House Of Treason: The Rise And Fall Of A Tudor Dynasty

by Hutchinson, Robert

  Lassells said the evangelicals at the court should not be ‘too rash or quick in maintaining the Scriptures, for if we let them [Norfolk and Gardiner] alone and suffer a little time, they would (I doubt not) overthrow themselves. They stand so manifestly against God and their prince that they cannot long survive.’

  With an element perhaps of wishful thinking, the four courtiers then discussed whether Norfolk’s words could possibly be construed as treasonable and the next day Smethwick repeated them to an official who advised him to speak to a member of the king’s Council. Nothing, of course, came of it. Lassells underestimated Norfolk and six years later he was to be burned at the stake for heresy.

  Meanwhile, Henry was still captivated by his bride. In September, Marillac said the king was ‘so amorous of her that he cannot treat her well enough and caresses her more than he did the others’.64 He was determined to show her off and that summer took her on a whirlwind progress through the counties of Surrey, Berkshire, Buckinghamshire and Oxfordshire, hunting and feasting all the way.

  The sun was now smiling again on the House of Howard and honours and positions were heaped upon them. Surrey was created a Knight of the Garter and appointed Cupbearer to Henry. His sister Mary became a member of the queen’s household and Catherine’s brother Charles was made a Gentleman of the king’s Privy Chamber. Marillac believed that Norfolk ‘nowadays has the chief management of affairs’ in the realm.

  The following year the royal couple went north for a long-promised progress, reaching York on 16 September, where their subjects cherished hopes, subsequently unfulfilled, that Catherine would formally be crowned queen. By now, the frivolous, flighty queen was bored with her obese husband’s fumbling, flatulent attentions and began to look elsewhere for affection.

  Henry returned to Hampton Court at the end of October and gave instructions that on 1 November 1541 - All Hallows Day - there would be special prayers offered for ‘the good life he led and trusted to lead’ with ‘this jewel of womanhood’, his queen.

  Unbeknown to him, John Lassells, whom we have just met, had been talking to his married sister, Mary Hall, a nurse to one of the children of Lord William Howard, Norfolk’s half-brother, and from 1533, chamberer to the dowager duchess. Her disclosures about the queen’s earlier nocturnal shenanigans at Chesworth and Lambeth sent Lassells running hotfoot to the Archbishop of Canterbury, with the most scandalous news.

  Cranmer was astonished, havered for a while, and finally screwed up enough courage to scribble a letter to his sovereign, which he left sealed in Henry’s pew in the Chapel Royal. On the note’s cover, the Archbishop prudently asked him to read it in private.

  The king was incredulous, disbelieving, and, unusually, struggled for words. Cranmer’s letter informed him that his beloved wife had behaved licentiously with Henry Monox, a lute player from Streatham in Surrey who had taught her the virginals when she was just fifteen while she stayed at the Norfolk house in Horsham. Unfortunately, she learned more from him than just nimble finger work on the keyboard. Two years later, she had a lusty affair with a gentleman page called Francis Dereham - the same man whom the queen had recently appointed her secretary and usher of her chamber. Henry asked Southampton, now Lord Privy Seal, secretly to investigate the allegations.

  Worse was to come.

  Under interrogation at the Tower, Dereham named Thomas Culpeper, one of the king’s especial favourites in the Privy Chamber, as having ‘succeeded him in the queen’s affections’. Marillac later commented dryly that here was a young man who shared the king’s bed who now ‘wished to share the queen’s too’.65

  A week later, at Gardiner’s palace at Southwark, a hesitant and apprehensive Council laid out the evidence that was accumulating against the queen before a still sceptical Henry. It must have been a tense, torrid meeting; it went on all day and most of the night, but finally the king was convinced of his wife’s past debauchery and her current betrayal of him - with Culpeper of all people.

