HOWARD (ENGLISH FAMILY). The head of this family, the duke of Norfolk, is the premier duke and the hereditary earl marshal of England, while the earls of Suffolk, Carlisle and Effing ham and the Lord Howard of Glossop represent in the peerage its younger lines.
Its founder was a Norfolk lawyer, William Howard or Haward, who was summoned to parliament as a justice in 1295, being appointed a justice of the common pleas in 1297. The genealogists trace back the Howard pedigree to a Howard or Hereward in the tenth century, grandfather of a Hereward who was banished by William the Conqueror.
William Howard's eldest son, Sir John Howard, served in Ed ward II.'s wars in Scotland and Gascony, was sheriff of Norfolk and Suffolk and governor of Norwich Castle. When he died in 1331 he was seised of many Norfolk manors. His son and heir, another Sir John, admiral of the king's navy in the north, was a banneret who displayed his banner in the army that laid siege to Calais. By the admiral's wife Alice, sister and heir of Sir Robert de Boys, the Howards had the Boys manor of Fersfield, near Diss, which is still among the possessions of the dukes of Norfolk. His son Sir Robert Howard, who had married a daughter of Sir Robert Scales (Lord Scales), died in 1388. From Sir John Howard, the only son of Sir Robert, two branches of the house of Howard spring. The elder line was soon extinct. By his first wife, Margaret, daughter and heir of Sir John Plays, Sir John Howard had a son who died before him, leaving a daughter through whom descended to her issue, the Veres, earls of Oxford, the ancient Norfolk estates of the Howards at East Winch and elsewhere with the lands of the houses of Scales, Plays and Walton, brought in by the brides of her forefathers. By his second wife, the heir of the Tendrings of Tendring, he had a second son, Sir Robert Howard, a knight who fought under Henry V. in France, and died, like his half-brother, before the old knight's career ended in 1436.
Robert Howard married Margaret Mowbray, daughter of the banished duke of Norfolk. Their only son, Sir John Howard, took service with his cousin the third duke of Norfolk, who had him returned as knight of the shire for Norfolk. The last of the Mow bray dukes of Norfolk had left a child heir, Anne Mowbray, mar ried to the infant duke of York, the younger of the princes doomed by Richard in the Tower. By the death of this little girl, John Howard became one of the coheirs of her house, which was now represented by the issue of Margaret Mowbray, his mother, and of her sister Isabel, who had married James, Lord Berkeley. A lion's share of the Mowbray estates, swollen by the great alli ances of the house, heir of Breouse and Segrave, and, through Segrave, of Thomas of Brotherton, son of Edward I., fell to How ard, who, by a patent of June 28, 1483, was created duke of Nor folk and earl marshal of England with a remainder to the heirs male of his body. On the same day the Lord Berkeley, the other coheir, was made earl of Nottingham. "Jack of Norfolk" led the archer vanguard at Bosworth and died in the fight, from which his son Thomas, earl of Surrey, was carried away a wounded prisoner. An attainder by the first parliament of Henry VII. ex tinguished the honours of the father with those of the son, who had been created an earl when the Lord Howard was raised to the dukedom. Their estates were forfeit.
Thomas Howard was released from the Tower of London in 1489, his earldom of Surrey and his Garter restored. In his loth year, as lieutenant-general of the North, he led the English army at Flodden, earning a patent of the dukedom of Norfolk, dated Feb. i, 1513-14. The victor of Flodden is the common ancestor of all living Howards that can show a descent from the main stock. For the history of the Howard dukes of Norfolk see NOR