The table groaned under its bounty. Capons, beef, mutton, venison, all freshly slaughtered and then roasted or boiled; ‘conies’, chicken, pigeon, even a heron: a carnivore’s paradise. There would be tarts and custards to follow, the whole washed down with weak beer or ale and rich wines.1 Elizabeth, Countess of Surrey was hosting a family feast, and everything needed to be perfect.
Ordinarily, she would have had her husband there with her. But the earl was many miles away to the north leading the defence against the Scots, who were once again threatening the border.2 In his absence, Elizabeth did as any noblewoman would do. She took a leave of absence from her position at court and resumed her place at home as chatelaine of the estate. This was such a complex role that there were ‘how to’ books in circulation explaining how best to be ‘wise and sound administrators’.3 Mostly, Elizabeth needed to manage those beneath her. She needed to know the laws relating to land, tax and inheritance; be aware of the agricultural calendar so that the right tasks were done at the right times; and make sure that her workers were not lazy. There were estate officials to handle the minutiae and to keep records and accounts. Elizabeth would have perused these and made sure she was satisfied before signing them.
She also needed to offer hospitality on a grand scale. She and her household were at the family’s main home, Tendring Hall on the Suffolk-Essex border. Elizabeth’s kitchen accounts show that on 5 August 1523, a multitude of in-laws descended for a family celebration, possibly marking the betrothal of Elizabeth’s young sister-in-law to Henry Radcliffe, the future earl of Sussex.4 Her parents-in-law the Duke and Duchess of Norfolk, their children Anne, Countess of Oxford, Elizabeth, Dorothy and Thomas, along with her aunt-in-law Lady Wyndham, all came to dinner and stayed until the next day, so Elizabeth also had to provide overnight accommodation for them and for their servants.
Hence the groaning tables. Meat was expensive and consuming it a sign of status. The family dined in Elizabeth’s own private chamber, separately from the rest of the household in the hall.5 While this was probably quieter, and the comparative privacy a mark of rank and exclusivity, it may also have made things more difficult for Elizabeth herself. Two years previously Elizabeth’s father the Duke of Buckingham had been summarily executed for high treason. Her father-in-law and her husband had sat on the jury that convicted him, and her father-in-law, the man now dining at her table, had pronounced the death sentence.6 Her father’s crime had been one of attitude. It was no secret that he expected to be regent if anything happened to Henry VIII, and it did not take a genius to spin ill-judged remarks into a design on the throne.7 Bonds of kinship created by marriage were supposed to help guard against such things – Elizabeth’s husband should in theory have supported his father-in-law against any accusations – but the usual unwritten rules of loyalty often went out of the window as soon as the word ‘treason’ was uttered. For Elizabeth, though, it remained complicated. Women’s family identities aren’t often considered in the general narrative of Tudor history, but Elizabeth hadn’t stopped being a Stafford when she became a Howard. Part of her role was to foster relations between the two families. Now, though, the Staffords were traitors, their descendants tainted. Her marital family preferred to ignore the kinship tie, and none of Elizabeth’s relatives visited during these years. Instead, she hosted Howard family celebrations and sent venison pasties to her father-in-law’s London house.8
Elizabeth’s father’s execution had sent shockwaves through the nobility. If the premier peer of the realm could be killed for appearing over-mighty, nobody was safe. And yet by May 1524 Elizabeth might have been forgiven for wondering what had become of that lesson. At the age of eighty, her father-in-law the old Duke of Norfolk had finally passed on. Elizabeth was now Duchess of Norfolk, her hook-nosed husband the new duke. It was usual for a peer to have a funeral commensurate with his or her rank, but the old duke’s made no concessions to royal anxieties. The whole county turned out. Nine hundred people wore nine hundred and fifty marks’ worth of black cloth. Three hundred priests were rounded up to pray for his soul. The procession from Framlingham, where he’d died, to his final resting place at Thetford Priory lasted several days, but even the funeral service itself was a marathon. An hour-long sermon on the lion of the tribe of Judah – the lion being the ‘badge’, the symbol, of the Howard family – so frightened some of the common folk that they fled from the church.9
Elizabeth and her husband now had significant shoes to fill. A close relationship to the royal court was becoming increasingly important for nobles as King Henry’s reign progressed; the court was the place where connections were made, loyalties assured, news gathered and reported. It was part of Elizabeth’s role as a noblewoman to achieve these things, not only at home in East Anglia but also at court as a lady-in-waiting. Combining the two was the tricky part. Elizabeth later wrote that she had served at court for sixteen years, but her surviving household accounts show that this wasn’t one single consecutive period of time.10 Like noblemen who held court office, ladies-in-waiting with husbands, children and homes to manage tended to divide their time between locations. But this divide wasn’t always even or clear-cut. The time that they spent at court or elsewhere fluctuated according to the needs of all concerned, and while it’s possible that there was some sort of rota system of service – we know that this was the case for the king’s privy chamber servants – either it wasn’t as stringent, or it didn’t apply to peeresses.11 Elizabeth was comparatively lucky. Her estates in East Anglia weren’t insurmountably far from London, and her accounts show that she was able to visit fairly regularly.
