Читать книгу Young and Damned and Fair: The Life and Tragedy of Catherine Howard at the Court of Henry VIII - Gareth Russell - Страница 21

And it came to pass in an eveningtide, that David arose from off his bed, and walked upon the roof of the king’s house: and from the roof he saw a woman washing herself; and the woman was very beautiful to look upon. And David sent and enquired after the woman. And one said, ‘Is this not Bathsheba …?’

– 2 Samuel 11:2–3

Catherine’s arrival at the Tudor court was made possible by royal deaths and the fluctuations of international diplomacy. Two years before Catherine left the dowager’s care, Queen Jane Seymour died shortly after giving birth to a son who, to the relief of nearly everybody, survived. The queen’s funeral and the hunt for her replacement were not separated by a significant passage of time.1 English diplomats were mobilised to find the king a wife and, through her, an alliance for a country that had found itself politically isolated since the break with Rome. Several princesses were considered, with the daughters of the Hapsburg and Valois families the front runners for most of the negotiations, as a bride from one of the two continental rivals seemed like the obvious choice. Catherine’s uncle William was dispatched to France to keep an eye on Marie de Guise, the twenty-four-year-old widow of the Duke of Longueville.2 The French were increasingly offended by King Henry’s demands to see the lady before he married her, until the exasperated French ambassador in London felt the need to point out to Henry that the well-born women of his country were not accustomed to being appraised like horses at market.3 Marie eventually dropped out of the race to marry the King of Scots, and her younger sister Renée, who was also considered, took the veil.4 After her, the favourite was Christina, a seventeen-year-old Danish princess who had lived in exile since her father’s deposition. On her mother’s side, Christina was a Hapsburg, and she had been under their care since Queen Elisabeth’s death in 1526. Married at thirteen and widowed at sixteen, Christina of Denmark was still wearing mourning for her husband, the Duke of Milan, when English envoys began to court her by proxy for their master. Letters to Cromwell and the king described her as ‘a goodly personage of excellent beauty’; her dimples were lauded along with ‘the great majesty of her bearing and the charm of her manners’, as well as her faint lisp which ‘doth nothing misbecome her’.5

Amid the dimple praising, the English diplomats seem to have underestimated Christina’s intelligence. She came from a family of clever and self-assured women. When an envoy told Christina that Henry VIII was ‘the most gentle gentleman that liveth, his nature so benign and pleasant that I think no man hath heard many angry words pass his mouth’, the princess struggled to keep a straight face.6 Like the French court before them, the Hapsburgs were left cold by Henry’s wooing techniques. His belligerence on the subject of the pope’s authority, which both the Hapsburg emperor and the King of France still acknowledged, irritated almost as much as the superior and slightly hectoring tone he used in his correspondence. Even as Henry was inaccurately claiming that his hand in marriage was desired by all the great powers of Europe, his representatives noticed that whenever they sought a subsequent audience with Christina, she had scheduled yet another fortuitously timed hunting trip with her aunt, the Dowager Queen of Hungary.7

For most of Henry VIII’s reign, England’s foreign policy had been predicated on the assumption that France and the Hapsburg Empire would always be in a state of enmity, with England able to alter the balance in favour of one or the other. France, ruled by the womanising François I, had been alarmed by the increase in Hapsburg power when his contemporary Charles V inherited the central European territories of his father’s family and the expanding Spanish empire of his mother’s. The emperor’s attempts to dominate the northern half of the Italian peninsula as thoroughly as he did the southern became the two countries’ central point of contention, aggravated by personal rivalries and decades of hostility. Then, in the summer of 1538, the two monarchs signed a ten-year truce which received the blessing of Pope Paul III, who, a few months later, published a bull excommunicating Henry VIII for his schismatic disobedience and iconoclasm.8 For the English government, a rapprochement between the empire and the French was as unwelcome as it was alarming. At best, there was a concern that the alliance might provide aid or encouragement to discontented aristocrats in Ireland, who were opposed to the king’s religious policies.9 At worst, there was the terrifying possibility that the former enemies would invade England themselves and punish a king who had, in one cardinal’s words, ‘rent the mystical body of Christ which is His Church’. Fear of attack produced stories that the country would be divided, with the French occupying Wales, Cornwall, and the southern shires, while the emperor annexed everything north of the Thames.10

To defend the realm, strongholds were built along the coastline, from Berwick in the northeast to Falmouth in Cornwall. The king inspected many of them personally, while the Earl of Hertford was sent to assess the fortifications in Calais, where the French would certainly attack first.11 The suspicion that the pope had ‘moved, excited and stirred divers great princes and potentates of Christendom, not alonely to invade this realm of England with mortal war, but also by fire and sword to extermin[ate] and utterly destroy the whole nation’ helps to explain not just the nervous atmosphere in London but also the slew of arrests and interrogations, subsequently known as the White Rose Affair, which affected Catherine’s family and took place around the time she began her relationship with Francis Dereham.12

