Chapter 9
I am a spirit of no common rate;
The summer still doth tend upon my state;
And I do love thee: therefore, go with me;
I’ll give thee fairies to attend on thee,
And they shall fetch thee jewels from the deep,
And sing while thou on pressed flowers dost sleep …
– William Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night’s Dream (c.1595)
One heavily romanticised version of Catherine’s ascent claimed that Henry first noticed her when she was serving in the nursery of his two-year-old son, Edward. Visiting his child one afternoon, the king spotted Catherine curtseying with the rest of the women. He marched over, raised her to her feet, and told her, ‘Catherine, from henceforward, I wish you never to do that again, but rather that all these ladies and my whole kingdom should bend the knee to you, for I wish to make you Queen.’ Catherine made a suitably self-effacing response, as virtuous maidens inevitably did, and the king ‘sent for the Bishop of London to come and marry him’ that very same day.1
The story is fiction. Despite living in London at the time, the Spanish merchant who wrote it managed to get the order of Henry’s marriages to Anne of Cleves and Catherine in reverse order. His account does nonetheless capture something of the suddenness with which Catherine made the transition from courtier to queen consort. Compared to her immediate predecessors, she had comparatively little experience of life at court before becoming one of its principal figures: Katherine of Aragon had been Princess of Wales and then dowager princess for nearly eight years by the time she became queen in 1509; for most of her childhood Anne Boleyn had lived in the household of the Queen of France, then the Queen of England’s from 1521 to 1527, and enjoyed her own household as de facto first lady throughout the six years of the king’s first annulment; and Jane Seymour had served in the households of both Queen Katherine and Queen Anne. Catherine, in contrast, was a resident at court for no more than eight months by the time she became queen – a short apprenticeship before being promoted to the top job.
Catherine’s household was a vast entity with a corresponding income. She and her servants had access to her own granary, bakery, brewery, buttery (to dispense wine and ale to the staff), cellar, garderobe of spices, a chaundry (to allocate the candles and tapers for the queen’s rooms and those rationed to her retainers), a ewery to house her table linen, and a private kitchen which was supplied by her own slaughterhouse, scullery, and wood yard. There were some hardships, admittedly, since unlike the king, the queen had to make do without her own confectioner or a wafery, a specific department set aside to take care of her biscuits. Her kitchens also lacked a separate department for poultry, meat, and fish.2 Within each of these departments, there were different staff members and competing agendas. Maintaining goodwill in the queen’s household required a nimble grasp of decorum to avoid giving offence, and even the queen had to respect that. For instance, when a bill came into the household from an apothecary, it was considered a faux-pas if the queen signed it. Payment should be authorised by her vice chamberlain, Sir Edward Baynton.3
On the male side of her staff, Catherine had ten officers of her household, headed by her chamberlain Thomas Manners, 1st Earl of Rutland, a peer who was roughly the same age as her husband and who delegated most of his work to Baynton. There was also a clerk of the Queen’s Council; a serjeant at arms; a clerk in charge of her wardrobe; eight titled positions in her stables; two wardens attached to her wardrobe; two sewers of her chamber, who had the job of tasting her food and guiding her guests to sit in the proper spots at dinner; four gentlemen ushers; two gentlemen waiters; twenty-one grooms; three pageboys, who carried out odd jobs and errands; four footmen, seven yeomen, and two grooms extraordinary for busy occasions in the queen’s household; two men who cleaned and arranged Catherine’s litter when she travelled; and seven sumptermen, who packed and led the workhorses when the court moved to a different residence.
While these male servants were vital to the running of the household, it was the ladies, as those who came into regular contact with the queen, who were the most important people in the establishment. These thirty-four women, excluding laundresses and kitchen staff, were grouped into five ranks – six great ladies, four ladies, and four gentlewomen of the queen’s privy chamber; nine ladies of exalted rank; five maids of honour; one ‘mother of the maids’, who watched over the maids of honour on the queen’s behalf; and four or five chamberers.4
Of these women, the six great ladies were the women with the least day-to-day interaction with Catherine. As their collective name suggests, they were drawn exclusively from the icing on the upper crust. At the start of her queenship, this group consisted of the king’s niece Lady Margaret Douglas; Catherine’s cousin Mary Fitzroy (née Howard), Dowager Duchess of Richmond and Somerset; her uncle William’s wife, Lady Margaret Howard; Katherine Brandon (née Willoughby), Duchess of Suffolk; Mary Radclyffe (née Arundell), Countess of Sussex; and the king’s former mistress, the lovely Elizabeth (née Blount), Lady Clinton, mother of the late Duke of Richmond. Shifts and positions in the queen’s households were frequently adjusted to suit its members’ pregnancies, and the great ladies as a group were often thinned out by the requirements of childbed. The Countess of Sussex left royal service to give birth to her son, Lord John Radclyffe, around the same time that Lady Clinton departed and never returned after she died giving birth to a daughter.5 The other great ladies were only required on state occasions, when their rank was used to convey the government’s respect for its visitors.
