Читать книгу Young and Damned and Fair: The Life and Tragedy of Catherine Howard at the Court of Henry VIII - Gareth Russell - Страница 23

The charms of Catherine Howard, and the endeavours of the duke of Norfolk and the bishop of Winchester, at length prevailed.

– Gilbert Burnet, Bishop of Salisbury, The History of the Reformation of the Church of England (1679)

On 4 January 1540, Catherine stood outdoors in the cold afternoon air wearing a new gown, her face framed by a French hood, a round headdress that curved around the back of the head with a veil flowing down behind it. This was to be her first glimpse of her employer, and the ladies and maids were expected to start serving immediately. Before they saw Anne of Cleves, Catherine and all the other members of the queen’s household had to listen to an oration delivered in Latin by Dr Daye, the queen’s almoner, which was answered in a similar style by a representative of the Duke of Cleves. Two of the king’s nieces, Lady Margaret Douglas and her twenty-two-year-old cousin the Marchioness of Dorset, led a delegation of ladies from the high nobility to greet their mistress as she stepped out of the carriage ‘she had ridden [in] all her long journey’. Anne of Cleves was twenty-four, tall and dignified, with a swarthy complexion and a prominent nose. After another round of presentations to the princess, ‘she with all the Ladies entered the tents, and there warmed them a pace’.1 For the first week after her arrival in England, she wore the opulent yet unflattering fashions of her homeland, to the distress of her attendants and courtiers, who described German fashion as ‘monstrous habit and apparel’.2

A blast of trumpets outside the tent announced the approach of the king on horseback, accompanied by his councillors, his gentlemen attendants, bishops, and nobles. The new division of the royal bodyguard, the Gentlemen Pensioners, were on hand, along with ten young footmen, garbed in gold, who stood nearest the king, assisted by pages dressed in crimson velvet. Anne, flanked by Catherine and her other women, emerged from the tent wearing a dress of cloth of gold with a pearl-encrusted bonnet on her head. She was helped into a saddle decorated with heraldic devices associated with her family in Cleves and rode over to her husband, who cut no more of a minimalist figure with the buttons on his purple velvet coat made of pearls, rubies, and diamonds, and the handle of his sword glittering with the numerous emeralds attached to it. As Henry and Anne spoke, the crowds who had gathered to watch them began to cheer. In the words of one Member of Parliament, ‘O what a sight was this to see so goodly a Prince & so noble a King to ride with so fair a Lady of so goodly a stature & so womanly a countenance … I think no creature could see them but his heart rejoiced.’3

For the journey to Greenwich Palace, where the royal wedding was to take place two days later, Catherine and the other gentlewomen were put in carriages and taken in procession with the other attendees. As they travelled, the queen’s ladies ‘beheld on the wharf how the Citizens of London were rowing up & down the Thames’ with banners and flags streaming from barges out to celebrate, despite the chill. Once they were behind the palace walls, Henry accompanied Anne and her servants to her private apartments, from where they could hear cannons in the City firing welcoming salutes.

Catherine spent the next month of her life at Greenwich, a riverfront palace of red brick. The queen’s apartments overlooked the west side of the inner courtyard, and it was from there on 6 January, the Feast of the Epiphany and the last of the traditional twelve days of Christmas, that Catherine helped escort the queen to her nuptial Mass.4 Royal weddings in Tudor England were not usually great state occasions. The last public royal union had been Prince Arthur’s four decades earlier, and apart from Mary I’s marriage to Prince Philip of Spain in 1554, all subsequent British royal weddings took place in relatively private palace chapels until the children of King George V decided tentatively to embrace the media age in the 1920s.5 Henry VIII’s fourth wedding was conducted in the queen’s closet at Greenwich at eight o’clock in the morning. He wore cloth of gold, decorated with silver flowers, and a crimson satin coat clasped by diamonds. The bride came in another cloth-of-gold gown, with decorative flowers crafted from pearls; her long blonde hair hung loose, topped by a small crown, and she wore a necklace full of ‘jewels of great value’.6 Count von Overstein, a nobleman in her brother’s service, gave her away, and Mass was celebrated by the Archbishop of Canterbury.7 When it was over, the dukes of Norfolk and Suffolk escorted the new queen back to her rooms, where Catherine and all the other women of the household kept her company while the king went to change his outfit.

