Tudor Queens of England (26 page)

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although always (as she thought) strictly deferential. She wrote and published a book of

Prayers and Meditations
in 1545, which was a unique achievement for any of Henry’s queens, and in consequence attracted rather more praise and attention from humanist scholars and ecclesiastics than she strictly deserved. Whether she had any hand in selecting the evangelical tutors whom the King appointed for his son Edward is more problematical but those who saw her as gently steering her erratic husband in that direction in the last years of his life were probably not wrong.

Too much should not be made of this. John Foxe later told a long and circumstantial story about how the conservative faction at court, led by Stephen Gardiner the Bishop of Winchester, sought to bring about her downfall by incriminating her in the heresy of Anne Askew. Anne was certainly a heretic (as even Cranmer admitted) and she seems to have had supporters within the Queen’s Privy Chamber, but the Queen herself was not touched. The story as told is that Henry had become irritated with his wife for ‘lecturing’ him on theology and that Gardiner seized the opportunity to persuade the King to draw up articles of accusation against her. A copy of these articles then came ‘by chance’ into the Queen’s possession. In spite of her agitation, she hastened to abase herself before her Lord and Master assuring him that her only desire was to learn from his wisdom. Perfect reconciliation and collapse of hostile party!

39
Whether these events actually occurred or not there is a kind of symbolic truth about the story because the Queen and her allies (notably Sir Anthony Denny, the Groom of the Stool) were clearly in the ascendant at Court in the last months of Henry’s life and that accounts for the shape of Edward’s regency Council. When the King went to war in France for the last time in 1544, he left Catherine as governor in his absence and although this was little more than a formality, it was also a studied gesture of confi dence as it had been with her predecessor in 1513 – only this time there was no Scottish invasion and the Queen did not have to go to war.
40
There are some indications that she expected to be named as Regent in the King’s will but in the event she was completely ignored. When it came to the real work of government, Henry was not prepared to entrust it to a woman – why else had he moved heaven and earth to beget a male heir?

Despite her reputation among the evangelicals, there was nothing oppressive about Catherine’s piety. Although she was a keen reader of improving books, her chief delights were in clothes, music and dancing. She loved animals and fl owers, kept jesters both male and female and generally gave the impression of enjoying the good things of life. Mirth and modesty are the two words most commonly used by contemporaries to describe her and she was a conspicuously successful stepmother to two broods of children, fi rst the Nevilles and then the Tudors. 136

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Her friendship with Mary survived the increasing divergence of their religious views and although she saw less of Elizabeth (who was 12 in 1545) and Edward (who was 8), relations appear to have been relaxed and amicable. In the case of the younger children there was no religious tension and Catherine may well have had a hand in appointing their tutors. She was spared the agonizing trauma that affl icted most of Henry’s other queens. Although the succession act of 1544

spoke dutifully of any children to be begotten between the King and his present wife, everyone knew that it was not going t

o happen.41 The unfor
tunate woman was into her third virtually sexless marriage and although nobody was going to tell Henry that, he must have known it perfectly well. The statute confi rmed what everyone knew – that Edward was his heir – but what followed thereafter must have come as a surprise, because if Edward were to die without ‘heirs of his body lawfully begotten’ the Crown was to pass to Mary and after her on the same terms to Elizabeth, neither of whom was legitimated. This was altogether unprecedented, and an expression of how far the power of statute had advanced, even since the last succession Act.