Etiquette elevated Catherine as queen in the same way but to far greater heights than it had every day since her childhood. When she sat in public or in her apartments, her chair was canopied by a cloth of estate. Everyone around her had to ‘stand still as a stone’ until she spoke, according to the strictures of an etiquette manual.6 Before she entered a public space, her servants cleared a route for her. In her guard chamber, her yeomen ushers were on hand to gently whisper advice and ‘receive, teach, and direct every man’ about the intricacies of court decorum.7 When Catherine sneezed, a forest of caps undulated in the air from her male servants and all, regardless of gender, politely blessed her.8
When she awoke, usually at about seven o’clock in the morning, she was greeted by the women who had, until June, been her superiors. Once, she had been expected to stand and curtsey when they entered a room. Now, as they dressed her and prepared her for her day, they were her underlings. They placed a footstool beneath her feet as they combed her hair.9 The girl who less than a year ago had been borrowing money to pay for a few silk trinkets now waited while the bejewelled hands of a countess fastened a diamond-and-pearl crucifix around her throat. The morning toilette was always performed by the ladies of Catherine’s privy chamber. Theoretically, they ranked beneath the great ladies, but in practice they were far closer to the queen, because of the intimate nature of their tasks. They consisted of four ladies, born or married into the nobility, and four married gentlewomen.10 The neat division in the group was supposed to allude to the support of both nobility and commoners for their sovereign’s wife, part of the constant play on symbolic gestures to confirm acceptance of the status quo in early modern politics.
Nearly all the women of Catherine’s privy chamber were significantly older than her. Her half sister Isabella Baynton was a mother and stepmother. Two of the ladies, Lady Rochford and Lady Edgecombe, were widows – Jane Boleyn, Dowager Viscountess Rochford, was in her mid-thirties, and Katherine, Dowager Lady Edgecombe, was in her forties.11 Their colleague Eleanor, Countess of Rutland, was about the same age as Lady Rochford. She was a Paston by birth, a long-established family of the Norfolk gentry who, decades earlier, had detested the Howards as aggressive arrivistes.12 Those quarrels were long dead by 1540. Lady Rutland had the easy grace and casual generosity of someone who was born into great money and married more. Her husband was an old jousting buddy of the Duke of Suffolk, and the countess had named their daughter, born a year earlier, in honour of the Duchess of Suffolk, another of Catherine’s ladies-in-waiting.13 Lady Rutland was effusively polite, a hostess par excellence: at the family’s country seat of Belvoir Castle she had the servants keep a room ready specially for the Duke of Suffolk, a frequent visitor, as was the Countess of Westmorland, the king’s kinswoman.14 Like many socialites, Lady Rutland stood at the centre of a vast network of patronage and mutual favours, underscored by frequent gifts and notes dripping with gratitude and hyperbolic affection.15 Presents among the Tudor aristocracy could be anything – those exchanged between courtiers during Catherine’s career included stags killed and sent as a gift from the hunter, golden brooches with scenes from the life of Saint John the Baptist, pieces of furniture, hawks and other prized birds, shirts stitched by the giver, French wine and other delicacies for a friend’s table like quails, baked partridge, herring, carp, and marmalade.16 Even eye medicine was dispatched, with noblewomen such as Catherine’s grandmother and Lady Lisle priding themselves on their apparent expertise.17 In the treacherous and fraught world of the court, the Countess of Rutland’s good standing with her peers was a testament to her charm. When Anne Bassett’s younger sister found that she was to complete her education at the house of a family friend, she was relieved to be sent to Lady Rutland rather than the Countess of Hertford, since Lady Rutland treated her wards like daughters, while Lady Hertford treated them like servants.18 Queen Catherine clearly grew fond of her as well and gave her a necklace from her own collection.19
