On the night of Tuesday, 31 March 1534, Elizabeth Stafford, Duchess of Norfolk, was in her chambers at Kenninghall Palace in Suffolk when she heard a commotion downstairs.1 Her husband Thomas, Duke of Norfolk had unexpectedly arrived home from the court. Parliament had been prorogued the previous day, but to cover the hundred miles he had allegedly been ‘riding all night’.2 He was not in a good mood. For all that he was a small, spare man, Elizabeth must have heard him stamp up the stairs – his chambers were below hers, in the innermost part of the ‘H’-shaped house – and then not stop but keep going, up the next flight and into her own outer chamber.3 Was she frightened, hearing his approach? Did they exchange any conversation at all? Or did he simply do as she later reported: lock her into a chamber and refuse to let her out?
Maybe she shouted. Elizabeth was not a person to accept things in silence. Maybe she paced back and forth as she listened to him in the rooms beyond, banging open chests and presses, issuing terse orders to the household staff who had been rudely wakened from sleep. We don’t know how long he kept Elizabeth confined, but we know that he took her richest jewels and clothing and then ordered her removal to a much smaller house in the village of Redbourn, Hertfordshire, not far from Dunstable on the great road north.4
In the years leading up to this moment, Elizabeth’s life had been uncertain and, at times, traumatic. Some of what follows makes for difficult reading, not least because much of it was relayed in her own words. Following her removal to the house at Redbourn, Elizabeth spent the rest of the 1530s writing long letters to Thomas Cromwell in which she detailed several earlier episodes of domestic violence at the hands of her husband and household. Her protestations about her husband’s behaviour were received first with impatience and then with weariness and even embarrassment by her family and friends, in what can feel like an uneasy echo of some present-day reactions to survivors of domestic abuse. In sixteenth-century England, though, a certain amount of violence was considered socially acceptable in particular contexts, and a wife’s refusal to reconcile with her elite husband was both politically and socially shameful.5
How had things reached this pitch? We don’t know what ‘last-straw’ event caused Norfolk to ride pell-mell from London to Kenninghall expressly to deal with Elizabeth in 1534, but we do know that their relationship was already on the rocks. Elizabeth had chosen a different path from the rest of her marital relations in the late 1520s and early 1530s when she quarrelled with Anne Boleyn, passed sensitive information to her mistress Catherine of Aragon, and was eventually expelled from court in 1531 for speaking too openly about her support for the queen. In September 1533 Imperial ambassador Chapuys reported that Elizabeth’s brother-in-law George Neville, Lord Bergavenny, had been summoned to court in order to mediate between husband and wife; Elizabeth ‘would not see or listen to’ Norfolk, ‘on account of his being in love with a maid of honour to the Royal concubine [Anne Boleyn] known by the name of Holland. For this reason the duke of Norfolk, since his return from France, dared not go and see his duchess until after Bergavenny’s mission, who, as above stated, went thither, and promised that the duke would in future lead a conjugal life with her.’6 Norfolk, then, had taken a mistress, and Elizabeth objected.
In the early 1530s she evidently did so loudly, vociferously and publicly, since Chapuys knew of it, but her own words on the matter come to us from a little later, in the letters that she wrote to Thomas Cromwell from Redbourn after her removal there.7 Cromwell might seem like an odd choice of confidant. He was a man, for a start. He was also the king’s chief minister, known for his ruthlessness, bound to serve Henry before anybody else; he would not keep her secrets if it wasn’t worth his while, and he was unlikely to take her side. But Elizabeth wasn’t looking for sympathy for its own sake, or not from Thomas Cromwell. She needed his legal expertise. She needed his influence with the king and the nobility even more, for there was no other recourse for women of her status in her position. Nobody but the king could force Thomas Howard to do anything Thomas Howard didn’t want to do. More women than Elizabeth understood this. In the 1530s alone several others wrote to Cromwell with similar marital complaints, seeking his mediation, and some were desperate. Lady Hungerford, for instance, had been imprisoned in a turret of her husband’s castle and feared for her very survival unless Cromwell could intervene and grant her a separation.8 Elizabeth’s own half-sister-in-law Katherine Howard, Lady Daubeney wrote likewise, asking him for help with her divorce in 1535.9 Another Howard sister, Anne, Countess of Oxford, had written to Cromwell’s predecessor Cardinal Wolsey in much the same vein in the 1520s, suggesting that ‘marital counsellor to the nobility’ was something of a known side role for royal ministers.10 It may even have been a broader practice than the sources suggest. The seizure of Wolsey’s and Cromwell’s papers after their deaths mean that their in-trays are disproportionately represented among our surviving material.
