If impulsive Mistress Anne Basset ever communicated directly with her gentler sister Katharine, the winter of 1541–2 must have seen an anxious flurry of notes between them.1 Both were in unenviably precarious positions. Their mother Honor, Lady Lisle remained under house arrest at their home in France. Their stepfather Arthur, Lord Lisle was imprisoned in the Tower of London on suspicion of treason. Anne had reprised her role as maid of honour to Queen Katherine Howard, but this came to an end with the latter’s fall and the dismissal of her household in November 1541. Anne was yet again without a position or even a clear home, and her ambitious soul loathed feeling aimless and adrift. Katharine, the less conventionally successful sister, had been taken into the former Queen Anna of Cleves’ household, probably in the summer of 1540.2 Though Katharine’s position was now more secure than her sister Anne’s, the winter after Queen Katherine Howard’s execution was not an easy time to be in Anna of Cleves’ service either. She spent most of this time at Richmond Palace, lodged in its innermost donjon, lead-topped turrets overlooking the Thames. Rumours abounded. Many thought that the king would take Anna back and make her queen again. In mid-December, Cleves ambassador Karl Harst was even instructed to seek reconciliation between Anna and the king.3 This could not be kept from her household. The relationship between Anna and some of her English women was not altogether easy. Although Harst preferred the women who served Anna now to those she had had while she was queen, he reported that she was still watched, and that her English women searched her belongings while she slept and showed her letters to the king. Though Anna did not want to return home, Harst told her that she would be better off with her brother and only one maid than here in this way and manner with fourteen.4
Katharine Basset, though, was loyal. At some point during the summer or autumn of 1541 she unguardedly praised Anna at Queen Katherine Howard’s expense. Soon, she told her colleague Jane Rattsey, she would ‘see a change’, information she seemed to have gleaned from the maids of the queen’s household – her sister Anne? Jane, startled, exclaimed, ‘What a man is the King! How many wives will he have?’ and wondered aloud, ‘What if God worketh this work to make the lady Anna of Cleves queen again?’ In December 1541 Jane was hauled before the Privy Council to explain this – if she could – and to be closely questioned on her opinion of the king’s annulment from Anna.5 Both she and Katharine must have panicked, for there was no telling how such comments might be taken by a king paranoid about his marital status and his masculinity.
Nothing seems to have happened to either of them, though Jane Rattsey was held in custody for a short time. Perhaps it was thought somewhat ridiculous to attempt to prosecute anybody for having ‘dispraised’ Queen Katherine, given the revelations about her infidelity to the king. The rumours about Queen Anna continued regardless, even that she was pregnant or that she had had a child. Her household officers, along with Dorothy Wingfield from her privy chamber, were examined by the Privy Council but speedily dismissed after they assured the councillors that there was no truth to the report.6
Ambassadors watched the king for hints not only that he might take Anna back, but for signs of interest in any woman. They did not have long to wait. At the end of January 1542, after Queen Katherine’s condemnation, Imperial ambassador Chapuys reported that King Henry gave a banquet, probably at Westminster, with many ladies present and that three had been singled out for royal attention. The king seemed most animated by Elizabeth Brooke, Thomas Wyatt’s recently repudiated wife; ‘She is a pretty young creature’, Chapuys remarked cynically, ‘and has sense enough to do as the others have done should she consider it worth her while.’7 Not only was Henry’s penchant for ladies-in-waiting fully understood by those around him, but commentators still expected them to play up to this despite the risks involved. Lucy Somerset, another of the maids of honour, was also said to suit the king’s ‘fancy’. Last but not least, Chapuys thought that Mistress Anne Basset herself was in the running, partly because her stepfather Lord Lisle had recently been given his liberty within the Tower of London complex, a sign that he would likely be released.8 If Anne heard this – if, indeed, there was any substance to it – surely she cannot have been pleased about it even if she had sought to appease the king on her family’s behalf. Anne might be ambitious, but she was no fool, and she cannot have thought that marriage to this king would be a good idea.
