Appendix I
There are three key problems confronting any assessment of Catherine’s portraiture. Firstly, after her execution there is a good chance that any images of Catherine would have been destroyed or ignored, until their identity became a subject of debate to later generations. A miniature alleged to show Catherine as painted by Hans Holbein was sold at Antwerp in 1668, then vanished from history.1 The allure of the lost is always potent, but even this portrait may have been mislabelled, as there is no documentary evidence that Catherine ever had her portrait painted – the second serious difficulty – and so it may be that Brett Dolman was correct in his recent paper when he argued that in searching for a surviving likeness of Catherine Howard we may very well be hunting for the impossible.2 The paperwork could, of course, have been lost, in which case one could argue that a surviving portrait or portraits would be the most obvious pieces of evidence that Catherine did indeed sit for an artist.
The third problem is the enthusiasm with which collections and patrons hope to own or view an image of one of Henry VIII’s six wives. Most people would rather discover a portrait of Queen Catherine Howard than one of Elizabeth Cromwell or Baroness Monteagle. The changing identifications of many Tudor portraits is thus a proverbial game of musical chairs. For example, a miniature allegedly showing Anne Boleyn by Lucas Horenbout has absolutely nothing to support that identification.3 The sitter’s brooch, once cited as the Ormond falcon and thus proof that it is a portrait of a Boleyn, is in fact too tiny, even upon magnification, to show anything clearly. The same miniature had previously been identified as Jane Seymour and then Katherine of Aragon, before it was floated as a potential likeness of Mary Boleyn, or her sister-in-law, Lady Rochford.
There are six original images, most with copies or derivatives, which have been identified as likenesses of Catherine. An incomplete Holbein sketch in the Royal Collection that shows a pretty young woman with auburn hair and a gentle smile was first formally identified as Catherine in 1867 on no compelling ground beyond optimism. There was no tradition placing it as Catherine before the eighteenth century and precious little in the way of documentary support afterwards.4 There is also a miniature currently held at the Yale Center for British Art in New Haven that has been suggested as a potential portrait of Catherine.5 The sitter’s clothes place it at approximately the right time for it to be Catherine, and the current tentative reattribution to Lucas Horenbout rules out earlier hypotheses that it depicts either Elizabeth I or Lady Jane Grey, since Horenbout was dead before either queen was of the right age; the lady in the Yale miniature does bear a certain physical resemblance to the future Mary I.6 It cannot, of course, absolutely be ruled out as a likeness of Catherine, especially given the style of costume, but there are other candidates whom the Yale miniature is far more likely to depict.
In the chapel of King’s College, Cambridge, the east window is one magnificent stained-glass monument among many. It shows the scene ‘The Queen of Sheba Bringing Gifts to Solomon’, and the marked physical similarities between the biblical king, sitting on his golden throne beneath a cobalt-blue canopy, and Henry VIII, prompted the theory that the face of the queen of Sheba was inspired by Catherine.7 The stained-glass queen wears a gown of green and white, the Tudor colours, with ruby, pink, and gold details. Gold bands rope around her dress like chains as she prostrates herself at Solomon/Henry’s feet, proffering a golden vessel in tribute and flanked by her sturdy guards and ladies-in-waiting in amethyst fur-lined robes and ruby gowns. The presence of the traditional crest and motto of the Prince of Wales elsewhere in the same window means that it must have been completed after Edward’s birth in 1537, while the presence of the initials ‘HK’ gives us a date between July 1540 and January 1547, the period after Edward’s birth when Henry was married to women called Catherine/Katherine. It also rules out recent speculation that the queen of Sheba’s face might have been inspired by Anne Boleyn’s.8 It is possible that the east window at King’s was finished during Henry’s sixth marriage, to Katherine Parr, and even if it was completed during his time with Catherine Howard, as seems probable, the depiction of the queen of Sheba is neither clear nor detailed enough to provide us with much of an idea of the young queen’s appearance.
