The aftermath of war was demanding and it was not till Christmas Eve that Henry and Catherine were able to get away from Whitehall to Greenwich for the 1544–5 holidays. And it was there that Catherine received (rather late I would guess) her New Year’s Gift from her step-daughter Elizabeth. It survives and it is eloquent testimony to the change which Catherine had brought over the royal family–and hoped to bring over England.
Elizabeth had left Court in September 1544, just before her parents’ reunion, and had returned to the schoolroom with her brother Edward. But the memory of that summer spent with Catherine was strong and she resolved to mark it with a new kind of present. Instead of the expensive trinkets, to which royalty then as now was prone, she would give something of and by herself: a book. It was not an original composition, of course. Instead it was a translation of the French religious poem, Miroir de l’âme pécheresse (Mirror or Glass of the Sinful Soul) by Marguerite of Angoulême.
The choice was predictable. Marguerite was, as we have seen, the archetypical royal female author and her work was a favourite of Catherine’s. Probably she had introduced Elizabeth to it over the summer; perhaps she had even read parts of it with her. But, otherwise, she seems to have intervened little and the translation was all Elizabeth’s own work, being made, written and perhaps bound by her.1
Naturally, historians have concentrated on what the work tells us about its remarkable eleven-year-old author. But its insights into Catherine are just as striking. For Elizabeth’s dedicatory letter to Catherine makes it clear that her step-mother would be no passive recipient. Instead, Elizabeth expected she would edit and correct her text. ‘I do trust’, she wrote, ‘that the file of your most excellent wit and godly learning…shall rub out, polish and mend…the words or rather the order of my writing.’ She also rather took for granted that Catherine would circulate the work and begged her not to–or, at least, that she would refrain until she had corrected it, ‘lest my faults be known of many’.2
Here, then, is a glimpse of another Catherine: the queen bee of a literary circle, who inspired, edited and circulated improving religious works among a coterie of women and like-minded men. It remained only for the Queen herself to emerge as an author. There was not long to wait, and in June 1545, Thomas Berthelet, the royal printer, published her Prayers Stirring the Mind unto Heavenly Meditations. The work was an immediate success. There was a second, augmented edition as early as November and it went through at least another five editions by 1548.
Obviously, its tone caught the moment. But its authorship undoubtedly helped: then, as now, royals sell books. This was realised by the publisher, who plugged Catherine’s position heavily on the title page. ‘Prayers or Meditations’, this read in the November 1545 edition, ‘wherein the mind is stirred patiently to suffer all afflictions here, to set at naught the vain prosperity of this world, and always to long for the everlasting felicity. Collected out of holy works by the most virtuous and gracious Princess CATHERINE, Queen of England, France and Ireland’.3
And Catherine evidently was an easy author to sell. She commissioned multiple copies of her book, in luxury bindings, to use in her Household devotions. She also seems to have given other such copies away as presents to friends. This was royal product-endorsement at the highest level and would certainly have helped sales outside the élite.
But it was not mere vanity publishing. On the contrary, in her writing as in her marriage, she was using her royal status as a means to an end: the promotion of the Gospel.
Nor was Catherine under any illusions about the extent of her talents. Affecting prayers, she knew, she could do very well. But serious scholarship was best left to others who were better qualified. This meant that for her next project, the translation into English of Erasmus’s Paraphrases of the Gospels, her role reverted from authorship to commissioning and financing. The Paraphrases were one of the key texts of Reformed scholarship, but, like all Erasmus’s works, they were written in a sophisticated and idiomatic Latin. Catherine picked an excellent managing-editor for the project in Nicholas Udall. He organised a team of translators, one for each Gospel, and produced a finished manuscript of his own share, the Paraphrase of St Luke, by October 1545. The Preface, naturally, was dedicated to Catherine and it incorporated her own view of the importance of publication. The King, Udall ventured to hope,
will not suffer it to lie buried in silence, but will one day…cause the same to be published and set abroad in print, to the same use that your Highness [Catherine] had meant it, that is to say, to the public commodity and benefits of good English people now a long time sore thirsting and hungering the sincere and plain knowledge of God’s word.4
But here, too, Catherine was aware of the benefits of royal participation and she managed to persuade Mary, with her superior Latinity, to undertake the translation of the Paraphrase of St John. Mary began the work and made good progress. But her chronic ill health prevented her from finishing it, and it was eventually completed by her chaplain, Francis Mallet. Mary, however, was less forthcoming as an author than Catherine, and the Queen wrote her a robust letter to remonstrate. It will serve as a model for any publisher who is faced with similar circumstances.5
Catherine’s first aim, naturally, was to get hold of the manuscript, ‘that it may be committed to the press in due time’. Her second was to discover Mary’s line on authorship. Did she ‘wish it to go forth to the world (most auspiciously) under your name’? Or did she prefer anonymity?