In the meantime, Princess Mary’s household was the pre-eminent female establishment once more, welcomed to court ‘in default of a Queen’.9 Mary’s relationship with Katherine Howard had not been overtly positive – Queen Katherine had threatened to dismiss some of her women because she did not think Mary had treated her with sufficient respect – but some of the late queen’s servants, notably those who had given evidence against her, found their way into Mary’s establishment over the course of the 1540s, not least those two gossips Margaret Morton and Maud Lovekyn.10 Princess Mary also kept up relationships with many of the decade’s most prominent noblewomen. Her privy purse expenses across these years are full of gifts flowing back and forth, expensive gestures of goodwill and of patronage. Gertrude Blount, Marchioness of Exeter received a puncheon of wine; Gertrude had been pardoned for her role in the ‘Exeter conspiracy’ that had seen the execution of her husband and had been released from her imprisonment in the Tower in the autumn of 1539.11 She remained attainted, which meant she had no access to her jointure lands and must live on an allowance from the Crown.12 Elizabeth Stafford, Duchess of Norfolk was given a brooch of garnet and gold.13 Elizabeth, too, remained in difficult straits, still under house arrest in Hertfordshire, still at odds with her bullish husband, and still struggling financially on what money he allowed her.
Gertrude, Elizabeth and many other noblewomen had cultivated a relationship with Princess Mary for years. Katherine Willoughby, Duchess of Suffolk was one of these. Married to Charles Brandon, Duke of Suffolk, Katherine was often called upon to represent and even reinforce Crown policy. She had helped her husband to suppress the Pilgrimage of Grace rebellion in 1536 and had formally greeted Anna of Cleves when she arrived in Kent at the end of 1539. But though Katherine played her part in toeing the party line, she also stayed in touch with Princess Mary, whether or not the princess’s actions aligned with the royal will. She sent her regular gifts. She visited, and played cards with her. Early in 1543 she lent the princess horses to bring her women from Hampton Court to Syon Abbey, and then to Westminster.14 The bond between the two was one born of kinship and service, for Katherine’s mother María de Salinas had served Princess Mary’s mother Queen Catherine of Aragon throughout her time in England. Nor was the relationship one-way. Princess Mary’s privy purse expenses show that she made a point of keeping up with her mother’s former servants and friends.15
Over the freezing winter of 1542–3, then, when Kathryn Parr, Lady Latimer came to London to nurse her husband through his final illness, she soon made contact with Princess Mary.16 Kathryn’s mother Maud, Lady Parr had likewise served Catherine of Aragon for many years. Kathryn and Mary may even have been childhood friends.17 Soon, Kathryn had joined the princess’s household as one of her ladies-in-waiting and was even ordering clothes for her, directing the tailor to send his bill to the king.18 By February, though, her new position had had an unforeseen effect. The king was visiting Mary’s chambers twice, even three times a day, and one suspects he was not only there to see his daughter.19
The king assented to his sixth marriage with a hearty ‘Yea!’. Katherine, Duchess of Suffolk, sandwiched between Lady Margaret Douglas and the Countess of Hertford, may have felt a little less optimistic. It was a warm July day and there were over twenty people squeezed into the queen’s holy day closet above Hampton Court’s chapel, a space that was most definitely not designed to hold so many. Katherine will have watched as King Henry slid a ring onto her friend’s finger, her delicate hands swallowed by his larger, fleshy paws. Perhaps Katherine marvelled at the new queen’s composure, since she herself was notoriously poor at keeping her feelings and opinions hidden. This was not a marriage at which a woman could easily rejoice, and yet quite calmly Kathryn Parr had promised – among other things – to be bonny and buxom in bed with a man who had already had five wives and had killed two of those. If her assent was less cheerful than Henry’s, one could easily ascribe that to womanly modesty.20
Katherine must surely have sympathised with Queen Kathryn’s plight. The two women had orbited one another for years and were probably long-standing friends. They had much in common. Both were goddaughters of Queen Catherine of Aragon. Both had mothers in her service and were raised by strong female role models, because both lost their fathers at a young age. They were even connected to some of the same Lincolnshire people and places, through natal family and through their respective marriages.21 But Katherine, Duchess of Suffolk had married only once, to Charles Brandon, Duke of Suffolk. Kathryn Parr, seven years older than her friend, was twice widowed already at the age of thirty-one and had hoped to please herself the third time with the young, handsome, charismatic Thomas Seymour. Though Mary Howard, Duchess of Richmond had turned up her nose at a marriage with him in 1538, Kathryn fell like a ninepin before his charm when she met him early in 1543.22 Yet the king had intervened. Seymour was sent away on an embassy, and Kathryn was now married for a third time against her desire.23
