House Of Treason: The Rise And Fall Of A Tudor Dynasty (37 page)

His wife had, meanwhile, given birth to a son, Thomas, at Finchingfield, Essex - the heir the earl was never to see. She and her two children were now eking out a meagre existence in one wing of Arundel House, on a pension of £8 a week. Anne, however, had scraped together £30 and used it to bribe the daughter of the Lieutenant to provide access to a nearby prisoner, an old priest named William Bennet, and two other incarcerated Catholics, the Lancashire landowner Sir Thomas Gerard and William Shelley, of Michelgrove in Clapham, Sussex, a near neighbour, in happier days, to the earl at Arundel Castle.
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Bennet sometimes said Mass for all three in the earl’s room, using smuggled vestments which were hidden behind a wall.

Another prisoner, John Snowden, a sailor who had traitorously served with the Spanish Armada during the thwarted invasion of England in July and August 1588, hoped to redeem himself by pretending to be a Catholic and revealing these secret Masses. He filched their missal and sent it to Walsingham as proof.

Bennet was immediately removed to another prison, The Counter, in Wood Street, one of the sheriff’s prisons for the city of London, and there questioned in October 1588. His confession, ‘written with his own hand’, was damning. As the Armada had battled up through the English Channel,

Gerard later told Bennet of Snowden’s disclosure of their Masses, and ‘charged me very earnestly and threatened me extremely in the earl’s name, to confess nothing in such sort as the terrifying of me had like to have cost my life’.
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But Gerard made his own confession, reporting that the earl ‘told us that the Spanish fleet was seen in the narrow seas, like unto a huge forest [of masts] and our fleet was not able to deal with them’.

Arundel also asked the priests held in the Tower to pray ‘for the advance of the Catholic enterprise all the twenty-four hours of the day’.
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Burghley, Hatton and Henry, first Lord Hunsdon,
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the Chamberlain, all questioned Arundel about these allegations. Hunsdon, enraged by his composure under interrogation, called him a ‘beast and traitor, and said rather than he should not be hanged within four days, that he himself would hang him’. Burghley, rather more measured, said ‘it was no marvel he was so settled in religion, because he read nothing to the contrary’.
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A new trial was now inevitable.

Like his forebears, Arundel now faced charges of high treason. Like his grandfather and father, the accused was grimly preceded by the execution axe, its blade pointing away from him, as he entered Westminster Hall on 14 April 1589. Arundel now had to undergo the same ordeal of a trial by his peers, this time presided over by Lord Derby, who sat under a cloth of estate, his three-foot long (0.91 m.) white wand of office as Lord High Steward lying before him.

Arundel was smartly dressed in a velvet gown, trimmed with fur and gold lace and fastened by gold buttons, worn over a black satin doublet with a tall black hat on his head. He was described ‘as a very tall man, somewhat swarthy-coloured’,
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but his pallor was grey from the four and a half years of confinement in the Tower.

As he arrived at the bar, he bowed twice to his twenty judges - one of them Burghley - ‘but the lords never [re]moved their hats nor made any countenance’. The clerk then formally addressed him: ‘Philip Howard, Earl of Arundel, late of Arundel in the county of Sussex, hold up thy hand.’ The earl held his hand ‘up very high, saying: “Here is as true a man’s heart and hand as ever came into this hall.”’
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His comment goaded his old enemy, John Popham, Attorney General, sitting near him, who sneered: ‘That shall appear anon!’

The indictment comprised twenty-four separate counts, but focused on the old charge that alleged that he tried to flee the country without permission and a new accusation that he had prayed traitorously for the success of the Spanish Armada.

The earl asked: ‘How [do] you prove me a traitor?’ and Popham snapped back that ‘because you have been reconciled to the Pope, there was a law made in the twenty-seventh year
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of this queen, that whosoever was reconciled to the Pope from the obedience of the queen’s majesty, was in case of treason’.
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The Attorney General turned to the charge against Arundel for fleeing England. After the earl had gone, he said, ‘he found fault with her hard dealing in giving countenance to his adversaries and in disgracing him and that he was discontented with the injustice of the realm towards his great grandfather, his grandfather and his father’.

Arundel remarked dryly that there were some people ‘who like the spider, can suck venom out of the sweetest flowers, and find materials for poison, where others would obtain matter only of a wholesome or harmless description’.
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Some of those who had made allegations against him were held in a room off the adjacent Court of the Queen’s Bench, hidden by an arras, or screen. One was Sir Thomas Gerard, who was now summoned to give evidence. He was led in, his guards pushing away the onlookers, clearly amazed by the chattering crowds around him.

Once sworn in, Gerard found it difficult to look the prisoner in the eye and stared fixedly at the Lord High Steward. Arundel ‘stood very stoutly in denial of what he witnessed [said], willing him to look him in the face and charging him as he would answer before God, in whose Presence he spoke, to tell him nothing but the truth’. Gerard, stumbling and hesitant, could only refer to the depositions which had been read in court earlier, ‘to which I have been sworn, yes, twice sworn’.
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He was quickly excused by the prosecution from further testimony.

