Young and Damned and Fair Read online

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  CONTENTS

  Epigraph

  List of Illustrations

  Map

  Family Trees

  Introduction

  1. The Hour of Our Death

  2. “Our fathers in their generation”

  3. Lord Edmund’s Daughter

  4. The Howards of Horsham

  5. “Mad wenches”

  6. “The King’s highness did cast a fantasy”

  7. “The charms of Catherine Howard”

  8. “The Queen of Britain will not forget”

  9. “All these ladies and my whole kingdom”

  10. The Queen’s Brothers

  11. The Return of Francis Dereham

  12. Jewels

  13. Lent

  14. “For they will look upon you”

  15. The Errands of Morris and Webb

  16. The Girl in the Silver Dress

  17. The Chase

  18. Waiting for the King of Scots

  19. “Being examined by my lord of Canterbury”

  20. A Greater Abomination

  21. The King Has Changed His Love into Hatred

  22. Ars Moriendi

  23. The Shade of Persephone

  Appendices

  Photographs

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Notes

  Bibliography

  Index

  For my grandparents,

  Robert and Mary Russell,

  and

  Richard and Iris Mahaffy

  An antique story comes to me

  And fills me with anxiety,

  I wonder why I fear so much

  What surely has no modern touch?

  . . . There, on a rock majestical,

  A girl with smile equivocal

  Painted, young and damned and fair

  Sits and combs her yellow hair.

  —STEVIE SMITH, “DIE LORELEI”

  LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

  First Insert

  Portrait of a Young Woman, ca. 1550–99, style of Hans Holbein the Younger (German, 1497/98–1543). Oil on wood, 11⅛ x 9⅛ in. New York, Metropolitan Museum of Art, Jules Bache Collection, 1949. © 2016, Metropolitan Museum of Art/Art Resource/Scala, Florence.

  Portrait of a Lady, Probably a Member of the Cromwell Family, ca. 1535–40, by Hans Holbein the Younger (German, 1497/8–1543). Oil on wood panel, 28 ⅜ x 19½ in. (72 x 49.5 cm.). Toledo Museum of Art, Toledo, Ohio, gift of Edward Drummond Libbey 1926.57. Photograph: Photography Incorporated, Toledo. Portrait of a Lady. Royal Collection Trust/© Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II, 2016.

  Framlingham Castle across the Mere. © Adrian S. Pye and licensed for reuse under the Creative Commons Licence. Garden Museum, Lambeth. Author’s collection.

  Detail from Thomas Howard, 2nd Duke of Norfolk; Agnes Howard (née Tilney), Duchess of Norfolk. Lithography by William Henry Kearney, printed by Charles Joseph Hullmendel. © National Portrait Gallery, London. Anne Boleyn. Oil on panel, English School, 16th century. Hever Castle, Kent, UK/Bridgeman Images.

  Thomas Howard, 3rd Duke of Norfolk. Royal Collection Trust/© Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II, 2016. William Howard, 1st Baron Howard of Effingham, English School of the 16th century. Private collection, California.

  Unknown woman, known as Margaret Pole, Countess of Salisbury, artist unknown, ca. 1535. Oil on panel, 24¾ x 19¼ in. National Portrait Gallery, London.

  Anne of Cleves, ca. 1539, by Hans Holbein the Younger (German, 1497/98–1543). 18.90 x 25.59 in. Musée du Louvre, Paris. © Musée du Louvre/A. Dequier - M. Bard.

  Thomas Cromwell, Earl of Essex, studio of Hans Holbein the Younger, ca. 1537. Watercolor and bodycolor on vellum. National Portrait Gallery, London. A Portrait of a Woman, Probably Catherine Carey, Lady Knollys, 1562, by Steven van der Meulen. Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection.

  Second Insert

  Portrait of Henry VIII (1491–1547), aged 49, 1540, by Hans Holbein the Younger (German, 1497/8–1543). Oil on canvas. Palazzo Barberini, Rome/Bridgeman Images.

