Chapter 16
O, you wake then! come away,
Times be short, are made for play;
The humorous moon too will not stay …
– Ben Jonson, Oberon, the Faery Prince: A Masque (1611)
On 7 July 1541, while she was still at Dunstable, Catherine received a new title when heralds at Greenwich proclaimed her the first queen consort of Ireland.1 The Irish Parliament had been summoned in spring, met from 13 June to 20 July, and its first statute was a proposal to change Henry’s title from lord to King of Ireland. The bilingual Earl of Ormond translated the relevant speeches into Irish, to the ‘contention’ of fellow lords who did not speak English, and the motion was ‘joyously agreed to by both Houses’.2 Those hearing the news on the streets of Dublin could not have been more emphatically supportive. Prisoners were pardoned; the council dispensed free wine to the revellers who danced and lit bonfires in the streets; Dubliners organised celebratory feasts in their homes, and two thousand people attended a thanksgiving Mass at St Patrick’s Cathedral.3 The kings of England had been styled lords of Ireland for the last three centuries since the reign of Henry II, when his intervention after a series of local disputes culminated with him being acknowledged as overlord by Ireland’s local kings and chieftains, and the apparent blessing of the papacy.4
The Irish Parliament wanted to use the Crown of Ireland Act to fix a plethora of problems facing their country, and while many foreigners, and historians, assumed that the kingly elevation in Ireland was Henry’s idea, it was an initiative born in Dublin. In his capacity as Lord of Ireland, Henry had ruled on the vicious side of indifference – when he did involve himself in the island’s issues, it was seldom pleasant. The first reason for proposing a change in his title was that a king had a certain set of expected responsibilities, far more clearly defined than a lord’s and, as king, Henry would be expected to work harder at the island’s good government.
It was also quite clear to everyone in sixteenth-century Dublin that the country could not prosper if the Crown’s authority was obeyed by some Irishmen and ignored by others. Everyone who interacted with Irish politics and possessed a modicum of intelligence could see that the country was in urgent need of reform. The Duke of Norfolk, who had been the king’s Viceroy for Ireland from 1519 to 1523, and later Thomas Cromwell had both put forward plans for an overhaul of the system.5
The Irish Council had an ambitious programme to accompany the act, which included bringing the estranged Gaelic nobility into the fold by granting them titles in the Anglo-Irish peerage while confirming their ancestral grants of land or making new ones. Through a process of assimilation, the Irish Parliament hoped to neutralise the tensions, and threats of rebellion, that had plagued the island and dominated the Irish aristocracy. A representative of the Irish Privy Council told his English colleagues that ‘being accepted as subjects, where before they were taken as Irish enemies … is the chiefest mean, by good wisdom, to continue them in peace and obedience’.
Henry acted on their advice with poor grace and pointed reluctance. When one Irish nobleman asked to receive the title of an earl, Henry reminded him of the ‘vile and savage life’ he and his ancestors had lived, despite the fact that the man’s fidelity and character had been vouched for by Henry’s viceroy and councillors. The insult was even more gratuitous for being couched in a half-acceptance of the man’s petition, which Henry granted with the title of a viscount on grounds that ‘the honour of an earl is so great that it is never conferred except by the king in person. If he desires it so much he must repair hither, where it shall gladly be given. If he will be content with the honour of a viscount or a baron, which may be given by letters patent, he shall have it.’6
Henry’s nitpicking over the Irish legislation dragged on for most of the summer, with messengers bouncing back and forth between London, Dublin and wherever the court moved on its progress. Some of the paperwork was brought to him when he and Catherine were at Pipewell in Northamptonshire, near to property owned by Dorothy Bray’s lover, and the king was clearly displeased by what he read.7 Would granting the proposed lands to the Irish who lived beyond the Pale secure their obedience or simply provide them with resources to fund future rebellions? A few weeks later, Henry complained that the parliamentary legislation made it sound as if the Irish lords and commons were granting him a title; he wanted every relevant piece of documentation to contain a ‘plain setting forth of his old right and inheritance’.8 Discussion of the exact wording of the title dragged into the autumn and it was only in January that it was finally settled upon.9 The Irish got much of what they wanted, although perhaps not enough, and their proposal that the Kingdom of Ireland should now be bumped up to stand after England and before France in the king’s official style was rejected, despite the fact that English royal presence in Ireland was arguably older and certainly more tangible.10
The king’s irritation over the Irish proposals aside, he and Catherine were enjoying themselves. On 14 July, the king hunted and killed a great stag and two fat bucks, which he then sent as personal gifts to the Lord Mayor of London.11 Two weeks later, the queen gave her chamberer Margaret Morton a note to deliver to Lady Rochford’s rooms.12 Morton, noticing that the queen’s letter was unaddressed and devoid of any seal, handed it over to Lady Rochford, who asked her to tell the queen that she would have a response for her in the morning. The next day, when Margaret went to fetch the reply, Lady Rochford sent it with a warning for ‘her Grace to keep it secret and not lay it abroad’. Morton, who disliked Lady Rochford intensely, thought the errand and the viscountess’s subsequent instructions about the queen needing to be careful with her correspondence were odd. She remembered both anomalies later.
