Chapter 14
A lady gave me a gift she had not;
And I received her gift which I took not;
She gave it me willingly, and yet she would not;
And I received it, albeit, I could not:
If she give it me, I force not;
If she take it again, she cares not.
Construe what this is, and tell not;
For I am fast sworn I may not.
– Sir Thomas Wyatt (d. 1542), ‘A Riddle of a Gift Given by a Lady’
On Palm Sunday, Charles de Marillac had an audience with King Henry. The main topic of their conversation was English resentment against Scotland. Evidently, the ambassador talked also with courtiers or informers during his visit because in a subsequent letter to Constable de Montmorency in France he wrote: ‘that this Queen is thought to be with child, which would be a very great joy to this King, who, it seems, believes it, and intends, if it be found to be true, to have her crowned at Whitsuntide. Already all the embroiderers that can be got are employed making furniture and tapestry, the copes and ornaments taken from the churches not being spared. Moreover, the young lords and gentlemen of this Court are practising daily for the jousts and tournaments then to be made.’1
It was hardly surprising that as soon as the idea of Catherine’s coronation was floated, gentlemen dusted off their armour and lances to head for the tiltyards. Jousts that accompanied a coronation offered spectacular opportunities for athletic one-upmanship, and preparations for them typically began months in advance.2 Whitsuntide, the suggested date for the coronation, was the seventh Sunday after Easter, which gave enough time for the court athletes to practise and for arrangements to be made to crown Catherine at a point when she would presumably be beginning to show her baby bump but long enough before it would be unwise for her to exert herself with the three or four days’ worth of ceremonies that surrounded it.
A coronation would raise Catherine’s prestige, and a child, even if she (preferably he) was only second in line after Prince Edward, could help her outshine Jane Seymour, her most successful predecessor. Jane’s portrait still hung alongside images of Henry, his parents, and his late brother, Arthur, in his private collection. Even during Katherine Parr’s reign, the spectral Queen Jane appeared in her place in dynastic paintings. Catherine’s table was set with Jane’s golden spoons, silver plates for spices, crystal glasses speckled with rubies, and a golden goblet, decorated with diamonds and pearls, that bore Queen Jane’s maxim ‘Bound to Obey and Serve’, which, in terms of prostrating oneself at the shrine of a husband, might be the one motto that outdid Catherine’s ‘No Other Will But His’.3 A baby would guarantee Catherine’s future. If she had a son, as Duke of York and the future king’s brother he would guarantee her position as a great lady. And if, for whatever reason, Prince Edward shared the fate of his late uncle Arthur and did not live long enough to either succeed or father an heir, then Catherine could find herself as queen mother and potentially regent, if her son succeeded to the throne as a minor, though given past precedent in England that job would likely go to one of her kinsmen.4 In light of how much could change and be secured by a successful pregnancy, it is easy to understand why early modern queens consort were so earnest in their prayers for conception and safe delivery.
The court’s Holy Week observances of 1541 seem to have been kept, like the king’s offering on Good Friday, ‘according to the ancient ordering in years past’.5 Conservative prelates would have found nothing to make them uncomfortable in the rituals. To all outward appearances, Henry and Catherine presided over a ‘Catholic’ court. The royal family still kept gilt images of saints such as John the Baptist, Saint Andrew the Apostle, Gabriel the Archangel, Saint Mary Magdalene, and Saint James the Great. The Virgin Mary stood rooted in grief and rendered in silver at the base of their private crucifixes. The life of the Virgin’s father, Saint Jerome, was displayed in tapestries at the Palace of Whitehall; her Assumption decorated the walls at Windsor; the scourging and Passion of her Son were popular topics for weavers. The king and queen also owned distinctly Catholic aids to morality, such as the allegorical tapestries of the seven deadly sins, which were commissioned by the royal household about three years after it repudiated the authority of the Vatican.6
The heavy presence of traditionalist art and ritual in the worship of Henry’s court has led to a modern description of the Henrician Church as ‘Catholicism without the Pope’. It is easy to see how that label has been taken as an aphorism. Henry’s Church defended a Catholic view of the sacraments, particularly the belief that during Holy Communion, Christ’s words of hoc est corpus meum became literally true through the miracle of transubstantiation.7 It refused to promote the emerging Protestant view that salvation was a gift that could be acquired through faith alone and that via sola fide the redeemed would be born again through a spiritual catharsis that required them to accept Christ as their saviour, trusting in Him and no other to atone for their sins. Instead, the Henrician Church promoted the older interpretation that in a world where belief was almost universal there must also be actions to show one’s faith, a kind of kinaesthetic spirituality that encourgaed pilgrimages, fasting, mortification of the flesh, and public and private acts of penance. The seven corporal deeds of mercy – to feed the hungry, give drink to the thirsty, clothe the naked, shelter the homeless, visit the sick and the imprisoned, and bury the dead – were seen as useful guides on the efficacy of good deeds in absolving oneself of certain sins.8 The early Church of England would not, to the distress of many reformers, abolish prayers for the departed and, implicit through them, the country’s belief in purgatory. Predestination, which was at this stage admittedly a fringe belief held only by the more extreme Protestant sects, drew even more ire – the idea that God had already chosen who was to be saved and who damned struck the majority of English Christians as a brutal, hope-destroying psychosis – and it led to Henry’s Church vigorously asserting the contrary doctrine of free will. Henry VIII himself was in many ways a spiritual conservative. In his will, he specifically sought the intercession and protection of the Blessèd Virgin Mary. In 1538, dressed all in white, he personally presided over the heresy trial of a Lutheran preacher called John Lambert, and each time the Eucharist was mentioned during the proceedings, Henry reverently doffed his cap as a sign of respect; he debated with Lambert, refused to offer succour to heretics, and signed a death warrant consigning the preacher to the stake.
Yet if the outward appearance of English and Welsh Christian worship remained fairly similar to how it had been in the centuries before the schism, the experience was radically different. The subtitle of the Six Articles, usually taken as a legislative victory for traditionalists, was ‘an act abolishing diversity of opinions’, a reflection of the king’s unhappiness as the after-effects of the break with Rome opened the floodgates to dozens of different interpretations of the Scriptures.
