Chapter 11
For my sweet thoughts sometime do pleasure bring:
But by and by, the cause of my disease
Gives me a pang that inwardly doth sting,
When that I think what grief it is again
To live and lack the thing should rid my pain.
– Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey (d. 1547)
From its earlier days under the Norman and Plantagenet kings, the queen’s household had derived its income from a set of properties that funded her lifestyle as well as her political or charitable activities. Individual queens had access to different perks, exemptions, and parcels of land, and there was usually an undignified scramble over how to fund a dowager if there was more than one queen alive early in a reign, but by and large the portfolio was passed from one generation to the next. Medieval queens consort who possessed ambitious or aggressive agendas, such as Henry III’s wife, Eleanor of Provence, were often strapped for cash, but otherwise the long-term dilution of a queen consort’s independence at least helped stabilise their finances. Catherine’s lands included six castles and more than one hundred manors, mills, farms, parks, and forests that were rented out to generate about £3,352 per year.1 Henry VIII’s first two wives had been given more or less the same estates once owned by Henry’s mother, but the dissolution of the monasteries helped swell Queen Jane Seymour’s coffers.2 Like Queen Jane, Catherine became the passive beneficiary of the misfortune of others when she received manors and estates left by Cromwell, Lord Hungerford, and the Marquess of Exeter, more from the recently executed abbot of Reading, and some confiscated from the still-living but ruined Countess of Salisbury, who had remained in the Tower since her incarceration during the White Rose intrigue.3
These properties made the queen consort one of the greatest magnates in the kingdom. Anne Boleyn, who had also held lands in Wales in her capacity as Marchioness of Pembroke, and Katherine Parr, who followed Catherine, took their duties as landowners seriously, and they were heavily involved in the running of their estates, in contrast to Catherine, who passed many of the responsibilities on to others.4 However, Catherine’s failure to assume as proactive a role in her finances as Anne Boleyn or Katherine Parr, both of whom had some relevant experience in the management of their estates before they became queens, need not be interpreted as crass indifference, especially in light of her ignorance when it came to land management.
Responsibility for caring for her estates fell to the Queen’s Council, which consisted of her receiver, surveyor, attorneys, solicitors, auditors, and the clerk of the council. They met at Westminster under the leadership of Catherine’s chancellor, Sir Thomas Denys.5 From their offices, the council could summon, in the queen’s name, tenants whose rents to the household were in arrears. Those tenants could then either negotiate an extension or pay when summoned, options sadly unavailable to the silkwomen and tailors who complained about how slow the council was in settling its own outstanding bills.6 Queen Catherine was not close to her councillors, and she made no effort to help Thomas Smith, her clerk of the council, when he earned himself a spell in the Fleet prison in London for quarrelling within the confines of the court.7
Catherine was, at heart, a pragmatist. It was how she approached the public execution of her queenship. Her failure to help Thomas Smith indicates her streak for self-preservation. Smith had been accused of papist sympathies, apparently evident in an exchange of insulting poetry with William Grey, a former servant of Thomas Cromwell.8 Whether Catherine acted out of studied or genuine ambivalence, her disregard for Smith’s plight reinforces the view that she was not a political queen. Unlike Anne Boleyn, or later queens consort such as Katherine Parr, Henrietta Maria of France or Caroline of Ansbach, Catherine had no clear political or religious agenda. Any books dedicated to her during her time as queen, such as the English translation of a German medical textbook on midwifery, were devoid of overt political or religious tones and seem to have been dedicated to her solely because of the position she occupied, rather than any expressed interest on her part.9
However, she may have attempted to exert some political influence very early on in her career. A tantalising glimpse of her nascent ambitions comes via her letter to Thomas Cranmer, the Archbishop of Canterbury, penned shortly before her wedding, in which she assures the archbishop that he will not suffer once she replaces Anne of Cleves. She promises him ‘you should be in better case than ever you were’, which simultaneously suggests an overestimation of her power and her refusal to play at factional politics, since Cranmer was regarded as one of the key advocates of reformism and had been a close ally of Thomas Cromwell’s.10 It is quite possible, even probable, that some of her relatives advised Catherine to make some gesture of goodwill to Cranmer, who was one of the councillors genuinely and consistently liked by Henry VIII, but her implication that she would have the power to make him more prosperous than he had been before was absurd. At some point, very early on, Catherine learned her lesson. Henry was not above reminding his wives, as he once had Jane Seymour, to keep out of affairs of state.