The queen had been in ‘merry’ spirits when she entered Northamptonshire on 21 July, the first county on the progress that Catherine had never visited before; but it was not a cheering experience for everyone travelling with her.13 Henry’s advisers were often tasked with settling one of the many questions of precedence created by the progress. At Collyweston Palace, where they arrived on 1 August, the dispute was between competing representative bodies of the county of Northamptonshire against those from the towns of Peterborough and nearby Stamford about who should welcome the king and queen, and in what order.14 At their earlier stay at Ampthill, the councillors had examined a local man called Richard Taylor who was accused of papism, and at Pipewell a man was examined, then released, after it was alleged that he had not blotted the pope’s name out of his prayer book. Upon examination, the council discovered that he had erased the pontiff’s name, but not as thoroughly as his neighbours had.15 Other messengers travelling to and from Collyweston included Eustace Chapuys’s secretary, who arrived with more letters about the still unresolved trade dispute with the empire, and those bearing invitations from the king to three Italian shipwrights who were experts in the construction of war galleys.16
Collyweston Palace had originally been owned by the king’s paternal grandmother Margaret, Countess of Richmond, and her coat of arms could still be seen in the palace’s four great bay windows with their fine views over the nearby Welland Valley. Following the devout countess’s death in 1509, the palace had been maintained but seldom lived in until it was passed over to the king’s bastard son. Catherine was staying in a house that still reflected the tastes of its original owner. She had access to summerhouses reached by gravel paths that ran through herb gardens and beside ponds. By the woods and near the orchard, there was a little clearing where the countess had once listened to outdoor concerts given by her choristers, who had been taught in the now-abandoned schoolroom beside the chapel. Catherine’s apartments, originally built for Henry’s mother Elizabeth of York when she visited, overlooked the gardens, which she could access by a private staircase. The palace had a fortified jewel house where Catherine’s treasure trove could rest as securely as the countess’s had half a century earlier.17
From Collyweston, the court moved into the county of Lincolnshire to spend three days at Grimsthorpe Castle, the recently renovated and expanded home of the Duke and Duchess of Suffolk.18 Grimsthorpe was part of the duchess’s inheritance but it became the duke’s at the time of their marriage, since before 1870 a married woman could not own any property in her own right under English law. The couple who stood outside to greet them were very familiar to the king and queen. The duke, born Charles Brandon, had by 1541 become the greatest landowner in Lincolnshire.19 The son of a man who had fallen for the Tudor cause at Bosworth, Brandon had seen service on land and sea in Henry’s wars and he had scaled the ranks of the nobility through a combination of valour and devotion. Since then, he had gone to seed in the same direction, if not quite with the same speed, as his king. He too had grown fat, his hair was grey and when he went to the House of Lords he had to remain seated for most of the time.20 Nearly thirty years earlier, Suffolk had caused one of the great scandals of the reign by eloping with the king’s youngest and recently widowed sister, Mary. A mea culpa, accompanied by lavish gifts from Mary’s inheritance from her first husband, King Louis XII of France, helped soothe royal outrage, and the couple had four children, three of whom lived past infancy.
