House Of Treason: The Rise And Fall Of A Tudor Dynasty (47 page)

68. BL Arundel MS 152, fol. 294.

69.
LPFD
, vol. 8, p. 385.

70.
LPFD
, vol. 8, p. 1. Another translation is ‘the big fuck’, which is probably more accurate, given Norfolk’s sometimes coarse speech.

71.
LFPD
, vol. 9, p. 335.

72. Stafford (?1512-56) was a distant relative of the third Duke of Buckingham.

73.
LPFD
, vol. 8, p. 251.

74.
LPFD
, vol. 9, p. 293.

75.
LPFD
, vol. 8, p. 169.

76. Froude, p. 296.

77. Before she died, Catherine wrote a typically pious last letter to Henry: ‘The hour of my death now approaches and at this moment my love for you compels me to remind you a little of the salvation of your soul. This last, you should put before all mortal considerations, abandoning ... all those concerns of the flesh on account of which you have plunged me into manifold miseries and yourself into more anxieties. Yet this, I forgive you and I both hope, and with holy prayers implore, that God will forgive you. I commend the daughter of our marriage to your care whom, I beseech you to behave towards her entirely in that fatherly fashion which I have on other occasions desired of you.’ Henry’s reaction is unrecorded. Vergil, p. 335.

78.
LPFD
, vol. 10, p. 51.

79.
LPFD
, vol. 10, p. 71.

80. Wriothesley, vol. 1, p. 33, said ‘she took such a fright ... that it caused her to travail [labour] and so was delivered afore her full time which was a great discomfort to all this realm’. The Papal Nuncio in Paris, Ridolfo, Bishop of Faenza, doubted she was pregnant at all. He told the Papal Secretary Ambrogio in March ‘that woman pretended to have miscarried of a son, not being really with child, and to keep up the deceit, would allow no one to attend her but her sister, whom the French king here in France [knew] as one of the greatest and most infamous lewd women’. See BL Add. MS 8,715, fol. 220B. In this the bishop was at least partially misinformed - Mary, of course, had already been banished from court.

81.
CDP Spanish
, vol. 5, pt ii, p. 28.

82. Ellis,
Original Letters
, first series, vol. 2, pp. 59-60, and Strype,
Ecclesiastic Memorials
, vol. 1, i, p. 434.

83. Wriothesley, vol. 1, p. 38.

84. A copy of the dispensation to marry is in Arundel Castle Archives, G1/5.

1. BL Cotton MS Titus B, i, fol. 383.

2.
Gentleman’s Magazine
, new series, vol. 23 (1845), p. 262.

3.
State Papers
, vol. 2, pp. 38-9.

4. National Archives, SP 60/1/65. In September 1534, when the prospect of having again to serve in Dublin was raised (but not fulfilled), Norfolk told Cromwell, ‘If the king really wishes to send me to Ireland he must first construct a bridge over the sea for me to return freely to England, whenever I like.’ See
CDP Spanish
, vol. 5, pt i, p. 254.

5. The Letters Patent creating him Lieutenant General of the English army in Scotland, dated 26 February 1523, are in Arundel Castle Archives, G1/84.

6. Arundel Castle Archives, A113.

7. See Harris,
English Aristocratic Women
... , pp. 18-19.

8. Corrie, Revd George (ed.),
Sermons of Hugh Latimer
(Parker Society, Cambridge, 1844), p. 253. Latimer (?1485-1555) faced a number of charges of heresy during his career, before resigning his bishopric in protest at the Act of the Six Articles in 1539. He was committed to the Tower on the accession of the Catholic Mary I in 1553 and burned with another Protestant martyr, Bishop Nicholas Ridley, at Oxford on 16 October 1555.

9. BL Cotton MS Titus B, i, fol. 383. Letter to Thomas Cromwell, 26 June 1536. Holland had apartments in Norfolk’s grand mansion at Kenninghall, Norfolk, and, despite Elizabeth’s claims, was probably born of gentle blood.

10. Harris,
English Aristocratic Women
... , pp. 86-7.

11. Arundel Castle Archives, G1/114/56. A seventeenth-century copy of the original, now apparently lost.

12.
CDP Spanish
, vol. 4, pt i, p. 509, and pt ii, pp. 629, 720.

13.
LPFD
, vol. 4, pt iii, p. 3035.

14. Byrne,
Lisle Letters
, vol. 1, fn, p. 350.

15. Harris, ‘Marriage’, p. 375.

16. National Archives, SP 1/76/38.

17. National Archives, SP 1/76/39.

18. BL Cotton MS Vespasian F, xiii, fol. 79. Cromwell also received letters from Elizabeth, the estranged third wife of Sir Walter Hungerford. In 1536, she sought his protection from her husband, claiming she had been imprisoned in his house at Farleigh, Somerset, for four years and that he had tried to poison her.

