Catherine Howard

73. ‘Virtuous and good behaviour’?

Catherine Howard was the opposite in every way from Anne of Cleves. She was English, and she was petite, plump, pretty and accomplished in the Courtly graces. She had an easy charm and an abundant store of good nature. And she knew how to attract men with a skill beyond her teenage years–perhaps indeed beyond her supposedly virginal state when she met Henry.

 

Catherine belonged to the mighty Howard clan. Her father, Lord Edmund, was the third son of the second Duke of Norfolk. The third Duke of Norfolk was her uncle and Anne Boleyn was her cousin. But, in Catherine’s case, mighty connexions did not lead to an easy upbringing.

Her father Edmund, like most Howards, enjoyed fighting. But, unlike his own father and his elder brother Thomas, he was a brawler rather than a general. He spent his youth hanging about the Court with no very obvious employment and it was not until 1531 that his niece, Anne Boleyn, helped find him a position as Controller of Calais. Even so, the salary was barely enough for a man of his status to live on, much less to pay off his debts.

Catherine’s mother, Jocasta Culpepper, was Edmund’s first wife. She was co-heiress of the Culpeppers of Aylesford, Kent, and widow of Ralph Legh, by whom she already had several children. She had about ten more by Edmund in some fifteen years of marriage. She was dead by the late 1520s and Edmund went on to marry two other wives, both widows, by whom he was childless. He was dismissed from his post in Calais in 1539 and died shortly afterwards.¹

Lord Edmund Howard, in short, was a man of no importance–save for the fact that he had a daughter who happened to become Queen of England.

 

Catherine was one of the younger members of his brood, which suggests that she was born in about 1520. But it is impossible to be sure. Her place of birth is also unknown, as are the places where she spent her childhood. It seems certain, however, that her mother, who brought considerable assets to the marriage, managed to keep some sort of establishment together–though Catherine’s father must often have been away. In 1527, for example, Edmund complained to Wolsey that his debts were such that he dared not ‘go abroad, nor come at my own house, and am fain to absent me from my wife and poor children’.

The suggestion, then, is of a scrabbled childhood, with a dominant, providing mother and a weak, debt-ridden and (to judge by the evidence of one of his later marriages) hen-pecked father. But, whatever its nature, Catherine’s childhood was a short one, even by Tudor standards. Its end was marked by her mother’s death, and her father’s remarriage and appointment to Calais, which followed each other in quick succession. Catherine, at the age of ten or twelve, was now considered a young woman and was sent off to finish her upbringing in the Household of her step-grandmother, the Dowager Duchess of Norfolk.²

 

Agnes Howard née Tilney was the second wife and widow of the second Duke of Norfolk. As a Dowager Duchess, she was one of the highest ranking women in England outside the royal family. She was also, thanks to her dower-rights and her tight-fistedness, one of the richest. As was customary, she kept a great Household, which was lodged, depending on her movements, in either of her main residences: at Horsham in Sussex, or at Lambeth on the south bank of the Thames opposite the King’s new palace of Whitehall.³

When Catherine joined her step-grandmother’s Household, she was placed in the Maidens’ Chamber. This was a large dormitory, in which the inmates generally slept two to a bed. There, Catherine found herself among other young unmarried women of gentle or noble birth. They were connected by blood or marriage to the Howards or came from lesser families which had hitched their stars to the ducal clan. They acted as the Duchess’s waiting women; they were also there, like Catherine herself, to complete their education. A music master was employed and the Duchess had clerks and secretaries who could teach them reading and writing. Also in the Household were many young gentlemen who were eager to teach the maidens other things as well.

 

The Duchess’s Household, in short, had something of the atmosphere of a slackly run mixed boarding school. The Duchess was an imperious but ineffectual headmistress; the boys spent their time trying to get into the girls’ dormitory; and there was excessive fraternisation between pupils and staff.⁴

Here, at last, Catherine found herself in her element. She was a quick developer, both physically and mentally. She also showed all the drive her father lacked. The result was that she became the leader in every escapade and act of domestic rebellion. And, because she was related to the Duchess, she got away with almost all of it.

 

She began, as is often the way with such girls, by attracting the attentions of one of her masters. Henry Manox had been employed by the Duchess in about 1536 ‘to teach…Mrs Catherine Howard to play on the virginals’. According to Manox’s admission, he ‘fell in love with her’ and she with him. But Catherine kept the relationship within bounds. This was not out of virtue, but rather a fierce sense of Howard pride. ‘I will never be nought with you’, she told him, ‘and able to marry me ye be not.’ But she permitted him consolatory favours which were, on more than one occasion, interrupted by the Duchess. Once, ‘it chanced…the Duchess…to find them alone talking in a Chamber’. As usual, the old lady struck first and remonstrated afterwards. ‘She gave…Mrs Catherine two or three blows and gave straight charge both to her and to…Manox that they should never be alone together.’⁵

But a better antidote to Manox’s attentions appeared in the form of Francis Dereham. Dereham was a Howard cousin and gentleman-servitor. He was of some independent means and so was able to give Catherine trinkets and lovers’ tokens, such as ‘a heart’s-ease of silk for a New Year’s gift’. He cut, in short, an altogether more dashing figure than Manox, whom he soon displaced in Catherine’s affections. She also permitted him attentions denied to the socially inferior music master. These included admission to the Holy of Holies, the Maidens’ Chamber.⁶

In theory, the Maidens’ Chamber was out of bounds to all men. And, to enforce the rule, the Duchess ‘every night…would cause the keys of the [Maidens’] Chamber to be brought to her Chamber’. But Catherine quickly saw a way round the problem and suborned the Duchess’s chamberer or maid, Mary Lascelles, ‘to steal the key and bring it to her’. The door was unlocked and Dereham and other favoured gentlemen were admitted to enjoy the delights within.⁷

‘They would’, the excluded Manox bitterly observed, ‘commonly banquet and be merry there till two or three of the clock in the morning.’ ‘Wine, strawberries, apples and other things to make good cheer’ were served and an escape route for the intruders was carefully spied out ‘into the little gallery’ next door.⁸

Jealous, angry and frustrated, Manox decided to inform the Duchess of these midnight feasts by an anonymous letter:

Your Grace

It shall be meet you take good heed to your gentlewomen for if it shall like you half an hour after you shall be a-bed to rise suddenly and visit their Chamber you shall see that which shall displease you. But if you make anybody of counsel you shall be deceived. Make then fewer your secretary.

The letter was laid in the Duchess’s pew, where she found it and read it. ‘When she came home [she] stormed with her women and declared how she was advertised…of their misrule.’⁹

 

Catherine was determined to get to the bottom of the plot against her. Employing her already developed skills in larceny, ‘[she] stole the letter out of my Lady’s gilt coffer and showed it to Dereham who copied it and thereupon it was laid in the coffer again’. Dereham immediately guessed the authorship of the letter and tackled Manox, calling him ‘Knave’ and saying ‘that he neither loved [Catherine] nor him’.¹⁰

But Dereham need hardly have worried. For, despite the Duchess’s occasional outbursts, neither she nor the other senior members of the Household, including Catherine’s aunt, the Countess of Bridgewater, and her uncle, Lord William Howard, took her goings-on very seriously. The Countess indeed reproved Catherine for her ‘banqueting by night’. But that was because she feared ‘it would hurt her beauty’, not her morals. Lord William made even lighter of it all, saying ‘What mad wenches! Can you not be merry amongst yourselves but you must thus fall out?’¹¹

 

Catherine Howard was, therefore, already a woman with a past when, in late 1539 and in anticipation of Henry’s forthcoming marriage, she was appointed one of Queen Anne of Cleves’s maidens.

Dereham was distraught, since he knew he would lose her. ‘If I were gone’, she remembered him saying, ‘he would not tarry long in the [Duchess’s] house.’ Her reply was brutal: ‘he might do as he list’.

For she would let nothing and no one stop her promotion. ‘All that knew me, and kept my company, know how glad and desirous I was to come to the Court,’ she insisted.¹²

 

Catherine’s instincts were right, for she took to the Court like a duck to water. Whitehall and Greenwich, after all, were only Horsham and Lambeth writ large. There were the same preening, predatory young men. There was the same jockeying and rivalry. There were the same fish to catch, only they were bigger.

Catherine’s name was soon linked with one of the hotter properties in the Court: Thomas Culpepper, a Gentleman of the Privy Chamber and her relative. He was a handsome, delinquent boy and a favourite of men and women alike. As Henry’s former Page, he had sometimes slept in his master’s bed, and, when he got older, he had a queue of female admirers. But with Catherine, it seems, it was different. She was his female equivalent and there was an instant, powerful attraction between them. Soon, it was rumoured, they would marry. But there were quarrels and they drifted apart. ‘If you heard such a report [that she should marry Culpepper]’, Catherine dismissively assured a former admirer, ‘you heard more than I do know’.¹³

 

For meantime Catherine had landed a bigger catch–indeed the biggest of all.

It was love at first sight. Or, as the old Duchess heard, ‘the King’s Highness did cast a fantasy to Catherine Howard the first time that ever his Grace saw her’. When this was is not clear. It might even have been in the autumn of 1539, in the run-up to Anne of Cleves’s arrival in England. But, certainly, by the late spring of 1540 a fully developed love affair was under way. It was public knowledge by June, and everyone assumed that the couple had consummated their relationship long before their marriage was celebrated on 8 August 1540 at Hampton Court.¹⁴

There were even strong rumours that Catherine went pregnant to the altar.

