Elizabeth Howard, Duchess of Norfolk

• 1. Introduction

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  Elizabeth Howard, Duchess of Norfolk, spent the last five years of her separation ruling herself, as she put it, in a house in Redbourn, Hertfordshire, on a meagre allowance of two hundred pounds a year. She had been locked in a chamber, stripped of her jewels, and sent away by a husband who refused to be held to account. What made her story unusual was not just the violence or the exile, but the paper trail she left behind. In letter after letter to Thomas Cromwell, she described beatings, blood, and betrayal in language that cuts across five centuries with startling directness. Who was this woman who refused to reconcile, who passed secret letters concealed in oranges to a deposed queen, and who outlived everyone who wronged her? Her life moved through some of the most dangerous years of Tudor England, and she watched from a position that was simultaneously close to power and stripped of it.

• 2. A Perilous Inheritance

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  Elizabeth was born around 1497 as the eldest daughter of Edward Stafford, 3rd Duke of Buckingham, and Eleanor Percy. Her family tree ran directly to royalty. Her paternal grandmother, Lady Catherine Woodville, was a sister of Queen Elizabeth Woodville, making her a sister-in-law of King Edward IV. That royal adjacency turned out to be more burden than blessing. Her paternal grandfather, Henry Stafford, 2nd Duke of Buckingham, was executed for treason in 1483 by King Richard III. Then in 1521, her own father was beheaded on Tower Hill, convicted of treason against King Henry VIII. Execution for treason was not a distant family tragedy for Elizabeth. It was a recurring pattern. Her eldest son, Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey, would eventually be beheaded in January 1547, and her estranged husband would only narrowly escape the same fate when the dying King's death on the 28th of January 1547 prevented a scheduled execution.

• 3. Court, Loyalty, and Letters in Oranges

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  Elizabeth came to court in 1509 as a lady-in-waiting to Catherine of Aragon, and the friendship that formed there shaped the rest of her life. During the long years when Henry VIII sought to have his marriage to Catherine annulled, the Duchess remained openly loyal to the queen and openly hostile to her husband's niece, Anne Boleyn. Her defiance took physical form. Late in 1530 it was noted that she was secretly passing letters to Catherine, concealed inside oranges, which Catherine then forwarded to the Imperial ambassador, Eustace Chapuys. The Duchess also told Chapuys that her husband had once confided that Anne would be "the ruin of all her family". Her candor cost her. In 1531, Anne Boleyn personally requested that the Duchess be exiled from court for too freely declaring her loyalty to Catherine. When Anne was crowned queen on the 1st of June 1533, the Duchess refused to attend, citing the love she bore the previous queen.

• 4. A Marriage That Became a Scandal

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  Before the 8th of January 1513, when Elizabeth was only fifteen and Thomas Howard was in his late thirties, she became his second wife. He was already the widower of Anne, a daughter of King Edward IV. Elizabeth had not entered this match willingly. She had earlier been promised to Ralph Neville, 4th Earl of Westmorland, and in a letter to Cromwell dated the 28th of September 1537 she recalled that she and Westmorland had loved together two years, and that she would have been married to him before Christmas if Howard had not pressed his suit on her father. Her father had initially tried to steer Howard toward one of his other daughters; Howard, according to Elizabeth, refused them all and insisted on her. She brought a dowry of two thousand marks and was promised a jointure of five hundred marks a year, a promise her husband apparently never kept. According to one account, as late as 1524 the couple still appeared bonded by mutual love. Three years later, Norfolk took a mistress.

• 5. Violence and Separation

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  Bess Holland, the daughter of Norfolk's steward, moved openly into Kenninghall with the Duke in 1527, and the Duchess's letters to Cromwell became increasingly raw in their detail. She claimed that while she was recovering after the birth of her daughter Mary, her husband had pulled her from her bed by the hair, dragged her through the house, and wounded her with a dagger. In three separate letters to Cromwell, she repeated that he had "set his women to bind me till blood came out at my fingers' ends, and pinnacled me, and sat on my breast till I spit blood". Norfolk dismissed the accusations as false lies. On the 23rd of March 1534 he forced a formal separation, arriving home after riding all night and locking her in a chamber before sending her away to Redbourn. Both Norfolk and Thomas Cromwell asked her brother to take her in; he refused. Her eldest son and daughter became estranged from her. Yet the Duchess would not be moved. In a letter dated the 30th of December 1536 she told Cromwell she would never again petition the King or any other to have her husband take her back. On the 3rd of March 1539 she wrote that she was of age to rule herself, as she had done for five years since her husband put her away.

• 6. The Final Reckoning

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  When Cromwell fell from power in 1540, the Duchess's years of writing to him came to an end. She and her brother were eventually reconciled, and before 1547 he sent one of his daughters to live with her, whom she treated generously. Norfolk spent the reign of Edward VI imprisoned in the Tower, released and pardoned only by Queen Mary I in 1553. His attainder was declared void in Mary's first parliament, restoring him to the dukedom. He died at Kenninghall on the 25th of August 1554 and was buried at St. Michael's Church at Framlingham in Suffolk. The Duchess was not named in his will. She outlived him by four years. In July 1557 she officiated as godmother at the baptism of her great-grandson, Philip Howard, holding the child over a gold baptismal font normally reserved for the baptism of royal children. Elizabeth Howard died on the 30th of November 1558 at Lambeth. Her brother, who had once refused to take her in during her worst years, wrote her epitaph: "Thou wast to me, both far and near, a mother, sister, a friend most dear."