The one constant in Henry’s religious policy was his sincere belief that he was rightfully head of the Church in England, the custodian and shepherd of the country’s conscience, while the pope was the heir to centuries of usurpation. To Tudor loyalists, Henry VIII was not a revolutionary but a restorer of what had, and should always have, been. He was resurrecting the legacy of early Christian Roman emperors such as Constantine the Great and Justinian, who had presided over early Church councils and involved themselves in their theological disputes. With sublime self-belief, Henry accepted the propaganda that cast him as a latter-day Old Testament king-cum-spiritual-leader – Solomon building the Temple and Jehoshaphat casting down idols. It has been argued that the Buggery Statute of 1533 was partly inspired by Henry’s fascination with Levitical law after his first divorce. His attempt to replicate the behaviour of King Jehoshaphat, who had attacked homosexual activity in various pagan cults, according to the Bible’s first Book of Kings, was evidenced in the role that accusations of sodomy played in bringing down English monasticism in the 1530s.9 The ransacking of the shrines and the abbeys also had an Old Testament precedent when, in the Books of Kings, one biblical monarch ‘took all the sanctified things which … his fathers the kings of Juda[h] had dedicated to holy uses, and which he himself had offered: and all the silver that could be found in the treasures of the temple of the Lord’ and put them to national use.10
All this scriptural justification for his ecclesiastical policies may endow Henry VIII with too much moral credit. After all, if Pope Clement VII had allowed him to marry Anne Boleyn, it is hard to foresee a set of circumstances that could have persuaded Henry to rebel against the Holy See at such enormous cost to himself and risk to his kingdom. Henry’s inquisitiveness and changing views after 1531 gave both reformers and conservatives cause for hope and despair at different times. Yet whatever one might make of the morality or impact of his decisions, the one salient feature of his Reformation was the king’s total belief that he was God’s anointed. Having convinced himself of that, he never wavered. His moods and his theological debates pulled the Church in different directions, but they were always anchored by the Royal Supremacy. Henry was impressed by some reformist ideas and appalled by others. Thomas Cromwell wrote that Henry ‘leaned neither to the right nor to the left hand’.11 A more critical eye might dismiss the Henrician Church of England as a syncretic misfire led by an erratic megalomaniac caught somewhere between the liturgical certainties of his childhood and the storm-following-sunshine appeal of new and untested philosophies.
For Catherine, as queen and wife to one of God’s self-appointed earthly lieutenants, Holy Week was a time when she was expected to be on display by attending services in the Chapel Royal at Greenwich. The ceremonies and customs of the week were designed to inspire the faithful through relevant biblical readings, symbolic gestures, and public processions. On Palm Sunday, Catherine heard the story of Christ’s entry into Jerusalem, as told in the Gospel according to Saint John, followed by anthems and a parading of the Blessed Sacrament. Priests and choristers knelt and kissed the ground in front of the Sacrament’s resting place. Saint Matthew’s version of the entry to Jerusalem rang forth from the choir with the words of the evangelist, Christ, and the crowd sung in different keys.
Holy Monday and Holy Tuesday generally stressed Christ’s role as the Messiah who fulfilled the prophecies of the Old Testament. Rather than interpreting it as a linear narrative, a sequential divine revelation, as Protestants increasingly came to do, medieval Christian theology stressed the interconnectedness of the Bible as a divinely inspired mirror that constantly reflected itself in past and present. For adherents of this view, the Virgin Mary’s first mention was not in Saint Luke’s Gospel, when she is referenced by name, but in the third chapter of Genesis, when a woman who will crush a serpent beneath her heel was foretold at the fall of man.12 In much the same way as defenders of transubstantiation insisted that the elevation of the Host during Mass marked a moment out of time, Holy Week and Easter tried to stress the concept that time was a human construct that, through Christ’s life, had interacted with something that was eternal, neither past nor present.
From Wednesday, the ceremonies Catherine attended began to centre more clearly on biographical details from the Gospel narratives of the Passion of Christ – Judas’s betrayal on the Wednesday, the Last Supper on the Thursday.13 The queen had been a passive observant for the first four days of Holy Week, but on the Thursday she was required to perform public acts of piety. Maundy Thursday took its name from Christ’s command or mandatum at the Last Supper – Mandatum novum do vobis: Ut diligatis invicem, sicut dilexi vos … (‘A new commandment I give unto you: That you love one another, as I have loved you …’)14 After the Supper, Christ had washed the feet of the twelve apostles to convey the importance of humility and serving others. In homage to this, since the reign of Edward I the English monarchy had performed a Maundy ritual on the Thursday of Holy Week in which various members of the royal family publicly washed the feet of the local poor.15 Henry IV had established the custom of the number of attendees growing to reflect the monarch’s age, and so, in 1541, fifty-one poor men16 had their feet bathed by a kneeling Henry VIII, who then handed them purses of money.17 We know less about Catherine’s performance of the Maundy obeisance than we do about some of her predecessors’, but Catherine would have followed the custom of having an apron tied around her gown as some of her ladies followed her with basins, cloths, and water that she used as she washed and wiped the feet of pauper women. Frustratingly, considering that we do not know Catherine’s date of birth, the records do not state how many women were invited to the queen’s Maundy ritual in 1541. If they had, we would know for certain what age Catherine was when it happened.
