Katherine Howard: A New History (16 page)

Why Katherine decided to appoint women who were aware of the unsettling nature of her childhood sexual encounters to important positions within her household must be considered. The indictments later brought against her suspected that it was because they, as her friends and confidantes, were necessary to help facilitate the queen’s sexual encounters with gentlemen at court, including past lovers. It is rather more likely that Katherine feared the consequences were she to refuse favour to those who knew the truth about her affairs in the years 1536 to 1539. Probably, she believed that she could more successfully control and manage these women were she able to keep an eye on them at court. Her behaviour was not idiotic or dangerous, as most historians have wrongly assumed, for queen consorts were readily expected to promote those within their households who had been close to them, either through kinship or friendship. Two weeks before Katherine’s marriage to the king, her old acquaintance Joan Bulmer, dwelling in York, wrote to Katherine, promising ‘her love for her’, declaring her misery because of her unsuccessful marriage and begging Katherine to provide assistance. Praising Katherine’s ‘perfect honesty’ and promising ‘unfeigned love that my hearth hath always borne towards you’, she concluded hopefully that ‘the quyne of Bretane wyll not forget her secretary’.
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It appears, however, that Katherine refused her former acquaintance’s request. Most historians have assumed that Katherine acceded to Joan’s desire for a position within her household, and granted her the office of chamberer. However, the lists for the queen’s household name only four chamberers, none of whom included Joan Bulmer. The chamberers mentioned were Katherine Tylney, Margaret Morton and mistresses Friswith and Loffkyn.
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Joan Bulmer, therefore, seems never to have served Katherine Howard, either as chamberer or in any other position. The lists for the queen’s household make no mention of her, and she does not appear as a prominent witness in the later interrogations. In fact, in her letter to Katherine it is apparent that Joan had not asked for a position within the queen’s household but instead sought ‘some room, the nearer her the better’. It appears that Joan was eager to escape her turbulent marriage, and desired to depart for London where she could meet and converse with the new queen, perhaps to confide in the severe difficulties she was experiencing. Possibly, with knowledge of Katherine’s own sexual experiences, she desired to offer Katherine condolences for what she had been forced to undergo, having herself become aware of what it was to be unhappily married. Rather than attempting to blackmail or threaten Katherine, as some historians have supposed, it is likely, since Katherine was to marry Henry VIII only two weeks later, that Joan both comforted her and warned her of the necessity of keeping quiet about her sexual affairs, particularly with Manox, for both socially and legally, women were commonly blamed and punished for sexual transgressions rather than their male counterparts. Why Katherine may not have responded to Joan’s letter is unknown. Possibly it was because of her own illiteracy, which will later be discussed, but more probably it was because she felt that, days before she married the King of England, anything connected with her former life within the household of the dowager duchess should be forgotten and discarded. On the other hand, perhaps Joan’s husband refused her permission to meet with Katherine.

