Thomas Howard, 1st Earl of Arundel

“ Thomas Howard, Earl of Arundel, Surrey, and Norfolk, was twentieth in lineal descent from that William de Albini who, in the year 1139, had acquired the Castle and Earldom of Arundel by virtue of his marriage with the widow of King Henry the First. He was born at Finchingfield, in Essex, in 1585,—a date which nearly marks the period of lowest depression in the strangely varied fortunes of an illustrious family. ”

“ Whether conviction, or ambition to serve his country as a legislator were his motives, it is not for man to judge: but he is unlike his ancestor, Philip Howard, Earl of Arundel, who, braving the power of Queen Elizabeth, disregarded her favour, and almost merited the title of martyr from the persecutions she heaped upon him for having abjured the Protestant worship, although educated in it by his father, the attainted Duke of Norfolk, in despite of Mary and her Spanish consort, who was likewise his sponsor. ”

“ William Howard, Viscount Stafford, was the fifth son of Thomas, earl of Arundel, and grandson of Philip the prisoner. Marrying the sister and heir of the fifth Lord Stafford, who died in 1637, he and his wife were created Baron and Baroness Stafford by a patent of 1640, with remainder, in default of heirs male, to heirs female. ”

“ By his attainder the Norfolk titles were once more forfeited. But Philip Howard, the son and heir, succeeded to the ancient earldom of Arundel in 1580, on the death of his maternal grandfather, while the Lord Lumley, his uncle by marriage, surrendered to him his life interest in the castle and honour of Arundel. The next year an act of parliament restored the earl in blood. After a profligate youth at court, he followed his wife in professing the Roman faith, and in 1585 made an attempt to leave England to seek safety from the penal laws. ”

“ From 1611 onwards he missed no opportunity of urging Salisbury and others to obtain him permission to return home, if only as a recognition of his exemplary conduct while abroad; but the king turned a deaf ear to his importunities. In 1614 he was ordained priest at Rome by Cardinal Bellarmine (Foley) . After this he probably returned to Madrid, where he possessed some influence and a wide circle of acquaintance. In 1616 his father, the archbishop, wrote to the newly converted Thomas Howard, second earl of Arundel [q. v.] ”

“ At his death in 1786 he was succeeded by his son Charles, the notorious “Jockey of Norfolk,” the big, coarse, generous, slovenly, hard-drinking Whig of whom all the memoir-writers of his age have their anecdotes. He conformed to the Church of England and spent a vast sum in restoring Arundel Castle. A third cousin succeeded him in 1815, Bernard Edward Howard, who, although a Roman Catholic, was enabled, by the act of 1824, to act as earl marshal. This was the grandfather of the fifteenth duke, earl of Arundel, Surrey and Norfolk, and hereditary earl marshal of England. ”

“ He himself was attainted and was lying a prisoner in the Tower, doomed to die in the morning, on the night of the death of Henry VIII. He was not released until the accession of Mary, parliament restoring his dukedom on his petition for reversal of the attainder. His grandson Thomas succeeded him in 1554, and in 1556 made the second of those marriages which have given the Howards their high place among the English nobility. The bride was Mary, sole heir in her issue of her father Henry, the last of the Fitzalan earls of Arundel. ”

“ Arundel Howard was Henry, second son of the Earl of Arundel. His father died July 12, 1652. Dorothy would call him Arundel Howard, to distinguish him from the Earl of Berkshire's family.
SIR,—You have made me so rich as I am able to help my neighbours. There is a little head cut in an onyx that I take to be a very good one, and the dolphin is (as you say) the better for being cut less; the oddness of the figures makes the beauty of these things. If you saw one that my brother sent my Lady Diana last week, you would believe it were meant to fright people withal ”

“ Thomas Howard, brother to the Earl of Carlisle, was one of them; there was not a braver, nor a more genteel man in England; and though he was of a modest demeanour, and his manners appeared gentle and pacific, no person was more spirited nor more passionate. Lady Shrewsbury, inconsiderately returning the first ogles of the invincible Jermyn, did not at all make herself more agreeable to Howard; that, however, she paid little attention to; yet, as she designed to keep fair with him, she consented to accept an entertainment which he had often proposed, and which she durst no longer refuse. ”