Letter-writing was not an especial gift of Elizabeth’s. Most of her letters were, thankfully, written by a secretary to her dictation; her own handwriting is unusually bad even by the standards of her sex at this time. Even when dictated, she did not always follow a traditional petitionary structure, and she and her secretaries filled every available part of the paper, squeezing postscripts into impossible corners and making them difficult to decipher. The style, though, remained the same regardless of the scribe.11 In writing, she ranted. She explained the same things over and over, even using the same phrases, as though repetition might help to hammer home her point. One can imagine Cromwell wincing when he saw her seal on a letter in his in-tray.
Her choicest phrases were reserved for her husband’s mistress, Bess Holland. She called Bess ‘harlot’, ‘that queen’, ‘washer of my nursery’, ‘the causer of all my trouble’. She made it clear that the affair had begun long before Bergavenny’s mediation of 1533: as early as 1527, in fact.12 Bess was the daughter of John Holland, Norfolk’s secretary, a relation of the Barons Hussey of Sleaford in Lincolnshire, and she had, apparently, been in Elizabeth’s service when she caught Norfolk’s eye. It wasn’t unusual for elite men to venture outside the marriage bed, whether as a one-off or a longer-term liaison. Charles Brandon, Duke of Suffolk fathered at least three illegitimate children; Edward Howard, Norfolk’s own brother, sired two.13 Norfolk was not behaving particularly unusually when he lewdly informed Cromwell in 1537 that there was ‘a young woman with pretty proper tetins’ – literally, ‘tits’ – in a particular lodging house at York.14 If women did object, they were at least supposed to do so privately.
Ordinarily, a woman’s birth family were her first resort in a troubled marriage. They might give her shelter, protect her, mediate with her husband or seek higher redress. Unluckily for Elizabeth, her parents were dead, and her brother Henry, now the family’s patriarch, lived under the stain of their father’s attainder for high treason. He could not inherit the dukedom of Buckingham, and as Baron Stafford he was considerably below Elizabeth’s husband in status. The last thing that he wanted to do was to cause a ruckus with a senior noble of unpleasant character. By the time Norfolk moved Elizabeth to Redbourn, Stafford had been asked more than once to take Elizabeth into his house. His letters in reply, both to Norfolk and to Cromwell separately, are a model of epistolary deference: the scribe’s hand is neat and professional, the margins respectfully wide.15 If his words were not what they wanted to hear, at least they could not fault his courtesy. Regretfully, he could not help, and he wished they would stop asking. He reminded Norfolk of Elizabeth’s ‘accustomed wild language, which lieth not in my power to stop’. Norfolk should know ‘by long experience’ that Stafford could do nothing to moderate his sister’s behaviour, and he was worried about the impact that it might have on his own and his family’s reputation.16 To Cromwell he was even more explicit: ‘be assured that I would not only receive her into my house but I would fetch her on my feet at London… but the redress of this standeth not in the advertisement of her kin’. They had explained to her many times that to disagree with her husband like this was a shameful thing, but nothing could ‘break her sensual and wilful mind’.17 He was ashamed to be her brother.
This, unfortunately, wasn’t an unusual response. Elizabeth’s aunt Anne, Countess of Huntingdon also advised her to take back her objections (a bit rich, coming from a woman who had been accused of adultery with both the king and his groom of the stool); Cromwell also advised her to try a softer approach with her husband; and even the king intervened.18 Elizabeth did have some sympathy from an interesting, albeit unhelpful quarter. In July 1533 one Mistress Amadas was hauled before the king’s council for having said, among other things, that ‘there was never a good wedded woman in England but Prince Arthur’s dowager, the Duchess of Norfolk, and herself’.19 Clearly, this was a deliberate conflation of their situations as faithful wives to adulterous husbands, and no doubt Amadas wasn’t the only one to note the similarities between the Norfolks’ situation and the king’s ‘great matter’. Both Elizabeth and Queen Catherine saw themselves, and were seen by others, as long-suffering, wronged wives of terrible husbands. Moreover, Bess Holland, Norfolk’s mistress and Elizabeth’s rival, was in service with Anne Boleyn: could there have been a more nightmarish parallel?20 Small wonder that Elizabeth felt so strongly about the queen’s situation; there is no better illustration of the way in which the political was inextricably personal for women in service at court.
