Edmund Tilney's mother, Malyn, was implicated in the scandal surrounding the downfall of Queen Katherine Howard.

Surrey's first wife died on 4 April 1497, and he and Agnes were married four months later by dispensation dated 17 August 1497.

As a supporter of Richard III, for whom he fought at Bosworth in 1485, Surrey was not in high favour during the early years of the reign of Henry VII.

In the same year he was involved in successful diplomatic negotiations with King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella for a marriage between the Spanish Infanta, Katherine of Aragon, and Henry VII's eldest son Arthur, Prince of Wales.

[4] Agnes Howard, and her step-daughter Muriel, Lady Gray, clipped the Scottish king's beard on 9 August 1503, and he gave her a length of cloth-of-gold.

[3] Katherine of Aragon, the wife of Henry VIII, gave her a pendant shaped like the letter "A" set with diamonds and pearls as a New Year's day gift.

His funeral and burial on 22 June at Thetford Priory were said to have been 'spectacular and enormously expensive', befitting the richest and most powerful peer in England.

Ordinances issued at Eltham in 1526 indicate that she was accorded first place in the Queen's household after the King's sister Mary Tudor.

[3] On 23 May 1533 Archbishop Thomas Cranmer declared Henry VIII's marriage to his first Queen, Katherine of Aragon, a nullity.

A possible cause of Anne's downfall perhaps came about as a result of her conflict with the King's chief minister, Thomas Cromwell, over the distribution of the spoils from the dissolution of the monasteries.

However the King's physical revulsion for his new bride[10] led to a speedy annulment of the marriage by Act of Parliament on 12 July 1540.

While the King and Queen were on progress during the fall of 1541, the religious reformer John Lassells and his sister Mary Hall told Archbishop Cranmer of the Queen's sexual indiscretions with her music master, Henry Manox, and a Howard kinsman, Francis Dereham, while she had been a young girl living in the Dowager Duchess's household at Lambeth.

[17] The Dowager Duchess, hearing reports of what had happened while Katherine had been under her lax guardianship, reasoned that 'If there be none offence sithence the marriage, she cannot die for that was done before'.

They revealed that the Duchess had attempted to destroy evidence by burning the papers of Dereham and his friend William Damport.