Читать книгу Young and Damned and Fair: The Life and Tragedy of Catherine Howard at the Court of Henry VIII - Gareth Russell - Страница 19

For among all that is loved in a wench chastity and cleanness is loved most.

– Bartholomew of England, De proprietatibus rerum (c.1240)

Catherine never could make a clean break of things. Time and time again, she went back to pick at a wound, drawn irresistibly to the drama of the supposed farewell or the intimacy of an emotional conversation. Her tête-à-tête with Manox in the orchard only a few days after she broke off their relationship was the first recorded instance of a trait that left too many of her actions open to misinterpretation. As Manox nursed hopes of reconciliation, Catherine entered a more adult world. The dowager’s household began to spend more time at Norfolk House in her home parish of Lambeth, the Howards’ recently completed mansion on the opposite side of the river to Whitehall, the king’s largest and still-expanding palace. There, Catherine began to see more of the relatives who lived in the capital or at court – her elder half sister, Lady Isabella Baynton, visited the dowager, and their brother Henry had married and brought his new wife to live with him.

Catherine conformed to general contemporary ideals of beauty, which praised women who had ‘moistness of complexion; and [are] tender, small, pliant and fair of disposition of body’.1 Contrary to the still-repeated tradition that she was ‘small, plump and vivacious’, the few surviving specifics about Catherine’s appearance describe her as short and slender.2 A former courtier subsequently described her as ‘flourishing in youth, with beauty fresh and pure’.3 She was comfortable with admiration and attention. Manox was not the only servant who was smitten; a young man called Roger Cotes was also enamoured.4 As she got older, Catherine was given servants of her own, including her roommate Joan Acworth, who became her secretary. How much correspondence Catherine actually had at this stage in her life is unknown, but it clearly was not enough to create a crushing workload for Joan.

It was through her secretary-cum-companion that Catherine found Manox’s successor. Francis Dereham was good-looking, confident to the point of arrogance, and a rule breaker who possessed a blazing temper which Catherine initially chose to regard as thrilling proof of his affection for her. He was also a ‘ladies’ man’, who had already notched his bedpost with several fellow servants, including Joan Acworth.5 Their fling had since ended, and Joan cheerfully moved on, even singing his praises to Catherine, who began to show an interest in him in the spring of 1538 – at the very most within a few weeks of ending things with Manox.6

By then, Francis had been in the dowager’s service for nearly two years.7 Distantly related to her, he was the son of a wealthy family in the Lincolnshire gentry where he learned the upper-class syntax and mannerisms necessary to pass as one of the club.8 The dowager was fond of Francis, and he eventually carried out secretarial work for her. When he first arrived at Chesworth House, he and his roommate Robert Damport were given tasks like buying livestock for the household, perhaps a boring pursuit but an important one considering that many aristocratic households spent nearly one-quarter of their expenditure on food.9 Dereham and Damport were sent to get animals ready for the annual cull on Martinmas, a religious festival that fell every year on 11 November. Not all the livestock were killed then, and it is not true that most meat served in winter was heavily salted or covered in spices to hide its decay; households generally fed the animals intended for table with hay throughout the colder months to keep the food as fresh as possible.10

One of Francis’s closest friends in the household was his wingman Edward Waldegrave, who gamely chased the friends of Francis’s lovers and helped organise nighttime visits to the maidens’ chamber, arriving with wine, apples, strawberries, and other treats pinched from the kitchens. Talking, drinking, and flirting continued into the small hours, often to two or three o’clock in the morning, and if anyone from downstairs unexpectedly came to inspect, there was a small curtained gallery at the end of the maidens’ chamber where the men could hide until danger had passed. The idea to hide them in there was Catherine’s.11 She was not the only girl with a sweetheart – for instance, Francis’s friend Edward was courting one Mistress Baskerville. To make the numerous rendezvous easier, Catherine took the initiative and sneaked into her grandmother’s room one evening, stole the relevant key, had a copy made, and then ensured the door to the staircase that led to the maidens’ chamber was unlocked after the dowager went to bed.12

Within a couple of months of seeing Dereham, the reluctance Catherine had expressed to Manox about losing her virginity had evaporated. She and Francis began lying on her bed during the clandestine parties; this progressed to kissing, foreplay, and then sex. There was not much privacy in the maidens’ chamber, but Catherine was ‘so far in love’ that it did not seem to deter her.13 One of the dowager’s maids, Margery, who later married another servant in the household called John Benet, spied on them and saw Francis removing Catherine’s clothes. Later, Francis told Margery that he knew enough about sex to make sure Catherine did not end up pregnant.

