Chapter 13

Lent

I have read in old books that some for as just causes have by kings and queens been pardoned by the suit of good folks.

– Mary Boleyn (d. 1543)

On 7 February 1541, the king and some of his councillors went into London for three days on business, while the queen stayed at Hampton Court with her household.1 When he returned from the city, the king was irritated to hear that some of the defences built during the invasion scare of 1538–39 were already beginning to crumble. The ramparts near Dover, Portsmouth, Southampton, and various other points along the southern coastline, had already partially collapsed, and some of their sister structures had been damaged by the incoming tide which, considering their location, cannot have been an unanticipated factor. Their deterioration justified Charles de Marillac’s earlier suspicion that more effort had gone into making the defences visually impressive than into making them durable.2

Worrying news was also coming from the north, where the Scottish Parliament was preparing to pass legislation that confirmed the kingdom’s commitment to Roman Catholicism. The year before, Henry’s representative in Edinburgh had reported conversations that seemed to indicate that the king, who was Henry’s nephew, applauded some of his uncle’s ecclesiastical policies, yet James V’s government was now passing bills that stressed a traditional Catholic view of the seven sacraments, encouraged ‘worship to be had of the Virgin Mary’, declared ‘that no man argue the Pope’s authority’, protected saints’ images from Protestants who wished to destroy them, and outlined harsher punishments for heresy.3 Scotland was too close to the parts of England where conservative religious sympathies had birthed the Pilgrimage of Grace for this development to pass without causing worry in London. It made the Duke of Norfolk’s mission to inspect defences on the Anglo-Scottish border doubly pressing. Persuading James V to repudiate papal authority was an ongoing and unsuccessful feature of Henry VIII’s foreign policy in the 1530s and early 1540s. The English consistently underestimated the depth of James’s devotion to his faith and dismissed his protestations of piety as proof that he must be dominated by the Scottish episcopacy, with the result that they misinterpreted his motives and leapt on any ephemeral sign that he might change his mind by rebelling against his ‘handlers’.4

At Hampton Court, the courtiers still lived under a pall. Thomas Wyatt and John Wallop remained in prison, more arrests were expected, and conversation in the palace antechambers predicted Wyatt’s execution.5 An observer wrote that ‘although he is more regretted than any man arrested in England these three years, both by Englishmen and foreigners, no man is bold enough to say a word for him’.6 It was tacitly understood that John Wallop was in less danger – although his conservatism was well known, he seemed to have been tossed into the Tower ‘due to his having said something in favour of Pope Paul’.7 Courtiers interpreted Wallop’s spell in gaol as an attempt to teach him a lesson, rather than a prelude to his death. Still, memories of the White Rose intrigue were fresh. Many people were nervous, and the debates over the possible outcomes did nothing to soothe frayed nerves. Wallop might, like the Countess of Salisbury, be spared the axe to spend years in prison. When summoned home from his embassy to France, Wallop had suspected it was because he was in trouble with his king. Every courtier or member of the local gentry who encountered him on his journey from Dover to London was under strict and horrible instructions to ‘let him pass on without suspicion’ to make sure Wallop put himself into the government’s hands without a fuss.8 Desperate to prove his loyalty, the fifty-year-old Wallop tried to surrender himself to Sir Richard Long, who, remembering his orders, would not accept. Wallop broke down in tears in front of Long, terrified and confused that he might be considered a traitor.9 By imprisoning a reformist and conservative at the same time, the king was reminding all his courtiers that both sides were at his mercy.