The latter, Catherine insisted, was thoroughly undesirable. ‘To which work’, she wrote, ‘you will, in my opinion, do a real injury if you refuse to let it go down to posterity under the auspices of your own name.’ Mary, after all, had done most of the work (and had intended to do it all ) and she deserved the credit. ‘And…I do not see why you should repudiate that praise which all men justly confer on you’.
But, Catherine concluded, ‘I leave the whole matter to your discretion’.6
Catherine was, in short, a natural. Not until Victoria would there be another royal author who was as successful and as at home in the world of books and publishing. But Henry failed lamentably to play the part of Disraeli. Instead of murmuring quietly (on the basis of his own Assertio), ‘we authors’, as Victoria’s Prime Minister was to do, he showed a disagreeable jealousy.
Was it the envy of a less successful writer for a best-seller? Or a man’s reluctance to be bested by a woman? Or just the customary tension within any literary couple?
Such emotions were, I think, involved. But the age meant that far larger issues were at stake as well. For instance, on 10 November 1545, four days after the publication of the augmented edition of Catherine’s Prayers or Meditations, a shocking incident took place at Ely Place, the town-palace of the new Lord Chancellor, Wriothesley. ‘As I was going to Mass’, Wriothesley informed Secretary Paget, ‘a bill…was let fall…in my dining chamber.’ The ‘bill’ or paper denounced his activities in reporting to Henry the discovery of forbidden religious books and (almost certainly) threatened him in crude and highly personal terms. ‘You know’, Wriothesley’s report to Paget continued, ‘that when those naughty [wicked] books were brought unto me, I could do no less than send them to his Highness, and also travail, as much as I could, to find out the author.’ ‘Wherein’, he reflected ruefully, ‘though I have not much prevailed, yet some be angry with my doing.’
Paget was to report the incident to Henry; show him the bill and find out what the King wished to be done in the matter.7
The incident cast a long shadow over the first Session of the new Parliament, which opened two weeks later on 23 November. For the swash-buckling Member for Tavistock, Sir Peter Carew, ‘was found to have had one of [the offending bills] in his custody’ and was arrested and detained. He was released fairly promptly, on 13 December. But the arrest of an MP proved counterproductive in the Lower House, with fatal result for the Bill against illicit books. ‘The bill of books’, Secretary Petre reported to his colleague Secretary Paget at the end of the Session, ‘albeit it was at the beginning set earnestly forward, is finally dashed in the Common House.’
According to Petre, Henry took the failure in his stride. ‘Whereat I hear not’, Petre reported, ‘that his Majesty is much miscontented.’ This would suggest that Catherine’s policy, which tolerated and even encouraged the publication of works of the ‘new learning’, was still in the ascendant. She was still in high favour at New Year, when Henry, despite having almost bankrupted himself in the war, gave her an extraordinarily extravagant New Year’s Gift of 1,000 marks (£66 13s 4d).8
On the back of all this Cranmer was riding high, too, and in the first half of January 1546 he manoeuvred Henry into agreeing to abolish a whole series of traditional observancies as ‘superstitious’. First the ringing of bells on Hallow E’en, the covering of images in Lent and the kneeling to the uncovered cross on Palm Sunday were to go. But having got so far, why stop? In collusion with Paget, it was decided that Henry should endorse more radical measures: there was to be no kneeling to the cross at any time and the yet ‘greater abuse’ of ‘creeping to the cross’ on Good Friday should ‘cease from henceforth and be abolished’.
