The other main event of the 1543–4 Christmas season was the arrival and entertainment at Court of Fernando de Gonzaga, Duke of Ariano, Prince of Malfeta and Viceroy of Sicily. He came to agree to a timetable and strategy between Henry VIII and his master Charles V for a joint invasion of France. For Henry, having more or less weathered the storms of the Reformation, had resolved to return to his first love: war. Once more, as in 1513, he would invade France and see off Scotland. And, once more, as in those early years of his reign, he had at his side a Queen whom he trusted as his co-adjutor in power.1
She was even called Catherine, after her namesake Catherine of Aragon.
That earlier Catherine had war with France in her blood; she was a daughter of Spain, and Henry would be fighting alongside her father, Ferdinand of Aragon (or at least he would be if Ferdinand could have been persuaded to fight). But for Catherine Parr, it would seem, the issue was more complex. And it was complicated, above all, by the question of religion. Charles V was the great hope for Catholicism in Europe and the Imperial alliance was the great hope also for religious conservatives in England. The alliance had been argued for strenuously by Gardiner, and its signature, in February 1543, had coincided with the triumph, likewise engineered by Gardiner, of orthodoxy and the apparent defeat of Reform in England.
But if Catherine experienced any doubts about the alliance between the English Moses and the Protector of the Roman Church, she showed no sign of it. Her already excellent relations with Mary, who was Charles’s cousin as well as Henry’s daughter, were a help. But Catherine, whether out of policy or conviction, also went out of her way to charm the succession of Imperial grandees who now came to England. The Viceroy left in early January but was succeeded by Manriquez de Lara, Duke of Najera, who arrived on 6 February on his way back to Spain. The Duke was denied an audience for several days–officially because the King had pressing business at Greenwich, but really, so he learned, because Henry wanted time to assemble a sufficently impressive Court to receive so distinguished a visitor.2
The audience finally took place on Sunday, 17 February, when the Duke was ‘assez bien recueilli’ (‘well enough received’) by the King. It sounds as though Henry was in a less expansive mood than usual. But any lack of warmth on the King’s part was more than made up for by Catherine’s behaviour. According to Chapuys, who escorted the Duke, the Queen was ‘slightly indisposed’. Nevertheless, ‘she would come out of her room to dance for the honour of the company’.3
Chapuys’s was an insider view. In contrast, the Duke’s Secretary, who wrote his own account of his master’s visit, knew nothing of the Queen’s illness and saw only the splendid show she put on for her visitors. She first received the Duke in her Privy Chamber. She was accompanied by Mary, while the Duke was escorted by the Queen’s brother, Essex. ‘The Duke kissed the Queen’s hand, by whom he was received in an animated manner.’ There followed a more general entertainment for the Spanish party in the Queen’s Presence Chamber. The Queen entered; sat on her throne and bade the Duke himself to sit. Then the royal band of violins, who had only arrived from Venice in 1540 and thus represented the latest fashion, struck up. The Queen had the first dance with her brother, ‘very gracefully’. Next it was Mary’s turn, followed by other ladies, until the entertainment culminated in a display by a professional dancer, who was also a Venetian. He danced ‘so lightly’, the Secretary noted, ‘that he appeared to have wings on his feet’. ‘Never did I witness such agility in any man’, he added.
He was equally impressed by Queen Catherine. She ‘has a lively and pleasing appearance’, he wrote, ‘and is praised as a virtuous woman’. She was certainly a magnificently dressed one, as he could see for himself.
She was dressed in a robe of cloth of gold, and a petticoat of brocade with sleeves lined with crimson satin, and trimmed with three-piled crimson velvet; her train was more than two yards long. Suspended from her neck were two crosses, and a jewel of very rich diamonds, and in her headdress were many and beautiful ones. Her girdle was of gold, with very large pendants.
The description is instantly recognisable. For its principal features–the elaborate underskirt, the exaggerated width of the lower sleeves and the length of the girdle with its gorgeous tasselled ends–are all to be found in the costume worn by Catherine in the portrait which has been recently reidentified as hers.4
In March, Najera was succeeded at the English Court by another Spanish grandee, the Duke of Alburquerque. According to the Imperial minister, Granvelle, the Duke was ‘somewhat too full of ceremonies’. Despite this (or perhaps because of it), he hit it off well with Henry, who, perceiving his ‘gravity, wisdom, knowledge and experience’, requested his company in the forthcoming expedition to France and ‘made him the best cheer in the world’. But, once again, Catherine went one better and gave the Duke ‘an even greater [welcome]’.
The result was that the Duke became virtually a member of the extended royal family: he was lodged near the palace; encouraged to behave like one of Henry’s own leading courtiers, and even invited to attend meetings of the Privy Council.5
Meanwhile, preparations for the war proceeded rapidly. As in 1513, it was to be fought on three fronts: France, Scotland, and, not least, the home front.
