Howard family

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  The Howard family has held the title of Duke of Norfolk continuously since the 28th of June 1483, when King Richard III created John Howard the first duke of a new creation. That single act launched a dynasty that would touch nearly every turning point in English history for the next five centuries. Two of John's descendants became queens of England. One commanded the fleet that turned back the Spanish Armada. Others went to prison, and to the scaffold, for their faith. The questions the Howards raise are about power and survival: how does a family remain at the top of the English nobility through the Tudor upheaval, the Reformation, treason trials, and religious persecution, and still hold the oldest dukedom in the land today?

• 2. Disputed Origins

  ›

  A pedigree compiled and signed by Sir William Dugdale, Norroy King of Arms of the College of Arms, and dated the 8th of April 1665, traced the Howards back to a Lancashire landowning family at Great Howarth Hall in Rochdale. Dugdale cited more than seventy undated deeds and concluded that the Howards, Dukes of Norfolk, derived from the Howarths of Great Howarth. According to his scroll, the founding figure was Osbert Howard de Howarth, who received lands in Rochdale from King Henry I in exchange for service as Master of the King's Buckhounds.

  William Howard de Howard, born in 1237, was identified by Dugdale as the direct progenitor of the noble line. He was knighted around 1278 and appointed Chief Justice of the Common Pleas in 1297. He married Alice de Ufford, daughter of the Suffolk landowner Sir Robert de Ufford, and Dugdale suggested that a young William may have left Lancashire for Norfolk at his father-in-law's urging to practise as a lawyer.

  Separately, a poem called the Iter Lancastrense, written by the Reverend Richard James in 1636, mentioned one Robin Howorrth as the ancestor from whose family great noble peers derived their progeny. Later family tradition preferred a more glamorous origin story, claiming descent from Hereward the Wake, the celebrated resister of the Norman Conquest. That legend remained part of Howard lore even as documentary evidence pointed firmly back to Lancashire.

  Sir William's son, Sir John Howard I, became Sheriff of Norfolk and Suffolk and married Joan de Cornwall, an illegitimate granddaughter of Richard, 1st Earl of Cornwall. He died in 1308, leaving the family rooted in East Anglian legal and administrative life.

• 3. Rise to the Dukedom

  ›

  Sir Robert Howard, a great-great-great-grandson of Sir William, made a marriage that would transform the family's fortunes. He wed Lady Margaret Mowbray, elder daughter of Thomas Mowbray, 1st Duke of Norfolk, whose dates were 1366 to 1399. When the Mowbray ducal line died out in 1476, their heiress Anne Mowbray died at just nine years old in 1481.

  Richard III, after declaring the son of King Edward IV illegitimate, created John Howard, the son of Sir Robert and Lady Margaret, as the first Duke of Norfolk of this new creation on the 28th of June 1483. That date was the two-hundredth anniversary of the Barony of Mowbray, to which John was also senior co-heir. John had already been summoned to Parliament as Lord Howard by Edward IV, and Richard III simultaneously made him hereditary Earl Marshal.

  John Howard fought to the death at the Battle of Bosworth Field, defending Richard III and the House of York against the forces that would install the Tudor dynasty. His son Thomas Howard, the 2nd Duke of Norfolk, proved more adaptable. Thomas became the grandfather of two English queens, Anne Boleyn and Catherine Howard, both wives of Henry VIII, and the great-grandfather of Queen Elizabeth I. It was the 2nd Duke's lineage that made the Howards indispensable to the Tudors even as that relationship repeatedly turned dangerous.

• 4. Tudors and Treachery

  ›

  Catherine Howard became the fifth wife and Queen consort of King Henry VIII, bringing the family to its highest point of royal intimacy. Her uncle, Thomas Howard, 3rd Duke of Norfolk, was a central figure in Henrician politics throughout this period. Before Catherine's rise, the Howards had already proved their military value: the family led the defence against a Scottish invasion at the Battle of Flodden, restoring Tudor favour after the family had backed the losing side at Bosworth.

  The same closeness to power that elevated the Howards also endangered them. In late 1546, the 3rd Duke of Norfolk and his son Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey, were both imprisoned. They faced accusations of plotting to usurp the crown from Henry VIII's son, Prince Edward, the future Edward VI, in a scheme said to be aimed at reversing the Reformation and returning England to papal authority. Surrey was tried for treason and executed in January 1547. The 3rd Duke was also sentenced to death but survived because Henry VIII died before the execution could be carried out. He remained in the Tower of London for the entirety of Edward VI's reign.

  Freed early in the reign of the Catholic Queen Mary I in 1553, the elderly 3rd Duke died the following year. The dukedom passed to his grandson Thomas, the 4th Duke, who despite a Protestant upbringing was himself a Catholic. He was imprisoned in 1569 on suspicion of involvement in the rebellion of the Catholic earls of northern England, then released in August 1570 when evidence proved insufficient.

