29. Hall,
Chronicle
, p. 525.
30. Allen,
Letters of Richard Fox
, p. 54.
31. A large merchant ship armed for naval operations.
32. Vergil, p. 27, and Stow, p. 490.
33. Allen,
Letters of Richard Fox
, p. 58.
34. ‘Crayer’ - a small trading vessel. Today’s naval parlance would call this ‘swarm attack’, although history demonstrates that the success of such tactics depends on high speed and numbers.
35. Grafton also calls him Sir Alphonse Charant. He was from the
Sanchade Gana
, one of six Spanish ships that had joined Howard’s fleet.
36. Short crossbow bolts or arrows.
37. A long edged and hooked weapon, used at sea to repel boarders, and on land, against attacking horsemen. The name ‘morris’ comes from ‘Moorish’, supposedly describing the origin of the weapon.
38. BL Cotton MS, Caligula D, vi, fol. 107.
39. A. Spont, ‘Letters and Papers Relating to the War with France 1512-3’,
Navy Records Society
, vol. 10 (1897), p. 134.
40. Alice was the widow of Sir William Parker and was twelve years older than Howard. In 1514, Surrey confirmed her holding of his manor of Barnshall, in Stoke-by-Nayland, Suffolk, for her life as part of her jointure. See: Arundel Castle MS, G1/5. When Alice made her will in December 1518, she provided money to build a tomb for her husband in Brittany. She died later that month. See
DNB2
, vol. 28, p. 337.
41. Probably the
Jenett of Purwyn
captured earlier from Andrew Barton.
42. Howard’s natural sons may be those later mentioned in a licence, dated 2 July 1519, granted to ‘Charles Howard, one of the gentlemen of the Privy Chamber and George Howard, one of the King’s Surgeons’ allowing them to import 1,000 tuns, or large barrels, of Gascon wine into England. See Brenan and Statham, fn p. 94.
43. The Howard Cup is now in the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. A ‘grace cup’ was traditionally used for communal drinking at the end of a meal, although this magnificent example may only have been for display. It stands 10.7 inches (27.3 cm.) high and is decorated with later, additional silver-gilt mounts, hallmarked for 1526, including Catherine of Aragon’s pomegranate badge. The cover is topped by a figure of St George slaying the dragon. At its heart is an elephant ivory cup of twelfth-century date, which was believed by the Howards to be a relic of the martyred Archbishop of Canterbury, St Thomas Becket (1118-70). Catherine later returned the cup to Thomas Howard, third Duke of Norfolk, and it passed down through the Howard family before being given away by the twelfth duke early in the nineteenth century. It was sold at Christie’s auctioneers, London, in 1931 and acquired by Lord Wakefield who presented it to the museum. It is illustrated in Richard Marks and Paul Williamson (eds),
Gothic Art for England 1400-1547
(London, 2003), p. 318.
44. An angel was worth 3s 4d, or 40 pence.
45. Brenan and Statham, pp. 93-4.
46. BL Cotton MS Caligula D, vi, fols 106-7. Dated 7 May 1513.
47. BL Cotton MS Caligula D, vi, fol. 104.
48. Plantagenet (?1480-1542) was the bastard son of Edward IV by Elizabeth Lucie. He became deputy of Calais in 1533 but was arrested in 1540, suspected of treason, and, despite being declared innocent, died in the Tower. His de Lisle title was of the fourth creation.
49. Allen,
Letters of Richard Fox
, pp. 64-5.
50. Later, he reorganised the royal dockyard at Deptford on the River Thames. An agreement between him, as Great Admiral of England, and John Heron, Treasurer of the Chamber, and John Hopton, Comptroller of the King’s Ships, dated 9 June 1517, was for the construction of ‘pond or afloat dock for certain ships to ride in’. See BL Add. Charters, 6,289. This was planned to accommodate five of the biggest ships in Henry VIII’s burgeoning navy.
51. Grafton,
Chronicle
, vol. 2, p. 269.
52. Hall,
Chronicle
, p. 555.
53. Nottinghamshire Archives, DD/P/6/⅓1/10.
54. Hall,
Chronicle
, p. 545.
55. Hall,
Chronicle
, p. 557.
56. Hall,
Chronicle
, p. 557.
57. In the sixteenth entury, water was rarely drunk because of the known dangers of contamination: dysentery was commonly the scourge of armies. ‘Small’ or weak ale and wine were drunk instead by the soldiery.
58. Barr,
Flodden
, p. 104.
59. Head,
Ebbs and Flows
, p. 35.
60. Hall,
Chronicle
, p. 560.
