Chapter 22
The body is but earth, ashes and worm’s meat … Serpents, worms and toads, shall grow, eat, and devour thy beautiful face, thy fair nose, thy clear eyes, thy white hands, thy goodly body. Remember this thou lord and lady. Remember this thou Christian man and woman. Remember this once a day.
– John Longland, Bishop of Lincoln (d. 1547), Henry VIII’s confessor
After Christmas, the emperor wrote to Chapuys, ‘With regard to the queen of England and the King’s fresh divorce We have nothing to say, except that We thank you for the news, and shall be glad to hear what is to become of the Queen, and other events of that country.’1 After the frenzied activity of the inquiries and the king’s corresponding reluctance to engage with government, the silence that had cocooned Catherine at Syon seemed to have settled over the case. It was back to business as usual for the Privy Council in January: the issues surrounding the Crown of Ireland Act had been resolved, and the council also had time to investigate four citizens suspected of Judaism, which had been illegal in England ever since Edward I expelled the entire Anglo-Jewish community in 1290.2 Rumours floated about that, despite de Marillac’s summertime bonhomie with the Duke of Norfolk, the French were actually angling for the Duke of Orléans’s betrothal to the emperor’s niece, Maria of Portugal, a suggestion that the imperialists were keen to downplay since the emperor was now interested in resurrecting a Hapsburg alliance with the Tudors to balance the scales against France’s unsettling friendliness towards the sultan. This in part explained the emperor’s non-comment on what he mistakenly described as Henry’s ‘latest divorce’. Regardless of the sniggering and eyebrows raised almost to the ceiling at the Hapsburg court, officially Charles V avoided offending a man he sought a treaty with. He could not, however, disguise his interest in Catherine’s fate, and Chapuys diligently hunted down the relevant information, which he was putting into a report for his master when he was interrupted by the news that Catherine had been condemned to death:
A few days ago the assembly of Parliament, or the States of this kingdom, began its sessions. The chief point of the Chancellor’s speech relates to the Queen’s misdeeds, which that official exaggerated and aggravated without measure. After some four days’ discussion, the members, lords, and prelates sitting in the said Parliament have declared the Queen, as well as Mme de Rochefort, guilty of high treason and lèse-majesté. As to the dowager duchess of Norfolk and her daughter, they are sentenced to perpetual imprisonment with confiscation of property, on the same plea and for the same reason that milord, his wife and the rest of the accomplices, had been condemned. Within two days the said resolution and award will be brought forward before the deputies of the people and Commons.
At this very moment, whilst I am writing these lines, some one comes to tell me that this very morning the Commons have passed a similar resolution on the Queen’s, Mme de Rochford’s, and the other two ladies’ cases. It is, therefore, to be apprehended that the Queen will soon be taken to the Tower. She is still in Syon House.3
Ten days before the emperor sent his request for more information about Catherine, a new session of Parliament had been opened by the king, who watched from his throne as Lord Chancellor Audley gave the maiden speech during which, according to Chapuys, he launched into a tirade on Catherine’s crimes that struck the ambassador as a gross distortion. Unfortunately, there is no direct record of what he said, but we do know that Audley concluded by contrasting Catherine’s failures with Henry’s ‘three shining qualities: in the perfect knowledge of the Word of God, the chiefest glory in a king; in the exact understanding of the art military, which is the second virtue in a prince; and in politic knowledge, which holds the third place, as bringing the greatest good to the republic’.4
Writs to summon this Parliament had been issued on 23 November, the same week that preparations for the juries and trial of Francis Dereham and Thomas Culpepper took place, which lends credence to the view that the Parliament of 1542 was initially fetched specifically to deal with Catherine.5 Here too was a significant contrast to the affair of Anne Boleyn, when Parliament had actually been dissolved a few weeks before she fell. With Catherine, where there was more evidence, the government were determined that everything should be done openly to allow any kind of scrutiny and spare the king the charge of unfairly executing a second wife. Chapuys’s letters to the emperor capture something of the stop-and-start nature of Catherine’s final month alive, when events could move quickly only to halt and be followed by stasis before the next burst of activity.
At the first session of the House of Lords, the clerical caste, the Lords Spiritual, were headed by the archbishops of Canterbury and York, joined by twenty-three bishops, whose position entitled them to sit in the Lords. The dukes of Norfolk and Suffolk were the highest-ranking members of the Lords Temporal, with the earls of Oxford, Arundel, Southampton, Sussex, Rutland, Hertford, Westmorland, Shrewsbury, Derby, Worcester, Cumberland, Huntingdon, and Bath; the countess’s estranged husband, the Earl of Bridgewater; and twenty-five viscounts and barons, including Lady Rochford’s father, Thomas Cromwell’s son, and Katherine Parr’s husband.6
The Lords had no intention of defending Catherine, especially since ‘the lasciviousness of her former life made people incline to believe any ill thing that could be reported of her’, but there was a spasm of discomfort at the proceedings.7 Different accounts suggest different origins for the decision to offer the queen a trial. Bishop Burnet believed the proposal came from the king via Lord Chancellor Audley, ‘that there might be no ground of suspicion of complaint, he proposed, that some of their number should be sent to examine the queen’.8 The Journal of the House of Lords implies that blue-blooded solidarity, or self-protection, inspired the offer, after the Lords murmured that to condemn the former queen by an Act of attainder was an affront to the state. Keen to secure unity, Audley made the offer on 21 January on the grounds that the ‘queen was in no sense a mean [average or unimportant] and private person but an illustrious and public one’.9 A deputation with the gentle but deadly presence of Archbishop Cranmer, gouty Suffolk, Lord Southampton, and the Bishop of Westminster were announced at Syon. They informed Catherine that the House of Lords considered it ‘just that a princess should be tried by equal laws’, that is, with trial by her peers, as Queen Anne Boleyn, her brother, Lord Montagu, the Marquess of Exeter, and the Duke of Buckingham had been.10
At this juncture, Catherine made another possible error when she declined the offer of a trial.11 Her preoccupation with her pride may have encouraged her to avoid the shame of having the details of her private life read out in court. She may also have gambled on the fact that it was only by abasing herself before her husband, appealing to his alleged sense of mercy, that she stood any chance of escape. The gateway to absolution was confession, and in her conversation with her visitors, Catherine did confess to her sinfulness, through which she insisted that she deserved death.12
In declining a trial, she threw herself at her husband’s feet and he trampled on her. An act of attainder was prepared against her in Parliament, couched as a petition that begged the king ‘not to be troubled at the matter, since that might be a means to short[en] his life’, to pardon anyone who had been detained or punished for criticising Queen Catherine since July 1540, that Catherine and her surviving accomplices, principally ‘the bawd, lady Rochford’ be attainted for high treason since ‘it appeared what she [Catherine] had intended to do’, and that ‘the king should not trouble himself to give his assent to this act in his own person, but grant it by letters patent under his hand and great seal’.
At Syon, Catherine had begged the Duke of Suffolk to pass on her plea that none of her relatives should suffer on her account, but although he gave a speech acknowledging her request, the legislation did not reflect it. Instead, it suggested that ‘the dowager duchess of Norfolk, countess of Bridg[e]water, the lord William Howard and his lady, four other men, and five women, who were already attainted by the course of common law, (except the Duchess of Norfolk and the Countess of Bridg[e]water,) that knew the queen’s vicious life, and had concealed it, should be all attainted of misprision of treason’.13 A law was also enacted that made it a criminal offence for anyone to withhold information about a royal bride if they knew she was not ‘a pure and clean maid’. It proved deeply unpopular as ‘a piece of grievous tyranny: since if a king, especially one of so imperious a temper as this was, should design such an honour to any of his subjects, who had failed in their former life, they must either defame themselves, by publishing so disgraceful a secret, or run the hazard of being afterwards attainted of treason’.14
The king’s men had served him well through orchestrating the last stage of the queen’s downfall, absolving Henry of all responsibility by casting it as a request from the peers of the realm. The clause specifying that Catherine’s death warrant could come into effect through a kind of rubber stamp rather than Henry’s own signature further distanced the king from a second act of uxoricide. The dowager duchess and the countess were condemned to perpetual imprisonment and the loss of all their worldly goods by acts of attainder and, on 4 February, Parliament made itself even more convenient by approving a new law that permitted the execution of those who ‘after their confessions or convictions of treason shall happen to fall mad or lunatic’.15 Everything necessary to grant the act of attainder’s request ‘that the queen and the lady Rochford should suffer the pains of death’ had been prepared.
