Young and Damned and Fair: The Life and Tragedy of Catherine Howard at the Court of Henry VIII

Sigh out a lamentable tale of things

Done long ago, and ill done; and when sighs

Are wearied, piece up what remains behind

With weeping eyes, and hearts that bleed to death.

– John Ford, The Lover’s Melancholy (1628)

A benefit of being executed was that one avoided any chance of the dreaded mors improvisa, a sudden death by which a Christian soul might be denied the opportunity to make their peace. So when Thomas Cromwell was led out to his death on 28 July 1540, he had the comfort of knowing that he had been granted the privilege of preparing to stand in the presence of the Almighty. The day was sweltering, one in a summer so hot and so dry that no rain fell on the kingdom from spring until the end of September, but the bulky hard-bitten man from Putney who had become the king’s most trusted confidant and then his chief minister1 (#litres_trial_promo) walked cheerfully towards the scaffold.2 (#litres_trial_promo) He even called out to members of the crowd and comforted his nervous fellow prisoner Walter, Lord Hungerford, whose sanity was questionable, and who had been condemned to die alongside him for four crimes, all of which carried the death penalty. Firstly, he had allegedly committed heresy, in appointing as his private chaplain a priest rumoured to remain loyal to the pope. Secondly, he was accused of witchcraft, by consorting with various individuals, including one named ‘Mother Roche’, to use necromancy to guess the date of the king’s death. Treason was alleged through the appointment of his chaplain and his meeting with the witch, which constituted a crime against the king’s majesty. He was also found guilty of sodomy, ‘the abominable and detestable vice and sin of buggery’, made a capital crime in 1534, in going to bed with two of his male servants, men called William Master and Thomas Smith.3 (#litres_trial_promo)

Rumours, fermenting in the baking heat and passed between courtiers, servants, merchants and diplomats who had nothing to do but sweat and trade in secrets, had already enlarged the scope of Lord Hungerford’s crimes. The French ambassador reported back to Paris that the condemned man had also been guilty of sexually assaulting his own daughter. It was whispered that Hungerford had practised black magic, violating the laws of Holy Church that prohibited sorcery as a link to the Devil. Others heard that Hungerford’s true crime had been actively plotting the murder of the king.4 (#litres_trial_promo) None of those charges were ever mentioned in the indictments levelled against Hungerford at his trial, but the man dying alongside him had perfected this tactic of smearing a victim with a confusing mélange of moral turpitudes guaranteed to excite prurient speculation and kill a person’s reputation before anyone was tempted to raise a voice in their defence.

The hill where they now stood had been the site of the finales to some of Cromwell’s worst character assassinations. It had been there, four years earlier on another summer’s day, that George Boleyn had perished before similarly large crowds after Cromwell arranged a trial that saw him condemned to death on charges of incest and treason. The details of Boleyn’s alleged treason had been kept deliberately vague during the trial, while the prosecution’s fanciful descriptions of his incestuous seduction of his sister had been excruciatingly, pornographically vivid. Boleyn, as handsome as Adonis and proud as Icarus, had defended himself so well against the accusations there had been bets that he would be acquitted.5 (#litres_trial_promo) When he was not, when he was condemned to die alongside four other men two days later, no one could risk speaking out for a man found guilty of committing such a bestial act.

Boleyn had died in sight of the Tower’s brooding walls, its cupolas and fortifications twin testaments to the inescapably neurotic nature of power. Within the Tower’s sheltered courtyards, George’s Boleyn’s sister, Queen Anne, was executed in a more private setting, before a carefully vetted crowd of around one thousand, which was tiny in comparison to that allowed to gather beyond the walls to watch her brother perish – and now Cromwell and Walter Hungerford.6 (#litres_trial_promo) Like Thomas More before her, another political heavyweight in whose destruction Cromwell had been intimately involved, Anne Boleyn had embraced the sixteenth century’s veneration for the ars moriendi – the art of dying.

The veil between life and death was made permeable by the teachings of Christianity. Everywhere one looked, there was proof of society’s lively fascination with the next life. Death was the great moral battleground between one’s strengths and weaknesses; the supreme test came when the finite perished and the eternal began. To die well, in a spirit of resignation to the Will of God and without committing a sin against hope by despairing of what was to come next, was a goal endlessly stressed to the Faithful in art, sermons, homilies and manuals. Within the great basilica of Saint-Denis in Paris, the tomb of King Louis XII and Anne of Brittany, his queen, showed the couple rendered perfect in the stonemasons’ marble, united atop the monument, their bejewelled hands clasped in prayer, their robes and crowns exquisitely carved; but beneath that sculpture the craftsmen had offered a very different portrait of the royal forms – there, the bodies of the king and queen were shown twisting and writhing in the first stages of putrefaction, their feet bare, their hair uncovered and their flesh pullulating with the onset of corruption.7 (#litres_trial_promo) Throughout Europe, these cadaver tombs, the transi, were commissioned by the rich and the powerful to show their submission to the final destruction of their flesh and with it the removal of this sinful world’s most potent temptations. In corruption they had been born and so through corruption they could be born again.