The Norfolks’ marriage may have been problematic even before Bess. At some point during the 1530s, Elizabeth accused her husband of violent abuse dating back to 1519. Norfolk repeated the slander in a letter to Cromwell. Elizabeth was going around saying that ‘when she had been in childbed with my daughter of Richmond two nights and a day, I [Norfolk] should draw her out of her bed by the hair of the head about the house and with my dagger give her a wound in the head’.21 Norfolk, though, denied this absolutely: ‘my good lord, if I prove not by witness… that she had the scar in her head forty months before she was delivered of my said daughter, and that the same was cut by a surgeon of London for a swelling she had in her head… never trust my word after… there is no man alive that would handle a woman in a childbed after that sort, nor for my part would not have done for all that I am worth’.22 From a man who in 1536 would threaten to bash Princess Mary’s head against the wall ‘until it was as soft as a boiled apple’, this is quite a statement.23 Nor, if true, did he really need to deny his actions with such vehemence. Violence from husband towards wives was acceptable in early modern society provided that it was done as a form of behavioural correction, and that it did not proceed to extremes.24 Norfolk could simply have justified himself along these lines.
Violence during childbirth, though, was likely to be considered ‘extreme’ by anyone who heard it. It’s possible that this was part of the point. While nobody is seeking to disbelieve a woman who claimed domestic violence at any point in history, it’s also true that early modern women might say that the violence had occurred during pregnancy because it made the case look worse and generated more sympathy. Narratives given in these circumstances were consciously designed to strike familiar and emotive chords with a reader or listener, and Elizabeth certainly saw herself as a victim to whom redress was owed.25 If she did exaggerate, or alter the circumstances, it was an effective strategy, as Norfolk’s appalled and panicked missive reveals.
This is not to say that she was lying, or that he was not an abusive husband. Her own letters describe another violent episode repeatedly in words that elicit a visceral reaction even 500 years later. The women at Kenninghall, she wrote, had ‘bound me and pinaculled me and sat on my breast until I spat blood’.26 They had done this because she had spoken out against Bess Holland. Even worse, in a different letter she said that Norfolk was directly responsible, that he had ‘set his women’ to do this ‘and never punished them’.27 Ever since, she had been sick ‘at the fall of the leaf and in the spring of the year’.28 The image of Elizabeth treated in this way would have been equally shocking in its day for the strong sense of social hierarchy overturned. This, indeed, was one of Elizabeth’s biggest problems with Bess. Many of the insults that she used were ones relating to social status: ‘drab’, ‘queen’, ‘washer of my nursery’ are terms that mix contempt for a lower-ranking woman with suggestions of prostitution. Poignantly, it becomes clear that she had thought her marriage with Norfolk was a love match. Even if it hadn’t been, she was the daughter of a duke, she had brought a dowry of 2,000 marks, she had always behaved herself well and she had given him five children: what more could he possibly want?29 What on earth did Bess have that she didn’t?
It’s unlikely that she ever got a satisfactory answer to this question. At least living at Redbourn meant that she no longer had to deal with Bess under her own roof, though whether it was worse or better to know that the couple were together at Kenninghall in her absence is a matter for conjecture. Elizabeth’s removal had clearly been a shock to her. Inventories made later on show that she had been in the middle of some complex embroidery work that she had had to leave behind. Tellingly, one of these was ‘a great pomegranate of gold’ that remained unfinished: the pomegranate was Catherine of Aragon’s badge.30 Needlework was a sharp, pointed and unanswerable form of resistance for women who had no other outlet.
