Howard’s father, a kinsman of the dukes of Norfolk, was the Catholic owner of the Corby Castle estate and founder in 1803 of the Cumberland Rangers volunteers. He remained a staunch supporter of the Cumberland and Westmorland Whigs in their long struggle against the Tory Lowthers, who made his right to vote without swearing allegiance to the established church a major issue at the Westmorland election of 1826.
Howard soon established himself as a regular contributor to debates and arranged for copies of the Mirror of Parliament to be dispatched to the Carlisle Commercial Newsroom to prove his diligence and counter any misreporting.
He divided for the reintroduced reform bill at its second reading, 6 July, against adjournment, 12 July 1831, and steadily for its details. He protested at attempts to delay its progress, 29 July, 27 Aug., and dismissed the proposed enfranchisement of £50 tenants-at-will as unconstitutional, 27 Aug. Endorsing a petition from Leath Ward that day against dividing the Cumberland constituency, he said that indisposition alone had prevented him from voting against the proposed county divisions (11 Aug.). He explained before dividing against Edmund Peel’s amendment to preserve freemen’s voting rights, 30 Aug., that he now considered the combination of a £10 householder vote and the enfranchisement of freemen resident within seven miles ‘perfectly adequate’. He joined in the clamour against the anti-reformers’ attempt to ‘create collision’ between the agricultural and commercial interests and cited extracts from the statutes of Henry VI and VIII as proof that non-resident freemen were not permitted to vote until 1774. He divided for the bill’s passage, 21 Sept., and Lord Ebrington’s confidence motion, 10 Oct. He objected to receiving a petition blaming the bishops for the bill’s defeat in the Lords and urging their disfranchisement, 18 Oct. According to a hostile witness, Howard ‘cut a sorry figure’ at the Cumberland reform meeting at Wigton, 15 Nov.
Hoping to see district registries established according to the French plan, he initially declined to join Blamire in outright opposition to the locally unpopular general register bill, 27 Jan. 1832. He denounced central registration when presenting a hostile petition from Cumberland, 22 Feb., and criticized the appointment of a select committee on the English measure that day as a waste of time and money. He was in favour of committing the Irish registry of deeds bill, 9 Apr. He supported the principle of the factory regulation bill, but warned of its adverse effects in depressed textile towns like Carlisle, called for the exemption of 14-21-year-olds from its provisions and asked the select committee to consider its likely impact on poor rates, 14, 16 Mar. He disagreed with the Irish secretary Smith Stanley on the tithes question, 30 Mar., and claimed that he would never have voted for his resolutions had he realized that ‘there was to be no difference in the appropriation of church property’. He explained that although he acquiesced in the continuance of the Church of Ireland, his priority was the establishment of a stable administrative and educational hierarchy within the Irish Catholic church. He suggested amending the Irish clandestine marriages bill by substituting the words ‘Roman Catholic clergymen’ for ‘Popish priests’, 29 June. He made several interventions in support of the anatomy bill, which he perceived as the only means of extending good surgical practice, but he objected to the appointment of political agents as coroners, 11 Apr., and voted to hold coroners’ inquests publicly, 20 June. He endorsed Carlisle’s petition against the bill to remove Scottish and Irish vagrants, 17 July 1832.
After a difficult canvass in which his Catholicism and refusal to support the ballot were major issues, he was returned for Carlisle as a Liberal with James at the general election of December 1832.