Sir, I understand from your letter that you desire me to be a woman of good reputation [toufs onette fame] when I come to court, and you tell me that the queen will take the trouble to converse with me, and it gives me great joy to think of talking with such a wise and virtuous person. This will make me all the keener to persevere in speaking French well, and also especially because you have told me to, and have advised me for my own part to work at it as much as I can.
—Anne Boleyn’s letter to her father, Thomas Boleyn, written from the court of Margaret of Austria in 1514 [via The Life and Death of Anne Boleyn by Eric Ives]
“Perfection, of a kind, was what he was after, And the poetry he invented was easy to understand; He knew human folly like the
“Perfection, of a kind, was what he was after,
And the poetry he invented was easy to understand;
He knew human folly like the back of his hand,
And was greatly interested in armies and fleets;
When he laughed, respectable senators burst with laughter,
And when he cried the little children died in the streets.”
- W.H. Auden (1907 – 1973), Epitaph on a Tyrant
On Tuesday, May 9th, 1536 Henry VIII strode into one of the vast audience chambers at Hampton Court Palace and took his seat before 22 bowing aristocrats and 27 bowing gentlemen-in-waiting. Near his throne, like a dutiful raven, stood Secretary of State Thomas Cromwell, waiting to assist his royal master in the formal notification to the aristocracy that the Queen of England had been arrested and would stand trial within the week for multiple counts of sexual perversion and intended treason. Earlier that day, the cumbersome legal proceedings against the Queen had been commenced as the Grand Jury of Middlesex prepared to meet in Westminster to organise the mundane details required for a treason trial, now that the main ground-work of evidence gathering had been completed by Cromwell. The foreman of the jury, Giles Alington, a stepson of the late Sir Thomas More, remarked that as far as he was concerned there was no need for there to be a trial at all - the Queen should be put to death at the first available opportunity.
In his slightly high-pitched voice, the King proceeded to outline the Queen’s heinous crimes which were “such great and weighty matters as whereupon doth consist the surety of our person, the preservation of our honour, and the tranquillity and quietness of you and all other our loving and faithful subjects”. He pointed out that although Norris, Brereton, Weston and Smeaton would stand trial in London on Friday, the Queen and Lord Rochford, as members of the Royal Family and aristocracy, were legally entitled to have a trial before their peers – that is to say, more or less everyone now clustered into the King’s presence. The King's presence reminded them that every man was expected to their duty for “the preservation of our honour”; there was not to be another unfortunate and unexpected acquittal of an accused traitor, as had happened with Henry Norris’s father-in-law, Lord Dacre, two years earlier.
With fulsome protestations of loyalty and yet further bowing, the lords and gentlemen assured the King of their repugnance at the Queen’s “abominable and detestable” actions. Retiring, they left the King alone with Cromwell, who promised his Sovereign that the rest of the nobility – some of whom had retired to their estates at the far extremities of the King’s domains – would be ordered back to London in time for the Queen’s trial for a much-needed show of unity.
This call for singularity of purpose amongst the elite was the first time the King had been seen in public – or rather, officially – since he had left the May Day jousts at Greenwich eight days earlier. He had, of course, been seen by the more eagle-eyed of his subjects, sailing downriver at night to take his fiancée Jane Seymour out for night-time supper parties on the Thames. With the music floating from the barge and Jane Seymour perched at his side, dressed with a conservatism that bordered on the theatrical. The sight did not sit well with the Londoners watching from the shore and Cromwell had spent the last few days trying to hunt down the authors of various pamphlets ridiculing the King and his wife-to-be. The Spanish ambassador had stared on in grim amazement at how cheerfully the King wore his cuckold horns, whilst the Bishop of Carlisle nearly fainted with mortification when the King presented him with a play he had written - before his wife's arrest - dramatising Anne's alleged evil.
With the news that the pro-Boleyn pamphleteers were being hunted down by Cromwell’s men and the reassuring sight of the greatest men in the kingdom promising to serve the government’s purpose, Henry Tudor retired once again to his privy apartments, where he dispatched a short letter to Surrey, where Jane Seymour was staying in with the Carew family and her younger sisters, Lady Elizabeth Ughtred and Mistress Dorothy Seymour. He told her that there was some literature circulating in the capital mocking them, but that she was not to be unduly upset by it or worried if anyone brought it up in conversation.
