St. Philip Howard, Cynic and Negligent Husband

[1557–1595] FEAST DAY: October 19

Of all the religious upheavals that shook Europe in the sixteenth century, Henry VIII’s was the most cunning. Although he cast off the authority of the pope and made himself Supreme Head of the Church in England, Henry insisted that he was still a Catholic. He retained the Mass, as well as all seven sacraments, and even insisted that priests remain celibate. Henry’s most violent attack on traditional religion—aside from his judicial murder of St. Thomas More, St. John Fisher, and the Carthusian Martyrs, among others—was the dissolution of the monasteries and the destruction of England’s shrines. Yet Henry’s reasons for this sacrilege were political. By dismantling the abbeys and the shrines he satisfied the radical Protestant faction in his government, and he enriched his treasury with the treasures of the Church. As for the monastic lands, he used them as bribes, parceling them out to the noblemen of England, buying the loyalty even of those noble families who wanted to remain faithful Catholics.

Today the Howard family, whose head is the duke of Norfolk, ranks first among England’s Catholic peers. But when Henry VIII, and then Edward VI, and then Mary I, and finally Elizabeth I were on the throne, the Howards were not so forthright about their faith. Throughout the Tudor period, they adjusted their consciences to fit the religious mood of the moment. In fairness to the duke of Norfolk, there was a lot riding on keeping in the king’s good graces. The Howards were the most powerful, and among the wealthiest, members of the English aristocracy. In terms of bloodline, their claim to the English throne was actually a little better than that of the Tudors, who were, after all, descended from an upstart Welsh archer. Thomas Howard, the third duke of Norfolk, had followed every twist and turn of Henry’s religious, marital, and political policy. True, at the end of Henry’s reign the duke had been imprisoned in the Tower of London on a charge of treason, but even then his luck held steady—Henry died, and the duke was released.

The fourth duke followed his father’s playbook. He was a staunch Protestant under Edward VI, a repentant and devout Catholic under Mary I, then a loyal Anglican when Elizabeth I wore the crown. It must come as no surprise that his son and heir, Philip Howard, grew up cynical and hedonistic.

Initially Philip was brought up as a Catholic. Queen Mary attended his baptism, where her husband, Philip II of Spain, was named the infant’s godfather. The duke engaged Dr. Gregory Martin, a learned and pious Oxford scholar, to tutor his son, but when Elizabeth I’s Parliament gave her Henry VIII’s title, Supreme Head of the Church in England, then passed the Act of Uniformity requiring all English subjects to attend church services that followed the Book of Common Prayer, the duke changed his religion as easily as he changed his shoes. The Catholic Dr. Martin left the house, to be replaced by Anglican chaplains and tutors.

Dr. Martin did not remain unemployed long. In 1570 he crossed the English Channel to enroll in the English Catholic seminary at Douai and subsequently was ordained a priest. A brilliant linguist, he was invited to join a select panel of five scholars to translate St. Jerome’s Latin Vulgate version of the Bible into English.

At age twelve Philip was married to Anne Dacre, daughter of Lord Thomas Dacre. Two years later the young couple was married again, at the insistence of Philip’s father. At the time the duke was locked away in the Tower of London on suspicion of treason. He feared the queen, in a vindictive mood, might annul Philip and Anne’s marriage. If they went through the ceremony a second time, however, it demonstrated that they had given their full consent twice, which, the duke hoped, would place the marriage bond safely beyond the breaking point.

At age fifteen Philip went to the university at Cambridge, where a wealthy student from the most influential family in the land could expect to become a target for sycophants. These thoroughly unpleasant young men introduced Philip to the taverns, the brothels, and the gambling houses of the town. They flattered him extravagantly, and he believed it all. Years later the memory of those sycophants still made Anne blush with shame.

After three years at the university Philip left for Queen Elizabeth’s court. Once again Philip found himself surrounded by people eager to win his favor. They offered him bribes—money, gold, jewels—and, vain and weak-willed courtier that he was, he took them. The court was full of sexually adventurous young women, and it appears that Philip accepted what they offered, too. About this time he stopped going home to visit Anne, and even stopped writing to her. Soon he was saying openly that he did not know if he was truly married.

His maternal grandfather, the earl of Arundel, and his aunt, Lady Lumley, tried to draw him away from his evil habits, but he treated both with such contempt that they revised their wills and left property that would have gone to Philip to other members of the family.

To win the favor of the queen Philip staged elaborate tournaments to celebrate the anniversary of her coronation. On another occasion he invited the queen and the court to his home, entertaining them in the most lavish manner for several days. In spite of his inherited wealth and the bribes he had been taking, such extravagance drove Philip deep into debt. To rebuild his fortune, he had to sell part of his estate and part of Anne’s property, too.

