Young and Damned and Fair

by Gareth Russell

  Thomas Howard’s tribe of children were expected to do their part in the rebuilding of the family—either through royal service, advantageous marriages, or both. The most spectacular match was that of the family’s heir, young Thomas, who married Henry VII’s sister-in-law, Anne of York; when she died in 1511, Thomas wed Henry VIII’s cousin, Lady Elizabeth Stafford, the younger sister of the Duke of Buckingham.45 The marriage of two of the Howard sisters, Elizabeth and Muriel, to members of relatively “new” families like the Boleyns and the Knyvets, might seem curious given the numerous subsequent accounts of the era that describe them as families of knights or country gentlemen, apparently far removed from the aristocratic pedigree the Howards had built for themselves. However, the idea of a binary of gentry and aristocracy is a misleading modern conceit. The few centuries before Catherine’s birth had seen enormous changes in the personnel of the elite—of the 136 lords who attended Parliament at the end of the thirteenth century, the direct descendants of only sixteen of them were around to perform similar duties at the start of the sixteenth.46 The aristocratic caste was simply too narrow to socialize or marry solely within itself, particularly if it is defined as those in possession of, or the offspring of someone with, one of the five titles of the nobility—in ascending order in England, baron, viscount, earl, marquess, and duke, or their female equivalents, baroness, viscountess, countess, marchioness, and duchess. In everyday social interactions, the nuances of aristocratic etiquette drew little distinction between the children of respected gentry families and those from certain families in the nobility—for instance, the offspring of a viscount, a baron, or a gentleman were all unentitled to style themselves “lord’ or “lady,” unlike those born to a duke, marquess, or earl.

  To give an idea of how small the high nobility was as a group, compared to the thousands who thronged the court and enjoyed a privileged lifestyle, by 1523 there were only two dukes, one marquess, and thirteen earls in the combined English and Irish peerages.47 Of those sixteen, less than half possessed a title that had been in the family for more than three generations. The idea of being “gently born,” meaning into a class of landowners who did not have to till their land themselves in order to generate an income from it, bonded the English upper classes together far more than a distinction between who was technically an aristocrat as opposed to a member of the gentry. Within the aristocracy, showing too much outward concern for whose title was “higher” was generally considered somewhat déclassé, carrying with it the whiff of insecurity or ignorance. Families like the Arundells, who owned sixteen thousand acres in the southwest, were technically “only” gentry, but they were still referred to as a “great” family by their contemporaries, and like most upper-class clans they benefited from their peers’ tendency to count the maternal ancestry as being equally important to the paternal.48 There was certainly a pecking order, and under Henry VIII it worked in the Howards’ favor, but, as ever, people tolerate in their friends what they deplore in their enemies, and it was only once people quarreled over other things that truly vicious hauteur reared its head.49 Ordinarily, what mattered was a shared sense of priorities cultivated by a similar education and sufficient money to maintain one’s position in landed society.

  The Howards’ return to the dukedom they had lost at Bosworth was accomplished after twenty-nine years when, in 1514, Henry VIII restored the title in recognition of Thomas Howard’s leadership of the English forces at the Battle of Flodden. Thomas Howard certainly showed no sense of snobbery towards his sons-in-law, and they seem to have been promoted and patronized alongside his own boys.50 In his old age, those men continued to rise after he effectively retired from public life, spending most of his time, in his family’s words, at the “Castle of Framlingham, where he continued and kept an honourable house unto the hour of his death. And there he died like a good Christian prince.”51