Catherine had enough jewellery to be generous with it. So much was flung at her in the opening months of her queenship that she may have struggled to keep up with it all. The glittering avalanche began with the official pieces which decorated the necks of her predecessors, and they were soon augmented by new trinkets from the king. When the ladies dressed Catherine in the morning, they might help her into one of the three ‘upper habiliments’ (the outward part of a dress) she had recently received, decorated with eight diamonds and seven rubies each.20 Her clasps were capped off by emeralds, her buttons were set with diamonds, and for her brooches rubies were crafted into the shape of flowers, then trimmed with diamond and pearl petals.21 If something was still felt to be missing from the top of her outfit, there were dozens of other brooches to choose from, like one of black agate that showed scenes from the Passion of Christ on one side and the Resurrection on the other, with rubies and small diamonds scattered around the base.22 There were earrings and French hoods trimmed with gold. She had seven diamond-and-gold rings.23 The ladies of the privy chamber circled Catherine’s little waist with golden girdles or double rows of pearls routinely interrupted by rubies.24 From these, it was fashionable to hang pomanders that contained pleasing scents in the bottom capsule, or little books at the end of a golden chain. As queen, Catherine’s dangling books included one that had belonged to Jane Seymour with a gold enamelled cover and a clock set into it – ‘upon every side of which book is three diamonds, a little man standing upon one of them, four turquoises and three rubies, with a little chain of golden hanging at it’. If that did not suit on a particular day, there was another gold book garnished with twenty-seven rubies, another ‘having a fair sapphire on every side and viii rubies upon the same’, or the ruby quota could be increased by selecting a gold-trimmed book ‘containing xii diamonds and xl rubies’.25
Care of the jewels was entrusted to another of the privy chamber women, Mrs Anne Herbert, who had ginger hair, a clear complexion, a prim smile and, by the time of Catherine’s wedding, a growing belly.26 Anne Herbert was a career courtier and the daughter of two more. Her mother had been a lady-in-waiting to Katherine of Aragon, her paternal grandmother had served Richard III’s queen, and her paternal great-grandmother had been a member of the royal household in the mid-fifteenth century.27 Born Anne Parr in 1515, she had joined Anne Boleyn’s retinue shortly after her mother’s death left her an orphan in 1531, and taken an oath of loyalty to Jane Seymour when there was a change in command in 1536, shortly before her own marriage to William Herbert, an insatiably ambitious Welsh soldier who had a contested claim to the defunct earldom of Pembroke.28 Technically, there was a male officer to monitor Catherine’s jewels, but the day-to-day running of the queen’s household was a study in the art of delegation. It was Anne Herbert who sent for pieces from the wardrobe, liaised with the relevant clerks, and dispatched the items that would not be used for a while into storage at Baynard’s Castle in London, where most of the queen’s wardrobe went if she was unlikely to use pieces for a few weeks.
The other women of the privy chamber were Anne Herbert’s kinswoman, Mrs Elizabeth Tyrwhitt, Mrs Joyce Lee, and Mrs Susanna Gilmyn.29 The latter was a talented artist, born Susanna Horenbout in the Netherlands; her brother was the portraitist Lucas Horenbout, and as a young woman her images of Christ had been praised by Albrecht Dürer, who admitted surprise that a woman had been capable of creating such beauty. Susanna’s first husband was John Parker, the man in charge of the maintenance of the Palace of Westminster, and after his death she married a London merchant, John Gilmyn, in September 1539. Life had never given Susanna as many opportunities as it had her brother, but she was well liked and respected by many of her contemporaries, including Henry VIII’s daughter Mary, who gave her a gift of twelve yards of black satin in 1544.30 She had come into the queen’s household thanks to her fluency in German, which she used to help Anne of Cleves with her English, but like the rest of the Privy Chamber women, Susanna remained to serve Catherine after Anne’s rustication.31