When Henry returned to his apartment and set down his black velvet-lined Mass book in the same little room next to his bedchamber where his two copies of the Great Bible were kept alongside a book of Aristotle, discussion turned from the betrayal of Christ to betrayal of the king.18 A minor conspiracy against him, the Wakefield conspiracy, had been uncovered and foiled in the north. The news was circulating at court by Easter Sunday, when a council meeting was held to discuss it, which means it must have reached the king a day or so earlier. The details of the failed plot were vague. Rumours that the ringleaders had been in league with the Scottish government or Cardinal Pole were voiced, as was a story that they had planned to kidnap the king’s deputy, the Bishop of Llandaff, president of the Council of the North. Some observers, such as Eustace Chapuys, were unsurprised that the north remained fertile soil for treachery after the region had been treated so terribly in the aftermath of the Pilgrimage of Grace: ‘The people’s indignation against the King has risen to a higher pitch since then,’ he wrote, ‘owing to the cruelties and exactions that followed the rebellion in the North.’19 The discovery of the Wakefield conspiracy increased Henry’s already lively sense of paranoia, and the presence of some very distant relatives of the Countess of Salisbury in the rebel cabal brought the imprisoned dowager back into his mind’s eye.
A map of England hung in Henry’s gallery at Greenwich.20 It was as close as Henry had ever come to seeing the northern half of his kingdom. Unlike his parents, he had never visited it, but the collapse of the so-called ‘Wakefield conspiracy’ of 1541 prompted him to reconsider his entrenched residency in the south.21 The Duke of Norfolk was back at Greenwich for the council meetings about the plot, and by Sunday the word round court was that the king, ‘fearing lest [in] the North there should exist other conspiracies of the same kind, or perhaps more dangerous ones still, has announced his intention to go thither immediately after these festivities’.22
In her apartments on Maundy Thursday afternoon, after the public charity, the queen was handing out more gifts. Accompanied only by her chamberer Katherine Tilney and Lady Rochford, one of her privy chamber ladies, Catherine met her old beau Thomas Culpepper in the small corridor that linked the queen’s public and private rooms. Since their flirtation in the weeks before Anne of Cleves’s arrival had ended with Culpepper transferring his affections to another woman, Culpepper had remained in service in the privy chamber, where he was a great favourite of the king. Thomas and Catherine’s earlier romance had apparently been so fleeting and inconsequential that Henry had never heard about it, but evidently Catherine remained fascinated. Lady Rochford had arranged the meeting on the queen’s behalf, and Henry Webb, one of the queen’s ushers, had gone to fetch Culpepper from the presence chamber. Culpepper already had two fine velvet caps that had been gifts from the king, but the queen’s present of a cap was not given in the same spirit. She begged him to keep the cap under his cloak until he was back in his rooms, in case anyone saw it.23 Culpepper flirtatiously bantered back, ‘Alas, Madam, why did you not this when you were a maid?’ This reference to Catherine’s lack of enthusiasm for him when she first came to court as a single woman did not land well. She retorted, ‘Is this all the thanks ye give me for the cap? If I had known ye would have these words you should never have had it.’
A flirtatious gesture met with a putdown or a reminder of contradictory past behaviour is always liable to embarrass, and Catherine did not summon Culpepper to her rooms for quite some time after his underwhelming reaction to the cap. Her response to his teasing and her own suggestion that he hide the cap when he left her apartments indicate that she had hoped for, and expected, praise and that she had not given him the hat with purely platonic intentions. This first meeting also conclusively disproves the absurd recent theory that Catherine only ever met with Thomas Culpepper in 1541 because he was blackmailing her with knowledge of her premarital private life.24 Culpepper’s mockery and Catherine’s annoyance at it, as well as everything she said to him at their subsequent meetings, are obviously and without exception the behaviour of two outgoing, confident people who were both attracted to one another and accustomed to being the dominant partner in a romantic relationship.
That evening, Catherine was back in chapel to see the altar stripped of its coverings and ornaments. Christ’s arrest had occurred after the Last Supper, and the symbolism of water and wine being poured over an altar that was then wiped clean by a stiff-twigged broom pointed to the forthcoming horror of the scourging and Crucifixion – the wine stood for Christ’s blood, the water for the fluids that spilled from His side when it was pierced post-mortem by a Roman soldier’s spear, and the sticks of the broom for the crown of thorns that was twisted into His head as the procession to Golgotha commenced. From the evening service on Spy Wednesday, Tenebrae saw all lights in the chapel being successively extinguished to the sound of chanted Psalms.
On Good Friday, the commemoration of the Crucifixion, the great spiritual theatre of Easter reached its apogee. Two pieces of linen decorated the otherwise stripped altar, and they were removed in homage to the fate of Christ’s garments that had been gambled for by His executioners.25 Henry and Catherine removed their shoes and led the congregation as they crept on their knees to kiss a crucifix held before them by two priests. ‘Creeping to the Cross’ on Good Friday was an ancient custom dismissed as superstition by most Protestants, but in 1541 it was still being practised by the majority of Henry’s subjects. After the adoration, Henry moved to a square enclosure near the altar where he knelt to pray over platefuls of rings. The king as God’s anointed was believed by many people to have sacerdotal powers, none in and of himself but rather as a vessel for God’s blessing, and the rings, known as cramp rings, were anointed by the monarch in the hope that the wearer ‘may be protected from the snares of Satan’.26 Psalms were sung as the king lifted up each of the rings individually before they were sprinkled with holy water.27
In most churches, the venerated crucifix was carried with the consecrated Host to a small makeshift hearse, representing Christ’s burial in the tomb of Saint Joseph of Arimathea, where candles were lit to burn in front of it until the following Friday. Christ was dead and the officiating cleric spoke words from the eighty-seventh Psalm, ‘I am counted as one of them that go down to the pit.’28 The ritual reminded the congregation not just of Christ’s death on the cross and the subsequent ‘Harrowing of Hell’, through which the souls of the damned were liberated, but also of their own mortality. On Easter Sunday, the crucifix and sacrament were removed – Christ had risen – and the promise of eternal life and salvation was reiterated to the worshippers. Easter was one of the few occasions in the year when the majority were encouraged to take Holy Communion, which required fasting from the evening before and permission from one’s confessor, since a state of grace by confession and subsequent atonement were necessary before partaking in the ‘great mystery’. The cap for Culpepper was not something that the queen needed to seek absolution for. Their meeting was indiscreet, but it was not yet a sin.