Margaret Pole, Countess of Salisbury, was an aged grande dame of the English aristocracy when she was arrested. A niece of two kings, Edward IV and Richard III, cousin of Henry’s late mother Elizabeth of York, and godmother to his eldest daughter, she was ‘the last of the right line and name of Plantagenet’, the royal family who had ruled England in one form or another between 1154 and 1485.13 Her third son, Reginald, had never accepted the legality of the break with Rome and chose life abroad, where he became a cardinal who wrote stinging tracts criticising Henry VIII’s morals and policies. Henry knew that Reginald Pole was actively encouraging the papal initiative for a joint Franco-Hapsburg invasion, which was especially worrying given that his mother, who was the fifth or sixth richest person in England, had sizeable estates on the southern coast.14 If imperial troops landed there, Henry suspected that her loyalty could not be counted upon.

One of the Poles’ servants betrayed the family by revealing that they were still in contact with the traitorous Reginald and that they had warned him about English plots to have him assassinated. The government homed in on the Countess of Salisbury’s youngest son, Sir Geoffrey Pole, and questioned him relentlessly. The Poles had certainly been indiscreet – at home, they had lamented the destruction of the monasteries and ‘plucking down of the Abbeys’ images’, and criticised the king’s dishonesty in how he had negotiated with the northern rebels of 1536. One of their cousins had described Henry as ‘a beast and worse than a beast’, and Geoffrey’s eldest brother, Lord Montagu, had commented hopefully on the life-shortening potential of the king’s infected leg after an ulcer had closed over earlier that year and, for ten days, the monarch writhed in agony.15

Under interrogation, Geoffrey provided enough evidence to destroy them all except, frustratingly for the government, his mother. It was not through lack of trying on their part. An unsubstantiated contemporary rumour claimed that Thomas Cromwell threatened Geoffrey Pole with torture.16 Sir Geoffrey insisted that while his family regretted the changes to the Church, they had never imitated Reginald by plotting the king’s deposition. A particularly horrible aspect of the case was the poor man’s attempt to exonerate even as he accidentally condemned. He affirmed or confessed conversations that the government used as evidence of treason, which he relayed to prove nothing more serious than private dissatisfaction. There were more arrests, more interrogations, and on 9 December 1538, Geoffrey’s eldest brother was executed alongside their kinsmen, the Marquess of Exeter and Sir Edward Neville. Three of their servants were hanged, then drawn and quartered, their limbs displayed throughout London, and the Countess of Salisbury was attainted and imprisoned in the Tower. In an age when self-destruction was regarded as a mortal sin, a guilt-addled Geoffrey made several suicide bids – twenty days after his brother was beheaded, he attempted to suffocate himself in his cell at the Tower.17 He was pardoned in recompense for his testimony and eventually went abroad, where he was reunited with his brother Reginald, who had to take care of the broken man for the rest of his life.18

Worryingly for the Howards, they heard later that when the Marquess of Exeter’s wife had been brought in for questioning, Cromwell had spent a great deal of time trying to get her to incriminate the Duke of Norfolk. Luckily for them, Lady Exeter held firm in denying that Norfolk had anything to do with her husband’s alleged politics, but the duke did not forget, or forgive, Cromwell’s attempts to implicate him during the White Rose Affair.19 The deteriorating relationship between the duke and Henry’s chief minister helped shape Catherine’s career when she arrived at court a few months after Lord Exeter’s execution.

Within court circles, at least officially, the reaction to the cull was to express ‘how joyful tidings it must be to all Englishmen to know that such great traitors have been punished’.20 Unofficially, by the time Catherine was spending more time near the capital, the government seems to have been aware of how badly the executions had played with the public. No firm reason for the deaths had been given. Beyond warning a close relative of a plot to murder him, the Poles did not seem to have had any communication with a foreign power. The secrecy of Lord Exeter’s trial invited suspicion, as did Cromwell’s attempts to magnify their crimes beyond what they had been accused of, or even what was credible.21 No one seriously believed that Lord Exeter had been plotting to murder the king and all his children or the king’s claim that the Poles, the Nevilles, and the Courtenays had been plotting treason for a decade.22 When yet more court figures, including the king’s longtime friend Sir Nicholas Carew, were publicly executed in the aftermath of the White Rose intrigue, Cromwell had one of his employees, Richard Morrison, publish a defence of the purge, entitled An invective against the great and detestable vice, treason, wherein the secret practices, and traitorous workings of them that suffered of late are disclosed. Yet still it offered no clear details of the alleged conspiracy, beyond insisting that the accused were papists.23

