House Of Treason: The Rise And Fall Of A Tudor Dynasty (38 page)

His words were prophetic. Blount left the chamber weeping and within seven weeks had fallen into disgrace, lost his office, and had returned to the Tower a prisoner himself.

Sunday 19 October 1595 was the earl’s last day of imprisonment in the Tower. He spent it in prayer, saying his rosary beads and reciting psalms off by heart. His servants were standing by his bedside weeping, and he asked them what time it was. They told him ‘eight o’clock’ (in the morning) and he replied: ‘Why, then I have almost run my course and come to the end of this miserable and mortal life.’

He begged them not to cry any more, but his breath grew shallower and at length he could only mouth the names of ‘Jesus’ and the Virgin Mary. The earl died at noon, ‘his eyes firmly fixed towards heaven and his long, lean and consumed arms out of the bed, his hand upon his breast, laid in cross one upon the other . . . Without any sign of grief or groan, only turning his head a little aside, as one falling into a pleasing sleep, he surrendered his happy soul into the hands of Almighty God.’
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The state was to have its last vengeance.

His burial service, on 22 October in the chapel of St Peter ad Vincula in the Tower, was vulgarly amended to vilify him and his religion.

Blount was asked if the earl had relented in his obdurate espousal of Catholicism and, having been told ‘no’, the minister began the burial service.

‘We are not come to honour this man’s religion,’ said the parson. ‘We publicly profess and here openly protest otherways to be saved, nor to honour his offence. The law has judged him and we leave him to the Lord . . .

‘Man that is born of women is of short continuance and full of trouble. He shoots forth like a flower and is cut down. He vanishes also as a shadow and continues not. Thus, God has laid this man’s honour in the dust . . . We commit his body to the earth, giving God hearty thanks that he has delivered us of so great a fear.’

He ended with this prayer:

He was buried in the chancel, in the same grave as his father was twenty-three years before.

The funeral costs were deliberately kept to a minimum. Ten shillings was paid for a coffin which was to be covered by just three yards of black mourning cloth, at a cost of £1 10s. The parson was paid 40s for his politically correct words and the clerk 13s 4d for digging the grave and paving over it afterwards. The Lieutenant wanted to know what should be done with the mourning cloth that had draped the coffin and was told to give it to the parson.
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His body was not to remain in the Tower.

In 1624 his remains were exhumed and reburied in the Fitzalan Chapel at Arundel. His coffin had a plate screwed to the lid with a Latin inscription recording that he had been ‘wickedly sentenced to death . . . for profession of the Catholic faith’.

The earl was named the ‘Venerable Philip Howard’ in 1886, beatified in 1929 and on 25 October 1970 was canonised as a saint by Pope Paul VI as a witness of Christ and an example of the Roman Catholic faith.
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The following year, his remains were placed in a shrine in the Catholic cathedral in Arundel.

‘No other part of history [is] so considerable as what happened to his own family, in which . . . there have been some very memorable people’

 

 

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 and one more had died piteously in prison. Two nieces had also been beheaded. Other members of the family had been frequently incarcerated on suspicion of infidelity to the throne. With the exception of Mary I, as far as the Tudor monarchy was concerned the Howards were very much a house of treason.

Amazingly, in the face of such adversity and distrust, the family fortunes survived, even prospered.

Charles Howard was the eldest son of William Howard, first Baron Effingham, one of the many progeny of Thomas Howard, second Duke of Norfolk, and his second wife, Agnes Tylney. Charles was born in 1536 and spent some time in the household of his half-uncle, the third Duke of Norfolk. His father was appointed Lord Admiral by Mary I in August 1555 and Charles was to follow him in this post and make a considerable reputation in naval affairs.

In 1563, he married Katherine Carey, eldest daughter of the queen’s second cousin, Henry, Lord Hunsdon, who later played the role of one of the more brutal inquisitors of Philip Howard, Earl of Arundel.

When the Earl of Lincoln died in January 1585, Elizabeth’s government cast around for a suitable candidate to replace him as Lord High Admiral and Howard was appointed the following May. Unlike some of the other Howards, his loyalty to the crown and the Protestant faith was unquestionable. His first duty was as one of the commissioners at the trial of Mary Queen of Scots at Fotheringay, Northamptonshire, in October 1586
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and it was her execution on 18 February the following year that brought England closer to war with Spain.

On 15 December 1587, he was ordered to mobilise and command the English naval forces against the expected Spanish invasion of England. Elizabeth’s tight-fisted control of cash for her fleet and her prevarication on the appropriate tactics frustrated and annoyed him. He warned Walsingham in January 1588, ‘If her majesty would have spent but 1,000 crowns to have some intelligence, it would have saved her twenty times as much.’
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On 10 March, Howard reported to the spymaster from his anchorage in Margate Roads, off the Kent coast, with news of the departure of the Spanish Armada:

But this was a premature false alarm and, after being damaged by storms, the huge Armada did not depart for England until 12 July.

Unlike some of his family, Howard did not suffer from false pride. Vain he might have been, but he was fully aware that he was not an experienced sailor. Therefore, he appointed expert captains as his tactical advisers and Sir Francis Drake as his vice-admiral and second-in-command. However, with a whiff of nepotism, Thomas Howard, second son of the fourth Duke of Norfolk, and half-brother to Philip, Earl of Arundel, was appointed to command the
Golden Lion
in the English fleet.