The King’s appearance at Hampton Court on May 9th raises the question of how deeply he was complicit in the judicial murder of his wife. Despite the King's garishly inappropriate nocturnal river parties and the fact that the audience on May 9th clearly shows he was not above using the charisma and terror his person inspired to remind the nobility of what he expected them to do, Jasper Ridley, G.W. Bernard, E.W. Ives, R.M. Warnicke and Alison Weir have all argued – if for very different reasons – that Henry believed Anne was guilty. In her excellent The Lady in the Tower, Weir goes so far as to say that: “In weighing up the evidence for and against her, the historian cannot but conclude that Anne Boleyn was the victim of a dreadful miscarriage of justice: and not only Anne and the men accused with her, but also the King himself, the Boleyn faction and – saddest of all – Elizabeth, who was to bear the scars of it all her life.” The general presumption, particularly by Ives and Weir, is that the mastermind behind the Queen’s downfall was his chief advisor, Thomas Cromwell (not to be confused with his infamous great-great-nephew, Oliver), who manipulated the King into believing his wife’s death was essential.
Now is not the time to go into the enormously complicated theories behind what exactly caused Anne Boleyn’s downfall in the months preceding her death. After years of research and of reading both the primary and secondary sources, to me two facts remain clear: firstly that she was innocent, secondly that it happened quickly. In this, I concur with more or less every major historian and writer working in the field at the moment.
For me personally, however, the missing third of this tragedy is not Thomas Cromwell, but Henry VIII. It was, after all, Henry who signed the death warrants and whilst it may have been Cromwell who organised the interrogations, arrests and trials, it frankly beggars belief that Henry could have been so easily duped into believing in his wife’s guilty. As far as I’m concerned, Henry was neither a participant nor a victim in what happened in 1536 – rather, he was the chief architect and the author of the tragedy. Cromwell certainly organised the details and oversaw the execution of the plot, but under no circumstances could he have dared act so audaciously – and so manically (the entire thing was a swift, brutal mess, without any of Cromwell’s usual slow, brilliant, relentless tactics) – without having been told to do so, in so many words, by Henry and to do so quickly.
For me, the best explanation condensed explanation comes from the historian Derek Wilson in his book A Brief History of Henry VIII: Reformer and Tyrant (2009): -
The details of this notorious travesty of justice – the interrogations, the suborning of witnesses, the dubious interpretation of the statute under which Anne was condemned – have frequently been explored ... If we look for a pointer to the truth, we should consider the means – the extremely cumbersome and illegal means – used to bring Anne down. This was a quite unwarranted extension of the existing treason law. Cromwell and his legal experts asserted that adultery by or with a queen was high treason. It was not. Once Anne’s enemies decided to go down this route, they had to find men they could fit up as the queen’s lecherous partners. So, the net had to be spread wider and confessions forced out of Anne’s supposed paramours. All this was complicated and messy. Simple annulment would have been enough to end the marriage. If it was necessary to blacken Anne’s name it would have been possible to fabricate an attempt by her on the king’s life (something which was initially considered, but then dropped). The only reason Cromwell would devise an unnecessarily complex scheme was that it was what Henry wanted. At the heart of the murder of Anne Boleyn lies sex – sex and jealous and the fear that only sex can provide.... Resentments, fears, jealousies and suspicions now multiplied in Henry’s fevered brain. He saw Anne at the centre of the group of admiring males, singing, laughing, dancing, sharing jokes – perhaps at his expense. And this was the woman who had the gall to lecture him about the attentions he was paying to Mistress Seymour. He also saw the pious queen who set her preachers up to humiliate him, who thought she knew more about Christ’s religion than God’s appointed head of the English church.
Or, in a nutshell – obsessive love turned into obsessive hatred and Anne was as powerless to escape the latter in 1536 as she had been to escape the former ten years earlier. And so Cromwell authored the details of the tragedy, whilst Henry commanded the original subject matter.
