Catherine Howard (18 page)

That Bluff King Hal suffered from megalomania is beyond dispute; for lesser men had become puffed up with the satanic pride that they could do no wrong. Early in the reign, when the monarch was engrossed in the pleasures of the joust, the masque and the hunt, Cardinal Wolsey, the King’s
alter ego
, had fallen prey to the same selfdestroying egotism. He started out his career humbly saying that ‘His Majesty will do so and so’, but subsequently and by imperceptible degrees he developed the habit of announcing ‘We shall do so and so.’ Finally, he attained the ultimate conceit of claiming ‘I shall do so and so.’
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The Cardinal’s disgrace and death were apparent and obvious evidence that power rested elsewhere. He was simply the King’s creature, the bubble of whose egotism was pricked by the sharp reality that final authority rested with his master. Henry, on the other hand, was nobody’s creature except his own. The monarch was responsible to God alone and the will of the deity tended to become the voice of Henry’s conscience – something he showed remarkable ability at manipulating to fit almost any occasion.

Henry united the well-disciplined inner conviction of the consummate egotist with the conscience-stricken religious orthodoxy of his generation. No one was more solicitous of his soul’s health; no one was more scrupulous in his conformity to the prescribed religious formula of the day. In the midst of the pleasures of youth and the excitement of the chase he found time for three masses each day, while on holy days he insisted on five masses.
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Regularly he chastised and humbled the royal frame by crawling on his knees to the cross, and he was constantly testifying ‘his zeal for the faith’ with all the ‘resources of his mind’ and body.
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Henry was fortunate in the simple nature of his faith, and he remained strong in the naive conviction that God was on his side. The relationship between Henry and his deity was elementary; in return for a punctilious fulfilment of his religious duties, God rewarded him with material success and eternal salvation. Very early in life the King confessed to the Venetian Ambassador that he could not see that there is ‘any faith in the world, save in me, and therefore God Almighty, who knows this, prospers my affairs.’
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Should God remove his blessings and plague the King with misfortune, then it was assumed that somewhere, somehow, Henry had failed to propitiate the divine wrath. When Catherine of Aragon failed to secure the succession by a male heir, Henry searched his conscience for the source of such obvious divine malediction, and discovered that he had been living in unconscious sin ever since his marriage to his brother’s widow. The monarch’s religious convictions were grounded upon the prevailing belief that every good and every evil stems from God, and as the burning of a candle before the image of the Virgin might be expected to cure foot and mouth disease, so the removal of sin would regain for the King his material well being.

Henry may have been many things but he was never a hypocrite, for righteousness was always on his side. He constantly lived up to his side of the bargain, defending the Church by both the sword and the pen. ‘We have done what became us’, he once wrote, ‘for [the] better discharge of our conscience, and found the truth so manifest that it ought to be allowed on all hands.’
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Knowing himself ‘to be in the right’, the King never for an instant doubted that he merited salvation and all the good things that God could bestow in this world, for ‘where there is the Spirit of God, there is freedom.’
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Others might suffer from a sense of their own inadequacies, and Luther might hurl inkpots at the devil of doubt and fear, but Henry remained serene in the citadel of his faith. As a man, as a Christian, and as a king, he claimed God as his ally, and though he denied it to his subjects, he asserted for himself the ultimate Protestant position that ‘though the law of every man’s conscience be but a private court, yet it is the highest and supreme court for judgment or justice.’
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No Christian Church has ever denied that eventually each individual must make his peace with his own god, but the conviction that God stands always at one’s elbow, ready and willing to confer his blessings, is a dangerous self-deception for any man, whether he be priest, puritan, or king. Any act of violence, any level of monstrosity is sanctioned when a sovereign believes as Henry did that ‘God and his conscience were perfectly agreed.’
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Royal self-deception went further than the confusion between the still small voice of conscience and the mandates of the deity, for the very essence of sovereignty is the art of deception. Every action must be performed upon a public stage; every move must be attired with the pomp and circumstance that fashion the spell of majesty. The monarch must feign grief when he feels only chilly apathy, must fabricate enthusiasm when pressed down with the weight of exhaustion, must listen with sympathy and understanding to those who stimulate nothing but anger and boredom. Deception is the badge of royal office, and in the end one suspects that Henry lost the ability to distinguish between what was real and what was simulated so that eventually his conscience fell victim to the self-deception of his office. As a young man, Henry once wrote a tender and moving melody in which he concluded:

My mind shall be;

Virtue to use,

Vice to refuse,

Thus shall I use me.
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Harry lived and died in the happy conviction that he had fulfilled the very letter of that virtuous standard, and two years before his death he had found no cause to change his mind or to doubt his principles, for he wrote that he ‘had been all his life a prince of honour and virtue, who never contravened his word, and was too old to begin now, as the white hairs in his beard testified’
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Whatever later generations might think, Henry himself presented his soul to God in the firm faith that he had lived a good and godly life. In his own estimation he remained a man more sinned against than sinning. The decision is not ours to make, but into the scales must be thrown the activities of Catherine Howard, fifth in the sad sequence of Henry’s wives.

