commander in chief against the Spanish Armada, and, although
giving due weight to the counsel of Drake and his other officers,
showed himself a leader as prudent as courageous. He was created
earl of Nottingham in 1596 and died in 1624. The legend that the
admiral was a Roman Catholic has no authority. Two of his sons
succeeded in turn to the earldom of Nottingham, extinct on the
death of Charles, the third earl in 1681. Sir William Howard of
Lingfield, younger brother of the great admiral, carried on the
Effingham line, his great-grandson succeeding to the barony on the
extinction of the earldom. Francis, seventh Lord Howard of
Effingham, was created earl of Effingham in 1731, a title extinct in
1816 with the fourth earl, but revived again in 1837 for the eleventh
baron, who had served as a general officer in the Peninsular campaign,
the great-grandfather of the present peer.
A patent of 1604 created Henry Howard (1540–1614), younger son of Surrey the poet, earl of Northampton, a peerage which ended with the death of this, the most unprincipled of his house.
Thomas, son of the fourth duke of Norfolk’s marriage with the daughter and heir of Thomas, Lord Audley of Walden, founded the line of the present earls of Suffolk and Berkshire and of the extinct Lords Howard of Escrick. His barony of Howard of Walden has descended to his heirs general. Lord William Howard (1563–1640), the “belted Will” of Scott’s Lay and the “bauld Willie” of more authentic legend, was another of the sons of the fourth duke and Margaret Audley. Married in 1577 to one of the three co-heirs of the Lord Dacre of Gilsland he suffered under Elizabeth more than one imprisonment with his brother the unfortunate earl of Arundel. But in 1603 he was able, on the partition of the Dacre lands, to make his home at Naworth Castle, where he lived, a border patriarch, cultivating his estates and serving as a commissioner of the borders. His great-grandson Charles Howard, although fledged in a nest of cavaliers, changed sides and fought at Worcester for the parliament. The Protector summoned him in 1657 to his House of Lords, but he was imprisoned in 1659 on suspicion of a share in Booth’s insurrection and, after the Restoration, was created, in 1661, earl of Carlisle, Viscount Morpeth and Lord Dacre of Gilsland, titles which are still held by his descendants. From Sir Francis Howard, a cavalier colonel and a younger son of “bauld Willie,” come the Howards of Corby Castle in Cumberland, a branch without a hereditary title.
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. A grant of the precedence enjoyed by the bride’s father being held illegal, her husband was in the same year created Viscount Stafford. Roger Stafford, the impoverished heir male of the ancient Staffords, had been forced to surrender his barony to the king by a deed dated in the preceding year, a piece of injustice which is in the teeth of all modern conceptions of peerage law. The Viscount Stafford was one of the “five Popish lords” committed to the Tower in 1678 as a result of the slanders of Titus Oates and he died by the axe in 1680 upon testimony which, as the diarist Evelyn protested, “should not be taken against the life of a dog.” But three earls of his own house—Carlisle, Suffolk and Berkshire—and the Lord Howard of Escrick, an ex-trooper of Cromwell’s guard and an anabaptist sectary, gave their votes against him, his nephew Mowbray being the only peer of his name in the minority for acquittal. In 1688 his widow was created countess of Stafford for life, and his eldest son, Henry, had the earldom of Stafford, with special remainder to his brothers. This earldom ended in 1762, but the attainder was reversed by an act of 1824 and in the following year Sir George Jerningham, the heir general, established his claim to the Stafford barony of 1640.
Authorities.—State papers; patent, close and plea rolls. Tierney, History of Arundel; G. E. C., Complete Peerage; J. H. Round, Peerage Studies; Howard of Corby, Memorials of the Family of Howard; Brenan and Statham, House of Howard; Howard, Historical Anecdotes of the Howard Family; Morant, Essex; Blomefield, Norfolk. (O. Ba.)
HOWARD, CATHERINE (d. 1542), the fifth queen of Henry
VIII., was a daughter of Lord Edmund Howard and a granddaughter
of Thomas Howard, 2nd duke of Norfolk (d. 1524).
