Henry VIII's Last Victim (3 page)

King Richard was also slain, but while his corpse was stripped with ‘not so much as a clout to cover his privy members’ and trussed up ‘like a hog’, no such degradation befell John Howard. His body was rescued from the field and carried, unharmed, to Thetford Priory in Norfolk, where it was solemnly buried alongside his Mowbray ancestors.

His son Thomas Howard, Earl of Surrey, had fought bravely alongside his father’s corpse – ‘Young Howard, single, with an army fights’
⁷
– but he too had been felled. Injured but not dead, he had begged Sir Gilbert Talbot to inflict the final blow so that he might die by the hand of a nobleman. This honour was refused and he was carried from the field and dispatched to the Tower of London. The seventeenth-century poet Sir John Beaumont later gave a flowery rendering to Howard’s justification for fighting for Richard III:

I never will my luckless choice repent,

Nor can it stain mine honour or descent;

Set England’s royal wreath upon a stake,

There will I fight, and not the place forsake.

And if the will of God hath so disposed,

That Richmond’s brow be with the Crown enclosed,

That duty in my thoughts, not faction, shines.
⁸

The first Parliament of the new reign passed an act of attainder against Howard. Not only did it declare him a high traitor (with all his lands, titles and possessions forfeited to the Crown), but it also tainted his blood and that of all his progeny. He was, in effect, legally dead and remained thus for nearly three-and-a-half years. But Henry VII was shrewd enough to realise the potential of the Howards. In 1489 he had the attainder reversed and Thomas Howard became Earl of Surrey once again, though most of his estates were withheld. He was released from the Tower and sent to the North to protect the borders. His children (including Henry Howard’s father, also called Thomas, then only sixteen) were brought to Court as surety. The King
need not have worried. Time and again, Howard proved his loyalty and worth. In 1501 he was appointed Lord Treasurer, one of the three principal offices of state, and in 1509 Henry VII, on his deathbed, restored his entire patrimony.

The accession of Henry VIII signalled new opportunities for the Howards. Hale and hearty and bursting with hubris, Henry VIII was itching to prove his mettle against the French as his hero, Henry V, had done. By 1512 England was at war with France and the younger Howards, whom the King knew well from their time at Court, were given key positions. Thomas’ second son, Edward, a special favourite of the King, was appointed Lord Admiral. His encounter the following year with the French fleet off the coast of Brittany secured his place for ever in the affections of his friend and King; it also cost him his life.

After his brother-in-law, Sir Thomas Knyvet, had burnt to death in an engagement with a French carrack, Edward swore that he would ‘never see the King in the face’ until he had avenged Knyvet’s death.
⁹
Consequently, when Edward espied the enemy fleet sheltering in Brest harbour, he swept towards it and boarded the command galley ‘with great courage’, we are told, and little regard for his personal safety.
¹⁰
The French threw off the grappling irons, cutting Edward off from most of his men. Realising there could only be one outcome, Edward tore his golden whistle, the badge of the Lord Admiral, from his breast and flung it into the sea. Seconds later he was stabbed to death and dumped overboard.

Once again a Howard had died honourably in action and once again the bards were inspired:

His life not ended foul nor dishonestly,

In bed nor tavern his lusts to maintain,

But like as beseemed a noble captain,

In sturdy harness he died for the right,

From death’s danger no man may flee certain,

But such death is meetest unto so noble a knight.

But death it to call me think it unright,

Sith his worthy name shall last perpetual,

To all his nation example and clear light,

But to his progeny most specially of all,

His soul is in pleasure of glory eternal . . .
¹¹

One more battle ensured the Howards’ rise from the ashes of Bosworth. While Henry VIII set off for France in June 1513 in search of his own Agincourt, Thomas Howard, Earl of Surrey, now in his seventies, and his son Lord Thomas Howard – Henry Howard’s grandfather and father respectively – were left behind to guard the northern borders.
It was a painful duty. They felt they had earned the right to fight alongside their King and, as the English army prepared to cross the Channel, ‘the Earl could scantly speak’, so great was his frustration. ‘My Lord,’ warned the King, ‘I trust not the Scots; therefore I pray you to be not negligent.’
¹²