Elizabeth’s life at Redbourn was substantially different. She was given an allowance of £50 a year and a household of only twenty people, a much smaller establishment that hardly befitted a duchess.31 The isolation was perhaps the hardest thing. Her earliest letters focused on this. In the summer of 1534, she wrote to Cromwell asking him to send her some venison. Venison was the preserve of the elite, who possessed deer parks in which to hunt, and it was a common gift between nobles, a sign of esteem. This year, though, she had none: ‘there be many of my friends that sent me venison the last year that dare not send me none this year for my lord’s displeasure’.32 She also said repeatedly that she was kept in ‘prisonment’, that she longed to go abroad and see her friends, and that no one came to see her except ‘such as my lord appoints to know my mind and to counsel me after his fashion’.33
At least, though, it was a quiet life. There was no more ‘breaking and fighting’.34 Initially, she seems to have hoped that Cromwell’s intervention might have taken her out of Redbourn, removed Bess from Kenninghall and reunited her with her husband, but this proved overly idealistic. Cromwell was not the man to take a woman’s side against an adulterous husband. It was in his interests to maintain a reasonable relationship with Norfolk, and he did so.35 The onus was on Elizabeth to reconcile, but once it became apparent that Norfolk was never going to give up Bess, she utterly refused to do so. Over time, then, her letters became more defiant, and her aims changed. She no longer sought his return to her. In fact she abused him roundly but probably truthfully, calling him ‘a great player’, someone who ‘can speak fair as well to his enemies as to his friends’.36
For his part, Norfolk wanted a divorce. It’s not difficult to imagine where he’d got that idea.37 Unlike the king, though, Norfolk had no real grounds that would have been accepted in a court of law. The way that the word ‘divorce’ was used as a catch-all phrase at this time makes it hard to know quite what he envisaged, though he was clearly enthusiastic, promising Elizabeth the return of her jewels, clothes and household goods if she would agree.38 Did Norfolk want to marry Bess? If so he needed an annulment, not a divorce, just like the king. But this would only be granted on grounds of ‘consanguinity’ – too close a kinship tie between husband and wife, which wasn’t the case for Norfolk and Elizabeth – and he could not claim childlessness, since they had had two sons. A ‘divorce’ in the strict sense of the word could only be granted by a Church court on grounds of adultery (the wife’s), cruelty (the husband’s), or heresy (either party). Norfolk could not claim any of these things either. Elizabeth refused unequivocally to consider any sort of divorce, with an implacability that echoed Queen Catherine’s. Duchess of Norfolk she was and would remain, and she wrote with smug satisfaction that Norfolk ‘had rather than £1000 he could have brought me to have been divorced’.39 Elizabeth clearly suffered much at Norfolk’s hands, but contemporary standards held her to be in the wrong. She had little agency, and less recourse. All she could do was accept the stalemate between them and try to build a new life at Redbourn.
Elizabeth’s isolation echoed Catherine of Aragon’s. From Enfield, to Ampthill, to Buckden, to Somersham and then, in the spring of 1534, to Kimbolton Castle in Cambridgeshire, Catherine and the few ladies-in-waiting remaining to her had spent years on an involuntary scenic tour of the fens, far from London, the court and the king. Kimbolton was a moated courtyard-style house typical of the late fifteenth century, owned and recently remodelled by a branch of the Wingfield family. It was less damp and better situated than some of her previous habitations, even if all there was to look at was the reflection of the flat, monotonous landscape in the still water of the moat.40 The improvement in lodging was the only bright spot on the horizon for Catherine’s household. Everything else that the former queen stood for had been torn down in law. In March 1534 a new Act of Succession was passed: Princess Mary was declared illegitimate, and was replaced in the succession by her baby sister Princess Elizabeth. Almost immediately, royal commissions were set up to force subjects to swear an oath to uphold this new state of affairs, and in November Parliament passed an official Act requiring such an oath by law. The king’s royal supremacy over the Church was also enshrined in parliamentary law in the same year, and likewise required an oath to be sworn. Support for Catherine had therefore been spun, in law, as opposition to the king.
