House Of Treason: The Rise And Fall Of A Tudor Dynasty (35 page)

In the middle of April, Alexander Nowell, Dean of St Paul’s Cathedral, wrote to Burghley about the state of Norfolk’s health - he suffered from an ‘abundance of humours and [the] weakness of [his] stomach is growing upon him’ because of the closeness of his prison and ‘the lack of air in the warmness of the weather’.

On 31 May, the duke was warned to prepare himself for death and at eight o’clock on the morning of 2 June he was marched out of the Tower and up the slight slope to the scaffold on Tower Hill.

Norfolk had ordered a special suit for the execution - a white fustian shirt, worn beneath a black satin doublet. After prayers had been said, the duke told ‘the multitude that stood around . . .’

Dean Nowell told the crowd that the duke ‘desires you to all join in a prayer to God to have mercy on him’ and called for silence so he could compose himself. The executioner offered Norfolk a blindfold but he brushed it aside saying ‘I fear not death’.

He knelt down and laid his head on the block.

It was cut off with one stroke of the axe, amid the tears of the sorrowful crowd and a small fight with some of the queen’s gentleman pensioners.
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Mary Queen of Scots followed him to the block and was executed on 8 February 1587.

On 16 June 1572, Philip wrote to Lord Burghley, lamenting the death of his father and asking the minister to take him and the rest of Norfolk’s family under his protection.
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Around 1600, Sir Walter Raleigh wrote to Sir Robert Cecil, son of Lord Burghley, with some good advice. Do not fear revenge: ‘Your own father’, he told him, ‘was esteemed to be the contriver of Norfolk’s ruin, yet his son followed your father . . . and loved him.’
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‘If that be the cause in which I am to perish, sorry I am that I have but one life to lose’

 

 

Philip Howard, the only son of the fourth duke and his first wife, was born at noon precisely on 28 June 1557, at Arundel House, just off the Strand in London. Nicholas Heath, Archbishop of York and Lord Chancellor, baptised him on 2 July in the Chapel Royal of the Palace of Whitehall, using a ‘gold’ font, ‘made [for the] purpose and kept in the Treasury only for the christening of the children of princes of the realm’.
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Philip’s mother died from puerperal fever, an infection arising from his birth. Two stepmothers rapidly followed her to the grave and the eldest boy’s care was entrusted to a ‘grave and ancient gentlewoman’ before he was tutored in Greek and Hebrew by the Oxford scholar Gregory Martin, at Audley End.
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As part of his father’s grand plan to acquire extensive estates in the north for his heirs, Philip, now Earl of Surrey, was betrothed to Anne Dacre when both were aged twelve. Two years later, when they reached the then age of consent, they were married by special order of Norfolk while he was imprisoned in the Tower.

Fourteen-year-old Philip watched the royal commissioners make their inventory of the Howard possessions at Kenninghall and wrote to Burghley that their coming

Little did he know - perhaps he never guessed - that Burghley was the chief architect of his father’s downfall and execution.

In accordance with his dead father’s last wishes, he and his two brothers spent two years at St John’s College, Cambridge, where he proceeded MA in November 1576. Apart from a university education, Philip Howard ‘received no small detriment, partly by the bad example[s] he saw there, partly by the liberty permitted him, but principally by the flattery of some ministers [dons], which was so palpable sometimes that his lady . . . was ashamed to hear it’.
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Meanwhile, his unattainted estates were being efficiently administered by a triumvirate of officials, including the fourth duke’s trusted auditor and receiver, William Dix. One of their early duties was to recompense Laurence Bannister, the steward of the Dacre estates, for his expenses when he was dragged into Norfolk’s treason case and confined in the Tower. This included his fine of £138 6s 8d, paid on his release; the £40 ‘to him which procured his pardon’, £278 5s for his board while behind bars.
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Among other administrative headaches, Dix was concerned about sureties for a flock of 2,800 sheep that belonged to the late duke.
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Soon afterwards, Howard took up residence at court - keen, like his forefathers, to capture the monarch’s attention and favour. Now aged eighteen, he swiftly forgot his father’s solemn advice to be wary of its dazzling glamour and dark-corner intrigues, and his head was turned by ‘corrupted immodest young women wherewith the court in those days did much abound’.
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He selfishly neglected his young wife - indeed, cast doubts on whether she was truly his spouse - in the cynical knowledge that the jealous and cantankerous Elizabeth did not willingly bestow her goodwill on dashing but married courtiers. Anne, or ‘Nan’, was left marooned, destitute in the country while he occupied Howard House, so handy for the palaces at Greenwich and Westminster. He lavished money on the showy tournaments held on the anniversaries of Elizabeth’s coronation. And he entertained the queen at his palaces at Norwich and Kenninghall during the royal progress to East Anglia in August 1578, ‘where for diverse days, he lodged and feasted not only herself . . . but the [Privy] Council, courtiers and all their company but all the gentlemen and people of the country’. A contemporary chronicler described how ‘the Earl of Surrey did show most sumptuous cheer, in whose park were speeches well set out’.
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His expensive New Year gift to Elizabeth in 1579 was a girdle ‘of tawny velvet, embroidered with seed pearls, the buckle and pendant of gold’.
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Very soon he had drunk, gambled and spent his way through much of the Howard property revenues. Furthermore, Surrey fell into serious debt - totalling more than £14,000, or nearly £3 million at current values - and was forced to sell land to fend off his creditors. His behaviour shocked and affronted his grandfather, Henry Fitzalan, twelfth Earl of Arundel, and his aunt Jane (
née
Fitzalan), who had married John Lumley, Baron Lumley, both of whom partly disinherited him as a punishment for his spendthrift ways.