  In 1571, the 4th Duke participated in the Ridolfi Plot, a scheme to overthrow and possibly assassinate Elizabeth I and replace her with Mary Queen of Scots, whom the Duke planned to marry. He was arrested in September 1571 when his involvement was uncovered, tried for high treason, and sentenced to death in January 1572. He was executed in June of that year. His son, Philip Howard, the 13th Earl of Arundel, was imprisoned in the Tower for his Catholicism in 1585 and remained there for over ten years. He fell ill with dysentery and died in October 1595.

• 5. Faith as Identity

  ›

  Four consecutive members of the Howard family fell from grace or were convicted and imprisoned for their Catholic beliefs during and after the English Reformation. What began as political catastrophe gradually became something the family wore as a mark of distinction. Philip Howard, 13th Earl of Arundel, who died in the Tower in 1595, is venerated as a saint. William Howard, 1st Viscount Stafford, is regarded as a blessed martyr.

  The most high-profile recusant family in England, the Howards maintained their Catholicism through a period when it carried extreme legal and personal risk. The repeated pattern of attainder, imprisonment, and eventual restoration meant the dukedom itself was suspended and revived multiple times between the fifteenth and seventeenth centuries. Charles II finally restored the titles for good, ending a cycle that had threatened to extinguish the senior line entirely.

  The Catholic identity also shaped how the family's titles were transmitted and how cadet branches formed. The Earls of Carlisle descend from the third son of the 4th Duke. The Earls of Suffolk and Berkshire descend from the 4th Duke's second son. The Earls of Effingham descend from a fourth son of the 2nd Duke, and it was that line which produced Charles Howard, 1st Earl of Nottingham, the Lord High Admiral who commanded the English fleet against the Spanish Armada in 1588. Curiously, the Effingham line was explicitly excluded from eligibility to inherit the dukedom when it was restored.

• 6. The Arundel Inheritance

  ›

  In 1580, the Howards inherited the Earldom of Arundel, one of the oldest titles in the English peerage, through genealogical succession from the FitzAlans, who were themselves ancient kin to the House of Stuart and had arrived in Great Britain from Brittany. The FitzAlan line had become extinct in the male line, and the connection came through the marriage of Thomas Howard, 4th Duke of Norfolk, to Mary FitzAlan as his first wife.

  Mary's brother Henry died in 1556, making her the heiress to the Arundel estates of her father, Henry FitzAlan, 12th Earl of Arundel. Her son was Philip Howard, 13th Earl of Arundel. From this marriage, the present Duke of Norfolk takes his hyphenated surname of FitzAlan-Howard, and it is also why Arundel Castle serves as the family's principal seat. The castle has been in the family for over four hundred years and is a Grade I listed building.

  The Howard family's heraldic arms reflect this layered history of inheritance. Their original arms showed a white bend on red with crosslets. When the first Howard Duke of Norfolk married the Mowbray heiress, he quartered his arms with those of Thomas of Brotherton, 1st Earl of Norfolk, who was a son of King Edward I. Starting with the 2nd Duke, the Howards added the checkered blue and gold of the Warren Earls of Surrey in the third quarter. Philip Howard's descendants later incorporated the gold lion on red of the FitzAlan Earls of Arundel in the fourth quarter, each addition recording a new inheritance absorbed into the Howard line.

• 7. Earl Marshal and Enduring Precedence

  ›

  The office of Earl Marshal is the eighth of the Great Officers of State in the United Kingdom, ranking beneath the Lord High Constable and above the Lord High Admiral. The Earl Marshal organises state funerals and the monarch's coronation at Westminster Abbey and serves as a leading officer of arms. Since John Howard was made hereditary Earl Marshal by Richard III in 1483, the office has been held by the Dukes of Norfolk.

  The Howards remain the Premier Dukes and Earls of the Realm in the Peerage of England, a rank that reflects the unbroken seniority of the Norfolk dukedom. Alongside the dukedom, the senior line holds the Earldoms of Arundel, Surrey, and Norfolk, plus six baronies. The barony titles created over the centuries include Baron Howard of Glossop, created on the 26th of November 1869, and Baron Howard of Penrith, created on the 10th of July 1930.

  Castle Howard in Yorkshire, one of England's most celebrated country houses, has been the seat of a Howard branch for over three hundred years. The Barons Howard of Henderskelfe, whose title was created on the 1st of July 1983, were associated with that house; the title became extinct on the 27th of November 1984. The most recent Howard peerage is Baron Howard of Rising, a life peerage granted to Greville Howard on the 4th of June 2004, showing that new titles continue to attach to a family whose roots in the English peerage stretch back more than five centuries.