By Easter, members of Catherine’s household were noticing her preference for the company of Jane Boleyn, Dowager Viscountess Rochford, the lady of the privy chamber who had helped arrange the queen’s private meeting with Thomas Culpepper on Maundy Thursday. Lady Rochford had been born Jane Parker, sometime around 1505, making her only a year or so younger than her future husband, George Boleyn.29 Her father Henry, Lord Morley, was a bibliophile who had grown up in the household of Henry VIII’s grandmother Margaret, Countess of Richmond, but kept away from court life as he grew older. He signed his letters as ‘Harry Morley’, and correspondents included European philosophers, scholars at Oxford and Cambridge, and fellow aristocrats.30 Lord Morley’s preference for his library over the corridors of power was not shared by his eldest daughter, although she later used her own wealth to become the ‘most special patroness’ of a scholar based at King’s College, Cambridge.31 Jane joined the court in her adolescence, and she never really left it. During the Shrovetide celebrations of 1522, she was given the role of ‘Lady Constancy’ in a masque called Château Vert, where she appeared alongside six other dancers, including the king’s youngest sister and Anne Boleyn, who had recently returned from her education in France. She married Anne’s brother George sometime between 1522 and January 1526, when Cardinal Wolsey authorised an extra £20 per annum to be granted to ‘young Boleyn for him and his wife to live on’.32
Jane’s marriage took place before her sister-in-law became the king’s fiancée, and as Anne rose, Jane went with her. In 1532, she was chosen as one of Anne’s companions on a trip to meet the King of France at Calais, and three years later Anne turned to Jane for help when they concocted a plan that would force Henry’s latest mistress to leave the court.33 Unfortunately, Jane’s enthusiasm for intrigues was not quite commensurate with her skill for them, a recurring problem in her career, and the king reacted by temporarily banishing her, rather than his mistress.34 Queen Anne’s decision to reach out to Jane discredits the historical tradition that the two women despised each other and that Jane was pathologically jealous of her.
By the 1530s, she enjoyed the courtesy title of Lady Rochford, since her husband was heir-presumptive to the earldoms of Ormond and Wiltshire. The couple were also given use of Beaulieu Palace in Boreham, Essex, a large country house that had once belonged to the Boleyns, before they sold it to the king for £1,000 in 1516.35 She was a woman of great wealth and prominence, but her world came crashing down around her after her husband was arrested on 2 May 1536, for allegedly committing incest with his sister the queen. In their histories of the English Reformation, John Foxe, writing in the sixteenth century, and Gilbert Burnet, Bishop of Salisbury, writing in the seventeenth, both accused Jane of providing false evidence which condemned the Boleyn siblings to death. Their criticism stuck, but Jane’s modern biographer Julia Fox has raised enough questions about the evidence linking Jane to perjury in 1536 to suggest that she did not betray her husband or actively seek his death.36 George trusted her to speak to their friends at court on his behalf, which he is unlikely to have done if their marriage was as unhappy as is usually assumed.37 If she did give any evidence during the fall of the Boleyns, then it is possible that she did so in her husband’s defence and her testimony was later subverted by Thomas Cromwell at the queen’s trial or Lord Rochford’s. Either way, Jane found herself in dire straits after her husband’s execution on 17 May 1536, and it was her natal family’s connections that came to her rescue when she and they had to bring pressure to bear on her father-in-law, who was reluctant to give her the income owed to her as his son’s widow.38 When he was finally compelled to give in, he did so ‘alone to satisfy the King’s desire and pleasure’ and in a letter peppered with complaints about Jane’s extravagance and righteous reminders that when he was a young man he and his wife had lived on a lot less, with a growing family, than childless Jane was now demanding for life as a feme sole.39
In 1539, Jane was able to join the household of Anne of Cleves, where she had been one of the women who pressed the queen about her chances of conceiving and subsequently gave evidence about it during the royal annulment hearings.40 Like most of her colleagues, Jane then transferred smoothly to Catherine’s service, where, by the spring, she had established a firm friendship with the new queen.
Historians are divided on what to make of Anne Boleyn’s sister-in-law and Catherine Howard’s confidante. The assessment of one biographer, that Lady Rochford was ‘a pathological meddler, with most of the instincts of a procuress who achieves a vicarious pleasure from arranging assignations’, strikes a judgemental note, especially when compared to more recent sympathetic depictions of her as ‘very much the grand lady … elegant, poised and animated’.41 Unlike some of Catherine’s other companions, Lady Rochford had lengthy experience of life at court, having been a member more or less constantly since 1522 and very possibly since 1520, but these two decades of life at Henry VIII’s court do not seem to have translated into a prudent attitude towards its dangers. There is some evidence, though it may admittedly be hearsay, that in the mid-1530s she had discussed intimate information about the king’s behaviour in bed.42 She had been involved in intrigues in the households of Anne Boleyn and Anne of Cleves, and in both cases her discretion had been poor. Like many courtiers, she delighted in gossip and she had an addiction to palace life that predisposed her to participate in its plots, particularly if they raised her standing. Proximity to royalty was important in Henry’s palace, but knowing their secrets gave a courtier even greater credit.
Lady Rochford’s ascendancy in Queen Catherine’s affections provoked curiosity in the household and then, after several months, hostility. She was not an obvious candidate for the queen’s favour. By 1541, Jane Boleyn was about thirty-six years old, old enough to be the queen’s mother by contemporary standards. Although they were distantly related to each other thanks to the Parkers’ kinship to the Tilneys and the Boleyns’ to the Howards, Catherine had far closer relatives in her household, including her sister Isabella, who was in the privy chamber with Lady Rochford and found herself being edged out of her sister’s favour by the latter.43 There was a childhood friend in Katherine Tilney or women closer in age, like Anne Bassett or the Duchess of Suffolk. The reasons for this unusual and damaging friendship are therefore difficult to determine, but given what happened next and what we know of both ladies’ personalities, it does seem as if a shared love of scandal and intrigue brought them together – a conclusion supported by the fact that Jane was instrumental in arranging Catherine’s secret Maundy meeting with Culpepper.