It is easy to read Henry’s motives. Physically repelled by Anne of Cleves, and humiliated by his sexual failure with her, he sought and found consolation from Catherine. We can also guess that sex, which had been impossible with Anne, was easy with her. And it was easy because she made it easy. Henry, lost in pleasure, never seems to have asked himself how she obtained such skill.

Instead, he attributed it all to love and his own recovered youth.

 

Of course, other, less innocent, forces were at work. Norfolk sang his niece’s praises. Gardiner, who had something of an eye for the ladies himself, made his episcopal palace available for midnight banquets which far outdid the impromptu entertainments in the Maidens’ Chamber at Horsham or Lambeth. And the old Duchess gave Catherine new and fashionable clothes and the benefit of her advice on how to handle Henry.¹⁵

Henry, however, was indifferent or oblivious to such manipulation. Indeed, in so far as it smoothed the path of his relationship with Catherine, he probably welcomed it. For he had eyes, ears and time only for her. Kingship was put on hold, foreign policy stalled, and the block and the stake stood idle as life at Court became one long honeymoon.

Even the weather conspired to help. The summer of 1540 was unusually ‘hot and dry’. ‘No rain’, the chronicler Wriothesley reported, fell from June till eight days after Michaelmas (that is, till 7 October). This summer-long drought inflicted terrible suffering on many of Henry’s subjects. Cattle died of thirst, and men and women of plague. But, for the King and Queen, it created a perfect, prolonged hunting season. In August 1540, when Henry was at Windsor, the French ambassador, Marillac, reported that nothing had happened because the King had ‘gone to the chase with a small company’. A month later, the Court had moved to Ampthill in Bedfordshire. Otherwise it was the same. ‘Nothing being spoken of here,’ Marillac noted, ‘but the chase and the banquets to the new Queen.’¹⁶

 

In September, Marillac visited the Court, probably at Grafton, and had an opportunity to form his own opinion of Catherine. He thought she was graceful, rather than the great beauty he had been led to expect. She dressed herself and her ladies in the French fashion. And she had chosen as her motto ‘Non autre volonté que la sienne [No other wish but his]’.¹⁷

Now, this may be no more than Catherine doing what came naturally. On the other hand, it could be interpreted as an ingenious combination of two of the most successful management techniques of her predecessors: Anne Boleyn’s deployment of seductive French fashions in behaviour and dress, and Jane Seymour’s carefully calculated submissiveness.

Whatever its origins, however, the result gave Catherine (and her husband) the best of both worlds and Henry was more demonstratively in love with her than with any previous wife. ‘The King’, Marillac reported, ‘is so amorous of her that he cannot treat her well enough and caresses her more than he did the others.’¹⁸

Marillac’s picture of an infatuated King is borne out by the inventory of Catherine’s jewels, which shows that Henry lavished an Aladdin’s cave of precious stones on her. Most formed part of his wedding gift to his new Queen. The gift included an ‘upper biliment’ or trimming for the top of a French hood, ‘of goldsmith work enamelled and garnished with 7 fair diamonds, 7 fair rubies and 7 fair pearls’; a ‘square’ or shaped necklace ‘containing 29 rubies and 29 clusters of pearls being 4 pearls in every cluster’, and an ‘ouch’ or pendant ‘of gold having a very fair table diamond and a very fair ruby with a long pearl hanging at the same’.

And these same jewels, minutely depicted, appear in Holbein’s miniature of the Queen. Dispute has raged as to whether its subject really is Catherine. But the identification of the jewels settles the issue once and for all. It also establishes, for the first time, her exact appearance. She had auburn hair, pale skin, dark eyes and brows, the rather fetching beginnings of a double chin, and an expression that was at once quizzical and come-hither.

It is easy, in short, to understand what Henry saw in her and why the rain of gifts continued. He gave her others, at The More in October 1540, perhaps on the occasion of the anniversary of their first meeting; while Christmas and New Year 1540–1 provided an excuse for yet more lavish presents, including a ‘square’ set with thirty-three diamonds and sixty rubies and bordered with pearls, and a jewelled sable muffler.

Henry was caught. And nothing, save Catherine’s own mistakes, could ever release him. ‘The new Queen’, Marillac informed his government in November, ‘has completely acquired the King’s Grace and the other [Anne] is no more spoken of than if she were dead.’¹⁹

 

The ambassador’s exaggeration is a pardonable one. Nevertheless, Anne of Cleves was very much alive and her presence as a sort of ghost from the past continued to be an embarrassment–for Henry, for Anne herself and, perhaps above all, for Catherine. For, despite her short reign, Anne had become remarkably popular. Her divorce, Marillac reported, had been ‘to the great regret of this people, who loved and esteemed her as the sweetest, most gracious and kindest Queen they ever had or would desire’. This assessment might be dismissed as ambassadorial gossip. But Marillac’s judgement is confirmed by the English chronicler Wriothesley. ‘[It] was great pity’, he commented, ‘that so good a lady as she should have lost her great joy.’ And Wriothesley’s verdict carries the more weight, since, as a religious conservative, he had no reason to be committed to the Cleves marriage. Instead, it must have been Anne’s own personal qualities of modesty and goodness which had won his regard.²⁰

Modesty and goodness, on the other hand, were not, perhaps, Catherine’s strongest suits. Nevertheless, Anne had to be fitted into a world in which she, as the King’s adoptive sister, could play a comfortable second fiddle to Catherine, as Henry’s wife and Queen.

As part of the divorce settlement, Henry had assured Anne of a welcome at Court. But, wisely, the offer was neither extended nor taken up for the first few months of the King’s new marriage. At New Year 1541, however, the ice was broken. Chapuys’s account, on which we largely depend, makes Anne take the initiative. But equally she must have received permission for her planned visit to Court.²¹

Anne began by sending Henry a magnificent New Year’s gift of two fine horses caparisoned in mauve velvet. Then, on 3 January, she presented herself at Hampton Court. There was a delay while Chancellor Audley and the Earl of Sussex, who, as Cromwell’s successor as Lord Great Chamberlain, was ceremonial head of the royal Household, briefed Queen Catherine on the delicate question of etiquette presented by her meeting with ex-Queen Anne. There were no precedents and they must have resorted to a mixture of common sense and invention.

Finally, Catherine was ready and Anne was admitted to the Queen’s presence. Only a few months before, Catherine had been one of Anne’s women. She had knelt in her presence and spoken to her only when spoken to. How, everyone must have wondered, would Anne cope with the role reversal?

She did so by giving a virtuoso performance of humility. ‘Having entered the room’, Chapuys reported, ‘Lady Anne approached the Queen with as much reverence and punctilious ceremony as if she herself were the most insignificant damsel about Court.’ ‘All the time’, he continued, ‘addressing the Queen on her knees’.

But Catherine was not to be outdone. Her schoolgirlish humour must have tempted her to laugh. But her sense of decorum and her coaching carried the day and she was all graciousness. She asked Anne, nay begged her, to rise and ‘received her most kindly, showing her great favour and courtesy’.

So far, Henry was not to be seen. Instead, he left it to the two women in his life to establish the appropriate relationship between them–of submission, on Anne’s part, and gracious acceptance, on Catherine’s. But, once it was safely accomplished, he appeared and, if anything, outdid Catherine in his courtesy to Anne.

‘The King’, Chapuys reported, ‘entered the room, and, after making a very low bow to [the] Lady Anne, embraced and kissed her.’ Then all three sat down to supper at the same table. Throughout the meal, they kept ‘as good a mien and countenance and look[ed] as unconcerned as if there had been nothing between them’. The conversation continued a while after supper until Henry withdrew, leaving the two women once more to themselves. They passed the time in dancing: first with each other and then with two Gentlemen of the King’s Household.

Was Catherine’s partner perhaps her old flame, Thomas Culpepper?

 

The next day, the show of Happy Families continued ‘with conversation, amusement and mirth’. Catherine gave a present of a ring and two lap dogs to Anne, who, after dinner on the 5th, left Court for her own house at Richmond.²²

The visit had been a triumphant success all round. Anne had established a place in the English royal family which she was to keep across three reigns, while Catherine had shown herself to be a model consort: gracious, forgiving and willing to let bygones be bygones.

These were, of course, the traditional qualities of a Queen. But, under Henry, their display had been the exception rather than the rule. For all of Catherine’s predecessors, one way or another, had been partisan, political Queens: each had had her own axe to grind, and each had ground her axe with a will. Catherine of Aragon represented the Spanish alliance. Anne Boleyn fought for Reform, and Jane Seymour against it. And even Anne of Cleves was intended to be Cromwell’s stalking-horse in the final push for Reform.

The natural thing was for Catherine to follow in their footsteps and become the figurehead for a revived anti-Reform policy. This, it seems certain, was the part which Gardiner and Catherine’s Howard backers had assigned to her. But would she do as they wished? Or would she strike out on her own?

 

Here a fresh look is needed. Catherine’s behaviour in her step-grandmother’s Household has often been seen to indicate that she was a crass, self-indulgent teenager, without a thought in her head, unless others had put it there. But a different reading is possible. Catherine, like many teenagers, certainly showed herself to be wilful and sensual. But she also displayed leadership, resourcefulness and independence, which are qualities less commonly found in headstrong young girls.