  At the burial ceremony itself, the priest chose to deliver his sermon on the text “Weep not: behold, the Lion of the tribe of Judah, the Root of David, hath prevailed.”52 Tribes, lions, and tenacity spoke to the Howards’ souls. As the padre reached the crescendo of his terrifying homily, mixing panegyric with eschatology, the individual with the eternal, several of the congregation became so unsettled and afraid that they left the chapel. Once the hardier mourners had departed at a more decorous pace, the workmen arrived to begin construction of the Duke’s unique monument. From an incarcerated traitor to the King’s right-hand for defense of the realm, and paterfamilias of one of the largest aristocratic networks in northern Europe, was an extraordinary trajectory for any life, yet the Duke died apparently torn between pride at his accomplishments and concern that in years to come observers would assume the worst regarding his loyalty in shifting allegiance from Edward V to Richard III to Henry VII. To prevent this, his tomb boasted a lengthy carved account of his life and service which constantly stressed his service to the Crown, irrespective of its incumbent. Over a year later, long after Edmund had returned to Lambeth, his wife, and their growing brood of children, work on the tomb was complete and Catherine’s grandfather rested in splendor.53

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  I. Today, the porch, like most of the former church, has been greatly altered, but much of the stonework dates from the fourteenth century and surviving illustrations suggest it stands on much the same site as it did in the 1520s.

  II. A custom dating from the sixth century, when the Body of Civil Law encouraged Christians to adopt nonparents as their child’s godparents.

  III. A reference to the Second Coming of Christ, when both the living and the dead would be judged.

  IV. Each time a peerage is created, the incumbents are numbered. If the title falls into disuse and is subsequently revived, the numbering starts anew. For instance, there have been six 1st earls of Sussex—the title was awarded to members of the de Warenne, Radclyffe, Savile, Yelverton, and royal families under Edward I, Henry VIII, Charles I, Charles II, George I, and Queen Victoria, respectively. In each case, the title had previously gone into abeyance following the extinction of the direct line of inheritance.

  V. To have two children with the same name was not unusual in an era with a relatively limited pool of Christian names and a custom for allowing godparents to pick a name at the christening ceremony. The 2nd Duke of Norfolk had two sons called Thomas and two daughters called Elizabeth. The aristocratic custom of a plethora of cozy nicknames arose from necessity.

  Chapter 3

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  Lord Edmund’s Daughter

  Anger makes dull men witty, but it keeps them poor.

  —Elizabeth I (1533–1603)

  Edmund Howard cannot have been thrilled at the arrival of another daughter. Girls required dowries and Edmund was already struggling financially. Catherine had the bad luck to be born to a man who peaked long before he became a father. Edmund was a toxic combination of corrupt, unstable, and pathetic, but he had not always been that. Those who knew him in his youth described Catherine’s father as “a courage and an hardy young lusty gentleman.”1 One of seven sons, but the third to reach adulthood, he had his father’s and brothers’ athletic capabilities, but lacked their acute social intelligence. He spent most of his childhood at court as a pageboy in the service of King Henry VII, like his elder brother Edward, and the upward trajectory of his family after Bosworth seemed to promise a life of success. During the festivities for Henry VIII’s coronation in 1509, Edmund and his two elder brothers were part of a group of “fresh young gallants and noble men gorgeously apparelled” who were asked to lead a tourney at the Palace of Westminster.2 The roll call of those invited to fight alongside him suggests that only the best jousters were chosen, and with good reason, given how much had been spent.

  Jousting mingled with a pageant was a relatively new kind of entertainment at the English court, with its combination of set pieces atop moving stages, music, dialogue, and mock combat. In Europe, it had long ago been transformed into an art form, with some celeb
rations re-creating the city of Troy or the twelve labors of Hercules, complete with mechanized monsters and giants. Artistic ingenuity rubbed uneasily with a sportsman’s zeal, and it was not always clear how choreographed the fighting should be. At a tournament performed before Pope Clement V, even the horses had been reduced to moving props maneuvered by six men concealed beneath cloth; a recent pageant for Cesare Borgia in the city of Ferrara saw the “dead” combatants fall to the ground in a beautifully executed dance, before standing to take their bows. In contrast, an entertainment in honor of Queen Isabeau of France saw real knights sparring in front of the royal party for several hours.3 In England, the men of Henry VIII’s court seemed keener to follow the French example than the Italian.

