Chapter 23
Her?
Don’t even mention her – she no longer exists.
– Sophocles, Antigone (c.441 BC)
Twelve days after Catherine’s death, Maria of Austria wrote to Eustace Chapuys. The majority of the letter was occupied by a précis of her brothers’ activities in the Hapsburg Empire. On English affairs, the queen regent told the ambassador, ‘We cannot do otherwise than thank you most cordially for the good service you are doing by continually informing Us of occurrences in that country.’1 This was Maria’s only oblique reference to Catherine’s death. The former queen had already passed beyond relevance. Glaziers were paid to remove her arms from the windows and niches of the English royal palaces, and seventeen months later, Henry married Katherine Parr, an elegant and intelligent widow in her early thirties.2
The apparent desire to draw a veil over an embarrassing incident, now that a blood sacrifice had been offered in atonement, saved Catherine’s friends and family from their sentences of life imprisonment. All were pardoned and set free, most in May 1542. After that, the majority of those servants and friends who had known Catherine, and come perilously close to dying with her, vanished into the safety of anonymity. Francis’s friend Edward Waldegrave even managed to return to service for the Prince of Wales, and by 1545 he had sufficient good standing at court for the new queen to refer to him as ‘our well-beloved Edward Waldegrave, servant to our most dear and entirely beloved son the lord prince’.3 Waldegrave married a Chesworth alumna, Francis’s former lover and Catherine’s friend, Joan Bulmer, after she became a widow. Her first marriage had never been a happy one and, after her imprisonment, her first husband had refused to be reconciled with her.4 She and her second husband had five children together and retired to a manor house in Warwickshire, purchased by Edward.5 He died there in 1584, and Joan outlived him to die on 10 December 1590, the forty-ninth anniversary of Francis Dereham’s execution. The couple are still buried in St Mary’s Church in Lawford; their tomb bears the inscription: ‘The end of the just is peace’.6
The Dowager Duchess of Norfolk also left the Tower in the spring of 1542 and after she died in 1545 she was buried next to her husband, whom she had outlived by just over two decades. In her grave, Tudor politics managed to disturb Agnes one last time. With the last of the priories and monasteries closing, the Howards moved her body to St Mary-at-Lambeth, the church near Norfolk House. Agnes’s bones remain there, but because of significant Victorian renovations to the church, which is now a museum, her resting place, along with that of Anne Boleyn’s mother, who was buried there in 1538, is no longer marked.7
The diplomatic crisis, of which Catherine had witnessed the acceleration in the summer and autumn of 1541, culminated with English invasions of Scotland and France, wars that changed, or ended, the lives of many whom Catherine had known. Her brother-in-law Sir Edward Baynton, who had served and then abandoned her, died in the French campaign. Sensibly, Baynton made a will before he crossed the Channel, which included bequests to Archbishop Cranmer and Richard Rich. In France, Baynton was in charge of overseeing the transport home of sick and wounded soldiers. It is possible that he contracted an illness from this work that resulted in his death on 27 November 1544.8 Catherine’s sister Isabella subsequently married the MP Sir James Stumpe, who had been her stepson-in-law until his first wife, Bridget Baynton, died. Isabella, who married again after Stumpe’s death, passed away in 1573.9
Thanks to Henry’s wars, the Countess of Bridgewater was never able to reunite her family. Her daughter Anne seems to have returned to her care and was eventually betrothed to Lord Stourton, who died before they were married, though as proof of his affection he left Anne ‘all my plate of silver gilt’.10 The countess’s son Gruffydd took up his mother’s quest to have his father posthumously pardoned; he became an MP and one of his sons, Walter, fought for Elizabeth I.11 Her youngest son Thomas did not return. At the time of the countess’s arrest, the Crown had placed Thomas in ward to the Bishop of Carlisle and sent him north to join the bishop’s household. Evidently, Thomas detested his time there, because he ran away and, to ensure he was not sent back, crossed the border and offered his services to the Scottish Crown. He had inherited the Howard skill on the battlefield, and in 1544 he commanded 200 men at the Battle of Blar-na-leine. The skirmish, which aimed to crush an insurrection, ‘began’, in one contemporary’s account, ‘with the discharge of arrows at a distance; but when their shafts were spent both parties rushed to close combat, and, attacking each other furiously … a dreadful slaughter ensued’.12 The countess’s son was, at the age of about nineteen or twenty, among the dead. Like his cousin Catherine, he was buried without pomp, and today his remains probably rest somewhere near the ruins of Beauly Priory in Aird, Scotland.