Recalcitrant souls were persuaded to swear these oaths by a new Act expanding the definition of treason. The crime of treason had previously rested on overt action. Any attempt to harm the king, his family or his royal lineage was treasonable. Now, actual action was no longer required to return a guilty verdict. Refusing to swear either of these oaths was treasonable. Even more frightening, simply speaking words against the king or his new marriage, or words in favour of the Pope, Catherine, Mary or anything that might be construed as a verbal attempt to deprive the king of any of his titles by any means was sufficient to have you strung up. Even knowing of somebody else’s treason and failing to reveal it was made into an offence: misprision of treason, the ultimate crime of inaction. The king and his ministers had found that they must rewrite the law in order to silence opposition to his supremacy over the Church and to the ‘great matter’. The violent ripping and rearranging of the fabric of religion and society was the reason why Henry passed more treason legislation than any other king before him.41
England no longer felt like a safe place. Royal commissioners were sent around the country to receive oaths – not those of women, obviously, since, as Bishop Stephen Gardiner complained in May, the process already took too long and would be worse if they were to be included.42 Wives had no legal identity anyway. Their opinions were surely of no importance. Lists of men who refused to swear, or those who were reported for speech that was now treasonable, arrived with increasing regularity on Thomas Cromwell’s desk throughout the year of 1535. Ironically, some of these were the sayings of women, who conveniently regained legal significance when their words were deemed unacceptable. In February 1535, Margaret Chanseler was famously hauled up for calling Anne Boleyn ‘a goggle-eyed whore’.43 Anne, Lady Shelton, who had custody of Princess Elizabeth and her sister the Lady Mary, was accused of treating Mary too kindly, and told firmly that she must not be allowed to use the title of ‘princess’. One of Mary’s maids refused to swear the Oath of Succession; she was locked up in her chamber and threatened with prison if she did not give in. Even after swearing, the same maid was shortly sent away on suspicion of encouraging Mary in her pretensions.44
Nor was it only those in royal service. When Mary left Greenwich in October she was surrounded by a ‘great troup’ of London wives, ‘unknown to their husbands’, who wept and cried that she was still a princess. Some of those women were taken to the Tower, and it was feared that Mary would follow them, though Imperial ambassador Chapuys thought this would not necessarily be a bad thing. There were plans afoot to spirit her out of England if necessary, and this would be easier from the Tower, where the constable – Sir William Kingston – was, allegedly, their ‘good servant’.45
Cromwell and the rest of the king’s advisors were fighting a battle on two fronts. Opposition to the king’s marriage and to the succession was one thing. Opposition to the royal supremacy was another, and it was considered the more serious crime. Priests were required to preach the king’s headship over the Church, but it was difficult to ensure that they did so. As the Archbishop of York patiently explained to Cromwell, ‘I cannot be in all places; nor, perhaps, shall I hear of all faults; nor can I put learning and cunning to preach in the heads of those that have it not already.’46 Many clerics were unhappy about the king’s divorce, but they were even more concerned about his supremacy over the Church and the implications of the loss of papal authority. Appeals to Rome were forbidden. Taxes and tithes formerly paid there must now be sent to the royal treasury. Nobody was allowed in or out of monastic precincts, a state of affairs that caused much woe for women like Jane Vaux, Lady Guildford, once lady-in-waiting to many royal women. In the long tradition of elderly noblewomen she had retired to live out her old age within the precinct of ‘Gaunt’s Chapel’ in Bristol, and now found she was not permitted to come and go through the church as she chose.47
Worse still, 1535 saw the beginning of a royal visitation of all monastic institutions, orchestrated and administered by Thomas Cromwell. The reason, ostensibly, was to make sure that all monks and nuns swore the Oath of Supremacy in person, but it soon became clear that there was more to it than this. Commissioners were keen to ferret out where monastic standards were low, where there was corruption, where there were dark deeds and sordid tales. They also inquired minutely into the finances of each institution, making notes and keeping record for a grand totting up of the value of monastic England: the Valor Ecclesiasticus. It must have been difficult not to think this sinister. The king had already taken the money due to Rome: why else would he be keen to know what his own monasteries were worth unless he intended to take that too? But though this was whispered up and down the country, few really considered that they might be witnessing the end of monasticism in England. It was fair to seek reform of moral condition. It might even be fair to close down the smaller, run-down, poorer houses. If reform was to occur, now was instead the time for redress of grievances: some, like William Fordham, a monk at Worcester, wrote to Cromwell asking for personal advancement, in Fordham’s case for restoration to the position of cellarer.48
