The Boleyn Women: The Tudor Femmes Fatales Who Changed English History (8 page)

Elizabeth’s grandfather, John Howard, was the son of Margaret Mowbray and Sir Robert Howard and was born in around 1421. He remained associated with his Mowbray kin throughout much of his life, to his great advantage. Early in his career he was appointed to act as chamberlain to his cousin, John Mowbray, 3rd Duke of Norfolk. It was this appointment which led to him becoming an esquire in the royal household in 1449 and a Member of Parliament. He fought in France in 1453, although was unfortunately taken prisoner by the French.
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As his cousin’s chamberlain, John played a very personal role, with his accounts from the 1460s making it clear that he was responsible for paying many of the duke’s personal expenses, sums for which he would later be reimbursed. For example, in 1462 he paid for the making of a jacket of crimson cloth for the duke, as well as incurring an additional 12 pence cost for lining the jacket.
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The duke particularly entrusted John with his wardrobe, with John Howard also purchasing a short gown of russet velvet as well as a tawny cloak lined with velvet and a jacket of the king’s own livery.

In 1464 John’s accounts show that he was even responsible for paying a ferryman to transport the Duchess of Norfolk and her household, as well as expending sums to buy sheets for the children of Norfolk’s chapel.
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He was entrusted with taking delivery of 17 yards of crimson cloth to be given as gifts by Norfolk to a number of gentlemen in 1465, including the Yorkist supporter Humphrey Blount of Kinlet in Shropshire, something which suggests a political motive to the generosity.
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Towards the end of 1467 Howard incurred expenses ‘riding in my lord’s need to Framlingham unto York and from thence unto Holt, with 15 servants and 16 horses by 12 days’.
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This loyalty was consistently rewarded by John’s prosperous kinsman, although at no little cost to Howard: in January 1467 John Howard was given the honour of acting as deputy to the Duke of Norfolk as Earl Marshall in a court tournament, a role which cost him more than 300 marks.

John Howard naturally adopted his kinsman’s Yorkist sympathies and fought at the Battle of Towton before attending Edward IV’s Coronation in June 1461. Edward appointed Howard as his carver, a prestigious post that can only have come about through Mowbray influence. He remained in favour throughout the reign, with Edward IV’s wardrobe accounts of 1480, for example, recording that a royal gift was made to John Howard of 9 yards of black velvet.
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Edward’s queen, Elizabeth Woodville, had earlier given 7 yards of green velvet to be made into a gown for him.
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He was ennobled by Edward IV as Lord Howard and his surviving accounts demonstrate that he was wealthy and able to live in some style during the reign. In his accounts from the early 1480s, for example, John made payments to a goldsmith, as well as purchasing cushions of red worsted for his home.
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John entertained lavishly, purchasing delicacies such as venison and cygnets, as well as sugar, pepper, cloves, grains, raisins and almonds.
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He enjoyed music and the arts, making payments to a bagpiper, as well as to a company of players who performed before him in December 1481.
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John enjoyed playing chess in his spare time.
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In 1463 John paid a servant 16 pence for riding to Framlingham to fetch a book that had evidently been left there on an earlier visit.
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The following year he purchased two books: one in French and the other a copy of the political treatise
Dives et Pauper
, further evidence of an interest in reading and education.
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John Howard cut a fine figure when he visited court or his estates, with records of his clothes including a long gown of black satin lined with purple velvet, a doublet of crimson satin, a short gown of tawny velvet and a long gown of russet, decorated with fur.
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The head of Elizabeth’s family liked comfort, possessing several pairs of slippers. When he sailed, he also took a number of rich goods with him for his personal needs, including religious paraphernalia, sheets, a silver basin, a case containing four goblets, a candlestick, his own cutlery and even a silver chamber pot.
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John Howard has been described as ‘conspicuously loyal’ to the royal house of York, something that ensured that the king showed him favour and promoted him in return for his services.
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In addition to the profits that he achieved through royal favour, he was also active in business as a prominent ship owner and was well connected among the merchants of England, something that is very likely to have brought him to the attention of Sir Geoffrey Boleyn.