Perhaps the most famous portrait of ‘Catherine’ is a half-length by Hans Holbein, about twenty-nine inches tall, of a lady in a high-necked dark dress and a white French hood trimmed with gold braid. She wears a golden necklace, waist chain and rings, and a large pendant that seems to depict the angels leading Lot’s family from the biblical destruction of Sodom.9 On either side of the sitter’s head, Holbein has added the biographical detail ‘ETATIS SVÆ 21’ (‘AGED 21’). The original is owned by the Toledo Museum of Art in Ohio, which acquired it in 1926, and copies are housed at the National Portrait Gallery in London and Hever Castle in Kent.10
It was identified as Catherine by the art historian Sir Lionel Cust in 1909, after he was asked to examine it by its owners, the Cromwell family. The portrait’s association with the Cromwells is enough to prove beyond reasonable doubt that whoever sat for this portrait in the sixteenth century, it was not Catherine Howard. Few families had less of a reason to keep a portrait of her than Thomas Cromwell’s, nor did the family have a tradition of regarding the unidentified lady as one of Henry VIII’s queens. Up to about 1817, they seemed to think it might show Oliver Cromwell’s mother, Elizabeth, but the clothing is at least a generation too early for that.11 Later in the nineteenth century, the rather magnificently named Avarilla Oliveria Cromwell believed it was a likeness of Henry VIII’s youngest sister, Mary, an interpretation shared and promoted by the talented amateur artist and historian Sarah Capel-Coningsby, Countess of Essex.12
Lionel Cust’s findings, published in the Burlington Magazine in 1910, enjoyed wide acceptance for the next forty years, which might explain why the Toledo portrait still crops up on so many souvenirs commemorating Catherine and Henry VIII’s other family members.13 However, as early as 1953 it was being questioned at a Liverpool exhibition, whose organisers preferred to showcase it as an Unknown Lady, a conclusion shared today by its curators in Toledo, who label it as a Portrait of a Lady, probably a Member of the Cromwell Family.14 When one of its copies was sold in a Christie’s auction room in 1961, it was tentatively marketed to prospective buyers under Avarilla Cromwell’s suggestion of Henry’s sister Mary Tudor, Queen of France and Duchess of Suffolk.15 Eight years later, Sir Roy Strong, director of the National Portrait Gallery, argued that it was a portrait of Catherine’s lady-in-waiting Lady Elizabeth Cromwell, Gregory’s wife and Queen Jane’s sister. The style of the sleeves suggests it was painted between 1535 and 1540 which, with the sitter’s age given as twenty-one, would put her date of birth between 1513 and 1519. Elizabeth Seymour’s date of birth is usually given either as circa 1513 or circa 1518. As a wealthy married woman and then as Cromwell’s daughter-in-law, she was in a position to afford a portrait by Holbein. Some viewers detect facial similarities, particularly around the mouth, chin, and nose, between the sitter and Queen Jane in a portrait by the same artist, and Elizabeth was a member by marriage of the family who owned the portrait from the sixteenth until the early twentieth century.16
Recent attempts to push Catherine’s date of birth back to the late 1510s are largely motivated by the desire to validate this portrait.17 The dress, though clearly appropriate for a member of the upper classes, is not quite grand enough for a queen, which has prompted some defenders of the portrait’s authenticity to advance a chronology wholly untenable with what we know of Catherine’s biography, namely that it must have been painted before she became queen, around the time she joined the court. This would date the portrait to a time in Catherine’s life when she was paying back Francis Dereham the money she had borrowed to buy a few silk flowers, and require her to have been born between 1516 and 1518, which makes her almost a decade older than some of the other maids of honour in 1539, and negates every piece of evidence we have from her childhood. Holbein painted the great and the good, and he did not come cheap. Even if the Howards had paid the fee during the time Catherine was Henry’s mistress, an unlikely scenario considering the secrecy surrounding the affair and the lengths Henry went to in lying about the reasons for his frequent visits to Lambeth, accepting that this portrait showed Catherine Howard before she became queen requires us to disregard almost everything we know about her life before 1540.
Although its two copies were once dismissed as later reproductions, analysis of the Hever Castle copy’s panelling dates it possibly to the mid-sixteenth century, which again lowers the likelihood of it being Catherine, since after her execution copies of her image were hardly in high demand. Before coming to Hever, that copy was owned by the Dukes of Sutherland, who counted Henry VIII’s youngest sister as one of their ancestresses. The dress is too late in terms of its style for the portrait to be of the elder Princess Mary, but it is from the right time period to show one of her daughters – Frances Grey, Marchioness of Dorset, who was twenty-one in 1538–39, or her younger sister Eleanor Clifford, Countess of Cumberland, who was the same age in 1540–41. Frances Grey inherited her father’s title on her husband’s behalf in 1545 and became Duchess of Suffolk, an ancestress of the Dukes of Sutherland and one of the most prominent figures at the courts of her uncle Henry VIII and cousin Edward VI.18 Unlike Queen Catherine, Frances Grey was the right age and background and was connected to families who might want a copy of her portrait. Who the lady in the Toledo Holbein is cannot be said with certainty. Elizabeth, Lady Cromwell, and Frances Grey, later Duchess of Suffolk, are the most likely candidates, with the available circumstantial evidence supporting either candidate, while none of it supports it being a likeness of Catherine.19
