The following abbreviations are used in the Notes:
Acts and Monuments – John Foxe, The Acts and Monuments of John Foxe: A New and Complete Edition, ed. Rev. S. R. Cattley (London: Seeley and Burnside, 1837–41)
BL – British Library (manuscripts)
Cal. S. P. Milan – Calendar of State Papers and Manuscripts in the Archives and Collections of Milan 1385–1618, ed. A. B. Hinds (London: His Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1912)
Cal. S. P. Span. – Calendar of letters, despatches, and state papers relating to the negotiations between England and Spain, ed. G. Bergenroth, et al. (London: Longman, Green, Longman & Roberts, 1862–1954)
HMC Bath – Calendar of the Manuscripts of the Marquis of Bath: preserved at Longleat, Wiltshire (London: His Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1907)
HMC Rutland – The Manuscripts of His Grace the Duke of Rutland G. C. B., preserved at Belvoir Castle (London: Her Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1888)
Household Ordinances – A collection of ordinances and regulations for the government of the royal household, made in divers reigns: from King Edward III to King William and Queen Mary, also receipts in ancient cookery (London: Society of Antiquaries of London, 1790)
Inventory – The Inventory of Henry VIII, ed. D. Starkey, et al. (London: Society of Antiquaries of London, 1998–2012)
Journal of the House of Lords – Journal of the House of Lords, Volume I, 1509–1577 (London: s. n., 1771)
Kaulek – Correspondance politique de mm. de Castillon et de Marillac, ambassadeurs de France en Angleterre, ed. Jean Baptiste Louis Kaulek (Paris: Félix Alcan, 1885)
LP – Letters and Papers, Foreign and Domestic of the Reign of Henry VIII, ed. J. S. Brewer, et al. (London: Her Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1862–1932)
MS Ashmole – Bodleian Library (manuscripts)
Original Letters – Original Letters, illustrative of English History, ed. Henry Ellis (London: Harding, Triphook, and Lepard, 1824)
Proceedings of the Privy Council – Proceedings and Ordinances of the Privy Council of England, 1386–1542, ed. Sir Nicholas Harris Nicolas (London: Eyre and Spottiswoode, 1834–37)
RCIN – Royal Collection Identification Number
SP – State papers domestic 1547–1649 (National Archives)
State Papers – State Papers, King Henry VIII (London, 1830–52)
Surrey Archaeological Collections – Surrey Archaeological Collections, relating to the History and Antiquities of the County (London: Various, 1858–)
The Cause Papers Database – Cause Papers in the Diocesan Courts of the Archbishopric of York, 1300–1858
The Spanish Chronicle – Chronicle of King Henry VIII of England, being a contemporary record of some of the principal events of the reigns of Henry VIII and Edward VI, written in Spanish by an unknown hand, ed. M. A. S. Hume (London: George Bell and Sons, 1889)
Introduction
1. Gareth Russell, ‘Catherine Howard and the Queen’s Household in England, 1540–1’ (unpublished MA dissertation submitted to Queen’s University, Belfast, 2011).
2. William Thomas, The Pilgrim: A Dialogue on the Life and Actions of King Henry the Eighth (London: Parker, Son, and Bourn, 1861), p. 59.
3. Lacey Baldwin Smith, A Tudor Tragedy: The Life and Times of Catherine Howard (London: Reprint Society, 1962), p. 11.
4. The only queen consort’s household to receive significant attention was Katherine Parr’s, see Dakota Lee Hamilton, ‘The Household of Queen Katherine Parr’ (unpublished DPhil thesis, submitted to the University of Oxford, 1992).
5. SP 1/168, f. 13.
6. David Starkey, Six Wives: The Queens of Henry VIII (London: Vintage, 2003).
7. Original Letters, I, ii, 121.
8. David Loades, The Politics of Marriage: Henry VIII and his Queens (Stroud: Alan Sutton Publishing, 1994), p. 132.
Chapter 1: The Hour of Our Death
1. At the time of his downfall, Cromwell was Chancellor of the Exchequer, the king’s Principal Secretary, Lord Privy Seal, Governor of the Isle of Wight, and Lord Great Chamberlain.
2. Edward Hall, Hall’s Chronicle: Containing the History of England, during the Reign of Henry the Fourth, and the Succeeding Monarchs, to the End of the Reign of Henry the Eighth (London, 1809), p. 840; Edward, 1st Lord Herbert, The Life and Raigne of King Henry VIII (London, 1683), p. 525.
3. Alan Stewart, Close Readers: Humanism and Sodomy in Early Modern England (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997), p. xvi. Another woman, called ‘Mother Huntley’, had been questioned about ‘certain grave misdemeanours’ alleged against Lord Hungerford, see LP, XV, 784.
4. LP, XV, 926; Retha M. Warnicke, The Marrying of Anne of Cleves: Royal protocol in early modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), p. 228.
5. Cal. S. P. Span., V, ii, 55.
6. Eric Ives, The Life and Death of Anne Boleyn: The Most Happy (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2004), p. 357.
7. Author’s visit, July 2011. The monument visible today is a reconstruction from the original designs and materials, which were saved by the conservationist Alexandre Lenoir when the basilica was ransacked by supporters of the French Revolution in 1793. During that attack, the original tomb of Louis XII and Anne of Brittany was vandalised and their bodies were thrown into a mass grave, along with most of the other cadavers at Saint-Denis. Although the bones were past the point of recovery, the grave was pieced back together following the restoration of the monarchy.
8. Lancelot de Carles, Bishop of Riez, in Georges Ascoli, La Grande-Bretagne devant l’opinion française au XVIIe Siècle (Geneva: Slatkine, 1971), lines 1002–12.
9. Acts and Monuments, VII, pp. 155–56.
10. LP, XV, 811.
11. My thanks to the wonderful Dr Mark Whittow for a walking tour of Oxford as part of an archaeology module. I was subsequently unable to get the medieval name out of my head when en route to Oriel or Corpus Christi, via what is now ‘Magpie Lane’.
12. Hall, Hall’s Chronicle, p. 840.
13. More described Anne Boleyn this way in a letter to Thomas Cromwell, dated 5 March 1534. In modern translations, the description is sometimes given as ‘really anointed queen’, meaning ‘truly or legally’. In the original, it reads as ‘rially’, which could mean either ‘really’ or ‘royally’. Either way, it does not much change the meaning of More’s letter, since he referred to Anne as Henry’s wife and added a pious hope that they would soon have children for ‘rest, peace, wealth, and profit’ of the realm. See Alvaro de Silva (ed.), The Last Letters of Thomas More (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans Publishing, 2000), pp. 48–56, 151.
14. Roger Wilson Chambers, Thomas More (London: Jonathan Cape, 1948), p. 331.
15. Acts and Monuments, V, p. 605.
16. Oatlands was part of a property swap with a local landowner called William Reed, sometimes given as ‘Rede’.
17. This physical description of Oatlands is the result of combining the research in Alan Cook, ‘The Oatlands Palace Excavations, 1968, interim report’, in Surrey Archaeological Collections (1969), LXVI, pp. 1–9; Simon Thurley, The Royal Palaces of Tudor England: Architecture and Court Life, 1460–1547 (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1993), pp. 60–6; J. W. Lindus Forge’s Oatlands Palace (Walton-on-Thames: Walton and Weybridge Local History Society 1982); Anton van den Wyngaerde’s sketch of the palace from early in the reign of Queen Elizabeth I, and Robert Poulton, Simon Thurley and Alan Cook, Excavations at Oatlands Palace, 1968–1973 and 1983–84 (Surrey County Archaeological Unit Monograph, 2010).
18. Gilbert Burnet, Bishop of Salisbury, The History of the Reformation of the Church of England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1829), III, p. 556.
19. LP, XVI, 12.
20. Ibid., XV, 902.
21. Ibid., 926.
22. Peter Wilding, Thomas Cromwell (London: William Heinemann, 1935), p. 319; Herbert, Life and Raigne, pp. 598–601.
23. Hall, Hall’s Chronicle, p. 839.
24. The Latin quote is from the Last Words of Christ on the Cross as given in Luke 23:46.
25. Raphael Holinshed, The Third Volume of Chronicles, Beginning at Duke William the Norman, Commonlie called the Conqueror; and Descending by Degrees of Yeeres to all the Kings and Queenes of England in their Orderlie Successions (London: Johnson et al., 1808), p. 818.
26. Jessie Childs, Henry VIII’s Last Victim: The Life and Times of Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey (London: Vintage Books, 2008), p. 150.
27. LP, XV, 942, grant 21.
28. Ibid., XVI, 1407, 1433.
29. Hall, Hall’s Chronicle, p. 839.
30. Revelation 12:1. The official teaching of Roman Catholicism remains that the verse pertains to the Virgin Mary and this position was confirmed by the use of papal infallibility to promulgate ex cathedra the dogma of the Assumption in 1950 under Pope Pius XII. See Munificentissimus Deus (1 November 1950), the Apostolic Constitution, available in full via the Vatican Archives online.
Chapter 2: Our Fathers in Their Generation
1. The order for mandatory records, ‘Every parson, vicar or curate within this diocese shall for every church keep one book of register wherein you shall write the day and year of every wedding, christening and burial made within your parish,’ was given on 5 September 1538, through Thomas Cromwell.
2. The will of Dame Isabel Leigh (née Worsley, prev. Culpepper), P. C. C. 18 Porch in Surrey Archaeological Collections, LI, p. 88.
3. Mary Howard may have been something of a favourite to her grandmother – another goddaughter, Joyce Wellbeck, received twenty shillings.
4. All the available sources listing Lord Edmund’s children place Mary after Catherine, not just Isabel’s will, when it could be argued that Mary was named after and separately from her sister because she was a goddaughter.
5. The will of Sir John Leigh of Stockwell, Knight of the Bath, P. C. C. 15 Bodfield, in Surrey Archaeological Collections, LI, pp. 87–8. The family’s surname is variably spelled ‘Legh’, ‘Leigh’, and ‘Leygh’ in the documents.
6. For example, see Joanna Denny, Katherine Howard: A Tudor Conspiracy (London: Portrait, 2005), pp. 5–9.
7. LP, XVI, 1426. De Marillac claimed that her romance with Francis Dereham had ended when she was eighteen. We know that the liaison ended in 1539, but de Marillac was still getting fragmentary information about the affair when he wrote this letter on 7 December 1541.
8. A letter from Charles de Marillac to King François I, dated 5 January 1540, trans. J. A. Froude and published in Thomas, The Pilgrim, App., p. 135.
9. De Marillac was wrong on other occasions. In a letter to King François I of 29 May 1541 (LP, XV, 868), he described the late Countess of Salisbury as being well past her eightieth birthday, when in reality she was sixty-seven. The Countess of Salisbury had been a prisoner since before de Marillac’s arrival in England, but it does further the possibility that he was making his comments based on the ladies’ appearances or on gossip, rather than on specific knowledge of their birthdates.
10. Katherine Carey’s most recent biographer and her mother’s place her birth in 1524 – see Sarah-Beth Watkins, Lady Katherine Knollys (Alresford: Chronos Books, 2015), pp. 10–11; Josephine Wilkinson, Mary Boleyn (Stroud: Amberley, 2009), pp. 79, 87; and Alison Weir, Mary Boleyn (London: Jonathan Cape, 2011), pp. 140–41, 147–48.
11. The aforementioned codicil to Sir John Leigh’s will was added on 26 August 1523, in which Leigh gave permission ‘for part of the land to be used in marriage settlements’. This might, on a highly tentative basis, suggest that another girl had been added to the family at some point between the first draft and the addition of the codicil, once it became clear that the Howards would need to provide more dowries in the future.
12. Her grandmother’s will mentions locations in Surrey on seven occasions, and her bequests for the improvements of local roads and to local housewives are all for Stockwell, which was within the parish of Lambeth. At the time of her downfall Catherine was also referred to in LP, XVI, 1395, as ‘late of Lambeth, Surrey’, which could admittedly refer to the time she spent there immediately before coming to court.
13. LP, I, App, 1a.
14. Gerald Brenan and Edward Philips Statham, The House of Howard (London: Hutchinson & Co., 1907), I, p. 79; Henry Howard, Indications of Memorials, Paintings, and Engravings of Persons of the Howard Family (Corby Castle: privately published, 1834), p. 13.
15. Norfolk House was demolished in the 1780s. The site where it stood is now mostly covered by a Hotel Novotel at 113–29 Lambeth Road. The only remains from Catherine’s lifetime are a few foundations. Author’s visit, 20 June 2015.
16. Brenan and Statham, House of Howard, I, p. 79.
17. Today, the porch, like most of the former church, has been greatly altered, but much of the stonework dates from the fourteenth century and surviving illustrations suggest it stands on much the same site as it did in the 1520s.
18. A custom dating from the sixth century, when the Body of Civil Law encouraged Christians to adopt nonparents as their child’s godparents.
19. Mark 7:32–37.
20. Nicholas Orme, Medieval Children (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2003), p. 28.
21. A reference to the Second Coming of Christ, when both the living and the dead would be judged. See Matthew 25:1–13.
22. Each time a peerage is created, the incumbents are numbered. If the title falls into disuse and is subsequently revived, the numbering starts anew. For instance, there have been six 1st earls of Sussex – the title was awarded to members of the de Warenne, Radclyffe, Savile, Yelverton, and royal families under Edward I, Henry VIII, Charles I, Charles II, George I, and Queen Victoria, respectively. In each case, the title had previously gone into abeyance following the extinction of the direct line of inheritance.
23. The surviving children in 1524 were Thomas, Earl of Surrey; Sir Edmund Howard; Lady Elizabeth Boleyn; Lord William Howard; Lord Thomas Howard; Anne de Vere, Countess of Oxford; Lady Katherine Howard; Lady Elizabeth Howard; and Lady Dorothy Howard.
24. LP, II, 1269.
25. Elizabeth Howard the younger married Henry Radclyffe, 2nd Earl of Sussex (1507–57). His father was elevated in 1529 to the earldom, which he inherited in 1542.
26. The duke’s mortuary monument indicates that Katherine and Rhys were betrothed but not yet married at the time of her father’s death.
27. Their children were typically referred to by the anglicised surname of ‘Rice’.
28. John Weever, Ancient Funerall Monuments within the united Monarchie of Great Britain, Ireland, and the Islands adjacent (London: Thomas Harper, 1631), p. 840. Lady Dorothy Howard’s husband was Edward Stanley, 3rd Earl of Derby (c.1509–72). He had already inherited the title at the time of their marriage.
29. This was another difference between the gentry and the nobility. Some landed families in the gentry felt comfortable endowing younger sons, as well as the heir – for instance, in 1435 Sir John Arundell helped found a collateral branch of the family by leaving enough for his younger son Thomas to set up his own household in nearby Tolverne. This, coupled with the cost of maintaining a certain level of public pomp, helps explain why several great gentry families declined peerages in the Tudor era.
30. Brenan and Statham, House of Howard, I, p. 79; Henry Ellis, ‘Copy of an Order made by Cardinal Wolsey as Lord Chancellor, respecting the Management of the Affairs of the young Earl of Oxford’, in Archaeologia, XIX (1821).
31. James Ross, John de Vere, Thirteenth Earl of Oxford (1443–1513): ‘The Foremost Man in the Kingdom’ (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2011), pp. 161–62.
32. John de Vere, 14th Earl of Oxford (1499–1526). He did not outlive his father-in-law by long, and the title passed to his second cousin. His widow survived him by three decades.
33. Weever, Funerall Monuments, p. 835.
34. Christopher Dyer, Standards of Living in the Later Middle Ages: Social change in England, c.1200–1520 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), p. 215. The example used is a thatcher, who in the 1510s was on an average income of fivepence farthing a day.
35. Adeliza of Louvain was queen consort of England through her marriage to King Henry I (d. 1135). That marriage was childless, and the Howards were descended from the offspring of her subsequent marriage to William d’Aubigny, 1st Earl of Arundel and Lincoln (d. 1176).
36. Howard, Indications, p. 49.
37. Brenan and Statham, House of Howard, I, pp. 7–8; James Conway Davies, The Baronial Opposition to Edward II: Its Character and Policy – A Study in Administrative History (London: Frank Cass & Co., 1967), p. 275; Alistair Tebbit, ‘Household Knights and Military Service Under the Direction of Edward II’, in The Reign of Edward II: New Perspectives, Gwilym Dodd and Anthony Musson (eds) (Woodbridge: New York Medieval Press, 2006), p. 89; Mark Buck, Politics, Finance and the Church in the Reign of Edward II: Walter Stapeldon, Treasurer of England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), p. 185n.
38. Weever, Funerall Monuments, p. 835.
39. Ibid., p. 833.
40. John de Vere, 13th Earl of Oxford (1442–1513) was a Lancastrian who escaped captivity to join Henry VII’s cause, when the latter was still in exile. After Bosworth, he was awarded many roles at court, including Lord Great Chamberlain, and stood as godfather to Arthur, Prince of Wales.
41. Weever, Funerall Monuments, p. 835.
42. H. C. Maxwell Lyte et al. (eds), Calendar of Patent Rolls, Henry VII: Volume I (London: His Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1914) p. 314.
43. Catherine’s biological grandmother – Elizabeth (née Tilney) (c.1444–97), daughter of Sir Frederick Tilney, a Norfolk landowner, and lady-in-waiting to queens Elizabeth Woodville, Anne Neville, and Elizabeth of York. Her first husband was Sir Humphrey Bourchier, who was killed at the Battle of Barnet on 14 April 1471. She married Thomas Howard on 30 April 1472. By her first marriage, she was the mother of John, 2nd Baron Berners.
44. David M. Head, The Ebbs and Flows of Fortune: The Life of Thomas Howard, Third Duke of Norfolk (Athens, GA, and London: University of Georgia Press, 2009), p. 20.
45. By 1476, the vagaries of ill health and bad luck had pruned the Mowbray family tree until the only Mowbray left to inherit the dukedom of Norfolk in the direct line was four-year-old Lady Anne de Mowbray. The kinsman with the strongest claim after her seemed to be John Howard. However, when a sudden childhood infection killed Anne at the age of eight, Edward IV showed absolutely no qualms at snatching away the birthright of the man who had served him so faithfully on the battlefields. The royal family co-opted the Mowbrays’ title, estates and vast income for themselves. The Norfolk prize was given to King Edward’s youngest son, Richard of Shrewsbury, whom he had fortuitously married off to the late Anne de Mowbray, despite the fact that Church law prohibited marriages between infants. In 1483, John backed the coup that put Richard III on the throne at the expense of Edward IV’s son. In return for his support, Richard made John the first Howard to hold the title of Duke of Norfolk, and Richard of Shrewsbury vanished into the Tower of London, where he and his elder brother, Edward V, disappeared from the records within weeks of Richard III’s accession.