In his determination to increase the family’s position as magnates, Suffolk bought the wardship of young Katherine Willoughby, heiress to the deceased Lord Willoughby de Eresby. The duke brought Katherine to the Suffolk household with the intention of marrying her to his son once they were both of age. Gossip in the household of Anne Boleyn, who was then on the rise and never much enamoured with the duke or his wife, made arch hints that the duke’s interest in his son’s fiancée was not entirely proper – an accusation that turned out to be a polished arrow when Suffolk’s wife died of tuberculosis in June 1533 and he broke off his son’s engagement to Katherine and married her himself that September.21 When the son also died of tuberculosis a year later, Queen Anne and her clique were not slow to exploit the duke’s private failings in order to undermine his position at court.22
By contemporary standards, Brandon and Willoughby’s marriage had been successful in that the new duchess provided her husband with two sons to replace the one who died in 1534. The twenty-two-year-old hazel-eyed duchess was one of Queen Catherine’s more outspoken and intelligent ladies-in-waiting. Although her Spanish mother had been a childhood friend of Katherine of Aragon, and the duchess had been named in the old queen’s honour, she did not share her namesake’s devotion to the old religion.
After the chamberers had unpacked everything at Grimsthorpe, the queen directed Katherine Tilney to find Lady Rochford and ask her if she had the thing she had promised her. Lady Rochford promised to bring her word herself when it arrived, an odd and cryptic answer to a similar question, both sent through a confused chamberer.23 The queen and her favourite had talked about Thomas Culpepper throughout the progress. Lady Rochford told the queen that another of the king’s Privy Chamber gentlemen, Thomas Paston, was also captivated by her.24 Paston, who was twenty-four – about Culpepper’s age – and single, would two years later marry Catherine’s niece, Agnes Leigh, daughter of her much older half brother, Sir John Leigh of Stockwell. Like most Privy Chamber gentlemen, Paston and Culpepper were both permitted to socialise with the queen’s ladies in her apartments, when off duty, during the day, and it was presumably there that Lady Rochford noticed Paston’s interest in the queen. Flirtation was a way of life in most Renaissance courts – a way of passing time and advertising one’s nimbleness in speech. Courtly love was a fashion that made it very difficult to tell when the usual patter, perhaps like Paston’s, had been replaced by the real thing, as seemed to be happening with Thomas Culpepper.
Catherine was not interested in Paston, but she was becoming obsessed with Culpepper. Since their conversation at Greenwich messages and gifts had passed between them. Catherine had worried about Culpepper when he was unwell. But there had been no opportunity for them to meet privately. Lady Rochford had been tasked with arranging a meeting and, if the wording recalled by Margaret Morton and Katherine Tilney about the two ladies’ messages was correct, the widowed viscountess promised to do so. Every time they arrived at a new house Lady Rochford would inspect the stairs leading to and from the queen’s rooms to see if there was a suitable venue for the discreet conversations her mistress and Culpepper desired. Thus far, she had not found anything suitable and, if she had, Culpepper could not be absent from the Privy Chamber if he was on duty that night or if the king demanded his company.
The day before they left Suffolk’s house at Grimsthorpe for the county capital, the kingdom’s other duke arrived. Norfolk had said his farewells to Henry and Catherine shortly before they left London with the intention of joining them at Lincoln, after he made another round of inspections of the border. His return may not have been welcomed by Catherine, since there is strong evidence that her relationship with her uncle had deteriorated. Her quarrel with Norfolk is mentioned in a history of the English Reformation penned a century later by the Bishop of Salisbury, who wrote, ‘The king went in progress with his queen, who began to have great influence on him; and, on what reason I do not know, she withdrew from her uncle, and became his enemy.’25
It would be possible to remain sceptical about Bishop Burnet’s version of events, except for two facts in its favour. Burnet’s The History of the Reformation was researched and published in 1679 and he had access to many original documents about the Tudor court that were later and sadly lost in a fire at the Cotton Library in London in 1731. Where Burnet quoted or discussed documents that were available in his time and have survived to ours, we can see that he generally reproduced them faithfully. That documents recording a chill between the queen and her uncle in 1541 may have existed only to be lost in the eighteenth century is seemingly corroborated by a lengthy, self-pitying and vitriolic letter written by the Duke of Norfolk five years later. By that point, he had temporarily lost royal favour and he used his letter as an opportunity to accuse everyone around him of betraying him over the last two-and-a-half decades. He specifically mentioned his two nieces ‘that it pleased the king’s highness to marry’ for the ‘malice’ they had both shown to him, which ‘is not unknown to such ladies … as my lady Herbert, my lady Tyrwhit, my lady Kingston, and others, which heard what they said of me’.26 Norfolk, whose ability to play the victim was matched by a determination never to play the role quietly, had once complained that Queen Anne Boleyn drove him from her presence with words that one would not use to a dog, which if nothing else was inaccurate on the basis that she liked her dogs far more than she did her uncle.27
Anne Boleyn’s feud with Norfolk is better documented than Catherine’s, but the three ladies-in-waiting mentioned by the duke prove that Burnet was truthful when he wrote that Catherine also came to dislike her uncle. Anne Herbert was in both queens’ households, Lady Mary Kingston only waited on Queen Anne in the final weeks of the latter’s life, but Elizabeth Tyrwhitt was a lady in Catherine’s service, never Anne Boleyn’s. The inclusion of her name on Norfolk’s list confirms that at some point she, and quite possibly Anne Herbert, heard Catherine’s plummeting opinion of the Howard patriarch.