Her friends visited her too. Towards the end of 1523 Ladies Parr and Bryan came to dinner, and on another occasion Lady Morley brought her daughter Mistress Parker and ‘another of the Queen’s maids’.12 Parr and Bryan were courtiers like Elizabeth; Maud Green, Lady Parr had served Catherine of Aragon for almost as long.13 Alice, Lady Morley was a neighbour, but her daughter Jane Parker was one of the queen’s maids of honour, and had clearly travelled with a friend.14 Relationships formed at court did not stop existing outside that bubble.
These and other court visitors would have had much to discuss at Elizabeth’s table during the mid-1520s. Perhaps they brought her the news that the king’s latest mistress, Mary Boleyn, Lady Carey had had a baby daughter, and though the king hadn’t acknowledged the child like he had Bessie Blount’s son Henry, the chances were reasonable that she was his.15 Perhaps one royal bastard was enough, though in the summer of 1525 the king added to the speculation over the succession by making Henry lord admiral and Duke of Richmond and Somerset, and then sent him north to act as a semblance of royal presence in a troubled region.16 In a show of even-handedness – or to placate her mother the queen – Princess Mary was also sent away in the same year to Ludlow, Princess of Wales in all but name.17
The king’s focus on his children was part of a general drive for domestic reform. In January 1526 a new set of court ordinances was published: the Eltham Ordinances, devised largely by the plump and pompous Cardinal Wolsey.18 They were needed. Controlling the number of people who entered the palace precincts was virtually impossible, and even keeping track of those who claimed food, lodging and salaries was a task too great for the manpower allotted to it. The kitchen might in theory be providing for a household of 500 or so, but in practice over three times that number were dining at the king’s expense.19 These, the latest in a long line of court ordinances, were designed for retrenchment. The problem was that ordinances were always more theory than practice, and often a futile remonstration against habits that were difficult to police. Courtiers must not, the Eltham Ordinances scolded, ‘cast, leave, or lay any manner of dishes, platters, saucers, or broken meat, either in the said galleries, or at their chamber doors’, but have their own servants take them straight to the scullery.20 Clearly, nobles expected some sort of palace ‘room service’. Twenty years later, behaviour in the public areas of the palace was still a problem; a proclamation begged courtiers not to ‘make water’ within the precinct of the court.21
Since the queen’s household mirrored the king’s, there wasn’t much that was relevant to ladies-in-waiting. The only part that Elizabeth and her friends might have been concerned about was the allowances for bouche of court – food, drink, light and fuel, the amount allotted according to social rank. As a duchess, Elizabeth was entitled to two loaves of bread and a gallon of ale in the morning, one loaf and another gallon of ale in the afternoon and two loaves, one gallon of ale and a pitcher of wine at supper, to be shared between herself and her servants. From November to April she could have one torch, one prickett (candle), two sises (small candles), one pound of white lights, ten talshides (timbers for fuel) and eight faggots of wood, and for the other half of the year as much wax, white lights, wood and coal as she could get for £39 13s 3d, an attempt at rationing supply, though this sum was roughly three and a half years’ wages to a tradesman. Jane Parker, as one of the queen’s maids, had the same food allowance to be shared between her and the five other maids, but less light and fuel.22 Again, this was probably hard to enforce. Reining in entitled courtiers was not an enviable task, and palaces were not always pleasant environments for Elizabeth and the other ladies.
