Thomas Howard, 3rd Duke of Norfolk

• 1. Introduction

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  Thomas Howard, 3rd Duke of Norfolk, was born on the 10th of March 1473 and died on the 25th of August 1554, outliving four of the six wives of King Henry VIII and surviving a reign that killed nearly everyone who rose as high as he did. He was an uncle to two of those wives, Anne Boleyn and Catherine Howard, and he watched both of them walk to the block. He helped build the case against Cromwell, the man who had been his most dangerous rival, then watched Cromwell executed on the very day that his own niece Catherine married the King. He negotiated with tens of thousands of armed rebels in the north of England, made promises the King had not authorized, and then suppressed the same rebellion with brutal force. He carried the title of Lord High Treasurer, Lord High Admiral, and Earl Marshal. And yet in December 1546, he found himself in the Tower of London, his son executed, his attainder signed by a dying king. What kept Thomas Howard alive, time and again, when everyone around him fell?

• 2. A Family Rebuilt from Ruin

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  The Howard family's story before Thomas was born was one of catastrophic miscalculation. His father and grandfather had sided with Richard III, which in 1483 had seemed like a sound bet. His grandfather was created Duke of Norfolk and his father Earl of Surrey in reward for that loyalty. Two years later, at the Battle of Bosworth on the 22nd of August 1485, the 1st Duke lost his life and the Earl of Surrey was badly wounded. The Howards backed the losing side and paid the price: their titles were forfeited and most of their properties stripped away. The rehabilitation was slow. Not until 1489 was Thomas's father restored as Earl of Surrey. The family's very survival depended on demonstrating usefulness to the new Tudor dynasty that had destroyed them.

  Thomas himself entered that world of conditional redemption as a young soldier. He served in a campaign against the Scots in 1497 under his father's command and was knighted by him on the 30th of September that year. His lineage was extraordinarily complex, reaching back through his great-grandmother Margaret Mowbray to Thomas of Brotherton, the sixth son of King Edward I, and through his great-grandfather Robert Howard to Richard, 1st Earl of Cornwall, himself the second son of King John. These connections mattered enormously in Tudor England, where proximity to royal blood was simultaneously a mark of prestige and a potential accusation of ambition. His first wife, Anne of York, was the daughter of Edward IV and therefore a direct aunt of Henry VIII, a match that embedded the Howards deeper still in the tangled web of royal kinship.

  The moment that truly restored the Howard name came on the 9th of September 1513, near Branxton in Northumberland. Scottish forces under King James IV had invaded England while Henry VIII was campaigning in France. Thomas Howard, his brother Edmund, their father, and the barons Dacre and Monteagle led an English army that was numerically inferior but crushed the Scots decisively at the Battle of Flodden. James IV died in the fighting. The Howards gained enormous prestige, and their coat of arms was changed permanently to incorporate the Scottish lion pierced through the mouth with an arrow, a heraldic trophy that was at the same time a calculated insult to the Scottish crown.

• 3. The Architecture of Power

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  On the 1st of February 1514, five months after Flodden, Thomas Howard's father was created Duke of Norfolk, and Thomas himself received the earldom of Surrey by letters patent issued the same day. Henry VIII was careful about what those grants meant in practice: he scattered the accompanying land grants across the realm specifically to prevent the Howards from building a concentrated territorial base in East Anglia. The King rewarded loyalty while quietly limiting its potential to become independence.

  For the next decade, the younger Thomas Howard was the King's reliable instrument. In September 1514 he escorted Henry's sister Mary to France for her marriage to King Louis XII. In 1517, he put down a May Day riot in London with soldiers. On the 10th of March 1520, he was appointed Lord Deputy of Ireland, where he spent months trying to manage the rivalry between Gerald FitzGerald, 9th Earl of Kildare, and Piers Butler, 8th Earl of Ormonde, writing back to London with constant demands for more money and more troops. By the end of 1521, he was recalled to command the English fleet in operations against France, besieging Brest, burning Morlaix in July 1522, and razing territory around Boulogne before winter forced a withdrawal with little strategic gain.

