CHAPTER VI
THE HOWARDS AND THE SEYMOURS

The collapse of the conspiracy against Katherine Parr led to an immediate counter-plot on the part of the Seymours and their allies to compromise the Duke of Norfolk and his son, Surrey, and thereby frustrate the aspirations of the Catholics, of whose party Norfolk was the acknowledged chief. A previous attempt to inflict irretrievable damage on the credit of the Howards had partially failed, though the unsavoury revelations connected with the arrest and execution of Queen Katherine Howard had covered the illustrious name with obloquy, and almost every conspicuous Howard in England had been sent to the Tower,[64] on the charge of having concealed the Queen’s previous immorality from the King’s knowledge when he proposed to marry her. At that moment Norfolk and his son only escaped by taking Henry’s side against their miserable kinswoman. But the Duke never regained his full influence over his master, and, despite his great services, both as statesman and warrior, lived on, to use the expression of one of his contemporaries, “like the bird that is wounded i’ the wing.” Yet he was a great power in the politics of those days, for though the Catholic party was of but small account at Court, a good two-thirds of the people remained firmly attached to the ancestral faith; this was the case more especially in the rural districts, where the vast majority clung to the dogmas and ceremonies of the ancient Church, and only awaited an opportunity to assert their preference. For the matter of that, it was shown very early in Queen Mary’s reign that the Protestant fervour of the official world, being a matter of policy rather than of conviction, was not to be relied on. The majority of that aristocracy which had so eagerly accepted the extreme reforms assented to by Edward VI was to be seen, a few weeks after his death, parading the streets of London, taper in hand, in the wake of the revived processions of Corpus Christi and Our Lady.[65]

Thomas Howard, third Duke of Norfolk, was one of the most conspicuous figures in Henry’s reign. He may not, perhaps, have been as astute a statesman as has been asserted, but he showed remarkable qualities as a capable peacemaker on the occasion of the Pilgrimage of Grace; while as a warrior he had no rival, and proved himself a hero on Flodden Field. If anything, he was excessive in his loyalty to the King, and he would even seem to have sunk all sense of his own dignity and importance, humbling himself utterly before the monarch whose assumption of quasi-divine attributes he had aided and abetted. Thus, when his niece Anne Boleyn was tried and executed for misdemeanours she was certainly not proved to have committed,[66] he, at her royal assassin’s command, pronounced the death sentence, and with his son, the young Earl of Surrey, who sat at his feet, holding the Earl Marshal’s baton in his hand, was actually present at her execution. When, some few years later, Norfolk’s other niece, Katherine Howard, was proved guilty of many serious offences, both before and after marriage, Norfolk sat in judgment upon her and would have witnessed her death too but for an attack of gout which kept him a prisoner. Two days after the execution he penned an abject letter to the King apologising for “the naughtiness of his said niece, the late Queen.”[67] In person, Norfolk was a dark, handsome man, of moderate stature, with piercing eyes and an exceedingly intelligent countenance. Holbein has left us several magnificent oil portraits of him, and at least one noble drawing, now in the Windsor Collection. He was fairly educated, a good Latin scholar, and a patron of art. His first wife, Princess Anne Plantagenet, the King’s aunt, died young in 1512. The day on which he espoused his second,[68] the handsome Lady Elizabeth Stafford, was an evil one for him. The alliance was one of convenience on his side and of compulsion on hers. His duchy had been greatly impoverished by the attainder of his father, the second Duke, after Bosworth, and the luckless Buckingham’s daughter was possessed of a handsome fortune in money and wide lands. She had been previously contracted to Ralph Nevill, afterwards Earl of Westmoreland, to whom she was greatly attached and with whom she kept up a correspondence till the end of her life. Although she bore her husband five children, the Duchess of Norfolk suffered some neglect at his hands, her rival being a certain Bess Holland,[69] a gentlewoman in her service. The mortification caused by this outrage drove the poor Duchess to the verge of distraction. She seems to have been a naturally conscientious, if narrow-minded, woman, of an exceedingly high-strung and excitable temperament. We should describe her nowadays as an “impossible” person, whose lack of tact and outbursts of uncontrollable rage not only alienated her husband’s affections, but deprived her of her children’s love as well as of her servants’ respect.

Of all the men of his time, Surrey, this ill-used lady’s son, was the most accomplished. He was an excellent Latin, French, and Italian scholar, and well versed in ancient and modern literature. No one could excel him in tourney or joust—not even John Dudley, afterwards Duke of Northumberland, who had exceeding skill with the sword and spear, and than whom scarce one could pull a bow with surer aim. Surrey danced more lightly than Thomas Seymour, who prided himself on the “altitude of his pirouettes,” and the King himself in his singing youth did not warble a sweeter note. No Englishman since Chaucer had so enriched our literature with verse all redolent of those sweet-scented fields and lanes, meadows and gardens amid which the poet’s muse loved best to linger. An Elizabethan critic well described him as “a poet new crept out of the school of Dante, Petrarch, and Ariosto,” and “coming nearer to Ariosto” than to either the prophet of Florence or the inspired singer of Vaucluse. Though of but medium height, Surrey was so graceful and well-proportioned as to seem taller than he really was. There is a portrait of him at Hampton Court, most probably by Guilliam Streete, which gives us a fair idea of this prince for a fairy-tale. The face is full of youthful charm: the eyes hazel, frank, and winning; the cheeks rounded and flushed with rosy health; the hair a darkish chestnut; the slight moustache of the colour of ripe corn. His costume is superb. The young Earl stands before us garbed from head to foot in red velvet, softened by bands of brocade and sarsenet, the only white spot visible being the silk shirt open at the neck, and even that enriched with a dainty arabesque wrought in gold stitchery. On his well-shaped head rests a jaunty cap of crimson velvet with a feathered plume of the same tint.

