Howard's father outlived him, although only by a year; having set out for the Holy Land on crusade, he reached Jerusalem but died there on 17 November 1437. Robert Howard's mother had pre-deceased them both; she left Robert her manor of Stoke by Nayland in her will. Howard and Margaret had had three children, John, Katherine, and Margaret. John was to be a prominent retainer for the third duke of Norfolk, and when civil war broke out less than twenty years later, he was to play a leading role as one of the House of York's firmest supporters. In 1483, when Richard III took the throne, he rewarded John Howard with the by now-extinct Mowbray dukedom of Norfolk.