In the sixteenth century, life was precious, truncated at any moment by plague, war or one of a thousand ailments that would be rendered treatable in the centuries to come, and so the people embraced it with a rare zeal. But living well, as Anne Boleyn had noted at her trial, also meant dying well.8 (#litres_trial_promo) Christians were supposed to die bravely because of the surety of mercy that even the weakest and most sinful was guaranteed by their religion, provided he or she had respected its doctrines and honoured its God. Before they were marched to the hill, Cromwell told Lord Hungerford that ‘though the breakfast which we are going to be sharp, yet, trusting to the mercy of the Lord, we shall have a joyful dinner’.9 (#litres_trial_promo) To the overwhelming number of Henry VIII’s subjects, Christianity was not a theory, it was not a belief system, it was not one religion among many – it was, more or less, a series of facts, the interpretation of which could be debated, but whose essential truth was inescapable and uncontested. The result of this way of accepting and experiencing their faith was that sixteenth-century Christians often behaved in ways which were paradoxically far more devout but also far more relaxed than their modern-day co-religionists. The line between sinners and the flock was not so clearly delineated, because even the worst members of society were still, in one way or the other, almost certainly believing Christians. All men were weak, all men would fail, all men would die, all men could be saved.

A celebrated person’s execution, their final public performance, was such an exciting event that people made the journey into London especially for it. Vast crowds surged through London, converging on Tower Hill to watch the annihilation of the detested commoner who had somehow risen to become Earl of Essex – a sign of royal favour given to him only a few weeks before he was arrested at a meeting of the Privy Council and taken to the Tower. The last ascent in the life of the Englishman who had risen farther than anyone else in his century were the wooden steps to the scaffold. Thomas Cromwell had not been a popular figure, but royal advisers seldom are. Snobbery played a large role in his reputation – an English diplomat described Cromwell as a man who had been ‘advanced from the dunghill to great honour’ – but so did his actions.10 (#litres_trial_promo) Ruthless, determined, brilliant, and utterly Machiavellian, Cromwell had overseen the destruction of many an aristocratic career and the evisceration of the old religion in England. Many of his opponents blamed him for tearing asunder the spiritual framework that they had lived, and hoped to die, by. The sacraments and liturgies of the Church had given a rhythm to the year, they had bestowed the tools for salvation on the faithful for centuries, and marked every major moment in a Christian’s life. In 1536, Cromwell had weathered the Pilgrimage of Grace, a traditionalist uprising which spread through most of northern England and which had demanded his removal from power. However, he could not survive the loss of the king’s favour four years later. His enemies surrounded him and he was condemned to death on a long list of crimes that included heresy, treason, and financial corruption.

The crowds entering the capital on 28 July 1540 came from every background, with well-born women wearing veils to shield their faces from the sun, while urchins wore battered hand-me-down cheap leather shoes which prevented their feet from being cut on the animal bones and refuse that littered the city streets. With no rain, the mud in the streets had become a dry dust that would turn into ankle-depth filth when the clouds broke in autumn. The spectators passed through the capital’s eighteen-foot high defensive walls via one of the seven gates. Those travelling in from the Hampshire and Surrey countryside entered through Newgate, while those from nearby Smithfield, home to a bustling meat market, accessed the City at Aldersgate. Smithfield also contained London’s designated red-light district, the aptly named Cock Lane. Subtlety in the assigning of place names was not a medieval strongpoint. The southwestern city of Exeter had renamed one of its rivers Shitbrook, because of the amount of faeces and waste it contained, and in Oxford, students hoping for an early sexual experience courtesy of the town’s prostitutes could find it on Gropecunt Lane, a narrow alley that ran from just opposite the university church of St Mary the Virgin down to the entrance of Oriel College.11 (#litres_trial_promo)

Rather more elegant sights awaited those who were travelling towards Cromwell’s execution via the Strand, a long straight road lined with the episcopal palaces and impressive homes of the aristocracy. The Strand had been the site of the Savoy Palace, principal residence of Richard II’s powerful uncle John of Gaunt, until it was burned down during the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381. It was eventually replaced by the Hospital of St John the Baptist, one of the most impressive medical establishments in early modern Europe, founded under the patronage of Henry VIII’s father. Near the hospital was one of the Eleanor Crosses, funerary monuments erected by a grief-stricken Edward I in 1290 to mark each of the fourteen spots where his wife’s coffin rested on its final journey to Westminster Abbey. This, the last halt before the interment, was now where professional water-sellers took advantage of the area’s excellent plumbing, which on occasion pumped the local fountains with wine or beer to celebrate an especially significant royal event – the last time had been for the birth of the heir to the throne, Prince Edward, in 1537. On a hot and busy day like this, as families and groups of friends swarmed towards the Tower, the Charing Cross water-sellers could reasonably have expected to turn a handsome profit.12 (#litres_trial_promo)

London in July 1540 was the perfect capital for Henry VIII’s domains: a broken society whose fracture lines were both reflected and grotesquely magnified throughout the city. Along the banks of the Thames, formerly semi-rural areas like Deptford and Woolwich were now shipyards for the Royal Navy, where titanic amounts of money poured into the construction of warships designed to repel the French and Spanish, if they ever came. Londoners grumbled at the despoiling of some of the few green areas left to them; they valued their leaf-dappled refuges so much that earlier in the king’s reign thousands had rioted over plans to encroach on the area of parkland around Soho, a district which got its name from a traditional hunting cry, ‘So, ho!’