María de Salinas, Lady Willoughby was one of only a few women to be mentioned by name in drafts of the Eltham Ordinances, receiving lodging and bouche of court as part of the queen’s household.23 This was probably because of her status as one of the queen’s closest ladies-in-waiting, and the fact that her husband did not hold office at court with her. In October 1526, though, she was almost certainly not there. William, her husband of ten years, was dying. He had summoned his estate and household officers to his bedside in Orford Friary in Suffolk, along with the prior and as many of the friars as could be spared, so that his will might be read and witnessed in their presence. It was four in the afternoon, and daylight was giving way to the dancing flames of many candles. The room in which William lay was too small to fit all of the people who had turned up. They spilled out into the adjoining great chamber, clustering by the doorway. Thomas Russhe, receiver of William’s lands, began to read the will loudly enough for everybody to hear.24
The first half was unremarkable: religious bequests to churches and friaries, and reiteration of the property set aside for María, her ‘jointure’ that would support her during her widowhood.25 But then Russhe reached the part stating that the residue of all the rest of the estate was also to go to María for the term of her life, and then to their daughter, seven-year-old Katherine. María and William had no male children. His male heir was his next-oldest brother, Sir Christopher, who had had designs on the estate for years. So far as William and María were concerned, Sir Christopher had already had all that he was entitled to. For María particularly this must have seemed obvious. In Castile, daughters inherited alongside sons as a matter of course, and a mere uncle would not have had any legal recourse.26 In England, though, things were less clear-cut. Some of the lands now gifted to María had earlier been set aside for Sir Christopher, and it wasn’t certain that a will could trump a previous agreement. This was why William had called witnesses: ‘All you that be here, for the love of God I pray you that you will testify that the same is my testament and last will and full mind.’27 Later that night he died, and María was left to deal with the fallout.28
María’s marriage had evidently been a strong one. William wanted their daughter Katherine to marry only according to María’s advice and that of her godmother, Queen Catherine, and though he’d been married once before, he was having a tomb made for himself and María, choosing to lie beside her, not his first wife, in perpetuity. His decision to leave her almost all of his property shows that he trusted her above anybody else, not only to manage it properly but to negotiate the legal fight that he knew he was creating. Finally, and most significantly, he made her his chief executrix, in charge of carrying out the will itself: he placed his immortal soul in her hands.29
In the months after William’s death María must frequently have cursed the English legal system. A proverb from her homeland claimed, ‘Better to be a widow than to be a married woman’, and in Castile this was true. There she would have been entitled to the property that she had brought to the marriage as dowry, plus half of her and her husband’s joint estate.30 In England things were lamentably different. Some women did retain control of their dowries by agreement with their husbands, but the law would not uphold this for them. They were only entitled to a third of their husband’s wealth after his death, or however much property he had assured to them in jointure at the time of their marriage, and this was never usually as much as half of the estate.31 William, however, had left María most of his land. The problem now was actively claiming this inheritance. Her brother-in-law Sir Christopher insisted that some of the lands had been entailed upon him at an earlier date and that this trumped anything William had said or done later on. María argued vociferously that this was not true.32 In theory, it was for the law to decide whose claim was stronger. But the law wasn’t an abstract monolith, and legal right and precedent were only one part of the game. Nepotism and legal patronage, the vested interests of powerful men and the fact that María was a woman and Sir Christopher a man were equally significant.
Lawsuits in early modern England were a game of reputational damage. People of María’s standing sued one another readily, but the aim was generally to force the other party to settle out of court to avoid a stain on their honour, not to seek an actual resolution. Slander was therefore an important part of litigation. María and Sir Christopher’s petitions used standard, but inflammatory, phrases: the charges were ‘outrageous’, brought only to put each other to ‘great delay, charge, cost and hindrance’, to his or her ‘utter undoing’. Sir Christopher was using ‘crafty means’ to get what he wanted, and María was obstinate, taking ‘sinister counsel’, bearing ‘cruel mind’ towards her brother-in-law.33
María used every tool at her disposal to win the dispute, and she wasn’t afraid to play dirty. She continued to administer the estate and collect the revenues, even though theoretically the lands belonged to the Crown until the legal process had run its course.34 Sir Christopher tried to stop her. At one point he claimed that she sent her men to cut down the corn on thirty acres of land belonging to him near Orford, even though it wasn’t ripe. Apparently she had said that she ‘would rather it should rot on the ground’ than that he should have it. Her servants, when questioned, replied blandly that the land was María’s, and they were merely peaceably carrying out their standard duties; Sir Christopher was the one who had entered unlawfully.35
María knew exactly what she was doing. Delaying the formal settlement of the estates bought her time to manoeuvre. Her daughter Katherine was still a child. In England, the guardianship of minor heirs and heiresses automatically belonged to the Crown in a system known as ‘wardship’. The Crown gained the right to administer the property that the heir was due to inherit and to skim the profits, as well as the gift of the heir’s marriage. These rights were usually sold on to the highest bidder. María knew she couldn’t afford to buy her daughter’s wardship.36 No doubt this pained her. In Castile she would have been Katherine’s guardian automatically, exactly as her own mother Inés had been the guardian of María and her siblings after their father’s death.37 Now María would lose control over Katherine’s environment, her upbringing and her future.
