Chapter 21
Why should the private pleasure of some one
Become the public plague of many more?
– William Shakespeare, The Rape of Lucrece (1594)
Culpepper and Dereham were escorted into the Great Hall at the Guildhall, centre of London’s civic government, on Thursday 1 December by Sir John Gage, Constable of the Tower, where they had spent the last few weeks. As Lord Mayor of London, Michael Dormer presided over the trial, in conjunction with, amongst others, Lord Chancellor Audley; Lord Russell; the earls of Southampton, Hertford and Sussex; the Duke of Suffolk and the Duke of Norfolk. Knights from the counties where the queen’s crimes were allegedly committed had been summoned as petty juries. Also present was John Sackville, sheriff in Lambeth, where Catherine and Dereham’s affair had taken place years earlier, as was a jury from Kent, Culpepper’s native county and the location of Greenwich Palace, where his first inappropriate meeting with the queen had taken place back in April. In a show of solidarity, every privy councillor attended, including the queen’s cousin, Lord Surrey.
Both men pleaded not guilty. The queen’s deposition, which claimed a coerced sexual relationship with Dereham but none with Culpepper, was read aloud to the court. The details gleaned from the interrogations about her premarital romance with Dereham and summer interactions with Culpepper were also relayed. The allegation that Dereham had intended to resume his affair with the queen after he joined her household at Pontefract was lent unfortunate credence by a joke Catherine had made about Culpepper to Lady Rochford during the progress, when she had apparently said that if Culpepper did not visit her that night, she could find another man behind a door who, in de Marillac’s early modern French, was ‘ung aultre qui ne demandoit pas meilleur party’, which could translate either as another who would cause less hassle or someone who represented a ‘making the best of things’ choice. The queen had made similar jibes when she teased Culpepper that she had a store of lovers waiting to replace him in York. In the hands of a skilled prosecutor, those words could be twisted and magnified as an allusion to Francis Dereham, who denied any aspirations to treasonable adultery, despite the torture he had endured, and admitted only to sleeping with Catherine in the dowager duchess’s establishment in the belief that he and Catherine were betrothed.
Next to him, Culpepper claimed that although the queen had ‘pined for him’, encouraged to do so by an interfering Lady Rochford, they had never gone to bed together. Nonetheless, his admission before the council two weeks earlier that he had ‘intended and meant to do ill’ was enough to damn him. The charges against Thomas were made capital from the ambiguity of his testimony. They focused on the fact that although he had not passed beyond words with the queen, he had confessed his intention to do so, and that even if he had never consummated his relationship with her, such conversations between a subject and a queen ‘deserved death’. The specifications of where they had met to plan their adultery were kept vague. The indictments did not state that adultery had taken place, but played a safer game in focusing on Culpepper’s admission of intent. Queen Catherine had, ‘on the 29 Aug. 33 Henry VIII., at Pomfret, and at other times and places before and after, with Thos. Culpepper, late of London, one of the gentlemen of the king’s privy chamber, falsely and traitorously held illicit meeting and conference to incite the said Culpepper to have carnal intercourse with her; and insinuated to him that she loved him above the king and all others. Similarly the said Culpepper incited the Queen.’1 Thomas’s prosecutors did not have much truck with the idea that there had been an instigator and a passive recipient in the relationship.
