CHAPTER V 1546 The King dying--The Earl of Surrey--His career and his fate--The Duke of Norfolk's escape--Death of the King.

The King was dying. So much must have been apparent to all who were in a position to judge. None, however, dared utter their thought, since it had been made an indictable offence—the act being directed against soothsayers and prophets—to foretell his death. Those who wished him well or ill, those who would if they could have cared for his soul and invited him to make his peace with God before taking his way hence, were alike constrained to be mute. Before he went to present himself at a court of justice where king and crossing-sweeper stand side by side, another judicial murder was to be accomplished, and one more victim added to the number of the accusers awaiting him there. This was the poet Earl of Surrey, heir to the Dukedom of Norfolk.

Surrey was not more than thirty. But much had been crowded, according to the fashion of the time, into his short and brilliant life. Brought up during his childhood at Windsor as the companion of the King’s illegitimate son, the Duke of Richmond—who subsequently married Mary Howard, his friend’s sister—Surrey had suffered many vicissitudes of fortune; had been in confinement on a suspicion of sympathy with the Pilgrimage of Grace; and in 1543 had again fallen into disgrace, charged with breaking windows in London by shooting pebbles at them. To this accusation he pleaded guilty, explaining, in a satire directed against the citizens of London, that his object had been to prepare them for the divine retribution due for their irreligion and wickedness:

He can scarcely have expected that the plea would have availed, and he expiated his offence by a short imprisonment, chiefly of importance as accentuating his hatred towards the Seymours, who were held responsible for it.36

In the course of the same year he was more worthily employed in fighting the battles of England abroad, where his conduct elicited a cordial tribute of praise from Charles V. “Our cousin, the Earl of Surrey,” wrote the Emperor to Henry, on Surrey’s return to England, would supply him with an account of all that had taken place. “We will therefore only add that he has given good proof in the army of whom he is the son; and that he will not fail to follow in the steps of his father and forefathers, with si gentil coeur and so much dexterity that there is no need to instruct him in aught, and you will give him no command that he does not know how to execute.”37

Two years later Surrey was in command of the English forces at Boulogne, there suffered defeat, and was, though not as an ostensible result of his failure, superseded by his rival and enemy, the Earl of Hertford, brother of the Admiral and head of the Seymour clan.

Such was the record of the man who was to fall a prey to the malice and jealousy of the opposite party in the State. His noble birth, his long descent, and his brilliant gifts, were so many causes tending to make him hated and feared; besides which, even amongst men in whom humility was a rare virtue, he was noted for his pride—“the most foolish, proud boy,” as he was once described, “that is in England.” When he came to be tried for his life those of his own house came forward to bear witness to the contempt he had displayed towards inferiors in rank, if not in power. “These new men,” he had said scornfully—it was his sister who played the part of his accuser—“these new men loved no nobility, and if God called away the King they should smart for it.”38 None of the King’s Council, he was reported to have declared, loved him, because they were not of noble birth, and also because he believed in the Sacrament of the Altar.39

In verse he had likewise made his sentiments clear, comparing himself, much to his advantage, with the men he hated.

It was a natural and inevitable consequence of his attitude towards them that the “new men” hated and sought the ruin of the poet who held them up publicly to scorn; and if his great popularity in the country was in some sort a shield, it was also calculated to prove perilous, by giving rise to suspicion and distrust on the part of a sovereign prone to indulge in these sentiments, and thereby to render the success of his foes more easy.

The Seymours were aware that their time was short. With the King’s approaching death the question of the guardianship of the successor to the throne was becoming daily more momentous; and when pride and vanity on the part of the Earl, together with treachery on that of friends and kin, placed a dangerous weapon in the hands of his opponents, they were prompt to use it.

During the summer there was nothing to serve as a presage of his fate; and so late as August he took part in the magnificent reception accorded to the French ambassadors, successfully vindicating on that occasion his right to precedence over the Earl of Hertford, with whom he was as usual at open enmity.