There was much that was purely personal in the violent animosity displayed by the Seymours against the Howards in general and against Surrey in particular. The Seymours, although of far more ancient and well-ascertained lineage than either the Brandons or the Boleyns, were not of the great aristocracy, but, in a sense, what the modern French would call arrivistes. Had it not been for the accident which raised their sister Jane to the towering position of Queen-Consort, the Seymours would probably have remained what they originally were, mere country squires of excellent lineage, reputed to be remotely connected with royalty. Their father,[70] Sir William St. Maur, or Seymour, of Wolf’s Hall, Wiltshire, had on one occasion entertained King Henry VIII; and their mother, Lady Seymour, by birth a Wentworth, and a lineal descendant of Edward III, was highly connected; but otherwise there was nothing in their antecedents to distinguish them from scores of other equally respectable and wealthy country gentlemen. The sudden[71] elevation of their sister Jane brought them a rapid promotion, which first dazzled them and then turned their heads. Honours and positions were heaped upon them. Edward, the eldest son, was first created Viscount Beauchamp, and, after the birth of Prince Edward, Earl of Hertford; the second, Thomas, was knighted. The youngest, Henry, seems to have preferred obscurity and security to rank and risk, and lived the life of a country gentleman, married young, and merely accepted knighthood on Edward VI’s accession.

The ranks of the old aristocracy had been thinned by the prolonged civil wars and the plague, and towards the middle of the century the Court was so full of new men that at the time of Henry’s last illness there were only two dukes in the peerage—Norfolk, then seventy-two; and Suffolk, a lad of seventeen. The new peers, whose fortunes were mainly derived from confiscated church property, were eager to obtain recognition from the few of the old aristocracy who yet remained, and more especially from the Howards, a sturdy race, full of sap and vigour, and conspicuous in Court and State. The Duke of Norfolk was too experienced a man, both socially and politically, to permit his inborn pride of birth to display itself out of season. With Surrey it was otherwise. In his case, pride of ancestry was something more than a mere matter of vulgar boast. He regarded it with a poet’s eye and imagination, and took delight in remembering that through his veins flowed the blood of emperors and kings who had founded realms and dynasties, and built up the glory of a great nation. In the beginning of the fifteenth century a marriage between Robert Howard and the Lady Margaret Mowbray had brought the illustrious house into alliance with royalty. His father’s first wife had been the reigning King’s aunt, and his mother, Elizabeth Stafford, had a right to quarter Royal Arms on her escutcheon. With such a pedigree, and in an age when rank was paramount, Surrey conceived himself sufficiently powerful to hold his own against the encroachments of a new peerage only too eager to claim a fellowship which offended his sense of propriety.