Article ends here. I would also add Schofield’s thoughts from his bio of Cromwell to explain why i’m in the Henry Did It camp:
A digression is now necessary because our conspiracy theorists give this sermon quite a different emphasis. They waste few words on Solomon, and home in instead on Haman as if he was Skip’s (or Anne’s) main theme. This, they claim positively, was a direct attack on Cromwell because of his policy regarding the monasteries, and it riled him so intensely that he began putting together his evil designs to murder the queen.10
If, however, Anne had ever borne any ill will towards Cromwell over the small monasteries, she now had far more than that to vex her. Henry’s heart had turned against her and his affection for Jane was an open secret; while Anne, queen though she was, had to watch and endure the shenanigans of the Seymour party and all the rumours of a new marriage. Cromwell was not the one stirring all this up; he was simply waiting to see what Henry would do, and meanwhile carrying on negotiations with Chapuys and dealing with other government business. And where is the evidence for Cromwell’s deadly retaliation? Only in those words clumsily mistranslated and taken out of context from Chapuys’s letter of 6 June seen in the previous chapter. The facts tell a wholly different story, and even Eric Ives is compelled to admit that Cromwell isn’t doing a thing about Anne at this stage.
When Skip quoted the wicked deeds of Haman, he was complaining about councillor s (the plural), not one in particular, and Anne had more dangerous enemies on the council than Cromwell – Norfolk for example, and Jane’s factional supporters. Because none of Henry’s ministers except Cranmer was showing much sympathy for Anne, this could have been a swipe at all of them. It is, however, true that Cromwell had been called Haman before, and he would be labelled Haman again in the Pilgrimage of Grace of 1537; but this was the invective of aggrieved Papalists of the old religion, never of reformers. Our conspiracy theorists have now got themselves into a pickle.
If Anne is an evangelical queen, as they say, why is she likening Cromwell to Haman, when Cromwell has been smuggling Melanchthon’s Apology into England, reforming the monasteries along evangelical lines and encouraging Henry to treat with the Lutherans? Those who seek to set Anne at enmity with Cromwell succeed only in delivering a devastating indictment of her evangelical credentials.11
For the sake of argument, however, let us suppose that Cromwell was, as is alleged, the prime or even the sole target of Anne’s anger. How did he react? He did nothing at all. The taunts of the doomed queen and the excitable Skip, if they really were aimed at him, passed him by like the idle wind. As Ives himself well notes, when Skip was taken to task for his sermon, he was interrogated on all aspects of it except the Esther-Haman point. Skip later re-appears in the records with Anne when she was in prison in the Tower. Again Cromwell does nothing. Obviously no one, least of all Cromwell, was getting excited over this rather worn and silly Haman jibe. Now in the thick of complex negotiations with Chapuys, he had far weightier things on his mind. Besides, likening a minister to Haman was pretty tame stuff when set alongside the comparison of Henry, Defender of the Faith and Head of the Church, to the apostate Solomon.12
Astute, adult men of state are not like petulant six-year-olds, who must get their own back whenever someone calls them names. Nor do they waste valuable time on petty, personal vendettas, especially when there is nothing worth getting worked up about. And should the time ever come for a sharp, surgical strike against an opponent, they make sure that someone else’s fingerprints are on the knife. So even if Cromwell had wanted to be rid of Anne, he needed only to wait patiently for Henry and the Seymours to do the deed for him. Cromwell was never afraid of this queen’s sharp tongue. ‘She can do me no harm’, he assured Chapuys a year ago. It was true then and it was even truer at this stage. Comparisons with Anne’s putsch against Wolsey in 1529–30 are not valid here. In Wolsey’s last years, Anne was Henry’s true love, the woman who would bear him his heir. In April 1536 she was neither. Her place in the king’s heart had been stolen by Jane. It did not matter any more whether Anne wanted Cromwell’s head off. She may have wanted Jane’s head off too, but there was nothing she could do about it. Henry, not Anne, decided whose heads should roll. The crumbling Boleyn faction had become toothless, and it held no terrors for Cromwell.
- John Schofield, The Rise and Fall of Thomas Cromwell: Henry VIII’s Most Faithful Servant, Chapter 9: Around the Throne, the Thunder Rolls. (Italics mine).
I noticed you've been following me for awhile thanks. I saw some of your posts on the Howards and noticed that you mentioned somewhere that the Duke of Norfolk might have played a part in Cromwell's downfall in 1540 in order to get revenge for Anne Boleyn's execution.
That's a very interesting theory and I like it. Is there much evidence for any affection Norfolk or the other Howards had for Anne? I've always seen Norfolk as an evil villain who treated his family badly but maybe there was more to him than that?
Hello.
Sorry it's taken such a time to respond, but as you'll see it's VERY long, so I wouldn't start reading this on the bus.
