by Alison Weir
11. LP 11, 48. Norton, 206, suggests that this Lady Boleyn was Elizabeth Wood, the wife of Sir James Boleyn, Anne Boleyn’s uncle.
12. LP 11, 48
13. LP 10, 913; Loke
14. Lisle TFS, 209
15. Statutes of the Realm 3, 28 Hen. VIII, c.24. Lisle TFS, 200, says they were betrothed on Easter Sunday, which fell on April 16, two days after the King had blessed the cramp ring, but LP 11, 48, makes it clear that a betrothal was first discussed, not entered into, at Easter, and the Act of Attainder passed against Thomas Howard (Statutes of the Realm 3, 28 Hen. VIII, c.24) reveals that the couple became precontracted after June 7.
16. Herbert, 585
17. Statutes of the Realm 3, 28 Hen. VIII, c.24
18. CSP Spain 5, 2, 77; LP 11, 147
19. LP 11, 48. Irish mistakenly assumes that they were witnesses. Lord William Howard’s daughter Douglass, born in 1542/3, would be named in Margaret’s honor.
20. John Phillips
21. LP 11, 147
22. Clarke
23. Hamilton, 245
24. Lefuse, 6
25. Wilson UKE, 285
26. Starkey, 736
27. Wriothesley, 48
28. LP 12, Part 2, 973
29. Statutes of the Realm 3, 28 Hen. VIII, c.7
30. Statutes of the Realm 3, 28 Hen. VIII, c.24; Hutchinson HT, 78
31. Head EFF, 132
32. Murphy BP, 168; Ashdown RT, 41
33. Denny KH, 93
34. Herbert, 585–6
35. Clarke
36. Herbert, 586
37. Statutes of the Realm 3, 28 Hen. VIII, c.24
38. Ibid.
39. It has been stated that Lord William Howard was sent to Scotland by Henry to seek evidence of Margaret’s illegitimacy (Strickland LQS 2, 76; Ashdown RT, 42–43; Bingham, 24; Buchanan, 257). He had actually been sent there in 1534–35 with William Barlow, later Bishop of Chichester, to persuade Margaret Tudor to renounce Methven and return to Angus (CSPF 6, 483). Lord William remained in Scotland until May 1536, and did not return there for many years. Much later, asked if he had learned anything in Scotland that had a bearing on Margaret’s legitimacy, he stated “that, from all he could gather there, the marriage between the Lady Margaret’s father and his Majesty’s sister, Queen Margaret, was not a lawful one” (Strickland LQS 2, 76).
40. Statutes of the Realm 3, 28 Hen. VIII, c.7
41. Wriothesley 1, 54
42. LP 11, 48. Lisle TFS, 210, citing Baron, states that Thomas confessed to calling Margaret “his sweet wife,” and also says that Margaret described the gifts that Thomas had given her.
43. LP 10, 740; Ashdown RT, 41
44. Statutes of the Realm 3, 28 Hen. VIII, c.24
45. LP 11, 48. Schutte, 52, identifies Thomas Smyth with the keeper of the stables to the Lady Mary and a page of the King’s household.
46. Herbert, 586
47. LP 11, 147; CSP Spain 5, Part 2, 77 (10)
48. CSP Milan, 971
49. John Phillips
50. Younghusband
51. LP 14, Part 2, 287
52. He is perhaps to be identified with John Astley, the older half brother of the courtier Sir John Astley (d.1596) who married Katherine Champernowne, later governess to Anne’s daughter Elizabeth. The Astleys were connections of Anne Boleyn; the elder John came to court at the age of twelve and was later in the household of Prince Edward.
53. Noted in margin “8 July.”
54. LP 11, 48
55. Castelli
56. Childs, 111
57. Statutes of the Realm 3, 28 Hen. VIII, c.24; Hutchinson HT, 78
58. LP 11, 147; CSP Spain 5, Part 2, 77 (10)
59. CSP Milan, 971
60. LP 11, 376
61. John Phillips
62. LP 11, 147; CSP Spain 5, Part 2, 77 (10)
63. LP 11, 294
64. John Phillips
65. LP 11, 147; CSP Spain 5, Part 2, 77 (10)
66. For which they had been obliged to petition Cromwell (LP 11, 1473).
67. LP 11, 294
68. Herbert, 586
69. Ibid.
70. LP 11, 293. This letter is listed in LP under 1537, but it cannot have taken over a year for news of her daughter’s disgrace and imprisonment to reach Margaret Tudor in Perth, so it must belong to 1536.