At Horsham and Lambeth, of course, she was a rebel without a cause, other than her own pleasure. But at Court, and as Queen, her independence of mind could be put to better use.

But would it be? As it happens, there are early indications that Catherine was prepared to think for herself. For example, she quickly established good relations with Cranmer, Gardiner’s bête noire. Similarly, as we have just seen, she responded enthusiastically to Anne of Cleves’s attempt to bury the hatchet. All this suggests at least a reluctance to toe the factional line, if not a positive commitment to reconciliation and healing.²³

Then there is the question of her sensuality. The long, withdrawing roar of Victorian morality inhibited generations of historians from treating this with anything other than disapproval and distaste. But we are past that now. We can confront sex as a fact, not as a sin. We can even, if pushed, see a sort of virtue in promiscuity.

Catherine benefits enormously from this shift in moral values. True, she was a good-time girl. But, like many good-time girls, she was also warm, loving and good-natured. She wanted to have a good time. But she wanted other people to have a good time, too. And she was prepared to make some effort to see that they did.

Nor, refreshingly in that God-infested century, does she seem to have had much truck with religion. If she thought of God at all, it was, perhaps, as a sort of superior Duchess of Norfolk: like her step-grandmother, He was haphazardly tyrannical and a kill-joy. But, with a little ingenuity, His strictures, too, could be avoided.

This was not the stuff of martyrs. But nor was it the stuff that made martyrs of others. And that, in the reign of Henry VIII, was something.

 

Catherine, in short, had begun rather well. She had a good heart, and a less bad head than most of her chroniclers have assumed. But would the pressure of politics and kin let her keep to her path of live and let live? And would she be able to carry Henry with her?

 

The first test came quickly. On 3 January, as Catherine was entertaining Anne of Cleves at the start of her visit to Court, the Council was interrogating Thomas Smith, the Clerk of Catherine’s Council. His fellow-examinee was William Grey, ‘sometime servant to the late Lord Cromwell’, and the two were charged with writing and publishing invectives against each other. Also in trouble was the leading printer-publisher, Richard Grafton, who was accused of printing and distributing the offending material.

At first sight it is difficult to see why the Council bothered to get itself involved in a private quarrel of literary men. Such quarrels were as frequent, intractable and insignificant then as now. Today, they take the form of ‘debates’ in learned journals, or leak and counter-leak in gossip columns. Then, a ‘flytyng’, or ritual public exchange of insults in verse, was the established device.

Smith’s and Grey’s exchanges followed the traditional form. But they gave them a new and dangerous twist by using them to take opposite sides on the burning political issues of the day. Smith struck the first blow by attacking Grey’s fallen master Cromwell:

Both man and child is glad to tell

Of that false traitor Thomas Cromwell

Now that he is set to learn to spell

Sing troll-a-way

Grey replied in kind and in equally bad verse. It was, he began, un-Christian to rail on the dead. Then he went on to suggest that, though Cromwell was a traitor,

Yet dare I say that the King of his grace

Hath forgiven him that great trespass.

Finally, he went fully on the offensive, and accused Smith of being Popish. Smith upheld, he claimed:

…both monks and friars

Nuns and naughty packs and lewd lousy liars,

The Bishop of Rome with all his rotten squires.

To build such a church thou art much to blame.

Smith responded hotly to the charge of Papistry and threatened to seek redress ‘before the highest powers’. He did not name them. But since he described himself in print as ‘servant to the King’s Royal Majesty and Clerk of the Queen’s Grace’s Council’, there was not much doubt who was intended.²⁴

It all threatened to get out of hand, and justified the Council’s intervention. On the 3rd, Smith and Grey were subject to ‘long examination’. The intention, clearly, was to discover whether they had written on their own initiative or whether they were acting as a front for other, more powerful figures. The results seem to have been inconclusive and they were ordered to reappear before the Council the following morning at 7 a.m.

Bearing in mind Smith’s status as a royal servant, Henry must have been consulted overnight about his treatment. As, surely, must Catherine. But neither lifted a finger to protect him and on the 4th he joined Grey and Grafton in being ‘committed to the Fleet [Prison] during the King’s pleasure’.²⁵

Catherine, Smith’s imprisonment made clear, had no intention of following Anne Boleyn as the patroness of religious controversy.

 

The tensions which led to the clash between Smith and Grey–between Reformer and anti-Reformer–of course operated at the highest political levels as well. The fact had been obscured by Catherine’s marriage and the prolonged Progress of 1540, which imposed a kind of truce. But, with the New Year, politics began to return to their normal state of vicious in-fighting. On 17 January, Sir Thomas Wyatt, Anne Boleyn’s former suitor and Cromwell’s protégé, was led bound to the Tower. And Sir Ralph Sadler, another Cromwell client, who had succeeded him as joint Secretary, was also arrested. These, evidently, were victims of Cromwell’s enemies. A few weeks later, on 5 February, Cromwell’s friends struck back by getting Sir John Wallop, the highly conservative former ambassador to France, sent to the Tower as well.²⁶

It was tit for tat. And where and when would it stop?

Marillac, the French ambassador who had correctly predicted the crisis of 1540, took the gloomiest view. ‘There could be’, he wrote home immediately after Wyatt’s arrest, ‘no worse war than the English carry on against each other.’ ‘For’, he continued, ‘after Cromwell had brought down the greatest of the realm, from the Marquess [of Exeter] to the Master of the Horse [Carew], now others have arisen who will never rest till they have done as much to all Cromwell’s adherents.’ ‘And God knows,’ he concluded, ‘whether after them others will not recommence the feast.’²⁷

But this time Marillac’s prediction was wrong. Wyatt, Sadler and Wallop were not executed. Indeed, they not only survived but were restored to favour and office as well.

Saturn, it seemed, had stopped eating his children.

 

What had happened? Were the rival groupings at Court and on the Council so evenly balanced that neither was able seriously to harm the other? Was Henry, freed from Cromwell’s malign influence, now consciously pursuing a policy of moderation and balance? Or was he simply too happy in his new marriage to bother with treason and vengeance?

All seem likely.

But the official explanation was different again. According to the Council’s letter to the new English ambassador in France, Henry had been predisposed to pardon Wyatt and Wallop because of their ready acknowledgement of their faults. But what had been decisive were ‘the most humble suits and intercessions made unto [the King], both for [Wallop] and for Wyatt, by the Queen’s Highness’.²⁸

For once, bearing in mind what we know about both Henry and Catherine, there seems no reason to disbelieve a government handout.

 

Chapuys’s account adds an interesting twist to the story, since he links the pardon with Catherine’s inauguration ceremonies as Queen. These, following the precedents of her immediate predecessors, took the form not of a coronation but of a river pageant.²⁹

The peculiarity lay in their delay. Anne Boleyn, Jane Seymour and Anne of Cleves had all made their river entrée into the City within a few weeks of their marriage to Henry. But the long, hot summer of 1540, the extended Progress, the plague and the pleasures of marriage combined to postpone Catherine’s inaugural visit to the City, and it was not until 19 March 1541, more than seven months after her wedding, that she passed for the first time under London Bridge.

But the City made up for the delay with the warmth of its welcome. The Mayor and Livery Companies in their gaily trimmed barges waited to receive the King and Queen between London Bridge and the Tower. At 3 o’clock, the royal barge, in which, most unusually, Henry and Catherine travelled together, shot the bridge. The City barges then formed an escort for the King and Queen as they were rowed downstream. The Tower ‘shot a great shot of guns’ and the ships lining the river fired salutes all the way to Greenwich.³⁰

Chapuys, who could be dismissive about English ceremonial, was impressed. ‘The people of this City’, he reported, ‘honoured her with a most splendid reception.’ As for Catherine, she struck while the iron was hot. ‘From this triumphal march’, the ambassador continued, ‘the Queen took courage to beg and entreat the King for the release of Mr Wyatt, a prisoner in the Tower.’³¹

This showed a shrewd sense of priorities. To have sued first for Wallop, who was one of her own, would have savoured of parti pris. But to begin with Wyatt, whose affiliations were all with the enemies of her house, established that her gesture was disinterested. Only once Wyatt was restored to the King’s good graces (though on the hard condition of taking back his hated estranged wife) did she kneel once more for Wallop. And, once more, she was successful.

 

There was scope also for Catherine’s emollient talents nearer home, among Henry’s strange, fractious brood of half-siblings.

With Mary, the eldest and most difficult, she got off to an awkward start. Mary, who was at least four years older than her new step-mother, had failed (on Chapuys’s own admission) ‘to treat her with the same respect as her two predecessors’. Catherine, in revenge, moved to cut back her establishment of maids. But a chastened Mary, Chapuys reported, had ‘found means to conciliate her and thinks her maids will remain’.³²

The storm in a tea-cup over, the two established cordial relations, though the serious Mary and the pleasure-loving Catherine were too different in character ever to become real friends. Nevertheless, they were able to co-operate in bringing about the most important gesture of family solidarity since the Divorce from Catherine of Aragon.