46. Henry VIII and Elizabeth Stafford shared a set of great-grandparents – their grandmothers, Queen Elizabeth Woodville and Katherine Woodville, Duchess of Buckingham, were sisters. The sixteenth century had an elastic definition of the word ‘cousin’.
47. K. B. McFarlane, The Nobility of Later Medieval England (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1973), pp. 144–45.
48. This list excludes courtesy titles enjoyed by a peer’s heir apparent and does not count as separate different titles held by the same person. They were Thomas Howard, 2nd Duke of Norfolk (d. 1524); Charles Brandon, 1st Duke of Suffolk (d. 1545); Thomas Grey, 2nd Marquess of Dorset (d. 1530); Thomas FitzAlan, 17th Earl of Arundel (d. 1524); John de Vere, 14th Earl of Oxford (d. 1526); James FitzGerald, 10th Earl of Desmond (d. 1529); Gerald FitzGerald, 9th Earl of Kildare (d. 1534); Henry Percy, 5th Earl of Northumberland (d. 1527); George Talbot, 4th Earl of Shrewsbury and 4th Earl of Waterford (d. 1538); Ralph Neville, 4th Earl of Westmorland (d. 1549); Richard Grey, 3rd Earl of Kent (d. 1524); Edward Stanley, 3rd Earl of Derby (d. 1572); Henry Bourchier, 2nd Earl of Essex (d. 1540); Henry Courtenay, 2nd Earl of Devon (ex. 1538); Henry Stafford, 1st Earl of Wiltshire (d. 1523); and Charles Somerset, 1st Earl of Worcester (d. 1526).
49. Another example was the prominence of men at court like Sir William Compton (d. 1528) or Henry Norris (ex. 1536), the latter of whom was part of a gentry family from Berkshire and a great-grandson of one of the earls of Oxford on his paternal grandmother’s side. He married Mary Fiennes, daughter of the 8th Baron Dacre, and was one of the most respected and influential men at court between 1526 and 1536. At the time of his death, Norris’s annual income was about £1,327 15s 7d, making him wealthier than many nobles. Through his ascent at court, Compton managed to increase his annual income from £10 to £1,700, constructing a significant base of those dependent on his patronage and support. In practical terms, the crucial difference seems to have been proximity to the court, rather than a strict division between gentry and aristocracy.
50. LP, V, 238.
51. Ibid., I, 20, 81–2, 257, 698, 707.
52. Weever, Funerall Monuments, p. 839.
53. Revelation 5:5.
54. At the earliest, the monument must have been completed in June 1525. It refers to the duke’s daughter as ‘the Lady Elizabeth wife to the count Rochford’ (Weever, Funerall Monuments, pp. 839–40). Thomas Boleyn was elevated to the viscounty of Rochford in June 1525.
Chapter 3: Lord Edmund’s Daughter
1. ‘A Contemporary Account of the Battle of Flodden, 9th September 1513. From a Manuscript in the Possession of David Laing, Esq., L.L.D., V.P.S.A. Scot’, in Proceedings of the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland (Edinburgh, 1870), VII, p. 148.
2. Hall, Hall’s Chronicle, p. 511.
3. Sydney Anglo, ‘The Evolution of Early Tudor Disguising, Pageant, and Mask’, in Renaissance Drama (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1968), pp. 14–15.
4. Hall, Hall’s Chronicle, pp. 510–11.
5. Sir Henry F. MacGeagh and H. A. C. Sturgess (eds), Register of the Admissions to the Honourable Society of the Middle Temple: From the Fifteenth Century to the Year 1944 (London: Butterworth and Co., 1949), I, p. 3, gives 3 February ‘1510–11’ for the admission of ‘Edmund Hayward, son of the Earl of Surrey’. The date of Edmund’s failed legal career is sometimes confusingly given as 1510 – Smith, A Tudor Tragedy, p. 36. However, the English legal new year did not commence until the Feast of the Annunciation on 25 March, meaning that when he was admitted on 3 February it was still legally classed as 1510, but 1511 in most other countries and to subsequent histories.
6. Hall, Hall’s Chronicle, p. 508.
7. Ibid., p. 517.
8. Sydney Anglo (ed.), The Great Tournament Roll of Westminster: a collotype reproduction of the manuscript (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1968), p. 56.
9. MS Ashmole 1116, f. 110.
10. Ibid., f. 109.
11. Hall, Hall’s Chronicle, p. 517.
12. Hall, Hall’s Chronicle, p. 519.
13. R. K. Hannay, R. L. Mackie, and Anne Spilman (eds), The Letters of James the Fourth, 1505–1513 (Edinburgh: Scottish Historical Society, 1953), p. 550.
14. There is some mystery over these two sons. Details of their tombs are recorded in Howard, p. 11. Charles Howard’s grave read: ‘Hic jacet Carolus Howard unus filiorum Thome Howard Comitis Sur; qui quidem Carolus obiit tertio die Martii Ao. Dni Millemo quingetesimo duo decimo cujus anime propitietur deus. amen.’ The grave of Henry Howard, who died on 22 February 1514 (NS), read: ‘Hic jacet Dns Henricus Howard, filius serenisimi, Ducis Norfolckiæ qui obiit xxiii. die Februarii, Ao. Dni. Millemo vcxiij., cujus anime propitietur Deus amen.’ They seem to have been two sons born to the duke’s second marriage and who died in infancy, mentioned with their siblings in Melvin Tucker, The Life of Thomas Howard, Earl of Surrey and Second Duke of Norfolk, 1433–1524 (The Hague: Mouton and Co., 1964), p. 26.
15. Proceedings of the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland, p. 143.
16. Norman MacDougall, James IV (Edinburgh: John Donald Publishers, 1989), p. 271.
17. A Ballade of the Scottyshe Kynge, written by John Skelton, Poet Laureate to King Henry the Eighth, John Ashton (intro.), (London: Elliot Stock, 1882), p. 81.
18. Ashton, Ballade, p. 63.
19. LP I, ii, 2246.
20. Proceedings of the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland, pp. 145–48.
21. Ashton, Ballade, p. 73; Hall, Hall’s Chronicle, p. 562.
22. Ashton, Ballade, pp. 73–4.
23. Hall, Hall’s Chronicle, p. 562. This was the same Heron who had murdered Sir Robert Ker, Scottish Warden of Middle March, in 1508, and whose pardon from the English government featured in James IV’s grievances against his southern neighbours. Heron was the bastard son of an English noble with estates near the Anglo-Scottish border. See LP, I, ii, 4406, for the pardon, and MacDougall, pp. 252–54, for the Scottish government’s complaints about him.
24. Ashton, Ballade, p. 74.
25. LP, I, ii, 2283. The casualty figures for Flodden are still unclear, with estimates varying between five and ten thousand on the Scottish side.
26. Hall, Hall’s Chronicle, p. 563.
27. Ashton, Ballade, p. 87.
28. William Dugdale, The Baronage of England (London: Thomas Newcomb, 1675), II, p. 272; LP, I, ii, 2283.
29. Original Letters, I, i, 32.
30. Hall, Hall’s Chronicle, p. 567.
31. Ibid., p. 564.
32. LP, I, ii, 2246.
33. Ibid., 3325.
34. Ibid., 3348.
35. Ibid., 2090.
36. Ibid., 2090; LP, Add. I, 33, 430.
37. Joyce had five children from her first marriage, as mentioned at length in the wills of her mother and stepfather: Ralph, John, Isabel, Joyce, and Margaret.
38. Lady Joyce’s date of birth was around 1480–81, based on evidence provided from the settling of her father’s estate in November 1493, when she was described as ‘Joyce wife of Ralph Legh, aged 12 or more’, when her younger sister was listed as ‘Margaret Culpepyr, aged 11 or more’. While the supplement of ‘or more’ seems vague, or catch all, the difference of a year between the sisters suggests that there was an attempt to be relatively specific. Calendar of Inquisitions Post Mortem and other analogous documents preserved in the Public Record Office: Henry VII (London: Eyre and Spottiswoode, 1898), I, p. 820.
39. LP, I, ii, 3484.
40. Sir Thomas Elyot’s Boke Named the Governor (1531) cit. Andy Wood, Riot, Rebellion and Popular Politics in Early Modern England (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2002), p. 26.
41. Wood, Rebellion and Popular Politics, p. 26.
42. Hall, Hall’s Chronicle, pp. 599–600.
43. Archaeologia: or Miscellaneous Tracts relating to Antiquity, Published by the Society of Antiquaries of London (London, 1834), XXV, p. 376.
44. Surrey Archaeological Collections, LI, pp. 87–8.
45. LP, IV, ii, 3732.
46. Thomas Lamb and ‘Lord Howard’s servant George’, who may have been the same as another servant of his, George Shaw – LP, I, ii, 2090; LP, Add. I, 1148; Muriel St Clare Byrne (ed.), Lisle Letters (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1981), III, 798.
47. LP, V, 1757.
48. Original Letters, III, i, 64.
49. W. Bruce Bannerman (ed.), The Visitations of the County of Surrey made and taken in the years 1530… 1572 … and 1623 (London: Herleian Society, 1899), XLIII, p. 21.
50. Surrey Archaeological Collections, LI, pp. 87–8.
51. It is not true that Joyce died giving birth to Catherine, since both women are mentioned in the will of Isabel Leigh. Cf. Denny, Katherine Howard, pp. 10–11. Joyce must have been alive in 1527, when she is mentioned as a beneficiary in her mother’s will, and equally she must have been dead for some time by May 1530, when Edmund’s second wife made her will (see Surrey Archaeological Collections, III, p. 174).
52. LP, V, 220, grant 14.
53. His appointment was given at Windsor Castle on 1 April 1531 – LP, V, 220, grant 14.
54. LP, V, 1757.
55. LP, Add., I, 746.
56. The friendship between Arundell and Northumberland was close enough for some to suggest a romantic relationship. For discussions on their relationship and the debate, see R. W. Hoyle, ‘Henry Percy, Sixth Earl of Northumberland, and the Fall of the House of Percy, 1527–1537’, in G. W. Bernard (ed.), The Tudor Nobility (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1992), pp. 180–211, and Gareth Russell, ‘His Dear Bedfellow: The Debate over Henry Percy’, in Tudor Life (2016).
Chapter 4: The Howards of Horsham
1. Weever, Funerall Monuments, p. 834.
2. Stewart, Close Readers, p. 94.
3. Ibid., p. 87.
4. Ann Kussmaul, Servants in Husbandry in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), p. 3; Peter Laslett, The World We Have Lost: Further Explored (London: Methuen, 1983), pp. 13–16.
5. Chesworth House, or Chesworth Place, became property of the Crown following the 4th Duke of Norfolk’s attainder and execution for treason in 1572. As a result, it was examined by a parliamentary commission in 1650 following the temporary abolition of the monarchy. The physical description of the house is taken from the commission’s findings, which are detailed in Dudley G. Elwes and Charles J. Robinson, A History of the Castles and Manors of Western Sussex (London: Longman & Co., 1876), pp. 119–20.
6. In 1531, Agnes ranked behind the queen, her daughter Princess Mary, and the king’s younger sister Mary, Duchess of Suffolk and Dowager Queen of France. Her only immediate equal was her daughter-in-law Elizabeth (née Stafford), Duchess of Norfolk.
7. A. R. Myers, The Household of Edward IV: The Black Book and the Ordinance of 1478 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1959), p. 94.
8. Kate Mertes, The English Noble Household, 1250–1600: Good Governance and Politic Rule (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1998), p. 1.
9. Chesworth House, which is privately owned, currently contains part of the brickwork that Catherine would have known, including a southeast range built in brick between 1514 and 1524. However, owing to neglect in the seventeenth century, the house today is very different to the one which Agnes Howard occupied, with additions from the seventeenth, eighteenth, and twentieth centuries.
10. ‘John Russell’s Book of Nurture’, quoted in Edith Rickert and Israel Gollancz (eds), The Babees’ Book: Medieval Manners for the Young: Done into Modern English from Dr. Furnivall’s Texts (New York: Cooper Square Publishers, 1966), p. 63.
11. State Papers, I, 180; LP, XI, 17; Ralph A. Griffiths, Sir Rhys ap Thomas and his Family: A Study in the Wars of the Roses and Early Tudor Politics (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1993), p. 113.
12. ‘The Babees’ Book or A Little Report on how young people should behave’, quoted in The Babees’ Book, p. 4.
13. ‘John Russell’s Book of Nurture’, in The Babees’ Book, p. 57.
14. Felicity Heal, Hospitality in Early Modern England (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990), p. 71.
15. LP, IV, ii, 4710. On Agnes’s patronage of John Skelton historians are divided, owing to the cryptic nature of Skelton’s dedications and debates over dating his work. H. L. R. Edwards, Skelton: The Life and Times of an Early Tudor Poet (London: Jonathan Cape, 1949), pp. 206–07, believes Agnes was one of Skelton’s patrons. Tucker, pp. 9, 74n, argues that the Howards’ connection to Skelton was the 2nd duke’s first wife Elizabeth, Countess of Surrey, and Greg Walker, John Skelton and the Politics of the 1520s (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), pp. 15–32, believes the Howard links to Skelton have been exaggerated.
16. LP, IV, ii, 4710.
17. Ibid., XVI, 1317, 1398, 1461; Ibid., Add. I, 367.
18. Ibid., VI, 212, 1111.
19. Elwes and Robinson, Castles and Manors, p. 120.
20. MS Ashmole 61, fol. 20.
21. ‘The Babees’ Book or A Little Report on how young people should behave’, quoted in The Babees’ Book, p. 3.
22. Sir John Maclean (ed.), The Berkeley Manuscripts (Gloucester: John Bellows, 1883), II, pp. 384–86.
23. ‘The Babees’ Book or A Little Report on how young people should behave’, quoted in The Babees’ Book, pp. 3–4.
24. Ibid.
25. ‘John Russell’s Book of Nurture’, in The Babees’ Book, p. 47.
26. Maclean (ed.), Berkeley Manuscripts, II, p. 382. The compliment referred to Catherine’s second cousin Katherine (née Howard), Lady Berkeley, daughter of Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey, and wife of Henry Berkeley, 7th Baron Berkeley.
27. ‘The Boke of Nurture, or School of Good Manners for Men, Servants, and Children, with Stans Puer Ad Mensam, newly corrected, being necessary for all youth and children’, quoted in The Babees’ Book, p. 132; ‘The Little Children’s Little Book’, quoted in The Babees’ Book, pp. 16–19; ‘The Young Children’s Little Book’, quoted in The Babees’ Book, p. 25; Penelope Eames, Furniture in England, France and the Netherlands from the Twelfth to the Fifteenth Century (London: Furniture History Society, 1977), p. 57.
28. ‘The Little Children’s Little Book’, quoted in The Babees’ Book, p. 16.
29. Agnes Strickland, Lives of the Queens of England from the Norman Conquest (Bath: Cedric Chivers, 1972), III, p. 105.
30. The Babees’ Book, p. 4.
31. ‘John Russell’s Book of Nurture’, quoted in The Babees’ Book, p. 50.
32. The Babees’ Book, p. 2012.
33. Joan Bulmer (née Acworth) was born c.1519 and later married ‘young Bulmer’. Others, like Katherine Tilney, seem to have been younger and were still unmarried and in the dowager’s service when Catherine became queen.
34. Originally published in French as L’enfant et la vie familiale sous l’Ancien Régime (Paris: Plon, 1960).
35. The tradition arose from a popular legend that the logs that were burned to warm the stable in Bethlehem at the time of Christ’s birth had been from ash trees.
36. Laurence Whistler, The English Festivals (London: William Heinemann, 1947), pp. 59–60.
37. Matthew 2:1–11.
38. Cal. S. P. Span., IV, ii, 323.
39. LP, III, 1675.
40. Griffiths, Sir Rhys ap Thomas, pp. 91–2.
41. Ibid., p. 92.
42. Ibid., p. 98.
43. LP, VIII, 230.
44. Proceedings of the Privy Council, VII, p. 282–83.
45. LP, IX, 577.
46. Griffiths, Sir Rhys ap Thomas, p. 113.
47. Muriel (ed.), Lisle Letters, IV, p. 10.
48. LP, IX, 576–77.
49. Ibid., XVI, 1414, 1469.
50. Ibid., VIII, 1103.
51. Ibid., IX, 577. This seems to disprove the contemporary rumour, either repeated or invented by the imperial ambassador, that Katherine’s first husband had been targeted partly because he was anti-Boleyn and that ‘had it not been for the Lady, who hated him because he and his wife had spoken disparagingly of her, he would have been pardoned and escaped his miserable fate’. The speed with which Katherine remarried, her favour with the queen, and the attempts made to safeguard Katherine’s finances during her husband’s downfall suggest that Rhys’s fall was not linked to the question of the king’s remarriage. Cf. Cal. S.P., Span., IV, ii, 323; Griffiths, Sir Rhys ap Thomas, pp. 104–11.
52. LP, X, 911.
53. Griffiths, Sir Rhys ap Thomas, pp. 94–5.
54. Later in life, Elizabeth I publicly defended her mother on several occasions, even going into relatively precise details of her life to do so. Given that her mother died before Elizabeth’s third birthday, and many of her childhood servants were appointed by Queen Anne, including Elizabeth’s governess Katherine Ashley (née Champernowne) and her future Archbishop of Canterbury, Matthew Parker, they remain the most likely source for Elizabeth’s information about her mother. It is not true that Elizabeth seldom mentioned her, and accounts from her sister’s reign, when it would have been more diplomatic to avoid the conversation, describe the topic in a way that suggests Elizabeth had discussed it frequently – see Lisa Hilton, Elizabeth I: Renaissance Prince (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2014), pp. 84–5.
55. Between May 1536 and October 1537, there was no clear heir to the English throne. All three of the king’s biological children were legally illegitimate, either because they had been born in bastardy or because they had been declared so after the annulment of their mothers’ marriages. As a result, Margaret Douglas’s place in the line of succession was ambiguous but undeniable.