This last would be Catherine’s own responsibility and it is clear that Henry kept her informed in detail of the arrangements as they evolved. In early June, for instance, she wrote to Anne Seymour née Stanhope, the Countess of Hertford, about her husband Edward’s movements. Hertford had been sent north to harry the Scots, and it is clear that his wife feared that he would be ordered to remain there. Catherine was able to reassure her. ‘Madam’, she wrote, ‘my Lord your husband’s coming hither is not altered, for he shall come home before the King’s Majesty take his journey overseas.’ She knew this, she added, ‘as it pleasith his Majesty to declare it me of late’.6
This was Catherine’s first involvement in Scottish affairs, which were to absorb so much of her time and energy in the coming months. For Hertford’s return was the result of yet another shift in the bloody kaleidescope of Scottish politics.
The country had been plunged into chaos once more following the shattering English victory at Solway Moss on 23 November 1542. But, unlike his father James IV, King James V had not been killed gloriously, fighting in the field at the head of his troops. Instead he died, of grief as it was said, two weeks later. It may equally have been of exhaustion, since he had fathered at least seven bastard sons in an adventurous amorous career. But his sole surviving legitimate issue by his wife, Queen Marie of Lorraine, was a week-old daughter, Mary, who was proclaimed Queen of Scots.7
‘It came with a lass’, James is supposed to have said on his deathbed, ‘it will pass with a lass.’ And so it seemed six months later, with the signature of the Treaty of Greenwich on 1 July 1543. Mary Queen of Scots was betrothed to Prince Edward, and Scotland was delivered up to Edward’s father, Henry VIII.8
But, as had happened so often before, Scotland escaped. Henry’s interests lay elsewhere, in France. And he tried to clinch his victory in Scotland, not by English arms but by Scottish proxies, who were happy to take English gold, but almost invariably betrayed English interests. Henry’s first white hope was the Earl of Arran, the Regent and Heir Presumptive. But, despite the offer of Elizabeth’s hand for his son, he threw Henry over and joined with the Franco-Catholic party in Scotland that was led by David Beaton, the Cardinal-Archbishop of St Andrew’s. Hertford’s sack of Edinburgh and Leith was Henry’s revenge.9
Then fate offered the English King another instrument: Matthew Stuart, Earl of Lennox, and the next in line to the throne after Arran. Lennox had spent over a decade in France, in the service of Francis I, and had been naturalised along with his brother, James, Seigneur d’Aubigny and Captain of the French Scots Guard. Lennox returned to Scotland in 1543, but, denied the Regency, rejected the French, cast the dust of Scotland off his feet and entered the service of Henry VIII.10
Lennox cut a striking figure when he arrived at the English Court in May 1544. Chapuys described him straightforwardly as ‘young and good-looking’. But Sir James Melville, though writing over twenty years later, probably got nearer the mark when he painted him in more ambiguous colours: as ‘liker a woman than a man, for he was very lusty, beardless and lady-faced’.11
Catherine, whose feelings for Seymour show that she was susceptible to male beauty, was probably struck. But there was another, more important, point of contact between them. For Lennox, like many of the Scots nobility, flirted with the Reformation. And Reform was to be the touchstone of the Treaties that were signed between Henry and Lennox on 26 June 1544.12
By these, the King gave the Earl of Lennox the hand of his niece, Lady Margaret Douglas, in marriage. Margaret was the daughter of Henry’s elder sister, Margaret, by her second, scandalous marriage to Archibald Douglas, Earl of Angus. Margaret Douglas herself was no better than she should be and, when caught up in the moral panic which followed the Catherine Howard affair, had been warned by Henry (that rigorous censor of other people’s behaviour) to ‘beware the third time’. But, through her mother, she had a possible claim to the English throne and she was endowed by Henry with enough lands to compensate Lennox for the income he had forfeited by renouncing his French allegiance. And that was enough.13
In return, Lennox promised to be ruled by Henry when he became Governor of the puppet-kingdom of Scotland. He would also, he agreed, ‘cause the Word of God to be taught and preached in his country, as the only source of truth and means of judging who proceeds justly with him and who abuses him for their own private glory, lucre and purpose’. To help Lennox forward, Henry was to supply him with a small expeditionary force, with the hint of a greater army to follow once France had been dealt with.14
The signature of the treaties was celebrated the same day with a formal dinner at Whitehall for Henry, Edward, Mary, Elizabeth and Lennox himself. There followed (almost certainly) a hunting expedition to Hyde Park, the great new park which Henry had acquired from the Abbot of Westminster. And the entertainment was rounded off by ‘a supper at Hyde Park’.15
Queen Catherine was a notable absentee from the celebrations. Perhaps, as I have suggested previously, it was felt inappropriate for the childless Catherine to be present at a feast which, in effect, introduced Henry’s heirs to the nobility of his two kingdoms of England and Scotland. More probably, it was a question of bridal etiquette. Lady Margaret Douglas, despite the cloud over her reputation, had been one of the great ladies of the Court, figuring prominently, for instance, in the reception of the Duke of Najera. But Lennox could hardly dine with his prospective bride. Instead, she was entrusted to the care of the absent Queen, who kept her in temporary purdah.