Her father was very poor, and Catherine lived mainly with
Agnes, widow of the 2nd duke of Norfolk, meeting the king
at the house of Stephen Gardiner, bishop of Winchester. Henry
was evidently charmed by her; the Roman Catholic party,
who disliked the marriage with Anne of Cleves, encouraged
his attentions; and after Anne’s divorce he was privately
married to Catherine at Oatlands in July 1540. Soon afterwards
she was publicly acknowledged as queen. Before her marriage
Catherine had had several lovers, among them being a musician,
Henry Mannock, or Manox; her cousin, Thomas Culpepper;
and Francis Dereham, to whom she had certainly been betrothed.
After becoming queen she occasionally met Dereham and
Culpepper, and in November 1541 Archbishop Cranmer informed
Henry that his queen’s past life had not been stainless. Cranmer
had obtained his knowledge indirectly from an old servant of the
duchess of Norfolk. Dereham confessed to his relations with
Catherine, and after some denials the queen herself admitted
that this was true; but denied that she had ever been betrothed
to Dereham, or that she had misconducted herself since her
marriage. Dereham and Culpepper were executed in December
1541 and their accomplices were punished, but Catherine was
released from prison. Some fresh information, however, very
soon came to light showing that she had been unchaste since
her marriage; a bill of attainder was passed through parliament,
and on the 13th of February 1542 the queen was beheaded.
See A. Strickland, Lives of the Queens of England (vol. iii. 1877).
HOWARD, JOHN (1726–1790), English philanthropist and
prison reformer, was born at Hackney, probably on the 2nd of
September 1726. His childhood was passed at Cardington,
near Bedford, where his father, a retired merchant of independent
means, had a small estate. He was apprenticed to a firm of
grocers in the city of London, but on the death of his father in
1742, by which he inherited considerable property, he bought
up his indenture, and devoted more than a year to foreign travel.
Never constitutionally strong, he became, on his return to
England, a confirmed invalid. Having been nursed through an
acute illness by an attentive landlady, a widow of some fifty-three
years of age, Howard, in return for her kindness, offered
her marriage and they were united in 1752. Becoming a widower
in less than three years, he determined to go abroad again,
Portugal being his destination. The ship, however, in which
he sailed was taken by a French privateer, the crew and passengers
being carried to Brest, where they were treated with great
severity. Howard was permitted to return to England on
parole to negotiate an exchange, which he accomplished, as
well as successfully representing the case of his fellow-captives.
He now settled down on his Cardington property, interesting
himself in meteorological observations. He was admitted a
member of the Royal Society in 1756. In 1758 he married
Henrietta, daughter of Edward Leeds, of Croxton, Cambridgeshire.
He continued to lead a secluded life at Cardington and
at Watcombe, Hampshire, busying himself in the construction
of model cottages and the erection of schools. In 1765 his
second wife died after giving birth to a son. In the following
year Howard went for a prolonged foreign tour, from which he
returned in 1770.
In 1773 the characteristic work of his life may be said to have begun by his acceptance of the office of high sheriff of Bedford. When the assizes were held he did not content himself with sitting out the trials in open court, his inquisitiveness and his benevolence alike impelled him to visit the gaol. Howard found it, like all the prisons of the time, wretchedly defective in its arrangements; but what chiefly shocked him was the circumstance that neither the gaoler nor his subordinates were salaried officers, but were dependent for their livelihood on fees from the prisoners. He found that some whom the juries had declared not guilty, others in whom the grand jury had not found even such appearance of guilt as would warrant a trial, others whose prosecutors had failed to appear, were frequently detained in prison for months after they had ceased to be in the position of accused parties, until they should have paid the fees of gaol delivery (see Introduction to The State of the Prisons of England and Wales). His prompt application to the justices of the county for a salary to the gaoler in lieu of his fees was met by a demand for a precedent in charging the county with an expense. This he undertook to find if such a thing existed. He went accordingly from county to county, and though he could find no precedent for charging the county with the wages of its servants he did find so many abuses in prison management that he determined to devote himself to their reform.
In 1774 he gave evidence before a committee of the House of Commons, and received the thanks of the house for “the humanity and zeal which have led him to visit the several gaols