Chapuys’s account makes clear that he recognised its significance. ‘A week ago’, he reported on 17 May, ‘the King and the Queen went…to visit the Prince [at Waltham Holy Cross in Essex] at the request of the [Lady Mary], but chiefly at the intercession of the Queen herself.’ The visit went well and ‘upon that occasion’, Chapuys continued, ‘the King granted [Mary] full permission to reside at Court, and the Queen has countenanced it with good grace’.³³

Naturally, the ambassador’s narrative omits Elizabeth, who was still unforgiven by Imperialists on account of her position as Anne Boleyn’s daughter. But Catherine made sure that she, too, had some sort of part in the family get-together. On 4 May, a day or two before the visit to Waltham, Catherine travelled by river from Chelsea to her town-house at Baynard’s Castle. The next day, ‘my Lady Elizabeth’ was taken by water from Suffolk House in Southwark to Chelsea and on the 6th, the Queen made the return journey from Baynard’s Castle to Chelsea as well.³⁴

Quite what these journeys signify is unclear. Catherine could have been supervising the preparation of Chelsea as Elizabeth’s residence on the 4th and making sure that she was settled in with her second visit on the 6th. Or she could have been collecting her to take her to join the family party at Waltham.

At any rate, she was showing an appropriate concern for her younger step-daughter, which she also expressed by giving Elizabeth little presents of jewellery alongside her more substantial gifts to Mary.³⁵

Catherine’s intervention had the desired effect of fully normalising relations among Henry’s offspring and at New Year 1543 all three of his children, apparently for the first time, exchanged New Year’s gifts.³⁶

 

But Catherine’s indiscriminate good nature had other, less desirable, consequences. She might be indifferent to the broader Howard political agenda. But she felt strong loyalty to those who had brought her up. She was also eager to do what she could for her former fellow inmates in the Duchess’s Household.

The result was that the plums of patronage fell in some otherwise unlikely places. Lord William Howard replaced Wallop as ambassador to France, on her nomination. Katherine Tilney, who had shared her bed at Horsham, was made one of her women. And she even gave a position in her Household to Francis Dereham, who had returned some time previously from a short, self-imposed exile in Ireland and was in London kicking his heels once more.

Now, it is important here to be clear about Catherine’s behaviour. It was not, as almost all modern historians agree, improper and irresponsible to the point of lunacy. On the contrary. Looking after one’s own was a moral imperative in the sixteenth century and long remained so. Which is why other powerful figures in the Dowager’s entourage also involved themselves in fixing Dereham’s Court appointment. ‘Lady Bridgewater and Lady Howard [Lord William’s wife]’, the Dowager recalled, ‘sued to her to speak to the Queen for Dereham.’ And, though the evidence is unclear, the Duchess herself may have given her blessing to the arrangement by bringing Dereham to Court and formally presenting him to the Queen.³⁷

There was a danger nonetheless.

For Catherine’s whole position as Queen depended on drawing a veil of decent obscurity over her days at Horsham and Lambeth. This does not seem to have been too difficult. Many, even most, Tudor girls (if we believe Chapuys’s jaundiced verdict on English womanhood) had similarly murky pasts. So it was in no one’s interest to dig too deep. Least of all was it in Henry’s. Wildly in love, he had, it seems, asked no questions and had been told no lies.³⁸

It was a happy arrangement.

Nevertheless, it depended on everybody observing certain rules. The first and most important was to distinguish sharply time past from time present. For in the Tudor Court, as in the future Soviet Union, individuals and moments were air-brushed out of history. In the past Catherine had been a maid and Anne of Cleves a Queen. In the past, too, Catherine and Dereham had been lovers, perhaps, as it would appear, consummated lovers. But the present required them all to forget these earlier selves. Anne of Cleves survived because she showed herself willing to do so. Catherine had a fair stab at it. But would Dereham?

The signs were not good. He quickly quarrelled, for instance, with Mr Johns, one of the Queen’s Gentlemen Ushers. The occasion was Dereham’s habit of lingering over his dinner or supper. This was a privilege reserved for the Queen’s Council, as the senior members of the Household were known, and not for riffraff like Dereham. Outraged by his presumption, Johns sent him a messenger to know ‘whether he were of the Queen’s Council?’ Dereham was unabashed. ‘Go to Mr Johns’, he ordered the messenger, ‘and tell him I was of the Queen’s Council before he knew her and shall be when she hath forgotten him.’³⁹

The reply was magnificent. But it was not wise. For it provoked a whole series of questions. What did Dereham mean when he said he had been ‘of Council’ with the Queen? Did he really mean that he had been a friend and adviser of ‘Mrs Catherine Howard’ before she married Henry? If so, just what relationship between them did this suggest?

The proper answer to any of these questions would have destroyed Catherine. But still her luck held, and thoughts turned to the summer Progress.

 

The Progress to the north, first planned in 1536, had been postponed on one ground or another ever since. But now Henry resolved to make it a reality. He had a mixture of motives. Another abortive Yorkshire rising had been nipped in the bud in the spring. There was the prospect of meeting at York with his nephew, James V of Scotland. But, above all, he would make the Progress with a Howard Queen at his side. And the name of Howard counted for as much in the north as that of Tudor.

The planning got seriously underway in May 1541. And Chapuys was clearly surprised by the scale of the preparations. Henry intended, he reported, ‘to repair to the Northern counties in pompous array, followed by at least 5,000 horse’.⁴⁰

The King and Queen left London, according to plan, at the end of June. But then the problems began. James of Scotland played hard to get. The weather was as unseasonably wet that summer as it had been dry the previous one with the result, Marillac reported, that ‘the roads leading to the North…have been flooded and the carts and baggage could not proceed without great difficulty’. And Catherine herself fell ill.⁴¹

In the face of these accumulated difficulties, the Court lingered damply in Bedfordshire and Northamptonshire for most of July and the whole thing, Marillac heard, was nearly called off once more. But this time too much had been invested in the preparations and too many hopes had been raised for cancellation to be a feasible option. Finally, in the third week of July, and about a month late, the Court left Northampton on the first leg of its journey to the north of England–that third of his kingdom which Henry had never previously visited and which he knew much less well than his titular realm of France.

The Progress was to be the crowning glory of Catherine’s reign–and its undoing.

 

After spending four or five days at Collyweston, the great country palace of Henry’s grandmother, Lady Margaret Beaufort, the King and Queen crossed into Lincolnshire. The county had been the seat of the first of the northern rebellions of 1536. Both the rebellion and its suppression had been traumatic, and relations between the locality and the crown had not yet recovered. The Progress was intended to be the moment of healing. It would bury the lingering resentment, on one side, and the mistrust, on the other, and knit up King and subjects into a unity once more.⁴²

By and large, it was successful. There were processional entrées into Stamford and Boston and, on 9 August, into Lincoln, the regional capital. The royal tents were set up at Temple Bruer, seven miles to the south-east of the city, where Henry and Catherine had a picnic dinner. Then they were greeted by three distinct groups: the gentry and their servants of the Parts of Lindsey (one of the three administrative divisions of the county), the mayor and citizens of Lincoln and the clergy of the Cathedral. Each group had played a part in the revolt and each now made amends. First, a representative of the clergy made a speech and offered a gift, to be followed in turn by spokesmen for the gentry and citizens who did likewise. The King handed the copy of the Recorder’s speech to the Duke of Norfolk and gentlemen and citizens knelt and cried: ‘Jesus save your Grace’.

By this time Henry and Catherine had changed into more sumptuous dress: his of cloth of gold, hers of cloth of silver. The heralds put on their tabards, the Gentlemen Pensioners presented their battle axes, Lord Hastings carried the sword of state, and the Masters of the Horse led the two magnificently caparisoned ‘horses of estate’ after the King and Queen. In this order, and preceded by the gentry and citizens, Henry and Catherine made their entry into the city. At the west doors of Lincoln Cathedral there was a carpet with cushions and faldstools. The King and Queen knelt down, and kissed the crucifix, which was presented to them by the bishop in cope and mitre. He ‘censed’ them and, through the clouds of incense, they entered the Cathedral to pray at the reserved sacrament while the choir sang the Te Deum.

Then, at the end of a long day, the couple withdrew to their lodgings at Lincoln Castle.⁴³

 

Henry was quickly asleep. But there were light and movement in the Queen’s apartments till far into the small hours. Even more strangely, the door to the backstairs, which led directly to Catherine’s bedchamber, was left ajar. The watchman, doing his rounds with his light, noticed the open door. He pulled it to, locked it from the outside and continued on his way. Shortly after, two figures approached and, after fumbling with the lock, somehow got the door opened. One remained on guard outside; the other entered.⁴⁴

Was he a thief? Or was he aiming to steal something more precious even than the Queen’s jewels?

 

From Lincoln, the route of the Progress turned inland towards Yorkshire. Just across the border lay the teeming hunting grounds of Hatfield Chase. Here Henry took an extended holiday from the political side of the Progress. He and Catherine stayed in magnificent tents and pavilions which were, in reality, fully equipped portable palaces. And they spent their days in hunting and their nights in feasting.

The French ambassador, Marillac, who accompanied the Court on the Progress, described one such day. A large area of the Chase was enclosed; it contained ponds and marshes as well as scrub and woodland. The latter was rich in game, the former in fish and wild fowl. Hunters and fishers in boats went on to the water, while bowmen stood on the land. The result was an extraordinary mixed bag of flesh, fish and fowl: two hundred stags and deer, ‘a great quantity of young swans, two boats full of river birds and as much of great pikes and other fish’.