Her seclusion did not last long, however, and three days later, on 29 June, Chapuys reported that ‘the marriage of the Earl of Lennox and Lady Margaret Douglas took place this morning at Mass, the King and Queen being present’.16
The treaties with Lennox and Lennox’s marriage to Margaret Douglas gave Henry a half-plausible policy towards Scotland. With that in place, the last remaining obstacle to his own departure for France was removed and on Monday, 7 July, the Council met at Whitehall to hear and endorse the King’s arrangements for the government of the realm in his absence. The arrangements centred on two figures: his wife and his son.
‘The King’s Majesty hath resolved’, the agenda-cum-minute began, ‘that the Queen’s Highness shall be Regent in his absence and that His Highness’s process [that is, legal and governmental business] shall pass…in her name.’ To assist her, she was given a five-man Council. It was formally headed by Cranmer. But Wriothesley, now Lord Chancellor and a baron, and the Earl of Hertford were to be its key members and (subject to business) to give their continuous attendance on the Queen Regent at Court. Hertford was also to be Lieutenant of the Realm ‘in case’–that is to say, if a sudden deterioration of the Scottish situation required the raising of a large army, as in 1513. Finally, Catherine and her Council were empowered to issue warrants for the payment of money.17
Catherine was yet to celebrate her first wedding anniversary. But already she had been given more public authority than any of her predecessors, apart from her namesake, Catherine of Aragon. And the earlier Catherine had been royal by birth and by upbringing as well as by marriage.
It is a striking testimony to Henry’s respect for his new wife, and to his judgement of her loyalty and capacity.
The arrangements for his son were equally dramatic. Two days later, on Wednesday, 9 July, Prince Edward was to remove from Whitehall to Hampton Court. This was his birthplace; it also contained a large, specially built Prince’s Side for his occupation. The next day, Wriothesley and Hertford were to go to Hampton Court and dismiss the women of his Household, headed by his Lady Mistress, Margaret, Lady Bryan, and appoint a male Household of gentlemen and tutors instead. Years later, when the boy began his journal or ‘Chronicle’, he remembered this as one of the liminal days of his short life. ‘He was brought up’, he recorded, ‘till he came to six years old, among the women. [Then] at the sixth year of his age, he was brought up in learning by…two well-learned men.’18
For Edward, the change signalled that his infancy was over, and that the harsh business of training him to be a man and a King had begun. The world outside was intended to read a variant of this message. Henry could safely go abroad, it was implied, because his heir was no longer a mere child but a youth on the threshold of the age of discretion.
On Friday, 11 July, Henry left Whitehall by water to begin his journey to France. From Gravesend he travelled overland to Dover and arrived at Calais at 9 p.m. on the 14th.19
For the first time in thirty years the King was at the head of his troops. He was rejuvenated, almost indeed a boy again.
We know nothing of Catherine’s parting from Henry and nothing of their farewells, whether public or private. But we can guess at Catherine’s feelings from the letter she wrote to Henry soon after. It is dated from Greenwich, which suggests that the Queen had accompanied him there on the first leg of his journey. ‘Although the discourse of time and account of days neither is long nor many of your Majesty’s absence’, it begins, ‘yet the want of your presence so much beloved and desired of me, maketh me that I cannot quietly pleasure in anything until I hear from your Majesty.’ She longed for his presence. But she knew that his absence was necessary. She knew also that she should submit her will to his. ‘And thus love’, she continued, ‘maketh me in all things to set apart mine own commodity and pleasure and to embrace most joyfully his will and pleasure whom I love.’
Did she really love Henry? And are the words sincere? Or are they courtly posturing?
Almost as though she could hear the query, Catherine then offers an impassioned reassurance–to Henry and to us. ‘God, the knower of secrets’, she writes, ‘can judge these words not only to be written with ink, but most truly impressed in the heart.’ Thus she wrote, and thus, I think, we should believe her.
But this is not mere artlessness. On the contrary, Catherine’s letter is a supreme example both of the epistolary art and of the art of managing a King who was difficult, imperious and unpredictable and yet, for all that, was a man, and a man, moreover, who was peculiarly susceptible to a woman’s charms.
