House Of Treason: The Rise And Fall Of A Tudor Dynasty (26 page)

But this was no time for duels.

Norfolk had been at Kenninghall since the beginning of November and word quickly reached him of his son’s arrest. On 3 and 4 December he wrote urgently to friends at court for news, including Gardiner, who he did not know had been disgraced.The Duke was also unaware that his letters were intercepted, read and held as potential evidence against him. He hastened to London and on his arrival, on Sunday 12 December, was arrested and humiliatingly degraded of his rank as Lord Treasurer. His white wand of office and the Garter insignia on his gown were removed from him at Westminster. Memories of his own similar treatment of Cromwell in the same palace must have troubled even his insensitive mind. He was taken by boat down to the Tower, and Norfolk ‘both in the barge and on entering the Tower’ publicly declared ‘no person had ever been carried thither before who was a more loyal servant [of the king] than he was and always had been’. His protests were ignored.

The Seymour coup against the Howards had been carefully planned. At the same time that his father was making his forlorn journey down the river, Surrey was marched under close guard through the crowded streets of London from Ely Place to the Tower, his progress marked by his anger and ‘great lamentation’.
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The king must have been a party to their arrests and, in the knowledge that he would soon meet his Maker, wanted to remove the last surviving dynastic threat to his nine-year-old son’s succession. He now believed the Howards’ vast feudal resources and ambitions made them potential risks for the security of his son’s forthcoming reign. Like Buckingham and others before them, they had to be cold-bloodedly snuffed out.
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Between three and four that Sunday afternoon, a small group of horsemen left London and rode post-haste for Norfolk. The party was led by John Gates, the thuggish fixer who undertook many unpleasant tasks for those who now controlled Henry’s Privy Chamber, his brother-in-law Sir Wymond Carew, and Sir Richard Southwell, who, tellingly, had been freed from custody. Their destination was the Howard palace at Kenninghall. They reached Thetford on Monday night and were at the gates of the duke’s mansion, seven miles (11.3 km.) away, by dawn the next morning.

News of the arrests had not yet reached the pastoral calm of Norfolk. They hammered on the doors of the sleeping palace and eventually were admitted. The steward, Robert Holdish, was away ‘taking musters’, and the trio instead met Henry Symonds, the duke’s almoner, ‘a man in whom [Norfolk] reposed a great trust for the order of his household and expenses of the same’. All entrances being secured, they ordered Symonds to summon Mary, Duchess of Richmond, and the duke’s mistress, Bessie Holland, who had been awoken by the clamour, down to the dining room for interrogation.

Mary was ‘sore perplexed, trembling and like to fall down’, they reported to Henry that evening. She fell on her knees and ‘humbled herself to your majesty’, saying:

Gates and his colleagues, ‘perceiving her humble conformity’, advised her not to despair. The polite niceties over, they demanded to see her chambers and coffers, but they discovered ‘no writings worth sending’. Her possessions were not worth much: clearly, her mean father had not dipped into his purse to brighten her life:

Then the searchers turned their attentions on the blowsy Bessie Holland, who had benefited considerably from Norfolk’s doting largesse. She possessed a wealth of pretty trinkets and baubles, including a number of gold brooches bearing pictures of ‘Our Lady in Pity’, the Holy Trinity, and, a nice touch this, Cupid:
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Both the Duchess of Richmond and Bessie were told to travel to London for further interrogation ‘in the morning or the next day at the latest’.

Gates and his team confiscated and inventoried all the duke’s possessions, down to the horses in the stable, including one old nag called Button. They also sent ‘our most discreet and trusty servants’ to all Norfolk’s other houses in East Anglia to ensure that ‘nothing shall be embezzled until we have time to see them, among which, we do not omit Elizabeth Holland’s [house] newly made in Suffolk which is thought to be well furnished with stuff’.
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They confiscated all Norfolk’s ‘writings and books, which we shall diligently peruse’, and listed the members of his household.
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Surrey’s wife, Frances, pregnant with their fifth child, who was ‘looking her time to lie in at this next Candlemas’ (2 February), also lived at Kenninghall with her children and ‘the women in the nursery attending upon them’. What should Gates do with them? Eventually it was decided to break up the household and she was sent away, one of Norfolk’s worthless old nightgowns, ‘much worn and furred with coney and lamb’, draped across her lap for a vestige of warmth during her journey.
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Her eldest son Thomas was placed in the care of Sir John Williams, the Treasurer of the Court of Augmentations, and the others dumped on old Sir Thomas Wentworth, a local magnate.

Back in London, Surrey had heard of his father’s arrest and wrote to the Privy Council:

Surrey recalled his appearance before the Privy Council of nearly four years before, over his nocturnal high jinks in London, and wanted the same sympathetic quartet of councillors to examine him again.