When the Seymours first came to Court, in the heyday of their youth and good looks, they sought young Surrey’s society, just as in our day new people seek that of a leader of the “smartest set.” So long as they kept their place, Surrey consorted with them willingly enough; but their rapacity and arrogance jarred on him at last, and he resented their many attempts at over-familiarity. He himself, on occasion, was apt to transgress the bounds of good behaviour, and once upon a time, being in lodgings in St. Lawrence Lane, Old Jewry, and leading what he himself is pleased to call a “racketty life,” went brawling about the streets at midnight with young William Pickering[72] and young Wyatt, the poet’s son, casting stones into peaceful citizens’ windows, and frightening them out of their wits. One night the party rowed over in a boat to Southwark, where dwelt in those days that gay and facile sisterhood whose representatives, in this year of Grace, 1909, patrol more central parts of our great city. In this fast company, our young gentlemen, evidently in their cups, behaved disgracefully. On Surrey’s part such conduct was all the more unseemly since he was already married to the plain-faced, but wealthy, Lady Frances Vere,[73] Lord Oxford’s daughter, to whom he declared himself devotedly attached. These escapades ended by attracting public attention, and their heroes were arrested for disorderly conduct. Thanks to their rank, they were brought before the Privy Council,[74] instead of being haled before an ordinary justice, though, as ill-luck would have it, Edward, Lord Hertford, was presiding at the Council board. The opportunity of paying off a few old scores was too much for him, and he swiftly resolved to give Surrey good cause to remember him in future. A very comical and characteristic scene ensued.[75] Surrey, mimicking Hertford, who was nothing if not puritanical in his mode of expressing himself, “having ever God on his lips,” assured the Council that if he had done what he had, it had been for the good of the souls of the wicked citizens of London, who were behaving more abominably than the men of papal Rome. Had he not seen them sitting round tables and playing at cards in the late hours of the night?—and was it not a godly thing to whizz a stone or so at their windows, which stone, passing silently through the air, fell with all the greater suddenness among them, thereby recalling them to a proper sense of their duties to their God, their King, and their country?[76] Mrs. Arundel, a woman of good family but greatly impoverished, who kept a sort of boarding-house for bachelors of rank in St. Lawrence Lane, Old Jewry, was the Earl’s landlady, and imparted a very different colour to the episode. “Her young gentleman,” she said, had frankly admitted to her that he considered these pranks good jokes: but she herself disapproved of them, especially the shooting at the windows of women of light character, or “bawds,” in Southwark, which the Earl, it seems, was addicted to, going by boat close to their quarters and firing off petards at the “trolls”! There was nothing for it, therefore, but to pronounce sentence. Surrey was committed to the Fleet, the most abominable of all the many vile prisons of those days, while Wyatt and Pickering, though of much inferior rank, were sent to the stately Tower, whence they were delivered in a day or two on payment of a heavy fine and promising good behaviour. How long Surrey remained in durance it is difficult to say—long enough certainly for him to compose his “Satire on the Citizens of London” and several other poems. He never forgave Seymour his share in the business, and never failed to annoy his enemy openly or covertly whenever opportunity occurred. It was quite in keeping with his character to address amatory verses with this intent to Hertford’s handsome and very proud wife, who took his lines in very bad part, as so many insults to her honour. The Countess once made a scandal by deliberately turning her back upon the poet-Earl when, in August 1542, at a ball in his own father’s house,[77] he ventured to ask her permission to lead her out to dance.

Late in the summer of 1542 a very serious quarrel broke out between Seymour and Surrey, over an incident which took place in Hampton Court Park. Seymour, it was alleged, had reported against Surrey that he had openly approved of the Pilgrimage of Grace. Surrey, coming face to face with his antagonist in a glen in the park, instantly challenged him. Coats were off in a moment, and the two were in the midst of a hearty boxing-match when the guard arrived and took both into custody for violating the royal privilege and fighting within the precincts of the King’s palace. The punishment for this offence, as readers of The Fortunes of Nigel will recollect, was loss of the right hand. All the diplomacy and influence of the Duke of Norfolk had to be exerted to avert the infliction of this terrible penalty; but, thanks to his efforts, both the hot-headed young gentlemen escaped with a sharp reprimand. Scores of similar curious instances might be quoted from the chronicles and letters of the time, to prove the depth and bitterness of the social animosity between the Howards and the Seymours. The Duke himself resented the cruel manner in which Hertford had behaved in the matter of His Grace’s niece, the unhappy Katherine Howard. There can be no doubt that at one time both Cranmer and the King wished to spare her life, and would have spared it had not Hertford, in his hot haste to ruin the Howards’ credit, prematurely dispatched letters to the King’s Ambassadors abroad containing full details of the Queen’s disgrace, with orders to hand them to the sovereigns to whose Courts they were accredited. This publicity rendered the royal clemency impossible.[78]

Early in the summer of 1546 the Duke of Norfolk made up his mind, in what he held to be the interests of himself and his family, to bring about a reconciliation, if that were possible, between his house and Seymour’s. He fully realised that, ageing as he was, he could no longer be a match for two unscrupulous and very able men, then reaching the prime of life, and already holding the King’s complete confidence. Further, he felt Surrey to be hopeless in all business calling for tact and diplomacy, and was convinced the persistent animosity between his son and Hertford would lead before long to some awful catastrophe. Surrey’s bravery as a fighting soldier was undisputed, but as a commander his lack of reticence and his rashness had led the King’s troops in France into more than one disaster; he himself had paid the penalty of his rashness before the walls of Montreuil, where he was seriously wounded and only saved from certain death by the gallantry of Sir Thomas Clere. He had then been recalled, and Hertford had been sent to take his place, a bitter humiliation to the proud Howards and one which more than anything else rankled in Surrey’s soul. Yet the old Duke recognised that Hertford’s bravery and tact as warrior and diplomatist had soon ended the war and obtained peace with honour for the English forces, thus raising his popularity to the highest pitch; for there was nothing the nation then desired so much as peace, at home and abroad. Hertford’s brother, Sir Thomas, was, if anything, still more popular, for he had so successfully scoured the seas in quest of French galleons laden with provisions that suppressed monasteries had been converted into storehouses. The magnificent ex-church of the Grey Friars had become a wine-vault, crammed to the roof with barrels of Burgundy and other wines of the best French vintages. In Austin Friars such a stock of cheeses was stored that there was no moving in that erstwhile beautiful priory church, and the huge and splendid church of the Black Friars was literally packed with salt herring and dried cod. Wherefore the people had good reason to be well pleased with brother Thomas.