  The effect was so terrible that his councillors, Norfolk among them, cowered in their robes. Henry treated them to the most terrifying of all rages. He called for a sword so that he could kill Catherine ‘that he loved so much’. And that ‘wicked woman’ had ‘never such delight in her incontinency as she [will] have torture in her death’, he screamed at the courtiers. They believed his anger had driven him insane, and they shrank from his rage, as he blamed them for ‘soliciting’ him to marry her. His frenzy eventually broke down into tears and, blubbing like a child, he sobbed about his ‘ill-luck in meeting with such ill-conditioned wives’.66

  They departed the meeting looking ‘very troubled, especially Norfolk, who is esteemed very resolute and not easily moved to show by his face what his heart conceives’, reported the perceptive Marillac.

  On 12 November, the Privy Council wrote to Sir William Paget, ambassador to France, reporting ‘a most miserable case lately revealed’. Dereham had confessed that he had known her carnally ‘many times, both in his doublet and [hose between] the sheets and in naked bed’. The ‘puffing and blowing’ emanating from the heaving blankets on Catherine’s bed had tiresomely kept the others awake in the girls’ dormitory on several nights. Monox admitted he used ‘to feel the [secret parts] of her body before Dereham was familiar with her’. The king’s heart ‘was pierced with pensiveness, so it was long before he could utter his sorrow and finally, with plenty [of tears] (which was strange in his courage) opened the same’. The letter added pessimistically: ‘Now you may see what was done before her marriage. God knows what has been done since.’67

  The investigation gathered speed, as a devastated king shunned his wife at Hampton Court. Marillac said the queen

  who, did nothing but dance and amuse herself, now keeps her apartments without showing herself . . . when musicians with instruments call at her door, they are dismissed, saying it was no longer time for dancing.

  Her brother Charles Howard was also exiled from court. Marillac added:The Duke of Norfolk must be exceedingly sorry and troubled for the queen happens to be his own niece and the daughter of his brother, just as Anne [Boleyn] was also his niece on his sister’s side and his having been the chief cause of the king marrying her.68

  Norfolk interrogated Catherine roughly but it was Cranmer’s gentler manner, plus his promise of mercy, that made her admit her licentious romps with Dereham.69 There were further distressing questions, and she refused ‘to drink or eat and weeps and cries like a madwoman, so they must take away things by which she might hasten her death’, according to her uncle.

  Witnesses recounted how the dowager duchess discovered Dereham in Catherine’s arms, ‘and she beat her and gave Joan Bulmer a stroke who stood by. Often she blamed him . . . for keeping company together, saying he would never be out of Catherine Howard’s chamber.’ On another occasion she asked where he was, muttering ‘I am sure he is sleeping in the gentlewomen’s chamber.’70

  Piece by piece, the evidence against the queen was mounting. The Privy Council was told that when the royal party was at Lincoln, Culpeper had entered her chamber ‘by the backstairs’ at eleven o’clock at night and had remained there until four the next morning. Another tryst had occurred in the cramped and noisome surroundings of the queen’s stool chamber, or lavatory. Hardly romantic. Her servant, Margaret Morton, testified that she never mistrusted the queen until at Hatfield, when she saw her glance out of her chamber window ‘on Mr Culpeper after such a sort that she thought there was love between them’.71

  Culpeper himself admitted ‘many stolen interviews’ with Catherine, which had been arranged by her lady of the Privy Chamber, Lady Jane Rochford, widow of Anne Boleyn’s beheaded brother, George. The queen clearly had a liking for intrigue and in every house during the northern progress would ‘seek for the back doors and back stairs’ herself. At Pontefract, she feared the king had set watch at the back door’ and her servant ‘waited in the court to see if that were so’.72

  The Howards were soon compro
mised in the investigation and many were dragged off to the Tower. The Lieutenant there warned the Privy Council that there were not enough rooms to ‘lodge them severally’ unless the king and queen’s own lodgings were used. The king agreed to this, but his keys to the apartments could not be found and accommodation for some prisoners had to be arranged elsewhere.

  Lord William Howard and Margaret, his wife, were among those arrested. He admitted that he knew of his niece’s behaviour with Dereham and, when told of it, had exclaimed: ‘What mad wenches!’ The dowager duchess and her daughter, the Countess of Bridgewater, were also imprisoned. All were accused of misprision of treason.