71. LP 11, 815
72. LP 11, 1373
73. LP 11, 1396
5. “Now May I Mourn”
1. Remley
2. The handwriting has been given the identification TH2. There is no way of checking whether or not it was Thomas Howard’s because no example of his handwriting is extant (Bond; Heale, 13; Seaton; Harrier; Lerer, 143–60). There is another sequence of poems in the manuscript—numbers 67 to 70—that has been attributed to Thomas Howard, but is written in a different hand, called TH1. There are similarities in that handwriting to TH2, and in both to the hand that has written on the flyleaf “Marayg” and “Th.h” (the page is torn here), which may denote joint ownership by the couple (Heale, 14).
3. Remley; Visitation, 247; Norton, 215. Remley also states that in the mid-1530s Sir John Shelton, the father of Margaret’s friend Mary Shelton, was in command of some of the palace guards, but from July 1536, Shelton was governor of the combined household of the Lady Mary and the Lady Elizabeth, and in command of their guards, who were not stationed at the Tower.
4. Batman
5. In Greek mythology Argus was a giant with a hundred eyes. After he was killed in her service, Hera, the wife of the god Zeus, caused his eyes to be placed in the tail of the peacock.
6. These are perilous quicksands off the Kent coast.
7. Several poems in the manuscript by TH2 reveal a detailed knowledge of Chaucer’s works as published by William Thynne in 1532 (Bond; Heale, 13; Seaton; Harrier; Lerer, 143–60).
8. Remley
9. The first three verses also appear in the manuscript as poem 99, also in Margaret’s hand.
10. There is a story that Margaret bore Thomas a child, Robert, during their captivity. This Robert Howard is said to have been delivered in secret on January 1, 1537, at Syon Abbey, Middlesex, and was supposedly taken away to be brought up by relations. The birth of a son to Margaret and Thomas Howard, a traitor convicted of aiming at the throne, at a time when Henry VIII was hoping for an heir of his body from Jane Seymour, would surely have alarmed the King. Their child might well have rivaled his own offspring for the crown; his parents having being precontracted before witnesses, Robert would have been accounted legitimate (although Henry VIII had the prerogative to declare the union illegal), and some might have thought he had a better claim to the throne than Margaret’s later issue, and—because he was born in England—than her grandson, James I, although he would never have become king as he died around 1598.
Robert Howard certainly existed, but the theory that Margaret and Thomas were his parents was put forward only in the 1970s by James Moss, an American novelist, and it has been much debated since. But there are serious drawbacks to it. Apart from Chapuys’s evidence that the couple had not had sex, Margaret was in the Tower in January 1537, and was not sent to Syon until November; and in her letter to Cromwell, sent in August 1536, she describes herself as “being a maid” (LP 11, 294). The pedigree in the College of Arms that Moss cited actually stated that Robert Howard was born around 1530 at Brockdish, Norfolk. Moss’s theory rests entirely on his claim that a coat of arms granted to Howard’s descendants in 1714 included a mullet (or star), a Douglas emblem, suggesting to him that information about Robert Howard’s true birth had been handed down secretly in the family.
Actually the ancient Douglas arms bear three mullets and a crowned heart on an azure field, so if the theory is true, the 1714 arms should have borne three mullets, not one between cinquefoils, and the arms of both ancestral families shown impaled; moreover, a mullet is often a symbol showing cadence, or steps of descent. Finally, the grant of arms itself would have recognized
the family as a cadet branch of the Howard family. Thus there is no evidence to connect Robert Howard of Brockdish with Margaret Douglas and Thomas Howard (Howard Family of Anne Arundel; Robert Howard).
11. LP 12, Part 1, Preface
12. LP 12, Part 1, 532
13. LP 12, Part 1, 533
14. Martienssen, 101
15. Moorhouse, 206
16. Chapman SHVIII, 150
17. LP 12, Part 1, 1198
18. The speed with which Margaret was released after Prince Edward’s birth argues that the King had already planned to set her free.
