I fear me ere it should be long, her majesty will be sorry that she has believed some as much as she has done, but it will be very late . . .4
But this was a premature false alarm and, after being damaged by storms, the huge Armada did not depart for England until 12 July.
Unlike some of his family, Howard did not suffer from false pride. Vain he might have been, but he was fully aware that he was not an experienced sailor. Therefore, he appointed expert captains as his tactical advisers and Sir Francis Drake as his vice-admiral and second-in-command. However, with a whiff of nepotism, Thomas Howard, second son of the fourth Duke of Norfolk, and half-brother to Philip, Earl of Arundel, was appointed to command the Golden Lion in the English fleet.
Elizabeth’s ever-present dread of catastrophic defeat at sea led either to a flurry of orders, or plain inaction, as she hesitated, undecided on how best to counter this approaching threat to her crown and her young Protestant state. ‘For the love of Jesus Christ Madam,’ Howard urged her on 23 June, ‘awake thoroughly and see the villainous treasons round about you.’5
The Armada finally arrived off the south-west coast of England on 19 July. Howard, on board his flagship, Ark Royal, at Plymouth, wrote breathlessly to Walsingham of the first, inconclusive naval action:I will not trouble you with a long letter - we are at present otherwise occupied than with writing.
Upon Friday . . . I received intelligence that there were a great number of ships descried off the Lizard [peninsula]. Whereupon, although the wind was very scant, we first warped6 out of harbour that night and upon Saturday turned out very hardly, the wind being [in the] south-west.
About three in the afternoon, [we saw] the Spanish fleet and did what we could to work for the wind, which [by this] morning we had recovered, [observing] their fleet to consist of 120 sail, whereof there are four g[alleasses]7 and many ships of great burden.
At nine of the [clock] we gave them fight which continued until one.
[In this] fight we made some of them to bear room to stop their leaks. Notwithstanding, we dare not adventure to put in among them, their fleet being so strong.
The admiral added an urgent appeal for munitions in a hasty postscript:Sir, for the love of God and our country, let us have, with some speed, some great shot sent to us of all bigness, for this service, will continue long, and some powder with it.8
Howard’s strategy was to push the advancing Armada further out to sea and away from any potential landfall on English soil. His smaller, lighter-armed warships could not hope to land a killer blow on the mighty Spanish fleet, so instead harried and snapped at its heels as the Armada sailed up the English Channel. The actions of 23 July, off Portland Bill, and, two days later, off the Isle of Wight, did not sink a single Spanish ship, but inflicted considerable battle damage.
The Armada anchored off Calais on 27 July, preparing to escort Spanish troops across the southern North Sea to planned invasion beaches in and around the Thames estuary. Howard now tried a new tactic: fireships. Eight vessels were packed with combustible materials - barrels of pitch and oil - to turn them into floating incendiary bombs. Just after midnight on 28 July, these were set ablaze and bravely steered in among the Armada. The Spanish, panic-stricken, cut their anchor cables, hoisted sail and headed out into the open sea in confusion.
The English were waiting for them beyond the horizon. As dawn broke, they attacked and battered the dispersed Armada off Gravelines, sinking twelve ships and forcing them eastwards until some were in danger of running aground on the treacherous sandbanks off the Zeeland coast. Then the wind suddenly veered and drove the Spaniards north, pursued by the English warships, like hunting dogs running down their prey.
Howard was forced to break off the chase as the Armada entered Scottish waters, not because of diplomatic niceties but because of his shortages of fresh water, food and powder and shot. The Spanish were left to limp home, around the north coast of Scotland and out into the tempestuous Atlantic, in the hope of steering a course home. After weeks of storms, only sixty ships survived. More than 20,000 Spanish sailors and soldiers had perished. It was a famous victory.
