A king without a queen was not in need of ladies-in-waiting, and a king who was nine years old was most certainly not yet in need of a queen. It was time for Kathryn Parr’s household to disperse. Most of the ladies-in-waiting were dismissed to wend their way home. A wages list covering the second quarter of the year from March to midsummer 1547 shows that ten women remained, all of whom were already in Queen Kathryn’s service. A degree of kinship connection was maintained. The list was headed by ‘Mistress Cobham’, who was in fact Elizabeth Brooke, the daughter of Baron Cobham and the mistress of the queen’s brother William Parr.1 By Michaelmas, ten women had become thirteen, and the divisions between household ranks were reinstated correctly: four gentlewomen, seven maids of honour and two chamberers.2
But this didn’t mean that Katherine, Duchess of Suffolk’s job was done. Though she was no longer among the queen dowager’s ladies-in-waiting, she was still her friend. After King Henry’s funeral she remained in London at her own house, the Barbican. Even if Queen Kathryn had not needed her, her own son Henry, now Duke of Suffolk, did; he had been given a prominent role in Edward VI’s coronation on 20 February, carrying the orb in the procession. Both of her sons were made Knights of the Bath in the traditional night-long ritual before the coronation itself.3
By the middle of April, Queen Kathryn was packing up at St James’s Palace. A queen dowager must live on her own dower estates, and Kathryn had chosen to move to her house at Chelsea.4 Her reason for staying close to London was clear: he was tall, handsome, and his name was Sir Thomas Seymour. She had wanted to marry him before the king intervened in 1543. Now the relationship resumed and went further. Before long they were lovers. Katherine, Duchess of Suffolk, as the queen’s closest friend bar her sister Lady Herbert, was soon brought into the secret. Messengers went between Chelsea and the Barbican with regularity. In a letter reassuring Seymour that she had wanted to marry him back in 1543 but God’s will, in the form of marriage to the king, had intervened, Queen Kathryn remarked, ‘I can say nothing but, as my lady of Suffolk saith, “God is a marvelous man.” ’5 A little later Seymour wrote to Kathryn, ‘I presume I have my lady of Suffolk’s goodwill touching mine own desire of you’; the other day she had told his friend Sir William Sharington ‘that she would that I were married to their mistress’.6
The marriage took place in secret, probably in May.7 Katherine, Duchess of Suffolk, probably knew about it; she was probably present. But things were complicated. A queen was supposed to spend time in mourning for her husband, the late king. To marry again so soon – less than six months after the king’s death – would be considered indecent, dishonouring his memory. And so it transpired. They got permission from the young king retroactively but without telling him that the marriage had already occurred, and he was not pleased. The king’s uncle Edward Seymour, Protector Somerset’s initial enthusiasm likewise turned to strong disapproval.8
It took time for the furore to settle down, and for most of that time Katherine, Duchess of Suffolk seems to have remained in London, visiting the queen regularly.9 London was full of noblewomen, for though there was no longer a queen’s household at court there were still female courtiers, and it was still important to stay in touch with the centre of power. The households of Princesses Mary and Elizabeth remained significant. Kathryn, as queen dowager, still had a complement of women. And Protector Somerset’s wife, Anne Stanhope, Duchess of Somerset built up something like a rival court as the wife of the man at the head of governance.10 Anne had been one of Queen Kathryn Parr’s most senior women, alongside the Duchess of Suffolk and others. She has gone down in history as a ‘shrew’, partly because she was portrayed in that way by Elizabethan writers like John Foxe.11 The fact remains that she and Kathryn Parr did not like one another, and this developed into a genuine feud in the spring of 1547. One of Kathryn’s letters to Thomas Seymour suggested that Anne had taught her husband Protector Somerset to break promises, ‘for it is her custom to promise many comings to her friends, and to perform none’.12 Their mutual dislike could not have been openly expressed while Kathryn was queen and Anne was in her service, but it was spat out now like a sour cherry and shows how the relationship between mistress and lady-in-waiting could turn bitter.
