House Of Treason: The Rise And Fall Of A Tudor Dynasty (4 page)

James IV, the Scottish king, was furious. He protested volubly about the Howards’ ‘outrage’, fruitlessly demanded the return of the ships and sought the arrest and prosecution of the Howards for Barton’s murder and for breaching the peace. Henry condescendingly pointed out that justice had merely been done to a ‘crafty pirate’ and thief.
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Surrey, meanwhile, was growing ever more anxious about the prospect of hostilities on two fronts with France and Scotland. He sought an interview with the king to dissuade him from embarking on war, but was received by Henry with ‘such manner and countenance . . . upon him that on the morrow, he departed home again’.
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He obtained the king’s leave of absence from court in September 1511 and retired in a huff to his estates in Suffolk and Norfolk to nurse his anger at being outmanoeuvred by Wolsey.

Sir Edward was appointed a vice-admiral on 7 April 1512, charged with maintaining control of the English Channel between the French port of Brest and the Thames Estuary. Over the next few months, his warships seized more than sixty vessels and imposed naval domination over the entire Channel. In response, the French began mobilising their own fleet and Howard, driven by his sovereign’s lust for martial glory, set out to destroy it.

In the first week of August, Howard sailed from Portsmouth in his flagship, the newly built
Mary Rose
, leading a twenty-five-strong fleet, which included the mighty
Regent
, commanded by his brother-in-law, Sir Thomas Knyvett. Their objective was Brest, which was sheltering the thirty-nine ships of the French fleet. These enemy vessels left port on 10 August and had just cleared its approaches when the English vanguard attacked. In brutal fighting,
Regent
was shackled with chains to the French carrack
³¹
Marie la Cordelière
and Knyvett boarded the larger enemy ship, ignoring the storm of arrows from her decks. As the French fought frantically to repel boarders, their vessel caught fire and the blaze spread rapidly across to the sails and rigging of the
Regent
. Very soon, it, too, was engulfed by flames. One desperate French gunner, deep in the bowels of the carrack, set fire to its powder magazine, choosing death rather than suffering the dishonour of his ship being captured.

Howard, coming up with the main body of his fleet, arrived to see both ships disappear in a series of catastrophic explosions, which hurled burning debris high into the air before falling back into the sea like a terrible deluge of fire. Inevitably, there were no survivors from either crew. Knyvett was dead, and so were all 700 of his men from the
Regent,
³²
together with 1,200 enemy sailors.

Bad news in war is never welcome. Henry had lost one of his closest confidants, but he managed to control his grief publicly. In London, Wolsey informed Fox of the loss of the
Regent
:

Howard had also lost a close friend and brother-in-law. He swore to make the French pay dearly, in blood and fire, for Knyvett’s death. Wolsey added:

Knyvett’s widow, Muriel, swore another kind of oath which, in its way, was as awesome as her brother’s. When news of her husband’s death reached her at their home at Buckenham, south-east of Norwich, on 12 August, she at once declared that she had made ‘tryst with him in Heaven that day five months’. Her will was written on 13 October and she died, just as she had prophesied, on 12 January 1513. Muriel had pined to death, aged twenty-six, leaving two daughters and four sons by Knyvett.

Sir Edward was one of the many members of the house of Howard who attended her funeral, his craving for vengeance still burning as fiercely as ever. On 19 March, he was appointed Lord High Admiral of England, Ireland and Aquitaine, in succession to John de Vere, thirteenth Earl of Oxford, who had died nine days earlier. On Easter Sunday, 27 March 1513, he again departed Portsmouth with his fleet and headed back to Brest. So hellbent was he on revenge that he sailed without any supply ships.

The enemy fleet remained in the port’s roadstead, blockaded by the English waiting impatiently for battle offshore. French reinforcements, in the shape of six shallow-draught, oar-propelled galleys, arrived in mid-April under the command of the Chevalier Gaston Prégent de Bidoux, immediately nicknamed ‘Prior John’ by the English. He put into Conquet, fifteen miles (25 km.) west of Brest, his vessels protected by powerful shore artillery batteries. Howard could not deploy his warships in the shallows, so he decided to pick off the French vessels by using fifteen rowing barges, or crayers.
³⁴
The admiral quit his ship for one such boat, commanded by a Spaniard called Carroz, or Charran,
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and crewed by sixteen English sailors. His plan was that the others would follow, but as the boat was lustily rowed through a hail of arrows and gunfire towards ‘Prior John’s’ galley, Howard found that he was alone. Undaunted, he clambered aboard and tried to capture the enemy ship.