A new cause of quarrel had been added to the old. The Duke of Norfolk, developing, as age crept upon him, an unwonted desire for peace and amity, had lately devised a method of terminating the feud between his heir and the Seymour brothers, so powerful, by reason of their kinship to Prince Edward, in the State. Not only had he revived a project for uniting his widowed daughter, the Duchess of Richmond, to Thomas Seymour, Lord Admiral, Katherine Parr’s former lover, but had made a further proposal to cement the alliance between the rival houses by marrying three of his grandchildren to Hertford’s children.

The old man’s scheme was not destined to succeed. Whether or not the Seymours would have consented to forget ancient grudges, Surrey remained irreconcilable, flatly refusing his consent to his father’s plan. So long as he lived, he declared, no son of his should ever wed Lord Hertford’s daughter; and when his sister—perhaps not insensible to Thomas Seymour’s attractions—showed an inclination to yield to the Duke’s wishes, he addressed bitter taunts to her. Since Seymour was in favour with the King, he told her ironically, let her conclude the farce of a marriage, and play in England the part which had, in France, belonged to the Duchesse d’Étampes, Francis I.’s mistress.

Mary Howard did not marry the Admiral, but, possibly sharing her brother’s pride, she never forgot or forgave the insult he had offered her; and, repeating the sarcasm as if it had been advice tendered in all seriousness, did her best to damn the Earl in his day of extremity. In a contemporary Spanish chronicle further particulars, true or false, of the quarrel are added. It is there related that, grieved at the tales that had reached him of his sister’s lightness of conduct, Surrey had taken upon himself to administer a brotherly rebuke.

“Sister,” he said, “I am very sorry to hear what I do about you; and if it be true, I will never speak to you again, but will be your mortal enemy.”40

The Duchess was not a woman to accept the admonition meekly, and it was she who was to prove, in the sequel, the more dangerous foe of the two.

The offence for which Surrey nominally suffered the capital penalty seems trivial enough. According to the story told by contemporary authorities—and it suits well with his overweening pride in his ancient blood and royal descent—he caused a painting to be executed wherein the Norfolk arms were joined to those of the royal house, the motto Honi soit qui mal y pense being replaced by the enigmatical device Till then thus, and the whole concealed by a canvas placed above it.

The very fact of the secrecy observed betrays the Earl’s consciousness that he had committed an imprudence. He was guilty of a worse when, notwithstanding the terms upon which he stood with his sister, he made her his confidant in the matter. The Duchess, in her turn, informed her father of what had been done, but to the Duke’s remonstrances Surrey turned a deaf ear. His ancestors, he replied, had borne these arms, and he was much better than they. Powerless to move him, his father, reiterating his fears that it might furnish occasion for a charge of treason, begged that the affair might be kept strictly private, to which Surrey readily agreed. Both men, however, had reckoned without the woman who was daughter to the one, sister to the other. Whether, as some aver,41 the Duchess took the step of betraying her brother directly to the King, or merely corroborated the accusations preferred against him by others—Sir Richard Southwell, a friend of Surrey’s childhood, being the first to denounce him42—the matter soon became known, the Earl was examined at length, and by the middle of December was, with his father, lodged in the Tower on the charge of treason, the assumption of the royal arms being viewed as an implied claim to the succession to the throne, and as a menace to the little heir. Hertford and his brother were at hand to exaggerate the peril to be feared from his ambition; and the affection of the populace, who, as he was taken through the city to his place of captivity, made great lamentation,43 was not fitted to allay apprehension. A month later the Earl’s trial took place at the Guildhall, crowds filling the streets as he went by. Brought before his judges, he made so spirited a defence that Holinshed admits that “if he had tempered his answers with such modesty as he showed token of a right perfect and ready wit, his praise had been the greater”; and though neither wit nor modesty was likely to avail to save him, it was not without long deliberation that the jury agreed to declare him guilty.

Their verdict was pronounced by his implacable enemy, Hertford; being greeted by the people with “a great tumult, and it was a long while before they could be silenced, although they cried out to them to be quiet.”44

The prisoner received what was practically sentence of death in characteristic fashion. His enemies might have vanquished him, but he could still despise them, still assert his inborn superiority to his victors.