The king was voicing his intention to go south to inspect the disintegrating strongholds when he began to feel unwell.10 He took to his bed with a fever, which de Marillac thought ‘should rather have profited than hurt him, for he is very stout’.11 Henry did not have time to sweat out the weight de Marillac thought he could stand to lose. He felt better by 23 February, when the council sent a letter to the Duke of Norfolk informing him that the king had recovered after a few days of sickness.12 They were wrong. The fever was tertian, a malarial strain, that caused the king’s leg ulcer to close over. He was in such pain that for a few days his entourage were genuinely afraid that he was going to die. The Privy Council and Privy Chamber worked together to stifle news of their master’s infirmity. Discussions about rebuilding the southern defences and the fortifications at Calais continued in council, as if nothing were wrong, but ambassadors and courtiers knew that something was amiss. From her windows, the queen could see the effects of tightened security – the usual flow of petitioners and place-seekers trying to get into the palace met with questions about their intentions, and more often than not they were sent away. When the doctors finally managed to pierce the ulcer and alleviate some of his pain, Henry sank into what the French envoy called a mal d’esprit.13 That unhappiness turned outwards and Henry began to threaten his advisers: he accused them of putting their own needs above his and undermining his policies with their flattery and greed. He missed Thomas Cromwell, charging his no doubt terrified councillors that ‘by false accusations, they made him put to death the most faithful servant he ever had’.14 He also raged against his subjects’ ingratitude. Having heard that ‘his subjects in divers places murmured at the changes which, contrary to their ancient liberties, are imposed upon them, and at their ill treatment for religious opinions,’ Henry ranted that ‘he had an unhappy people to govern whom he would shortly make so poor that they would not have the boldness nor the power to oppose him.’15 Either because he was embarrassed at his physical condition or in too low spirits to take comfort from her company, Henry ordered that Catherine was not allowed to visit him and the queen was left rattled by his decision.16

The king’s temper did not improve during Shrove Tuesday. Usually a time of celebration before the penitential season of Lent began on Ash Wednesday, it was sometimes known as ‘Fat Tuesday’, or by its French translation ‘Mardi Gras’ and the English celebrated it with rich foods such as pancakes, which used up all the ingredients they would not be allowed during Lent. The court usually marked the holiday with feasting, cockfighting, plays, and dancing. In 1541, all those entertainments were cancelled. Courtiers were encouraged to go home, petitioners were still turned away, and an isolated Catherine, for the first time, felt the chill fear of uncertainty that so many of her husband’s companions had endured for years. De Marillac wrote in a letter to his own king that Henry ‘spent Shrovetide without recreation, even of music, in which he used to take as much pleasure as any prince in Christendom, and stayed in Hampton Court with so little company that his Court resembled more a private family than a king’s train’.17

In observance of Lent, fish replaced meat, eggs and cheese were removed, sexual intercourse was discouraged, and examination of one’s conscience was exhorted as the Church marked the temptation of Christ in the wilderness with a season of self-denial.18 In the magnificent Chapel Royal at Hampton Court, the riot of colour was blotted out as sombre veils were hung through the chancel and over the lectern, statues, and altars.

Catherine may have used the Lenten fast as a time to examine her life. It is hard not to fall into the trap of undue speculation when writing about a historical individual. In Catherine’s case, we can only infer from what happened next, since she left no record of her feelings at this time. All that can be said with confidence is that after her only Lent as queen, her behaviour altered significantly. She became more prone to insecurity but paradoxically began to behave more recklessly in the privacy of her own apartments. She veered between uncertainty, which bred unhappiness, and a dangerous overconfidence. It was possibly during her husband’s brush with death that she realised for the first time that his love for her was no more consistent than his love for his country. Her husband had threatened to impoverish and punish his own people for having ‘murmured’ against his policies. She had stood on the sidelines during Thomas Cromwell’s destruction, an event that Henry was now blaming on everyone but himself. She knew that her uncle and Bishop Gardiner were hated by Cromwell’s supporters for ruining him, but neither of those men had been at the king’s side at Shrovetide when he lashed out that he had been tricked into destroying ‘the most faithful servant he ever had’. Norfolk was in the north and Gardiner on a diplomatic mission to Europe. She knew that there had been ample opportunity for Henry to save Cromwell, if he had wished to. Perhaps too the atmosphere among the agitated courtiers, even before the king took ill, had eventually affected her.