The queen’s family were all in relatively good health that spring. Uncle William, although keen to come home, remained on his embassy in France, and gossip that Catherine’s aunt would be reconciled with her estranged husband, the Earl of Bridgewater, had come to nothing. The earl was a wealthy man and the countess had secured enough money to maintain a townhouse of her own at Lambeth, while her sons were still wards of the dowager duchess, as Catherine had once been.44 Catherine’s brothers Charles and George continued to do well at court – the king made a grant to Charles during Lent.45 On St George’s Day, 23 April, the king went to Westminster for the annual chapter meeting of the Most Noble Order of the Garter, the highest chivalric order available to an English subject, a group of twenty-four ‘companions’ of the order, founded by Edward III in 1348 to promote chivalry, loyalty, and fraternity in battle. It was dedicated to England’s patron saint, George, and on his feast day new members were usually brought in to fill any vacant stalls. There were three spaces available in April 1541, one of which went to Catherine’s cousin, Lord Surrey.46 His father was already a companion knight, as his grandfather and great-grandfather before him had been, meaning that Surrey’s promotion had more to do with the favour the Howards stood in by the spring of 1541 than with a specific policy of rewarding the queen’s family in light of her pregnancy. For the Howards, this was fortunate because by the time Catherine’s brother George received a grant from the king in May, preparations for the queen’s coronation had stopped along with any talk of her having a child.47
What precisely happened with Catherine’s pregnancy is unclear, and a variety of explanations are all equally possible. The first is that the pregnancy had ended in miscarriage at a very early stage. A second possibility is that Catherine had, either of her own volition or at the instigation of others, invented the story in order to restore herself to the king’s favour after the upset their relationship had suffered during his spell of poor health. She perhaps hoped to make her lie into a truth at the earliest available opportunity. At some point, biological chronology would have given her away, but by that stage Henry might have been so pleased with the anticipated arrival of a new Duke of York that he would have forgiven her earlier ‘mistake’. There is a possible explanation as to why Catherine might have lied, found in Chapuys’s correspondence. Chapuys believed that the deception started with the king, who had faked his illness at Lent to avoid seeing Catherine, because, for a few weeks, he had considered divorcing her and reported his suspicions in a letter to Maria of Austria: ‘Last Lent I wrote to Your Majesty that this king, feigning indisposition, was ten or twelve days without seeing his queen or allowing her to come into his room; that during all that time there had been much consultation and talk of a divorce; but that, owing to some presumption that she was in the family way, or because the means and ways to bring about a divorce were not yet sufficiently prepared, the affair dropped.’48
Alternative correspondence, from the Privy Council to the Duke of Norfolk and Charles de Marillac to François I, confirms that Chapuys’s suspicions about Henry’s illness were unjustified. Henry was genuinely and seriously ill during Lent, as was Chapuys himself at the same time, which might explain how he was confused about events later. It is possible that Catherine or some of her ladies feared the sickness was a ruse or that the king’s decision to keep his distance from her while he was unwell encouraged Catherine to try to buy herself some time by claiming she was pregnant.49 A third possibility is that Catherine, or those around her, made a genuine mistake in diagnosing her condition.
Whatever the truth, the fragility of the royal line of succession was brought home by shocking news from the Scottish court in May. At the same time as Catherine announced her pregnancy, the Scottish queen consort, Marie de Guise, was preparing to give birth. The child was a boy, a younger brother to King James’s one-year-old heir, James, Duke of Rothesay. Some sources give the new prince’s name as Arthur; others suggest that he was christened Robert.50 Officially, he was referred to as the Duke of Albany in his eight short days alive. On 14 May, Sir Thomas Wharton, writing from the border as Deputy Warden of the West Marches, sent the news that not only had the newly born Albany died, but within a day his elder brother had also passed away.51 De Marillac, who had a vested interest in Scottish news since Scotland was France’s ally and its queen was a French noblewoman by birth, wrote that ‘the queen of Scotland was brought to bed of her second son, but that, within eight days after, he died, and the eldest also, at which there was great sorrow there’.52 According to Wharton, the catastrophe, at once a political and personal tragedy for the Scottish monarchy, ‘perplexes all’. Queen Marie, who perhaps needless to say was ‘very sickly and full of heaviness’, wrote in anguished letters to her mother, Antoinette, Duchess of Guise, that the tragedy seemed so horribly improbable that she believed her babies must have been poisoned.53
Henry VIII was not close to his Scottish relatives. Leaving aside his political disagreements with his nephew, he refused to provide support or financial help to his sister Margaret, Queen Mother of Scots, who had remarried twice after her first husband’s death at the Battle of Flodden and found herself permanently short of money. Her French daughter-in-law was doing her best to heal the rifts that Margaret’s remarriages had created between her and her son King James, but in the meantime Margaret had written many times to her brother begging him for a pension so that she could ‘live like a princess, as the King their father intended’.54 The death of the two princes also coincided with English suspicions about the Scottish government’s involvement in recent unrest in Ireland and the north of England, so it is perhaps unsurprising, if equally unlovely, that there was no trace of sympathy emanating from the Tudor court at the news.