Catherine, however, had not yet reached the limits of her quiet audacity. For in the last lines of her letter she ventures to compare her love for Henry with her love for God. ‘I do make’, she wrote, ‘like account with your Majesty, as I do with God for his benefits and gifts heaped upon me daily.’ She was hopelessly in debt to God and unable to repay his least benefit. And she was certain to die in this unregenerate condition. Nevertheless she hoped that God would accept her good will and save her in spite of her sinfulness and ingratitude. ‘And even such confidence’, she continued, ‘I have in your Majesty’s gentleness.’ She could never repay his love, any more than she could her debt to God. Yet Henry, divine in his forgiveness, loved her, she knew, in spite of her inadequacies.20
This was daring indeed. Not because of the extravagance of the comparison between Henry and the Almighty, which so grates on the modern sensibility. But rather because of the theology. For Catherine, the theologically literate Henry would have realised immediately, was explaining her relationship with him in terms of the doctrine of Justification by Faith.
Man (and Woman too) the doctrine held, was wholly sinful. This meant that Humankind could never fulfil the commandments which God had laid down as necessary for salvation. By God’s justice therefore all were condemned. The only hope was in God’s charity: ‘in his gracious acceptation of [human] good will’, as Catherine put it. And this good will was shown, not by actions or ‘works’, but only by faith. The doctrine of Justification by Faith was the cornerstone of Lutheranism and ordinarily it was anathema to Henry. But when Catherine used it as an analogy to explain her own absolute, submissive love for him, even he found it acceptable.
If this was a woman’s preaching, he seems to have felt, long let it continue. At least, that was his reaction for the moment.
In fact, despite her heartfelt pleas, Catherine had to wait some time before she heard from her husband, who had thrown himself all-absorbingly into the business of war. Her own life, too, as Queen Regent was scarcely less busy. She managed the rump Council which Henry had left with her as a kind of Cabinet for domestic affairs. She oversaw the supplies–of men, matériel, and, above all, of money–for the war. She took immediate decisions on northern and Scottish affairs. These were invariably reported to Henry. But, by then, action–and actions decided by Catherine–had already taken place. Finally, in the absence of Henry as paterfamilias, she became acting head of the royal family.
In the immediate aftermath of Henry’s departure, this last task, which was probably the most congenial to Catherine, loomed largest. Continuing business had kept her at Whitehall until 20 July. But on the 21st she joined Edward and his reconstructed Household at Hampton Court. Mary, who, together with her entourage, now formed a sub-department of the Queen’s Household, accompanied her. The result was that two of the royal children and their step-mother were, once more, under one roof.21
But Elizabeth was not. Clearly she felt somewhat left out and on 31 July she wrote to Catherine from her temporary residence at St James’s. The letter is written in Italian, which was Elizabeth’s latest linguistic acquisition. Was this a language which Catherine had learned as well in her own mother’s Household? Or would she have needed a translator? In view of the highly personal tone of the letter, it seems likely that Elizabeth assumed that Catherine could read and understand it unaided.
It was ‘a whole year’, Elizabeth began, since she had seen Catherine. We know that she had left Court soon after her step-mother’s marriage. But this must also mean that their paths had failed to cross in the autumn, when the royal Court and the little Courts of the King’s younger children were in such close proximity. And Elizabeth had no better luck after she returned to Court on the eve of her father’s departure for the French war. Catherine herself, as we have seen, was absent from the reception for Lennox, at which the rest of the royal family were present; while Elizabeth, in turn, must have missed Lennox’s wedding a few days later.
Well, therefore, might Catherine’s younger step-daughter exclaim against ‘Unkind fortune, envious of all good and always turning human affairs upside down, [which] has deprived me for a whole year of your most illustrious presence, and not thus content, has again robbed me of the same good!’ ‘Which thing’, she continued, ‘would be intolerable to me, did I not hope to enjoy it very soon.’ But she further consoled herself with the reflexion that, though she was out of Catherine’s sight, she was not out of her thoughts: ‘I well know’, she wrote, ‘that the clemency of your Highness has had as much care and solicitude for my health as the King’s Majesty himself.’ She was grateful to Catherine for mentioning her in her letters to Henry in France and she ended by looking forward to the day when her father and Catherine’s husband came back a conqueror, ‘so that your Highness and I may, as soon as possible, rejoice together with him on his happy return’.22
It is difficult to know which to admire more–the eleven-year-old Elizabeth’s linguistic talents and courtly skills, or the speed and completeness with which Catherine had won her trust and affection.
How Elizabeth was to repay it was another matter, however.