After the jury retired, they returned a verdict that ‘sufficient and probable evidence’ had been produced to justify the death sentence. With that, each prisoner chose to follow the well-established script of submission. One could not say the law, the foundation of order, was unjust and so Dereham and Culpepper changed their pleas to acknowledge that they had been found guilty. Full prostration before the Crown was their only chance at salvation once a jury had reached that decision. Since neither of them was an aristocrat, there was no legal precedent for any other kind of traitor’s death sentence than hanging, drawing, and quartering, which is what they received. Even his friends could not conceal their disapproval at the sight of Norfolk laughing as the sentence was handed down.2
What had they really been condemned to die for? Dereham and Culpepper were trapped not by what they had done but what they had planned to do. Their actions – in Culpepper’s case the covert meetings and in Dereham’s, joining Catherine’s household – were taken, not unreasonably, as proof that they both had the goal of seducing the king’s wife. Dereham was also guilty of withholding knowledge of Catherine’s treasonous conduct, because he had not alerted the government to their pre-contract and her unsuitability to be queen at the time of her marriage. The documents about Dereham’s last two weeks alive are frustratingly imprecise. De Marillac, who, like all the other major embassies in London, had accepted the Privy Council’s invitation to send witnesses to the Guildhall trial, only confirms that Dereham confessed after the jury had found him guilty. Yet it seems unlikely that he confessed, as Culpepper did, to a plan to become the queen’s lover. Although de Marillac does not specify, Dereham’s submission at the end of the six-hour trial probably related to his failure to alert the Privy Council to Catherine’s lack of virginity. This left Dereham in a legal grey area. It was, after all, also illegal to slander the queen consort. Which law should he have broken? The situation was further complicated by Catherine’s insistence that any talk of marriage between them had been a joke. Francis’s death sentence could only be fully justified if it was proven beyond reasonable doubt that he had hoped for something unambiguously treasonous because of his feelings for Catherine – either that the king would die or that Catherine would consent to an adulterous relationship. The king harboured no doubts that Francis had entertained one or both of those thoughts, despite the fact that no amount of torture could bring Francis to admit to either.
With his own trial fast approaching, Robert Damport buckled and asked to see some of the Privy Council. They visited him in his cell in the Tower, as Catherine’s three brothers rode through the streets of London with Lord Surrey and Thomas Culpepper’s brother to advertise that they were free men, untainted by suspicion of their kinsman’s treason, an absolution on horseback.3 Damport told his visitors that when the king’s affair with Catherine first began, Dereham fell into despair during which he reflected hopefully that if the king died, he might be able to resume his relationship with Catherine. The exact words he reported were: ‘I could be sure to Mistress Catherine, and I would; but I dare not. The King beginneth to love her; but, and he were dead, I am sure I might marry her.’4 The councillors were sceptical, considering that both Damport and Dereham had been pressed for such information before and denied it. Damport also made this revelation on 6 December, five days after Francis was condemned to death, quite possibly after the verdict against his friend sufficiently frightened him into telling a lie. If Francis was going to perish anyway, perhaps by perjuring himself Damport might live. His story was, almost certainly, a fabrication. He had not admitted it while he was tortured the first time, Francis denied it up to the very end, and even the councillors, who had wanted this testimony earlier, seemed surprised at Damport’s revelation after Dereham had already been condemned. There is also the fact that the chronology of Francis’s visit to Ireland does not quite fit with Damport’s claim. According to Damport, Dereham was distraught because the king began ‘to love’ Catherine, which would place the conversation in the spring or early summer of 1540. Every other piece of evidence relating to Francis’s decision to leave London suggests that their last quarrel had been over Thomas Culpepper.5
The circumstances of Damport’s revelation and the tenacity with which Dereham, who had admitted his earlier romps with Catherine, stuck to his denial even when the king, inspired by Damport’s claim, ordered both men to be subjected to another round of torture, also suggests that Damport’s final, desperate revelation was a fabrication.6 Even as Francis’s family ransacked their resources for an offering to the government that might have their son acquitted or his sentence at least commuted to beheading, and he was reduced to begging for the latter, he would not budge from his claims that he had never hoped for or planned the king’s death, nor had he planned to commit adultery with the queen. De Marillac expected Dereham and Culpepper to be executed on the Saturday two days after their trial. Instead, some of Francis Dereham’s last few days alive were spent at the mercy of torturers and another round of questions.