Riots were rare in Henrician England, but tensions were constant and none were more intense than those caused by the country’s break with Rome. Seven years before Cromwell’s execution, the king had repudiated papal authority and embarked upon his own version of the Reformation in what rapidly became one of the least articulate government policies in British history. There was absolutely no clear strategy for where the Church of England should go once it was commanded from London rather than Rome. The king, who had harnessed anti-clericalism in Parliament to secure his dream of annulling his marriage to Katherine of Aragon, had then hurled himself into what initially looked like the wholesale dismemberment of English Catholicism. The severing of obedience to the Vatican was the initial step in a legal, cultural, and economic revolution. The monasteries were dissolved, or pressured to surrender, first the smaller abbeys, then the larger and wealthier. On the eve of the Reformation, about one-third of the land in England belonged to the Church and so the seizure of its assets became an unsavoury bonanza for the government and its supporters, whose loyalty to the regime was often bought with gifts of land taken from the religious orders.

The first human casualties after the break with Rome had been the conservatives who could not in good conscience abjure their oaths of loyalty to the pope. There were some among them who, despite their misgivings, were prepared to acknowledge that canon law just about permitted the king’s banishment of Katherine of Aragon and marriage to Anne Boleyn, whom even Thomas More had acknowledged as ‘this noble woman royally anointed queen’, but under no circumstances could they accept that Henry had the right to make himself Supreme Head on Earth of the Church of England and Ireland.13 (#litres_trial_promo) Thomas More, the country’s former Lord Chancellor, and the esteemed scholar Cardinal John Fisher went to the block in 1535. The leaders of the Carthusian order of monks were hanged until they were half dead, cut down to be castrated, disembowelled and only then beheaded. The country folk coming into London through Newgate for Cromwell’s death had to pass by the looming, grey-stoned edifice of Newgate prison, where three hermits, one deacon and six monks had been stripped, chained to posts with their hands tied behind their backs and simply left to starve to death in their cells, rotting towards martyrdom in excruciating pain and their own gathering excrement. One plucky Catholic lady, a doctor’s wife, disguised herself as a milk maid, bribed the guards to let her into the cell and fed, watered and bathed the condemned gentlemen. The gaolers tightened security after the king irritably asked how the condemned men had remained alive for so long.14 (#litres_trial_promo)

A few miles to the west of the prison was Tyburn, the site of near-daily executions of criminals – rapists, horse thieves, forgers and murderers. It was here that many of the Carthusian monks met their end after being processed through the streets tied to a wicker hurdle pulled by a slow-moving horse. Back at Smithfield, within sight of the grubby walkways of Cock Lane, Father John Forest had been burned to death atop a pyre that consisted of religious statues, including one of Saint Derfel, taken from a pilgrimage centre in north Wales. There was a hideous poetic irony in using the symbols of pre-Reformation Christianity to incinerate one of its most vocal sympathisers.

For the poorest of the poor, the Reformation initially brought a different kind of martyrdom. Admittedly, the Church had not always done all that it could to alleviate poverty, but as medieval Catholicism’s emphasis on charity as a means to secure salvation came under attack by reformers, beggars would have been a depressingly and increasingly familiar sight for the spectators. This was especially true for those from Smithfield whose monastic hospital and poorhouse, St Bartholomew’s Priory, had been shut down during the dissolutions, leaving the local poor and invalided defenceless, friendless and often homeless. Throughout London it was the same, with those who had relied on the Church either for charity or work, wandering the streets, joined by the hundreds who poured in from the countryside where the dissolutions had closed off many traditional forms of employment or benefice. Nor were the seized properties being put to edifying use in the post-monastic world. Courtiers, lawyers and merchants who benefited from the government’s liberality often turned the former abbeys and churches into stinking tenements, overpacked and overpriced, where families lived in pathetically cramped quarters with rampant disease and indifferent landlords. The church of St Martin-le-Grand was demolished to make way for a tavern; Bermondsey Abbey, where Henry VIII’s grandmother Elizabeth Woodville had spent the final few years of her life, became a bull-fighting arena, before it was demolished to make way for the private home of a lawyer who worked on the Court of Augmentations, the legal body set up to deal with former monastic lands; the Priory of St Mary Overy became a bear-baiting pit. Statues of saints and angels had been torn from their niches and burned in a crusade against the old ways; yet even with such zeal from the iconoclastic reformers, clear religious policy, vital in an age which still carried the death penalty for heresy, proved elusive.

Thomas Cromwell, rising to power during the break with Rome and then securing his position at the king’s side thanks to his indefatigable work on the dissolutions, was seen as the Reformation’s henchman by its opponents and ‘an organ of Christ’s glory’ by its supporters; he seems to have believed in the Reformation’s mission and to have risked much to support those who shared his spirituality.15 (#litres_trial_promo) Whether he was as indifferent to its human cost as is usually supposed is unclear, but that he never shirked from unpleasant tasks is certain. The quartered limbs and parboiled heads of dead traitors were on prominent display throughout the capital, with the skulls of the most famous offenders sitting atop pikes that jutted out over the nineteen arches of London Bridge. They would stay there until they had been stripped clean by birds and the elements.