Part One
As a child I used to be very annoyed by 20th-century writers treating historical figures like ice-cold robots welded to lifeless 'logic', and incapable of doing anything rash or ridiculous.
Oh why would Richard kill the Princes when it'd make him look bad?!
See? It must've been a plot by Margaret Beaufort all along.
(I know it's improved since then, but that first impression stuck.)
Reading history, I've always assumed family members instinctively cared for one another, unless their words and actions proved otherwise, and yet the above mentality pushed the exact opposite: that it was 'irresponsible' to even suggest any sort of natural bond between relatives unless they actually wrote it down, which is an absurd standard.
To me it's as silly as saying 'we don't know' if they breathed air as no one put it in a diary.
What does it matter how long ago they lived? They're still people.
I've even seen the extremely smug attitude that caring about one's own children is entirely a 'modern' invention, and the Mediæval and Tudor age wouldn't have understood such a concept.
Wouldn't have understood love!
Since then I've been interested in emotional bonds between friends and family, given how much closer they were than now, particularly rebelling against the idea Elizabeth didn't care about Anne.
And the Boleyns / Howards are my favourites, so their clannish level of kinship fascinates me the most.
Let's go through some of them:
Catherine Howard, Countess of Bridgewater
Catherine's first husband was Rhys ap Gruffydd, heir of a powerful Welsh family.
Problem was when his grandfather died Rhys got passed over (I expect because he was seventeen) in favour of Walter Devereux (the 10th Baron Ferrers), and Rhys wasn't 'avin that.
Devereux arrested him for disturbing the peace, which sent Catherine bananas as she'd convinced herself they were all out to get her husband.
In response she stirred up the local gentry and marched on Carmarthen Castle, threatening to burn the door down and bust on in there if Rhys wasn't freed.
Well after that unease and bitter factionalism bubbled up to denonation point, with servants killed on either side and Catherine attacking and destroying Devereux's property, meaning he sent word to England descibing BOTH of them as leaders of a 'rebellion and insurrection'.
Rhys sounds like a knob to me. You could say Henry caused this mess in the first place, but Rhys ought to have known where all this was leading.
His Wiki page lays it on that he was some noble folk hero martyred to the Reformation, but adding 'FitzUrien' to his name, thereby playing on ancient Welsh myths and thus (supposedly) announcing himself as Prince of Wales, was pushing his luck to say the least.
That's a worse blunder than Henry Howard made and no one ever feels sorry for him.
I shouldn't think he had conspired with James V, but going by this quote from the chronicler Elis Gruffudd (a very interesting fella in his own right) he wasn't universally mourned:
Rhys was beheaded in 1531, but Catherine was in the soup herself after all she'd been up to assisting him.
As Gareth Russell says:
'While we may never know exactly how much his own actions brought about Rhys's death, we can be certain of the devastating effect it had on his widow. She had been intimately involved in her husband's quarrel, and so the possibility that she would be accused of complicity in his alleged treason was tangible.
Left to forge prospects for their three young children — Anne, Thomas and Gruffydd — and fearful for herself, Lady Katherine followed in the footsteps of her elder brother Edmund and flung herself on the mercy of their niece, Anne Boleyn. Once again, the family's dark-eyed golden girl did not disappoint.'
It notable how often you see Anne, and later Elizabeth, willingly pull relatives out of sticky situations, which suggests at least some previous attachment on both sides, as I shouldn't imagine either would be too happy doing it for the more hostile characters.
Compare Katherine's reliance on Anne, a half-niece, to Elizabeth Seymour writing to Cromwell for help, not Jane, her own sister.
'She may even have tried to limit the damage for her aunt and young cousins shortly before Rhys's execution.'
Which was good of Anne considering Rhys had slagged her off, with both of those links having the nerve to imply his death was somehow her doing.
Had he lived, I do wonder if his opposition, compared to Catherine, who, familiarity or not, no doubt wanted to benefit from the connection, would've provoked a certain marital discord.
'Rhys had been attainted at the time of his conviction, meaning that the Crown could seize his goods and property, but his Act of Attainder specifically and unusally made provisions for his widow, who was left with an annual income of about £196.
If Anne could not save Rhys, she worked hard to salvage his family's situation.'
Meaning she got Henry to surrender some of his ill-gotten gains solely to avoid her aunt's destitution, where plenty of other widows and orphans were left to fend for themselves.