It cannot be doubted, as has wryly been noted, that ‘we still do not know enough about the position of the queen consort in England’, reflecting ‘the essential maleness of history’.
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This is particularly relevant in relation to Henry VIII’s queens, for while those who made a considerable impact, such as the king’s first two queens, have left considerable evidence of their activities, patronage, and interests, the activities of Henry’s later wives, who reigned for much shorter durations, are less well-known. In contrast with the Renaissance humanism espoused by Katherine of Aragon through her education and the evangelical French humanism of Anne Boleyn, Katherine Howard is commonly thought to have been illiterate and entirely conventional in her religious beliefs.
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However, Katherine of Aragon had been educated as a foreign princess and Anne Boleyn’s father, as an influential courtier and diplomat, had successfully utilised his connections with European courts to ensure that his daughter received an education quite unique for English gentlewomen. By contrast, Katherine Howard’s education befitting her position was more typical of her day, for it had never been envisaged at her birth that she might one day become a queen. Despite this, the king’s new queen is often popularly assumed to have been frivolous, uneducated and even stupid. In the words of one writer, she had ‘little more than puppy fat for brains’.
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However, there is actually no evidence to support this claim – it is Katherine’s alleged adulteries during her period as queen that leads most to assume that she lacked common sense or wisdom. As with Jane Seymour and Anne of Cleves, who both ruled for similarly short periods of time, there is virtually no surviving documentation that indicates the true personality of the king’s fifth queen. As will be discussed in regards to her later activities, it is more likely to have been Katherine’s relative inexperience at the Tudor court, rather than her alleged stupidity, which influenced her actions as queen. Without compelling evidence from the early period of her reign to demonstrate her personal characteristics it is unfair and unwise for historians to characterise Katherine in a negative light, for much of what we do know of her comes from hostile observers under desperate circumstances, in the last few months of her life. Thus the suggestion that her personality was comprised of ‘wild hysteria and agonizing self-appraisals with haughty disdain and senseless cheerfulness’ is not necessarily at all accurate, for surviving source material makes no mention of these supposed traits during the months of her marriage.
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Unlike Anne Boleyn, who had served Katherine of Aragon for at least four years before the king fell in love with her, and Jane Seymour who had similarly been in royal service for around seven years, Katherine was relatively inexperienced at the Tudor court, for it seems apparent that Henry had decided to marry her within months of their first meeting. Having served Anne of Cleves from the winter of 1539-40, at the time of her marriage in July 1540 the new queen had been at court for just seven or eight months. Furthermore, when she married the king she may not yet have been sixteen years of age. Surrounded by knowledgeable and educated women within her household, most of whom were several years older than her, it is not going too far, surely, to suggest that Katherine was somewhat out of her depth when she became Queen of England. This is essential to bear in mind when considering her later activities as queen.

Like her predecessors, the new queen’s image was immortalised in portraits painted by the finest court artists, although it is possible that there are no extant portraits of Katherine still in existence today. The French ambassador described Henry’s new wife in the summer of 1540 as a lady of ‘great beauty’, but upon meeting her in September 1540 found her to be ‘of moderate beauty, but of very attractive deportment, little and strong, of modest demeanour and mild countenance’.
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He also added that she favoured French fashions and encouraged her ladies to follow her, which is interesting in light of Katherine’s portraiture.
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Certainly, during her period as queen, it seems likely that Katherine would have been painted by the masterful Hans Holbein, who had created images of previous queens such as Jane Seymour and Anne of Cleves. However, whether any portraits of Katherine painted by Holbein survive today has been the subject of considerable controversy. In the nineteenth century, a portrait of a young woman in her twenty-first year was identified as Queen Katherine. As has been pointed out, at this time Holbein was in much favour with Henry VIII, making it likely that the king would have commissioned Holbein to paint his young queen.
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Housed today at the Toledo Museum of Art in Ohio, the sitter, not yet twenty-one, wears a rich gown of black silk (see Figure 5). There is some controversy as to whether this signifies that the sitter is a widow, and thus dressed in mourning apparel, or whether or not it merely portrays her high status and excellent lineage, for black was an extremely expensive dye during this period and, as such, only the wealthiest were able to wear it.
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It is instructive that, in most of her portraits, Queen Anne Boleyn is attired in gowns of black. On the basis that the sitter’s attire signifies that she is a widow, and because of a supposed resemblance to Queen Jane, some historians have cautiously suggested that the image portrays Elizabeth Seymour, younger sister of Queen Jane, who was a widow in 1534 following the death of her first husband Sir Anthony Oughtred. However, there are substantial problems with this identification, namely that Elizabeth’s actual birth date is unknown and so it cannot be known for certain whether she was aged twenty or twenty-one in the mid 1530s when she was widowed. Moreover, as Alison Weir usefully suggests, it would be extraordinary for a younger daughter of a mere knight (Sir John Seymour) to wear such extravagant costume, when she herself was relatively unknown in the mid-1530s before her elder sister rose to prominence, and it seems unlikely that, given the proliferation of the image – three versions exist – the sitter was a mere maid-of-honour to Anne Boleyn. It is also doubtful whether or not the sitter really does resemble Jane Seymour, for her colouring, in particular, seems somewhat darker than that of Henry VIII’s third queen.