We know very little of Charles Howard’s movements following his rustication in 1541, but one seventeenth-century account states that he was killed fighting in France three years later.13 None of Catherine’s brothers seems to have fathered children, and the same source states that Henry Howard died at a relatively young age. The only brother to grow old was George, who soldiered in the war against Scotland, where, like his father long before him, he was knighted.14 He successfully revived his career at court, where he remained until his death in May 1580. He served as a gentleman usher to his second cousin, Queen Elizabeth I, was elected a Member of Parliament for the new constituency of Reigate in 1563, and, like his father, became a justice of the peace.15
In the months and years after Catherine’s death, Henry VIII’s moods acquired a new unpredictability. His health collapsed as his weight increased, and he died, morbidly obese, at the Palace of Whitehall on 28 January 1547, aged fifty-five. The snow and ice made the roads to the palace almost impassable, and by the time Cranmer made it to Henry’s bedside, there was no time for the last rites. Instead, the archbishop cradled the king’s hand as he passed away. His will, which confirmed his self-created position as ‘in earth immediately under God the Supreme Head of the Church of England and Ireland’, passed the throne to his nine-year-old son as King Edward VI.16 Henry’s body was interred at Windsor Castle, next to that of the new king’s mother, Queen Jane Seymour. During the journey to Windsor, the procession stopped for a night at crumbling Syon, the abbey where Catherine had spent her last winter. A story circulated later that as Henry’s coffin rested in Syon’s chapel, a putrid liquid leaked from it and local dogs sniffed around it the next morning, fulfilling, in some Catholics’ view, a prophecy made against Henry that dogs would one day lick his blood, as they had with Ahab, a wicked and idolatrous king in the Old Testament.17 Henry left instructions for a magnificent sepulchre to be constructed at Windsor, but his children lacked either the funds or inclination to complete it. Henry’s grave is marked today by a plain black marble slab, installed in the reign of the nineteenth century’s William IV.
Henry’s death saved Catherine’s uncle Norfolk from following her to the scaffold by a matter of hours. In the last year of his reign, Henry had turned on the Howards again, having convinced himself that the family’s patriarch and heir were both plotting against him. Catherine’s cousin, the Earl of Surrey, had led one of the English armies to defeat at the Battle of Saint-Etienne in France. Surrey was so aghast at his actions that he apparently begged his companions to ‘stick their swords through his guts and make him forget this day’, but his contrition and shame did not stop a burst of suicidal egotism when he commissioned a portrait of himself with a coat of arms clearly advertising the Howards’ descent from Saint Edward the Confessor and King Edward III.18 It looked, to a paranoid Henry, as if the Howards were planning to snatch power from him or his son, and Surrey was executed for treason on 19 January 1547, the last political casualty of Henry’s torturous reign. His father was condemned by act of attainder on the 27th, but with the king’s death a day later, the guardians of the new regime were too nervous to open the reign with the execution of the country’s highest-ranking peer.19 Instead, Norfolk was kept in the Tower.