19. BL Cotton MS Titus B, i, fols 383, 391-2.

20. BL Cotton MS Titus B, i, fol. 84.

21. Harris, ‘Marriage’, p. 375.

22. BL Cotton MS Titus B, i, fol. 383.

23. BL Cotton MS Titus B, i, fol. 383.

24. BL Cotton MS Titus B, i, fol. 386.

25. Robinson, p. 25.

26. BL Cotton MS Titus B, i, fol. 84.

27. BL Cotton MS Titus B, i, fol. 125.

28. BL Cotton MS Titus B, i, fol. 390. See also
LPFD
, vol. 12, pt ii, pp. 341-2.

29. BL Cotton MS Titus B, i, fol. 389.

30.
LPFD
, vol. 12, pt i, p. 119.

31. National Archives, SP 1/144/16.

32. BL Cotton MS Vespasian F, xiii, fol. 75.

33. National Archives, SP 1/114/86.

34. Harris,
English Aristocratic Women. .
., pp. 179-80.

35. National Archives, SP 1/158/249.

36. BL Cotton MS Titus B, i, fol. 152, and see Wood,
Letters
, vol. 3, p. 190.

1.
LPFD
, vol. 11, p. 347.

2. The dispensation is printed in full by Nott, p. xxviii. For the location of the wedding, see Brenan and Statham, p. 172.

3. Lord Thomas Howard (1512-37) was the second son of Thomas, second Duke of Norfolk, and his second wife, Agnes. The antiquary John Leland was probably one of his childhood tutors. Howard arrived at court in 1533 for the marriage of his niece Anne Boleyn to Henry.

4. First Act of Succession, 1534, 26 Henry VIII,
cap
. 13.

5. Second Act of Succession, 1536, 27 Henry VIII,
cap
. 7.

6. 28 Henry VIII,
cap
. 18. See Head, ‘Attainder of Lord Thomas Howard’, pp. 3- 16. The references to ‘succession’ come from section nine of the Second Act of Suppression.

7.
LPFD
, vol. 11, p. 64.

8. BL Add. MS 17,492. The volume, in its original stamped leather covers, also includes verse penned by other contemporary poets, including Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey, and Sir Thomas Wyatt.

9. BL Cotton MS Vespasian F, xiii, fol. 134B. Her household was now modest: she had only one gentleman and a groom that looked after her clothes, ‘another that keeps her chamber and a chaplain that was with her in the court’.

10. Byrne,
Lisle Letters
, vol. 3, p. 458.

11. Wriothesley, vol. 1, p. 53. This seems unlikely and is probably a product of the paranoia of the period. Fitzroy had attended Anne Boleyn’s execution more than six weeks before. If he had been poisoned, as part of a wider Boleyn plot against the king and his heirs (so that Anne could marry one of her alleged accomplices), it must have been a very slow-acting poison.

12. For information about Gostwick’s career, see Elton, ‘
Revolution
’, pp. 192-3 and fns. Gostwick, later knighted, left detailed advice on how to run an estate to his son and heir, discussed in A. G. Dickens’s ‘Estate and Household Management in Bedfordshire,
c
. 1540’, in
Bedfordshire Historical Record Society
, vol. 36 (1956), pp. 38-45. It is reprinted by Williams in
Historical Documents
, pp. 910-12. He later became Treasurer of Tenths and First Fruits.

13. Remarkably bad or shocking, in the mid-sixteenth-century sense.

14. Sadler (1507-87) was in Cromwell’s service before becoming a gentleman of the Privy Chamber around 1536 and was appointed one of Henry’s secretaries the following year. He was knighted in 1542.

15.
LPFD
, vol. 11, p. 76. Gostwick asked Cromwell if he could purchase ‘a little mule of the Duke of Richmond, now in my custody’.

16.
LPFD
, vol. 11, p. 97.

17. Surrey rode Richmond’s own horse, which together with its saddle, had been sent to him.

18. Cited by Childs, p. 122.

19. Sir Thomas Boleyn handed over the King’s Privy Seal on Sunday 18 June and it was delivered to Thomas Cromwell on 29 June and he was appointed Lord Privy Seal on 1 July, with a fee of twenty shillings a day. He was also created Baron Cromwell of Oakham eight days later.

20. Then a small parish to the north of London.

21. Shooter’s Hill - at 443 feet (132 m.) the highest point in south London - is near Greenwich. Its name was first recorded in 1226.

22. National Archives, SP 1/105/245. Norfolk to Cromwell; Kenninghall, 5 August 1536, and see
LPFD
, vol. 11, p. 102.

23.
LPFD
, vol. 11, p. 103. Norfolk to Cromwell, Kenninghall, 6 August 1536.

24. Knowles, p. 181.

25.
LPFD
, vol. 11, p. 183.

26. Robinson, p. 30.

27. Swales, p. 254.

28. At this stage Henry was bluffing, as he had no ready forces to defeat the rebels. He was also furious, as he always was, at any sign of opposition to his reign. He promised the insurgents that ‘a great army’ would invade their neighbourhoods ‘as soon as they come out of them and to burn, spoil and destroy their goods, wives and children, with all extremity, to the fearful example of all lewd subjects’. See
LPFD
, vol. 11, p. 226.

