by six men concealed beneath cloth; a recent pageant for Cesare Borgia in the city of Ferrara saw the ‘dead’ combatants fall to the ground in a beautifully executed dance, before standing to take their bows. In contrast, an entertainment in honour of Queen Isabeau of France saw real knights sparring in front of the royal party for several hours.3 In England, the men of Henry VIII’s court seemed keener to follow the French example than the Italian.
Rather than a typical outdoor arena, like those used for a joust, the men fought in an elaborate fairy-tale set, as members of the court looked on and placed bets. A miniature castle had been built within the courtyard – miniature, at least, in comparison to its inspiration. Tudor roses and engraved pomegranates, Katherine of Aragon’s device, lined its walls, while a fountain splashed water in front of it. In the spirit of Sybaris, the little castle’s gargoyles spouted red, white, and claret wines to the delight of the audience. The entirely artificial ivy that wrapped this folie was ‘gilded with fine gold’. Edmund, by no means the least competitive of the group, rode forward from the castle to ask the king’s permission to fight for the honour of the court belle who had been given the role of Pallas Athena, the chaste embodiment of wisdom. Royal permission gave way to a testosterone-fuelled spectacle of egotism. The participants’ vitality and their determination were well matched, and the joust only halted at nightfall. The next day, the king and queen prevented the match resuming by stepping in to pre-emptively select the winners for themselves.4
In the years to come, the court lost none of its allure for Edmund. A brief, half-hearted and failed attempt to pursue a legal career did not get much further than enrolling in London’s prestigious Middle Temple in 1511.5 Within ten days of his admission to the Temple, Edmund was back at court to participate in another set of jousts, this time to mark the birth of the Duke of Cornwall, the king’s short-lived son and heir. Henry VIII, a tall and muscular youth blessed with the good looks of his grandfather Edward IV, was, at nineteen, keen to participate rather than simply observe as he had two years earlier.6 In recognition of Edmund’s skills, he was asked to lead the defenders; his brother-in-law, Sir Thomas Boleyn, was on the same team, as was Charles Brandon, the king’s handsome and womanising favourite. Once again, the royal household spared no expense to celebrate such an important event. The queen and her ladies gazed down from a box hung with arras and cloth of gold on a forest crafted from green velvet, satin, and ‘silks of divers colours’, complete with artificial rocks, hills, dales, arranged flowers, imported ferns, and grass. In the middle of the forest, the workmen had rendered another miniature castle ‘made of gold’. A manmade lion, ‘flourished all over with Damask gold’, and an antelope clothed in silver damask were flanked by men disguised as wildlings from a mythical forest, who escorted the bejewelled beasts as they dragged the final pieces of the pageant into place in front of the queen. Horns blasted, and parts of the set fell away to reveal four knights on horseback ‘armed at all places, every of them in cloth of gold, every of them his name embroidered’. These were Edmund’s opponents, the challengers, and their captain was the young king, joined by another of Edmund’s brothers-in-law, Sir Thomas Knyvet, and a clique of companions, all of whom had been given aliases that married amorous devotion with masculine honour. The king led the charge with his pseudonym of Coeur Loyale (‘Loyal Heart’), while 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