Elizabeth had written to Catherine that she ‘hope[d] to enjoy [her presence] very soon’. Indeed, a letter from Secretary Paget, dated 29 July and written at the King’s camp, took for granted that they were already together, since it informed Lord Russell ‘the Queen, my lord Prince and the rest of the King’s children now at Hampton Court’ were in prosperous health. But Paget’s remark is impossible to reconcile with Elizabeth’s own Italian letter. Probably he anticipates a decision which had been taken but not yet implemented back in England. Nevertheless, Elizabeth did not have long to wait and, shortly after the date of the Italian letter, she had her wish and rejoined Catherine and her half-siblings at Hampton Court.23
But it was Catherine’s influence that mattered. Her younger step-daughter remained with her for most of the summer and autumn and the effect was profound. Elizabeth imbibed the religious life of Catherine’s Household. She witnessed Catherine’s masterful conduct of business and the effortless ease with which she, a mere woman, imposed her authority in and on a masculine world. She established relationships among the Queen’s servants, men and women, and, in the fullness of time, would recruit many of them into her own Household.
In short, if Catherine had a legacy, it was Elizabeth herself.
Catherine seems first to have had formal word from Henry in a letter dated 23 July, almost a fortnight after his departure from London. There were probably earlier word-of-mouth messages, but evidence of them does not survive. And even the letter of 23 July was from the King’s Council, not from Henry himself. But Catherine was undeterred. Two days later, on 25 July, she wrote a brief acknowledgement to the Council with the King. It is signed at the head in royal style–‘CATHERINE THE QUEEN, KP’–and it is couched in the lofty, first-person-plural language of sovereignty: ‘Right trusty and right well beloved cousins and trusty and right well beloved’, it begins, ‘we greet you well.’ It thanks them for their letter and their good news, and then refers them for further details to Catherine’s letter to Henry of the same date, ‘not doubting but that his Highness will communicate the same unto you accordingly’.24
For it was to her husband, not to his Council, that Catherine wrote her substantive reply.
And this letter was very different. The combined signature-cipher, ‘CATHERINE THE QUEEN, KP’, is the same. But it is at the foot of the letter, not at the head and the writer has undergone a corresponding role-reversal. Writing to her husband’s Council she was every inch the imperious Queen Regent; to her husband himself she was, as she signed herself, ‘Your Grace’s most obedient, loving wife and servant’. This is the same language she had employed in the intensely personal Greenwich letter. There is also the same religiosity, shaping itself this time into Catherine’s certainty of Henry’s divine calling.25
The Council’s letter had begun by informing her of ‘the prosperous beginning in your Highness’s affairs and proceedings against your enemies’. It would have mentioned Suffolk’s laying siege to Boulogne on the 19th; the fall of the lower town on the 21st and the commencement, the following day, of the bombardment of the fortifications of the upper town, whither the French had retreated.
Catherine was ecstatic. It was ‘so joyful news unto me’, she wrote to Henry, ‘that giving unto Almighty God upon my knees most humble thanks, I assuredly trust that it shall please Him, by whose only goodness this good commencement and beginning hath taken good effect, to grant such an end and perfection in all your Majesty’s most noble enterprises, as shall redound to His glory, to the common benefit of Christendom, and especially of your Majesty’s realms’.26
At first sight, Catherine’s words seem much the same as the proud boasts of her predecessor, Catherine of Aragon, in the wake of the English victory at Flodden. In fact, there is a notable difference of tone.
First, Catherine Parr is much less blood-thirsty. Catherine of Aragon had crowed openly over James IV’s corpse and his spoils. In contrast, Catherine Parr, in the prayer she wrote specially for the wars, prayed God ‘so to turn the hearts of our enemies to the desire of peace, that no Christian blood be spilt’. Or, if that were impossible, her petition continued, she begged that Henry’s victories should be bought ‘with small effusion of blood and little damage of innocents’. She also had much more of a sense of England’s manifest destiny, casting her country as the plucky underdog–David against Goliath–which, nevertheless, was destined to triumph because its cause was just and its King was chosen of God.27
The difference is partly a product of the contrasting personalities of the two women; it is also a result of their different times–the one writing as a crusading Catholic, the other as an evangelical, even, though the word hardly yet dared speak its name in England, as a Protestant.
But, of course, neither Henry’s first wife nor his sixth let religious enthusiasm in the least get in the way of common sense and a sound practical grasp of realities. Instead, after the effusions of her first paragraphs, Catherine’s letter to her husband reports briskly on the despatch of business. The £40,000 in cash Henry had ordered to be sent would be shipped ‘on Monday next’. And Henry, his wife recommended, should take appropriate security precautions on his side of the Channel as she had done on hers. Similarly, musters were already in hand to raise the required standing reserve of 4,000 troops, ready to be sent off ‘upon one hour’s warning’. And so on. Finally, she added a paragraph in her own hand which assured Henry ‘of the good diligence of your councillors here, who taketh much pain in the setting forth of your Highness’s affairs’.28
The praise must have been deserved, for Catherine’s own standards of efficiency were high.
