taken into custody for striking Edward Seymour, who that very year became King Henry’s brother-in-law and a viscount with a place on the council. This happened at Hampton Court Palace, and the prescribed penalty for such an act of violence on royal premises was loss of the right hand. Surrey, whose hopes for a military career hung in the balance, was saved by the intervention of Cromwell. As recently as 1546 an argument around the Privy Council’s table had ended with Seymour striking Bishop Gardiner, who as a leading conservative was linked to the Howards, in the face. Two years before that, with the council increasingly under Seymour domination, the bishop’s personal secretary and nephew, Germaine Gardiner, had been put to death after being charged with denying the royal supremacy. Much more than political advantage was at stake here, obviously. These were men who hated and feared each other intensely and had good reason to do so.

No one was more intense than Surrey, who shared his father’s high pride in their family’s ancient lineage (actually far more ancient and noble in the female than in the male line, the Howards themselves being rather recent upstarts who had married well) and his disdain for the new men by whom they saw themselves being supplanted. What he lacked, tragically, was the political savvy, the craftiness, that had made it possible for his grandfather to erase the stigma of having fought on the wrong side at Bosworth Field and finally claw his way back to preeminence among the noble families of England. Surrey was brilliant—an accomplished classicist, a poet of very nearly the highest order—but also arrogant and reckless almost to the point of madness. He had an obsessive, anachronistically medieval conception of personal honor. His lifelong pursuit of military glory had been punctuated with pridefully self-destructive acts; his striking of Edward Seymour, whom he was incapable of accepting as an equal, much less as senior in rank, was merely a remarkably vivid example.

With the king visibly failing and increasingly susceptible to their suggestions, Seymour and his following saw an opportunity to finish off their rivals. They ensnared Gardiner in a clumsy but effective trap, telling the king that the bishop had refused a request that he exchange some properties belonging to his see of Winchester for lands belonging
to the Crown. It is understandable if Gardiner had in fact been reluctant to agree to such a deal—trades advantageous to the Crown had become a subtle way of plundering the dioceses—but it is unlikely that he would have flatly refused. Gardiner himself protested that he had simply expressed a wish to discuss the matter with the king. In the end he had to submit an apology and surrender his seat on the council. If there had ever been any chance that he would figure in the king’s plans for the management of the kingdom after Prince Edward succeeded, that chance was now lost. He did, however, survive. He remained not only free but bishop of Winchester.

The Howards were not so fortunate. On December 12 father and son were confined in the Tower amid rumors that they had been planning to seize control of the government in the event of the king’s death, planning to abduct Prince Edward, and other, similar nonsense. When in January 1547 they were charged, however, it was for no such offense. Surrey was accused of committing high treason by using the heraldic emblems of Edward the Confessor, a Saxon monarch whose reign had preceded the Norman Conquest, and thereby staking a claim to the crown. Norfolk was charged with being aware of his son’s treason and failing to report it. When put on trial, Surrey defended himself vigorously and at length, pointing out that his ancestors had displayed the same arms that were now alleged to be treasonous and had experienced no difficulty as a result of doing so. It was by no means clear that the jury was prepared to convict until Secretary Paget brought word that the king demanded a guilty verdict. Surrey was beheaded six days later. Thereafter Norfolk, in an effort to save himself, sent the king a letter of submission in which he pleaded guilty to “keeping secret the acts of my son, Henry earl of Surrey, in using the arms of St. Edward the Confessor, which pertain only to kings.” It did no good. Norfolk was attainted by Parliament, so that he had no opportunity to answer the charges against him, all his possessions became the property of the Crown, and the king could order his execution whenever he wished. On January 26 Henry signed the necessary order, which was to be carried out the next day; but when the sun rose on January 27, Henry was dead and the council became afraid to proceed. The old duke, a pauper now, paced his cell waiting to learn his fate.

Henry’s Third Succession Act had authorized him to appoint a Regency
Council to govern if his son inherited while still a child. Many of the king’s last hours of consciousness were spent in consultation first with his secretary Paget, then with Paget and Edward Seymour, and finally with a wider circle to decide who would be named executors of his will and the new king’s regents. Gardiner and Norfolk were out, absolutely. So was anyone too closely associated with either of them—the bishop of the new see of Westminster, for example, because he had been “schooled” by Gardiner, whom Henry described as being of “so troublesome a nature” that if he were included no one would be able to control him. The Regency Council was by no means uniformly evangelical; Henry ensured a measure of balance by appointing such figures as Cuthbert Tunstal, the bishop of Durham who, a decade and a half before, had made himself a nuisance with his objections to the royal supremacy. But when all the names had been filled in, the list was dominated on the clerical side by Archbishop Cranmer and bishops affiliated with him, and on the lay side by Seymour and his cohorts. The evangelicals had won the last throw of the dice, the one that decided the long contest for control of policy that the whole final decade of Henry’s reign had turned into.

Under the terms of Henry’s will, the sixteen members of the Regency Council were to be equals and all decisions were to require approval of the group as a whole. If this is really what Henry intended, he was being exceedingly unrealistic: his arrangement left not only the council but the kingdom in desperate need of a chief executive. Edward Seymour recognized this need and put himself forward to fill the void, and his friends on the council were so quick to support him that the public learned of his appointment as lord protector of the realm and governor of the new king’s person almost before they knew that the old king was dead. It is not certain that this was a usurpation; Charles V’s ambassador reported seeing a letter bearing King Henry’s signature that bestowed the duties of lord protector upon his brother-in-law.

