The death of the last of the Mowbray line, the young Lady Anne, only daughter of the fourth and last Mowbray Duke of Norfolk in 1481, left Howard, as her cousin, the senior co-heir to their extensive estates throughout England. But his very substantial inheritance had been blocked by her precocious marriage to Edward IV’s younger son, Richard, Duke of York. No doubt, it was a cause of some celebration to Lord Howard when Richard, Duke of Gloucester, bastardised York and his elder brother, Edward V,
43
and they both mysteriously disappeared after entering the Tower of London. He certainly had no interest in them living. No surprise, then, that Howard enthusiastically supported Gloucester and he was handsomely repaid by being created first (Howard) Duke of Norfolk and Earl Marshal of England on 28 June 1483, a week after Richard had grabbed the throne. His first duty was to officiate at Richard III’s coronation and, less than a month later, he was appointed Lord Admiral of England, Ireland and Aquitaine.
But he had picked the wrong side and paid the ultimate price on Bosworth field.
His son languished for three and a half years in the Tower. Its Lieutenant offered to arrange an escape for him in 1487, during an abortive rebellion by John de la Pole, Earl of Lincoln, but he wisely declined the use of ‘the key to go out at his pleasure’
44
and this may have begun to convince Henry VII of his loyalty.
Thomas Howard stepped out of the gloom of the Tower into the bright new light of the Tudor age. He was firmly to bind his family’s fortunes to those of the Tudor dynasty but over the next century, the raw ambition and unashamed lust for power of his descendants would imprison many of them within the walls of that grim fortress alongside the River Thames. Another would suffer appallingly for his religious faith.
Some never came out alive.
PART 1
BACK FROM THE BRINK
1
REBUILDING THE DYNASTY
‘Sir, he was my crowned king. Let the authority of Parliament set the crown on that stake and I will fight for it. As I fought then for him, I will fight for you, when you are established by the same authority’
Thomas Howard, Earl of Surrey, to King Henry VII, 1485
1
Thomas Howard, Earl of Surrey, was already middle aged when he saw his father die amid the din and slaughter of Bosworth. After recuperating from the serious wounds he suffered at the Battle of Barnet on Easter Sunday 1471, the following year, like many Howards before and after, he had married a carefully selected wealthy heiress. Elizabeth was the daughter of the minor Norfolk magnate Sir Frederick Tylney and the widow of Sir Humphrey Bourchier, a comrade-in-arms who had been slain during that same battle. She brought him twelve prosperous manors in East Anglia, as well as five surviving children,
2
one of whom was destined to play a momentous role in shaping the monarchy in sixteenth-century England: Thomas junior, born in 1473, was the uncle of two of Henry VIII’s queens and, arguably, the principal political survivor of the bloody tumult of three Tudor reigns.
After the disaster of Bosworth and his imprisonment in the Tower, Howard was released in early 1489 by Henry VII, and the attainder for treason against him was reversed on 3 March that year by Parliament - although most of the lands he had lost were cannily withheld until he could demonstrate fully his loyalty to the crown.
3
In May, however, he celebrated his restoration to the title of Earl of Surrey.
He became the archetypal Tudor nobleman who maintained full allegiance to whoever sat on the throne, whatever policies they pursued. If God was in His heaven, and the king ruled with a firm but fair hand, the Howards were perfectly content. This deeply held fidelity to the crown - also destined to become his son’s watchword - was born out of the family’s intense desire to preserve social order and cohesion in the realm. The Howards were Tudor aristocratic anachronisms, with an inbred conservatism which led them to worship devoutly at the altars of hierarchy, autocracy, status and power. Over the next three generations, they kept one foot firmly grounded in the old confident and arrogant attitudes and beliefs of fifteenth-century noble England, despite the storm of change that raged all around them and which, several times, nearly brought them down.
