VOLUME XIII SLICE VII Horticulture to Hudson Bay (continued 9)
Reading edition
If American cities have nothing to learn from other countries in regard to bad housing, they have nothing to teach in the way of reform. They are following Europe slowly and a long distance behind. There is no serious attempt to deal with insanitary areas as they have been dealt with in England, or to prevent the creation of new ones by regulation and planning of extensions as in Germany, or to promote the provision of superior houses by organized public effort as in several countries. A little has been done in New York to improve the worst housing. A Tenement House Act was passed after the report of the Commission of 1895 and a Department formed to give effect to it. Some cleansing and repairing and insertion of windows is carried out every year, but more attention seems to be paid to fire escapes. Societies for providing improved dwellings exist in New York, Boston, Chicago and Philadelphia. The oldest is one formed in Boston in 1871, called the Co-operative Building Company; it was followed in 1876 by an Improved Dwellings Company in Brooklyn, and in 1879 by a similar society in Manhattan, and in 1885 by another in Boston. The largest concern of the kind is the City and Suburban Houses Company in New York, formed in 1896 under the guidance of Dr E. R. L. Gould; it has built four groups of tenements housing 1238 families in the city and 112 houses on a suburban estate at Brooklyn; in all it has housed some 6000 persons. More recently Mr Henry Phipps has given £200,000 for the provision of model dwellings in New York, and a building has been erected on the plan of the Maison des Enfants in Paris. In Chicago the City Houses Association works at housing reforms in various ways. There are some other institutions of a like kind, but the aggregate results are inconsiderable. Two other building agencies have done far more in the United States than philanthropic societies; these are the building and loan associations and private employers. The former are co-operative provident societies; they are widely diffused throughout the United States and their operations are on a very large scale. They date from 1831, when the Oxford Provident Building Association was formed at Frankfort, near Philadelphia. Pennsylvania has still the largest number of associations, but from 1843 onwards the movement spread rapidly and continuously in other states. The high-water mark appears to have been reached in 1897, when the total assets of the associations amounted to about £133,000,000. In 1905 there were 5326 associations with an aggregate membership of 1,686,611 and assets of about £130,000,000. The states of Pennsylvania and Ohio head the list, but the movement is very strong in many others. It accounts for the comparatively large number of houses owned by working-class families in the United States. With regard to housing by employers, no comprehensive information is available, but the total amount is certainly considerable though probably not so large as in Germany or in France. Some of the better-known instances are the Pelzer Manufacturing Company at Pelzer in South Carolina, which has built about 1000 dwellings; the Maryland Steel Company at Sparrows Point, Maryland, 800 dwellings; Ludlow Manufacturing Associates at Ludlow, Mass., 500 dwellings; Whitin Machine Works at Whitinsville, Mass., 600 dwellings; Westinghouse Air Brake Co. at Wilmerding, Penn., 360 dwellings; Draper Co., Hopedale, Mass., 250 dwellings. These are all more or less “model” settlements, not in cities, but in outlying or country places, where works have been established, and that is generally true of housing by employers in the United States, whereas in Germany much has been provided by them in the large towns. Rents are very much higher in American cities than in European towns of comparable size and character.
Authorities.—Board of Trade Reports—“Cost of Living of the Working Classes (England)” (1908); “Cost of Living in German Towns” (1908); “Cost of Living in French Towns” (1909). Proceedings of International Housing Congress (London, 1907); The New Encyclopaedia of Social Reform; E. R. Dewsnup, The Housing Problem in England; T. C. Horsfall, The Example of Germany; J. S. Nettlefold, Practical Housing Reform; A. Shadwell, Industrial Efficiency, ch. xi. on “Housing”; W. Thompson, The Housing Handbook, Housing up to Date.
(A. Sl.)
HOUSMAN, LAURENCE (1867- ), English writer and artist, was born on the 18th of June 1867. Having studied at South Kensington, he first made a reputation as a book-illustrator. Some of his best pictorial work may be seen in the editions of Meredith’s Jump to Glory Jane (1892), the Weird Tales of Jonas Lie (1892), Jane Barlow’s Land of Elfintoun (1894), Christina Rossetti’s Goblin Market (1893), Werewolf (1896), by his sister, Miss Clemence Housman, Shelley’s Sensitive Plant (1898), and his own Farm in Fairyland (1894). His designs were engraved on wood by Miss Housman. His volumes of verse include Green Arras (1896), Rue (1899), Spikenard (1898) and Mendicant Rhymes (1906); and the mysticism which characterizes the devotional poems in Spikenard recurs in his half-allegorical tales, All Fellows (1896), The Blue Moon (1904) and The Cloak of Friendship (1906). His nativity play, Bethlehem, was presented in the Great Hall of London University at South Kensington for a week in December 1902. In 1900 he published anonymously An Englishwoman’s Love Letters, which created a temporary sensation; and he followed this essay in popular fiction by the novels A Modem Antaeus (1901) and Sabrina Warham (1904). On the 23rd of December 1904 his fantastic play Prunella, written in collaboration with Mr Granville Barker, was produced at the Court Theatre.
His brother, Alfred Edward Housman (b. 1859), an accomplished scholar, professor of Latin at University College, London, is known as a poet by his striking lyrical series, A Shropshire Lad (1896).
HOUSSAYE, ARSÈNE (1815-1896), French novelist, poet and man of letters, was born at Bruyères (Aisne), near Laon, on the 28th of March 1815. His real surname was Housset. In 1832 he found his way to Paris, and in 1836 he published two novels, La Couronne de bluets and La Pécheresse. He had many friends in Paris, among them Jules Janin and Théophile Gautier, and he wrote in collaboration with Jules Sandeau. He produced art criticism in L’Histoire de la peinture flamande et hollandaise (1846); semi-historical sketches In Mlle de la Vallière et Mme de Montespan (1860) and Galerie de portraits du XVIIe siècle (1844); literary criticism in Le Roi Voltaire (1858) and his famous satirical Histoire du quarante et unième fauteuil de l’académie française (1855); drama in his Comédiennes (1857); poetry in his Symphonie des vingt ans (1867), Cent et un sonnets (1873), &c.; and novels, Les Filles d’Ève (1852) and many others. In 1849, through the influence of Rachel, he was entrusted with the administration of the Théâtre Français, a position he filled with unfailing tact and success until 1859, when he was made inspector-general of works of art. He died on the 26th of February 1896.
His Confessions, souvenir; d’un démi-siècle appeared in 1885-1891. See also J. Lemaître, Arsène Houssaye (1897), with a bibliography.
His son, Henry Houssaye (1848- ), the historian, was born in Paris. His early writings were devoted to classical antiquity, studied not only in books but on the actual Greek sites which he visited in 1868. He published successively Histoire d’Apelles (1867), a study on Greek art; L’Armée dans la Grèce antique (1867); Histoire d’Alcibiade et de la république athénienne depuis la mort de Périclès jusqu’à l’avènement des trente tyrans (1873); Papers on Le Nombre des citoyens d’Athènes au Vème siècle avant l’ère chrétienne (1882); La Loi agraire à Sparte (1884); Le Premier Siège de Paris en 52 av. J.-C. (1876); and two volumes of miscellanies, Athènes, Rome, Paris, l’histoire et les mœurs (1879), and Aspasie, Cléopatre, Théodora (6th ed. 1889). The military history of Napoleon I. then attracted him. His first volume on this subject, called 1814 (1888), went through no fewer than forty-six editions. It was followed by 1815, the first part of which comprises the first Restoration, the return from Elba and the Hundred Days (1893); the second part, Waterloo (1899); and the third part, the second abdication and the White Terror (1905). He was elected a member of the French Academy in 1895.
HOUSTON, SAM, or Samuel (1793-1863), American general and statesman, of Scotch-Irish descent, was born near Lexington, Virginia, on the 2nd of March 1793. His father, who had fought in the War of Independence, died in 1806, and soon afterward Samuel removed with his mother to the frontier in Blount county, Tennessee. When he was about fifteen his elder brothers obtained for him a place as clerk in a trader’s store, but he ran away and lived with the Cherokee Indians of East Tennessee for nearly three years. On his return he opened a country school, and later attended a session or two of the Academy at Maryville. During the War of 1812 he served under Andrew Jackson against the Creek Indians, and his bravery at the battle of Tohopeka, in which he was disabled by several wounds, won promotion to a lieutenancy. In 1817 he was appointed sub-agent in managing the business relating to the removal of the Cherokees from East Tennessee to a reservation in what is now Arkansas, but he was offended at a rebuke from John C. Calhoun, then secretary of war, for appearing before him in Indian garments, as well as at an inquiry into charges affecting his official integrity, and he resigned in 1818. He entered a law office in Nashville, and was admitted to the bar, and was soon elected a district attorney. From 1823 to 1827 Houston represented the ninth district of Tennessee in Congress, and in 1827 was elected governor of the state by the Jackson Democrats. He married Eliza Allen in January 1829; his wife left him three months later, and he resigned his office of governor, again took up his residence among the Cherokees, who were at this time about to remove to Indian Territory, and was formally adopted a member of their nation.
In 1830 and again in 1832 he visited Washington to expose the frauds practised upon the Cherokees by government agents, and attracted national attention by an encounter on the 13th of April 1832 with William Stanberry, a Congressman from Ohio, who intimated that Houston himself was seeking to defraud them. Commissioned by President Jackson, Houston went to Texas in December 1832 to negotiate treaties with the Indian tribes there for the protection of American traders on the border. He decided to remain in Texas, and was elected a delegate to the constitutional convention which met at San Felipe on the 1st of April 1833 to draw up a memorial to the Mexican Congress asking for the separation of Texas from Coahuila, in which the anti-American party was in control, as well as to frame a constitution for the commonwealth as a new member of the Mexican Republic, and he served as chairman of the drafting committee, and took a prominent part in the preparations for war when next year the petition was refused. In October 1835, soon after the outbreak of the War for Texan Independence, the committees of the township of Nacogdoches chose Houston as commander-in-chief of the forces in eastern Texas, and after the San Felipe convention in November he was chosen commander-in-chief of the Texan army. On the 21st of April 1836, while in command of 743 raw troops, he met on the bank of the San Jacinto about 1600 Mexican veterans led by Santa Anna and completely routed them; on the next day Santa Anna was taken prisoner.