Bile and viciousness increased on both sides of the confessional divide as the king, with God in one eye and the Devil in the other, brooded like Shelley’s Ozymandias over a kingdom riven by divisions. Who was in and who was out at the centre of government changed constantly and, unlike most of his predecessors, Henry VIII seemed to want his fallen favourites to vanish into the vast silence of mortality rather than simply leave the sunlight of his presence. Cromwell had previously helped arrange the exits of other favourites, now he was enduring the same agony.

We may know now that the Tudor dynasty was successful in holding on to power, and in preventing both civil war and foreign invasion, in the same way we know that the United States and her allies prevailed in the Cold War, but those attending Cromwell’s execution had no such assurances, and paranoia was rampant, a communal insecurity for which the king’s glamorously bizarre behaviour must bear a large portion of the blame. To have embarked upon something as seismic as the schism with the Vatican without having a clear strategy for the years ahead was foolish, but to then change his mind as often as he did with something as sacred and vital to his people’s understanding of themselves was criminally incompetent. When Henry VIII had exhausted the wealth of the Church, he began to lose interest in the Reformation; his natural conservatism reawakened and he was appalled by the many Protestant sects that were using the newfound availability of the Bible to interpret God’s Word for themselves, in many cases reaching conclusions that Henry regarded as rank heresy. The pendulum began to swing in the opposite direction, with legislation known as the Six Articles reaffirming the government’s commitment to Catholic theology. Protestants nicknamed the laws ‘the whip with six strings’ and the arrests of religious radicals began once their patron, Cromwell, was no longer in a position to protect them. At Smithfield, the local authorities were busy setting up another pyre to burn three Lutherans, Robert Barnes, Thomas Gerard and William Jerome, who had once preached their gospel with Cromwell’s support. They were to die on the 30th, two days after Cromwell. With intimidation, espionage, cancerous fears of enemies foreign and domestic, and bitter sectarian tensions, Henrician England and Ireland were countries tottering permanently on the edge and many blamed Thomas Cromwell for organising the march to the precipice.

In the countryside, beyond the stench and sweat of the crowd assembled to watch Cromwell’s and Hungerford’s deaths, Edmund Bonner, Bishop of London, prepared to preside over the king’s wedding service to Catherine Howard. The pretty palace of Oatlands sat in a rolling deer park, its loveliness marred only by the building work that the king, with his passion for architecture, had ordered three years earlier when the manor had come into his possession.16 (#litres_trial_promo) A fortune was spent on transforming the seldom-used Oatlands into a retreat fit for the sovereign – an octagonal tower, still a work in progress on the day Cromwell was struck down, was added to the courtyard. Terraced gardens were constructed with multiple fountains, each one an enormous extravagance splashing cooling streams of water. An orchard, its mature trees groaning under the weight of fruit, offered shade to the heads of courtiers and servants, as they endured the stifling heat. The trees were old, but the orchard was not. They had been uprooted from St Peter’s Abbey at nearby Chertsey, a nine-century-old monastery founded by Saint Erkenwald, one of the earliest bishops of London, and brought to grace the king’s gardens when the abbey was shut down, its brothers expelled and its possessions stripped by Cromwell’s inspectors. The stones that built the little palace’s extension had come from the Augustinian priory at Tandridge as it was pulled down to make way for aristocratic demesnes. The price paid by many of his subjects for the king’s religious revolution weighed heavily and silently on Oatlands, but as thick carpets from the Ottoman Empire, chairs upholstered in velvets and cloth of gold, gilt cups, bejewelled table services, and beds hung with cloth of silver were all processed into Oatlands, there was little outward sign of the stresses and tribulation that had gone into making it suitable for the royal household.17 (#litres_trial_promo)

An Oxford graduate in his early forties, Edmund Bonner had risen from relative obscurity, which encouraged accusations that he had been born out of wedlock, to become England’s ambassador to France and, after that, Bishop of London.18 (#litres_trial_promo) He had secured both his ambassadorship and episcopacy through Thomas Cromwell’s patronage, yet like everybody else he had abandoned Cromwell in his hour of need. The latter’s frantic letters from prison, entreating royal mercy from Henry, written in a disjointed and panicky mess compared to his usual precise calligraphy, had gone unanswered, as Cromwell’s former dependants turned their faces from him, as if he had never existed.

We cannot say for certain where in Oatlands Catherine Howard resided during her wedding visit. Recent excavations of the palace have given us a better picture of its layout and the safest guess would be that her rooms were in the queen’s apartments, located in the palace’s southern towers between the inner and outer courtyards. From any eastern- or western-facing windows above the quadrangle, she would have had beautiful views of either the orchard with its purloined apple trees, the octagonal dovecote or the ornamental gardens circling the fountains. From just above the entrance to the inner courtyard, she would have been able to see the ramp that had recently been installed to help her husband-to-be mount what must have been a particularly sturdy steed. Beyond the walls lay the deer park where she and the king would spend a few days of hunting as part of a ten-day honeymoon.