Katherine, Duchess of Suffolk had been lucky by comparison. Her marriage to Charles Brandon appears to have been a success; she was his ‘entirely beloved wife’.24 The couple embodied the companionate model of aristocratic marriage, working seamlessly together as a team to manage their enormous estates, promote clients and friends, fulfil their obligations to the king and, most importantly, to procreate. Their two sons Henry and Charles were now rising eight and six. For all that Suffolk and the king were contemporaries, Suffolk was affable and remained physically active, though with bouts of poor health. The king, lamed from a jousting accident many years ago, was overweight, stank of the pus from his leg, was irritable and unpredictable. Of the two, Henry was not the man a woman would want in her bed.
Katherine, Duchess of Suffolk may have been one of those to whom the new queen unburdened herself. Certainly she swiftly became part of the queen’s inner circle, attested by her inclusion in the small group who witnessed their marriage, packed like sardines into the queen’s closet on that July day. Like most queens consort, Queen Kathryn filled her household with friends, family and like-minded associates, most of whom Katherine, Duchess of Suffolk also knew. Many were experienced, having served previous queens; Jane, Lady Denny, Jane Dudley, Viscountess Lisle and Anne Seymour, Countess of Hertford were all old friends. Anne Basset became maid of honour for the fourth time. The queen’s sister Anne Herbert came from Princess Elizabeth’s household, and her cousin Maud, Lady Lane also became one of her trusted confidantes.25
Queen Kathryn needed all the emotional support that she could get. The court remained at Hampton Court Palace, but the queen’s chambers were over the kitchen, and the king visited often. The zeal with which Queen Kathryn ordered ‘perfumes’ not only for her chambers but for her bed suggests that both were a noisome problem.26 And yet she could hardly do other than perform her marital duty with the king, who remained desperate for a second male heir. Her expenses show that she regularly consumed water ‘ad provocandum menstruum’, to bring on menstruation.27 Such purgatives were thought to increase fertility by cleansing the womb.28 If Queen Kathryn failed to fall pregnant she risked being cast aside, but if she did conceive the king would surely turn his attentions elsewhere and she could relax, her duty done.
The mid-1540s were a stressful time at home and abroad. The weather, capricious as the king’s temper, stormed, froze and scorched England into plague and scarcity.29 War, too, was a certainty even before Queen Kathryn’s marriage, as the king had signed a treaty with Emperor Charles V agreeing to an invasion of France within two years.30 For Katherine, Duchess of Suffolk the 1540s were correspondingly laced with anxiety for her husband Charles. He had not been present at the king’s marriage in July 1543 because he was serving as lieutenant of the north, defending the northern border against Scottish incursions and handling a thousand and one details of civilian as well as military business. This was not a job that he enjoyed. More to his taste was the planning of a Scottish invasion, which he was asked to do six times between February 1543 and March 1544.31 Six times Katherine’s heart must have been in her throat, and six times relief as the invasion was called off. In the event, the Earl of Hertford eventually led the Scottish invasion in May 1544. Suffolk returned south to the court, where he was a jovial presence in Privy Council meetings as the promised invasion of France was planned. The king had shocked his councillors by declaring that he would personally lead the army to France in a repeat of his antics in the 1520s. Suffolk now had to make this happen: namely, to place the town of Boulogne under siege so that the king might come and accept its surrender. An experienced commander, he did this beautifully and the king’s participation in the French campaign ran like clockwork.32
At home, Katherine, Duchess of Suffolk performed double duty in soothing both her own and the queen’s worries. Queen Kathryn had been appointed regent of the kingdom while the king was away in France. Like Queen Catherine of Aragon in 1513, Queen Kathryn Parr took this responsibility seriously; it was, after all, a chance to show that she could handle the job if there should be a royal minority in due course. Her wisdom was compared with that of Penelope, a classical reference to a woman who had governed her husband’s estates during the Trojan War.33 The king returned home in October and the royal couple embarked on a short progress into Kent.
