Norfolk believed his son ‘Thom’ would be made a ward of the queen, but Philip was sure to ‘have your brother William left still with you, because, poor boy, he has nothing to feed cormorants with; to whom you will as well be a father as a brother’.83 A separate enclosure urged Philip to make use of ‘Sir Thomas Cornwallis’ but ‘beware of him, and all other Papists’. He commended Lord Henry Howard ‘my brother and your uncle. There is no one who may stand you in better stead. He has been so natural, as for my sake, he has brought himself into trouble.’84
All these letters are signed plain ‘Thomas Howard’. The dukedom was already attainted and all honours had been stripped from him. Sir Gilbert Dethick, Garter King of Arms, had ordered his heraldic accoutrements - banner, helmet, crest and stall plate - to be taken from St George’s Chapel, Windsor, and hurled into the castle ditch, in his degradation from the Order.85
The duke also wrote a farewell to his faithful steward William Dix on a page of the fifth edition of the New Testament of Our Saviour Jesus Christ, printed and published in 1566 by Richard Jugge, ‘printer to the queen’s majesty’. Unsurprisingly, his thirteen lines form a harrowing letter:Farewell good Dix. Your service has been so faithful to me as I am sorry that I cannot make proof of my goodwill to recompense it.
I trust my death shall not make no change in you towards mine, but that you will faithfully perform the trust that I have reposed in you; forget me and remember me in mine.
Forget not with plainness to counsel and advise Philip and Nan’s inexperienced years. The rest of their brothers and sisters’ well-doing rests much upon their virtues and considerate dealings.
God grant them His grace which is able to work better in them than my natural well-meaning heart can wish unto them.
Amen, and so hoping of your honesty and faithfulness when I am dead, I bid you this, my last farewell, the 10 of February 1572.
T.H.86
On one of the book’s endpapers is an ink inscription demonstrating that the duke disposed of a number of his books to his friends, writing a last message in each. The note relates to a quarto copy of Richard Grafton’s Chronicle or History of England, published in 1570,87 which had this letter, containing Norfolk’s regrets about the recent history of the Howard family, written on a leaf:Good friend George, farewell. I have no other tokens to send to my friends but my books and I know how sorrowful you are amongst the rest for my hard hap88 whereof, I thank God, because I hope his merciful chastisement will prepare me for a better world.
Look well throughout this book and you shall find the name of a duke very unhappy.89 I pray God it may end with me and that others may speed better hereafter. But if I might have my wish and were in as good a state as ever you knew me, yet I would wish for a lower degree.
Be a friend, I pray you, to mine and do my hearty commendations to your good wife and to gentle Mr Denny.
I die in the faith that you have ever known me to be. Farewell, good friend, 1572
Your dying as he was living Norfolk.
God bless my godson - Amen.
Sadly it is not possible to identify the recipient.
On 26 February, he sat down to write his ‘last confession and to my remembrance, true in all points upon the which I might take to my death’. He humbly recalled ‘my life, my former misspent and ill-ordained life’ and protested ‘even before the Lord that I have been a Protestant [underlined] ever since I know’. But he confessed ‘that my dealings have been given just suspicion that I should be a Papist or a favourer of Papists’.
I did arrogantly presume . . . to enter into dealing with the Queen of Scots . . . nor is it any excuse for me to say that I was persuaded thereto if I had been mindful of my duty as I ought to have been.
After her majesty had commanded me to the contrary and that I made promise [. . . . .] no further from it, I . . . disobediently entered into the cause anew . . . after I . . . submitted to her majesty under my hand and seal never to deal further in that, my unhappy cause . . . to my utter shame.
Norfolk agreed he had received letters about Ridolphi’s mission and, when his secretary Barker brought two letters from the agent and the Pope, he had read and concealed them. The document ends:
This is my sorrowful confession. Pity my hard fortune, in whose hands whoever this shall come. I myself will sufficiently lament and repent it during my short life. By the woeful and repentant hand, but now too late of
Tho: Howard.90
He also wrote a lengthy will and attached to it a chequer roll listing the houses he thought ‘fit for my children to keep . . . and also what number of persons I find convenient to attend them’. Five houses are suggested: Framlingham Castle, Suffolk, Flitcham, Lopham and Thetford lodges in Norfolk and, of course, Kenninghall. The duke ordained that Philip should have ‘two gentlemen to attend in his chamber’ and one yeoman usher, together with a schoolmaster for his education. The Howard household should have a second tutor ‘to teach the younger sons’ and one more ‘to teach them languages’. There was also a chaplain, two laundry men, one porter, four yeoman waiters, two grooms of the stables, an usher of the hall for William and three persons in the cellar, buttery and pantry.