It was a scene of pastoral bliss from a hunting tapestry. Almost, indeed, the Garden of Eden. Nature gave with a prodigal hand, and deer grazed near the tents as tame ‘as if they had been domestic cattle’. Proudly, Henry pointed them out to Marillac who was supping with him in his tent.⁴⁵

In this Garden of Eden, there was also an Eve. For it was at Hatfield that ‘[Catherine] looked out of her Privy Chamber window on Mr Culpepper’. It was a look of desire and her women remembered it.⁴⁶

 

Henry then moved to Pontefract, which was ‘one of the finest castles in England’, as Marillac admiringly noted, for another extended visit. Here the King received the submission of Yorkshire. The ceremonies were almost as curious as the hunt at Hatfield Chase and they were described by Marillac with the same minute interest. The gentry and other notables were divided into two groups: the sheep and the goats. ‘Those who in the rebellion remained faithful were ranked apart’, the ambassador reported, ‘and graciously received by the King and praised for their fidelity.’ ‘The others’, he continued, ‘who were of the conspiracy, among whom appeared the Archbishop of York, were a little further off on their knees.’ As in Lincolnshire, a spokesman then made their submission. ‘One of them’, Marillac wrote, ‘speaking for all, made a long harangue confessing their treason in marching against their sovereign and his Council, thanking him for pardoning so great an offence and begging that if any relics of indignation remained he would dismiss them.’ ‘They then’, Marillac concluded, ‘delivered several bulky submissions in writing.’⁴⁷

One survives. ‘We your humble servants, the inhabitants of this your Grace’s county of York’, it begins, ‘confess that we wretches…have most grievously, heinously and wantonly offended your…Majesty.’ They promise henceforward to be good subjects and to pray for the preservation of King Henry, Queen Catherine and Prince Edward.

And no doubt Catherine lent her prayers to theirs. They received ‘a benign answer’. It was like the pardons of Wyatt and Wallop writ large.⁴⁸

At Pontefract, there was another odd incident. Denny, sent as usual from the King to the Queen, ‘one night found [her bedchamber door] bolted’.⁴⁹

But, with his usual discretion, he said nothing about it. At the time.

 

From Pontefract the Progress moved to York, by easy stages and with a major detour to inspect the fortifications at Hull. At York, Henry lingered much longer than the pre-published programme of the Progress envisaged. Marillac was puzzled. Twelve hundred or a thousand workmen were labouring night and day to complete the refurbishment of the dissolved Abbey of St Mary’s into a new northern palace for the King. Henry had also, the ambassador noted, ‘brought from London his richest tapestry, plate and dress, both for himself and his archers, pages and gentlemen, with marvellous provision of victuals from all parts’.⁵⁰

Were the preparations, the ambassador wondered, for the meeting with James V of Scotland? Or were they for Catherine’s coronation in the Minster which would follow the birth of the Duke of York?⁵¹

 

In the event, neither the King of Scots nor the Duke of York appeared, and the Court began its slow return journey southwards.

The Court arrived at Hampton Court on 29 October, just in time for the celebrations of the great Feasts of All Saints Day on 1 November and All Souls Day on the 2nd. Henry, who had noticed nothing of the strange goings-on in the Queen’s apartments during his visit to the north, and had not been told about them either, was in a genial and expansive mood. The Progress, despite James V’s failure to keep the rendezvous at York, had been a political success. The King had also enjoyed himself and was happy.

For at last, he thought, he had found the right wife.

His feelings were reported a little later in a letter from the Council. ‘Now in his old days’, the King felt, ‘after sundry troubles of mind which have happened unto him by marriages, [he had] obtained…a jewel [in Catherine]’. ‘For womanhood and very perfect love towards him’ she would be ‘to his quietness’; she was also likely to ‘[bring] forth the desired fruits of marriage’. And in conduct, above all, she was perfect, showing outwardly all ‘virtue and good behaviour’.⁵²

 

All Saints Day was one of the Days of Estate when the King took communion publicly in the Chapel Royal. There at Hampton Court, under the splendours of the blue and gold roof of Wolsey’s Chapel which depicts the angelic host blowing on trumpets in triumph, Henry offered up his grateful prayers for his new-found marital happiness with Catherine. ‘He gave [God] most humble and hearty thanks for the good life he led and trusted to lead with [the Queen].’ He also ordered Bishop Longland of Lincoln, his confessor, ‘to make like prayer and give like thanks with him’.

The following day, however, the Chapel witnessed a very different scene. Henry arrived in his Closet for the mass for All Souls Day. But on his seat he found a letter. He opened it and read it. It was from Cranmer and it made sensational charges against his ‘jewel’ of womanhood. During her time in the Duchess’s Household, the letter claimed, Francis Dereham ‘hath lied in bed with her in his doublet and hose between the sheets a hundred nights’. And Henry Manox also ‘knew a privy mark of her body’.⁵³

 

Knowledge of Catherine’s relationships with both Manox and Dereham was, as we have seen, an open secret in the Duchess’s Household. But the allegations in this letter went much further than anything the Duchess or Lady Bridgewater or Lord William Howard had allowed themselves to see.

Clearly, the information was the result of an inside job. Its source was Mary Hall née Lascelles, who had been a serving woman in the Duchess’s Household at the same time as Catherine. She had spoken to her brother, John Lascelles, and Lascelles, in turn, had spoken to Cranmer. Lascelles claimed that the information had emerged innocently. But the fact that he was later burned as a Protestant heretic strongly suggests that he had a factional motive in denouncing the Howard Queen.⁵⁴

Similarly, Cranmer’s behaviour in the affair was complex–as Cranmer’s behaviour usually was. Once the information had come to his hands, his oath as a Councillor, as well as his personal concern for Henry’s honour and happiness, required him to disclose it to the King. But how unhappy was he with his task?

One thing is clear. Cranmer was not, as used to be thought, simply pursuing a Reforming vendetta against a ‘Catholic’ consort. Instead, he had got on surprisingly well with Catherine. According to some reports, in the dark days of June and July 1540, she had protected him when it seemed likely that he would share the fate of Cromwell. Nor, thanks in part to her indifference to the Howard political agenda, was the persecution of Reformers in the wake of the Act of Six Articles anything like as fierce as might have been expected. On the other hand, Catherine was also indifferent to Cranmer’s concerns. She had no interest in Reform. And, so long as she was Queen, there was always the possibility that her ‘Catholic’ relatives, the Howards, and their allies, including Gardiner, might be able to use her to initiate a fresh persecution of Reformers.⁵⁵

So, Cranmer decided, Catherine should go. His decision was reached with some regret. But, as so often in his career, he did not let regrets get in the way of stern necessity.

 

But even Cranmer, well as he knew Henry, must have been disconcerted by the King’s reaction. For Henry at first flatly refused to believe the allegations. He, who had been willing to magnify every scrap of gossip against Anne Boleyn, loftily dismissed the denunciations against Catherine Howard as ‘rather a forged matter than of truth’.

The King did agree, however, that the charges should be investigated. But, to protect Catherine, whose reputation, he was sure, would be vindicated, from ‘any spark of scandal’, he ordered the investigation to be conducted in the utmost secrecy.

It was entrusted to four confidential Councillors: Fitzwilliam, who had succeeded Cromwell as Lord Privy Seal; Russell, who was now a Baron and Lord Admiral; the Master of the Horse, Sir Anthony Browne; and Secretary Wriothesley. As instructed, they proceeded in the strictest confidentiality. Elaborate subterfuges were used to summon witnesses and suspects. And the Councillors wrote the transcripts of the examinations themselves. This resulted in some documents of rare illegibility. Which is one reason why they have been so little used by historians. The other is the sensational nature of their contents, which I reproduce here in unexpurgated form for the first time.⁵⁶

 

On 5 November, Fitzwilliam began with Mary Hall née Lascelles. She not only stuck to her story but provided shocking corroborative detail. When she had learned of the extent of Manox’s affair with Catherine, she testified, she had reproached the music teacher for his folly and presumption. But he had laughed in her face. ‘I know her well enough’, Manox had boasted, ‘for I have had her by the cunt, and I know it among a hundred.’ ‘And she loves me’, he had continued, ‘and I love her, and she hath said to me that I shall have her maidenhead, though it be painful to her, and not doubting but I will be good to her hereafter.’⁵⁷

Meanwhile, that same day, Manox himself was being interrogated at Lambeth by Wriothesley. Under the Secretary’s cold questioning, the music teacher’s boasts shrank to a more complex and credible story. Catherine, as we have seen, had refused him full intercourse. Manox accepted this, but demanded a token of her affection. ‘Yet’, he said to her, ‘let me feel your secret (naming the thing plainly) and then I shall think that indeed you love me.’ ‘I am content’, Catherine replied, ‘so as you will desire no more but that.’ Manox gave his word as she had required.

A day or two later Manox and Catherine met in ‘my Lady’s Chapel Chamber at Horsham’. The room, dark and deserted, was a fine and secret place, and Manox took the opportunity to beg Catherine to fulfil her promise. She agreed. ‘[And] I’, Manox testified, ‘felt more than was convenient.’

It was more than convenient indeed. But that, he insisted desperately, was as far as he had gone. ‘Upon his damnation’, he swore, ‘and most extreme punishment of his body, he never knew her carnally.’⁵⁸

And, despite brutal pressure, he refused to budge from this.