Katherine, Duchess of Suffolk, though, remained close to Queen Kathryn even after they were geographically further distant. By June 1548 Queen Kathryn was six months pregnant with Seymour’s child, and on Wednesday the 13th the couple travelled west to Seymour’s new country residence, Sudeley Castle, on the northern edge of the Cotswolds.13 After a gentle, golden summer, she was brought to bed on 30 August and gave birth to a healthy baby girl whom she named Mary. But all was not well. Like her predecessor Jane Seymour, Queen Kathryn’s health worsened in the days following the birth. She told her attendant Lady Tyrwhit that she was sure she could not live. On 5 September, ‘between two and three of the clock in the morning’, she died.14
Did Katherine attend her friend’s funeral? We don’t know. She will have watched, however, as Thomas Seymour went off the rails, his wife’s death leaving him without anchor. He began plotting a coup against his brother, Protector Somerset, whom he blamed for his own exclusion from the king’s Privy Council. In his wild state he lost all caution. The plot found its way to his brother’s ears. Arrested on 17 January 1549, he was executed on Tower Hill on 20 March. One of his last requests was that his baby daughter Mary might be raised by her mother’s friend, Katherine, Duchess of Suffolk.15 Katherine duly took baby Mary into her household at Grimsthorpe, though not without several plaintive letters to secretary William Cecil and Protector Somerset about the need for money to support the child.16 This notwithstanding, she kept Mary in her household for a full year or more, until the child disappears from all surviving records.17 Almost certainly, she had died before her third birthday.
Edward’s reign did at least bring with it the fresh wind of further religious reform. By 1547 it is clear that Katherine no longer believed in transubstantiation, the Real Presence in the Eucharist, and was prepared to say so publicly now that this was increasingly permissible. In 1547 alone she encouraged and then sponsored the publication of her friend Queen Kathryn’s most reformist work yet, The Lamentation of a Sinner.18 She also continued to be rude to Stephen Gardiner; walking past the chamber in which he was imprisoned in the Tower of London in 1550, she commented loudly that ‘it was merry with the lambs when the wolf was shut up’.19
What of the other women we have met? Greater religious reform under Edward VI was a boon to Mary Howard, Duchess of Richmond too. The transfer of power between monarchs had been a difficult time for Mary and her family. She had not served Queen Kathryn Parr as a lady-in-waiting ‘in ordinary’, though she had appeared from time to time in ‘extraordinary’ service. She spent the last years of King Henry’s reign living in her father the Duke of Norfolk’s home in Kenninghall in Suffolk, which chafed her independence. Mary never remarried, and though she received her jointure she appears to have lived in debt.20 In 1546 her father and brother had come under royal suspicion, in no small part because of her brother the Earl of Surrey’s unguarded and ill-advised use of royal arms at a time of royal paranoia over the succession, alongside his boasts about his father’s likely pre-eminence in the forthcoming royal minority. Reported by one of his friends, Sir Richard Southwell, the earl was arrested in December 1546. Those of the Privy Council who did not relish the thought of Norfolk’s conservative presence for the future did not hesitate to make the most of this, with the result that Norfolk too was arrested.21
Mary learned of this when royal commissioners arrived at Kenninghall to turn them out and to inventory their belongings. A consummate courtier, she fell to her knees, trembling, and vowed to keep back no piece of information that might aid the investigation. When questioned, though, she did precisely this: used obfuscation and vagueness to turn questions about her brother’s heraldry and to save her father, who she understood was the prime target here. Her brother was executed on 19 January 1547. Her father’s death warrant was signed on 27 January, the night of the king’s death; but the new regime thought it best not to begin with bloodshed and he was allowed to live, albeit imprisoned in the Tower.22
Her father’s imprisonment paradoxically allowed Mary greater freedom to explore her religious convictions, and she took full advantage. Like the Duchess of Suffolk, she spent time raising children: she was given custody of her nephews and nieces, her brother the Earl of Surrey’s children. In line with her beliefs, she appointed the evangelical John Foxe as their tutor. While in her household he wrote his first draft of his infamous Book of Martyrs. Mary also harboured writer John Bale on his return from exile in 1547, and had many Protestant works dedicated to her.23 Mary died sometime in 1555 and was buried alongside her husband Henry Fitzroy in St Michael’s Church in Framlingham, Suffolk.