As the limbs of the Poles’ dead servants rotted in the streets, the public mood was one of thinly veiled disquiet. There was discontent about impending tax increases, preparations against the possible invasion, and continuing religious tensions.24 Food prices were rising in the west of England, the decision to cut the number of saints’ days was unpopular in dioceses in the south, and, as if to give credence to the worst fears about the international situation, the king, flanked by his courtiers, inspected parades of troops mobilised to guard the capital if the kingdom was attacked.25

It is inconceivable that Catherine would not have heard of the White Rose Affair – the questions about the conservatism of her uncle were enough to make the Howards uneasy – but how much she knew about the rest of the problems facing the country in 1538 and 1539 is unclear. She was young, privileged, and politically sheltered. It is quite possible that many of the nuances, and much of the unhappiness, bypassed her completely. The rising cost of food in Bristol was unlikely to disturb a girl laughing, flirting, and crying behind the red brick walls of Norfolk House.

One event that she cannot have missed was the death of the Hapsburg empress consort, which occurred during Catherine’s final irritation-filled months with Francis Dereham. Weakened by a miscarriage, the Empress Isabella had succumbed to a fever, possibly influenza, at the age of thirty-five, and one Spanish courtier observed that ‘to describe the sadness which His Majesty felt at her tragic death will need many pages’.26 Royal etiquette was inviolable, unaffected by passing trivialities like the threat of war or diplomatic crises, so when news arrived of Isabella of Portugal’s death in Toledo, the Tudor court acted as if the spouse of a cherished ally had passed away, rather than the empress of a country expected to invade within the year. Henry ordered his court to wear mourning for fifteen days, and a service was organised at St Paul’s Cathedral, which began with five heralds carrying banners of the Virgin Mary and St Elisabeth, the late empress’s patron saint. The archbishops of Canterbury and York participated, and both the country’s surviving dukes, five earls, and Thomas Cromwell attended, along with the Lord Mayor of London and all his aldermen, dressed in black robes. Their attire blended in with the dark velvet and hangings that covered the enormous church, broken only by the light of the candles, the golden letters reading Miserere mei Deus on the empty hearse, and the colourful Hapsburg coats of arms, which had been installed especially for the service. No one in the capital could escape the obsequies for the empress – every parish church in London was ordered to light candles and sing a requiem for her.27 St Mary-at-Lambeth, the church that stood less than a minute’s walk from the dowager’s town house, was not exempt.

Beneath the façade, diplomatic tensions simmered. English councillors noted that the French and imperial ambassadors turned up to the service at St Paul’s together, a pointed display of their countries’ continued amity, and King Henry sent his Lord Chancellor to represent him, rather than attend in person. Even less tactfully, eleven days after the service the king and various members of his entourage were in public to watch a performance on the Thames in which two galleys engaged in a mock battle that culminated with actors dressed as the pope and the college of cardinals losing and being tossed into the river. The disgusted French ambassador refused to attend a spectacle he described as a ‘game of poor grace’.28

The anti-papal river pageant took place in June 1539, probably before Catherine joined the court. Her debut and the months immediately after are the least documented part of her adult life.29 Nonetheless, it is possible to piece together a broad picture of events in the final third or quarter of 1539, beginning with the acceleration of the king’s plans to marry again that ultimately brought Catherine to court for the first time as a maid of honour.

The invasion threat settled the choice of who would be the next queen consort. The English ambassador to Paris reported home that the Queen of France, a Hapsburg archduchess by birth, was doing everything in her power to strengthen the alliance between her husband and her brother.30 Accepting that the Franco-Hapsburg pact could not be broken for the time being, Henry decided to look for friends elsewhere. Englishmen at the imperial court noticed that the emperor could not mask his irritation at news that Henry VIII had sent a delegation to meet with King Christian III in Copenhagen – years earlier, Christian had deposed the emperor’s brother-in-law and driven the then Danish royal family into exile, including the aforementioned Princess Christina.31 Riling the Hapsburgs temporarily became the driving force behind English foreign policy, and it was in this mood that attention turned to Duke Wilhelm of Cleves, a German nobleman who was involved in a territorial dispute with the emperor over possession of the county of Gueldres. His eldest sister, Sybilla, was married to the head of the Schmalkaldic League, a federation of German rulers who were generally sympathetic to the Reformation and wary of the Hapsburg emperor who technically remained their overlord. An alliance with the league, through one of Sybilla’s unmarried sisters, meant that if the empire and France attacked, England would have allies who could distract them by starting a war in the Hapsburgs’ German territories. In the first week of October 1539, the negotiations ended with the announcement that Henry VIII would marry the Duke of Cleves’s middle sister, Anne.32