The best-case scenario, then, was somebody with whom María saw eye to eye. Naturally she will have hoped for a guardian who would treat Katherine well and teach her what she needed to know to succeed in this world. But ideally this would also be a person of high status, with political pull that might translate into legal patronage and influence with the king. One can imagine her casting a mental eye over the English nobility and making delicate inquiries in the course of her normal duties at court. Whatever she did, it paid off: Katherine’s wardship was bought by Charles Brandon, Duke of Suffolk, and he was the perfect candidate. María knew the affable duke well already. She was godmother to his daughter, had served at court with his wife, and probably socialised with him at home. The Brandon and Willoughby estates bordered one another, which was the main reason for Suffolk’s interest. If he could in due course marry young Katherine to his own son and heir Henry, the two patrimonies would be united in an extremely pleasing and profitable manner. More immediately important for María, Suffolk was a royal councillor, the king’s brother-in-law, a man of rank and influence. If he threw his weight behind her in the matter of the estate dispute, Sir Christopher might well back down.
The wardship was officially agreed on 20 November 1527. Suffolk was to pay the exorbitant sum of 4,000 marks into the royal treasury, in yearly instalments of 500 marks. He also had to put up his Oxfordshire lands as collateral, because his credit was such that Wolsey and the king did not trust him to stick to the payment schedule. In return, he would receive forty marks per year for young Katherine’s expenses.38 That he agreed to these terms shows how valuable her lands and marriage were, and how cannily María had worked the system to her own and her daughter’s advantage. Seven-year-old Katherine would not even need to move very far. The duke’s home at Westhorpe in Suffolk was only twenty miles from the Willoughby seat at Parham. His wife Mary, the queen dowager of France, was warm and kind, a woman of strong opinion but a realist who could teach Katherine how to navigate royal politics. Katherine would grow up with Suffolk’s own daughters Frances and Eleanor, who were almost the same age.
At stalemate, Sir Christopher clamoured for Wolsey’s attention, trying to force the legal issues. María wouldn’t bring the evidences, she wouldn’t abide by his decree, she was still delaying the process.39 The great cardinal, though, was otherwise engaged. That summer, the king, driven by fears of dynastic extinction and – perhaps – the lure of Mistress Boleyn’s seductive eyes, had publicly expressed doubts about the validity of his marriage to Queen Catherine. The whole of Europe was in shock. Why, Henry demanded, had they not had a son? Why so many dead babies? Was God angry with him? Poring over his Bible, in Leviticus he found an answer: a man should not marry his brother’s wife. It is an unclean thing, and he will be childless. Princess Mary, as a girl, did not count. Too well Henry knew that even one male heir would not be sufficient. Catherine, now aged forty-two and possibly menopausal, had not been pregnant since 1517. Should he – could he – do anything to change his desperate situation? Naturally he turned to his chief advisor, facilitator of all his desires, the cardinal. Marriage was governed by the Church. It wasn’t unprecedented for kings to get out of marriages that had become problematic, and the Pope was the man to ask.
On 17 May 1527 a tribunal met secretly in York Place, Wolsey’s London home. Clerics and lawyers must have eyed one another with astonishment as they realised why they had been called: the king was placing himself on trial for having lived almost twenty years in unlawful matrimony.40 Unfortunately, it was clear fairly quickly that this was not going to be as straightforward as Henry hoped. Because Catherine had indeed been married to Henry’s brother Arthur, she and Henry had had a dispensation from the Pope to allow them to marry. To ask the Holy Father to now pronounce the marriage invalid and permit an annulment meant that he would also have to declare that that dispensation should not have been granted: tantamount to admitting fault in one’s predecessor, something that no Pope was keen to do. Moreover, there were rumours that Henry’s desires were not purely conscientious in nature. He continued to spend a lot of time with maid of honour Anne Boleyn. On Shrove Tuesday 1526 he had jousted under the motto ‘Declare, I dare not!’, which many took to be a reference to his love for her.41 Then, nobody had batted an eyelid. By 1527, though, it was clear that this was more than a passing fancy. The Pope was not going to countenance an annulment simply to legitimise adultery.
