House Of Treason: The Rise And Fall Of A Tudor Dynasty (22 page)

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’.
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Despairingly, he told Chapuys, the Spanish ambassador, ‘I wish the queen was burned.’
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The duke sat uncomfortably as one of the judges at the trial of Culpeper and Dereham for treason at the Guildhall. Marillac commented:

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:

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:

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:

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’.
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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.
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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.
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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’.
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One eyewitness, the merchant Ottwell Johnson, said both ladies ‘made the most godly and Christian end that was ever heard tell of’.
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Norfolk and his son had survived a huge scandal.

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

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

 

 

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:

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 Flodden, 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.
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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.
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He told the councillors:

Norfolk’s misgivings over the expedition were scarcely eased by Lawson’s rather torpid reply a week later:

One hundred spears do not make an army. Norfolk and Sir Anthony Browne, the Master of the Horse, decided to speak out frankly about the shortcomings in supplies. On 20 September, they wrote to the Privy Council:

Norfolk, now labouring under ‘a great agony of mind’, was keen to protect his back in London, telling Gardiner and the king’s secretary, Sir Thomas Wriothesley, that if he was blamed for the delays in supplies, he hoped they would be his ‘buckler’ [shield] of defence. He also had a keen sense of his own mortality. In what had become his custom before going into action, the duke had written a new will and had handed it over to Cuthbert Tunstall, Bishop of Durham, for safekeeping ‘if the case requires’.
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He was suffering misgivings about his chances of success in this campaign:

But Norfolk, who had arrived in Newcastle in time for Fitzwilliam’s subsequent death, was also fretting about other issues. On 12 October, he wrote again to Gardiner and Wriothesley, this time troubled by worries about his own future. He was now aged sixty-nine, not enjoying great health, and the thought of a late blossoming of his career in the service of the crown in the bleak border country, away from the comforts of court and the seat of power, horrified him. He begged them to make ‘intercession with the king, when the time comes, not to name him Warden of the Scottish Marches’.

After all, he had more than served his time in the north: ‘About twenty years past, I was the king’s lieutenant here, when the Marquis of Dorset was Warden, who when the winter came, was discharged and I was charged with both offices.’
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His plea was successful: six days later, Henry wrote, somewhat sniffily, that he intended ‘not to trouble Norfolk with the Wardenry’ and, on 25 October, he selected Edward Seymour, first Earl of Hertford, to take up the post.
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Paradoxically, Norfolk’s relief was tinged with irritation that, by this appointment, the Seymour clan had continued their inexorable advancement in the public affairs of the realm. But on balance, the duke must have embarked on his latest military expedition with a lighter heart, knowing that administering the inhospitable heather-clad bogs, moors and mountains of the borders would be someone else’s problem in the months ahead.

It was not that he did not relish fighting the Scots. He and his father, the second duke, had been the glorious victors at Flodden and he believed absolutely that his family had been ‘appointed by God to be to the Scots a sharp scourge and rod’.
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Now with Surrey, his son, and his half-brother, Lord William Howard,
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riding beside him, Norfolk was determined to teach the unruly Scots another harsh lesson with steel and fire. ‘We shall do as much as is possible for men to do,’ he promised sombrely, ‘to make the enemies speak according to the king’s pleasure, or else make them such a smoke as never was in Scotland these hundred years.’
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