Once the tentative timetable for the royal wedding had been established, more and more women returned to court to take, or seek, their places in the re-formed household. Catherine was still in her grandmother’s care by the first week of August, when her name is absent from a thank-you note signed by ladies of the court to the king, after they were taken to Portsmouth for a banquet and tour of the navy’s new ships.33 Further circumstantial evidence suggests that she should have been at court by 5 November, when the king announced that he expected his fiancée to arrive in the next twenty days.34 That optimistic estimate was defeated by the atrocious weather conditions which delayed the princess’s arrival by a month, but the king’s hope suggests that Catherine and many of the other ladies had already arrived in the palace. Preparations for the future queen’s numerous official receptions had started by 24 October, which supports a timeline that has Catherine ending her romance with Francis Dereham in the late summer of 1539 and arriving at court before the autumn.

By Catherine’s own admission, she was keen to go. She later told the Archbishop of Canterbury, ‘all that knew me, and kept my company, knew how glad and desirous I was to come to the court’.35 Many of her friends were also leaving the dowager’s household – Joan Acworth became Joan Bulmer and moved north to York to live with her husband, along with one of the dowager’s maids who had married a city official there. Lord William found a new job for Alice Wilkes as she prepared to marry Anthony Restwold, who planned to join the administration in Calais. The disapproving Mary Lascelles became Mary Hall after she married and moved to Sussex. Dereham’s friend Edward Waldegrave was, like Catherine, entering royal service by joining the household of the infant Prince of Wales.36 Some of the old group remained in the dowager’s service, including Robert Damport and, to his immense frustration, Francis Dereham.37

Catherine’s enthusiasm for entering the glamorous uncertainty of palace life was not shared by everybody. Some peers, such as the earls of Arundel and Shrewsbury, were notably infrequent attendees, preferring to leave the necessary networking to their relatives. Poets like John Skelton and Thomas Wyatt, who knew the court well, mercilessly satirised its mores. One of Wyatt’s most severe criticisms of his fellow courtiers was the way in which daughters, sisters, and nieces could be farmed out for their family’s political advantage.38 In the oft-repeated narrative of Catherine’s life, this was her fate – brought to court and groomed by her relatives to seduce the ageing king, maximise their influence over him, weaken Queen Anne’s position, and in doing so destroy Thomas Cromwell, the architect of her marriage. The chronology of Catherine’s rapid rise to prominence does not support this narrative, nor do the memories of those who knew her. Rather, it seems to have been coincidence, not design, which first brought Catherine into the limelight.

The dowager duchess did not accompany Catherine to court, but Norfolk House was close enough for the girl to visit and for the dowager to keep informed of what was going on at court.39 On several subsequent occasions, the dowager expressed variations on the remark ‘that the King’s highness did cast a fantasy [attraction or fancy] to Katharine Howard the first time that ever his Grace saw her’.40 The dowager made her claims in conversation with several of the king’s councillors in 1541 and tellingly they did not correct her – they simply wanted to know who had told her.41 Her recollections suggest that the king’s initial attraction to Catherine was a spontaneous case of lust at first sight.

Throughout his life, Henry VIII was fascinated by the story of King David, the Old Testament hero who, while flawed, nonetheless fulfilled God’s plans for him. Over the course of his reign, Henry paid for three series of tapestries that depicted scenes from David’s life.42 According to the Bible, in middle age David spotted a young beauty called Bathsheba bathing one evening, was overcome with lust, and ruthlessly pursued her until she became his queen.43 Given his fascination with King David and his subsequent marriage to Catherine, the dowager’s claim that he ‘cast a fantasy’ on their first meeting might suggest a similarly single-minded pursuit. However, if Henry did notice Catherine when she was first presented at court in the autumn of 1539, any flirtation seems to have been obvious, if the dowager duchess is to be believed, but short-lived. After that first meeting and perhaps some subsequent slightly lecherous displays of fondness towards her when she was in his company, there are no further signs of royal interest in Catherine for several months. Considering that Anne of Cleves had not yet arrived in England and the king had such high hopes for his forthcoming marriage to her, it would be odd if the Howards had planned to put Catherine in the unenviable position of being her employer’s competition, especially when all the signs initially suggested that Anne would enjoy her husband’s support and affection.44