But suddenly, as Denny was presenting the final papers to the King for signature, he brushed them aside saying, ‘I am now otherways resolved’.9
What had happened?
The conventional answer is that Gardiner, who was in Brussels negotiating with the Emperor, pulled off a coup by warning Henry that further religious Reformation in England would jeopardise the renewal of the Imperial alliance. Henry listened and Gardiner, able now to conclude the treaty, returned in triumph to England on 21 March.10
There is some truth in this. But I am sure that other, more intimate forces moved Henry as well.
For Elizabeth had decided to repeat the success of her last New Year’s Gift to Catherine by producing a similar present this year for her father. As with the Mirror, it would be a translation of a religious work by a leading royal authoress. But instead of Queen Margaret of Navarre, the writer would be Queen Catherine of England and the work her recently published Prayers or Meditations. This Elizabeth turned into Latin, French and Italian and topped with an elegant Latin epistle dedicating the whole to ‘my matchless and most kind father’.
Historians, including the present writer, have fallen over themselves to praise Elizabeth’s tact and subtlety in sending him the gift of a book ‘compiled by the Queen your wife…[and] translated by your daughter’. But was it really such a clever choice after all?
For though the dedication emphasised that theology was the proper study of Kings, ‘whom philosophers regard as Gods on earth’, it went on, rather awkwardly, to sing the praises of the Prayers or Meditations and its author, who was, of course, not a King at all but a woman and a Queen. ‘A work of such piety’, Elizabeth innocently enthused, ‘a work compiled in English by the pious industry of a glorious Queen and for that reason a work sought out by all!’
For all those reasons, Elizabeth concluded, Prayers or Meditations ‘was by your Majesty highly esteemed’.11
But was it?
It is, in fact, unlikely that Henry had bothered to read Catherine’s work in the original English. For Henry was not interested in vernacular religion, which he thought of either as a woman’s world or (in its less innocent form) as a dangerously heterodox nuisance. Instead, his concerns (as Elizabeth mentioned) were with theology and religious controversy. These took place in Latin and were properly royal and masculine.
But Elizabeth’s Latin translation would have brought home to Henry just how far his wife was trespassing into this realm. She had also got his daughter Elizabeth at it. And, he would soon have discovered, she had set his other daughter Mary’s pen to work as well. Indeed, I wonder if the illness which stopped Mary from finishing her translation of the Erasmus Paraphrase was not a diplomatic one that followed an explosion from her father.
All this is speculation, of course. But it is borne out by the great speech which Henry gave at the prorogation of Parliament on Christmas Eve 1545.
Normally the task was performed by the Chancellor. But, on this occasion, aware perhaps of the bad odour in which Wriothesley was held by many members, Henry delivered the speech himself. The mere fact caused a sensation. But its content was still more impressive. For Henry, that most extreme of men, uttered a heartfelt plea for moderation. And central to it was the proper use of Scripture.
It had been given to his people ‘in your mother tongue’, Henry explained, as a concession, ‘only to inform your own consciences and to instruct your children and family’. But the concession had been abused and God’s Holy Word was ‘disputed, rimed, sung and jangled in every alehouse and tavern’.12
Henry, according to Petre, spoke ‘so sententiously, so kingly, or rather fatherly’, that even many who were used to hearing him talk wept. As for Petre himself, he wrote, it gave him ‘such a joy and marvellous comfort as I reckon this day one of the happiest of my life’.13
With such applause ringing in his ears, Henry had begun the holidays in expansive mood. But, as Christmas turned into New Year, he discovered that the ‘jangling’ of Scripture had spread from the alehouse into the palace and that the jangler-in-chief was none other than his own wife.
