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letter, regaling the king with the story of how Edmund’s men had deserted him, ‘caused great heart burning and many words’.31 The king was furious, and it took a lot for his courtiers to calm him down to the point where he ruled that no one should be punished for the crime and humiliation of flight from the field. Nonetheless, the deliberately leaked news meant that there was no escaping the fact the Edmund’s division had been the only section of the English forces to sustain a defeat at Flodden. This might explain why Edmund’s sole reward from the Crown was a daily pension of three shillings and four pence, an amount that could generously be described as nominal.32

      Still, he was able to bask in the reflected glow of his father and benefit from the general climate of exultation, or relief, after the battle. In the autumn of the following year, the government gave Edmund £100 to equip himself in suitable finery for jousting at another major royal event, the marriage of the king’s youngest sister to King Louis XII of France, as the living seal on the postwar treaty. In Edmund’s own words, he was ‘to prepare myself to do feat of arms in the parts of France at jousts and tourneys’ during the celebrations.33 In a theme that was to repeat itself throughout most of their subsequent diplomacy, the English and French vied to outshine one another, with the result that peace between them was less bloody but hardly more cordial than war. Edmund was sent with his father, stepmother, and half sister, the Countess of Oxford, in a delegation that included a hundred horses, numerous retainers, and suitably lavish outfits to conform with the government’s request that everything should be done to advertise the wealth of Henry’s kingdom.34

      At least by then Edmund had steady employment as a justice of the peace in Surrey, thanks in no small way to his family’s influence there.35 Tasked with preserving order in the localities, the JPs and their deputies were supposed to arrest criminals, keep a watch on troublemakers, maintain law and order, supervise foreign nationals, levy fines, and make sure food prices were being set at a fair rate. For the next few years Edmund appears in government documents arranging for safe conduct for a group of Prussian friars on a pilgrimage to Scotland, interrogating six suspected French spies, adjudicating on the alleged kidnapping of a maid by her employers who disapproved of her choice of husband, confining a constable called William Bever to the stocks on Lambeth High Street as punishment for ransacking a man’s house in the search for French agents, and obeying government orders to carry out a hunt for vagrants.36

      Approaching forty, he found a wife in Joyce Leigh, a widow with five children from her first marriage to another local official.37 Joyce, whom the Howards tended to refer to by the slightly grander name of ‘Jocasta’, was nearly the same age as her new husband; she had first been married off at the age of twelve, then left a woman of substance by both her father and her first husband.38 Her money as well as her standing within the Lambeth community were useful to Edmund, since by 1514 there were signs that he was accumulating debts and that the blue-blooded security conveyed by his visit to France for the royal wedding was a slowly unravelling illusion.39

      In November 1519, shortly after his marriage to Joyce, riots in Surrey resulted in Edmund being hauled in front of the Star Chamber, a panel set up to administer justice to the kingdom’s elite if there was a fear that common courts and judges might be too intimidated to hand down a fair sentence on a nobleman. As a body, the chamber was particularly concerned with the maintenance of public order. Consisting of legal experts from the common courts and members of the Privy Council, the royally appointed body of men that still constituted the main organ of government in early Tudor England, the Star Chamber could pass its defendants over to the commons if they felt their misdemeanours constituted crimes that could and should be adequately and publicly punished. The Star Chamber played on concepts of honour and the corresponding power of shame to bully errant peers into compliance. Even if they were pardoned, as many of them were, the summonses alone were enough to set tongues wagging.

      The relationship between rulers and ruled in Tudor England was characterised by elaborate anxiety. Political theorists, such as Sir Thomas Elyot who published his treatise on good government in 1531, preached that ‘everything is order, and without order nothing may be stable or permanent’.40 This belief was occasionally both shaken and strengthened by the fact that the century proved to be one of social mobility, wider literacy, growing towns, and an expanding population. Elite views of social unrest were inevitably influenced by their own childhood curriculums that were generally heavy on the classics, in which rebellion was cited as a chief cause for the fall of Ancient Rome, encouraging a belief that popular protest led to mob rule, ‘which of all rules is most to be feared’.41 No one wanted the poor to be miserable, but nearly everyone wanted them to be obedient. In both town and countryside, outdoor and entertaining activities were encouraged in every season, because it was understood that people needed to enjoy themselves and, in doing so, dissipate their energy.

      The belief that the plebeian urban classes were naturally credulous, easily distracted, and prone to overreaction placed the blame for any outburst of civil unrest squarely on the shoulders of their immediate superiors. Edmund and a colleague ‘were indicted of riots, and maintenance of bearings of diverse misdoers within the county of Surrey’.42 The recent disturbances in the county were a poor reflection on the king’s deputies, and Edmund’s fiery temper, or ill standing with the sovereign, did not help. Both defendants were shamed but pardoned, while another, Lord Ogle, was passed over to the common courts after riots blamed on his dereliction of duty resulted in the death of a bystander.43

      The years following the Star Chamber hearing saw Edmund’s career stagnate and his debts increase. Joyce Howard’s properties were mortgaged and remortgaged, despite opposition from her mother and stepfather. Years earlier, after the death of Joyce’s father, Richard Culpepper, who had been a wealthy landowner in Kent, her mother Isabel had remarried to Sir John Leigh then swiftly arranged a wedding between Joyce and John’s younger brother, Ralph. This meant that John and Isabel had a doubly vested interest in monitoring Joyce’s inheritance, with Isabel mindful of the Culpepper estates and John equally concerned about the disposal of the Leigh bequests from Joyce’s first husband.44 The couple evidently came to distrust Edmund Howard, and both their wills attempted to limit his ability to interfere in their daughter or grandchildren’s inheritance.

      This distrust was not entirely undeserved – Edmund’s debts had all but taken over his life by 1527. Despite being a public figure tasked with the maintenance of the law, on one occasion Catherine’s father had only dodged arrest as a debtor thanks to a tip-off from a friend.45 Aristocratic poverty, of course, was not quite the same as the agony of the actual condition, and the names of at least two of Lord Edmund’s servants crop up in subsequent correspondence.46 But by the end of the 1520s, he was undeniably struggling and badly so, to the extent that he began to borrow heavily from his friends, even persuading one, John Shookborough, to stand as surety for his debts.47 The idea of getting another job, a profession that would pay a consistent wage, was considered abhorrent, something that would bring ‘great reproach and shame to me and all my blood’, in Edmund’s words. At least on the surface, he claimed to resent the position he was born into, citing his aristocratic heritage as something that had condemned him to a life of genteel struggle.

      Perhaps such woeful excuse-making was why his relatives’ aid seems to have dried up between 1524 and 1531, a time when Edmund became increasingly desperate. During one spell of hiding to avoid the possibility of being apprehended by his creditors, he sent

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