Characteristically, Elizabeth did not reward any of her commanders and left many of her sailors to die of disease and hunger. An epidemic of typhus, originating in the Elizabeth Jonas, swept through the fleet and killed hundreds. Howard was aghast: ‘It would grieve any man’s heart to see them that have served so valiantly, die so miserably.’ He sold some of his own plate to raise cash to clothe his men and used his own money to pay some of the discharged sailors. ‘It is a most pitiful sight to see how the men . . . die in the streets. I am driven myself to come [ashore] to see them bestowed in some lodging. And the best I can get is barns and outhouses,’ he complained.9
Eventually the parsimonious Elizabeth created Howard Earl of Nottingham on 22 October 1597, to become the second peer of the realm. Two years later, he was appointed ‘Lieutenant General of All England’ and finally retired from public duties, aged eighty-three, in January 1619. One of his favourite pastimes was hunting with dogs - he was a leading breeder of spaniels - and continued to hunt enthusiastically right up to his final illness.10 He died on 14 December 1624 at Haling House, Croydon, Surrey, and was buried in the Effingham family vault at Reigate, Surrey.
Henry Howard, younger son of the Earl of Surrey, had recurrently fallen foul of Elizabeth’s government and had been imprisoned on at least five occasions. He returned to partial favour after the execution of his brother, the fourth Duke of Norfolk, in 1572, but found himself back within the noisome confines of the Fleet Prison in the aftermath of the Throgmorton plot in 1583. Even though she knew nothing of his perfidious reports to the Spanish about events at her court, or of his secret correspondence with Mary Queen of Scots, there seems little doubt that Elizabeth was convinced of his treachery and would cheerfully have signed his death warrant with a swift flourish of her quill pen. Howard’s sworn enemy, Edward de Vere, seventeenth Earl of Oxford, told him that the queen reviled and detested him ‘and sought his head more than any person living’.11
As the Virgin Queen sank into old age, the arch-conspirator Howard daringly began a secret correspondence with James VI of Scotland to facilitate his succession to the throne of England. Robert Cecil, son of Elizabeth’s long-serving minister, Burghley, and also party to these negotiations, recommended Howard as ‘long approved and trusty’.12
He bet on the right horse.
James became King of England and Scotland in March 1603 and, on hearing the news of his accession, sent Howard a jewel of three stones in reward for his efforts. He immediately appointed him a member of his Privy Council and on 13 March 1604, at the Tower - the scene of so much misery to his family - Howard was created Earl of Northampton. His notorious obsequiousness and flattery had not deserted him and this unpleasant trait earned him the less than happy nickname of ‘His Majesty’s earwig’.13 Northampton’s habitual duplicity also sometimes irked the new king, and James twice wrote to him in 1605 accusing him of disliking his sons, the princes Henry and Charles, and of ‘innate hatred to me and all Scotland for my cause’. Moreover, he threatened to repay Howard ‘for your often cruel and malicious speeches against Baby Charles and his honest father’.14
No one was quite sure of duplicitous Northampton’s religious beliefs. He regularly attended the Chapel Royal and in 1604 served on the commission to expel seminary priests and Jesuits. He was one of the four privy councillors in October 1605 to whom Lord Monteagle handed the infamous letter warning of the Catholic Gunpowder Plot.
He erected new houses at Greenwich and at Charing Cross, north of Whitehall, where he died, aged seventy-four, on 16 June 1624 from gangrene in his thigh - but not before receiving extreme unction from a priest. His will, dated the day of his death, declared:I die . . . a member of the Catholic and Apostolic church, saying with St Jerome ‘in qua fide puer natus fui in eadem senex morior’ [I will die as an old man in the same faith in which I was born as a child].15
So, religiously, he had the last laugh on all those he had fooled over the years. He also left money to set up three almshouses or hospitals dedicated to the Holy Trinity at Castle Rising in Norfolk, Greenwich and Clun in Shropshire.16
Northampton’s nephew, Thomas Howard, son of the fourth Duke by his second wife Margaret Audley, who had served at sea against the Spanish Armada, also supported the accession of James I. He was almost immediately created Earl of Suffolk and appointed Lord Chamberlain. In the fifteen years that followed, he and his uncle enjoyed considerable political power.17
When the king, who was of diverse sexual proclivities, showed favour to the young, handsome George Villiers (later to be Marquis of Buckingham), Suffolk tried an old Howard trick to divert him and maintain their influence. They discovered a striking youth called William Monson with whom they ‘took great pains in tricking and prancking up’ and washed ‘his face every day with posset-curd’ to maintain his complexion. It did not turn out too well with Catherine Howard. It did not work in the seventeenth century either. James thought Monson to be a vain, forward boy and rejected him as any kind of royal favourite.18
Suffolk, now Lord Treasurer, was dismissed from all his offices in 1619 for corruption and fined £30,000. He died on 28 May 1626, leaving crippling debts. Another Howard was dishonoured.