Instead, Catherine settled down to life in the queen’s household, something that cannot have been too onerous considering their mistress was still on the other side of the North Sea. All the other ranks of ladies-in-waiting were either married or widowed. Catherine’s immediate companions were the other maids of honour, young and unmarried girls like herself from a noble background who had been sent to court to serve the future queen, who would act as both their chaperone and matchmaker. Catherine was joined by her second cousin Katherine Carey, the eldest child of Anne Boleyn’s sister Mary, and Mary Norris, who had been the Duke of Norfolk’s ward ever since her father was executed for treason in 1536.45 Earlier that year, Mary’s brother had managed to win back some of the estates that had been confiscated by the Crown at the time of their father’s death, and her admission to court was another sign of their reviving fortunes.46 The final maid of honour we can be certain of was Anne Bassett, who was very pretty and fluent in French and English, but struggled with writing the latter to the extent that she used a scribe for letters home.47 Anne, whose stepfather, Lord Lisle, was King Henry’s uncle, was the only one of the maids to have lived at court before – she had joined Jane Seymour’s household shortly before her death.48 Since her parents lived in Calais, Anne spent the next two years residing at court or in the homes of her well-connected mother’s many friends. That autumn, she had gone to her cousin’s house in the country to recuperate from a cold before returning to London.49 She certainly knew how to talk like a courtier – she had been part of the group of ladies invited to a banquet on some of the new warships at Portsmouth. As part of their thanks to the king, they wrote, ‘We have seen and been in your new Great Ship, and the rest of your ships at Portsmouth, which are things so goodly to behold, that, in our lives we have not seen (excepting your royal person and my lord the Prince your son) a more pleasant sight.’50 Along with the French phrases and little Latinisms with which courtiers liked to liberally pepper their conversations, Catherine was also going to have to learn the knack of laying flattery on with the proverbial trowel.

The period between Queen Jane Seymour’s death on 24 October 1537 and the king’s marriage to Anne of Cleves on 6 January 1540 was the longest period in Henry VIII’s reign in which he was without a wife. The queen’s household was a lucrative source of aristocratic employment, and its absence in those years had been felt both by the young women who hoped to come to court and by their parents. However, when Henry began to reconvene the household in 1539, he did so after a recent batch of reforms that sought to limit its size. The aristocrats’ jockeying for places attempted to circumvent the monarch’s decision, trying everything from milking family connections to sending thoughtful personal presents to those who might help them.51 Anne Bassett was sent into the royal presence with a gift of the king’s favourite marmalade as an accompaniment to a request that her younger sister be allowed to join the household. Reading Anne Bassett’s letters to Calais, it is clear that her mother, Lady Honor Lisle, had been applying pressure to her daughter to be successful in her petition. Anne, dictating to a scribe, reported that she had ‘presented your codiniac [marmalade] to the king’s highness and his grace does like it wondrous well, and gave your ladyship hearty thanks for it’, but given the number of requests the king was receiving, Anne Bassett apologetically told her mother that she had not been able to press her sister’s suit for ‘fear how his grace would take it’.52 The palace, at least initially, stood firm and the cap on numbers was maintained.53

The maids of honour, who were the lowest rank in the queen’s ‘above stairs’ household, bar the chamberers, were out of bed at about six or seven o’clock in the morning to supervise the chamberers, maidservants who would light the fires in the queen’s apartments and clear away the collapsible beds or mattresses that many of the servants slept on during the night. Once the queen arrived from Germany, Catherine and her colleagues were expected to accompany her to Mass and attend to her during her meals. Catherine’s place in the household gave her access to the privy chamber, the queen’s private rooms, which very few courtiers ever saw. Entry to them was controlled by well-placed servants who acted like watertight doors shielding the royals from the never-ending crowds of petitioners and place seekers who thronged the public rooms. Tudor palaces were constructed with this limiting of access in mind. The queen’s public apartments, where she granted audiences and hosted foreign dignitaries, were separated from her privy rooms by a short gallery that ensured that even when the doors opened from the public rooms, the crowds still could not glimpse into the royals’ private chambers. Servants sped up and down stairs to this gallery, bringing up plates of food from the queen’s privy kitchen, which then had to be handed over to the maids of honour, pages, or chamberers, who would take the plates from them at the privy apartment doors. The same routine was repeated when clothes were ordered up from Her Majesty’s cavernous wardrobe. The maintenance of the queen’s wardrobe required soft brushes, and furs in particular had to be properly cleaned at least once a week, even if she was not using them, ‘for moths be always ready to alight in them and engender’.54

The gallery had two little rooms jutting off from it – one held a small altar and the other, separated by a lattice grille, contained a prie-dieu. The queen went there to hear Mass every day, accompanied by a few of her maids of honour. The queen’s priests were not technically members of her elite privy chamber staff, and so to prevent them or their altar boys entering the inner sanctum, a small devotional space was set aside in the gallery. It was only on holy days that the queen joined her husband to progress through the throngs of courtiers to attend Mass in one of the palace’s public chapels.55