Catherine was not with Henry when he died. Whether this was by custom, inadvertence or someone’s decision is not clear because the King’s demise took no one by surprise. She attended his funeral but only as a spectator. As Queen Dowager she was left at the age of 35 with no political role but a substantial jointure and an unassuaged sexual appetite. For the time being the latter dictated events and within weeks she was secretly married to Lord Thomas Seymour, now the brother of the Duke of Somerset, the Lord Protector. Somerset disapproved of their union for a variety of reasons, not least its haste and a furious quarrel developed between the brothers over the jewels that Catherine claimed had been given to her personally by the late king and which the Protector claimed were Crown property. For about 18 months she was Lady Seymour of Sudeley, presiding over a large household, which also included for a while the King’s sister Elizabeth. She was soon to discover that there were risks attached to having a real man at last and while she was pregnant in the summer of 1548 she found her husband making passes at Elizabeth, now a precocious 14-year-old. The girl was sent away in disgrace but Seymour himself was above reproach. Having at long last conceived a child, Catherine was brought to bed at Sudeley Castle and, on 30 August 1548, gave birth to a healthy daughter. Six days later she contracted puerperal fever as Jane Seymour had done and died with her erring husband beside her. After Henry’s death she had published a second religious work, the

Lamentation of a Sinner
, which was unequivocally Protestant. When she was buried in September 1548 it was with the Protestant rite, which would not become legal until the following year. The ceremony was performed by her

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almoner, the Protestant scholar and future bishop, Miles Coverdale. Catherine had not enjoyed her hard-earned status as Queen Dowager very long. Indeed, apart from her pregnancy it is likely that she did not enjoy it much at all because every time she appeared at court she had to fi ght a petticoat war with the Duchess of Somerset, as each claimed precedence; and as we have seen, her husband had a roving eye which in due course was to contribute to his downfall. That, however, is not part of Catherine’s story; her legacy is to be found in the reign of Elizabeth and the Protestant ascendancy.

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7

The Queen as Whore: Catherine Howard

Anne Boleyn had been condemned for political reasons on the pretext of adultery because that was what had been necessary to touch a raw nerve in the King’s psychology. No such shadow had ever hung over Catherine of Aragon

– indeed if it had done it would have been much easier to get rid of her – or Jane Seymour, or Anne of Cleves, although Henry found her displeasing for several reasons. Catherine Howard was an altogether different proposition. According to the author of the only full study of Catherine: The Queen was accused of having been a woman of ‘abominable carnal desires’ who had craftily and traitorously misled her royal spouse into believing that she was ‘chaste and of pure, clean and honest living’. Worse still, she had followed ‘daily her frail and carnal lust’ …

1

Very similar language had been used of Anne, but this was different because the charges against Catherine were true – or substantially so. The traitorous intent may be questioned, because Catherine had no political agenda and doing away with her husband never crossed her mind, but she certainly behaved like a whore both before and after her marriage. Although she was suffi ciently streetwise to declare at one point that ‘a woman might lie with a man, and yet have no child by him unless she would’, errant sexual behaviour posed an obvious threat to the succession.

2 I
f a woman was sleeping around, how did anyone know whether a child she might bear had been begotten by the King or not? There were no DNA tests in the sixteenth century. So even the most serious charge of treason was justifi able in contemporary terms and it was also treason for the Queen to will the actual bodily harm that her lovers were infl icting upon her. Although to modern eyes Catherine Howard was a stupid and oversexed adolescent who did not remotely deserve to die for her sins, at the time she was a moral outrage. No one ever successfully cheated on Henry VIII, but Catherine tried, uniquely among his consorts, and paid the ultimate price.

She was a younger daughter of Lord Edmund Howard, who was himself a younger brother of the Duke of Norfolk, and his wife, Joyce Culpepper. The couple had ten children altogether and it is not clear where in this 140

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brood Catherine belonged. She had been born in about 1521, and had been offl oaded at the customary age of seven or eight into the grand household kept by her step-grandmother, the dowager Duc

hess.3
This was no doubt thought to be an advantageous placement, but it turned out to be a disastrous mistake. The Duchess’s young ladies, of whom there were several, were not adequately chaperoned and in a sense were left to bring themselves up. It is diffi cult to be certain how much formal education they received. Catherine was later to be literate in English but not in Latin as far as anyone can tell; she could dance, play the lute and knew how to present herself in a courtly setting. She could also probably sustain a conversation in French but she had little or no book learning. In other words, her training was that of an aristocratic damsel destined for the court and a husband among the minor peerage or upper gentry. It was on the disciplinary side that the Dowager Duchess’s regime was particularly defi cient. The