These women orbited Catherine, and their daily duties were arranged in something like shifts, since all eight were seldom needed at one time. If she wanted to take a nap after dinner, the ladies were ready with water and towels to refresh her when she woke, though contemporary guides discouraged too much sleep during the day on the grounds that it ‘dulls the wits and hurteth the brain’.32 When she wanted to bathe, they arranged it and waited on her throughout. At Hampton Court, hot and cold running water was pumped through golden taps into a sunken stone bathtub for the king or a lead-lined one, draped in linen, for the queen. At Whitehall, there were stoves to make sure the royal bathrooms never became too cold.33 The dozens of linen towels, bathrobes, curtains, and cloths used during the queen’s baths were passed to the household’s team of laundresses, while her bedsheets and menstrual cloths, strips of fine Holland linen, were sent to the queen’s personal laundress.34 Life as queen removed discomfort even from the mundane. Catherine would never again have to visit the ‘house of easement’ with its utilitarian rows of toilets. Instead, she was accompanied to her stool chamber, with its crimson velvet canopy, by one of the privy women, who left her while she used a toilet capped with a crimson velvet seat.35 When she was finished, a red silk cloth was tied over it and pinned down with gilt nails. Later, another servant would arrive to open up the wooden box, take out the removable pan, empty it, clean it, and replace it.36
Apparently, the ladies of the privy chamber did not much care for the house of easement, either, and they were not above using their position to secure some privileges of their own. The queen’s closed stool cost more than her vice chamberlain received in annual salary. Nevertheless, the household paid for six for the privy women. Some of these presumably made their way to the double lodgings, two rooms allocated to ladies of the queen’s privy chamber, each with a fireplace and a separate ‘garderobe’ where the new toilets could be placed.37
Once Catherine was dressed, the maids of honour carried out the tasks she had once performed for Anne of Cleves. They gave her one of her three private prayer books and then, carrying her beads and cushions, accompanied her from her privy chambers into the little gallery where she could listen to Mass being celebrated by one of her four chaplains from behind a grille. While she was at prayer, the chamberers went into her bedroom to strip the clothes off her bed, lightly beat the feather bed to plump it for her, changed the sheets if they were not clean, and then rearranged everything, finishing with the cushions and pillows. They would then check her carpets, tapestries, and room cushions to see if they were clean and send for someone if they thought the fire in the grate, if lit, was about to die out.38
After Mass, the maids of honour accompanied Queen Catherine back to her privy apartments. There was a high turnover in the maids of honour who were after all at court with the goal of securing a husband. Katherine Carey had been the first maid to depart when she left Queen Anne’s service shortly after Easter to wed Francis Knollys, who brought her to his family’s manor house in Oxfordshire, where she began the business of giving birth to the first of their sixteen children.39 Mary Norris had married Sir George Carew. Catherine gave Mary Carew a necklace as her wedding present.40
It was only Anne Bassett who remained to walk a few decorous steps behind her former-colleague-turned-mistress. The arrest of her stepfather for treason and her mother’s subsequent mental collapse left Anne financially shipwrecked, dependent on the generosity of her superiors or extended relatives and, without a dowry, bereft of any real chance of a proposal. She was now flanked by newcomers – Margaret Garneys, Margaret Copledike, and Damascin Stradling, whose Welsh mother was kin to the queen’s aunt, Lady Margaret Howard. Even they did not stay for long, and within a year Margaret Garneys had married Walter Devereux, Viscount Hereford, a match that cannot have been approved of by the queen’s aunt, Lady Bridgewater, since before being elevated to the viscounty of Hereford, Walter Devereux had been Lord Ferrers, the man who had quarrelled with, and arrested, the countess’s first husband, Rhys ap Gruffydd. A replacement maid of honour was Dorothy Bray, one of the younger daughters of the recently ennobled Lord Bray. In later life, Dorothy had a reputation as something of a bluestocking – in Queen Elizabeth’s reign, she kept two hundred books in her private rooms at her London mansion. In Catherine’s time, a young and ebullient Dorothy balanced any nascent literary interests with a flare for romances which seemed to remind the queen of her younger self.41
Catherine’s fifth maid of honour is listed as ‘Lady Lucy’ in the accounts, and she must have been Lady Lucy Somerset, the eldest daughter of the Earl of Worcester, who was the only peer with a daughter called Lucy in 1540.42 A great-granddaughter of Edward IV on her mother’s side, she was born sometime around 1524, which made her roughly the same age as the rest of the young girls who were sworn in as maids of honour between 1539 and 1541.43 Lucy’s stepmother had been a favourite lady-in-waiting of Anne Boleyn’s and had retired from court life after that queen’s execution.