Along with memorising the complex rules of who could pass through which door and no further, maids of honour were expected to look the part. They were to be stylish enough to complement their mistress without outshining her. Catherine’s early purchases during her time with Francis Dereham showed her appreciation for fashion, but life at court required more than a few tasteful silk flowers. The court was obsessed with appearances and everyone wanted to make sure their clothes advertised their position in the hierarchy. Pins held together the voluminous folds of noblewomen’s dresses – the king’s eldest daughter ordered 10,000 of them for her wardrobe – and the extortionate cost of the dresses meant that hand-me-downs were greatly appreciated.56 Catherine’s family were expected to provide for her when she made her debut, particularly her wardrobe, but as an unmarried girl she was also one of the few ladies in the queen’s service who received a salary. She and the other maids of honour received £10 a year, a sum she immediately used to pay back Francis Dereham what he had loaned her to buy some clothes in Lambeth.57 It was a further indicator of her desire to move on from their relationship.

Discipline was harsh in the royal household, with a warning for the first offence and dismissal for the second.58 Many of the palace’s rules were hygiene related – residents were forbidden from leaving half-eaten food or dirty dishes around, and if any were found the servants had to clear them away immediately.59 Urinals were built near most of the major courtyards, though as any attendee at a modern festival or large-scale outdoor event will know, even the most adequate provisions did not always satisfy men who were either in a rush or drunk. To combat this, palace officials at Greenwich daubed white crosses on some of the palace’s outer brickwork, counting on the fact that the symbol of Christ’s crucifixion would prevent anyone from defacing it. For Catherine, the proper toilets were called the ‘common house of easement’, a large building where the toilets were covered by a plain piece of wood with a hole over a large tank. Depending on how old the palace was, the tank’s contents were either periodically flushed away or cleared out by a gang of labourers once the court had moved on to another residence. In the newer or renovated buildings, water from the palace moat was used to flush, but pipes ensured the filth was taken away from the moat itself, which was kept clean as a breeding ground for carp and other fish that ended up on the palace tables.60

Although Catherine had grown up in the aristocracy and its households, nothing in her past could have prepared her for the splendour of palace life. In terms of size and magnificence, the English royal establishment had no peer in the British Isles. Her own family’s vast wealth paled in comparison to the king’s. One modern estimate puts Henry’s income at nearly forty times the Duke of Norfolk’s.61 The court was the great theatre of political display, and under Henry VIII it seemingly had enough funds to glitter. Foreign visitors remarked that the prettiest of the king’s houses were Greenwich Palace, Hampton Court, and Windsor Castle, but his favourite residence was also his largest, the Palace of Whitehall, which in 1539 was still sometimes referred to in courtiers’ conversations by its old name of York Place.62 A sprawling complex of buildings, Whitehall was the largest palace in Europe, and it only yielded the accolade to Versailles after an accidental fire in 1698. It stood, like nearly all of Henry’s largest homes, on the bank of the Thames, and when Catherine first arrived there as a resident in the autumn of 1539, preparations were under way for a series of renovations and expansions, including the construction of a set of riverside rooms for the king’s eldest daughter.63 The expansion of Whitehall would cost nearly £30,000. To put the scale of its expense into context, the construction of the entirety of the king’s fabulous new hunting lodge at Nonsuch had finished at £24,500. For the palace expansion 12,600 yards of land were reclaimed from the Thames via a 700-foot stone dyke that would help create the space needed for the new gatehouse, banqueting hall, outdoor preaching auditorium, orchards, and enlarged gardens. Whitehall already had the largest set of royal apartments in England, four tennis courts, two bowling alleys, and a tiltyard. An entire suburb of Westminster had been bought up and demolished to make room for its twenty-three acres – compared to six at Hampton Court. It was so large that a gatehouse was necessary to straddle the busy London street that divided the park side, with most of the palace gardens, from the public rooms, stables, and accommodations on the other side.64

Life in this splendid maze brought Catherine into more regular contact with other members of her family. Her elder half sister Isabella was also in the queen’s household, as one of the ladies of the privy chamber, an elite band of eight who helped the queen to dress and tended to her in her most intimate moments. Isabella and her husband, Sir Edward Baynton, who was to serve as vice chamberlain of the same household, were beneficiaries of sustained if restrained royal favour, having received two countryside properties in grants earlier that year.65 Catherine’s paternal uncle the duke was still a vital man at the age of sixty-six and a prominent presence at court. The Howard fortunes had admittedly stuttered after the execution of Queen Anne Boleyn and then Lord Thomas’s elopement with the king’s niece, but the duke’s military and diplomatic skills meant the government had come to rely on him again after the Pilgrimage of Grace and during the attempts to prevent an invasion. His ability to win three of the maids of honour places for members of his affinity reflected his continued influence at court, as did his pension from the French government, letters from petitioners, such as those who hoped he could use his position to save the monastery of Our Lady in western Ireland, and his regular attendance of the Privy Council.66