Katherine, Duchess of Suffolk had to wait a little longer. Her husband the duke did not return until the end of November, but he did at least return whole, and was well rewarded for his efforts.34 Unfortunately, Katherine’s time with her husband was short-lived. She was with him in Rochester on 19 July 1545 – the same day as the Mary Rose sank, a tragedy witnessed by not only the king but by Lady Carew, the wife of the ship’s captain.35 The records don’t tell us whether she was still at his side while he attended Privy Council meetings in Guildford in Surrey in mid-August. There, on 22 August 1545 at the age of sixty-one, he died.36 Katherine, now twenty-six, was a widow.
Her feelings, like her presence, were not recorded. As a woman she probably did not attend his funeral, a grand, heraldic affair at St George’s Windsor, paid for by the king.37 By the terms of Suffolk’s will she received 500 marks’ worth each of cash, plate, jewellery, household stuff and all of his sheep in the county of Lincoln. She was also bound by him to ‘keep her sole and marry not’, a device often used with a wife’s consent in order to keep the inheritance whole for their sons, and she was made one of his executors, responsible for carrying out his last wishes.38 No doubt she grieved. But Katherine, like her mother, was also practical. Her sons were both minors, and Henry, the elder, was now a Crown ward. If she wanted to retain control of his upbringing and of the estates she needed to purchase his wardship. This wasn’t only a matter of money, but of patronage. The king needed to be persuaded that this was a good political move.
Fortunately, Katherine was well connected. Since entering Queen Kathryn’s household she had been exposed to a network of men and women who espoused religiously progressive views, and had gradually become one of them.39 She exchanged letters, gifts and visits with Anne Seymour, Countess of Hertford; she stood godmother to Jane Dudley, Viscountess Lisle’s baby daughter in November 1545, hosting a gathering for friends at her own house in London after the ceremony.40 Suffolk had not been strongly religiously conservative, but he had not been of a strongly evangelical persuasion either.41 Now Katherine rearranged her household to suit her as a widow and began employing those whose beliefs were closer to her own, evolving faith. Her jointure estates included a number of Church benefices, and she was able to begin appointing evangelical priests to the churches on her lands.42 Within a year she was able to secure her son Henry’s wardship for the princely sum of £1,500, and of the seven men who stood as guarantees for her payments to the Crown, six were among the most prominent religious reformers at court.43
The handle was turned and the ropes creaked. Thomas Wriothesley, the lord chancellor, spoke again, raising his voice over the noise of the rack and of a woman in pain. She must tell them who maintained her in her heresy. Who was part of her ‘sect’? Were they privy councillors? Who had sent her money? Which gentlewomen? The Duchess of Suffolk? The Countess of Sussex? Of Hertford? Lady Denny? Lady Fitzwilliam?44
Anne Askew remained silent. They had been through this already, and she had denied that any of these elite courtier women had had anything to do with her or her beliefs. For hours, Wriothesley and Sir Richard Rich had interrogated her in this small room. So often the mere sight of the rack was enough to inspire prisoners to speak. Not so for Anne. Though it was a bright July day the only light came from candles, flickering into dark corners, glinting malevolently on the whites of the men’s eyes and the gold touches on their clothing. Anne did not want to die, but since it seemed to be God’s will that she should, at least she would not die apostate with lies on her tongue.
So she ‘lay still and did not cry’. The men were so infuriated with her silence that they stood over her and turned the handle on the rack themselves until she was ‘nigh dead’. When – eventually – the lieutenant of the Tower loosed her bonds, she lost consciousness. She came to on the bare floor, cold against the burning pain of her body, unable to move. Lord Chancellor Wriothesley was sat on a chair, a looming spectre. For two more hours he ‘reasoned’ with her, trying to persuade her, through a haze of pain, to recant her heretical opinions.45 Though she knew that she faced death by burning, she would not give way.