The King’s fears proved well founded. James IV of Scotland, in honour of the ‘auld alliance’ with the French, took advantage of the English exodus and invaded from the North. By the end of August about forty thousand Scots were encamped on Flodden Hill, six miles inside the English border. While Catherine of Aragon busied herself with the sewing of standards and banners, the Howards prepared to do battle. The Scots outnumbered the English by about two to one; they were well fed and supplied, rested and ready for battle. The English had arrived only days before and were already down to their last rations. The Scots also held the strategic advantage, encamped upon a five hundred-foot hill with the English in full view below. But they had not counted on the Howards.

As dawn broke on 9 September 1513, the English columns marched away from Flodden towards the north. By the afternoon, they had regrouped at Branxton. The Scots, fearful lest their baggage supplies be cut off and thirsty for English blood, abandoned Flodden for Branxton Hill and, at around four o’clock, thundered down on the English. After initial setbacks, the English re-formed and counter-attacked. The battleground became a quagmire and many soldiers removed their boots to gain better footing. Soon it became clear that the long German pikes wielded by the Scots were too heavy and cumbersome for hand-to-hand fighting. With their swords and bills (hand weapons tipped with a bladed hook), Surrey’s men cut the Scots dead in their tracks. James IV perished in the battle along with the flower of his nobility. Surrey’s autobiographical epitaph, composed ten years later, claimed that the Scottish King was slain ‘in plain battle directly before his own standard’.
¹³
According to this account, the Scots lost seventeen thousand men, though a figure of ten thousand is more realistic. The English lost fewer than fifteen hundred.

It was a spectacular triumph, far more impressive than the ‘ungracious dogholes’ Henry VIII had wrested from the French.
¹⁴
Surrey dispatched James IV’s bloodied surcoat to Queen Catherine, who promptly forwarded it on to her husband in France, ‘sending for your banners a king’s coat’. ‘I thought to send himself unto you,’ she added with gleeful bloodlust, ‘but our Englishmen’s hearts would not suffer it.’
¹⁵
The poets and broadsiders drew, like a sixteenth-century press pack, to the scent of freshly spilt blood. While the Scots mourned

The flowers of the forest that fought aye the foremost,

The prime of our land lie cold in the clay,
¹⁶

the English Poet Laureate, John Skelton, could not resist a cruel taunt:

King Jamy, Jemmy, Jocky my jo,

Ye summoned our King, why did ye so?
¹⁷

Flodden marked the complete rehabilitation of the Howards. The blood of one battle had washed away the stain of another. In a lavish ceremony held at Lambeth Palace on Candlemas Day 1514, Thomas Howard senior was granted the Dukedom of Norfolk and appointed Earl Marshal of England, while his son, Thomas Howard junior, was elevated to the Earldom of Surrey for life. As a further reward, Norfolk ‘and his heirs forever’ received an augmentation to their coat of arms: the upper half of a lion ‘pierced in the mouth with an arrow, and coloured according to the arms of Scotland, as borne by the said King of Scots.’
¹⁸

Such was the legacy Henry Howard inherited. He grew up listening to stories of Howard gallantry – stories, if his grandfather’s epitaph is anything to go by, that would have lost nothing in the re-telling. By the time of Henry’s birth four years after Flodden, his father was Earl of Surrey and Lord Admiral of England. His grandfather was the Duke of Norfolk, Earl Marshal and Lord High Treasurer. With a fortune equal to their rank, they were two of the most powerful magnates in England.

But Howard gains had not come easily. Their past was turbulent and bloody and their future by no means assured. Nothing could be taken for granted, especially with a capricious king like Henry VIII on the
throne. One false move and the foundations of their house – the lands, the titles, the offices – could be removed again. Had Henry Howard been more sensitive to the fragility of his family’s greatness, his fate might have been very different.

^fn1
These grants led some later commentators to suspect that John Howard may have been complicit in the murders of Richard, Duke of York, and his elder brother, Edward V – the ‘Princes in the Tower’.

