House Of Treason: The Rise And Fall Of A Tudor Dynasty by Robert Hutchinson Read Free Book Online Page B

have received certain news that the King of Scots himself was killed . . . so he has paid a heavier penalty for his treachery than we would have wished.’ 72 He celebrated the victory with a feu de joie , a rippling salvo of 1,000 cannon, declaring: ‘I will sing him a soul knell with the sound of my guns.’
    In Rome there was initial news of a catastrophic English defeat, with Surrey a prisoner with fifteen other lords, and 30,000 Englishmen dead. In war, first reports are frequently wrong and this was no exception. Cardinal Christopher Bainbridge, Henry’s ambassador to Rome, recounted gleefully how the ‘French and Scots [in the city] were sought greatly but when the king’s letter came all their joy was turned to shame’. 73
    Surrey received his just reward on Candlemas Day, 1 February 1514, at Lambeth Palace, when the earl, resplendent in crimson robes, was ‘honourably restored unto his right name of Duke of Norfolk’. 74 Sir Thomas Wriothesley, Garter King of Arms, presented him with the engrossed patent of the dukedom and an augmentation to his coat of arms, an escutcheon bearing the lion of Scotland pierced through the mouth with an arrow, to mark his victory at Flodden. 75 A grateful king presented him with forty manors spread across Berkshire, Derbyshire, Hertfordshire, Kent, Nottinghamshire, Oxfordshire, Shropshire, Staffordshire, Warwickshire and Wiltshire, together with an annual pension of £40.
    His eldest son Thomas was created Earl of Surrey in his place and also granted an annuity of £12 for life and sixteen manors and two castles, yielding a handsome annual income of £333 6s 8d. 76
    At the end of that September, and with peace declared, the second Duke of Norfolk escorted Henry’s young sister Mary to France for her marriage to the elderly and sickening Louis XII. The journey was a chapter of unfortunate accidents. The newly ennobled Surrey, as Lord Admiral, had to shepherd the wedding party across the English Channel, but bad weather kept them at sea for four days of sickness and misery. The princess’s ship became separated and finally it ran aground on a sandbank outside Boulogne, forcing her to be rowed ashore through the surf. She was less than pleased at the danger and the insult to her dignity.
    Her marriage took place on 9 October, and, almost immediately, Norfolk was involved in a row over the dismissal of her English servants (who had been selected by Wolsey) and their French replacements. A fuming Mary wrote to her brother: ‘I marvel much that my lord of Norfolk would at all times so lightly grant everything at their requests here . . . Would [to] God, my lord of York [Wolsey] had come with me in the room of Norfolk, for then I am sure I should have been left much more at my heart[’s ease] than I am now.’ 77 There was only one saving grace for the princess. The marriage only lasted eighty-three days before her husband died (reportedly through overexertion on the marital bed, unwise for a man of his years and poor health) and she was free later to marry secretly her true love, Sir Charles Brandon.
    Norfolk had gradually been edged out of the king’s inner councils by Wolsey and it must have been a tedious duty for him to escort him during the ceremony in Westminster Abbey on 18 November 1515 in which he received his cardinal’s hat, awarded by Pope Leo X two months earlier. Worse was to come: on Christmas Eve, Henry appointed Wolsey his Lord Chancellor.
    It would be left to his son, Thomas, to neutralise the threat posed by the Cardinal.

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    GUARDIANS OF ENGLAND
    ‘A man of the greatest wisdom, reliability and loyalty’
    The historian Polydore Vergil’s description of
Thomas, second Duke of Norfolk 1
     
     
    It began, as many such riots begin, with a small, trifling incident - merely a row over the purchase of two birds for an Englishman’s simple dinner. But this was a spark that set alight a powder keg of resentment, hatred and violence in the narrow, filthy and