Free The Last White Rose by Desmond Seward

free, he would certainly have tried to knife them.
    In a bizarre indictment (the draft of which had been corrected and annotated by Henry personally), Surrey was accused of displaying at one of his houses a shield that bore the Howard arms quartered with those of King Edward the Confessor. On 13 January 1547 the earl was tried at the Guildhall before a jury of knights and squires from East Anglia as he was not a peer of Parliament, after being brought from the Tower by an escort of 300 yeomen. He defended himself magnificently, speaking from nine in the morning till five in the afternoon.
    Unbowed, and as haughty as ever, he told a senior member of the council, Sir Richard Rich, that he was capable of condemning his own father in return for a piece of gold. He reminded another member, Lord Paget, that his father had been a ‘catchpole’ (a man whose job was arresting debtors), telling him England had never prospered ‘since the King put mean creatures like thee into government’. When rebuked for his attempt to escape, he replied that, however innocent a man might be, he was always condemned. Some of the jury were very unwilling to convict him, but in the end they yielded and he was found guilty of treason, the shield with Edward the Confessor’s arms beingtaken as conclusive proof of his designs on the throne. Six days later, wearing a black satin suit trimmed with black rabbit fur, Surrey was beheaded on Tower Hill.
    An Act of Attainder introduced against Norfolk, condemning the duke to death and confiscating his estates, was passed by Parliament on 27 January, signed for the dying king with a ‘dry stamp’ or facsimile signature. He was saved at the last moment by Henry going to his own eternal reward shortly before dawn the next day, just a few hours before Norfolk was due to climb up the scaffold on Tower Hill. The execution was postponed, indefinitely. But he had to spend the next six years in prison, released only when Mary came to the throne and dying in his bed in 1554, aged eighty-one.
    Shortly after the duke’s arrest, the imperial ambassador of the day, Francis van der Delft, reported a conversation with Lord Chancellor Wriothesley, who had told him smoothly ‘how pitiable it was that persons of such high and noble lineage should have undertaken so shameful a business as to plan the seizure of the government by sinister means’. 9 Rumours circulated that Norfolk and Surrey had intended to murder both the king and the Prince of Wales. There was of course not a word of truth in the charge which, once again, existed only in the strange mind of Henry VIII.
    The two Howards had been victims of an imagination that, as so many times before, had induced a mental condition verging on clinical paranoia; in the king’s diseased mind, father and son reincarnated Suffolks, Poles and Courtenays – and King Richard.

    31. Winter 1546–7: Henry VIII’s Final Phobia
     
1 . E. Jones (ed.), Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey: Poems , Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1973, no. 45.

2 . Hall, p. 866.

3 . ‘devious, vengeful, foul-mouthed and essentially second rate’ is G.R. Elton’s verdict on the Duke of Norfolk, in Reform and Reformation , p. 117.

4 . The latest studies of Surrey are: W.A. Sessions, Henry Howard, the Poet Earl of Surrey , Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1999; and J. Childs, Henry VIII’s Last Victim , Jonathan Cape, London, 2006.

5 . LP Hen VIII , op. cit. , vol. XVI (i), 12.

6 . G. Constantyne, ‘Transcript of an Original Manuscript Containing a Memorial from George Constantine to Thomas, Lord Cromwell’, ed. T. Amyot, Archaeologia 22, London 1831, p. 62.

7 . Jones, Henry Howard .

8 . LP Hen VIII , op. cit. , vol. XXI (ii), 696.

9 . CSP Spain , VIII, 364.

E PILOGUE
     

     

     
    Henry VIII’s lifelong fear that there would be an attempt to oust his dynasty came true when King Edward VI died from tuberculosis on 6 July 1553. At the time, England’s real ruler was John Dudley, Duke of