  On the 4th of December 1522, he became Lord High Treasurer when his father stepped down. On the 21st of May 1524, his father died and he succeeded as Duke of Norfolk. His relationship with Cardinal Wolsey had been openly hostile: they clashed over foreign policy, with Wolsey preferring diplomacy and Howard drawn to military solutions. Wolsey had in 1523 maneuvered the reversion of the Earl Marshal's office away from Howard toward Charles Brandon, 1st Duke of Suffolk, a pointed rebuke. By 1525, Howard had been displaced as Lord Admiral as well, replaced by Henry FitzRoy, the King's illegitimate son. Norfolk spent years largely absent from court.

  The reversal came through his niece. In the mid-1520s, Anne Boleyn attracted the King's attention, and suddenly Howard's political value spiked. By 1529, matters of state ran through Norfolk, his brother-in-law Thomas Boleyn, and the Duke of Suffolk. In October of that year, Howard and Suffolk were sent personally to take the great seal from Cardinal Wolsey, a humiliation that prefigured the Cardinal's arrest in November 1530. Wolsey became ill traveling from York to London and died in Leicester. Howard was positioned to fill the vacuum.

• 4. Two Nieces, Two Executions

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  On the 2nd of May 1536, Anne Boleyn and her brother George Boleyn, Viscount Rochford, were arrested on the King's orders. They were tried in the great hall of the Tower of London. Norfolk presided over the trial as Lord High Steward, the highest judicial role at a state trial, and sentenced both of them to death. Rochford was executed on the 17th of May. Anne followed two days later. The man who had benefited most from Anne's rise now formally condemned her.

  Norfolk's political star fell again after his niece's execution, but the pattern repeated itself four years later. By 1540, another of his nieces, Catherine Howard, had caught the King's eye. Henry and Catherine were married at a private ceremony at Oatlands Palace on the 28th of July 1540, the same day Thomas Cromwell was executed. According to the scholar Nicholas Sander, the conservative Howards may have seen Catherine as a figurehead for a campaign to restore Catholicism in England. Norfolk enjoyed renewed prominence and material rewards.

  The marriage collapsed in the autumn of 1541. While the King and Queen were on progress, the religious reformer John Lassells and his sister Mary Hall told Archbishop Cranmer of Catherine's premarital sexual history. On the 1st of November 1541, Cranmer revealed Catherine's extramarital behaviour to the King in a letter. Henry turned his fury on the entire Howard family, accusing them of concealing the Queen's misconduct. Catherine was condemned by a bill of attainder and executed on the 13th of February 1542. Norfolk's daughter Mary, his stepmother, and his half-brother William Howard were all punished. Norfolk retreated to his residence at Kenninghall and wrote to the King blaming his niece and his stepmother for the scandal. The French ambassador Charles de Marillac noted on the 17th of January 1542 that Norfolk had apparently been restored to his full former credit and authority.

• 5. The Pilgrimage and Its Aftermath

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  When the Pilgrimage of Grace erupted in Lincolnshire and the northern counties in October 1536, it was the largest popular uprising of the Tudor period. Robert Aske assembled between 30,000 and 40,000 people at Scawsby Leys, near Doncaster. Norfolk and his eldest son, the Earl of Surrey, shared command of the King's forces with George Talbot, Earl of Shrewsbury. Howard had between 5,000 and 7,000 men against more than 40,000 rebels.

  Facing those numbers, Howard negotiated. He promised a general pardon, that Parliament would meet in York within a year, and a temporary reprieve for the abbeys. The biographer Jesse Childs noted explicitly that Henry VIII had not authorized Norfolk to grant any remedies for the rebels' grievances. The promises were made to avoid annihilation. Howard's enemies at court told the King that the Howards, being Catholic, must have sympathized with the Pilgrimage and could have put down a peasant rebellion if they had wanted to.

  When Bigod's Rebellion broke out in January 1537, proving that the earlier promises had been empty, Norfolk led forces north and carried out a policy of brutal repression on behalf of the King, a Catholic nobleman executing the King's justice against a Catholic uprising. The episode captured the contradiction at the heart of Howard's entire career: his faith was real, but his survival instinct was stronger. His position as the premier Catholic nobleman of England made him a natural magnet for conservative religious sentiment, but his usefulness to Henry depended on keeping that sentiment directed toward the King's service rather than against it.