Texan independence was won by this victory (although the Mexican government repudiated the treaty negotiated by Santa Anna), and Houston was elected president of Texas (1st of September) and was inaugurated on the 22nd of October. His term expired in December 1838; he was elected again in 1841 and served until 1844. During his first term a newly founded city was named in his honour and this was the seat of government in 1837-39 and in 1842-45. Texas having been admitted as a state of the American Union in 1845, Houston was elected one of its first two United States senators. He served as a stalwart Union Democrat from March 1846 until 1859; he opposed the Kansas-Nebraska bill in an able speech (3rd March 1854), and spoke frequently in defence of the rights of the Indians. In 1859 he was elected governor of Texas and tried to prevent the secession of his state; upon his refusal, in March 1861, to swear allegiance to the Confederacy he was declared deposed. He died at Huntsville, Texas, on the 26th of July 1863. Houston was an able soldier, wary, intrepid and resolute; and was a legislator of rare foresight, cool discrimination and fearless candour.
See A. M. Williams, Sam Houston and the War of Independence in Texas (Boston, 1893); Henry Bruce, Life of General Houston (New York, 1891); and W. C. Crane, Life and Select Literary Remains of Sam Houston (Philadelphia, 1884).
HOUSTON, a city and the county-seat of Harris county, Texas, U.S.A., at the head of deep-sea navigation on Buffalo Bayou, a tributary of Galveston Bay, 50 m. N.W. of Galveston, and about 325 m. W. of New Orleans. Pop. (1880) 16,513; (1890) 27,557; (1900) 44,633, of whom 4415 were foreign-born and 14,608 were negroes; (1910 census) 78,800. The land area in 1906 was 16.02 sq. m.; in 1908, about 20 sq. m. It is served by the Galveston, Harrisburg & San Antonio (Southern Pacific), the Galveston, Houston & Henderson, the Gulf, Colorado & Santa Fe, the Houston & Texas Central (Southern Pacific), the Houston, East & West Texas, the International & Great Northern, the Missouri, Kansas & Texas, the San Antonio & Aransas Pass, the Trinity & Brazos Valley, the St Louis, Brownsville & Mexico, the Texas & New Orleans, and the Houston Belt & Terminal railways, several of which have their headquarters at Houston. The Federal government has greatly improved the natural channel from the city to the Gulf of Mexico, straightening, widening and deepening it to a depth of 25 ft. for the entire distance from the Galveston jetties to the Houston turning basin—where the municipality has constructed free municipal wharves. The city occupies an unusually fine site on both sides of the Buffalo Bayou. Among the principal buildings are a Carnegie library, the Houston Lyceum, the Federal building, the Masonic temple, the city high school, the city hall and market house, the Harris County Court House, the Cotton Exchange, and the First and Commercial National banks. Houston is the seat of the Texas Dental College, of St Thomas College (1903), and of the Houston, Annunciation and St Agnes academies; and the will (1901) of William Marsh Rice provided an endowment (valued in 1908 at about $7,000,000) for the William M. Rice Institute for the Advancement of Literature, Science and Art, of which Dr Edgar Odell Lovett, formerly professor of mathematics (1900-1905) and of astronomy (1905-1908) in Princeton University, was made president in 1908. The city is the most important railway and shipping centre of South Texas, and has a large trade in cotton (the receipts for the year ending Aug. 31, 1907 being 2,967,535 bales), cotton-seed oil, sugar, rice,1 lumber and citrus fruits. Houston is important also as a manufacturing centre, its factory product being valued at $13,564,019 in 1905, an increase of 81% over the factory product in 1900. There are extensive railway car-shops, cotton-seed oil, petroleum and sugar refineries, cotton gins and compresses, steel rolling mills, car-wheel factories, boiler, pump and engine works, flour mills, rice mills and a rice elevator, breweries, planing and saw-mills, pencil factories, and brick and tile factories. Its proximity to the Texas oil fields gives the city a cheap factory fuel. The assessed valuation of taxable property in the city increased from $27,480,898 in 1900 to $51,513,615 in 1908. The No-Tsu Oh Carnival week each November is a distinctive feature of the city. Houston, like Galveston, adopted in 1905 a very successful system of municipal government by commission, a commission of five (one of whom acts as mayor) being elected biennially and having both executive and legislative powers. The waterworks are owned and operated by the municipality, which greatly improved them from the city’s surplus under the first two years of government by commission. In 1908 extensive improvements in paving, drainage and sewerage were undertaken by the city. The payment of an annual poll-tax of $2.50 is a prerequisite to voting. Houston was settled and laid out in 1836, and was named in honour of General Sam Houston, whose home in Caroline Street was standing in 1908. In 1837-1839 and in 1842-1845 Houston was the capital of the Republic of Texas. About 15 m. E.S.E. of the city is the battleground of San Jacinto, which was bought by the state in 1906 for a public memorial park.
1 Much rice is cultivated in the vicinity of Houston by Japanese farmers.
HOUWALD, CHRISTOPH ERNST, Freiherr von (1778-1845), German dramatist and author, was born at Straupitz in Lower Lusatia, a son of the president of the district court of justice, on the 28th of November 1778. He studied law at the university of Halle, and on completion of his academic studies returned home, married, and managed the family estates. In 1816 he afforded a home to his friend K. W. S. Contessa (1777-1825), himself a poet, who had met with serious reverses of fortune; Contessa lived with Houwald, assisting and stimulating him in his literary work, for eight years. In 1821 Houwald was unanimously elected syndic for Lower Lusatia, an office which placed him at the head of the administration of the province. He died at Neuhaus, near Lübben, on the 28th of January 1845.
Houwald is remembered as the author of several so-called “Fate tragedies” (see German Literature), of which the best known are Das Bild, Der Leuchtturm, Die Heimkehr, Fluch und Segen (all published in 1821). They have, however, small literary value, and Houwald is seen to better advantage in his narratives and books for juvenile readers, such as Romantische Akkorde (publ. by W. Contessa, Berlin, 1817); Buch für Kinder gebildeter Stände (1819-1824); and Jakob Thau, der Hofnarr (1821). Houwald’s collected works, Sämtliche Werke, were published in five volumes (Leipzig, 1851; 2nd ed., 1858-1859). See J. Minor, Die Schicksalstragödie in ihren Hauptvertretern (Frankfurt, 1883), and Das Schicksalsdrama in Kürschner’s Deutsche Nationalliteratur; vol. cli. (Stuttgart, 1884); O. Schmidtborn, C. E. von Houwald als Dramatiker (1909).
HÒVA, the name originally applied to the middle-class Malayo-Indonesian natives of Madagascar (q.v.), as distinct from the noble class Andrìana and the slave class Andèvo. Hòva has now come to mean the most numerous and powerful of the tribes which form the native population of Madagascar. The Hòva, who occupy the province of Imérina, the central plateau of the island, are of Malayo-Indonesian origin. The period at which the Hòva arrived in Madagascar is still a subject of dispute. Some think that the immigration took place in very early times, before Hinduism reached the Malay Archipelago, since no trace of Sanskrit is found in Malagasy. Others believe that the Hòva did not reach the island until the 12th or 13th century. At the French conquest of Madagascar (1895), the Hòva were the most powerful and, politically, the dominant people; but were far from having subjected the whole of the island to their rule. The Hòva are short and slim, with a complexion of a yellowish olive, many being fairer than the average of southern Europeans. Their hair is long, black and smooth but coarse. Their heads are round, with flat straight foreheads, flat faces, prominent cheekbones, small straight noses, fairly wide nostrils, and small black and slightly oblique eyes. The physical contrast to the negro is usually very obvious, but, especially among the lower classes, there is a tendency to thick lips, kinky hair and dark skin. In many of their customs, such as taboo, infanticide, marriage and funeral rites, they show their Indonesian origin. Most of them now profess Christianity.
HOVE, a municipal borough of Sussex, England, adjoining the watering-place of Brighton on the west, on the London, Brighton, & South Coast railway. Pop. (1901) 36,535. The great seawall of Brighton continues along the front at Hove, forming a pleasant promenade. Here is the Sussex county cricket ground. The municipal borough, incorporated in 1898, includes the parishes of Hove and Aldrington, of which the first is within the parliamentary borough of Brighton, but the second is in the Lewes division of the county. The corporation consists of a mayor, 10 aldermen and 30 councillors. Area, 1521 acres.
HOVENDEN, THOMAS (1840-1895), American artist, was born in Dunmanway, Co. Cork, Ireland, on the 28th of December 1840. He was a pupil of the South Kensington Art Schools and those of the National Academy of Design, New York, whither he had removed in 1863. Subsequently he went to Paris and studied in the École des Beaux Arts under Cabanel, but passed most of his time with the American colony in Brittany, at Pont-Aven, where he painted many pictures of the peasantry. Returning to America in 1880, he became an academician in 1882, and attracted attention by an important canvas of “The Last Moments of John Brown” (now in the Metropolitan Museum of Art). His “Breaking Home Ties,” a picture of American farm life, was engraved with considerable popular success. Hovenden was mortally injured in a heroic effort to save a child from a railroad train in the station at Germantown, near Philadelphia, and died at Norristown, Pennsylvania, on the 14th of August 1895. Among his principal works are:—“News from the Conscript” (1877), “Loyalist Peasant Soldier of La Vendée” (1879). “A Breton Interior,” “Image Seller” and “Jerusalem the Golden” (in the Metropolitan Museum of Art).
HOW, WILLIAM WALSHAM (1823-1897), English divine, son of a Shrewsbury solicitor, was born on the 13th of December 1823, and was educated at Shrewsbury school and Wadham College, Oxford. He was ordained in 1846, and for upwards of thirty years was actively engaged in parish work at Whittington in Shropshire and Oswestry (rural dean, 1860). He refused preferment on several occasions, but his energy and success made him well known, and in 1879 he became a suffragan bishop in London, under the title of bishop of Bedford, his province being the East End. There he became the inspiring influence of a revival of church work. He founded the East London Church Fund, and enlisted a large band of enthusiastic helpers, his popularity among all classes being immense. He was particularly fond of children, and was commonly called “the children’s bishop.” In 1888 he was made bishop of Wakefield, and in the north of England he continued to do valuable work. His sermons were straightforward, earnest and attractive; and besides publishing several volumes of these, he wrote a good deal of verse, including such well-known hymns as “Who is this so weak and helpless,” “Lord, Thy children guide and keep.” In 1863-1868 he brought out a Commentary on the Four Gospels; and he also wrote a Manual for the Holy Communion. In the movement for infusing new spiritual life into the church services, especially among the poor, How was a great force. He died on the 10th of August 1897. He was much helped in his earlier work by his wife. Frances A. Douglas (d. 1887).
