The queen’s women sat in attitudes of relaxation in the privy chamber at Bridewell Palace, fanning themselves languidly. As the Bishop of Carlisle had earlier remarked, mopping the sweat from his face, it was a very hot day, and it had not been made any cooler by the egos on display at Blackfriars that morning.1 María de Salinas, Lady Willoughby and the rest of Queen Catherine’s ladies-in-waiting had listened in grim horror as a papal court of law, presided over by the Pope’s representative Cardinal Campeggio, continued to place the royal marriage on trial. Legal counsel from both sides had been debating the matter for weeks already. The court had come to Bridewell Palace, next door to the friary, so that the king and queen might both make their appearances on the allotted day. Queen Catherine had already protested the legality of the court once; now, magnificent in her righteousness, she simply refused to engage. She declared the judges too biased to rule on her case and then she went on her knees before her husband, asking him gently how she had offended him. As King Henry, red in the face and looking everywhere but at his wife, took refuge in silence, Queen Catherine rose, summoned her attendants and swept out of the hall, ignoring calls for her return.2
Now María and the others took solace in embroidery, every window set open to its widest. They must all have been acutely aware of the king’s glowering presence a floor below.3 Perhaps they had even heard him haranguing Cardinal Wolsey a few hours earlier. If so, nobody can have been particularly surprised when the gentleman usher keeping the door of the queen’s chamber came to announce the arrival of Wolsey and his colleague, Cardinal Campeggio.4 Queen Catherine stood, but as her ladies came to remove the skeins of embroidery silks she had draped around her neck she stopped them. She and a companion left the privy chamber to speak to the cardinals amid the crowds in her presence chamber. When told that the cardinals had come to ask her what she intended to do regarding the trial and to give her counsel, she gestured to the white sewing thread and protested her femininity: ‘to make answer to your request I cannot so suddenly, for I was set among my maidens at work, thinking full little of any such matter’. Playing to the audience, she bewailed her lack of impartial counsel, before taking the cardinals into the privy chamber and berating them soundly.5 One can imagine María and the other women gravely pretending to pay no attention.
In the months after the trial, the atmosphere at court grew steadily more oppressive. Cardinal Campeggio ultimately refused to rule on the matter, proroguing the court instead. Few people ever told King Henry ‘no’. Having failed conspicuously to produce the annulment the king required, Cardinal Wolsey was deprived of his office as lord chancellor and banished to his manor at Esher. By the end of November 1529 the tension was such that one felt anything might happen, and at a banquet in celebration of St Andrew’s Day it finally did. A sudden hush fell over the room as one voice rose above the hubbub of courtiers dining. Queen Catherine of Aragon was speaking to her husband. She told him forcefully that his treatment of her was akin to the pains of purgatory on earth, because he refused to visit her or dine with her in her apartments any more. She cared ‘not a straw’ for the opinion of his almoner – Wolsey – or anybody other than the Pope; for every doctor or lawyer he found to decide their divorce case in his favour, she would find a thousand to declare their marriage valid and indissoluble.6 These were bold words, born of desperation. Though the legatine court at Blackfriars had been formally adjourned, the Pope had not yet agreed to have the case tried in Rome, and she was losing hope that he ever would.