“Of what have you found me guilty?” he demanded. “Surely you will find no law that justifies you; but I know that the King wants to get rid of the noble blood around him, and to employ none but low people.”45

On January 19, not a week after his trial, the poet, King Henry VIII.’s latest victim, was beheaded on Tower Hill. It was not the fault of Henry’s advisers that his aged father did not follow him to the grave. To have cleared Surrey out of their path was much; but it was not enough. The Duke’s heir gone, there were many eager to share amongst themselves the Norfolk spoils; Henry was ready to send his old servant to join his son; and only the King’s death, on the very night before the day appointed for the Duke’s execution, saved him from sharing Surrey’s fate. On January 28, 1547, nine days after the Earl had been slain, Henry was dead.

The end can have taken few people by surprise. Whether it was unexpected by the King none can tell. His will was made—a will paving the way for the misfortunes of one of his kin, and preparing the scaffold upon which Lady Jane Grey was to die; since, tacitly setting aside the claims of his elder sister, Margaret of Scotland, and her heirs, he provided that, after his own children, Edward, Mary, and Elizabeth, the descendants of Mary Tudor, of whom Jane was, in the younger generation, the representative, should stand next in the order of succession to the throne. It was the first occasion upon which Lady Jane’s position had been explicitly defined, and was the prelude of the tragedy that was to follow. Should the unrepealed statutes declaring the King’s daughters illegitimate be permitted in the future to weigh against his present provisions in their favour, his great niece or her mother would, in the event of Prince Edward’s death, become heirs to the crown.

For Henry the opportunity of cancelling, had it been possible, the injustices of a lifetime was over. “Soon after the death of the Earl of Surrey,” writes the Spanish chronicler, “the King felt unwell; and, as he was a wise man, he called his council together, and said to them, ‘Gentlemen, I am unwell, and cannot tell when God may call me, so I wish to put my soul in order, and to reward my servants for what they have done.’”

The writer was probably drawing upon his imagination, and presenting rather a picture of what, in his opinion, ought to have taken place than of what truly happened. It quickly became patent to all that the end was at hand; but, though the physicians represented to those about the dying man that it was fitting that he should be warned of his condition, most of them shrank from the task. At length Sir Anthony Denny took the performance of the duty upon himself, exhorting his master boldly to prepare for death, “calling himself to remembrance of his former life, and to call upon God in Christ betimes for grace and mercy.”46

What followed must again be largely matter of conjecture, the various accounts being coloured according to the theological views of the narrator. It is possible that, feeling the end near, and calling to mind, as Denny bade him, the life he had led, Henry may have been visited by one of those deathbed repentances so mercilessly described by Raleigh: “For what do they do otherwise that die this kind of well-dying, but say to God as followeth: We beseech Thee, O God, that all the falsehoods, forswearings, and treacheries of our lives past may be pleasing unto Thee; that Thou wilt, for our sakes (that have had no leisure to do anything for Thine) change Thy nature (though impossible) and forget to be a just God; that Thou wilt love injuries and oppressions, call ambition wisdom, and charity foolishness.”47 Into the secrets of the deathbed none can penetrate. Some say the King’s remorse, for the execution of Anne Boleyn in particular, was genuine; others that he was haunted by visionary fears and terrors. In the Spanish chronicle quoted above, it is asserted that, sending for “Madam Mary,” his injured daughter, he confessed that fortune—he might have said himself—had been hard against her, that he grieved not to have married her as he wished, and prayed her further to be a mother to the Prince, “for look, he is very little yet.”

The same authority has also drawn what one must believe to be an imaginary picture of a final and affecting interview between Katherine and her husband, “when the good Queen could not answer for weeping.”48 His account is uncorroborated by other evidence, and it is impossible to believe that she can have felt genuine sorrow for the death of a man whose life was a perpetual menace to her own.

According to Foxe, when Denny, the courageous servant who had warned him of his danger, asked whether he would see no learned divine, the King replied that, were any such to be called, it should be Cranmer, but him not yet. He would first sleep, and then, according as he felt, would advise upon the matter. When, an hour or two later, finding his weakness increasing, he sent for the Archbishop, it was too late for speech. “Notwithstanding ... he, reaching his hand to Dr. Cranmer, did hold him fast,” and, desired by the latter to give some token of trust in God, he “did wring his hand in his as hard as he could, and so, shortly after, departed.”49

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