The information, or lack of, provided by the torture sessions was sent to Henry by his nervous councillors, who had persuaded him to decamp to the countryside until the affair was resolved, with only musicians, one or two advisers, and privy chamber gentlemen for company. De Marillac heard that ‘this King has changed his love for the Queen into hatred’, and the councillors bore the brunt of his mood swings as he grappled with the realisation that his wife had preferred another man to him. There was no repetition of the nighttime river banquets that had occurred when Anne Boleyn was imprisoned in 1536 or the cheery plays Henry had penned about it and shown to a discomfited Bishop of Carlisle. In 1541, he was absolutely certain that Catherine had deceived him, and his grief was so severe that at one point his entourage feared for his sanity. He lurched from his seat at the council table with a sudden call for horses without any indication of where he was planning to go. He cried for a sword so that he could kill ‘that wicked woman’ himself and vowed that he would have her tortured to death to ensure she felt as much pain in her demise as she had delight in her lust. There were echoes of the Lenten rants about Cromwell as he blamed his councillors for their poor service and less threatening yet still uncomfortable scenes during which the king wept in front of his servants.7
Despite this erratic behaviour, Henry remained in control of the case against his wife and her family, even from his rural retreats. His guiding hand can be seen throughout the paperwork, where phrases such as ‘This is His Majesty’s opinion …’ and instructions to wait ‘till the King’s pleasure should be further known’ proliferate, along with his orders of whom to arrest, whom to pardon, why and when; his citation of previous legal cases to convince the judges that treason had taken place; his sanctioning of the use of torture on Robert Damport and Francis Dereham; his interest in sending his own physicians to nurse Lady Rochford back to health to secure her execution; and his direct involvement in arranging the seizure of Howard goods and the relocation of the clan’s dependants.8 His grief did not touch everyone. The King of France sent several letters which were, on the surface, comforting but on closer reflection seem masterfully patronising. François’s platitude that ‘the lightness of women cannot bind the honour of men’ reads like a reassurance designed to accentuate what it claimed to dispel.9 Eustace Chapuys, who had seen too many of Henry’s matrimonial misdemeanours, was even less sympathetic. In a letter to the young Bishop of Arras, one of Maria of Austria’s councillors, Chapuys gave his unvarnished assessment of Henry’s mood that December:
The king has wonderfully felt the case of the Queen, his wife, and that he has shown greater sorrow and regret at her loss than at the faults, loss, or divorce of his preceding wives. In fact, I should say that this king’s case resembles very much that of the woman who cried more bitterly at the loss of her tenth husband than she had cried at the death of the other nine put together, though all of them had been equally worthy people and good husbands to her: the reason being that she had never buried one of them without being sure of the next, but that after the tenth husband she had no other one in view, hence her sorrow and her lamentations. Such is the case with the King, who, however, up to this day does not seem to have any plan or female friend to fall back upon.10
Two days after Chapuys wrote this, an unstable Catherine received a delegation at Syon who wanted to know more specifically why she had allowed Francis back into her service.11 Considering that Francis was already condemned to death, the queries sought evidence to incriminate her family as the case against them gathered momentum, as per the king’s instructions. The ex-queen was part of a group who found themselves unexpectedly pestered in their prison cells or homes. Joan Bulmer and Alice Restwold were brought back, the former to answer questions mostly pertaining to the dowager duchess’s knowledge of the affair and the latter pressed on what Lord William, who had helped find her a job after she left Norfolk House, knew or suspected. The two women endured three days of interrogation, spread out over a nine-day period.12 Edward Waldegrave trawled his memory to provide answers about Dereham’s intentions towards Catherine and actions after she became queen.13 The dowager duchess’s maids were asked if they had witnessed her incinerating any of Dereham’s papers, a charge which the dowager consistently denied, heightening the king’s suspicions since he could not understand why the duchess had Francis’s coffers broken into unless it was ‘to conceal letters of treason’.14 Katherine Tilney and her former colleagues William Ashby and Andrew Maunsay were also quizzed about the dowager, who had taken to her bed in Norfolk House with the claim that she was too ill to receive visitors, much less be moved for questioning.15