Henry VIII’s court was a place riddled with espionage, where nothing was quite what it seemed and people listened behind the walls, peeped at keyholes, and whispered in alcoves. Its inhabitants exhibited a bizarre and unsettling mixture of bone-chilling fear alongside obsequious, and often genuine, loyalty. When John Wallop wept, it was not ostensibly because he was afraid that he was going to die, but rather that ‘nothing grieved him so much as that your Majesty should think him a false man’.19 Henry VIII was able to command an obedience within the walls of his palace that was total in comparison to the varying degrees of resentment that festered outside. Some writers have likened the courtiers’ loyalty to a kind of Stockholm syndrome, and while modern labels like that are difficult to validate, they do nonetheless seek to explain why there was such sustained devotion to a man who caused a sword of Damocles to hang over the head of everyone he had ever known, liked, promoted, or loved and who ruled by playing them off against each other.20

The first six months of Catherine’s queenship was a reduced version of it. She was only very briefly at one of the larger palaces at the start of August, when she was first proclaimed queen. Apart from that, Catherine moved from hunting lodge to hunting lodge with a reduced court that insulated her from the political reality of her new position – that her marriage had pitched her headfirst into a fraught and internecine environment where everyone had long, if silenced, memories of those who had already been destroyed by her husband. Her behaviour during Anne of Cleves’s visit to Hampton Court showed how much store Catherine set by doing things properly, and that visit and her quarrels with her stepdaughter confirmed in different ways how disagreeable she found criticism. Her husband’s dark mood, which resulted in her first moment in the shadows, must have unsettled her, as did the situation as described in de Marillac’s letters – eerie silence and mounting panic in an enormous palace.

One touching anecdote about Catherine from this time unfortunately can now be disproved. The incarcerated Countess of Salisbury had complained about the cold blowing in off the Thames, and to alleviate her pain the queen’s tailor, John Scutt, delivered two nightgowns, one trimmed with fur and the other with satin, a woollen kirtle, a bonnet, four pairs of hose, four pairs of shoes, and a pair of slippers. This is often ascribed to Catherine’s generosity and her sympathy for the elderly and bereaved Lady Salisbury.21 However, at the same time the king’s tailor was asked to make or source an almost identical delivery for Lord Lisle, another royally descended prisoner in the Tower, and the order for both was issued by the Privy Council in a meeting held at Hampton Court on 1 March. The bill, for £11 6s 4d, was settled on 12 April.22 Even in prison, Tudor concepts of social hierarchy were maintained – queens, dukes, and countesses were treated as their position demanded. They were to have everything they needed, except freedom. The queen’s tailor was asked for the same reason the king’s was commissioned for Lord Lisle’s ‘necessaries’ – they were making clothes for the countess, who was King Edward IV’s niece, and Lord Lisle, who was his illegitimate son.23 Queen Catherine had nothing to do with the gift to the Tower in 1541. To have associated herself with someone like Lady Salisbury, whom the king loathed and whose son Reginald was still actively working against Henry in Europe, would have been unwise, to say the least.

On 8 March, the recovered king and his court left Hampton Court after nearly three months and sailed downriver to the Palace of Westminster.24 They did not plan to stay for long – Westminster was an administrative hub and Parliament met there, but most of the royal apartments had been destroyed by fire in 1512 and never fully rebuilt. The decision to move there for just over a week was motivated by Catherine. Owing to the plague that had ravaged London after the summer drought, the queen had been kept away from the capital until the risk abated. She therefore had not made her ceremonial entry into the City, a queenly rite of passage during which City officials and by extension the commoners they represented would formally greet her and in doing so convey their support for her queenship. For this to happen, she had to formally cross London’s boundaries. Hence, she would go to Westminster for eleven days, and then when the court travelled to Greenwich Palace on St Joseph’s Day, the guilds and aldermen of London would acknowledge her in coordinated public ceremonies.

The business of government continued. Eustace Chapuys was unwell and had temporarily left London to recuperate in the countryside, and the French ambassador was busy quashing rumours that King Henry planned to initiate a rapprochement with the emperor by offering the hand of Princess Mary in marriage.25 Plans were in motion to issue the necessary papers for summoning a parliament in Dublin, since Ireland had its own House of Lords and House of Commons, and two scarlet robes made from twenty-four yards of fabric were ordered from the king’s tailor to be sent to the Earl of Desmond, the speaker of the Irish House of Lords, and McGilpatrick, who performed the same office for the House of Commons.26 A dispute over trade tariffs with the regent of the Netherlands rumbled on, the Duke of Norfolk was expected back from the borders by the middle of Lent, and talk of the king travelling to Dover to see the dilapidated fortifications had revived now that Henry was in better health.27