If, during the day, Queen Catherine wanted some semblance of privacy, she could retreat to her closet. It was a small and intimate room where the queen could go to read or write letters or conduct private conversations. Her closet would have been the most probable place for her to chat with her grandmother or aunts if they needed to speak with her. They remained in regular contact. It was also where she could summon her secretary when they were going over her correspondence. Because of this, the closet featured prominently in lurid sixteenth-century fantasies of libidinous secretaries seducing their wealthy patronesses. Ordinarily, a private meeting between two people of the opposite gender was considered inappropriate, but a great lady could not expect to discuss her communications in public, giving rise to the habit of the secretary conferring with his employer in her closet. Filthy puns on secretaries having a key to the most private lock abounded. Nor were noblemen exempt from the deluge of winking innuendo about the closets. Some complained that ‘jealous women and some men’ were apt to think that a man who spent a great deal of time in the closet with scholars he patronised or male secretaries he employed must ‘useth his servants in his chamber’.44
Catherine generally preferred company to solitude, and the nine ‘ladies of exalted rank’ provided her rooms with a constant hum of activity.45 Favoured guests were often entertained in the queen’s galleries, which, like her gallery at Hampton Court, usually had a view of the gardens and were stuffed full of folding chairs and card tables, their walls hung with portraits and tapestries. Maids of honour stood nearby with basins and ewers so the queen’s guests could wash their hands, while gossip and ideas passed back and forth among the women gathered around the tables.46
Cliques are unavoidable in any large establishment, and Catherine’s household was no exception. One group orbited the Duchess of Suffolk, whose religious sympathies lay increasingly with Protestantism. It was a circle of palace intellectuals, with the ladies debating religion, financing scholars at Oxford or Cambridge, translating books on theology, or even writing their own. A few years later, several women in this group would risk their lives to support a young female Protestant preacher, though they ultimately failed to save her from death in the flames. Lady Joan Denny, whose husband Anthony was one of the gentlemen of the king’s Privy Chamber, was an enthusiastic patron of the new learning. She was also reputed to be one of the most intelligent of Catherine’s ladies-in-waiting, as well as very beautiful.47 Like many women in Catherine’s household, Lady Denny was often prepared to go further than her husband in matters of religion, and the cloistered environment of the queen’s rooms gave her the opportunity to do so. While the crackdown on the theological independence of the queen’s household began several years after Catherine’s career ended, the provocation developed throughout her time as consort. The Duchess of Suffolk named her pet dog ‘Gardiner’; that way the ladies could order at least one Gardiner to desist from making such a mess.48 There is no record of Catherine being particularly close to this set of women – who included her cousin the Dowager Duchess of Richmond, Anne Herbert, Elizabeth Tyrwhitt, and the shy Lady Jane Dudley, whose husband Sir John served as Catherine’s master of the horse – however there is also nothing to suggest any animus, and Catherine seems to have got on quite happily with these women, who gave her every outward sign of deference.49
She remained close to Katherine Tilney, her old friend and bedmate from Chesworth, who now served as one of her chamberers. It was Tilney, or one of her colleagues, who opened the door at six o’clock in the evening when Sir Thomas Henneage, one of the king’s gentlemen, arrived with a report on how the king’s day had gone. Sir Thomas’s wife, Lady Katherine Henneage, served as one of Catherine’s nine ladies attendant, and the couple lived together in court accommodation. At Hampton Court they had a fine two-storey brick house in the palace grounds. The king did not visit his wife every day, but if Henneage informed Catherine that the king would dine with her that evening, the meal usually served as a prelude to sex, which took place in her apartments.50 On these occasions, none of Catherine’s ladies or gentlewomen of the privy chamber would sleep in a pallet bed at the foot of hers, as they usually did. Instead, she would be left alone with her husband.