She was in her late teens, slender, like most of the Howard women, with a ‘very delightful’ appearance, according to the French ambassador.19 (#litres_trial_promo) The court’s temporary reduction in size and then its removal to the relative obscurity of Oatlands fuelled speculation that she was already pregnant; Catherine’s petite frame gave the lie to the story, but it would be weeks before she was unveiled to the public again and the stories could finally be put to rest.20 (#litres_trial_promo) Sixteenth-century weddings were not usually romantic occasions and the modern idea of writing one’s own vows or of putting the couple’s affection for one another at the centre of the ceremony would have struck Catherine and her contemporaries as bizarre. It was, like an execution, a formal occasion governed by established precedent; there was a proper way of doing things and as she made her way down to the recently renovated chapel near her husband’s tower to stand in front of Edmund Bonner, Catherine, keen to adhere to etiquette after a lifetime spent learning its nuances, had no intention of making a mistake.

The king had arrived at Oatlands earlier that day. Lucrezia Borgia’s twenty-three-year-old son Francesco, Marquis of Massalombarda, had been visiting London for the last week and he was due to leave that evening; the king had entertained him with visits to his palaces at Greenwich and Richmond and given him two fine horses as a parting gift.21 (#litres_trial_promo) It was unusual for a traveller to begin a journey in the evening when visibility was poor, so perhaps the marquis had delayed his departure to make sure he witnessed the executions on Tower Hill. If he did attend, his status would have vouchsafed for him a place at the front of the crowd.

Much as a hush falls when a bride enters a church, a silence settled over the spectators as Cromwell began his final speech.22 (#litres_trial_promo) He delivered it perfectly, thanking God for allowing him to die this way, in full knowledge of what lay ahead, and confessing readily that he was a wretched and miserable sinner who had, like all Christians, fallen short of the standards hoped for by Almighty God: ‘I confess that as God, by His Holy Spirit, instructs us in the truth, so the devil is ready to seduce us – and I have been seduced.’ Then he began to pray – for the king, for ‘that goodly imp’ the heir apparent – and to ask for prayers for himself, though as a reformer he was careful not to ask for prayers for his soul after he was dead but solely ‘so that as long as life remaineth in this flesh, I waiver nothing in my faith’.23 (#litres_trial_promo)

As Catherine, her throat now glittering with pieces from the royal collection, knelt before Edmund Bonner, Cromwell knelt in the sawdust of the scaffold and prayed aloud, ‘O Lord, grant me that when these eyes lose their use, that the eyes of my soul might see Thee. O Lord and father, when this mouth shall lose his use that my heart may say, O Pater, in manus tuas commendo spiritum meum.’24 (#litres_trial_promo) Hungerford, his sanity now snapped entirely, kept interrupting, writhing and screaming at the executioner to get on with his bloody business.25 (#litres_trial_promo) Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey, stood at the forefront of the crowd and watched the scene without pity. He was missing his cousin’s wedding to be here to see his family’s bête noire finished off. Later that day, he could not conceal his good mood. It felt to him like a settling of scores: ‘Now is the false churl dead, so ambitious of others’ blood.’26 (#litres_trial_promo)

More of the Howards may have been at Oatlands to help Catherine, steady any nerves and, as ever, offer advice. A few days earlier, in preparation for the wedding, the king had granted Catherine’s eldest brother Charles five properties in London, while their half sister Isabella got a manor house in Wiltshire and all the lands that had once belonged to Malmesbury Abbey. As a gift for performing the service, Bishop Bonner’s debts were paid off by the royal household and he was given a set of gold dining plate that had been confiscated from his predecessor during the dissolutions.27 (#litres_trial_promo) The newly enriched Isabella, wife to the queen’s vice-chamberlain, was almost certainly in attendance in her capacity both as Catherine’s sister and lady-in-waiting. This was the second queen Isabella would serve and her husband’s fifth. Both were too clever to give any thought to the merry-go-round of queens consort, or rather, any voice. A woman would soon be imprisoned for asking of the king: ‘How many wives will he have?’28 (#litres_trial_promo)

At the Tower, Lord Hungerford’s wish that the headsman should acquit his task quickly was not to be fulfilled. Edward Hall described Cromwell’s executioner as ‘ragged [and] butcherly’, who ‘very ungoodly performed his office’.29 (#litres_trial_promo) No more details are provided about what went wrong with the beheading, but rumour began with the claim it had taken three strokes to cut through the minister’s thick neck. By the end of the month, entertainment had triumphed over plausibility with stories that it had taken two headsmen half an hour to kill him and allegations that Cromwell’s enemies, who had been seen banqueting and celebrating throughout the week preceding his death, had taken the executioner out to feast him the night before, to get him drunk and hope that with a hangover he would give Cromwell as painful a death as possible. All we know for certain is Edward Hall’s remark that the executioner had carried out the task in an ‘ungoodly’ manner and that afterwards Cromwell’s head was taken with Lord Hungerford’s to gaze and rot from the top of the pikes at London Bridge.