Henry VII had no such luxury of certainty in the scheme of things. His claim to the crown was at best slender and secured only by right of conquest at Bosworth. He adroitly married Elizabeth of York, the eldest daughter of King Edward IV, on 18 January 1486 in an attempt to implant political unity into a still divided realm but was always apprehensive about the insecurity of the Tudor grip on regal power. A spate of rebellions (and a dangerous pretender to the throne) justified fully his fears. Later, these were to return again and again to haunt his descendants who wore the crown of England. A king’s prime duty is to prolong his dynasty and, in this, Henry was in an almost indecent haste. Almost nine months to the day after the wedding, his lineage was safeguarded by the birth of a prince, at Winchester, christened Arthur. A second son, Henry, was born at Greenwich Palace on 28 June 1491.
Surrey began his long, careful journey back to power and status with an appointment as Chief Justice in Eyre North of the Trent in 1489. The following year, rioting and disorder broke out in Yorkshire after the king’s imposition of new taxes and Surrey, at the head of a small royalist force, swiftly and efficiently quashed any opposition. As a grim public demonstration of his effectiveness in this police action, he summarily strung up the ringleaders at York. The main protagonist - the ‘firebrand’ John à Chambre - was executed ‘in great state’ as ‘a traitor paramount’ on specially constructed gallows high up on a stage, with fellow malcontents hung on ‘the lower story round about him’.
4
Surrey was rewarded for his efforts on 20 May 1490 when Henry VII made him Vice-Warden of the East and Middle Marches on the borders of Scotland, as the operational deputy to the infant Prince Arthur who nominally held the top job.
5
He was granted power to negotiate with the Scottish king James IV over any breaches of a fragile Anglo-Scottish truce and to investigate ‘all persons who have
covin
[treacherous dealings] with the enemy and [to] punish them’. Within two days, he published a proclamation warning the ‘great numbers of Scots [who have been] applying themselves to idleness and begging [and have] over-run the realm’ to immediately return home ‘under pain of punishment’.
6
He continued in the north as the king’s lieutenant, administering law and order,
7
collecting taxes, suppressing dissent - such as further riots in the spring of 1492 at Acworth, near Pontefract, Yorkshire, over tax
8
- and handling the sometimes Byzantine diplomatic relations across the Scottish border. His first two sons, Thomas and Edward, the latter born in 1476, were educated as pages in Henry’s household but they were, to all intents, being held hostage to guarantee his good behaviour as the king’s viceroy in the north.
Surrey was increasingly regarded as Henry VII’s best soldier and he was soon to prove his military mettle. In 1497, with a force of Yorkshire levies, he relieved a five-day Scottish siege of Norham Castle
9
which controlled a strategic ford over the River Tweed in Northumberland. Then he launched a retaliatory punitive expedition into the Scottish border country which destroyed Ayton Castle in Berwickshire before the onset of ‘extraordinarily foul and stormy’ weather drove him back into England.
10
Thomas and Edward accompanied him on the raid, both of whom he knighted at Ayton on 30 September. Surrey later concluded a new truce and began negotiations for the marriage of Henry’s daughter, Margaret, to James IV of Scotland.
His wife Elizabeth died on 4 April that year at their newly built mansion at Lambeth, across the Thames from Westminster, but he did not wait long to find a second spouse. On 8 November, Surrey swiftly married Elizabeth’s cousin, Agnes Tylney, the daughter of Hugh Tylney of Skirbeck and Boston in Lincolnshire,
11
in the chapel of the castle of Sheriff Hutton, near York.
12
She was to become a long-lived and formidable matriarch of the Howard clan, bearing him six surviving children. Through his brood of five living sons and six daughters from two wives, Surrey was to build marital unions with most of the prominent noble families in England. For example, his daughter Muriel
13
married John Grey, second Viscount Lisle, sometime before June 1503.
14
Before he died on 9 September 1504, aged twenty-four, substantial properties in Somerset, Berkshire and Gloucestershire had been settled upon her.
15
Around May 1506, she took as her second husband Thomas Knyvett, one of the brash cronies who now surrounded young Prince Henry at Greenwich.
Surrey returned to court in 1499 and, two years later, became an influential member of Henry VII’s Privy Council, joining a group of courtiers ‘of singular shrewdness’. On 16 June 1501, he was appointed Lord Treasurer of England, a post the Howards were to make their own suzerain for the next four decades.