In much the same way as life in university halls can erode a sense of propriety, years in the maidens’ chamber left the girls feeling extremely comfortable in one another’s presence. When the bed hangings were pulled shut, the noises the couple made left no doubt about what they were doing. Their lovemaking was so energetic that their friends took to teasing Francis about being ‘broken winded’ once it was over.14 The pair were drunk on one another, kissing and cuddling like ‘two sparrows’, and the memories of the people who saw them in 1538, written down in 1541, prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that their relationship was consensual.15 It has already been mentioned that it was customary for young people of the same sex to share a bed – in the way Francis did with Robert Damport – and on several occasions, perhaps after too much of the purloined wine, another girl was in the bed when Francis and Catherine began foreplay.16 Alice Wilkes was so irritated by the couple’s ‘puffing and blowing’ that she insisted on switching beds to get a better night’s sleep.17 Alice, who was soon to marry another member of the household called Anthony Restwold, tried to speak to Catherine about the terrible risks she was taking. Any girl would find herself ruined by a pregnancy out of wedlock, let alone the Duke of Norfolk’s niece. Catherine dismissed her concerns by pointing out that ‘a woman might meddle with a man and yet conceive no child unless she would herself’, much the same stance taken by Francis in his earlier conversation with Margery.18 A rebuffed Alice then shared her fears with Mary Lascelles, who had held a low opinion of Catherine ever since she found out about her involvement with Henry Manox. ‘Let her alone,’ she advised, ‘for [if] she hold on as she begins we shall hear she will be nought in a while.’19

Mary Lascelles’s sour-sounding reflection on Catherine’s impending comeuppance was based as much on hard-nosed pragmatism as on religious sensibility. Lascelles’s advice to Henry Manox about the consequences of becoming involved with a noble girl showed that she appreciated the practical dangers implicit in these kinds of upstairs–downstairs romances. The potential consequences of sin were awful, particularly in a society where God was liable to prove far more forgiving than His earthly flock. Religion was omnipresent in Catherine’s world. It was not separated from the world, but rather it influenced everything in society, from the ecstatic to the banal, and was in its turn influenced – sixteenth-century villagers playing football after Mass sang songs celebrating the skills of Saint Hugh of Lincoln in bouncing the ball up and down from the tips of his toes.20 Eroticism and sexuality could be incorporated into the Divine as much as the mundane. Christianity’s blushes about nudity were at least a century away – prayer books handed out to children might show a naked Bathsheba bathing in the moonlight; icons of pure and brave Saint Agatha often depicted her bare breasts seconds before the pagan Romans tore them from her as part of her martyrdom; the loincloth-wearing Saint Sebastian was usually shown as lean and muscular as the arrows of the unbelievers pierced him for his faith in Christ.21

None of these devotional images were supposed to excite lust, of course, but nude images, no matter how holy their intent, at the very least ran the risk of provoking impure thoughts in some of their audience, and this reflected a society in which theological teachings on sexuality were often torturously contradictory. There were tensions between, and within, theological writings on sex and medical thoughts on the same subject. Views on what constituted a danger to one’s spiritual or physical health swung depending on which writer you consulted: a monk from the Franciscan order, for instance, was historically likely to be less censorious than one from the Dominican tradition. Medical wisdom held that ‘men fall into various illnesses through retaining their seed with them’, while in Catherine’s lifetime the Bishop of Rochester argued that an orgasm damaged a man’s health more ‘than by shedding of ten times so much blood’.22 A large part of the dichotomy stemmed from the age-old question of whether sex was something to be enjoyed or endured and if, in circumstances such as marriage or procreation, it might become something praiseworthy. The philosopher Sylvester Prierias Mazzolini, who died around the time of Catherine’s birth, argued that any deviation from the missionary position was a contraceptive, itself a sin, and that the pursuit of sexual pleasure, even within wedlock, was fundamentally dangerous. Couples who were engaged often began a sexual relationship before the actual wedding service, a custom with which certain members of the priesthood had no quarrel but others found to be objectionable.