‘maids quarters’ in the great rambling Howard mansion at Horsham resembled nothing so much as a modern student dormitory, and the girls entertained their admirers more or less at will. Catherine’s fi rst affair came at the age of 14, when she ‘had to do’ with a young music teacher named Henry Manno

x.4 This last
ed for about a year, and then Mannox was replaced by a lover of more wealth and status, Francis Dereham. Dereham could have been a serious candidate for her hand in marriage and that may have been why the Duchess, who knew perfectly well what was going on, did not put a stop to it. Agnes Howard may have had her own somewhat eccentric notions of teaching girls how to look after themselves. Because Catherine and Dereham were lovers in the full sense of that word, the latter must have possessed more contraceptive knowledge than a young lady was supposed to have. As we have seen, she admitted as much, and such expertise must have come from somewhere.

In 1539, when she was about 18, Catherine moved out of this somewhat overheated environment into a place in the Chamber establishment of Queen Anne of Cleves. She was described as being very small and of ‘mediocre beauty’. She had none of the courtly accomplishments of Anne Boleyn but was suffi ciently presentable and her kinship with the powerful Duke of Norfolk would have done the rest. There was probably nothing particularly calculated about this appointment. When it was made, no one knew that Anne would turn out to be a pudding or that Henry would react so adversely to her. The requirement was for young ladies with good aristocratic credentials, not for great beauties, nor for sexual educators, although as we have seen the latter were certainly needed. So Catherine came within the King’s fi eld of vision, rather as Anne had done though the household of Catherine, or Jane through that of Anne. There was, however, one big difference. Where Anne had been a fl irt, and Jane had offered

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calm, Catherine was a skilled seductress. It is reasonable to suppose that with her peculiar background she had more sexual experience than any of her colleagues

– even the married ones – and it was this quality that caught the King’s attention. He had failed to consummate his union with Anne, and was full of self-doubt, looking for reassurance, and this adolescent sex-pot was just what he was hoping for

.5
By about March or April of 1540, Henry was beginning to show a serious interest in her, and the Duke and the Dowager Duchess were quick to perceive a political opportunity.

It was not known at that point that the King had decided to end his failed marriage but it would not have required much skill to realize that Catherine’s best initial response should be coy. It worked, and Henry quickly became infatuated. Gossip had already identifi ed her as the King’s latest ‘amour’, long before Anne had any inkling that anything was wrong. Lavish presents began to be sent as early as April, and unlike Jane in similar circumstances, Catherine did not refuse them, so that when convocation dutifully declared the King’s marriage null and void on 9 July, expectations were already formed. The ground was carefully prepared in spite of the shortness of the time. The king’s non-consummation of his existing marriage was ascribed to his having acted under compulsion, a transparent fiction that was aimed against his fallen minister, Thomas Cromwell, then in the Tower awaiting the attentions of the executioner. Moreover Parliament, which now had jurisdiction in such matters, helpfully abolished the impediment of consanguinity insofar as it applied to fi rst cousins – which was the relationship between Catherine and Anne Boleyn. Henry’s marriage to Anne might have been declared null but he had no desire to deny that he had slept with her. Both the French and Imperial courts greeted the repudiation of Anne of Cleves with theatrical displays of incredulity and disgust, which made the English ambassadors’ lives diffi cult for a few weeks, but neither had the slightest intention of taking any action. If even the Duke of Cleves was not prepared to break off diplomatic relations, why should anyone else? Henry and Catherine were married at Oatlands on 28 July and it was observed that he was so uxorious that he could not keep his hands off her, even in public. ‘The king’s affection was so marvellously set upon that gentlewoman, as it was never known that he had the like to any woman’, wrote Cranmer’s secretary Ralph Morice, and most of the comment was similarly indulgent.