Anne also got Catherine a new husband in old-timer Henry Daubeney, but they bloody hated each other and split up soon enough.
According to Eric Ives:
'Over the winter of 1535-6, Katherine Howard, Anne's aunt, was trying to secure a separation from her second husband, Henry, Lord Daubeney. She told Cromwell that the only assistance she was receiving was from the Queen herself, and this despite the strenuous efforts which were being made to destroy her standing with Anne.
The help may have been very practical indeed; Lord Daubeney, who was certainly pleading financial hardship at one stage, reached an amicable agreement with his wife after Anne's father had made available £400.'
Even though this post about Catherine insists neither Anne nor Norfolk gave a toss about her personal woes, from the looks a things Anne was trying to solve this problem too.
'I have none to do me help except the Queen, to whom I am much bound, and with whom much effort is made to draw her favour from me.
My lord my husband has paid well to make friends against me, but I trust that the truth of what I suffer will be known...'
One wonders how all these paid agitators ended up gathered 'round Anne, nagging or distracting her from Catherine's cause, but evidently she wasn't put off.
Plus, according to that last link, Catherine never learnt her lesson and took part in the Pilgrimage of Grace an' all, raising 3,000 men against Henry!
By the sounds of it, this isn't a sudden burst of furious piety at work, rather there's almost an absence of religion in Catherine's life.
The obvious explanation would be yet again wreaking vengeance in Rhys's memory, and that's evident given her long-standing vendetta against his disloyal servants.
But would it be too much to think she was motivated to a certain extent by the death of her niece and nephew, being 'much bound' to the former?
And as she avoided all punishment, the remaining Howards (i.e. Norfolk) had to have covered up for her.
William Howard, 1st Baron Howard of Effingham
In 1529 there was much scrapping over the wardship of the Broughton sisters.
Wolsey ended up with the younger, Katherine, but upon his fall it seems Anne got the girl transferred to the care of Agnes Tilney, who then married her to William, so Anne was responsible for his first marriage.
(Not that it prevented Katherine Broughton from acting, as Ives puts it, as 'ringleader', in a demo for Mary six years later, and getting herself locked up in the Tower as a result, but there you go.)
Given the amount of important roles he enjoyed during Anne's queenship, all whilst barely out of his teens, she must have liked him:
• 1531: Ambassador to Scotland.
• 1532: Travelled to Calais with Anne to meet Francis.
• 1533: Served as Earl Marshal during Anne's coronation, in place of Norfolk.
• 1533: Held the canopy at Elizabeth's christening.
• 1535: Visited Scotland to award the Order of the Garter to James.
• 1536: Went again to Scotland to arrange a meeting between Henry and James.
Besides, Chapuys said of him:
'People are astonished at the despatch of so stupid and indiscreet a man.'
So he had to be Anne's friend.
Once he hears of her arrest, William curses it as 'heavy news', demanding to know the truth from Cromwell and resenting all the Scottish clergy as 'capital enemies' for rejoicing in her fall.
Mainly I'm mentioning him to discuss his own character, and where his evident loyalty to other family might give us a further suggestion of his relationship to Anne, and how he kept to that sense of honour even when it led him into dangerous territory.
Consider, for example, how he named his son Charles after his brother, and called his daughter Douglas in honour Margaret Douglas, Charles's wife, thus commemorating their doomed romance.
You'd also be surprised how often he turns up in Young and Damned and Fair, as he appears to have been Katherine's closest uncle, for all that she's usually connected to Norfolk.
Indeed, so deep was he in it Agnes had to be advised not to warn him off coming home, meaning he arrived from France and found himself immediately clapped in the Tower, whereupon he craftily claimed all his best plate was washed overboard so Henry couldn't get at it, which worked.
Later, his connection with Henry Howard ensured he missed out on being Admiral, and when he did get it, Mary took it off him to punish his partiality to Elizabeth.
There's a section here detailing his bond with Elizabeth, where he's credited with saving her life, if you ignore the obvious errors:
I especially like the idea everyone feared William would kidnap Philip!
However, there's a very odd paragraph in his son's Wiki page:
'In 1552, he was sent to France to become well-educated in the French language, but was soon brought back to England at the request of his father because of questionable or unexpected treatment.'
Am I mad or does this imply Charles Howard endured sexual abuse in his teens?