   Following the extinction of the male Mowbray line of descent in 1476, the Dukedom of Norfolk fell into abeyance (though other Mowbray titles and estates were inherited by the heiress, Lady Anne Mowbray). Edward IV granted the Dukedom to his son Richard, Duke of York, who had married Lady Anne. The King also passed an Act of Parliament giving his son the enjoyment of the Mowbray estates for life even if his wife predeceased him. Anne died in 1481, leaving the Mowbray co-heirs, John Howard (by virtue of his mother, Lady Margaret Mowbray) and William Berkeley, blocked from their inheritance for the duration of Richard’s life. With Richard out of the way, the chief obstacle to Howard’s inheritance was removed and the Dukedom of Norfolk lay in the gift of the new King, Richard III, almost certainly the murderer of his nephews. However, no contemporary accused Howard of complicity in the murders and the evidence presented against him is circumstantial at best. Anne Crawford, who provides the best analysis of this, concludes: ‘That Howard had any hand in that son’s death is inherently unlikely’ (Crawford, ‘John Howard, Duke of Norfolk: A Possible Murderer of the Princes?’, in
Richard III: Crown and People
, ed. J. Petre, 1985).

^fn2
Henry Tudor’s claim was not beyond dispute. His mother, Lady Margaret Beaufort, descended from Edward III through a son of John of Gaunt (third son of Edward III) and his mistress (later his third wife) Catherine Swinford. The son had been born out of wedlock and, although he and his Beaufort siblings were subsequently legitimised, they were expressly forbidden from inheriting the throne.

2

HENRY HOWARD

HENRY HOWARD WAS
probably born in 1517.
^fn1
In an age when people looked to the weather – and much else besides – for providential signs, the year did not augur well. The winter was so harsh that it claimed almost four hundred deer from his grandfather’s park at Framlingham and caused the Thames to freeze over, so that ‘men with horse and carts might pass betwixt Westminster and Lambeth’.
¹
A very hot summer followed in which the sweating sickness, a virulent and highly contagious form of influenza, broke out in London. ‘The patients experience nothing but a profuse sweat, which dissolves the frame,’ the Venetian ambassador observed, while one Italian traveller recorded a daily death toll of five hundred.
²

The Earl and Countess of Surrey hardly needed further incentive to have their baby boy baptised as quickly as possible. Child mortality was a severe problem in the sixteenth century, with up to forty per cent of children dying before they reached their fifteenth year. The Howard chapel at St Mary’s, Lambeth, the family’s London parish,
^fn2
contained
the little bodies of Thomas Howard’s four children by his first wife, Anne Plantagenet, the daughter of Edward IV. Two of them, Henry and Thomas, had been baptised before their deaths, but there had not been time for the others.
³
According to the beliefs of the Catholic Church, they had died in a state of original sin and were consigned to limbo, forever denied the vision of God. Following Anne’s death in 1512, Thomas Howard – with indecent haste, some felt – married Elizabeth Stafford, daughter of the Duke of Buckingham. She had provided him with one surviving daughter, Katherine, but not, until now, the longed-for son.

This boy was therefore a very special child. Finally his father had an heir. And to this special child was given a special name: as the priest immersed the baby three times in holy water, the word on his lips was not John or Thomas, the traditional names for Howard heirs, but Henry, the name of the King of England.
^fn3
He would represent the next phase of Howard greatness, offered up at the baptismal font as a symbol of the family’s loyalty to the Tudor regime.

While all available steps were taken for the preservation of Henry Howard’s health, his parents were not expected to care for him on a daily basis. The routine tasks necessary for nurturing an infant were considered menial, not at all suitable for a countess whose priorities were to be a good wife and householder. Her chief duty was to produce as many children as possible and for the next three years she was almost constantly pregnant. Anything that would have affected her fertility, such as breastfeeding, was ruled out.
^fn4
So Henry was handed over to a wet-nurse, and the nursery, peopled by gentlewomen, nurses and a laundress, became the centre of his world.