By rights Anne should not have been racked at all. She was a woman, for a start. Women were not tortured. She was also of gentry status, an ancient Lincolnshire family, her brothers in service with the king at court.46 An educated woman, she had come to London after the breakdown of her marriage and had become part of a growing evangelical community there at a time when religious divisions were growing increasingly fraught.47 Back in the mid-1530s, many with progressive views had thought that their time had come: they could finally follow in the footsteps of Martin Luther and other continental reformers. The legislation passed had initially appeared to confirm this. The monasteries were dissolved, shrines and relics desecrated, and the Bible was printed in English for everybody to read. But there it had stopped. On the face of it, religious policy had even appeared to backtrack. Where the Ten Articles of 1536 had laid emphasis on scripture as the foundation of faith and had accepted the doctrine of justification of faith alongside the efficacy of good works, the Six Articles of 1539 – his father’s ‘six fists’, as Edward VI would later call it – firmly reasserted the centrality of the mass and of transubstantiation alongside other more traditional doctrines. Appalled by the audacity of lay people to interpret the Bible in ways that did not support the royal supremacy, an Act was passed in 1542 which restricted its reading.48 Katherine, Duchess of Suffolk and the other women at court were no longer permitted to read the Bible together in groups, only silently as individuals; there was to be no discussion of scripture. Women below the rank of nobility were no longer allowed to read it at all.
Whether the king was trying to steer some sort of middle way or whether there were factions bouncing him from pillar to post is difficult to ascertain, and was perhaps even difficult to fathom for those who lived through this time.49 But despite the increasingly draconian measures, at the beginning of 1546 there were plenty of people in the queen’s household who were keen to discuss religion. The entire day was structured around it. There was scriptural study, study of the Psalms and the gospels, and afternoon sermons.50 By this time Queen Kathryn herself had written and anonymously published two religious texts.51 Katherine, Duchess of Suffolk was at the forefront of the circle of reformist believers around the queen. In fact her own former chaplain, John Parkhurst, who would later go into exile under the Catholic Queen Mary I, was now in the queen’s employ.52 Katherine was a patroness of reformist writers like John Bale, and by those who liked her she was called a ‘godly woman’, a ‘great professor and patroness of true religion’.53 There were plenty who did not like her at all. Katherine’s sharp tongue did not endear her to her conservative peers. She had long been at loggerheads with Stephen Gardiner, Bishop of Winchester, one of the architects of Anne Askew’s arrest. At a dinner given by Katherine and her husband in 1545, Suffolk had enlivened the occasion by asking the ladies to choose the man they ‘loved best’ as their dinner partner, and then refused all invitations himself. Katherine, deprived of her own husband, asked Gardiner to partner her; if she couldn’t have the man she loved best, she declared, she would have the one she ‘loved the worst’ instead.54
Paradoxically, the experience of formal religion in the chapel royal at court was much the same as it had been before the break with Rome. Holy days remained in place. Traditional ceremonies remained, too; there were palms on Palm Sunday, ashes on Ash Wednesday, and the king even crept to the cross, literally crawling down the nave of the chapel while meditating on the wounds of Christ, on Good Friday. The king was resistant to changing the pattern of religious ceremony that provided such a stage for royal majesty and magnificence.55 But Anne Askew’s arrest and interrogation shows that the atmosphere was a little different in the city of London. In fact, Anne had already been arrested once previously, in March 1545, but Edmund Bonner, Bishop of London had let her go. Then Askew was only a small fish in a bigger pond of heresy. In April 1546, though, prominent evangelical preacher Edward Crome had given a provocative and public sermon at St Paul’s Cross in London in which he openly denied transubstantiation, the Real Presence in the bread and wine of the mass. This precipitated a crackdown on evangelical heresy in the city, and this was the context in which Askew was arrested for the second time, this time by the Privy Council, in May 1546.56