Were it only poor lodgings or sub-standard teaching, he could've moved elsewhere.
Were it excessive beating, you'd expect it to be made plain, not using all this cagey, obfuscating language.
But the thought did lead me to ponder their father-son bond, where Charles, whatever shame he suffered, knew he was loved enough that writing to his father would make it stop.
And William, reading it, rescued him immediately, proving the boy right.
This is a mere fancy of mine, but when it's just after Elizabeth's ordeal, whom he obviously cared so much about, and knowing she could easily have died like Katherine, which happened in part because he never stopped Dereham, one wonders if his moral failing then pushed him to protect Charles and Elizabeth later.
Thomas Howard, 1st Viscount Howard of Bindon
I'm hard-pressed to unearth much information on this lad, but everyone leaves him out so I won't.
There's gotta be some reason Elizabeth ennobled him, and so early on (in 1559) before he'd had the chance to serve her.
It can't just be she looked round the court, noticed he was the last of Norfolk's children, and awarded him for that.
I wish we knew more about Elizabeth's childhood, as in who she met and associated with at court, because you can be certain she met the Howards then.
I also want to add a little about his eldest son, the 2nd Viscount, who was...odd, to say the least:
• Being a pirate;
• Dressing as a tramp;
• Beating everyone including his wife.
This gave me the the idea that perhaps his and Norfolk's reputation had somehow been rolled up together over the centuries, where this Henry Howard, although unknown today, was probably infamous in his time, and maybe his behaviour in a sense lended credibility to the accusations of spousal abuse against Norfolk, where people felt Henry 'got it from somewhere'.
When Elizabeth learnt what he was up to, she sent Hercules Meautys (what a name) to rescue his sister, and took Frances in, with her husband dubbing her 'a filthy and porky whore', which was rich coming from him.
And his other son, the 3rd Viscount, killed his own father-in-law and had a long-running feud with Walter Raleigh.
He also spent years trying to have his brother's granddaughter Ambrosia declared a bastard to grab all her land, so Elizabeth locked him up!
Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey
Anne found Surrey a wife and took him with her to France, where he and FitzRoy remained as honoured guests until the next autumn.
He was then obliged to serve as Earl Marshal as Anne and George were sentenced to death.
Four years later, according to Gareth Russell, Surrey not only watched Cromwell's execution, but gloated about it afterwards:
'Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey, stood at the forefront of the crowd and watched the scene without pity. He was missing his cousin's wedding to be here to see his family's bête noire finished off.
Later that day, he could not conceal his good mood. It felt to him like a settling of scores:
"Now is the false churl dead, so ambitious of others' blood."'
What does this mean?
Who's blood has Cromwell lusted after?
Who did he kill four years ago?
Surrey can't be referring to himself when Cromwell had actually protected him from punishment not long before, which in itself suggests a few interesting things:
• Cromwell was not yet aware of just how much the Howards despised him, as in, up til then his relationship with them was at least civil, cordial even, so the old line about Norfolk begrudging the 'new men' just because they're new men doesn't quite wash.
• This would've the perfect opportunity to bring down a mighty rival, but instead Cromwell felt bizarrely generous and intervened on Surrey's behalf, meaning he saw no harm in preserving the family, and instead thought it useful to get them on side.
• Why does he feel the need to favour the family?
Has he done something to antagonise them?
• The Howards are collectively putting on an Oscar-worthy acting routine of feigned friendliness, or at least indifference to said actions, so Cromwell, whilst he might suspect he's given slight offence, assumes it'll soon be forgotten if he pats them on the head here and there.
Surrey is at 'the forefront' of spectators, keen to behold Cromwell dying in all its gory brutality, besides opting to watch such a horrendous deed over attending Katherine's wedding.
Instead of a happy celebration of his family's success, something he could've easily enjoyed in the knowledge of Cromwell being dealt with out of the way, he insisted on serving as a witness, as if it wouldn't be over until he'd seen it done, almost to be sure that it had.
For this would 'settle the score', shedding his blood in payback for... what exactly?
Thetford Priory?
Is that all?
Or for the blood Cromwell himself so coveted?
And even the sight of such suffering left Surrey unmoved, ridiculing the dead man not only as a 'churl', but a 'false' one.
False to whom?
'False' as in affecting loyalty to his Queen whilst working to bring her down?
Because is that extreme level of hatred really just supposed to be nothing deeper than empty class prejudice?
