Howard

The name arrived with the Normans, or close behind them. The dominant reading of Howard takes it from the French personal names Huard and Houard, adapted into English after the Norman Conquest of 1066, from a Germanic root close to Old High German Hugihard, "heart-brave", or Hoh-ward, "high defender, chief guardian". Running alongside it, and often confused with it, is the Anglo-Scandinavian personal name Haward from the Norse Hávarðr: ha(r) "high" or hǫð "battle", plus varðr, "guardian". A few bearers owe the name instead to the unrelated Hayward, and in rare cases to Old English eowu hierde, "ewe herd". The Anglo-Norman habit of writing French -ou- as -ow- (couard to coward, tour to tower) is what produced the modern spelling. The first public record of the surname is dated 1221, in Cambridgeshire.

How the ducal Howards themselves came by it is genuinely disputed, and the family has told the story more than one way. A pedigree compiled and signed by Sir William Dugdale, Norroy King of Arms, and dated 8 April 1665, derived them from the Howarths of Great Howarth Hall at Rochdale in Lancashire. Dugdale claimed it was clear "from above seventy deeds, without date" that the Dukes of Norfolk descended from that house, and that its founder Osbert Howard de Howarth had been given lands in Rochdale for his service as Master of King Henry I's Buckhounds. The rival account makes the founder a son of a John Howard de Wiggenhale, whose kin held land in and around Wiggenhall in Norfolk. A third and much older story, cherished by later Howards, claimed descent from Hereward the Wake, the Fenland rebel who held the Isle of Ely against William the Conqueror and was in the end pardoned and given his lands back. That last is legend rather than pedigree, and should be read as such.

What is not in doubt is the man the documented line begins with. Sir William Howard, born 1237 by the Dugdale scroll, settled at East Winch and Wiggenhall in west Norfolk and made his career in the law. He was knighted around 1278, summoned as a justice to the Model Parliament of 1295, and appointed a Justice of the Court of Common Pleas in 1297. His first wife was Alice de Ufford, daughter of the justiciar and Suffolk landowner Sir Robert de Ufford, the marriage that probably drew him out of Lancashire to Norfolk in the first place, if Dugdale had it right. His son Sir John Howard became Sheriff of Norfolk and Suffolk and married Joan de Cornwall, an illegitimate granddaughter of Richard, 1st Earl of Cornwall and King of the Romans, second son of King John. Sir John died in 1308. In one generation a working lawyer's family had married into the blood of the English crown.

Five generations on, Sir Robert Howard married Lady Margaret Mowbray, elder daughter of Thomas Mowbray, 1st Duke of Norfolk (1366-1399). It was an unremarkable match at the time and it turned out to be the making of the family. The Mowbray dukes died out in the male line in 1476, and the heiress of the last duke, Anne Mowbray, died at the age of nine in 1481. Her widower was Edward IV's younger son, Richard of Shrewsbury, Duke of York. When Richard III declared that boy illegitimate, the Mowbray inheritance fell to the senior co-heir of the old barony: Margaret's son, John Howard.

Richard III created him Duke of Norfolk on 28 June 1483, the third creation of the title and, pointedly, the 200th anniversary of the Barony of Mowbray to which he was co-heir. He had already been summoned to Parliament as Lord Howard by Edward IV. With the dukedom came the office of hereditary Earl Marshal. Two years later he repaid it in the only currency that mattered: John Howard, 1st Duke of Norfolk, fought and died at the Battle of Bosworth Field in 1485, in defence of the House of York, against the man who became Henry VII.

That should have finished the family. The dukedom was attainted and the Howards were the losing side's dead. They came back the way they would come back again and again over the next two centuries, by making themselves useful to the crown that had beaten them. John's son Thomas Howard, 2nd Duke of Norfolk, led the defence of England against a Scottish invasion at the Battle of Flodden, and the new Tudor dynasty restored the family to favour. Grants followed: Henry VII gave him Acton Burnell Castle in Shropshire after 1487. The old Mowbray fortress at Framlingham in Suffolk became the Howard seat, and Henry VIII later sold Castle Rising in Norfolk to a Thomas Howard as well. The pattern of the whole family history is already visible here: ruin, service, restoration.