19. John Phillips
20. Gristwood, 17
21. Wriothesley, 70
22. John Phillips
23. Cotton MS. Vespasian f.13
24. LP 12, Part 2, 1023
25. Ashdown RT, 44
26. The King’s Book of Payments, f.6, cited in LRIL 2, 194–95; PPE Mary, 228
27. Hutchinson HT, 78
28. LRIL 2, 194
29. The King’s Book of Payments, f.6, cited in LRIL 2, 195; PPE Mary, 228; Strickland LQS 2, 73
30. LP 12, Part 2, 1023
31. Wriothesley, 70
32. Hutchinson HT, 100
33. Tottel, 219
34. LRIL 2, 195; LP 12, Part 2, 1013
35. Wriothesley, 70
36. When the priory was dissolved in 1540 some of the Howard tombs, and Richmond’s, were removed to a new chancel in the church of St. Michael and All Angels at Framlingham (VCH Norfolk 2, 19) or to the Howard chapel in St. Mary’s Church, Lambeth. Other remains, including those of Thomas’s father, the 2nd Duke of Norfolk, were apparently left undisturbed among the ruins (Ashdown-Hill). What happened to Thomas Howard’s remains is not known.
37. Wriothesley, 70
38. John Phillips
39. LRIL 2, 196; LP 11, 994, listed incorrectly under 1536.
40. LP 14, Part 2, 781, from a list of the King’s Payments in Arundel MS. 97, f.82: payments from January 1, 28 Hen. VIII (1536–37), i.e. from January 1, 1537. This, and Wriothesley’s chronicle, cited in the text, prove that Margaret was taken to Syon in November 1537, not 1536, as suggested by the incorrect listing of LP 11, 994 under 1536 and by Lisle THS, 212; Schutte, 56, and Irish. Margaret could not therefore have attended Jane Seymour’s funeral, as Schutte, 61, and Bingham, 25, state; they also say that she was named among the mourners as “Lady Margaret Howard, the King’s niece,” but the reference is to Margaret Gamage, the wife of Lord William Howard; Margaret is not mentioned in the official account of the funeral in LP 12, Part 2, 1060.
41. Willey
42. Strickland LQS 2, 74
43. Pailthorpe et al. Only the brick undercroft beneath the great hall remains of the fifteenth-century convent in which Margaret stayed. It was largely demolished when Edward Seymour, Duke of Somerset, built Syon House around 1550, partly on the site of the abbey church; his house was remodeled by Robert Adam in the eighteenth century (Howard).
According to Strickland, LQS 2, 74, and Bingham, 25, the Abbess was dismayed at the large train of servants that Margaret brought with her, as well as the number of visitors she was allowed to receive, and voiced her complaints in a letter to Cromwell, which prompted him to send a rebuke to Margaret. Both these writers assumed that Margaret’s letter of August 1536, reproduced in the text, was sent from Syon in response to this. However, Margaret was not at Syon in August 1536 or August 1537, nor did she go there until November 1537, and there is no record of the Abbess making any complaint to Cromwell.
44. NA SP 1/241, f.262
45. LP 13, Part 1, 877
46. Ashdown RT, 46
47. LP 13, Part 2, 1280
48. PPE Mary, 72; Strickland LQS 2, 76
49. GWA, 206
50. Heale
6. “Beware the Third Time”
1. LP 13, Part 1, 1419
2. LP 13, Part 2, 622
3. Brigden TW, 403; P. Marshall
4. LP 13, Part 2, 622
5. Scarisbrick, 361n.
6. I can find no evidence to support Schutte’s statement (p.62, citing no source) that in 1538 Margaret was “at the center of intense speculation” because the government was seeking to prove her illegitimate.
7. Brigden HH, 521
8. LP 14, Part 2, 572
9. LP 15, 21
10. LP 14, part 2, 572; Chronicle of Calais, 170
11. PPE Mary, 86
12. LP 15, 138. In LP the reference is to the “Prince’s lodging,” but it should almost certainly read “Princess’s lodging,” meaning Mary’s, as Prince Edward’s was off Chapel Court. Strickland, LQS 2, 77, states that Margaret’s lodging was at the foot of the spiral stairs that led up behind the chapel to the Queen’s gallery, but that is nowhere near the Inner Court.
13. The Second Court was the Green Court (the present Fountain Court) to the east, and the Outer Court was the present Base Court.
14. The lodgings of Sir Anthony Denny and Sir Thomas Heneage, the two chief gentlemen of the Privy Chamber, can still be identified in the south range of Clock Court, opposite the Great Hall; Cromwell’s were probably in that range too. These apartments all survive today (Thurley, 76–77).
15. Thurley, 21
16. Wriothesley, 110; Hall
17. Strickland LQE 3, 49
18. PPE Mary, 88
19. Letters of the Queens of England, 207; Weir HVIIIKC, 440
20. LP 15, 996
21. LP 16, 380
22. LP 16, 1389
23. LP 17, 267
24. Margaret Pole did not, as is so often asserted, refuse to lay her head on the block, crying, “So should traitors do, but I am none!” Nor did the hangman chase her around the scaffold with the ax. These are later stories reported by Herbert. Chapuys described her execution thus: “She was told to make haste and place her neck on the block, which she did. But as the ordinary executor of justice was absent doing his work in the north, a wretched and blundering youth was chosen, who literally hacked her head and shoulders to pieces in the most pitiful manner” (CSP Spain 6, Part 1, 166).