  Norfolk desperately tried to distance himself from his niece, telling Marillac ‘with tears in his eyes, of the king’s grief’ who had loved Catherine ‘much and the misfortunes to his house in her and Queen Anne [Boleyn], his two nieces’.73 Despairingly, he told Chapuys, the Spanish ambassador, ‘I wish the queen was burned.’74

  The duke sat uncomfortably as one of the judges at the trial of Culpeper and Dereham for treason at the Guildhall. Marillac commented:A strange thing has been noted that Norfolk . . . in examining the prisoners laughed as if he had cause to rejoice. His son, the Earl of Surrey, was also there, and the brothers of the queen and Culpeper rode about the town.

  It is the custom and must be done to show that they did not share the crimes of their relatives.75

  After a hearing lasting around six hours, Dereham and Culpeper were found guilty. Both were executed at Tyburn on 10 December, with the king unexpectedly commuting the sentence to simple beheading for Culpeper, rather than the hanging and evisceration cruelly suffered by Dereham. The heads of both men were displayed on London Bridge.

  Norfolk was, above all else, a survivor in the cut and thrust politics of Henry’s court. Now was the time speedily to abandon his kith and kin to save his own neck. The duke had prudently moved to Kenninghall, well away from the hullabaloo in London. On 15 December 1541, he picked up his pen and ‘scribbled’ a sycophantic, obsequious letter to his king:Most noble and gracious Sovereign Lord: Yesterday [it] came to my knowledge that my own ungracious [step] mother my unhappy brother and his wife, with my lewd sister of Bridgewater were committed to the Tower.

  By long experience, knowing your accustomed equity and justice (used to all your subjects) [I] am sure [this was] not done but for some [of] their [faults] and traitorous proceedings against your royal majesty.

  Which, revolving in my mind, with also the most abominable deeds done by two of my nieces against your highness, has brought me to [the] greatest perplexity that ever [a] poor wretch was in.

  [I] fear that your majesty, having so often and by so many of my kin been thus falsely and traitorously handled, might not only conserve a displeasure in your heart against me and all other of that kin, but also . . . abhor to here speak of any of the same.

  Norfolk, already ‘prostrate and most humble’ at the feet of his monarch, now sought to win credit for the discovery of his family’s crimes:I beseech your majesty to [remember] that a great part of this matter is come to light by my declaration to your majesty, according to my bounden duty, of the words spoken to me by my mother in law [stepmother], when your highness sent me to Lambeth to search Dereham’s coffers.

  Without the which, I think she [would] not be further examined, nor consequently her ungracious children.

  Moreover, the dowager duchess - as well as his ‘two false traitorous nieces’ - had not shown any love towards him, and this rancour, together with his honest endeavours in the matter, gave him some ‘hope that your highness will not conserve any displeasure in your most gentle heart against me’.

  Still ‘prostrate at your royal feet [and] most humble’, Norfolk pleaded with Henry to tell him ‘plainly’ how ‘your highness do weigh your favour towards me’. He assured the king:Unless I know your majesty [continues] my good and gracious lord (as you were before their offences [were] committed), I shall never desire to live in this world any longer but [would] shortly to finish this transitory life, as God knows, who sends your majesty the accomplishments of your most noble heart’s desires.76

  There is no sign of drafting here. The words spill off the page, pleading, beseeching and grovelling for mercy. In Norfolk’s mind, the incarceration and probable death of his immediate family was plainly a small price to pay for his survival and the achievement of his ambitions.

  On 22 December, Lord William Howard and his wife, the wife of Catherine’s elder brother Henry, and others of the Howard household were sentenced to ‘perpetual imprisonment’ for their misprision and their goods and estates confiscated. They and the dowager duchess were eventually freed in August 1542.