See his Life by his son, F. D. How (1898).
HOWARD (Family). Among English families, the house of Howard has long held the first place. Its head, the duke of Norfolk, is the first of the dukes and the hereditary earl marshal of England, while the earls of Suffolk, Carlisle and Effingham and the Lord Howard of Glossop represent in the peerage its younger lines.
Its founder was a Norfolk lawyer, William Howard or Haward, who was summoned to parliament as a justice in 1295, being appointed a justice of the common pleas in 1297. Over the parentage of this man genealogists have disputed for centuries. The pedigree-makers have hailed him in turn as the descendant of a Norman “Auber, earl of Passy” and as the heir of Hereward, “the last of the English.” But out of the copies of Norfolk deeds and records collected for Thomas, earl of Arundel, in the early part of the 17th century, it seems clear enough that he sprang from a Norfolk family, several of whose members held lands at Wiggenhall near Lynn. These notes from deeds, evidently collected by an honest inquirer, make no extravagant claims of ancient ancestry or illustrious origin for the Howards, although the facts contained in them were recklessly manipulated by subservient genealogists. Doubtless the judge was the son of John Howard of Wiggenhall, living about 1260, whose widow Lucy, called by the genealogists the daughter of John Germund, was probably the wife of John Germund by her second marriage. William Howard was employed as counsel by the corporation of Lynn, and it is worthy of note that the “crosslets fitchy” in his shield of arms suggest the cross with which the dragon was discomfited by St Margaret, the patroness of Lynn. Prospering by the law, William Howard of Wiggenhall rose to knight’s rank and acquired by purchase Grancourt’s manor in East Winch, near Lynn, where he had his seat in a moated house whose ruins remain. He was probably dead and buried in his chapel at East Winch before November 27, 1308, the date of the patent by which Henry Scrope succeeded him as a commissioner of trailbaston. His two wives, Alice Ufford and Alice Fitton—heir of Fitton’s manor in Wiggenhall—were both daughters of knightly houses. Before his death his eldest son, John Howard, was a knight and already advanced by his marriage with Joan of Cornwall, one of the bastard line founded by Richard of Cornwall, king of the Romans.
Sir John Howard served in Edward II.’s wars in Scotland and Gascony, was sheriff of Norfolk and Suffolk and governor of Norwich Castle. When he died in 1331 he was seised of many Norfolk manors. His son and heir, another Sir John, admiral of the king’s navy in the north, was a banneret who displayed his banner in the army that laid siege to Calais. By the admiral’s wife Alice, sister and heir of Sir Robert de Boys, the Howards had the Boys manor of Fersfield, near Diss, which is still among the possessions of the dukes of Norfolk. His son Sir Robert Howard, who had married a daughter of Sir Robert Scales (Lord Scales), died in 1388. From Sir John Howard, the only son of Sir Robert, two branches of the house of Howard spring. The elder line was soon extinct. By his first wife, Margaret, daughter and heir of Sir John Plays, Sir John Howard had a son who died before him, leaving a daughter through whom descended to her issue, the Veres, earls of Oxford, the ancient Norfolk estates of the Howards at East Winch and elsewhere, with the lands of the houses of Scales, Plays and Walton, brought in by the brides of her forefathers. After the death of Margaret Plays, her widower found, with the peculiar instinct of his race, a second well-endowed wife. By her, the heir of the Tendrings of Tendring, he had a second son, Sir Robert Howard, a knight who fought under Henry V. in France, and died, like his half-brother, before the old knight’s career ended in 1436.
It is to the marriage of this young knight that the house of Howard owes the tragedy of its greatness. He was a younger son, although he had some of his mother’s inheritance. Had he married the landless daughter of a neighbour he might have been the ancestor of a line of Essex squires, whose careers would have had the parish topographer for chronicler. But his bride was Margaret Mowbray, daughter of the banished duke of Norfolk. Although this was a noble alliance, it is probable that the lady had no great portion. The head of her elder brother, the boy earl marshal, had been stricken off in the cornfield under the walls of York, but her younger brother’s right to his father’s dukedom was allowed by parliament in 1425.
Sir John Howard, only son of the match between Howard and Mowbray, took service with his cousin the third duke of Norfolk, who had him returned as knight of the shire for Norfolk, where, according to the Paston Letters, this Howard of the Essex branch was regarded by the gentry as a strange man. He followed the White Rose and was knighted at the crowning of King Edward IV., who pricked him for sheriff of Norfolk and Suffolk. In the duke’s quarrel he brawled with the Pastons, his wife boasting that, should her husband’s men meet with John Paston “there should go no penny for his life.” “And Howard,” writes Clement Paston, “hath with the king a great fellowship.” Offices and lands came to John Howard by reason of that fellowship. Henry VI., when restored, summoned him to parliament in 1470 as Lord Howard, a summons which may have been meant to lure him to London into Warwick’s power, but he proclaimed the Yorkist sovereign on his return and fought at Barnet and Tewkesbury. When peace was made, Edward summoned him again as a baron and gave him the Garter and the treasurership of his household. After Edward’s burial, at which he bore the king’s banner, Howard, an enemy of the Wydviles, linked his fortunes with those of the duke of Gloucester. At this time came his sudden lifting to the highest rank in the peerage. The last of the dukes of Norfolk had left a child heir, Anne Mowbray, married to the infant duke of York, the younger of the princes doomed by Richard in the Tower. By the death of this little girl, John Howard became one of the coheirs of her illustrious house, which was now represented by the issue of Margaret Mowbray, his mother, and of her sister Isabel, who had married James, Lord Berkeley. A lion’s share of the Mowbray estates, swollen by the great alliances of the house, heir of Breouse and Segrave, and, through Segrave, of Thomas of Brotherton, son of Edward I., fell to Howard, who, by a patent of June 28, 1483, was created duke of Norfolk and earl marshal of England with a remainder to the heirs male of his body. On the same day the lord Berkeley, the other coheir, was made earl of Nottingham. High steward at Richard’s crowning, the duke bore the crown and rode as marshal into Westminster Hall. For the rest of his life he was Richard’s man, and though warned by the famous couplet that “Dykon his master” was bought and sold, “Jack of Norfolk” led the archer vanguard at Bosworth and died in the fight, from which his son the earl of Surrey was carried away a wounded prisoner. An attainder by the first parliament of Henry VII. extinguished the honours of the father with those of the son, who had been created an earl when the lord Howard was raised to the dukedom. Their estates were forfeit.
Thomas Howard, a politic mind, loyal to the powers that be, was released from the Tower of London in 1489, his earldom of Surrey and his Garter restored. Accepting the position in which the Tudor king would have his great nobles, he became the faithful soldier, diplomatist and official of the new power. In his seventieth year, as lieutenant-general of the North, he led the English host on the great day of Flodden, earning a patent of the dukedom of Norfolk, dated 1 February 1513/4, and that strange patent which granted to him and his heirs that they should bear in the midst of the silver bend of their Howard shield a demi-lion stricken in the mouth with an arrow, in the right colours of the arms of the king of Scotland. This augmentation has been interpreted as a golden scocheon with the demi-lion within the Scottish tressure. Thus charged on the silver bend, it makes bad armory and it is worthy of note that, although the grant of it is clearly to the duke and his heirs in fee simple, Howards of all branches descending from the duke bear it in their shields, even though all right to it has long passed from the house to the duke’s heirs general, the Stourtons and Petres.
The victor of Flodden is the common ancestor of all living Howards that can show a descent from the main stock. The second duke, twice married, was father of at least eleven sons and six daughters, the sons including Edward the lord high admiral, killed in boarding Prégent’s galleys at Brest, Edmund the knight marshal of the army at Flodden, and William the first Lord Howard of Effingham. The eldest son, Thomas, succeeded as the third duke of his name, although the second under the patent of 1514. He had fought as captain of the vanguard at Flodden and after the victory was created earl of Surrey. When Richard III. was allying himself with the Howards, Thomas Howard, a boy of eleven, had been betrothed to Anne, daughter of the late King Edward IV., and Henry VII. allowed the marriage with his queen’s sister to take place in 1495. This royal bride died of consumption, leaving no living child, and her husband took in 1513, as his second wife, Elizabeth Stafford, daughter of that duke of Buckingham upon whom the old duke of Norfolk, the tears upon his cheeks, was forced to pass sentence of death. Succeeding his father in 1524, Norfolk was created earl marshal in 1533. An unsuccessful diplomatist, his chief services in arms were the butchery in the north after the Pilgrimage of Grace and the raid into Scotland which ended with the rout of Solway Moss. He left his wife for a mistress, Elizabeth Holland, was in discord with his family, and lived to see his two nieces, Anne Boleyn and Catherine Howard, and his son Surrey, the fiery-tempered poet, go in turn to the block. He himself was attainted and was lying a prisoner in the Tower, doomed to die in the morning, on the night of the death of Henry VIII. He was not released until the accession of Mary, parliament restoring his dukedom on his petition for reversal of the attainder. His grandson Thomas succeeded him in 1554, and in 1556 made the second of those marriages which have given the Howards their high place among the English nobility. The bride was Mary, sole heir in her issue of her father Henry, the last of the Fitzalan earls of Arundel. Her father’s line and the royal Stewards of Scotland sprang from one forefather, Alan, son of Flaald the Breton. The Mowbray match had already brought to the Howards the representation of an elder line of the Fitzalan earls, who sat in the seats of their ancestors, the Aubignys and Warennes, great earls near akin to their sovereigns. And now the younger line, earls of Arundel and Lords Mautravers, were also to have a Howard to represent them. From this time the spreading genealogy of the Howards drew its origins from most of the illustrious names of the houses founded after the Norman Conquest.