There is one final piece to be fitted into the jigsaw. One of the most contentious matters debated in the 1545 Parliament was the Act to dissolve the remaining religious foundations known as Chantries, which existed primarily to pray for souls in Purgatory. The doctrine of Purgatory was now in dispute and the King was desperate for the cash. But the Bill was fought to the last. ‘The book of colleges etc.’, Petre noted in his end-of-session report, ‘escaped narrowly and was driven over to the last hour, and yet then passed only by division of the House.’14
As Petre’s description of the Act implies, it could also be construed to threaten the endowments of the Colleges of Oxford and Cambridge with confiscation as well. Cambridge knew instantly where to turn and appealed to Catherine in a sonorous Latin letter.
On 26 February the Queen replied, pointedly, in English and in a letter drafted in her own hand. After drawing attention to her use of the vernacular, she turned to the learning which they had called on her to defend. She understood, she said, ‘that all kind of learning doth flourish amongst you in this age, as it did amongst the Greeks at Athens long ago’. But, she warned them, they were ‘not so to hunger for the exquisite knowledge of profane learning’ that it might be thought that ‘the Greeks’ university was but transposed or now in England revived’. For that would be to forget the great difference between now and then: Christianity. Learning, she emphasised, existed only to serve the true doctrine of the Gospel; all else was vanity. This should define their activities, so ‘that Cambridge may be accounted rather a university of divine philosphy, than of natural or moral, as Athens was’.
Finally, she informed them, she had put their suit to ‘my lord, the King’s Majesty’. And he in turn had assured her that not only would he forgo their existing possessions but also found new Colleges.15
The confidence and assurance of this letter is astonishing. And its contents, no doubt relayed to Henry in Catherine’s interview with him, probably astonished–and troubled–Henry. For here was a woman who not only strayed into the territories of sacred and profane learning but presumed to redefine their respective frontiers as well. Where would it stop? Or rather, when would it stop?
Henry decided to answer his own question and the result was that Catherine lost favour, suddenly and, it seemed, catastrophically.
On 27 February 1546, the day after Catherine had written to Cambridge, the Imperial ambassador Van der Delft, to whom the Queen had, as usual, gone out of her way to be agreeable, wrote home in some agitation. ‘Sire’, he informed Charles V, ‘I am confused and apprehensive to have to inform your Majesty that there are rumours here of a new Queen, although I do not know why, or how true it may [be].’16
These rumours were linked, almost certainly, with Foxe’s ‘story’ of the plot against Catherine, ‘wherein appeareth in what danger she was for the Gospel by means of Stephen Gardiner and others of his conspiracy’. The ‘story’ has been dismissed as a fiction by some historians, most notably by Glyn Redworth, Gardiner’s most recent biographer. Others have been impressed by the wealth of accurate circumstantial detail, including, in particular, the names of Catherine’s women.17
But no one has managed quite to pin the ‘story’ down. In part, this is because of Foxe’s characteristic vagueness over the chronology of the incident, which at one point he dates to ‘about the year after the King returned from Boulogne’ (October 1544) and at another to the period ‘after these stormy stories’ of the trial and execution of the Lincolnshire woman Anne Askew (18 June–16 July 1546) for denying that the bread and wine in the mass became the body and blood of Jesus Christ. It is also because historians have missed an important clue about the King’s physicians, Drs Owen and Wendy, who figure crucially in the ‘story’.
Foxe begins by describing Catherine’s public profession of the Gospel. He notes her reading and study of the Scriptures, and her employment of learned chaplains, both for her own private instruction and also to give expositions of the Gospel in her Privy Chamber ‘every day in the afternoon, for the space of an hour’. The ‘conferences’, as Foxe calls them, were a regular feature of life in her Court, but they were ‘especially [prominent] in Lent’. They were intended primarily for the ladies and gentlemen of her own Household. But they were also available to ‘others that were disposed to hear’.
‘As these things’, Foxe emphasises, ‘were not secretly done, so neither were their preachings unknown to the King.’ ‘Whereof at first’, he adds, ‘and for a great time [after], he seemed very well to like.’
