Lord Edmund Howard 1st Earl of Bridgewater, and Elizabeth Howard, who married Henry Radclyffe, 2nd Earl of Sussex. Howard spent his early years at court, and in 1509 he was listed as one of the noblemen who organized the jousts for the joint coronation of Henry VIII and his first wife, Catherine of Aragon. Although his eldest brother, Thomas Howard, 3rd Duke of Norfolk, became a dominant figure at court, and another brother, Edward Howard, was a close companion of the King, Edmund appears not to have shared the King's favour and seems to have been considered ineffectual. Biographers have described Howard as
Execution by elephant to have ordered a huge number of criminals to be crushed for his amusement. The French traveler François Bernier, who witnessed such executions, recorded his dismay at the pleasure that the emperor derived from this cruel punishment. Nor was crushing the only method used by the Mughals' execution elephants; in the Mughal sultanate of Delhi, elephants were trained to slice prisoners to pieces "with pointed blades fitted to their tusks". The Muslim traveler Ibn Battuta, visiting Delhi in the 1330s, has left the following eyewitness account of this particular type of execution by elephants: Other Indian polities also carried out