In Bed with the Tudors: The Sex Lives of a Dynasty from Elizabeth of York to Elizabeth I (27 page)

A Water to putt away the Redness of the Eyes:
Take an ownce of Quick Brimstone, whyte Frankencense 2 drames, Mirra 2 drames, Camphora 2 drames, make all these in powder by themselves, then putt them in a Stillatory and take Rosewater 1 pint and therewith wash your face and you shall perceive your coullor to abate.

Other personal problems experienced by the Tudors were the parasites that could infest bedding, clothing and rushes. Fleas found homes in clothing, particularly favouring the rich furs of the court. One solution was to seal the garment up in a closed bag, suffocating the pests, as the usual washing with lye did not help; rooms were scattered with alder leaves and slices of bread smeared with glue were left as traps. More feared were the lice, which could thrive in ‘sweat and foul odours’, necessitating the removal of the court at regular intervals so that the royal palaces could be cleaned. Fleas were inevitable but to be infested with lice carried definite social stigma. Removing vermin from hair and beards was an intimate act, performed by those close servants that had access to the royal person. Combs were an essential personal item. Most Tudor palaces were equipped with a bathroom of some sort; at Hampton Court, Henry’s Bayne Tower contained a round wooden bath which was lined with linen to prevent splinters. Sometimes the linen sheets were lifted to make a steam bath and hot stones were added, with cinnamon, mint, cumin or liquorice. Water was pumped underneath the Thames through a lead pipe from a spring three miles away; two large bronze taps delivered it either hot or cold. Such luxuries were beyond the reach of most, though, for whom washing was a less frequent, communal activity. London’s public baths or Southbank stews became increasingly associated with brothels due to their mixed bathing and were closed down by Henry in 1546. Even before this, the fear that water spread disease, especially syphilis, began to curtail even the most regular bathers, who rubbed their bodies with oil to close up the pores before indulging. Medicinal baths for the more fortunate might be liberally sprinkled with hollyhock, mallow, fennel and camomile. However, even had Anne resorted to such hygienic, herbal and floral remedies, she could not compete with the new apple of her romantic husband’s eye.

Ironically, the establishment of a new queen’s household had brought fresh young female blood to the court and the king’s head had quickly been turned by a petite, plump teenager who could not have been much more different from Anne. The red-haired Catherine Howard, a Boleyn cousin, may have been aged between fifteen or twenty-two, depending on various sources, by the time she left the household of her step-grandmother to serve the new queen. That spring she and Henry became lovers; once he decided to free himself from Anne and marry her, events moved very swiftly; perhaps there was a possibility that she had fallen pregnant or that, at least, Henry believed she had. On 24 June the queen was commanded to leave court and retire to Richmond, with the promise that Henry would follow soon after. It was a promise he did not keep, citing fear of the plague, although according to at least one contemporary source the area was relatively safe that summer. A commission of the clergy was established to examine the marriage and depositions taken from various sources among those who had witnessed the king’s displeasure.

The statements of court gentlemen give some indication of their access and proximity to the king as well as his expressions of dislike. Even had he held his tongue, it must have been impossible for him to keep the details of his sexual activities secret from his closest male attendants. The court was a hotbed of scandal. According to the Earl of Southampton, Henry had been displeased with Anne’s person from the start but said little: ‘when he saw her first, the king considered it was not time to dispraise her who had been so extolled by others, so waited and proceeded coldly.’ Eight days after the marriage, the Earl of Essex told Southampton that the queen was still a maid and the king had no affection for her; the marriage was still unconsummated at Easter by which time Henry had become Catherine Howard’s lover. Lord Russell, Lord Admiral, said that the king was ‘astonished and abashed when he first saw Anne’ and asked Russell ‘if he thought the woman so fair and of such beauty as report had been made of her’: he was ‘ashamed that men hath so praised her as they have done’. Sir Anthony Browne, Master of the Horse, had been present with Henry at the unfortunate Rochester meeting, where he had noticed on the king’s ‘countenance a discontentment and misliking of her person, and the King tarried not to speak with her twenty words’ and ‘deferred sending the presents that he had prepared for her’. Sir Thomas Hennage reinforced the sexual slurs Henry had already made: ‘he mistrusted the queen’s virginity, by reason of the looseness of her breasts and other tokens; and the marriage had never been consummated’, which was supported by Anthony Denny, gentleman of the king’s chambers and his secretary Thomas Wriothesley.