By this point, two new faces had joined the regular roll call of inquisitors – Richard Rich, the middle-aged chancellor of the Court of Augmentations, a man unencumbered by any discernible principles and never too far away from charges of corruption, and the king’s solicitor general, Henry Bradshaw. Rich, Bradshaw, and the councillors had heard enough examples of the dowager’s titanic idiocy, including jokes she had allegedly made about Dereham fleeing to Ireland ‘for the Queen’s sake’ in front of the queen’s servants, to see her as easy prey, an impression apparently confirmed when they arrived at Norfolk House ‘as if only to visit and comfort her’ and found that the dowager was nowhere near as ill as she had pretended – until they told her that the Lord Chancellor wanted to question her and she immediately began to complain of pains in her chest. Honeyed lies persuaded Agnes to have her barge prepared to call on Lord Chancellor Audley, and the men left her for Sir Thomas Wriothesley’s house, also in Lambeth, where they waited by a window until they saw the duchess sail by. They immediately sent men over to Norfolk House to shutter it and make arrangements for the disbanding of the household on the assumption that Agnes would never return.16
At the Lord Chancellor’s, the dowager showed a magnificent gravitas. There was no sign here of the twittering gossip making ill-advised bons mots in front of servants. Instead, the councillors wrote to the king’s secretary with an apologetic request that ‘you signify unto the King’s Majesty, that, according to our last advertisement, we travailed all yesterday in the examination of my Lady of Norfolk; who made herself so clear from all knowledge of the abomination between the Queen and Dereham, that she would confess no mistrust or suspicion of their love, or unseemly familiarity’. They gave ‘her scope and liberty, without interruption, to say what she would’, but she took that opportunity to deny everything. Only a day before, the council had wrung three or four sheets of affidavits from her gentleman, William Ashby, and received a set of questions to put to her, annotated by the king himself, none of which seemed to perturb the duchess.17 No, she had never suspected anything improper between her granddaughter and Francis Dereham. She had only opened the latter’s coffers in November to provide her stepson the duke with evidence to help the Privy Council’s inquiries. Her desire to send a word of warning to her son William in France had not been to obfuscate, but rather to alert him of an unhappy turn of events. She had never made jokes about Francis Dereham’s sojourn in Ireland, and she had no idea why he had gone there in the first place. She had never been overly generous to Francis; rather, she was munificent with all her servants, despite the fact that her wealth had in fact been exaggerated. No, she had never sent her grandson to fetch legal advice about possible loopholes that would free them all from suspicion of treason.18 Agnes’s performance was one part poor widow to one part great lady; it, and ‘her extreme denial’, riled and reluctantly impressed her opponents, who described her as ‘old and testy’ and immovable, regardless of the small mountain of contrary evidence they could put in front of her.19
Similar admiration was not generated by Lord William Howard, who, like his predecessor, Sir John Wallop, had been lured back to London with everyone who met him under specific instructions not to inform him that he was under suspicion. William mirrored his mother in denying any knowledge of his niece’s romance with Francis. What made his story credible was not the fact that it was the truth, more that there was just enough truth in it to raise doubts in the councillors’ minds. It was plausible for an uncle, even one in the same household, to have missed how far his niece’s love affair had progressed. He had confronted Henry Manox for his anonymous note to the dowager. Could that not have been the result of anger at Manox stirring up trouble on what Lord William presumed then to be a false premise? They had evidence from Alice Restwold and other servants that the dowager had worried about her son finding out, which indicated either that he did not know or she did not know that he knew. The council had leapt down the rabbit hole with the Howard investigation by trying to give precise, ascertainable meanings to half-remembered conversations, truths, lies, differing interpretations, and genuine mistakes, when in fact any number of conclusions were possible. Lord William’s ‘stiff manner’ irked Wriothesley, who perhaps expected the same kind of fear and contrition shown by William’s wife, Margaret, who tottered on the verge of full collapse. The councillors began to pity the ‘simple woman’ as she endured a horrible epiphany, that the gossip she remembered from her visits to Norfolk House had come to constitute treason.20
