Charles Howard

Charles Howard was a gentleman at the court of Henry VIII of England.

He was the eldest son of Lord Edmund Howard and Joyce Culpeper, and the elder brother of Sir George Howard. His maternal grandmother, Isabel Worsley, mentioned him first among her Howard grandchildren. As a scion of the mighty Howard family, his uncle, Thomas Howard, 3rd Duke of Norfolk, secured him a position at court. Charles' fortunes improved in 1540, when his sister, Katherine Howard, became King Henry VIII's fifth wife. With his sister's encouragement Charles entered into a relationship with the King's niece, Margaret Douglas, the daughter of Henry's sister, Margaret Tudor, Queen Dowager of Scotland, who had previously contracted a similar mesalliance with his half-uncle Lord Thomas Howard. The king did not approve.

Gareth Russell writes:Charles Howard seems to have had the Howard charisma seeping out of his fingertips, and if he was not quite the stuff of the council chamber, he at least fitted in perfectly to the merrymaking routine that dominated the court in the latter half of 1540. A seventeenth-century account states that he was killed fighting in France, three years after his rustication in 1541. He died without issue.

Ancestry