The badly treated widow of Philip Earl of Arundel outlived her husband by thirty-five years and died in 1630 aged seventy-four.
Her son, Thomas, was restored in blood as Earl of Arundel and Surrey on 18 April 1604. As importantly, he was granted the lands in Norfolk, Suffolk, Cambridgeshire, Essex, Surrey and Sussex, that had been enjoyed by his father, and the dignities and baronies lost by his grandfather, the fourth Duke of Norfolk.19
Two years later he married Alatheia, third daughter and later the sole heiress of Gilbert Talbot, seventh Earl of Shrewsbury, who died in 1616. She brought to the marriage huge estates in Derbyshire, Nottinghamshire and South Yorkshire, including the industrial town of Sheffield, with an annual income of £15,000, or £2 million at current values. Arundel took Holy Communion at the Chapel Royal that year and was quickly made a Privy Councillor. In August 1621, he was created Earl Marshal at a fee of £2,000 a year.
After all those years of bloodshed, all that intrigue, all that misery in the Tower of London, the Howards had at last retrieved their political fortunes.
In the future, they would enjoy industrial wealth and influence to add lustre to their once fatal family pride.
APPENDIX I
THE HOWARD HOMES AT KENNINGHALL, LAMBETH AND NORWICH
The ‘H’-shaped Palace of Kenninghall, fronting east and west, was built by Thomas Howard, third Duke of Norfolk in 1525-7, around 250 yards (228 m.) north-east of an earlier doubled-moated manor house, East Hall,1 which was demolished. The redbrick house, set in 700 acres (283.27 hectares) of deer park, was divided into two courts, named Ewery and Shelfhanger, with tall chimneys and Gothic traceried windows. It was further extended in 1532 at a cost of £348 1s 8d.2
It had seventy rooms, and later became the first house in England to be equipped with a bathroom, when the fourth duke fitted up a chamber there with ‘twelve pieces of copper, great and small, to bathe in’. The clue to its purpose was in its decoration: hanging on the walls was a tapestry of ladies bathing.3
The third duke’s own suite of rooms was situated on the second floor over the chapel. Conveniently, off the gallery on the floor above, were the apartments of his mistress, Bessie Holland. In either court was accommodation for his children, and later their families, with the nursery on the ground floor, next to the wash-house. Space was reserved for the duke’s stepmother, Agnes, Dowager Duchess of Norfolk, and more was later found for Mary, Duchess of Richmond, after the death of her husband.
The chapel walls were wainscoted and over the altar was probably a triptych of Christ’s birth, passion and resurrection. It was staffed by six chaplains4 - the oak presses in the vestry held forty-two embroidered copes, or ecclesiastical vestments - and had its own choristers, kept in order by their master. Music was provided by ‘two pairs of organs’ and the hymns and psalms were sung using illuminated Mass books.
The interior of the palace was hung with more than fifty rich tapestries with subjects including the Story of Hercules, the Siege of Paris and Christ’s Passion. Others prominently and proudly displayed the Norfolk arms.5 Of particular magnificence was the decoration of the ‘public rooms’ - the great hall and the presence chamber - as befitting the ducal style and title of ‘right honourable and mighty prince . . .’.
The palace also housed a number of officials: his secretary, Bessie’s father; the steward, treasurer, comptroller of the household, seneschal,6 auditor, tutor to the Howard children, almoners, and the physician, Adrian Junius.7 There was also an armoury and a tennis court.
Household accounts for 1525 indicate the style of food served at table by the third duke’s retainers, dressed in his personal livery of black and tawny velvet. On one day, Saturday 9 September, when the duke and his soon-to-be-discarded duchess were dining at home, doubtless with a host of household staff, they consumed: 400 oysters; 8 salt fish; 1 fresh pike; 2 tench; 30 eels and 286 eggs.