Ever sensitive to the ebb and flow of royal favour, courtiers knew that this was an unprecedented situation. Their shifting alliances became heightened, the stakes ratcheted ever higher, and this did not make for peace. Anne Boleyn remained at court with the king and queen in an awkward ménage à trois. Though Henry began renovations specifically for Anne at the soon-to-be-renamed York Place almost the moment he seized it from the cardinal in November 1529, these would not be ready for some time. The evidence suggests that she continued to occupy a different set of apartments within the same palace as the royal couple. Thus, after his emotionally charged dinner with Catherine on St Andrew’s Eve, the king retired for supper with Anne in her own chambers – at which he was told waspishly that he should never have stooped to discuss the divorce with his wife. Anne snapped that Catherine would inevitably best him in verbal sparring and one of these days he would simply give in.7
The king went to some effort to reassure her and other observers. Just over a week later he bestowed the earldom of Wiltshire on Anne’s father Thomas, and the next day threw a huge celebratory banquet at which Anne was treated as though she were the queen, and not the absent Catherine.8 Her extended family turned out en masse, including the two Duchesses of Norfolk: Elizabeth Stafford, the ‘younger’ Duchess, wife to Thomas Howard, 3rd and current Duke of Norfolk, and her stepmother-in-law Agnes, the dowager duchess. Elizabeth, as we know, had served Queen Catherine for many years. Agnes, too, was no stranger to court occasions. Their status as duchesses meant that they were both frequently in attendance at banquets, revels and ceremonies. But mother and daughter-in-law relationships could be fraught then as now; their shared connection to the royal court did not make them friends. In fact they had a history of sniping at one another. In the summer of 1528, the deadly sweating sickness had rampaged through the country with more virulence than usual. Anne Boleyn caught it; her sister’s husband died of it.9 The Duke of Norfolk also caught it at his home in Suffolk and several of his servants died. Dowager Duchess Agnes, hearing of this, mentioned it in a letter to Cardinal Wolsey and offered her own allegedly infallible remedy against the illness. She added snidely that her stepson’s illness had occurred ‘as I think through default of keeping’.10 By this she meant housekeeping, Elizabeth’s job as Norfolk’s wife. Her words have been read as a dig at her daughter-in-law. For a minor remark, this had major implications. To criticise a woman’s household management was to imply that she wasn’t fit to be an aristocratic wife and to carry out the public, political responsibilities that came with it. Agnes was suggesting to the king’s chief advisor that Elizabeth wasn’t up to the task of being Duchess of Norfolk. This was hardly the act of a supportive matriarch.
Resentment was still simmering between the two duchesses the following year. On one occasion Elizabeth was, in her eyes, slighted at court, and she was furious about it; her beloved mistress the queen told her to give way and allow Agnes, the dowager duchess, to walk in front of her in the position of greater precedence. Elizabeth felt brushed aside, dismissed and relegated. Elizabeth and her husband spoke ‘angry words’ to Queen Catherine, who, according to the Imperial ambassador Eustace Chapuys, was still offended by the incident some time later.11 Chapuys had only been in England for a few months when he reported this in December 1529, but already he had a keen sense of the personal politics governing Henry’s court. A Savoyard, Chapuys’ native language was French, and he was used to a court full of schemers on the make. A small man with an openness of expression that led people to confide in him, his dark eyes were nevertheless shrewd and he was extremely quick on the uptake, grasping the likely political implications of an event before others had fully understood what had even occurred.12 He was committed to aiding the queen in her troubles with the king, and he knew whose support would make his job easier. This incident, he noted, would make it much more difficult to recruit Elizabeth’s husband to the queen’s cause.
This spat over who should go in front of whom sounds trivial, even childish, but it had implications that contemporaries took seriously. As Duchess of Norfolk, Elizabeth was the premier peeress of the realm. All the aristocratic titles of England were ordered first by rank – duchess, marchioness, countess, viscountess, baroness – and then by antiquity within those ranks. The older the title, the more senior its holder. The dukedom of Norfolk was the oldest of its kind, second only to the royal dukedoms, and this routinely put Elizabeth and her husband at the head of every procession, every list, every hierarchy. Rank determined the lodgings allocated, the offices held, the fabrics and colours worn, the very food on one’s plate; it mattered, and so the order of precedence in a court procession was indeed worth a quarrel. But, for men, rank was simple. There could be only one Duke of Norfolk at a time. For women it was more complex. Elizabeth, as the wife of Thomas Howard, 3rd Duke of Norfolk, held the title of Duchess of Norfolk. But Agnes, as the widow of the previous duke, also held the courtesy title of Duchess of Norfolk. It was all very well to differentiate by calling the widow the ‘dowager’, or simply by referring to the two as the ‘older’ and ‘younger’ duchesses. Was it the older or the younger, though, who took precedence? This was a knotty point, and the answer was not the same everywhere. Nonetheless Elizabeth would undoubtedly have known that in England it was the older, dowager duchess who was placed ahead of her younger counterpart.13 The widowed Agnes, therefore, took precedence over Elizabeth, the younger duchess. When Elizabeth attempted to interrupt this custom the queen had intervened to uphold it, exerting control and insisting on peace within her household.