In any circumstances, marriage to Henry was fraught with danger, but what in the end proved fatal was the fact that Catherine’s husband was something more than a man or even a king. He was also a semi-divine monarch, upon whose altar Tudor England sacrificed both friend and foe. Harry was a ‘god on earth’, a ‘king among the stars’, and a ‘lion among beasts’. In contrast with the majesty of the sovereign, the nobility were mere ‘ants in little hills’, for all subjects received ‘their nourishment from the King’, even as the light of small stars ‘proceedeth from the sun alone’.
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The king and his crown were inseparable in a society which still comprehended the functions of State in anthropomorphic terms. In the sixteenth century, political abstractions were animate, and as heroism is a vacant concept without a flesh and blood hero, so the crown without a regal wearer lost most of its dignity and became unthinkable. Power, majesty, and divinity remained human, anthropomorphic symbols harnessed to the chariot of State. For Catherine and her generation, government was simple and personal: it was ‘Harry with the crown’ who was the source of authority.
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The lavish ceremony of the royal household was contrived to elevate this demigod, the man who wore the crown, above the lesser sort. His every act, his most humble and biological needs had to be transformed into actions of dazzling dignity. Only by the most rigid and pompous ritual could society manufacture the illusion of a monarch who ‘does not seem a person of this world but one descended from heaven’
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Almost by definition, Tudor England had to destroy the dangerous and seditious opinion held by Edward Foster, gunner in His Majesty’s navy, who impudently and impiously asked ‘if the King’s blood and his were both in a dish or a saucer, what difference were between them, or how should a man know the one from the other?’
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Such queries were tantamount to the most transparent treason, for once the divinity that doth hedge a king was doubted, the very essence of government collapsed. Princes were ‘not as common people be, who die and perish with a few men’s tears’, for when they fail, ‘the state doth whole default, the realm is rent in twain in such a loss.’
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To an age that was only dimly aware of the ubiquitous nature of Leviathan, and the distortion of justice that could be perpetrated in the name of State necessity, justification for governmental action continued to rest upon the difference between the sacred blood of kings and the pale equivalent that coursed through the veins of common men. The time was not far distant when Englishmen would view judicial murders as pragmatic necessity, but for the generation of Henry VIII most men preferred to dignify social expediency by calling it divine necessity and not
raison d’etat
. Catherine married not simply a mortal monarch, but also the Lord’s anointed governor on earth.

The problem remained elementary: God ‘hath not only lent the King his figure, his throne, and his sword, but given him his own name’ and called him a ‘god on earth’.
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Not even the hidden places of one’s heart were safe from the omnipresent scrutiny of the monarch. Catherine Howard and her society felt close upon them the inspection of the King’s bright eye. When she became Queen and commenced her dangerous love-affair with Thomas Culpeper, she warned her paramour that Henry could reach into the inner recesses of a guilty conscience. Catherine implored him not to spread abroad the secret of their love, nor even whisper it in the privacy of the confessional. She bade him beware that whensoever he went to confession he, ‘should never shrive him of any such things as should pass betwixt her and him, for if he did, surely the King, being supreme head of the church, should have knowledge of it.’
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There is, of course, another interpretation that can be placed upon her words: that Catherine realized that within the structure of a State Church the confessional was no place to divulge a secret, especially one involving the royal person, for priests were as much ministers of the Crown as of God. The scepticism of the twentieth century should not, however, obscure the uncomplicated faith of the sixteenth; Catherine and her society were the victims of a deep-seated, almost atavistic, conviction that in some mysterious fashion there was a direct pipeline between God’s lieutenant on earth and the hidden secrets of a subject’s sinful soul.

Foreign observers were vastly impressed by the almost divine authority with which the average Englishman surrounded the personality and actions of the sovereign. Nicander Nucius commented that the English are:

Wonderfully well affected [towards their king]; nor would any one of them endure hearing any thing disrespectful of the King, through the honour they bear him; so that the most binding oath which is taken by them is that by which “the King’s life” has been pledged.’
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There is a fearful ring of truth to the words of Martin Luther when he said, ‘Junket Heintz will be God and does whatever he lusts’ for his word has become an article of faith ‘for life and death’.
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‘Harry with the crown’ was undoubtedly God’s vicar on earth and the inscrutable source of justice, but he was also the living symbol of national unity and corporate entity. Englishmen might be endowed with rights and privileges, but they were also born with duties. The State had not yet become a mechanical contrivance dedicated to the furthering of man’s material well being. For King Henry as for Catherine Howard, the realm was of divine inspiration, and every man, woman and child was bound by obligations which he owed society. ‘No man’, wrote Richard Compton, ‘is born only for himself but for his country also’,
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and every honest man was expected to ‘refuse no pain, no travail, no study; he ought to care for no reports, no slanders, no displeasure, no envy, no malice so that he might profit the commonwealth of his country, for whom next after God he is ordained.’
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The doctrine of anarchistic individualism, of mighty magnates who drew strength from their own bottomless sink of egotism was anathema to God and State, and both conspired to assure the traitor a warm and welcome place in hell, for those who rebel ‘against their prince get unto themselves damnation’.
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Allegiance to the Crown knew no bounds and transcended all other loyalties. Every man was urged ‘to forsake father, mother, kindred, wife, and children, in respect of preserving the prince’
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Family honour and even love of one’s ‘own flesh’ were not enough to stand in the way of obedience to the Crown, for he who nameth treason, ‘nameth the whole puddle and sink of all sins against God and man’.
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It was in the name of this dogma that friend forsook friend and kin betrayed kin. When Catherine Howard’s star plunged into eclipse, her uncle, the Duke, coldly disowned her, calling her his ‘ungrateful niece’ and suggesting that she be burnt alive for her sins.
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Her first cousin and brother showed an equal lack of sympathy and, feigning bravado and merriment, publicly paraded themselves in the streets of London dressed in their most costly finery. ‘It is the custom,’ the French Ambassador laconically noted, ‘and must be done to show that they did not share the crimes of their relatives.’
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It was a Tudor axiom that, ‘the court, like heaven, examines not the anger of princes [but] shines upon them on whom the king doth shine, smiles if he smile, declines if he decline’.
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