56. Original Letters, III, iii, 208.
57. Muriel (ed.), Lisle Letters, III, 221; LP, XIII, i, 295.
58. LP, X, 371.
59. Ibid., XI, 636.
60. Ibid., Add., I, 1148.
61. Ibid., XVI, 1398; W. A. Copinger, The Manors of Suffolk: Notes on Their History and Devolution (London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1905), I, p. 221. Manox was also thought to have been related to Edward Waldegrave, another young man on the dowager’s staff, and a close friend of Manox’s future rival, Francis Dereham.
62. SP 1/167, f. 117.
63. See in particular R. M. Warnicke, ‘Katherine [Catherine; née Katherine Howard] (1518x24–1542), queen of England and Ireland, fifth consort of Henry VIII’, in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), and Denny, Katherine Howard, pp. 86–9, 115–24. This particular interpretation rests strongly on Denny’s belief that Catherine was born c.1525. Variants of this narrative of Catherine as a victim of long-term sexual abuse have been repeated elsewhere.
64. Paul Johnson, Elizabeth: A Study in Power and Intellect (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1974), pp. 25–7; David Starkey, Elizabeth: Apprenticeship (London: Vintage, 2001), pp. 67–70.
65. Martin Ingram, ‘Child sexual abuse in early modern England’, in Michael J. Braddick and John Walter (eds), Negotiating Power in Early Modern Society: Order, Hierarchy and Subordination in Britain and Ireland (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), pp. 81–3.
66. B. A. Windeatt (trans.), The Book of Margery Kempe (London: Penguin, 2004), p. 59.
67. See chapter 19.
68. LP, XVI, 1321.
69. Ibid., XVI, 1320.
70. Ibid., XVI, 1321.
71. Ibid.
72. Dating Mary’s arrival requires combining her own imprecise memories with the itinerary of her first mentioned employer, Lord William Howard. On 5 November 1541, Mary dated her arrival to ‘three or four years past’ (LP, XVI, 1320), provisionally meaning 1537 or 1538. In the same statement, she mentions that her first job was as a nursemaid to Lord William’s daughter Agnes, the future Marchioness of Winchester. Agnes must have been born before 1535, the year of her mother’s death, but Mary’s own recollections make it clear that she had not served the girl from birth. Mary also states that much of her early employment was spent in Lord William’s household and that it was only later that she gradually began to spend more time at the dowager duchess’s. After the Prince of Wales’s christening in October 1537, William was sent to France to report back on a rumoured marriage negotiation between the Scottish king, James V, and Marie de Guise, Dowager Duchess of Longueville (LP, XII, ii, 1004). The proposed union worried the English, and William was ordered to remain in France until a final announcement was made. That announcement arrived in January 1538, which, when set alongside Mary’s statement from November 1541, supports the idea that she became familiar with both households after that – in early or mid-1538. Testimonies from other servants, who dated the beginning of Catherine’s affair with Francis Dereham to mid-1538, suggest that Mary arrived in 1538, since she had certainly arrived before the end of the liaison with Manox.
73. LP, XVI, 1320.
74. SP 1/167, f. 129.
75. Ibid., f. 130.
76. Ibid., f. 117.
77. Ibid., 1/168, f. 85.
Chapter 5: Mad Wenches
1. Kim M. Philips, Medieval Maidens: Young Women and Gender in England, 1270–1540 (Manchester University Press, 2003), p. 6.
2. Smith, A Tudor Tragedy, p. 138.
3. George Cavendish, The Life of Cardinal Wolsey, by George Cavendish, his Gentleman Usher, and Metrical Visions (Chiswick: Harding, Triphook, and Lepard, 1825), II, p. 64. The author had retired from court in 1530, but he remained tied to it through his brother, William.
4. LP, XVI, 1317.
5. Ibid., 1321.
6. Ibid.
7. In 1536, the dowager duchess gave him money to purchase a livery – LP, XVI, 1398.
8. Francis Dereham’s date of birth is difficult to determine. G. H. Dashwood (ed.), The Visitation of Norfolk in the year 1563 taken by William Hervey, Clarenceux King of Arms (Norwich: Miller and Leavins, 1878), I, family tree 84, p. 228, provides dates of birth for Francis’s siblings of ranging from late in Henry VII’s reign to early in Henry VIII’s, but they seem out of order and there are gaps for several of the younger siblings. More concretely, a family will indicates that Francis was under twenty-one in 1529, two years before his father’s death. How far under twenty-one is not clear, but it weakens the suggestion he was born c.1508. He may have been a decade or so older than Catherine, but his entry into the dowager’s service in 1536 raises the possibility of a date of birth of c.1515, or perhaps sometime after.
9. LP, XVI, 1398, 1416; Dyer, Standards of Living in the Later Middle Ages, p. 55.
10. Dyer, Standards of Living, pp. 58–63.
11. Burnet, History of the Reformation, IV, p. 71.
12. LP, XVI, 1321; Burnet, History of the Reformation, IV, p. 71.
13. Burnet, History of the Reformation, IV, p. 71.
14. SP 1/167, ff. 130, 161.
15. Burnet, History of the Reformation, IV, p. 71.
16. LP, XVI, 1337; Proceedings of the Privy Council, VII, p. 354.
17. SP 1/167, f. 131.
18. Ibid.
19. LP, XVI, 1320.
20. Teresa McLean, The English at Play in the Middle Ages (Slough: Kensal Press, 1983), p. 3.
21. Susan E. James, Kateryn Parr: The Making of a Queen (Aldershot: Ashgate Publishing, 1999), plate 9.
22. Beryl Rowland (trans.), Medieval Woman’s Guide to Health: The First English Gynecological Handbook (Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 1981), p. 87; James A. Brundage, Law, Sex, and Christian Society in Medieval Europe (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), p. 491.
23. Brundage, Law, Sex, and Christian Society, p. 504.
24. Ibid., p. 535.
25. Thomas Tentler, Sin and Confession on the Eve of the Reformation (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1977), p. 143.
26. Rowland, p. 167.
27. SP 1/167, f. 137.
28. LP, XVI, 1321.
29. Ibid., 1469.
30. SP 1/167, ff. 130, 137. Whoever that family was it was not the ‘Lord Bayment’ mentioned in Smith, A Tudor Tragedy, p. 50. There was no family with that title in the Anglo-Irish peerages in 1539.
31. LP, XVI, 1469.
32. Ibid., 1385, 1424.
33. Ibid., 1337 (2).
34. Ibid., 1330, 1337 (2).
35. Ibid., 1469.
36. Ibid.
37. LP, XVI, 1348. Maunsay told a member of the Privy Council on 15 November 1541 that Bess ‘could also speak of this’, at a time when they were inquiring after the queen’s alleged sexual indiscretions at Horsham and Lambeth. If she was subsequently questioned, Bess’s testimony sadly has not survived, but because he identified her, Maunsay must have known that she had some specific and relevant information.
38. LP, XVI, 1385.
39. Ibid.
40. LP, XVI, 1414.
41. Burnet, History of the Reformation, IV, p. 71.
42. Burnet, History of the Reformation, IV, p. 71.
43. Catherine only referred to ‘my lady Breerton’. Elizabeth Brereton (née Somerset), daughter of Charles, 1st Earl of Worcester, and widow of William Brereton (ex. 1536) could have been the lady she was referring to, but there is no firm evidence that her late husband had ever been properly knighted. The only definite Lady Brereton in 1539 was Lady Eleanor Brereton (née Brereton), wife of Sir William Brereton, who became Lord Justice of Ireland in April 1540. Her husband was in England between 1536 and November 1539, which leaves Eleanor as the only Lady Brereton in the right place and time.
44. For one instance among hundreds, the twelfth-century case of the disinheritance of Mabel de Francheville by her cousin Richard de Antsey, who challenged her legitimacy in the hope of confiscating her lands, which would then fall to him. Pope Alexander III eventually ruled in de Antsey’s favour. In living memory for Catherine’s parents, the bastardising of Edward V and his siblings in 1483 on the grounds of his father’s alleged pre-contract with Lady Eleanor Talbot helped bring the Duke of Gloucester to the throne as Richard III. A pre-contract would also later be used to annul Henry VIII’s fourth marriage.
45. He may have retired from his job in Calais shortly before his death, quite possibly for health reasons. Plans were in motion to appoint a replacement by 31 January, although the intention may have been to make the appointment only after Edmund retired or was dismissed. LP, XIV, i, 172; 906, grant 17; Sylvanus Urban, The Gentleman’s Magazine and Historical Chronicle (London: John Nichols, 1797), p. 543.
46. Margaret Jennings was not subsequently attached to Catherine’s household, as was suggested in the nineteenth century and repeated in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The sources make it clear that the Lady Howard in question was Catherine’s aunt.
47. Archaeologia: or Miscellaneous Tracts Relating to Antiquity (London: J. B. Nichols and Son, 1883), XLVII, p. 326.
48. LP, XII, ii, 463.
49. Muriel (ed.), Lisle Letters, IV, 998.
50. LP, XIII, I, 395.
51. Muriel (ed.), Lisle Letters, V, 1139. The Countess of Bridgewater acted as chief female mourner. Elizabeth Boleyn had died at a house near Baynard’s Castle in London and her body was taken from there to Lambeth on a barge, with burning torches and banners from each of the barge’s corners.
52. Burnet, History of the Reformation, IV, p. 71.
Chapter 6: The King’s Highness Did Cast a Fantasy
1. LP, XII, ii, 1004.
2. Ibid.
3. LP, XIII, ii. 77.
4. There is some evidence that a middle sister, Louise, was also briefly considered. She later married Charles II, Prince de Chimay.
5. LP, XII, ii, 1172, 1187; Julia Cartwright, Christina of Denmark, Duchess of Milan and Lorraine, 1522–1590 (London: John Murray, 1913), pp. 149–54.
6. Cartwright, Christina of Denmark, pp. 192–94.
7. LP, XIII, i, 583; LP, XIV, ii, 400; Cartwright, Christina of Denmark, pp. 192–94.
8. LP, XIII, ii, 1087. The final straw seemed to be the despoliation of the shrine of Saint Thomas Becket and St Augustine’s monastery, both in Canterbury.
9. LP, XIV, i, 953, 1005, 1245; XV, 142. There were already concerns about the Scottish government’s possible role in encouraging aristocratic dissent in Ireland.
10. Susan Brigden, ‘Henry VIII and the Crusade against England’, in Thomas Betteridge and Suzannah Lipscomb (eds), Henry VIII and the Court: Art, Politics and Performance (Farnham: Ashgate, 2013), pp. 215–23.
11. LP, XIV, i, 940; XIV, ii, 35.
12. The white rose was the heraldic crest most popularly associated with the House of York, the branch of the Plantagenets who ruled England immediately before the Tudors.
13. Hall, Hall’s Chronicle, p. 842.
14. Hazel Pierce, Margaret Pole, Countess of Salisbury, 1473–1541: Loyalty, Lineage, and Leadership (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2003), pp. 36–7.
15. LP, XIII, ii, 695.
16. The Spanish Chronicle, p. 132. This is accepted by Pierce, Margaret Pole, p. 128.
17. Muriel (ed.), Lisle Letters, V, 1259; LP, XIV, i, 191.
18. LP, XVI, 74.
19. Burnet, History of the Reformation, VI, pp. 258–59; LP, XXI, ii, 554.
20. LP, XIII, i, 1124.
21. Ibid., i, 37.
22. Ibid., 233, 280.
23. Madeleine Hope Dodds and Ruth Dodds, The Pilgrimage of Grace, 1536–1537, and the Exeter Conspiracy, 1538 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1915), II, pp. 321–22.
24. LP, XIV, i, 815, 1009, 1035.
25. Ibid., 940, 953, 1005, 1245, 1288.
26. Manuel Fernández Alvarez, Charles V: Elected Emperor and Hereditary Ruler (London: Thames and Hudson, 1975), p. 115.
27. Charles Wriothesley, A Chronicle of England During the Reigns of the Tudors, William Douglas Hamilton (ed.) (London: Camden Society, 1875), pp. 97–9.
28. LP, XIV, ii, 1137.
29. An example being Francis Dereham’s trip to Ireland: the majority of the sources suggest that he went there without the dowager duchess’s permission or knowledge, but there is one which implies she told Lady Isabella Baynton that she knew Dereham had gone there. On the balance of probability, especially given the doubt expressed in the latter anomalous source, the majority version that remembered him leaving England without taking leave of the Howard family beforehand seems the most probable – SP 1/168, f. 53; LP, XVI, 1409 (8), 1416.
30. LP, XIV, ii, 300.
31. Ibid., i, 955.
32. Ibid., ii, 275.
33. Original Letters, I, ii, 146.
34. LP, XIV, ii, 469.
35. Burnet, History of the Reformation, VI, p. 233.
36. SP 1/167, ff. 110, 131; LP, XVI, 1334, 1379.
37. SP 1/168, f. 14.
38. Ives, Life and Death, p. 9.
39. SP 1/168, f. 8.
40. Ibid., f. 53. The framing of the questions put to Agnes during the interrogations also makes it clear that the dowager was not present at the time and that the information was passed on to her by another source.
41. Ibid.
42. Inventory, II, pp. 58–9.
43. 2 Samuel 11:1–27.
44. LP, XIV, ii, 221.
45. Anne of Cleves may have had as many as seven maids of honour, based on BL – Additional MS 45, 716a, f. 16. At least at the start of her queenship, Catherine had five, excluding the mother of the maids, based on SP 1/157, f. 16. Katherine Parr’s were back up to seven in 1547, with their mother – Hamilton, ‘Household of Queen Katherine Parr’, pp. 30–1.
46. LP, XIV, i, 1088.
47. Muriel (ed.), Lisle Letters, III, 574; IV, 899; VI, 1653.
48. Lord Lisle was an acknowledged illegitimate son of King Edward IV, Henry VIII’s maternal grandfather.
49. LP, XV, 1030 (52); Muriel (ed.), Lisle Letters, V, 1558.
50. Original Letters, I, ii, 146.
51. LP, XV, 215.
52. Ibid., 229.
53. LP, XIV, ii, 33; XV, 215
54. ‘John Russell’s Book of Nurture’, in The Babees’ Book, p. 66.
55. Household Ordinances, p. 156; Thurley, Royal Palaces, pp. 123–27.
56. Ninya Mikhaila and Jane Malcolm-Davies, The Tudor Tailor: Reconstructing sixteenth-century dress (London: Batsford, 2006), p. 23.
57. Muriel (ed.), Lisle Letters, IV, 161–62, 191, 894; Burnet, History of the Reformation, VI, 72.
58. BL, Harleian MS 6807, ff. 10v–11.
59. Thurley, Royal Palaces, p. 172.
60. Ibid., pp. 172–76.
61. G. W. Bernard, The Power of the Early Tudor Nobility: A Study of the Fourth and Fifth Earls of Shrewsbury (Brighton: Harvester Press, 1985), p. 173.
62. Susan Brigden, Thomas Wyatt: The Heart’s Forest (London: Faber and Faber, 2012), p. 521; Thurley, Royal Palaces, p. 50; LP, XIV, ii, 718.
63. LP, XIV, ii, 718.
64. Thurley, Royal Palaces, pp. 50–8.
65. LP, XIV, ii, 340.
66. Ibid., i, 970, 1208; XV, 330.
67. SP 1/168, f. 48.
68. Head, Ebbs and Flows, pp. 251–52.
69. Childs, Henry VIII’s Last Victim, pp. 92–3.
70. Ibid., p. 17.
71. Ibid., pp. 133–34. His wife was Lady Frances de Vere, daughter of the 15th Earl of Oxford and his second wife Elizabeth (née Trussell).
72. Ibid., p. 3.
73. Beverley A. Murphy, Bastard Prince: Henry VIII’s Lost Son (Stroud: History Press, 2010), p. 176.
74. Ibid., pp. 221–22.
75. Mary Howard had three titles in 1539 – her late husband Henry Fitzroy (1519–1536) had been Duke of Richmond and Somerset and Earl of Nottingham. It was only later in the reign, when the Seymour match was suggested again, that Surrey apparently claimed that marrying a Seymour was beneath a Howard.
76. Household Ordinances, p. 155.
77. LP, IX, 612.
78. SP 1/167, f. 148.
79. Ibid.
80. Ibid.
81. Burnet, History of the Reformation, VI, 72.
82. SP 1/168, f. 53.
83. LP, XIV, ii, 256.
84. The Hapsburg Netherlands covered what is now the kingdoms of Belgium and of the Netherlands, the grand duchy of Luxembourg, and part of the French region of Nord-Pas-de-Calais. Daughters or sisters of the monarch ruled the Netherlands as extremely capable deputies for most of the sixteenth century.
85. LP, XIV, ii, 314, 360, 553, 591.
86. Ibid., 622.
87. Ibid., 718.
88. Ibid., 677.
Chapter 7: The Charms of Catherine Howard
1. The account of Anne of Cleves’s arrival, including the weather and her ladies’ outfits, is taken from Hall’s Chronicle, pp. 834–36. Edward Hall’s mania for the details of Tudor court pageantry is a historian’s delight.
2. LP, XIV, i, 490.
3. Hall, Hall’s Chronicle, pp. 834–36.
4. The Feast of the Epiphany is still counted as the last day of Christmas in Catholic countries, like Spain, where as ‘Kings’ Day’ it is the main gift-giving day of the season.
5. The first recognisably ‘modern’ royal wedding, taking place in a cathedral and accompanied by processions through the streets and media attention, was that of Mary, the Princess Royal, to Henry Lascelles, the future 6th Earl of Harewood, in February 1922.
6. Hall, Hall’s Chronicle, p. 837.
7. Hall, Hall’s Chronicle, p. 836.
8. LP, XV, 86. A report of the punishment of a criminal mentions that they were pelted with snowballs by local children.
9. Hall, Hall’s Chronicle, p. 837.
10. LP, XV, 822; letter from Charles de Marillac to the Constable de Montmorency, 5 January 1540, cit. Thomas, The Pilgrim, pp. 135–36.
11. Warnicke, The Marrying of Anne of Cleves, pp. 183–84.
12. The famous portrait of Anne of Cleves by Hans Holbein, which now hangs in the Louvre, is usually blamed for misleading the king. However, Holbein did not go to Schloss Düren to paint Anne’s portrait until August 1539 and it was not complete until September, by which point the negotiations for the marriage were almost concluded.