The wedding afternoon was taken up with a procession and the royal couple’s first public meal together as husband and wife, followed by enough time for the queen to change into a dress trimmed with ermine, which she wore to Evensong with her ladies. That night, the court was entertained with banquets and dancing before the king and queen were ceremonially put to bed. The drapes were closed, the servants retreated, and, so everyone assumed, the deed was done. Five days later, with snow still on the ground, Catherine and the other women saw Queen Anne in English attire for the first time when they accompanied her to a celebratory joust.8 Those around her judged the sartorial change a huge improvement ‘which so set forth her beauty and good visage, that every creature rejoiced to behold her’.9

The chronicler’s rhapsody about Queen Anne’s beauty at the joust may have been the result of florid patriotism rather than honest reporting. By the time the court moved to Westminster on 5 February, no one in it could have missed the rumours about the king’s latest wedding night. The whispers had even reached the ears of the Queen of France. Thomas Cromwell, who obviously had a vested interest in seeing the marriage work, thought Anne had ‘a queenly manner’, and many people, including the French ambassador, agreed that her carriage and manners were commendable, though revealingly the latter reported it in the context that ‘people who have seen the lady close say that she is neither as young as was expected, nor as pretty as she was reported to be. She is tall, and her face and carriage have a force in them which shows she is not without mind. The spirit and sense will perhaps supply the deficiency of beauty.’10

Initially, a date in February had been mooted for Anne of Cleves’s coronation. That was then pushed back to Whitsuntide, in early summer. On 22 February, Marie de Guise was crowned queen consort in Scotland at Holyrood Abbey, an event which may have exacerbated Anne’s worry about why her own had not been arranged. She dropped heavy hints about it to some of the king’s councillors when they called on her in early spring, by which point they must have known that there would never be a coronation.11 Some of the gentlemen in the king’s privy chamber had started to criticise earlier reports from Cleves that had praised Anne’s beauty. Her later reputation as the ‘Flanders Mare’, a grotesque caricature of ugliness, is the product of imaginative histories written in the eighteenth century, but it does seem that she failed to live up to expectations.12 When she first landed in England, Henry had ridden in disguise to surprise her. Anne was the first foreign princess to arrive in the country to marry a reigning English monarch since Margaret of Anjou wed Henry’s great-uncle Henry VI, ninety-five years earlier. Henry VI had gone disguised as a messenger to Southampton to deliver a letter from himself to Margaret, who, unfortunately for the hoped-for moment of a romantic recognition, assumed he actually was a servant and kept him kneeling while she absentmindedly read his letter.13 Anne of Cleves’s first encounter with her husband was even less encouraging. She failed to pay much attention to the corpulent messenger in front of her, and when he tried to get her attention by kissing her she, naturally, recoiled.14 Henry was disappointed by her behaviour and her appearance. In a conversation with the papal nuncio, the Queen of France, Eleanor of Austria, remarked ‘that the new Queen [of England] is worthy and Catholic, old and ugly’.15 Eleanor must have received her report from the French ambassador to England because she was able to tell Cardinal Farnese about Anne’s unflattering Teutonic wardrobe, which had been described in a letter to Eleanor’s husband, along with de Marillac’s description of Anne as ‘tall and thin, and not particularly pretty’.16 Amid dripping disdain for the English court’s mimicry of her own, Queen Eleanor managed to correct the English accounts that had Anne improving herself via English fashion. The styles en vogue at Henry VIII’s court may be popular with the English nobility, but they had originated in France.