From the little chapel at Oatlands and the imposing towers of London, bells tolled out to mark a wedding and a death. Bells still tolled too every second day of November, the Feast of All Souls, the Catholic Day of the Dead, when Christ’s flock on earth were compelled to remember their brothers and sisters in the faith who had gone before them. They would toll again on the fifteenth day of August, the Feast of the Assumption, to mark the entry of the Virgin Mary into Heaven, there to be crowned its queen, as foretold, so the Church taught, in the visions of Saint John in the Book of Revelation.30 (#litres_trial_promo) Celestial queens had not yet been abolished, despite the best efforts of the Protestant evangelicals and the man who had fallen on Catherine’s wedding day. But in a world where statues of Our Lady could be taken from Norfolk and torched in front of large London crowds with Cromwell watching on, it did not seem as if the Virgin Mary was any more secure on her throne than Katherine of Aragon or Anne Boleyn had been on theirs. It was an age of uncertainty and terrifying possibilities, and Catherine Howard was now its queen.

Chapter 2

Our Fathers in Their Generation (#ulink_609d9aa8-64e0-5b47-bb77-e963de7bde97)

Let us now praise men of renown, and our fathers in their generation.

– Ecclesiasticus 44:1

The first recorded mention of Catherine Howard, born as she was in the decade before the government made mandatory parish-level records of each baptism, comes from a will.1 (#litres_trial_promo) Her maternal grandmother, Isabel Worsley, left a bequest, ‘To Charles Howard Henry George Margaret Catherine Howard XXs [twenty shillings] each.’2 (#litres_trial_promo) It is a very quiet entrance for a future queen of England – Catherine is even upstaged in the concluding half of the sentence by her younger sister Mary, who, as Isabel’s goddaughter, received a more substantial bestowal of £10.3 (#litres_trial_promo) Yet it is from the Worsleys and their kin that much of the relevant evidence about Catherine’s early years originates.

Beyond its object as a matter of general historical interest in showcasing how prosperous members of county society chose to dispose of their earthly possessions on the eve of the Reformation – rather touching is Isabel’s stipulation that every housewife in Stockwell, part of Isabel’s home parish of Lambeth, should receive a gift of linen worth twelve pence or, failing that, a monetary gift of the same amount; likewise her decision to set aside £6 to repair a local highway – the will, which went to probate on 26 May 1527, proves that Catherine had been born, with time to spare for a younger sister, by the spring of that year.4 (#litres_trial_promo) As with all four of Henry VIII’s English-born wives, and many of their contemporaries, we are left to guess when they arrived in the world using fragmentary evidence provided by throwaway or contested remarks from those who knew them or saw them, personal letters, family wills, and comments in contemporary memoirs or chronicles. The analysis of these documents has thus produced a broad spectrum of supposition. In Catherine’s case, suggestions for her birthdate have run the gamut from 1518 to 1527. The promotion of the former date seems motivated mainly by a desire to rehabilitate a particularly dubious portrait, which will be discussed subsequently, while support for the later years partly derives from the account of a Spanish merchant living in London late in Henry VIII’s reign, who described Catherine as ‘a mere child’ at the time of her marriage in 1540.

While both Catherine and her younger sister are mentioned in Isabel’s final testament of 1527, they are absent from the will of her husband, Sir John Leigh, which is usually dated to 1524. Their three brothers, Charles, Henry, and George, are mentioned in both.5 (#litres_trial_promo) The year 1525, which leaves time for a younger sister to be born and named as Isabel’s goddaughter by 1527, has thus gained understandable acceptance as Catherine’s most likely date of birth in several recent accounts of her career.6 (#litres_trial_promo) Critics of this conclusion point out that the two sisters’ absence from Sir John’s will proves nothing, because in a patriarchal society like early modern England, it would be unusual for very young female members of a family to be mentioned in the wills of male relatives.

In fact, both conclusions are arrived at by misreading John Leigh’s testament. While codicils pertaining to the distribution of some parcels of land were added in August 1524, the will itself was actually written nearly a year earlier, and dated 16 June 1523. If the Leighs’ documents are to be used as bookends for Catherine’s arrival, they establish a date between the summer of 1523 and the spring of 1527. Furthermore, far from focusing solely on the male members of his line, John Leigh made numerous gifts to young female members of his extended family, including all Catherine’s elder half sisters. They, admittedly, were Leighs, but it seems unlikely that John Leigh would also include all Catherine’s Howard brothers and neglect to mention her at all, unless she was extremely young, a tentative conclusion that leaves us free to accept the one specific contemporary comment on her age, made by the French diplomat Charles de Marillac, who met Catherine on several occasions in 1540 and 1541, and believed that she had been eighteen years old in 1539–40.7 (#litres_trial_promo) Catherine and de Marillac attended several hunting trips together in the summers of 1540 and 1541, and this seemingly decisive statement from someone well placed to know dates her birth to 1520 or 1521. De Marillac’s credibility is allegedly undercut by the claim that he believed Anne of Cleves to be thirty in 1540, when she was in fact twenty-four, but an examination of the relevant letter shows that on the subject of Anne’s age, de Marillac wrote, ‘Her age one would guess at about thirty.’8 (#litres_trial_promo) An unchivalrous comment, but not necessarily an inaccurate one.9 (#litres_trial_promo) It may very well be that, with Catherine, de Marillac was again basing his estimate on how old she looked.