For Mary’s mother, too, the Duke of Norfolk’s arrest proved freeing. Elizabeth, Duchess of Norfolk had spent the rest of Henry’s reign in her house at Redbourn, Hertfordshire, resigned to her ‘prisonment’. She, did, however, welcome some of her nieces into her household, and she remained in touch with family and friends by letter. After her husband’s arrest her allowance was paid instead by the Privy Council, and she was given permission to visit London. The accession of Mary I in 1553 saw her return to something of her old prominence; she carried the queen’s train at her coronation. Elizabeth finally did gain access to her jointure estates after her husband’s death in 1554 and was restored to the bosom of her family, standing godmother to her grandson Philip, the future Earl of Arundel, at St Clement Danes Church in London in 1558. She died the same year, only weeks after Elizabeth I’s accession, and was buried in the Howard family chapel at St Mary’s, Lambeth under a stone with a laudatory inscription composed by her brother Henry, Lord Stafford, who circumspectly wrote nothing about his sister’s headstrong nature.24
Gertrude Blount, Marchioness of Exeter followed a similar path. Having been imprisoned during the years of the Exeter Conspiracy in the late 1530s, she was released by the end of 1539, and it’s unclear quite how she spent the reign of Edward VI. Her own son Edward remained imprisoned in the Tower, as he had been for most of his young life. He was too valuable a pawn and had too much Yorkist blood in his veins to be allowed to run loose and create a new royal line. Everything changed, though, on Mary I’s accession in 1553. Gertrude featured prominently in the procession at her entry into the city of London in early August, riding only a few places behind the queen herself and directly following the Princess Elizabeth. Then, joy: on reaching the Tower, the queen publicly released and pardoned Edward along with other political prisoners. Mother and son were summoned to court and honoured.25 The golden days had arrived.
Gertrude’s influence during the beginning of Mary I’s reign was considerable, sought by her friends and distrusted by her enemies, and many thought that her son Edward was a natural husband for the queen. Unfortunately, the queen disagreed. Appalled by this refusal, Gertrude left court. Edward was shortly sent abroad to Charles V’s court, a means to keep him away from the English throne. After a time, Gertrude, always wily and strategic, was readmitted to the queen’s service where she worked hard to restore Mary’s goodwill towards her son, whom she missed unbearably. She became afraid she would die before she saw him again, but in the event it was the other way round: Edward died unexpectedly in Italy on 18 September 1556. Gertrude’s last years are shadowy. Her health continued to decline, and she made a will on 25 September 1557. Before 8 January 1558 she had died, and was buried in Wimborne Minster in Dorset.26
The two Basset sisters, Anne and Katharine, also continued their roles as female courtiers. Anne Basset, the bold, ambitious, younger sister, received clothing from the Crown by warrant throughout 1546, but she did not remain in Queen Kathryn Parr’s service after King Henry’s death.27 She was, however, granted an annuity of £26 13s 4d by King Edward, which was to be paid half-yearly during the king’s minority.28 She reappeared in royal service at Queen Mary’s accession as a lady of the privy chamber – an elevation in rank likely down to her age, since she was now in her early thirties, and experience – and was granted the same annuity by the new queen. Within a year, she had finally obtained the goal of so many ladies-in-waiting: a good marriage. On 7 June 1554 she married Walter Hungerford, one of the gentlemen pensioners twelve years her junior, in the queen’s chapel at Richmond Palace. Within three years she had died.29 Her older, gentler sister Katharine remained in Anna of Cleves’ service for the remainder of King Henry’s reign, but on 8 December 1547 she married Henry Ashley, Esquire, of Hever in Kent, a man she had evidently met while in Anna’s household there. Her death is not recorded, but was after 1558 when she was mentioned in her brother James’s will.30
