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      The Howards’ quartered coat of arms was displayed on pennants and a thousand cloaks throughout the parade. Four lions could be found on the shield and one as the crest, the motif broken in the third quarter by a chequered blue-and-gold field that advertised their possession of the earldom of Surrey. The first quarter had the original Howard coat of arms scaled down to make room for the arms that proclaimed their descent from King Edward I, in the second quarter, and beneath that, the earls of Arundel.

      No less than many of their contemporaries, Catherine’s family were fascinated with the tangled limbs and roots of their family tree. She could claim distant descent from Adeliza of Louvain, a twelfth-century queen who was subsequently the Countess of Lincoln and Arundel.35 Later generations of the Howards eulogised Adeliza, with only marginal exaggeration, as ‘a Lady of transcendent beauty, grace and manner, of peculiar gentleness of disposition, added to true virtue and piety’.36 However, there were other less exalted ancestors who had played a more deliberate role in pushing the Howards to the apex of English society – the first recorded mention of the family places them to the village of East Winch in Norfolk, about three centuries before Catherine’s birth. From there, a family associated with law and commerce had risen through a shrewd policy of exemplary civil service, coupled with unions with the daughters of similarly wealthy businessmen and, eventually, the sons and daughters of the local nobility. They had been introduced to the court of King Edward I and used their money to raise troops for the king’s wars and those of his son, Edward II.37 In the fourteenth century, they had married into the powerful de Mowbray family, which eventually brought them the dukedom of Norfolk after they continued to serve the Crown and, crucially, supported the winning side in the dynastic conflicts of the 1400s.

      Their luck seemed to have deserted them when the first Howard duke, John, enjoyed his new dukedom for just over two years, until he was killed supporting King Richard III at Bosworth Field in August 1485. That battle brought the Tudors to power after decades of exile on the Continent, and unsurprisingly they took a decidedly dim view of the Howards’ Ricardian loyalties. Fortunately, unlike Edward IV or Richard III, Henry VII understood that irreversible punishments turned the aristocracy into implacable enemies. Instead of destroying the Howards, he therefore decided to demote them and then promote them again, at his pleasure. Luckily, the Howards had not lost their genetic knack for climbing and they proved adept at playing the unpleasant game the new king set for them.

      John Howard’s heir and Catherine Howard’s future grandfather, thirty-nine-year-old Thomas, had also fought for King Richard III at Bosworth. Unlike his lord father, he was wounded but survived the battle.38 Much was made later of Thomas’s insistence that he would always fight for England’s true king, regardless of who that king was, but even such protestations of patriotic zeal made over Richard III’s not-quite-cold corpse were insufficient to convince the Tudors that Howard should go unpunished.39 Henry VII could not afford to be seen as weak, particularly where the aristocracy was concerned. His late uncle, the deeply unfortunate Henry VI, had ended his life deposed and murdered in the Tower of London. For a medieval king, unfettered mercy could create as many problems as unchecked tyranny. Thomas Howard was therefore temporarily banned from inheriting his father’s titles, a large slice of the Howard fortune was handed over to the Tudor loyalist, the Earl of Oxford, and Howard himself was sent to the Tower of London, where he spent the next three years as a prisoner.40

      Having shown the potential of the stick, Henry VII moved to the carrot. In 1489, Thomas was allowed once again to style himself Earl of Surrey, a subsidiary title previously used as a courtesy by the Duke of Norfolk’s eldest son and heir. Two years earlier, Thomas had an opportunity to gain his freedom from the Tower during the Earl of Lincoln’s ill-fated rebellion against Tudor rule. He wisely chose to stay put to demonstrate that he remained faithful to his king, even while a prisoner – a decision for which he must have given hearty thanks after Henry VII remained secure on his throne and Lord Lincoln ended his life as a sword-pierced corpse.41 When Thomas was eventually released from the Tower, he further proved his fidelity by helping to suppress anti-taxation riots in Yorkshire and deputising for the king’s son, Prince Arthur, who, at the age of three, was understandably considered too young to police the Anglo-Scottish border himself.42 In return for each act of service, another title, another piece of land, another sign of royal favour, was handed back to the Howards. Thomas’s first wife, Elizabeth, became a lady-in-waiting to the new queen, Elizabeth of York, and eventually godmother to the king and queen’s eldest daughter, Princess Margaret.43 The Howard children were allowed to come to court, and the boys were given positions in the royal households.44 The message from the Tudors’ throne was clear, if not always easy to follow. Where Edward IV had turned the Howards into enemies whose only chance of prosperity lay with toppling his lineage, Henry VII had turned them into servitors whose hope lay in doglike obedience.45

      Thomas Howard’s tribe of children were expected to do their part in the rebuilding of the family – either through royal service, advantageous marriages, or both. The most spectacular match was that of the family’s heir, young Thomas, who married Henry VII’s sister-in-law, Anne of York; when she died in 1511, Thomas wed Henry VIII’s cousin, Lady Elizabeth Stafford, the younger sister of the Duke of Buckingham.46 The marriage of two of the Howard sisters, Elizabeth and Muriel, to members of relatively ‘new’ families like the Boleyns and the Knyvets, might seem curious given the numerous subsequent accounts of the era that describe them as families of knights or country gentlemen, apparently far removed from the aristocratic pedigree the Howards had built for themselves. However, the idea of a binary of gentry and aristocracy is a misleading modern conceit. The few centuries before Catherine’s birth had seen enormous changes in the personnel of the elite – of the 136 lords who attended Parliament at the end of the thirteenth century, the direct descendants of only sixteen of them were around to perform similar duties at the start of the sixteenth.47 The aristocratic caste was simply too narrow to socialise or marry solely within itself, particularly if it is defined as those in possession of, or the offspring of someone with, one of the five titles of the nobility – in ascending order in England, baron, viscount, earl, marquess, and duke, or their female equivalents, baroness, viscountess, countess, marchioness, and duchess. In everyday social interactions, the nuances of aristocratic etiquette drew little distinction between the children of respected gentry families and those from certain families in the nobility – for instance, the offspring of a viscount, a baron, or a gentleman were not entitled to style themselves ‘lord’ or ‘lady’, unlike those born to a duke, marquess, or earl.

      To give an idea of how small the high nobility was as a group, compared to the thousands who thronged the court and enjoyed a privileged lifestyle, by 1523 there were only two dukes, one marquess, and thirteen earls in the combined English and Irish peerages.48 Of those sixteen, fewer than half possessed a title that had been in the family for more than three generations. The idea of being ‘gently born’, meaning into a class of landowners who did not have to till their land themselves in order to generate an income from it, bonded the English upper classes together far more than a distinction between who was technically an aristocrat as opposed to a member of the gentry. Families like the Arundells, who owned 16,000 acres in the south-west, were technically ‘only’ gentry, but they were still referred to as a ‘great’ family by their contemporaries, and like most upper-class clans they benefited from their peers’ tendency to count the maternal ancestry as being equally important as the paternal.49 There was certainly a pecking order, and under Henry VIII

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