House Of Treason: The Rise And Fall Of A Tudor Dynasty (50 page)

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Authors: Robert Hutchinson

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4.
LPFD
, vol. 21, pt ii, pp. 280-82.
5. BL Cotton MS Titus B, I, fol. 94.
6.
CDP Spanish
, vol. 8, p. 533.
7. Ibid.
8.
LPFD
, vol. 21, pt ii, p. 310.
9. He was questioning their humanity.
10.
LPFD
, vol. 21, pt ii, pp. 313-14.
11.
LPFD
, vol. 21, pt ii, p. 326.
12. National Archives, SP 1/227/97, and Herbert, p. 564. Knyvett (1508-51), was the first son of Sir Thomas Knyvett and his wife Muriel, daughter of the second duke. He had married by 1527, Anne, the daughter of Sir John Shelton of Carrow, Norfolk. Norfolk had little sympathy for his nephew. In 1539, he described Knyvett as ‘young and has a great wit and trusts too much to his wit and will neither follow the advice of his father-in-law [Shelton], nor me, but is ruled by three or four light naughty knaves of Welshmen and others’ and was, moreover, running into debt. ‘If he comes to you before I do, be quick with him and give not too much confidence to his words’ (
LPFD
, vol. 14, pt i, p. 381).
In April 1541, he struck Surrey’s squire, Thomas Clere during a row on the tennis court at Greenwich Palace, ‘in which they shed blood’. He was condemned to lose his right hand - the fist that had struck the blow. A bizarre ritual followed. ‘The king’s master cook, ready with his knife to do the execution and the sergeant of the scullery with his mallet; the irons laid in the fire to have seared him, and the king’s surgeon with the searing cloth ready. When the execution should have been done, the king sent Mr Long [Sir Richard Long, gentleman of the Privy Chamber] to stay it till after dinner, and then the officers of the household sat again and then the king pardoned him.’ (Wriothesley, vol. 1, p. 125.) Knyvett had pleaded with the king to take his left hand instead, ‘for if my right hand be spared, I may hereafter do such good service to his grace as shall please him to appoint.’ (Cobbett,
State Trials
, vol. 1, pp. 139-40.) Marillac described the scene more graphically. Knyvett was ‘more frightened than hurt. [He] was led by the executioner on to a scaffold, his hand bound to a block and then all the other mysteries done, even pretending to deal the blow and then his pardon was sent to him’ (
LPFD
, vol. 16, pt i, p. 440). In February 1542, he was in trouble again for another misdemeanour and, six years later, was bound over in the sum of £1,000 to answer charges, probably connected with his alleged adultery with the Countess of Sussex (Bindoff, vol. 2, pp. 482-3).
13. Warner (1511-65), together with Devereux, had been in trouble earlier in 1546 for their religiously reformist beliefs (
APC
, vol. 1, pp. 114-15).
14. National Archives, SP . 1/227/101
15. Blagge (1513-51) was a favourite of the king’s, who referring to his rotundity, called him ‘my pig’. An evangelical, he had been caught up in the roundup of reformists earlier in 1546. He was walking in St Paul’s Cathedral, London, when, he claimed, he was tricked into denying the efficacy of the Mass. He was summoned before Lord Chancellor Wriothesley and tried and condemned for heresy. He was saved by an intervention by the king himself and was pardoned. When Henry next saw him, he called out: ‘Ah, my pig! Are you safe again?’ Blagge, bowing low, replied: ‘Yes sire. And if your majesty had not been better to me than your bishops, your pig would have been roasted ere this time’ (Nichols,
Narratives
, fn, p. 42). Blagge wrote bitterly of Wriothesley’s character: ‘By false deceit, by craft and subtle ways, cruelty had crept full high, borne up by sundry stays’ (Nott, vol. 1, p. xcvii).
16. National Archives, SP 1/227/103.
17. National Archives, SP 1/227/105.
18. 26 Henry VIII,
cap
. 13.
19. Herbert, pp. 563-4.
20. Gross obesity in the body’s trunk is one of the symptoms of Cushing’s syndrome. Bessie’s evidence about the device to lift the king up and down is puzzling. There is no mention of a lift or any other contrivance in Henry’s household accounts and probably there was little need of one: the king’s secret apartments were always on one floor. Her testimony probably refers to the ‘king’s trams’ - a form of sedan chair, probably on wheels - which were used to carry Henry in the latter stages of 1546. See Hutchinson,
Last Days of Henry VIII
, pp. 149-50 and pp. 207-9.