Almost none of Catherine’s contemporaries disregarded the Church’s teachings on sex in their entirety, but equally there is plenty of evidence that very few accepted them in full. Moralists noted with concern, disappointment, and apparent surprise that very few men admitted to masturbation when they confessed their sins.23 The suggestion that couples should wait three days before consummating a marriage was almost universally ignored.24 Clerical tomes lambasted homosexual activity, masturbation, foreplay, oral sex, and anal sex, lumping them all together as sodomy, but even here there were inconsistencies. For every morality guide that ranked homosexual sex in the same category of vice as masturbation, there were others that ranked it just above bestiality, such as the manual written to help confessors in the assigning of penance which carefully ranked every sexual transgression from the least severe (an unchaste kiss) to the worst (bestiality). In the same list of ascending vice, incest was number eleven, while masturbation was jarringly ranked as number twelve, which was four ranks worse than the rape of a virgin, itself classed as marginally worse than the rape or abduction of a married woman. Many lay Christians found these debates absurd and correspondingly ignored thundering assertions like the one that claimed that if a sinner ‘has foully touched his own member so that he has polluted himself and poured out his own semen, this sin is greater than if he had lain with his own mother’.25

However, even if people did not always pay attention to the obsessively detailed denunciations from the guardians of sexual morality, there was still widespread acceptance of the importance of chastity, especially in women, and a belief that sexual intercourse created a bond between two people that could not easily be broken. Medicine taught that women were more lustful than men, more illogical, more emotional, and more susceptible to biological impulses. Female orgasm was believed to be desirable in securing a conception, perhaps one of the few pieces of medical advice that worked in a woman’s favour in the 1530s. The rest seemed to focus either on their emotional volatility or the horrors that sex could inflict on them – childbirth, after all, killed many, and contemporary textbooks acknowledged that some women endured great pain during sex itself, perhaps because of a prolapsed uterus or some other infirmity, when ‘such women cannot endure a man’s penis because of the size of it, and sometimes they are forced to endure it whether they would or not’.26

A woman’s life could be ended or ruined by the consequences of sex, a point which was constantly stressed in the hope of encouraging restraint. Virginity, or perhaps more accurately an unsullied reputation, was the most valuable part of an aristocratic lady’s social armour. Without it, she was a defenceless and easy target. Catherine was clearly enjoying her sexual relationship with Francis, while doing her research in how to avoid becoming a mother. Her boast that she knew how to ‘meddle’ with a man without risking pregnancy suggests that she knew something about oral sex – number fourteen in the aforementioned confessors’ manual, between having sex outside the missionary position and homosexuality – or the other rudiments of sixteenth-century contraception. In the rural idyll at Horsham or behind the walls of her grandmother’s London mansion, it was easy to make the mistake of thinking that biology and the disapproving stares of Mary Lascelles were her greatest threats.

Before the dowager arrived at her pew for morning Mass, her servants gathered the usual pile of letters left there as petitions for her. After a service at Lambeth, one note brought a nasty surprise: it claimed that if the dowager went up to the maidens’ chamber half an hour after her usual bedtime ‘you shall see that which shall displease you’.27 The dowager ‘stormed’ in a rage and only through sheer luck did the girls manage to hide the worst from her. Perhaps it was one night where only a few couples were meeting or most of the men managed to make it into the curtained gallery in time. In any case, the duchess did not discover that Catherine was seeing Dereham. The note was opaque enough for the dowager to think that it referred to another young man called Hastings, whose flirtatious interest in one of Catherine’s roommates had already been noticed. Catherine did not think the tip referred to Hastings, and she was angry enough at the potential embarrassment to break into the dowager’s rooms again, steal the letter, and take it straight to Francis, who agreed that Henry Manox must have written it, perhaps with the help of one of his friends. Apparently, Manox had wanted to ruin Dereham without ruining his own chances with Catherine. True to form, Francis was almost as angry as the dowager, if for very different reasons. He found Manox and proceeded to hurl insults at him.28 The two men may have been friends before, since one of Francis’s complaints was that the letter proved Manox had never loved him or Catherine.

