One of the two hereditary posts remaining amongst the Great Offices of State in the United Kingdom is the Earl Marshal, held continuously by the Howard dukes of Norfolk since the late 17^th century, and even before that, off and on since the late 15^th century. Even earlier, it was a post inherited by their ancestors, the Mowbrays, and via a side-step, the Bigods and the Marshals of the early 12^th century, whose very surname indicated the office they held. His office is symbolised by a golden baton with black tips. After 1660, the Howards held the premier non-royal peerage in England: the dukedom of Norfolk. Yet for many years successive dukes were not able to take up their seats in the House of Lords, nor exercise their duties as Earl Marshal. For not only were they the premier peers of the land, they were also the leading recusant family in England, steadfast to the old faith of Rome.

There are many, many, branches of the Howard family. Overall today they hold, besides the dukedom, 7 earldoms and 14 baronies (six of them held by Norfolk himself). The family tree includes a saint and two cardinals, plus two queens: Catherine Howard and Anne Boleyn if we count her as having a Howard mother. Besides well-known castles held by the ducal branch, there are some of the finest country houses in Britain built by the cadet branches: Audley End (the earls of Suffolk), Castle Howard (the earls of Carlisle), and numerous others. This post will focus solely on the main, ducal line, and the office of Earl Marshal.

The Earl Marshal of England (and since the 19^th century of the United Kingdom) organises grand state functions, most notably royal funerals and coronations, as well as the State Opening of Parliament (in conjunction with the Lord Great Chamberlain). He oversees the College of Arms, the body that regulates the use of heraldry in the United Kingdom, and sits as judge of the High Court of Chivalry—very active in the 17^th century, but dormant since about 1750, with one or two notable exceptions. There were similar offices for the kingdoms of Scotland (the Keith family, Earl Marischal, until attainted as Jacobites in 1715); and of Ireland (until 1697). Today the Lord Lyon performs the function of regulator of heraldic affairs north of the border in Scotland.

A marshal was initially a king’s stable master, in charge of keeping his horses in order and overseeing the army of equerries and grooms who worked in the royal stables. He was initially junior to the comes stabuli, the lord of the stables, the Constable. The Germanic words marha schalk (horse keeper / servant) first moved into French, as maréchal, which became a term for a military commander, which then moved back into German and English. In France in particular, the top commanders of the army were known as Marshals of France; while in Germany, the head of the royal household became known as the Hofmarshall (with similar words used for the Danish and Swedish courts), more equivalent to the English Lord Steward. It’s interesting to see how this word evolved in so many different directions. In England, a separate office evolved, Master of the Horse, from the 14^th century, when the job of Marshal of the King’s Horses became devoted instead to regulating court ceremonial and elements of chivalry, and became known simply as the Lord Marshal.

An early Anglo-Norman lord, Gilbert, served in the English royal household as Royal Serjeant and Marshal to Henry I. When he died in 1129, his office was given to his son, John FitzGilbert. He began sometimes to use Marshal as a surname. His elder son John succeeded him as the King’s Marshal and was in turn succeeded by his younger brother in 1194: William Marshal (or sometimes ‘the Marshal’) was one of the most prominent nobles of the reigns of Henry II, Richard I, John I and Henry III, for whom he served as regent in his early years, famously known as ‘the best knight that ever lived’, and rewarded with an earldom, Pembroke, in 1199. His family rose and fell with great speed—the earldom of Pembroke passing through all five of his sons in turn—and the office of Lord Marshal (or Marshal of the Court) passed via his daughter to the Bigod family, great landowners in East Anglia.

Roger Bigod was a Norman lord who established his family in Norfolk, near the town of Thetford where he founded a priory. In about 1100 he was given permission by the king to build some castles just across the border in Suffolk, notably Bungay on the river Waveney, and Framlingham a bit further to the south. Bungay retained its form as a fortress for centuries, seized by the crown in about 1300, but given to the Howards in 1483, who kept it until the 20^th century—until it was given to the town as a castle ruin in 1987. Framlingham, on the other hand, was transformed by the Bigods into a proper dynastic seat by the 13^th century, and continued to be expanded and modernised by subsequent owners in the Mowbray and Howard families in the 15^th and 16^th centuries. As the main seat of their power, Howards expanded the park, added a mere or lake, and re-clad its facades in more fashionable brick. But it was confiscated several times in the tumultuous Tudor century—and perhaps ironically, or deliberately, served as a prison for Catholic priests and recusants under Elizabeth I in the 1580s—until it was returned, mostly derelict, by King James in 1613. One of the Howard cadets, the Earl of Suffolk, sold the castle in 1635, and in 1636 it was given to Pembroke College, Cambridge, who built workhouses within its crumbling walls. In 1913 Framlingham Castle was given to the state and today is looked after by English Heritage.

The Bigod family died out in 1306, and their lands defaulted to the Crown. Edward II then bestowed the estates and castles to his brother, Thomas of Brotherton, who was then created Earl of Norfolk in 1312, and Lord Marshal—now called ‘Earl Marshal’—in 1316. He was ultimately succeeded by his daughter, Margaret of Brotherton, Countess of Norfolk. Interestingly, she seems to be the only woman to have held the office of Earl Marshal, and was held in such esteem by Richard II that she was created Duchess of Norfolk in 1397, but died only a year and a half later. Her sons from two marriages having predeceased her, she too was succeeded by a daughter, Elizabeth de Segrave, 5^th Baroness Segrave, who took all these properties in East Anglia—and the precious royal Plantagenet blood of her grandfather in her veins—by marriage into the House of Mowbray.

The Mowbrays, another Norman noble family, were established primarily further to the north, in Lincolnshire and Yorkshire. But from 1349 John, 4^th Baron Mowbray, was married to the Segrave heiress, whose lands were based in the East Midlands, and in 1383 their son Thomas succeeded to both baronies, then rose in rank as Earl of Nottingham, and was appointed Earl Marshal, before being created Duke of Norfolk alongside his grandmother in 1397.

Thomas Mowbray soon quarreled with the King, however, the title was rescinded in 1399, and he died in exile, but the title was restored to his son John in 1425. Two more John Mowbrays succeeded as dukes of Norfolk in the 15^th century, with Framlingham Castle as their chief centre of operations. As close kin to the Plantagenets, they sometimes quartered their Mowbray white lion on red with the Brotherton arms, that is, the three gold lions of England on red, with a white (or silver) three-point label at the top which indicates a junior branch. Sometimes they used just the Brotherton arms alone, a real indication of proximity to the throne and royal power.

In 1476, the 4^th Duke of Norfolk died leaving just a daughter, Anne. Two years later, aged only 5, she married Richard, Duke of York, the younger son of King Edward IV. They were re-created Duke and Duchess of Norfolk. But she died in 1481, and he disappeared into the Tower in 1483—a new king, Richard III, was proclaimed. One of the Mowbray co-heirs, Viscount Berkeley, had already been paid off, but the other coheir, Sir John Howard, a son of Margaret Mowbray, secured the vast Brotherton-Mowbray-Segrave succession due to his support of Richard’s usurpation. The Howards would hold on to this position of close proximity to the royal family—for good or ill—for the next several centuries.

But the Howards themselves did not have a long pre-eminent noble pedigree. Unlike almost all other magnates at court, they had no pretensions to Norman antecedents in the male line. So they wove alternative origin stories, and made themselves sound much more English—not Norman—as descendants of Anglo-Saxon warriors. An early claim put forward in the 16^th century was that they descended from the Howarth family, landowners in Rochdale in Lancashire (or perhaps Hawarth in Yorkshire). It was conjectured that this name came from haga worth, a settlement near a hawthorn hedge. One Osbert Howard de Haworth was Keeper of the King’s Buckhounds in the 12^th century and was thought to have been an ancestor. Later genealogists, especially in the 19^th century, tied the Howards to a much older progenitor, Hereward the Wake, a folk hero outlaw who lived in the 11^th century and famously tried to defend East Anglia against the Norman invasion. His name suggests a Germanic warrior (a here ward, a leader of men). Some genealogies have linked him to the Mercian royal family, or to Oslac an Anglo-Saxon ealdorman of York. Modern researchers have proposed instead he was related to Danes, as nephew of Brand, abbot of Peterborough, one of the chief sites defended by Hereward in about 1070.