21. The ‘Vernacle’ or ‘Veronica’. This was the legend that Saint Veronica wiped Christ’s face with her veil on the road to Calvary. The veil was said to have been placed in a marble coffer on the altar of a chapel attached to St Peter in Rome but it was later moved elsewhere in the Vatican. In 1999, a distinguished scholar said the veil was now held in Manoppella, 150 miles (241 km.) from Rome. Relics had been stripped from English and Welsh monastic shrines as superstitious hokum by Cromwell in the late 1530s.
22. Herbert, p. 563.
23. Hume, p. 143.
24. A cap of crimson velvet, lined with ermine fur, carried before the sovereign on state occasions, but also used in crests.
25. Herbert, p. 564.
26. Moore, ‘Heraldic Charge’, p. 562.
27. Howard,
Memorials
, p. 36, and National Archives, SP 1/227/109.
28. National Archives, SP 1/227/114.
29. Lacey Baldwin Smith,
Mask of Royalty
, p. 255, and Starkey,
Henry VIII, Personalities
... , p. 136.
30. SP 1/227/129, and
LPFD
, vol. 21, pt ii, pp. 288-9.
31.
LPFD
, vol. 21, pt ii, p. 289. With the duke in the Tower, the Lord Chancellor was also presented with a saddler’s account for more than £10, which included £1 5s 6d for a new saddle of ‘Spanish leather’ for Norfolk, and £1 6s 8d for a new side-saddle for Bessie Holland. Ibid.
32. One leg, if not both, was afflicted by fistulas, the result of his jousting accidents.
33. Mary, Dowager Queen of Hungary, Regent of Flanders and sister of Charles V.
34.
CDP Spanish
, vol. 8, p. 533.
35. From 1544, Henry’s eyesight was failing and his accounts include the purchase of spectacles, ten pairs at a time, from Germany. See Hutchinson,
Last Days of Henry VIII
, p. 157.
36. Henry’s annotations in italics.
37. National Archives, SP 1/227/123.
38. A new edition had been published in 1545 by Georg Witzel the elder.
39. First published in 1499.
40. These works by classical authors were fashionable at this time for their apparent support for the Henrician Reformation.
41. Herbert, pp. 566-7.
42. Childs, p. 299.
43. Hume, pp. 145-6.
44. National Archives, E 101/60/22.
45. The label is a heraldic device similar to a riband, with several shorter ribands hanging down, which overlays arms to indicate they belong to an eldest son.
46. BL Harleian MS 297, fol. 256, and Herbert, pp. 567-8.
47. National Archives, SP 1/227/106, and printed in
LPFD
, vol. 21, pt ii, pp. 285-6.
48. Moore, ‘Heraldic Charge’, pp. 568-9.
49. Moore, ‘Heraldic Charge’, p. 569.
50. Grafton,
Chronicles
, vol. 2, p. 498.
51. Hume, p. 146.
52. Years later, a Norfolk man, Robert Balam, wrote to a friend in London describing the disastrous floods that afflicted the county in October 1570. He recalled the three occasions when he had wept as an adult - the loss of English-held Calais in 1558, ‘the loss of the old Duke of Norfolk and his son the Earl of Surrey’, and the unkindness of a friend. See Surrey History Centre, LM/COR/3/329.
53. A cross decorated with fleur-de-lis at the termination of each of its arms.
54. A ‘merlett’ or ‘merlion’ is a heraldic bird. This is an old term for martlet or swallow, often shown in arms without legs or feet in the mistaken belief that the bird could not stand on the ground. Edward the Confessor’s arms actually had doves. See John Brooke-Little,
Boutell’s Heraldry
(London, 1970), p. 206.
55.
LPFD
, vol. 21, pt ii, p. 365. See also National Archives, KB8/14.
56. Hume, p. 146.
57. Weever, pp. 842-3, and see Moore, ‘Heraldic Charge’, p. 573.
58. Hume, p. 147.
59. Cited by Chapman, p. 137.
60.
CDP Spanish
, vol. 9, p. 4.
61. Herbert, p. 565.
62. BL Stowe MS 396, fols 8-9.
63. Hume, pp. 147-8.
64. The present-day Marble Arch.
65. Hume, p. 148. The merchant Ottwell Johnson was more matter of fact about the whole business on 15 January. After complaining about his servant Jasper’s failure to sell cattle at Smithfield because of their poor condition, he reported: ‘the Earl of Surrey was indicted, arraigned and condemned to die as a traitor at the Guildhall in London ... God be merciful unto him and also unto his father, [who] by his own writing [has] submitted himself to the king his majesty ....’ Johnson then moved quickly on to other homely topics such as the gum he was sending Sabine Johnson for perfume, and reminding the recipient to take the pills he had bought ‘to amend your stomach’. See National Archives, SP 46/5/190.