While Catherine was at Westminster, a scandal involving seduction and larceny broke in court circles. With her sense of humour, it is hard to believe she did not find some of its details amusing. It had links to Catherine’s establishment, and in fact its unusual resolution had much to do with that household. The affair began when a London-based goldsmith called William Emlar was brought before the Privy Council after silverware belonging to Eton College surfaced in the local markets. Eton had been founded just over one hundred years earlier by King Henry VI, Henry VIII’s great-uncle, which meant that it had already endured a plundering of its resources when Edward IV deposed Henry VI in 1461. Building work on the still-incomplete school had resumed under the Tudors, and by 1541 the provost was Nicholas Udall, an Oxford scholar who had written a textbook called The Floures for Latine Spekynge that was used in English classrooms for most of the rest of the century, and who had also helped script most of the pageants for Anne Boleyn’s coronation in 1533. The appearance of the Etonian plate and silver in London implied either corruption in the school or, more probably, theft. William Emlar told the council that he had received the items from a former student at Eton called John Hoorde, the nineteen-year-old son of a well-to-do Shropshire gentleman. Hoorde was brought in for questioning, during which he implicated his friend and co-conspirator Thomas Cheney, who was still in his final year at Eton. On 13 March 1541, Cheney was summoned to Westminster, where he confessed to stealing the plate. He also implied that Nicholas Udall, the provost, had been party to the scheme, so Udall was fetched from Windsor to answer questions about his role in the black-marketing of his school’s possessions.

Udall, who was about thirty-four or thirty-five years old at the time, seemed an unlikely thief. During his early career, the Duke of Norfolk had apparently been one of many court lights who recognised his talent and promoted him. Udall’s work for the 1533 coronation had managed to incorporate scenes that ranged from flattering juxtapositions of Anne Boleyn’s physique, status, and heraldry (‘Of body small, / Of power regal / She is, and sharp of sight; / Of courage hault, / No manner fault / Is in this falcon white …’) to paeans to Queen Anne’s patron saint and clever innuendoes about her coat of arms as it was incorporated into renderings of the Annunciation.28 As a headmaster, Udall had maintained Eton’s tradition of beating recalcitrant or underperforming students on Fridays or ‘flogging days’, yet he had still acquired a reputation as ‘the best schoolmaster’ during his seven years there.29 He encouraged acting and drama at the school, for which it is still famous, and it is probable that he wrote his play Ralph Roister Doister, the earliest surviving theatrical comedy in the English language, for performance by a student cast.30 His skills as one of the finest Latinists of his generation had stood him in good stead to lead a school where most of the lessons were still conducted in Latin and dunce caps were affixed to the heads of the custos, young gentlemen who talked too much in English in the classrooms, made more than three spelling mistakes in a lesson, or misquoted one of the rules of Latin grammar.

In his interrogation before the council at Westminster, Udall denied complicity in the theft but instead startlingly confessed to ‘buggery with the said Cheney sundry times’.31 According to Udall, the last time student and headmaster had sex was only eight days before Udall’s testimony. There was no good reason for Udall to confess to the crime of sodomy to try to exculpate himself from one of larceny. The Buggery Statute of 1533 had made homosexual activity a capital offence. It had been one of the accusations laid against Lord Hungerford, who had been executed nine months before Udall confessed to similar behaviour. The only explanation for Udall’s startling admission was that it was the truth. It is possible that Cheney had already confessed their liaison in the hope that Udall’s senior age and position would drag attention off him for helping to steal the silver. The councillors in session that day – the Duke of Suffolk, the Earl of Southampton, the Earl of Sussex, Sir Anthony Wingfield, Sir Thomas Wriothesley, and Cromwell’s onetime ward Sir Ralph Sadler – signed an order for Udall to be incarcerated in the Marshalsea prison in Southwark, which may indicate some sympathy for Udall or, just as likely, respect for his social position. Compared to other London prisons, the Marshalsea was relatively comfortable in the sixteenth century, and while prisoners were prepared to pay through the nose for its amenities, there were many other gaols where Nicholas Udall would have paid as much and suffered more.