Her sister-in-law did not buckle. Instead, at her interrogation at Westminster on the Feast of the Immaculate Conception, the Countess of Bridgewater gave the impression of a woman who, staring down the barrel of a loaded gun, shrugged. Ten men sat opposite her – the Archbishop of Canterbury, Lord Chancellor Audley, the Duke of Suffolk, the Earl of Southampton, into whose custody she had been placed until they had enough evidence to send her to the Tower, the earls of Hertford and Sussex, the Constable of the Tower, Wriothesley, and Rich. Bishop Gardiner was also there.21 Norfolk was not. The woman who had once incited large parts of southern Wales into quasi-rebellion to protect her family was unfazed by the censorious line-up on the other side of the table. The councillors had recently taken her maid, Mistress Philip, and one of William’s gentlemen to arm them with more information, which they fired at the countess in the form of twenty-six questions about Catherine’s upbringing.22 Had the countess ever heard talk of late-night romps or picnics in the maidens’ chamber? Had she ever seen anything in Catherine’s attitude to Dereham that might have indicated a romance? Had she ever rebuked Catherine or given her advice about her behaviour at Chesworth House or Norfolk House? Had she ever witnessed something that she had considered wanton between the young couple? They wanted her to admit to the role she had played in persuading Catherine to take Dereham into her service, that she had known about a pre-contract between them and taken steps to cover it up since the queen’s wedding, that she had aided her mother’s surreptitious attempts to seek legal advice, and that she had known of, or helped, with the smashing of the controversial caskets at Norfolk House. With every answer, ‘she sheweth herself to be her mother’s daughter; that is, one that will by no means confess anything that may touch her’.23
The reports went to Oatlands, where the king had retreated to end his marriage in the same place it had been solemnised. On the same day as the countess’s interrogation, the king’s team at Oatlands wrote to the councillors in London. Lord Russell, Sir Anthony Browne, Sir Ralph Sadler, and Sir Anthony Wingfield had spoken to the king about the council’s assessments of the dowager duchess, her two children, and her daughter-in-law, and their conclusion that even further torture would bring no new revelations from Dereham:
Touching Culpepper and Dereham, if your Lordships do think that ye have gotten as much of Dereham as would be had, that then ye shall (giving them convenient respite and warning of the time, that they may prepare themselves to God for the salvation of their souls,) proceed to their execution, in such sort as hath been signified unto you before, accordingly.
Thus the Holy Trinity preserve Your good Lordships in long life and good health.
At Oatland, this present Feast of the Conception of Our Lady. By your Lordship’s loving friends …
The next day, fourteen people were shipped to the Tower because ‘misprision of treason is proved against’ them. The gates opened through the murky, freezing river water for the Dowager Duchess of Norfolk; the Countess of Bridgewater; Lord William Howard and his wife, Katherine Tilney; Alice Restwold; Joan Bulmer; William Ashby; the ex-queen’s sister-in-law Anne Howard; the dowager’s former maid Margaret Benet; Agnes’s sister-in-law Lady Malyn Tilney; Edward Waldegrave; and even the original informant, Mary Hall. A broken Robert Damport was, of course, already incarcerated. Every single one was expected to have their worldly goods and possessions confiscated as a prelude to ‘their bodies [sentenced] to perpetual prison’.24 The Countess of Bridgewater’s children were taken from their grandmother and from one another to be committed to separate wardship – her daughter, Anne, was sent to the Countess of Oxford’s household;25 the elder boy, Gruffydd, was passed to Archbishop Cranmer’s household; and his younger brother, Thomas, went north to the Bishop of Carlisle’s.26 Faced with the confiscation of his goods, William claimed that his best plate and silver had been washed overboard on his return voyage from France. His mother’s claims that her wealth had been magnified by rumour had already been dented by the discovery of £800 in silver hidden in Norfolk House, and the old lady’s panic at the thought she would be put in a dungeon when she reached the Tower. A prisoner had to pay for their own upkeep, which prompted the frightened revelation from the dowager that she had at least a further £1,000 than she had admitted to. There had been storms in the Channel that prompted sailors on one boat to kill Lord William’s poor horses and toss their bodies into the swell in a desperate attempt to keep the ship afloat, yet in light of his mother’s brazen mendacity, the king and the Privy Council suspected that William was trying to swindle Henry out of what would soon be rightfully his – ‘Word was brought unto the King’s Majesty,’ wrote the Privy Council, ‘that all of Lord William’s stuff, plate, and apparel, which he had with him in France, should now be perished and lost on the sea; which, whether it be matter of truth or (the cast standing as it doth) devised by some crafty means to embezzle the same’ would be resolved by their inquiries.27 Captains were sent to search every castle and house William had stayed at on his way back from France to see if he had hidden the treasure there. It was never found.