  Rather than a typical outdoor arena, like those used for a joust, the men fought in an elaborate fairy-tale set, as members of the court looked on and placed bets. A miniature castle had been built within the courtyard—miniature, at least, in comparison to its inspiration. Tudor roses and engraved pomegranates, Katherine of Aragon’s device, lined its walls, while a fountain splashed water in front of it. In the spirit of Sybaris, the little castle’s gargoyles spouted red, white, and claret wines to the delight of the audience. The entirely artificial ivy that wrapped this folie was “gilded with fine gold.” Edmund, by no means the least competitive of the bunch, rode forward from the castle to ask the King’s permission to fight for the honor of the court belle who had been given the role of Pallas Athena, the chaste embodiment of wisdom. Royal permission gave way to a testosterone-fueled spectacle of egotism. The participants’ vitality and their determination were well matched, and the joust only halted at nightfall. The next day, the King and Queen prevented the match resuming by stepping in to preemptively select the winners for themselves.4

  In the years to come, the court lost none of its allure for Edmund. A brief, halfhearted and failed attempt to pursue a legal career did not get much further than enrolling in London’s prestigious Middle Temple in 1511.5 Within ten days of his admission to the Temple, Edmund was back at court to participate in another set of jousts, this time to mark the birth of the Duke of Cornwall, the King’s short-lived son and heir.I Henry VIII, a tall and muscular youth blessed with the good looks of his grandfather Edward IV, was, at nineteen, keen to participate rather than simply observe as he had two years earlier.6 In recognition of Edmund’s skills, he was asked to lead the defenders; his brother-in-law, Sir Thomas Boleyn, was on the same team, as was Charles Brandon, the King’s handsome and womanizing favorite. Once again, the royal household spared no expense to celebrate such an important event. The Queen and her ladies gazed down from a box hung with arras and cloth of gold on a forest crafted from green velvet, satin, and “silks of divers colours,” complete with artificial rocks, hills, dales, arranged flowers, imported ferns, and grass. In the middle of the forest, the workmen had rendered another miniature castle “made of gold.” A man-made lion, “flourished all over with Damask gold,” and an antelope clothed in silver damask, were flanked by men disguised as wildlings from a mythical forest, who escorted the bejeweled beasts as they dragged the final pieces of the pageant into place in front of the Queen. Horns blasted, and parts of the set fell away to reveal four knights on horseback “armed at all places, every of them in cloth of gold, every of them his name embroidered.” These were Edmund’s opponents, the challengers, and their captain was the young King, joined by another of Edmund’s brothers-in-law, Sir Thomas Knyvet, and a clique of companions, all of whom had been given aliases that married amorous devotion with masculine honor. The King led the charge with his pseudonym of Coeur Loyale (“Loyal Heart”), while Sir Edward Neville, another teammate, got Valiant Desire.7 Knyvet, who got the part of Ardent Desire, joked that his character’s name would be better suited to his codpiece.8 The sounds of the trumpets gave way to the beating of the drums that announced the arrival of these challengers, dressed in armor and crimson satin.

  Edmund’s slot came on the following day, February 13, when the entertainments began with Thomas Boleyn and the Marquess of Dorset arriving in the costumes of pilgrims en route to the shrine of Santiago de Compostela, a holy site in the Queen’s Spanish homeland, reputed to be the burial place of one of the Twelve Apostles. They knelt before the “mighty and excellent princess and noble Queen of England” to ask permission to joust in her presence; the Queen graciously acquiesced and her husband returned to the fantastic tiltyard.9 An account of the joust, containing a tally of the scores of each knight, divided along the lines of their respective teams, survives today at the Bodleian Library in Oxford. In thin scratches of black ink, it lists Edmund Howard’s mistakes.10