25. Brenan and Statham, 295
26. Perry SK, 221. Ashdown, RT, 49, says she declared that her marriage to Angus had been valid, and Margaret was therefore truly legitimate.
27. LP 16, 1307. A Scottish mark was the equivalent of an English shilling, so Queen Margaret left about £37,680 in today’s values.
28. Buchanan, 270
29. LP 16, 1328
30. LP 16, 678, no. 38; Head EFF, 183; Schutte, 72
31. Warnicke, 73
32. It is unlikely that it relates to Thomas Howard’s arrest, as has been suggested, because it is lacking in emotion and betrays uncertainty as to her lover speaking in her favor.
33. LP 16, 1332
34. Ashdown, RT, 48, states incorrectly that he was imprisoned, but then freed, and then went to fight the Turks, returning after a year, late in 1542, to find Margaret interested in another man. But there is no record of her having another suitor before the summer of 1543.
35. Schutte, 73; Brenan and Statham, 305–07
36. Heale, 155, states that “thing” then meant either “object” or “genitals,” and according to Huggett, 3, it is a contemporary term for a penis, but given that Margaret did not give herself to Thomas Howard but kept herself chaste until they could be properly married, and that neither she nor Charles Howard was punished severely for their involvement, I do not think that meaning is intended here. In this context, “thing” probably means “love.”
37. LP 16, 1331
38. LP 16, 1332
39. Deriving from Strickland LQS 2, 77
40. Although Charles, not being the son of a peer, was not entitled to this courtesy title, he and his siblings were styled “Lord” and “Lady” after his sister’s marriage to the King.
41. LRIL; LP 16, 1333
42. Underneath the poem another hand has added: “Hap have bidden/My hap a-wanting/Madame/Madame d/Madame Margaret/et Madame de Richemont/Je vo
udrais bien qu’il fut” (I really would that it was).
43. LP 16, 1342
44. Meerson
45. Howard
46. Most of Kenninghall was demolished between 1650 and 1751, but the two-story brick service range survives as a private house.
47. Survey of London, 137–40; Roberts TP
48. LP Addenda 1, 2, 1573
49. Hayward, 202–03
50. LP 17, 896
51. LP 18, Part 2, 190
52. Strickland LQS 2, 78; Ashdown RT, 50
53. PPE Mary, 96
54. Brother of the future Queen Katherine Parr.
55. LP 18, Part 1, 467
56. CP 1, 157
57. Hutchinson LDHVIII, 59; LP 18, Part 1, 873
58. James CP, 199
59. Porter MT, 144
60. James CP, 136
7. “A Strong Man of Personage”
1. The original Gaelic form of the name Lennox was Levenach, which was still sometimes in use, usually as Levenax, in sixteenth-century sources.
2. Mary, daughter of James II, had had, by her second husband, James, Lord Hamilton, a daughter, Elizabeth, who married Lennox’s grandfather, Matthew Stewart, 2nd Earl of Lennox, who had fallen at Flodden in 1513.
3. Macauley, 9
4. Macauley, 10, 21, 22
5. Merriman ODNB; Porter CT, 309
6. Through James II’s daughter Mary’s son by James, Lord Hamilton.
7. Ridley HVIII, 379
8. Mahon, 120
9. Merriman ODNB
10. Additional MS. 32,649, f.126
11. Steel, 43
12. Additional MS. 32,650, f.73; Guy MHIMO, 31
13. Macauley, 29
14. CSP Scotland 1, 343
15. Porter CT, 312
16. LP 18, Part 1, 810
17. Additional MS. 32,651, f.85
18. LP 18, Part 1, 880
19. Marshall MG, 136; The Scottish Correspondence of Mary of Lorraine, 31
20. Additional MS. 32,652, f.114; Macauley, 42
21. LP 18, Part 2, 202
22. Additional MS. 32,652, f.159
23. Merriman ODNB
24. LP 18, Part 2, 257; Additional MS. 32,652, f.182
25. Two Missions of Jacques de la Brosse, 19; Marshall MG, 137–38
26. Guy MHIMO, 31
27. A History of the County of Renfrew from the Earliest Times
28. LP 18, Part 2, 269
29. LP 18, Part 2, 275