Norfolk asked to be buried in the Howard mortuary chapel at Framlingham and ‘there laid in that tomb whereat my loving wives are buried’. He asked his executors ‘to bestow no further charge of any new tomb upon me, otherwise then, a statue of me set in the wall or laid upon that tomb as they shall think most fit’.91
Elizabeth hesitated and havered over the death warrant. She signed it on 9 February 1572 and then delayed its implementation. It was addressed to Sir Thomas Bacon, ‘Lord Keeper of our Great Seal of England’, and in the awful legal jargon of state retribution, it rehearsed that ‘Thomas duke of Norfolk, late of Kenninghall . . . for sundry treasons by him committed and done was the 16th day of January arraigned and tried . . . by his peers and found guilty’.
He was sentenced to suffer the awful fate of traitors, but
We being moved to pity of our grace especial, are pleased and contented to change such manner of execution as by our Steward of England was then pronounced against the said duke, minding nevertheless the surety and preservation of our person and realm . . . and also to give example of terror, dread and fears for all others hereafter . . .
Forseeing always that no other execution of death be executed to the said duke but only to cause his head to be smitten from his body at the Tower Hill, the accustomed place of execution.92
In the middle of April, Alexander Nowell, Dean of St Paul’s Cathedral, wrote to Burghley about the state of Norfolk’s health - he suffered from an ‘abundance of humours and [the] weakness of [his] stomach is growing upon him’ because of the closeness of his prison and ‘the lack of air in the warmness of the weather’.
On 31 May, the duke was warned to prepare himself for death and at eight o’clock on the morning of 2 June he was marched out of the Tower and up the slight slope to the scaffold on Tower Hill.
Norfolk had ordered a special suit for the execution - a white fustian shirt, worn beneath a black satin doublet. After prayers had been said, the duke told ‘the multitude that stood around . . .’
It is no new thing for men to suffer death in this place, though since the beginning of our most gracious queen’s reign, I am the first and God grant I may be the last. That I treated with the Queen of Scots I freely confess . . . Ridolphi I never talked to but once and that not to the prejudice of the queen for many men know I had dealings with him for money matters upon bills and bonds.
I found him to be a man that enjoyed the tranquillity of England and of a prompt and ready wit for any wicked design.
I have never been addicted to Popery . . . but have always been averse from Popish doctrines . . . Yet I cannot deny but that I have had amongst my servants and familiars some that have been addicted to Popish religion.
Dean Nowell told the crowd that the duke ‘desires you to all join in a prayer to God to have
mercy on him’ and called for silence so he could compose himself. The executioner offered Norfolk a blindfold but he brushed it aside saying ‘I fear not death’.
He knelt down and laid his head on the block.
It was cut off with one stroke of the axe, amid the tears of the sorrowful crowd and a small fight with some of the queen’s gentleman pensioners.93
Mary Queen of Scots followed him to the block and was executed on 8 February 1587.