Next to attract Catherine’s attention were the affairs of Scotland. ‘This afternoon [31 July]’, as Catherine informed Henry, ‘were brought unto me letters from your Majesty’s Lieutenant of the North [the Earl of Shrewsbury].’ The letters reported the chance capture of a Scottish ship. This had turned out to be carrying French and Scottish envoys with highly confidential despatches, which Shrewsbury had sent to Court along with his letter. Catherine quickly assessed their contents and decided that they merited immediate action.
‘Because I thought this taking of them’, she wrote later the same day to Henry, ‘with the interception of the said letters, to be of much importance for the advancement of your Majesty’s affairs…I have presently sent such of the said letters as, upon view of the same, appeared of most importance to your Majesty.’ Meanwhile, she also advised him, the principal envoys had been summoned by her Council for further ‘examination’.
That was the practical Catherine. But the chance event, with its potential to make such a powerful contribution to Henry’s northern policy, also fitted with Catherine’s providential view of the world. It was ‘ordained, I doubt not, of God’, she wrote to Henry, ‘to the intent your Highness might thereby certainly understand the crafty dealings and juggling of that nation [the Scots]’.29
Once again, she was sure, her God had intervened actively to assist her husband.
On 4 August, the Council replied to Catherine’s letters on Henry’s behalf, thanking her for her diligence and reporting the success of the bombardment of the fortifications of upper Boulogne. ‘Yesterday’, they wrote, ‘the battery began, and goeth lustily forward, and the wall beginneth to tumble apace, and the loops [loopholes] of the defences of the town so well laid to by our artillery, as a man dare not once look out for his life’. The result, they reported, optimistically as it turned out, was that the town must surrender ‘shortly’.30
Ordinarily, the triumphant militarism of the language might have grated with Catherine. But, in a good cause, she swallowed it and, in her reply written on the 6th, she thanked them for their news of ‘the good health and prosperous success of my Lord the King’s Majesty’. ‘Which’, she continued, ‘we doubt not in the goodness of God, Whose Almighty hand directeth and governeth his Highness, shall long continue and increase more and more’.31
Catherine’s providentialism proved infectious. Indeed, it became the language of the moment and was picked up, for instance, by Lennox in the letter which he wrote to Catherine’s Council on 8 August from Chester en route to Scotland. He acknowledged their report of the capture of the Scottish ship and the incriminating Scots correspondence, and went on to attribute it (in broad Scots) to ‘the provision of God, who ever works with the King’s Majesty our master’. Nor was Catherine, for her own part, in doubt about the reasons for the initial success of Lennox’s own mission. For when, on 9 August, she forwarded some of the Earl’s earlier letters to Henry, she added a postscript. ‘She imputes’, she wrote, ‘the good speed which Lennox has had to his serving a Master whom God aids.’ ‘He might have served the French King, his old master’, she added, ‘many years without attaining such a victory.’32
To this stream of letters from Catherine Henry had, as yet, made no direct reply. But he used other means to keep in touch. On 2 September, for instance, he ordered Hertford, who had left for the French front as soon as it became clear that the Scots were incapable of launching any serious attack on England during the King’s absence, to ‘bring the Queen’s Highness good news of this town’. Accordingly, Hertford wrote a note to the English Council ‘from the King’s Majesty’s camp before Boulogne’. He informed them of the capture of the strategically important ‘bray’ or outwork of the castle, as well as giving them assurances about the King’s own state of health. ‘Thanks be to God’, he wrote, ‘his Highness is merry and in as good health as I have seen his Grace at any time this seven years.’ ‘[All of] which’, he ended, ‘I pray you show her Grace.’33
Finally, on 8 September, Henry at last found a moment to write to Catherine himself. It had taken him almost eight weeks. But, he did his best to make clear, it was not for want of affection, but of time. ‘Most dearly and entirely beloved wife’, he began. Then he thanked her for her most recent letters and messages, as well as for the boat-load of venison she had sent him (for the royal parks, freed from Henry’s usual depredations, teemed with deer that summer). In return, he explained, he had wished to ‘have written unto you a letter with our own hand’. ‘But’, he continued, ‘we be so occupied, and have so much to do in foreseeing and caring for everything ourself, as we have almost no manner rest or leisure to do any other thing.’ Hence his resort to a secretary.34
There was some truth in Henry’s excuses. But, equally, he had always hated writing, and grasped at any straw to free himself from the disagreeable task–as with his present claim to being overwhelmingly busy.