Nor was he physically able to do so. In May 1527 renegade troops belonging to Charles V had sacked Rome and the Vatican and taken the Pope captive. Charles V was Queen Catherine’s nephew, and though he pronounced himself horrified at his troops’ action he now had the Pope effectively at his mercy. This was not good news for the king of England. In the summer of 1527, therefore, Wolsey himself was sent to France to broker a peace and shore up support for Henry’s cause with diplomatic representatives from across western Europe, as well as to attempt to negotiate the release of the Pope – or to set himself up as a papal vice-regent in the interim, able to pronounce on Henry’s marriage.42 Before he left he saw María and Sir Christopher, heard their complaints, and apparently washed his hands of them, telling them firmly to go back to the law courts.43 Clearly, such things were not his priority just now. He may have been growing afraid for his own position. By July King Henry was ‘at all times’ with the Dukes of Norfolk and Suffolk and Anne Boleyn’s father, none of whom were friendly to Wolsey. Even after the cardinal returned home, he found that it was made difficult for him to see the king alone.44
María and the Duke of Suffolk might have been content to wait for the cardinal to return to domestic affairs, but Sir Christopher was not. Impatient, in the spring of 1528 he began doing what noblemen often did in land disputes: breaking and entering. On a cold February afternoon he came to the manor house at Eresby in Lincolnshire with a few servants, one of whom climbed the gate and broke the lock so that the rest could enter. They were not a large group, and they were not armed for conflict. What they had come for were the evidences, the paperwork that might help Sir Christopher to claim ownership. He sent his man up to the evidence house, which was not locked, but the door was blocked from the inside with ‘two great sand stones’. Thomas, his carver, was able to crawl under the door, remove the stones and let the men in. They took away some of the evidences and, after a few days playing lord of the manor, departed. News travelled quickly and a lawsuit was soon begun in young Lady Katherine’s name. María termed it unlawful entry; Sir Christopher said he had every right to be there.45 The Duke of Suffolk was sufficiently concerned about the potential impact on his ward’s inheritance to write to Wolsey asking that ‘remedies may be had herein’ and that Wolsey let him know what he planned to do about it.46
The answer was not a lot. The lawsuits continued, but the attention of many of the key players was elsewhere. It was a year of gathering storm clouds, and of girding loins for the mysterious something just out of sight on the horizon. We tend to think that events at court existed in a bubble, but this was far from the case. María’s legal battle was reliant on the patronage of court figures, but she was also giving support in turn to her mistress the queen. It was a tense time to be in the queen’s household. Catherine had known for over a year that something was going on. She had found out about the secret May tribunal in York Place within twenty-four hours, and almost immediately despatched two of her most trusted servants, her physician Fernán López de Escoriaza and Francisco Felipez, to Spain to her nephew the emperor, begging for his assistance.47 They made it there safely, though King Henry had explicitly ordered that they be preventatively arrested and held up in France.48 Cardinal Wolsey spent much of 1528 trying to infiltrate the queen’s chambers. Some reports suggest that this was already standard practice. There was much contemporary anxiety about the ‘doubleness’ of servants, and biblical translator William Tyndale accused Wolsey in print of having bribed certain of the queen’s servants into reporting her deeds and words. Indeed her almoner Robert Shorton did so, albeit through protestations of loyalty.49 Wolsey and the king were keen to get at least one of Queen Catherine’s Spanish servants on side, which speaks for their continued close relationship to her. The attempted arrest of Francisco Felipez in France in the summer of 1527 was supposed to be staged so that the king could pay his ransom and thus bring him ‘in more firm confidence’, because he was ‘privy unto the Queen’s affairs and secrets’.50 When this failed, they probably looked elsewhere. As Francis Bacon would later darkly remark, ‘Spanish women spy well’; no doubt Catherine knew this as well as Henry.51 At least one woman was said to have left court ‘for no other cause, but for that she would no longer betray her mistress’.52 Women, as well as men, were part of this deadly game. By the end of 1528, the stage was set for the greatest play in Christendom; but who was to direct?