We don’t know exactly when or where this happened, but it was public enough for Chapuys to hear about it. Both Elizabeth and her husband Norfolk had been ‘much offended’, he wrote, ‘especially the Duchess, who belongs to the House of Lancaster’.14 Therein lay a clue. Elizabeth, born into the Stafford family, had royal blood; her paternal grandmother was Catherine Woodville, sister of Edward IV’s queen, and among her great-grandmothers was Margaret Beaufort, grandmother of Henry VIII. Agnes, the dowager duchess, came from the Tylney family, who were of Lincolnshire gentry stock. Elizabeth felt that this ought to make a difference even after marriage had nominally levelled the playing field, and she might also have felt that her lengthy service as one of Queen Catherine’s ladies-in-waiting meant that she deserved the higher place.
Agnes, the dowager duchess, had never served Queen Catherine ‘in ordinary’, but she too had lengthy experience of the royal court and had known the queen since she had arrived in England, far longer than her daughter-in-law had. Agnes had escorted the king’s older sister Princess Margaret to Scotland for her wedding with James IV in 1503, and reprised the role for his younger sister Princess Mary’s marriage to Louis XII of France in 1514. She was one of the godmothers to the queen’s daughter, Princess Mary, in 1516.15 But she was also the grandmother, by marriage, of Anne Boleyn. The prospect of having kin on the throne of England was one that most courtiers would jump at, and Agnes was probably not averse to the idea.
By now a widow in her early fifties, Agnes’ long career had suddenly become useful to the king because she had been present on Catherine and Prince Arthur’s wedding night back in 1501. She was one of a number of people called in the summer of 1529 to give a statement about what she had seen. Like everybody else, she knew only that they had been put to bed together, but this was inevitably used to argue that sexual intercourse had occurred. Prince Arthur, she remembered, was ‘about the same stature that the young Earl of Derby is now at’. She had seen them placed together ‘in one bed the same night’ and, with the rest of the court, had left them to it.16 The other English women asked responded in the same way. Jane, Lady Guildford, now sixty, said that she’d left the couple in bed that night ‘in mind and intent as she believeth to have carnal cognition together as man and wife’ and had found them still there together the next morning.17 The fact that they gave these statements did not mean that either woman was ‘against’ the queen in the matter of the royal divorce. It would not have been politic to refuse. Duchess Agnes perhaps resisted as far as she dared by insisting that they come to her in Suffolk to record it. Perhaps, though, ladies-in-waiting like her daughter-in-law Elizabeth thought that those asked should have refused to give any testimony at all. In fact, surviving records suggest that hardly any women were asked to give statements about Queen Catherine and Prince Arthur. This was partly because women’s testimony was generally considered less valuable and less reliable than men’s, but it was also an indictment of the process. Ladies-in-waiting were party to secrets about their mistress’s marriage bed and everybody knew it. Why else had King Louis XII of France, for example, been so averse to the presence of Jane, ‘mother Guildford’, in his wife’s household? If the king were so certain that Catherine was lying, that she had in fact slept with Arthur, who better to prove it than her women?
Instead, the Crown commissioners asked all the male aristocrats they could find who had been there that night. Their nobility itself was regarded as a sign of their trustworthiness, even though they had surely seen far less than the queen’s women. Beyond that, royal officials simply avoided approaching those they knew would not give the evidence required. María de Salinas, Lady Willoughby, for example, was never asked to tell what she knew, even though – or, more likely, because – she was one of only a very few prime candidates in England to know the truth of the matter. As one of Queen Catherine’s Spanish women, she had had access to the queen’s chamber in the days immediately following the marriage. She had heard Francisca de Cáceres mocking Arthur’s alleged inability to perform; she had seen Catherine’s sad face. But she was still in Catherine’s service. She wasn’t likely to lie to please the king.