  The athletic Charles Brandon parried well, superbly in fact, but after an acceptable length of time in the tilt, without fail he yielded to the King by a margin or tied with him, a masterstroke of hail-and-hearty camaraderie that suggested that when the King triumphed it was because he was the better sportsman. Everyone else followed suit and let the King win, except Edmund, who beat him every time. Lances splintered and sweat-drenched men cried out, while noblemen and “well-apparelled” servants watched as Edmund Howard repeatedly sent the nineteen-year-old monarch crashing to the ground.11 It was said that a banquet afterwards ended with “mirth and gladness,” but that was mainly because the decision to let some of the common people take away as souvenirs the solid gold letters and decorations hanging from the courtiers’ costumes had resulted in poor Thomas Knyvet practically being stripped naked by zealous trophy hunters.12

  Nearly all the men who participated in the Westminster jousts of February 1511 went on to rise further in the King’s graces, with the exception of Edmund. Three months later, Edmund was not asked to join in another set of jousts at the King’s side, while his elder brothers and his brothers-in-law were. Two years after those Westminster jousts, and the funeral of the little baby prince they had celebrated but who did not live to see his eighth week, the King went off to war against France, and he did not invite Edmund to accompany him. Henry VIII’s dreams of recapturing the martial glory days of Edward III or Henry V proved costly to the Howard family—Edmund’s elder brother Edward, who had become a favorite of the King’s, drowned in a naval battle against the forces of Louis XII. Despite the attacks Edward had led against Scottish ships, King James IV chivalrously told Henry VIII in a letter that Edward Howard’s life and talents had been wasted in Henry’s pointless war.13 Edmund’s brother-in-law and former jousting companion Thomas Knyvet was likewise lost at sea when his ship went up in flames at the Battle of Saint-Mathieu. Knyvet’s widow and Edmund’s sister, Muriel, died in childbirth four months later. Another of Edmund’s brothers, Henry, seems to have died of natural causes the following February, and been buried at Lambeth, less than a year after the death of another brother, Charles.14

  The war that took his brother’s life provided Edmund Howard with the opportunity to achieve the high point of his career. In the King’s absence, the northern English province of Northumberland was invaded by Scotland, France’s ally, who “spoiled burnt and robbed divers and sundry towns and places.”15 It was quite possibly the largest foreign army ever to invade English soil—four hundred oxen were needed to drag the mammoth cannon across the border.16 Queen Katherine, left behind as regent, “raised a great power to resist the said King of Scots,” and placed it under the command of Edmund’s father.17 Katherine had been forced to marshal an army quickly, and they were bedeviled by the war’s ongoing problem of poor supplies. By the time they actually engaged the Scots, many of the twenty-six thousand English soldiers had been without wine, ale, or beer for five days.18 In an age when weak ale, or “small beer,” was often supplied to prevent people drinking from dubious or unknown water supplies, its absence as the army moved north was felt keenly.19

  At the Battle of Flodden, which took place on September 9, 1513, Edmund was given command of the right flank on the “uttermost part of the field at the west side,” with three subordinate knights servi
ng as lieutenants over fifteen hundred men, mostly from Lancashire and Cheshire.20 When they were “fiercely” attacked by the soldiers of Lord Home, Edmund’s personal standard, and his standard-bearer, were hacked to pieces on the field, at which point most of Edmund’s men turned and fled.21 If his talents as a leader failed, his courage did not. With only a handful of loyal servants remaining by his side, Edmund was “stricken to the ground” on three separate occasions. Each time, according to a contemporary account, “he recovered and fought hand to hand with one Sir Davy Home, and slew him.”22 A wounded soldier called John Heron returned to fight at Edmund’s side, declaring, “There was never noble man’s son so like to be lost as you be this day, for all my hurts I shall here live and die with you.”23 Edmund’s life was only saved by the arrival of cavalry headed by Lord Dacre, who rode in “like a good and an hardy knight” to rescue Edmund from annihilation and bring him through the cadavers to kneel at his father’s feet, where he learned that “by the grace, succour and help of Almighty God, victory was given to the Realm of England” and received a knighthood, an honor bestowed on about forty-five of his comrades who had also shown exceptional bravery in the melee.24