Duke of Norfolk

[Wannabestepfordwife]

Hi does anyone know of any really good books or any books about the Duke of Norfolk.

I'm absolutely fascinated by him and I can always find books on Thomas Cromwell but never any on the Duke of Norfolk

The Ebbs and Flows of Fortune by David Head is the one proper academic biography.
There's also a popular book about the Howard family called something like House of Treason by Robert Hutchinson but I'm not crazy about him as a historian - he has a tendency to shove in totally unjustified descriptions of women in particular. However the background is pretty handy.

If you want novels there are a couple of entertaining but not totally accurate ones by D.L.Bogdan/Darcy Bonnette, Secrets of the Tudor Court about his daughter Mary and Rivals at the Tudor Court about him, his wife and Bess Holland his mistress.
(Actually, she fucks up on really stupid things like having chipmunks running around, but the history on the second one isn't too bad. She just needs a good editor.)

What you really need to do, though, if you haven't already, is look for his letters at british-history.ac.uk. There are some real jewels in there.

Thank you that's fantastic will get stocked up on those

Another recommendation, if you're interested. I've just finished reading Jessie Childs' biography of Norfolk's son Surrey. It's called 'Henry VIII's Last Victim' and it's absolutely outstanding.

It's really readable but also does the scholarly stuff properly (ie gives proper references to sources and thinks carefully about the bits where evidence clashes).

Surrey is fascinating. What a family.

Thank you will have a look at that one as well. The Howard's are such a fascinating. Surrey always seems a bit more human than his father

Yes, definitely. With Surrey you get a sense of someone who is talented but has such a weight of expectation on his shoulders that he's never going to be able to live up to it.
With Norfolk it's harder to see the vulnerability. Bogdan picks up on the fact that he lost his first wife and entire family of children, as well as his childhood experiences of his family losing everything when they were on the wrong side at Bosworth.

I've been scrutinising various film/tv versions of him, too - Patrick Troughton in the 1970 tv Six Wives of Henry VIII is the best by a country mile. The one in the Tudors is nice and devious but I don't really buy him as a military commander, and David Morrissey in The Other Boleyn Girl glowers so much you can't buy into the fact that his contemporaries found him charming and affable and said you could never tell what he was thinking.

Thanks Tunip! B yes. I know it's a zonbie!