“ Howard was utterly incredible, being only worthy to form the plot of a sensational novel. He regretted that Mr. Baudenage, the principal mover in this conspiracy, would escape unscathed.
Their lordships, therefore, resolved that Mrs. Howard's child had no claim to the earldom; but that Charles Francis Arnold Howard, the son of the Hon. Rev. Francis Howard, by his second marriage, had made out his right to vote at the election of representative peers for Ireland as Earl of Wicklow. ”

“ Want of money, and a consciousness that he was living ‘beneath the compass of his birth,’ brought him to court about 1570, but the intrigues of which his brother, Thomas Howard, fourth duke of Norfolk, was suspected at the time, depressed his prospects (cf. his Latin letter to Burghley, 22 Sept. 1571, in Cott. MS. Cal. C. iii. f. 94) . When in 1572 Norfolk was charged with conspiring to marry Mary Queen of Scots, Banister, Norfolk's confidential agent, declared in his confession that Howard was himself first proposed 'for that object' (Murdin, p. 134) . ”

“ HOWARD, WALTER (1759–1830?) , called the 'Heir of Poverty,' born on 19 May 1759, was son of William Howard, by Catherine Titcombe of St. Helier, Jersey, and grandson of Charles Francis Howard of Overacres, and lord of Redesdale, Northumberland. His father claimed kinship with the ducal family of Norfolk; in 1750 he sold Overacres, the seigniories of Redesdale and Harbottle, and the advowson of Elsdon, Northumberland, to the Earl of Northumberland, and thenceforward appears to have been supported by Edward Howard, duke of Norfolk (1686-1777) [q.v.] ”

“ The victor of Flodden is the common ancestor of all living Howards that can show a descent from the main stock. The second duke, twice married, was father of at least eleven sons and six daughters, the sons including Edward the lord high admiral, killed in boarding Prégent’s galleys at Brest, Edmund the knight marshal of the army at Flodden, and William the first Lord Howard of Effingham. The eldest son, Thomas, succeeded as the third duke of his name, although the second under the patent of 1514. ”

“ During September 1667 Evelyn persuaded Howard to give the Arundelian marbles, which were lying neglected in the same garden, to the university of Oxford. The university made him a D.C.L. on 5 June 1668, at the same time conferring on his two sons, Henry and Thomas, of Magdalen College, the degree of M.A. Howard was raised to the peerage, with the title of Baron Howard of Castle Rising in Norfolk, on 27 March 1669, and in the following April went as ambassador extraordinary to Morocco. ”

“ He is aware that I know some things about his character and conduct in California, and, fearing that I may use that information against him, he seeks to ward off its effect by making it appear that I am his personal enemy, am jealous of him, etc. I know of no other reason for his hostility to me. He is welcome to abuse me as much as he pleases; I don't think it will do him much good, or me much harm. I know very little of General Howard, but believe him to be a true, honorable man. Thomas is also a noble old war-horse. It is true, as you say, that he is slow, but he is always sure. ”

“ When Sir Thomas Wyat approached London, Howard was very active in the defence of the queen. He shut Ludgate in Wyat's face. ‘And that night’ (3 Feb. 1553-4) , says Wriothesley, ‘the said Lord Admirall watched the [London] Bridge with iii c men, and brake the drawbridge, and set rampeers with great ordinance there.’ As a reward for his exertions he was created Baron Howard of Effingham on 11 March 1553-4; the manor of Effingham, Surrey, had been granted him by Edward VI in 1551. But Howard's active devotion to Elizabeth's interests roused the suspicions of Mary and her advisers. ”

“ In the confusion of the Civil Wars, and the distraction [Pg 202] of men’s minds from family scandals to events of public import, it would have been quite possible for Lady Howard to mislead the Tavistock people as to the true parentage of her son George. The Earl was by no means an old man when the Countess died, in fact, was aged forty-nine years.
During the seven years of Sir Richard’s absence, Lady Howard wrote many letters to her steward Cutteford, who occupied Walreddon and managed her estates in Devon and Cornwall. ”

“ At the disruption of the party over Irish home rule he joined the liberal unionists, but did not sit in the 1886 parliament. He succeeded his uncle, William George Howard (1808-1889) , the invalid and bachelor eighth earl of Carlisle, in 1889. In the House of Lords he continued to vote with the liberal unionists, while his wife had become an ardent public worker on the radical side. On one question of social reform, the temperance question, they were wholly agreed. ”