Either of these are of course possible. According to records, however, the first identifiable ancestor is Sir William Howard, a prominent lawyer and judge from the area near King’s Lynn in Norfolk, who rose to prominence in the 1270s and was named one of the justices of the Common Pleas in 1297. He held lands in Wiggenhall, just south of Lynn, and purchased the nearby manor of East Winch in 1298. His first marriage solidified his social rise, by connecting him to the family of Ufford, magnates from Suffolk (and soon to be created earls of Suffolk, 1337). Their son was named Sheriff of Norfolk and Suffolk and Governor of Norwich, and obtained a position at court too, as Gentleman of the Bedchamber of Edward I. He moved the family even closer to royal circles by marrying Joan de Cornwall a daughter of an illegitimate son of Richard, Earl of Cornwall, younger brother of Henry III.

As the 14^th century progressed, the Howards continued to accumulate lands in Norfolk, Suffolk and Essex, and served as MPs or in the military. Sir Robert Howard fought with the 2^nd Duke of Norfolk (John Mowbray) in France, and became his brother-in-law in 1420. It was his son, John, who scooped up his mother’s vast inheritance (and importantly the right to bear the royal arms of England) and was named Duke of Norfolk in the summer of 1483. He had already served as Earl Marshal, as a deputy for his Mowbray cousin at a tournament in 1467. A loyal Yorkist, he was named Treasurer of the Royal Household by Edward IV in 1468, and a member of the King’s Council, then raised to the peerage as Baron Howard in 1470, and even a Knight of the Garter in 1472—a key sign of royal favour for someone not quite yet of magnate status. Once he inherited the Mowbray lands in 1483, John Howard was therefore also Baron Mowbray, Baron Segrave, and Earl Marshal in his own right. He acted as Earl Marshal at the funeral of Edward IV and the coronation of Richard III, where he bore the royal crown and his son (created Earl of Surrey in his own right at the same time) carried the Sword of State.

The first Duke of Norfolk had been born and raised at Stoke by Nayland, one of the newer Howard properties (since the early 15^th century) closer to the southern borders of Suffolk, but soon took up residence in Framlingham. I haven’t been able to find much information about the original house at Stoke (aka Tendring Hall). He added the arms of the Mowbrays and the Brothertons (ie, England, ‘differenced’) to his own. King Richard lavished upon him even higher offices that year: Lord High Admiral of England, Admiral of Ireland and Admiral of Aquitaine (though any hopes of regaining England’s lost continental possessions were swiftly fading by this point). Two years later Norfolk led the vanguard at the Battle of Bosworth Field and was slain alongside his king and cousin.

The new king, Henry VII, put the late Duke’s son and heir, Thomas Howard, into the Tower of London, and took away both titles, Norfolk and Surrey. But by the end of the 1490s, he was back in favour and highly involved in the royal government. He was restored to the earldom of Surrey in 1489, and named Lord High Treasurer in 1501. He even married his son Thomas to Lady Anne of York, sister-in-law to the King himself. When Henry VIII succeeded as king in 1509, the Earl of Surrey acted as Earl Marshal at his coronation; and when the young king went overseas to fight the French in 1513, it fell to Surrey to lead an army north to defend the borders against invading Scots. The battle of Flodden was so disastrous for Scotland—the King (James IV) himself was killed on the day—so Surrey was allowed to resume his father’s old title, Duke of Norfolk (from 1514), and honoured with an ‘augmentation’ to his coat of arms: the Howard arms consisted of a silver bend on red, surrounded by six ‘cross-crosslets fitchy’, to which was now added, on the bend, a Scottish lion, cut in half, with an arrow shot straight through its head. He also added the arms of the De Warrenne family—one of the greatest magnate dynasties of medieval England—the blue and gold checks of the old earls of Surrey.

Another of the new castles added to the Howard portfolio was Reigate, a seat of the Warrennes in Surrey, which at one point was the seat of Lord Howard of Effingham (the Admiral famous for defending England versus the Spanish Armada in 1588), who rebuilt the local former priory into a country house. The castle was mostly demolished in the English Civil War of the 1640s, and the house passed out of the family.

The restored 2^nd Duke of Norfolk continued to hold a central position in government as Lord High Treasurer, and died in 1524, just before things started to get fraught at the Tudor court.

His son the 3^rd Duke continued to hold the office of Lord High Treasurer. As heir he had acted as Lord High Admiral (1513) and Lord Deputy of Ireland (1520). But from the mid-1520s he was increasingly out of favour, and, in trying to regain it, pressed for the downfall of his lowborn rival, Cardinal Wolsey, and the rise of his niece, his sister’s daughter, Anne Boleyn. When she succeeded in marrying the King and being crowned queen in 1533, Norfolk was restored as Earl Marshal (it had been the King’s best pal, Charles Brandon, since 1523), and his daughter Mary was wed to the King’s son, the Duke of Richmond—illegitimate, but some considered a potential heir in case Anne Boleyn failed to deliver a son. It was a good year for the Howards.

Things changed rapidly. In 1536, the Duke of Richmond died. Queen Anne and her brother George Boleyn were executed for treason, with the Duke of Norfolk, their uncle, presiding over the trial as Lord High Steward (an office that was appointed as need arose, not hereditary). Another rivalry intensified against the King’s new first minster, Thomas Cromwell, in particular over the efforts to reform the Church. Unlike his late niece, Norfolk was not keen on the reform ideas, and when, in the late 1530s, the King wavered in his own commitment, and Cromwell fell from power, Norfolk was there to swiftly supply another niece. The teen-aged Catherine Howard became Queen of England in July 1540, but by the end of 1541 she too had fallen foul of Henry VIII’s temper and was executed.

Still Norfolk survived, and in 1541 was appointed Lieutenant-General of the North, responsible for putting down Catholic unrest. In 1546 however, he and his son were arrested on the King’s orders, ostensibly for Surrey’s affront of daring to using the Brotherton arms in his banners without the mark of difference (the three silver labels). The increasingly ill Henry VIII feared that Surrey had ambitions to take the throne from young Prince Edward, reverse the Protestant reforms, and push away the Seymours, his precious son’s uncles and protectors. Indeed, the Earl of Surrey did have pretensions, with floods of Plantagenet blood coursing through this veins: not just via his father’s family and the Mowbrays, but through his mother’s family too, the Staffords (heirs of Edward III’s youngest son, Thomas of Woodstock). Surrey was executed in the Tower 19 January 1547, and the King himself died a few days later, an act of divine judgement perhaps, saving the 3^rd Duke’s life. His titles were once more attainted and he was held in the Tower for six years until Princess Mary took the throne in 1553. Restored to his titles, he presided over Mary’s coronation, then died a year later.

Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey, had been one of the most colourful figures at court, well known as a poet, a soldier, a brawler. When not at court, he lived at Kenninghall in Norfolk, near the old Mowbray heartland at Thetford, where the Priory now housed most of the Howard tombs. Kenninghall had been transformed from a modest manor house into a palace by the 2^nd Duke. In the reign of Edward VI, while the ex-duke was in the Tower, it housed Princess Mary and Princess Elizabeth, and it was from here that Mary proclaimed the beginning of her reign in 1553. The Howard palace at Kenninghall was confiscated again later by Queen Elizabeth, who resided there sometimes herself. But in the 17^th century it fell into ruin and was completely demolished in the 1640s. Today a few fragments survive, incorporated into other buildings.

From 1554, the new Duke of Norfolk was the 17-year-old Thomas Howard, who recouped his grandfather’s dukedom, and retained the favour of Queen Mary. She saw his family as a pillar in her new project to return England back to its loyalty to Rome, and in 1554, he was honoured with the post of First Gentleman of the Chamber to the King-Consort, Philip of Spain, when he came to England for his marriage. In 1556, Norfolk too married, and well: Lady Mary FitzAlan, daughter of the Earl of Arundel, head of another prominent noble family that preferred the old church. Eventually she would prove to be a major heiress, but not yet, and she died only a year later, having given birth to one son, appropriately named Philip, as godson of Philip of Spain. The Duke remarried Margaret Audley, who was already an heiress (of Walden Abbey, in Essex, the future Audley End) and already a widow.

