In her later letters she asserted that she had been a dutiful wife, continuing to serve at court daily ‘sixteen years together' while her husband was absent in King Henry VIII's wars, and accompanying him to Ireland when he was posted there in 1520–22. She bore him five children, and according to Graves, as late as 1524, when he became Duke of Norfolk, 'they appeared to be bonded by mutual love'. However, in 1527 Norfolk took a mistress, Bess Holland, the daughter of his steward, with whom he lived openly at Kenninghall, and whom the Duchess described variously in her letters as a bawd, a drab, and 'a churl's daughter', 'which was but washer of my nursery eight years'. It appears the Duchess' anger caused her to exaggerate Bess Holland's inferior social status, as her family were probably minor gentry, and she eventually became a lady-in-waiting to Queen Anne Boleyn. During the long period in which King Henry VIII sought to have his marriage to Catherine of Aragon annulled, the Duchess remained staunchly loyal to Queen Catherine and antagonistic towards her husband's niece, Anne Boleyn, with whom the King was infatuated. Late in 1530 it was noted that the Duchess was secretly conveying letters to Queen Catherine from Italy concealed in oranges, which the Queen passed on to the Imperial ambassador, Eustace Chapuys, and at one time the Duchess told Chapuys that her husband, the Duke, had confided in her that Anne would be 'the ruin of all her family'. In 1531 the Duchess was exiled from court at Anne Boleyn's request for too freely declaring her loyalty to Catherine. According to Graves, the Duchess also quarrelled with Anne over Anne's insistence that the Duchess's daughter, Mary Howard, should marry Henry VIII's illegitimate son, Henry FitzRoy. When Anne Boleyn was crowned on 1 June 1533, the Duchess refused to attend the coronation 'from the love she bore to the previous Queen'. Meanwhile, the Duchess's own marriage continued to deteriorate. The Duke refused to give up his mistress, and resolved to separate from his wife. Both the Duke and Thomas Cromwell requested the Duchess's brother to take her in, a suggestion he utterly rejected. The Duchess wrote of her husband's abuse of her during this period, claiming that when she was recovering after the birth of her daughter, Mary, he had pulled her out of bed by the hair, dragged her through the house, and wounded her with a dagger.