As with Surrey, the violent vagaries of contemporary politics claimed many of those involved in Catherine’s story. One of her brothers-in-law, Sir Thomas Arundell, was executed for treason on 26 February 1552. Both the Seymour brothers met similar ends – Thomas, who had inventoried Catherine’s jewels when she fell, was beheaded on 20 March 1549, and clever Edward Seymour, Earl of Hertford, the first man to tell Thomas Culpepper that his thoughts about the queen were enough to condemn him to death, on 22 January 1552.20 Catherine’s former master of the horse, Sir John Dudley, became the most powerful man in Edward VI’s government as Duke of Northumberland; he was executed for treason on 22 August 1553. John Lascelles, the devout evangelical whose conversation with Archbishop Cranmer in 1541 had set in motion Catherine’s downfall, was burned for heresy on 16 July 1546. Ten years later, Cranmer, Catherine’s most reluctant but zealous interrogator, perished when the government of Catherine’s stepdaughter, Queen Mary I, condemned him to burn in the centre of Oxford. The site of his stake is marked by a small metal cross on Broad Street.21
Mary Tudor’s succession, after the death of her half brother Edward VI at the age of fifteen in 1553, was hard won. Mary was popular and tenacious enough to defeat a coup that aimed to disinherit her in favour of her young and conveniently Protestant cousin, Lady Jane Grey. Anne of Cleves, still a mistress in the art of pragmatic supplication, waited quietly in the countryside to see if Mary or Jane would emerge victorious, swore loyalty to Mary, and received a state funeral at Westminster Abbey when she died, possibly from cancer, in 1557.22 Until the very end, she was praised for her generosity to her servants, her cheerfulness, and the good table she offered as a hostess.23
Cardinal Reginald Pole, the son of the butchered Countess of Salisbury, returned to England after decades in exile. In Henry VIII’s time, Reginald had been referred to as ‘the Archtraitor Reginald Pole, enemy to God’s word and his natural country’; in 1556 he replaced Cranmer as Archbishop of Canterbury, and he served Mary until his death in 1558.24 Mary’s reign also benefited two clergymen closely associated with Catherine’s queenship. Her uncle’s ally Stephen Gardiner, Bishop of Winchester, had languished in prison for most of Edward VI’s reign. Under Mary, Gardiner became Lord Chancellor, a post he held until he died of natural causes at his episcopal palace in Southwark in November 1555. Edmund Bonner, the bishop who had married Catherine to Henry in 1540, was less lucky. He used the Marian regime’s crackdown on radicals to pursue anyone suspected of Protestant sympathies, earning himself the nickname of ‘Bloody Bonner’ in the process. When Mary died in November 1558, her sister and successor, Elizabeth, was so revolted by Bonner’s behaviour that she had him degraded from his diocese and imprisoned. He died as an inmate in the Marshalsea prison in 1569.
Mary’s triumph in 1553 brought relief for the Duke of Norfolk, who had lived in the Tower for six years by the time she set him free, as she did most of her father’s and brother’s prisoners. The duke did not enjoy his liberty for long. He died in his mansion at Kenninghall on 25 August 1554, at the age of eighty, the same age as his late father when he had expired in the very different world of 1524. Mary I also, unintentionally, gave a kind of reprieve to Catherine. As a young woman, Mary had lost some of her closest friends and allies to acts of attainder, the notorious legal mechanism which allowed for execution without a trial. When she became queen, she retrospectively annulled en masse the condemnations that her father’s government had secured through attainder, meaning that Catherine Howard was legally pardoned by the member of the royal family who had disliked her the most. Mary’s actions brought a husband to Catherine’s former colleague and then her maid, Anne Bassett, whose prospects had been ruined by her stepfather’s arrest in 1540. Bassett had remained single until June 1554, when she married Walter Hungerford, the son of the peer executed on Catherine’s wedding day. Queen Mary danced at Anne’s wedding celebrations, and she restored several of the late Lord Hungerford’s confiscated estates to the newlyweds.25
By the time Elizabeth I succeeded to the throne in 1558, natural deaths had carried off many of the other men involved in Catherine’s career. Sir Edmund Knyvet, the cousin whose hand she was credited with saving, fulfilled his vow to use his sword-wielding hand in the Crown’s service. He helped suppress a rebellion in Norfolk in 1549 and died at his London town house on 1 May 1551. The two courtiers who were pardoned during the celebrations that marked Catherine’s official entry into London, Sir Thomas Wyatt and Sir John Wallop, returned to royal service, but Wyatt did not survive for long. He had been tasked with escorting a diplomatic mission, and then the Earl of Tyrone, to London when he caught a fever and died eight months after Catherine’s execution. Wallop served in the wars against France and was inducted into the Order of the Garter in 1543. He died in 1551, and his will dutifully acknowledged Edward VI as rightful head of the Church, although, true to the Catholic sympathies which had earned him a spell at the Tower in 1540, it also asked for the intercession of the Virgin Mary in easing his soul’s passage into Heaven.