  Portrait of a Lady, Formerly Identified as Lady Jane Grey, attributed to Lucas Horenbout. Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection. Eustache Chapuys. Foundateur du college d’Annecy, housed at the Lycée Berthollet, Annecy, France. Reproduced by kind permission of Lauren Mackay.

  Sir Thomas Wyatt, after Hans Holbein the Younger, ca. 1540. Oil on panel, 18 ½ in. diameter. National Portrait Gallery, London. View across the lake to Grimsthorpe Castle. © Richard Croft and licensed for reuse under the Creative Commons License.

  The ruins of the Bishop’s Palace, Lincoln. Author’s collection. Cathedral Church of the Blessed Virgin Mary of Lincoln. Author’s collection.

  Pontefract Castle, ca. 1620–40, by Alexander Keirincx (1600–ca. 1652). Wakefield Museums and Galleries, West Yorkshire. UK/Bridgeman Images. James V of Scotland (1512–42), ca. 1536–1537, by Corneille de Lyon (ca. 1500–75). Oil on panel. Private collection. Photo © Philip Mould Ltd., London/Bridgeman Images.

  Hampton Court Palace, Hampton, London. Universal Images Group/Getty Images.

  Thomas Cranmer, 1545–1546, by Gerlach Flicke. Oil on panel, 38¾ x 30 in. National Portrait Gallery, London.

  Catherine Howard Being Conveyed to the Tower, 1542, by Henry Marriott Paget (1856–1936). Private Collection/Bridgeman Images. Tower of London with Traitors’ Gate and the White Tower. © Copyright Christine Matthews and licensed for reuse under the Creative Commons License.

  INTRODUCTION

  In the Great Hall at Hampton Court Palace, magnificent tapestries depicting scenes from the life of the patriarch Abraham are on display. Every day, hundreds of tourists pass these enormous works of art which cost Henry VIII almost as much as the construction of a new warship. After centuries of exposure, their colors had faded and the bright sparkle of the threads of beaten gold had worn away, until a lengthy conservation project carried out between the Historic Royal Palaces, the Clothworkers’ Company, and the University of Manchester offered a reconstruction and an academic paper conveying just how vibrant the tapestries would have been when they were first unveiled. Their detail is extraordinary, mesmeric. The reflections of mallard ducks floating on the ponds are visible, reeds sway in the wind, every face is detailed, sandals and toenails are stitched perfectly, bread in a servant’s basket is believably colored. Crucially, part of the conservation work necessitated turning the tapestries over to look at the threads at the back and see all the ugly, confusing stitch-work that had gone into making the familiar scene on the front possible.

  My interest in the story of Henry VIII’s fifth wife, Queen Catherine Howard, began years ago and solidified in 2011 when, under the supervision of Dr. James Davis at Queen’s University, Belfast, I completed my postgraduate dissertation on her household.1 As with all of Henry’s wives, Catherine’s life had been written about many times in biographies and studies of her husband’s reign. In the year of Henry VIII’s death, an Italian merchant remarked, “The discourse of these wives is a wonderful history,” an observation that captures why the Tudors remain one of England’s most famous dynasties.2 In Catherine’s case, the circumstances of her career had already been dissected in A Tudor Tragedy: The Life and Times o
f Catherine Howard, first published in New York in 1961 and generally judged the standard biography of her. Written by Professor Lacey Baldwin Smith, the central contention of A Tudor Tragedy was that Catherine’s “career begins and ends with the Howards, a clan whose predatory instincts for self-aggrandizement, sense of pompous conceit, and dangerous meddling in the destinies of state, shaped the course of her tragedy.”3

  I intended to use Catherine’s sixteen-month period as queen consort as a useful framing device to analyze the Queen’s household, one of the least-studied but most fascinating components of Henry VIII’s court: how it functioned, who populated it, who dominated it, how it was financed, and how it interacted with the wider court.4 The thesis would place one early modern queen of England, in this case the hapless Catherine Howard, in the context of a life lived not just next to the great men of the early English Reformation but amongst the servants, ladies-in-waiting, and favorites, without whom no great aristocratic lady could function and from whom she was seldom, if ever, separated. I did not, initially, expect to find anything remarkably different about her rise and fall.