Catherine did not know this uncle, with his patrician nose and thin lips, as well as she knew her uncle William or her aunt Katherine, Countess of Bridgewater, but she would have been presented to him before he brought her to court. Sometimes, when it was too dark for him to travel back from any business in Lambeth safely, the duke was invited to stay at his stepmother’s house, but he was not as close to Agnes as her own children were.67 His marriage to the late Duke of Buckingham’s daughter was unhappy enough to warrant comparisons to Jason and Medea, and there were contested allegations that Norfolk had beaten his wife along with the uncontested fact that he was now living in sin with a mistress called Bess Holland.68 To his wife’s distress, their three surviving children – Henry, Mary, and Thomas – had all sided with their father, although it seems that the eldest at least did so under duress.69 The eldest two were regular fixtures at court by the time Catherine joined it. Henry Howard, the duke’s twenty-two-year-old heir apparent, enjoyed the courtesy title of Earl of Surrey, but his father kept a tight control of the purse strings, which might explain why he was able to win his son’s loyalty.70 Surrey was married in his teens to the Earl of Oxford’s daughter, and she was pregnant with their fourth child when Catherine went to court for the first time.71 A superb horseman and intellectually brilliant, Surrey was a celebrated poet who helped pioneer several new verse forms in English, most notably blank verse and the English sonnet.72 Like many of his relatives, he had a flammable temper, unassailable pride in his ancestry, and the same views about the damage being done, as they saw it, to the social hierarchy by men such as Thomas Cromwell. Unlike his father, Surrey’s religious views leaned towards reform.

His younger sister, Mary, had been married at fourteen to the king’s bastard son, the Duke of Richmond, and became a widow at seventeen when her husband was left sufficiently weakened by a virus to succumb to a subsequent bacterial infection.73 Mary was as bright as her brother, which meant that her father thought she was too clever for a woman. Compared to Catherine, her education had been exhaustive. She was also attractive and tenacious – since her husband’s death, Mary and her family had been fighting to get the widowhood settlement promised to her at the time of the marriage. As Dowager Duchess of Richmond and Somerset, she was owed an annual income of £1,000 from the government, but because the marriage had never been consummated, owing to the couple’s youth, the king claimed that there was some doubt about whether Mary had any right to the inheritance.* He turned the matter over to a panel of lawyers and judges, even though all impartial experts, including the Archbishop of Canterbury, believed that Mary was owed the money as Richmond’s widow, with or without a consummated marriage.74 Since no attempt was ever made to take the titles she acquired through marriage from her, the king may have known they were right and simply did not want to part with the money. A year before Catherine left Norfolk House, there had been talk of marrying the lovely Mary to Sir Thomas Seymour, the late queen’s brother. Mary, it seems, had resisted because she suspected that a remarriage would not only cost her the rank of a dowager duchess, twice over, but also diminish her chances of getting the revenue promised to her in 1533.75 In 1539, she too was appointed to the new queen’s staff, though given her rank as a duchess she joined it as one of the great ladies, the six highest-ranking members of it after the queen. She was, at this stage at least, still far above her cousin from Lambeth.

With Francis Dereham back at Norfolk House, Catherine enjoyed a new flirtation that winter. Thomas Culpepper was the son of a gentry family who had rebelled against Richard III, which meant they were well placed to enjoy royal favour after the Tudors came to power. Catherine’s mother had been a Culpepper, but subsequent accounts of Catherine’s career that describe Thomas as her cousin are incorrect. There were several branches of the Culpeppers, and Thomas was one of the Bedgebury Culpeppers, meaning that he and Catherine were sixth cousins. Even in the world of sixteenth-century kinship where the word ‘cousin’ was stretched to elastic limits, they hardly qualified as related.

He was exactly her type. He served as one of the king’s gentlemen of the privy chamber, all of whom, according to the household’s ordinances, had to ‘be well-languaged, expert in outward parts, and meet and able to be sent on familiar messages’.76 He was handsome, athletic, and if he had any insecurities, they were extremely well hidden. Even some relatively prim women seemed to forget themselves in Culpepper’s company – Anne Bassett’s mother, Lady Honor Lisle, coyly sent him her colours to wear during a jousting tournament, accompanied by a letter confessing she had never done anything like that before.77 In his younger days Culpepper had served as one of Lord Lisle’s servants and apparently flirting with his master’s wives was a habit he never grew out of.