Why Catherine turned against the duke is unclear. The most obvious conclusion is that as she grew more comfortable in her role as queen, she felt she needed him less. It has been suggested here that the duke’s role as Catherine’s Svengali in the early days of her marriage has been exaggerated, which undermines the image of the ingénue turning against her patron. Nor was Catherine the only member of the family to develop an animosity towards the duke. Along with Queen Anne Boleyn, the Countess of Bridgewater’s first husband ‘confessed’, in Norfolk’s words, ‘that of all men living he hated me most’.28 Norfolk’s second wife despised him and later gave evidence against him. At various times, his relationships with his surviving children were strained. The Duke of Norfolk was not the feeble-minded ogre of popular legend; in biography and fiction he is so often presented as a cretinous boor pining for wars against France or a return to the Wars of the Roses, with nothing to commend him to Henry VIII’s government except his title. It is easy to forget that the duke could be charming, engaging and courteous. He was also a Francophile with real military skill but little hunger for war. On many occasions, his advice should have been listened to, for example on Ireland in 1520, the north in 1536, or the Anglo-Scottish border in 1539. Yet he was also prone to faintly hysterical reactions and he was incapable of admitting he was in the wrong – when defending himself in 1546, he did not mimic many of his contemporaries by acknowledging his own wretchedness in disappointing the king, but instead hit back with, ‘In all times past unto this time, I have shewed my self a most true man to my sovereign lord’ – and when he lost his temper, he was accusatory, offensive and aggressive. He tried too hard to control members of his family, which they resented, objected to and rebelled against. There are enough quarrels with his other relatives throughout Norfolk’s life to lend credence to the stories – told by Elizabeth Tyrwhitt, and probably by Anne Herbert as well, referenced by Norfolk in 1546 and then repeated in 1676 by Bishop Burnet – that by the time they met again at Grimsthorpe Castle in August 1541, Catherine was contemptuous of her uncle and discussed those feelings in front of her women.
The royal party left Grimsthorpe on the morning of 8 August and travelled to the market town of Sleaford, roughly halfway in the forty miles between Grimsthorpe and Lincoln.29 The local manor had once been the patrimony of the Hussey family, until Lord Hussey of Sleaford was beheaded for supporting the Pilgrimage of Grace. The visit to his home may have brought up unpleasant memories for Mary Tudor, since Lord Hussey had been one of her chamberlains. The next morning the court headed to Temple Bruer, a spot about seven miles from Lincoln, where the cavalcade stopped to have dinner and send messengers to inform the authorities in Lincoln that the king and queen were about to arrive. When Catherine, in a crimson velvet gown, rode toward the walls of Lincoln she could see a forest of red robes, swaying into bows as she approached. They were Lincoln’s mayor, burgesses and aldermen, who stood as representatives of the commoners of the region, while the gentry’s delegation sat on horseback near a tent that had been erected for Henry and Catherine to change in before their ceremonial entry to the city itself. Henry, resplendent if enormous in green velvet – the Tudors’ colour, but also, by happy coincidence, one traditionally associated with Lincoln – listened to an address in Latin delivered by the cathedral’s archdeacon, dean and clergymen, after which the priests rode off to the minster to prepare for the service Henry and Catherine were due to attend after receiving gifts from the other castes, who admitted their wrongdoing in 1536 in return for gestures of pardon from the king.
Catherine and Henry remained on their horses throughout the clergy’s presentation, then rode over to their tent, where Henry changed into a dazzling outfit of cloth of gold and Catherine donned a dress cut from cloth of silver. After pieces from her jewellery collection were wrapped around her throat and waist, and slotted into her ears and onto her fingers, the little queen shimmered from head to toe as she walked out on her husband’s arm. Their servants helped them back onto their horses and as soon as they were mounted, the heralds put on their coats, the trumpets sounded and the procession into Lincoln began.
