His letters and manuscripts still in existence reveal a lamentable deficiency in orthography and the handling of the king's English.
Some of Howard's biographers attempt to attribute his methodical businesslike habits in later life to the experience gained while in the service of this wholesale grocer. But when we consider that his stay was far less than one year, we may fairly be allowed to conclude that more was due to an inherited temperament for slow methodical action.
Before reaching his seventeenth year, the death of his father released him from the grocery business, for which he had evidently no affection, and left him in possession of £7,000 in ready cash, beside land, plate, house, etc.
This fortune was left under the management of guardians, it being his father's wish that he should not control it until his twenty-fourth year. But his course of life goes to show that he had wonderfully easy trustees, as he immediately bought himself off the grocery business, and made a long tour of the Continent for the benefit of his health. Returning to England, he dropped into the little village of Stoke Newington, a mere hamlet, where he had some possessions.
That a young man of wealth and free from all ties of family or business, should have voluntarily chosen such a home, and been contented to remain there, in a state of idle inactivity, for the space of seven or eight years, can be accounted for only by remembering his feeble health.
When twenty-five, his health entirely failed, and he was prostrated by a severe fit of illness, through which he was nursed by his landlady, Mrs. Loidore. Upon his recovery he made her his wife, in testimony of his gratitude, though history records that she had neither beauty, money, nor health, having been an invalid for twenty-two years, and was twenty-seven years his senior.
Two or three years after this seemingly ill-suited marriage, which, strange to say, seems to have been a not unhappy one, Mrs. Howard died. Immediately Mr. Howard, then twenty-eight or nine years of age, again left England for a second extended tour. This being the year of the great earthquake of Lisbon, he naturally turned his steps thitherward.
Setting sail from England for Spain, he was captured on the high seas by a French privateer, and for two months suffered the hardships and indignities of prison life in those times. Upon his release he used all his influence to secure the exchange of the remainder of his vessel's company, and was successful. This prison experience he never forgot.