13. Retha M. Warnicke, ‘Henry VIII’s Greeting of Anne of Cleves and Early Modern Court Protocol’, in Albion (1996), pp. 580–82.
14. The habit of a disguised royal bridegroom spying on his fiancée was a trope borrowed from numerous romances, but one which actual princesses seemed to find both offensive and annoying. Three years after Anne’s marriage, Princess Maria Manuela of Portugal shielded her face with a fan when she heard her betrothed was dressed as a commoner in the crowds as she entered Salamanca.
15. LP, XV, 179.
16. The comments on Anne’s appearance tally with de Marillac’s assessment, although it is possible that Eleanor had also heard reports on Anne of Cleves from her sister Maria, Dowager Queen of Hungary, who had sent a nobleman to escort Anne on her journey through the Netherlands. The sisters were in regular enough contact that when a messenger was absent from the dowager queen’s court, it was assumed he had taken a message to the Queen of France – LP, XV, 837, and a letter from Charles de Marillac to King François I, 5 January 1540, cit. Thomas, The Pilgrim, p. 135.
17. The title was held by Edward’s family before their seizure of the crown in 1461, and it was given to his younger son, Richard, in 1473. Ironically, given its customary designation as a title for the monarch’s second surviving son, five of the men invested with the title since then later succeeded to the throne – Henry VIII, Charles I, James II, George V, and George VI were all dukes of York during their fathers’ or brothers’ lifetimes. In the eighteenth century, the title was also joined with the duchy of Albany and awarded to younger brothers of kings George I, George III, and George IV. The duchies were separated for a son and grandson of Queen Victoria and have not been coupled together since.
18. John Strype, Ecclesiastical Memorials (London: John Wyat, 1721), App., pp. 315–16.
19. LP, XIV, ii, 33.
20. Ibid., XV, 925. De Marillac’s experience of England typically meant London.
21. Ibid., 243. This message was carried verbally by one of Anne’s compatriots, making it more likely that the sentiment was genuine.
22. Ibid., 776.
23. Ibid., 976.
24. Ibid., 823.
25. Diarmaid MacCulloch, Thomas Cranmer: A Life (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1996), p. 258.
26. LP, XV, 822.
27. The English interest in maintaining the alliance with Cleves is suggested by the Duke of Norfolk’s embassy to France, in which his mission was to persuade François I to default on his treaty with Charles V in favour of a tripartite alliance with England and Cleves – LP, XV, 233.
28. LP, XV, 652.
29. Ibid., 38.
30. Ibid., 189.
31. Cal. S. P. Span., VI, 160.
32. LP, XV, 154.
33. Ibid., 121.
34. Ibid., 115.
35. Hall, Hall’s Chronicle, p. 837; LP, XV, 209. For the weather, a letter from Sir John Gage records that the weather was improving by the middle of February – LP, XV, 218.
36. LP, XV, 239, 240.
37. Ibid., 115, 224.
38. Ibid., 223.
39. Ibid., 223, 253, 412; Roger Bigelow Merriman, Life and Letters of Thomas Cromwell (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1902), II, p. 338.
40. LP, XVI, 1332.
41. Michael Everett, The Rise of Thomas Cromwell: Power and Politics in the Reign of Henry VIII (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2015), pp. 58–61.
42. SP 1/121, f. 131.
43. Burnet, History of the Reformation, VI, pp. 258–59.
44. LP, XIV, ii, 379.
45. Ibid., 383.
46. Hall, Hall’s Chronicle, p. 838.
47. Ibid., p. 840.
48. LP, XV, 414.
49. Ibid., 259, 269.
50. Ibid., 179.
51. Wriothesley, Chronicle, p. 115.
52. LP, XV, 1025.
53. Glyn Redworth, In Defence of the Church Catholic: The Life of Stephen Gardiner (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1990), pp. 119–20.
54. LP, XV, 822.
55. SP 1/168, ff. 64–5.
56. Ibid., f. 8.
57. Ibid., f. 80.
58. LP, XV, 612, grant 12.
59. Ibid., 686; Inventory, II, 155.
60. Hastings Robinson (ed.), Original Letters Relative to the English Reformation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1846), I, pp. 201–02.
61. Robinson (ed.), Original Letters, I, pp. 201–02.
62. LP, XV, 648, 737.
63. Burnet, History of the Reformation, V, p. 276.
64. LP, XV, 442.
65. Ibid., 719, 737.
66. Ibid., 749; Stanford E. Lehmberg, The Later Parliaments of Henry VIII, 1536–1547 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977), p. 127.
67. Redworth, In Defence of the Church Catholic, pp. 105–06.
68. LP, XV, 833.
69. Wriothesley, Chronicle, p. 118.
70. LP, XV, 737.
71. Ibid., 823.
72. Ibid., 332.
73. Ibid., 418.
74. LP, XV, 412.
75. Ibid., XIV, ii, 389; XV, 171. Even on occasions when they were declaring the opposite, as in conversations with Charles de Marillac, the English courtiers’ conversations suggested a degree of concern about the Duke of Cleves’s actions – LP, XV, 651.
76. Ibid., XV, 161, 662, 665.
77. Ibid., 676.
78. Ibid., 712.
79. Ibid., 811, 901.
80. Ibid., 703.
81. Cal. S. P. Span., XI, 337.
82. Strype, Ecclesiastical, I, App., p. 313.
83. LP, XV, 850 (11) seems to show Cromwell’s sluggishness or reluctance to press ahead with the annulment, despite Wriothesley’s panic.
84. Ibid., 776.
85. Ibid., 766 – the French ambassador was told by an unnamed gentleman of the court that the primary reason for the king’s anger was Cromwell’s religious policy.
86. Ibid.
87. Ibid., 767.
88. In a twist of fate, Anne’s childhood fiancé eventually married Christina of Denmark, the emperor’s niece who had avoided Henry’s advances in 1538–39.
89. LP, XV, 267.
90. Ibid., XIV, i, 1193.
91. Ibid., XV, 825, 850 (13).
92. Original Letters, II, ii, 141.
93. LP, XV, 844.
94. HMC Rutland, I, p. 27.
95. LP, XV, 850 (5, 7, 9, 13, 14).
96. Ibid., 850 (7).
97. Burnet, History of the Reformation, II, pp. 307–08; LP, XV, 823.
98. LP, XV, 860, 861.
99. H. A. Kelly, The Matrimonial Trials of Henry VIII (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1976) p. 273.
100. There is some debate over legislation passed to facilitate Catherine’s marriage, with suggestions that some of it indicates that Catherine had made some half-confession about having being attached to someone in a relationship that involved discussion of marriage but no consummation. However, it seems far more likely that the legislation was designed to free Henry from any difficulty regarding the annulment of his marriage to Anne of Cleves; Kelly, Matrimonial Trials, pp. 261–64.
101. LP, XV, 845.
102. Ibid., 899.
103. Ibid., 883.
104. Ibid., 991.
105. Ibid., 925 (ii).
106. Ibid., 901.
107. MacCulloch, Thomas Cranmer, p. 271.
108. Burnet, History of the Reformation, I, pp. 569–70.
109. Thurley, Royal Palaces, p. 190.
110. David Starkey, ‘Intimacy and innovation: the rise of the Privy Chamber, 1485–1547’, in David Starkey (ed.), The English Court: from the Wars of the Roses to the Civil War (London: Longman, 1987), p. 82.
Chapter 8: The Queen of Britain Will Not Forget
1. LP, XIV, i, 1303; Thurley, Royal Palaces, p. 60.
2. Hall, Hall’s Chronicle, p. 840. This might explain why writers later in the century and in the Stuart era mistakenly dated Catherine’s wedding to 8 August, for instance Burnet, History of the Reformation, II, p. 449.
3. LP, XV, 902.
4. Emperor Charles IV (d. 1378) was survived by his fourth wife, Elisabeth of Pomerania (d. 1393), the mother of Anne of Bohemia, queen consort of England (d. 1394). Charles is buried in St Vitus’s Cathedral in Prague, in a sepulchre that houses the Empress Elisabeth’s remains and those of his first three wives – Blanche of Valois (d. 1348), Anna of Bavaria (d. 1353), and Anna of Swidnica (d. 1362). Technically, King Philippe II of France (d. 1223) was also married four times, but twice to the same woman. Henry VIII’s record as the most married European sovereign was beaten in the next generation by Tsar Ivan IV (‘the Terrible’) of Russia (d. 1584), who wed seven times.
5. Cal. S. P. Span, VI, i, 115.
6. The Bulmers were a prominent family in York; The Cause Papers Database, G.360 – a case regarding a tithe dated to the Church Courts at York on 7 October 1540 gives a John Bulmer’s age and occupation, when he was named as one of the plaintiffs. Holinshed gives the name of Joan’s husband as Anthony Bulmer, but John Roche Dasent et al. (eds), Acts of the Privy Council (London: Her Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1890–1964), I, pp. 46–8, explicitly gives his Christian name as William. There is nothing to support the narrative that Joan and Anthony were married while she was still in service to the Dowager Duchess of Norfolk, since the Acts of the Privy Council only refer to an estrangement between the couple after February 1542. The suggestion that William Bulmer stopped Joan joining Queen Catherine’s household in 1540 is speculative and it is difficult to believe that a counter-command from the queen would not have secured Joan’s place.
7. LP, XV, 875.
8. Antonia Fraser, The Six Wives of Henry VIII (London: Arrow Books, 1998), p. 329; Denny, Katherine Howard, pp. 166–67.
9. E101/422/16, f. 63v; SP 1/157, ff. 15–16.
10. SP 1/167, f. 110.
11. James, Kateryn Parr, p. 152.
12. LP, XVI, 1321.
13. Ibid., 1334.
14. Ibid., 1394, 1422. Potentially contrary evidence is that the king granted a pardon to Mary Lascelles on the grounds that she had refused to join the queen’s service and that by pardoning her it would encourage others to tell the truth in future. Joan was not included in this pardon, but that may simply be because she had not willingly revealed the information about Catherine’s past, as Mary had, or because in July 1540 she had sought employment in Catherine’s household.
15. SP 1/168, f. 80.
16. Original Letters, I, ii, 121.
17. Griffiths, Sir Rhys ap Thomas, p. 90.
18. The countess’s quest to prove that the witnesses against her husband had acted from greed or fear resulted in future generations’ resilience in trying to overturn what they saw as a miscarriage of justice. The last attempt to have Rhys’s verdict posthumously revoked was through a petition to King James I in 1607. For Llwyd, see Griffiths, Sir Rhys ap Thomas, pp. 127–28.
19. Smith, A Tudor Tragedy, p. 155.
20. That it was a sustained policy is supported by the fact that they sought out Alice Restwold in October 1541 – see SP 1/167, f. 136.
21. See chapters 11 and 17.
22. SP 1/167, f. 117.
23. LP, XIII, ii. 695
24. Andrew S. Currie, ‘Notes on the Obstetric Histories of Catherine of Aragon and Anne Boleyn’, in Edinburgh Medical Journal (1888), pp. 1–34; Ove Brinch, ‘The Medical Problems of Henry VIII’, in Centaurus (1958), pp. 339–69.
25. Sir Arthur Salusbury MacNalty, Henry VIII: A Difficult Patient (Norwich: Christopher Johnson, 1952), pp. 159–63, which retracts in detail an earlier lecture given by the author in support of the theory that the king had syphilis. For the recent resurrection of the theory, see Joanna Denny, Anne Boleyn (London: Portrait, 2004), pp. 119, 227–28, and the same author’s Katherine Howard, pp. 160–61.
26. Frederick Chamberlin, The Private Character of Henry the Eighth (London: John Lane, 1932), pp. 268–76 for the medical experts’ responses, and pp. 276–82 for Chamberlin’s own debunking of the syphilis myth.
27. Derek Wilson, A Brief History of Henry VIII: Reformer and Tyrant (London: Constable & Robinson, 2009), p. 106. This is one of the best books to explore and promote the idea that Henry’s impotence significantly affected his performance as king, along with Ives, Life and Death, pp. 190–92.
28. Ives, Life and Death, p. 191.
29. Ibid.
30. Michelle Anne White, Henrietta Maria and the English Civil Wars (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006), pp. 23–4.
31. Derek Wilson, The Uncrowned Kings of England: The Black Legend of the Dudleys (London: Constable & Robinson, 2005), p. 109.
32. C. M. Prior, The Royal Studs of the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (London: Horse and Hound Publications, 1935), pp. 2–3; Inventory, II, pp. 98–9.
33. Thurley, Royal Palaces, pp. 63–5.
34. Martin Biddle, Nonsuch Palace: The Material Culture of a Noble Restoration Household (Oxford: Oxbow Books, 2005), pp. 1–3.
35. Thurley, Royal Palaces, p. 38.
36. Ibid., p. 51.
37. LP, XIV, ii, 35.
38. Hall, Hall’s Chronicle, p. 840.
39. One such procession was organised in London by Edmund Bonner.
40. LP, XIV, i, 1239.
41. Ibid., XII, i, 923; XIV, ii, 378; XV, 985, 1015.
42. Susan Brigden, New Worlds, Lost Worlds: The Rule of the Tudors, 1485–1603 (London: Penguin, 2000), p. 233; LP, XV, 82.
43. Hall, Hall’s Chronicle, p. 841; Burnet, History of the Reformation, I, pp. 599–600. Wriothesley, Chronicle, I, p. 126, incorrectly places Meekins’s execution on 30 July 1541.
44. LP, XVI, 20. Swinerton or Swynerton came from the parish of Swineshead, most likely the one which is now in Bedfordshire. He was summoned to appear before the Privy Council at Ampthill, also in Bedfordshire. If he had been from the Lincolnshire village of the same name, he would have been taken to the Council of the North. Until the reign of George III, Swineshead was an exclave of Huntingdonshire, but it was enclosed as part of Bedfordshire by Parliament in 1803.
45. LP, XIV, ii, 11.
46. LP, XV, 202; Kaulek, 347; Cal. S.P. Span, VI, i, 135.
47. Brigden, Thomas Wyatt, pp. 515–21.
48. The constable was, in effect, the King of France’s chief minister, and all the other Great Officers of the French Crown were subordinate to him.
49. LP, XV, 954.
50. Holinshed, Chronicles, III, p. 819.
51. Hall, Hall’s Chronicle, p. 840.
52. LP, XV, 976.
53. J. J. Scarisbrick, Henry VIII (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1997), p. 353.
54. Herbert, Life and Raigne, p. 532.
Chapter 9: All These Ladies and My Whole Kingdom
1. The Spanish Chronicle, pp. 75–6.
2. Hamilton, pp. 15–16.
3. James, Kateryn Parr, p. 122.
4. LP, XV, 21.
5. Elizabeth Norton has suggested that the Lady Clinton in attendance was Jane (née Poynings), Elizabeth Blount’s mother-in-law. However, by 1540, Jane had remarried to Sir Robert Wingfield, and despite his death, it would be unusual to see her referred to by her previous marital name – see Elizabeth Norton, Bessie Blount: Mistress to Henry VIII (Stroud: Amberley, 2013), pp. 301–04. I believe it was Elizabeth (née Blount) who served in the household as Lady Clinton in 1540, but I am convinced by Norton’s suggestion, based on her analysis of family wills, that Elizabeth probably died giving birth to a daughter. This child was christened Catherine, which, on an admittedly tenuous basis, may have been a tribute to the queen Elizabeth served at the time of her death.
6. The Babees’ Book, p. 4.
7. Household Ordinances, p. 38.
8. Margaret Visser, The Rituals of Dinner: The Origins, Evolution, Eccentricities, and Meaning of Table Manners (London: Viking, 1992), p. 334.
9. ‘John Russell’s Book of Nurture’, in The Babees’ Book, p. 64.
10. The gentlewomen of the privy chamber were generally members of the gentry, perhaps linked to the aristocracy on their mothers’ sides and married to up-and-coming court-based knights or expectant sons. Once a husband was knighted, his wife could style herself a lady.
11. Julia Fox, Jane Boleyn: The Infamous Lady Rochford (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2007), p. 333; S. T. Bindoff (ed.), The House of Commons, 1509–1558 (London: Secker & Warburg, 1982), III, pp. 255–58; J. L. Kirby, ‘Edgcumbe, Sir Richard (c.1443–1489)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Lady Edgecombe’s parents, Sir John St John of Bletsoe and Sybil (née Morgan), had started their family in the late 1490s. Lady Edgecombe’s brother, who had the same name as her father and served as one of the MPs for Bedfordshire, was married by 1521 and she by 1525. She was widowed on 14 August 1539.
12. Norman Davis (ed.), The Paston Letters and Papers of the Fifteenth Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1971), I, 116, 117, 165, 231.
13. LP, XIV, i, 1312; XV, 236.
14. S. J. Gunn, Charles Brandon, Duke of Suffolk, c.1484–1545 (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1988), p. 205; Barbara J. Harris, ‘Women and Politics in Early Tudor England’, in Historical Journal (1990), p. 265.
15. Muriel (ed.), Lisle Letters, IV, 882; Original Letters, II, ii, 106.
16. Wriothesley, Chronicle, I, p. 124; LP, XIV, i, 965; XIV, ii, 753, 1121; XV, 1, 215, 229, 947.
17. LP, XIV, ii, 188.
18. Muriel (ed.), Lisle Letters, V, p. 1393.
19. LP, XVI, 1389.
20. Ibid.
21. BL: Addit. MS 46, 348, ff. 167b, 169b, 170a.
22. Ibid., f. 168b.
23. Ibid., f. 172b.
24. LP, XVI, 1389; BL: Addit. MS. 46, 348, f. 171b.
25. James P. Carley, The Books of Henry VIII and his Wives (London: British Library, 2004), pp. 134–35.
26. RCIN 912256.
27. James, Kateryn Parr, p. 11.
28. LP, XII, ii, 167, 424, 1060. William Herbert’s father, Sir Robert Herbert, was the illegitimate son of the 1st Earl of Pembroke, who died in 1469. The title had been surrendered to the Crown in the reign of Edward IV as part of a deal by the 2nd earl. It was one of the titles used by King Edward V prior to his accession in 1483, and after his death it merged with the Crown until it was revived and elevated for Anne Boleyn, who became Lady Marquess of Pembroke in 1532. With her death, the title was again in abeyance, and William Herbert hoped to have it restored in his favour. This was achieved in the reign of Edward VI, and the title is currently held by William and Anne’s descendant, William Herbert, 18th Earl of Pembroke and 15th Earl of Montgomery.
