LITMIR.BIZ

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Sir Edward Neville, another teammate, got ‘Valiant Desire’.7 Knyvet, who got the part of Ardent Desire, joked that his character’s name would be better suited to his codpiece.8 The sounds of the trumpets gave way to the beating of the drums that announced the arrival of these challengers, dressed in armour and crimson satin.

      Edmund’s slot came on the following day, 13 February, when the entertainments began with Thomas Boleyn and the Marquess of Dorset arriving in the costumes of pilgrims en route to the shrine of Santiago de Compostela, a holy site in the queen’s Spanish homeland reputed to be the burial place of Saint James the Apostle. They knelt before the ‘mighty and excellent princess and noble Queen of England’ to ask permission to joust in her presence; the queen graciously acquiesced and her husband returned to the fantastic tiltyard.9 An account of the joust, containing a tally of the scores of each knight, divided along the lines of their respective teams, survives today in the Bodleian Library at Oxford. In thin scratches of black ink, it lists Edmund Howard’s mistakes.10

      The athletic Charles Brandon parried well, superbly in fact, but after an acceptable length of time in the tilt, without fail he yielded to the king by a margin or tied with him, a masterstroke of hail-and-hearty camaraderie that suggested that when the king triumphed it was because he was the better sportsman. Every one else followed suit and let the king win, except Edmund, who beat him every time. Lances splintered and sweat-drenched men cried out, while noblemen and ‘well-apparelled’ servants watched as Edmund Howard repeatedly sent the nineteen-year-old monarch crashing to the ground.11 It was said that a banquet afterwards ended with ‘mirth and gladness’, but that was mainly because the decision to let some of the common people take away as souvenirs the solid gold letters and decorations hanging from the courtiers’ costumes had resulted in poor Thomas Knyvet practically being stripped naked by zealous trophy hunters.12

      Nearly all the men who participated in the Westminster jousts of February 1511 went on to rise further in the king’s graces, with the exception of Edmund. Three months later, Edmund was not asked to join in another set of jousts at the king’s side, while his elder brothers and his brothers-in-law were. Two years after those Westminster jousts, and the funeral of the little baby prince they had celebrated but who did not live to see his eighth week, the king went off to war against France, and he did not invite Edmund to accompany him. Henry VIII’s dreams of recapturing the martial glory days of Edward III or Henry V proved costly to the Howard family – Edmund’s elder brother Edward, who had become a favourite of the king’s, drowned in a naval battle against the forces of Louis XII. Despite the attacks Edward had led against Scottish ships, King James IV chivalrously told Henry VIII in a letter that Edward Howard’s life and talents had been wasted in Henry’s pointless war.13 Edmund’s brother-in-law and former jousting companion, Thomas Knyvet, was likewise lost at sea when his ship went up in flames at the Battle of Saint-Mathieu. Knyvet’s widow and Edmund’s sister, Muriel, died in childbirth four months later. Another of Edmund’s brothers, Henry, seems to have died of natural causes the following February, and been buried at Lambeth, less than a year after the death of another brother, Charles.14

      The war that took his brother’s life provided Edmund Howard with the opportunity to achieve the high point of his career. In the king’s absence, the northernmost English county of Northumberland was invaded by Scotland, France’s ally, who ‘spoiled burnt and robbed divers and sundry towns and places’.15 It was quite possibly the largest foreign army ever to invade English soil – 400 oxen were needed to drag the mammoth cannon across the border.16 Queen Katherine of Aragon, left behind as regent, ‘raised a great power to resist the said King of Scots’, and placed it under the command of Edmund’s father.17 Katherine had been forced to marshal an army quickly, and they were bedevilled by the war’s ongoing problem of poor supplies. By the time they actually engaged the Scots, many of the 26,000 English soldiers had been without wine, ale, or beer for five days.18 In an age when weak ale, or ‘small beer’, was often supplied to prevent people drinking from dubious or unknown water supplies, its absence as the army moved north was felt keenly.19

      At the Battle of Flodden, which took place on 9 September 1513, Edmund was given command of the right flank on the ‘uttermost part of the field at the west side’, with three subordinate knights serving as lieutenants over fifteen hundred men, mostly from Lancashire and Cheshire.20 When they were ‘fiercely’ attacked by the soldiers of Lord Hume, Edmund’s personal standard, and his standard-bearer, were hacked to pieces on the field, at which point most of Edmund’s men turned and fled.21 If his talents as a leader failed, his courage did not. With only a handful of loyal servants remaining by his side, Edmund was ‘stricken to the ground’ on three separate occasions. Each time, according to a contemporary account, ‘he recovered and fought hand to hand with one Sir Davy Home, and slew him’.22 A wounded soldier called John Heron returned to fight at Edmund’s side, declaring, ‘There was never noble man’s son so like to be lost as you be this day, for all my hurts I shall here live and die with you.’23 Edmund’s life was only saved by the arrival of cavalry headed by Lord Dacre, who rode in ‘like a good and an hardy knight’ to rescue Edmund from annihilation and bring him through the cadavers to kneel at his father’s feet, where he learned that ‘by the grace, succour and help of Almighty God, victory was given to the Realm of England’ and received a knighthood, an honour bestowed on about forty-five of his comrades who had also shown exceptional bravery in the melee.24

      The scale of the Scottish defeat stunned as much as their mighty guns had when they first crossed the border – the corpse of King James was found ‘having many wounds, and naked’, lying in egalitarian horror with about eight thousand of his subjects, including nine earls, fourteen lords, a bishop, two abbots, and an archbishop.25 There was hardly a family in the Scottish nobility who escaped bereavement after Flodden; particularly heartbreaking was the example of the Maxwell clan – Lord Maxwell fell in combat within minutes of all four of his brothers.26 In the immediate aftermath of the carnage, many English soldiers were spotted wearing badges that showed the white lion, the Howards’ heraldic crest, devouring the red lion, an ancient symbol of Scotland.27 English writers later praised the Scots’ ‘singular valour’, but at the time soldiers on the field were so repulsed by the violence that they refused to grant amnesty to the captured prisoners.28 Queen Katherine shared the attitude of the troops with the victorious lion badges. Edmund’s father wanted to give King James’s remains a proper burial; he, and several councillors, had to talk the queen out of her original plan of sending the body to Henry as a token of victory. The queen relented. She dispatched James’s blood-soaked coat to her husband instead of his body and jokingly cast herself as a good little housewife in the accompanying letter, which contained the rather repulsive quip, ‘In this your grace shall see how I can keep my pennies, sending you for your banners a King’s coat. I thought to send himself unto you, but our Englishmen’s hearts would not suffer it.’29

      Flodden provided the exorcism for Bosworth, and a few months later, on the Feast of Candlemas, the Howards’ dukedom was restored to them.30 Edmund’s

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