This is a wild young man, a fool who boasted that he could hold Boulogne forever, who has displeased the king with his rowdy grandeur more than once, but always played his way back into favor. He was the best friend of Henry Fitzroy, the king’s bastard son, and has always before been able to draw on that brotherly tragic love to win royal forgiveness.

Although everyone is quick to say that it is no surprise that the duke’s heir is missing from his father’s table, that the Howards are always storming off, everyone knows the young man would not disappear into the stews of London without his retinue and friends. Henry Howard is far too pleased with himself to go anywhere without a full entourage to admire him: somebody must know where he is.

One man knows: Lord Thomas Wriothesley. Slowly, it emerges that his men were seen bundling the young earl into a boat on the river late at night. Apparently there were a dozen of them in the Wriothesley livery and they had the young man between them, carrying him as he struggled and cursed them, and then they slung him in the bottom of the barge and sat on him. The boat went swiftly downstream into the darkness, and then it seemed to simply disappear. It was not an arrest, there was no warrant, and they did not arrive at the Tower. If it was a kidnap, then Wriothesley has somehow found the mad courage to attack a son of the House of Norfolk, and to do it in the precincts of a royal palace. Nobody knows how he could do this, on what authority, nor on what quiet stretch of the dark river the barge with its honored cargo can be moored, nor where the heir of the Howards is tonight.

It is inconceivable that Wriothesley could wage a private vendetta against the young man. Wriothesley and the Howards were conspiring against me only a few weeks ago, and Wriothesley was ready to take me in the royal barge down the river where he has now disappeared with the young Howard heir. So perhaps he was authorized by the king to take the young man. But nobody can think what Henry Howard can have done to invite such an attack, and Wriothesley is absent, and his servants are saying nothing.

His father swears that Henry is innocent of anything. It is his brother, Tom, who was accused of reading heretical books and attending the sermons in my rooms, and besides, that is now allowed. Henry Howard, the older boy, is mostly interested in his own self-importance and his own pleasures. He is too busy with sport and jousting, poetry and whoring to seriously reflect. He will never have engaged in difficult study. Nobody can imagine him as a heretic, people begin to think that Wriothesley has overreached himself.