Before they passed into the city, Lincoln’s other representatives prostrated themselves as the clergy had done. The city’s serjeant-at-law and recorder, Mr Misseldon, was tasked with the first greeting, which he delivered in English and then presented a copy to the king, who passed it to the Duke of Norfolk, riding near enough behind him as the highest-ranking aristocrat present. The gentry and the mayor’s party alike knelt before the king and twice shouted, ‘Jesus save your Grace!’ Before he began his speech, the mayor kissed the mace, the symbol of his office, passed it to the king, who also kissed it, and then handed it back. The initial gesture symbolised the mayor’s position as representative of the city’s liberties, which were granted by the king; the king’s return of the mace, carried by the mayor for the rest of the ceremony, in turn underlined the monarchy’s obligation to respect and preserve the rights it had long ago bestowed on its subjects.
The court nobility did not generally have a high opinion of Lincolnshire’s landed classes. A few years earlier, Thomas Cromwell had received a report that referred to them as ‘a sight of asses, so unlike gentlemen as the most part of them be’, but that might have been nothing more than a blast of geographical snobbery.30 On 9 August, the leaders of the local gentry acquitted themselves well in a ceremony that was not only partly humiliating but also nerve-racking and rife with potential for a mistake to be made or offence given. The gentry from the nearby Lindsey region pleaded for absolution and gave Henry a purse that contained £300; the Lincoln authorities handed over £40.31 Through this, the fruits of the county were being offered to the sovereign, who accepted his subjects’ gifts in the same way his government accepted their taxes. Again the underlying imagery was one of submission in return for protection, obedience and tribute that was supposed to bring with it certain freedoms and privileges. Under Henry VIII, that bargain had long ago been stretched to its limits, but the theatre of politics continued with the script used in past centuries. The symbolism was continued with the city’s offerings to Catherine – she was given local fish for her table, including pike and carp.32 This may sound like a lacklustre souvenir in comparison to the king’s purses of gold, but food was a staple of present-swapping within the aristocracy – Cardinal Wolsey had sent Anne Boleyn fish for her supper table during Lent and Lady Lisle sent baked partridge to Sir Brian Tuke.33
Rising to their feet with the king’s permission, Lincoln’s leaders took their place at the front of the procession and escorted it through Stonebow, the main gate, where a statue of the Virgin Mary, the city’s patron saint, watched down on the arrivals, in the company of a carved Saint Gabriel. On the other side of Stonebow, the king’s coat of arms had been erected after a manic two-day cleaning spree in which everyone in the city was ordered to help clear away dunghills and filth from the streets, which were then coated with sand. All Lincoln’s church bells rang out in welcome, including those of the Cathedral Church of the Blessed Virgin Mary of Lincoln, an architectural wonder built in the eleventh century on the site of an earlier place of worship, expanded and beautified throughout the Middle Ages. Its 520-foot spire might have been the tallest building constructed between the time of the Great Pyramid of Pharaoh Khufu and the completion of the Washington Monument in 1884.34 In the afternoon light, the hilltop cathedral was an awe-inspiring sight, dwarfing both its bishop’s palace, which nestled in the first southern indents of the hill, and the local castle that lay directly ahead of the great western door. Here Henry and Catherine dismounted to be met by John Longland, Bishop of Lincoln, who moved forward from a sea of choristers to greet the king and queen.
If the suppression of the Pilgrimage of Grace had shown the government at its most firm, the reception at Lincoln Cathedral was an attempt to wipe the sting of repression away with rosewater and perfume. Henry in gold and Catherine in silver knelt on prayer cushions covered in more cloth of gold and clasped their hands in prayer as Bishop Longland presented a bejewelled crucifix for them both to kiss. Incense curled forth into the air from golden censers to bless Catherine and her husband, who knew the bishop well, since he had once served as the king’s confessor. Bishop Longland’s loyalty to his king, however, was not as strong as his zeal for the Queen of Heaven: a golden statue of the Virgin had been hidden in the cathedral’s vaults when Thomas Cromwell’s commissioners came to gut the Church of its ‘idols’.35
Another of the bishop’s preoccupations was saving his flock from the perils of lust, a concern shared by his episcopal predecessors – and one of many scenes immortalised in stone by earlier masons on Lincoln Cathedral’s west front. If Catherine saw it, it is possible she missed its significance, especially since it was part of a series of carvings that also showed the torment of the damned in Hell, Daniel in the lions’ den, and the expulsion of Adam and Eve from Eden. When the king and queen had been blessed, clergy held the canopy used for processions of the Blessed Sacrament over Henry and Catherine as they walked into the cathedral and over to the choir, where they again knelt in prayer as the choristers sang a Te Deum, a service of thanks for the couple’s safe arrival. The area where they prayed was a broad space, with only the few sturdy beams bracing the transepts giving any clue to how far the long-dead architects had been willing to push their craft when it came to building the cathedral.