The young duchess died in her seventeenth year after giving birth to a son, and the duke took a second wife from a humble stock, newly enriched and honoured, the daughter of Henry VIII.’s subservient chancellor, the Lord Audley of Walden. Within ten years he married a third time, the lady being Elizabeth Leybourne, the widow of Lord Dacre of Gilsland. She survived her marriage but a few months and her husband then obtained the wardship of her Dacre offspring, a son who died young, and three daughters whom the duke, with the true Howard eye for a rich inheritance, gave as brides to three of his sons. After three such good fortunes by marriage Norfolk in his folly looked for a crown with a fourth match, listening to the laird of Lethington when he set forth the scheme by which the duke was to marry a restored queen of Scots and rule Scotland with her who should be recognized as Elizabeth’s successor. Ten months in the Tower under strong suspicion would have warned another man, but Norfolk was unstable and false. After promising fidelity and the abandonment of the Scots marriage scheme, Cecil took him corresponding with Mary and tampering with the Ridolfi plot. He died on Tower Hill in 1572 for an example to the disloyal counties, protesting innocence and repentance, warning his children in a last letter to discredit all “false bruits” that he was a papist.
By his attainder the Norfolk titles were once more forfeited. But Philip Howard, the son and heir, succeeded to the ancient earldom of Arundel in 1580, on the death of his maternal grandfather, while the Lord Lumley, his uncle by marriage, surrendered to him his life interest in the castle and honour of Arundel. The next year an act of parliament restored the earl in blood. After a profligate youth at court, he followed his wife in professing the Roman faith, and in 1585 made an attempt to leave England to seek safety from the penal laws. But his ship was boarded in the Channel and the earl, condemned by the Star-Chamber to a heavy fine and to imprisonment during the queen’s pleasure, suffered a harsh captivity in the Tower. After the defeat of the Armada he had been condemned to death on a charge of high treason, founded on the tale drawn by torture from a priest, that Arundel had urged him to say a mass for the success of the Spaniards. But he was allowed to linger in his prison until 1595 when he died, the sight of his wife and children being cruelly refused to the dying man. Thus it befell that, of the chiefs of the Howards born since the great Mowbray alliance, two had died by the axe and one in the prison from which a fourth had hardly escaped. A fifth had fallen in a lost battle, and only one had died in peace in his own house.
The ill fate of the Howards seemed to be appeased by the death of Philip, earl of Arundel. Tudor policy did its work well, and noblemen, however illustrious their pedigrees, could no longer be counted as menaces by the Crown, which was, indeed, finding another rival to its power. In the first year of James I., Thomas, the young son of Earl Philip, was restored in blood and given the titles of Arundel and Surrey. But the lands belonging to these titles remained with the Crown and he had to repair his fortunes by one of those marriages which never failed his house, his wife being Alathea Talbot, who was at last the heir of Gilbert, earl of Shrewsbury. To the grief of his mother he left the Roman church. A knight of the Garter, he was in 1621 created earl marshal for life, and revived the jurisdiction belonging to the office. An act of 1627, one of several such aimed at aggrandizing families by diverting the descent of dignities in fee from heirs general, entailed the earldom and castle of Arundel upon Thomas, earl of Arundel and Surrey and the heirs male of his body “and for default of such issue, to the heirs of his body.” His pride and austerity made him unpopular at court and he left the country in 1642, settling at last in Padua, where he died in 1646, impoverished by the sequestrations of the parliament, whose forces had taken and retaken his castle of Arundel. In answer to his petition for the dukedom, the king had, on the 6th of June 1644, given him a patent of the earldom of Norfolk, in order, as it would seem, to flatter him by suggesting that the title of Norfolk would at least be refused to any other family. He is celebrated as a collector of paintings, books, gems and sculptures, his “Arundel marbles” being given by his grandson in 1667 to the University of Oxford. The dukedom for which Arundel had petitioned Charles I. in vain was restored by act of the first parliament of Charles II. to his grandson Thomas, a lunatic living at Padua, on whose death in 1677 it passed to this Thomas’s brother, Henry Frederick, who had been created earl of Norwich and hereditary earl marshal of England in 1672. In 1777 Edward, the ninth of the Howard dukes, died childless in his ninety-second year. With him ended the earldom of Norwich, while the representation of the Mowbrays and Segraves passed to his nieces, the Ladies Stourton and Petre, the abeyance of the two baronies being determined in 1878 in favour of Lord Stourton. Under the act of 1627 the earldom of Arundel and the castle passed with the dukedom to a second cousin, Charles Howard of Greystock (d. 1786), an eccentric recluse. At his death in 1786 he was succeeded by his son Charles, the notorious “Jockey of Norfolk,” the big, coarse, generous, slovenly, hard-drinking Whig of whom all the memoir-writers of his age have their anecdotes. He conformed to the Church of England and spent a vast sum in restoring Arundel Castle. A third cousin succeeded him in 1815, Bernard Edward Howard, who, although a Roman Catholic, was enabled, by the act of 1824, to act as earl marshal. This was the grandfather of the fifteenth duke, earl of Arundel, Surrey and Norfolk, and hereditary earl marshal of England.
The eldest of the cadet branches of the ducal house has its origin in William (c. 1510-1573), eldest son of the victor of Flodden by his second marriage. He survived the reign of Henry VIII., that perilous age for the Howards, with no worse misadventure than the conviction of himself and his wife of misprision of treason in concealing the offences of his niece, Queen Catherine. But both were pardoned. In 1553 he had the office of lord admiral of England, and in the next year the Garter. For his services against Sir Thomas Wyat he was created (March 11, 1553/4) Lord Howard of Effingham, the title being taken from a Surrey manor granted him by Edward VI. Queen Elizabeth continued his employment in diplomacy, and had he been richer he might have had an earldom. His eldest son Charles (1536-1624), lord admiral of England in 1585, sailed as commander in chief against the Spanish Armada, and, although giving due weight to the counsel of Drake and his other officers, showed himself a leader as prudent as courageous. He was created earl of Nottingham in 1596 and died in 1624. The legend that the admiral was a Roman Catholic has no authority. Two of his sons succeeded in turn to the earldom of Nottingham, extinct on the death of Charles, the third earl in 1681. Sir William Howard of Lingfield, younger brother of the great admiral, carried on the Effingham line, his great-grandson succeeding to the barony on the extinction of the earldom. Francis, seventh Lord Howard of Effingham, was created earl of Effingham in 1731, a title extinct in 1816 with the fourth earl, but revived again in 1837 for the eleventh baron, who had served as a general officer in the Peninsular campaign, the great-grandfather of the present peer.
A patent of 1604 created Henry Howard (1540-1614), younger son of Surrey the poet, earl of Northampton, a peerage which ended with the death of this, the most unprincipled of his house.
Thomas, son of the fourth duke of Norfolk’s marriage with the daughter and heir of Thomas, Lord Audley of Walden, founded the line of the present earls of Suffolk and Berkshire and of the extinct Lords Howard of Escrick. His barony of Howard of Walden has descended to his heirs general. Lord William Howard (1563-1640), the “belted Will” of Scott’s Lay and the “bauld Willie” of more authentic legend, was another of the sons of the fourth duke and Margaret Audley. Married in 1577 to one of the three co-heirs of the Lord Dacre of Gilsland he suffered under Elizabeth more than one imprisonment with his brother the unfortunate earl of Arundel. But in 1603 he was able, on the partition of the Dacre lands, to make his home at Naworth Castle, where he lived, a border patriarch, cultivating his estates and serving as a commissioner of the borders. His great-grandson Charles Howard, although fledged in a nest of cavaliers, changed sides and fought at Worcester for the parliament. The Protector summoned him in 1657 to his House of Lords, but he was imprisoned in 1659 on suspicion of a share in Booth’s insurrection and, after the Restoration, was created, in 1661, earl of Carlisle, Viscount Morpeth and Lord Dacre of Gilsland, titles which are still held by his descendants. From Sir Francis Howard, a cavalier colonel and a younger son of “bauld Willie,” come the Howards of Corby Castle in Cumberland, a branch without a hereditary title.
William Howard, Viscount Stafford, was the fifth son of Thomas, earl of Arundel, and grandson of Philip the prisoner. Marrying the sister and heir of the fifth Lord Stafford, who died in 1637, he and his wife were created Baron and Baroness Stafford by a patent of 1640, with remainder, in default of heirs male, to heirs female. A grant of the precedence enjoyed by the bride’s father being held illegal, her husband was in the same year created Viscount Stafford. Roger Stafford, the impoverished heir male of the ancient Staffords, had been forced to surrender his barony to the king by a deed dated in the preceding year, a piece of injustice which is in the teeth of all modern conceptions of peerage law. The Viscount Stafford was one of the “five Popish lords” committed to the Tower in 1678 as a result of the slanders of Titus Oates and he died by the axe in 1680 upon testimony which, as the diarist Evelyn protested, “should not be taken against the life of a dog.” But three earls of his own house—Carlisle, Suffolk and Berkshire—and the Lord Howard of Escrick, an ex-trooper of Cromwell’s guard and an anabaptist sectary, gave their votes against him, his nephew Mowbray being the only peer of his name in the minority for acquittal. In 1688 his widow was created countess of Stafford for life, and his eldest son, Henry, had the earldom of Stafford, with special remainder to his brothers. This earldom ended in 1762, but the attainder was reversed by an act of 1824 and in the following year Sir George Jerningham, the heir general, established his claim to the Stafford barony of 1640.
Authorities.—State papers; patent, close and plea rolls. Tierney, History of Arundel; G. E. C., Complete Peerage; J. H. Round, Peerage Studies; Howard of Corby, Memorials of the Family of Howard; Brenan and Statham, House of Howard; Howard, Historical Anecdotes of the Howard Family; Morant, Essex; Blomefield, Norfolk.
(O. Ba.)