At some point, a few of Queen Anne’s ladies took it upon themselves to find out exactly what was happening in the royal marriage. A well-aimed compliment would bring information, through the queen’s denial or acceptance of it, and one afternoon while Anne was with three of her women – the Countess of Rutland and the widowed ladies Edgecombe and Rochford – they expressed the loyal hope that she might soon be pregnant and give birth to a Duke of York, a title that had been given to second sons in the royal family since the reign of Edward IV.17 The queen took the bait by saying she was certain that she was not pregnant and stuck to it even when the women gamely pressed her on how she could be absolutely certain. Faced with the queen’s persistence, Lady Rochford joked, ‘By Our Lady, I think your Grace is a maid still indeed.’ The queen answered, ‘How can I be a maid and sleep every night with the King?’ Lady Rochford made the obvious jest of how a bit more than sleep was required to make a prince, but Anne did not seem to know how much more – ‘When he comes to bed, he kisses me and taketh me by the hand and biddeth me, “Goodnight, sweetheart”; and in the morning kisses me and biddeth me, “Farewell, darling.” Is that not enough?’ Confronted by the queen’s naïveté, Lady Rutland stopped laughing and replied, ‘Madam, there must be more than this, or it will be long ere we have a Duke of York.’18

Queen Anne’s ignorance of sex and conception still stuns and confuses. On the one hand, it is perfectly believable that a woman who had been brought up with a limited education, no knowledge of music or dancing, who spoke and understood no language except German when she was shipped off to England, and who had spent her entire life under the watchful eye of her adoring but strict mother, could have been innocent enough to think that sharing a bed with a man constituted full marital intimacy.19 Especially since, at a later date, Henry admitted that he had gone so far as digital penetration which, to a very innocent person, might conceivably equate with consummation. On the other, there is the possibility that Anne of Cleves was playing up her simplicity to escape from embarrassing conversations. It is worth noting that despite asking, ‘Is that not enough?’ at the end of the conversation, she had insisted at the start of it that she knew that she could not be pregnant.

In her short career as queen, Anne of Cleves elicited great praise for her public behaviour, and several sources confirm that she managed to make herself very popular with the people of London.20 Her correspondence with her family revealed how happy she was in ‘such a marriage that she could wish no better’.21 She tried to learn English as quickly as she could, and was apparently successful in her endeavours since she had mastered it by the end of 1540.22 She asked to be taught the rules of the card games her husband enjoyed, and she sought advice on how she could make herself more agreeable to him. Deciphering much of Anne’s behaviour, including the aforementioned conversation with her ladies-in-waiting, is frustrated by the same problem facing the French ambassador when he explained to his master that it was impossible to tell if Anne’s preternatural calm and good nature were the result of ‘either prudent dissimulation or stupid forgetfulness’.23 She was capable of losing her temper, and during one very mild disagreement, Henry complained that she ‘began to wax stubborn and wilful’, which suggests that she was not quite as docile as she pretended.24 There were also some indicators that she understood that she was in difficulty, without perhaps realising until the final move that she had lost before she started playing.

After the farce of their first meeting, Henry VIII had entered into their marriage determined to dislike her, and the intention created the reality. Before Anne arrived, the Archbishop of Canterbury had tried to warn Cromwell that an arranged marriage was a risk for someone like Henry, who set such high store on his personal happiness. It would be ‘most expedient the King to marry where that he had his fantasy and love, for that would be most comfort to his Grace’, advice which Cromwell ignored.25 Henry even tried to get out of going through with it on the morning of the wedding, asking, ‘Is there no remedy but to put my neck in the yoke?’ before Cromwell reminded him that jilting Anne meant losing the alliance.26

He was right. As long as the pact between the Hapsburgs and the French monarchy remained, England could not sacrifice its ties to Queen Anne’s family. Cleves still seemed like a valuable ally, particularly after another nosedive in relations between the English court and the emperor’s.27 The latter had chosen not to wear his insignia as a member of the English Order of the Garter on St George’s Day, as was customary, a fact not missed by the English, who complained about it later to his ambassador.28 In Spain, then part of the Hapsburg Empire, several men under the protection of the English Crown had been tossed into the gaol cells of the Inquisition.29 The English ambassador, Sir Thomas Wyatt, who suspected the men had been imprisoned in retaliation for his country’s alliance with Cleves, had an audience with Charles V in which he mistakenly used the word ‘ingratitude’ to describe the emperor’s attitude towards Henry.30 Charles, whose letters from his servants were often addressed to ‘His Sacred Imperial and Catholic Majesty’, and whose dominions stretched from the Americas to the Alps, had been listening politely to Wyatt but ‘then stopped him, and made him repeat it, asking who it was he charged with ingratitude’.31 When Wyatt failed to take the hint and repeated his faux pas, the emperor made it very clear to Wyatt that ‘he owed his master nothing, and the term ingratitude could only be used by an equal or a superior’. His Sacred Imperial and Catholic Majesty proceeded to take several swipes at Henry’s concept of justice, which caused Wyatt to behave even more rudely.