Charles de Marillac, whose correspondence provides so much of our knowledge about English court life during Catherine’s career, was recalled as the relationship between the two countries deteriorated. In France, he acquired the favour of King Henri II, who succeeded to the throne in 1547, and during Henri’s reign de Marillac’s careers as clergyman, courtier, and diplomat continued to flourish. He represented his king on embassies to the Hapsburg Empire, the papal states, and the Swiss cantons, and he rose through the Church hierarchy to become Archbishop of Vienne. The last act of his public life was a speech in 1560 in which he begged for toleration for France’s growing number of Protestants. The two pillars of a successful monarchy, he said, were ‘the integrity of religion and the benevolence of the people. If they are strong, it is not necessary to fear that obedience will be lost.’26 After this advice, given on the eve of France descending into a generation-long trauma with eight religious wars, de Marillac retired, and he died on 2 December 1560. His former adversary, Eustace Chapuys, had passed away in Louvain in January 1556.27
The sectarian divide, evident in both countries during Catherine’s time as queen, intensified in the decades after her death. Most of her former ladies-in-waiting spent quiet lives as women of property, but in terms of how religion and politics divided and shaped her generation, the fates of Lady Margaret Douglas and the Duchess of Suffolk are revealing.
After her second brush with disgrace for her liaison with Catherine’s brother, Margaret Douglas wisely reinvented herself as an icon of royal propriety. She submitted to an arranged marriage with the pretty Earl of Lennox in 1544 as part of her uncle’s manoeuvres to increase English influence in Scotland.28 Lennox was a French-educated, pro-English Scottish émigré, and Henry provided generously for the couple. Fortunately for Margaret, it was a happy marriage, and the couple also agreed on religion. Whatever her levels of piety during her uncle’s reign, by the time her cousin Mary succeeded to the throne, Margaret was a zealous Roman Catholic.
Where she had once enjoyed romantic intrigues, a more mature Margaret occupied herself with political aims, usually with the same energy and lack of long-term success. Her faith, her ancestry, and her two healthy sons briefly made her seem like a more attractive candidate as heiress to the throne than her cousin, Princess Elizabeth. Margaret’s favoured position at Mary I’s court fuelled her delusional belief that she might succeed her as queen, but Mary had come to power on the argument that it was fundamentally wrong to tamper with the succession. In the meantime, Margaret allowed confidence to master good sense when she took to taunting Elizabeth, who suffered from migraines and was notoriously sensitive to strong smells and loud noises, by installing her kitchens immediately above Elizabeth’s apartments at court. The strategy did not pay dividends when Elizabeth became queen and promptly made it clear that Margaret was no longer welcome at court. The animosity between the cousins intensified, and Margaret found herself imprisoned in the Tower for the second time in her life when her eldest son, Lord Darnley, visited Scotland and married Mary, Queen of Scots, a move which Elizabeth interpreted to be the result of his mother’s ambition and a threat to her own position.
The rest of Margaret’s life was stalked by tragedy. Darnley was detested in Scotland, and at the age of twenty-one his body was found in the smoking ruins of an Edinburgh townhouse. Scottish politics then claimed the life of Margaret’s husband, who was shot dead by his opponents four years later, and their only surviving child, Charles, died in his early twenties. Despite their animosity, Queen Elizabeth visited Margaret to break the news of her husband’s death in person, and she paid for Margaret’s state funeral when she died in 1578.29
Margaret Douglas’s former colleague in the queen’s household, Katherine Brandon, Duchess of Suffolk, outlived her by two years. Katherine had become as fervent in her Protestantism as Margaret was in her Catholicism. Under Edward VI, she was a generous patroness to evangelical preachers and scholars, delighted in the disgrace of Bishop Gardiner, and described Edward’s reign as a time when ‘it was merry with the lambs’.30 She endured almost unimaginable heartbreak in 1551 when her only two sons, Henry and Charles, died within hours of each other. They were both students at Cambridge when they contracted the sweat, a strain of the plague that was famous for the speed with which it could claim a victim.31 Katherine, left a widow after the duke’s death in 1545, married one of her gentleman ushers, and they had two children together, Susan and Peregrine. The family left England in 1555 when Katherine came under pressure from Mary I’s government to convert to Catholicism. They were living as guests of King Sigismund II Augustus of Poland when they heard the news of Elizabeth’s accession and returned home. In old age, Katherine increasingly sympathised with the Puritan cause and despaired at Elizabeth I’s attempts to reach a religious compromise.