The council sent messengers to Shropshire and Buckinghamshire for the fathers of the two Etonians involved to come to London. Thomas Cheney’s father, Sir Robert Cheney, arrived a few days before Richard Hoorde, John’s father. In the meantime, the Privy Council established a version of events in which Cheney and Udall had been sleeping together while Cheney and his friend Hoorde had worked with one of Udall’s servants, a man called Gregory, to rob the college of various images, plate, and silver that they then attempted to sell in London. Udall, it seems, was not party to the scheme, though the fact that he had been in debt beforehand raises the possibility that he could have been. So while he would not be charged with theft, his sexual relationship with a male student, with which he may have been blackmailed to keep quiet about Cheney’s theft, could still put a noose around his neck.

At this point, the affair goes quiet. Everyone involved ultimately escaped punishment. John Hoorde went home to Shropshire, where he eventually married a local woman called Katherine Oteley and lived well into the reign of Queen Elizabeth I. Thomas Cheney married Frances Rotherham, a woman from his mother’s home county of Bedfordshire. He died in the spring of 1554, when he was in his early thirties. Most unexpectedly of all, Udall was released from prison and was soon once again in favour with the great personalities of the court – he helped Princess Mary with her translation of a biblical commentary, Paraphrases upon the New Testament, was patronised by Henry VIII’s final wife, Queen Katherine Parr, recruited to Bishop Gardiner’s household, and after Princess Mary succeeded to the throne in 1553, Udall was appointed headmaster of Westminster School in London, where he served until his death two years later.

Three of the councillors who quizzed Emlar, Hoorde, Cheney, and Udall had wives in Catherine’s service, but it was one in particular who had a vested interest in the case. Sir Thomas Wriothesley had, like Sir Ralph Sadler, risen to the Privy Council thanks to his ties to Thomas Cromwell, and again like Sadler, he had managed to avoid ruin when the minister fell in 1540. Holbein’s portrait of Wriothesley shows a bearded man with auburn hair and, even allowing for artistic embellishment, piercing and watchful blue eyes.32

From prison, Nicholas Udall wrote a grovelling, hysterical letter to his ‘Right worshipful and my singular good Master’. Apart from illustrating that Udall really did love Latin and the classics as much as his previous job had required him to – the text is peppered with references to Pliny, promises of rehabilitation couched in didactic examples from the lives of Greek philosophers, and Latin pieties about the value of mercy – his letter to Sir Thomas Wriothesley provides clues as to why a scandal that should, according to the law of the land, have taken Udall’s life ended with him walking free. Udall’s decision to throw himself on Wriothesley’s good graces is the first oddity, for while the letter does hint that Wriothesley had patronised Udall before 1541, he was nonetheless a strange choice. Wriothesley did not exactly have the reputation of an angel of mercy. A few years later, he was nearly ruined when allegations surfaced that he had personally tortured a female prisoner on the rack by twisting the roller himself after the professionals at the Tower refused to keep going.33

The second point of interest is the plan that they concocted – or, to be more precise, Wriothesley offered and Udall gratefully acquiesced to. Udall’s letter states that Wriothesley had tried to get him his old job back, ‘my restitution to the room of Schoolmaster of Eton’, then, once that ploy had failed, Udall begged for the opportunity to meet with Wriothesley in person to outline a strategy for Udall’s rehabilitation that would enable him ‘to shake it off within two or three years at the uttermost’. Judging by his subsequent relationships with Mary Tudor, Katherine Parr, and Stephen Gardiner, it evidently worked. This leaves the question of why Wriothesley was prepared to undertake ‘travail, pains, and trouble’ on Udall’s behalf despite, as Udall wrote, being full of ‘displeasure and indignation’ at his actions.