But Catherine, Foxe allows, grew too bold and started ‘frankly to debate with the King touching religion, and therein frankly to discover herself ’. She was, in short, treading the same path as Anne Boleyn, and Henry came similarly to detest it. And, as with Anne, there were many who were prepared to take advantage of Henry’s growing irritation with his wife.18
The breaking-point came probably in the last week of March. Henry moved from Greenwich back to Whitehall on the 28th while Gardiner had returned from his embassy on the 21st and immediately resumed a leading role in the Council and the Court. Catherine, who now had to visit her increasingly immobile husband in his own apartments, rather than waiting, as had previously been the custom, for him to come to hers, had spent some time with the King. And, as usual, she had turned the conversation to religion. Henry, never the most patient of men, had grown increasingly irritable with the painful disability of his ulcerated leg, and it was as much as he could do to keep his temper. So he deflected the conversation to other topics. But he kept up appearances and bade her a hearty ‘Farewell sweetheart’ as she left.
As soon as she had gone, however, he gave vent to his real feelings. ‘ “A good hearing”, quoth he, “it is when women become such clerks; and a thing much to my comfort, to come in mine old days to be taught by my wife”.’ Gardiner, then and subsequently, played on Henry’s feelings and ‘marvellously whetted the King both to anger and displeasure towards the Queen, and also to be jealous and mistrustful of his own estate (power and position)’. ‘For the assurance whereof ’, Foxe adds meaningfully, ‘princes use not to be scrupulous to do anything.’
The result was that Gardiner and his new ally Wriothesley got Henry’s agreement to a coup against the Queen. Her leading women, Ladies Herbert, Lane and Tyrwhit, would be arrested; their illegal books seized as evidence; and the Queen herself sent ‘by barge’ to the Tower.19
But Henry, after another contretemps with Catherine, unburdened himself to one of his physicians, ‘either Dr Wendy, or else Owen, but rather Wendy, as is supposed’. The King told this physician that he was determined to be rid of such a ‘doctress’ as Catherine was. He also outlined the means he had chosen to do it.
Naturally, the King swore his physician to secrecy ‘on peril of his life’. Equally naturally, he must have expected the story to leak. Was it to add to Catherine’s terror? Or had he begun to have second thoughts?20
And why did Foxe highlight his uncertainty about the identity of the physician in question?
Foxe did so, I think, because he knew that there had been a recent change in the King’s long-standing medical establishment. For in his letter of 17 December 1545, Petre had also reported to Paget that ‘the long sickness of Dr Butts makes it necessary that another physician should be appointed’. As it happens, Butts had died on 22 November 1545, a day or two after Paget’s departure on Embassy to France and his successor, Dr George Owen, had been appointed on the 24th, with the accustomed high fee of £100 a year. But Owen was not the only doctor in attendance on Henry in March 1546, for on the 8th a messenger was paid ‘for posting to Cambridge to Dr Wendy for his repair to the Court’. The messenger had received the very large sum of £4, which suggests that the summons was urgent.21
So both Owen and Wendy were present at Court when the plot against the Queen broke. And both had powerful connexions with her. Owen, for instance, had acted as her personal physician on her becoming Queen, and had authorised her apothecary’s bills for medicines which, no doubt, he had prescribed. There were also close ties between Owen and Catherine’s religiously radical Secretary, Walter Bucler, who was then on Embassy to the German Protestants. But Owen’s ties related primarily to the past. Wendy’s, more interestingly, belonged to the future. For on 24 October 1546, as ‘the Queen’s [newly appointed] physician’, he was to receive the grant of a valuable manor and rectory. Was this the result of services rendered–and more, much more, than medical ones?22
It seems likely.