But when Arundel died on 24 February 1580, Howard still succeeded to the earldom and substantial properties, including Arundel Castle in Sussex. He now had two London homes - Arundel House, as well as Howard House in Charterhouse Square. His wife, as co-heir to the Dacre lands, had already brought manors and baronies in the north to the marriage. He demanded to be summoned to Parliament as Earl of Arundel but his title was questioned and he was not restored in blood until 15 March 1581 by private statute.
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His panache and ostentation remained undiminished: on 15 and 16 May 1581, he took part in a colourful ‘triumph’ before Elizabeth and the French ambassador which was intended as an elaborate, if not incomprehensible, allegory promoting the queen’s marriage to yet another hopeful suitor, François d’Alençon, Duke of Anjou.

This may have been the last gasp of a misspent youth, for around this time the earl returned to his long-suffering wife and the couple belatedly set up home together. A daughter, Elizabeth, was born in 1583, and a son, Thomas, followed on in 1585. The earl began to take his public duties seriously, aided by a prodigious, if not photographic, memory.
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On 4 July 1581, he was asked to ‘examine certain disordered persons in the town of Brithelmestone [Brighton]’ and in August the same year arrested four south coast pirates called Daniel, Hunter, Page and Richards. Unfortunately, they escaped. He was also told in July 1580 that the queen needed his castle at Framlingham to imprison those recusants - obdurate Catholics - arrested in Norfolk and Suffolk.
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Shortly afterwards, the Countess of Arundel openly converted to Catholicism while living at Arundel Castle. The queen, who anyway had taken an unreasonable dislike to Anne, committed her into the custody of Sir Thomas Shirley, of Wiston House, on the other side of the South Downs, for a year. It was during this period that her first child was born.

The Howards, as a family, were slowly returning to the old faith of the third Duke of Norfolk. Arundel’s favourite sister, Meg (who had married Robert Sackville, second Earl of Dorset, in 1580), was an early convert, as was his younger half-brother, Lord William Howard. Philip’s uncle, Henry Howard (later Earl of Northampton), had become a Catholic in 1558 and was frequently in and out of prison because of official suspicions over his loyalty. Unwittingly, there was good reason as, unknown to Elizabeth’s government, Henry Howard received 500 crowns (£125) in July 1582 from the Spanish ambassador, Don Bernardino de Mendoza, for information he provided about events at court. The envoy reported to King Philip of Spain:

Howard, younger brother of the executed fourth duke, also kept ‘close correspondence with all the Catholic gentlemen of the kingdom, who, in turn esteem him, and show him all favour, both for his high qualities and for his influence with his nephew and he has offered to continue giving me constant information’. For this Howard received a handsome pension of 1,000 crowns a year from the appreciative ambassador.
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Others saw him in a different light. In later years, the courtier Sir Anthony Weldon declared he had ‘a venomous and cankered disposition’ and described him as ‘a great clerk, yet not a wise man, but the grossest flatterer of the world’.
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Then came one of those defining moments in life that unexpectedly and suddenly reveal a crossroads, both in terms of self-belief and personal values.

The Earl of Arundel witnessed one or more of the four disputations of religious issues staged between the condemned Jesuit priest Edmund Campion and a group of Anglican divines in the church of St Peter ad Vincula and later in the great hall of the Tower in September 1581. The debates gave Arundel grave pause for thought and he discovered, almost to his surprise, that Campion’s arguments deeply impressed him.

These were perilous and treacherous times.
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The Earl of Arundel’s lengthy, deeply considered decision to become a Catholic was an act of enormous courage and commitment when adherents of the faith were being ruthlessly persecuted and missionary priests hunted down and slaughtered by the state. With the memory of his father’s execution always haunting him, he struggled against changing his religious loyalties. It is claimed that the final call came to him one day when

He kept his decision secret - not even telling his wife - until he met his Catholic half-brother William (‘to whom he bore a special love’), in London and told him of his conversion. Lord Howard lent him a Catholic treatise by Dr William Allen
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and the earl was received into the Church by the fugitive Jesuit priest Father William Weston at Arundel on 30 September 1584.

In early November 1583, a Catholic zealot, twenty-nine-year-old Francis Throgmorton, was arrested by agents of Walsingham (by now Elizabeth’s Secretary of State as well as her spymaster) for plotting to put Mary Queen of Scots on the throne. The Spanish ambassador, Mendoza, was expelled from England for his involvement, Throgmorton was executed at Tyburn on 10 July 1584, and Lord Henry Howard imprisoned yet again.
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Arundel feared he would be caught up in the fevered hunt for further conspirators and decided to flee England with his brother William. He despatched his secretary, John Momford, to Hull in south Yorkshire to hire a ship to take them to Flanders, but he was arrested, questioned and threatened with the rack in an attempt to extract information. The queen, her suspicions about the earl’s loyalty growing by the minute, invited herself to Arundel House where an extravagant banquet was laid on for her. At the end of the evening Elizabeth declared her satisfaction at the delights of the evening and graciously thanked Arundel for her entertainment. She then told him bluntly that he was now a prisoner in his own house.
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