De Marillac’s estimate of Catherine’s age gains more credibility upon examination of the ages of Catherine’s peers when she joined the court as a maid of honour in 1539. None of the girls who served alongside her was born before 1521, the date of birth for Anne Bassett, the most senior of the group, who had been at court since 1537. One of the girls who joined at the same time as Catherine, her second cousin Katherine Carey, was born either in 1523 or 1524, and while we do not have precise dates for the others, all those who joined within twelve months of Catherine were definitely born at some point in the early-to-mid-1520s.10 (#litres_trial_promo) The implication that Catherine, coming from a similar background into the same position, was five or six years older than the rest – or even three years older than the already established Anne Bassett – stretches credulity. When combined with the evidence of John and Isabel Leigh’s wills, Charles de Marillac’s indirect guess of about 1521 rules out a date as late as 1525, and the biographical details of the other half-dozen or so maids of honour similarly discredit one as early as 1518. None of this is definitive, but when set alongside other circumstantial evidence from Catherine’s life, it suggests 1522 or 1523 as the most probable years of her birth.11 (#litres_trial_promo)

Where she was born is more easily established. Most accounts of Catherine’s life state that her place of birth is a mystery, but in fact regardless of when she was born, it was almost certainly in the parish of Lambeth in the county of Surrey, just south of London.12 (#litres_trial_promo) Before she was born and throughout her childhood, her father Edmund served as a justice of the peace for Surrey, charged with the ‘conservation of the King’s peace’ and to ‘punish delinquents … [and] hear and determine felonies’ in the king’s name.13 (#litres_trial_promo) Directives to him from the Privy Council, issued on either side of Catherine’s birth, as well as evidence from family accounts, place him specifically in Lambeth – for a time, he lived in a house on Church Street, part of what is now Lambeth Bridge Road.14 (#litres_trial_promo) Several members of Edmund’s family had homes in Lambeth, most prominently Norfolk House, a mansion renovated at the command of Edmund’s father which subsequently functioned as the Dukes of Norfolk’s main residence near the capital.15 (#litres_trial_promo) For a Howard, Lambeth was the most logical place in Surrey to set up residence, and as further examination of his finances make clear, by the 1520s Edmund could only, indeed barely, afford one establishment, so it is highly unlikely that Catherine could have been born anywhere else. It was from his father that Edmund acquired his home on Church Street.16 (#litres_trial_promo)

Lambeth was, to use a modern term but ancient concept, a place of high property prices, favoured by the elite for its proximity to Westminster and the court, and in 1522 the Howards began construction of a family chapel within the pretty riverside church of St Mary-at-Lambeth. That chapel has now all but vanished, although the church itself remains, significantly renovated by the Victorians and preserved as a horticultural museum. As in Catherine’s lifetime, the building nestles in the shadow of Lambeth Palace, principal residence of the archbishops of Canterbury.

In the 1520s, the Church prohibited even the grandest families from carrying out private christenings in the intimate chapels that were ubiquitous in any aristocratic dwelling. Baptism inducted a soul into the community of the faithful, and so unless the baby looked likely to die shortly after its birth, the clergy insisted that christenings could only be carried out at the local parish church. Given her father’s residency as a JP for Surrey and her family’s ties to St Mary’s, then the local parish church, it is more than probable that shortly after her birth, Catherine was brought to its porch by her godparents and midwife.17 (#litres_trial_promo) Regrettably, there is no record of who they were.

Baby Catherine had no right to look upon the interior of the church proper until she had been baptised. The local priest arrived in the porch to greet the baptismal party, which, as was customary, did not include the parents.18 (#litres_trial_promo) He inquired after the child’s gender. When they told him that they had brought a girl, the padre placed Catherine on his left side – boys went to the right. As the door into the interior opened, the sign of the cross was made on Catherine’s forehead, and the priest, his hand resting on her forehead, asked her name. After answering ‘Catherine’, her godparents handed the priest some salt and he put a little into Catherine’s mouth. Prayers were intoned over her during the ‘exorcism of the salt’, a symbolic banishing of the taste of sin that the Devil had brought to Eden, and the sign of the cross was made over her forehead twice more. More homage was paid to Holy Scripture when the priest spat into his left hand, dipped the thumb of his right hand into the spittle, and rubbed it onto Catherine’s nose and ears to remind the party of how Christ had healed a deaf and dumb man who sought His aid.19 (#litres_trial_promo) As the sign of the cross was made on Catherine’s tiny right hand, the priest told her that all this was done ‘so that you may sign yourself and repel yourself of the party of the Enemy. And may you remain in the Catholic faith and have eternal life and life for ever and ever. Amen.’20 (#litres_trial_promo) Now, at last, she could enter the hallowed ground, and before she passed from porch to church, the priest announced, ‘Catherine, go into the temple of God.’

The clergyman, the baby, and her guardians took a few steps to the font, where Catherine was stripped of her christening robe and her godparents answered questions on her behalf, confirming not just her admission to the Catholic faith but also their role as sponsors of her spiritual development. Even if they did not speak Latin, the adults knew enough from a lifetime of services in that language to respond with ‘Abrenuncio’ when the priest asked, ‘Abrenuncias sathane?’ After renouncing the Devil, they responded with the same answer to the question, ‘Et omnibus operibus eius?’ (‘And all his works?’) Likewise for the final question, ‘Et omnibus pompis eius?’ (‘And all his pomp?’) With oil on his fingers, the priest made the sign of the cross on Catherine’s chest and back, before asking the godparents, ‘Quid petis?’ They answered that they sought ‘Baptismum’. To clarify that they wished to see her admitted to the eternal Church, the priest pressed, in ecclesiastical Latin, ‘Vis baptizari?’ (‘Do you wish to be baptised?’) And they answered, simply, ‘Volo.’ (‘I do.’) The priest then shifted Catherine in his arms so that her head faced the east, and he intoned the words, ‘Et ego baptizo te in nomine patris’ just before he fully submerged her in the holy water. (‘And I baptise you in the name of the Father.’) Then he plucked the infant from the font, turned to face the south, immersed her again in the name of the Son and then, this time upside down, in the name of the Holy Spirit. Finally, the priest passed what was quite probably a crying baby into the arms of her most senior godparent, who held Catherine as she was bundled into a chrisom, a hooded robe that covered her forehead and body to preserve the signs of her baptism.

Her godparents held a candle in Catherine’s little hands as the priest prayed, ‘Receive a burning and inextinguishable light. Guard your baptism. Observe the charge, so that when the Lord comes to the wedding, you may be able to meet him with the saints in the hall of heaven.’21 (#litres_trial_promo) That duty was stressed to the godparents, who were also enjoined to make sure she knew her Our Father, Hail Mary, and Apostles’ Creed. Catherine was taken home in the borrowed chrisom; her mother would return the garment when she was ready to rejoin society.

Within a year or so of her birth, Catherine’s father joined most of the other Howards at Framlingham Castle in Suffolk for his father’s funeral. In May 1524, there was little outward sign that they all stood on the precipice of an unfamiliar world. The Reformation, the real undertaker of the Middle Ages, was not quite seven years old, and its influence had yet to be significantly felt by the majority of Tudor subjects. There was no deviation from the centuries-old Catholic liturgy as the Howards gathered to bury their patriarch, and saviour, Thomas Howard, 2nd Duke of Norfolk, dead at the age of eighty in the county of his birth.22 (#litres_trial_promo)

Unlike a christening, most aristocratic farewells in the sixteenth century were neither an intimate affair nor a single ceremony. The late duke had nine surviving children by the time he died in May 1524, several of whom had children of their own, giving Catherine kinship to most of the great landed families.23 (#litres_trial_promo) Catherine’s aunt Elizabeth was married to Sir Thomas Boleyn, head of one of the wealthiest families in Kent and currently in pursuit of his right to succeed his Irish grandfather as Earl of Ormond.24 (#litres_trial_promo) Anne Howard was already a countess through her marriage to the head of the de Vere family. In the months preceding the duke’s death, Edmund’s unmarried sisters were affianced, and the fractious negotiations concerning their dowries and widows’ rights were tidied up. The second youngest, also confusingly christened Elizabeth,* (#ulink_dfccd30b-a6bb-529a-991b-5d3f9a9ca1bc) was betrothed to the heir of Lord Fitzwalter, another prominent East Anglian landowner.25 (#litres_trial_promo) Katherine, the youngest and fieriest of the late duke’s daughters, was accompanied to the funeral by her handsome if equally temperamental fiancé Rhys, scion of a successful political family in south Wales – Rhys had an ailing grandfather who was not expected to live much longer.26 (#litres_trial_promo) In Wales, the young man was known as Rhys ap Gruffydd, but the English often preferred to anglicise the couple’s surname to ‘Griffiths’.27 (#litres_trial_promo) The only Howard sister left unattached at the time of their father’s funeral was Lady Dorothy, but her father had ‘left for her Right, good substance to marry her with’, and the family eventually arranged a wedding with the Earl of Derby.28 (#litres_trial_promo)

That will left Edmund’s stepmother Agnes as one of the wealthiest independent women in England. As dowager duchess, she would no longer have access to Framlingham Castle as her home, but she had periodic use of Norfolk House in Lambeth and full-time access to a sizeable country estate near the village of Horsham in Sussex. With the exception the eldest son, none of the old duke’s surviving children, including Edmund, expected much of a windfall from their father’s final testament. While provisions were usually made to fund younger sons’ education or early careers, to prevent the destruction of the family’s patrimony by generations of division by bequests, the nobility endeavoured to pass the inheritance more or less intact to the next in line.29 (#litres_trial_promo) The other siblings’ absence from the will was not therefore a matter for shock or confusion; younger sons could and often did parlay their family name and connections into successful careers of their own. One of the most remarkable aspects of the system was the extent to which even those left out of the posthumous treasure trove seemed to support it as necessary for the common good.