The Privy Council was not only interested in heresy in London, but in those at court who might be encouraging it. Katherine, Duchess of Suffolk’s nemesis Bishop Gardiner led the charge. He and others with similar views were keen to remove evangelical influence from around the king, knowing that this would be crucial to the balance of power in the next reign, the inevitable minority of the eight-year-old King Edward VI. They knew that much of this centred on Queen Kathryn Parr, who had proved her mettle as queen regent once already, and it’s probable that Gardiner and his cronies would have liked to remove the queen herself if only they could find a way to do so. They had thought that Anne Askew might be the way. Perhaps certain of the king’s councillors had learned lessons from the rest of the reign, because they sought to use Askew not to target the queen herself – too obvious – but the women around her. Some of them no doubt remembered the case of Elizabeth Barton, the nun of Kent, who had had so many noble supporters back in the 1530s; or else, perhaps more likely, they had heard rumours that certain female courtiers had been in contact with Askew.57 This was too opportunistic to have been a carefully laid plot, and moreover, they were not wholly wrong about Askew’s connections. According to Askew’s maid, the Countess of Hertford and Lady Denny had indeed sent her money.58 Her links to Katherine, Duchess of Suffolk were even stronger. Katherine also hailed from Lincolnshire. She was a patron of Hugh Latimer, a leader in the London network of reformers. Askew’s sister Jane was married to George St Poll, a lawyer in the duchess’s service. Damningly, Katherine was later said to have arranged interviews between Askew and the queen before Askew’s arrest.59
If true, this might be why Askew bravely refused to implicate the Duchess of Suffolk even under torture, an echo of the way in which the nun of Kent had protected Gertrude, Marchioness of Exeter back in 1534. The Privy Council got nowhere with its interrogation. Askew was sent to the pyre in early July 1546, her body so damaged from the rack that she had to be carried there on a chair.60 She was viewed by her evangelical peers as a martyr, killed for refusing to surrender her denial of transubstantiation. We can’t be sure whether Katherine, Duchess of Suffolk or any of the other court women also believed this. At this stage in 1546 none had yet directly stated that they did not believe in the Real Presence – not surprisingly, given Askew’s end – but only a year later many were openly sympathetic. For Katherine, her colleagues and the queen it didn’t end there. Askew’s death did not stop them from discussing and sharing religious books. Katherine was thought to be a particularly strong influence with the queen in this regard. By 1546 she had a copy of Tyndale’s New Testament, and her library included many other evangelical texts. Protestant martyrologist John Foxe and Jesuit Robert Persons both later wrote that she was instrumental in disseminating many of these.61
By now King Henry was often ill and in pain from his ulcerated leg and excruciating headaches. Henry’s pain was never only his own; he made it into a problem for those around him. To distract him, Queen Kathryn did what she did best, discussing religion and disputing with the king on knotty theological points. After one sharp discussion in the presence of Stephen Gardiner, Henry waited until Queen Kathryn had left and exclaimed sarcastically, ‘A good hearing it is when women become such clerks, and a thing much to my comfort, to come in mine old days to be taught by my wife.’62
Gardiner was never one to lose an opportunity. He stoked the king’s rage, and obtained his permission to draw up articles charging the queen with heresy. Well aware of the religious activities of her ladies-in-waiting and confident of finding illegal texts, he also ordered a search of the belongings of three of her women ‘who they knew to be great with her, and of her blood’: the queen’s sister Lady Anne Herbert, her cousin Lady Maud Lane and Lady Elizabeth Tyrwhit, all reformist sympathisers. This, along with their arrest, ought to provide enough ammunition to justify an arrest of the queen herself. Like a spider in its web, the king rarely left his chambers, and so Queen Kathryn continued to visit with him and to debate religious matters. Now keen to see how far she would go, the king encouraged her. He even told his physician Dr Wendy about it. While the queen suffered a bout of illness brought on by discovering the articles against her, Dr Wendy confided the king’s plot to her.