The victor of Flodden, the 2nd Duke, was grandfather to two queens of England (Anne Boleyn and Catherine Howard, the second and fifth wives of Henry VIII) and great-grandfather to Queen Elizabeth I. No other subject family came so close to the Tudor throne, and none was so thoroughly burnt by it. Catherine Howard (c.1523-1542) was queen consort for barely more than a year before her arrest and execution in 1542, the second of Henry's wives to die on the block and the second of them a Howard on the paternal or maternal side.

Her uncle, Thomas Howard, 3rd Duke of Norfolk, was one of the central figures of Henrician politics, and he outlived his own niece's disgrace only to be caught in the last convulsion of the reign. In late 1546 he and his son, the poet Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey, were arrested and accused of plotting to seize the crown from Henry's heir, Prince Edward, and to reverse the Reformation by returning the English church to papal jurisdiction. Both were tried for treason and both were sentenced to death. Surrey was executed in January 1547.

The 3rd Duke was saved by the narrowest margin in English history: the king died before the warrant could be carried out. He spent the whole of Edward VI's reign a prisoner in the Tower of London, was freed early in the reign of the Catholic Mary I in 1553, and died the following year. The dukedom passed over the executed Surrey to Surrey's son Thomas, the 4th Duke, a family in which the title now regularly skipped a generation, because the generation in between had been beheaded.

After the English Reformation the Howards became the most high-profile recusant family in England, the great house that would not conform. It cost them four heads of the family in a row, each falling from grace, convicted or imprisoned over their Catholic faith, and the sources of the family's own tradition put it bluntly: it became a tradition among the Howards to suffer for being Catholics.

Thomas Howard, 4th Duke of Norfolk (1536-1572) was the most powerful subject of Elizabeth I in the early years of her reign, and a Catholic despite the Protestant education he had been given as a child. He was imprisoned in 1569 on suspicion of involvement in the rebellion of the Catholic earls of the north, and released in August 1570 when the evidence would not hold. In 1571 he went further and joined the Ridolfi Plot, a scheme to overthrow and possibly assassinate Elizabeth, marry Mary, Queen of Scots, put her on the throne and restore Catholicism in England. He was arrested that September, sentenced to death in January 1572, and executed in June.

His son Philip Howard, 13th Earl of Arundel, was deprived of the dukedom, which lay under attainder, but kept the earldom of Arundel. He was imprisoned in the Tower for his Catholicism in 1585 and stayed there for over ten years, dying of dysentery in October 1595 without ever being released. He is honoured as a saint. William Howard, 1st Viscount Stafford, is honoured as a blessed. Two martyrs in one family is a rare and very heavy inheritance, and it is the reason the Howards are still spoken of as the senior Catholic house of England.

It was the 4th Duke's first marriage that gave the family its greatest seat. He married Mary FitzAlan, who became heiress to the Arundel estates of her father Henry FitzAlan, 12th Earl of Arundel, after her brother Henry died in 1556. Arundel Castle in Sussex passed to the Howards in 1555 and the earldom itself was inherited in 1580, when the Howards became the genealogical successors of the paternally extinct FitzAlans, a house that had come to Britain from Brittany and was ancient kin to the Stuarts. That inheritance is why the present duke's surname is FitzAlan-Howard and why his seat is Arundel, held by the family for over 400 years.

Both the dukedom and the Earl Marshalship were the subject of repeated attainders and restorations across the 15th, 16th and 17th centuries. A lesser family would have been erased by any one of them. The Howards survived because the honours were never all held in one pair of hands: while the dukedom lay forfeit, the family still held the earldom of Arundel through the FitzAlan heiress, and the cadet branches went on rising in their own right. Charles II restored the titles for good, and the hereditary office of Earl Marshal was settled on the family in 1672.

The senior line today holds the Dukedom of Norfolk together with the earldoms of Arundel, Surrey and Norfolk and six baronies, and stands as Premier Duke and Premier Earl in the Peerage of England, the senior peer of the realm outside the royal family, and the longest-running non-royal English dukedom, held continuously since 1483 apart from those attainder years. The arms record the accumulation as clearly as any charter: the original Howard white bend on red with crosslets, quartered from the first duke with the arms of Thomas of Brotherton, Earl of Norfolk and son of Edward I, and those of Mowbray; the chequered blue and gold of the Warenne Earls of Surrey added by the 2nd Duke; and the gold lion on red of the FitzAlans of Arundel taken into the fourth quarter by Philip Howard's descendants.