Those who brought presents were rewarded handsomely: two shillings were given to a man who brought a porpoise from the bailiff of Yarmouth and a similar amount given to the messenger from the Abbot of Langley who had carried three swans to Kenninghall. One must not imagine the Norfolks mere fish-eaters: a record of foodstuffs consumed over twenty-six days includes 12 oxen, 12 calves, 47 sheep, 3 bucks; 44 sucking-pigs and 263 rabbits. Poultry included 18 swans, 22 geese, 106 capons, 403 chickens and 406 pigeons, mallards, snipe, pheasants, partridges and lapwings. A crane and a bittern also went into the pot. Over the same period, the household consumed 2 porpoises; 1 sturgeon, 1 conger eel, 27 soles; 85 salt fish; 1 salmon trout, 840 other fish (cod, whiting, plaice, herring, flounders), 27 pike, 493 perch and roach; 3,200 oysters; 1,449 eels, 2,370 eggs, 134 dozen loaves. To wash all this down, they drank 58 barrels of beer, brewed on the premises.8 Total cost of provisions for this period was £202 2s
By the mid-seventeenth century the magnificence of Kenninghall had dulled and it fell into disrepair. It was demolished around 1650, leaving only one wing which remains today. The materials were used to maintain other buildings on the Norfolks’ estates.
The second Duke of Norfolk built a London home in Lambeth, on Church Street, west of the palace of the Archbishop of Canterbury. Norfolk House had a fine library and substantial gardens and paddocks and Wenceslas Hollar’s map of London of c. 1660, shows a high tiled lantern, topped by a weathercock, above the gabled roof, together with a bell cupola.
After the third duke’s attainder and imprisonment, the property passed to William Parr, Marquis of Northampton, but in 1552, he exchanged it with the crown for the lordship of Southwark, which had been owned by the Bishop of Winchester.
After the house was returned to the Howards, it was sold in 1558 by the fourth duke to Richard Garth and John Dister for £400. Then it was described as a capital messuage ‘wherein the ancestors of the said duke have accustomed to lye’. It included two inns, called the George and the Bell, the former annexed to the mansion on its west side. Bell Close, at the rear of the inn, comprised two acres and other paddocks included more than twenty-three acres in ‘Cottmansfield’, four acres near the Bishop of Rochester’s house and eight acres of marsh called ‘The Hopes’ in Lambeth marsh.9
The mansion had a great gate on ‘the king’s highway leading from Lambeth to St George’s Fields’ which opened on to a paved yard. On the west side of the yard was the duke’s chapel, which by 1590 had been partitioned into a hall, buttery and parlour. On the east side were the kitchens, with a ‘great chamber’ above for dining and a gallery, an oratory and several closets. Street frontage of the house was about 125 feet (38 m.).
The new owners divided the property into three, with one third, including Norfolk Hous
e and the Bell, sold first to John Glascock and then to Margaret Parker, wife of Matthew Parker, Archbishop of Canterbury. At her death in 1570, it passed to her younger son, also called Matthew, and the house was demolished in the seventeenth century.
Only Norfolk Row remains to remind us of the glories of the house: in 1610, it was a cartway to a lane, running behind the village of Lambeth.
The fourth duke focused his attentions on his new London home at Howard House, formerly the Carthusian monastery at the Charterhouse, and with building a new palace in Norwich, in the parish of St John Maddermarket, formerly called St Cross, from 1561. He had bought the land there from Alan Percy, third son of Henry Percy, fourth Earl of Northumberland, and warden of the Holy Trinity College at Arundel. He cleared the site and built the palace with materials brought by barge from St Benet’s abbey.10 An indenture of 1563 mentions ‘my capital messuage new built with buildings, courts, orchards, gardens, ponds and yards’.11
The north and south boundaries of the site were the River Wensum and Wymer Street (now St Andrew’s Street). The three-storey buildings formed a quadrangle with a great gateway in the south side. In the middle of the courtyard was a water conduit. Along the first floor of the south wing ran a gallery, with the duke’s apartments at one end and his wife’s at the other. The west wing held the great hall and presence chamber on the third floor and fifteen other rooms. The dining hall, with a ceiling as high as the roof, was on the north side, overlooking the river. This part of the house also contained a water gate, leading to a private quay, and the armoury. The mansion also included a theatre, a covered real tennis court and a bowling alley.12
House Of Treason: The Rise And Fall Of A Tudor Dynasty Page 30