His son, Lord Thomas Howard, was the builder of Audley End. He was restored in blood by act of Parliament in 1583, and, when very young, embraced the military service, but abandoned it for success at court, where he sought every opportunity of ingratiating himself with the queen, and succeeded, in a great measure, in obtaining her countenance. During the next reign, almost the whole of his life was passed at court; and although the high and lucrative offices which he held afforded him more ample means of displaying his magnificence than those enjoyed by his ancestors, he contrived to eclipse them all in extravagance; and we are assured that in the building of Audley End alone he expended a no less sum than 190,000_l._ He was much honoured by King James I., and was advanced by him to the Earldom of Suffolk, and made Lord Chamberlain, and afterwards Lord High Treasurer of England. Lady Suffolk was, unfortunately, a woman of a covetous mind, and having too great an ascendancy over her husband, used it in making him a party to her extortions on persons who had business to transact at the Treasury, or places to obtain at court; and her husband was charged with embezzlement, deprived of his office, and fined 30,000_l._, but which was reduced by the king to 7000_l._ He was generally considered to have been chiefly guilty only in concealing the mal-practices of his wife, who eventually died in debt and difficulty. From this period the history of the possessors of Audley End is a mere confused piece of family biography, of little interest to the general reader: they seem never to have recovered the charges entailed upon them by the building of Audley End, and constant curtailments of the house and park were made by each succeeding owner up to the partition of the estates in 1747. The cost of the original building appears to have involved Lord Suffolk greatly, for we learn from one of his letters, printed in the “Cabala,” that, at the period of his committal to the Tower, he was in debt nearly 40,000_l._, though he had then recently sold the Charter House to Mr. Sutton for 13,000_l._, and disposed of his property at Aynhoe in Northamptonshire; and he died possessed of Lulworth and Framlingham Castle, and Charlton in Wiltshire, with the estates belonging to them, as well as Suffolk House in the Strand, besides the large Essex property derived through his mother, Margaret Audley. At all events the cost of the building must have been very serious, nor did the charge of maintaining it prove less formidable; so much so, in fact, that none of the possessors of Audley End, after the death of the first Earl of Suffolk, were enabled to keep an establishment suitable to the size and magnificence of the house. Earl Theophilus and his son James, the third earl, seem, indeed, to have resided there; but the latter, of whom it is not recorded that he took any active part during the Commonwealth, lived in retirement, and, after