Arguments about who had incited the wrath of the dowager eventually reached the ears of Lord William, who was irritated by the atmosphere in the house and went to Manox’s accommodation to add a second dose of criticism, rather awkwardly bringing the news up in front of Manox’s wife. William was unimpressed by Manox’s churlish troublemaking, as he saw it, and perhaps by the abuse of his position in flirting with Catherine. He was equally bored by the gossiping about it in the maidens’ chamber and the he-said-she-said resulting from the dowager’s discovery: ‘What mad wenches!’ he said. ‘Can you not be merry amongst yourselves but you must thus fall out?’29 Lord William’s anger understandably frightened Manox more than Francis Dereham’s. Not long after the contretemps, Manox left the dowager’s service to work for another family in Lambeth.30 In regards to the temporarily strained environment in the house, Catherine’s glamorous aunt, the countess, was more sanguine when the scandal broke: the only advice she gave her niece was that staying up too late would ‘hurt her beauty’.31

While Catherine’s guile and Francis’s bravado saved them and their friends from the worst of her relatives’ suspicions, they were so obviously obsessed with each other that the dowager eventually noticed.32 She may actually have been the last person in the house to know – even John Walsheman, the dowager’s elderly porter, realised before she did.33 Years of being told to look at Catherine, to watch her and defer to her, meant that almost everyone in the household knew what their mistress’s granddaughter was doing. The grooms who worked in the dowager’s chambers knew what was going on, which was unsurprising given that their female colleagues, the dowager’s maids (known as chamberers), including Dorothy Dawby, who was carrying messages and gifts between the lovers, and the disapproving Mary Lascelles, who had recently been promoted from the nursery, were also aware of the situation.34 The dowager’s other maids, Lucy and Margery, were talking about the affair, as was the maid Mistress Philip, who brought the news to her mistress, the Countess of Bridgewater.35 Catherine’s uncle William and his wife, Lady Margaret Howard, also knew, with Margaret apparently spotting the obvious signs of infatuation and discussing it with her husband, whose fondness for Dereham prevented him from reacting aggressively or from inquiring too closely into what was happening.36 Andrew Maunsay, another servant, remembered later that ‘a laundry woman called Bess’ knew about the liaison too – an oddly specific memory which raises the possibility that Catherine needed a laundress who could clean her sheets more often than usual, without telling the dowager.37

Since aristocratic households kept secrets with the same discretion as a modern workplace or high school, perhaps what was most remarkable about Catherine’s summer romance in 1538 was that nobody else tried to inform the dowager about it after Manox’s botched attempt to exact revenge. Catherine benefited from the affection she inspired in many of those around her, while those who did not care for her, such as Mary Lascelles, were too afraid to spill her secrets to the dowager. The duchess’s suspicions were only confirmed one afternoon when she walked in on Catherine and Francis wrapped in each other’s arms, chatting with Joan Acworth, who was acting as Catherine’s woefully inept chaperone. The last time she had caught Catherine in an embrace, the dowager had slapped her. This time, her blows fell with a more democratic energy – she punched Catherine, Francis, and Joan, then launched herself headlong into a tirade.38 Back in her rooms, she raged to her sister-in-law and companion, Malyn Tilney. Malyn seemed to know or suspect what was going on with Catherine, but chose tact over honesty in dealing with Agnes’s anger and apparently encouraged her belief that what she had just witnessed was the worst of it. Eventually, the dowager calmed down and contented herself with comments that evolved from acid to arch to accepting and finally to amusement. When anyone asked where Francis was, she replied with comments in the vein of ‘I warrant if you seek him in Catherine Howard’s chamber ye shall find him there.’39