Sadly, he did not know that Gardiner was now out in the cold and Wriothesley had changed sides, deciding that his future prosperity now lay with the Seymour clan.

Norfolk, in another part of the Tower, also took up his pen and wrote to his sovereign, begging for mercy. He was astonished by his arrest and could not for the life of him understand why he now languished in prison:

Let his accusers confront him in front of his king or before the Privy Council, then, if he was found guilty, he would accept his punishment according to his just deserts.

Henry could take all his lands and goods, as long he may ‘know what is laid to my charge’ and ‘may hear some comfortable word from your majesty’.
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Fear of the unknown is a powerful, nagging emotion. Norfolk had every reason to be worried. Both he and his son now confronted a march to the scaffold.

‘Who knows the cares that go to bed with statesmen?’

 

 

While Norfolk and his son sat brooding in the Tower, the Privy Council, now firmly under Hertford’s sway, began an assiduous search to uncover the evidence necessary to support indictments of treason against them. Two days after their imprisonment, the Spanish ambassador, Francis van der Delft, reported the political gossip pervasive at Westminster that ‘they entertained some ambiguous designs when the king was ill at Windsor six weeks ago to obtain control of the Prince [Edward] or the country and their chance of liberation is small . . .’.
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One of the first witnesses to supply information to the Council was Surrey’s steward, Richard Fulmerston,
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who had recently been repaid all but £140 of the money he lent to his master. The Howards’ ‘most earnest drudge and servant’ provided faithful testimony on their behalf:

No luck there, then, for the industrious investigators. The blandness of his statement was hardly surprising: Fulmerston realised that if he acknowledged his masters’ treason, he would be vulnerable to charges of misprision himself.

Norfolk was questioned in his two rooms in the Tower by Sir William Paulet, the Lord Steward of the Household, and Sir William Paget, the king’s secretary. Their interrogation left him no wiser as to what lay behind his arrest. He emphatically denied writing his own letters in code or that he supported the Pope: ‘If I had twenty lives, I would rather have spent them all, than that he should have any power in this realm, for no man knows better than I . . . how his usurped power has increased. Since he has been the king’s enemy, no man has felt and spoken more against both here and in France and also to many Scottish gentlemen.’

That night, he penned an impassioned six-page letter to the Council, pleading to know ‘what the causes [against him were]’, adding defiantly, ‘if I do not answer truly to every point, let me not live one hour . . .’. He remembered the terrible fate of others close to the king: ‘My lords, I trust you to think [that] Cromwell’s service and mine [be] not alike . . . He was a false man and surely, I am a true poor gentleman.’ Repeatedly, the duke demanded to confront and face down his accusers: ‘I will hide nothing. Never [was] gold tried better by fire and water than I have been, nor have had greater enemies about my sovereign lord than I have had and yet, God be thanked, my truth has ever tried me as, I doubt not, it shall do in these causes.’

The faces of his many enemies down the years appeared in his mind’s eye like so many spectres, as he wrote his letter in the spluttering candlelight, each page brimming with pathos. Cardinal Wolsey had ‘confessed to me at Esher’ that for ‘fourteen years’ he had sought ‘to destroy me . . . [and] unless he put me out of the way, I should undo him’. Cromwell was his most implacable foe who, when eliminating the last survivors of Plantagenet nobility, had questioned the wife of the Marquis of Exeter ‘more strictly’ about Norfolk’s loyalty ‘than of all other’. There was his discarded and spurned wife, of whom Cromwell had often slyly told him: ‘My lord, you are a happy man that your wife knows no hurt [of] you, for if she did, she would undo you.’ Her father, the Duke of Buckingham, had confessed at the criminal bar so long ago, ‘my father [the second Duke of Norfolk] sitting as a judge, that of all men living, he hated me the most’. His brother-in-law, Thomas Boleyn, Earl of Wiltshire, also ‘confessed the same and wished he had found means to thrust his dagger in me’. Finally, the ‘malice borne me by both my nieces, whom it pleased the king to marry’, was well known to those ladies who attended them in their last hours in the Tower.

This was a veritable litany of hate directed at just one man and some of it came from those once close to him. In the face of such relentless odium, some may have pondered the shortcomings in their own characters or even become quite paranoid. However, Norfolk was not like other men: his blood, his ambition, his lust for power all smothered any frail, human sensitivity. But apart from his wife, all these adversaries were dead. Who was now his secret enemy in the shadows? Who had struck him down? And why? The duke’s bafflement was palpable: his abundant loyalty and fidelity to the crown was evident for all to admire. After all, who was it who had diligently hunted down all those traitors during what he called the ‘commotion time’ - the ‘Pilgrimage of Grace’ rebellion? It was, of course, Norfolk. He asked: