vanguard at Flodden and after the victory was created earl of
Surrey. When Richard III. was allying himself with the Howards,
Thomas Howard, a boy of eleven, had been betrothed to Anne,
daughter of the late King Edward IV., and Henry VII. allowed
the marriage with his queen’s sister to take place in 1495. This
royal bride died of consumption, leaving no living child,
and her husband took in 1513, as his second wife, Elizabeth
Stafford, daughter of that duke of Buckingham upon whom the
old duke of Norfolk, the tears upon his cheeks, was forced to
pass sentence of death. Succeeding his father in 1524, Norfolk
was created earl marshal in 1533. An unsuccessful diplomatist,
his chief services in arms were the butchery in the north after
the Pilgrimage of Grace and the raid into Scotland which ended
with the rout of Solway Moss. He left his wife for a mistress,
Elizabeth Holland, was in discord with his family, and lived to
see his two nieces, Anne Boleyn and Catherine Howard, and his
son Surrey, the fiery-tempered poet, go in turn to the block.
He himself was attainted and was lying a prisoner in the Tower,
doomed to die in the morning, on the night of the death of
Henry VIII. He was not released until the accession of Mary,
parliament restoring his dukedom on his petition for reversal
of the attainder. His grandson Thomas succeeded him in 1554,
and in 1556 made the second of those marriages which have
given the Howards their high place among the English nobility.
The bride was Mary, sole heir in her issue of her father Henry,
the last of the Fitzalan earls of Arundel. Her father’s line and
the royal Stewards of Scotland sprang from one forefather,
Alan, son of Flaald the Breton. The Mowbray match had already
brought to the Howards the representation of an elder line
of the Fitzalan earls, who sat in the seats of their ancestors,
the Aubignys and Warennes, great earls near akin to their
sovereigns. And now the younger line, earls of Arundel and
Lords Mautravers, were also to have a Howard to represent
them. From this time the spreading genealogy of the Howards
drew its origins from most of the illustrious names of the houses
founded after the Norman Conquest.
The young duchess died in her seventeenth year after giving birth to a son, and the duke took a second wife from a humble stock, newly enriched and honoured, the daughter of Henry VIII.’s subservient chancellor, the Lord Audley of Walden. Within ten years he married a third time, the lady being Elizabeth Leybourne, the widow of Lord Dacre of Gilsland. She survived her marriage but a few months and her husband then obtained the wardship of her Dacre offspring, a son who died young, and three daughters whom the duke, with the true Howard eye for a rich inheritance, gave as brides to three of his sons. After three such good fortunes by marriage Norfolk in his folly looked for a crown with a fourth match, listening to the laird of Lethington when he set forth the scheme by which the duke was to marry a restored queen of Scots and rule Scotland with her who should be recognized as Elizabeth’s successor. Ten months in the Tower under strong suspicion would have warned another man, but Norfolk was unstable and false. After promising fidelity and the abandonment of the Scots marriage scheme, Cecil took him corresponding with Mary and tampering with the Ridolfi plot. He died on Tower Hill in 1572 for an example to the disloyal counties, protesting innocence and repentance, warning his children in a last letter to discredit all “false bruits” that he was a papist.
By his attainder the Norfolk titles were once more forfeited. But Philip Howard, the son and heir, succeeded to the ancient earldom of Arundel in 1580, on the death of his maternal grandfather, while the Lord Lumley, his uncle by marriage, surrendered to him his life interest in the castle and honour of Arundel. The next year an act of parliament restored the earl in blood. After a profligate youth at court, he followed his wife in professing the Roman faith, and in 1585 made an attempt to leave England to seek safety from the penal laws. But his ship was boarded in the Channel and the earl, condemned by the Star-Chamber to a heavy fine and to imprisonment during the queen’s pleasure, suffered a harsh captivity in the Tower. After the defeat of the Armada he had been condemned to death on a charge of high treason, founded on the tale drawn by torture from a priest, that Arundel had urged him to say a mass for the success of the Spaniards. But he was allowed to linger in his prison until 1595 when he died, the sight of his wife and children being cruelly refused to the dying man. Thus it befell that, of the chiefs of the Howards born since the great Mowbray alliance, two had died by the axe and one in the prison from which a fourth had hardly escaped. A fifth had fallen in a lost battle, and only one had died in peace in his own house.
The ill fate of the Howards seemed to be appeased by the death of Philip, earl of Arundel. Tudor policy did its work well, and noblemen, however illustrious their pedigrees, could no longer be counted as menaces by the Crown, which was, indeed, finding another rival to its power. In the first year of James I., Thomas, the young son of Earl Philip, was restored in blood and given the titles of Arundel and Surrey. But the lands belonging to these titles remained with the Crown and he had to repair his fortunes by one of those marriages which never failed his house, his wife being Alathea Talbot, who was at last the heir of Gilbert, earl of Shrewsbury. To the grief of his mother he left the Roman church. A knight of the Garter, he was in 1621 created earl marshal for life, and revived the jurisdiction belonging to the office. An act of 1627, one of several such aimed at aggrandizing families by diverting the descent of dignities in fee from heirs general, entailed the earldom and castle of Arundel upon Thomas, earl of Arundel and Surrey and the heirs male of his body “and for default of such issue, to the heirs of his body.” His pride and austerity made him unpopular at court and he left the country in 1642, settling at last in Padua, where he died in 1646, impoverished by the sequestrations of the parliament, whose forces had taken and retaken his castle of Arundel. In answer to his petition for the dukedom, the king had, on the 6th of June 1644, given him a patent of the earldom of Norfolk, in order, as it would seem, to flatter him by suggesting that the title of Norfolk would at least be refused to any other family. He is celebrated as a collector of paintings, books, gems and sculptures, his “Arundel marbles” being given by his grandson in 1667 to the University of Oxford. The dukedom for which Arundel had petitioned Charles I. in vain was restored by act of the first parliament of Charles II. to his grandson Thomas, a lunatic living at Padua, on whose death in 1677 it passed to this Thomas’s brother, Henry Frederick, who had been created earl of Norwich and hereditary earl marshal of England in 1672. In 1777 Edward, the ninth of the Howard dukes, died childless in his ninety-second year. With him ended the earldom of Norwich, while the representation of the Mowbrays and Segraves passed to his nieces, the Ladies Stourton and Petre, the abeyance of the two baronies being determined in 1878 in favour of Lord Stourton. Under the act of 1627 the earldom of Arundel and the castle passed with the dukedom to a second cousin, Charles Howard of Greystock (d. 1786), an eccentric recluse. At his death in 1786 he was succeeded by his son Charles, the notorious “Jockey of Norfolk,” the big, coarse, generous, slovenly, hard-drinking Whig of whom all the memoir-writers of his age have their anecdotes. He conformed to the Church of England and spent a vast sum in restoring Arundel Castle. A third cousin succeeded him in 1815, Bernard Edward Howard, who, although a Roman Catholic, was enabled, by the act of 1824, to act as earl marshal. This was the grandfather of the fifteenth duke, earl of Arundel, Surrey and Norfolk, and hereditary earl marshal of England.
The eldest of the cadet branches of the ducal house has its origin in William (c. 1510–1573), eldest son of the victor of Flodden by his second marriage. He survived the reign of Henry VIII., that perilous age for the Howards, with no worse misadventure than the conviction of himself and his wife of misprision of treason in concealing the offences of his niece, Queen Catherine. But both were pardoned. In 1553 he had the office of lord admiral of England, and in the next year the Garter. For his services against Sir Thomas Wyat he was created (March 11, 1553/4) Lord Howard of Effingham, the title being taken from a Surrey manor granted him by Edward VI. Queen Elizabeth continued his employment in diplomacy, and had he been richer he might have had an earldom. His eldest son Charles (1536–1624), lord admiral of England in 1585, sailed as