The fact that Dereham, like Manox before him, was able to keep his job was a poor reflection on the dowager’s acquittal of her position as a guardian. Properly, either he would have been dismissed or Catherine would have been sent to stay with another relative until the infatuation had passed. Agnes may have failed to act out of a desire to avoid embarrassment for herself – after all, how could she explain the problem without admitting her own dereliction of duty? She was anxious that none of the other girls should breathe a word about it to Catherine’s uncle William and confided these worries to her chaplain, Father Borough.40 At what point she figured out that one of William’s own servants, and his wife, had passed on the household gossip about Francis and Catherine is unclear. For quite some time she seemed to believe, or chose to, that it was only a mutual crush that would soon blow over. Katherine Tilney, who slept in the maidens’ chamber, stated later, and stood by her testimony, that the dowager duchess never knew the relationship had been consummated or that there was talk in the house of the couple making it to the altar.

Francis encouraged the idea of a wedding. When a friend asked him if he would ‘have’ her, meaning marry her, Francis replied, ‘By St. John you may guess twice and guess worse.’41 The gifts passing between the couple took on a domestic character. Catherine gave him bands and sleeves for a shirt; at New Year’s he gave her a gift of a heartsease, a wild pansy with yellow and purple markings, crafted from silk for her to wear. Dereham was with her almost constantly; they nicknamed each other ‘husband’ and ‘wife’, and he lounged ‘on one bed or another’ to talk to her in the maidens’ chamber and constantly brought up ‘the question of marriage’.42 When his friends teased Francis about how he could not kiss Catherine often enough, he bantered back by asking why he should not kiss his wife. According to her own recollections a few years later, Catherine did not correct him but instead winked and whispered, ‘What if this should come to my lady’s ear?’

She was still careful to keep the details from her grandmother. She would not wear the lovely silken flower until she persuaded a family friend and visitor, Lady Eleanor Brereton, to tell the dowager that she had given the bauble to Catherine as a gift.43 The silk flower was a token Catherine appreciated, and she wanted more. Catherine’s love of clothes and fashion developed, although like most young unmarried girls from the same background, she had almost no money of her own. She had enough pocket money to go to Mrs Clifton, a housewife in Lambeth who embroidered for her one of Francis’s shirts that he had received as a present from the dowager at New Year’s. When Francis told her about a hunchbacked lady in London who was said to be a skilled needlewoman, particularly with silk, Catherine was so keen to commission some pieces that Francis offered to lend her the money to buy another silk flower. At a later date, he bought her the fabric she wanted to make a new headdress. He considered it a gift; Catherine intended to pay him back. She took the cloth to the diminutive Mr Rose, her grandmother’s embroiderer. Trusting in his good taste and perhaps not too interested in the precise details beyond securing the desired colour and fabric, Catherine did not give Rose specific instructions beyond what kind of hat she wanted. When it was ready, she regretted her lack of specification. Francis loved the Freer’s knots, symbols of constant love that Rose had stitched into it, but Catherine was less enthused.

She was starting to withdraw from him. Francis’s ardour was suffocating, his attentiveness more possessive than protective, and his volatile temper now struck Catherine as a predictable and irritating liability. After their few months together, Francis Dereham was stripped of his appeal. To his frustration, she evaded giving him a firm answer about a wedding. Their marital pet names for each other fell by the wayside, as Catherine tried to slow down Francis’s march to the altar. At the time, a pre-contract referred to a commitment between two people who were pledged to marry at a future date. With it in place, many couples began to sleep together, partly because of the belief that sex created a bond as unbreakable as marriage. Obviously, in practice it did not always work that way, but pre-contracts were a serious business, especially for the upper classes. One could be disinherited if evidence was found or manufactured suggesting a parent had been pre-contracted to someone else before their marriage, thus rendering their future children bastards in the eyes of the law.44 A real problem lay in the fact that the details of what constituted a pre-contract were infamously blurred, not least because there was no real requirement for them to be written down. At what point did talk of marriage become an unbreakable pledge? As far as Francis Dereham was concerned, he and Catherine were bound to one another. She, it seems, did not view the situation in quite the same way.