The 4^th Duke of Norfolk’s history is no less stormy than those of his predecessors. The reign of Elizabeth I started well for him, acting as Earl Marshal at the coronation of 1559 and being appointed to a position of trust and authority as Lieutenant-General of the North. And it was in the North that the Howard interests shifted somewhat in this period. The 4^th Duke’s third wife was the widow of Thomas, 4^th Baron Dacre of Gillesland, one of the pre-eminent families of Cumberland. When her Dacre son died in 1569 it was decided that her three daughters, co-heirs to the Barony of Dacre, would each marry one of her three Howard step-sons, which they did. The key Dacre property was Greystoke Castle, near Penrith, originally built in the 12^th century and by the 1570s a possession of the Howards through this marriage. Falling to a side branch in the later 17^th century, Greystoke Castle was enlarged and altered in the 1780s when it returned to the main line, then enlarged again in the 19^th century when it became the seat of a separate junior branch once more. It is still held privately, and is run as a B&B and a venue for corporate events. The earldom of Greystoke in the Tarzan stories is, incidentally, fictional, and situated in Scotland.

Eventually the 4^th Duke’s unwillingness to conform to the reformed Church of England and his collaboration in various plots to put Mary, Queen of Scots on the throne (perhaps with himself as her king-consort), landed him, like his father and his grandfather, in the Tower, and he was executed for treason in 1572.

The eldest son of the 4^th Duke, his only child with Lady Mary FitzAlan, was Philip Howard. Queen Elizabeth restored some of his father’s lands, but not titles. In 1580, however, he inherited the vast estates and castles of the FitzAlan family and the Queen created him Earl of Arundel. He is either known as the 1^st Earl, as a new creation, or the 13^th, counting it as a continuation of his grandfather’s title (or in fact some sources consider him the 20^th Earl counting from the original creation of 1138, making it the oldest still extant earldom in England).

The FitzAlans were originally from Brittany and came to England with the Normans. One son of the first Alan, William, was given lands in the marches between England and Wales, in Shropshire, while the younger son, Walter, went to Scotland and established a dynasty of hereditary stewards to early Scots kings—and eventually took the office as their surname, becoming the Stewarts, and later Stuarts. The earliest possessions of the English FitzAlans that passed to the Howards in the 1580s were the Shropshire castles of Oswestry and Clun. Both had been used by the FitzAlans mostly for defensive or storage purposes, not so much as residences. Clun was also used as a hunting lodge, but Oswestry was (and is) surrounded by a sizeable market town. Both were largely in ruins by the time they passed into Howard hands in the 1580s. They passed out of Howard hands in the 17^th century, but Clun was re-purchased by a duke of Norfolk in 1894, and restored. Today it is open to visitors and managed by English Heritage.

The main area of FitzAlan power and wealth was not the Welsh borders, however. They also acquired Arundel Castle in Sussex along with the earldom of the same name (though it was in fact sometimes called the earldom of Sussex) in the mid-13^th century. The castle has remained in family hands ever since and remains the chief seat of the Howard family. The original motte and bailey castle, which took its name from the dell or valley of the river Arun, was expanded numerous times over the centuries, notably by the 11^th Duke in the 1780s, and thoroughly renovated in the late 19^th century. In recent years Arundel Castle has stood in for Windsor Castle in films like The Madness of King George or Young Victoria.

The FitzAlans also had a London residence, Arundel House, on the Strand, with gardens going down to the Thames and an adjacent wharf. Originally the townhouse of the bishops of Bath and Wells, after the dissolution of the monasteries it was given to various people before being sold to the 12^th Earl of Arundel in 1549. In the 17^th century, it notably housed several Howard protégés (scientists, artists, writers), and in the 1660s given as a meeting space for the Royal Society. It is thought this was the setting of the first performance of Thomas Tallis’ famous 40-voice motet, Spem in alium, in 1568. Arundel House was demolished in 1678, and replaced in the late 19^th century by new streets and buildings.

Young Philip Howard was born in Arundel House and initially raised by moderate Protestant tutors. He nevertheless formally returned his allegiance to the Roman Church in 1584. When this became known at court, he tried to flee to the Continent, but was arrested and held in the Tower for several years. He was put on trial in 1589, for having prayed for the success of the Spanish Armada, and his titles were attainted. The Queen refused to sign the death warrant of her cousin, however, and he remained her guest for another five years, dying while still in prison for his faith. He was therefore canonised in 1970 as one of England’s ‘Forty Catholic Martyrs’ from the era of the Reformation. In the 19^th century, a chapel was built near Arundel Castle in Sussex, to honour the Virgin Mary and St Philip Neri, but in 1965 it was raised to the status of a cathedral, and soon after changed its name to Our Lady and St Philip Howard.

In the next reign, King James I began to restore favour to the Howards, first creating an earldom of Suffolk in 1603 for Philip Howard’s younger brother, Thomas, and then restoring the earldoms of Arundel and Surrey to Philip’s son Thomas. The family was returning to favour: his son was named Henry Frederick in honour of the King’s eldest son, and in 1613, Arundel was selected to escort the King’s daughter, Elizabeth, to her wedding to the Elector Palatine in Heidelberg—a significant event watched by Protestants all over Europe. Arundel himself formally re-joined the Church of England in 1615, but his commitment was fairly thin (and he returned to the Catholic faith later in life). In 1621 he was restored as Earl Marshal and acted in this capacity for the coronation of Charles I in 1626. As relates to this office, he also revived the Earl Marshal’s Court, or the High Court of Chivalry, as a more permanent institution in 1634, as part of the King’s plans to strengthen the court and regulation of the English nobility. It was extremely active for a few years, then abolished in 1640, and has since returned to its status of convening only when necessary, which has in fact been quite infrequent since the 19^th century.

Arundel fell out with the King in 1626 due to the unapproved marriage of his son (known as Lord Maltravers as heir, the usual subsidiary title of the FitzAlans) to the King’s cousin, Lady Elizabeth Stuart, daughter of the Duke of Lennox. The Earl spent some time in the Tower then was confined to house arrest. By the 1630s, he was back in favour, however, and was appointed Justice in Eyre north of the Trent (1634), Lord Lieutenant of Surrey (1635), and Lord Steward of the Household (1640). In the 1640s, he became estranged from the court again and left for a grand tour of Europe, where he collected great treasures—so much so that he is remembered now by the nickname ‘the Collector Earl’. The ‘Arundel Marbles’, one of the first great collections of Greek and Roman sculptures in England, were later donated to the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford.

While abroad, Thomas Howard was re-created Earl of Norfolk (1644), possibly with an eye to restoring the dukedom to his son, already making his name for himself in the House of Lords (created Baron Mowbray by writ of acceleration to allow him to take up a seat in Parliament before he succeeded to his father’s titles). But the Earl died abroad in Padua in 1646, and his son followed shortly after in 1652. A more long-term legacy of these generations was another great inheritance, this time in Yorkshire, which would become another main centre of Howard wealth and power now that many of their estates in East Anglia were lost. The Earl of Arundel’s wife, from 1606, was Lady Alathea Talbot, one of the three daughters and co-heiresses of the 7^th Earl of Shrewsbury. A grand-daughter of Bess of Hardwick, the Countess of Arundel was a court favourite of Queen Anne of Denmark and herself a great collector of art—but also spent much of her life abroad due to her faith. She outlived her sisters, so by the 1650s was a peeress in her own right, as 13^th Baroness Furnivall, 17^th Baroness Strange of Blackmere,and 17^th Baroness Talbot. In terms of land, she brought with her great estates in Yorkshire and Nottinghamshire.

Sheffield Castle in South Yorkshire, originally one of the properties of the Furnivall family, inherited by the Talbots, and erected into a grand country home in the early 16^th century, was mostly dismantled during the Civil War in the 1640s. Little information exists as to how it looked. But other parts of the Manor of Sheffield became an important part of the Howard patrimony. Much of its remaining buildings were dismantled in the early 18^th century, but a Turret House remains, in a residential area of Sheffield known as Norfolk Park (the former deer park, given to the city as it began to really develop in the mid-19^th century). A large city park was opened by the Duke of Norfolk in 1848, and then formally given to the city outright in the 20^th century. Remains of the manor itself have been leased to the city since the 1950s, and there are current plans to restore it as a tourist attraction.