 

But Dereham, whom Wriothesley examined later on the 5th, could offer no such defence. ‘He hath had carnal knowledge with the Queen’, he admitted, ‘lying in bed by her in his doublet and hosen divers times and six or seven times in naked bed with her.’

Other ladies of the Duchess’s Household, who were subsequently examined, glossed Dereham’s bald account with lascivious details. Mary Lascelles testified that ‘she hath seen them kiss after a wonderful manner, for they would kiss and hang by their bills [that is, lips] together and [as if] they were two sparrows’. Alice Restwood, who was legitimately sharing Catherine’s bed, said that there was ‘such puffing and blowing between [Dereham and Catherine] that [she] was weary of the same’. Indeed, Dereham’s heavy breathing and other noises had become a running joke in the Maidens’ Chamber. ‘Hark to Dereham broken winded!’ exclaimed another frequent gentleman-visitor after a particularly strenuous display.⁵⁹

But it was Margaret Benet who contrived to witness the most. ‘[She] looked out at a hole of a door’, she stated, ‘and there saw Dereham pluck up [Catherine’s] clothes above her navel so that [she] might well discern her body.’ And Benet’s ears had been as busy as her eyes. ‘She heard’, she told her interrogator, ‘Dereham say that although he used the company of a woman…yet he would get no child except he listed.’ And Catherine, according to Benet, had replied in a similar vein. ‘A woman’, she had said, ‘might meddle with a man and yet conceive no child unless she would herself.’⁶⁰

Was this confident contraceptive knowledge? Or merely old-wives’ tales? In either case, it explains why Catherine was prepared to have frequent sex with no apparent heed to the risks of pregnancy.

 

The examinations of Manox and Dereham established, beyond doubt, the truth of Mary Lascelles’s charges against Catherine. Henry was badly shaken. He had believed. And he had been proved wrong. ‘His heart was so pierced with pensiveness’, the Council reported, ‘that long it was before his Majesty could speak and utter the sorrow of his heart unto us.’ And when he did so, he wept freely ‘which was strange in one of his courage’.⁶¹

Were his tears for Catherine? Or the loss of his own illusions?

 

Whatever his state of mind, Henry acted quickly. A summons was sent to the senior members of the Council, including Catherine’s uncle, Norfolk, at about midnight on Saturday the 5th. The following day, Henry ‘on the pretext of hunting’, dined in a little pleasure-house in one of the parks around Hampton Court. Then, under the cover of night, he left secretly for London.

Catherine never saw him again. As always with Henry, the break with an about-to-be-discarded wife was clean and clinical. There was no time for hysterics or for her supposed last, desperate attempt to see him in the Chapel Gallery. Indeed, when her husband left the palace, she was aware neither of his departure nor that anything was wrong.

The King arrived at Whitehall late at night. Soon after his arrival, the Council met at midnight and remained in session till 4 or 5 a.m. on Monday morning. ‘These lords have been ever since in Council morning and evening’, Marillac reported, ‘the King assisting, which he is not wont to do.’ ‘They show themselves very troubled’, the ambassador added, ‘especially Norfolk, who is esteemed very resolute, and not easily moved to show by his face what his heart conceives.’

While these urgent debates continued, Catherine, the occasion of them all, remained at Hampton Court with her women. She was in a sort of limbo. No one had yet told her anything officially. But the King’s unexplained absence made clear that something was amiss. Confused and unsure, she abandoned her usual round of pleasure. ‘She has taken no kind of pastime’, the very well-informed Marillac reported, ‘but kept in her Chambers.’ ‘Before’, he added, ‘she did nothing but dance and rejoice [but] now when the musicians come, they are told there is no more time to dance.’⁶²

 

The blow fell on Monday the 7th. In the evening, a powerful delegation of Councillors, headed by Cranmer, was despatched to Hampton Court to confront Catherine with her misdeeds. Her first reaction was to brazen it out. But, as the evidence against her was rehearsed, her resistance collapsed. She had another interview with Cranmer that night and made, it was thought, a full written confession. She begged the King’s mercy, which she had so often procured for others; she pleaded her youthful frailty and the wicked ways of young men; and she acknowledged that she had been so ‘blinded with desire of worldly glory that I could not, nor had grace, to consider how great a fault it was to conceal my former faults from your Majesty’.⁶³

Cranmer handled her with tact and real kindness. For her condition was pitiable. ‘I found her’, he reported to Henry, ‘in such lamentation and heaviness as I never saw no creature, so that it would have pitied any man’s heart to have looked upon her.’ Indeed, her ‘vehement rage’ was such that he really feared for her sanity. Fortunately, he was able, when he saw her next, to give her the news that Henry, softened by her confession, had decided to show her mercy. This quietened her. But then her paroxysms resumed, worse even than before. Gently, Cranmer questioned her to discover their cause. It was the King’s mercy, she said through sobs, which more brought home to her the enormity of her conduct than her previous fear of death.

After that, she continued in a calmer state till about 6 o’clock (probably on the 8th or 9th) when she had ‘another like pang, but not so outrageous as the first was’. The explanation was, she told Cranmer, ‘for remembrance of the time’. For six was the hour when ‘Mr Heneage was wont to bring her knowledge of your Grace’.⁶⁴

It was the prettiest picture of female repentance which could be desired. But was it real? Or the work of a quick-witted actress?

 

Whatever their nature, Catherine’s agonies of grief were enough to win Henry’s mercy. Probably, he was inclined to extenuate her misbehaviour as the result of a poor education, and to blame those who had brought her up more than Catherine herself. Moreover, it was far from clear whether Catherine and Dereham had committed any offence. The fall of Catherine’s predecessor, Anne Boleyn, had established that adultery by a Queen was certainly treason–both for the Queen and her paramour(s). But Dereham and Catherine had enjoyed their nights of passion before Catherine became Queen. Neither had been married then; and, while fornication was a sin, it was not a crime.

Catherine had been shameless. She had been deceitful. But that was all.

The Duchess, who had a sharp forensic brain, was quick to grasp all this. She had spoken to her step-son, Norfolk, on the night of Sunday 6 November, on his return to Lambeth from Hampton Court, and again after the marathon session of the Council in the small hours of the Monday morning. And the upshot of these conversations was that she was confident Catherine would escape. ‘The Duchess’, one of her servants testified, ‘said that if it were done while [Catherine and Dereham] were here [at Lambeth], neither the Queen nor Dereham should die for it.’ ‘But’, she added, ‘I am sorry for the King, for he taketh the matter very heavily.’

The Duchess’s optimistic reading of events seemed to be vindicated when, on 11 November, the Council at Court wrote to inform Cranmer at Hampton Court of Henry’s decision about the Queen’s immediate fate. She was to be moved to the former nunnery of Syon, ‘there to remain, till the matter be further resolved…[and] furnished moderately, as her life and conditions hath deserved’. She would have the use of three Chambers, ‘hanged with mean stuff, without any cloth of state’, and the services of four gentlewomen and two chamberers.

It was hardly the luxury she had been used to. Nevertheless, she had kept the essentials, for she was still to be treated ‘in the state of a Queen’.⁶⁵

 

But Catherine was aware of the fragility of her position. For she had another, much more dangerous, secret.

‘The Queen’, Lady Rochford later testified, ‘three or four times every day since she was in this trouble, would ask [her]: what she heard of Culpepper?’ According to Lady Rochford, Catherine added: ‘If that matter came not out, she feared not for no thing and said she would never confess it and willed [Lady Rochford] to deny it utterly.’ Catherine was to admit that these conversations had taken place. But she turned them round. According to her, it was Lady Rochford who had encouraged her to be steadfast, and she claimed that Lady Rochford had said: ‘I will never confess it, to be torn with wild horses’.⁶⁶

The truth, probably, is that each egged on the other. Catherine had behaved like the love-sick Juliet and Lady Rochford like Juliet’s pandering Nurse.

Some of the Council, meanwhile, were convinced that they were not yet to the bottom of their investigations. But their suspicions were not directed at Thomas Culpepper. Instead, they were convinced that Catherine’s appointment of Dereham to her Household meant that this love affair had continued after her marriage to Henry. That, of course, would have been treason and Dereham was pressed brutally on the point, almost certainly with the use of torture. Finally, Marillac heard, that ‘Dereham, to show his innocence since the marriage, said that Culpepper had succeeded him in the Queen’s affections’.⁶⁷

Dereham’s revelation was made on Saturday, the 11th. That day, Culpepper, oblivious to the disaster which was about to overtake him, ‘was…merry ahawking’. On the Sunday, Catherine was questioned on the new allegations by Russell and Browne. She admitted three secret interviews with Culpepper at Lincoln, Pontefract and York, and that she had given him gifts of a cap, a chain and a cramp-ring. But she threw all the blame on Culpepper’s own persistence and Lady Rochford’s encouragement of it. ‘Yet must you give men leave to look’, Lady Rochford had said, ‘for they will look upon you.’

Lady Rochford’s motives are hard to understand. She was the widow of George Boleyn, Lord Rochford, and, as such, had seen her husband and her sister-in-law, Queen Anne, destroyed by charges of adultery and incest. Those charges were a fabrication. But now she was encouraging her new mistress, Queen Catherine, to act out such follies indeed. Had Lady Rochford’s been a life starved of affection? Was she living out in Catherine the romantic fantasies that she had never known?⁶⁸

We can only guess. But her indulgence proved fatal: to her mistress, to herself and to Catherine’s lover.