On 16 June 1572, Philip wrote to Lord Burghley, lamenting the death of his father and asking the minister to take him and the rest of Norfolk’s family under his protection.94
Around 1600, Sir Walter Raleigh wrote to Sir Robert Cecil, son of Lord Burghley, with some good advice. Do not fear revenge: ‘Your own father’, he told him, ‘was esteemed to be the contriver of Norfolk’s ruin, yet his son followed your father . . . and loved him.’95
10
MARTYR EARL
‘If that be the cause in which I am to perish, sorry I am that I have but one life to lose’
St Philip Howard before his death in the Tower, October 15951
Philip Howard, the only son of the fourth duke and his first wife, was born at noon precisely on 28 June 1557, at Arundel House, just off the Strand in London. Nicholas Heath, Archbishop of York and Lord Chancellor, baptised him on 2 July in the Chapel Royal of the Palace of Whitehall, using a ‘gold’ font, ‘made [for the] purpose and kept in the Treasury only for the christening of the children of princes of the realm’.2
Philip’s mother died from puerperal fever, an infection arising from his birth. Two stepmothers rapidly followed her to the grave and the eldest boy’s care was entrusted to a ‘grave and ancient gentlewoman’ before he was tutored in Greek and Hebrew by the Oxford scholar Gregory Martin, at Audley End.3 As part of his father’s grand plan to acquire extensive estates in the north for his heirs, Philip, now Earl of Surrey, was betrothed to Anne Dacre when both were aged twelve. Two years later, when they reached the then age of consent, they were married by special order of Norfolk while he was imprisoned in the Tower.
Fourteen-year-old Philip watched the royal commissioners make their inventory of the Howard possessions at Kenninghall and wrote to Burghley that their coming
makes me afraid that the queen is very much displeased with my lord my father, which makes me no less heavy than duty binds me, or his unhappy chance does require.
Being assured of the great friendship that you bore to my father in his former imprisonment, I now most earnestly desire your lordship to continue the same and remember him who is afflicted with grief and troubled with his unhappy state.4
Little did he know - perhaps he never guessed - that Burghley was the chief architect of his father’s downfall and execution.
In accordance with his dead father’s last wishes, he and his two brothers spent two years at St John’s College, Cambridge, where he proceeded MA in November 1576. Apart from a university education, Philip Howard ‘received no small detriment, partly by the bad example[s] he saw there, partly by the liberty permitted him, but principally by the flattery of some ministers [dons], which was so palpable sometimes that his lady . . . was ashamed to hear it’.5
Meanwhile, his unattainted estates were being efficiently administered by a triumvirate of officials, including the fourth duke’s trusted auditor and receiver, William Dix. One of their early duties was to recompense Laurence Bannister, the steward of the Dacre estates, for his expenses when he was dragged into Norfolk’s treason case and confined in the Tower. This included his fine of £138 6s 8d, paid on his release; the £40 ‘to him which procured his pardon’, £278 5s for his board while behind bars.6 Among other administrative headaches, Dix was concerned about sureties for a flock of 2,800 sheep that belonged to the late duke.7
Soon afterwards, Howard took up residence at court - keen, like his forefathers, to capture the monarch’s attention and favour. Now aged eighteen, he swiftly forgot his father’s solemn advice to be wary of its dazzling glamour and dark-corner intrigues, and his head was turned by ‘corrupted immodest young women wherewith the court in those days did much abound’.8
He selfishly neglected his young wife - indeed, cast doubts on whether she was truly his spouse - in the cynical knowledge that the jealous and cantankerous Elizabeth did not willingly bestow her goodwill on dashing but married courtiers. Anne, or ‘Nan’, was left marooned, destitute in the country while he occupied Howard House, so handy for the palaces at Greenwich and Westminster. He lavished money on the showy tournaments held on the anniversaries of Elizabeth’s coronation. And he entertained the queen at his palaces at Norwich and Kenninghall during the royal progress to East Anglia in August 1578, ‘where for diverse days, he lodged and feasted not only herself . . . but the [Privy] Council, courtiers and all their company but all the gentlemen and people of the country’. A contemporary chronicler described how ‘the Earl of Surrey did show most sumptuous cheer, in whose park were speeches well set out’.9 His expensive New Year gift to Elizabeth in 1579 was a girdle ‘of tawny velvet, embroidered with seed pearls, the buckle and pendant of gold’.10
Very soon he had drunk, gambled and spent his way through much of the Howard property revenues. Furthermore, Surrey fell into serious debt - totalling more than £14,000, or nearly £3 million at current values - and was forced to sell land to fend off his creditors. His behaviour shocked and affronted his grandfather, Henry Fitzalan, twelfth Earl of Arundel, and his aunt Jane (née Fitzalan), who had married John Lumley, Baron Lumley, both of whom partly disinherited him as a punishment for his spendthrift ways.