Just across the border to the east, in Nottinghamshire, Worksop Manor was also an estate of the Furnivall family, since the 1250s. It was rebuilt by the Talbot earls of Shrewsbury as one of their main country seats in the 1580s, and became one of the great house of the Elizabethan age. Like Sheffield Manor, Worksop passed to the Howards in the 1650s, along with one of the hereditary honours possessed by the Talbots, the right to give the sovereign a glove during the coronation and to support his right arm during processions in Westminster Abbey. In the early 18^th century, the dukes of Norfolk doubled the size of the house and developed its gardens. This area of the northern end of Nottinghamshire became known as ‘the dukeries’ as it was home to four contiguous ducal estates: Norfolk, Newcastle, Kingston and Portland. In 1761 Worksop suffered a major fire; a truly palatial replacement structure was planned, but only one wing was completed by 1777, since the 9^th Duke had no children and wasn’t very interested in his distant heirs. Eventually the building and its estate were sold to the duke next door, Newcastle, in 1838, who dismantled most of the buildings. Sold off again by the late 19^th century, today Worksop is a well-known stud farm for thoroughbred horses.

The ‘Collector Earl’ and his son, Henry Frederick, were both dead by the time of the Restoration of Charles II in 1660. There had long been talk about restoring the dukedom of Norfolk, and the King’s early reign was very much focused on reconciliation and restoring honour to some of England’s grandest and most ancient noble houses (several dukedoms are created in this period, much as they are, for similar reasons, by the King’s cousin, Louis XIV in France). There were issues however: not only were the Howards still Catholic, but the eldest son, Thomas (since 1652, Earl of Norfolk, Arundel and Surrey), was known to be mentally disabled, and in fact spent much of his life in an asylum in Padua. In some ways, perhaps this gave the King a good excuse to restore the dukedom in 1660 as he could be certain that this Thomas Howard would not stir up any political trouble. And so, after a nearly unanimous petition put forward by the House of Lords, the King restored the dukedom, after nearly a century. The new 5^th Duke of Norfolk was also Earl Marshal, so his cousin, Henry Howard, 3^rd Earl of Suffolk, served as acting Earl Marshal in the coronation of April 1661. But a few years later, in 1672, this office was awarded to the Duke’s brother and heir (also called Henry) and declared formally hereditary, which it has been ever since. The new acting Earl Marshal had himself been created Baron Howard of Castle Rising (a property very close to their original family home in Norfolk) in 1669, so that he could sit in the House of Lords, and in 1672, was elevated further as Earl of Norwich. In 1677 Henry Howard finally succeeded as 6^th Duke of Norfolk, but had to remove himself from political circles in 1678 when the climate became very hot regarding Catholics and the hysteria of the Popish Plot, and he moved to Bruges.

Other family members made even more waves as leaders of the Catholic nobility. His brother, Philip, had lived abroad for many years, formally announcing his adherence to Catholicism in 1646 in Rome and joining the Dominican Order as a monk. In the 1650s he founded a new Priory in Bornem in the Southern Netherlands (south of Antwerp) and became its first prior; this, and the nearby nunnery in Vilvoorde, was intended as a place to train English priests and educate Catholic women. He also later rebuilt the English College in Rome. In 1662 he was recalled to the English court to serve as Grand Almoner for Queen Catherine of Braganza, but as anti-Catholic tensions rose in the 1670s, he once again left for the Low Countries, and then Rome, where he was named Bishop of Helenopolis in Bithynia, one of Rome’s titular seas (as it was in Asia Minor, Ottoman territory), then Cardinal in 1675, and Cardinal-Protector of England and Scotland in 1679. Rising further in the Roman hierarchy, he was appointed Camerlengo (1689-91), the chief financial officer of the College of Cardinals, before he died in 1694, in Rome.

Back in England, any attempt by the family to lay low was scuppered by the actions of the Duke’s uncle, William Howard, Viscount Stafford (a title he had been given after marrying another great heiress in 1640), whose active participation in the Popish Plot of 1678 was denounced by Titus Oates. He was tried by his peers in Parliament, and shamefully unsupported by any of the 8 Howard peers, except the Duke’s son, Baron Mowbray (though this may have had to do with internal family squabbles as Mowbray was angry at his father’s re-marriage to his long-term mistress the year before). Stafford was attainted and executed in 1680—like his predecessor, St Philip Howard, he is considered a Catholic martyr and was beatified in 1929.

The 6^th Duke of Norfolk had sailed back in 1680 in time to vote against his uncle, and returned permanently by about 1683, but died soon after. His son Henry now took over as 7^th Duke. It was he who did much to redevelop the family’s estates in the north of England. Having broken with his father over his relationship with a long-term mistress, which he considered damaging to the family’s relationship in society, the 7^th Duke himself suffered social scandal as the result of a long adultery trial and eventual divorce from his wife, Lady Mary Mordaunt, in 1685 (she later remarried her lover, Sir John Germain). While he remained a Catholic in private, he publicly conformed, and restored his family’s position at court by not supporting the Catholic James II in 1689, and was rewarded with a seat on the Privy Council by William and Mary. He died in 1701, and the senior Howard titles passed to his nephew, Thomas, of Worksop.

The 8^th Duke of Norfolk also married a wealthy heiress, Mary Shireburn, in 1709, though they had no children, and ultimately her chief estate, Stonyhurst Hall in Lancashire, was given by her heirs to the Jesuits, who opened Stonyhurst College in 1794 (transferring some of their former college from the Spanish Netherlands). The 8^th Duke was Earl Marshal for the coronations of Queen Anne, George I and George II, though the function was actually carried out by his Protestant Howard cousins as deputies (first the 3^rd Earl of Carlisle, then the 6^th Earl of Suffolk, and finally the 4^th Earl of Berkshire). In 1722, the Duke was briefly arrested under suspicion of supporting the Jacobites, but was soon released. In fact it was his wife who was a chief supporter, and she reportedly left him for being too weak in his faith. In contrast, his younger brother, Henry, was named to a Catholic bishopric in 1720, but died before taking up the post; another brother, Richard, was a canon in St Peter’s in Rome; while still another, Edward, was actually an active participant in the 1715 Jacobite uprising in supporter of a (Catholic) Stuart restoration. He escaped punishment due to his brother’s intervention and settled at Workop Manor safely far from court (while Arundel Castle remained the seat of the Duke).

In 1732, Lord Edward became the 9^th Duke of Norfolk. Like his predecessors, he was nominally Earl Marshal, for the coronations of George II and George III, but as a Catholic could not carry out the functions of the office so again deputised his Howard cousins (two earls of Effingham then another earl of Suffolk). He set about rebuilding a new family residence in London—Arundel House on the Strand being a bit shabby—so he purchased two townhouses on St James’s Square, in a much more fashionable area next to the royal palaces, and developed a much grander Norfolk House, completed in 1752. Norfolk House was demolished in 1938, to make way for an office building, but some of the interiors, notably the music room, were preserved and are now on display in the Victoria & Albert museum.

In 1767, the Duke’s nephew and heir died, and he and his wife (Mary Blount, another fervent Catholic woman, for whom, apparently, Captain Cook named Norfolk Island north of New Zealand) became disinterested in completing their grand plans to re-develop Worksop into a country house on a palatial scale, as they were not particularly close to the distant cousin who would inherit the bulk of the Howard titles and estates. When the Duke died in 1777, the dukedom and most of the ancient earldoms and baronies passed to Charles Howard of Greystoke, while the earldom of Norwich and the barony of Castle Rising became extinct, and the baronies of Furnivall, Talbot and Strange of Blackmere, as well as Mowbray and Segrave, went into abeyance between multiple heirs, ultimately being divided between the Stourton and Petre families.

Charles Howard lived at Greystoke Castle in Cumbria. In 1777 he became Duke of Norfolk, earl of Norfolk, Arundel and Surrey, Baron Maltravers, and Earl Marshal of England. He also inherited the properties in Sheffield and Worksop, as well as Arundel Castle in Sussex. He died only a few years later, in 1786, and his son, also Charles, became the 11^th Duke. He renounced Catholicism so he could hold political office, though he was vocal in his support for Catholic emancipation. He had no legitimate children (but several illegitimate children), so the title passed once again to a different branch.