Two of Henry’s ancestresses were buried, or partially buried, in Lincoln Cathedral. A few feet from where he and Catherine knelt was the tomb of his three-times great-grandmother Katherine, Duchess of Lancaster, who had also been a sister-in-law of Geoffrey Chaucer.36 Ahead of them, bathed in the light streaming through the stained glass of the great east window, was the victual tomb of Henry’s six times great-grandmother, Queen Eleanor of Castile, whose viscera had been interred at Lincoln after she died nearby in 1290.37 An elaborate funerary procession had brought her body back to Westminster for burial and as with many medieval royal funerals some of her organs, which were removed during embalming, were buried near to the site of her death. Eleanor’s position as the king’s ancestress and a former Queen of England had not saved her monument from damage during the gutting of the cathedral fourteen months earlier, when the head shrine of Saint Hugh of Lincoln, a twelfth-century Bishop of Lincoln, was dismantled. The head shrine’s name was literal – after his canonisation, the cathedral staff had tried to move Saint Hugh’s body to a new resting site, but the skull became detached during the exhumation which led to a separate shrine for it in the early fourteenth century.38 Over the next two centuries, the head shrine had been visited so many times that the pilgrims’ knees had worn a groove into the step directly in front of it.39 In 1540, the royal commissioners ordered that ‘a certain shrine and divers feigned relics and jewels, with which all simple people be much deceived and brought into great superstition and idolatry’ should be destroyed and melted down; 2,621 ounces of gold and 4,285 ounces of silver, along with ‘a great number of pearls and precious stones’, were stripped from the cathedral.40
Oddly, the shrine to a local nine-year-old who had vanished in 1255 was left intact by Henry’s Reformation.41 The child, known as ‘Little Saint Hugh of Lincoln’, despite the fact that he had never formally been canonised, had been found murdered at the bottom of a well. His death was used as one of the most infamous examples of the ‘blood libel’ against the local Jewish community, who were accused of enticing the child to his capture, feeding him up, then ritually torturing and crucifying him before dumping the body. Fantastic stories claimed that every Jew in England had been invited to the Christian child’s execution. The fact that there was no evidence to suggest that little Hugh had suffered a death anywhere near as traumatic as the blood libel story claimed did not prevent it being repeated in a climate of anti-Semitic hatred that lasted long after the entire Anglo-Jewish community were expelled from England in 1290. There is no clear reason why ‘little Saint Hugh’s’ shrine was spared when the cathedral’s other shrines were gutted. Perhaps the commissioners hesitated to pillage a spot associated with a child or spared it because it did not have the same material value of the other Saint Hugh’s. For whatever reason, the grizzly reminder of the ruthless exploitation of a boy’s death was still on display when Catherine entered the cathedral in August 1541.
The arrival in Lincoln and her public prayers at its cathedral was one of the high points of Catherine’s queenship. Throughout the progress, she carried out her public duties perfectly. Accounts of the tour, written years later, referred to her as Henry’s ‘fair and beloved queen’. Catherine was a flawlessly behaved consort – content to dazzle as a supporting player, clothed in silver next to Henry’s cloth of gold, never pulling focus or openly pursuing her own agenda. After a rapid and unexpected rise, she had successfully negotiated her first few months on the consort’s throne. She had weathered rumours of a rival’s restoration at her expense and the embarrassment of an alleged pregnancy, some details of which had leaked to the public. She was credited with saving the lives of two prisoners, at least one of whom had been expected to die; she had established her pre-eminence over a disgruntled and respected stepdaughter and won praise from diplomats and courtiers for her tact and dignity.