Catherine’s husband was born on 28 June 1491, the third child and second son of Henry VII and his queen, Elizabeth of York. The dynasty’s grasp on power was not yet six years old, and Henry’s earliest public appearances, like his investiture as Duke of York on his third birthday, aimed to appropriate the legacy of the Tudors’ predecessors and discourage the dwindling number of Yorkists who hoped that fortune’s wheel might turn again in their favour. His Welsh father was tall, lean, and athletic, with dark hair and watchful brown eyes. As he grew, young Henry looked far more like his mother’s side of the family – fair hair, muscular build, and a height that made him about a head taller than most of his contemporaries. He spent most of his childhood in the same household as his sisters Margaret and Mary, two of the four siblings who survived the perils of infant mortality to make it past their fourth birthdays. He charmed nearly everybody he met – the European philosopher Erasmus of Rotterdam was formally presented to Henry when he visited England in 1499, and in 1501 Henry escorted Katherine of Aragon down the aisle of St Paul’s Cathedral at her wedding to his eldest brother, Arthur. On both occasions, the prince’s dignity and confidence won praise.51
Shortly before his eleventh birthday, Henry’s life changed irrevocably when Arthur died during an outbreak of the sweating sickness. Arthur’s sixteen-year-old widow had also been infected, and for a few weeks her life hung in the balance. When she recovered, the preservation of the Anglo-Spanish alliance prompted a petition to the Vatican for the pope to dispense the biblical prohibition of a brother marrying his spouse’s widow.52 Julius II obliged, since there was some confusion among experts in exegesis about the Bible’s intentions – it was banned in Leviticus, but permissible in Deuteronomy – and similar dispensations had already been granted for families across the social spectrum in Christendom, including Katherine of Aragon’s.53
Post-natal complications carried off Henry’s mother less than a year after Arthur’s passing. There was talk of his father’s remarriage to the Dowager Queen Giovanna of the Naples, and English diplomats tried to inspect her gowns to see ‘her breasts and paps, whether they be big or small’, but the Neapolitan match came to nothing, and a darker, more repressed atmosphere settled over the royal family’s daily lives.54 Henry VII’s popularity diminished with each new tax hike and as the new heir Henry was guarded by his father with a zeal that the Spanish ambassador characterised as obsessive.55 His eldest sister travelled north to marry King James IV of Scots, despite her grandmother’s fears that a thirteen-year-old was too young for wedlock.56 Henry’s father briefly considered breaking off the proposed marriage between Henry and Katherine of Aragon, who was still living in London in increasing unhappiness at the delay, and feelers were put out about the possibility of a match with the Archduchess Eleanor of Austria. Those plans came to nothing when Henry VII succumbed to tuberculosis on 23 April 1509. The new king made it clear that he wanted to marry Katherine at the first available opportunity, and Eleanor of Austria went on to marry François I of France.57
Katherine of Aragon’s happiness that her seven years of uncertainty were over was in step with the general mood at Henry VIII’s accession. Diplomats gushed about a king who was ‘much handsomer than any sovereign in Christendom’; courtiers wrote to friends abroad that ‘everything is full of milk and honey and nectar’; it was ‘the prettiest thing in the world to see him play’ tennis, and in physical competitions he ‘surpassed them all, as he surpasses them in stature and personal graces’.58 Henry was fluent in Latin and French, had a working knowledge of Italian, possessed an imperfect if passionate interest in engineering and architecture, dabbled in mathematics, Spanish, astronomy, classical Greek, and he was a superb musician. He performed his own compositions before a court that Queen Katherine described as one of ‘continual feasts’.59
Capable of parroting, expanding, or critiquing another’s thoughts, but incapable of developing many that were uniquely his, Henry VIII was intellectually skilled, but not brilliant. In itself, that is hardly a great failing or even an insult, but it became a problem because Henry failed to recognise his own limitations. Throughout his life, the majority of Henry’s troubles were caused by the fact that he constantly overestimated himself. On several occasions during the first decade of his reign, he leapt into hugely expensive wars on the Continent after repeatedly trusting in the good intentions of allies, including his father-in-law King Ferdinand, who used England to distract the French long enough to achieve his own goals, then pulled out of the war and left England to fight on alone.60 Henry’s foreign policy was an unending catalogue of aggression, duplicity, myopic eagerness, expense, and defeat. Even his infrequent victories in France carried more than a whiff of Pyrrhus when they conquered towns that proved so costly to defend that in his son’s reign they eventually had to be handed back to the French.
