Even though we live in a largely patriarchal society (which used to a lot more patriarchal), there have always been women willing to strike out on their own paths in spite of sometimes dire consequences. One of them, long, long ago, was Anne Howard, who was born in England in 1557. Her life was almost incomprehensibly incomparable to anything we experience today.
She was the eldest of three sisters and a brother, born into a noble family. Her father died when she was 10, and her mother remarried and moved up in the social world to become a duchess. But then her mother also died shortly after, and the children were raised and educated by their grandmother, Lady Mounteagle. This was a bit of an insurrection right there, because they lived in Elizabethan England, where the Catholic religion was banned, and yet Lady Mounteagle was a devout Catholic and educated the Howard children in that tradition.
The three sisters were “assigned” to arranged marriages, which were carried out at the age of 12. Even in those days that was a bit young, so the ceremonies were repeated once the brides and grooms reached the age of consent — which in those days was all of 14. Anne became the Countess of Arundel through her husband’s title.
In the 1580s the couple settled in Arundel Castle in Sussex (it’s quite a place; it’s been restored and is sometimes open to visitors — and all the “castle” scenes in the movie The Madness of King George were filmed there). It was at the castle that Anne Howard began writing poems that she published under her own name, which was quite unusual for women at the time. She also formally converted to Catholicism. That got the attention of Queen Elizabeth, who decided to punish her — but as a Countess, the punishment was simply house arrest. In a giant castle. Howard’s letters and journal entries also survive, and suggest that her situation really wasn’t so bad.
However, it got worse. Her husband eventually converted to Catholicism too, and got the same treatment from the Queen. But he tried to escape! He was caught and they threw him into the Tower of London. Some of Howard’s writings refer to his plight, and the fact that he died there. Queen Elizabeth was still annoyed with them, so everything Howard was entitled to inherit from her husband was withheld. She had to gradually sell off the land from her (huge) estate, and lived with her children in relative poverty. Although “relative poverty” for a Countess in England in the sixteenth century didn’t at all mean dressing in rags and begging for food.
Anne Howard never remarried, and her inheritance was eventually restored. She spent the rest of her life writing and working to help local people in need. In spite of Catholicism being a crime at that time and place, she stayed a Catholic and even continued to try to convert others. Queen Elizabeth, luckily, appears not to have noticed.
Howard lived to be 73, also unusual for that era, and is remembered chiefly through her writings, which have been published in a number of compilations throughout the 20th Century.