Elizabeth’s ever-present dread of catastrophic defeat at sea led either to a flurry of orders, or plain inaction, as she hesitated, undecided on how best to counter this approaching threat to her crown and her young Protestant state. ‘For the love of Jesus Christ Madam,’ Howard urged her on 23 June, ‘awake thoroughly and see the villainous treasons round about you.’
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The Armada finally arrived off the south-west coast of England on 19 July. Howard, on board his flagship,
Ark Royal
, at Plymouth, wrote breathlessly to Walsingham of the first, inconclusive naval action:

The admiral added an urgent appeal for munitions in a hasty postscript:

Howard’s strategy was to push the advancing Armada further out to sea and away from any potential landfall on English soil. His smaller, lighter-armed warships could not hope to land a killer blow on the mighty Spanish fleet, so instead harried and snapped at its heels as the Armada sailed up the English Channel. The actions of 23 July, off Portland Bill, and, two days later, off the Isle of Wight, did not sink a single Spanish ship, but inflicted considerable battle damage.

The Armada anchored off Calais on 27 July, preparing to escort Spanish troops across the southern North Sea to planned invasion beaches in and around the Thames estuary. Howard now tried a new tactic: fireships. Eight vessels were packed with combustible materials - barrels of pitch and oil - to turn them into floating incendiary bombs. Just after midnight on 28 July, these were set ablaze and bravely steered in among the Armada. The Spanish, panic-stricken, cut their anchor cables, hoisted sail and headed out into the open sea in confusion.

The English were waiting for them beyond the horizon. As dawn broke, they attacked and battered the dispersed Armada off Gravelines, sinking twelve ships and forcing them eastwards until some were in danger of running aground on the treacherous sandbanks off the Zeeland coast. Then the wind suddenly veered and drove the Spaniards north, pursued by the English warships, like hunting dogs running down their prey.

Howard was forced to break off the chase as the Armada entered Scottish waters, not because of diplomatic niceties but because of his shortages of fresh water, food and powder and shot. The Spanish were left to limp home, around the north coast of Scotland and out into the tempestuous Atlantic, in the hope of steering a course home. After weeks of storms, only sixty ships survived. More than 20,000 Spanish sailors and soldiers had perished. It was a famous victory.

Characteristically, Elizabeth did not reward any of her commanders and left many of her sailors to die of disease and hunger. An epidemic of typhus, originating in the
Elizabeth Jonas
, swept through the fleet and killed hundreds. Howard was aghast: ‘It would grieve any man’s heart to see them that have served so valiantly, die so miserably.’ He sold some of his own plate to raise cash to clothe his men and used his own money to pay some of the discharged sailors. ‘It is a most pitiful sight to see how the men . . . die in the streets. I am driven myself to come [ashore] to see them bestowed in some lodging. And the best I can get is barns and outhouses,’ he complained.
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Eventually the parsimonious Elizabeth created Howard Earl of Nottingham on 22 October 1597, to become the second peer of the realm. Two years later, he was appointed ‘Lieutenant General of All England’ and finally retired from public duties, aged eighty-three, in January 1619. One of his favourite pastimes was hunting with dogs - he was a leading breeder of spaniels - and continued to hunt enthusiastically right up to his final illness.
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He died on 14 December 1624 at Haling House, Croydon, Surrey, and was buried in the Effingham family vault at Reigate, Surrey.

Henry Howard, younger son of the Earl of Surrey, had recurrently fallen foul of Elizabeth’s government and had been imprisoned on at least five occasions. He returned to partial favour after the execution of his brother, the fourth Duke of Norfolk, in 1572, but found himself back within the noisome confines of the Fleet Prison in the aftermath of the Throgmorton plot in 1583. Even though she knew nothing of his perfidious reports to the Spanish about events at her court, or of his secret correspondence with Mary Queen of Scots, there seems little doubt that Elizabeth was convinced of his treachery and would cheerfully have signed his death warrant with a swift flourish of her quill pen. Howard’s sworn enemy, Edward de Vere, seventeenth Earl of Oxford, told him that the queen reviled and detested him ‘and sought his head more than any person living’.
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As the Virgin Queen sank into old age, the arch-conspirator Howard daringly began a secret correspondence with James VI of Scotland to facilitate his succession to the throne of England. Robert Cecil, son of Elizabeth’s long-serving minister, Burghley, and also party to these negotiations, recommended Howard as ‘long approved and trusty’.
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He bet on the right horse.

James became King of England and Scotland in March 1603 and, on hearing the news of his accession, sent Howard a jewel of three stones in reward for his efforts. He immediately appointed him a member of his Privy Council and on 13 March 1604, at the Tower - the scene of so much misery to his family - Howard was created Earl of Northampton. His notorious obsequiousness and flattery had not deserted him and this unpleasant trait earned him the less than happy nickname of ‘His Majesty’s earwig’.
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Northampton’s habitual duplicity also sometimes irked the new king, and James twice wrote to him in 1605 accusing him of disliking his sons, the princes Henry and Charles, and of ‘innate hatred to me and all Scotland for my cause’. Moreover, he threatened to repay Howard ‘for your often cruel and malicious speeches against Baby Charles and his honest father’.
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