Church of St John Maddermarket
Monument to Margaret Duchess of Norfolk †1563. Marble. Nave, north central under windows. Commissioned John Lord Howard of Walden, 1791, restored by Thomas, Lord Howard-de-Walden in 1903 Attributed to De Carle.
The large inscription is set on a curved striated sarcophagus with lions’ feet in front of a dark hexagon. The Duchess’s coat of arms are displayed under a coronet above. Lady Margaret (1540-1563) was the eighteen-year-old widow of Lord Henry Dudley and sole heir of Thomas, Lord Audley of Walden at the time of her marriage in 1559 to her cousin Lord Thomas Howard, the 4th Duke, following papal dispensation. She was his second wife. The monument made good the omission of any surviving commemoration for Lady Margaret, who had been buried in St John Maddermarket: ‘In 1563, on the 7th of Feb. at night, in the Duke's palace in this parish, died the virtuous Lady Margaret Duchess of Norfolk daughter of the Lord Audley, second wife to Thomas Duke of Norfolk, who was beheaded by Queen Elizabeth, and was solemnly buried on the north side of the choir of this church, on the 18th of Feb. the singing men, priests, and dean, went before in the procession.’ (Francis Blomefield, 'City of Norwich, chapter 42: Middle Wimer ward', in An Essay Towards A Topographical History of the County of Norfolk: Volume 4, the History of the City and County of Norwich, Part II (London, 1806), pp. 287-329). Maddermarket, she appears not to have been commemorated. Blomefield’s account of the ceremony suggests that she may have been buried in the chancel, before it was removed, most was probably removed in the 16th, as argued by Pevsner. The removal of the chancel may be datable after the execution of her disgraced husband in 1572. She is commemorated in one of the grand Howard monuments at Framlingham, besides his first wife, leaving an empty space between them for the Duke.
Duke’s Palace was sited on what is now Duke Street, next to St John Maddermarket. The Duke acted like ‘a regional prince. Norfolk was his ‘country’ and, according to Camden, ‘when he was in his Tennis court at Norwich, he thought himselfe in a manner equall with some Kings’ (Camden, Historie, 130). He conducted himself in regal manner. He was the protector and patron of an East Anglian gentry network. In 1562 three earls, other peers, and many knights and ladies lodged at his Norwich palace and were sumptuously entertained.’
C.L.S Linnell and S.J Wearing, Norfolk Church Monument, Ipswich, 1952, p. 35; Michael A. R. Graves, ‘Howard, Thomas, fourth duke of Norfolk (1538–1572)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004; online edn, Jan 2008; Nikolaus Pevsner and Bill Wilson, Buildings of England. Norfolk 1: Norwich and North-East, New Haven and London, 1997, p. 240; D.P. Mortlock, The Guide to Suffolk Churches, Cambridge, 2009, p.184; F. Meeres, A History of Norwich, Chichester, 1998, pp.93-94