Since the act and his wife’s condemnation, the king’s malaise had lifted. On the night of 29 January, the day the act was passed in Parliament, Greenwich Palace echoed with the sounds of ‘a grand supper’ given by the king, who flirted with Thomas Wyatt’s wife Elizabeth, another young woman related to Sir Anthony Browne, and with Anne Bassett.16 If Catherine had gambled on clemency, she may have suspected that she had made a poor bet when Sir John Gage arrived at Syon on 7 February to dismiss her remaining servants. It took him a few days to make arrangements on where they were to go and to settle their wages. Chapuys told the Hapsburgs, ‘In two or three days the matter will be cleared up, and it will be known what will become of her.’17
Three days later, that Friday, the last of Catherine’s illusions were snatched from her when most of her servants left and she was informed that barges had arrived to take her to the Tower. She descended into a blind panic at the very sight of the councillors who had arrived as her escort. They begged her to be reasonable, but she was so terrified that she could only move to struggle. Eventually, they lost their patience and manhandled Catherine into the waiting barge. She cut a pathetic figure in her black velvet dress and French hood as they manoeuvred her towards the smallest of three boats. Lord Southampton, escorted by a large retinue of servants, represented the government in the first; the Duke of Suffolk sat in the final barge, which was full of armed men. Catherine was put in a covered boat, with four waiting women, the last of her servants, a group that quite probably included her sister Isabella, and four sailors, who pushed off in the fading afternoon light.
By the time they passed under London Bridge, where Thomas and Francis’s heads remained on display, the sun had already set. Southampton and Suffolk waited with Sir John Gage on the steps of the Tower to greet her ‘with the same honour and ceremonies as if she were still reigning’.18 Catherine was escorted to her apartments, which may very well have been the fine set of rooms where Anne Boleyn had spent the last two-and-a-half weeks of her life in 1536. Somewhere in the vast fortress, Lady Rochford had been brought back into custody, and she ‘had shewn symptoms of madness until the very moment when they announced to her that she must die’.19 Perhaps she had been exaggerating and prolonging her alleged ill health after the first breakdown in the hope of saving herself, or perhaps the sentence shocked her into sanity. If all that was left was death, it had to be done well.
At Westminster, the MPs from the House of Commons were summoned to hear the queen and Lady Rochford’s sentences on Saturday, the 11th. The lords, dressed in their robes, either clerical colours or the rich reds of the secular noblemen, gave their assent and Catherine and Jane passed beyond the chance of reprieve.20 There could be no executions on the Sabbath, when Catherine was told in the evening to prepare her soul since she was to be beheaded early the next morning. A thirty-one-year-old clergyman called John White was brought to her rooms to take her last confession. White, who eventually succeeded Stephen Gardiner as Bishop of Winchester, had read divinity at New College, Oxford, eight years earlier and was a religious traditionalist, with a strong belief in the sacrament of confession and the existence of purgatory.21 As she knelt and prayed with White, Catherine reiterated what she had done with Henry Manox and Francis Dereham, but ‘took God and His angels to be her witnesses, upon salvation of her soul, that she was guiltless of that act of defiling the sovereign’s bed’.22 Catherine then made a curious request which could not be refused – she wanted to see the block that she would die on. Her marriage had begun on the day when Cromwell’s death was botched; she had been queen when Lady Salisbury was all but hacked apart on the scaffold. She explained to her gaolers that she wanted the opportunity to practise ‘by way of experiment’, and she did so, over and over again, laying her slender neck into the wooden curvature.23
The Tower is always locked and sealed at sundown. Catherine heard the gates shutting and the locks turning as she faced her last night. At about seven o’clock in the morning, the privy councillors arrived to witness her execution. Her cousin, Lord Surrey, attended, just as he had Thomas Cromwell’s death eighteen months earlier, though not in the same boisterous spirits. The only councillors to miss it were the Duke of Suffolk, who had been compelled to sit for health reasons during most of his recent speeches in the House of Lords and whose ill health may have been exacerbated by the expedition on the freezing river to fetch Catherine on Friday, and her uncle Norfolk, who had abandoned not only her but Lady Rochford, his niece by marriage, and his brother, sister, sister-in-law, and ‘ungracious’ stepmother in a letter to the king in which he disavowed all affection for them and knowledge of their crimes.24 Norfolk had attended sessions of the Privy Council the day before the beheading, so it was apparently a diplomatic choice to stay away from Catherine’s death.25
She was escorted out into the chilly morning air and led to a scaffold that stood on the same site where Anne Boleyn had been executed.26 Catherine’s hope that the execution would be private was not granted, although the decision to hold it within the confines of the Tower saved her from dying in front of a crowd as large as Cromwell’s and Lord Hungerford’s. One of the men watching her was Ottwell Johnson, a London-based merchant with family ties to Calais, where Catherine’s father had sought refuge in the twilight of a dwindling life. Edmund, who had endured so much humiliation, had fathered a daughter aggressively averse to it. Now, a demure and fragile figure in a dark gown, her feet moved up the steps to the scaffold. Johnson watched Catherine with admiration as she made steady progress towards the headsman. He did not write down her exact words, but he told his brother two days later that she died well.* That day, at the palace, her husband was bouncing from room to room overseeing preparations for the guests who had been invited to attend a banquet with him the day after, the feast of St Valentine. Catherine’s marriage ended as it had begun, with a celebration and a slaughter. For her last performance, she was, as ever when in public, note perfect. She spoke of Christ and the redemption promised to all who believed. She urged the crowd to learn from her example and effusively praised the justice of her sentence and the good government of the king. There were no last-minute protestations of love, nor was there admission of guilt for the adultery she was suspected of but had not formally been condemned for.