One person immune to grief, horror, revulsion, and pity that winter was Anne of Cleves. Three days after Catherine was shipped off to Syon, Anne set up residence at Richmond Palace. Richmond had been the greatest prize tossed at her during the annulment bonanza of the previous year, and it was also the house closest to the Hampton Court Chase, where the king was moving from house to house in wounded, prickly sorrow. Although it was one of the seven great English royal palaces, by the time Richmond was signed over to Anne of Cleves it was infrequently visited by the court. It had been built on the orders of Henry VIII’s father in the first decade of the century as one of the finest examples of Renaissance architecture in northern Europe.28 Its many towers and three storeys overlooked the Thames, and galleries intersected its orchards and gardens, stuffed full of carved and gilded heraldic beasts. A fountain splashed in its stone-and-marble inner courtyard; gold or stone crests dotted its glass-windowed corridors. It had fallen out of favour not because it lacked splendour or luxury, more because its style seemed hopelessly outdated by the 1530s. The layout of the rooms still reflected the decade of its construction, when there had been a large royal family with king, queen, and titled, unambiguously legitimate children. In Richmond’s chapel, the closets for a king, a queen, and their progeny stood empty.29 If their emptiness stung Anne, she did not always hide it well. In the last decades of the twentieth century, a myth grew up about Anne that became as convincing, in its own way, as the old canard of her as the repellent ‘Flanders Mare’. Anne of Cleves has been presented as the great survivor in a world organised to kill, the one who got away, the lady who had the last laugh in a story that saw a ‘narcissistic buffoon foiled by a woman with common sense’.30 Unfortunately, this inspirational Anne is the product of projection rather than reality. Incredible as it might seem to us, especially in the light of what was happening to Catherine and the harsh crudities that had been used against Anne herself a year earlier, the ex-queen or, to be legally precise, the queen-who-never-was was poised and eager for Henry to take her back.31
London buzzed with speculation that Cleves would be restored, and one woman was even imprisoned when a conversation was reported in which she had suggested Queen Catherine’s adultery was God’s punishment on the king for divorcing the virtuous Anne.32 Eustace Chapuys was somewhere between distressed and irate at the rumours, and his mood was hardly helped by de Marillac’s public taunt that ‘the young duke of Cleves would soon be one of the most highly connected princes in the world’. The emperor was emphatic on what Chapuys’s response should be on the subject of Anne: ‘You must watch the affair, since you know how injurious it would be for Us were the King to effect a reconciliation with her. If it be so, you must try all means in your power to dissuade the King from it, and, if possible, prevent him from taking her back.’33 Chapuys’s informants managed to get him some of de Marillac’s correspondence and codes to his ciphers. From what he knew of Henry’s personality, Chapuys did not think he could ever reunite with someone he had discarded, but nonetheless he agreed with the emperor that ‘means ought to be found to prevent it’.34 Those means, whether intentionally planted by the imperial embassy or simply the product of idle unfounded gossip, soon broke in London with a story that Anne had recently given birth to a bastard child.35 A housewife called Frances Lilgrave was imprisoned for suggesting that the father was the king, and officers from Anne’s household were summoned to court to answer the Privy Council’s questions on the matter after the king was told of the rumours on the Feast of the Immaculate Conception.36