The English were not the only ones collecting testimonies of that night. The Spanish court, too, began to search for those who had been present, and their lists of those to ask contained many more women than those of the English.18 Familiar names appear; María de Rojas, now the wife of Don Alvaro de Mendoza, living close to Nájera: ‘she used to sleep in the Queen’s own bed after the death of her first husband, Arthur’. Catalina Fortes, who had left in 1509 to become a nun, and was indeed now living in the convent of Madre de Dios in Toledo: ‘she was much in her [Catherine’s] confidence’. The wife of Juan de Cuero, who had ‘acted up’ as Catherine’s chamberlain after the departure of the Manriques. Even Catalina of Motril, ‘once the Queen’s slave, who used to make her bed and attend to other services of the chamber’, who had married a Morisco crossbow-maker named Oviedo and recently returned as a widow to her home town of Motril in Granada. We can’t be sure that all of these people were successfully located and questioned, but some certainly were; there were more specific instructions and interrogatories made for Catalina Fortes, for one, and there are many references in diplomatic correspondence to sending these depositions to the court in England. As late as 1532, the Spanish court was still searching for women who knew the truth. Catalina de Guevara, somebody noted, had sworn on oath that the queen was a virgin when she married Henry.19 There is no record of Francisca de Cáceres being sought for testimony, though we know that she was still alive and living in Granada.20 There’s no record of María de Salinas being approached by the Spanish either, and this was probably because it was impossible to send envoys to take her deposition so far away in England. By the end of 1529 the matter was at stalemate, and nobody knew quite where it might go next.
The new year brought heartbreak for Elizabeth, Duchess of Norfolk. In 1529 her husband the duke had purchased the last year of the young Earl of Derby’s wardship from the king. Early in 1530, in a move of questionable legality – he did not have royal permission – he married the young earl to his and Elizabeth’s eldest daughter, Catherine. So far, so good; this was a political, social and economic coup. But London was not a safe place. Sickness abounded. Cardinal Campeggio himself had complained about the ‘inconstant weather’ and counted himself fortunate if he was not lying on his bed groaning.21 Plagues like the sweat did not always spare the young, and Catherine had been staying at Norfolk House in Lambeth. Just a few short weeks into this next chapter of her life, on 15 March 1530, Elizabeth’s daughter died of plague. Her death was described as ‘one of the greatest blows the Duke has ever received’, but nothing was mentioned about Elizabeth’s undoubted grief.22 High mortality rates did not inure anybody to the loss of a child.
The marriage with the Earl of Derby was nevertheless too valuable to lose. Elizabeth and Norfolk had another daughter, Mary, and Elizabeth understandably thought the obvious solution was for Mary to marry Derby instead. But Norfolk had been discussing Mary’s potential marriage to the king’s illegitimate son (Bessie Blount’s Henry Fitzroy), and both he and Anne Boleyn were keen for that to go ahead. Anne, eager to secure a formal connection to the royal family to bolster her own intentions in that direction, was vocal about it, using ‘high words’ to Elizabeth. Not seeing why an upstart Boleyn should dictate the marriages of her children, Elizabeth responded in kind, and was almost dismissed from court.23 At this point, dowager Duchess Agnes involved herself in the dispute by suggesting her own youngest daughter, Norfolk’s much younger half-sister, for the Derby match. Norfolk jumped at the solution. The paperwork was drawn up with both his and Agnes’ signatures, but Elizabeth was not part of the formal arrangements.24 Wracked with grief, one daughter lost and the other married against her will, Elizabeth must have felt pushed aside, resentful of the influence that Agnes still held within the family, and furious with her niece Anne Boleyn.
