Traitors’ Gate, from the Bloody Tower
Anne Askew’s fellow-sufferers were named John Lascels (? Lascelles), John Adams, and Nicholas Beleinian; there is a woodcut of their martyrdom in Foxe’s book.
Anne Askew’s death appears to have been fraught with some danger to Queen Catherine Parr. Aware of the Queen’s sympathy for Anne, and her leaning towards the Reformed faith, Wriothesley, the bigoted Lord Chancellor, went so far as to draw up a warrant for Catherine’s arrest. Fortunately for the Queen she was warned of her danger, and either was actually frightened into a fever, or feigned illness. During an interview with the King, the suffering Queen so worked upon his feelings, that when Wriothesley appeared with a guard to take her into custody, Henry turned upon him, and, heaping the foulest abuse upon him, drove him from the presence (Speed’s Chronicle). Luckily for Catherine Parr the days of Henry were near their end, or it is more than probable that she would have shared the fate of Anne Boleyn and Catherine Howard.
In 1546 peace had been made between England and France, and in order to ratify the treaty the French sent their Lord High Admiral to England, with the Bishop of Evreux, and some other nobles. Landing at Greenwich, they were conducted with great ceremony to the Tower—where a splendid banquet awaited them in the palace of the fortress—by the Earls of Essex and Derby in the royal barge. After leaving the Tower they proceeded to Lambeth Palace, and thence to Hampton Court, where the treaty was signed. These were the last guests of the Sovereign in the Tower. The last State prisoner to be executed in Henry’s reign was the gifted and brilliantly endowed Earl of Surrey, the eldest son of Thomas Howard, third Duke of Norfolk, who, as I have said before, also narrowly escaped with his life.
Henry VIII., for the good of his people, was dying fast at the close of the year 1546. His once handsome and athletic form had become a bloated mass of corruption. His nature, always cruel, became fiend-like during his later years, owing to his physical sufferings. He knew that death was gaining upon him rapidly, but whilst he lived he determined still to destroy, and when even in the very grasp of the King of Terrors, still sent out his death orders. No cause can be assigned for the King, while his wicked old life was fast ebbing away from him, ordering the death of Norfolk and his son Surrey. The only possible reason was that perhaps Henry feared they might wield too great an influence after his death, when his heir, Edward, should have become King.
Henry intended that his son’s uncle, Lord Hertford, Queen Jane Seymour’s brother, should be his sole guardian, and for a wretched pretext Norfolk and Surrey were arrested, imprisoned in the Tower, and sentenced to death. Of the Duke of Norfolk, Sir Walter Raleigh wrote in the preface to his great History: “Henry knew not how to value his deservings, having never omitted anything that concerned his own honour and the King’s service.” Despite his weakness for tears, Norfolk may rank amongst the English worthies, for he had done good service to the State, both in arms and council. He had commanded the English army at the Battle of Flodden, and had led another army during a second victorious war in Scotland; he had also led the English van in the war with France. In Ireland he had been one of the best and most just of the English Lords-Deputy. By the accident of birth the Duke was of the blood-royal, being descended from the Mowbrays; further than this, he had married one of the daughters of Edward IV., and two of his nieces had been Queens of England. For his own safety he was perilously near the steps of the throne, and his birth was too high, the story of his life too romantic, for Henry to tolerate his surviving himself, consequently, with reason or without, his death was determined upon; Henry was never troubled by lack of just cause. The dying King excused his treatment of the Duke and his son Surrey to foreign courts, by giving out that they had conspired to take upon themselves the government of the State; this was a pure invention. Another and a still more ridiculous charge brought against them was that Norfolk and his son had quartered in their shield the royal arms of Edward the Confessor. This charge could not have hoodwinked the most simple, for it had been the custom of the Duke’s family long before he himself was born to have these arms quartered upon their shield. However, on the 14th of January 1547, the House of Lords, without even the form of a trial, and without examining either the Duke or his son, passed a bill of attainder against them, and the end of the month was fixed for their execution.
While awaiting his trial in the Tower Norfolk appears to have been inclined—to make use of a racing expression—to “hedge,” as regarded his religious opinions. The Duke had always professed himself a Catholic, both by birth and conviction, but from his prison he sent a petition to the Lords of the Council in which, after asking their permission to have some books sent to him from Lambeth, he adds, “for unless I have books to read ere I fall asleep, and after I wake again, I cannot sleep, nor have done these dozen years. That I may have mass, and be bound upon my life not to speak to him who says mass, which he may do in the other chamber whilst I remain within. That I may be allowed sheets to lie in; to have licence in the daytime to walk in the chamber without, and in the night be locked in as I am now. I would gladly have licence to send to London to buy one book of St Austin, ‘de Civitate Dei,’ and one of Josephus, ‘de Antiquitatibus,’ and another of Sabellius, who doth declare most of any book that I have read, how the Bishop of Rome from time to time hath usurped his power against all Princes by their unwise sufferance” (“Seward’s Anecdotes,” Ed. 1798).
Surrey was placed in the Tower at the same time as his father. Not only was Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey, a charming poet, especially when writing of love, of which his verses addressed to the “Fair Geraldine” are perhaps his best, but he was also remarkable in the history of English literature as having been the first writer of blank verse in our language; he was also a distinguished soldier. But thirty years old when his fate came upon him, he was a national loss, and in killing Surrey, Henry destroyed one of England’s most gifted sons. Not being a peer, Surrey was tried before a Common jury at the Guildhall on the 13th January 1547. He made a splendid defence where no defence was necessary, and where no defence, however eloquent, and no career, however blameless, would have saved him. With the axe’s edge turned towards him he left the Guildhall for the Tower, and six days later one of the wisest, noblest, and most gifted heads that England possessed, rolled in the bloody sawdust of the scaffold on Tower Hill. Norfolk’s life was only saved by the providential death of Henry VIII., which took place only a few hours before the time fixed for the Duke’s execution. He remained a prisoner in the Tower until the reign of Mary Tudor, and lived to preside at the trial of the Duke of Northumberland, and again to take up arms when Wyatt’s rebellion broke out, although then in his eightieth year. He died a natural death in his bed—a rare event with the heads of his house—in 1554, aged eighty-one. Norfolk had lived in the reign of eight English sovereigns—from the reign of Henry VI. to that of Mary Tudor.
Back of the Byward Tower