61. The English camp at Milfield is six miles (10 km.) from Wooler on the A697 road to Coldstream.
62. Barr,
Flodden
, pp. 133-8.
63. Grafton,
Chronicle
, vol. 2, p. 275.
64. Laing,
Flodden
, p. 150.
65. Barr,
Flodden
, pp. 167-8.
66. Brooks,
Battlefields
, p. 287. The bagpipe lament ‘Flowers of the Forest’, written c. 1750, to commemorate the Scottish dead at Flodden, is still played at military funerals.
67. Hall,
Chronicle
, p. 564.
68. They are now held by the College of Arms in London, although some doubt has been raised about their authenticity.
69. James’s head was later buried in St Michael’s church, Wood Street, London. The antiquary John Stow reported later in the sixteenth century that, after the dissolution of the Carthusian house, the king’s body, still wrapped in lead, was thrown into a lumber room ‘amongst the old timber and rubble. Since [such] time, workmen there, for their foolish pleasure, hewed off his head. Lancelot Young [Master Glazier to Elizabeth I] feeling a sweet savour to come from thence and seeing the same dried from all moisture, and yet the form remaining with the hair of the head and [red] beard, brought it to London to his house in Wood Street, where for a time he kept it for the sweetness. In the end [he] caused the sexton of that church to bury it amongst other bones, taken out of their charnel house.’ John Stow,
Survey of London
(two vols, Oxford, 1908), vol. 1, p. 298.
70. Margaret, Henry’s sister, and wife to James IV, had given birth to a son, seventeen months before. The infant was crowned James V of Scotland on 21 September 1513 at Stirling Castle.
71. BL Cotton MS Vespasian F, iii, fol. 15. This detailed French aid to Scotland: 25,000 gold crowns, forty cartloads of gunpowder; 400 handguns and 6,000 spears, the same number of maces and the tactical assistance of French military advisers, led by a knight called d’Aussy. The same day Catherine wrote to Wolsey, ‘a post has come with news from Lord Howard which she has sent the king’. She repeated: ‘I think it is God’s doing that his subjects should gain such a victory in his absence.’ See BL Cotton MS, Caligula, B, vi, fol. 35.
72. BL Egerton MS 2,014, fol. 2. Reprinted in part, Byrne,
Letters, Henry VIII
, pp. 20-21.
73. BL Cotton MS Vitellius, B, ii, fol. 50.
74. The ceremony of Howard’s creation as [second] Duke of Norfolk is in BL Egerton MS 985, fol. 59.
75. Copies of the Letters Patent creating Thomas Howard [second] Duke of Norfolk for his services to the crown in Scotland and granting the augmentation of arms, is in Arundel Castle archives, G1/83.
76. Head,
Ebb and Flows
, p. 41.
77. Ellis,
Original Letters
, first series, vol. 1, pp. 116-17.
Chapter 2: Guardians of England
1. Vergil,
Anglica Historia
, p. 6.
2. The blue-grey stock dove,
Columba oenas
, is similar to a pigeon.
3. See John Holmes, ‘A Catalogue of French Ambassadors in England’,
Gentleman’s Magazine
, vol. 169 (1840), p. 484. Two letters from de la Guiche are in BL, Cotton MS Caligula E i, fol. 59 and Caligula E ii, fol. 116.
4. From the Old English
cnafa
, originally a term for a male servant but by the early sixteenth century the word had become a taunt, meaning a deceitful and unreliable scoundrel.
5. He sold second-hand clothes.
6. Formerly called the ‘Priory of the Blessed Virgin without Bishopsgate’. The area of Spitalfields in London’s East End is a corruption of ‘hospital’. For more information on the priory, see:
Survey of London
, vol. 27,
Spitalfields and Mile End
(London, 1957), p. 22. The hospital had 180 beds for the poor. Twenty years later the priory church was in decay and the roof fell in during August 1538. (See a letter from the Lord Mayor of London, Sir Richard Gresham, to Thomas Cromwell, in National Archives SP1/135/7.) The priory was dissolved in 1539.
7. Walter Thornbury,
Old and New London
, vol. 2, p. 149 (London, 1878). The house and the preaching cross can be seen on a copperplate map of London, engraved c. 1553-9, the relevant section of which is illustrated in Adrian Prockter and Robert Taylor,
A-Z of Elizabethan London
(London, 1979), p. 30.
8. Grafton,
Chronicle
, vol. 2, p. 290.
9. Or ‘Fight for your neighbourhood’.
10. Grafton,
Chronicle
, vol. 2, p. 291.