Usually, Cromwell's fractious history with the Howards is portrayed as Norfolk's one-man defamation campaign of all-encompassing lordly outrage verging on eye-popping insanity, except Surrey clearly loathed him too.
Perhaps from that we can conclude that Cromwell had become unpopular with the whole family, hence the 'bete noir' reference above.
When Surrey's resentment is remembered, it's conveniently boxed up and filed away as the same-old 'snobbery' of his father, which a very neat, uncomplicated excuse that prevents us looking into it properly.
I daresay Surrey was proud and class-conscious, but wouldn't everyone be like that, to a greater or lesser extent?
Why then is this 'haughtiness' only ever attributed to characters we're supposed to dislike, namely Anne, Norfolk, and occasionally George and Surrey, with the 'good' people somehow immune to such 'base' emotions?
Indeed, I'm starting to wonder how much real evidence there is for this common supposition of arrogance.
As if Surrey's known at all, it's for the manner of his death, namely he 'got himself killed' by 'stupidly' quartering the royal arms with his own, which, whilst a gross oversimplification, nevertheless defines him, where history views his character through this lens and reads his entire life backwards, as if there's no explanation for his behaviour other than he was just born to be a cocksure moron.
It plays upon modern bigotry against aristocrats, where they're all stuck-up, slow-witted inbreds fixated with the pecking order and archiac symbolism, keeping the honest worker down to prove they're better than everyone else, which is a laugh because they're all REALLY shallow, superfluous chuckleheads and deserve what they get.
Since the idea Surrey died for something so 'silly' as what badge went where slots so well into the stereotype, then it's cheapened his reputation overall.
Rather than being highly esteemed as a pioneer of English literature and the forerunner of Shakespeare, he's treated as nothing but a hot-headed toff tripped up by his own idiotic pretensions, with an end offered as a 'fitting' denouement, almost a lesson in morality; about where not 'knowing your place' or 'getting ideas above your station' leads... after vilifying Surrey and Norfolk for apparently demanding people know their place and not get ideas above their station.
Something hypocritical there.
There's also a reflexive judgementalism within this fandom and the lower end of publishing (i.e. novels and pop. history) where it's assumed if Anne or any of her family are executed, then even if they're technically innocent, they must've deserved it really, else 'the universe' wouldn't let it happen.
Therefore, known evidence is read with the most bad-faith interpretation, with any declared slip leapt upon and blown out of proportion, solely to prove their own bias correct.
You're right to think that, you are.
Hating them makes you A Good Person.
Again, this ONLY applies to Anne and her supporters, not her enemies.
No, no. They were martyrs to the Cause.
But I wouldn't say Surrey's usage of royal arms spoke to any pathological sense of superiority, certainly not to the extent it should define his memory.
Heraldry and ancestry is the lifeblood of nobility: everyone he knew fought for whatever their birth and court careers entitled them, so why shouldn't he?
Look at his sister protesting again and again and again for her rights as FitzRoy's widow: does this make her a 'snob' because she never gave up fighting?
In fact, dubbing Cromwell a 'churl' doesn't mean too much either.
The average person objects to someone because they're a thief, cheat, liar, etc. but calling them as much is a toothless insult, as they'd require a sense of honour to feel the sting.
And if they had that, they would've have committed the offence it in the first place.
So, you pick on something they probably are sensitive about, such as status or physical appearance, to get your own back.
Calling Henry VIII, for example, a fat bastard, doesn't mean you oppose him for having a weight problem, or that you dislike fat men generally.
It's that you're hitting 'below the belt' to inflict the worst punishment you can.
Oh yeah, it's petty, but the aggrieved often are.
Surrey's real crime, if we deem it one, was apparently rash language of what vengeance he'd wreak on his foes once the King was gone, meaning the Seymours.
So is it mere coincidence that the main targets of this infamous 'snobbery' are those who caused or benefited from Anne's fall?
Are we to believe his only complaint, right down to twice vetoing Mary Howard's marriage, is nothing better than looking down his nose at humble Seymour origins, for they've done nothing whatsoever to draw his ire?
For all the time I've been reading history, the way the court of 1536 splits between the Boleyns and those pushing Jane Seymour, and then, once the Boleyns are wiped out, it greatest rivalry becomes Howard versus Seymour, one lasting for the remainder of Henry's reign, has always struck me as both telling and appropriate.