Katherine, Duchess of Suffolk and the rest of the queen’s women were immediately ordered by her to ‘convey away their books, which were against the law’. On her next visit to the king Queen Kathryn discussed instead the inferiority of women, and declared that she had only ever seemed to dispute with Henry to distract him from his pain, and because she sought to learn from his wise answers. Forgiven, she concocted a new plot with the king: on the next day, the day on which she had been due to be arrested, she came to the king’s privy garden with the three women who had likewise been in danger. When the lord chancellor arrived to arrest them the king shouted at him, calling him ‘arrant knave, beast and fool’.
The story comes to us from John Foxe, writing during Mary’s and Elizabeth’s reigns. Its veracity has been a matter for debate, not least because it’s the earliest account of these events, which were not mentioned by anybody writing contemporaneously. But Foxe’s source, he stated, was ‘certain of her ladies and gentlewomen being yet alive, which were then present about her’. Of the three women specifically targeted in this episode, Elizabeth Tyrwhit is the most likely source, since she was the only one still alive when Foxe published his account in 1570, and was linked to him through John Field, another Protestant writer. But Foxe spoke of ladies in the plural. This could easily have been Katherine, Duchess of Suffolk, in whose household Foxe sojourned during 1550, and who would most certainly have known of these events from the queen.63
Where once the queen’s ladies-in-waiting had been mere scenery, important in their role as the queen’s confidantes and companions but perceived merely as window-dressing, they were now understood as political players in their own right. They functioned as a route to the queen for patronage purposes; but, more nefariously, they were now also perceived to be legitimate targets for arrest, questioning, even execution. Where once employment in the queen’s service had been merely a route to a better marriage, now it was, quite literally, a matter of life and death.
The summer and autumn passed a shade more calmly. Katherine, Duchess of Suffolk remained at court with the queen among her ‘ordinary’ ladies-in-waiting. In that capacity she was present at the banquets held for the French embassy in August, arranged for the official ratification of the treaty between England and France concerning the future of Boulogne.64 As ever, the king was determined that the English outshine the French. The queen and the royal children received new clothes and jewels for the occasion, and no doubt Katherine and the rest of the queen’s women wore their finest. Chronicler Edward Hall wrote with world-weariness, ‘to tell you of the costly banquet houses that were built, and of the great banquets, the costly masques, the liberal huntings… you would much marvel and scant believe’.65 Perhaps Katherine as well as Hall found it indescribable.
At some stage after this, Katherine was given permission to leave the court temporarily and return home to Lincolnshire to her two small sons.66 No doubt she needed a rest, and it was understood that noblewomen like Katherine had responsibilities outside the court that must periodically be dealt with in person. She and her husband had enlarged and renovated their home Grimsthorpe Castle a few years previously. Now it was an impressive two-storey building faced in pale limestone, with crenellated towers and four wings around a courtyard. It was soaked in Katherine’s family history; she had inherited Grimsthorpe from her father, and the great hall was hung with tapestries given to her late husband by his first wife Mary, the French queen, by whom Katherine had been raised.67 Christmas and New Year were spent quietly. Katherine will have given and received gifts from friends, family and associates, and she may well have welcomed many of her local clients and tenants to the hall at Grimsthorpe for a holiday meal. There would be accounts to check and sign off, petitions to answer, instructions to give to her estate officers.
Katherine was still in Lincolnshire in mid-January 1547 when a messenger from the queen arrived.68 This, in itself, wasn’t unusual. Katherine and the queen were friends, and messages regularly passed between them when they were apart.69 But this messenger almost certainly carried bad news. The king’s health had been concerning for over a year. The ulcer on his leg gave him periodic attacks of fever. While Anne Askew was racked in the Tower in early July 1546, Henry was sick all night with colic.70 By November he could no longer walk and was wheeled about his palaces in a chair.71 Shortly after removing to Whitehall in late December, he had his worst episode yet: a fever that raged for thirty hours and left him exhausted and weak.72 The royal couple had spent Christmas separately, probably at the king’s instigation, and this may well have caused Queen Kathryn considerable anxiety. Since her almost-arrest in the summer she had spent little time away from her husband, knowing that her presence by his side was her best chance of avoiding a repeated threat.73 At the end of December the king had dictated a new will.74 By 10 January, Queen Kathryn had sent servants to move her things to Westminster to join her husband, only to find that he would not allow her to see him.75 It was shortly after this that she sent her messenger to Katherine, Duchess of Suffolk.