29.
LPFD
, vol. 11, p. 246.

30.
CDP Spanish
, vol. 5, pt ii, p. 269. He took ‘a quantity of ammunition’ and artillery out of the Tower as well as arrows and handguns.

31.
LPFD
, vol. 11, p. 252.

32. Hutchinson,
Cromwell
, p. 112. Cromwell served as a teenage mercenary soldier in the French army that was routed by Spanish forces at the Garigliano River, near Cassino, Italy, on 28 December 1503. The survivors, including Cromwell, fell back, naked and half-starving on Rome. Ibid
.
, p. 9.

33.
CDP Spanish
, vol. 5, pt ii, p. 268.

34.
LPFD
, vol. 11, p. 230.

35. Robinson, p. 31.

36. In 1525 Norfolk was involved in suppressing a 4,000-strong protest against a new tax in East Anglia. The Duke of Suffolk cracked down hard on the rioters which triggered new disturbances. Norfolk met the protestors’ leaders at Huntingdon and told them: ‘I am sorry for your case. If you depart home to your dwellings, I will be a means to your pardon.’ The new tax was withdrawn and thus the duke’s reputation was locally enhanced. See Chapman, p. 25. Norfolk was good at dealing with the lower classes - normally with a firm hand. At one stage, Henry appointed him, with others, to keep the peace regarding laws affecting ‘hunters, workmen, artisans, servants, innkeepers, mendicants, vagabonds and others calling themselves travelling men’. See Cornwall Record Office, Arundell papers, AR/22/30.

37.
LPFD
, vol. 11, p. 243.

38. A falcon cannon could fire a ball weighing about two pounds (0.91 kg.) and was an anti-cavalry and infantry weapon.

39. Also called a hackbut, harquebus or arquebus. This form of light gun was used by infantry throughout the sixteenth century. Sometimes the butt was curved so that, when levelled, it rested against the chest rather than the shoulder. The Royal Armouries possess two breech-loading hackbuts once owned by Henry VIII. One, bearing the monogram ‘H.R’ and the date of 1537, weighs 9.5 lb (4.31 kg.) and the other, jocularly known as ‘King Henry’s fowling piece’, a massive 18 lb (8.17 kg.). Both were originally fired by a wheel-lock mechanism.

40.
LPFD
, vol. 11, p. 250.

41.
LPFD
, vol. 11, p. 254.

42.
LPFD
, vol. 11, p. 259.

43.
LPFD
, vol. 11, p. 258.

44.
LPFD
, vol. 11, p. 282.

45.
LPFD
, vol. 11, p. 280.

46. From the translation of the Greek for ‘Jesus’.

47. Meaning the common good of the people.

48.
LPFD
, vol. 11, p. 298.

49. Ibid.

50. Hoyle, p. 288. See
State Papers
, vol. 1, p. 518.

51.
LPFD
, vol. 11, p. 347. Henry, in his reply from Windsor on 27 October, sought to reassure Norfolk: ‘We do not only know your loyalty, wisdom and great experience to be such, as being now joined and in company with our good cousin of Shrewsbury, in what state ... you find things, will direct them in such sort as shall be to our honour, your sureties, and the discomfiture of our rebels ... You desire us, in case [of] any mischance should happen to you, to be a good lord to your children ... Surely good cousin, albeit we trust certainly in God, that no such thing shall fortune. Yet, we would you should perfectly know that if God should ... take you out of this transitory life before us, we should not fail to remember your children, being your lively images and in such wise, to look [after] them with our princely favour, for your assured truth and service, as others ... should not be discouraged to follow your steps in that behalf.’ See
State Papers
, vol. 1, pp. 493-5.

52.
State Papers
, vol. 1, pp. 495-6.

53.
LPFD
, vol. 11, p. 360-61.

54. He told Cromwell the will was ‘sealed in a box, which I require you to keep unopened while I live ... If I should die at this time in my master’s service, see my will performed and beg the king, whom I [would] have supervisor of it and whom I love better than myself and trust more than the rest of the world. Since I saw you, I have not been well but for a continual lax [diarrhoea]. I think such thing has grown about my heart that it would cost me my life.’ His desire to serve the king ‘and to anger my enemies will, I trust, make me shortly strong and lusty. If you knew the crafty drifts [plots] used here to bring me out of credit, you would say I am not well handled. But God shall send a shrewd cow short horns and, for my part,
veritas libersbit
[truthfulness is free].’ See
LFPD
, vol. 12, pt i, pp. 118-19.