who was summoned to parliament as a justice in 1295, being
appointed a justice of the common pleas in 1297. Over the
parentage of this man genealogists have disputed for centuries.
The pedigree-makers have hailed him in turn as the descendant
of a Norman “Auber, earl of Passy” and as the heir of Hereward,
“the last of the English.” But out of the copies of Norfolk
deeds and records collected for Thomas, earl of Arundel, in the
early part of the 17th century, it seems clear enough that he
sprang from a Norfolk family, several of whose members held
lands at Wiggenhall near Lynn. These notes from deeds,
evidently collected by an honest inquirer, make no extravagant
claims of ancient ancestry or illustrious origin for the Howards,
although the facts contained in them were recklessly manipulated
by subservient genealogists. Doubtless the judge was the son
of John Howard of Wiggenhall, living about 1260, whose widow
Lucy, called by the genealogists the daughter of John Germund,
was probably the wife of John Germund by her second marriage.
William Howard was employed as counsel by the corporation of
Lynn, and it is worthy of note that the “crosslets fitchy” in his
shield of arms suggest the cross with which the dragon was
discomfited by St Margaret, the patroness of Lynn. Prospering
by the law, William Howard of Wiggenhall rose to knight’s
rank and acquired by purchase Grancourt’s manor in East
Winch, near Lynn, where he had his seat in a moated house
whose ruins remain. He was probably dead and buried in his
chapel at East Winch before November 27, 1308, the date of the
patent by which Henry Scrope succeeded him as a commissioner
of trailbaston. His two wives, Alice Ufford and Alice Fitton—heir
of Fitton’s manor in Wiggenhall—were both daughters of
knightly houses. Before his death his eldest son, John Howard,
was a knight and already advanced by his marriage with Joan of
Cornwall, one of the bastard line founded by Richard of Cornwall,
king of the Romans.
Sir John Howard served in Edward II.’s wars in Scotland and Gascony, was sheriff of Norfolk and Suffolk and governor of Norwich Castle. When he died in 1331 he was seised of many Norfolk manors. His son and heir, another Sir John, admiral of the king’s navy in the north, was a banneret who displayed his banner in the army that laid siege to Calais. By the admiral’s wife Alice, sister and heir of Sir Robert de Boys, the Howards had the Boys manor of Fersfield, near Diss, which is still among the possessions of the dukes of Norfolk. His son Sir Robert Howard, who had married a daughter of Sir Robert Scales (Lord Scales), died in 1388. From Sir John Howard, the only son of Sir Robert, two branches of the house of Howard spring. The elder line was soon extinct. By his first wife, Margaret, daughter and heir of Sir John Plays, Sir John Howard had a son who died before him, leaving a daughter through whom descended to her issue, the Veres, earls of Oxford, the ancient Norfolk estates of the Howards at East Winch and elsewhere, with the lands of the houses of Scales, Plays and Walton, brought in by the brides of her forefathers. After the death of Margaret Plays, her widower found, with the peculiar instinct of his race, a second well-endowed wife. By her, the heir of the Tendrings of Tendring, he had a second son, Sir Robert Howard, a knight who fought under Henry V. in France, and died, like his half-brother, before the old knight’s career ended in 1436.
It is to the marriage of this young knight that the house of Howard owes the tragedy of its greatness. He was a younger son, although he had some of his mother’s inheritance. Had he married the landless daughter of a neighbour he might have been the ancestor of a line of Essex squires, whose careers would have had the parish topographer for chronicler. But his bride was Margaret Mowbray, daughter of the banished duke of Norfolk. Although this was a noble alliance, it is probable that the lady had no great portion. The head of her elder brother, the boy earl marshal, had been stricken off in the cornfield under the walls of York, but her younger brother’s right to his father’s dukedom was allowed by parliament in 1425.
Sir John Howard, only son of the match between Howard and Mowbray, took service with his cousin the third duke of Norfolk, who had him returned as knight of the shire for Norfolk, where, according to the Paston Letters, this Howard of the Essex branch was regarded by the gentry as a strange man. He followed the White Rose and was knighted at the crowning of King Edward IV., who pricked him for sheriff of Norfolk and Suffolk. In the duke’s quarrel he brawled with the Pastons, his wife boasting that, should her husband’s men meet with John Paston “there should go no penny for his life.” “And Howard,” writes Clement Paston, “hath with the king a great fellowship.” Offices and lands came to John Howard by reason of that fellowship. Henry VI., when restored, summoned him to parliament in 1470 as Lord Howard, a summons which may have been meant to lure him to London into Warwick’s power, but he proclaimed the Yorkist sovereign on his return and fought at Barnet and Tewkesbury. When peace was made, Edward summoned him again as a baron and gave him the Garter and the treasurership of his household. After Edward’s burial, at which he bore the king’s banner, Howard, an enemy of the Wydviles, linked his fortunes with those of the duke of Gloucester. At this time came his sudden lifting to the highest rank in the peerage. The last of the dukes of Norfolk had left a child heir, Anne Mowbray, married to the infant duke of York, the younger of the princes doomed by Richard in the Tower. By the death of this little girl, John Howard became one of the coheirs of her illustrious house, which was now represented by the issue of Margaret Mowbray, his mother, and of her sister Isabel, who had married James, Lord Berkeley. A lion’s share of the Mowbray estates, swollen by the great alliances of the house, heir of Breouse and Segrave, and, through Segrave, of Thomas of Brotherton, son of Edward I., fell to Howard, who, by a patent of June 28, 1483, was created duke of Norfolk and earl marshal of England with a remainder to the heirs male of his body. On the same day the lord Berkeley, the other coheir, was made earl of Nottingham. High steward at Richard’s crowning, the duke bore the crown and rode as marshal into Westminster Hall. For the rest of his life he was Richard’s man, and though warned by the famous couplet that “Dykon his master” was bought and sold, “Jack of Norfolk” led the archer vanguard at Bosworth and died in the fight, from which his son the earl of Surrey was carried away a wounded prisoner. An attainder by the first parliament of Henry VII. extinguished the honours of the father with those of the son, who had been created an earl when the lord Howard was raised to the dukedom. Their estates were forfeit.
Thomas Howard, a politic mind, loyal to the powers that be, was released from the Tower of London in 1489, his earldom of Surrey and his Garter restored. Accepting the position in which the Tudor king would have his great nobles, he became the faithful soldier, diplomatist and official of the new power. In his seventieth year, as lieutenant-general of the North, he led the English host on the great day of Flodden, earning a patent of the dukedom of Norfolk, dated 1 February 1513/4, and that strange patent which granted to him and his heirs that they should bear in the midst of the silver bend of their Howard shield a demi-lion stricken in the mouth with an arrow, in the right colours of the arms of the king of Scotland. This augmentation has been interpreted as a golden scocheon with the demi-lion within the Scottish tressure. Thus charged on the silver bend, it makes bad armory and it is worthy of note that, although the grant of it is clearly to the duke and his heirs in fee simple, Howards of all branches descending from the duke bear it in their shields, even though all right to it has long passed from the house to the duke’s heirs general, the Stourtons and Petres.
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. He had fought as captain of the