It is, however, problematic to identify the sitter as Queen Katherine Howard, for the costume of the sitter may date actually from the mid- to late-1530s rather than the early 1540s, when she was briefly queen consort. A further issue is the sitter’s age for, as has been suggested in this study, the queen was aged sixteen in 1540 and almost certainly never reached her twenty-first birthday. The sitter wears a serious, thoughtful expression, almost bordering on matronly propriety. Her hair appears to be reddish-brown, or auburn, with dark eyes, pale skin, a prominent nose and firm chin. The sitter sits with her hands clasped and the fingers interlaced, displaying expensive jewellery. She wears a French hood edged with white, embroidered in gold, with a black veil, a popular headdress that had become fashionable in England during the 1520s and later became associated with Anne Boleyn. By the late 1530s and early 1540s, the headdress began to be worn further and further back on the head until it required a strap worn beneath the chin to keep it in place, as evidenced in this particular portrait. The sleeves are adorned with gold embroidery, with rich cambric ruffles at the wrists. The sitter’s jewellery is also noteworthy, for she wears a narrow necklace, clearly expensive, set with pearls and diamonds, with a large pendant jewel attached. She wears a brooch on her gown from which hangs a circular jewel, edged in gold, with a diamond prominent in the centre. This has intriguingly been suggested as depicting the story of Lot’s wife and the flight of Lot from Sodom.
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Yet ‘it is strange that Catherine [
sic
] Howard should have selected so ominous a subject, so suggestive of the frailty and irresolution of the female mind’.
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Other versions of the portrait exist, with a copy housed in the National Portrait Gallery, which dates from after 1612 and was purchased in 1898. Another version sits in Hever Castle.

Certainly Katherine was famous for the jewellery she enjoyed. Indeed, the author of
The
Chronicle of Henry VIII
somewhat bluntly remembered her as the ‘wife who made him [the King] spend so much in dresses and jewels [...] who every day had some fresh caprice’.
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At New Year 1540-1, the queen was presented with a ‘square containing 27 table diamonds and 26 clusters of pearls’, a brooch constructed of 33 diamonds and 60 rubies with an edge of pearl, and a ‘muffler of black velvet furred with sables containing 38 rubies and 572 pearls’.
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At the time of her downfall, Katherine’s jewellery was delivered to Anne Herbert, sister of the queen’s successor Katherine Parr. During her period as queen, Katherine Howard owned many luxurious items, including:

• •an ‘upper habiliment of goldsmith’s work enamelled and garnished with vij. fair diamonds, vij. fair rubies and vij. fair pearls’
  
• •‘an upper habiliment containing eight diamonds and seven rubies’
  
• •a ‘carcane for the neck, of goldsmith’s work, wherein is set in gold vj. very fair table diamonds, and v. very fair rubies, and betwixt every of the same stones is two fair pearls containing in the whole xxiiij’
  
• •a ‘collar’ of 16 diamonds; two ‘laces’ of ‘xxvij fair table diamonds and clviij fair pearls’
  
• •‘a rope of fair large pearl containing cc pearls’
  
• •‘one fair brooch of gold enamelled with white having a border of antique boys about the same, with a very fair square diamond holden by a man whose coat and boots are enamelled with blue, and a king, crowned, with a sceptre in his hand at th’one end thereof’
  
• •‘a gold brooch with 35 small diamonds and 18 rubies with three persons and two horses in the same being the story of Noye’
  
• •‘a Jesus of gold containing xxxij diamonds having three pearls hanging at the same’
  
• •seventeen girdles of gold
  
• •twenty-three pairs of beads
  
• •eight chains of gold
  
• •tablets of gold
  

The sheer amount of expensive jewellery Katherine enjoyed is incredible. She also made presents of jewellery to her ladies, including to both of the king’s daughters and to his niece Lady Margaret Douglas.
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