The longest-lived of all of the women we have met was Katherine, Duchess of Suffolk, of the sharp tongue, fiery temper and progressive religion. With little recourse to the royal court after Queen Kathryn Parr’s death in 1548, she spent much of her time at Grimsthorpe, her home in Lincolnshire. Her two sons, Henry and Charles, were educated along reformist lines at St John’s College, Cambridge, but in 1551 disaster struck. Sweating sickness broke out in the university city, the same disease of which chronicler Edward Hall wrote that one might be ‘merry at dinner and dead by supper’.31 Katherine had been staying at her home in Kingston, Cambridgeshire. Knowing the danger, she immediately had her sons removed to the Bishop of Lincoln’s palace at Buckden in Huntingdonshire – the same house in which Queen Catherine of Aragon had once been imprisoned – but she herself fell ill, albeit not from the sweating sickness. By the time she had recovered sufficiently to visit her sons on 14 July, Henry was dead and Charles was dying. In the space of a few hours she had lost both her children.32
It is hard to imagine the depth of her grief. She may have found consolation in an unlikely quarter; at some point in 1552 she married for a second time, to her gentleman usher Richard Bertie. Like her former mistress Queen Kathryn Parr she had made a love match to please herself, but, unlike the queen’s, Katherine’s proved fruitful and long-lasting. Bertie’s religious sympathies matched her own, and the accession of Mary I was not good news for them. Under pressure to accept the return to Catholicism, they chose exile instead.
This was not an easy option. For all that the queen did not want Protestants in her realm, she did not want them to leave and spread their heresy either. Bertie left first. To get out of the country, Katherine disguised herself and her baby daughter Susan and one of her maids and left the Barbican in the darkness of the very early morning. The Barbican was next door to Garter House, the home of the Garter herald, and he had been set to keep watch on her by her enemies. Hearing noise as she and her small company left the house, he came out of his own with a torch. Horrified, Katherine sent the men of her company ahead and took only her daughter and the two women with her. Followed by the herald, she stepped into a doorway of Garter House so that he could not see her. Thinking she had already left, the herald returned to his own entrance and Katherine got safely away.
The couple’s time abroad was chronicled by Richard Bertie and incorporated into John Foxe’s Book of Martyrs in its 1570 edition.33 Their son, born during that time, was named Peregrine in honour of their travels. From Wesel to Strasbourg to Frankfurt, they travelled Europe’s most Protestant provinces, winding up as guests of the Polish king at the time of Queen Mary’s death in England in November 1558. Returning to England a year later, it soon became clear that Katherine’s Protestant – even Calvinist – beliefs had outstripped those of most other English reformers. Though Queen Elizabeth restored the Protestant state to a degree, it did not go far enough for those who had experienced a more stringent form of Protestantism on the continent. Katherine never returned to service as a lady-in-waiting. By the late 1570s her health was deteriorating, and she died at Grimsthorpe on 19 September 1580.
Surviving the waiting game took courage, audacity, talent and a degree of luck. At the start of Henry VIII’s reign it was broadly the same game it had always been: ladies-in-waiting attended the queen as she moved between the birthing chamber, diplomatic audiences and courtly entertainments. By the end of the reign in 1547 it had evolved into something darker and more dangerous. The choices that ladies-in-waiting were forced to make could put their very lives at risk.