The universal acclaim for the pulchritudinous prince of 1509 began to dry up as he was played for a fool by men who were ostensibly his allies, and it evaporated after his quarrel with the papacy. Henry insisted that the death of his son, the Duke of Cornwall, in 1511, and the deaths in utero or shortly after birth of the boy’s male siblings proved that the royal marriage was a contravention of biblical law. Initially, there was no reason to believe that the Vatican would put up too much resistance to the king’s request for his marriage to be dissolved. Popes were often prepared to grant annulments to childless emperors, kings, and princes if it meant preventing the ensuing unrest of a succession crisis. Thirty years earlier, Pope Alexander VI annulled the marriage of King Louis XII of France to the childless Queen Jeanne on grounds that could kindly be considered tenuous, to pave the way for Louis’s marriage to the Duchess of Brittany. Queen Jeanne, who had contested her husband’s blatantly dishonest account of their private lives, had to accept the pope’s decision, retired to a convent, and subsequently founded an order of nuns dedicated to the Immaculate Conception of the Virgin Mary. It was hoped that the equally pious Queen Katherine might follow suit if Pope Clement VII performed a similar service for Henry VIII.
Unfortunately, Henry seemed to think the best way to crack a walnut was to drop a brick on it. He wanted the annulment granted on the grounds that the previous pope had exceeded the limits of his office in dispensing what could not be dispensed, namely the word of God. This required Clement VII to curtail the past and future powers of his own office, a prospect which became even less tempting when the queen’s Hapsburg relatives stepped up their pressure on the pope to support her. Attempts via the papal nuncio to persuade Queen Katherine to mimic the actions of Jeanne of France, by stepping aside and taking the veil, were scuppered by the lady herself, who was determined to fight her proposed demotion every step of the way.
By this stage, Henry was no longer able to keep pace with his younger self, who had spent his summers ‘shooting, singing, dancing, wrestling, casting of the bar, playing at the recorders, flute and virginals, and in setting of songs, making of ballads … jousts and tourneys’.61 His youthful prettiness had settled into an impressive and mature presence by the time he turned forty in 1531, captured in Joos van Cleve’s portrait of him, which shows a confident monarch piously clutching a scroll with an extract from the Gospel according to Saint Mark, ‘Go ye into all the world, and preach the gospel to every creature.’62 An evangelist monarch was how Henry saw himself as his frustration with the pope turned to anger. Anne Boleyn was the most prominent person close to the king whose Catholicism was tinged with enough sympathy with the cries for reform and the protests of Martin Luther to make her a powerful critic of Clement VII’s inaction, but she was not the only one. The break with Rome was solidified by 1533, the same year as the new Archbishop of Canterbury ruled in Henry’s favour, dissolved the marriage to Katherine of Aragon, and crowned Anne Boleyn at Westminster Abbey. Three years later, Anne was dead on manufactured charges of adultery and treason, and within eighteen months her successor had followed her into the grave, twelve days after giving Henry the legitimate son he needed.
As dissatisfaction turned to protest, the death toll in England mounted in opposition to the religious changes. The northern rebellion of 1536 may have had the potential to bring Henry’s entire regime crashing down around him had the palace-bound aristocracy not remained loyal to their king.63 Earlier that year, Henry had been competing in a jousting tournament when he was thrown from his horse and knocked unconscious. That incident has featured prominently in several theories that seek to explain the increasing terror of Henry’s final decade in power by postulating that he suffered sufficient brain damage from the fall to bring about a decisive and terrible shift in character.64 There have also been suggestions that Henry perhaps suffered from a genetic disorder such as McLeod syndrome, which usually accelerates in middle age, when it can cause heart failure, physical pain, and behavioural changes, or Cushing’s syndrome, which can cause skin to heal poorly, a possible explanation for the problems Henry endured as a result of his leg ulcer, along with high blood pressure, abdominal obesity, migraines, exhaustion, and painful deposits of fat between the shoulder blades.65
Many of the modern speculations on the symbiosis between Henry VIII’s mental and physical health are well written, well researched, and thought-provoking. They are inevitably based on speculation, since the surviving records make it far easier to rule out what Henry VIII did not suffer from than to diagnose what he did endure. It is possible that he suffered from a severe illness in the later years of his life – type 2 diabetes would explain many of his ailments and fit with his increasingly unhealthy lifestyle – but there is a fundamental flaw in the argument that a medical explanation is needed to explain why the latter half of Henry’s reign was more bloody than the earlier years.66 The break with Rome created a trauma in the body politic, even for those who were enthusiastically in favour of it and were later appalled by the government’s exploitation of it. After 1533, a king who detested disobedience had embarked upon a policy that was controversial enough to generate a lot of it. Yet his execution of his father’s unpopular advisers Richard Empson and Edmund Dudley in 1510 and the destruction of the Duke of Buckingham in 1521 showed that Henry had always been capable of morally and legally questionable savagery. Henry VIII was a man who had somehow gone rotten without ever being ripe.