Nor is there any way of knowing whether Seymour and his cohorts were, as they claimed, simply carrying out the king’s wishes when they made it almost their first matter of business to heap rewards upon themselves. Henry’s will instructed his executors to make good on any promises that he had made before his death, and when the Regency Council sought to find out what was intended by this, it could turn only to the
three of its own members who had been most in the king’s company during the last weeks of his life: Anthony Denny, William Paget, and Seymour himself. They reported that “the king, being on his deathbed put in mind of what he had promised, ordered it
to be put in his will
[emphasis added], that his executors should perform everything that should appear to have been promised by him.” They then went on to provide details. What they disclosed was, if a true statement of Henry’s intentions, an act of extraordinary generosity on the part of a king who knew all too well that he was leaving his son an empty treasury, heavy debts, and ruined credit. If it was not true, Seymour and the others were thieves on a breathtaking scale. Certainly it is reasonable to suspect that the whole thing had been fabricated for their benefit. The statement that Henry was on his deathbed when he added to his will instructions for the carrying out of his promises is not easily squared with the fact that the will itself was almost certainly completed and signed weeks before he died and well before he or anyone else had reason to think that death was imminent. But the entire record of the king’s final weeks—of what he actually did and said, and when he did and said it—is an impossible tangle of contradictions and ambiguities.

What is certain is that, well before Henry’s body was put to rest, the closest associates of his last days declared that among the “unfulfilled gifts” he would have bestowed if he had lived were new titles for them and their friends. Thus, supposedly in keeping with the king’s wishes, Edward Seymour was elevated from Earl of Hertford to Duke of Somerset, William Parr from Earl of Essex to Marquess of Northampton, and Seymour’s henchmen John Dudley and Chancellor Wriothesley to the earldoms of Warwick and Southampton respectively. Six knights, Thomas Seymour, Richard Rich, and Paget among them, were made barons, and to all these men and to others besides (Cranmer, for example, who as a clergyman could not receive a title, and Anthony Denny, who for some reason got no title) there were munificent disbursements of money and land. The new Duke of Somerset—we will use that name for Edward Seymour henceforth, to distinguish him from his brother Thomas Lord Seymour of Sudeley—did best of all. He was given four manors previously belonging to the Diocese of Lincoln, seven from the Diocese of Bath and Wells, and tracts of church land at Westminster on which he would soon begin building the magnificent Somerset House
with stones hauled in from ruined monasteries. He was also granted the incomes of the treasurership of one cathedral, the deanship of another, and prebends (chapter memberships) at six others. Overall this splendid payday transferred lands generating income of £27,000 annually to private hands, nearly half in the form of gifts for which the recipients paid nothing. If these benefactions were in fact expressions of the late king’s wishes and not merely an act of plunder by which Somerset enriched himself and rewarded his allies, they did in fact accomplish the second purpose as well as the first.

There was trouble all the same. Thomas Seymour was as ambitious as his elder brother, he would soon show himself to be every bit as ruthless, and now he was unable to see why he—no less an uncle of the king than Somerset—should not have a more important part in the new regime. Somerset, in addition to being lord protector and governor, had taken for himself the offices of high steward, great chamberlain, lord treasurer, and earl marshal. Thomas Seymour regarded it as an indignity that he was only a baron, and that his only office—aside from his seat on the council—was that of master of ordnance, a job he had been given more than two years earlier, when King Henry was still alive and active. He argued that the posts of protector and governor should not be held by one man, and that he, by virtue of his blood relationship with the king, should have one of them. Somerset refused but attempted to appease his brother by surrendering the office of great chamberlain (a lucrative one involving custodianship of royal lands) to John Dudley, the new Earl of Warwick, who in turn resigned the office of lord high admiral in favor of Thomas Seymour. But Seymour was not at all satisfied, turning his attention and energy not to his new naval responsibilities but to securing the kinds of honors to which he thought himself entitled. Later in the year, when Somerset and Dudley went north to resume the war on the Scots, Seymour remained behind in London to make mischief in his brother’s absence and pay court to Dowager Queen Catherine, with whom he had had a budding romance years before until the king took an interest in the lady.

A more pressing problem emerged in the person of Thomas Wriothesley, lord chancellor and new Earl of Southampton. During the last half-decade of Henry’s reign Wriothesley had been one of the chief instruments through whom the king discouraged religious innovation
and tried to achieve a national uniformity based on the kind of conservatism set forth in the Six Articles. He himself was as conservative a major figure as was to be found on the Regency Council, and though he had offered no objections to Somerset’s appointment as lord protector (his share in the “unfulfilled gifts” must have helped to make him cooperative), soon thereafter he began to make a nuisance of himself. He insisted that there should be no significant departures from the terms of the late king’s will and that no religious reforms should be undertaken until the new king reached his maturity and could act in his own right. What gave particular offense was his insistence that Somerset must—as had been stipulated when he became lord protector—take no action without the approval of a majority of the council.