The idea the Howards took over hating the Seymours because of their slain family is to me to most obvious explanation; the driving force pushing the enmity beyond a decade, and blaming it all on snooty la-di-da attitudes baffles me.
It's so pat and offhand, as if it was thrown into historical research centuries ago and never questioned, passed down to us as unassailable received wisdom, rendered true from repetition, as no one likes Surrey or Norfolk enough to bother reassessing their motivations.
But could such prolonged open hostility run on no greater impulse than keeping the gentry in check?
Is THAT all?
And do note how leading this narrative is, where, if we accept the Howards despised the Seymours as upstarts, then the fault for all bad blood is immediately shoved onto them and them alone, when those poor Seymour lads, rosy-cheeked and pure of heart, are just doing their best in life, working hard and loving everyone.
But oh! Those nasty Howards bullies are So Mean!
Not once is it reversed, proposing that the Seymours envied the Howards' breeding and birth, vowing to bring them down out of spite.
Instead they're absolved of all guilt in the conflict and justified in everything they do as a self-defence measure, even when they brought about Surrey's death and tried it on ten years previously.
So why on earth should he like them?
How I wish this painting still existed.
Starkey describes Henry Howard thus:
'Surrey inherited all Buckingham's grand pride in blood and aristocracy, and all his determination that noblemen should once more come into their own.
Perhaps it was from his mother's side too that he got his most dangerous trait: a rashness and a violence that bordered on madness.
Add to all this an intelligence that was both penetrating and fast and the result was one of the most remarkable men of the age.'
And yet I don't know of any aggressive outbursts prior to 1536, being then known for 'soberness and good learning'.
We tend to class poets of later eras as on the sensitive side, so far from being 'always like that', it may well be that the deaths of George, Anne, FitzRoy and putting down the Pilgrimage of Grace knocked him off the rails, a process then driven beyond all remedy by watching Katherine die and the suicidal shame he endured over his military failures.
Although I do like the sound of him as the hero of High Fantasy.
Whilst I'm here, let's look at this very awkward scenario of Surrey attending the triple Neville wedding, being the children of his mother's intended and her sister.
Considering how desperate so many are to clear Henry VIII of Anne's death, protesting how he Genuinely Believed and that makes it alright then, he's cheerful enough fannying about as a Turk less than two months later.
Finally, writing this I read several of Surrey's poems, and must include this truly endearing piece commemorating his wife's love for him:
Such a poet, and still no one credits him with any tender emotions.
Anyway, don't mind me but I've hit the picture limit.
I'm not sure when Part Two will be done, but I'll let you know, come the time.
She had been a remarkable woman. She would remain a remarkable woman even in a century which produced many of great note. There were few others who rose from such beginnings to a crown, and none contributed to a revolution as far-reaching as the English Reformation. To use a description no longer in fashion, Anne Boleyn was one of the ‘makers of history’. Yet historians see through a glass darkly; they know in part and they pronounce in part. What Anne really was, as distinct from what Anne did, comes over very much less clearly. To us she appears inconsistent - religious yet aggressive, calculating yet emotional, with the light touch of the courtier yet the strong grip of the politician - but is this what she was, or merely what we strain to see through the opacity of the evidence?
Commissioned by the New York businessman Lumen Reed, George Whiting Flagg set out to paint Mary Queen of Scots Preparing for Execution, only to change to Jane when he discovered that Mary was ‘too old at the time of her execution to make an interesting picture’.
Eric Ives, Lady Jane Grey: A Tudor Mystery
Ugh, goodness me... This might explain why Mary Queen of Scots has been perpetually portrayed as youthful at her execution. It makes easier to romanticize death.
"Good Christian people, I have not come here to preach a sermon; I have come here to die. For according to the law and by the law I am judged to die, and therefore I will speak nothing against it. I am come hither to accuse no man, nor to speak of that where of I am accused and condemned to die, but I pray God save the king and send him long to reign over you, for a gentler nor a more merciful prince was there never, and to me he was ever a good, a gentle, and sovereign lord. And if any person will meddle of my cause, I require them to judge the best [shades of William Brereton]. And thus I take my leave of the world and of you all, and I heartily desire you all to pray for me.
Jesu, receive my soul. O Lord God have pity on my soul."
-Anne the Queen. "Life and Death of Anne Boleyn". Ives, E. pp 358, 359.