The answer lies in the relationship between Thomas Cheney, the student at the centre of the outrage, and one of Catherine’s ladies-in-waiting, Lady Jane Wriothesley, Sir Thomas’s wife. Lady Wriothesley may have briefly left the court around the time of Catherine’s marriage to give birth to a son, Anthony, who sadly died shortly afterwards. By the time the Eton affair was playing out in the council chambers at Westminster, Lady Wriothesley was back in the queen’s service. Before her marriage, she had been Mistress Jane Cheney from Chesham Bois, the same manor in Buckinghamshire that eventually belonged to Thomas Cheney’s father, Sir Robert. The exact familial relationship between Lady Wriothesley’s father and Thomas Cheney’s is difficult to specify, but given their respective ages and the fact that they both hailed from the same manor, the logical conclusion is that they were either siblings or first cousins. The affiliation between Sir Thomas Wriothesley’s wife and the student who possibly seduced and certainly robbed Nicholas Udall explains why Wriothesley advocated the unthinkable suggestion of sending Udall back to Eton as if nothing had happened – because that was what the Cheney–Wriothesley families wanted, so that their kinsman’s name would not become associated with a buggery scandal. Lady Wriothesley was kin to Bishop Gardiner, in whose service Udall eventually began his climb back to steady employment and social respectability, and she was the half sister of the bishop’s secretary, confidant and nephew Germaine Gardiner.34 It was in the Wriothesleys’ best interests to help Udall by sweeping the scandal under the rug. All the events in the affair support the conclusion of a cover-up based on who Thomas Cheney was related to.35 Chatter about the flow of silver and scandal from Eton to London cannot have missed the alcoves and galleries of the queen’s household. Even if, presumably, Lady Wriothesley might have preferred to stay tight-lipped about the whole thing, the Duchess of Suffolk and the Countess of Sussex both had husbands who were involved in the questioning of the associated parties.

Hoorde’s and Cheney’s fathers were still on their way to meet the council when the royal household left Westminster for Greenwich on the afternoon of 19 March. It was two years to the day since Catherine’s father had died in debt and been thwarted in his dreams of a career at court. From the palace, Catherine walked down the steps to the royal barge. To mask the smell from the river, its decks were strewn with rosemary-scented rushes and herbs burned in sconces. The king and various members of her household accompanied Catherine, taking their places before the twenty-six oarsmen pushed off into the current.36 As they sailed past the Tower, its heavy gates rising from the filthy waters of the Thames, salvoes of cannon fire rang out in salute. Directly ahead, they could see brightly decorated barges, hung with cloth and banners flapping from their masts. The Lord Mayor of London and his aldermen were on one of those boats, between Tower and London bridges, and they were rowed over to welcome Catherine to the City. Catherine Howard, the private gentlewoman, had been to London many times, but ‘this was the Queen’s Grace first coming to London since the King’s Grace married her’, and as a result ‘the people of this city honoured her with a most splendid reception’.37

From the Tower, Catherine and Henry continued to Greenwich, where they disembarked at a wharf that led to a staircase exclusively for the royal family’s use. At Greenwich, the king announced his intention to free Thomas Wyatt and John Wallop, a decision accredited to Catherine’s influence. Queens traditionally interceded for compassionate causes, mirroring the Virgin Mary’s role in Catholic theology whereby Mary acted as a conduit of mercy while God functioned as the font of justice. The trope of the intercessor queen featured heavily in medieval romances and popular tales. Earlier in Henry VIII’s reign, his first wife had publicly begged him to free a group of xenophobic apprentice boys after they rioted against the presence of wealthy foreigners in London, and his second had asked him to intervene with the French government on behalf of a man condemned to burn for heresy.38

On several occasions, a queen’s intervention seemed too well staged to be genuine – for instance, in the apprentice boys’ case, Katherine of Aragon had fallen to her knees with Cardinal Wolsey and the court nobility following suit. The consort’s role as mediatrix at the heart of government could be used by her husband as an acceptable reason to reverse a policy, lest he appear weak or inconsistent in doing so of his own volition. There were those on Henry’s council who were worried at the prospect of putting Wyatt on trial, in case his eloquence resulted in embarrassment for the government, as George Boleyn’s had at his trial in 1536. Pardoning Wyatt at the queen’s behest, which was distinctly different to an exoneration, would allow the Crown to maintain that it had been right to imprison him, while avoiding any prospective fallout from his defence of himself. The Privy Council pretended that Wyatt’s admission of guilt in return for mercy had been ‘spontaneous’, when it had been anything but.39 Considering that Wyatt and Wallop’s detentions look, in hindsight, like Henry reminding factions at his court of his dominance over them, it is possible that Catherine was asked to publicly beg for their lives as a touching dénouement to a scene that Henry had always intended to culminate with the two men walking free.