HOWARD, CATHERINE (d. 1542), the fifth queen of Henry VIII., was a daughter of Lord Edmund Howard and a granddaughter of Thomas Howard, 2nd duke of Norfolk (d. 1524). Her father was very poor, and Catherine lived mainly with Agnes, widow of the 2nd duke of Norfolk, meeting the king at the house of Stephen Gardiner, bishop of Winchester. Henry was evidently charmed by her; the Roman Catholic party, who disliked the marriage with Anne of Cleves, encouraged his attentions; and after Anne’s divorce he was privately married to Catherine at Oatlands in July 1540. Soon afterwards she was publicly acknowledged as queen. Before her marriage Catherine had had several lovers, among them being a musician, Henry Mannock, or Manox; her cousin, Thomas Culpepper; and Francis Dereham, to whom she had certainly been betrothed. After becoming queen she occasionally met Dereham and Culpepper, and in November 1541 Archbishop Cranmer informed Henry that his queen’s past life had not been stainless. Cranmer had obtained his knowledge indirectly from an old servant of the duchess of Norfolk. Dereham confessed to his relations with Catherine, and after some denials the queen herself admitted that this was true; but denied that she had ever been betrothed to Dereham, or that she had misconducted herself since her marriage. Dereham and Culpepper were executed in December 1541 and their accomplices were punished, but Catherine was released from prison. Some fresh information, however, very soon came to light showing that she had been unchaste since her marriage; a bill of attainder was passed through parliament, and on the 13th of February 1542 the queen was beheaded.
See A. Strickland, Lives of the Queens of England (vol. iii. 1877).
HOWARD, JOHN (1726-1790), English philanthropist and prison reformer, was born at Hackney, probably on the 2nd of September 1726. His childhood was passed at Cardington, near Bedford, where his father, a retired merchant of independent means, had a small estate. He was apprenticed to a firm of grocers in the city of London, but on the death of his father in 1742, by which he inherited considerable property, he bought up his indenture, and devoted more than a year to foreign travel. Never constitutionally strong, he became, on his return to England, a confirmed invalid. Having been nursed through an acute illness by an attentive landlady, a widow of some fifty-three years of age, Howard, in return for her kindness, offered her marriage and they were united in 1752. Becoming a widower in less than three years, he determined to go abroad again, Portugal being his destination. The ship, however, in which he sailed was taken by a French privateer, the crew and passengers being carried to Brest, where they were treated with great severity. Howard was permitted to return to England on parole to negotiate an exchange, which he accomplished, as well as successfully representing the case of his fellow-captives. He now settled down on his Cardington property, interesting himself in meteorological observations. He was admitted a member of the Royal Society in 1756. In 1758 he married Henrietta, daughter of Edward Leeds, of Croxton, Cambridgeshire. He continued to lead a secluded life at Cardington and at Watcombe, Hampshire, busying himself in the construction of model cottages and the erection of schools. In 1765 his second wife died after giving birth to a son. In the following year Howard went for a prolonged foreign tour, from which he returned in 1770.
In 1773 the characteristic work of his life may be said to have begun by his acceptance of the office of high sheriff of Bedford. When the assizes were held he did not content himself with sitting out the trials in open court, his inquisitiveness and his benevolence alike impelled him to visit the gaol. Howard found it, like all the prisons of the time, wretchedly defective in its arrangements; but what chiefly shocked him was the circumstance that neither the gaoler nor his subordinates were salaried officers, but were dependent for their livelihood on fees from the prisoners. He found that some whom the juries had declared not guilty, others in whom the grand jury had not found even such appearance of guilt as would warrant a trial, others whose prosecutors had failed to appear, were frequently detained in prison for months after they had ceased to be in the position of accused parties, until they should have paid the fees of gaol delivery (see Introduction to The State of the Prisons of England and Wales). His prompt application to the justices of the county for a salary to the gaoler in lieu of his fees was met by a demand for a precedent in charging the county with an expense. This he undertook to find if such a thing existed. He went accordingly from county to county, and though he could find no precedent for charging the county with the wages of its servants he did find so many abuses in prison management that he determined to devote himself to their reform.
In 1774 he gave evidence before a committee of the House of Commons, and received the thanks of the house for “the humanity and zeal which have led him to visit the several gaols of this kingdom, and to communicate to the House the interesting observations which he has made on that subject.” Almost immediately an act was passed which provided for the liberation, free of all charges, of every prisoner against whom the grand jury failed to find a true bill, giving the gaoler a sum from the county rate in lieu of the abolished fees. This was followed in June by another requiring justices of the peace to see that the walls and ceilings of all prisons within their jurisdiction were scraped and whitewashed once a year at least; that the rooms were regularly cleaned and ventilated; that infirmaries were provided for the sick, and proper care taken to get them medical advice; that the naked should be clothed; that underground dungeons should be used as little as could be; and generally that such courses should be taken as would tend to restore and preserve the health of the prisoners. It was highly characteristic of the man that, having caused the provisions of the new legislation to be printed at his own private cost in large type, he sent a copy to every gaoler and warder in the kingdom, that no one should be able to plead ignorance of the law if detected in the violation of its provisions. He then set out upon a new tour of inspection, from which, however, he was brought home by the approach of a general election in September 1774. Standing as one of the anti-ministerial candidates for Bedford, he was returned by a narrow majority but was unseated after a scrutiny.
After a tour in Scotland and Ireland, he set out in April 1775 upon an extended tour through France, the Low Countries and Germany. At Paris he was at first denied access to the prisons; but, by recourse to an old and almost obsolete law of 1717, according to which any person wishing to distribute alms to the prisoners was to be admitted, he succeeded in inspecting the Bicêtre, the Force l’Évêque and most of the other places of confinement, the only important exception being the Bastille. Even in that case he succeeded in obtaining possession of a suppressed pamphlet, which he afterwards translated and published in English, to the unconcealed chagrin of the French authorities. At Ghent he examined with special interest the great Maison de Force, then recently erected, with its distinctive features—useful labour, in the profits of which the prisoners had a share, and complete separation of the inmates by night. At Amsterdam, as in Holland generally, he was much struck with the comparative absence of crime, a phenomenon which he attributed to the industrial and reformatory treatment there adopted. In Germany he found little that was useful and much that was repulsive; in Hanover and Osnabrück, under the rule of a British sovereign, he even found traces of torture. After a short tour in England (Nov. 1775 to May 1776), he again went abroad, extending his tour to several of the Swiss cantons. In 1777 appeared The State of the Prisons in England and Wales, with Preliminary Observations, and an Account of some Foreign Prisons. One of the immediate results was the drafting a bill for the establishment of penitentiary houses, where by means of solitary imprisonment, accompanied by well-regulated labour and religious instruction, the object of reforming the criminal and inuring him to habits of industry might be pursued. New buildings were manifestly necessary; and Howard volunteered to go abroad again and collect plans. He first went to Amsterdam (April 1778), and carefully examined the “spin-houses” and “rasp-houses”1 for which that city was famous; next he traversed Prussia, Saxony, Bohemia, Austria and Italy, everywhere inspecting prisons, hospitals and workhouses, and carefully recording the merits and defects of each. The information he thus obtained having been placed at the service of parliament, a bill was passed for building two penitentiary houses, and Howard was appointed first supervisor, but he resigned the post before anything practical had been achieved. In 1780 he had published a quarto volume as an appendix (the first) to his State of Prisons; about the same time also he caused to be printed his translation of the suppressed French pamphlet on the Bastille; but on obtaining release from his employments at home his passion for accumulating statistics urged him to new and more extended continental tours, as far as to Denmark, Sweden and Russia in 1781, and to Spain and Portugal in 1783. The results of these journeys were embodied in 1784 in a second appendix, with the publication of which his direct labours in connexion with the subject of prison reform may be said to have ceased.
The five remaining years of his life were chiefly devoted to researches on the means for prevention of the plague, and for guarding against the propagation of contagious distempers in general. After an extended tour on the continent his researches seemed to be complete; and with a great accumulation of papers and memoranda, he was preparing to return homewards from Constantinople by Vienna, when it occurred to his scrupulous mind that he still lacked any personal experience of quarantine discipline. He returned to Smyrna, and, deliberately choosing a foul ship, took a passage to Venice. A protracted voyage of sixty days, during which an attack by pirates gave Howard an opportunity of manifesting his personal bravery, was followed by a weary term of confinement which enabled him to gain the experience he had desired. While imprisoned in the Venetian lazaretto he received the information that his only son, a youth of twenty-two years of age, had lost his reason and had been put under restraint. Returning hastily by Trieste and Vienna (where he had a long and singular interview with the emperor Joseph II.), he reached England in February 1787. His first care related to his domestic concerns; he then set out upon another journey of inspection of the prisons of the United Kingdom, at the same time busying himself in preparing for the press the results of his recent tour. The somewhat rambling work containing them was published in 1798 at Warrington, under the title An Account of the Principal Lazarettos in Europe: with various Papers relative to the Plague, together with further Observations on some Foreign Prisons and Hospitals, and additional Remarks on the present State of those in Great Britain and Ireland.
In July 1789 he embarked on what proved to be his last journey. Travelling overland to St Petersburg and Moscow, and so southwards, and visiting the principal military hospitals that lay on his route, he reached Kherson in November. In the hospitals of this place and of the immediate neighbourhood he found more than enough to occupy his attention while he awaited the means of transit to Constantinople. Towards the end of the year his medical advice was asked in the case of a young lady who was suffering under the camp fever then prevalent, and in attending her he himself took the disease, which terminated fatally on the 20th of January 1790. He was buried near the village of Dauphigny on the road to St Nicholas. There is a statue by Bacon to his memory in St Paul’s, London, and one at Bedford by A. Gilbert. In personal appearance Howard is described as having been short, thin and sallow—unprepossessing apart from the attraction of a penetrating eye and a benevolent smile.
Authorities.—Anecdotes of the Life and Character of John Howard, written by a Gentleman (1790); Aikin, View of the Character and Public Services of the late John Howard. (1792); Memoirs by J. Baldwin Brown (1818); T. Taylor (1836), Hepworth Dixon (1849), J. Field (1850), and J. Stoughton, Howard the Philanthropist (1884).
1 The spinhouses were for women prisoners, who were set to spinning or other useful work; in the rasp-houses, the prisoners were employed in rasping wood.