The priest William Bennet was then called and again stuck by his confession. Arundel then produced a small piece of paper (a ‘little ticket’) hidden inside the sleeve of his doublet (‘next to his skin’, for fear of discovery if searched). It was a copy of a retraction written by Bennet.

Some of the peers sitting in judgement muttered that the priest was ‘a false man and no lawful witness’.
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Two of them, Lords Grey and Norris, urged Bennet to explain why his two confessions contradicted themselves and asked if he knew of this letter: yes or no? The priest remained steadfast in his denials that he wrote the retraction.

The judges withdrew into the Court of the Queen’s Bench to decide on their verdict and were back within an hour. Henry, Lord Norris, was the youngest of the peers, and he was asked first: ‘Is Philip late Earl of Arundel of the several treasons whereof he is indicted, guilty or not guilty?’

Norris put his hand on his heart and replied: ‘Guilty.’All the others said the same.
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Arundel was recalled to the bar and arrived ‘cheerfully’. He was told of the guilty verdict and merely said in response: ‘
Sic voluntas Dei
’ - ‘God’s will be done.’

The axe blade was turned towards him and he was sentenced to death by an anxious Lord Derby.
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The next day Howard wrote a letter to Burghley, pathetically full of gratitude for his ‘honourable goodness always extended to me’. Like his father before him, he wanted the minister to look after his wife and children.

He had already made his will, dated 12 June 1588: ‘I Philip Earl of Arundel, being a member of the true ancient Catholic and Apostolic Church . . . [do] bequeath my soul into the hands of the most glorious and inseparable Trinity, one true Almighty and Everlasting God.’ He asked that payment be immediately made of ‘such money as my late lord and dear father gave to certain poor towns by his last will and which I have not, by my negligence, already performed, for which I am heartily sorry’. He also asked that [Margaret] ‘my sister’s marriage money being the sum of £3,000, be paid to her out of the money that shall come out of the sale of the manor of [Castle] Rising [Norfolk] with all expedition after my death . . . For that I have done her so much injury in withholding it from her so long.’ Arundel left £2,000 to his daughter Elizabeth on her marriage,
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provided this was approved by her mother, his half-sister Margaret and his executors, his half-brother William and Lord Robert Sackville. Kenninghall was bequeathed to his son. His wife and Margaret were both left gold crosiers studded with diamonds.
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In the event, none of his instructions were carried out and most of Arundel’s property, including his wife’s estates, went to the crown.

Sentence of death was also not carried out on the earl.

He lingered on for six more years in the Tower, unaware that his execution warrant had not been signed by Elizabeth. The sword of death was always hanging over his head. ‘Not a bell sounded but it might be his knell, not a footstep was heard, but that it might be the messenger of death. Each morning as he arose, he knew not that before night, he might be a headless corpse. Each night, as he laid his head upon the pillow, he was uncertain whether the morning might not summon him to another world.’
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His wife was still living in three unfurnished rooms on the ground floor at Arundel House, but, if the court visited Somerset House next door, she was ordered to the country, because of the embarrassment of her presence. On one such occasion, when she was away, the queen saw an inscription about the sadness of life, scratched on the glass of one of the windows in Arundel House. Angered by its sentiments, she added a message beneath ‘expressing much passion and disdain, on purpose to grieve and afflict the poor lady’.
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Sometime after his attainder she moved into a smaller house in Spitalfields, north of the city, and later to another at Acton, in Middlesex, where she retained a Catholic priest as a chaplain.
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Arundel was now growing weak and feeble from sickness. He spent much of his time at prayer or in translation of devotional works, such as the fifty-three pages of the Carthusian Johann Justus’s
Epistle of Christ to the Christian Soul.
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A scrap of paper, addressed to him, was smuggled into the Tower, with two lines in Latin, intended to provide some religious comfort: ‘Not always between two thieves did Christ hang! Truth will rise again in the Crucifix . . .’
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Sometime in August 1595, he had got up at his usual time of 5.00 a.m., had breakfasted and was in reasonable health. At dinner (about ten o’clock) he had eaten some roast teal (duck) and had scarcely finished his plate before he began to retch violently. Soon after, he was afflicted with dysentery.

His doctors suspected poison and he made no recovery even after a few weeks. Arundel knew his last hour was nigh and appealed to the queen to be allowed to see his wife and two children.

The earl’s letter was given to the Lieutenant, Sir Michael Blount, to deliver to court and at length he returned with Elizabeth’s answer, which he repeated verbally. The queen said that if Arundel

Resolute, if not stubborn, to the end, Arundel answered: ‘On such condition, I cannot accept her majesty’s offers. If that be the cause in which I am to perish, sorry am I that I have but one life to lose.’
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The earl was now confined to his bed. Blount visited him to seek pardon for the harsh treatment inflicted on the prisoner, and was duly forgiven. But Arundel had some sharp words of advice for him: