Howard sons and daughters seemed to be everywhere, at every level of society, entrenched in almost every key position. It was no easy matter to keep such a family empire together, and the Howards were forced to pay a heavy price for their matrimonial pre-eminence. Alliance with sovereignty won for them the envy of less fortunate clans, while their cherished position of acting as a stud farm for royalty, was fraught with dangers. Lord Burghley is reported to have once remarked that ‘marriage with the blood royal was too full of risk to be lightly entered into’,28 and though union with the Tudors brought political influence and social prestige, it was rarely accompanied by security or peace of mind. The alliance between the two houses was more than once to prove itself dangerous to the Howard interests. A sixteenth-century proverb observes that ‘there is more to marriage than four bare legs in bed’, and the full significance of that dictum becomes particularly obvious when dealing with royalty, for more than one Howard was to discover that a double standard existed for those of princely blood and those of more humble clay.
Both Anne Boleyn and Catherine Howard lost their heads because they failed in their essential function, both as Howards and royal wives; neither could cement the union with a male heir, and both ladies allowed the breath of adulterous scandal to touch their lives. As mere mortals they deserved death twice over for their double sins. The Howards learned to their cost that marriage to royalty is a public, not a private, affair. Lord Thomas, the Duke’s half-brother, died in the Tower of London in 1536 for ‘having tried in the presence of witnesses to contract a marriage’ with Lady Margaret Douglas, the King’s niece. Elopement and high romance may be permissible in the lesser sort, but for royalty, wedlock was strictly a business proposition, and Henry was justifiably annoyed at the thought of squandering such a valuable diplomatic pawn as a Tudor niece upon a mere subject, even though he was a Howard. Moreover, the royal uncle placed a dangerous interpretation upon the foolhardy actions of the young Howard gallant, and it was rumoured abroad that Thomas had been ‘led and seduced by the Devil’ and was obviously aspiring to ‘the imperial crown by reason of marriage in so high a blood.’29 The Lady Margaret seems to have had a persistent and fatal penchant for Howard striplings, and five years later she was again in disgrace for having had an affair with Catherine’s brother, Charles.30
The Tudors were constantly on the watch that the Howards limit their ambitions to Tudor women and refrain from casting greedy eyes upon the Tudor crown. Henry Howard, first cousin to Catherine and heir to the dukedom, was relieved of his head in 1546 for having ‘openly used, and traitorously caused to be depicted, mixed, and conjoined with his own arms and ensigns, the said arms and ensigns of the King.’31 The heraldic pretensions of the Howard family were tantamount to an assertion that Howard blood was the equal of Tudor blood, and that a Howard might yet succeed a Tudor upon the throne. The folly of young Henry Howard was twofold, for not only did he arouse the most fundamental and predatory instincts of the Tudors, but he also exposed himself and his family to the enmity of personal and dynastic hatred. The Howards were envied by those who coveted their dignity, intrigued against by those who feared their power, and detested by those who abhorred their policy. Once the artful and persuasive whisper of the opposing faction had inflamed the King’s natural suspicions, Henry Howard’s fate was sealed. Social status, political influence, and marriage to royalty were coveted dignities, but the price came high: the Howards found themselves surrounded by a host of rivals who were only too willing to replace them in the blissful and lucrative light of royal favour.
At the moment of Catherine’s birth the head of the Howard clan was Thomas, third Duke of Norfolk, who had been waiting none too patiently for over half a century to enter into his ducal dignity when his father, hoary and full of years, finally died in 1524. The Duke was a nobleman of limited mentality, few inhibitions, and inordinate ambitions, who succeeded regularly in transforming the banal into the burlesque. When Thomas blundered, he did so with magnificent stupidity; when he fought, he operated with terrifying efficiency; when he married, he espoused first the daughter of Edward IV and then the heiress of the greatest grandee of the realm, Edward Stafford, Duke of Buckingham; when he dreamed, he saw before him the dazzling spectre of the crown; and when he quarrelled with his wife, he ordered his servants to pin her to the floor, where they sat on her until she spat blood. The only thing that was in any fashion commonplace about the Duke was his intelligence, which was never able to penetrate the window-dressing of sixteenth-century diplomacy and politics. It is only too easy to paint Norfolk as a ‘ponderous, cold-hearted, chicken-brained Duke, moving sluggishly in the mists of the feudal past like some obsolete armoured saurian’.32 Thomas Howard represented a contradiction in terms – the domesticated feudal magnate. The third Duke stood midway between his father, who advocated the self-destroying creed of absolute duty to the monarchy and who would defend the crown irrespective of the man who wore it, and his son, who betrayed signs of family and feudal megalomania and whose long, arrogant face and stiffnecked pride were almost a symbol of what the Tudors felt most obliged to liquidate – the divine right of aristocracy. Sir Thomas Palmer once remarked of the Duke’s brother and Catherine Howard’s father, Lord Edmund Howard, that ‘though he be a lord, yet he is not God.’33 By the third and fourth generation the Howards tended to be increasingly forgetful of their purely mortal origins.
Uniting the county blood of the Howards with the ancient race of the Mowbrays, the Duke equivocated; he was never able to decide whether he was a strange new man whose dignity was simply a mirror of royal authority, or a feudal baron with his roots in the impenetrable past. He nurtured a positive phobia for Cardinal Wolsey, not because the cardinal monopolized political power about the King, but because he was a presumptuous upstart, the son of an Ipswich butcher, and the Duke boasted that he would some day eat that butcher’s cur alive.34 Yet the Venetian Ambassador observed that Thomas was ‘liberal, affable and astute’ and would associate with everybody, no matter what his origins.35 Above all else Norfolk was a realist and, though his instincts were feudal both in politics and religion, he realized the political expediency of compromising with the powers that be, for he had learned the lesson of the proverb that ‘enjoins our kissing the hand we are unable to cut off’.
Of all the facets of Thomas Howard’s personality, the one most often exposed to criticism is his servility, which later generations have stigmatized as ‘unbecoming his rank and station’. This indeed is the ultimate irony – to rebuke the feudal wolf for his good behaviour! Of all the great barons of Henry’s reign, Norfolk had the most reason and the greatest occasion to try his hand at treason. Yet he remained true to a crown that struck down his father-in-law, executed two of his nieces, shocked his religious sensibilities, elevated men of no social consequence to high dignity and authority, and viewed the Duke himself with deep suspicion, lest the feudal wolf revert to its predatory nature.
At least twice he sacrificed personal popularity to accomplish his sovereign’s nefarious plans. During the Evil May Day riots of 1517, the apprentices of London gave vent to their narrow nationalism and economic hatred by looting the homes and shops of foreign merchants and lynching Flemish and Venetian traders. Thomas and his brother Edmund and his father were called in to suppress the turmoil, and enforce brutal royal justice, while Henry VIII himself played the pleasing role of gracious pardoner after legal vengeance had been administered.36 Again in 1536, Norfolk was called out of political exile as being the only man capable of curbing the feudalreligious uprising of the northern counties during the Pilgrimage of Grace that rocked the Tudor throne to its foundations. The Howards, as the heroes of Flodden Field against the Scots in 1513, were immensely popular in the northern shires, and had the Duke harboured treasonous thoughts he could easily have joined the insurgents. Thomas put aside any such ideas and became the willing instrument of Henry’s vengeance that enjoined the Duke to ‘cause such dreadful execution upon a good numbe
r of the inhabitants, hanging them on trees, quartering them, and setting their heads and quarters in every town, as shall be a fearful warning.’37 The memory of the silent figures swinging from a hundred gibbets was more than enough to transform the Duke’s popularity into bitter hatred, and the final paradox was attained when lordly Norfolk and low-born Cromwell were associated in the popular mind, which wished to see both strung up from the same gallows.38