The Howards of Glossop, in Derbyshire, just beyond the easternmost suburbs of Manchester, became a separate branch in the later 17^th century. Like so much else in the north of England, this was part of the Talbot inheritance, having originally been a manor held by Basingwerk Abbey, then given to the Talbots at the Dissolution of the Monasteries in the 1530s. It also has an ancient Norman earthworks castle, just to the north of town, but this had been no more than a mound for centuries. In the 1730s, the Howards rebuilt an ancient manor house (formerly known as Royle Hall) located down in the valley of Glossop Brook (the Glossopdale), which flows out of the Peak District. Glossop Manor was used as a hunting lodge by the family in the 18^th and early 19^th centuries, but was rebuilt as a more permanent country estate by Baron Howard of Glossop (a second son of the 13^th Duke, created baron in 1869) in the 1870s, then was sold to the local council in the 1920s, used as a school, then demolished in about 1950. Today its parklands form Manor Park in the town of Glossop.

Throughout the 18^th century, the Howards developed Glossop as a major centre of the burgeoning Industrial Revolution, first with woollen mills, but later and much more intensely as a centre for cotton weaving. The location was ideal, with a fairly damp climate keeping the raw materials from drying out and ample running water in the surrounding hills to power the mills. By 1831 there were about 30 cotton mills in Glossopdale. And as is more interesting for our story here, the Howards were keen to make this a safe space for Catholic and other dissenting entrepreneurs. After Catholic Emancipation in 1829 they built a new Catholic church in Glossop, followed by other town improvements including a town hall in 1838 and a railway station in 1847—which still displays the Howard Lion above its main doors. The Glossop Estate was sold in 1925, but much of it was donated to the town the Howards built, with placenames remaining as a memory: Norfolk Square, Howardtown, Howard Park, and so on.

The new Duke of Norfolk in 1815 was Bernard Howard of Glossop. He was thus Earl Marshal for the coronations of George IV, William IV and Victoria, though for the first of these in 1821 he had to deputise his Protestant brother, Henry Molyneux-Howard (who had adopted his mother’s surname after she inherited properties in Nottinghamshire: Tevershell and Wellow). He commemorated Catholic emancipation with a grand banquet, and was awarded the Order of the Garter in 1834 by William IV, an honour that had been denied his predecessors since the early 17^th century (with the notable exception of the 7^th Duke, appointed in 1685 by James II, himself of course a Catholic).

In 1842, the 12^th Duke was succeeded by his son, Henry (known for most of his life as Earl of Surrey), who was an active politician, and the first Catholic to sit in Parliament after emancipation as MP for Horsham (Sussex), 1829-32. He was appointed a Privy Councillor in 1837, and Treasurer of the Household, and officiated at the coronation of Queen Victoria as Earl Marshal in 1838—no longer needing a deputy. He also revived the claim, long dormant, to serve as Chief Butler of England, an office associated with the family’s former property at Kenninghall (restored to them, but soon to be sold in the 1870s), which carried the right to officiate at coronation banquets traditionally held in Westminster Hall. But the last of these banquets was held in 1821 and was seen as such a lavish expense that it has never been revived. As duke he retained a position in some of the Whig governments of Victoria’s reign, notably that of Lord John Russell in 1846-52 (where he served as Master of the Horse), then in the coalition government of Lord Aberdeen, 1853-54 (where he was Lord Steward of the Household). Like his father, he was given the Garter in 1848.

The 13^th Duke’s sons were also active in politics. The second son, Baron Howard of Glossop, was Vice-Chamberlain of the Household in the Russell administration of 1846, and a great supporter of the establishment of Catholic schools. The older son, Surrey, resigned his seat in Parliament in 1851 over proposed anti-Catholic legislation. So the Howards weren’t finished with their role as defenders of Catholicism in Britain yet. A second Howard cardinal emerges in this period as well: a cousin, Edward, became a papal diplomat in India, protector of the English College in Rome, and Cardinal from 1877.

The 14^th Duke of Norfolk, who succeeded in 1856, added the surname Fitz-Alan formally to his own and replaced the old Mowbray lion with the FitzAlan lion in his coat of arms (fairly subtle: a gold rampant lion instead of a silver one). He and his wife, Augusta Lyons, daughter of a naval hero, built a villa in Bournemouth now known as the Norfolk Royale.

His reign as duke was short, and in 1860 he was succeeded by his very young son, Henry. The 15^th Duke of Norfolk was Earl Marshal for the funeral of Queen Victoria, and for the coronations of Edward VII and George V; he was also Lord Lieutenant of Sussex from 1905. He continued the family tradition of supporting Catholic charities, especially in Sheffield (where he was mayor, 1895-97), and founded a college at Cambridge University to support Catholic students (St. Edmund’s) in 1896. He also supported the creation of Sheffield University in 1905 and served as its first Chancellor. The 15^th Duke also was responsible for the construction of the neo-gothic Chapel of Our Lady and St. Philip Neri at Arundel, opened in 1873, which we’ve encountered above, as well as a new Catholic church in Norwich, 1877, which since 1976 has been the Catholic cathedral for that city in Norfolk.

When the 15^th Duke died in 1917 he was succeeded by his only surviving son (an older son, Philip had died in 1902), whose mother was heiress of a Scottish landed estate in Kirkudbrightshire (southwest Scotland), and the barony of Herries of Terregles (created for the Herries family in 1490 and passed to the Maxwells in the 1540s). The 16^th Duke, Bernard Marmaduke FitzAlan-Howard, was thus also 12^th Baron Herries after his mother died in 1945 (and took his curious second name from his Maxwell grandfather). This inheritance included Terregles House, long the seat of the Maxwells, another traditionally Catholic noble family. The old medieval tower house had been replaced in the late 18^th century with a grand country house. The estates were sold off after World War I and the house in the 1930s (and was fully demolished in 1962). The Duke having no sons, the barony of Herries passed in succession to his daughters, the third (and still living) being Jane, 16^th Baroness, married to the Marquess of Lothian, a conservative politician better known as Michael Ancram.

The 16^th Duke of Norfolk was Earl Marshal for the coronations of George VI and Elizabeth II and the State Openings of Parliament for many years until his death in 1975. For a family who has survived so much upheaval over so many centuries, it is interesting that the senior branch seems to have such trouble producing sons. So once again the ducal title passed to a cousin, Miles, from the sideline of Howard of Glossop established in the later 19^th century.

Here again we have yet another estate being added to the list of formal seats of the family (Arundel being the constant, generation after generation). The 17^th Duke’s father was the 3^rd Baron Howard of Glossop, but his mother, Mona Stapleton, was 11^th Baroness Beaumont (a title dating from 1309), and heiress of the Stapleton seat in North Yorkshire, Carlton Towers, near Selby. The earlier 17^th-century manor house was encased in a grand Victorian Gothic Revival mansion built for Henry Stapleton, 9^th Baron Beaumont, in the 1870s. The property had been in the hands of the Stapletons since much earlier in fact, and we see an owner from about 1300 serving as a steward in the household of Edward II. Like the Howards they were recusants, and there is evidence of their support for the Catholic Church all over this district. The 17^th Duke inherited the house from his mother in 1971 (and her title), and lived there while his father lived at Arundel. Today Carlton Towers is the residence of the current duke’s younger brother and his family.

The 17^th Duke of Norfolk had a long career in the army, then took up the role of Earl Marshal after 1975. As a prominent Catholic lord, he represented Queen Elizabeth II at the installation services of Pope John Paul II in 1978. He married a cousin, Anne Constable Maxwell, whose father also served in Rome, as a Papal Chamberlain.

In 2002, the Duke of Norfolk and Baron Beaumont died, and was succeeded by his son, Edward, 18^th Duke (b. 1956), who is also Earl of Arundel, Earl of Surrey, Earl of Norfolk, Baron Maltravers, Baron FitzAlan, Baron Clun and Baron Howard of Glossop. He is also head of a family that is spread vastly across the country, with the still extant lines of the earls of Suffolk and Berkshire (merged since the 1740s), the earls of Carlisle, and the Howards of Greystoke and Penrith. As Earl Marshal, the Duke of Norfolk reminded the world of his family’s prominent historical role at the funeral of Elizabeth II in 2022, and now for the coronation of King Charles III in May 2023.