Still, this was all Henry’s opinion; it was hardly equable with the fabrication of evidence that had brought down Anne Boleyn or the theological case Henry had compiled against Catherine. Yet, in the intervening years Henry had discovered he could bend the law to his inclination and had put aside two burdensome wives in order to follow his romantic desires. The queen’s behaviour could not be faulted and she found many admirers at court but Henry’s age and aversion, fuelled by the surrender of Catherine Howard, placed his imperative to father more children at the centre of the debate. He could not perform with Anne, although he was capable of the act, as testified by his physician Sir William Butts, who swore to the effect that Henry experienced two nightly ejaculations. He might also have prescribed wild purslane and blue iris to remedy this excessive ‘waste’. Literally, the precious royal seed was being spilt to no good effect. Therefore, Anne must step aside.
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When Anne was first informed of Henry’s intentions, she took the matter ‘heavily’ but after the initial surprise, perhaps mindful of the fates of her predecessors, declared to commission that she was ‘content always with your majesty’. Her swift recapitulation resulted in a generous settlement. She was to be given Hever Castle, Richmond Castle and other various houses and would thereafter be known as the king’s sister. The marriage was annulled on 9 July; Henry married Catherine Howard, his ‘rose without a thorn’ on 28 July.

Catherine Howard is most famous – or infamous – for committing adultery whilst married to the king. It may be the case though, that the marriage itself was adulterous or bigamous, as according to practices of the time, she was technically someone else’s wife. Nor may she actually have had intercourse with anyone else after her marriage to Henry. Her behaviour prior to arriving at court gives a good indication of the casual sexual encounters that occurred between young people living under the same roof. Unsupervised as a teenager, she had an early liaison with her music teacher Henry Manox, during which he came to have an intimate knowledge of her body whilst stopping short of full intercourse. This was due more to his lowly social status than her youth. Sharing a dormitory which was supposedly locked securely at night, Catherine found a way to entertain her new lover, Francis Dereham, whose status as a gentleman gained him access to her bed. While the women slept in the crowded chamber, Dereham and a friend crept in using a duplicate key and spent the night there in feasting and merrymaking. It is clear from the descriptions of the ‘panting and puffing’ as well as witness statements, that Catherine and Dereham had full sex on a number of occasions, in the belief that they would be married in the future, ‘hanging together by the belly like sparrows’; a bird that was considered especially lascivious. By calling each other man and wife, they had entered into a pre-contract or handfasting, which was as good as a ceremony in the eyes of the Church, thus legally invalidating Catherine’s union with Henry. Catherine’s later condemnation for adultery, therefore, had little basis in reality.

Catherine’s promiscuous past must have been fairly typical of Tudor youth. It was common practice to place young people either in an apprenticeship or position of service in a large household. Often with scant regulation, prey to their fellows or masters, young women grew to maturity in environments where sexual opportunity was available and sometimes inescapable. Service did not necessarily denote low social class; often these were girls from good families who had fallen on hard times, like Catherine herself. Servants in particular were vulnerable to exploitation and censure, especially as the child’s father might be their master or a fellow servant in the same household, in whose interest it was to apportion blame elsewhere. In such cases it was important to ascertain exactly what had happened. Sometimes this was necessary to prevent an unwed mother feeling the full force of the law, especially when things went wrong during delivery. When spinster Margaret Hilles, servant to Bartholomew Skerne, gentleman, gave birth in his house at Pattiswick between ten and eleven at night on 26 January 1568, fifteen male jurors gave their oath that the child had been stillborn. Margaret had been ‘overcome with labour’
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in Skerne’s house, suggesting that this had not been her intended or desired place for lying-in, although it may have been her place of residence. This strongly suggests she was denied the traditional female preserve and assistance of a ritualised lying-in and her labour was a public affair, with all members of the household being informed of its progression at first hand. The extent of the privacy and support offered to servants in her position depended upon the good will of her master and those household members senior to her in age, experience and rank. Who was the father of Margaret’s child? Her body may have been the property of her master in every sense.