The slight, dark-haired, swarthy man who held the ducal title may have been an unscrupulous dynast, greedy for personal power and family aggrandizement, but in Tudor times security rested on calculated servility and cautious recognition of the political facts of life. All the Howards had to dance nimbly the Tudor fandango, lest their suspicious sovereign reach down and pluck from them their family titles, or lest their political opponents interpret bristling dynastic pride as high treason. Retirement into secure political nonentity was impossible, for whether Thomas Howard desired it or not, the ducal dignity and feudal blood were always the magnetic centre for political organization and traitorous sentiments. Howard blood conjoined with Plantagenet descent made the Duke and his son possible successors to the throne should Henry VIII die without a male heir. During the crisis of Henry’s divorce of Catherine of Aragon and the break with Rome, the Pope suggested that Catherine’s daughter, the Princess Mary, might marry Norfolk’s son and ‘thus gain many adherents and overthrow her father’.39 The faintest rumour of such a suggestion was enough to place the duke’s head in jeopardy, and the Howards learned to move cautiously in the midst of plots and counterplots, any one of which might have cost them their lives. In 1536, during the rebellion of the north, it was hoped that Norfolk would join others of the feudal discontented, and the old nobility revealed to the Imperial Ambassador that they ‘counted in case of need’ on the Duke to ‘support the cause of Faith and Church’. The Ambassador, however, shrewdly noted that ‘owing to the said duke’s versatile and inconstant humour’ no one could ‘rely on him’.40 Norfolk was too experienced a campaigner and too agile a politician to risk his neck in defence of either faith or Church.
If Thomas Howard is to be classified at all, it is as the rough and ready military man, more at home in camp life than in that pavilion of Renaissance brilliance and wit which was Henry’s court. Efficient and thorough, if unimaginative, he found the weight of medieval armour a lighter burden than the intricate game of court politics and international diplomacy. The King, his master, went straight to Norfolk’s greatest weakness when he wrote: ‘We could be as well content to bestow some time in the reading of an honest remedy as of so many extreme and desperate mischiefs.’41 Like many military men, the Duke tended to be an alarmist who could offer a military remedy, but rarely a lasting political solution. An inveterate intriguer, but politically inept, he never won the recognition after which he grasped, because he was both too inconstant and too cautious. Taciturn and often tactless, his brusque and arrogant methods lost him valuable friends at court, while his constant aspiration ‘for greater elevation’, together with family insolence, antagonized both friend and foe. ‘Never,’ the Duke expostulated, was gold ‘tried better by fire and water’;42 never did a man more loyally do his duty. One suspects, however, that Norfolk never attained his ambitions because his loyalty and service were offered more for the sake of reward than from a feeling of devotion to the Crown.
It is dangerous to underestimate Thomas Howard’s abilities or his influence. He may have been constantly grasping after the realities of power and confusing it with its shadow, but he was never the foul-mouthed illiterate of history books. His brother William may have been a veritable ‘block-head’, but it is well to remember that the Duke’s son, Henry, Earl of Surrey, was a major literary luminary, and his grand-niece was England’s most accomplished sovereign. He may have belonged to an older tradition which considered that it was sufficient if a nobleman could blow lustily upon the horn and carry his hawk with experience, but he was far from being in a class with his ill-educated ducal colleagues who were almost illiterate. Thomas was proud of his son’s ‘proficiency and advancement in letters’, while his own knowledge of French and Latin was better than might have been expected of an old soldier.43
Above all else, the third Duke of Norfolk was an Englishman with all the inherent characteristics of his breed and class – instinctively conservative, suspicious of newfangled ideas, and mistrustful of mincing society, foreign fashions, and unorthodoxy in religion. He once informed Cardinal Wolsey that he gave not ‘a straw’ for the cardinal’s legatine and foreign powers, but that he honoured the man because he was an archbishop and cardinal of the Church ‘whose estate of honour surmounteth any duke now being within this realm’.44 A subject was to be known and esteemed for his social position within the English hierarchy, and not by some intruding authority of the Pope in Rome. The Duke could accept separation from the papacy because for him, as for other loyal subjects of the throne, the Holy See represented a corrupt and alien influence, but in all else he was essentially conservative. ‘He had never read the Scripture nor ever would’, and he suggested that England was a far merrier place before ‘this new learning came.up’.45 But for all that, the man was a realist, and when he was asked what he thought about priests having wives, he answered that ‘he knew not whether priests had wives but that wives will have priests’.46 The theological niceties of the issue were quite beyond him; they were the pastime of scholars and ecclesiastics and beneath the dignity of a nobleman. No matter what the duke’s personal sympathies may have been for the Holy See, it was sufficient for Norfolk and his kind to support the decision of the King when Henry ‘had distinctly declared his will more for one thing than for the other’.47 This was Thomas Howard’s creed, and he warned Sir Thomas More that ‘By the mass, Master More, it is perilous, striving with princes. And therefore I would wish you somewhat to incline to the King’s pleasure. For by God’s body, Master More, Indignatio principis mors est!’48 Tottenham Court would turn French before cautious Norfolk disobeyed his prince.
