Once more Charterhouse, now known as Howard House, was to be prepared for a royal mistress, and in a royal manner.
The new owner, buoyed with hopes of a marriage with Mary, Queen of Scots, began to put his new house in order. He added the screen in the great hall and the “Tarrass Walk,” the lovely tapestry room, the duchess’s withdrawing-room and the magnificent great staircase.
On the 6th of August, 1568, Elizabeth came in state from Hampton Court to Howard House, to pay a visit to her disloyal servant, already plotting against her and arranging the duchess’s salon for her rival. The air was thick with intrigue, and by the autumn the rumour of the marriage with Mary had reached Elizabeth. Norfolk denied it, but a year later the truth came out, and he spent some time in the Tower, to be released, under surveillance, when the Black Death threatened that district.
He had learned no lesson. Either a devouring ambition or the attraction of the most fascinating woman in Europe lured him on. Plots and counterplots were hatched in the long gallery that now forms part of the upper-story quarters of the Master and Registrar of Charterhouse. Mary’s emissaries were seized—one of them, called Bailly, has carved the lesson these events taught him in the Beauchamp Room in the Tower—and the luckless queen was betrayed in her turn, even as Elizabeth had been, by the man who so short a time before had decorated the Charterhouse to receive her as a bride.
He told, like a coward, the place where her cipher was hidden under a tile in the Charterhouse, but nothing could save his own neck, and he followed his father and his two girl cousins, Anne Boleyn and Katherine Howard, in June 1572.
The next owner of Howard House, Philip Howard, Earl of Arundel, was only a boy of fifteen when he inherited his father’s property, but he was of sterner stuff, for he refused to abjure the Roman Catholic faith he had embraced, even to see his wife and children, before he died, worn out, and under sentence of death, in 1595. Elizabeth had kept him prisoner in the Beauchamp Tower for ten years, and it
THE CHARTERHOUSE FROM THE SQUARE
was there, in 1587, that he carved the words, “The more suffering for Christ in this world, so much the more glory with Christ in the life to come.”