Elizabeth I, who died unmarried and childless after a reign of forty-five years in 1603, may have been indirectly and partly influenced by Catherine in one of the most significant decisions of her life. Elizabeth’s favourite, Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester, whose father had served as Catherine’s master of the horse, told a diplomat in the 1560s that he and Elizabeth ‘had first become friends before she was eight years old. Both then and later (when she was old enough to marry) she said she never wished to do so. Thereafter he had not seen her waver in that decision.’32 Although this admission is often paraphrased to say that Elizabeth developed her aversion to marriage specifically in reaction to Catherine’s death, and it would be unwise to see Catherine’s end as the crucible of the Virgin Queen, Elizabeth was eight years old at the time of Catherine’s execution. Leicester’s remarks indicate that it may, quite naturally, have affected her, even if only as a childish vow which, in light of her subsequent refusal to marry, Leicester chose to regard as decisive.
For the Howards and the Tudors, Catherine remained persona non grata for the rest of the century. There seems to have been a consensus, even among those charitable enough to view her with pity, that Catherine’s behaviour had destroyed herself and unfairly damaged others. From the sanctuary of his beloved library, Lady Rochford’s father, Lord Morley, translated a fourteenth-century text, De claris mulieribus, from Latin into English. The book structured its chapters around individual lives, in this case the great or notorious women of history and mythology. Lord Morley picked forty-six from the original text’s roster of 104, and his daughter’s modern biographer, Julia Fox, has convincingly argued that in the section on the Trojan princess Polyxena, Morley made a subtle validation of his daughter and condemnation of her mistress. In most places, Morley’s translation is word perfect, but in his account of Polyxena, who was sacrificed to atone for the mistakes of the adulterous Helen of Sparta, he inserted a sentence bemoaning that ‘so sweet a maiden should be devoured by the hands of Pyrrhus for to satisfy for another woman’s offence’.33
As far as we know, only one courtier wrote a full and unambiguous reflection on Catherine’s downfall. In retirement, George Cavendish, a talented writer who had once served as a gentleman usher to Cardinal Wolsey, composed a series of first-person monologues which he put into the mouths of the Henrician court’s most famous casualties, each of which attempted to impart the truth of the person, as Cavendish had known or perceived them, with a wider moral point about why they had fallen. Cavendish, whose brother William had remained at court long after he retired, included the figures of Catherine and Culpepper in his Metrical Visions. Although we do not know if Cavendish ever met either of them, his portraits of Thomas and Catherine are detailed enough to suggest that he had access to firsthand information about them. Culpepper was dismissed as an impious rogue, who ‘drowned in the depth of my own outrage’.34 With Catherine, Cavendish focused almost exclusively on her physical beauty, which he blamed for leading her into sin. Comments on Catherine’s appearance were frequent and effusive in nearly every near-contemporary account of her downfall: when Nikander Nucius, a Greek-born diplomat in service to the Hapsburg emperor, visited London in 1545, the skulls of Culpepper and Dereham were still being displayed over London Bridge, and Nucius was told that they had perished for falling in love with a queen who had been ‘the most beautiful woman of her time’.35 For George Cavendish, Catherine’s loveliness was ‘the chief cause of my mischief’. Yet, his text does show restrained compassion towards her by suggesting that while beauty inevitably incited lust, which in its turn brings ruin, these dangers are commonplace among the young. Cavendish’s interpretation of Catherine was of a youthful siren damned for adolescent mistakes. His spectre of Catherine plaintively admits that it is ‘hard for youth against vice to fight: for youth is blind and hath no sight’.36 Metrical Visions suggested that Catherine’s epitaph should be:
By proof of me, none can deny
That beauty and lust, enemies to chastity,
Have been the twain that hath decayed in me,
And hath brought me to this and untoward;
Some time a queen, and now a headless Howard.