An inventory of his possessions taken in 1541 shows that Culpepper was a dapper dresser with ‘numerous gowns, coats and other articles of apparel’.78 The king, who liked to be surrounded by men younger than himself, perhaps in an attempt to recapture something of his own vanished youthfulness, adored him, and the profitable side to royal employment ensured that the unmarried Thomas was a wealthy man by 1539. He owned several properties, including lands from a shuttered monastery in Kent, seven manors, and a fifteen-roomed townhouse at Greenwich. Like many young men, he seemed slightly more interested in clothes and other immediate outgoings such as gambling and high living than in long-term investments. He did not spend much on decorating the townhouse, which was described as having ‘hangings (mostly old) and some very scanty furniture in hall, parlour, and 13 other chambers and a chapel’.79 Given that he spent most of his time at court, perhaps he felt decorating was an unnecessary expense.

He noticed Catherine shortly after her arrival at court. They were both young, unattached, and good-looking. They flirted and he pursued her. Catherine demurred, apparently holding Thomas at arm’s length. Thomas was persistent, and he told Catherine that he loved her. Their attraction to one another became a topic of conversation between Catherine and the other maids of honour. When she was in Thomas’s company, Catherine flirted but apparently hid the depth of her feelings. From remarks he made a year later, it seems clear that he wanted and expected a sexual relationship, which did not occur.80 Thomas, who expressed love more easily than he felt it, did not deal well with sexual frustration, and so he moved on to somebody else, an unexpected turn of events that caused Catherine to break down in tears in front of her fellow maids. The rejection certainly came as a jolt to someone who had only ever been the object of lavish, even cloying, devotion and pursuit. Prior to Culpepper, Catherine had always been the one to end her relationships, and she had never been replaced by another woman. Henry Manox had apparently even ranked his fiancée after Catherine. Thomas’s rejection was thus a new and unwelcome sensation for Catherine, made worse by the fact that she does seem to have developed genuine feelings for him.

Courtiers, like servants and politicians, gossiped only a little less than they breathed, and rumour’s ability to report and magnify meant the news reached Francis back at Lambeth. He stormed up to court demanding to know if it was true that Catherine was going to marry Culpepper. They quarrelled, with Dereham predictably insisting that she belonged with him. Catherine, who had already shown her ability to be brutally honest when sufficiently riled, was firmer with him than she had been when they last spoke. ‘What should you trouble me therewith,’ she asked, ‘for you know I will not have you; and if you have heard such report [about Culpepper], you heard more than I do know.’81 Dereham returned to Lambeth, where he demanded to be released from the dowager’s service if it meant living there without Catherine. The dowager thought his desperation would blow over and refused his request.82

By December, Anne of Cleves was at last on her way to England, and the king was impatient to see her for the first time. He wanted her to travel by sea, but the court in her native Düsseldorf preferred her to make the journey most of the way by land. The winter seas would be treacherous, and Anne was ‘young and beautiful, and if she should be transported by seas they fear how much it might alter her complexion. They fear lest the time of the year being now cold and tempestuous she might there, though she were never so well ordered, take such cold or other disease, considering she was never before upon the seas, as should be to her great peril and the King’s Majesty’s great displeasure.’83 Moving the princess and her retinue by land meant travelling through Hapsburg and French territory, since the Netherlands were governed by the emperor’s younger sister Maria of Austria, Dowager Queen of Hungary, who acted as regent on her brother’s behalf.84 Parading the symbol of the alliance against him through the emperor’s dominions struck Henry as a bad idea, and he feared that his fiancée might be detained in order to prevent the marriage. He did not count on the Hapsburgs ladies’ compulsive good manners. Maria promised to ‘see her well treated in the Emperor’s dominions’ and made good on her word when she dispatched a nobleman to escort Anne and her retinue en route to her wedding, ‘although it displease them’, as an Antwerp-based merchant remarked.85

Thomas Culpepper was sent across the Channel as part of the delegation to welcome Anne when she reached Calais, but they found themselves trapped there with her as storms prevented a return journey. As bitter winds and sleet lashed England, Catherine waited for the woman she was to serve.86 A letter managed to get through from Anne Bassett’s mother, who was hosting the future queen in Calais, which brought the welcome news that the princess was ‘good and gentle to serve and please’.87 The courtiers and officials were less inclined to be adventurous than the merchants who tried to make it back to England, so letters got through long before Anne did. Finally, two days after Christmas, the weather lifted long enough for her to board a ship ‘trimmed with streamers, banners and flags’ and cross from Calais to England.88

* Although marriages did take place and were often consummated at fourteen or fifteen, several dynasties gave credence to the argument that overexertion in the marital bed could harm an adolescent male’s health. The premature deaths of heirs to the English and Spanish thrones had previously been attributed to this, which might explain why Henry Fitzroy and Mary Howard were kept apart during their short marriage.