Thomas Howard, 3rd Duke of Norfolk Thomas Howard, 3rd Duke of Norfolk Thomas Howard, 3rd Duke of Norfolk (1473 – 25 August 1554) (Earl of Surrey from 1514), was a prominent Tudor politician. He was an uncle of two of the wives of King Henry VIII of England, namely Anne Boleyn and Catherine Howard, both of whom were beheaded, and played a major role in the machinations affecting these royal marriages. After falling from favour in 1546, he was stripped of the dukedom and imprisoned in the Tower of London, avoiding execution when King Henry VIII died on 28 January 1547. He was released on the
Blood & Thunder: The Life & Art of Robert E. Howard Conan the Barbarian, was the first major biography of Howard since "Dark Valley Destiny: the Life of Robert E. Howard" (1983) by L. Sprague de Camp, Catherine Crook de Camp and Jane Whittington Griffin. Finn's book was intended as a corrective to both the earlier biography and the various misconceptions about Howard that had accumulated since the writer's death. According to "Publishers Weekly", "Finn quietly and expertly demolishes ... misconceptions about Howard [and] discusses Howard in the context of a populist writer whose dyspeptic view of civilization was forged in the corrupt Texas oil boomtowns in which he grew up