29. The identity of the Mistress Lee as Joyce Lee is by a process of elimination, with all the gentlewomen with that surname in 1540–41, with husbands attached to the court.
30. Lorne Campbell and Susan Foister, ‘Gerard, Lucas and Susanna Horenbout’, in Burlington Magazine (1986), pp. 719–27.
31. Elizabeth Norton, Anne of Cleves: Henry VIII’s Discarded Bride (Stroud: Amberley, 2010), p. 63.
32. ‘John Russell’s Book of Nurture’, pp. 66–7; ‘Francis Seager’s School of Virtue’, p. 143; both quoted in The Babees’ Book.
33. Thurley, Royal Palaces, pp. 169–70.
34. Mikhaila and Malcolm-Davies, Tudor Tailor, p. 24.
35. James, Kateryn Parr, p. 127.
36. Hamilton, ‘Household of Queen Katherine Parr’, pp. 171–72.
37. Thurley, Royal Palaces, pp. 171–76; Hamilton, ‘Household of Queen Katherine Parr’, pp. 45, 172.
38. ‘John Russell’s Book of Nurture’, in The Babees’ Book, pp. 64–6.
39. An Act of Parliament in 1540 gave the newly married couple the right to inherit the Oxfordshire manor.
40. LP, XVI, 1389.
41. Ibid., 1339.
42. The identities of Lucy, the two Margarets, and Damascin are reached after research, since in Lucy’s case only her first name and title are used in the surviving documentation, and in Damascin’s and the Margarets’, only their surnames. They are the only girls of the right age and background in 1540–41 whose details correlate with what survives in LP, XV, 21.
43. Margaret Somerset (née Courtenay), Countess of Worcester, was the daughter of Katherine Courtenay, Countess of Devon, a younger daughter of King Edward IV and Queen Elizabeth Woodville.
44. Stewart, Close Readers, pp. xv, 178.
45. LP, XV, 21.
46. Hamilton, ‘Household of Queen Katherine Parr’, p. 29; Thurley, Royal Palaces, p. 143.
47. James, Kateryn Parr, pp. 154–55, 323.
48. David Baldwin, Henry VIII’s Last Love: The Extraordinary Life of Katherine Willoughby, Lady-in-Waiting to the Tudors (Stroud: Amberley, 2015), p. 72.
49. In her will, Jane Dudley, by then Dowager Duchess of Northumberland, confessed, ‘I have not loved to be very bold afore women’, as part of a stipulation that she should not be autopsied, due to her modesty.
50. Thurley, Royal Palaces, p. 140.
51. Scarisbrick, Henry VIII, pp. 13–14.
52. Leviticus 20:21.
53. Deuteronomy 25:5. Her parents’ pact with Portugal was maintained by marrying Katherine’s sister Maria to King Manoel I, after the death in childbed of his first wife, Katherine and Maria’s eldest sister.
54. James Gairdner (ed.), Memorials of King Henry the Seventh (London: Longman, Brown, Green, Longmans, and Roberts, 1858), p. 232.
55. Jacobo Fitz-James Stuart, 10th Duke of Berwick and 17th Duke of Alba (ed.), Correspondencia de Gutierre de Fuensalida (Madrid: privately published, 1907), p. 449.
56. Lisa Hilton, Queens Consort: England’s Medieval Queens (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2008), p. 411.
57. Eleanor of Austria (1498–1558) was Charles V’s eldest sister and the widow of King Manoel I of Portugal when she married King François I of France in 1530.
58. Scarisbrick, Henry VIII, pp. 13–14; LP, I, 2391.
59. Giles Tremlett, Catherine of Aragon: Henry’s Spanish Queen (London: Faber and Faber, 2010), p. 159.
60. Scarisbrick, Henry VIII, pp. 21–39.
61. Hall, Hall’s Chronicle, p. 515.
62. RCIN 403368; Mark 16:15.
63. R. W. Hoyle, The Pilgrimage of Grace and the Politics of the 1530s (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), p. 454.
64. The best argument for a shift in 1536 can be found in Suzannah Lipscomb, 1536: The Year That Changed Henry VIII (London: Lion Hudson, 2006).
65. For the theories on Henry’s health, see in particular Robert Hutchinson, The Last Days of Henry VIII: Conspiracy, Treason and Heresy at the Court of a Dying Tyrant (London: Phoenix, 2006), and Kyra Kramer, Blood Will Tell: A Medical Explanation of the Tyranny of Henry VIII (Bloomington, IN: Ash Wood Press, 2014), the latter of which tackles the debate from the perspective of medical anthropology.
66. C. R. Chalmers and E. J. Chaloner, ‘500 Years Later: Henry VIII, Leg Ulcers and the Course of History’, Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine (2009), pp. 514–17.
67. Strype, Ecclesiastical, I, App., p. 313.
68. Household Ordinances, p. 144; BL Harleian MS 6807, f. IIv.
69. Tremlett, Catherine of Aragon, pp. 134–39; Retha M. Warnicke, The Rise and Fall of Anne Boleyn: Family politics at the court of Henry VIII (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), p. 229n.
70. Household Ordinances, pp. 151–52.
71. SP 1/167, f. 136.
72. Muriel (ed.), Lisle Letters, IV, 155–56; LP, XIV, ii, 1026.
Chapter 10: The Queen’s Brothers
1. BL: Addit. MS 46, 348, f. 6b.
2. Burnet, History of the Reformation, I, p. 568, mentions consternation in Parliament at the king’s request. LP, XV, 697 states that the request was granted without open complaint.
3. Matilda of Boulogne, whose husband seized the throne as King Stephen in December 1135, was crowned separately at Easter 1136, since her husband’s coronation was probably intended to directly mirror that of his predecessor, Henry I – see Edmund King, King Stephen (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010), pp. 47–8, 56–7. The reasons for Marguerite of France never being crowned are unclear, since by all accounts her marriage to Edward I was a happy one. He commissioned a goldsmith, Thomas de Frowick, to make a crown for her to wear after her wedding, but the decision to skip a coronation may have had something to do with the prominence of Edward’s first wife, Eleanor of Castile, who was mother to the living heir apparent, the future Edward II. There is no other logical explanation for Philippa of Hainault’s coronation being delayed for nearly two years except at the instigation of the queen regent, Isabella of France.
4. David Starkey, Six Wives: The Queens of Henry VIII (London: Vintage, 2004), p. 602.
5. She arrived at Windsor on 17 August and did not return to Hampton Court until 18 December – LP, XV, 963; XVI, 325.
6. LP, XVI, 60, 311.
7. Ibid., XV, 963, 996; XVI, 26, 112, 114, 124, 179.
8. Ibid., XV, 259.
9. Ibid., XVI, 503, grant 25.
10. Sarah Morris and Natalie Grueninger, In the Footsteps of Anne Boleyn (Stroud: Amberley, 2015), pp. 87–90.
11. LP, XVI, 1389.
12. Kaulek, 246.
13. Supper was the name generally used for a later meal.
14. Morris and Grueninger, In the Footsteps of Anne Boleyn, pp. 131–32.
15. Thurley, Royal Palaces, p. 193.
16. Ibid.
17. LP, XVI, 11. De Marillac was born between 1510 and 1513.
18. Cavendish, Life of Cardinal Wolsey, II, p. 66.
19. Thomas, The Pilgrim, p. 58.
20. LP, XVI, 12.
21. In 2009, the then Wales Herald Extraordinary, Dr Michael Powell Siddons, could find no information on any specific heraldic device or beast associated with Catherine, in contrast to all five of Henry’s other queens – see Michael Powell Siddons, Heraldic Badges in England and Wales (Woodbridge: Society of Antiquaries of London, 2009), Volume I, p. 116; Volume II, part I, pp. 21–25, 132.
22. Inventory, II, 94; Hall, Hall’s Chronicle, p. 834.
23. LP, XVI, 12.
24. Strickland, Lives of the Queens of England, III, p. 122.
25. For the coin debate, see Starkey, Six Wives, p. 810.
26. LP, XVI, 1389.
27. Ibid., 32.
28. Ibid., 60.
29. Mikhaila and Malcolm-Davies, Tudor Tailor, pp. 16–19.
30. LP, XVI, 60.
31. Ibid., 41, 61, 62.
32. Ibid., 284, 286. Lord Grey became 1st Viscount Grane in the Irish peerage in 1536, but he was still referred to as Lord Leonard Grey by many of his contemporaries by 1540.
33. Ibid., 334.
34. Cal. S. P. Milan, I, 131.
35. J. L. Laynesmith, The Last Medieval Queens: English Queenship, 1445–1603 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), p. 182.
36. Hamilton, ‘Household of Queen Katherine Parr’, p. 127.
37. LP, XVI, 27.
38. Ibid., 128; Burnet, History of the Reformation, IV, p. 64.
39. LP, XVI, 128.
40. SP 1/167, f. 131.
41. Henry is named first in Sir John Leigh’s will from 1524, but Charles precedes him in Dame Isabel Leigh’s in 1527. W. Bruce Bannerman (ed.), The Visitations of the County of Surrey (London: Harleian Society, 1899), XLIII, p. 21, is the only source which puts George first, however it omits Henry entirely. W. Bruce Bannerman (ed.), The Visitations of Kent (London: Harleian Society, 1924), LXXV, i, p. 81, gives Henry as the eldest and Charles as the youngest.
42. Burnet, History of the Reformation, IV, p. 64.
43. LP, XVI, 1056, grant 16.
44. Patricia Buchanan, Margaret Tudor, Queen of Scots (Edinburgh and London: Scottish Academic Press, 1985), p. 255.
45. Frederic Madden, ‘Narrative of the Visit of the Duke of Najera to England, in the Year 1543–4’ (London: Society of Antiquaries, 1831), p. 352; Thurley, Royal Palaces, p. 131. Other people allocated double lodgings at all the palaces included Thomas Cromwell and the future Queen Mary I.
46. LP, XIII, ii, 622.
47. Original Letters, III, iii, 309.
48. Hall, Hall’s Chronicle, p. 819.
49. Kimberly Schutte, A Biography of Margaret Douglas, Countess of Lennox (1515–1578) (Lewiston, NY: Edward Mellen Press, 2002), p. 27.
50. Brenan and Statham, House of Howard, I, pp. 305–07, which also includes fanciful descriptions of Catherine’s ‘tearful entreaties’ in 1540 for the pair to be allowed to marry. Schutte, Margaret Douglas, pp. 72–3, dates the affair to 1541 but repeats the story that Margaret was sent to Syon. Later in her life, when Margaret listed her previous detentions, she made no mention of being rusticated for her involvement with Charles Howard. Alison Weir’s biography of Lady Margaret Douglas was published after this manuscript was first submitted, but before publication; Weir also concludes that there is no evidence to support that the affair was discovered and punished in 1540 – Alison Weir, The Lost Tudor Princess: A Life of Margaret Douglas, Countess of Lennox (London: Jonathan Cape, 2015), pp. 89–93.
51. LP, XVI, 1067, grant 16.
52. Ibid., 183.
53. Ibid., 91.
54. Baynton hosted Anne Boleyn at his home in August 1535, but this should not necessarily be taken as a sign of affection or intimacy between the pair – likewise, their shared sympathies for religious reform. The queen most likely used her visit as a base for her charitable operations in the area, see Ives, Life and Death, p. 262.
55. Ives, Life and Death, p. 326.
56. Bindoff (ed.), House of Commons, I, p. 402.
57. LP, VI, 613. It seems highly unlikely that the letter regarding celebrations after the queen’s coronation in 1533 was a veiled reference to sexual activity, especially when it is remembered that the letter was written to the queen’s brother and she was pregnant at the time – see Ives, Life and Death, pp. 182–83. Cf. G. W. Bernard, Anne Boleyn: Fatal Attractions (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2010), pp. 185–86.
58. Tremlett, Catherine of Aragon, pp. 167–68; Sir Anthony Browne was the king’s Master of the Horse during Catherine’s tenure. At the time of his quarrel with his sister, the office was held by Sir Nicholas Carew. Browne’s interrogation of his sister has resulted in a recent academic dispute and, quite possibly, in its exaggeration. For the argument that it is central to explaining Anne Boleyn’s downfall see Bernard, Anne Boleyn, pp. 152–55. For the suggestion that the disagreement between the siblings has been exaggerated and conflated with the downfall of the queen later that summer, see Ives, Life and Death, pp. 331–35, and Warnicke, Rise and Fall, p. 299n.
59. LP, V, 748; XIII, 450.
60. Ibid., XVI, 223.
Chapter 11: The Return of Francis Dereham
1. It is unclear if Catherine also received the extra twenty-eight manors that were given to Katherine Parr later in her marriage. Hamilton, ‘Household of Queen Katherine Parr’, p. 141–42, believes both queens had the same amount of property, which would give Catherine 133 manors in twenty counties; fifteen boroughs; six castles; and other related properties.
2. LP, I, I, 94 (35); VII, 419 (25); Hamilton, ‘Household of Queen Katherine Parr’, p. 142.
3. LP, XVI, 503, grant 25.
4. Ives, Life and Death, pp. 214–16; Hamilton, ‘Household of Queen Katherine Parr’, pp. 147–62.
5. LP, XV, 21; XIX, ii, 165, 534, 677, 749, 767; Add., 1694, 1742, 1735.
6. LP, XIX, ii, 165.
7. Proceedings of the Privy Council, VII, pp. 105–07.
8. LP, XVI, 423.
9. The Birth of Mankind was first published in German in 1533. It was the work of Eucharius Roeslin (d. c.1554), and its first English translation was by Richard Jonas in 1540. Richard J. Durling, A Catalogue of Sixteenth Century Printed Books in the National Library of Medicine (Bethesda, MD: US Department of Health, Education, and Welfare, 1967), pp. 503–04.
10. MacCulloch, Thomas Cranmer, p. 272.
11. LP, XVI, 316.
12. Aysha Pollnitz, ‘Religion and Translation at the Court of Henry VIII: Princess Mary, Katherine Parr and the Paraphrases of Erasmus’, in Susan Doran and Thomas S. Freeman (eds), Mary Tudor: Old and New Perspectives (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), pp. 132–36.
13. Cal. S.P. Span., VI, 143.
14. Ibid., 151.
15. SP 1/168, f. 53.
16. LP, XVI, 1409.
17. Steven G. Ellis, Ireland in the Age of the Tudors, 1447–1603 (London: Longman, 1998), pp. 36–7.
18. Ciarán Brady, ‘Comparable histories?: Tudor reform in Wales and Ireland’, in Steven G. Ellis and Sarah Barber (eds), Conquest and Union: Fashioning a British State, 1485–1725 (London: Longman Group, 1995), p. 66.
19. Mary O’Dowd, ‘Gaelic Economy and Society’, in Ciarán Brady and Raymond Gillespie (eds), Natives and Newcomers: Essays on the Making of Irish Colonial Society, 1534–1641 (Bungay, Ireland: Irish Academic Press, 1986), pp. 120–47; Colm Lennon, The Lords of Dublin in the Age of Reformation (Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 1989), pp. 105, 195.
20. Herbert, Life and Raigne, p. 534.
21. SP 1/167, f. 136. Lady Margaret Howard gave the man’s name as ‘one Stafford’, but it is unlikely that this was Katherine Carey’s stepfather, William Stafford. If it had been, he would have been specified by name.
22. SP 1/168, f. 53 supports the idea that it was Dereham who first suggested it though, frustratingly, the answers of the Dowager Duchess of Norfolk and the Countess of Bridgewater have not survived.
23. Why they were not destroyed as soon as they were handed over is an intriguing question, and perhaps the safest answer is the aforementioned theory of buying Dereham’s silence.
24. SP 1/168, f. 85.
25. An exception is Starkey, Six Wives, pp. 661–62, who describes Dereham as a member of the household. The rest generally build on Smith, A Tudor Tragedy, pp. 148–49, that Dereham was appointed as the queen’s private secretary in August 1541.
26. Household Ordinances, p. 199.
27. Mary Saaler, Anne of Cleves: Fourth Wife of Henry VIII (London: Rubicon Press, 1995), p. 78.
28. LP, XVI, 268.
29. Bindoff (ed.), House of Commons, II, p. 429; SP 1/157, fos. 13–14; LP, XV, 21.
Chapter 12: Jewels
1. LP, XVI, 325.
2. Morris and Grueninger, In the Footsteps of Anne Boleyn, pp. 95–97.
3. Kaulek, 246.
4. LP, XVI, 528.
5. Ibid., 325.
6. Ibid., 379, grant 34.
7. Ibid., XV, 940.
8. Ibid., XVI, 503, grant 14.
9. For Elizabeth Seymour, see Luke MacMahon, ‘Ughtred, Sir Anthony (d. 1534), soldier’, in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography; Teri Fitzgerald, ‘Elizabeth Seymour’, in Tudor Life (December 2014), pp. 43–51; Tracy Borman, Thomas Cromwell: The Untold Story of Henry VIII’s Most Faithful Servant (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 2014), pp. 282–84.
10. Some estimates put Lady Cromwell’s birth in c.1500–05, which would have made her older than Jane, who was born c.1508. Other evidence would suggest c.1513.
11. Borman, Thomas Cromwell, pp. 282–83.
12. Original Letters, III, iii, 354.
13. This physical description of Chapuys is based on portraits of him at the Musée-château and Lycée Berthollet, both in Annecy, France – see plates 1 and 18 in Lauren Mackay, Inside the Tudor Court: Henry VIII and His Six Wives Through the Writings of the Spanish Ambassador, Eustace Chapuys (Stroud: Amberley, 2014). The latter image is reproduced in this book, by kind permission of Lauren Mackay.
14. Mackay, Inside the Tudor Court, pp. 18–19, 202–03.
15. Hall, Hall’s Chronicle, p. 840; LP, XV, 953.
16. Hall, Hall’s Chronicle, p. 840. Holinshed, Chronicles, III, p. 819, describes him as the last ‘till queen Maries [Mary I] daies’.