HOWARD, OLIVER OTIS (1830-1909), American soldier, was born in Leeds, Maine, on the 8th of November 1830. He graduated at Bowdoin College in 1850, and at the U.S. Military Academy in 1854. In 1857 he served in Florida against the Seminole Indians, and from 1857 to 1861 he was assistant professor of mathematics at West Point. At the beginning of the Civil War he resigned to become colonel of the 3rd Maine volunteer regiment, and at the first battle of Bull Run was in command of a brigade. In September he was promoted brigadier-general of volunteers. He served in the Peninsular Campaign, and at the battle of Seven Pines (Fair Oaks) he was twice wounded, losing his right arm. On his return to active service in August 1862 he took part in the Virginian campaigns of 1862-63; at Antietam he succeeded Sedgwick in command of a division, and he became major-general of volunteers in March 1863. In the campaign of Chancellorsville (see Wilderness) he commanded the XI. corps, which was routed by “Stonewall” Jackson, and in the first day’s battle at Gettysburg he was for some hours (succeeding Doubleday after Reynolds’s death) in command of the Union troops. The XI. corps was transferred to Tennessee after Rosecrans’s defeat at Chickamauga, and formed part of Hooker’s command in the great victory of Chattanooga. When Sherman prepared to invade Georgia in the spring of 1864 the XI. corps was merged with the XII. into the new XX., commanded by Hooker, and Howard was then placed, in command of the new IV. corps, which he led in all the actions of the Atlanta campaign, receiving another wound at Pickett’s Mills. On the death in action of General M’Pherson, Howard, in July 1864, was selected to command the Army of the Tennessee. In this position he took part in the “March to the Sea” and the Carolinas campaign. In March 1865 he was breveted major-general U.S.A. “for gallant and meritorious service in the battle of Ezra Church and during the campaign against Atlanta,” and in 1893 received a Congressional medal of honour for bravery at Fair Oaks. After the peace he served as commissioner of the Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen and Abandoned Lands from 1865 until 1874; in 1872 he was special commissioner to the hostile Apaches of New Mexico and Arizona; in 1874-1881 was in command of the Department of the Columbia and conducted the campaign against Chief Joseph in 1877 and that against the Bannocks and Piutes in 1878. In 1881-1882 he was superintendent of West Point; and in 1882-1886 he commanded the Department of the Platte, in 1886-1888 the Department of the Pacific, and in 1888-1894 the Department of the East. In 1886 he was promoted major-general and in 1894 he retired. He died at Burlington, Vermont, on the 26th of October 1909.
Howard was deeply interested, in the welfare of the negroes; and the establishment by the U.S. Government in 1867 of Howard University, at Washington, especially for their education, was largely due to him; it was named in his honour, and from 1869 to 1873 he presided over it. In 1895 he founded for the education of the “mountain whites” the Lincoln Memorial University at Cumberland Gap, Tenn. (see Cumberland Mountains), and became president of its board. He held honorary degrees of various universities, and was a chevalier of the Legion of Honour. He wrote, amongst other works, Donald’s Schooldays (1877); Chief Joseph (1881); a life of General Zachary Taylor (1892) in the “Great Commanders” series; Isabella of Castile (1894); Fighting for Humanity (1898); Henry in the War (1898); papers in the “Battles and Leaders” collection on the Atlanta campaign; My Life and Experience among our Hostile Indians (1907); and Autobiography of O. O. Howard (2 vols., New York, 1907).
HOWARD, SIR ROBERT (1626-1698), English dramatist, sixth son of Thomas Howard, 1st earl of Berkshire, was born in 1626. He was knighted at the second battle of Newbury (1644) for his signal courage on the Royalist side. Imprisoned in Windsor Castle under the Commonwealth, his loyalty was rewarded at the Restoration, and he eventually became auditor of the exchequer. His best play is a comedy, The Committee, or the Faithful Irishman (1663; printed 1665), which kept the stage, long after its interest as a political satire was exhausted, for the character of Teague, said to have been drawn from one of his own servants. He was an early patron of Dryden, who married his sister, Lady Elizabeth Howard, and in the Indian Queen, a tragedy in heroic verse (1664; pr. 1665) Howard had assistance from Dryden, although the fact was not made public until the production of Dryden’s Indian Emperor. The magnificence of the spectacle, and the novelty of the costume of feathers, presented by Mrs. Aphra Behn, that was worn by Zempoalla, the Indian queen, made a great sensation. The scenery and accessories were unusually brilliant, the richest ever seen in England, according to Evelyn. In 1665 Howard published Foure New Plays, in the preface to which he opposed the view maintained by Dryden in the dedicatory epistle to The Rival Ladies, that rhyme was better suited to the heroic tragedy than blank verse. Howard made an exception in favour of the rhyme of Lord Orrery, but by his silence concerning Dryden implicated him in the general censure. Dryden answered by placing Howard’s sentiments in the mouth of Crites in his own Essay on Dramatic Poesy (1668). The controversy did not end here, but Dryden completely worsted his adversary in the 1668 edition of The Indian Emperor. Howard died on the 3rd of September 1698.
His brother, James Howard, wrote two comedies, All Mistaken, or the Mad Couple, a comedy (1667; pr. 1672), and The English Mounsieur (1666; pr. 1674), the success of which seems to have been partly due to the acting of Nell Gwynn.
HOWARD, LORD WILLIAM (1563-1640), known as “Belted, or Bauld (bold) Will,” 3rd son of Thomas Howard, 4th duke of Norfolk (executed in 1572), and of his second wife Margaret, daughter of Lord Audley, was born at Audley End in Essex on the 19th of December 1563. He married on the 28th of October 1577 Elizabeth, daughter of Thomas, Lord Dacre, and proceeded subsequently to the University of Cambridge. Being suspected of treasonable intentions together with his elder brother, Philip, earl of Arundel, he was imprisoned in 1583, 1585 and 1589. He joined the church of Rome in 1584, both brothers being dispossessed by the queen of a portion of their Dacre estates, which were, however, restored in 1601 for a payment of £10,000. Howard then took up his residence with his children and grandchildren at Naworth Castle in Cumberland, restored the castle, improved the estate and established order in that part of the country. In 1603, on the accession of James, he had been restored in blood. In 1618 he was made one of the commissioners for the border, and performed great services in upholding the law and suppressing marauders. Lord William was a learned and accomplished scholar, praised by Camden, to whom he sent inscriptions and drawings from relics collected by him from the Roman wall, as “a singular lover of valuable antiquity and learned withal.” He collected a valuable library, of which most of the printed works remain still at Naworth, though the MSS. have been dispersed, a portion being now in the Arundel MSS. in the Royal College of Arms; he corresponded with Ussher and was intimate with Camden, Spelman, and Cotton, whose eldest son married his daughter. He published, in 1592 an edition of Florence of Worcester’s Chronicon ex Chronicis, dedicated to Lord Burghley, and drew up a genealogy of his family, now among the duke of Norfolk’s MSS. at Norfolk House. He died in October 1640 at Greystock, to which place he had been removed when failing in health to escape the Scots who were threatening an advance on Naworth. He had a large family of children, of whom Philip, his heir, was the grandfather of Charles, 1st earl of Carlisle, and Francis was the ancestor of the Howards of Corby.
HOWARD OF EFFINGHAM, WILLIAM HOWARD, 1st Baron (c. 1510-1573), English lord high admiral, was the son of the 2nd duke of Norfolk. He was popular with Henry VIII., and at Anne Boleyn’s coronation was deputy earl marshal; and he was sent on missions to Scotland and France; but in 1541 he was charged with abetting his relative Queen Catherine Howard, and was convicted of misprision of treason, but pardoned. In 1552 he was made governor of Calais, and in 1553 lord high admiral, being created Baron Howard of Effingham in 1554 for his defence of London in Sir Thomas Wyat’s rebellion against Queen Mary. He befriended the princess Elizabeth, but his popularity with the navy saved him from Mary’s resentment; and when Elizabeth became queen he had great influence with her and filled several important posts. His son, the second baron, who is famous in English naval history, was created earl of Nottingham (q.v.); and from a younger son the later earls of Effingham were descended. William’s descendant, Francis (d. 1695), inherited the barony of Howard of Effingham on the death of his cousin, Charles, in 1681; and Francis’s son, Francis (1683-1743), was created earl of Effingham in 1731. This earldom became extinct on the death of Richard, the fourth holder, in 1816; but it was created again in 1837 in favour of Kenneth Alexander (1767-1845), another of William Howard’s descendants, who had succeeded to the barony of Howard of Effingham in 1816.
HOWE, ELIAS (1819-1867), American sewing-machine inventor, was born in Spencer, Massachusetts, on the 9th of July 1819. His early years were spent on his father’s farm. In 1835 he entered the factory of a manufacturer of cotton-machinery at Lowell, Massachusetts, where he learned the machinist’s trade. Subsequently, while employed in a machine shop at Cambridge, Mass., he conceived the idea of a sewing machine, and for five years spent all his spare time in its development. In September 1846 a patent for a practical sewing machine was granted to him; and Howe spent the following two years (1847-1849) in London, employed by William Thomas, a corset manufacturer, to whom he had sold the English rights for £250. Years of disappointment and discouragement followed before he was successful in introducing his invention, and several imitations which infringed his patent, particularly that of Isaac Merritt Singer (1811-1875), had already been successfully introduced and were widely used. His rights were established after much litigation in 1854, and by the date of expiration of his patent (1867) he had realized something over $2,000,000 out of his invention. He died in Brooklyn, New York, on the 3rd of October 1867.
See History of the Sewing Machine and of Elias Howe, Jr., the Inventor (Detroit, 1867); P. G. Hubert, Jr., Inventors, in “Men of Achievement” series (New York, 1893).