Manners were apparently not high on the list of English diplomatic priorities that winter. On 2 February, the French ambassador visited Henry and asked him to recall his representative in Paris.32 The Bishop of London had spoken to King François in an offensive manner and the latter wanted him ‘replaced by a more prudent and wiser’ envoy.33 The French would not let the matter drop, and to appease them Henry eventually decided to appoint Sir John Wallop. In France, the outgoing ambassador, the obstreperous Bishop Bonner, reported that ‘more [honour] is now made to the queen than heretofore’.34 The French courtiers’ attention to their Hapsburg queen suggested that the alliance with the emperor was still strong, but the English also received some intelligence from other sources about cracks that were beginning to appear over the possession of Milan, which the empire had and the French wanted. Sensing an advantage, Catherine’s uncle Norfolk left London quietly on the king’s orders on 12 February, just as the weather was beginning to thaw, and reached the French court four days later.35 His mission was to weaken François’s trust in the emperor by playing on anxieties about Milan and liaising with courtiers who might be privately hostile to the pact with Austria.36

In this he had no better ally than the French king’s elder sister Marguerite, Queen of Navarre. Navarre, a small kingdom straddling what is now southwestern France and northwestern Spain, had been absorbed by the Hapsburg Empire, a development that unsurprisingly left Marguerite less than enthusiastic about her brother’s diplomatic volte-face. She met with Norfolk and bombarded him with advice – the King of England should grease the palms of those who could help him, including François’s two sons, who had already received expensive gifts from the emperor.37 They should counteract Queen Eleanor’s influence by winning the support of the king’s mistress, the Duchess of Etampes. Norfolk was sceptical about that last recommendation because he ‘thought it strange to seek anything at such a woman’s hand’, but Marguerite assured him that she spoke from personal experience, ‘as she was compelled to do it herself’.38 Norfolk, who thought Marguerite was ‘the most frank and wise woman he ever spake with’, began gift hunting for the princes and courting the favour of Madame d’Etampes, who was certainly open in her requests for payment – Henry VIII had to buy her two stallions – and Norfolk returned to England at the start of March impressed, and perhaps surprised, at the influence a royal mistress could wield.39

Nineteen weeks passed between Norfolk’s return and Catherine Howard’s wedding. It was assumed, then and later, that Norfolk was the ‘author of this marriage’ in conjunction with his ally Stephen Gardiner, the conservative Bishop of Winchester, who used Catherine to facilitate the downfall of Thomas Cromwell.40 Catherine’s rise coincided with and influenced Cromwell’s demise, but the extent to which she was deliberately and completely used to further her uncle’s goals is difficult to gauge.

Ten years earlier, Norfolk had liked and even supported Thomas Cromwell.41 He had shared bawdy jokes with him about a serving girl’s ‘tetins’ and described himself as ‘your poor assured friend’.42 Since then, jealousy and political differences had divided them. Norfolk could not forgive Cromwell’s attempts to get the Marchioness of Exeter to incriminate him when she was interrogated during the White Rose Affair.43 Above all, Norfolk was too good a servant to the king to remain loyal to any man who lost his favour, which was Cromwell’s fate in the spring and early summer of 1540. Stephen Gardiner, the son of a cloth merchant from Bury St Edmunds, was as clever as Cromwell, only moderately less ruthless, and substantially less charming. He had excelled in his legal studies at Cambridge and come to the court’s attention in the early 1520s. He subsequently represented Henry in missions to France, Rome, and Venice, debated the merits of ecclesiastical versus classical pronunciation of ancient Greek, and served for a time as the king’s principal secretary. Although he had written books defending the break with Rome, by 1539 continental Protestants detested him – even Martin Luther knew of, and worried about, his prominence in the English government.44 At home, Gardiner was dogged by accusations that he remained a papist at heart, and during Lent 1540 a radical preacher called Robert Barnes publicly accused him of it.45 Barnes had previously enjoyed Cromwell’s protection, but when Gardiner went to the king to protest this slander, Henry allowed him to bring Barnes in for questioning.46