As a result, Catherine’s focus narrowed, and she seems to have taken an aggressive delight in playing the role of Lady Bountiful by helping her servants. A surviving letter to Catherine from Edward Lee, Archbishop of York, is a regretful response to her request that he accept one of her chaplains as an archdeacon. As a landowner in the region Catherine technically had the right of advowson – to nominate someone for a vacant ecclesiastical post – but it seems that in her zeal to help her chaplain she may have overreached. The popular fantasy of being a queen is one that carries with it the promise of a life without restrictions, when, in reality, it contains more. Archbishop Lee told Catherine that ‘I never granted advowson saving at the King’s command, but one, which I have many times sore repented,’ and while he acknowledged her complaint that he had not properly responded to an earlier letter she had written on behalf of another clergyman in her household, Dr Mallett, he reminded Catherine, perhaps a tad pointedly, that not only had she unhelpfully failed to specify which dependant she wanted to nominate as archdeacon, but that the archdiocese had already given a nod towards the queen’s household when it had promised Catherine’s chaplain, Dr Lowe, a living that would bring him an extra £40 once it became available.11
Catherine had the personality traits nurtured by lifelong popularity among her peers, including an affable bossiness that became tart when defied. Years earlier, Catherine had been quick to rebuke Henry Manox for embarrassing her in his conversations with Mary Lascelles. Her exchange with the Archbishop of York displayed her insistence, perhaps to the point of sensitivity, on respect from those around her, as well as her tendency to back down when presented with a satisfactory explanation. If an argument persisted and no apology was offered, a less pleasant side of Catherine’s character revealed itself.
That autumn, a series of slights came from her eldest stepdaughter, Mary, the only surviving child of Henry’s first marriage. Mary, who was referred to as ‘the princess’ by her Hapsburg relatives but who had been legally classed as ‘Lady Mary’ since her father disinherited her at the age of seventeen, disliked her new stepmother and she was not blessed with gifts of subtlety any more than Catherine was with patience in the face of an insult. This was not how Mary had treated Anne of Cleves, and someone who had been at court was able to tell Catherine that Mary had also been more respectful towards Jane Seymour. Mary Tudor was a clever woman, fluent in several languages. Like many upper-class women who benefited from a Renaissance education, she was as comfortable choosing jewels and gowns as she was translating books of theology, a task which presented a pleasant challenge for someone who was a good linguist, if somewhat shaky on the finer points of grammar.12 However, if she was clever, Mary was not always wise, and she badly underestimated the new queen’s temper.
In a letter from 5 December, the emperor’s ambassador to London informed Mary’s cousin, Maria of Austria, Dowager Queen of Hungary: ‘The Princess, having heard from me that the attempt lately made to take away from her two of her maid servants proceeded entirely from this new queen, who was rather offended at her not treating her with the same respect as the two preceding ones, has found some means of conciliation with her, so that she thinks that for the present, at least, her two maids will not be dismissed from her service.’13
A subsequent letter, written by the ambassador two months later to the dowager queen, indicates that the reconciliation between Catherine and Mary only lasted a few weeks, at the very most, and when it broke down Catherine made good on her threat. On 6 February 1541, the ambassador told Maria that her cousin was ‘thank God, in good health just now, though exceedingly distressed and sad at the death of one of her favourite damsels, who has actually died of grief at her having been removed from her service by the King’s order’.14 While he did not specifically state that the deceased woman was removed from Mary’s service at the queen’s behest, the dismissal so soon after it was raised as a threat by Catherine, and the fact that Mary had seemed to be in her father’s good graces over the intervening Christmas season, strongly suggests that the banishment of Mary Tudor’s maid was the unfortunate conclusion of an earlier quarrel with the young queen.
Catherine was still at Windsor, and her feud with Mary Tudor fermenting, when Francis Dereham returned to London. Despite having left the dowager duchess’s service without her permission, he visited his old employer at Norfolk House, where a deal of sorts was struck; to piece together precisely what they agreed can only be done, and then imperfectly, by sifting through the transcripts of interrogations that took place in the autumn of 1541. At some point in 1540, the dowager had made discreet legal inquiries about the possible ramifications of a pre-contract like Francis and Catherine’s and if there was any form of general pardon that might spare those involved.15 She also seems to have asked for any written proof he had about his relationship with Catherine, including ballads she knew he had written about her. If this request was made, then Francis did not fully comply. All the documents were locked in a chest, which was kept at Norfolk House. Agnes knew where that chest was and that the papers were in it, strongly suggestive of a compromise between the two. Some members of the Privy Council believed, probably correctly, that this was how Francis kept the dowager’s favour after abandoning her service.16 We cannot know for certain if the dowager, with her long-standing affection for Francis, had encouraged him to leave London until Catherine was safely married, or if her story that he left without her knowledge is true. On the balance of probability, the latter seems more likely, especially in light of the Howards’ subsequent uncertainty about what to do with him.