The Earl Marshal is the eighth of the Great Officers of State, ranking below the Lord High Constable and above the Lord High Admiral, and a leading officer of arms. The duty is to organise the coronation in Westminster Abbey, state funerals and the state opening of Parliament. It is not ceremonial in the empty sense: it means a Howard runs the day. Edward Howard, 18th Duke of Norfolk (b.1956), organised both the funeral of Elizabeth II and the coronation of Charles III.

The faith that cost them so much was only slowly forgiven. The Roman Catholic Relief Act of 1829 finally reopened the House of Lords to Catholic peers, and the head of the family took his seat in a chamber his ancestors had been barred from for the better part of three centuries. Between the Reformation and that Act, the premier duke of England could not sit in the parliament he outranked.

The Howard talent for the sea ran through a cadet line. The Earls of Effingham descend from the fourth son of the 2nd Duke of Norfolk, who served as Lord High Admiral, and it was his son who took the fleet out against Philip II. Charles Howard, Lord Howard of Effingham and 1st Earl of Nottingham (1536-1624), commanded the English fleet that defeated the Spanish Armada in 1588, the moment an English naval reputation was made, under a Howard.

There is a sting in the tail of that branch's story, and it is worth telling straight. When the dukedom was restored, the Effingham line was expressly excluded from eligibility to inherit it. The family that had saved the kingdom at sea was passed over in the settlement of its own house's chief honour. The Effingham earldom survives to this day regardless.

The Howard cadet branches are unusually well documented, and several of them are still going. In order of genealogical seniority, the Barons Howard of Penrith descend from a younger brother of the 12th Duke; the Earls of Suffolk and Berkshire, created in 1603 and seated at Audley End in Essex, from the second son of the 4th Duke; the Earls of Carlisle, created in 1661, from the third son of the 4th Duke; and the Earls of Effingham from the fourth son of the 2nd Duke.

The Carlisle line went north and stayed. Lord William Howard's marriage to Elizabeth Dacre in 1577 brought in the Dacre inheritance: Henderskelfe in Yorkshire, where Castle Howard now stands and where a branch of the family has been seated for over 300 years; Naworth Castle in Cumberland, under the Duke of Norfolk's control from the late 16th century and now the Carlisle seat; Morpeth Castle in Northumberland, where the Howards were the last of the great families to hold it, taking it by female-line descent from the Dacres. Greystoke Castle came into Howard hands by the 4th Duke's marriage into the same family, by 1571, and remains a private family residence. Lord William bought Corby Castle in Cumberland in 1611 and his branch held it until 1994. Featherstone Castle in Northumberland was acquired by a Sir William Howard in the 17th century and sold on by the Earl of Carlisle in 1711.

Further south the family had been Lords of the Manor of Reigate, and owners of its castle, from 1397. The senior line's houses tell the same story of accumulation: Arundel Castle in Sussex, Carlton Towers in Yorkshire, Norfolk House in London, and Framlingham in Suffolk before them. Very few English families can point at that many roofs and say the name has been over all of them.

Most people called Howard are not descended from the Dukes of Norfolk, and the honest version of the history says so. The surname is a common English one with several separate origins (the Norman Huard and Houard, the Norse Hávarðr, the occupational Hayward, the ewe-herd) and it was already in the public record in Cambridgeshire in 1221, generations before any Howard sat in the Common Pleas. Families in Ireland and across the English counties carried it independently. The American director Ron Howard, for instance, comes from a separate Irish-American pool of the name; the connection to Arundel is etymological, not genealogical.

The name travelled well. John Howard (born 1939) became the second-longest-serving Prime Minister of Australia, in office from 1996 to 2007, and the author of the gun-law reform that is still studied around the world, a Howard at the head of a nation on the far side of the earth from Norfolk. Others carried it into the fighting line: Major John Howard (1912-1999) led the glider-borne coup de main that seized the Orne bridges and opened D-Day on 6 June 1944.

The motto the senior line carries is Sola virtus invicta: virtue alone is unconquered. For a family beheaded under Henry VIII, executed under Elizabeth, imprisoned under Edward VI, attainted repeatedly and shut out of public life for its religion until 1829, it is not a boast. It is a description of the only thing they were never actually stripped of. The dukedom has run since 1483, the Earl Marshal's staff is still in Howard hands, and Arundel is still the family's home.