Crafty, servile, compromising, and versatile, Thomas learned his lesson well; so well that neither the family which was so much a portion of his life, nor the feudal past which was so much a part of his instincts, was allowed to stand in the way of obedience. The clothing of a complacent and obedient Tudor servant might sit ill upon the self-seeking, self-interested shoulders of this Howard duke, but at least the feudal wolf, whether Henry VIII believed it or not, had in fact been domesticated, and like any tamed wild animal, Norfolk was neither a very pleasant nor a very enviable creature.
Not only did personality and tradition place the Duke in an impossible position, but in terms of his leadership of the Howard clan and political faction at court, this senior member of the family spent a lifetime chasing after the unattainable. Though he was the titular head of the Howard dynasty, the Duke found it almost impossible to hold his family empire together. There was little to endear the tactless and inept magnate to his more polished and talented relatives. Married to the daughter of a descendant of Edward III, and his sisters espoused to members of the old nobility, Norfolk was by breeding and sympathy a member of the feudal aristocracy, and he tended to hold himself aloof from the newer men of the reign, even though they were associates of his own tribe. The younger and bolder set of the Boleyns, the Norrises, the Knyvets, and the Brians, may have been better educated and more cultured, but in the eyes of the ancient caste this was not necessarily the mark of a gentleman. The old maxim was often reiterated that ‘a Prince may make a nobleman but not a gentleman.’ The Howard dynasty was imposing enough on paper, but it was not what it might have been a century earlier – the vast feudal following of an independent magnate to whom the lesser sort owed personal fealty.
If Thomas Howard failed as a family patriarch, he was no more successful as a politician at court. There is something pathetically inconsequential, almost tragically futile, about the duke. Always fascinated by the lamp of power, he fluttered ai
mlessly about the source of light and authority, accomplishing little and occasionally burning himself rather severely. As Earl Marshal of the kingdom and the ranking peer of the realm, his traditional place was beside the King, both on the field of battle and in the Privy council. But what once belonged to the barons by feudal right, the Tudors now bestowed only as a reward for single-hearted service. Thomas Howard and his father had proved their loyalty and had in part wiped clean the sins of their ancestors, but the new devotion demanded by the Tudor monarchs was a self-destroying faith which could countenance no rivalry. The Howards could never quite overlook their ancient connections and traditions, and consequently Henry VIII hesitated long before rewarding or depending upon a family which claimed status and authority from a source outside the royal bounty. Norfolk was constantly complaining that he was not receiving his just deserts, and that he and his kind were being replaced in government by parvenus and upstarts, but the Duke was careful to limit himself to querulous outbursts about the ‘thieves and murderers’ who were placed in positions of high office.49 Once, in 1536, Henry pointedly snapped back saying, ‘If there be any ... of what degree soever he be, that will not serve as lowly, and as readily under the meanest person We can put in authority, as under the greatest Duke in our realm, We will neither repute him for our good subject nor ... leave him unpunished.’50 Since there were only two dukes at the time, Norfolk took the hint and swallowed his annoyance. The decline of the old standards finally reached the point where one of Norfolk’s own nieces, by virtue of her marriage to the sovereign, could scold him as if he were a ‘dog, so much so that Norfolk was obliged to quit the royal chamber’ in a towering rage, but all he dared do was call her a ‘big whore’ under his breath.51
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