HOWARD, Charles, Viscount Andover (c.1615-79), of Charlton, Wilts.

A member of the powerful Howard family and grandson of Thomas Howard, 1st earl of Suffolk (d. 1626), Andover owed his brief career in the Commons to the influence of his father, the lord lieutenant of Oxfordshire and (by 1640) high steward of Oxford.17CP; Oxford Council Acts 1626-1665; ‘Thomas Howard, first earl of Suffolk’, Oxford DNB. Perhaps brought up in the Roman Catholicism to which he later certainly adhered, he does not appear to have attended school or university in England but instead spent up to three years travelling abroad from December 1633.18CSP Dom. Addenda, 1625-49, p. 461. It is conceivable that he was little known in Oxford.

While still a youth Andover was evidently moving in court circles and trying his hand at the kind of speculative venture which frequently engaged the earl of Berkshire. Probably in 1633 he and James Livingston, a gentleman of the bedchamber, petitioned Charles I for preferential treatment of their bid for 8,000 acres of land to be disafforested in the Forest of Dean.19CSP Dom. 1633-4, pp. 380-1. Back in London following his sojourn on the continent, in April 1637 Andover reportedly married secretly, and without parental consent, a teenage daughter of the widowed viscountess Savage, although the latter, who had four younger daughters, was alleged to have merely ‘pretended displeasure’.20HMC De L‘Isle and Dudley, 100-1. The following year Andover performed in the masque, Britannia Triumphans.21I. Jones, Britannia Triumphans [(1638), 28]. Royal favour as much as local prominence may have led to his inclusion in June 1638 on the Wiltshire commission of the peace; it certainly lay behind his acquisition by early 1640 of the joint stewardship of Ampthill manor, Bedfordshire.22C231/5, p. 299; CP. If his later protestations of poverty represented reality also at this date – as might be the case given the circumstances of his marriage – then he may have relied on the acquisition of office and perquisites.

Early in 1640 the Howards’ association with the court, and by extension with its more unpopular policies, may have been outweighed in the minds of Oxford electors by earl of Berkshire’s role in supporting the city’s defence of its privileges against perceived encroachment by the university under its chancellor, Archbishop William Laud. Admitted a freeman on 3 March, Andover was the same day elected to Parliament for the city’s senior seat, with Thomas Cooper I*, an alderman with Laudian connections, as his junior partner.23Oxford Council Acts 1626-1665, 90. Once at Westminster, his social position alone may explain his inclusion on the committees for privileges (16 Apr.) and for the bill curbing inappropriate apparell (21 Apr.).24CJ ii. 4a, 8a. There is no other sign of his involvement in proceedings.

Continuing confrontation between town and gown, compounded by national issues, ensured a fiercer contest for the Oxford seats in autumn 1640. In the election of 12 October, Andover had to be content with the junior place, conceding the senior to the more experienced John Whistler*, the city’s recorder.25Oxford Council Acts 1626-1665, 97. While Whistler soon proved a powerful advocate of opposition to royal policies, Andover served on a single committee – again that for privileges (6 Nov.) – in a Commons stint that lasted only a few weeks.26CJ ii. 21a. In a move probably calculated to enhance the crown’s influence in the upper chamber, Andover was summoned to the Lords as Lord Howard of Charlton. The vacancy at Oxford announced on 18 November was supplied by John Smith*, a member of a local brewing family who had been defeated in October.27CJ ii. 30b; Oxford Council Acts 1626-1665, 98.

Andover took his seat in the Lords on 20 November, and until 1648 was usually referred to by contemporaries under his parliamentary title.28LJ iv. 93b. By early 1642 he had been identified as one of a handful of peers particularly close to the king and on 28 February had to admit receipt of a letter from the latter requesting him, notwithstanding previous leave of absence, to attend Parliament to engage in debate on important matters.29LJ iv. 619a. He was one of the nine peers who on 5 June signed a letter to the Lords from York declining a summons to return to the House, and who were impeached by the Commons on 15 June.30CJ ii. 619b, 623a, 625b, 626a, 627b; LJ v. 136a, 140a, 140b, 141a. Meanwhile, like his father, on the 15th he signed the declaration of peers at York that Charles had no intention of going to war; a week later father and son committed themselves to paying for 30 horses for three months to be employed to assist the king.31Clarendon, Hist. ii. 186; CSP Dom. 1641-3, p. 344. With his eight fellows, on 20 July Howard was disabled from sitting or voting in the Lords and committed (in absentia) to the Tower.32LJ v. 219b, 223a, 223b; CSP Dom. 1641-3, pp. 357-8.