Another alleged portrait of Catherine is a miniature of a lady in a golden dress with furred sleeves and a large ruby-pearl-and-emerald necklace. Two versions exist – one in the Royal Collection and the other in the collection of the Duke of Buccleuch and Queensberry.20 A description that closely matches it places it as one of the items recovered by the royal household after the restoration of the monarchy in the 1660s, and it seems to have been one of the pieces perhaps initially accumulated a generation earlier in the treasure trove of Thomas Howard, 21st Earl of Arundel. Lord Arundel was fascinated by his ancestors, especially those who had lived at the court of Henry VIII, and he went to great lengths to acquire portraits of them and their contemporaries.21 Many of his Tudor pieces were inherited from the collection of Lord Lumley, a Catholic peer born in Henry VIII’s reign and a brother-in-law of the 4th Duke of Norfolk, who managed to acquire full-length portraits of Anne Boleyn and Christina of Denmark (Boleyn’s, unfortunately, vanished in 1773, shortly after it was damaged by fire).22 However, it is not clear when this miniature was first identified as a likeness of Catherine. If it did come into the Royal Collection from Lord Lumley via the Earl of Arundel, the absence of a label identifying it as Catherine Howard is problematic in light of Lord Lumley’s ties to the Howards in the generation after Catherine’s death. When it was inventoried by the royal household in 1661, it was described as an unknown lady in the dress of Henry VIII’s era, but by the 1740s the Buccleuch copy had inspired the image of Catherine in a pictorial guide to British history by Thomas Birch called The Heads of Illustrious Persons of Great Britain.23 When the version in the Royal Collection was catalogued again, around 1837, the popular identification had stuck and it was listed as Catherine.24
More recently, the necklace, which is almost identical to one worn in Holbein’s portrait of Jane Seymour, also once part of the Arundel collection and now housed at the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna, has become the key piece of evidence in the debate on the sitter’s identity. The necklace in question is listed in the jewellery collections of Catherine Howard and Katherine Parr, and on that basis David Starkey has suggested that the miniature is of Queen Catherine, perhaps painted to celebrate her wedding in 1540.25 With queens often loaning pieces of their jewellery to friends for special occasions, such as having one’s portrait painted, Susan James has countered that the lady in the miniature may be Lady Margaret Douglas, who would have been in a position to borrow jewellery from Queen Anne Boleyn or Catherine, or from Katherine Parr after 1543, quite possibly in preparation for her own wedding.26 There is another candidate: Mary, Lady Monteagle – the Duke of Suffolk’s daughter, who was one of Jane Seymour’s ladies-in-waiting and who sat for a sketch by Holbein that now hangs in the Royal Library at Windsor Castle.27 The woman in this sketch does have certain physical similarities to the lady in the miniature, although it is difficult to tell since they are shown from opposite angles. There is unfortunately not evidence enough either to rule the miniature out or to prove that it is Catherine, and the current reference used for it by the Royal Collection, Portrait of a Lady, perhaps Catherine Howard, seems the fairest conclusion on it.
A final work, currently housed at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, shows a young girl with auburn hair, dark eyes, pale skin, and full lips.28 Her low-cut navy dress has golden pins holding together its sleeves, which are interspersed with crimson, and a gold-decorated French hood sits so far back on her head it requires a strap beneath her chin, like a bonnet. Like Holbein’s probable portrait of Elizabeth Cromwell or Frances Grey, where the same style is worn, the headdress trend helps date the portrait, along with the lower cut of the bodice and the shape of the sleeves. The Metropolitan portrait seems to have originated from the workshop of Hans Holbein the Younger between circa 1540 and 1545. The museum, which acquired the portrait along with the rest of the Jules Bache collection in 1949, identifies it as Unknown lady, c. 1540–5, aged 17, a piece of information provided in original gold lettering on either side of the girl’s head.
The latter detail fits with other circumstantial evidence of Catherine’s life. If the Metropolitan portrait is of her, the age given puts her date of birth at circa 1523; it supports de Marillac’s assessment of a graceful and pretty young woman, and there are some physical similarities to other women in the extended Howard family, noticeably to Catherine’s cousin, the Dowager Duchess of Richmond.29 The details on the dress, decorated with pearls and gold and set off by a matching brooch and necklaces, narrows down the pool of who it could be to someone wealthy enough to dress this way, and to retain Holbein as a seventeen-year-old member of Henry VIII’s court in the early-to-mid-1540s. Some of the possible alternatives, such as Lady Elizabeth Fitzgerald, the Earl of Kildare’s daughter, are ruled out by their other portraits, which show no similarity to the woman in the Metropolitan Museum’s piece.30 Others, like Anne Bassett, who turned seventeen sometime around 1539, would not have had enough money for this kind of portrait, following her stepfather’s incarceration. Lady Anne Manners, the eldest daughter of the Earl and Countess of Rutland, and the baronesses Bray and Sheffield, respective daughters of the earls of Shrewsbury and Oxford, were of the right age and background, though none of them was regularly at court in the last decade of Henry’s reign, which leaves Catherine as a possible, if by no means definite, candidate.
Brett Dolman’s suggestion that searching for Catherine’s portrait may be a futile quest given the transience of her career is depressing but inescapably fair.31 Of the six images associated with her, only two, the Royal Collection’s Holbein miniature and the Metropolitan Museum’s Holbein half-length, stand up to scrutiny and, tantalisingly, might show us the face of Catherine Howard.