17. Mackay, Inside the Tudor Court, pp. 168–72.
18. Ibid., pp. 182–83, 202–03; Cal. S. P. Span., VI, i, 135.
19. Cal. S. P. Span., VI, i, 144.
20. Ibid.
21. For Catherine’s jewellery collection and the dates of the gifts from the king, see LP, XVI, 1389.
22. Cal. S. P. Span., VI, i, 149.
23. Ibid.
24. LP, XV, 1012, grant 12.
25. After the deposition of King Richard II in 1399, his widow, Isabelle de Valois, was regarded as a former queen consort rather than a widow, due to the non-consummation of her marriage, and she was eventually sent home to her parents in France. Margaret of Anjou was tentatively classed as a former queen by Yorkists following her husband’s first deposition in 1461.
26. By the time Elizabeth Woodville was received back at court, during the reign of her son-in-law Henry VII, her title and position as queen had been legally restored by Act of Parliament.
27. This account of Anne of Cleves’s visit is based on a letter from Eustace Chapuys to Maria of Austria of 8 January 1541 – Cal. S. P. Span., VI, i, 149.
28. Cal. S. P. Span., VI, i, 148. Chapuys had been sceptical of the need to do so, because he doubted that Henry would ever take back someone he had dismissed, but he remained vigilant during Anne’s visit, as the length of his letter about it indicates.
29. LP, XVI, 374.
30. Ibid., XV, 976.
31. Norton, Anne of Cleves, p. 115.
32. Cal. S. P. Span., VI, i, 149.
33. Chapuys and most of the courtiers concluded that the dogs and jewel were given to Anne by Catherine on her own initiative, rather than as part of an elaborate gift-giving orchestrated by the king, who had already separately presented Anne with an increase to her annual income.
34. LP, XVI, 503, grant 32.
35. Cal. S. P. Span., VI, i, 149.
36. Ibid., 151, 161.
37. Ibid., 150; LP, XVI, 482, 534.
38. State Papers, VIII, 514.
39. LP, XVI, 517.
40. Ibid., 511.
41. Ibid., 481.
42. Ibid., 482, 528, 529; Cal. S. P. Span., VI, i, 151.
43. LP, XVI, 649.
Chapter 13: Lent
1. LP, XVI, 529.
2. Ibid., XIV, ii, 35; XVI, 533, 590; Kaulek, 274.
3. Ibid., XV, 114; Acts of the Parliament of Scotland, II, p. 368.
4. LP, XV, 248; Jamie Cameron, James V: The Personal Rule, 1528–1542 (East Lothian: Tuckwell Press, 1998), p. 289.
5. LP, XVI, 534.
6. Kenneth Muir, Life and Letters of Sir Thomas Wyatt (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1963), p. 167.
7. LP, XVI, 541; Cal S. P. Span., VI, i, 155.
8. LP, XVI, 595.
9. Ibid., 597.
10. Ibid., 533.
11. Ibid., 589; Kaulek, 273.
12. Ibid., 558.
13. Kaulek, 273.
14. Ibid., 274.
15. LP, XV, 589; Kaulek, 273.
16. Cal. S. P. Span., VI, i, 204.
17. Ibid.
18. Luke 4:1–13.
19. LP, XVI, 597.
20. Hoyle, Pilgrimage of Grace, p. 545; for the Stockholm syndrome analogy, Beth von Staats, ‘Thomas Cranmer: Were his recantations of faith driven by Stockholm Syndrome?’, in Tudor Life (November 2014), pp. 2–14.
21. Strickland, Lives of the Queens of England, III, pp. 127–28, seems to have been the origin of the story; for one modern repetition of it, see Denny, Katherine Howard, p. 186.
22. Proceedings of the Privy Council, pp. 146–47; LP, XVI, 1489.
23. Proceedings of the Privy Council, p. 146.
24. LP, XVI, 598.
25. Ibid., 606.
26. Ibid., 631, 658. McGilpatrick was replaced as speaker by Thomas Cusack.
27. Cal. S. P. Span., VI, i, 134, 154; LP, XVI, 589, 607 – de Marillac mistakenly concluded that the discussions about the inspections had ceased, but the tour began twelve days later.
28. Ives, Life and Death, pp. 222–23.
29. Ibid., p. 219; Sir Henry C. Maxwell-Lyte, A History of Eton College (London: Macmillan & Co., 1877), p. 114.
30. Ralph Roister Doister (c.1553) was probably written during his time as headmaster of Westminster School, though Tim Card, Eton Established: A History from 1440 to 1860 (London: John Murray, 2001), pp. 38–9, suggests that it may have been written earlier or give a flavour of the kind of plays encouraged at Eton in Udall’s time.
31. A sympathetic biographer of Udall attempted to argue that the word ‘buggery’ was mistranslated in the publication of the Privy Council records in the nineteenth century and that the original read ‘burglary’. This is untrue. Cf. William L. Edgerton, Nicholas Udall (New York: Twayne Publishers, 1965), pp. 37–40.
32. Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 25.205.
33. MacCulloch, Thomas Cranmer, p. 354.
34. Redworth, In Defence of the Church Catholic, p. 82n.
35. For the Udall–Cheney affair at Eton, the relevant pieces of evidence are Proceedings of the Privy Council, VII, pp. 152–58; LP, XII, I, 1209; Bindoff (ed.), House of Commons, I, pp. 12, 663; Sir Henry Ellis (ed.), Original Letters of Eminent Literary Men of the Sixteenth, Seventeenth, and Eighteenth Centuries (London: Camden Society, 1843), pp. 2–7; Maxwell-Lyte, pp. 114–16, 143–44; Sir Wasey Sterry, The Eton College Register, 1441–1698 (Eton, 1943), pp. 70, 179.
36. LP, XVI, 804.
37. Wriothesley, Chronicle, I, p. 124; Cal. S. P. Span., VI, i, 155.
38. LP, II, 3204; E. W. Ives, ‘A Frenchman at the Court of Anne Boleyn’, in History Today (1998), pp. 21–6.
39. LP, XVI, 678, grant 41.
40. State Papers, VIII, 544 (LP, XVI, 1660); Cal. S. P. Span., VI, i, 155; Brigden, Thomas Wyatt, p. 547.
41. Brigden, Thomas Wyatt, pp. 515–66.
42. LP, XVI, 517.
43. Brigden, Thomas Wyatt, p. 547. On the subject of John Leigh, Wyatt may ironically have had a hand in setting up Leigh’s arrest before he himself was taken.
44. Childs, Henry VIII’s Last Victim, p. 167.
45. Brigden, Thomas Wyatt, pp. 92–3.
46. Cal. S. P. Span., VI, i, 155.
47. State Papers, VIII, p. 544.
48. LP, XVI, 650 (2).
49. Ibid., XIV, ii, 71.
Chapter 14: For They Will Look Upon You
1. Kaulek, 289. It does not seem as if Henry told de Marillac personally.
2. The jousts for Elizabeth Woodville’s coronation in 1465 were the result of months of preparation by the organisers and contestants; Laynesmith, Last Medieval Queens, p. 109.
3. Inventory, I, 55, 57, 112–55, 1096–97.
4. In France, the precedent for the king’s mother to serve as regent during her son’s minority was more established – approximately a century on either side of Catherine Howard’s life, the regency in France was held by Louise of Savoy, Catherine de Medici, Marie de Medici, and Anne of Austria. However, a dowager queen had never successfully served as regent for her son in England – an attempt to do so by Elizabeth Woodville in 1483 ended in disaster, and previous queens, such as the mothers of Henry III, Richard II, and Henry VI, had all been sidelined in favour of a council of guardians.
5. LP, XVI, 774.
6. Inventory, II, p. 49.
7. Luke 22:19–20.
8. Matthew 25:34–40; the Book of Tobias, sometimes known as the Book of Tobit, 1:19–20 and 2:6–9.
9. Richard Rex, Henry VIII and the English Reformation (London: Macmillan Press, 1993), pp. 173–74. A contemporary defence of Henry’s actions on the grounds that it mirrored Old Testament kings, such as Hezekiah, can be found in Thomas, The Pilgrim, p. 40. For the biblical precedent of Jehoshaphat, see 1 Kings 22:46. In the Old Testament, Jehoshaphat’s actions specifically pertain to expelling male prostitutes associated with worship in various pagan cults. The theory that the Buggery Act may have been partly inspired by this relies also on the act’s alleged purpose in intimidating English monks on the eve of the Dissolution.
10. 4 Kings 12:18 (Douay-Rheims translation); 2 Kings 12:18 (the King James Version).
11. Rex, Henry VIII and the English Reformation, p. 172.
12. Luke 1:27; Genesis 3:15.
13. Matthew 26:14–29.
14. John 13:34.
15. Edward I’s grandfather, King John, performed the ceremony twice, in 1210 and 1213, and fragmentary evidence survives about Henry III’s participation in the ritual, which he seems to have conducted on several dates throughout the year. It was in the reign of the latter’s son, Edward I, that it became a more regular occurrence for English kings. See Virginia A. Cole, ‘Ritual Charity and Royal Children in Thirteenth-Century England’, in Joëlle Rollo-Koster (ed.), Medieval and Early Modern Ritual: Formalized Behavior in Europe, China and Japan (Leiden, Netherlands: Brill, 2002), pp. 228–43.
16. The number was based on one for each year of the sovereign’s life, thus despite the fact he turned fifty in 1541, it was Henry VIII’s fifty-first year.
17. LP, XVI, 1488 (183b).
18. Inventory, I, 9513, 9514, 9515.
19. Cal. S. P. Span., VI, i, 158.
20. Inventory, I, 9543.
21. Henry VII visited the north of England after his succession. Elizabeth of York had spent time residing in Lancashire and Yorkshire before becoming queen.
22. LP, XVI, 733; Cal. S. P. Span., VI, i, 156.
23. SP 1/167, f. 148.
24. Catherine’s conversations with Culpepper were very different in setting, tone, and dynamic to her more fraught dealings with Francis Dereham. A hat, however dashing, did not constitute a down payment for hush money. Equally, her request that he hide it undercuts recent arguments that, at this stage, their relationship was purely platonic.
25. Psalm 21:19 in the Douay-Rheims translation; Psalm 22:18 in the King James Version; Matthew 27:35.
26. The custom of blessing the cramp rings on Good Friday was discontinued by Henry’s younger daughter, Elizabeth I.
27. For Easter, Eamon Duffy, The Stripping of the Altars, second edition (New Haven and London: Yale University Press), pp. 22–37. For the cramp rings ceremony: Marc Bloch, The Royal Touch: Sacred Monarchy and Scrofula in England and France (Montreal, QC, and Kingston, ON: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1973), pp. 105–06.
28. Psalm 87:5 in the Douay-Rheims translations of the Bible; Psalm 88:4 in the King James Version.
29. Fox, Jane Boleyn, pp. 8, 333.
30. Original Letters, III, iii, 278.
31. Fox, Jane Boleyn, pp. 120–21, suggests that she may also have partially or fully paid for William Foster, the scholar’s, education at Eton.
32. LP, IV, 1939.
33. Ibid., V, 1109; VIII, 263.
34. Ibid., VII, 1257.
35. Thurley, Royal Palaces, pp. 44–5.
36. Fox, Jane Boleyn, pp. 315–26.
37. Ibid., pp. 191–92; Clare Cherry and Claire Ridgway, George Boleyn: Tudor Poet, Courtier and Diplomat (Lúcar, Spain: MadeGlobal, 2014), pp. 232–33.
38. Original Letters, I, ii, 124.
39. Ibid., III, iii, 265.
40. Warnicke, The Marrying of Anne of Cleves, pp. 233–34.
41. Smith, A Tudor Tragedy, p. 154; Fox, Jane Boleyn, pp. 120, 329.
42. LP, X, 908.
43. Ibid., XVI, 1366.
44. Ibid., XIV, I, 927; XV, 217; XVI, 824; Proceedings of the Privy Council, VII, pp. 282–83. The rumours that the Bridgewaters might reunite were reported in February of the previous year, but there was never a formal reconciliation between them. The documents are clear that both Lady Bridgewater’s sons were living with the dowager, but they do not specify if her daughter Anne was with the dowager or still residing with her mother.
45. LP, XVI, 678, grant 38.
46. Ibid., 751.
47. Ibid., 878, grant 49.
48. Cal. S. P. Span., VI, i, 204.
49. Two of Henry’s previous wives, Katherine of Aragon in 1510 and Anne Boleyn in 1534, had been accused of concocting pregnancies – see Starkey, Six Wives, pp. 116–18; Tremlett, Catherine of Aragon, pp. 168–71; Ives, Life and Death, pp. 191–92; Warnicke, Rise and Fall, pp. 173–78. Cf. Bernard, Anne Boleyn, pp. 74–6.
50. Cameron, James V, p. 265, gives it as Arthur.
51. LP, XVI, 832.
52. Ibid., 852.
53. Ibid., 832; Rosalind K. Marshall, Mary of Guise (London: Collins, 1977), pp. 87–8.
54. LP, XVI, 573.
55. Ibid., 804.
56. Ibid., 816.
57. Starkey, Six Wives, p. 602; Hilton, Elizabeth I, pp. 43–4.
58. LP, XIV, ii, 697.
59. Katherine Ashley following her marriage in 1545.
60. Starkey, Elizabeth, pp. 25–6.
61. LP, XVI, 804.
62. Kaulek, 302.
63. Mikhaila and Malcolm-Davies, Tudor Tailor, pp. 16–18.
64. Jennifer Loach, Edward VI (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1999), p. 12.
65. A variety of theories have been put forward on the causes of Edward VI’s death – Loach, Edward VI, pp. 160–62, suggests renal failure; Frederick Holmes, Grace Holmes, and Julia McMorrough, ‘The Death of Young King Edward VI’, in New England Journal of Medicine (2001) argue for tuberculosis; Linda Porter, Mary Tudor: The First Queen (London: Piatkus, 2009), pp. 184–86, suggests a bacterial pulmonary infection that left Edward defenceless against secondary infections.
66. Chris Skidmore, Edward VI: The Lost King of England (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2007), p. 28.
67. The others were Richard I in 1189, Edward II in 1307, and Henry V in 1413.
68. Cal. S. P. Span., VI, i, 161.
69. Cal. S. P. Span., VI, i, 161.
70. LP, XVI, 1122.
71. Thomas, The Pilgrim, p. 75.
72. LP, XVI, 111.
73. Cal. S. P. Span., VI, i, 163.
74. LP, XVI, 823.
75. LP, XVI, 823.
76. Thomas, The Pilgrim, p. 58.
77. Steven J. Gunn, Early Tudor Government, 1485–1558 (London: Macmillan Press, 1995), pp. 194–95; Bernard, Anne Boleyn, p. 184; Starkey, Six Wives, pp. 584–85.
78. The Spanish Chronicle, p. 77.
79. LP, XVI, 1332.
80. LP, V, 276.
81. HMC Bath, ii, pp. 9–10.
Chapter 15: The Errands of Morris and Webb
1. LP, XIII, ii, 855.
2. This means that the countess did not die on Tower Green, though her name is included in the memorial plaque there. Both Eustace Chapuys and the court herald Charles Wriothesley record that she was taken out of the Tower, which means that the site of Lady Salisbury’s death is probably now covered by the A100 road.
3. LP, I, i, 81.
4. For contemporary descriptions of the execution, see Cal. S. P. Span., VI, i, 166, and Wriothesley, Chronicle, I, p. 124. For the site of East Smithfield, Colin Buchanan et al., Tower of London Local Setting Study (Bristol: Land Use Consultants, 2010), pp. 20–21.
5. Thomas, The Pilgrim, p. 61.
6. LP, XVI, 868.
7. Thomas, The Pilgrim, p. 12.
8. Ibid., p. 61.
9. LP, XIV, ii, 212.
10. Thomas, The Pilgrim, p. 12; LP, XVI, 1060, 1081–83, 1204.
11. Thomas, The Pilgrim, pp. 10–11.
12. LP, XVI, 868.
13. Hall, Hall’s Chronicle, p. 842; Wriothesley, Chronicle, I, p. 125. Hall gives Damport and Chapman’s execution date as 9 June 1541, while Wriothesley writes that it took place on the 19th.
14. Cal. S. P. Span., VI, i, 166.
15. LP, XVI, 760.
16. Wriothesley, Chronicle, I, p. 125; Holinshed, Chronicles, III, p. 820.
17. LP, XVI, 932.
18. Cal. S. P. Span., VI, i, 168.
19. Wriothesley, Chronicle, I, pp. 125–26; LP, XVI, 941.
20. Wriothesley, Chronicle, I, p. 126.
21. The freed member of the gang was John Cheney (killed in battle in 1544), son of Sir Thomas Cheney, treasurer of the royal household from 1539 to 1558. For the Dacre case, see Cal. S. P. Span., VI, 166; LP, XVI, 760, 932, 941; Wriothesley, Chronicle, I, pp. 125–26.
22. James, Kateryn Parr, p. 59.
23. Ibid., p. 98; LP, XVIII, i, 66.
24. Ives, Life and Death, pp. 278–79; Henry Clifford, The Life of Jane Dormer, Duchess of Feria (London: Burns and Oates, 1887), pp. 167–68; Johnson, Elizabeth, pp. 112–14.
25. LP, XVI, 832, 873, 905, 911.
26. Barbara J. Harris, ‘The Fabric of Piety: Aristocratic Women and Care of the Dead, 1450–1550’, in Journal of British Studies (April 2009), p. 316.
27. LP, XVI, 503, grant 14; 625.
28. Proceedings of the Privy Council, VII, p. 154; LP, XVI, 625.
29. Hastings Robinson (ed.), Original Letters Relative to the English Reformation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1846), pp. 266–67.
30. LP, XVI, 678; 947, grant 2.
31. Household Ordinances, p. 41; Thurley, Royal Palaces, pp. 70–4, 83.
32. LP, XVI, 941.
33. Ibid., 763.
34. Proceedings of the Privy Council, VII, pp. 192, 195–96.
35. LP, XVI, 1130.
36. Ibid., 1089.
37. Kaulek, 347.
38. Ibid.
39. LP, XVI, 1011.
40. Ibid.
41. Ibid., 1002, 1011, 1016.
Chapter 16: The Girl in the Silver Dress
1. LP, XVI, 974.
2. Ibid., 631, 901, 926.
3. Ibid., 912. Brendan Bradshaw, The Irish Constitutional Revolution of the Sixteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), p. 265.