But Henry then made up for his failure with the vivid immediacy of his dictated prose. In quick, deft phrases, he described the current state of the siege, the first French feelers for a peace and the manoeuvrings between himself and his ill-yoked ally, the Emperor, to claim the credit. Throughout he is straightforward and matter-of-fact and, in sharp contrast to Catherine’s own side of the correspondence, makes only a single mention of the Almighty and that a cursory one to ‘the grace of God’. On the other hand, his boast that the winning of the ‘bray’ (which had been mentioned in Hertford’s earlier letter) had been done ‘without any loss of men’, may show the influence of Catherine’s humanitarianism. More likely, however, the King is slapping himself on the back at the success of his own generalship.
Towards the end of his letter, Henry turns away from the great questions of war and peace and the fate of nations to the membership of Catherine’s Household. In theory, this was in the gift of the Queen; in practice, Catherine, like her wiser predecessors, consulted Henry every step of the way. She had asked, Henry noted, ‘to know our pleasure for the accepting into your chamber of certain ladies in places of others that cannot well give their attendance by reason of sickness’. Henry’s reply made clear that he thought little of Catherine’s nominees: they were, he wrote, almost as unfit as those they were supposed to replace and they were quite unsuited to the often physically demanding role of body-service. Nevertheless, he conceded, Catherine might have her way and ‘take them into your Chamber’ as companions rather than body-servants: ‘to pass the time sometime with you at play or otherwise to accompany you for your recreation’.35
The incident, as it stands, is insignificant and it is not possible even to identify the names of the women in question. But it is a pointer to something of real importance, since Catherine’s advent marked a turning-point in the history of the Queen’s Household.
Hitherto, while Henry’s Queens had come and gone, their servants had been a remarkably stable body. Not so with Catherine. No doubt the accident of mortality played a part. Thomas Manners, Earl of Rutland, who had served as Lord Chamberlain successively to Queens Jane Seymour, Anne of Cleves and Catherine Howard, died on 20 September 1543 and was followed to the grave just over a year later, on 27 November 1544, by his even longer-serving deputy Sir Edward Baynton, who had been Vice-chamberlain to all of the last five of Henry’s Queens, including, briefly, Catherine herself.36
These two deaths allowed for a clean sweep at the senior levels of the Queen’s male Household. Catherine’s uncle, William, Lord Parr of Horton, became Chamberlain; Sir Edmund Walsingham, Vice-chamberlain; Sir Thomas Arundell, Chancellor; Sir Robert Tyrwhit, Comptroller and later Master of the Horse; and Walter Bucler, Secretary. The result, once again, could have come from the pages of R. H. Tawney’s Religion and the Rise of Capitalism, as these men introduced a distinct, though by no means exclusive, Evangelical flavour in religion and combined it with a marked tightening-up in the running of the Queen’s lands and the administration of her Household.37
The change among her women was even more striking. Once more, the decline and death of the Earl of Rutland was crucial, as his wife, Eleanor, had exercised a parallel sway over the ladies of the Queen’s Household for almost a decade. Born a Paston, and daughter of the great Norfolk family, she was a grande dame of the old school, being kindly, level-headed and generous. She was also catholic in her friendships and mainstream in her religion. But she took advantage of her husband’s death to retire from the Court and she was replaced as the dominant force in the Queen’s Household by Catherine’s sister, Anne Herbert, who became Chief Lady of the Queen’s Privy Chamber. Anne, as we have seen, was well established in the Household of Henry’s Queens, with a record of service going back to Jane Seymour. But Catherine’s other leading attendants were the new-comers, Lady Lane and Lady Tyrwhit. Both were related to Catherine: Lady Lane was born Maud Parr and, as Parr of Horton’s eldest daughter, was Catherine’s first cousin, while Elizabeth Tyrwhit née Oxenbridge, was, as wife of Sir Robert, a member of Catherine’s more remote cousinage.
Most importantly of all, however, all three women shared Catherine’s religious inclinations. Elizabeth Tyrwhit, indeed, went too far even for her puritanically inclined husband, who remarked a little later to Sir Thomas Seymour that she was ‘not sane [sound] in divinity, but she was half a Scripture woman’.38
The result was that the change of personnel in Catherine’s Household went hand in hand with an even more radical change of tone. This was well described by Francis Goldsmith, who was recruited into Catherine’s Household from Peterhouse, Cambridge, at some time after 1543 and was agreeably surprised with what he found there. ‘Every day [is] like a Sunday’, he wrote in his letter of thanks to Catherine, ‘[which is] a thing hitherto unheard of, especially in a royal palace.’ For though ‘[Reformed] religion [was] long since introduced, not without great labour, to the palace’–not least, though Goldsmith is too tactful to say so, by Catherine’s predecessor, Anne Boleyn–it had been left to Catherine to cherish and perfect it.39
The fact was obvious to everybody–apart from Henry. Wrapped up in his boy-games of war, he was oblivious and, as we have seen, referred soothingly in his letter to Catherine’s recruiting her women ‘to pass the time with you at play or otherwise accompany you for your recreation’. This was the old role of royal ladies in waiting. Their new one was to be agents of radical religious change.