It’s likely that her message was a summons. If Queen Kathryn thought she might be in danger, or if the king was dying, she needed her closest friend. And things did not look good. The king did not leave his private chambers. He gave no audiences, granted no access except to his doctors, those of the privy chamber who saw to his bodily needs, and certain of his privy councillors. On 23 January he revealed the names of those he had chosen to form a regency council after his death; at night on the 27th, he died.
The king’s death was kept secret for three days. We don’t know whether the queen and her women knew about it before it was made public on 31 January. On that same day, the names of those appointed to the regency council were also announced, and the queen was not among them. One of Henry’s last acts had been to shut his wife out of power. Instead, Edward Seymour, Earl of Hertford – the new king’s uncle, and a friend of both the queen and the Duchess of Suffolk – proclaimed himself Lord Protector of England and Duke of Somerset. He had fetched Prince Edward from his house in Hertfordshire the previous Friday, and the new king was now lodged in the Tower for security’s sake.76
The death of a king was not a time to pause and breathe, no matter the circumstances. While the new king was publicly proclaimed across London and the council began preparations for the funeral, the queen’s household immediately went into mourning. Queen Kathryn had her jewels sent to the Tower and donned black clothing.77 Changes were inevitable for the queen and the women around her. Queen Kathryn was now the queen dowager. Her household would be downsized accordingly: Katherine, Duchess of Suffolk was probably out of a job. Nor could the queen remain at Westminster or, in the long term, any of the royal palaces. Katherine probably helped her as she made preparations to move the short distance from Westminster to St James’s Palace, where her servants draped the chambers and galleries in black cloth.78
Peers and peeresses were summoned to London, lodged, and clothed in black. Seventy-four London suppliers provided 33,000 yards of black cloth. The king’s body lay in state in its coffin in the privy chamber at Whitehall and mourners held vigil, overlooked by the alarmingly life-sized mural of the king painted on the wall there by Holbein. The king had requested burial in St George’s Chapel at Windsor, next to his third and favourite wife Jane Seymour, mother of the new king. All of the roads between Westminster and Windsor were mended, overhanging trees and hedges cut back so as not to catch and tear the banners as they passed. The king’s coffin was draped in black cloth of gold and topped with an effigy of the king in life, dressed in rich fabrics and jewels and wearing an Imperial crown ‘of inestimable value’. The whole travelled on a large gold chariot, drawn by seven horses trapped in black.79
Katherine, Duchess of Suffolk was not part of the lengthy funeral procession that accompanied the king’s corpse first to Syon, and then the next day to Windsor. Queens did not play an active part in kings’ funerals, and so Queen Kathryn and her women travelled separately to the chapel. After days of masses and offerings, the time for burial drew nigh. Katherine, outfitted in sixteen yards of black cloth, stood close to the queen in the royal closet above the chapel.80 They had a discreet bird’s eye view of the entire spectacle, watching through the oriel windows alongside the rest of the queen’s women, nobles and ‘notable strangers’, foreign visitors to the realm.81 The closet had been built for Queen Catherine of Aragon. It was still covered in her cipher and her pomegranate badge, proclaiming the king’s first marriage. Katherine had been named for this queen. Did she notice these now as she stood with Queen Kathryn Parr, watching the committal of the man who had caused such anguish to so many women? Did she think about the bonds between those women? Her own mother, María de Salinas, had come over from Spain with Catherine of Aragon for her marriage to the king, and had attended her as he married another and betrayed her. Now María’s daughter helped that queen’s successor to bury that same king.
Ashes to ashes, and dust to dust. The snaps of a dozen staves of office rang through the chapel, and they were thrown into the vault. The circle was complete. Katherine and her mistress had survived the waiting game.