4. The papal blessing was allegedly given by Pope Adrian IV in 1155 and confirmed by Pope Alexander III in 1172. This is, perhaps needless to say, a controversial episode in Anglo-Irish history and the existence of papal endorsement has been contested. Henry VIII’s repudiation of the Vatican’s authority continually stressed that Rome had no right to interfere in the sovereignty of any Christian country, a claim that simultaneously made him head of the Church in England and damaged the legitimacy of his rule over Ireland.
5. The Duke of Norfolk in question was Catherine’s uncle, not her grandfather who died in 1524. Norfolk was still Earl of Surrey when he served as viceroy of Ireland.
6. LP, XVI, 784.
7. Ibid., 1030.
8. Ibid., 1058, 1061.
9. Bradshaw, Irish Constitutional Revolution, pp. 231–38.
10. LP, XVI, 1159.
11. Wriothesley, Chronicle, I, p. 127.
12. The court was at Loddington when Morton was given the errand, dating it to between 28–31 July – LP, XVI, 1053, 1061; SP1/167, f. 133.
13. LP, XVI, 1019.
14. Ibid., 1061, 1066.
15. Ibid., 992, 1035.
16. Ibid., 1005, 1071.
17. Michael K. Jones and Malcolm G. Underwood, The King’s Mother: Lady Margaret Beaufort, Countess of Richmond and Derby (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), pp. 83–6, 154–56.
18. LP, XVI, 1074.
19. Gunn, Charles Brandon, pp. 170–74.
20. Journal of the House of Lords, I, p. 164.
21. Cal. S. P. Span., IV, ii, 765.
22. Gunn, Charles Brandon, p. 119; Ives, Life and Death, pp. 140–41.
23. SP1/167, f. 131.
24. Fox, Jane Boleyn, p. 298.
25. Burnet, History of the Reformation, V, p. 295.
26. Ibid., VI, p. 259.
27. Head, Ebbs and Flows, pp. 124–25.
28. Burnet, History of the Reformation, VI, pp. 258–59.
29. LP, XVI, 1077.
30. Ibid., XI, 888.
31. Hall, Hall’s Chronicle, p. 842.
32. Hill, p. 51.
33. Ives, Life and Death, p. 111; LP, XIV, i, 965.
34. Jonathan Foyle, Lincoln Cathedral: The Biography of a Great Building (London: Scala Arts & Heritage Publishers, 2015), p. 104.
35. It was not discovered until repairs were carried out in 1586. J. W. F. Hill, Tudor and Stuart Lincoln, p. 50n.
36. By counting the king’s descent from Katherine via his father – Katherine (often known by her first married surname of Swynford), Duchess of Lancaster (d. 1403) was the mother of John Beaufort, 1st Earl of Somerset (d. 1410), father of John Beaufort, 1st Duke of Somerset (d. 1444), father of Margaret Tudor, Countess of Richmond and later Derby (d. 1509), mother of King Henry VII.
37. Eleanor of Castile had numerous descendants by the sixteenth century and this relationship is made by counting back from Henry’s mother. Describing Eleanor as Henry VIII’s ancestress comes from firmly disagreeing with popular theories that the connecting family members of Edward III and Edward IV were illegitimate. For a good discussion of why, see Kathryn Warner, Edward II: The Unconventional King (Stroud: Amberley, 2014), p. 68; Ian Mortimer, The Perfect King: The Life of Edward III, Father of the English Nation (London: Vintage, 2008), pp. 17–25; Hannes Kleineke, Edward IV (New York: Routledge, 2009), pp. 28–9.
38. Saint Hugh died in 1200, he was canonised by Pope Honorius III in 1220, the body was moved in 1280 and the head shrine completed c.1340, Foyle, Lincoln Cathedral, p. 93.
39. Author’s visit, 30 June 2015.
40. LP, XV, 772. The cathedral’s shrine to Saint John of Dalderby was also destroyed.
41. Foyle, Lincoln Cathedral, p. 85.
42. Author’s visit, 30 June 2015.
43. LP, XVI, 1088.
44. Ibid., 1339.
45. SP1/167, f.131.
46. LP, XVI, 1391, grant 18.
47. SP1/167, f. 159.
Chapter 17: The Chase
1. LP, XVI, 1094.
2. Hill, Tudor and Stuart Lincoln, pp. 1–3.
3. Anne Herbert’s elder sister, Katherine, had been married to Lord Burgh’s eldest son, and after his premature death she had married another northern nobleman, Lord Latimer.
4. LP, XVI, 1102.
5. Ibid., 1089.
6. They arrived on Thursday 18 August 1541, and left on Monday 22 August. The Hatfield Chase is not to be confused with Hatfield Palace in Hertfordshire, the main residence of the future Elizabeth I for most of her childhood.
7. LP, XVI, 1114.
8. Ibid., 1138.
9. Ibid., 1071; Mackay, Inside the Tudor Court, p. 207.
10. This account of the long weekend at Hatfield is based on de Marillac’s account of it – LP, XVI, 1130.
11. LP, XVI, 972. Francis Talbot, 5th Earl of Shrewsbury, 5th Earl of Waterford, and 11th Baron Talbot (d. 1560).
12. LP, XVI, 1122.
13. SP 1/167, f. 133.
14. SP 1/167, f. 133.
15. R. W. Hoyle and J. B. Ramsdale, ‘The Royal Progress of 1541, the North of England, and Anglo-Scottish Relations, 1534–1542’, in Northern History (September 2004), pp. 253–54.
16. James V sent Thomas Bellenden on 9 July.
17. Cameron, James V, p. 289.
18. Ibid.
19. LP, XVI, 766; XVII, 61; Cameron, James V, p. 264.
20. LP, XVI, 832, 990 (5).
21. It is still pronounced this way among a dwindling number of denizens of a particular strain of Received Pronunciation, who have historically used it and a thousand other anti-phonetic nomenclatures as linguistic bear traps to weed out conversational interlopers and demarcate the tribe. It is not generally pronounced that way in Pontefract itself, although the survival of the alternative form elsewhere preserves a link to the Tudors and Shakespeare.
22. Ian Roberts and Ian Downes, Pontefract Castle: Key to the North (Wakefield: West Yorkshire Archaeology Service, 2013), p. 22.
23. Roberts and Downes, Pontefract Castle, p. vi.
24. William Shakespeare, Richard III, Act III, scene iii.
25. My thanks to the extremely kind and helpful staff at Pontefract Castle for pointing this out and answering my queries about it. Author’s visit, 2 July 2015.
26. Constanza of Castile, Duchess of Lancaster, (1354–94) was the daughter of Pedro the Just, King of Castile and León. Her husband pursued her claim to the Castilian throne, which is why ‘her’ tower at Pontefract was referred to as the Queen’s Tower.
27. SP 1/167, f. 133.
28. LP, XVI, 1339.
29. SP 1/167, f. 136; Herbert, Life and Raigne, p. 535.
30. SP 1/167, f. 133.
31. Ibid.
32. LP, XVI, 1339.
33. Ibid., 1172, 1176, 1211.
34. Smith, A Tudor Tragedy, p. 141.
Chapter 18: Waiting for the King of Scots
1. D. M. Palliser, Tudor York (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979), p. 1.
2. Lorraine Attreed, ‘The Politics of Welcome: Ceremonies and Constitutional Development in Later Medieval English Towns’, in Barbara A. Hanawalt and Kathryn L. Reyerson (eds), City and Spectacle in Medieval Europe (Minneapolis, MN, and London: University of Minnesota Press, 1994), p. 219.
3. York Castle was not something Catherine had to see except from a distance during her visit. The castle, built in the reign of William I, was not in a good enough condition to host the king and queen in 1541. By that stage, it was primarily used for musters of troops and public events.
4. For York in 1541, see Hoyle, Pilgrimage of Grace, p. 2; Gordon Kipling, Enter the King: Theatre, Liturgy, and Ritual in Medieval Civic Triumph (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998), pp. 183–84; Palliser, Tudor York, pp. 1–5, 24–9, 207–08.
5. Hoyle, Pilgrimage of Grace, p. 2; LP, XVI, 1130, 1131.
6. Hoyle, Pilgrimage of Grace, p. 2.
7. Kipling, p. 40n.
8. For the minster in 1541, see John Harvey, ‘Architectural History from 1291 to 1558’, pp. 149–92, and David E. O’Connor and Jeremy Haselock, ‘The Stained and Painted Glass’, p. 324, both in Aylmer and Cant (eds), History of York Minster; Palliser, Tudor York, p. 238.
9. LP, XVI, 1229.
10. Ibid., 1339.
11. Marie de Guise (1515–60) was the daughter of Claude of Lorraine, Duke of Guise, and Antoinette of Bourbon, Duchess of Guise. Her first husband was Louis II, Duke of Longueville. After his death, she married King James V of Scots. She was the mother of Mary, Queen of Scots, and served as her regent in Scotland from 1542 to 1560.
12. Hoyle and Ramsdale, ‘The Royal Progress of 1541’, p. 253.
13. LP, XVI, 1183.
14. Hoyle and Ramsdale, ‘The Royal Progress of 1541’, p. 255.
15. Ibid., p. 261.
16. State Papers, V, pp. 44–5.
17. LP, XV, 248.
18. Ibid., XVI, 1181–82.
19. Ibid., 1143.
20. Ibid., 1163.
21. Hoyle and Ramsdale, ‘The Royal Progress of 1541’, p. 255.
22. LP, XVI, 1253.
23. Ibid., 1229.
24. Ibid., 1202, 1207.
25. Ibid., 1251.
26. Ibid., 1205 (2).
27. Ibid., 1260.
28. Kaulek, 347.
29. Cal. S. P. Span., VI, i, 209.
30. LP, XVI, 1261.
31. Ibid., 1194.
32. Ibid., 1253.
33. Ibid., 1252.
34. A divorce did not take place. The dauphine gave birth to her son, the future King François II, in January 1544.
35. LP, XVI, 1266, 1269.
36. That Catherine was at Chenies Manor House is my own supposition, based on a consultation of relevant maps of the area, comments made in LP, XVI, 1278 and 1287, and in SP 1/167, f. 136.
37. LP, XVI, 1339.
38. The impetus for inviting Alice to Chenies may have been her husband Anthony’s job in Calais. The couple appear to have been visiting England in late 1541, which may have prompted Catherine to take the opportunity of trying to buy Alice’s loyal silence. Equally, it may have been a generous gesture which she decided to make during the opportunity afforded by Alice’s trip back to England.
39. LP, XVI, 1289.
40. Ibid., 1307.
41. Ibid., 1297.
42. Kaulek, 350.
Chapter 19: Being Examined by My Lord of Canterbury
1. LP, XVI, 1339.
2. Ibid., 1332.
3. SP 1/167, f. 127; Burnet, History of the Reformation, I, pp. 623–24, writes that the king gave thanks personally after receiving the Sacrament.
4. LP, XVI, 1310.
5. Ibid., 1334.
6. Smith, A Tudor Tragedy, pp. 165–66.
7. LP, XVI, 1334.
8. Ibid., 1312, 1314.
9. The physical description of the Earl of Southampton is based on the sketch of him by Holbein, currently housed in the Royal Collection.
10. The wording used in the transcripts of Manox’s interview on 5 November 1541 describe Joan as ‘also entertained’ by Dereham. This could mean that she received financial rewards or support from him, possibly bribes in return for access to Catherine. However, elsewhere in the interrogation records Wriothesley used ‘entertained’ to mean sexual intercourse, and he also recorded Joan’s relationship with Francis immediately after a description of Dereham’s involvement with Catherine. In that context, ‘also entertained by’ can only have a sexual connotation.
11. SP 1/167, f. 117.
12. Dereham’s first interrogation is recorded on 5 November. However, he must have been taken beforehand. Andrew Pewson, one of the Dowager Duchess of Norfolk’s servants, mentioned in his interview ‘his going to Hamptoncourte after Derams apprehencion’ on Friday 4 November. The delay raises the possibility that Dereham was tortured even at this early stage, between All Souls’ Day and Saturday, the 5th.
13. SP 1/167, f. 136.
14. Ibid., f. 136v.
15. Ibid., f. 127.
16. LP, XVI, 1339.
17. SP 1/167, f. 109.
18. LP, XVI, 1334.
19. Ibid., 1332.
20. Cal. S. P. Span., VI, i, 201.
21. LP, XVI, 1332.
22. Ibid.
23. SP 1/168, f. 48.
24. State Papers, I, p. 697.
25. SP 1/168, f. 96.
26. Ibid., f. 98.
27. Ibid., f. 14.
28. LP, XVI, 1332; Cal. S. P. Span., VI, i, 204.
29. SP 1/167, f. 127.
30. Cal. S. P. Span., VI, i, 204.
31. This description of Archbishop Cranmer is based on the portrait of him by Gerlach Flicke, painted in 1545.
32. State Papers, I, p. 689.
33. Most probably Catherine’s uncle Lord Thomas Howard the younger, who died of a fever in the Tower in October 1537. It could also have referred to her first cousin, Lord Thomas Howard, who was the 3rd duke’s youngest surviving son and later created 1st Viscount Howard of Bindon by Elizabeth I.
34. See Chapter 5 for discussion of Lady Brereton.
35. Burnet, History of the Reformation, VI, document 72.
36. State Papers, I, p. 689.
37. Ibid.
38. LP, XVI, 1332.
39. HMC Bath, II, p. 10.
40. SP 1/168, f. 80.
41. LP, XVI, 1416, 2.ii.
42. SP 1/168, f. 80.
43. Ibid.
44. LP, XVI, 1332; State Papers, I, pp. 691–92.
45. State Papers, I, p. 691.
46. LP, XVI, 1332.
47. State Papers, II, p. 694.
48. LP, XVI, 1366.
49. HMC Bath, II, p. 10; SP 1/167, f. 136.
50. Herbert, Life and Raigne, p. 535.
Chapter 20: A Greater Abomination
1. Their visit suggests that de Marillac’s version of events, which has Dereham confessing and naming Culpepper in an attempt to exonerate himself, is the correct one. Here, the traditional chronology of Catherine’s downfall is inconsistent with a closer examination of the sources. It is not so much that de Marillac’s account is incorrect, but rather that it is incomplete.
2. HMC Bath, II, pp. 9–10.
3. Smith, A Tudor Tragedy, pp. 173–74; Denny, Katherine Howard, pp. 223–36.
4. Smith, A Tudor Tragedy, pp. 171–74.
5. LP, XVI, 1339.
6. SP 1/167, f. 131; 1/168, f. 8.
7. LP, XVI, 1339. Tilney and Dereham were sent by the queen to fetch Alice Restwold when Catherine was staying at Lord and Lady Russell’s in the last week of October.
8. SP 1/167, f. 136.
9. LP, XVI, 1438.
10. He seems to have made an offer to Anne Askew when she was tortured for information about the queen’s household in 1546.
11. SP 1/168, f. 8.
12. SP 1/167, f. 136.
13. SP 1/167, f. 148; LP, XVI, 1366, 1371.
14. LP, XVI, 1339.
15. Cal. S. P. Span., VI, i, 207; SP 1/167, f. 147.
16. Cal. S. P. Span., VI, i, 209.
17. Fox, Jane Boleyn, p. 302.
18. Cal. S. P. Span., VI, i, 209.
19. State Papers, I, p. 694.
20. State Papers, I, p. 708.
21. Ibid., p. 700.
22. Proceedings of the Privy Council, VII, p. 267.
23. LP, XVI, 1337.2.
24. SP 1/167, f. 161.
25. Ibid., f. 131.
26. Ibid., f. 133.
27. Ibid., f. 136.
28. Proceedings of the Privy Council, VII, p. 279.
29. State Papers, I, pp. 698, 708.
30. Ibid., p. 698.
31. Ibid., pp. 691, 701.
32. LP, XVI, 1326.
33. State Papers, I, p. 692.
34. Ibid., pp. 692–94.
35. Ibid., pp. 694–95.
36. SP 1/167, f. 129.
37. Ibid., f. 166.
38. Ibid., f. 162.
39. Proceedings of the Privy Council, VII, p. 267.
40. LP, XVI, 1332, 1342.
41. Cal. S. P. Span., VI, i, 207.
42. LP, XVI, 1342.
43. Ibid., 1366. De Marillac gives her name as ‘Katharine de Auvart’.
44. For the arrangements at Syon, see State Papers, I, pp. 691–95.
45. LP, XVI, 1366.
46. Ibid., 1391, grant 59.
47. Cal. S. P. Span., VI, i, 209.
Chapter 21: The King Has Changed His Love into Hatred
1. The date refers to the thirty-third year of the monarch’s reign, a common English dating technique in the medieval and early modern period.
2. For the trial of Dereham and Culpepper, see Proceedings of the Privy Council, VIII, p. 276; LP, XVI, 1395; Kaulek, 379, 380; Cal. S. P. Span., VI, i, 209.
3. SP 1/168, ff. 14, 48; Kaulek, 380.
4. State Papers, VIII, p. 698.
5. Gossip about the king’s early appreciation of Catherine’s appearance was current in Norfolk House in late 1539, though it does seem quite a stretch for Francis to describe the king as being in love with Catherine and for that to prompt his own departure for Ireland. The king’s second wave of romantic interest in Catherine in early 1540 could have coincided with the end of her flirtation with Culpepper, around the same time as jealousy over one or both of those men provoked Francis’s quarrel with her and his subsequent decision to leave the dowager’s service. However, given Dereham’s admission of his sexual relationship with Catherine, without the threat of torture, and his refusal to corroborate Damport’s story, even when he was repeatedly tortured, the weight of evidence still suggests Damport’s claims were untrue.
6. SP 1/168, f. 100.
7. LP, XVI, 1426.
8. SP 1/168, ff. 100, 110; State Papers, VIII, p. 700; Proceedings of the Privy Council, VII, p. 283; LP, XVI, 1422, 1430; Cal. S. P. Span., VI, i, 209.