11. For a description on how ‘Bucklers’ was played, see Sally Wilkins,
Sport and Games of Medieval Cultures
(Westport, 2002), p. 131.
12. Grafton,
Chronicle
, vol. 2, p. 292.
13. Vergil, p. 245.
14. Wriothesley, vol. 1, p. 11. These trials - from the French
Oyer et Terminer
, ‘to hear and determine’ - were presided over by justices commissioned by the crown.
15. Grafton,
Chronicle
, vol. 2, p. 293.
16. Then called ‘Gracious Street’.
17. Grafton,
Chronicle
, vol. 2, p. 293.
18. Ibid.
19. Holinshed,
Chronicles
, vol. 3, p. 624.
20. Ibid., p. 625.
21. Grafton,
Chronicle
, vol. 2, p. 294. A large number of interlopers had appeared among the rioter prisoners, a group later called ‘the black wagon’. Holinshed,
Chronicles
, vol. 3, p. 625, reported that ‘Diverse offenders that were not taken, hearing that the king was inclined to mercy, came well [dressed] to Westminster and suddenly stripped them[selves to] their shirts, with halters, and came in among the prisoners willingly to be partakers of the king’s pardon. One John Gelson, yeoman of the crown, was the first that began to spoil [loot] and exhorted others to do the same. Because he fled and was not taken, he came in with a rope among the other prisoners and so had his pardon.’
22. She had been promised by her father to Philip, the son of Maximilian, Archduke of Austria, under a treaty of 5 August 1480.
23. This included an allowance of twenty shillings a week for food and drink and the wages of a household of two women, a young maid, a gentleman, a yeoman and three grooms. She was also allowed £15 11s 8d a year for the upkeep of seven horses.
24. Bapst, p. 153, confirms that three children were born to Howard and his first wife and names the first two as Lady Muriel and Lady Catherine but does not provide any authority for this statement. Robinson, p. 25, says she had four sons who all died in infancy. They were buried in the Howard chapel of St Mary’s church, Lambeth.
25.
Complete Peerage
, vol. 12, p. 554.
26. Monetary calculations have been derived from a model available on the Inter-net. See: Lawrence H. Officer’s ‘Comparing the Purchasing Power of British Pounds from 1264 to 2006 ...’ URL:
http://www.measuringworth.com
. A jointure is the property and income settled on a wife to support her if she outlives her husband.
27.
Lords Journal
, vol. 1, pp. 18-23.
28. Pollard,
Wolsey
, p. 76.
29. Vergil, p. 285.
30. Pollard,
Wolsey
, p. 107, and Vergil, pp. 262-5.
31. Vergil, pp. 262ff. An angry Wolsey swore that Buckingham would ‘sit upon [his] skirts’ for this insult, and the next day Buckingham appeared at court, insolently wearing a short coat and explained to the king that this simple stratagem would foil Wolsey’s plans for revenge against him.
32. Starkey,
Personalities
... , p. 65.
33. He claimed descent from Thomas of Woodstock (1355-97), seventh and youngest son of King Edward III, Earl of Buckingham and Duke of Gloucester.
34. The roll file of the court of the Lord High Steward is in the National Archives, KB/8/5.
35.
LPFD
, vol. 3, pt i, pp. cxxxi-iii.
36. Gilbert’s confession is in BL Harleian MS 283, fol. 70. It includes the allegation that Buckingham wished that God ‘would not suffer the king’s issue to prosper as appears by the [death o]f his son and that his daughters prosper not and that the king’s [grace] has no issue male ...’
37. The chaplain, Delacourt and Knyvett were jealous of the favour shown to Hopkins in Buckingham’s household. Henry Corsley, the prior of the Carthusian house, wrote a letter, signed by all eight of his community, protesting their innocence of any involvement in the prophecies and urging that Hopkins should be sent to some other Carthusian house for appropriate punishment. In the event, Hopkins is believed to have died in the Tower, broken-hearted at the fate of his patron. See
VCH: Somerset
, vol. 2 (ed. William Page), (London, 1911), pp. 118-23.
38. BL Stowe MS 164, fol. 3.
39. Hall,
Chronicle
, p. 624, and
LPFD
, vol. 3, pt i, p. cxxxiv.
40. 14/15 Henry VIII,
cap
. 20. The Act talks of Buckingham’s ‘many treasons in the counties of Gloucester, Somerset, the City of London, the counties of Kent and Surrey ...’ A late sixteenth-century copy of the attainder is in National Archives, SP 30/28/209.
41. The countess later told Thomas Cromwell she provided Norfolk with five children.