For most of 1540, Francis had ostensibly been earning his living as a merchant in Ireland. There were plenty of reasons for him to go to there, aside from the helpful sea separating him from Henry VIII. Dublin was the sixth largest city in the British Isles, and the island’s eastern ports, such as the expanding Drogheda and Limerick, dubbed ‘a little London’ by a visitor in 1536, did a lively trade with their English and Welsh counterparts.17 In the southern ports, fishing boats skimmed alongside trading ships to and from Europe. Ireland was also a society of ambiguity, a constant grinding mess of tensions and contradictions between de jure sovereignty, de facto authority, and outright criminality. The Pale, which contained Dublin and her sister towns on the eastern coast, remained generally loyal to the Crown. In many ways, Dublin replicated the culture, architecture, mores, and mannerisms of any other Tudor city. Within its walls, the so-called Anglo-Irish, the descendants of long-ago settlers borne across the Irish Sea by the first English intervention in the twelfth century, were at their most influential and numerous. In the south and west of the island, the Gaedhil (natives) spoke a different language, dressed differently, and remained openly hostile to the Reformation. The Irish nobility were split between those headed by the Earl of Ormond, who espoused obedience to the monarchy, and other noble families who might have been prepared to acknowledge the feudal system that made Henry VIII their overlord, but who also continued to dominate their own ancestral lands and benefited from the ambiguities of life outside the Pale.18
Francis Dereham entered a land fuelled by the tense but dependent relationship between these two groups whose alleged ancestral differences were now largely imaginary after centuries of intermarriage. The east coast merchants provided the wine, salt and luxury items the Gaelic aristocracy wanted, while the Irish heartlands in return produced most of the goods exported from Dublin and the other ports. The Gaelic lords both preyed on and protected Irish merchant ships – in the harbours and straits where the government’s control was lacklustre, the local lord expected a fee which could be paid by the captains or forcibly taken from them by the lord’s retainers. Identifying what passed for unregistered trade, as opposed to smuggling or outright piracy, was thus nearly an impossible task that plagued Irish parliaments for years – the issue was still being debated in parliaments that met in the reigns of Elizabeth I and James I.19 While he was in Ireland, Francis exploited this economic ambiguity to the extent that he was eventually accused of piracy.20 Although he was not prosecuted for it, it may have been the reason he chose to return to Lambeth.
Upon hearing of his return, a Howard family servant who knew or suspected the truth about Francis and Catherine remarked to Lord William’s wife, ‘If I were Dereham I would never tell to die for it.’21 The problem with that statement was that it presupposed a rational dignity that Francis quite simply did not possess. Something had to be done to buy his silence. He was impulsive, besotted, possessive, and loquacious.22 Even the dowager’s coy affection for him did not blind her to the fact that this was the worst possible combination of traits, and her harvesting of all the incriminating evidence from a man she knew to have the emotional equilibrium of a toddler gave the Howards possession of the documents that could have been used to push Catherine off the throne if they fell into the wrong hands.23
Francis wanted a job in Catherine’s service. Refusing him or accepting him were both dangerous. The dowager duchess went to the queen to discuss it. Judging from subsequent queries, the Countess of Bridgewater supported her mother’s suggestion that Catherine should grant an audience to Francis and perhaps show him some sign of her favour. Lord William Howard, who had known Francis for years, and his wife Margaret, who served as one of Catherine’s ladies-in-waiting, would help facilitate a meeting at court, under the guise of reintroducing the queen to a family retainer. That was as far as the Howards were prepared to go; there is nothing to suggest that anyone else in the family even knew about the agreement with Dereham outside these four and the queen. Catherine had no affection for Francis, then or later, and he caused her nothing but anxiety from the moment he re-entered her life, but shortly before All Hallows’ Eve, on a pre-arranged day, she asked her aunt Margaret where Dereham was. Lady Margaret curtseyed and answered, ‘Madam, he is here with my lord.’ Lord William, who did not leave on his embassy to France until January, had brought Francis to court that day as part of his retinue, which gave Catherine an opportunity to summon him without inviting suspicion. ‘My lady of Norfolk hath desired me to be good unto him,’ the queen answered, ‘and so I will.’24
Most accounts of Catherine’s career believe that at this point or shortly afterwards, Catherine made Francis her private secretary, but this long-established story is disproved by the household records.25 A queen’s private secretary managed her correspondence, took dictation from her, and drafted replies to any official letters she had to issue. It was a prestigious position, not just because it required intimate knowledge of the queen’s affairs but also because the secretary was entitled to ‘bouche of the court’, meaning all his material needs met along with three stable places and four servants in residence of his own.26 Sir William Paget had held the job of secretary for Anne of Cleves, in tandem with a German gentleman called Matthew.27 Shortly after the divorce, Paget was recruited as clerk of the Privy Council, and a man called Thomas Derby took over as secretary for the new queen. Derby was still in the job by the middle of November 1540, nearly three weeks after Lord William brought Francis Dereham for his meeting with Catherine.28 When Derby left his post, he was not replaced by Dereham but by a man called John Huttoft, who served Catherine until the end of her career.29
Francis was not appointed to her household staff in any capacity in November 1540, and the half-baked compromise that Catherine and some of her relatives came up with shows how uncertain they were about what to do with him. He could not be given an official post, certainly not as her secretary, since he was too young, unknown at court, and manifestly unqualified to serve as an officer of the queen’s household, even if he had once taken some dictation for the dowager duchess of Norfolk. Everything about their actions in the early winter of 1540 supports a scenario in which the Howards, who had known and even liked Francis, decided to keep him close enough to control him through apparent acts of favour and the confiscation of his private papers, but not so close as to provoke speculation about his friendship with the queen. They must have known that it would not content Francis indefinitely, but a long-term plan is not always possible for those treading water. Unfortunately, Dereham, whose decision to keep the papers linking him to Catherine did not bode well for his future quiescence, had lost none of his flair for a public scene or his aggressive temper, and fleeting proximity to the girl he wanted to marry eventually proved too difficult for him.