• 6. The Fall and the Saving Death

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  By 1546, the last years of Henry VIII's reign, the Seymour family and Catherine Parr were gaining power as supporters of the Reformation, and Norfolk was politically isolated. He attempted to bind the families together by arranging a marriage between his widowed daughter Mary and Thomas Seymour, 1st Baron Seymour of Sudeley. The King approved, but Norfolk's own son Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey, objected, and the marriage did not happen. Surrey was proving ungovernable. He had been repeatedly imprisoned for rash behaviour and was accused of incorporating the royal arms of Edward the Confessor into his personal heraldry. He was entitled to bear those arms, but doing so was read as a statement of ambition dangerous to the crown.

  On the 12th of December 1546, both Norfolk and Surrey were arrested and sent to the Tower. Before dawn two days later, on the 14th of December, Howard's house at Kenninghall was raided by Richard Southwell, John Gates, and Wymond Carew, searching for evidence of Surrey's treason. They found the Duke's daughter Mary, his daughter-in-law Frances (who was pregnant with her fifth child), and Norfolk's mistress Bess Holland alone in the house. On the 24th of December, Howard acknowledged in writing that he had concealed his son's treason and offered his lands to the King.

  Surrey was convicted and executed on the 19th of January 1547. On the 27th of January, father and son were both attainted by statute. The dying King gave his assent to Norfolk's execution through royal commissioners. The rumour was that Howard would be executed the following morning. Henry VIII died in the early morning of the 28th of January 1547, and the council decided not to begin the new reign with a beheading. Norfolk remained in the Tower throughout the entire reign of Edward VI. His estates were taken by the ruling clique, for which he was later partly compensated by lands worth £1,626 a year from Queen Mary I.

• 7. The Catholic Restoration and the Tomb at Framlingham

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  Mary I came to the throne in July 1553, and Howard was released and pardoned alongside the Bishop of Winchester, Stephen Gardiner. He was appointed to the Privy Council and presided as Lord High Steward at the trial of the Duke of Northumberland on the 18th of August. He was restored to the office of Earl Marshal and officiated at Mary's coronation on the 1st of October 1553. In Mary's first parliament, his attainder was declared void, restoring him to the dukedom and all its subsidiary titles.

  The grandchildren who had been under the care of John Foxe, later the author of Foxe's Book of Martyrs, were taken from him. Howard dismissed Foxe, who went into exile on the continent to escape Mary's anti-Protestant measures. The education of his grandson and heir Thomas was reassigned first to Bishop Gardiner, now Lord Chancellor, and then to the Catholic priest John White, who was soon elected Bishop of Lincoln. In late 1553, Howard arranged a marriage between his grandson Thomas and Mary FitzAlan, a daughter of the Earl of Arundel, intending to unite the two most prominent Catholic families in England. In early 1554, aged over eighty, he led some of the forces that put down Wyatt's Rebellion, a Protestant uprising against the Queen's planned marriage to Philip II of Spain.

  Howard died at Kenninghall on the 25th of August 1554, after several weeks of declining health. He was buried in the Church of St Michael the Archangel in Framlingham, Suffolk. His tomb is decorated with the twelve Apostles and some of the oldest Christian saints, arranged on all four sides: on the south, Matthew, James the Great, James the Less, and Andrew; on the west, Peter, the Prophet Aaron, and Paul; on the north, Matthias, Jude Thaddeus, Simon the Zealot, and Philip; on the east, John the Evangelist, Simeon of Jerusalem, and Thomas. The effigy of Howard lies to the left of his first wife Anne of York rather than the customary right, because her royal descent took precedence. Parts of the tomb are believed to have come from the 2nd Duke's tomb at Thetford Priory, destroyed when the Priory was dissolved. His grandson Thomas Howard became the 4th Duke of Norfolk and carried the contradictions of the family's position into the next reign.