Elizabeth’s father, Thomas (the future Earl of Surrey and second Duke of Norfolk), was as loyal to the Yorkist kings as his father. He fought, and was injured, at the Battle of Barnet, fighting to restore Edward IV to the throne in 1471 after the temporary reinstatement of the Lancastrian Henry VI.
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On a personal level the battle had a fortunate consequence for Thomas, whose comrade Humphrey Bourchier, the heir to Lord Berners, was killed in the fighting. Soon afterwards Thomas married Bourchier’s widow, Elizabeth Tylney. While Elizabeth Tylney was her father’s heiress, she was not a particularly good match for Thomas and there may have been more to the match than financial gain, with one commentator suggesting that the couple are likely to have known each other, with Thomas being aware of his wife’s attractions.
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It is possible that the couple made a love match, although the fact that Elizabeth, as the daughter of a Norfolk knight, Sir Frederick Tylney, also had territorial interests in Norfolk must have been a consideration. The Howards were certainly interested in Elizabeth Tylney’s lands and those of her first husband, with her son, John Bourchier, Lord Berners marrying Catherine Howard, his stepfather’s half-sister. The couple settled at Elizabeth’s principal manor of Ashwellthorpe in Norfolk, suggesting that the match was indeed considered to be of sound financial advantage to Howard, even if the existence of Elizabeth’s son by her first marriage meant that all Thomas Howard could hope for was a life interest in his wife’s estates, rather than their inheritance by his own children.

It is likely that there was affection in the marriage. Certainly, Elizabeth’s children by her first marriage seem to have been assimilated easily into the family. Elizabeth Howard Boleyn was close enough to her half-brother, Lord Berners, in later life to receive the gift of a sapphire ring from him.
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In addition to this, the couple’s first child, Thomas Howard, who would later become the third Duke of Norfolk, was born in 1473, relatively soon after the wedding. The marriage was well received by the Howard family, with Thomas’s father’s accounts making regular references to both his daughter-in-law and to his grandchildren and step-grandchildren. For example, in January 1482 he paid for a girdle of gold that was sent to Elizabeth Tylney, presumably as a New Year’s gift.
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At the same time a little horn was sent to ‘my young Master Howard’ who can be identified as Elizabeth Howard Boleyn’s eldest brother, Thomas. Later in the year John Howard paid from his own pocket for his son-in-law and step-grandson, Lord Berner’s medicines.
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It is clear that family was important to Elizabeth’s grandfather, with payments in his accounts regularly made for his children’s clothing, such as a payment for fine green cloth for a livery gown for his third daughter, Jane.
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In February 1465 his second daughter, Margaret, received a gift of ‘a devise of gold’ and also a pair of shoes from her devoted father.
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Elizabeth Tylney quickly proved her fecundity to her second husband. Young Thomas’s birth was followed in 1477 by Edward and then Edmund in around 1479. The three sons were followed by two daughters, Elizabeth and Muriel, with four sons and one daughter also dying young.
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Elizabeth’s date of birth is nowhere recorded. However she had married by the last years of the fifteenth century, suggesting a date of birth early in the 1480s. Her mother died in 1497 and her father quickly remarried, producing a family of seven further surviving children, including another daughter called Elizabeth who eventually married the Earl of Sussex.
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Elizabeth Howard Boleyn’s father and grandfather remained devoted to the Yorkist dynasty during the years after Barnet, with both being steadily rewarded by Edward IV. They came to particular prominence in 1483 with the controversial accession of Richard III, to whom they were conspicuously loyal. John Mowbray, Duke of Norfolk, died suddenly in 1476, leaving a daughter, Anne Mowbray, as his heiress. She was married in childhood to Edward IV’s second son, Richard, Duke of York, but did not long survive, ensuring that John Howard and his cousin, William, Lord Berkeley, stood as potential co-heirs to the Mowbray estates. Shortly after Richard came to the throne, he repaid the Howards’ loyalty by creating John Howard first Duke of Norfolk. At the same time his son, Elizabeth’s father, was created Earl of Surrey and given an annuity of £1,100, in recognition of the fact that the earldom had little endowment. He was appointed Lord Steward of the Household at the same time.
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The following year, after he had made his peace with his brother’s widow, Queen Elizabeth Woodville, Richard III gave the Howards an even greater honour by betrothing his niece, Anne of York, who was the daughter of Edward IV, to Elizabeth’s eldest brother, young Thomas. It is therefore no surprise that both were prominent among the king’s supporters at the Battle of Bosworth Field in August 1485 when he faced the Lancastrian claimant, Henry Tudor. The first Duke of Norfolk paid for this loyalty with his life, dying on the battlefield alongside his king. Elizabeth’s father survived but was injured, finding himself a prisoner of the victor and new king, Henry VII. He was incarcerated in the Tower and was unable to succeed to his father’s dukedom, with both being attainted by Parliament on 7 November 1485, with the loss of their lands and honours which this entailed.