Nevertheless, 1535 was a bleak year for the great and the good as well as for ordinary people. Sir Thomas More had resigned the chancellorship of the exchequer back in 1532 because he did not feel that he could serve the king in that office and yet oppose royal policy. Now he refused to take the Oath of Supremacy and was arrested for treason. John Fisher, Bishop of Rochester – Catherine of Aragon’s former confessor – did likewise. Both men were imprisoned in the Tower in April 1534. Repeatedly questioned over the course of a whole year, they could not be brought to swear. On 22 June 1535, Fisher was beheaded for treason. On 6 July More was brought to the scaffold in his turn: ‘I die the King’s good servant’, he declared, ‘and God’s first.’49 As if in response, the weather worsened. It rained continually through the summer and a fearful people muttered about the vengeance of God. The harvest failed and plague followed. Thomas Broke wrote to Cromwell that ‘death and penury of wholesome bread are very prevalent in the city’, and sent a list of the dead.50
And yet some things remained refreshingly constant. María de Salinas, Lady Willoughby was still in touch with her former mistress, Catherine of Aragon. Catherine had been haemorrhaging servants all through 1534 and 1535. In July 1534 Chapuys wrote indignantly that the king had sent away one of Catherine’s Spanish women ‘who has all her life been in attendance’.51 Could this have been María? There can have been few other Spanish women left in Catherine’s service. If it was María who was sent away and forbidden to return, at least she might have been able to be present to help her daughter Katherine give birth to her first grandchild, a boy named Henry, in September 1535.52
Not long after this, bad news arrived. Catherine of Aragon was sick. It had been kept quiet. Chapuys did not hear of it until early December, and only then because he had happened to pay a visit to Cromwell, who had just sent someone to inform the king.53 Chapuys, alarmed, asked permission to visit her, or to send a servant there. Cromwell was amenable to the latter, but said he could not allow Chapuys to go himself unless the king agreed. While waiting for the answer, Catherine apparently recovered, as her physician wrote that ‘there was no fear for the present’.54 Rumours, though, had already spread abroad even before Chapuys himself wrote to the emperor on 13 December, and, as ever, women were involved in the exchange of information. On that same date the papal nuncio at the French court wrote home to the Pope’s secretary to report that Sir John Wallop, the English ambassador in France, had heard that Catherine could not live more than six months ‘or a little longer’. Wallop knew this from his wife, Lady Wallop, who was Catherine’s ‘creature’ and had heard it herself directly from Catherine’s physician.55
This pessimism was, unfortunately, well placed. On Wednesday, 29 December Chapuys received a letter from the queen’s physician informing him that Catherine had had a relapse and that this time it was worse than before. Could he get leave to visit her? He could, and did, the very next day; but on his way out of Eltham Palace he was overtaken by the Duke of Suffolk, who had been sent to tell him that news had just arrived that Catherine was ‘in extremis’ and that Chapuys was unlikely to reach her in time. Chapuys was sceptical. He even went back to his lodging and wrote a long letter to his master the emperor before he finally set off.56 Somebody else, though, received the same news and took it wholly seriously. On the same day – Thursday, 30 December – María, Lady Willoughby also sat down at her London home, the Barbican in the north of the city, and dictated a letter to her secretary for Thomas Cromwell.57 She was polite, but haste made her brief: a quick line of customary salutation was ended with an impatient ‘etc’ before she launched straight into her suit. She knew that it was not the first time that she had asked him for permission to visit Catherine, but this time ‘need driveth me to put you to pain’. She had heard that Catherine, ‘my mistress’ – María was careful not to call her queen, yet avoided having to use the objectionable ‘princess dowager’ – was ill once again. ‘You did promise me to labour the king’s grace to get me licence to go to her grace afore God send for her’, she reminded him, ‘for as I am informed it is no other likelihood but it shall be shortly.’ She needed a letter from Cromwell or from the king explaining that she had permission, otherwise the guards would not let her in. Nobody could help her but him: ‘Mr Secretary, under God and the king all my trust is in you. I pray you, remember me now at this time.’