After the tangible disappointment of having no heir was banished by Prince Edward’s birth in 1537, words and images flowed from the pens of Tudor servants and wrapped themselves around Henry VIII, casting him as the father of his people, the custodian and dispenser of true religion in the ilk of Old Testament hero-kings like Asa or Jehoshaphat. Frontispieces in new editions of the Bible portrayed the bearded king handing down the gospel to his grateful subjects, flanked by wise and demure councillors. The overwrought rhetoric was the product of a stomach knot of fear which never quite left the illustrated councillors’ real-life counterparts, as they struggled to serve a consistent inconsistency. Henry VIII’s government may have appeared as one of brutal lunacy to frequently appalled foreign observers, but those close to Henry were often as dazzled by his charisma as they were terrified by his chilling cruelty to those who disappointed him. The king’s manners were flawless, his charm and munificence capable of eliciting compliments even from those diplomats who were usually revolted by him. He was large but not yet obese, and so there was still an air of majesty about him rather than bloated despotism. The physique helped distract from the fact that the king was a pathological hypochondriac, paradoxically laying waste to his own health with mounting portion sizes and too much alcohol at his meals. Despite his pious protestations about marrying her for the sake of his country, at the time of his wedding to Anne of Cleves, Henry appeared obsessed with romantic love, and at least one of his courtiers seemed to hold the private opinion that he was shirking a prince’s duty by expecting to marry as happily as an ordinary gentleman.67 This was the man who visited Catherine’s apartments at night and on whom she was completely dependent.
Curfew for the queen’s staff was at nine o’clock. If Catherine was hungry, and the king had chosen not to visit her, the maids usually brought her a bedtime snack in the hour before curfew.68 Leaving the food, they curtseyed out of her presence and left her in the enormous canopied bed, while a lady-in-waiting slumbered nearby in case the queen needed anything in the small hours. Given her newfound position as head of the largest female-dominated domestic establishment in England, Catherine seemed lucky to have spent most of her formative years in a large female-dominated establishment like the Dowager Duchess of Norfolk’s. Unfortunately, Catherine’s childhood and adolescence at Horsham and Lambeth were to shape her subsequent career in predominantly negative ways. Her education had rendered her poised, elegant, and immaculately mannered, with a talent for music and dancing that equipped her to succeed in a court with a king who loved the former and had once excelled at the latter, but it had also left her woefully unprepared for a position that required her to psychologically distance herself from her daily companions. Her youthful romances and easy dominance of her friends at Horsham gave her a taste for gossip and backstairs intrigue which she never had a chance to grow out of. The examples of her friends’ behaviour and the extent to which she had escaped censure at Chesworth and Lambeth had also desensitised her to the opprobrium that such behaviour could elicit in other environments.
Separate to that and with their own potential to harm her were attitudes within the court towards the institution of the queen’s household. Both Katherine of Aragon and Anne Boleyn been criticised for the secretive natures of their households and the dangerous independence of the female bonds established within them – Katherine from her reliance on one of her disreputable confessors and Anne through her closeness to various ladies-in-waiting – which invited suspicion and resentment from the male courtiers and even the household’s own members.69 The climate of self-scrutiny in the household was almost as intense as the watchful stares from outsiders. Household members were encouraged to report colleagues who slept in or broke curfew to the vice chamberlain.70 Servants noticed if a male retainer stayed too long at the dinner table after the food was cleared away, since the right to dally was reserved solely for officers of the household.71
In a world sealed within the walls of a palace and moderated by decorum and hierarchy, arguments were magnified and the seemingly trivial crushed friendships and reputations. Feuds were endemic. The Countess of Sussex, once a benefactress, regarded Anne Bassett with cold dislike, and while a mutual friend’s letter does not give us the cause of the dispute, it confirms that ‘though the matter is forgiven, she has not forgotten it’.72 Queen Catherine, significantly younger than any of Henry’s previous queens and with the least experience of life at his court, bar Anne of Cleves, had inherited a household, newly formed and swiftly transferred from one mistress to the other, which knew many secrets and was constantly suspected of knowing more.