Children were on Catherine’s mind in May 1541. In the same week as Wharton’s letter about the deaths in Scotland, Catherine visited her stepchildren. Until that point, she had only interacted with the eldest, twenty-five-year-old Mary, and she wanted to meet the other two. The visit to her stepson was discussed in one of Chapuys’s letters to the Governor of the Netherlands, but he failed to mention – and perhaps did not know – that on Friday, 6 May the queen’s barge brought her to Chelsea Old Palace, where she received the Princess Elizabeth.55 The night before, Catherine had stayed at Baynard’s Castle, her official residence in London, while the king visited his son’s household in Essex, and it is interesting that Catherine took the opportunity to meet Elizabeth, away from the girl’s father, before she was introduced to the Prince of Wales.56
The seven-year-old Elizabeth was the youngest, least loved, and most ignored of Henry’s children. She had her mother’s dark eyes, her father’s colouring, and the long Tudor nose of her grandfather Henry VII. She was two-and-a-half when her mother was beheaded, and her first two stepmothers had respectively lacked the inclination or the opportunity to take much interest in her.57 She spent most of her life in the smaller countryside palaces where royal children were housed to keep them safe from the noxious, harmful air in the city. Her mother’s execution on charges of adultery cast a pall over Elizabeth’s life, not just because it robbed her of the mother who had showered her with attention and gifts, but also because it left her legitimacy open to question. Chapuys, with a touch more spite than was excusable, consistently and pointedly referred to her in his letters as ‘Anne Boleyn’s daughter’, rather than as ‘the King’s bastard’, which was the official government line after legislation removed her from the line of succession in 1536. A few months after her mother’s death, Elizabeth’s then governess wrote to Thomas Cromwell to explain that Elizabeth had outgrown all her clothes and needed new ones, which could not be bought because the court had forgotten to pay the ex-heiress’s bills. Elizabeth’s modern biographers who read this as the result of forgetful neglect in the excitement of her father’s third marriage rather than deliberate cruelty are probably right. It may have been that Queen Anne was more involved than Henry in the management of their daughter’s household and it took Lady Bryan’s complaint for Cromwell to realise that no one had stepped into the void to make sure Elizabeth had everything she needed. Even with those explanations, it is a poor reflection on Henry VIII’s interest in his younger daughter, and although she, like her elder sister, had her own suite of rooms at Greenwich Palace, she was seldom invited to court, on account of her age, and her father did not visit her in her own houses after Queen Anne’s execution. Despite this, Elizabeth impressed nearly everyone she met, and even at this early stage in her life observers were quick to notice her self-possession and her intelligence. A year earlier, Sir Thomas Wriothesley had gone to see her and written that when he spoke to her, Elizabeth replied ‘with as great gravity as she had been 40 years old. If she be no worse educated than appears she will be an honour to womanhood.’58
Elizabeth was to be better educated and substantially so. Within a few years of Wriothesley’s observations, her schooling was farmed out to tutors like the regius professor of Greek at Cambridge. In 1541, when Catherine met her presumably for the first time, Elizabeth’s accomplishments were largely due to the intelligence and forcefulness of her governess, Katherine Champernowne.59 Katherine, whom Elizabeth and nearly everyone else referred to as Kat, was determined to make the most of Elizabeth’s natural aptitude and pushed ahead with a rigorous programme despite objections from some of the princess’s staff, who compared her style of teaching to a servant pouring too much wine into too small a goblet. Elizabeth regarded Kat Champernowne as a second mother and in later life praised her for providing most of the love and encouragement she could remember from her childhood.60
Kat may have been part of the reason for the meeting between her charge and Queen Catherine at Chelsea, because her sister Lady Joan Denny was one of Catherine’s ladies-in-waiting. Kat shared her sister’s brains and her Protestant sympathies. Later, Joan’s husband used his position in the king’s privy chamber to suggest men known to favour religious reform as potential tutors for Elizabeth and her younger brother, something that played a significant role in the two siblings’ future commitment to a Protestant England, albeit to varying degrees. Kat was also ambitious for and protective of her ward, and she knew that the favour of the queen could help Elizabeth’s future prospects, which must, given her position, be made or broken by the king’s goodwill. It is possible that the relationship between Elizabeth’s governess and Catherine’s lady-in-waiting saw Lady Denny lobbying for a meeting on Elizabeth’s behalf.
Catherine’s own familial bond to Elizabeth may also explain why she went out of her way to meet her at Chelsea. The trip from Baynard’s was unusual enough in itself; despite being the queen’s official London residence, the castle was hardly ever used for overnight stays by Tudor queens consort, but it was clearly used as a base for Catherine to talk with Elizabeth, who moved to Chelsea by barge on 5 May, the day before Catherine was taken there by her twenty-six oarsmen.61 On her mother’s side, Elizabeth was Catherine’s second cousin – Elizabeth’s maternal grandmother, the late Countess of Ormond, had been Edmund Howard’s younger sister and Anne Boleyn’s mother. In relative terms, the necklaces Catherine gave to Elizabeth as a gift were not remarkably expensive and paled in comparison to the rubies Princess Mary had received from their father at Christmas, but it was more than Catherine had ever given to Mary personally or willingly.
Four days afterwards, Catherine rejoined her husband to accompany him to Waltham Holy Cross in Essex, where the Prince of Wales was staying with the Princess Mary and their respective households. When she saw him for the first time, Edward was three years old, ‘handsome, well-fed and remarkably tall for his age’, and waddled over to her in an infant-sized man’s doublet set off with a floor-length skirt.62 Royal and noble-born boys were generally dressed in feminine clothes from the waist down until around the age of seven, when they were ‘breached’ and began wearing clothes similar in style to an adult’s. Edward was not breached until his sixth birthday, so he would still have worn the clothes of an aristocratic infant in May 1541.63 A squad of well-born boys kept him company in the schoolroom, including Barnaby Fitzpatrick, the young man who became the prince’s closest friend.64 Barnaby was the son of an Irish lord who had a distant bloodline claim to one of the ancient Irish sub-kingdoms but wanted to trade that in for a title in the contemporary Anglo-Irish nobilities. The invitation for Barnaby to join the Prince of Wales’s household was a boon for the Fitzpatricks, and it indicated that the king was interested in rehabilitating potentially rebellious Irish nobles by bringing certain families into more regular contact with the court. One month after Catherine’s visit to Waltham, Barnaby’s father was created Baron Fitzpatrick of Upper Ossory.