66. Surrey’s body was removed to the new Howard mortuary chapel at Framlingham in 1614 and reburied there. The monument to him and his wife includes his coronet, which is not worn on the effigy’s head but laid separately on a cushion by his legs, as an indication of his attainder. (See Robinson, p. 52.) The monument was erected with funds bequeathed by his younger son, Henry Howard, Earl of Northampton. It is attributed to the sculptor Maximilian Colt, of the parish of St Bartholomew the Great, London, who also carved the monument to Elizabeth I in Westminster Abbey. See Adam White, ‘A Biographical Dictionary of London Tomb Sculptors’,
Walpole Society
, vol. 61 (1999), p. 31.
67. Robinson, p. 243. The sketch is in BL Harleian MS 1453, fol. 69. See also William Sessions, ‘Enough Survives’,
History Today
, vol. 41 (June 1991), p. 53.
68. 28 Henry VIII,
cap
. 1.
69. The commission to Hertford to pronounce ‘in the Parliament House [Henry’s] assent for the attainder’ was signed by the so-called ‘dry stamp’, a system of creating a facsimile of Henry’s signature that had been used since September 1545. This was a small carved wooden block that was impressed on a document - probably with a special hand-press - to leave a dry, imprinted signature, later inked in. Henry’s will was also (suspiciously) signed by dry stamp.
LPFD
, vol. 21, pt ii, p. 408.
70. The ceremony of degrading is described in BL Egerton MS 985, fol. 65.
71. National Archives, E 101/60/22.
72. Brewer,
The Death of Kings
(London, 2000), p. 121.
73.
CDP Spanish
, vol. 9, pp. 494-8.
74.
APC
, vol. 2, p. 106.
75. At Chesworth, the Privy Council authorised Sir Thomas Seymour to take charge of the house and the contents were delivered to him. Some of the tapestries, bedding and carpets belonging to the duke were requisitioned for Edward VI’s use at Nonsuch Palace. See Surrey History Centre, LM/COR/22; LM/COR/2/3 and LM/1890.
76. After her death in June 1577, she was buried with the other Howards at Framlingham. Childs, p. 316.
77. Head,
Ebbs and Flows
... , p. 230.
78. Norfolk’s holdings were summarised as 204 horses in stables; 88 oxen, 115 steers, 407 sheep and 420 hogs. In his salt store at Kenninghall were preserved more than 400 lings [a long, slim-bodied fish of the cod family] 1,617 cod, 43 mudfish [loach], 32 barrels of white herring and 11 barrels of salmon. See Howard,
Memorials
, p. 21.
79. Robinson, p. 23.
80. Fletcher and MacCulloch, p. 145.
81. Norfolk Record Office, BL 11C/14, m.10d.
82. Possibly a description as a hard worker.
83. Norfolk Record Office, WAR 55 Bressingham Court Roll 1545-60.
84. Norfolk Record Office, BL 11C/14, m.10d. For more information, see Diarmaid MacCulloch’s ‘Kett’s Rebellion in Context’,
Past and Present
(August 1979), pp. 53-7, and the same author’s ‘Bondmen under the Tudors’, in C. Cross et al. (eds),
Law and Government under the Tudors
(Cambridge, 1988). See also National Archives, SC 2 (Court Rolls) 192/101 - a description of the courts in Norfolk of Thomas Howard, fourth Duke of Norfolk, 1558.
85. National Archives, SP 46/1/154.
86. National Archives, SP 46/2/78-80.
87.
APC
, vol. 2, p. 206.
88.
APC
, vol. 2, p. 400.
89.
APC
, vol. 3, p. 88.
90.
APC
, vol. 3, p. 254.
91. Wriothesley,
Chronicle
, vol. 2, p. 65. He reported ‘there was such a fear and disturbance among the people suddenly before he suffered that some tumbled down the ditch [moat] and some ran towards the houses nearby and fell, that it was a marvel to see and hear, but [what] the cause was, God knows’.
92. Wriothesley,
Chronicle
, vol. 2, p. 95, and Stow,
Annals
, p. 613.
93. Head,
Ebbs and Flows
... , p. 236.
94. Warwick and Northampton escaped death.
95. Elton,
Reform and Reformation
, p. 377. Norfolk’s goods passed from Somerset to Northumberland in 1550.
96. Rutland Papers, pp. 118-19.
97. ‘Reversal of the Supposed Attainder of Thomas Duke of Norfolk, 1 Mary,
cap
. 13, and ‘Restitution in blood of Thomas Howard, Earl of Surrey’, 1 Mary,
cap
. 1. A copy of Surrey’s restitution is in Arundel Castle Archives, G2/10.
98. Green,
Framlingham
, p. 80.
99. Cruden,
History of Gravesend
, p. 176.
100. Nichols,
Chronicles of Queen Jane
, pp. 38-9.

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