(images Wikimedia Commons)

If you are watching the coronation of King Charles III this Spring, chances are you have been confused by mention of the ‘shared office’ of Lord Great Chamberlain of the United Kingdom, one of the two Great Officers of State that remains hereditary, alongside the Earl Marshal (the Duke of Norfolk), and one of the chief participants in the ceremonies on the day. You may have even heard that this ‘shared office’ is due to the split inheritance of the Duke of Ancaster.

Who was the Duke of Ancaster and why is his hereditary office currently held by someone called Baron Carrington?

Rupert, 7^th Baron Carrington (whose surname, confusingly, is Carington, with one r), was nominated to fill the post of Lord Great Chamberlain following the death of Elizabeth II in September 2022. He will fill this role until the reign ends, when it will pass back to the family of the Marquess of Cholmondeley (who held it in the previous reign). Carrington’s family possess a ¼ share of the office, while the Cholmondeleys hold a ½ share. The other ¼ is held by the heiress of the last Earl of Ancaster, the 28^th Baroness Willoughby de Eresby. The formal term for this collective hereditary portioning of an office is that it is held ‘in gross’. It is the result of the complicated succession of 1779 that followed the death of the next-to-last Duke of Ancaster, Robert Bertie. The dukedom and other titles passed to an uncle, some of his private fortune passed to his illegitimate daughter, while the barony of Willoughby and the office of Great Lord Chamberlain went into abeyance between his two sisters. It is the heirs of these sisters who share the office today.

The office of Lord Great Chamberlain is a purely ceremonial position, and is different to the office of Lord Chamberlain. They were once the same, the chief courtier in charge of running the monarch’s chamber (bedchamber) and by extension, the household, but since the 14^th century, his actual duties have been carried out by a deputy, who became known as the Lord Chamberlain. Today the Lord Chamberlain, a non-hereditary post but still always someone with a title, is the senior officer of the royal household, responsible for organising all day-to-day ceremonial activities, diplomatic visits, garden parties, award ceremonies. Since 2021 this has been Lord Parker of Minsmere. The higher ranking office, the Great Chamberlain, has been hereditary (for the most part) since the 1130s, and is responsible for organising the great state events of the monarchy, coronations and funerals, along with the Earl Marshal. At the coronation, he dresses the sovereign on the day and is involved in the investiture of royal insignia during the ceremony. He carries the crown at the State Opening of Parliament, and bears a white staff, a symbol of his office, along with a golden key—always a symbol of the office of chamberlain, in any European monarchy, as the courtier with the keys to the monarch’s private spaces. We’ve seen these moments on television when the Lord Great Chamberlain raises his white staff to signal the king’s messenger, ‘Black Rod’, that he should go knock on the door of the House of Commons to summon them to attend the sovereign.

The office of Lord Great Chamberlain was for centuries held by the De Vere family, earls of Oxford from 1141 (with some interruptions; but fully confirmed as hereditary by Queen Mary in 1553). When the 18^th Earl died in 1625, there was some uncertainty with his succession, but within the year it was decided that the earldom would pass to his male heir, but the office of Great Chamberlain would pass to his closer heir via a female, Robert Bertie, Baron Willoughby the Eresby. He was at about the same time raised in rank as 1^st Earl of Lindsey.

So who was Robert Bertie?

The Bertie family (pronounced ‘Barty’) had a family legend—as all these great aristocrats do—that they came to Britain with the Saxons, originating in ‘Bertiland’, said to be in Prussia, though no such place name exists (some have speculated it refers to Bartelsdorf in East Prussia, now in Poland). In any case, a certain Richard Bertie, son of a stone mason, appears in Tudor history as captain of Hurst Castle in Hampshire, and as master of the horse of Catherine Willoughby, the widow of Charles Brandon, Duke of Suffolk. Catherine was herself a major heiress, particularly in Lincolnshire; her father, William, 11^th Baron Willoughby de Eresby, was thought to have held thirty manors in Lincolnshire and thirty more in East Anglia. His barony dated from 1313, centred on the manor of Eresby in Spilsby, Lincolnshire (his title appended ‘de Eresby’ to keep it distinct from the Barony of Willoughby de Broke (1491), based in Wiltshire). The Willoughbys themselves came from a village of that name a bit further east in Lincolnshire, at the foot of the hills known as the Lincolnshire Wolds (the village name itself comes from Norse for ‘farm by the willow tree’), in the northern part of the county known as Lindsey. They acquired the manor of Eresby in 1310—its ancient manor house was rebuilt in the 1530s by Brandon, but was destroyed by fire in 1769, leaving little remains today.

A favourite of King Henry VIII, in 1516 the 11^th Lord Willoughby was married to the chief lady in waiting and confidante of Queen Katherine of Aragon, Maria de Salinas, and was given as a wedding gift, the castle of Grimsthorpe in the more southerly part of Lincolnshire known as Kesteven, which included a manor called Ancaster. After her father’s death, Catherine Willoughby became a ward of Charles Brandon, and eventually his fourth wife. In the 1540s he transformed Grimsthorpe Castle from a medieval castle (originally been built by an early Earl of Lincoln in the mid-12^th century, and confiscated from Lord Lovell by Henry VII) into a splendid residence worthy of a duke. He used building materials from the nearby Abbey of Vaudey, recently secularised. It was grand enough to host royalty: Henry VIII and Marie of Guise, Queen of Scots, both stayed there. It would be rebuilt in the early 18^th century to celebrate the creation of the Dukedom of Ancaster, as a Baroque palace, the last major building of John Vanbrugh, and a Capability Brown park was added in the 1770s. It is still in private hands today.

The Duke of Suffolk died in 1545 and about 8 years later, the Duchess of Suffolk married her master of the horse, Richard Bertie. Both were devoted Protestants, so early in the reign of Mary I fled to the Continent, first to the Rhineland, and then to Poland. A son was born on their travels so they named him Peregrine, as a pilgrim (‘peregrinus’ a foreign traveller).

Returning to England in the reign of Elizabeth I, Richard Bertie became an MP for Lincolnshire, then Justice of the Peace for Lindsey and High Sheriff of Lincolnshire, 1564-65. He apparently tried to claim a seat in the House of Lords in his wife’s name (as Baroness Willoughby) but was rebuked. His son was more successful when his mother died in 1580, and Richard Bertie himself died in 1582.

Peregrine Bertie, now 13^th Baron Willoughby de Eresby, served as a diplomat for Elizabeth I, for example to the court of Denmark, but became much better known as a soldier. He served as a commander of English forces sent to the Netherlands to aid the Dutch in their fight against Spanish rule, and was named governor of Bergen-op-Zoom in 1586. He later fought for the Huguenot cause in France and aided Henry IV in his conquest of his kingdom in the 1590s. He ended his career as governor of Berwick and Warden of the East March in 1598 and died in 1601.

Lord Peregrine had married in 1577 Lady Mary de Vere, daughter of the 16^th Earl of Oxford, the Lord Great Chamberlain of England (her brother was the volatile 17^th Earl, the one some have suspected to be the ‘real’ William Shakespeare). Already having quartered his Bertie arms with Willoughby, the family would eventually also add those of De Vere, once their children became heirs of her family after 1625. The very old Willoughby arms were azure ‘fretty’ (a criss-cross pattern) on gold, while the (I assume) new Bertie arms sported an unusual trio of horizontally arranged battering rams, with blue ram’s heads. The De Vere coat-of-arms, as one of the oldest in the Kingdom, was quite simple: red and gold quarters, with a silver star (or ‘mullet’) in the first quarter.

As we’ve seen, their son Robert Bertie inherited the office of Great Lord Chamberlain and was created Earl of Lindsey. Lindsay, the northern third of Lincolnshire, had once been an independent Anglo-Saxon kingdom, absorbed by Northumbria in the 7^th century. Its name reminds us that most of this eastern coast of England was for much of the Middle Ages a mucky wetland, and this patch of higher ground became known as the Isle of Lind (-ey usually meaning island in Anglo-Saxon place names). Lind probably came from the Brittonic word for pool or lake, and the Romans named a town after it, Lindum Colonia, which eventually became Lincoln. Lindsey was a separate administrative unit within Lincolnshire until the administrative reforms of the 1970s when it disappeared.