Edward, who became Edward VI upon his father’s death, died shortly before his sixteenth birthday, which resulted in subsequent descriptions of him as a sickly child. The irony of the sought-after son being the least healthy in the litter is one too tempting for many writers to ignore, but Edward’s death in 1553 was probably the result of a short-term illness.65 As a teenager, he was physically robust, with a passion for jousting and hunting that rivalled his father’s as a young man. In his childhood, there were spells of ill health, inevitable and often exacerbated by those who were tasked with protecting him. When Catherine first met her most valuable stepchild, she saw a boy who had been cosseted in a household that went to obsessive and self-defeating lengths to keep him away from any potential infection. From time to time, this cloistering mixed badly with the servants’ tendency to give the heir whatever he asked for and produced a lifestyle that a court physician described as ‘gross and unhealthy’.66
That Edward was the king’s sole surviving son and legitimate child was never far from the minds of servants or courtiers, many of whom feared the chaos that would be unleashed if the son predeceased the father. After Henry I’s only son was lost at sea in 1120 and the beautiful young Queen Adeliza failed to produce a new heir, the country had descended into a generation-long civil war when the king died in 1135. Since then, there had been four kings who succeeded their fathers because elder brothers had died before them. Henry VIII was one of them.67 The conversation the ladies-in-waiting had with Anne of Cleves about the absence of a duke of York revealed how much the spare to the heir was on everyone’s mind, as did the joyous rush to prepare for Catherine’s coronation once the king believed she was pregnant, and the subsequent abandonment of the ceremony when it was discovered that she was not.
The visit into Essex to see the little heir was judged a success. It ended with the king inviting Mary back to court, and ‘the Queen has countenanced it with a good grace’.68 Mary had been pressing for her father to visit Edward more often – she was over twenty years older than her brother and she had a protective and caring attitude towards him. However, Chapuys was quite clear in his letter to the emperor that the deciding factor was Catherine’s enthusiasm for the trip – he told Charles V that Henry and Catherine had gone ‘to visit the Prince at the request of the Princess, but chiefly at the intercession of the Queen herself’.69 This implies that Catherine was eager to meet with all three of Henry’s children and apparently to be reconciled with the eldest. Her different attitudes towards the two Tudor sisters leaves little doubt about which one she preferred, while the ‘good grace’ that she displayed when Mary was invited back to London was another example of her tendency towards kindness once she had calmed down about an earlier slight.
Catherine’s rapprochement with Mary may have had pragmatic motivations as well. It is speculative, but two months later the Duke of Norfolk revealed in conversation with the French ambassador that there were ‘secret’ plans to restore Mary to the line of succession.70 For the good of the realm, there would have to be a clearly designated second-in-line. Since three of Henry VII’s offspring had lived long enough to produce children of their own and Henry VIII had bastardised two of his, the issue was murky, with too many claimants, none of whom was in a strong enough position to succeed without a challenge. Henry’s matrimonial and diplomatic escapades had even managed to raise doubt in Catholic Europe about Edward’s legitimacy, on the grounds that he was the son of an excommunicate, conceived at a time when England was in schism from the Holy See.71 This admittedly was a minority view, and both the emperor and François I recognised Edward as Henry’s heir apparent, but who would come after him was nonetheless a fraught question. The pursuit of the answer was liable to prove bloody. Henry VII had seven acknowledged and uncontested grandchildren alive in 1541: James V, King of Scots and his half sister, Lady Margaret Douglas, were the children of Henry VII’s eldest daughter, Margaret Tudor, Queen of Scots; there were also Henry VIII’s three children by three different wives and the two surviving daughters of Henry VII’s youngest daughter Mary, Duchess of Suffolk – Frances Grey, Marchioness of Dorset, and Eleanor Clifford, Countess of Cumberland. Of those seven, only Frances had children of her own – so far, two girls. There were thus ten direct bloodline claimants to the English throne, who could be divided into three groups: the direct Tudor line in Henry’s children; the Stewart or Scottish line via Queen Margaret’s; and the Suffolk line in the late duchess’s daughters and granddaughters.
If Catherine bore any children, they would rank after Edward but before his sisters, regardless of their gender, but until that happened who followed Edward was frighteningly ambivalent. Since both Henry’s daughters had been declared illegitimate after their respective mothers’ demotions, James V and any future descendants could plausibly claim the English inheritance if Edward died without heirs. James, after all, was a man and the product of an uncontested royal marriage. It seemed unlikely that either of the Suffolk sisters would try to advance their lineage at the expense of their Tudor cousins, though as events were to prove in the next decade the improbable could happen. A fracas with Scotland seemed likely. To resolve the ambiguity, Henry planned to put his two daughters after Edward and any heirs he might father, with Mary as the eldest ranking above Elizabeth. These plans were not formalised until 1544, but the French ambassador’s correspondence proves they were being discussed as early as 1541. It may be that Catherine knew of her stepdaughter’s rising prominence – even if Mary never became queen, acknowledging her as second-in-line was a clear sign of her restoration to her father’s favour – and decided that it would be sensible to remain on good terms with her. Mary’s rumoured restoration and Catherine’s attempts to build a better relationship with her, and her younger sister, occurred shortly after the end of Catherine’s alleged pregnancy. It is possible that the debacle forced Catherine to realise that, if she did not have children of her own, her future as a widow would be determined by one of her stepchildren. The rumours of Mary’s return to the line of succession may also have arisen from Henry’s doubts about Catherine’s fecundity, after the embarrassment at Easter.
Perhaps what is most telling about the visit with Elizabeth at Chelsea and then with Edward and Mary at Waltham Holy Cross four days later was when it took place. Catherine did not rush into the role of loving stepmother. From the evidence left to us, she first met Elizabeth and Edward ten months after she married their father. The only reason she knew Mary was that she was the only one old enough to live at court. Going to see Edward did not carry any great risks, but the trip to meet Elizabeth does seem to have required some organisation and genuine interest on Catherine’s part. So much of her behaviour in spring 1541 can only be explained by accepting that she was growing in confidence and that her successful execution of her duties as queen during the Christmas at Hampton Court had bolstered her self-esteem. Catherine had always liked to organise people; she was friendly, charming, and had the kind of charisma that aimed to make people smile while remaining the centre of attention. The intercession for Wyatt and Wallop, the brief rendezvous with Thomas Culpepper, the meeting with Elizabeth Tudor, and then the trip to Waltham are all the actions of a woman who felt that she could get away with more and began to behave accordingly.