The Howard dynasty was hedging its bets. The Duke of Norfolk was Anne’s maternal uncle. Ambassador Chapuys, ear to the ground and quick to see faction everywhere, thought that Norfolk was at the head of Anne’s ‘party’. There are some grounds for his assertions even if the ‘party’ was not as clearly defined as he would have it. While Norfolk was probably not responsible for Anne’s rise – he spent most of his time away from court between 1525 and 1528 – he undoubtedly benefited from his position as the patriarch of her family once the king began seriously to doubt his marriage. Contemporary sources show him at the forefront of many state matters from 1529, often alongside Anne’s father and brother, and the Venetian ambassador thought that after Wolsey’s disgrace and death in November 1530, ‘every employment devolves to him’.25 Did he do this for Anne? As so often for this period, their relationship is difficult to see in the surviving material and it’s likely that it was not a close or personal one. Arguably there is more evidence for antagonism than affection, but much of this dates from her tenure as queen when she was under an enormous amount of pressure. Whatever Norfolk’s level of support for his niece, it probably had more to do with dynastic ambition than familial love, and his later actions reveal that he was never prepared to stand by her if she failed. A loyal servant to his core, for Norfolk obedience to his king and his king’s desires would always come first.
Historians often assume that where a patriarch led, his family followed. There is something very satisfying in imagining scenes of family counsel around a long table in a panelled room, where the family patriarch planned the moves of individual family members like pawns on a chessboard. Clearly, the reality was less straightforward. Thomas Howard himself would later rehearse a long list of disagreements with family members going back twenty years.26 Usually, when we think of a family group like this, we are thinking of men. Any women in the picture are often depicted as pawns, ordered around by those men for the greater good of the family. It is true that early modern gender relations did support the superiority of men over women, and also emphasised the household hierarchy of husband over wife and father over children. It was often in women’s own interests to support the broader goals of the family, since what was good for the family was good for those belonging to it. Norfolk’s wife Elizabeth, though, had spent over fifteen years in service with the queen. Left alone at court for lengthy periods while her husband dealt with military issues far away, she’d had ample opportunity to develop strong ties to the queen and the rest of the royal household. Was she now to throw away those long-held loyalties and follow her husband in supporting their niece’s bid for the throne?
Though in service with the queen, Elizabeth lodged with her husband at court, as most wives did.27 It must have been obvious when their rooms were empty of Norfolk’s explosive personality. It’s likely that he did most of his paperwork in this space and that there were letters from relatives, clients, absent friends, councillors and foreign intelligencers stored in chests or littering the table. In the autumn of 1530 this included letters from Gregorio Casali, the king’s ambassador and advocate at the Vatican, the court of the Pope, on whom the decision regarding the validity of the king and queen’s marriage currently depended. Casali had been tasked with collating scholarly opinions of the marriage, in addition to his usual work of reporting back events, gossip and the general mood in Rome. While ambassadors reported officially to the monarch who employed them, they often corresponded with other courtiers as well. Casali and Norfolk had been keeping each other up to date for years.28 The queen had little access to this kind of information. Her visitors were restricted and her letters were watched, opened and read. She would not know Casali’s latest news.
Unless, of course, somebody told her – or better yet, forwarded the letter. But Elizabeth’s movements might be noted if she attempted to see her mistress alone at an odd time of day or night, and there would be little opportunity to pass it on otherwise. She must send a gift. A gift that could contain a paper missive, one that would naturally be taken apart and its secret found. Elizabeth must have given some thought to this puzzle, or else it was not her first foray into espionage, for she chose an orange, an expensive, imported fruit bought by nobles to convey their wealth, status and taste. What better gift for a Spaniard? The pith of the orange would keep the letter dry, and she could use ribbon to hide where the peel had been lifted. Sent in a basket with other food items, it would be perfect.