  Norfolk returned to Lambeth at the turn of the year amidst continuing doubts about his own survival. By mid-January however, he had returned to court ‘apparently in his full former credit and authority’.77

  No such mercy was shown to Catherine and her procuress, Lady Rochford. On 11 February 1542, the queen was found guilty of treason by Act of Attainder.78 The following day she asked for the block to be delivered to her room in the Tower and spent the evening bizarrely rehearsing her own execution. The next morning at nine o’clock she was swiftly despatched on Tower Green. Lady Rochford, who had been thought mad during her questioning, immediately followed her to the scaffold and met the same fate. Always anxious to endow his actions with a veneer of legality, Henry had hurried an Act through Parliament allowing the execution of insane persons who had committed treason.79

  Surrey watched his diminutive and terrified cousin die, ‘so weak, that she could hardly speak’. But she did manage to confess ‘in a few words that she merited a hundred deaths for so offending the king’.80 One eyewitness, the merchant Ottwell Johnson, said both ladies ‘made the most godly and Christian end that was ever heard tell of’.81

  Norfolk and his son had survived a huge scandal.

  Henry had not yet worked out when his time of reckoning would come for them.

  7

  DOWN BUT NOT OUT

  ‘His majesty, like a prince of wisdom, knows that who plays at a game of chance must sometimes lose’

  Sir William Paget to the Earl of Surrey, 18 January 15461

  After the execution of a second niece who had loved and lost her royal bedmate, Thomas Howard, third Duke of Norfolk, was languishing in another valley of dark despair in the roller-coaster of Henry’s regard. In early April 1542, the French ambassador Marillac reported him still in disfavour, but two months later his prospects had changed for the better. Maybe the derring-do of a famous military exploit could rescue him from prolonged political disgrace.

  Henry, after the dark emotional turmoil of Catherine Howard’s betrayal and confronting advancing years and declining health, also sought the glory of military adventures to rebuild his battered self-esteem and cheer his old heart. Should Scotland or France become his target? Egged on by the young bloods at his court, and spurred by an embarrassing defeat during a skirmish at Hadden Rig near Berwick on 24 August (when a small English force of raiders was routed with the loss of 500 prisoners), Henry plumped for war with the old foe across his northern border. With an admirable diplomatic sleight of hand, he claimed feudal suzerainty over James V of Scotland and objected to his nephew’s failure to reform his own Church and abjure the Pope’s supremacy.

  Conflict is expensive, and Norfolk was one of the 300 richest in the realm who now faced hefty tax bills - both he and Suffolk had each to find 6,000 crowns, or £1.3 million at current prices, to help create a war chest of 300,000 crowns to pay for Henry’s martial ambitions. No wonder the duke was depressed and Marillac commented:The duke departed . . . to refresh himself at his own house [Kenninghall], as he has been languishing all this Lent . . . [being] very ill in body besides being mentally worried.2

  Every head of state needs reliable, dependable generals and Norfolk was again recalled to the colours, as ‘Lieutenant and Captain-General of the North’. Memories of Fl
odden, all those years before, were kept alive by the late-night fireside boasts of veterans who had fought the Scots on that bloody day. The duke found himself happily returned to the king’s grace and ‘all men who have heretofore served in war are ordinarily at his house, reckoning to be soon employed’, the French envoy reported.3

  Norfolk could never be described as a compliant general. There were unquestionable shortcomings in the logistical support for Henry’s armies, but when reading Norfolk’s despatches we can detect not only overt impatience over poor planning, but also a frequent, instinctive desire to justify in advance any future failure on his part. Such insecurity, such lack of confidence was born out of the king’s unpredictable and violent temper, and the certain knowledge that Norfolk had enemies aplenty at court, only too pleased to point accusing fingers over the disgrace of military blunders.

  He wrote to the Privy Council from Kenninghall on 11 September 1542, his mind buzzing with the arrangements for the expedition to Scotland. As far as the old campaigner was concerned, an army marched not only on its stomach, but refreshed by beer. Likely shortages of this vital beverage for his troops were his chief worry.4 He told the councillors:I wrote of late to send 1,000 tuns5 [barrels] of beer to Berwick and also wrote to Sir George Lawson [the Treasurer of Berwick] to know what he could furnish. His answer shows that he could do nothing towards furnishing so great an army for eight days going towards Edinburgh.

  These parts cannot help for lack of foists.6 I am leaving here in two or three hours and so cannot help . . . but at York I will do my best. Hull and York should be written to, to brew as much as they can (1,500 tuns above that [sent] from London would not do too much.7