The New Murrey and Blue blog

We all know that Sir John Howard, 1st Duke of Norfolk, was descended from Thomas of Brotherton, a younger son of Edward I. Several branches of the Howard family have held the title ever since, except for periods under attainder from 1485-1514, 1547-53 and 1572-1660. Were any of them descended from more recent monarchs?

Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey, the poet and contemporary of Sir Thomas Wyatt, whose son was similarly truncated in 1554, was the son not just of the 3rd Duke but of Elizabeth Stafford, daughter of Edward, Duke of Buckingham. He was three times descended from Edward III, through Thomas of Woodstock and John of Gaunt (twice), although you will note that there are still some gaps in his pedigree. This Earl is clearly an ancestor of all subsequent Dukes and quasi-Dukes of Norfolk.

Henry, as a first cousin of Anne Boleyn and Katherine Howard, followed them to the block just nine days before Henry VIII‘s own death, which caused the cancellation of his father’s execution that day. They had been sentenced on 13th January for quartering the royal arms of Edward the Confessor, leading the paranoid and morbidly obese king to fear that they planned to supplant Edward VI in the succession, possibly also as they were a Catholic family.

We can see here that the 11th Duke, Charles, married Frances Fitzroy-Scudamore, a descendant of Charles II, but they had no sons. There is also Lavinia Strutt, who married the 16th Duke, but they too had no sons and the other duchesses cannot be connected to the Merry Monarch, nor yet to James II.

The principal issue here is that the ducal family has had no universal ancestor since Henry Frederick, Earl of Arundel, who died in 1652. Sir Matthew Pinsent, an early subject on Who do you think you are? comes from the first Lord Howard of Effingham, a brother of the 3rd Duke, thus not from Edward III.