Cases of servants labouring in master’s houses, beggars in fields and barns are sadly plentiful and the penalties for transgressing social codes were felt most heavily by the vulnerable. Their cases come to light most typically when unplanned pregnancy was the result. It was common for masters to dismiss pregnant workers or remove them from sight, perhaps to conceal their own guilt, like Margaret Grene of Fairstead, Essex, who was taken by her master over the county border into Suffolk in 1588 to give birth in anonymity.
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In the same year, Alse Mathewe of Essex lost her job for conceiving an unlawful child by a fellow servant and was forced to wander the countryside, begging and finally giving birth in Clare, Suffolk, attended by local women and midwives who tried to discover the child’s paternity. Mistresses could be more sympathetic, especially when there was no question of the master being implicated in the pregnancy. In the summer of 1591, Alice Perier’s mistress paid for her to travel to London to find the father of her unborn child. Alice stayed for a week at the White Horse by Bishopsgate, until she was ejected for being too great with child, then went into labour on the way to find new lodgings in Whitechapel. She delivered her son in the porch of St Botolph’s by Aldgate, where a few passing women took pity on her and carried her to the house of a Father Noswell, a water-bearer who lived in a nearby alley, where she remained for a month. On the advice of her mistress, Alice later abandoned the child, for which she did penance in a local church: what became of her son is unrecorded. A similar story is that of Mary Andros, who gave birth in 1599, whilst having left her employment to seek the child’s father. Unsupported and friendless, she had no choice but to lie down on the bare ground and be assisted by local women in an unfamiliar place.
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Such births cannot have been too infrequent, given the readiness of women to extend their help to a stranger, whose gender and travail overrode any other concerns.

Catherine, though, famously stated that she knew how to ‘meddle’ with a man without conceiving a child. This implies a significant knowledge of birth control for one of her years, suggesting she had been informed early by the other women of her chamber. Undoubtedly among women of all classes, the usual methods of delaying conception were employed, such as withdrawal, the risky rhythm method and potions of herbs like rue. For new mothers, prolonged breastfeeding could also offer some protection. The parish registers of several Essex villages indicate that conceptions occurring after a birth happened on average between nine and twelve months later, consistent with breast feeding patterns among the lower classes. For young girls like Catherine, an ill-timed pregnancy might spoil their chances of a better marriage later on. In fact, Catherine was keen to distance herself from her ‘husband’ Dereham once a place at court had been secured for her. Superstition had plenty of contraceptive advice to offer: a hemlock plaster on the testicles could prevent pregnancy, as could the placing of a cockerel’s testicles under the bed. Sponges soaked in herbs or vinegar were used as barriers and apparently, some women went as far as to use wax to seal up the uterus! The first quondams, or condoms, made by glovers from linen or animal gut became available in the sixteenth century, named after the cowls worn by monks whose licentious behaviour was often cited as the reason for the Reformation. Early lambskin condoms were known as the Venus Glove. However, these would have been expensive and beyond the reach of most. In addition, certain times were prohibited for sexual activity. Sundays, Lent and saint’s days were debarred, although this was clearly not strictly followed as some churches insisted those indulging during that time must be denied communion or do public penance. Contemporary wisdom advised abstinence at the height of summer, as sexual activity overheated and dried the body, although the parish records show a conception cycle which suggests otherwise. More encounters took place in warmer weather, with young people taking advantage of greater degrees of privacy offered by the great outdoors, resulting in peaks in the birth rate the following spring.

What is perhaps more surprising is that Catherine did not conceive whilst married to Henry. The rumours in July 1540 of her potential pregnancy proved to be just that. He had been disappointed four year before that Jane Seymour had not conceived sooner; now he was approaching fifty. After his recent claims to have been experiencing ‘twice nightly’ excretions to prove his ability, and despite lavishing Catherine with public physical affection, she gave no indication of being with child. This may have been embarrassing for the king who would not have liked the implication that he was ‘not a man like any other’ but it was not just a royal problem. Then, as now, some couples clearly found it easier to achieve conception than others. Baptismal records are inconclusive on this; some wives conceived before or very soon after the wedding, whilst others did not for several years. In the case of infertility, it would be unlikely for a yeoman, craftsman or labourer to be able to afford the advice of a doctor, even if that doctor had been able to help: medical diagnoses were based on the four humours; hot, cold, wet and dry and imbalances might be addressed by certain foods. Cheaper methods would be passed by oral tradition through the social network: a mixture of chestnuts, pistachios and pine nuts boiled down in sugar and ragwort was a recommended aphrodisiac. A mixture of rabbit’s blood, sheep urine, mare’s milk and mugwort were also reported to enhance fertility. Alternatively, large winged ants were mixed with the testicles of quail, bark oil and amber and applied to the member; failing that, a tourniquet to the left testicle or the sympathetically shaped Mandrake root was recommended. Bald’s ninth-century
Leechbook
suggested agrimony boiled in ewe’s milk would provoke an insufficiently virile man, whilst boiling the herb in Welsh beer would produce the opposite results.