 

The mysterious comings and goings in the Queen’s apartments during the northern Progress were now explained. But had Catherine admitted everything? ‘As for the act’, Russell and Browne reported, ‘she denieth upon her oath, or touching any bare of her but her hand.’ The Councillors’ suspicion, clearly, was that she was being economical with the truth as before.⁶⁹

What Catherine had said already, however, was quite enough to undo her. Henry’s projected mercy was abandoned, and the terms of her confinement were notably tightened.

The King, in a letter written by Secretary Sadler late at night on the 12th, showed himself especially anxious about Catherine’s jewels. They were the tokens of his besotted love for her. Now that she had forfeited his love, she should go unadorned. She was to be given, Sadler instructed Cranmer, six French hoods ‘with edges of goldsmiths’ work, so that there be no stone nor pearl in the same’. She was also to have six gowns, ‘with such things as belong to the same, except always stone and pearl’.⁷⁰

Culpepper was arrested on the 12th or at the latest on the 13th. He was taken straight to the Tower and on the 14th his goods were inventoried for confiscation. He was examined soon after his arrival in the Tower, and, protected by his rank and favour from the kind of duress that was freely applied to Dereham, he told a balanced and nuanced tale. He stressed that Catherine had taken the initiative. But he also admitted the strength of his own feelings, and the eagerness with which he had responded. He is, in short, to be believed.

The result reads like a piece of romantic fiction. The predominant tone is tender and wistful. But it is enlivened with flashes of humour and coarse directness and moments of unintended bedroom farce. It is also a story that, again because of the illegibility of the original, has lain largely untold for four and a half centuries.⁷¹

 

It was ‘on Maunday Thursday last [14 April 1541] at Greenwich’, Culpepper recalled, that Catherine had renewed their acquaintance. He was summoned by her servant ‘Henry Webb, [who] brought him to the entry between her Privy Chamber and the Chamber of Presence’. There he found the Queen herself, who ‘gave him by her own hands a fair cap of velvet garnished with a brooch and three dozen pairs of aglets (decorative pins) and a chain’. ‘Put this under your cloak,’ she said, ‘[and let] nobody see it!’ ‘Alas, Madam,’ he replied, ‘why did not you this when you were a maid?’

This was not at all the response that Catherine had intended to provoke and at their next meeting she made her dissatisfaction plain. ‘Is this all the thanks ye give me for the cap?’ she demanded. ‘If I had known ye would have [said] these words you should never have had it.’⁷²

Nevertheless, her attentions continued and ‘at Greenwich [she] sent to him, being sick, at diverse times flesh or the fish dinner by Morres the Page’. Perhaps it is to this period that Catherine’s only surviving letter belongs. ‘Master Culpepper’, it begins, ‘I have heard you are sick…the which thing troubled me very much till such time that…you…send me word how that you do, for I have never longed so much for [a] thing as I do to see you and speak with you, the which I trust shall be shortly now…. It makes my heart to die to think what fortune I have that I cannot always be in your company…Yours as long as life endures–CATHERINE.’⁷³

 

Despite the passionate tone of this letter, the relationship seems to have stalled till the start of the Progress in July. Once again, a gift was used to get things under way. ‘In the Progress time’, Culpepper testified, he ‘took a cramp-ring [a preventative against rheumatism] off my Lady Rochford’s finger, which, she said, was the Queen’s’. Lady Rochford then told the Queen of Culpepper’s pretty theft. In response, Catherine ‘took another cramp-ring off her own finger and bade the Lady Rochford carry it to Culpepper’ with a message. The message was that ‘it was an ill sight to see him wear but one cramp-ring and therefore she did send him another’.

Nevertheless, and despite Catherine’s best endeavours, it was not until the beginning of August, at Lincoln, that the first of their clandestine meetings took place. Lady Rochford, as usual, acted as intermediary and ‘appointed him to come into a place under her Chamber being, as he thinketh, the Queen’s stool house (that is, her lavatory)’.

The assignation nearly turned into a disaster. As we have seen, one of the watch, noticing the open door of the backstairs, had locked it shut. But Culpepper and his servant managed to pick the lock.

When Culpepper finally arrived in the stool house, he found the Queen and Lady Rochford ‘and no other body’. It was about 11 o’clock at night and he and Catherine talked till three in the morning. ‘They had there’, he said, ‘fond communication of themselves and of their loves before time and of Bess Harvey.’

 

Elizabeth (‘Bess’) Harvey was a well-known, even perhaps a notorious, figure at the Tudor Court, where she had been in and out of employment in the Queen’s Household. She had been in service to Anne Boleyn, during which time she got on friendly terms with Sir Francis Bryan. But in 1536 she was dismissed in circumstances which, she claimed, were a mystery to her. By 1539, however, she was once more a member of the ‘shadow’ Queen’s Privy Chamber, and, as such, accompanied Anne Basset and the rest on the outing to view the fleet at Portsmouth. But she was not appointed to Catherine’s own Household and in March 1541 was retired with a life annuity of £10 a year.

Had Culpepper broken Bess’s heart, as he broke so many others? At any event, Catherine felt that he had treated her badly and left her shabbily dressed. So, after the conversation at Lincoln, she ‘gave a damask gown [to Bess]’ and sent Culpepper a message of reproof by the ubiquitous Lady Rochford. ‘He did ill’, the message went, ‘to suffer his tenement to be so ill repaired and that she, for to save his honesty, had done some cost over it.’

The remark, which characterises Bess as a rented building (‘tenement’), ill-maintained by Culpepper as its lessee, is saucy and mocks both Culpepper and his former mistress. But, typically, Catherine made up for the hurt by the kindly gesture of the gift of the gown.

 

But, now, in the stool house at Lincoln, Catherine had been thoroughly unsettled by the incident with the watch. ‘[She] always at that time’, Culpepper recalled, ‘started away and returned again as one in fear lest somebody should come.’

Nevertheless, as the hours went by, and they talked of old times, their love returned. ‘Now she must indeed love him,’ Catherine said. ‘She had bound him’, Culpepper gallantly replied, ‘both then and now and ever that he both must and did love her again above all other creatures.’

When he finally left, he kissed her hand, ‘saying he would presume no further’.⁷⁴

 

On another occasion, the Queen’s worst fears were fulfilled and ‘Lovekyn, one of her Chamberers, came down when he was with the Queen, and the Queen put her out’. Catherine never forgave the woman for her tactlessness and threatened to dismiss her from her service.⁷⁵

These problems with her servants and the lack of suitable retreats in the little houses where she and Henry were staying on the Progress meant that it was almost a fortnight before Culpepper and Catherine were able to have another nocturnal tryst. Even then, it was postponed for a night as ‘the Queen feared lest the King had set watch’ on the door to the backstairs. But the coast turned out to be clear and on 31 August, Culpepper was summoned once more ‘and talked with her till the King went to bed’.

At this meeting, in Pontefract Castle, Catherine began by reproaching him for his previous unfeeling conduct in abandoning her. ‘I marvel’, she said, ‘that ye could so much dissemble as to say ye loved me so earnestly and yet would and did so soon lie with another.’ Culpepper’s reply was unanswerable. Catherine, he retorted, ‘was married [to Henry] afore he loved the other’. Moreover, he continued, she had only herself to blame. ‘He found so little favour at her hands at that time’, he said, ‘that he was rather moved to set by other.’

Catherine now changed tack and became frankly vampish. ‘If I listed [wished]’, she said, ‘I could bring you into as good a trade as Bray hath my Lord Parr in.’ Culpepper replied indignantly. ‘He thought her no such woman as Bray.’ ‘Well’, answered Catherine, ‘if I had tarried still in the Maidens’ Chamber I would have tried you.’⁷⁶

All this casts light on another unhappy Tudor aristocratic marriage. Sir William Parr, ennobled in 1539 as Lord Parr of Kendal, had married Anne Bourchier, daughter of the Earl of Essex. The marriage was a great catch, as Anne was her father’s only child and heiress, but it turned into a personal disaster and both parties sought comfort elsewhere. Anne ‘eloped’ from her husband and refused to return, while Parr, Catherine’s reference makes clear, had taken a mistress called Bray. She was, almost certainly, Dorothy Bray, the next to the youngest of the six sisters of John, Lord Bray and Catherine’s colleague as one of Anne of Cleves’s maids. Parr clearly developed a taste for women of the Bray family and in 1548 went on to marry Elizabeth Brooke, who was Dorothy’s niece as the child of her eldest sister Anne. As Parr was separated but not divorced from his first wife at the time, this second marriage was bigamous. Subsequently, it became a plaything of religious politics: its validity was asserted by Protestants and rejected by Catholics.⁷⁷

Stories like this, in which both men and women of Catherine’s acquaintance flouted conventional morality to pursue their own sexual happiness, make her own behaviour seem almost commonplace.

But these other women were not married to the King.

 

It was also at Pontefract that Catherine sent Culpepper a note to make another assignation. ‘As ye find the door’, she wrote, ‘so to come.’