Chapuys, who forgot it was poor form to continue punching after the fight was won, characterised Anne as a plump, garish, over-the-hill alcoholic in his conversations with Henry’s courtiers, in which he turned Anne’s post-marital rejuvenation of herself on its head by arguing that because of ‘her being fond of wine, and of indulging in other excesses, as they might have had occasion to observe, it was natural enough to suppose that she had failed’ as a suitable candidate for queenship.37 De Marillac had initially written to King François for instructions on whether or not to promote Anne’s candidacy in light of Catherine’s ruin, but on the day that Catherine was stripped of her title he penned a letter advising the French government that, in his opinion, Anne’s fortunes were unlikely to change.38
None of this perturbed the resilience of the Clevian embassy, who wrote on Anne’s behalf to courtiers whom they erroneously believed to be sympathetic to her cause, including the Earl of Southampton and Archbishop Cranmer, and then to the entire Privy Council.39 Their persistence reached a point where Cranmer had to cut them off mid-conversation with a protestation that he could not discuss something so intimate without the king’s permission. Even with that, the matter was not laid to rest until February, when the king, after pointedly refusing to allow his barge to sail anywhere near Richmond Palace, sent a curt note to Anne asking her to send back the ring from the royal collection that she had received as a Twelfth Night gift from Catherine in 1541.40 A year later, Anne was distraught when Henry married another woman who was not only older than her but also, as she bitterly insisted to her servants, far less attractive.41
The council was dispelling the rumours about Anne’s love child at the same time as they reached the decision that Francis Dereham was beyond the point of usefulness following the latest bout of torture. In accordance with the king’s wishes, both men could now be executed. The king had rejected Dereham’s plea that his sentence be commuted to beheading, a mercy which, inexplicably, he had granted to Culpepper who was ‘only to lose his head’.42 Thomas’s death warrant survives in the National Archives at Kew, a short and perfunctory piece of parchment that stipulated that in light of how heinous the offence, the men should die publicly at Tyburn. The council signed it on the king’s behalf, their signatures visible in neat black ink – Archbishop Cranmer heads the list, followed by Audley and then everyone else present, in ranking order: the Duke of Suffolk; the earls of Southampton, Sussex, and Hertford; Bishop Gardiner; Sir John Gage; Sir Thomas Wriothesley; and Richard Rich.43 The warrants were signed on the 9th and the sentence carried out the next day when the two men were tied to wooden or wicker hurdles which were pulled from the Tower by horses that dragged them the four miles through the city and its crowds to Tyburn gallows.
No one recorded their speeches, which indicates that they were short and conventional. Thomas, standing on the ground in front of the gallows, asked the spectators to pray for his soul. It is tempting to wonder if Dereham was in a fit state to make an eloquent farewell after the torture he had endured in prison, since no account mentions his final words, even in passing. Thomas Culpepper knelt down in the dirt, positioned his neck on the block, and an axe cut through his neck. A noose was placed over Francis’s throat and he was dropped just enough to cut off the air supply. The victim’s legs kicked, the body began to spasm against the trauma and then the rope was severed so that Francis, still alive, could be stretched out for the knives to slice into his flesh, first to castrate him, and then for his intestines and other viscera to be drawn from him.44 Only then was his head struck off like Thomas’s and taken to be impaled on the spikes that jutted out over London Bridge.45 Dereham’s body did not receive a proper Christian burial, since it was hacked into quarters which were also displayed in various parts of the City.46 One would almost certainly have gone to Lambeth, his home parish and the site of his original crimes. Where the others went is not recorded.