But when Arundel died on 24 February 1580, Howard still succeeded to the earldom and substantial properties, including Arundel Castle in Sussex. He now had two London homes - Arundel House, as well as Howard House in Charterhouse Square. His wife, as co-heir to the Dacre lands, had already brought manors and baronies in the north to the marriage. He demanded to be summoned to Parliament as Earl of Arundel but his title was questioned and he was not restored in blood until 15 March 1581 by private statute.11
His panache and ostentation remained undiminished: on 15 and 16 May 1581, he took part in a colourful ‘triumph’ before Elizabeth and the French ambassador which was intended as an elaborate, if not incomprehensible, allegory promoting the queen’s marriage to yet another hopeful suitor, François d’Alençon, Duke of Anjou.
First the Earl of Arundel entered the tiltyard, all in . . . engraven armour, with [horse] caparisons and furniture all richly and bravely embroidered, having attendant on him two gentlemen ushers, four pages riding on spare horses and twenty of his gentlemen . . . apparelled in short cloaks and Venetian hose of crimson velvet, laid with gold lace; doublets of yellow satin, hats of crimson with gold bands and yellow feathers . . .
Then he had six trumpeters that sounded before him and thirty-one yeomen that waited after him apparelled in cassock coats . . .12
This may have been the last gasp of a misspent youth, for around this time the earl returned to his long-suffering wife and the couple belatedly set up home together. A daughter, Elizabeth, was born in 1583, and a son, Thomas, followed on in 1585. The earl began to take his public duties seriously, aided by a prodigious, if not photographic, memory.13 On 4 July 1581, he was asked to ‘examine certain disordered persons in the town of Brithelmestone [Brighton]’ and in August the same year arrested four south coast pirates called Daniel, Hunter, Page and Richards. Unfortunately, they escaped. He was also told in July 1580 that the queen needed his castle at Framlingham to imprison those recusants - obdurate Catholics - arrested in Norfolk and Suffolk.14
Shortly afterwards, the Countess of Arundel openly converted to Catholicism while living at Arundel Castle. The queen, who anyway had taken an unreasonable dislike to Anne, committed her into the custody of Sir Thomas Shirley, of Wiston House, on the other side of the South Downs, for a year. It was during this period that her first child was born.
The Howards, as a family, were slowly
returning to the old faith of the third Duke of Norfolk. Arundel’s favourite sister, Meg (who had married Robert Sackville, second Earl of Dorset, in 1580), was an early convert, as was his younger half-brother, Lord William Howard. Philip’s uncle, Henry Howard (later Earl of Northampton), had become a Catholic in 1558 and was frequently in and out of prison because of official suspicions over his loyalty. Unwittingly, there was good reason as, unknown to Elizabeth’s government, Henry Howard received 500 crowns (£125) in July 1582 from the Spanish ambassador, Don Bernardino de Mendoza, for information he provided about events at court. The envoy reported to King Philip of Spain:Milord Harry . . . with a care which I can hardly describe . . . informs me of everything he hears, which is of service to your majesty . . . He has very good qualities and intelligence and much friendship with the ladies of the Privy Chamber, who inform him exactly what passes indoors.
Howard, younger brother of the executed fourth duke, also kept ‘close correspondence with all the Catholic gentlemen of the kingdom, who, in turn esteem him, and show him all favour, both for his high qualities and for his influence with his nephew and he has offered to continue giving me constant information’. For this Howard received a handsome pension of 1,000 crowns a year from the appreciative ambassador.15 Others saw him in a different light. In later years, the courtier Sir Anthony Weldon declared he had ‘a venomous and cankered disposition’ and described him as ‘a great clerk, yet not a wise man, but the grossest flatterer of the world’.16
Then came one of those defining moments in life that unexpectedly and suddenly reveal a crossroads, both in terms of self-belief and personal values.
The Earl of Arundel witnessed one or more of the four disputations of religious issues staged between the condemned Jesuit priest Edmund Campion and a group of Anglican divines in the church of St Peter ad Vincula and later in the great hall of the Tower in September 1581. The debates gave Arundel grave pause for thought and he discovered, almost to his surprise, that Campion’s arguments deeply impressed him.
House Of Treason: The Rise And Fall Of A Tudor Dynasty Page 27