By York, she was confident enough to make a joke about their clandestine meetings. ‘She had store of other lovers at other doors as well as he,’ she said. ‘It is like enough,’ he replied in the same spirit. But then she became more serious. ‘She had communication with him how well she loved him.’ She also ‘showed him how when she was a maiden how many times her grief was such that she could not but weep in the presence of her fellows’.

And, it is clear, she had a similar ‘grief’ about the promiscuous and popular Culpepper. At Sheriff Hutton, he testified, he sent a ring by Lady Rochford and, in return, the Queen sent him two bracelets. They were accompanied with the message that ‘they were sent him to keep his arms warm’–for normally, she knew, he kept them snug in the embraces of other women.

Her other fear, of course, was of the mighty monarch who was her husband. ‘She doubted not’, she told Culpepper, ‘that he knew the King was Supreme Head of the Church and therefore the Queen bade him beware that whensoever he went to confession he should never shrive him of any such things as should pass betwixt her and him.’ ‘For, if he did’, she added, ‘surely the King, being Supreme Head of the Church, should have knowledge of it.’

‘No, Madam, I warrant you,’ Culpepper replied.

Catherine’s meaning is not entirely clear. Did she suspect that the priest would betray such sensational revelations to the King? Or that God would somehow communicate them to his deputy on earth? Or did she even confuse her husband with God himself?

After all, at times, that was an easy enough mistake to make.

But, really, there was so little to confess. It was all talk, talk, talk. Nevertheless, as Culpepper admitted, the intention was there. ‘He intended’, he admitted, ‘and meant to do ill with the Queen and that likewise the Queen so minded with him.’⁷⁸

It was little. But it proved enough for the law.

 

Dereham and Culpepper were tried for treason at Guildhall on 1 December and found guilty. Their execution was postponed for several days as the Council made final frantic efforts to extract from them the admission that they had actually committed the act with Catherine as Queen. But, despite ‘serious examination’, the efforts failed.

There was now no reason to delay the process of law. Dereham’s final request was for Henry to spare him the full penalty of treason. But Henry, the Council reported, ‘thinketh he hath deserved no such mercy at his hands and therefore hath determined that he shall suffer the whole execution’. On 10 December, therefore, he was dragged on a hurdle to Tyburn and hanged, castrated, disemboweled, beheaded and quartered.

And all for sleeping a few times with an attractive and willing teenage girl who at the time was not married.

Culpepper was luckier. Benefiting from Henry’s former favour and his powerful friends he was, despite the fact that his crimes were ‘very heinous’, only beheaded.⁷⁹

 

On 22 December, it was the turn of the Duchess, Lord William, the Countess of Bridgewater and the women of the Duchess’s Household. They were tried for ‘misprision of treason’, for concealing and abetting Catherine’s offences, and they were sentenced to imprisonment at the King’s pleasure and forfeiture of goods.⁸⁰

The rumour was that Norfolk himself would share their fate. But on 12 December he wrote Henry an abject letter. He distanced himself from ‘mine ungracious mother-in-law, mine unhappy brother…with my lewd sister of Bridgewater’. And he denounced ‘the most abominable deeds done by two of my nieces’, Queen Anne and Queen Catherine. In view of that toll of disasters inflicted by his family, the Duke conceded, it would be reasonable for Henry ‘to conceive a displeasure in your heart’ against him and his whole Howard kindred. But, in extenuation, Norfolk pleaded that it was he who had first pointed the finger of suspicion at the Duchess; moreover, Anne Boleyn and Catherine, his ‘two false, traitorous nieces’, had borne him ‘small love’.⁸¹

The letter proved excuse enough. Norfolk was quickly restored to favour and even the convicted members of his family were soon pardoned.

 

Only against Catherine and Lady Rochford was Henry implacable. They were condemned by an Act of Attainder. The Bill was introduced on 21 January 1542 and completed all its Parliamentary stages three weeks later. The key clauses of the Act were flagrantly retrospective. If any loose-living woman dare marry the King ‘without plain declaration before of her unchaste life unto his Majesty’, it was treason. Adultery by or with the Queen or the wife of the Prince of Wales was treason. And failure on the part of the witnesses to disclose such offences was misprision of treason. Finally, with all the loopholes closed, Catherine and Lady Rochford were declared convicted of high treason.

On 11 February the Act received the royal assent in absentia by letters patent, to spare Henry the grief of hearing, once again, a recital of the ‘wicked facts’ of the case.⁸²

Catherine was now legally dead. It remained only to inflict the actual penalty.

 

All this time, Catherine had remained in her easy confinement at Syon House. ‘She is’, Chapuys reported at the beginning of 1542, ‘making good cheer, fatter and handsomer than ever she was, taking great care of her person, well dressed and much adorned; more imperious and commanding, and more difficult to please than ever she was when living with the King her husband.’

Was this stupid indifference, as most modern accounts have supposed? Or merely making the best of a bad job? Chapuys himself seems to incline to the latter. Notwithstanding her apparent pleasure in life’s luxuries, he reported, ‘she believes that her end will be on the scaffold, for she owns she has deserved death’.⁸³

And it was this responsible, dignified Catherine who confronted a delegation of Lords at Syon. For there had been some nervousness about using an Act of Attainder against the Queen and condemning her unheard. ‘[The] Queen’, Lord Chancellor Audley informed the House, ‘was in no sense a mean and private person but an illustrious and public one.’ ‘Therefore’, he continued, ‘her case had to be judged with…integrity.’ To remove any suspicion of injustice, he recommended the despatch of a delegation to hear her speak in her own defence, for it was ‘but just that a princess should be tried by equal laws’.

The delegation duly waited on the Queen. But Catherine refused the opportunity to defend herself, either with the delegates or before a more public assembly. Instead, she ‘openly confessed and acknowledged to them the great crime of which she had been guilty against the most High God and a kind prince’. She had only two requests to make: that Henry ‘would not impute her crime to her whole kindred and family’ and that the King would also give some of her fine clothes to her attendants, ‘since she had nothing now to recompense them as they deserved’.⁸⁴

Catherine the rebel, it seemed, was tamed at last. For she was here acknowledging her submission to the core values of the sixteenth century: God, King, Family and Dependants.

She was now ready for the final submission: to the Good Death.

 

There were still a few flashes of the old Catherine, however. On 10 February she was removed from Syon to the Tower by water. According to Chapuys, she did not go without a struggle: ‘[there was] some difficulty and resistance’. As with the fallen Anne Boleyn, the procession to the Tower was like a black parody of her inauguration river pageant. Lord Privy Seal Southampton went first in a large barge. Then followed the Queen and her ladies in a small covered boat. While at the rear was Suffolk in another large barge, filled with armed men. Catherine landed at the water gate and stepped ashore. She was dressed in black velvet and was ‘received with the same honours and ceremonies’ as if she were still Queen.⁸⁵

Two days later, on Sunday the 12th, she was told to prepare herself for death on the morrow. Marillac heard that, since ‘she weeps, cries and torments herself miserably, without ceasing’, her execution had been postponed to give her time to compose herself. But his chronology is wrong and so too, probably, is his picture of Catherine’s state.

For Chapuys tells a very different story: not only was Catherine prepared for death, she even went through a form of rehearsal to make sure she got things right. Later on the Sunday evening, the ambassador reported, ‘she asked to see the block, pretending that she wanted to know how she was to place her head on it’. Her request was granted and the block was brought into her Chamber. Once it was in place, ‘she herself tried and placed her head on it by way of experiment’.

Like so much in Catherine’s life, her preparation for death was curiously materialistic.⁸⁶

 

The execution was scheduled for early the following morning. Soon after 7 o’clock, the Council and other dignitaries arrived to act as witnesses. Norfolk was absent, but his son and heir, the Earl of Surrey, was present to watch his cousin beheaded. He was a poet and man of action. Did he imagine that one day he might be in her place?

According to Marillac, Catherine was ‘so weak that she could hardly speak’. But he was not an eye-witness. The merchant Ottwell Johnson was–and he gives a very different account. ‘I see the Queen and the Lady Rochford’, he wrote to his brother John on the 15th, ‘suffer within the Tower.’ ‘Whose souls’, he continued, ‘be with God, for they made the most godly and Christian end.’⁸⁷

Catherine, according to Johnson, ‘uttered [her] lively faith in the blood of Christ only’. She ‘desired all Christian people to take regard unto [her] worthy and just punishment’. She had offended ‘God heinously from [her] youth upward, in breaking all his commandments’. And she had offended ‘against the King’s royal Majesty very dangerously’. She was ‘justly condemned…by the Laws of the realm and Parliament to die’. And she ‘required the people (I say) to take example at [her], for amendment of their ungodly lives and gladly to obey the King in all things’. Then she prayed ‘heartily’ for ‘[the King’s] preservation, and willed all people so to do’. Finally, she commended her soul to God and earnestly called for mercy on Him.

That is what Johnson heard and what Catherine must have said. God knows what, if any of it, she believed. The reference, in particular, to her faith in ‘the blood of Christ only’ sounds more like Cranmer than anything that Catherine would say of her own accord. Had he coached her? Had she undergone some form of conversion in the Tower?

We cannot know.

After she had finished speaking she knelt at the block, in her carefully rehearsed gesture, and her head was struck off.

Lady Rochford’s turn was next. According to Chapuys, she ‘had shown symptoms of madness until the very moment when they announced to her that she must die’. But she, too, made a good end.

The strange, delinquent partnership of mistress and servant was over.⁸⁸