Mary Tudor - Anna Whitelock [60]
When Chancellor Wriothesley arrived the following day with a detachment of the guard to arrest the queen, Henry berated him as a “Knave! Arrant knave, beast! And fool!” and ordered him to “avaunt [leave]” his “sight.”
THE COLLAPSE OF the plot against Katherine Parr signaled the end of the conservatives’ brief period of ascendancy. With Henry’s health deteriorating rapidly, the Seymour faction, led by Edward’s uncle Edward Seymour, earl of Hertford, acted to destroy its enemies, the Howards and Bishop Gardiner, and take control of the government. “Nothing is done at court,” reported the newly arrived van der Delft, “without their intervention and the Council mostly meets at Hertford’s house. It is even asserted that the custody of the Prince and government of the realm will be entrusted to them; and this misfortune to the house of Norfolk may have come from that quarter.”7
Mary, meanwhile, was untouched by these shifts of power and remained in relative peace at court as Henry continued to show her every sign of favor. One of the last entries in the king’s accounts is the purchase of a horse for Mary, “a white grey gelding.”8
On December 12, Thomas Howard, the foremost peer of the realm, and his eldest son, Henry Howard, earl of Surrey, were arrested on grounds of treason and sent to the Tower. Surrey, a descendant of Edward III, had boasted of his Plantagenet blood and declared that when Henry died, his father would be “metest to rule the prince.” He had planned, it was alleged, to disband the Council, depose the king, seize the young Prince Edward, and display his own heraldry as the royal arms and insignia, an indication of his ambition for the throne. It was upon this last charge that he was tried and found guilty of high treason.9
Meanwhile his father, Norfolk, was questioned and imprisoned in the Tower. On January 12, he confessed that he had “offended the King in opening his secret counsels at divers times to sundry persons to the peril of his Highness … [and] concealed high treason, in keeping secret the false acts of my son, Henry, Earl of Surrey, in using the arms of St Edward the Confessor, which pertain only to kings.”10 Surrey was executed on January 19 on the scaffold at Tower Hill. A week later Thomas Howard was attainted without trial and awaited execution.
ON THE EVENING of December 26, Henry ordered his will to be brought to him. He wanted to make some changes to the list of executors. “Some he meant to have in and some he meant to have out.” The crown would go directly to Edward and any lawful heirs of his body and in default to Mary “upon condition that she shall not marry without the written and sealed consent of a majority” of Edward’s surviving Privy Council. In the event of Mary’s childless death, Elizabeth would succeed. The succession would then be conferred on the Grey and Clifford families, descendants of Henry’s younger sister, Mary.11 Sixteen executors were to act as Edward’s councillors until he reached the age of eighteen. They included Edward Seymour, the earl of Hertford; John Dudley, the earl of Warwick; Sir William Paget, the royal secretary; and Sir Anthony Denny, chief gentleman of the Privy Chamber. Stephen Gardiner, bishop of Winchester, was excluded, and Katherine’s position as regent was revoked. Instead, the voices of all the executors were to be equal and decisions were to be taken by majority vote.
Though he had suffered for some time from ulcerated legs, obesity, and gout, Henry’s health had declined rapidly since the New Year and he remained confined to the Privy Chamber with a high fever. On January 10, the French ambassador, Odet de Selve, wrote to Francis I that “neither the Queen nor the Lady Mary could see him.”12 His