16
He thus became the third in importance of the king’s ministers. Richard Fox, Bishop of Winchester, had been Lord Privy Seal since Henry’s accession - so loyal, it was said, that he was willing to sacrifice his own father’s life to save that of his sovereign. And William Warham, Bishop of London, was appointed Lord Chancellor and Archbishop of Canterbury in 1504. Under Surrey’s careful management, royal revenues grew from £52,000 a year to £142,000 by the end of the reign in 1509.
17
The earl benefited by the slow but sure recovery of some of his lost lands and property in East Anglia, his wealth augmented by gifts from a now grateful but ailing monarch.
18
Among a considerable parcel of manors acquired in 1507 was that of the former Mowbray possession of Kenninghall, a small village midway between Thetford and Norwich, where his son Thomas constructed a substantial palace of seventy rooms.
19
By 1506, Surrey had built up property holdings with an annual net income of £1,200, or well over £500,000 at 2009 cash equivalents.
20
He was involved in negotiations concerning the marriage of the Spanish princess Catherine of Aragon to Prince Arthur on 14 November 1501 and was in charge of arrangements for Arthur’s funeral after his premature death on 2 April 1502. The following year, he escorted Henry VII ’s fourteen-year-old daughter Margaret to Scotland for her marriage to James IV, and had the honour of giving away the bride, dressed in a gown of cloth of gold, in the chapel of Holyrood House, Edinburgh, on 8 August.
21
Surrey was appointed one of the executors of the king’s will, and, a few days before his death from chronic pulmonary tuberculosis
22
on 21 April 1509 at Richmond Palace, Henry VII suffered a rare attack of conscience. He restored all Surrey’s lands, lost him by attainder twenty-four years before, as a mark of appreciation for his loyal service.
23
It was a crowning moment for the royal servant: after the defeat at Bosworth and the black despair of his incarceration in the Tower, all his hopes and dreams of the intervening years had at last been fulfilled.
Henry VIII was proclaimed king three days later. Surrey served as Earl Marshal at the coronation of the eighteen-year-old and, on 10 July the following year, was appointed to the position for life at a fee of £20 a year, triumphantly reclaiming the position once held by his father.
24
A month after the coronation, his second son Edward was appointed Royal Standard Bearer with an annual pension of £40. Surrey had high hopes of becoming the new king’s chief minister, but was thwarted by an ambitious young cleric introduced to court by Bishop Fox, who was now climbing high in Henry VIII’s estimation. Thomas Wolsey, the son of a prosperous Ipswich butcher, had been appointed royal almoner when Henry ascended to the throne and by 1511 his position at court was becoming unassailable.
Wolsey quickly flexed his political muscles. Surrey and Fox had signed an Anglo-French treaty in 1510, but the new minister was marching very much in time with the king’s ambition for military adventures, and was intent on war with France. Surrey opposed this on diplomatic and fiscal grounds, but to his chagrin discovered that his second son Edward had ‘marvellously’ angered and incited the king over the Scots, France’s traditional ally, ‘by whose wanton means, his grace spends much money and is more disposed to war than peace’.
25
During June 1511, Henry received complaints about the Scottish privateer Andrew Barton who was preying on English merchant vessels at the eastern end of the English Channel. Although there is little surviving evidence of the incident, the king apparently ordered the two Howard sons, Edward and his elder brother Thomas, ‘in all haste’ to capture Barton and his two ships, the
Lyon
and the
Jenett of Purwyn
. Richard Grafton, the chronicler, recorded that the Howards’ ships were stationed in the Downs, off the east coast of Kent, on 2 August, when they
perceived Andrew was making towards Scotland and so fast the lord [Thomas] Howard chased him that he overtook him and there was a sore battle. The Englishmen were fierce and the Scots defended themselves manfully . . . Howard and his men, by clean strength, entered the main deck and the Scots fought on the hatches . . . Andrew was taken and [was] so sore wounded that he died there and the remnant of the Scots were taken, with their ship called the
Lyon
.
26
Edward Howard, meanwhile, intercepted the Scottish barque
27
Jenett
and boarded her, ‘slew many’ and captured the surviving crew. Both vessels were brought as prizes to Blackwall on the River Thames and the Scottish prisoners transferred to the Archbishop of York’s palace in London, before being repatriated.
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