As he sat in the Tower awaiting his fate, Surrey had time to reflect on the unfairness of it all. Given that two of Henry VII’s three ‘titles’ to the crown had only come into existence after the Battle of Bosworth Field – title by conquest and title by marriage to Elizabeth of York (which did not in fact occur until 1486), dating his reign to the day before Bosworth based only on his dubious title as heir to the house of Lancaster was highly ambitious. Surrey could hardly have been expected to recognise that a descendant of the legitimised Beaufort family, who were produced in a long-running affair between John of Gaunt, third surviving son of Edward III, and his Hainault mistress who later became his third wife, was in fact the true hereditary king before Bosworth, particularly since the first Tudor claimed through his mother, the then-living Margaret Beaufort, whose husband, Lord Stanley, could have made an equally good attempt at claiming the crown matrimonial. Surrey was no traitor to have fought for his crowned king, and a man who certainly had a better claim to the throne than Henry Tudor, regardless of the rights and wrongs of Richard III’s own position regarding the bastardisation of his brother’s children. Unfortunately for Surrey, such legal niceties carried little weight in the years after Bosworth as Henry VII sought to cement his claim to the throne. Henry VII was always aware that there were rival claimants to the crown and he required absolute loyalty from his nobility, ensuring that, until Surrey had been able to prove his loyalty to the new king, he was going nowhere.

For Elizabeth Tylney and her children, news of the outcome of the Battle of Bosworth was a disaster and she immediately moved with her family to the Isle of Sheppey, a location that was calculated to afford easy access to the Continent if required.
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She found herself in particular difficulty, with records from October 1485 recording that Lord Fitzwalter, a supporter of the new king, had broken up her household at Ashwellthorpe and dismissed her servants. She appealed to her husband’s kinsman, the Earl of Oxford, who took both her eldest son, the eighteen-year-old Lord Berners, and her third son, Edward Howard, into his household.
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The eldest Howard brother, young Thomas, may perhaps have entered royal service at this time, an indication that the family were not considered to be fully in disgrace, although Elizabeth Tylney’s younger children, including young Elizabeth, remained with their mother while they waited to see whether their fortunes would be revived.
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Signs of royal favour came relatively quickly with a limited pardon granted to Surrey in March 1486, although he remained in prison. He was finally released in January 1489 and the attainders against him reversed, although he was still not permitted to take up his father’s title of Duke of Norfolk. For Surrey, this release was intended as a test of his loyalty to his new master and he immediately headed north with a royal army to take up a position as Lieutenant of the North.
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Surrey performed well at this task and quickly obtained the return of his lands. In 1495 the king even allowed his sister-in-law, Anne of York, to marry Surrey’s son in fulfilment of the couple’s long-standing betrothal. This was clear evidence of royal favour and Elizabeth, who by 1495 was of marriageable age herself, also saw her own prospects rise.

Few details survive of Elizabeth Howard’s early life. She appears to have remained with her mother throughout her childhood and in the 1490s travelled with her parents and siblings to Sheriff Hutton Castle in Yorkshire.
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Elizabeth’s half-brother, Lord Berners, and eldest full brother, Thomas, had a very similar handwriting style which suggests that they were educated together. In addition to this, her half-sister, Margaret Bourchier, was known for her own learning, while Thomas was fluent in French, as well as knowledgeable in Latin and Italian. In later life he enjoyed reading every night before he went to bed, something which strongly suggests that education was valued by Elizabeth’s parents and that she too would have received a good education. This would have fitted her for her marriage to Thomas Boleyn, who was reputed to be the best French speaker at Henry VIII’s court and who promoted the education of his children. If Elizabeth was still unmarried in 1495 when her own brother married, she gained a new companion with the arrival of her sister-in-law, Princess Anne of York, who, under the terms of the marriage contract, was to live with her parents-in-law while her sister, the queen, paid an annual sum for her clothes and expenses. This may have been Elizabeth Howard’s first exposure to royalty and would have assisted her in her later role as a lady-in-waiting to Queen Catherine of Aragon. Certainly, Elizabeth of York maintained an interest in her sister throughout her life, with a payment of £120 ‘to my Lord Howard for the diets of my Lady Anne for a year ended at Michaelmas last passed’ appearing in her accounts for March 1503.
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The queen took an active interest in the dress of Anne of York, suggesting her close involvement in her life after marriage, something which would have benefited the Howards. In May 1502, for example, she made a payment for 7 yards of green satin from Bruges for a kirtle ‘for my Lady Anne’.
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She paid her sister pocket money, with two references in her surviving accounts mentioning sums of money paid to Anne personally, one of which was noted to be ‘for her purse’.
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