Sir Edmund Knyvet (c.1508–1551), often confused with his uncle and namesake, a serjeant-porter to the King, who died in 1539, was the eldest son of Sir Thomas Knyvett, a distinguished courtier and sailor, and his wife Lady Muriel Howard, the daughter of Thomas Howard, second duke of Norfolk. After his father’s death at sea in 1512, Charles Brandon, duke of Suffolk, Sir Thomas Wyndham, and Anthony Wingfield, successively purchased Knyvet’s wardship, until Knyvet reached majority and later came into his inheritance in 1533. Now a Norfolk landlord, Knyvet joined his uncle Thomas Howard, third duke of Norfolk, in suppressing the Pilgrimage of Grace uprising in Yorkshire in 1536. He was knighted in 1538 or 1539, and was made sheriff of Norfolk and Suffolk in November 1539.[1]
By 1527 he was married to Anne Shelton, cousin to Queen Anne Boleyn and sister of Mary Shelton. Knyvet was therefore intimately connected to the Norfolk gentry, in particular the Boleyn, Howard, and Shelton families. At times his relationship to the Howards was strained: for example, his uncle Thomas Howard, third duke of Norfolk, “always wrote about Knyvet in terms which revealed small sympathy for his hotheaded, conceited and clever young kinsman.”[2] In 1541 his hotheadedness led to an altercation during a tennis game within the precincts of court, when Knyvet struck Thomas Clere, a close friend of his cousin Henry Howard, earl of Surrey. In keeping with a recent statute enacted to curb violence at court, Knyvet was sentenced to have his right hand struck off—a sentence he only narrowly escaped by a last-minute royal pardon. When the earl of Surrey was brought to trial for treason in December 1546, Knyvet testified against him. Knyvet received material benefit from the disgrace of the Howards as well, since he subsequently received a lease of some of their lands. The following year, Knyvet was elected to the Commons as a knight of the shire of Norfolk. He died in London on 1 May 1551.[3]