HOWE, JOHN (1630-1706), English Puritan divine, was born on the 17th of May 1630 at Loughborough, Leicestershire, where his father was vicar. On the 19th of May 1647 he entered Christ’s College, Cambridge, as a sizar, and in the following year took his degree of B.A. During his residence at the university he made the acquaintance of Ralph Cudworth, Henry More and John Smith, from intercourse with whom, as well as from direct acquaintance with the Dialogues themselves, his mind received that “Platonic tinge” so perceptible in his writings. Immediately after graduation at Cambridge, he migrated to Oxford, where he became fellow and chaplain of Magdalen College, proceeding M.A. in 1652. He was then ordained by Charles Herle (1598-1659), the Puritan rector of Winwick, and in 1654 went as perpetual curate to Great Torrington in Devon, where he preached the discourses which later took shape in his treatises on The Blessedness of the Righteous and on Delighting in God. In the beginning of 1657 a journey to London accidentally brought Howe under the notice of Cromwell, who made him his domestic chaplain. In this position his conduct was such as to win the praise of even the bitterest enemies of his party. Without overlooking his fellow-Puritans, he was always ready to help pious and learned men of other schools. Seth Ward (afterwards bishop of Exeter) and Thomas Fuller were among those who profited by Howe’s kindness, and were not ashamed subsequently to express their gratitude for it. On the resignation of Richard Cromwell, Howe returned to Great Torrington, to leave it again in 1662 on the passing of the Act of Uniformity. For several years he led a wandering and uncertain life, preaching in secret as occasion offered to handfuls of trusted hearers. Being in straits he published in 1668 The Blessedness of the Righteous; the reputation which he thus acquired procured him an invitation from Lord Massereene, of Antrim Castle, Ireland, with whom he lived for five or six years as domestic chaplain, frequently preaching in public, with the approval of the bishop of the diocese. Here too he produced the most eloquent of his shorter treatises, The Vanity of Man as Mortal, and On Delighting in God, and planned his best work, The Living Temple. In the beginning of 1676 he accepted an invitation to become joint-pastor of a nonconformist congregation at Haberdashers’ Hall, London; and in the same year he published the first part of The Living Temple entitled Concerning God’s Existence and his Conversableness with Man: Against Atheism or the Epicurean Deism. In 1677 appeared his tractate On the Reconcileableness of God’s Prescience of the Sins of Men with the Wisdom and Sincerity of His Counsels, Exhortations and whatsoever means He uses to prevent them, which was attacked from various quarters, and had Andrew Marvell for one of its defenders. On Thoughtfulness for the Morrow followed in 1681; Self-Dedication and Union among Protestants in 1682, and The Redeemer’s Tears wept over Lost Souls in 1684.
For five years after his settlement in London Howe enjoyed comparative freedom, and was on not unfriendly terms with many eminent Anglicans, such as Stillingfleet, Tillotson, John Sharp and Richard Kidder; but the greater severity which began to be exercised towards nonconformists in 1681 so interfered with his liberty that in 1685 he gladly accepted the invitation of Philip, Lord Wharton, to travel abroad with him. In 1686 he determined to settle for a time at Utrecht, where he officiated in the English chapel. Among his friends there was Gilbert Burnet, by whose influence he obtained several confidential interviews with William of Orange. In 1687 Howe availed himself of the declaration for liberty of conscience to return to England, and in the following year he headed the deputation of nonconformist ministers who went to congratulate William on his accession to the English throne. The remainder of his life was uneventful. His influence was always on the side of mutual forbearance, between conformists and dissenters in 1689, and between Congregationalists and Presbyterians in 1690. In 1693 he published three discourses On the Carnality of Religious Contention, suggested by the disputes that became rife among nonconformists as soon as liberty of doctrine and worship had been granted. In 1694 and 1695 he published various treatises on the subject of the Trinity, the principal being A Calm and Solemn Inquiry concerning the Possibility of a Trinity in the Godhead. The second part of The Living Temple, entitled Animadversions on Spinosa and a French Writer pretending to confute him, with a recapitulation of the former part and an account of the destitution and restitution of God’s Temple among Men, appeared in 1702. In 1701 he had some controversy with Daniel Defoe on the question of occasional conformity. In 1705 he published a discourse On Patience in the Expectation of Future Blessedness, but his health had begun to fail, and he died in London on the 2nd of April 1706. Richard Cromwell visited him in his last illness.
Though excelled by Baxter as a pulpit orator, and by Owen in exegetical ingenuity and in almost every department of theological learning, Howe compares favourably with either as a sagacious and profound thinker, while he was much more successful in combining religious earnestness and fervour of conviction with large-hearted tolerance and cultured breadth of view. He was a man of high principle and fine presence, and it was said of him “that he never made an enemy and never lost a friend.”
The works published in his lifetime, including a number of sermons, were collected into 2 vols. fol. in 1724, and again reprinted in 3 vols. 8vo. in 1848. A complete edition of the Whole Works, including much posthumous and additional matter, appeared with a memoir in 8 vols, in 1822; this was reprinted in 1 vol. in 1838 and in 6 vols. in 1862-1863. E. Calamy’s Life (1724) forms the basis of The Life and Character of Howe, with an Analysis of his Writings, by Henry Rogers (1836, new ed. 1863). See also a sketch by R. F. Horton (1896).
HOWE, JOSEPH (1804-1873), Canadian statesman, was born at Halifax, Nova Scotia, on the 13th of December 1804, the son of John Howe (1752-1835), a United Empire Loyalist who was for many years king’s printer and postmaster-general for the Maritime Provinces and the Bermudas. He received little regular education, and at the age of 13 entered his father’s office. In 1827 he started the Acadian, a weekly non-political journal, but soon sold it, and in 1828 purchased the Nova Scotian, which later became amalgamated with the Morning Chronicle. From this date he devoted increasing attention to political affairs, and in 1835 was prosecuted for libelling the magistrates of Halifax. Being unable to find a lawyer willing to undertake his case, he pleaded it himself, and won his acquittal by a speech of over six hours, which secured for Nova Scotia the freedom of the press and for himself the reputation of an orator. In 1836 he was elected member for Halifax in the provincial assembly, and during the next twelve years devoted himself to attaining responsible government for Nova Scotia. This brought him into fierce conflict with the reigning oligarchy and with the lieutenant-governor, Lord Falkland (1803-1884), whom he forced to resign. Largely owing to Howe’s statesmanship responsible government was finally conceded in 1848 by the imperial authorities, and was thus gained without the bloodshed and confusion which marked its acquisition in Ontario and Quebec. In 1850 he was appointed a delegate to England on behalf of the Intercolonial railway, for which he obtained a large imperial guarantee. In 1854 he resigned from the cabinet, and was appointed chief commissioner of railways. In 1855 he was sent by the imperial government to the United States in connexion with the Foreign Enlistment Act, to raise soldiers for the war in the Crimea. Through the rashness of others he got into difficulties, and was attacked in the British House of Commons by Mr Gladstone, whom he compelled to apologize.
In 1855 he was defeated by Mr (afterwards Sir Charles) Tupper, but was elected by acclamation in the next year in Hants county, and was from 1860 to 1863 premier of Nova Scotia. In the latter years he was appointed by the imperial government fishery commissioner to the United States, and thus took no part in the negotiations for confederation. Though his eloquence had done more than anything else to make practicable a union of the British North American provinces, he opposed confederation, largely owing to wounded vanity; but on finding it impossible to obtain from the imperial authorities the repeal of the British North America Act, he refused to join his associates in the extreme measures which were advocated, and on the promise from the Canadian government of better financial terms to his native province, entered (on the 30th of January 1869) the cabinet of Sir John Macdonald as president of the council. This brought upon him a storm of obloquy, under which his health gradually gave way. In May 1873 he was appointed lieutenant-governor of Nova Scotia, but died suddenly on the 1st of June of the same year.
Howe’s eloquence, and still more his unfailing wit and high spirits, made him for many years the idol of his province. He is the finest orator whom Canada has produced, and also wrote poetry, which shows in places high merit. Many of his sayings are still current in Nova Scotia. In 1904 a statue in his honour was erected in Halifax.
His Letters and Speeches were published in 1858 in Boston, Mass., in 2 vols., edited nominally by William Annand, really by himself. See also Public Letters and Speeches of Joseph Howe (Halifax, 1909). The Life and Times by G. E. Fenety (1896) is poor. The Life by the Hon. James W. Longley (Toronto, 1904) is dispassionate, but otherwise mediocre. Joseph Howe, by George Monro Grant (reprinted Halifax, 1904), is a brilliant sketch.
(W. L. G.)
HOWE, JULIA WARD (1819-1910), American author and reformer, was born in New York City on the 27th of May 1819. Her father, Samuel Ward, was a banker; her mother, Julia Rush [Cutler] (1796-1824), a poet of some ability. When only sixteen years old she had begun to contribute poems to New York periodicals. In 1843 she married Dr Samuel Gridley Howe (q.v.), with whom she spent the next year in England, France, Germany and Italy. She assisted Dr Howe in editing the Commonwealth in 1851-1853. The results of her study of German philosophy were seen in philosophical essays; in lectures on “Doubt and Belief,” “The Duality of Character,” &c., delivered in 1860-1861 in her home in Boston, and later in Washington; and in addresses before the Boston Radical Club and the Concord school of philosophy. Samuel Longfellow, his brother Henry, Wendell Phillips, W. L. Garrison, Charles Sumner, Theodore Parker and James Freeman Clarke were among her friends; she advocated abolition, and preached occasionally from Unitarian pulpits. She was one of the organizers of the American Woman-Suffrage Association and of the Association for the Advancement of Women (1869), and in 1870 became one of the editors of the Woman’s Journal, and in 1872 president of the New England Women’s Club. In the same year she was a delegate to the Prison Reform Congress in London, and founded there the Woman’s Peace Association, one of the many ways in which she expressed her opposition to war. She wrote The World’s Own (unsuccessfully played at Wallack’s, New York, in 1855, published 1857), and in 1858, for Edwin Booth, Hippolytus, never acted or published. Her lyric poetry, thanks to her temperament, and possibly to her musical training, was her highest literary form: she published Passion Flowers (anonymously, 1854), Words for the Hour (1856), Later Lyrics (1866), and From Sunset Ridge: Poems Old and New (1898); her most popular poem is The Battle Hymn of the Republic, written to the old folk-tune associated with the song of “John Brown’s Body,” when Mrs Howe was at the front in 1861, and published (Feb. 1862) in the Atlantic Monthly, to which she frequently contributed. She edited Sex and Education (1874), an answer to Sex in Education (1873) by Edward Hammond Clarke (1820-1877); and wrote several books of travel, Modern Society (1880) and Is Polite Society Polite? (1895), collections of addresses, each taking its title from a lecture criticizing the shallowness and falseness of society, the power of money, &c., A Memoir of Dr Samuel G. Howe (1876), Life of Margaret Fuller (1883), in the “Famous Women” series. Sketches of Representative Women of New England (1905) and her own Reminiscences (Boston, 1899). Her children were: Julia Romana Anagnos (1844-1886), who, like her mother, wrote verse and studied philosophy, and who taught in the Perkins Institution, in the charge of which her husband, Michael Anagnos (1837-1906), whose family name had been Anagnostopoulos, succeeded her father; Henry Marion Howe (b. 1848), the eminent metallurgist, and professor in Columbia University; Laura Elizabeth Richards (b. 1850), and Maud Howe Elliott (b. 1855), wife of John Elliott, the painter of a fine ceiling in the Boston library,—both these daughters being contributors to literature. Mrs Howe died on the 17th of October 1910.