But beyond the Lincoln Cathedral choir, half-hidden in the bracket of a dark pillar on the left of the dismantled shrine and Eleanor of Castile’s dented memorial, just above the carved face of a bearded saint, long-dead masons had rendered the image of a demonic imp – a visual reminder to worshippers that evil, sin and failure lurked close to all human triumphs, just as it had in Eden and through the betrayal of Judas Iscariot at the Last Supper.42
When they had finished their prayers, the king and queen blessed themselves and processed out of the cathedral. They were escorted ‘straight to their lodgings for the night’, down the hill to Bishop Longland’s palace.43 Twenty fat oxen and a hundred fat muttons had been provided for the visiting entourage by the city, cooked in the palace’s cavernous fireplaces.
The fatigue of a long day was eased by the layout of the rooms set aside for Catherine. Lady Rochford’s bedroom was at the top of a narrow little flight of stairs leading from the queen’s. Jane was the queen’s preferred lady-in-waiting and a member of her Privy Chamber, so the location of the dowager viscountess’s rooms was not suspicious; however Catherine’s announcement that she wanted a late-night chat in those rooms was distinctly odd. Members of the royal family did not call on anybody. Katherine Tilney and Margaret Morton accompanied Catherine up the staircase until she dismissed them and went in alone. Once they thought they were alone, Catherine and Lady Rochford went to the back entrance to the apartments and waited for Thomas Culpepper to arrive.
Light spilled in as one of the guardsmen on watch approached and saw an unlocked door in the dead of night leading into the queen’s apartments. Catherine and Lady Rochford ducked out of view and the guard relocked the door. He had then mercifully moved on before Culpepper arrived, accompanied by one of his servants, who was also told to wait outside. Apparently very pleased with himself, Culpepper had picked the lock and slipped through the door. Catherine was frightened by the near-miss and Culpepper had to be his most charming self to calm her down. The three of them relocated to the queen’s lavatory, a large room with enough space for Lady Rochford to doze in the corner while the two she had brought together had ‘fond communication’. With frankness and humour, they chatted about past lovers. It must have been refreshing for Catherine, daringly liberating, to talk about Manox and Dereham, or other men like Roger Cotes and Thomas Paston who might have harboured unreciprocated feelings for her, with a man like Culpepper, who was handsome and amused by her stories. He had a few of his own, including his dalliance with Bess Harvey. He seems to have been quite clear to Catherine about the nature of his relationship with Bess and about his less than chivalrous treatment of her. Bess’s wardrobe was not that of a kept woman. She had the notoriety but not the rewards. Thomas and Catherine’s conversations became more flirtatious when the queen teased him with boasts of her skills as a lover: ‘If I listed [wanted], I could bring you into as good a trade as Bray hath my lord Parr in.’ Thomas replied that he did not think of her as the same kind of woman as the flighty Dorothy, but Catherine was not put off and replied, ‘Well, if I had tarried still in the maidens’ chamber I would have tried you.’44
The two talked for hours, until about two or three o’clock in the morning, which makes Lady Rochford’s subsequent claim that she fell asleep much more believable. Katherine Tilney had the same idea and climbed into the bed she shared with Mistress Frideswide, another chamberer. A disgruntled Margaret Morton, who had seen other examples of odd behaviour from Catherine during the last few weeks, went back to see if the queen was still with Lady Rochford. When she returned to the chamberers’ room, Tilney asked, ‘Jesus, is not the Queen abed yet?’ Morton answered, ‘Yes, even now’, and went to bed.45
The next morning, the king, accompanied by Catherine, went to inspect Lincoln Castle. The queen learnt of the case of a local spinster called Helen Page who had been condemned for various minor felonies. We do not know what Helen Page’s crimes were, or her sentence, or who brought it to the queen’s attention, but Catherine evidently heard enough to feel moved and she spoke to the king, who agreed to pardon the woman.46 Charitably, but less appropriately, Catherine also had one of her servants deliver a damask gown to Bess Harvey, and then sent Lady Rochford with an innuendo-heavy joke to Culpepper to tell him about the dress, which the queen claimed she gifted to save Thomas’s reputation for having allowed ‘his tenement to be so ill repaired’.