  Instead, I came to the conclusion that the Queen’s household had shaped the trajectory of Catherine’s career. Popular culture often presents Tudor royal households, particularly a queen’s, as beautiful irrelevances. Sumptuously dressed ladies-in-waiting whispering behind their fans, dancing or throwing coy glances, are familiar images of life in the queens’ establishments. In many works of fiction, these characters seem to spend a good deal of their time giggling over something which is not credibly amusing. The reality was more interesting and more important.

  Establishing who Catherine’s ladies-in-waiting were was a difficult task. The surviving list, which was for a long time incorrectly believed to be a list of women attached to the household of Catherine’s predecessor, Anne of Cleves, gives the women by their title or surname, and for a few of the figures, I had to undertake some guesswork based on Tudor women with the right background, name, and family ties to court.5 The more I researched, the more convinced I became that the influence and intentions of Catherine’s family had been exaggerated or, at least, misrepresented, and acting on the advice of a professor, I began to consider a full-length study of Catherine’s horribly compelling story.

  The result, this book, is as much a study of Catherine Howard’s world as it is a study of her personal life. Some biographies have a tendency to inflate and isolate their subjects, by endowing them with more importance or independence from the world around them than they actually possessed. The impact of religious changes, international diplomacy, and court etiquette will all be discussed in depth, not just because they are fascinating topics in their own right, but because directly or indirectly they shaped Catherine’s story. Like the Hampton Court tapestries, it is the details of the background figures and the threads weaving behind them which together produced the image.

  Putting her household, and her grandmother’s, at the center of a biography of Catherine makes her story a grand tale of the Henrician court in its twilight, a glittering but pernicious sunset, in which the King’s unstable behavior and his courtiers’ labyrinthine deceptions ensured that fortune’s wheel was moving more rapidly than at any previous point in his vicious but fascinating reign. Accounts of the gorgeous ceremonies held to celebrate the resubmission of the north to royal control saw Catherine, the girl in the silver dress, gleaming, Daisy Buchanan–like, safe and proud above the hot struggles of the poor—the perfect medieval royal consort. Until, like a bolt out of the heavens, a scandal resulted in an investigation in which nearly everyone close to Catherine was questioned and which ultimately wrapped itself in ever more intricate coils around the young Queen until, to her utter bewilderment, it choked life from her entirely.

  The downfall of Catherine Howard took place from November 2, 1541, to February 13, 1542. To narrate and analyze what happened, I relied on four or five different types of documents. There are the official proclamations and correspondence from Henry’s government, principally but not exclusively orders issued by the Privy Council which help establish the broad chronology of Catherine’s fall and the Crown’s eventual version of events. There are numerous surviving if incomplete transcripts of interrogations held between the first week of November and third week of December 1541, to which we might add the subcategory of the Queen’s own confessions, framed as letters to her husband. The diplomatic correspondence of the Hapsburg, French, and Clevian ambassadors are invaluable, not least because, while they were initially confused about what was happening, they ultimately left the fullest accounts of events as they unfolded to an outsider’s gaze, particularly Charles de Marillac and Eustace Chapuys. Lastly, there are a few surviving letters or chronicles that give clues to the English public’s reaction to the affair.

  Interpretation of this evidence is fraught with difficulty. Many supporting or referenced documents did not survive the Cotton Library fire of 1731 and some that did were badly damaged by the smoke.6 That many interviews of those who served either Catherine or her family were conducted but have not survived to the present is proved by the councillors’ notes, where they jotted down their intention to summon a witness for a second or third round of questioning that has since been lost. We know, for instance, that Catherine was rash enough to send Morris, one of her page boys, to Thomas Culpepper’s rooms with food for him when he was ill. Yet if young Morris was questioned about what he had brought to Culpepper’s rooms, as seems probable, then the transcripts of his interrogation do not survive. Nor do those of Catherine’s former secretary Joan Bulmer, who must have been questioned given the fact that she was subsequently incarcerated for her actions. The Queen’s fleeting mention of Morris’s involvement in bringing gifts to Culpepper, usually overlooked, reminds us that numerous members of the household must have been aware or, at the very least suspicious, of the Queen’s actions and that much of the evidence concerning her behavior most likely came from sources other than the principals.