“ Popular feeling ran high against him, and he sought an asylum at Bornhem, where he arrived in September 1674, and resumed his duties as prior. On 27 May 1675 he was created a cardinal-priest by Clement X, mainly owing to the influence of his old friend John Baptist Hacket, now the pope's confessor. Soon afterwards Howard left for Rome. Among the distinguished company who attended him were his uncle William Howard, viscount Stafford [q.v.] , Lord Thomas Howard, his nephew, and John Leyburn, president of the English College of Douay, his secretary and auditor. ”

“ Probably to defeat this inquiry, he made a great part of it over to his son-in-law, the Earl of Salisbury, and his brother, Sir W. Howard (Carte, Hist. of England, iv. 47-8) . The king threatened the earl with another Star-chamber bill, but Howard appeased him by making humble submission, and promising to pay all, though he was fully 50,000l. in debt (Cal. State Papers, Dom. 1619-23, pp. 115, 116) . The king and Buckingham stood sponsors for his grandson, James Howard, afterwards third earl of Suffolk (1619-1688) [q.v.] ”

“ The newly wedded couple were in consequence confined at Lambeth under the supervision of Archbishop Abbot. As Lord Maltravers, Howard was elected M.P. for Arundel, Sussex, in 1628. From 20 May 1633 until 31 Aug. 1639 he was joint lord-lieutenant of Northumberland and Westmoreland. On 17 Dec. 1633 he was appointed a commissioner to exercise ecclesiastical jurisdiction in England and Wales. On 10 Aug. 1634, having been previously elected M.P. for Callan in the Irish parliament, he became a privy councillor of Ireland. He was appointed a commissioner to try offenders on the borders on 30 Nov. ”

“ He died, however, of a fever caught while visiting the poor, before his consecration, on 22 Nov. 1720, and was buried at Arundel. ‘Such charity,’ said Bishop Giffard, ‘such piety, has not been seen in our land of a long time.’ There is a portrait at Greystoke believed to represent either Henry Howard or his brother Richard.
In the ‘Howard Papers’ it is asserted (p. 313) that Henry Howard died at Rome. The statement obviously refers to his brother Richard Howard (1687–1722) , also a priest in the Roman communion, who died at Rome, where he was a canon of St. ”

“ Howard spent the rest of his life as a country gentleman and antiquary. In politics he was a whig; he signed the petition in favour of parliamentary reform, and continually advocated the repeal of the penal laws against Roman catholics. When in 1795 it became possible, Howard was made captain in the 1st York militia, with which he served for a time in Ireland. In 1802 he raised the Edenside rangers, and in 1803 the Cumberland rangers, for which regiment he wrote a little work on the drill of light infantry (1805) . ”

“ It is surely of some consequence to whom the first monument in St. Paul's should be erected; and who can be so proper to begin this selection as Mr. Howard? He spent his life and fortune in services which were highly dangerous to himself, but beneficial to every country and every age. Though engaged in doing the most active good, he created no enemies, and excited no envy, even in his life-time ”

“ Stowe MS. 95; 16 f.e. ⁠for alone read by itself 32 ii 14 Howard, Henry, 6th Duke of Norfolk: for second earl read third earl 33 i 31 ⁠for In 1678 read Before 1678 34 ii 22 f.e. Howard, Henry (1757-1842) : for Monticucolli read Montecuculi 36 ii 34 Howard, Henry (1769-1847) : after 1847. insert He left three sons, Frank Howard [q. v.] , William, advocate-general in Bombay, who was killed while hunting in 1862, and Edward Irvine, founder of the 'Bombay Quarterly,' who was killed in a railway accident in 1868. ”

“ He was in the rival camp to Dryden and was a friend of Martin Clifford7 and of Thomas Sprat, then Buckingham's chaplain: these three have been thought to be jointly responsible for The Rehearsal. Sprat had published a poem of congratulation to Howard on Howard's The British Princes (1669) , the latter a long pseudo-epic v of the Blackmore style in dreary couplets which, again, provides no parallel with the Reflections. And what of Howard's plays? Many of these were written in the 1660's during his poetic apprenticeship; none seems akin to our poem. ”