On 27 November, ambassador Chapuys reported to Emperor Charles V that the Duchess of Norfolk had sent the queen a present of poultry and an orange, inside which was the letter from Casali, which he now forwarded.29 Casali was not personally in touch with Elizabeth, which suggests that she had happened upon the letter opportunistically rather than acting as a link in an established chain of communication. Since Casali was indeed in contact with her husband Norfolk, and the couple shared lodgings on the king’s side of the royal court, it is reasonable to suppose that this was where she found it. Chapuys seems to have thought so; he feared that she was being used as a cat’s paw by Norfolk trying to pass false information to the queen. Nowhere, unfortunately, did he divulge the contents of the letter itself, and there is no way for us to know exactly what it contained. He did admit that ‘at all events this seems to open a way for the Queen to communicate more freely [with her friends] and disclose her plans to the Duchess, for which purpose it has been deemed expedient to dissemble better in future’.30 This was espionage as it was routinely practised in most royal courts. There was, as yet, no formal, centralised, bureaucratic intelligence organisation in Tudor England, though certainly established networks of spies were routinely used in military contexts.31 Otherwise, intelligence networks, news networks and espionage blurred; all were a central feature of early modern diplomacy, and women were equally as involved as men. It was not surprising that the queen was so cheered by Elizabeth’s communication, nor that an experienced diplomat like Chapuys immediately saw her as a potential route for future intelligence and plans.
By the end of the year the king had been summoned to Rome, and begun an angry exchange of letters with the Pope trying to circumvent this. Christmas was spent with the queen at Greenwich in an uneasy atmosphere, though Christmas traditions and revels were conducted as usual. Anne Boleyn’s temper was no sweeter. On New Year’s Day she reportedly told one of the queen’s ladies that she wished all Spaniards were at the bottom of the sea. When the lady remonstrated, Anne replied that she ‘cared not for the Queen or any of her family, and that she would rather see her hanged than have to confess that she was her queen and mistress’.32 At about the same time, she put her servants in livery emblazoned with the popular continental motto ainsi sera, groigne qui groigne – ‘let them grumble, this is how it’s going to be’. Was she trying to convince others, or herself? For the new year had not started auspiciously. Anne’s quarrels with the king were reported by several ambassadors; some said this was to do with the king’s continuing affection for his daughter Princess Mary, that Anne feared this happy family tableau. One Imperial ambassador wrote that Henry had summoned some of Anne’s relatives and begged them ‘with tears in his eyes’ to mediate between them, though this news was third-hand by the time it reached him and should perhaps be taken with a pinch of salt.33
At the end of the month, Elizabeth sent another message to the queen. Chapuys’ initial caution about her motives and her husband’s involvement was understandable, but needless. Her message said that the queen’s opponents were trying to draw her, Elizabeth, over to their ‘party’, but that they would never succeed. Moreover, the queen should be ‘of good courage’, because said opponents were at their wits’ end, ‘being as much amazed and bewildered in this affair as the first day it began’.34 The unequivocal support was one thing. The information about those around Anne Boleyn was another altogether. Only somebody as close to Anne’s family, indeed part of that family, could have imparted this with any authority. Only Elizabeth could have provided this intelligence. Self-evidently, her husband the duke would not have wanted the queen to know this. One assumes that he was unaware, or else he might at the very least have rethought the security of his filing system. Though Elizabeth’s general opinions and loyalty to the queen were known, she wisely kept her more questionable activities secret.
Elizabeth’s words reflect the speed with which the king’s ‘great matter’, his divorce, was finally moving. Parliament had been in session since 1529. It had so far passed several Acts restricting the power of the clergy, and thus, by extension, of the Pope in Rome. On 11 February 1531, the Convocation of Canterbury – the ecclesiastical equivalent of a parliament – granted Henry the title of ‘singular protector, supreme lord, and even, so far as the law of Christ allows, supreme head of the English church and clergy’.35 Though caveated to allow those still convinced of the Pope’s headship to agree, and requiring passage through the secular Parliament, this was a significant step on the road to allowing the king to decide the validity of his own marriage and thus, in due course, to remarry as he chose.
All concerned were under severe stress. In April the queen was reported ill with ‘hysteria’, and Anne quarrelled violently with the king over his continued relationship with his daughter, Princess Mary. After the storm, the king complained to Anne’s uncle Norfolk of her language and bearing, saying plaintively that she was not like the queen, who had never in her life used such words to him.36 The report comes from Chapuys, but he had it from Elizabeth. On this occasion, she may have given the queen her information in person rather than sending a written or verbal message. She told the queen about the king’s complaint, adding that her husband Norfolk was in ‘marvellous sorrow and tribulation’. Confidently, Elizabeth declared that Anne would be ‘the ruin of all her family, and that if God wished that she should continue in her fantasy it would be a very good thing for the Queen’.37 Though this sounds at odds with the legal strides being taken in Parliament and with the Church, it is evident that on the ground at court things felt far less clear-cut and the future remained uncertain.
Elizabeth’s espionage is often written about with a raised eyebrow or in a tone of slight amusement, as though she was a bizarre eccentric, or should have known better than to choose the ‘losing’ side against her own family. But in the early 1530s there were good reasons for Elizabeth to have made the choices she did. Her relationship with dowager Duchess Agnes, the family’s matriarch, was, as we have seen, increasingly fraught. Elizabeth could not hope to occupy what she felt was her rightful position within the dynasty while Agnes, with her wealth, experience and contacts, remained alive, and the two continually got across each other. Nor was her relationship with her husband Norfolk much solace. She had borne him five children before 1521, of whom three still lived. Five or so years later, in 1526 or 1527, he had taken a mistress. Elizabeth ‘Bess’ Holland was employed within their household, allegedly as a laundress, and was probably related to Norfolk’s treasurer, John Holland.38 It wasn’t unusual for noblemen to take mistresses. The king himself had done so on several occasions. Wives were expected to put up and shut up, and Queen Catherine had set an exemplary example of precisely this, turning a blind eye when Henry begat children first with Bessie Blount and then with Mary Boleyn, Lady Carey. Elizabeth may have done likewise initially. Evidence of her displeasure comes from letters that she wrote later on in the 1530s. These letters suggest that gradually Bess’s star rose, and her place by Norfolk’s side became both permanent and accepted by the rest of the household. Elizabeth would later allege that Norfolk had instructed her own servants to beat her because she would not accept Bess’s presence.39 Small wonder that Elizabeth felt sidelined by the Howards. Small wonder, too, that in the depths of grief over her daughter’s death in the spring of 1530, she was horrified to find that any control she had expected to exercise over her remaining daughter’s marriage had been undermined by her niece Anne Boleyn, another upstart mistress.
She must have felt, in short, that she and her mistress Queen Catherine were fighting the same battle in much the same war. Elizabeth, too, tried for many years to persuade her husband to give up his mistress and return to her. She, too, would argue that theirs had been a loving marriage, that she had borne him children, that she did not deserve this treatment. This fellow-feeling, perhaps even a need to help the queen in order to uphold the sacrament of marriage as a lifelong commitment, is entirely understandable.
In May 1531 the Duke of Albany sent a letter to the king to tell him that the divorce case was ‘in good trim at Rome’. Elizabeth, Chapuys reported, saw this letter and ‘went immediately and told the Queen’.40 Clearly, she continued to have access to confidential information of this kind, presumably still through her husband Norfolk, and she used her access on both the king’s and queen’s sides of the court to her full advantage. The queen, on hearing this news, was visibly distressed. Chapuys was able to calm her down by telling her that the Duke of Albany was actually about to leave his position in Rome and so could write more boldly than he had done before, since it would no longer matter to him if he were proved wrong. The Duke of Norfolk, indeed, had been heard to say that ‘the Devil and no other must have been the originator and promoter of this wretched scheme’.41
Elizabeth’s calm, and presumably also the queen’s, was short-lived. By the end of the month Elizabeth had been dismissed from court, ‘owing to her speaking too freely, and having declared in favour of the Queen much more openly than these people like her to do’.42 Had her espionage activities been discovered? Perhaps. Even if her specific messages had not been revealed, Chapuys’ report suggests that she had been careless in what she said in the general space of the royal court. Anne was allegedly behind her dismissal, which must have been galling for Elizabeth. She had to return to comparative isolation in East Anglia to stew over her husband’s infidelities. The queen was left to fight on without her spy.