  The extant records of the interrogations were written quickly, as the deponent gave his or her testimony, and so translating the increasingly illegible scrawl or deciphering the mounting number of abbreviations present their own challenges.7 Many of these transcripts were translated in full for the first time by David Starkey for his book Six Wives: The Queens of Henry VIII (2003). Anyone studying Catherine Howard’s life is indebted to Dr. Starkey for that, particularly his work on Thomas Culpepper’s testimony and Henry Manox’s. I wonder if I might have suffered deeply from doubt at my translations of some of Manox’s biological vocabulary had I not already known that “the worst word in the language” had been spotted by another.

  Separate to the illegible and the vanished, there is of course the question of intent. A common supposition about Catherine’s downfall is that the people who were quizzed lied, because their interrogators or their own panic pressured them into doing so. At least two of the main witnesses were tortured later in the interrogation and one of them almost certainly faced similar horrors earlier. Another witness gave a piece of evidence damning Catherine that can neither be refuted nor verified. It is up to the reader to interpret it as an honest mistake, an accurate testimony, or a lie born from malice or fear.

  Yet, even with all of these shortcomings, acknowledged and grappled with, there is enough for us to piece together the various stages of the process of Catherine’s downfall and its dominant characteristics. Scraps of achingly intimate detail survive—we know that the Dowager Duchess of Norfolk held a candle as she stood over a broken-into chest and what color of dress Catherine wore for her final journey by river. Beyond reasonable doubt, what happened in 1541 was not a coup launched with the intention of destroying the Queen or her family. Some, if not many, of those involved may have been delighted to embarrass or undermine the Howards, but it was never the primary motivating factor. The government was responding to an unprecedented and unexpected set of developments. In the scrawl of ink on singed or water-damaged
pages, amid lists upon lists of questions and the panicked, scratched-out signatures of frightened servants, there is nothing to suggest that Henry VIII’s advisers were doing anything other than pursuing the evidence in front of them. Some of their conclusions may have been wrong, but they were not incomprehensible or unreasonable. When torture was used, it did not produce any evidence to contradict the testimonies of those whose bodies had not been brutalized. The fact that Queen Catherine shared a set of grandparents, a husband, and a similar finale with Anne Boleyn has produced a misleading impression that the two queens’ fates were broadly similar. To compare them in detail is to produce a study in contrast. The circumstances of Anne Boleyn’s downfall are notorious, and the weight of modern academic opinion supports the skepticism of many of her contemporaries about her guilt. Anne’s queenship collapsed over seventeen days in May 1536, the evidence against her was given by the only deponent from a background humble enough to allow torture, and as Sir Edward Baynton wrote, in the Queen’s household in May 1536 there was “much communication that no man will confess any thing against her.”8

  The implosion of Catherine’s marriage was a very different affair. Three months were taken to determine her fate, Parliament was consulted, embassies were invited to send representatives to the trials of the Queen’s co-accused, witnesses were fetched back for multiple rounds of questions, and a thorough agenda was set for each interrogation. So the interpretation of Anne Boleyn’s downfall as one in which a powerful but divisive queen consort was harried to her death with maximum speed, minimum honesty, and determined hatred has no bearing on her cousin’s fate five years later. What happened to Catherine Howard was monstrous and it struck many of her contemporaries as unnecessary, but it was not a lynching. The Queen was toppled by a combination of bad luck, poor decisions, and the Henrician state’s determination to punish those who failed its king. A modern study of Henry’s marriages offered the conclusion that if “ever a butterfly was broken on the wheel, it must surely have been Catherine Howard,” and in the sense that the wheel in question was her husband’s government, then there was an inexorable quality about the way it turned to crush Catherine after November 2, 1541.9