9. LP, XVI, 1372, 1396.
10. Cal. S. P. Span., VI, i, 211.
11. LP, XVI, 1422.
12. SP 1/168, ff. 13, 14, 100; Proceedings of the Privy Council, p. 277; State Papers, VIII, p. 706.
13. LP, XVI, 1416 (2).
14. State Papers, VIII, p. 700.
15. SP1/168, f. 80.
16. Ibid., f. 51.
17. Ibid., ff. 80, 112.
18. Ibid.
19. State Papers, VIII, p. 702; SP 1/168, f. 112.
20. State Papers, VIII, pp. 701–02; Proceedings of the Privy Council, pp. 280–81; LP, XVI, 1416 (2); SP 1/168, f. 122.
21. Proceedings of the Privy Council, VII, p. 280.
22. LP, XIV, 1422; SP 1/168, f. 53.
23. State Papers, VIII, p. 706.
24. LP, XVI, 1422.
25. It is unclear which Countess of Oxford this was, as there were two alive in 1541. It could have been Lady Bridgewater’s younger sister Anne, Dowager Countess of Oxford, or Dorothy (née Neville), Countess of Oxford. The latter had a larger household and neither of the Lady Bridgewater’s sons was sent to close relatives. However, it cannot be ruled out that young Anne was briefly sent to the home of her aunt, the Dowager Countess.
26. Proceedings of the Privy Council, pp. 280–81.
27. State Papers, VIII, p. 709.
28. Richmond Palace reverted to the Crown in 1557 and Elizabeth I died there in 1603. It was demolished and sold as raw materials after the abolition of the monarchy in 1649.
29. Thurley, Royal Palaces, pp. 27–32, 53.
30. Karen Lindsey, Divorced Beheaded Survived: A Feminist Reinterpretation of the Wives of Henry VIII (Cambridge, MA: Da Capo Press, 1995), p. 137.
31. Anne’s decision to move to Richmond and remarks she made in 1542–43 strongly suggest that she wished to be reinstated as queen after Catherine’s fall – see Norton, Anne of Cleves, pp. 119–28.
32. LP, XVI, 1332, 1407.
33. Cal. S. P. Span., VI, i, 227.
34. Ibid., 204.
35. Ibid., 213.
36. Proceedings of the Privy Council, VIII, p. 279, 282; SP 1/168, f. 100.
37. Cal. S. P. Span., VI, i, 209.
38. LP, XVI, 1332, 1366.
39. SP 1/167, f. 168; LP, XVI, 1387, 1457.
40. Cal. S. P. Span., VI, i, 232.
41. Norton, Anne of Cleves, pp. 128–29.
42. State Papers, VIII, pp. 704, 708–09; SP 1/168, f. 80.
43. SP 1/168, f. 117.
44. There is some debate about what the ‘drawn’ part of the sentence referred to, whether the mode of transport or the extraction of the vital organs. In Francis Dereham’s case, his sentence stipulated he was to be hanged, then disembowelled, beheaded, and then quartered. The sentence was carried out and confirmed in Wriothesley, Chronicle, I, p. 131.
45. Cal. S. P. Span., VI, i, 213.
46. Thomas Culpepper is buried in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Newgate. Also known as St Sepulchre-without-Newgate, the church is the largest parish church in London and it has been a living of St John’s College, Oxford, since the seventeenth century. The walls and tower remain, but the Great Fire in 1666 gutted the interior and the porch seems to be the only original interior feature left standing from 1541. Culpepper’s body lies in the same church as John Smith, Governor of Virginia, who acquired posthumous fame owing to his association with Pocahontas.
47. SP 1/168, f. 112.
48. Proceedings of the Privy Council, pp. 280, 281, 283–4.
49. Hall, Hall’s Chronicle, pp. 842–43.
50. Burnet, History of the Reformation, I, pp. 626–67.
51. Cal. S. P. Span., VI, i, 215.
52. Ibid., 223.
Chapter 22: Ars Moriendi
1. Cal. S. P. Span., VI, i, 227.
2. Proceedings of the Privy Council, VIII, p. 304.
3. Cal. S. P. Span., VI, i, 223. The original translators’ use of ‘lese Majesty’ and ‘Sion House’ have been adapted in this citation. Chapuys’s phonetic rendering of Lady Rochford’s name was left as ‘de Rochefort’ in the original.
4. Lehmberg, Later Parliaments of Henry VIII, p. 141. Lehmberg (pp. 142–43) credibly suggests that the Lord Chancellor’s discussion of Catherine was deliberately left out of transcripts, with orders perhaps given to the clerks beforehand that they were not to record a specific discussion of the queen’s vices.
5. Lehmberg, Later Parliaments of Henry VIII, pp. 128–29.
6. Journals of the House of Lords, I, p. 166.
7. Burnet, History of the Reformation, I, p. 627.
8. Ibid., p. 625.
9. Journal of the House of Lords, I, p. 166.
10. Ibid.
11. Cal. S. P. Span., VI, i, 232.
12. Bishop Burnet (History of the Reformation, I, p. 626) noted: ‘How much she confessed to them is not very clear, neither by the journal nor the act of parliament; which only says that she confessed without mentioning the particulars.’ The charges against her did not subsequently change to ones of adultery, which suggests that she reiterated her earlier confessions. For Catherine’s insistence that she deserved to die, Cal. S. P. Span., VI, i, 232.
13. Burnet, History of the Reformation, I, pp. 626–27.
14. Ibid., p. 627. The law was unpopular enough to be repealed in the reign of Henry’s son, Edward VI.
15. Lehmberg, Later Parliaments of Henry VIII, p. 147.
16. Cal. S. P. Span., VI, i, 230.
17. Ibid.
18. Ibid.
19. Ibid.
20. Hall, Hall’s Chronicle, p. 843; Cal. S. P. Span., VI, i, 232.
21. Burnet refers to him as ‘Dr White’, although he did not return to study for his doctorate until the reign of Mary I.
22. Burnet, History of the Reformation, I, p. 624.
23. Cal. S. P. Span., VI, i, 232.
24. SP 1/168, f. 48.
25. Proceedings of the Privy Council, VIII, pp. 304–05.
26. The spot on Tower Green, still exhibited to tourists today and marked with a memorial plaque, is almost certainly not the site of the actual scaffold on which Catherine perished. It was shown by a colourful yeoman to Queen Victoria, who had a fascination with Anne Boleyn and Lady Jane Grey, and the actual spot of Anne and Catherine’s scaffolds lay on what is now the parade ground near the White Tower. Cal. S. P. Span., VI, i, 232, stipulates the scaffolds for the respective queens were erected on the same site.
27. Original Letters, I, ii, pp. 128–29.
28. This description is based on the funeral of Elizabeth of York (d. 1503). See Laynesmith, Last Medieval Queens, pp. 119–26.
Chapter 23: The Shade of Persephone
1. Cal. S. P. Span., VI, i, 233.
2. Siddons, Heraldic Badges, I, p. 116.
3. LP, XIX, ii, 613.
4. Proceedings of the Privy Council, pp. 46–8, 81–2, 148. Bulmer was still refusing to be reconciled with Joan in October 1542, five months after she was released from the Tower. Bulmer himself was imprisoned in Fleet prison, on financial charges, in February 1543 and the couple were officially separated by June of that year.
5. He should not be confused with his kinsman Sir Edward Waldegrave, the Catholic courtier imprisoned for hearing Mass in Elizabeth I’s reign. Joan Waldegrave’s children were called Edward, Anne, Mary, Bridget, and Margery.
6. Barry L. Wall, Long Melford through the ages: A guide to the buildings and streets (Ipswich: East Anglian Magazine Ltd, 1986); L. L. B. Martin Woods, The Winthrop Papers (Boston, MA: Massachusetts Historical Society, 1931).
7. The Countess of Bridgewater was also interred there, in 1554.
8. Bindoff (ed.), House of Commons, I, p. 403.
9. Evidence from family wills raises the possibility that Isabella may not have been close to any of her surviving siblings. Despite the fact that George Howard was his half brother, while Isabella was his full sibling, John Leigh left bequests to the former and not the latter when he died in 1563. He also left a benevolence to his nieces and nephews from other Leigh siblings, including their late sister Margaret, but no mention is made of Isabella whatsoever – see Surrey Archaeological Collections, LI, p. 90.
10. Sir Nicholas Harris Nicolas (ed.), Testamenta Vetusta: Being Illustrations from Wills of Manners, Customs, etc. (London: Eyre & Spottiswoode, 1826), pp. 729–30. There is debate over whether their relationship began in the lifetime of Lord Stourton’s first wife, Elizabeth (née Dudley), sister of Catherine’s former Master of the Horse.
11. For Gruffydd ap Rhys’s career, see Griffiths, Sir Rhys ap Thomas, pp. 117–25. Elizabeth I made more substantial grants to Gruffydd than Mary I did, perhaps partly because of his Howard blood and his son’s service to her.
12. Donald Gregory, The History of the Western Highlands and Isles of Scotland, from A. D. 1493 to A. D. 1625 (London and Glasgow: Hamilton, Adams, and Co., etc., 1881), p. 161.
13. Dugdale, II, p. 272.
14. Ibid.
15. Bindoff (ed.), House of Commons, I, p. 403.
16. Suzannah Lipscomb, The King Is Dead: The Last Will and Testament of Henry VIII (London: Head of Zeus, 2015), p. 171.
17. Hutchinson, pp. 229–30.
18. Childs, Henry VIII’s Last Victim, p. 243.
19. Scarisbrick, Henry VIII, pp. 495–96.
20. Edward Seymour is better known to history as Duke of Somerset, the title he enjoyed between 1547 and 1552.
21. Many of the leaders and victims of the Tudor state were buried in the same chapel as Catherine and Lady Rochford. Lady Jane Grey was interred there after her execution in 1554. Cardinal Fisher, Thomas More, the Countess of Salisbury, and Catherine’s kinsman Philip Howard, 20th Earl of Arundel, who died imprisoned for his faith in 1595, rest in St Peter’s, as does Thomas Cromwell, both of the Seymour brothers, John Dudley, Catherine’s brother-in-law Thomas Arundell, and two more of her kinsmen – the 4th Duke of Norfolk, executed for treason in 1572, and William Howard, 1st Viscount Stafford, beheaded during the anti-Catholic hysteria of the Popish Plot in 1680. Catherine is thus buried in a chapel that houses the remains of three saints, two beatified Catholic martyrs, three dukes, one marquess, four earls, and three queens.
22. Norton, Anne of Cleves, pp. 159–62.
23. Saaler, Anne of Cleves, pp. 91–2.
24. Hall, Hall’s Chronicle, p. 828.
25. Muriel (ed.), Lisle Letters, VI, pp. 277–79.
26. R. J. Knecht, The Rise and Fall of Renaissance France, 1483–1610 (London: Fontana Press, 1996), p. 335.
27. Mackay, Inside the Tudor Court, p. 246.
28. Bindoff (ed.), House of Commons, I, p. 403.; Cal. S. P. Span., VIII, I, 206.
29. Rosalind K. Marshall, ‘Douglas, Lady Margaret, Countess of Lennox (1515–1578)’, in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography.
30. Acts and Monuments, VIII, p. 570.
31. Baldwin, Henry VIII’s Last Love, pp. 97–101. The brothers had attempted to escape the epidemic in Cambridge and both died at Buckden Palace in Cambridgeshire.
32. Letter, dated 6 August 1566, from Jacob de Vulcob to Jacques Bochetel de La Foret, cit. Simon Adams, Leicester and the Court: Essays on Elizabeth Politics (Manchester University Press, 2002), p. 139.
33. Fox, Jane Boleyn, pp. 312–13.
34. Cavendish, Life of Cardinal Wolsey, II, p. 69.
35. The Second Book of Travels of Nicander Nucius of Corcyra, J. A. Cramer (ed. and trans.) (London: Camden Society, 1841), p. 48.
36. Cavendish, Life of Cardinal Wolsey, II, pp. 65–8.
37. Catherine’s grave was not marked with a plaque until the reign of Queen Victoria. During renovations of the chapel, the queen ordered that those buried there should be commemorated. Excavations were carried out on the chancel at the same time, but Catherine’s body was not among those exhumed.
38. Thomas, The Pilgrim, p. 3.
39. Thomas, The Pilgrim, p. 58.
40. Original Letters, I, ii, p. 129.
Appendix I: The Alleged Portraits of Catherine Howard
1. Kate Heard and Lucy Whitaker (eds), The Northern Renaissance: Dürer to Holbein (St James’s Palace: Royal Collection Enterprises, 2011), p. 83.
2. Brett Dolman, ‘Wishful Thinking: Reading the Portraits of Henry VIII’s Queens’, in Betteridge and Lipscomb (eds), Henry VIII and the Court: Art, Politics and Performance, pp. 124–26.
3. Roland Hui, ‘Two New Faces?: The Horenbolte Portraits of Mary and Thomas Boleyn’ (tudorfaces.blogspot.co.uk, 2011).
4. Sir Roy Strong, Tudor and Jacobean Portraits (London: Her Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1969), I, p. 43. A coloured version of the sketch, described as Catherine Howard, was printed by Francesco Bartolozzi in 1797, and in the 1850s, Strickland (III, p. 124) accepted the sketch as a likeness of Catherine and based her description of her appearance on it, which seems to have been the origin of the myth that Catherine was curvaceous, repeated in many subsequent histories.
5. Susan E. James and Jamie S. Franco, ‘Susanna Horenbout, Levinia Teerlinc and the Mask of Royalty’ (Antwerp: Jaarboek Koninklijk Museum voor Schone Kunsten, 2000).
6. It was acquired by the Yale Center for British Art in 1970 via a sale at Sotheby’s. I am grateful to Dr Edward Town for his extremely kind help with my questions about the miniature. For the Yale miniature, see Sir Roy Strong, The English Renaissance Miniature (London: Thames and Hudson, 1984), p. 44; David Starkey et al., Lost Faces: Identity and Discovery in Tudor Royal Portraiture (Exhibition Catalogue, London: Philip Mould Ltd, 2007), pp. 79–83.
7. Christopher Morris, The Tudors (London: Collins, 1955), fig. 15; Fraser, Six Wives of Henry VIII, p. 315, is more tentative on the Sheba attribution, describing it as a possible ‘tantalising glimpse’.
8. The period between November 1541 and July 1543, when Henry VIII was unmarried, can also tentatively be dismissed – though glaziers were not always thorough in reflecting the latest instalment in the matrimonial misadventures of the royal household. For the suggestion that the queen of Sheba might have been inspired by Anne Boleyn, see Bernard, Anne Boleyn, p. 198.
9. Genesis, 19:15–26; Strong, Tudor and Jacobean Portraits, I, p. 43. The details in the brooch are difficult to see, but it does show a figure leading individuals away from scenes of destruction. It could also represent the moment Lot’s wife was turned into salt for her disobedience.
10. Toledo Inventory 1926.57; National Portrait Gallery, Portrait 1119; ‘Portrait of King Henry VIII’s Fifth Wife Catherine Howard Is Found’, The Times (4 March 2008).
11. Oliver Cromwell was Thomas’s great-great-great-nephew, via the latter’s sister Katherine. Her son, Sir Robert Williams (d. 1544), preferred to go by the Cromwell name, a move imitated by his descendants.
12. Lot 45 at Christie’s auction on 27 October 1961; Portrait of Mary Tudor, Queen of France and Duchess of Suffolk, drawn by Sarah Capel-Coningsby, Countess of Essex, in Lucy Aikin, Memoirs of the Court of Queen Elizabeth (London: Stratham and Spottiswoode, 1818).
13. Sir Lionel Cust, ‘A Portrait of Queen Catherine Howard, by Hans Holbein the Younger’, in Burlington Magazine for Connoisseurs (July 1910), pp. 193–99.
14. Courtesy of the Toledo Museum of Art, correspondence with the author, 2015.
15. Henry VIII’s youngest sister, Mary (d. 1533), married King Louis XII of France and, after his death, Charles Brandon, 1st Duke of Suffolk. They were the maternal grandparents of Lady Jane Grey.
16. Fraser, Six Wives of Henry VIII, p. 315n; Kathy Lynn Emerson, Wives and Daughters: The Women of Sixteenth Century England (Troy, NY: Whitston, 1984), pp. 114–15, 197.
17. Starkey et al., Lost Faces, pp. 73–5, is the best modern argument in favour of the Toledo portrait and its derivatives as depictions of Catherine Howard.
18. Frances Grey’s appearance is not incompatible with this attribution. She is usually described as an obese lady, based on the misidentification of a portrait by Eworth of Lady Dacre and her son. This has been convincingly refuted, and Frances’s appearance is discussed, in Leanda de Lisle, The Sisters Who Would Be Queen: The Tragedy of Mary, Katherine and Lady Jane Grey (London: HarperPress, 2009), pp. 167–68.
19. Strong, Tudor and Jacobean Portraits, I, p. 43.
20. RCIN 422293.
21. Jonathan Brown, Kings and Connoisseurs: Collecting Art in Seventeenth-Century Europe (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995), pp. 22–3, 65. The portrait of Anne of Cleves by Holbein that now hangs in the Louvre was also part of the Arundel collection and was subsequently purchased by the French Crown in 1671.
22. Leo Gooch, A Complete Pattern of Nobility: John, Lord Lumley (c.1534–1609) (Rainton Bridge: University of Sunderland Press, 2009), pp. 115–16; Ives, Life and Death, p. 43. The Boleyn portrait was apparently last recorded intact during a sale of John West’s (d. 1772) collection.
23. ‘Catherine Howard, Queen of K. Henry VIII’, in Thomas Birch, The Heads of Illustrious Persons of Great Britain (London: John and Paul Knopton, 1747).
24. Heard and Whitaker (eds), Northern Renaissance, p. 83.
25. Starkey et al., Lost Faces, pp. 70–3; Starkey, Six Wives, p. 651.
26. Susan E. James, ‘Lady Margaret Douglas and Sir Thomas Seymour by Holbein: Two Miniatures Re-identified’, Apollo (1998), pp. 15–20.
27. RCIN 912223; RL 12223.
28. Unknown Lady, c. 1540–5, aged 17, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 49. 7.30.
29. It cannot be Mary Fitzroy herself owing to her age. For arguments in favour of the Metropolitan portrait as a portrait of Catherine, see James and Franco, ‘Susanna Horenbout’, p. 124, and Conor Byrne, Katherine Howard: A New History (Lúcar, Spain: MadeGlobal Publishing, 2014), pp. 118–20.
30. National Gallery of Ireland 1195. Katherine Knollys (née Carey) was also unlikely on the basis of her subsequent portraiture and the uncertainty of her husband’s financial situation. A case over his inheritance was not settled until 1545; Yale Center for British Art B1974.3.22.
31. Dolman, ‘Wishful Thinking’, pp. 124–26.