A few women from her suite stood by to perform their last service for Catherine, who sank to the straw and nuzzled her neck, bare and exposed, into the embrace of the block. She had made it familiar. She would leave with dignity. The feared final humiliation was avoided as the axe rose into the air, then descended at rapid speed to slice through Catherine’s neck with one clean and merciful stroke. Blood gushed forth onto the scaffold; the dead woman’s head thudded into the straw; the ladies moved forward with a cloak that they threw over the little body and then they lifted it, and the head, over to one side of the scaffold. Jane Boleyn, Lady Rochford, was brought out to follow her mistress. She sang from the same hymn sheet – she was a wretched sinner, as all Christians were, she begged for mercy from God and prayers from the bystanders, she praised the king – and knelt down. For her too the end was swift. A whistle in the air, a momentary trauma, and the play was over.
No one recorded Jane’s final speech either, but Ottwell Johnson wrote: ‘I saw the Queen and the Lady Rochford suffer within the Tower, the day following, whose souls (I doubt not) be with God, for they made the most godly and Christians’ ends, that ever was heard tell of (I think) since the world’s creation; uttering their lively faith in the blood of Christ only, and with goodly words and steadfast countenances.’27 Had Catherine lived out a normal span and died with the title she acquired on her wedding day, representatives of London guilds would have lined the route her coffin took through the city. Hundreds of flaming torches would have flickered in the darkness over the many days it took to inter her. One maiden for each year of her earthly life would have carried a taper, while anthems and requiems rang out to pray for her soul’s entry into paradise. Mountains of black cloth would have been issued to every member of the royal households, down to the pageboys, all of whom would have appeared in the procession, honouring their departed mistress. Hundreds of poor folk, encouraged to pray for her soul, would have moved with knights and noblemen on horseback, carrying displays of Catherine’s heraldry and images of her patron saints. While her bier rested in the chapel, six women would have kept vigil, on rota, kneeling throughout. Alms would have been issued in the dead queen’s name. All the panoply and pomp of monarchy would have accompanied her off the face of the earth. Bishops would have blessed her grave before her body was lowered into it, after which her chamberlain, his deputies, the officers of her household, and her gentlemen ushers would have broken their staffs, symbols of their office, and hurled the broken pieces into the grave to symbolise that their service to the queen was at an end.28
Instead, her body was taken, with Lady Rochford’s, to the chapel of St Peter-ad-vincula a few yards away, and the stones beneath the altar were prised up. Jane Boleyn and Catherine Howard were buried quickly next to the mouldering remains of Lady Salisbury, Thomas More, Jane’s husband, and another queen of England. The prayers for the faithfully departed were hastily intoned, the cannons fired out over London, the stones were returned, the few attendees genuflected to the altar and walked out of the little church into the courtyard, where the scaffold still stood. The body of Catherine Howard was left to a vast silence. In all probability, she had not yet reached her twenty-first birthday.
* The story that she proclaimed, ‘I die a Queen, but I would rather die the wife of Culpepper’, is apocryphal and comes from an account which claimed Catherine had been interrogated by Thomas Cromwell.