When would Henry wake up to the transformation brought about by his new wife? And what would he do when he noticed?
For the moment, the war-games were all-absorbing and when Henry snatched the pen from his secretary to add a final paragraph to his letter, it was to give Catherine the latest blow-by-blow account of the bombardment. ‘As this day’, he wrote, ‘which is the eighth day of September, we begin three batteries and have three mines going, besides one which hath done his execution in shaking and tearing off one of their greatest bulwarks.’
No more to you at this time, sweetheart [he concluded] both for lack of time and great occupation of business, saving that we pray you to give in our name our hearty blessing to all our children, and recommendations to our cousin Margaret [Countess of Lennox] and the rest of the ladies and gentlewomen, and to our Council also.
Written with the hand of your loving husband
HENRY R40
The mining, which Henry described so enthusiastically, was almost immediately effective. On 11 September, three days after the date of Henry’s letter, a mine was exploded under the castle and on the 14th the town surrendered. One of Henry’s first actions after receiving the surrender was to despatch the newly knighted Sir William Herbert ‘to declare at length his Majesty’s good success and conquest of Boulogne to the Queen’s most noble Grace’. The messenger was carefully chosen, being both Henry’s favourite Gentleman of the Privy Chamber and Catherine’s brother-in-law. Partly, presumably, because of adverse weather conditions in the Channel, and partly because of the remoteness of Woking, where the Court then was, Herbert took some five days before he was able to give the tidings to Catherine ‘this night’ on the 19th.41
This was her great opportunity to put her spin on events and the Council’s letter announcing the fall of Boulogne to their colleagues in the Council of the North is heavy with the providential language the Queen had made her own. The Queen, the letter informed them, had just heard of the conquest, which had taken place ‘without effusion of blood’. She was sure that the news would be joyful to them and that they would order appropriate thanks-givings ‘in all the towns and villages of those Northern parts’ for ‘this great benefit of God’.
No doubt Catherine had offered such a prayer herself and I think we can hear its actual words embedded in the Council’s letter. Henry’s triumph was, the letter continued, a benefit ‘heaped upon us in such sort as we all are most bounden to render most humble thanks to Him, and pray for the long continuance of our most puissant [powerful] master, whom Almighty God long preserve’.42
But Catherine’s thanks for victory came too soon. For that same day, unbeknown to the English, Charles V signed a separate peace with the French at Crépy. Fighting now on one front rather than two, the French armies were free to turn on the English and the Dauphin immediately marched against the second English force under the Duke of Norfolk which was besieging Montreuil. It was panic stations and on the 23rd the Council with the King wrote home to order the despatch of the 4,000 reinforcements, ‘which so often hath been demanded and countermanded’, and 50,000 marks (that is £33,333). The letters reached Lord Chancellor Wriothesley, who was holding the fort in London, at 9 o’clock on the 25th. He opened them and, in view of the emergency, ordered the immediate despatch of letters–in the Queen’s name–to summon the troops and raise the cash without losing more valuable time by consulting the Queen herself.
But this is the exception that proves the rule about the reality of Catherine’s regency powers. For Wriothesley was profuse in his apologies and pleas of urgent necessity. ‘Thus, my Lords’, he concluded his report to his colleagues in the Council at Court, ‘I have passed a piece of the storm, wherein, if I have not taken the best ways, I shall beseech the Queen’s Highness most humbly to pardon me.’ ‘And for that in our letters’, he continued, ‘we use her Grace’s name and authority, before the letters came to her hands, surely, me thought, it was not mete to lose so much time, as to send to Woking and tarry the answer back again, before the doing of anything.’43
The reasoning was unanswerable–which, no doubt, was well for Wriothesley, for Catherine’s, it is clear, was not a name to be taken lightly in vain.
The emergency proved shortlived. Henry ordered a protective retreat from Montreuil and on 30 September, convinced that Boulogne itself was safe, he set sail for England and landed at midnight at Dover. Meanwhile Catherine, who had moved to Eltham, set out to meet him. She travelled in slow stages, dining at Mereworth, the Master of the Rolls’ house, Allington Castle, the seat of Sir Thomas Wyatt, and Foot’s Cray. Finally, she met Henry at Otford, the former great palace of the archbishops of Canterbury near Sevenoaks, which Henry had seized for himself in 1537.44
Her regency was over; she was a Queen Consort again–with a Queen Consort’s vulnerability.