The 1^st earl of Lindsey had been raised at court; his godparents were none other than Queen Elizabeth I and Robert Dudley. Aside from performing court duties as Lord Great Chamberlain for the early years of the reign of Charles I, he was active in Lincolnshire as starting major drainage projects in the 1630s. Having served as a young man in Dutch campaigns, he was named a royalist commander at the outset of the Civil War, at first tasked with taking Hull (unsuccessfully), and then acting as general of the infantry at the Battle of Edge Hill in October 1642, where he lost his life. He had married Elizabeth Montagu (sister of the 1^st Baron Montagu of Boughton) thus integrating the Bertie family further within the hierarchies of the upper court aristocracy (and also the families holding power in the East Midlands).

Their son, Montagu Bertie (known as ‘Lord Willoughby’ as heir) was a favourite of King Charles I. He raised a regiment of Life Guards and brought it into Royalist service in the Civil War, and in 1643 was named to the Privy Council and a Gentleman of the Bedchamber. Now 2^nd Earl of Lindsey, he remained faithful to the King through all his tribulations, including his imprisonment and trial. Though he himself was not punished in 1649, he was forced to pay significant sums to the new regime and retired from politics. At the Restoration of Charles II, he performed the role of the Lord Great Chamberlain in the coronation of 1661, was given the Order of the Garter, and was re-appointed Lord Lieutenant of Lincolnshire, an office his descendants would hold continuously for the next 150 years.

Robert Bertie succeeded as 3^rd Earl of Lindsey in 1666, and in politics retained his family’s strong loyalty to the Crown which gradually morphed into the Tory faction in Parliament. His younger half-brother, James, inherited his own barony, Norreys, and an ancestral seat, Rycote in Oxfordshire, from his mother. Lord Norreys was a more substantial politician, and due to his close connections with his brother-in-law, Lord Danby (essentially the King’s first minister), and helped hold together a ‘Crown Party’ in the turbulent last years of Charles II’s reign, earning for himself an earldom, that of Abingdon, in 1682. The secondary Bertie branch, the earls of Abingdon, outlived the senior branch, and in 1938 combined the two earldoms into one. The current 14^th Earl of Lindsey and 9^th Earl of Abingdon is Robert Bertie (b. 1931); his heir is known as Baron Norreys.

The 3^rd Earl of Lindsey remained in office under the regime of William and Mary, despite the fall from power of the Danby faction and the rise of the Whigs. His sons regained some of this favour under the new King and Queen, and eventually shifted their loyalties towards the Whig party: the second son, Peregrine, in particular, was named Vice-Chamberlain of the Household of William III, in 1694, and continued in this office under Queen Anne. The older son, another Robert, had been a Tory MP for Boston in the 1680s, and supported the northern rising in support of the Glorious Revolution. He was rewarded by William & Mary with the office of Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster, 1689. In 1701 he succeeded his father as 4^th Earl of Lindsey, 17^th Baron Willoughby de Eresby, and Lord Great Chamberlain—performing this role at the funeral of William III, then at the coronation of Queen Anne on St. George’s Day, 23 April 1702. He was also appointed a Privy Councillor.

In 1706, he was raised a rank in the peerage, as Marquess of Lindsey, and in the new reign, of George I, was elevated again, in 1715, as Duke of Ancaster and Kesteven. I’ve not been able to find precise reasons for the choice of these titles: perhaps ‘Duke of Lincolnshire’ was rejected, so this was a substitute? Why use both names? Ancaster was one of the original Willoughby estates brought to the Bertie family in the 1550s. Its name suggests Roman origins (‘Anna’s fort or camp’) and indeed there are remains of a Roman settlement here, on a key road north from London. The region of Kesteven was, like Lindsey, one of the three subdivisions of Lincolnshire, in the southwest of the county. Its name may derive from a hybrid of Celtic ceto (‘wood’) and Norse stefna (‘meeting place’)—its name appears as Coestefne in about 1000. More recently it has been used as part of the title of one of its most famous residents, born and raised in Grantham, Baroness Thatcher of Kesteven (cr. 1992).

The 1^st Duke of Ancaster and Kesteven had also added to his family’s lands, by marriage in 1678 to the Welsh heiress Mary Wynn, a descendant of the ancient princely house of Aberffraw (kings of Gwynedd), and heiress of the 4^th Baronet Wynn. The Wynn estates were centred on Gwydyr Castle, in the Conwy Valley on the eastern edges of County Carnarvon (North Wales). Its ancient manor house had been rebuilt in the 16^th century, with material from the local secularised abbey of Maenan. It was neglected as a Bertie property in the 18^th century, but subsequent heirs rebuilt it—and the name was resurrected in the title Baron Gwydyr (or Gwydir) in 1796. The estate was mostly sold off in the 1890s, and the house finally in 1921 by Earl Carrington (see below). Today it is privately owned and restored. The 1^st Baron Gwydir also built a grand London residence, in Whitehall, Gwydyr House, which is today the office of the Secretary of State for Wales. An earlier residence for the Berties in London was Willoughby House, built as a town house by the Duke and Duchess of Suffolk in the 1530s near Cripplegate, in what was once the edge of the Roman City—after this part of London was bombed in World War II, it was redeveloped as the Barbican, and still uses the name Willoughby House for one of its residential units.

The eldest son of the 1^st Duke, Robert, had died studying abroad, so it was the second son, Peregrine, who became 2^nd Duke in 1723. In politics, he returned to the family’s traditional alliance with the Tories, and despite the ongoing power of the Whig Ascendancy in the first two reigns of the Hanoverian kings, was appointed to key court and government offices: Gentleman of the Bedchamber in 1719-27 (at first as Marquess of Lindsey, the title used by the heir), and Chief Justice in Eyre, north of the Trent, 1734-42. He maintained the family position in Lincolnshire as Lord Lieutenant, and married a daughter of one of the other local elites, the Brownlows, baronets from the other side of Grantham, at Belton House. He acted as Lord Great Chamberlain in key monarchical events in the deaths and accessions of George I and George II.

Another Peregrine succeeded his father as 3^rd Duke of Ancaster in 1742. He led a military career, rising to the rank of full general by 1772, and was appointed to the office of Master of the Horse in 1766, which was by this point more a political office than an office of the household. The appointment was the start of a long alliance with the Pitt family. In 1773, he built a country house on Richmond Hill overlooking the Thames in west London, Ancaster House, designed by Robert Adam; but his heirs sold this house soon after. In town they also occupied Lindsey House (sometimes called Ancaster House), on Lincoln’s Inn Fields, near Sir John Soane’s House.

The 3^rd Duke died in 1778 and was succeeded by his son Robert as 4^th Duke, but only for a year. As Lord Lindsey, he had served in the War of American Independence, 1777-78, and on his return to England was appointed a Privy Councillor, perhaps the start of a great political career. But he died soon after of scarlet fever. He was unmarried, but willed much of his money to an illegitimate daughter, Susan Bertie, who later married another veteran of the war in America, the fantastically named (and outrageously painted) Banastre Tarleton. He had been famous as the daring leader of ‘Tarleton’s Raiders’, particularly in South Carolina, and later became an MP for Liverpool, a vocal anti-abolitionist, a general in the Napoleonic wars in Iberia, and finally a baronet in 1815.

The 4^th Duke of Ancaster and Kesteven was the last person to hold the office of Lord Great Chamberlain undivided. Although the ducal title and the earldom of Lindsey passed to his uncle, Brownlow (named for his mother’s family), the office of Great Chamberlain following strict rules governing inheritance went into abeyance between the 4^th Duke’s two sisters, Priscilla and Georgina, as did the claims to the barony of Willoughby de Eresby. In 1780, Priscilla was confirmed as 21^st Baroness, while her new husband, Sir Peter Burrell (from a family of baronets from Sussex), was appointed Lord Great Chamberlain, and performed the functions of this office until 1820 (and it is he who was created 1^st Baron Gwydyr).

The 5^th Duke of Ancaster took over the family responsibilities in Lincolnshire, as Lord Lieutenant, and was also appointed to the Privy Council by George III. When he died in 1809, his personal wealth passed to his only grandson, Brownlow Colyear, son of the 4^th Earl of Portmore, who was a potential candidate to re-establish the Bertie name and titles, but he was killed by bandits while studying in Rome in 1819.