Despite how late she had gone to bed the night before, that evening the queen asked Katherine Tilney to accompany her on another visit to Lady Rochford. This time Tilney was told to wait in an alcove outside the room, where she sat with Lady Rochford’s maid for hours. On the other side of the door, the queen and Lady Rochford again slipped out of another exit from the room and went down to the stool house, where Culpepper joined them. Opportunities to meet had proved sparse since they left London, so even after the frightening brush with the guardsman the previous night, they did not want to miss the chance to talk. The queen was in a more serious humour than before, when she had fired out witty quips and suggestive gifts. She was agitated, jumping with fear when she heard a noise and dashing into the shadows. The first night they had talked of the past; on the second evening, conversation turned to the present and Catherine told Culpepper that she was in love with him. Culpepper felt the same: ‘bound’ to her, because he ‘did love her again above all other creatures’. As he left, he kissed Catherine’s outstretched hand and told her it was the only physical intimacy he could allow himself.47
The declaration of love at Lincoln was a rubicon moment between Catherine and Thomas. They had been indiscreet before – servants had been sent on unusual errands, open doors had been noticed, risqué gifts had been exchanged, Culpepper had been invited in daylight to the corridor leading to Catherine’s private rooms – but after Lincoln, their behaviour, and particularly Catherine’s, spiralled out of control. There could be, and was, no more pretence that they were meeting as friends to joke about long-ago romantic mishaps. The possibility that the queen might commit adultery with Culpepper had shifted to a probability and the only explanation for why she was prepared to run such a terrible risk was the obfuscating lunacy of having fallen in love with an arrogant, risk-taking womaniser who, it seems, had actually developed feelings for her, which were either too strong or too weak for him to take the wisest course of action and avoid any further nocturnal meetings.
A suggestion that Catherine hoped to use Culpepper as a stud for the heir she could not get from her husband is often raised in conversations about Henry’s marriages. Henry VIII’s sexual problems may have been exaggerated and it has already been argued here that if he was impotent for prolonged periods of time, his wife’s safest option was to remain barren. For a queen with an impotent husband, prayer and patience were the only courses of action open to her. Neither does the chronology of Catherine’s liaison with Culpepper imply that her goal was pregnancy. She was in her stool house with him at Lincoln for hours on end, talking. Had she later slept with Culpepper and if the proficiency in contraception she had boasted of during her relationship with Francis Dereham had let her down, she probably would have been able to pass the child off as Henry’s, but her behaviour does not suggest that a child was part of her plan or that she approached Culpepper in the spring and summer of 1541 with anything other than feelings of deep attraction that evolved into addling love.
Thomas Culpepper’s motivation is less clear. He said all the right things when he was with her, but it is difficult to believe that he was as romantically infatuated with Catherine as she was with him. Later, nobody suggested that it was Culpepper who was the initiating party. The preposterous idea that he was blackmailing her into meeting with him is impossible to credit from a documentary point of view. Nothing Culpepper or the queen said, then or later, corroborates that interpretation. A theory that gained currency in the years immediately after their deaths was that it had been a grand love affair, somewhere between the star-crossed hopelessness of the next generation’s Romeo and Juliet and the destructiveness of Helen and Paris. The vignette of Culpepper kissing his queen’s hand in the pre-dawn darkness after professing his love for her and gallantly refusing to go further for honour’s sake is arresting. It happened. It was not, however, the conclusion.
The most mercenary explanation for Culpepper’s entanglement with Catherine is not that he was blackmailing her. Rather, he knew, like all the gentlemen in the Privy Chamber, that the king’s health was unpredictable, his weight was increasing, his ulcer remained the great unknown that could close over and kill him at any moment, and he had seen at first hand how close Henry had come to dying during the scare in February. When Henry went, Catherine would be left as one of the wealthiest women in the country, even if she did not have children. Widowed queens had remarried before: after Henry I died, his childless widow Adeliza of Louvain married a former officer of the royal household called William d’Aubigny. When great widows married, they often did so to men far beneath them in the social hierarchy, with the differences in class helping to offset the legal inequality created by gender. Two of Henry VIII’s great-grandmothers, Queen Catherine de Valois and Jacquetta of Luxembourg, had eloped with handsome servants after their respective first husbands, a king and his younger brother, predeceased them. His aunt Cecily, Lady Welles, both of his sisters, and his sister-in-law Lady Mary Carey, had done the same. Along with perhaps some genuine romantic feelings for Catherine, Culpepper potentially had his eye on the long-term advantage of marrying a young and attractive woman, who was likely to become a dowager queen before she was much older. That is speculation, of course, and while it is unlikely that Catherine’s future never crossed Culpepper’s mind, we cannot know if the queen’s future financial and social desirability outweighed her current personal attraction.