11. Dead, putrefying flesh.
12. Hall, Chronicle, p. 418, and Grafton, Chronicle, vol. 2, p. 151.
13. The site of the Battle of Bosworth has traditionally been thought to be the top of Ambion Hill. However, recent research, based on contemporary sources, has placed it on level ground at Redemore Heath, one mile (1.6 km.) south-west of Ambion Hill. Today’s visitor centre is on the summit of the hill. See Brooks, pp. 266-7. For further discussion, see Peter J. Foss, History of Market Bosworth (Wymondham, 1983) and his later book, The Field of Redemore: The Battle of Bosworth 1485 (Leeds, 1990).
14. Bill men were armed with a variety of long pointed, hooked, spiked and bladed staff or hafted weapons, including partisans, glaives, gisarmes, lugged spears and halberds, some of which were probably developed from agricultural tools. They were particularly useful for infantry to attack mounted horsemen, but were equally efficacious in hand-to-hand fighting on foot.
15. Hall’s Chronicle, p. 418.
16. De Vere (1442-1513) was a distinguished and accomplished soldier. He was imprisoned as a suspected Lancastrian in 1468 and escaped to France after the Battle of Barnet in 1471. He was attainted for treason in 1475 and joined Henry Tudor in Brittany in 1484 and sailed with him from Honfleur.
17. Hall’s Chronicle, p. 419.
18. Brenan and Statham, vol. 1, fn p. 54.
19. Hutton, Bosworth Field, pp. 100-106, and Brenan and Statham, vol. 1, p. 55.
20. Brenan and Statham, vol. 1, pp. 54-5.
21. From Sir John Beaumont’s poem Bosworth Field, published in 1629.
22. Brenan and Statham, vol. 1, p. 56.
23. Northumberland’s position was immediately in front of today’s visitor centre on Ambion Hill.
24. Brooks, p. 269.
25. Vergil, p. 224.
26. Hall, Chronicle, p. 421.
27. Henry VII eventually arranged for a monument to Richard to be erected after his visit to Leicester in September 1495, paying £10 to James Keyley for carving an alabaster effigy or ‘picture’ of the dead king (BL Add. MS 7,099, fol. 129). After the Greyfriars surrendered on 10 November 1538 during the dissolution of the monasteries, the tomb was apparently wrecked, and the body removed from what was called ‘a cattle trough’ although this is likely to have been a reused twelfth-century stone coffin. Local tradition holds that Richard’s remains were then thrown into the nearby River Soar. While there is no evidence to support this legend, a skeleton was found face up on the bed of the river, near Bow Bridge, in 1862. It was immediately suggested that these were the remains of Richard III, although it was difficult to determine the sex of the skeleton and its age at death may not fit. The skull, showing cranium damage, as if struck by sword blows, was taken into the safe-keeping of the Goddard family at Newton Harcourt, Leicestershire.
28. A bronze-gilt processional cross, bearing Yorkist motifs of incised sunburst symbols, was found on the Bosworth battlefield site around 1778. It seems probable that it was carried by one of Richard’s chaplains and abandoned in panic-stricken flight after the royalist forces were defeated. It is now in the possession of the Society of Antiquaries of London. See David Gaimster, Sarah McCarthy and Bernard Nurse (eds), Making History: Antiquaries in Britain I707-2007, London, 2007, p. 119, where it is illustrated.
29. See Weever, p. 830, where he cites information provided by Francis Thynne, Lancaster Herald.
30. The choice of burial place is interesting; Norfolk’s parents were buried in the church near their estates at Stoke-by-Nayland, Suffolk, as was his first wife Katherine (née Moleyns). Her monument must have been erected much later, after 1514, as its inscription referred to her as ‘... sometime wife unto the right high and mighty Prince, Lord John Howard, Duke of Norfolk, and mother unto the right noble puissant Prince Lord Thomas Howard, Duke also of Norfolk’. See Robert Hawes and Robert Loder, History of Framlingham (Woodbridge, 1798), p. 66. The first duke married, as his second wife, Margaret Chedworth, widow of John Norris of Bray, Berkshire, who died in 1494.
31. Grafton, Chronicle, vol. 2, p. 154.
32. Hall, Chronicle, p. 420.
33. Northumberland was assassinated at South Kilvington near Thirsk, Yorkshire, in 1489 in a skirmish with the peasantry who rebelled over his efforts to collect a newly imposed tax, intended to enable Henry VII to intervene on behalf of Brittany against the French crown. He was the only person to die during the commotion.
34. The Bill is contained in BL Add. MS 46,372, fols 1-50 and there is a copy in Arundel Castle Archives, G2/8. See also Rot. Parl., vol. 6, pp. 275-8. It was based on the legal canard that Henry VII’s reign began the day before Bosworth was fought. First named in the Bill was Richard of Gloucester himself, followed by Norfolk.
35. See, for example, the award, on 21 September 1485, to John Martindale, king’s servant, for ‘service done beyond the seas and on this side’ of the office of keeper of the park of Kelsale, Suffolk, ‘lately held by John, Duke of Norfolk’.
36. The award was made on 29 July 1486. See Patent Rolls, vol. 1, p. 121.
37. Campbell, vol. 2, p. 420.
38. See Gairdner, Paston Letters, vol. 4, pp. 87-8.
39. Head, Ebbs and Flows, p. 18. St Katherine’s Dock was built on the site of the hospital in 1825.
40. Tucker, pp. 47-9. Her husband’s attainder specified that she ‘might freely enjoy ... all her own inheritance’. Rot. Parl., vol. 6, p. 276. See also Howard, Memorials, appendix 6.
41. Robinson, p. 1. It is situated off the A47, the main Norwich-King’s Lynn road. South of this road, near the appropriately termed Manor Farm, is a partially silted moat, the site of a long-vanished manor house that was the Howards’ first home. Their mortuary chapel, dedicated to St Mary and built on the south side of the chancel of All Saints church, fell into disrepair, with the lead stripped off the roof. It was repaired by Thomas Howard, Earl of Arundel, the only son of Sir Philip Howard, in the 1630s. It became decayed again and was said to be the home of paupers in the nineteenth century before it was finally demolished by the architect Sir Gilbert Scott during his restoration of All Saints in 1875-8 and rebuilt by him. (See Pevsner and Wilson, p. 326.) The church still has the magnificent fourteenth-century octagonal font, with foliated panels, given by Sir John Howard II which bears his arms and those of his wife Alice de Boys. Sadly, the medieval cone-shaped cover of painted wood was lost by 1844 but was replaced by another designed by Sir Ninian Comper in 1913. For an illustration of the original, see Weever, op. cit., p. 849, and Robinson, p. 3. A drawing of the stained-glass image of the family’s founder, Chief Justice Sir William Howard, once in the east window of the chancel and now lost, is in Arundel Castle Archives, MS 1638. The Howard monuments at East Winch are also all now destroyed. Blomefield, in 1805-10, records the remains of a monument to Sir Robert Howard, died 1388, and his wife Margaret, daughter and co-heir of Robert de Scales, Baron Scales, against the south wall of this chapel. In the early seventeenth century, the epitaph was defaced and ‘a great part of the monument itself destroyed many years past’ (Blomefield, vol. 9, pp. 152-3).
42. Towton, fought all day in snowstorms, caused official losses totalling 28,000 killed, and has the unenviable distinction of being the bloodiest battle fought on English soil.
43. Gloucester claimed the marriage of Edward IV and Elizabeth Woodville was invalid.
44. Weever, p. 835, and Casady, p. 13. He told the Lieutenant that he ‘would not depart thence [until] such time as he that commanded thither should command him out again’.
Chapter 1: Rebuilding the Dynasty
1. Camden, Remains ... , p. 354. The quote may be apocryphal, but these words reflect the essence of Howard loyalty to the Tudor crown over several generations.
2. Howard’s wife had also produced four other sons and a daughter, all of whom had died young.
3. See Rot. Parl., vol. 6, pp. 410, 426. Casady, p. 14. His petition prayed for the repeal and making void of the act, passed 7 November 1485, against him and his father.
The act of ‘annullation and restitution’ was limited to any ‘honour but the Earldom of Surrey or to any other lands than those which the said Earl of Surrey had in right of his wife’.
4. Bacon, p. 68. The Commissions of Oyer and Terminer for the city and county of York were set up on 27 May. See Patent Rolls, vol. 1, p. 285.
5. Patent Rolls, vol. 1, p. 314.
6. Patent Rolls, vol. 1, p. 322.
7. Such as the pardon he granted the yeoman John Harrison, of the quaintly named Middleton-in-the-Mire, Yorkshire, on 11 October 1490, for the death of Thomas Metcalf. Surrey and other king’s councillors investigated at the scene and decided that Metcalf had killed himself. See Patent Rolls, vol. 1, p. 332.
8. Plumpton Correspondence, pp. 95-7. After executing the leaders, he won a royal pardon for the remaining rioters. During the fighting, he lost a valuable gelding, taken by a soldier commanded by one of his captains, Robert Plumpton. He demanded its immediate return: ‘Cousin, I have some proof that your servant Robert Beck has my gelding - one [who] knows him well told it me. I pray you cousin, fail not to send me the gelding.’ Ibid., p. 96.
9. The Scots believed Surrey was absent at court in London. Teams of oxen had dragged the famous six-ton (6,040 kg.) cannon Mons Meg from Edinburgh to the village of Ladykirk, across the river from Norham Castle, for the siege, at a speed of three miles (4.83 km.) a day. The twenty-two-inch (56 cm.) calibre gun, which could fire stones weighing 390 lb (180 kg.) up to two miles, had been given to the Scots king James II by Philip the Good, Duke of Burgundy, in 1457. Surrey’s arrival, with about 9,000 men, forced the Scots to break off the siege and retreat. Mons Meg is today preserved in Edinburgh Castle.
10. The present-day Ayton Castle was built in 1851 by James Gillespie Graham, Scotland’s leading Gothic revival architect.
11. Pope Alexander VI granted Surrey a dispensation to marry, since his new bride was within the prohibited degrees of marriage and also because the banns were only published once. See Tucker, fn, p. 94.
12. Sheriff Hutton Castle, thirteen miles (22 km.) north of York, is situated on a minor road off the A64. After Bosworth, the castle became the property of Henry VII and, in 1525, Henry VIII granted it to his illegitimate six-year-old son, Henry Fitzroy, Duke of Richmond, who had been appointed Warden-General of the Scottish Marches. The castle became the headquarters of the Council of the North and was repaired by Thomas Howard, third Duke of Norfolk, in 1527 but after the Council’s relocation to York in the mid-sixteenth century it fell into decline. It was built in 1379 on the remains of an eleventh-century motte and bailey castle and consisted of a quadrangular curtain wall with four rectangular corner towers and a large gatehouse in the east wall, enclosing an inner courtyard. A middle and outer ward originally existed but these are now covered by the adjacent farm. The domestic ranges have also disappeared. The castle is privately owned and has recently undergone extensive repair.
13. Muriel was sometimes called ‘Marcella’.
14. His viscountcy was of the second creation, in 1483.
15. Close Rolls, vol. 2, pp. 90-91, 92 and 220. Muriel Howard had a daughter by de Lisle, Elizabeth, who, in March 1504, married a cousin of the king, Henry Courtenay, later Earl of Devonshire, and afterwards Marquis of Exeter. She died c. 1516 without issue. Exeter was beheaded and attainted for treason by Henry VIII in 1539. See Brenan and Statham, fn, p. 89, and Complete Peerage, vol. 8, p. 61.
16. The appointment was made on 25 June at Westminster, with effect from 16 June. See Patent Rolls, vol. 1, p. 239. He was commissioned to collect the benevolence, or tax, granted the crown by Act of Parliament (11 Henry VII, cap. 10), in November 1505.
17. Traditionally, Henry VII’s financial policy has been considered miserly, if not rapaciously exploitative of his subjects, but its severity has more recently been questioned. See, for example, G. R. Elton, ‘Henry VII: Rapacity or Remorse?’ Historical Journal, vol. 1 (1988), pp. 21-39.
18. Such as the Annuity to the Earl of Surrey Act (11 Henry VII, cap. 41) and Estates of the Earl of Surrey Act (11 Henry VII, cap. 40), both in 1495.
19. Close Rolls, vol. 2, p. 288. Pevsner and Wilson, p. 78 and p. 451.
20. DNB2, vol. 28, p. 421.
21. Margaret was annoyed by the attention lavished on Surrey by her bridegroom. She told her father: ‘As for news, I have none to send but that my lord of Surrey is in [such] great favour with the king here that he cannot forebear the company of him no time of the day.’ Ellis, Original Letters, first series, vol. 1, p. 41.
22. Clifford Brewer, The Death of Kings (London, 2000), p. 111.
23. A copy of the formal petition for an Act of Restitution, granted to Thomas Earl of Surrey is in Arundel Castle Archives, G2/9.
24. LPFD, vol. 1, p. 172. The Dukes of Norfolk hold the hereditary title of Earl Marshal to this day.
25. BL Cotton MS Titus B, i, fol. 104B; reprinted in Allen, Letters of Richard Fox, p. 54.
26. Hall, Chronicle, p. 525. The Howards’ ships were the merchantmen Barbara and Mary of Barking. See Geoffrey Moorhouse, Great Harry’s Navy (London, 2005), p. 5.
27. An ocean-going sailing ship, with the aftermost mast fore-and-aft rigged and the other masts square-rigged.
28. Grafton, vol. 2, p. 242. See also Stow, Annals, p. 489, and Holinshed, vol. 3, p. 811. An early folk ballad records Barton’s death at Sir Thomas Howard’s hand: ‘Lord Howard took a sword in his hand, / And off he smote Sir Andrew’s head; / “I must have left England many a day, / If you were alive as you are dead.” / He caused his body to be cast, / Over the hatchboard into the sea, / And about his middle, three hundred crowns; / “Where’er you land, this will bury thee.” ’
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 r
elic 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.
House Of Treason: The Rise And Fall Of A Tudor Dynasty Page 34