Charlie Fenton’s Reviews > House of Treason: the Rise and Fall of a Tudor Dynasty > Status Update

‘Norfolk’s youngest half-brother, the twenty-four-year-old courtier Lord Thomas Howard, had been wooing Lady Margaret Douglas, the daughter of the king’s sister sister, Margaret, and half-sister to James V of Scotland, since the end of 1535 - two years after he had arrived at court. Theirs was a heady, whirlwind romance and some time before the middle of 1536, probably at Easter, they married secretly.‘

‘For more than a century the vengeful hand of the English crown had frequently lain heavy on the Howards. Their colossal pride, egotism, ambition, or loyalty to their faith, had cost them dear. Two Dukes of Norfolk had been attainted as traitors and spent lonely years confined in the Tower of London. Another had been beheaded. An heir to the dukedom had been executed on trumped-up charges‘

‘The following month, he was appointed a member of the Privy Council. Like the third duke, he soon acquired a taste for political intrigue and a thirst for power. Ranged against him at court, however, were some powerful adversaries: Cecil, Elizabeth’s omnipotent minister, and Robert Dudley, who was created Earl of Leicester in 1564.‘

‘The Howards should have recognised their peril. They were clear targets for the king, worried over his son’s succession, and for those who now made their bid for supremacy. Norfolk’s and Surrey’s dynastic pride and inbred arrogance had spawned an absurd complacency. In Henry’s dangerous court of conspiracies, no man - no matter how important, how influential - was entirely safe‘

‘Norfolk desperately tried to distance himself from his niece, telling Marillac ‘with tears in his eyes, of the king’s grief’ who had loved Catherine ‘much and the misfortunes to his house in her and Queen Anne [Boleyn], his two nieces’. Despairingly, he told Chapuys, the Spanish ambassador, ‘I wish the queen was burned.’’

‘They devised a sophisticated entrapment that would finally overthrow the despised and hated Cromwell, restore everything they cherished in the old liturgy, and provide them with an inestimably powerful political weapon at court... The trap came in the shape of another of Norfolk’s nieces, pretty eighteen-year-old Catherine Howard, the giddy, empty-headed daughter of the duke’s recently deceased spendthrift brother’

‘Norfolk’s youngest half-brother, the twenty-four-year-old courtier Lord Thomas Howard, had been wooing Lady Margaret Douglas, the daughter of the king’s sister sister, Margaret, and half-sister to James V of Scotland, since the end of 1535 - two years after he had arrived at court. Theirs was a heady, whirlwind romance and some time before the middle of 1536, probably at Easter, they married secretly.‘

‘In January 1535, Chapuys reported court gossip about Anne’s peevish temper. Henry Percy, sixth Earl of Northumberland, her former love, talked freely of her arrogance and malice, saying that lately she had used ‘such shameful words to the Duke of Norfolk as one would not address to a dog, so that he was compelled to quit the royal chamber. In his indignation... he uttered reproaches against [her]‘’

‘Howard was to come bitterly to regret his haste in choosing his second wife. They married early in 1513 and in the long, sour and poisoned years that followed, Elizabeth would frequently reflect, with aggrieved rage, on how she had been cheated by Howard and denied a happy and loving life with Neville... She gave birth to the Howards’ first child - happily a son, christened Henry - in late 1513’

‘Surrey returned to court in 1499 and, two years later, became an influential member of Henry VII’s Privy Council joining a group of courtiers ‘of singular shrewdness’. On 16 June 1501, he was appointed Lord Treasurer of England, a post the Howards were to make their own suzerain for the next four decades. He thus became the third in importance of the king’s ministers.’