In which case it was Wendy whom Henry sent to his wife after her sudden collapse with shock. For the bill of articles against the Queen had been mislaid and brought to Catherine. Faced with the same terrible fate as her predecessor, she had broken down. Wendy now told her of the plot and also advised her what to do. She should, he counselled, ‘somewhat…frame and conform herself to the King’s mind’. ‘If she would do so’, he added, ‘and show her humble submission unto him…she should find him gracious and favourable unto her.’
Catherine accepted the advice and, accompanied by her three faithful ladies, took once more the road to her Canossa of the King’s bedchamber.
Henry deliberately turned the subject of conversation to religion. But Catherine did not bite. Instead, she protested her weakness as a woman and the God-given superiority of men. Therefore, she said, she had no opinion worth having, since ‘must I, and will I, refer my judgement in this, and all other cases, to your Majesty’s wisdom, as my only anchor, Supreme Head and Governor here in earth, next under God’.
‘Not so by St Mary’, replied the King. ‘You are become a doctor, Kate, to instruct us (as we take it) and not to be instructed or directed by us.’
Catherine had an answer for that too. She had disputed with Henry in religion, she said, principally to divert his mind from the pain of his leg but also to profit from her husband’s own excellent learning as displayed in his replies.
‘Is it even so, sweetheart?’ Henry answered. ‘And tended your arguments to no worse end? Then perfect friends we are now again, as ever at any time heretofore.’
And they kissed and made up.23
The next day her arrest was to have taken place. At the time fixed she was walking in the garden with Henry when Chancellor Wriothesley turned up with a detachment of the Guard. The King took him aside; Wriothesley fell to his knees and Henry berated him, ‘Knave! arrant knave, beast! and fool!’ After Wriothesley had fled, Catherine completed her victory by sweetly interceding with the King on his behalf.24
No doubt Foxe’s ‘story’ was improved in the telling. But the fact that Dr Wendy received his reward from her would seem to clinch its essential truthfulness. Catherine’s survival, however, had been bought at a price. She had forgone her independence as a woman. And there could be no going back.
Moreover, circumstances were now turning against her. The decline in Henry’s health, which is the background to Foxe’s ‘story’, now became precipitate. And, as it did so, all thoughts turned to the future. But it was a future in which the childless Catherine could have little role to play. As if to symbolise her isolation, the couple spent Christmas 1546–7 apart. ‘The King’, the Imperial ambassador reported, ‘is here in London; the Queen being at Greenwich.’ ‘It is’, he added, ‘an innovation for them to be thus separated during the festivities.’
While they were apart, Henry, though mortally sick, had supervised the drawing up of charges of treason against the Duke of Norfolk and his son, the Earl of Surrey. Both were condemned and Surrey was executed on 19 January. Meanwhile, Henry had also drafted his will. The destruction of the Howards guaranteed the future of Reform, which meant so much to Catherine. But Henry’s will, though it gave Catherine honour and wealth after her husband’s death, excluded her from all part in government. She would be Queen Dowager, not Queen Regent.25
On 11 January 1547, Catherine’s lodgings at Whitehall were got ready for her arrival. But it is unclear whether or not she was allowed to see the King. Certainly she was not present when Henry died on the night of 28 January 1547.
She did not take part in his funeral either, but watched it instead, high up, from her closet.26
By then her mind, like everybody else’s, was on the future after Henry.
For Catherine at least, it was a future that seemed rosy. True, she would lose the political power and public role which had become second nature to her. But, in return, she would enjoy, perhaps for the first time in her life, full personal happiness. She would marry Thomas Seymour. She would have Elizabeth to live with her. Who knows, she might even have children.
And it all came to pass. She set up house with Elizabeth. With barely decent speed she married Seymour. And she became pregnant with a foetus that kicked so vigorously that mother and father were sure that it was a boy.
But it all went sour. Seymour made open love to Elizabeth. The baby turned out to be a girl. And Catherine, like Jane Seymour before her, caught puerperal fever after the birth. In her delirium, Lady Tyrwhit noted, she sometimes railed against Seymour and his betrayal of her with Elizabeth. She died on 7 September 1548, after four days illness.27
Perhaps marriage to Henry had been the better part after all.