The clock was ticking. She must have waited in an agony of impatience for an answer. Since María evidently had her own channels of communication with Catherine’s household, she was probably as regularly updated as Cromwell himself. Her son-in-law the Duke of Suffolk may also have passed information to her. None of it was good news. Catherine got worse every hour, reported her apothecary; ‘these two days and nights she has been able to take nothing, either to eat or to drink, that would remain in her stomach, and she has not slept more than an hour and a half for the pain in her stomach’.58
María made up her mind. Perhaps she had never intended to wait for licence from the king or a response from Cromwell, but had simply written as an empty gesture towards correct protocol, should questions be asked later on. At some point either late on 30 December or the next day, she rode the sixty-five miles almost due north to Kimbolton. It would have been an uncomfortable journey in the January cold. Most likely she and her servants would have had to pause overnight. The light would fade early, and risking the horses’ footing on England’s rutted roads in the dark was perilous, as indeed she discovered. Arriving at Kimbolton on New Year’s Day at six in the evening, she was wet, cold and muddy; she had, she said, taken a fall from her horse only a mile away. She was emotionally overwrought as well, upset by the fall and yet relieved that Catherine still lived, saying that ‘she thought never to have seen the Princess again’. The household officers asked for her licence to visit. Certainly, she told them, it was ‘ready to be showed’; she ‘would not otherwise presume’ to visit, but just now she needed to recover herself. If they didn’t want her to die of a chill, they had better let her into Catherine’s chamber so that she could ‘repair to the fire’.59 She would show them all the documentation they desired in the morning. Discomfited, no doubt, by her distressed state, they let her go. Catherine was glad to see her, and María had not left her chamber since; five days later, and they reported to Cromwell that they had yet to see either her or her paperwork. One cannot imagine that he was much surprised.
Did María genuinely fall from her horse near the end of her journey, or was it a ruse to gain her entry into the house? The historian and biographer John Strype, reading the officers’ letter 150 years later, was firmly convinced that she had faked it, adding the words ‘as she pretended’ to the description of her fall.60 It was certainly effective, and María undoubtedly had sufficient chutzpah to have carried it off with aplomb. And yet she clearly had shown up looking plausibly as though she had fallen into the wet and the mud. Even if she had deliberately lain down in it to create that impression, she must have arrived close to freezing. In either case, her need for warmth and dry clothes was no lie.
Catherine’s chambers were in the south range of the courtyard, overlooking the gardens. What did María and Catherine say to one another during those days, sat together in the winter sunlight? That María still described Catherine as her ‘mistress’ is touching, and shows that the bond of service and friendship remained unbroken despite their time apart. Catherine’s conversations with Chapuys, once he arrived, were all about the need to keep up the fight against the king’s marriage, the succession and his supremacy for the sake of Princess Mary, but also for the English people, who were suffering ‘great danger to their souls’. She was worried that ‘the divorce affair’ had caused ‘the evils and heresies of this country’, and Chapuys reassured her that sometimes God allowed these things to occur ‘for the greater exaltation of the good and confusion of the bad’, and that it would soon be reversed when those who had swerved from the faith returned.61
Though both Catherine and María had said that they thought that this was the end, in fact Catherine rallied. She began to keep food down; she could sleep again. Her physician thought her out of danger, and so she sent Chapuys home to London. On the afternoon of the Epiphany, 6 January, she even combed and tied her hair ‘without any help from any of her maids’.62 On the morning of 7 January, though, her condition worsened. At ten in the morning she was given extreme unction. By two of the afternoon she was gone.63 María, in all probability, was at her side as she died, though the enduring tale that Catherine died in her arms is, alas, a later invention with no basis in contemporary evidence. There may have been many people from the household by the bedside, praying for her soul as it departed. For the Spaniards in particular – María, confessor Jorge de Athequa, physician Miguel de la Sa, apothecary John de la Soto, and likely more unnamed – it must have been an unbearably sad day. Some, like María, had come to England with Catherine over thirty years previously, and owed their present lives to her patronage. They had served her in better and worse times, both richer and poorer, in sickness and in health, and they had sworn oaths to serve her with loyalty until death parted them. Now it had, and nothing would ever be the same again.