There was, of course, no epitaph on a grave that remained unmarked. Nor could the Howards have erected a memorial to an attainted traitor, even if they had desired to do so.37 As one of Edward VI’s privy councillors wrote, ‘He that dieth with honour liveth for ever, / And the defamed dead recovereth never.’38 For many, Catherine remained as Cavendish saw her – a beautiful but promiscuous young woman who committed adultery and paid for that mistake with her life. Compared to queens like Anne Boleyn or Katherine of Aragon, who tangibly and deliberately mattered, Catherine has been depicted as an irrelevance, the author of a shallow yet profane queenship.
It has been argued here that Catherine probably did not commit physical adultery with Thomas Culpepper and that her denials of it were probably truthful, but that adultery would likely have taken place had their liaison not been discovered in November 1541. Despite how often she is described as a queen executed for committing adultery, the treason laws under Henry VIII meant that she could be, and was, condemned for her intention, rather than her actions. A privy councillor wrote later that ‘before her marriage, she had contaminated her virginity, and afterwards committed or, at the leastwise, sought means to commit adultery’.39 As for her promiscuity, the copious evidence left to us indicates that she had two sexual partners – her first love and her husband.
Her story is, like so many lives, one which was predominantly shaped not by intention or design, but by the unquantifiable power of luck. This may be frustrating when we try to construct an easily understood narrative, but Catherine, whose life is often seen as one moulded and ended by conspiracy, exemplifies the impact of the unpredictable and the improbable. It was improbable luck that first brought her to the king’s attention in 1539–40, and it was appalling circumstance that led from Mary Hall’s revelations to Catherine’s execution four or five months later. Had Mary retracted her statement, if John Lascelles had decided it was too dangerous to bring to Cranmer, or Henry had dismissed the latter’s letter, had Culpepper burned Catherine’s note, Francis Dereham stayed in Ireland, or if he had not quarrelled with the dowager duchess and travelled to Pontefract in August 1541, had Lady Rochford withheld gossip about Culpepper’s infatuation, if Catherine had held her nerve and not attempted to lie so clumsily during her interrogations, or had Henry decided not to prosecute her to the end, when even some in the House of Lords were uncertain about the merits of executing her – if any of these had played differently, the outcome of the scandal might have been disgrace or survival, rather than death.
In Greek myth, Persephone was the daughter of Spring, snatched from the land of the living by the god of death to keep him company. As queen, Catherine made many mistakes, but it was not a foregone conclusion that she should pay for those errors with her life. At every stage of Catherine’s fall, after the first revelation, her husband’s hand can be seen guiding her into the grave as punishment for her betrayal and humiliation of him. Catherine’s career offers a window into the mesmerising brutality of Henrician England as it lurched through the final decade of Henry’s reign and the first of the English Reformation. In this world, Catherine Howard did not have the impact of other English queens, before or after, and it would be disingenuous to claim otherwise, but that augments, rather than lessens, her particular tragedy. Looked at in detail, the portrait that emerges of Henry’s fifth wife is of an elegant, beautiful, and vivacious young woman. Her faults were obvious, but usually trivial. She could be vain, quick-tempered, egotistical, reckless, and when in a temper, capable of great rudeness. Catherine was mediocre in everything, except her appearance and her charm. She was a girl whom many of us may know or have known.
In his letter to his brother and family in Calais, in which he gave them, and us, the only extant eyewitness account of Catherine Howard’s final moments, the merchant Ottwell Johnson added a postscript: ‘I pray you let them be made partakers of this news, for surely the thing is well worth the knowledge.’40