Appointed a commissioner of array for Wiltshire, by the autumn Howard had raised his own regiment for the king.33Northants. RO, FH133; Newman, Royalist Officers, 199. Since it was quartered for at least a year at Islip, a few miles north-east of Oxford, he was well placed to participate in royalist deliberations there, and attended the council of war on 14 December.34Royalist Ordnance Pprs. ed. Roy, 174, 179; Jnl. of Sir Samuel Luke ed. Philip, i. 95, 161. He was present at the seige of Bristol in July 1643, wounded at an engagement near Newbury in September, briefly governor of Salisbury at the beginning of October, and a signatory to the peers’ letter sent at the end of November to the Scottish privy council and peace commissioners, disavowing assent to the parliamentary invitation to Scots troops to advance into England.35Mems. of Prince Rupert, 23, 255, 257; Mercurius Aulicus no. 38 (17-23 Sept. 1643), 528 (E.69.18); no. 40 (1-7 Oct. 1643), 559 (E.71.8); Docquets of Letters Patent ed. Black, 79; Clarendon, Hist. iii. 288. A member of the Oxford Parliament, he signed a further missive to the Scots on 1 March 1644 and was still militarily active in Oxfordshire later in the spring, although he had not escaped embroilment in the rivalries endemic in the royalist camp.36Names of the Lords and Commons assembled in the Pretended Parliament assembled at Oxford, January 1643 (1646), sig. A2; A Copy of a Letter from the Members of Both Houses assembled at Oxford (1644), 6 (E.32.3); Jnl. of Sir Samuel Luke, i. 241; CSP Dom. 1644, p. 64; Mercurius Aulicus no. 9 (25 Feb.-2 Mar. 1644), 857 (E.37.26); Whitelocke, Mems. i. 368.

In March 1645, armed with a licence from the king to go to Holland, Howard applied from Oxford to Robert Devereux, 3rd earl of Essex, for a pass which would enable him to settle business at Charlton en route; the request was declined, and it is probable that for the time being he remained in England.37LJ vii. 271a. Presenting himself in London to compound for his delinquency in July 1646, he was briefly detained in the custody of Black Rod, but released on condition of taking the Covenant and on bail of £1,000 of his own money and £500 put up by Edward Wilkinson and Ferdinando Parker of Middlesex.38LJ viii. 391b, 435b, 437b, 446a. Subsequently he was allowed to recover goods from the family house at Ewelme Park and to retire to the country, but he was back in London by 30 March 1647, when a quarrel with his younger brother Thomas Howard* came to the attention of the Lords.39LJ viii. 483a, 485b; ix. 110b, 117a. On 2 April he was finally given a pass to go to Holland.40LJ ix. 119a.

It was to be the first of several visits before the Restoration, undertaken primarily in the service of Prince Charles, to whom he wrote on 18 January 1648 that he intended ‘now … to venture all can be imagined dearest to me with your fortunes, ill, or good’.41HMC Pepys, 207. By that summer the movements of Andover (as he was once again known) had become a matter of concern to the Derby House committee. Following the seizure of correspondence in cipher, in July/August he was temporarily detained at Dover Castle on suspicion of plotting on the prince’s behalf.42CSP Dom. 1648-9, p. 148, 150-1, 185, 188-9, 243; LJ x. 357b, 377a, 379a, 396b, 420a, 436a; Bodl. Tanner 57, ff. 196, 208; Whitelocke, Mems. ii. 355, 385. Having obtained in October a pass to return to England, in July 1649 he compounded on the Exeter articles; a fine of £375 was confirmed in July 1650 on a certificate from Lord Fairfax (Sir Thomas Fairfax*).43LJ x. 536a; CCC 1971. He had already entered a recognisance of £10,000 to the council of state when in August he received a pass to go to Spain for six months, on condition of taking the Engagement.44CSP Dom. 1651, pp. 517, 557. By this time almost certainly known to some as a practising Roman Catholic, in May 1652 Andover was an unwelcome nominee to at least one moderate royalist for the (unnecessary) post of Charles’s ambassador to Rome, while in May 1653 he reported to his royal master from Brussels the conditions on which Catholic clergy from Holland and north Germany would assist the cause; he may have been dabbling in schemes without official sanction.45Nicholas Pprs. i. 296. He had further passes to go abroad in December 1654 and (to Antwerp) in November 1655; Henry Manning, spying for John Thurloe* when he was arrested at Cologne in December 1655 named Andover as one of the sources of ‘fancies’ he had reported home.46CSP Dom. 1654, p. 443; 1655-6, p. 575; Nicholas Pprs. iii. 151. In May 1658 he was in Paris, and that year was named as a colonel of proposed insurrectionary forces.47CSP Dom. 1658-9, p. 12; Bodl. Eng. hist. e. 309, p. 5. Intelligence suggested that he participated with his sister, Lady Mary Howard, in plans for risings in the summer of 1659; by September he had returned to England and lived sometimes at Isleworth.48CCSP iv. 365.

After the Restoration Andover was for a while a gentleman of the bedchamber, but the pension of £1,000 a year awarded in June 1660 was by the later 1660s paid in lieu of his place.49CCSP v. 15; CSP Dom. 1660-1, pp. 523, 555; CTB i. 217-32, 456-65; ii. 243, 251, 260, 271, 275, 359, 584, 617. He petitioned in 1664, still as of the bedchamber, that he was ‘upon the uttermost confines of starving’ and subsequently received additional free gifts.50CSP Dom. 1664-5, pp. 22, 334, 356. Already a ratepayer in Bow Street, London, by about 1667, he apparently continued there some time after succeeding his father as earl of Berkshire in 1669, but it was at the hospital of La Charité in Paris that he died in April 1679; he was also buried there.51Survey of London ed. F. H. W. Sheppard, viii (1970), 185-92; CP. He was survived by his wife and executrix, but not the son referred to by his mother-in-law in 1640.52CSP Dom. 1639-40, p. 486; PROB11/360/57. His title went to his next brother, Thomas, while it was left to their other brothers Philip Howard* and Sir Robert Howard* to sit in the Commons.