By 3 April, Barnes and two of his colleagues, William Jerome and Thomas Gerrard, were in the Tower. Barnes had not just insulted Gardiner but slandered the Virgin Mary, allegedly proclaiming that she had only been worth something when she was pregnant with Christ, otherwise ‘our Lady was but a saffron bag’.47 He denied that specific allegation, but he was not quite so definite when it came to refuting the charge that he had argued that a government had no right to ‘make laws that rule men’s consciences’.48 William Jerome’s sermons had sailed dangerously close to supporting the doctrine of predestination, a belief that the majority of English people still regarded as heresy. Cromwell’s association with these men tainted him at a time when he was already vulnerable, and Gardiner, whose skills as an interrogator were considerable, was determined to make the most of the opportunity.

Before Gardiner struck against them, English reformers and radicals had their hopes raised by the king’s marriage to ‘a pious woman, by whom, it is hoped, the Gospel will be diffused’.49 Unfortunately for them, they overestimated the queen’s influence and her allegiance to Protestantism. The Queen of France was closer to the mark when she identified Anne of Cleves as a Catholic whose family, like Henry, had quarrelled with the pope.50 Raised hopes perhaps inevitably led to raised voices, and the three men had preached sermons that stepped far beyond what Henry’s government was prepared to tolerate. By Easter, many English evangelicals seem to have realised their mistake. On 12 April another Protestant clergyman in Gardiner’s custody committed suicide by hanging himself in his cell.51 After Cromwell was gone, some of the fierier sort of Protestants chose lives or careers abroad.52

In this ugly battle, Henry’s physical attraction to Catherine was obviously very useful to Gardiner and the duke. Subsequent accounts of her rise to the throne often cast Norfolk and Gardiner as an unsavoury cross between Catherine’s chaperones and her pimps, hosting banquets at which they pushed a singing, smiling Catherine into the king’s sights. Gardiner’s modern biographer, Glyn Redworth, has cast doubt on this version of events, and there is room for scepticism, not least because this narrative of Catherine’s rise is too neat.53 The dowager duchess’s previously mentioned recollection of Henry’s instant attraction to Catherine provides evidence that the initial stage of their relationship was spontaneous and apparently inconsequential. The likelihood is that the king flirted with Catherine, probably quite obviously, but the impending arrival of Anne of Cleves made it little more than a social diversion. Once the king decided that he ‘abhorred’ his new wife, his interest in Catherine revived.54

That Norfolk was responding to circumstances as they unfolded is supported by the fact that he clearly knew very little about his niece. There is, for instance, absolutely nothing to suggest that he was aware of her previous romances with Henry Manox or Francis Dereham. The dowager did not rush to enlighten him. If the Howards had wanted to entice Henry VIII, they would not have chosen Catherine. She was damaged goods. Had they been as Machiavellian as the usual presentation of them suggests, at some point in the vetting process either the dowager duchess or the Countess of Bridgewater could have pointed out that elevating Catherine would put them all at risk in the long run. Rather, the king’s infatuation seems to have caught them all off-guard, and while her family seem to have played the hand dealt to them – they would have been foolish not to – that is not the same thing as stacking the deck.

Confronted with the king’s frequent demands for her company, Catherine sought the wisdom of her relatives. They gave her advice on the proper way to behave when she was with him, ‘in what sort to entertain the King’s Highness and how often’, as it was put later.55 On one of her trips back to Lambeth to visit her grandmother, Catherine discovered that Francis Dereham had absconded without telling anyone where he was going. The dowager asked her if she knew where he had gone, but she answered, probably quite truthfully, that she had no idea.56 After he heard about the king’s interest in his beloved, Francis confided his despair to a friend, and since the indulgent dowager consistently refused to give him permission to leave, Francis had taken matters into his own hands and fled.57