In such challenging circumstances different individuals made different choices. The stories uncovered here show how many factors went into a woman’s experience as a lady-in-waiting during this era, and how her connections, her principles and her character might shape her life differently from those of her colleagues. Much of women’s history leans on a trope of ‘exceptional’ women: ‘girlbosses’ who achieved incredible things against the impossibly patriarchal odds of their day. Such women did, of course, exist, and we should celebrate them. But we could easily describe all women in the past in this way. All of the women in The Waiting Game existed close to the centre of power and acted in ways that influenced the broader historical narrative. All occasionally stepped outside the boundaries that society allegedly dictated for their sex. And perhaps this is the point. These boundaries were less rigid in practice than in theory, and in many cases ‘exceptional’ women were, in fact, not so exceptional. The Waiting Game shows that if we simply allow women to exist in the past on their own terms there is no need for explicit ‘girlbossification’; they are a fascinating historical lens in their own right. Women’s history does not need to be exceptional to be relevant.
All the ladies-in-waiting we have met here were strong, determined, intelligent women whose experiences shine light onto the varying aspects of a lady-in-waiting’s role. María de Salinas, Lady Willoughby shows us how women could mobilise their contacts to fight complex legal suits and manage their lands, but that they could just as easily be ‘bad’ landlords as good. Women could be villains as well as victims, sometimes both simultaneously, and could simply make bad decisions like everybody else; Jane Parker, Viscountess Rochford’s involvement in Queen Anne Boleyn and Queen Katherine Howard’s downfalls could be read as an example of all three things. Some were thoughtful, cautious and wily, seeking ways to achieve their own ends while remaining on the right side of royal favour; this was Gertrude Blount, Marchioness of Exeter’s usual modus operandi, standing godmother to royal children and toeing the line while also passing information to the king’s enemies. Others found it impossible to be so politically or personally circumspect. Elizabeth Stafford, Duchess of Norfolk suffered many years of ostracism for speaking too freely in support of Queen Catherine of Aragon, and for refusing to accept her own husband’s infidelity. Her daughter Mary, Duchess of Richmond used the same determination more effectively, to shine in her cousin Queen Anne Boleyn’s household, to successfully defy the king in the matter of her remarriage, and to pursue reformed religion in the face of her father’s disapproval. Katherine Willoughby, Duchess of Suffolk followed the new reformist religion too, while Honor, Lady Lisle found herself in trouble for adhering to the old ways.
After the hiatus of Edward VI’s reign, ladies-in-waiting returned under queens regnant Mary I and Elizabeth I in turn. Their father’s reign had shown how significant, even dangerous ladies-in-waiting could be; now both of his daughters capitalised on this, using the women in their service to further their own political ends. Ladies-in-waiting had always functioned as a connection between the queen and the world outside her privy chamber, acting as barometers of her mood. Now the queen’s mood was more important than ever before, since she ruled the whole country by herself, and so the role of her ladies-in-waiting as ‘information brokers’ correspondingly rose.34 Spanish ambassador Simon Renard fretted about what advice Queen Mary’s ladies were giving her about marriage. Queen Elizabeth deliberately used her women as private diplomatic agents in her many marriage suits; they would, apparently on their own initiative, covertly mention Elizabeth’s keenness to the relevant ambassador, who would therefore continue to press the suit, maintaining a diplomatic alliance until it suited the queen to break it off, at which point she would claim innocently that her ladies had acted without her authority. The queen’s secretaries deliberately cultivated relationships with particular ladies-in-waiting so that they might know when best to approach the queen over any given issue, and when it would be better not to walk into a storm of the queen’s temper. The ladies themselves used their close connection to the queen to further their own ends, assured of her favour in lawsuits, family disputes and matters of debt. To be the queen’s lady-in-waiting was to be a person of significance, and everybody knew it.
These women’s long-standing ability to fade into the background has served them well. To follow them as a historian is often to see them slide out of view as soon as one tries to focus the lens. But allowing light into the darker corners of any history illuminates more than just one frame. To tell Henry’s reign from the perspective of ladies-in-waiting is to see the familiar become unfamiliar. We were never supposed to know these stories like this. It’s important that we do.