Priscilla Bertie, Baroness Willoughby de Eresby, and her husband Peter Burrell, Baron Gwydyr, thus became the senior curators of the Bertie inheritance—though the earldom of Lindsay did pass to a collateral branch, established back in the 1640s from a younger son of the 2^nd Earl. The 10^th and 11^th earls were both seen as feeble-minded and kept away from society and politics. The 12^th Earl, who succeeded in 1899, made more of a name for himself, in the military, and in the 1880s served as aide-de-camp to his distant cousin Lord Carrington (him again) when he was Governor of New South Wales. The 12^th Earl left no male heir, but through his daughter he has numerous descendants in Australia, and the Lindsey earldom passed to the branch of Abingdon, as we’ve seen.

Peter Burrell, Jr took over as both Baron Willoughby and Baron Gwydyr. He married a great heiress and added her surname to his own: Clementina Drummond, heiress of the 1^st Baron Perth, and to two mighty castles in Perthshire: Drummond and Stobhall. He also succeeded his father as acting Lord Great Chamberlain. He thus represented this Great Office of State in one of the grandest coronations in British history, that of George IV in 1821. In 1830, George IV died, and it was agreed that the office would pass to the holder of the other half of the divided succession: George, 2^nd Marquess of Cholmondeley, in the name of his mother, Lady Georgina Bertie (who lived until 1838, so was technically the ‘owner’ of this ½ share). He was thus in charge of the ceremonial role in the coronation of William IV.

The House of Cholmondeley (pronounced ‘Chumley’) was an ancient landowning family from Cheshire, with a grand castle at Cholmondeley since the 12^th century and estates at Malpas, near the borders with Wales. In 1706 they became earls. In 1791, the 4^th Earl of Cholmondeley married Lady Georgina Bertie, sister and co-heiress of the 4^th Duke of Ancaster. They enjoyed royal favour in the Regency period, she as Lady of the Bedchamber to the Princess of Wales from 1795, and he as Lord Steward of the Household from 1812. In 1797 he inherited the large palladian mansion built by a cousin, Robert Walpole, in the 1720s: Houghton Hall, in Norfolk. This house would become the family’s main seat from this point until today. In 1815, the Earl became the 1^st Marquess of Cholmondeley, and the original castle in Cheshire was rebuilt in a flashy neo-gothic style.

The 2^nd Marquess of Cholmondeley gave up the position as Lord Great Chamberlain on the death of William IV. It passed back to the owner of the other half-share, Peter Drummond-Burrell, who bore the crown in the coronation of Queen Victoria in 1838. He held this office until his death in 1865 when it passed to his son, Albyric, 23^rd Baron Willoughby de Eresby. When he died in 1870, the family’s half-share was divided once more between two sisters, Clementina, who became 24^th Baroness Willoughby, and Charlotte, Baroness Carrington by marriage. Each of their descendants would now bear ¼of the office, and they agreed that the deputy, ie, the acting Lord Great Chamberlain, would be Clementina’s son, Gilbert Heathcote-Drummond-Willoughby, 2^nd Baron Aveland (the Heathcotes were another East Midlands family, with lands in both Lincolnshire and Rutland). Aveland succeeded his mother as Baron Willoughby in 1888, was created Earl of Ancaster in 1892, and exercised the role of Great Chamberlain at the funeral of Queen Victoria in 1901, then once more yielded the office to his Cholmondeley cousins.

The long reign of Victoria had been very good for the Willoughby branch of the family. The next Cholmondeley, the 4^th Marquess, would not be so fortunate, acting as Lord Great Chamberlain for the coronation of Edward VII in 1902, but then for his funeral only 8 years later.

So in 1910, the role passed to the owner of the junior ¼ share, Earl Carrington, who bore St Edward’s Staff at the coronation of June 1911. In 1912, an agreement between the families formalised what was in practice already occurring, that the office of Lord Great Chamberlain would change with each reign, and would be held by the Cholmondeleys every other reign (as holders of a half-share), and by the Willoughbys and the Carringtons every fourth reign (as holders of quarter shares). Earl Carrington was already a prominent Liberal statesman in Edwardian Britain, and was appointed Governor or New South Wales (Australia), 1885-90, Lord Chamberlain of the Household, 1892-95, and Earl Carrington, 1895. He had also been a personal friend of Edward VII in his long years as Prince of Wales. Carrington’s family name originally had been Smith, relatives of the Smith banking dynasty of Nottingham. This branch were created Baron Carrington (of Upton, Notts.) in 1797, and in 1839 adopted Carrington as their surname. The 3^rd Baron added the surname Wynn, but also (in 1880) change the spelling of the surname to Carington with one r. Notes on a postcard for any reasons why he did this. In 1911 he was appointed Lord Privy Seal, thus holding two of the Great Offices of State, and in 1912 was promoted once more, to Marquess of Lincolnshire. His seat had been Wycombe Abbey in Buckinghamshire, but he sold it in 1896.

When Lord Lincolnshire died in 1928, his only son having been killed in World War I, the quarter share of the Lord Great Chamberlainship was divided equally between his five daughters and their heirs. They nominated the husband of the third daughter, William Legge, Viscount Lewisham, son of the 6^th Earl of Dartmouth, to act out the position for the remainder of the reign of George V, who died in 1936 (and that same year he succeeded as 7^th Earl of Dartmouth).

The new Lord Great Chamberlain in January 1936 was another unlucky Cholmondeley (the 5^th Marquess), since the reign of Edward VIII was too short for a coronation, and ended in abdication in December. He nevertheless bore the Royal Standard at the coronation of George VI in May 1937, which he had helped plan the previous year. The 2^nd Earl of Ancaster (Gilbert Heathcote-Drummond-Willoughby) now took the role, until his death in 1951 when he was succeeded by his son, James, the 3^rd Earl of Ancaster. But George VI died in February 1952, so the 5^th Marquess of Cholmondeley was given a second chance to exercise this position.

The long reign of Queen Elizabeth II was thus attended to first by the 5^th Marquess of Cholmondeley until his death in 1968, then his son, Hugh, 6^th Marquess, until his death in 1990, and finally David, 7^th Marquess. He ceased to be the Lord Great Chamberlain in 2022, and in March 2023 was appointed to be a Lord in Waiting to the new King, as a sign of gratitude for the long service of this family to the House of Windsor. The Marquess’s second son, Oliver, will be a page at the coronation.

The new Lord Great Chamberlain, the 7^th Baron Carrington (b. 1948), is the great-grandson of the 4^th Baron, younger brother and male heir of the Marquess of Lincolnshire. His father, the 6^th Baron Carrington, was well known as a Conservative politician, with an incredibly long career from the 1950s to his sudden resignation as Foreign Secretary in 1982 when he failed to anticipate the Argentine invasion of the Falkland Islands. He later was Secretary General of NATO (1984-88), and Chancellor of the Order of the Garter (1994-2012), and was created a life peer (Baron Carington of Upton) in 1999 to allow him to retain a seat in the newly reformed House of Lords. When he died in 2018, he was succeeded by his son Rupert Carington, a banker, as 7^th Lord Carrington, who was in that year one of the elected peers to the House of Lords.

But he is not one of the shareholders in the office of Lord Great Chamberlain. These are the descendants of the five daughters of Lord Lincolnshire. By 2022 there were 11 co-heirs, in several families, including the Legge-Bourkes, cousins of the Legges of Dartmouth (above), and the family of Tiggy Legge-Bourke, socialite and close friend of Charles as Prince of Wales, and nanny to the royal princes in the 1980s. These all now have tiny shares of the ¼ share of this set of heirs to the Dukes of Ancaster. The other ¼ is held by Jane Heathcote-Drummond-Willoughby, 28^th Baroness Willoughby de Eresby, who, while unlikely to hold the title Lord Great Chamberlain herself—which would be an interesting innovation, as a woman—unless two reigns pass in the next decade (she is nearly 90), has nonetheless enjoyed what some would consider the biggest prize: the landed fortune, with 7500 acres in Lincolnshire and Perthshire, nearly £50 million (estimated in 2008), and the castles of Grimsthorpe and Drummond. The earldom of Ancaster became extinct with her father’s death in 1983. A grand-daughter of Nancy, Lady Astor, she was inducted into the world of high society at an early age, and was one of the six Maids of Honour at the 1953 coronation of Elizabeth II. She never married, so her quarter share will be split into smaller shares by her cousins.