That is not to say that a sense of insecurity vanished completely. Her husband’s brush with death during Lent and the fiasco of her alleged pregnancy were not things that a childless queen was likely to remain unaffected by. Alongside the confidence, there was also a jitteriness to Catherine which occasionally expressed itself through what she was prepared to believe. A week after their visit to the Prince of Wales, Henry noticed that Catherine was in low spirits, and when he asked her why ‘she said it was owing to a rumour that he was going to take back Anne of Cleves’. That story was not new – it had circulated in London in September – but this time, Catherine reacted to it and even, in her weaker moments, found it credible. Henry’s comforting of his wife made up in sincerity for what it lacked in finesse: ‘The King told her she was wrong to think such things, and even if he were in a position to marry he had no mind to take back Anne.’72
Reading between the lines, the Cleves rumour seems to have been resuscitated by Scottish involvement in the Wakefield conspiracy. Chapuys thought that whoever was spreading the story must know nothing about Henry VIII’s personality ‘as his love never returns for a woman he has once abandoned’ and that whispers of Anne’s restoration at Catherine’s expense arose because ‘many thought he would be reconciled to her for fear of the King of France making war on him at the solicitation of the duke of Cleves and the king of Scotland’.73 Since the divorce, France had allied with Cleves. On the same day as Catherine’s visit to her stepson, Lord William had written from Paris with the news that the Duke of Cleves was at the French court as a guest of the royal family.74 If Henry were reconciled with Anne of Cleves, it might negate the possibility of France’s alliance with Scotland and Cleves causing problems.
Fortunately for England, Lord William’s reports from France made it clear that the Duke of Cleves had no intention of risking his diplomatic credibility on his sister’s behalf. The two men met at a supper party hosted in the duke’s honour by the King and Queen of France – Duke Wilhelm embraced the English ambassador, asked after the health of King Henry, and said absolutely nothing about his sister.75 Of course, those chatting about the merits of putting Anne of Cleves back on the consort’s throne did not have access to the ambassador’s letters to know how unimportant Anne’s position was to Cleves’s foreign policy, but a lack of precise information did not stop them talking or Catherine from listening. Her brief unhappiness reflected the power of the rumour mill at court and the speed with which members of the household could bring almost absurd stories to their mistress’s ears.
There were other problems facing Catherine in 1541, arising from the realm of public opinion, where she was intermittently accused of low morals and wild spending. Catherine’s tactfulness, deportment, and her kindness to Anne of Cleves, Thomas Wyatt, and John Wallop were praised at court and in diplomatic correspondence, as was her desire to see her stepchildren. A member of the Privy Council later described Catherine’s behaviour in public as that of ‘a very virtuous and chaste creature’, but others were less enamoured.76 The demotion of Anne of Cleves had not been popular in the capital, which was a tribute to her public persona, since she had had very little time to establish herself as queen before she was divorced, and Catherine had first come to the wider population’s notice as a potential mistress receiving surreptitious nighttime visits from the king on his barge. Talk in London had already referred to her as a harlot and a woman of ‘poor character’. Accusations of whoredom were an occupational hazard for royal women, who held a place in people’s imaginations that was usually either patriotic or prurient. Vices were not so much magnified as imagined. Anne Boleyn had been referred to as ‘a strong whore’ and ‘a goggle-eyed whore’; it was assumed that Jane Seymour could not be a virgin because of her age when she married; and in 1511 a man was imprisoned for implying that Katherine of Aragon’s newborn son was illegitimate.77
Catherine’s high spirits also encouraged criticism. What might appear as vivacious loveliness to some can be interpreted as irritating garrulousness by others. A Spanish merchant living in London, who admittedly never let fact stand in the way of a good story, claimed later that ‘the King had no wife who made him spend so much money in dresses and jewels as she did, who every day had some new caprice’.78 She certainly liked to have a good time and in her apartments Catherine ‘did nothing but dance and rejoice’.79 A defence of her spending can be mounted by pointing out that it does not seem so great when set in its wider context. Her jewellery acquisitions in the summer and winter of 1540, for instance, compare favourably in cost to those commissioned by or for Anne Boleyn, even before she became queen.80 However, Catherine’s extravagance was not balanced by any particular displays of piety or memorable largesse, as it had been by some of her predecessors.
The unkind attacks on Catherine’s morals were illegal under the Treason Act of 1534, but they only constituted a threat if they came from someone who actually knew something specific about her involvement with Francis Dereham. In May 1541, comments about her sexuality could be dismissed as the febrile ramblings of bored and ill-informed commoners, while mutterings about her spending and dancing simply did not matter. Wisely, given the nature of her rise to prominence, Catherine’s focus continued to be her husband. To please him was the only way to guarantee her position.
It is interesting that after a period when she felt real doubt and insecurity, Catherine threw herself into the role of a model queen consort – conduit of royal mercy, stepmother, suppressor of discord – and found herself to be very good at it. At the same time, she began to pine for some of the excitement she had known as a younger woman, with men like Thomas Culpepper. It would be tempting to identify this as the point at which Catherine’s behaviour underwent a definitive change and argue that after it she acted either with greater circumspection or greater recklessness. The truth is that she did both. Human beings are a mass of contradictory emotions. If one were to try to summarise Catherine’s life from this point on, it would be that she excelled in public but made more and more mistakes in private. She was aware of the tenuousness of her position, yet met in quasi-secret with an old admirer. She interceded for prisoners such as Thomas Wyatt and John Wallop, but did not help others who posed too great a risk to become involved with. She continued to respond to the hearsay being fed to her by her ladies, and she inflamed the household’s volatile atmosphere by favouring Lady Rochford over other women of the privy chamber, including her sister. Catherine was the most observed woman in the country. Her every move was watched and judged by the courtiers and servants around her. When she mentioned that Thomas Culpepper continued to stare at her, even after she had made it very clear that she wanted nothing more to do with him because of his rudeness to her on Maundy Thursday, Lady Rochford answered with an observation that could be true of the nature of queenship – ‘Yet must you give men leave to look, for they will look upon you.’81