Norfolk’s aristocratic hauteur was all the more pronounced because of its fragility: for all the Howards’ pretensions, someone as versed in history as Thomas Cromwell could have pointed out that the family’s entry to the peerage had been no more than six decades before, and their ducal title had been granted around the time of Cromwell’s own birth. Howard magnificence was borrowed plumage from their Mowbray predecessors in the Norfolk title, complete with an ancient Norfolk mausoleum in their Cluniac priory of Thetford, a funereal venue which meant a great deal to the Duke.