In 1581 Philip Howard attended a debate in the Tower of London that pitted a panel of Protestant theologians against a single Jesuit priest, St. Edmund Campion. Brought up a Protestant, Campion had studied at Oxford, where he performed so brilliantly that Sir William Cecil, part of Elizabeth I’s inner circle, proclaimed the young man “one of the diamonds of England.” After he entered the ministry, however, Campion began to have doubts about the Anglican Church. He slipped out of the country, taking a roundabout route to Douai, where he was received into the Catholic Church and then began studying for the priesthood.

After his ordination Father Campion joined the Jesuits, who sent him back to England to serve as a clandestine missionary. He brought the Mass and the sacraments to the persecuted Catholics of the country and worked to persuade Protestants to return to the Catholic faith. After a little over a year in England, Father Campion was arrested, imprisoned in the Tower of London, and tortured repeatedly on the rack. Now he was compelled to participate in a public religious debate. He requested books that he might prepare for the contest. They were denied. The Protestant theologians, however, had brought to the debate a small library of texts for their own reference. In spite of these disadvantages, Campion defended the Catholic position eloquently, scoring more points against his opponents than they scored against him. When it became obvious that the sympathies of the spectators were shifting to Campion, the government cancelled the debate. By that time, however, Father Campion had unknowingly awakened the conscience of Philip Howard.

Soon a rumor was circulating in the court that the young earl was about to become a Catholic and planned to join the English Catholic exiles on the Continent. Before Philip could act he received word that the queen was coming to visit him at his residence in London, Arundel House. He planned a sumptuous banquet that delighted Elizabeth. The next day, instead of sending her thanks, she sent Philip a message that he must remain at Arundel under house arrest. Philip was so closely watched that three years passed before he could safely arrange a meeting with a Jesuit father, William Weston, so both he and Anne could make their confessions and be received back into the Catholic Church.

By this time the life of Catholics in England was near impossible. Successive acts of Parliament had made it treason to call the queen a heretic, to even discuss who might succeed her at her death, or to bring papal documents into the country. It was treason for an English Catholic priest ordained overseas to return home, and it was treason to help or house a Catholic priest. And the penalty for treason was horrible: the traitor was hanged by the neck but cut down while still alive and conscious. Next his genitals were hacked off, his chest cut open, and his heart ripped out. Finally, he was beheaded and his body chopped into four quarters, which were displayed wherever the monarch pleased. In 1535, after the Carthusian prior St. John Houghton suffered this grisly death, Henry VIII had one of the martyr’s arms, with the shoulder attached, nailed over the entrance to his monastery, a bloody lesson to the monks and passersby of what happened to dissenters who refused to recognize the title Henry had usurped for himself.

Of course, there were lesser penalties for lesser crimes. To hear Mass or to receive the Catholic sacraments was a crime punishable with imprisonment. Catholic parents faced prison if they had their child baptized a Catholic, or tried to send their children to Catholic schools on the Continent. Priests who said Mass in England were hauled off to prison, where they were tortured to reveal the places where they had stayed and the names of the people who had attended their Masses.

Then there were the financial penalties. Anyone who missed Protestant services was fined twenty pounds a month—an amount that would bankrupt a working family in two or three months. To bring into the country “crosses, pictures, beads or such like vain and superstitious things,” as the act of Parliament put it, would cost the importer his land and all his goods. The same punishment applied to whoever received these holy objects.

Parliament’s reach extended even to within the privacy of the family: one statute made a Protestant husband liable if his Catholic wife refused to attend services at the Anglican parish church.

Unwilling to compromise their faith, and fearful of what might become of them if they tarried in England, Philip and Anne resolved to flee the country. Since Anne was pregnant, Philip would go first and she would follow later. He hired a ship to spirit him quietly out of England, but government agents had been watching the young earl. His ship had barely left port when it was stopped and boarded, and Philip was arrested. He was taken to the Tower of London and fined ten thousand pounds for the offense of trying to leave England without the queen’s permission. For the next five years he remained a prisoner in the Tower, left in a legal limbo with no charges preferred against him, until the Spanish Armada’s failed invasion gave Elizabeth’s government the excuse it had been waiting for to charge Philip with treason. After a farce of a trial he was found guilty and sentenced to death. The sentence was never carried out. Elizabeth appeared satisfied to let Philip rot in the Tower.

For the last six years of his life Philip designed a monastically inspired routine, dividing each day into periods of study, exercise, and prayer. He fasted three times a week. Since he was forbidden a crucifix, he scratched one into the wall. When the Jesuit priest St. Robert Southwell was arrested and confined in the Tower, the two prisoners sent letters back and forth between their cells.

In August 1595 Philip fell ill with a serious case of dysentery. When it became obvious he was dying, he sent a message to the queen, begging her permission to see a priest. She refused. She also refused to let him see Anne, his son, or his brothers. When Philip died, only his servants and his jailers were at his bedside.

Not long before he sent a letter to Anne. “I call God to witness,” he wrote, “it is no small grief unto me that I cannot make recompense in this world for the wrongs I have done you; for if it had pleased God to have granted me longer life, I doubt not but that you should have found me as good a husband…by his grace, as you have found me bad before…[God] knows that which is past is a nail in my conscience.”