Meanwhile, the Tower’s administrators were struggling with the influx of gently born prisoners, since there were not enough appropriate rooms to hold all of them.47 The London mansions and country manors of the dowager duchess, Lord William, and the countess had all been seized, stripped, locked up, and handed over to court-appointed stewards.48 On 22 December, Lord William and Lady Margaret Howard, Lady Malyn Tilney, Anne Howard, Katherine Tilney, Alice Restwold, Joan Bulmer, William Ashby, Margaret Benet, Robert Damport, and Edward Waldegrave were brought to be arraigned for misprision of treason.49 The king had intervened to pardon Mary Hall, the original informant, on the grounds that she had never sought to work in Catherine’s employment and when confiding the secrets of Lambeth to her brother had expressed ‘sorrow for His Majesty’. Henry also explained that freeing Mary Hall was to encourage others to report friends or family to the government in the future without fear of collateral retribution. The dowager duchess and the countess were excused since, as the only two members of the group who held aristocratic titles by right of marriage rather than a courtesy lordship given to the sons of noblemen (as was the case for Lord William), they could only properly be tried by their peers. As with Catherine and Lady Rochford, their arraignment would have to wait until Parliament reconvened in January.
At the hearing, none made the same mistake as Culpepper or their onetime companion Francis in trying to plead their innocence. Frightened, demoralised, and in Lady Margaret’s case, tottering on the edge of a breakdown, all of them showed themselves to be suitably contrite, even the formerly defiant Lord William. They were all found guilty and received the anticipated sentences of life imprisonment. But, as of yet, there were no more executions scheduled. The mood in the capital towards the Howards and their servants had also subtly shifted. Although criticism of Catherine had not abated:
[it] was thought extreme cruelty to be so severe to the queen’s kindred for not discovering her former ill life: since the making of such a discovery had been inconsistent with the rules of justice or decency. The old duchess of Norfolk, being her grandmother, had her of a child; and it was said, for her to have gone and told the king, that she was a whore, when he intended to marry her, as it was an unheard-of thing, so the not doing of it could not have drawn so severe a punishment from any but a prince, or that of a king’s temper.50
Catherine was absent from this progression of misery. After she was questioned on 5 December, she was left at Syon. She was at once the subject of most conversations and half-forgotten. Her husband stayed away, travelling through the Chase in peripatetic misery, refusing to discuss affairs of state.51 There is no account of how she received the news of Thomas and Francis’s deaths, but the incarceration and ruin of her closest family members seems to have distressed her. Unlike her uncle Norfolk, who had washed his hands of her conspicuously and thoroughly, the dowager duchess and Lady Bridgewater had, despite their poor advice in days past, done their best not to implicate Catherine. A cynic might point out that to indict Catherine was to damn themselves, but they could have exonerated one another by painting Catherine as a duplicitous harlot who had hoodwinked them all into believing she was a model of virtue. The condemnations of Catherine by others who were questioned were recorded; the dowager and the countess seem to have made none.
There were moments in the crumbling ornateness of the convent by the river when Catherine’s attendants heard that ‘she believes that her end will be on the scaffold’, yet there were also prolonged spells of defiant, manic gaiety. Chapuys heard that Catherine had recovered her appetite and her habit of command, which she used to torment the disloyal servants who had been appointed by others to watch over her. Catherine was ‘more imperious and commanding, and more difficult to please than she ever was when living with the King, her husband’. In the second kingdom of Syon, the great purgatorial wait for a horrible finale, Catherine was once again ‘taking great care of her person’. Like a candle flaring before it went out, she had apparently never been more beautiful than she was during that winter at Syon. Staring death in the face in a mood of hubristic hedonism, she became as preoccupied with her toilette as she had been at Hampton Court. She made the most of her denuded wardrobe, dressing and coiffing herself, donning her few remaining jewels, waiting for the opening of Parliament on 16 January, when the matter would be settled. Preening in her loveliness, Catherine kept her pulse beating at Syon with the appearance of someone who might live for ever; but in her more sombre moments, when no amount of make-believe could distract her, Chapuys heard from her servants that ‘her only prayer is that the execution be secret, and not in public’.52