On 19 March 1539, her father died.45 After his second wife’s death, Edmund had married Margaret Jennings, a forceful lady who rather ruled the roost at their home in Calais.46 His last few years had been plagued by bad health and the monetary problems he had tried so hard to escape. One evening, shortly before he was due to arrive as a dinner guest of Lord and Lady Lisle, he had to send a letter to his hostess, addressed with the words, ‘To the Right Honourable the Viscountess Lisle this be delivered – Haste, post haste, haste, for thy life.’ In it, he confessed that he could not attend because the medicine he was taking to cure the pain of kidney stones ‘made me piss my bed this night, for the which my wife hath sore beaten me, and saying it is children’s parts to bepiss their beds’. There is a commendable sense of undaunted humour in Edmund’s letters, perhaps a clue to some of the qualities that had won his contemporaries’ praise so many years ago. It was Lady Lisle who had recommended the medicine that made him so ill – ‘You have made me such a pisser,’ he joked, ‘that I dare not this day go abroad [outside], wherefore I beseech you to make mine excuse to my lord … for I shall not be with you this day at dinner.’47 Two years before he passed away, his colleagues in Calais had voted to elect him their mayor, a move that surprised everyone and raised a few eyebrows in London. Those on the ground in the town advised the government to approve the election, as they customarily did, because the result had been a popular one with ‘the Caliciens’.48 Evidently, in his new home Edmund had managed to build up a decent supply of goodwill, but when the letter announcing the election was read out to the king, he ‘laughed full heartily’ and vetoed it. Thomas Cromwell was ordered to write to the burgesses and aldermen of Calais to inform them ‘that the King’s Majesty will in no wise that my Lord Howard be admitted unto the Mayoralty’.49 A few months after the king torpedoed his career, Edmund’s religious conservatism got him into trouble.50 Then, on St Joseph’s Day, a long and frustrating life came to its end.

Catherine almost certainly saw her father again shortly before his death. The previous spring, he had returned to England, and Lambeth, to act as one of the chief mourners at the funeral of his younger sister Elizabeth Boleyn, Countess of Ormond.51 Elizabeth was buried in the Howard crypt in St Mary-at-Lambeth, so it is highly probable that Catherine and others from Norfolk House made the short journey to attend. This would have been the first time father and daughter had seen one another in nearly seven years, and it does not seem as if Edmund permanently relocated, firstly because the hoped-for job at court never materialised and secondly because he could not stay while he remained in debt to so many people. His death in 1539 made Catherine an orphan, and the responsibility to find her a good position in life rested even more with the other Howards. Luckily, an opportunity presented itself, which would also have the added advantage of getting her away from Francis Dereham. Her uncle William had been involved in several missions abroad to scout eligible princesses for Henry VIII. By summer 1539, he was well placed to know that the queen’s household was going to be revived to serve the Duke of Cleves’s younger sister, Anne, who would arrive in England for her wedding within the year. The Duke of Norfolk and his allies at court were unenthusiastic about the king’s choice. Many of them would have preferred an alliance with the French or the Hapsburg Empire, whereas the queen-to-be’s relatives were part of a German cabal against Europe’s most powerful family. Even more upsettingly, the match was seen as a victory for its chief architect, Thomas Cromwell. Politics aside, the queen’s household was an ideal place for a well-bred young girl, particularly if she still needed a husband, since she would be introduced to the most eligible men in the country. Catherine’s uncle Norfolk sent word to Norfolk House that Catherine had been selected to join the court as a maid of honour.

The fantastic new life opening up in front of her gave Catherine the push she needed to break things off with Francis. As with Manox, the two talked things over in the orchard at Lambeth. Francis claimed later that Catherine wept hysterically, sobbing that she had to obey her family’s orders. In her memory, she lost her temper at his numerous agonised questions about his future – she replied that he ‘might do as he list’, since his plans were no longer her concern.52 Both versions of their conversation may contain some element of truth. Perhaps Catherine did weep at seeing how upset he was – it is entirely possible to feel grief for a relationship that one nonetheless intends to end. The hesitation or mixed emotions resulted in another failure to drive the point home. She did not make clear to Francis that she considered this a permanent goodbye, nor did she state firmly that she had never considered their talk of marriage to constitute a binding pre-contract. Francis, who was both enraged and devastated by this turn of events, still believed there was a chance he would one day be Catherine’s husband.