took place on 9 September 1513, Edmund was given command of the right flank on the ‘uttermost part of the field at the west side’, with three subordinate knights serving as lieutenants over fifteen hundred men, mostly from Lancashire and Cheshire.20 When they were ‘fiercely’ attacked by the soldiers of Lord Hume, Edmund’s personal standard, and his standard-bearer, were hacked to pieces on the field, at which point most of Edmund’s men turned and fled.21 If his talents as a leader failed, his courage did not. With only a handful of loyal servants remaining by his side, Edmund was ‘stricken to the ground’ on three separate occasions. Each time, according to a contemporary account, ‘he recovered and fought hand to hand with one Sir Davy Home, and slew him’.22 A wounded soldier called John Heron returned to fight at Edmund’s side, declaring, ‘There was never noble man’s son so like to be lost as you be this day, for all my hurts I shall here live and die with you.’23 Edmund’s life was only saved by the arrival of cavalry headed by Lord Dacre, who rode in ‘like a good and an hardy knight’ to rescue Edmund from annihilation and bring him through the cadavers to kneel at his father’s feet, where he learned that ‘by the grace, succour and help of Almighty God, victory was given to the Realm of England’ and received a knighthood, an honour bestowed on about forty-five of his comrades who had also shown exceptional bravery in the melee.24
The scale of the Scottish defeat stunned as much as their mighty guns had when they first crossed the border – the corpse of King James was found ‘having many wounds, and naked’, lying in egalitarian horror with about eight thousand of his subjects, including nine earls, fourteen lords, a bishop, two abbots, and an archbishop.25 There was hardly a family in the Scottish nobility who escaped bereavement after Flodden; particularly heartbreaking was the example of the Maxwell clan – Lord Maxwell fell in combat within minutes of all four of his brothers.26 In the immediate aftermath of the carnage, many English soldiers were spotted wearing badges that showed the white lion, the Howards’ heraldic crest, devouring the red lion, an ancient symbol of Scotland.27 English writers later praised the Scots’ ‘singular valour’, but at the time soldiers on the field were so repulsed by the violence that they refused to grant amnesty to the captured prisoners.28 Queen Katherine shared the attitude of the troops with the victorious lion badges. Edmund’s father wanted to give King James’s remains a proper burial; he, and several councillors, had to talk the queen out of her original plan of sending the body to Henry as a token of victory. The queen relented. She dispatched James’s blood-soaked coat to her husband instead of his body and jokingly cast herself as a good little housewife in the accompanying letter, which contained the rather repulsive quip, ‘In this your grace shall see how I can keep my pennies, sending you for your banners a King’s coat. I thought to send himself unto you, but our Englishmen’s hearts would not suffer it.’29
Flodden provided the exorcism for Bosworth, and a few months later, on the Feast of Candlemas, the Howards’ dukedom was restored to them.30 Edmund’s bravery was commented upon by his contemporaries, but an anonymous and spiteful 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’.