Yet comments from the Privy Council in a letter to the queen’s uncle William, in France, a report written by Eustace Chapuys for Maria of Austria, and another by Charles de Marillac for King François I, all state that Catherine had been lobbying on the gentlemen’s behalf for quite some time.40 In a letter written one week after the king’s decision, the council told Lord William that Wallop, his predecessor as ambassador to France, had been freed after ‘great intercession was made for him and Wyatt by the Queen’. Chapuys wrote that after her official entry into London ‘the Queen took occasion and courage to beg and entreat the King for the release of Master [Wyatt], a prisoner of the said Tower, which petition the King granted, though on rather hard conditions’, and de Marillac, who had previously been almost certain that Wyatt would only leave the Tower in a coffin, praised Catherine for her ‘great and continual suit’ to have the two men pardoned. So while it is possible that Henry knew of Catherine’s plans to ask for Wallop and Wyatt’s liberty on the day of her official entry to London, it seems as if Catherine had been working on her husband for quite some time.

One of the men who had ended up in prison in the fallout of the Wyatt affair was John Leigh, a relative of Catherine’s late mother. He had served in some of Wyatt’s embassies and stood accused of papist sympathies.41 Some of those who cared for Wyatt seem to have spoken to the queen in the hope that she would have the bravery and prominence lacked by other courtiers who were too afraid to plead on his behalf. Her kinsman’s fate may have helped focus the queen’s interest in the detentions.42 Wyatt’s most recent biographer has surmised that Catherine’s cousin, Lord Surrey, may have been one of those who talked to Catherine about Wyatt’s plight.43 Surrey and Wyatt were close friends, and Surrey would eventually compose Wyatt’s elegy in which he praised him as a man ‘with virtue fraught, reposed, void of guile’.44 Catherine had already shown herself indifferent or perhaps even hostile to the machinations of court faction through her friendliness towards Archbishop Cranmer, and she liked to help people. While she never risked her standing with her husband if she knew the case had been judged treasonous, it is clear that in this case she went to some effort for both men, regardless of their political backgrounds, and in doing so earned more admiration from diplomats and some courtiers.

Her influence had its limits, and Chapuys was right in describing ‘hard conditions’ on Wyatt’s rehabilitation. Both men had to confess to wrongdoing for which the king was pardoning them, abandoning their previous protestations of innocence, and Wyatt was required to set up house with his estranged wife after living apart from her for fifteen years, allegedly after he had caught her in bed with a lover.45 He also promised to separate from the two women he had been living in sin with, including the mother of his illegitimate children, and he was warned that if he did not resume ‘a conjugal life’ with his wife ‘or should he be found to keep up criminal relations with one or two other ladies that he has since loved, he is to suffer pain of death and confiscation of property’.46 Why the details of Wyatt’s private life should have featured so prominently in his pardon is unclear. His wife’s brother, Lord Cobham, may have asked the king to remove the separation as a stain on the family’s honour or Henry may have wished to cast himself as a virtuous prince, capable of reforming morally errant subjects.

Wyatt’s audience with the king took place at Dover Castle at the end of the month.47 The king had gone to Kent to see the damaged defences while Catherine stayed behind with her women, which meant she did not have an opportunity to witness the ceremony that marked Wyatt’s rehabilitation.48 Instead, she spent the final weeks of Lent at Greenwich. Breaking the rules of the Lenten fast was a controversial topic in Henry’s England, and traditionalists were upset by reformers’ tendency to eat meat on the vigils of certain feast days. Shortly before Catherine became queen, the Bishop of Lincoln had complained when one of the Bishop of Worcester’s servants ate buttered chicken on the eve of the Feast of the Assumption.49 At court, the Lenten dietary rules were generally still adhered to, but that did not mean all exhortations for restraint were. Catherine and her husband may have continued sleeping together during the penitential season, and if not, they certainly had in the build-up to it. When Henry returned to Greenwich on 5 April after sixteen days in the south, Catherine informed him that she was pregnant.