HOWE, RICHARD HOWE, Earl (1726-1799), British admiral, was born in London on the 8th of March 1726. He was the second son of Emmanuel Scrope Howe, 2nd Viscount Howe, who died governor of Barbadoes in March 1735, and of Mary Sophia Charlotte, a daughter of the baroness Kilmansegge, afterwards countess of Darlington, the mistress of George I.—a relationship which does much to explain his early rise in the navy. Richard Howe entered the navy in the “Severn,” one of the squadron sent into the south seas with Anson in 1740. The “Severn” failed to round the Horn and returned home. Howe next served in the West Indies in the “Burford,” and was present in her when she was very severely damaged, in the unsuccessful attack on La Guayra on the 18th of February 1742. He was made acting-lieutenant in the West Indies in the same year, and the rank was confirmed in 1744. During the Jacobite rising of 1745 he commanded the “Baltimore” sloop in the North Sea, and was dangerously wounded in the head while co-operating with a frigate in an engagement with two strong French privateers. In 1746 he became post-captain, and commanded the “Triton” (24) in the West Indies. As captain of the “Cornwall” (80), the flagship of Sir Charles Knowles, he was in the battle with the Spaniards off Havana on the 2nd of October 1748. While the peace between the War of the Austrian Succession and the Seven Years’ War lasted, Howe held commands at home and on the west coast of Africa. In 1755 he went with Boscawen to North America as captain of the “Dunkirk” (60), and his seizure of the French “Alcide” (64) was the first shot fired in the war. From this date till the peace of 1763 he served in the Channel in various more or less futile expeditions against the coast of France, with a steady increase of reputation as a firm and skilful officer. On the 20th of November 1759 he led Hawke’s fleet as captain of the “Magnanime” (64) in the magnificent victory of Quiberon.
By the death of his elder brother, killed near Ticonderoga on the 6th of July 1758, he became Viscount Howe—an Irish peerage. In 1762 he was elected M.P. for Dartmouth, and held the seat till he received a title of Great Britain. During 1763 and 1765 he was a member of the Admiralty board, and from 1765 to 1770 was treasurer of the navy. In that year he was promoted rear-admiral, and in 1775 vice-admiral. In 1776 he was appointed to the command of the North American station. The rebellion of the colonies was making rapid progress, and Howe was known to be in sympathy with the colonists. He had sought the acquaintance of Benjamin Franklin, who was a friend of his sister Miss Howe, a clever eccentric woman well known in London society, and had already tried to act as a peacemaker. It was doubtless because of his known sentiments that he was selected to command in America, and was joined in commission with his brother Sir William Howe, the general at the head of the land forces, to make a conciliatory arrangement. A committee appointed by the Continental Congress conferred with the Howes in September 1776 but nothing was accomplished. The appointment of a new peace commission in 1778 offended the admiral deeply, and he sent in a resignation of his command. It was reluctantly accepted by Lord Sandwich, then First Lord, but before it could take effect France declared war, and a powerful French squadron was sent to America under the count d’Estaing. Being greatly outnumbered, Howe had to stand on the defensive, but he baffled the French admiral at Sandy Hook, and defeated his attempt to take Newport in Rhode Island by a fine combination of caution and calculated daring. On the arrival of Admiral John Byron from England with reinforcements, Howe left the station in September. Until the fall of Lord North’s ministry in 1782 he refused to serve, assigning as his reason that he could not trust Lord Sandwich. He considered that he had not been properly supported in America, and was embittered both by the supersession of himself and his brother as peace commissioners, and by attacks made on him by the ministerial writers in the press.
On the change of ministry in March 1782 he was selected to command in the Channel, and in the autumn of that year, September, October and November, he carried out the final relief of Gibraltar. It was a difficult operation, for the French and Spaniards had in all 46 line-of-battle ships to his 33, and in the exhausted state of the country it was impossible to fit his ships properly or to supply them with good crews. He was, moreover, hampered by a great convoy carrying stores. But Howe was eminent in the handling of a great multitude of ships, the enemy was awkward and unenterprising, and the operation was brilliantly carried out. From the 28th of January to the 16th of April 1783 he was First Lord of the Admiralty, and he held that post from December 1783 till August 1788, in Pitt’s first ministry. The task was no pleasant one, for he had to agree to economies where he considered that more outlay was needed, and he had to disappoint the hopes of the many officers who were left unemployed by the peace. On the outbreak of the Revolutionary war in 1793 he was again named to the command of the Channel fleet. His services in 1794 form the most glorious period of his life, for in it he won the epoch-making victory of the 1st of June (see First of June, Battle of). Though Howe was now nearly seventy, and had been trained in the old school, he displayed an originality not usual with veterans, and not excelled by any of his successors in the war, not even by Nelson, since they had his example to follow and were served by more highly trained squadrons than his. He continued to hold the nominal command by the wish of the king, but his active service was now over. In 1797 he was called on to pacify the mutineers at Spithead, and his great influence with the seamen who trusted him was conspicuously shown. He died on the 5th of August 1799, and was buried in his family vault at Langar. His monument by Flaxman is in St Paul’s Cathedral. In 1782 he was created Viscount Howe of Langar, and in 1788 Baron and Earl Howe. In June 1797 he was made a knight of the Garter. With the sailors he was always popular, though he was no popularity hunter, for they knew him to be just. His nickname of Black Dick was given on account of his swarthy complexion, and the well-known portrait by Gainsborough shows that it was apt.
Lord Howe married, on the 10th of March 1758, Mary Hartop, the daughter of Colonel Chiverton Hartop of Welby in Leicestershire, and had issue two daughters. His Irish title descended to his brother William, the general, who died childless in 1814. The earldom, and the viscounty of the United Kingdom, being limited to heirs male, became extinct, but the barony, being to heirs general, passed to his daughter, Sophia Charlotte (1762-1835), who married the Hon. Penn Assheton Curzon. Their son, Richard William Curzon (1796-1870), who succeeded his paternal grandfather as Viscount Curzon in 1820, was created Earl Howe in 1821; he was succeeded by his son, George Augustus (1821-1876), and then by another son, Richard William (1822-1900), whose son Richard George Penn Curzon-Howe (b. 1861) became 4th Earl Howe in 1900.
The standard Life is by Sir John Barrow (1838). Interesting reminiscences will be found in the Life of Codrington, by Lady Bourchier. Accounts of his professional services are in Charnock’s Biographia Navalis, v. 457, and in Ralf’s Naval Biographies, i. 83. See also Beatson’s Naval and Military Annals, James’s Naval History, and Chevalier’s Histoire de la Marine française, vols. i. and ii.
(D. H.)
HOWE, SAMUEL GRIDLEY (1801-1876), American philanthropist, was born at Boston, Massachusetts, on the 10th of November 1801. His father, Joseph N. Howe, was a ship-owner and cordage manufacturer; and his mother, Patty Gridley, was one of the most beautiful women of her day. Young Howe was educated at Boston and at Brown University, Providence, and in 1821 began to study medicine in Boston. But fired by enthusiasm for the Greek revolution and by Byron’s example, he was no sooner qualified and admitted to practice than he abandoned these prospects and took ship for Greece, where he joined the army and spent six years of hardship amid scenes of warfare. Then, to raise funds for the cause, he returned to America; his fervid appeals enabled him to collect about $60,000, which he spent on provisions and clothing, and he established a relief depot near Aegina, where he started works for the refugees, the existing quay, or American Mole, being built in this way. He formed another colony of exiles on the Isthmus of Corinth. He wrote a History of the Greek Revolution, which was published in 1828, and in 1831 he returned to America. Here a new object of interest engaged him. Through his friend Dr John D. Fisher (d. 1850), a Boston physician who had started a movement there as early as 1826 for establishing a school for the blind, he had learnt of the similar school founded in Paris by Valentin Haüy, and it was proposed to Howe by a committee organized by Fisher that he should direct the establishment of a “New England Asylum for the Blind” at Boston. He took up the project with characteristic ardour, and set out at once for Europe to investigate the problem. There he was temporarily diverted from his task by becoming mixed up with the Polish revolt, and, in pursuit of a mission to carry American contributions across the Prussian frontier, he was arrested and imprisoned at Berlin, but was at last released through the intervention of the American minister at Paris. Returning to Boston in July 1832, he began receiving a few blind children at his father’s house in Pleasant Street, and thus sowed the seed which grew into the famous Perkins Institution. In January 1833 the funds available were all spent, but so much progress had been shown that the legislature voted $6000, later increased to $30,000 a year, to the institution on condition that it should educate gratuitously twenty poor blind from the state; money was also contributed from Salem, and from Boston, and Colonel Thomas H. Perkins, a prominent Bostonian, presented his mansion and grounds in Pearl Street for the school to be held there in perpetuity. This building being later found unsuitable, Colonel Perkins consented to its sale, and in 1839 the institution was moved to South Boston, to a large building which had previously been an hotel. It was henceforth known as the “Perkins Institution and Massachusetts Asylum (or, since 1877, School) for the Blind.” Howe was director, and the life and soul of the school; he opened a printing-office and organized a fund for printing for the blind—the first done in America; and he was unwearied in calling public attention to the work. The Institution, through him, became one of the intellectual centres of American philanthropy, and by degrees obtained more and more financial support. In 1837 Dr Howe went still further and brought the famous blind deaf-mute, Laura Bridgman (q.v.) to the school.