Edward Etchingham, captain of
Germyn
, graphically described his commander’s death to Wolsey on 5 May: ‘The news . . . be so dolorous that [hardly] can I write them for sorrow’:

Howard scrambled up over the bows into the forecastle of the French admiral’s galley, together with the Spaniard and his small party of English sailors. They hitched their boat’s cable to the capstan of the French ship, but it was either cut by the enemy or somehow let slip, and the boat was swept away on the tide, leaving them marooned on the enemy deck.

Later, under a flag of truce, ‘Prior John’ acknowledged that ‘there was one that leapt into my galley with a gilt target [shield] upon his arm, [who] I cast overboard with moorish pikes and the mariner that I have prisoner, told me that same man was your admiral’.

Howard, encumbered by his armour, sank quickly beneath the waves and drowned. He was thirty-six. Etchingham ended his despatch:

Three days later, Howard’s body was recovered from the sea by the French, disembowelled and embalmed, and buried nearby. Prégent wanted to keep Howard’s heart but his whistle was sent jubilantly as a trophy of war to the French queen, Anne of Brittany, and his armour to Princess Claude.
³⁹

Sir Edward Howard died a swashbuckling hero, more corsair than naval commander. Admirals have no place in war in boarding ships with a handful of men to fight against overwhelming odds, cut off from any hope of reinforcement, or indeed escape. Their role is strategic or fighting tactical or strategic battles - not engaging in single-handed combat against lower-rank enemy sailors. His death was unnecessary, avoidable, and the result of crass, if not blind, stupidity on his part. Nonetheless, his ‘death or glory’ end, his relentless drive to destroy the enemy, warmed the heart of many a patriotic Englishman and saddened others. The symbolism of hurling his silver whistle - the badge of an admiral - into the sea, moments before he died, is the stuff of legend, if not a Hollywood epic.

Howard had married Alice Lovell, sister and sole heir of Henry, Lord Morley, in 1505, but the couple had no children.
⁴⁰
He did, however, have two underage illegitimate sons. His will, written the previous January, made provision for them:

He left Henry’s wife, Queen Catherine of Aragon, his ‘St Thomas’s Cup’ - a superb silver-gilt and ivory ‘grace’ or loving cup - engraved with three inscriptions in Latin and English: ‘Drink thy wine with joy’; the more sententious: ‘Be sober’; and finally: ‘Fear God’.
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The pious Catherine would have thoroughly approved of the legacy. He also instructed that his local abbey, the Trinitarian priory at Ingham, Norfolk, should ‘find a secular priest, to be called “Howard’s Priest” and a friar, likewise named’. Brandon was left ‘my rope of bowed nobles that I hang my great whistle by, containing three hundred angels’,
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and the king, his admiral’s whistle.
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Both were disappointed in their bequests, as these now lay in enemy hands.

Howard’s brother Thomas was appointed Lord High Admiral in his place, providing him with his first opportunity to emerge from the shadow cast by the noisy bravura and derring-do of his younger sibling. Safe at home in Plymouth harbour and aboard
Mary Rose
, he sought to placate Henry’s anger at the loss of admiral and ship:

He would punish two men who ‘did their part very ill the day my brother was lost . . . Cooke, the queen’s servant in a row[ing] boat, and Freeman, my brother’s servant’.

But Thomas, Lord Howard, soon fell foul of Henry’s overarching need to make his mark on European politics through leading his army in a ‘fire and sword’ invasion of France. Although Howard needed to revictual his ships, his prime task was to engender a new spirit of élan among his dispirited, demoralised crews who were deserting their ships in shoals. He complained to Wolsey that his sailors would ‘rather end up in purgatory than return to battle’.
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Despite these morale problems, the new admiral was ordered to take his ships from Plymouth to Southampton to escort a force led by Arthur Plantagenet, Viscount Lisle,
⁴⁸
in a feint attack on Brest. The king and his main army, meanwhile, crossed the Channel further east to attack Louis XII of France. Howard’s pleas that the wind was against him did not wash with an impatient Henry. Bishop Fox, in Southampton, told Wolsey on 19 May:

All too conscious that he was making a hash of his first command, Howard galloped to London to explain his problems in person to his master. But both Henry and Wolsey refused to see him. How he must have suffered and squirmed in the face of these snubs! However, he cadged and wheedled fresh supplies and paid, out of his own purse, to transport the victuals down to Southampton. Eventually, he managed to escort the diversionary force across to Brittany and hastened northwards to the main theatre of war. He was soon sent home.
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Henry, fearful that James IV of Scotland would invade while he and his army were campaigning in France, appointed Surrey to guard England’s northern marches. The ageing Earl of Surrey was the obvious choice for the job, given his years of experience in the region, but the old campaigner was less than happy at the mission, preferring to win his glory instead on a French battlefield. When Henry embarked at Dover in June, he took Surrey’s hand, and told him: ‘My lord, I trust not the Scots, therefore I pray you not be negligent.’ An order is an order, and the earl replied: