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

However, two of the Howard siblings had reason to rue the custom that dictated an undiluted inheritance for the new patriarch: Edmund and Anne, both of whom had come to rely on their father’s help.30 (#litres_trial_promo) Anne was trapped in a miserable marriage to the twenty-five-year-old Earl of Oxford, who, two years earlier, had been sent to live in his father-in-law’s household like an errant child when the royal court decided that his immoderate drinking, dereliction of duty, and reckless spending were besmirching one of the oldest names in the country.31 (#litres_trial_promo) With the duke dead, the chances of the adult earl being allowed to return to his hedonism were much improved, and Anne, like most wives, remained dependent on her husband’s generosity.32 (#litres_trial_promo) For Edmund, his father’s death robbed him of his principal benefactor and patron, adding to the financial worries afflicting him at the time of Catherine’s birth.

In addition to a very large family, their surnames reading like a who’s who of Henry VIII’s England, the Duke of Norfolk’s funeral was also attended by thousands of others, including ‘many great Lords, and the Noble men of both Shires of Norfolk and Suffolk’, who arrived at Framlingham to pay their respects to the old duke and solidify ties to the new.33 (#litres_trial_promo) The kaleidoscope of different servants’ liveries danced through the other guests, the priests, monks, guards, squires, and common people who gathered in the shade of the castle’s walls or lined the route to the Benedictine priory at Thetford, where the duke’s tomb had been prepared.

When Framlingham’s gates, crowned by the Howard coat of arms, swung open, the long cavalcade of choreographed grief snaked its way under the arch and down the hill, passing two artificial lakes, with a dovecote on the manmade island in the middle of the largest body of water. Combined, Framlingham’s two lakes, which were constructed after the damming of a nearby stream, covered nearly twenty-three acres, a perfect reflecting pool for the castle’s thirteen towers, slightly lowered on the Howards’ order to further emphasise the impressive size of the walls. Fashionable red brick extensions, remodelled gardens, new chambers, and the latest in Renaissance design had also been added at the family’s instructions.

As was customary for the aristocratic elite, a wax effigy topped the duke’s bier, rendered as lifelike as possible by the artisans entrusted with the task. One hundred smaller wax effigies had been placed beneath it, representing those who mourned, while space for 700 candles had been set aside, so that even when it travelled at twilight or rested at night, the Duke of Norfolk, and through him the House of Howard, could be illuminated for those hoping to catch a glimpse. Four hundred men, hooded as a sign of mourning and penitence, were assigned to carry torches. Ten thousand people received charitable bequests under the terms of the duke’s will, with the money paid out at the time of the funeral in the hope of encouraging prayers for his posthumous redemption, as well as to display the largesse that the aristocracy prided themselves on. In total, the funeral cost nearly £1,300, at a time when the average weekly income of a skilled worker was about twenty-six pence, and pre-decimalisation of the currency there were 240 pence in every pound.34 (#litres_trial_promo)

The Howards’ quartered coat of arms was displayed on pennants and a thousand cloaks throughout the parade. Four lions could be found on the shield and one as the crest, the motif broken in the third quarter by a chequered blue-and-gold field that advertised their possession of the earldom of Surrey. The first quarter had the original Howard coat of arms scaled down to make room for the arms that proclaimed their descent from King Edward I, in the second quarter, and beneath that, the earls of Arundel.

No less than many of their contemporaries, Catherine’s family were fascinated with the tangled limbs and roots of their family tree. She could claim distant descent from Adeliza of Louvain, a twelfth-century queen who was subsequently the Countess of Lincoln and Arundel.35 (#litres_trial_promo) Later generations of the Howards eulogised Adeliza, with only marginal exaggeration, as ‘a Lady of transcendent beauty, grace and manner, of peculiar gentleness of disposition, added to true virtue and piety’.36 (#litres_trial_promo) However, there were other less exalted ancestors who had played a more deliberate role in pushing the Howards to the apex of English society – the first recorded mention of the family places them to the village of East Winch in Norfolk, about three centuries before Catherine’s birth. From there, a family associated with law and commerce had risen through a shrewd policy of exemplary civil service, coupled with unions with the daughters of similarly wealthy businessmen and, eventually, the sons and daughters of the local nobility. They had been introduced to the court of King Edward I and used their money to raise troops for the king’s wars and those of his son, Edward II.37 (#litres_trial_promo) In the fourteenth century, they had married into the powerful de Mowbray family, which eventually brought them the dukedom of Norfolk after they continued to serve the Crown and, crucially, supported the winning side in the dynastic conflicts of the 1400s.

Their luck seemed to have deserted them when the first Howard duke, John, enjoyed his new dukedom for just over two years, until he was killed supporting King Richard III at Bosworth Field in August 1485. That battle brought the Tudors to power after decades of exile on the Continent, and unsurprisingly they took a decidedly dim view of the Howards’ Ricardian loyalties. Fortunately, unlike Edward IV or Richard III, Henry VII understood that irreversible punishments turned the aristocracy into implacable enemies. Instead of destroying the Howards, he therefore decided to demote them and then promote them again, at his pleasure. Luckily, the Howards had not lost their genetic knack for climbing and they proved adept at playing the unpleasant game the new king set for them.

John Howard’s heir and Catherine Howard’s future grandfather, thirty-nine-year-old Thomas, had also fought for King Richard III at Bosworth. Unlike his lord father, he was wounded but survived the battle.38 (#litres_trial_promo) Much was made later of Thomas’s insistence that he would always fight for England’s true king, regardless of who that king was, but even such protestations of patriotic zeal made over Richard III’s not-quite-cold corpse were insufficient to convince the Tudors that Howard should go unpunished.39 (#litres_trial_promo) Henry VII could not afford to be seen as weak, particularly where the aristocracy was concerned. His late uncle, the deeply unfortunate Henry VI, had ended his life deposed and murdered in the Tower of London. For a medieval king, unfettered mercy could create as many problems as unchecked tyranny. Thomas Howard was therefore temporarily banned from inheriting his father’s titles, a large slice of the Howard fortune was handed over to the Tudor loyalist, the Earl of Oxford, and Howard himself was sent to the Tower of London, where he spent the next three years as a prisoner.40 (#litres_trial_promo)

Having shown the potential of the stick, Henry VII moved to the carrot. In 1489, Thomas was allowed once again to style himself Earl of Surrey, a subsidiary title previously used as a courtesy by the Duke of Norfolk’s eldest son and heir. Two years earlier, Thomas had an opportunity to gain his freedom from the Tower during the Earl of Lincoln’s ill-fated rebellion against Tudor rule. He wisely chose to stay put to demonstrate that he remained faithful to his king, even while a prisoner – a decision for which he must have given hearty thanks after Henry VII remained secure on his throne and Lord Lincoln ended his life as a sword-pierced corpse.41 (#litres_trial_promo) When Thomas was eventually released from the Tower, he further proved his fidelity by helping to suppress anti-taxation riots in Yorkshire and deputising for the king’s son, Prince Arthur, who, at the age of three, was understandably considered too young to police the Anglo-Scottish border himself.42 (#litres_trial_promo) In return for each act of service, another title, another piece of land, another sign of royal favour, was handed back to the Howards. Thomas’s first wife, Elizabeth, became a lady-in-waiting to the new queen, Elizabeth of York, and eventually godmother to the king and queen’s eldest daughter, Princess Margaret.43 (#litres_trial_promo) The Howard children were allowed to come to court, and the boys were given positions in the royal households.44 (#litres_trial_promo) The message from the Tudors’ throne was clear, if not always easy to follow. Where Edward IV had turned the Howards into enemies whose only chance of prosperity lay with toppling his lineage, Henry VII had turned them into servitors whose hope lay in doglike obedience.45 (#litres_trial_promo)

Thomas Howard’s tribe of children were expected to do their part in the rebuilding of the family – either through royal service, advantageous marriages, or both. The most spectacular match was that of the family’s heir, young Thomas, who married Henry VII’s sister-in-law, Anne of York; when she died in 1511, Thomas wed Henry VIII’s cousin, Lady Elizabeth Stafford, the younger sister of the Duke of Buckingham.46 (#litres_trial_promo) The marriage of two of the Howard sisters, Elizabeth and Muriel, to members of relatively ‘new’ families like the Boleyns and the Knyvets, might seem curious given the numerous subsequent accounts of the era that describe them as families of knights or country gentlemen, apparently far removed from the aristocratic pedigree the Howards had built for themselves. However, the idea of a binary of gentry and aristocracy is a misleading modern conceit. The few centuries before Catherine’s birth had seen enormous changes in the personnel of the elite – of the 136 lords who attended Parliament at the end of the thirteenth century, the direct descendants of only sixteen of them were around to perform similar duties at the start of the sixteenth.47 (#litres_trial_promo) The aristocratic caste was simply too narrow to socialise or marry solely within itself, particularly if it is defined as those in possession of, or the offspring of someone with, one of the five titles of the nobility – in ascending order in England, baron, viscount, earl, marquess, and duke, or their female equivalents, baroness, viscountess, countess, marchioness, and duchess. In everyday social interactions, the nuances of aristocratic etiquette drew little distinction between the children of respected gentry families and those from certain families in the nobility – for instance, the offspring of a viscount, a baron, or a gentleman were not entitled to style themselves ‘lord’ or ‘lady’, unlike those born to a duke, marquess, or earl.

To give an idea of how small the high nobility was as a group, compared to the thousands who thronged the court and enjoyed a privileged lifestyle, by 1523 there were only two dukes, one marquess, and thirteen earls in the combined English and Irish peerages.48 (#litres_trial_promo) Of those sixteen, fewer than half possessed a title that had been in the family for more than three generations. The idea of being ‘gently born’, meaning into a class of landowners who did not have to till their land themselves in order to generate an income from it, bonded the English upper classes together far more than a distinction between who was technically an aristocrat as opposed to a member of the gentry. Families like the Arundells, who owned 16,000 acres in the south-west, were technically ‘only’ gentry, but they were still referred to as a ‘great’ family by their contemporaries, and like most upper-class clans they benefited from their peers’ tendency to count the maternal ancestry as being equally important as the paternal.49 (#litres_trial_promo) There was certainly a pecking order, and under Henry VIII it worked in the Howards’ favour, but, as ever, people tolerate in their friends what they deplore in their enemies, and it was often only once people quarrelled over other things that truly vicious hauteur reared its head.50 (#litres_trial_promo)

The Howards’ return to the dukedom they had lost at Bosworth was accomplished after twenty-nine years when, in 1514, Henry VIII restored the title in recognition of Thomas Howard’s leadership of the English forces at the Battle of Flodden. Thomas Howard certainly showed no sense of snobbery towards his sons-in-law, and they seem to have been promoted and patronised alongside his own boys.51 (#litres_trial_promo) In his old age, those men continued to rise after he effectively retired from public life, spending most of his time, in his family’s words, at the ‘Castle of Framlingham, where he continued and kept an honourable house unto the hour of his death. And there he died like a good Christian prince.’52 (#litres_trial_promo)

At the burial ceremony itself, the priest chose to deliver his sermon on the text ‘Weep not: behold, the Lion of the tribe of Judah, the Root of David, hath prevailed.’53 (#litres_trial_promo) Tribes, lions, and tenacity spoke to the Howards’ souls. As the padre reached the crescendo of his terrifying homily, mixing panegyric with eschatology, the individual with the eternal, several of the congregation became so unsettled and afraid that they left the chapel. Once the hardier mourners had departed at a more decorous pace, the workmen arrived to begin construction of the duke’s unique monument. From an incarcerated traitor to the king’s right hand for defence of the realm, and paterfamilias of one of the largest aristocratic networks in northern Europe, was an extraordinary trajectory for any life, yet the duke died apparently torn between pride at his accomplishments and concern that in years to come observers would assume the worst regarding his loyalty in shifting allegiance from Edward V to Richard III to Henry VII. To prevent this, his tomb boasted a lengthy carved account of his life, which constantly stressed his service to the Crown, irrespective of its incumbent. Over a year later, long after Edmund had returned to Lambeth, his wife, and their growing brood of children, work on the tomb was complete and Catherine’s grandfather rested in splendour.54 (#litres_trial_promo)

* (#ulink_b57d3fee-b878-5515-8758-a27e1ffa2e25) To have two children with the same name was not unusual in an era with a relatively limited pool of Christian names and a custom for allowing godparents to pick a name at the christening ceremony. The 2nd Duke of Norfolk had two sons called Thomas and two daughters called Elizabeth. The aristocratic custom of a plethora of cosy nicknames arose from necessity’s proverbial role as the mother of invention.

Chapter 3

Lord Edmund’s Daughter (#ulink_e6434dab-e99f-5c4d-9e00-2c6eaee714d1)

Anger makes dull men witty, but it keeps them poor.

– Elizabeth I (1533–1603)

Edmund Howard cannot have been thrilled at the arrival of another daughter. Girls required dowries and Edmund was already struggling financially. Catherine had the bad luck to be born to a man who peaked long before he became a father. Edmund was a toxic combination of corrupt, unstable, and pathetic, but he had not always been that. Those who knew him in his youth described Catherine’s father as ‘a courage and an hardy young lusty gentleman’.1 (#litres_trial_promo) One of seven sons, but the third to reach adulthood, he had his father’s and brothers’ athletic capabilities, but lacked their acute social intelligence. He had spent most of his childhood at court as a pageboy in the service of King Henry VII, like his elder brother Edward, and the upward trajectory of his family after Bosworth seemed to promise a life of plenty. During the festivities for Henry VIII’s coronation in 1509, Edmund and his two elder brothers were part of a group of ‘fresh young gallants and noble men gorgeously apparelled’ who were asked to lead a tourney at the Palace of Westminster.2 (#litres_trial_promo) The roll call of those invited to fight alongside him suggests that only the best jousters were chosen, and with good reason, given how much had been spent.

Jousting mingled with a pageant was a relatively new kind of entertainment at the English court, with its combination of set pieces atop moving stages, music, dialogue, and mock combat. In Europe, it had long ago been transformed into an art form, with some celebrations recreating the city of Troy or the twelve labours of Hercules, complete with mechanised monsters and giants. Artistic ingenuity rubbed uneasily with a sportsman’s zeal, and it was not always clear how choreographed the fighting should be. At a tournament performed before Pope Clement V, even the horses had been reduced to moving props manoeuvred by six men concealed beneath cloth; a recent pageant for Cesare Borgia in the city of Ferrara saw the ‘dead’ combatants fall to the ground in a beautifully executed dance, before standing to take their bows. In contrast, an entertainment in honour of Queen Isabeau of France saw real knights sparring in front of the royal party for several hours.3 (#litres_trial_promo) In England, the men of Henry VIII’s court seemed keener to follow the French example than the Italian.

Rather than a typical outdoor arena, like those used for a joust, the men fought in an elaborate fairy-tale set, as members of the court looked on and placed bets. A miniature castle had been built within the courtyard – miniature, at least, in comparison to its inspiration. Tudor roses and engraved pomegranates, Katherine of Aragon’s device, lined its walls, while a fountain splashed water in front of it. In the spirit of Sybaris, the little castle’s gargoyles spouted red, white, and claret wines to the delight of the audience. The entirely artificial ivy that wrapped this folie was ‘gilded with fine gold’. Edmund, by no means the least competitive of the group, rode forward from the castle to ask the king’s permission to fight for the honour of the court belle who had been given the role of Pallas Athena, the chaste embodiment of wisdom. Royal permission gave way to a testosterone-fuelled spectacle of egotism. The participants’ vitality and their determination were well matched, and the joust only halted at nightfall. The next day, the king and queen prevented the match resuming by stepping in to pre-emptively select the winners for themselves.4 (#litres_trial_promo)

In the years to come, the court lost none of its allure for Edmund. A brief, half-hearted and failed attempt to pursue a legal career did not get much further than enrolling in London’s prestigious Middle Temple in 1511.5 (#litres_trial_promo) Within ten days of his admission to the Temple, Edmund was back at court to participate in another set of jousts, this time to mark the birth of the Duke of Cornwall, the king’s short-lived son and heir. Henry VIII, a tall and muscular youth blessed with the good looks of his grandfather Edward IV, was, at nineteen, keen to participate rather than simply observe as he had two years earlier.6 (#litres_trial_promo) In recognition of Edmund’s skills, he was asked to lead the defenders; his brother-in-law, Sir Thomas Boleyn, was on the same team, as was Charles Brandon, the king’s handsome and womanising favourite. Once again, the royal household spared no expense to celebrate such an important event. The queen and her ladies gazed down from a box hung with arras and cloth of gold on a forest crafted from green velvet, satin, and ‘silks of divers colours’, complete with artificial rocks, hills, dales, arranged flowers, imported ferns, and grass. In the middle of the forest, the workmen had rendered another miniature castle ‘made of gold’. A manmade lion, ‘flourished all over with Damask gold’, and an antelope clothed in silver damask were flanked by men disguised as wildlings from a mythical forest, who escorted the bejewelled beasts as they dragged the final pieces of the pageant into place in front of the queen. Horns blasted, and parts of the set fell away to reveal four knights on horseback ‘armed at all places, every of them in cloth of gold, every of them his name embroidered’. These were Edmund’s opponents, the challengers, and their captain was the young king, joined by another of Edmund’s brothers-in-law, Sir Thomas Knyvet, and a clique of companions, all of whom had been given aliases that married amorous devotion with masculine honour. The king led the charge with his pseudonym of Coeur Loyale (‘Loyal Heart’), while Sir Edward Neville, another teammate, got ‘Valiant Desire’.7 (#litres_trial_promo) Knyvet, who got the part of Ardent Desire, joked that his character’s name would be better suited to his codpiece.8 (#litres_trial_promo) The sounds of the trumpets gave way to the beating of the drums that announced the arrival of these challengers, dressed in armour and crimson satin.

Edmund’s slot came on the following day, 13 February, when the entertainments began with Thomas Boleyn and the Marquess of Dorset arriving in the costumes of pilgrims en route to the shrine of Santiago de Compostela, a holy site in the queen’s Spanish homeland reputed to be the burial place of Saint James the Apostle. They knelt before the ‘mighty and excellent princess and noble Queen of England’ to ask permission to joust in her presence; the queen graciously acquiesced and her husband returned to the fantastic tiltyard.9 (#litres_trial_promo) An account of the joust, containing a tally of the scores of each knight, divided along the lines of their respective teams, survives today in the Bodleian Library at Oxford. In thin scratches of black ink, it lists Edmund Howard’s mistakes.10 (#litres_trial_promo)

The athletic Charles Brandon parried well, superbly in fact, but after an acceptable length of time in the tilt, without fail he yielded to the king by a margin or tied with him, a masterstroke of hail-and-hearty camaraderie that suggested that when the king triumphed it was because he was the better sportsman. Every one else followed suit and let the king win, except Edmund, who beat him every time. Lances splintered and sweat-drenched men cried out, while noblemen and ‘well-apparelled’ servants watched as Edmund Howard repeatedly sent the nineteen-year-old monarch crashing to the ground.11 (#litres_trial_promo) It was said that a banquet afterwards ended with ‘mirth and gladness’, but that was mainly because the decision to let some of the common people take away as souvenirs the solid gold letters and decorations hanging from the courtiers’ costumes had resulted in poor Thomas Knyvet practically being stripped naked by zealous trophy hunters.12 (#litres_trial_promo)

Nearly all the men who participated in the Westminster jousts of February 1511 went on to rise further in the king’s graces, with the exception of Edmund. Three months later, Edmund was not asked to join in another set of jousts at the king’s side, while his elder brothers and his brothers-in-law were. Two years after those Westminster jousts, and the funeral of the little baby prince they had celebrated but who did not live to see his eighth week, the king went off to war against France, and he did not invite Edmund to accompany him. Henry VIII’s dreams of recapturing the martial glory days of Edward III or Henry V proved costly to the Howard family – Edmund’s elder brother Edward, who had become a favourite of the king’s, drowned in a naval battle against the forces of Louis XII. Despite the attacks Edward had led against Scottish ships, King James IV chivalrously told Henry VIII in a letter that Edward Howard’s life and talents had been wasted in Henry’s pointless war.13 (#litres_trial_promo) Edmund’s brother-in-law and former jousting companion, Thomas Knyvet, was likewise lost at sea when his ship went up in flames at the Battle of Saint-Mathieu. Knyvet’s widow and Edmund’s sister, Muriel, died in childbirth four months later. Another of Edmund’s brothers, Henry, seems to have died of natural causes the following February, and been buried at Lambeth, less than a year after the death of another brother, Charles.14 (#litres_trial_promo)

The war that took his brother’s life provided Edmund Howard with the opportunity to achieve the high point of his career. In the king’s absence, the northernmost English county of Northumberland was invaded by Scotland, France’s ally, who ‘spoiled burnt and robbed divers and sundry towns and places’.15 (#litres_trial_promo) It was quite possibly the largest foreign army ever to invade English soil – 400 oxen were needed to drag the mammoth cannon across the border.16 (#litres_trial_promo) Queen Katherine of Aragon, left behind as regent, ‘raised a great power to resist the said King of Scots’, and placed it under the command of Edmund’s father.17 (#litres_trial_promo) Katherine had been forced to marshal an army quickly, and they were bedevilled by the war’s ongoing problem of poor supplies. By the time they actually engaged the Scots, many of the 26,000 English soldiers had been without wine, ale, or beer for five days.18 (#litres_trial_promo) In an age when weak ale, or ‘small beer’, was often supplied to prevent people drinking from dubious or unknown water supplies, its absence as the army moved north was felt keenly.19 (#litres_trial_promo)

At the Battle of Flodden, which took place on 9 September 1513, Edmund was given command of the right flank on the ‘uttermost part of the field at the west side’, with three subordinate knights serving as lieutenants over fifteen hundred men, mostly from Lancashire and Cheshire.20 (#litres_trial_promo) When they were ‘fiercely’ attacked by the soldiers of Lord Hume, Edmund’s personal standard, and his standard-bearer, were hacked to pieces on the field, at which point most of Edmund’s men turned and fled.21 (#litres_trial_promo) If his talents as a leader failed, his courage did not. With only a handful of loyal servants remaining by his side, Edmund was ‘stricken to the ground’ on three separate occasions. Each time, according to a contemporary account, ‘he recovered and fought hand to hand with one Sir Davy Home, and slew him’.22 (#litres_trial_promo) A wounded soldier called John Heron returned to fight at Edmund’s side, declaring, ‘There was never noble man’s son so like to be lost as you be this day, for all my hurts I shall here live and die with you.’23 (#litres_trial_promo) Edmund’s life was only saved by the arrival of cavalry headed by Lord Dacre, who rode in ‘like a good and an hardy knight’ to rescue Edmund from annihilation and bring him through the cadavers to kneel at his father’s feet, where he learned that ‘by the grace, succour and help of Almighty God, victory was given to the Realm of England’ and received a knighthood, an honour bestowed on about forty-five of his comrades who had also shown exceptional bravery in the melee.24 (#litres_trial_promo)

The scale of the Scottish defeat stunned as much as their mighty guns had when they first crossed the border – the corpse of King James was found ‘having many wounds, and naked’, lying in egalitarian horror with about eight thousand of his subjects, including nine earls, fourteen lords, a bishop, two abbots, and an archbishop.25 (#litres_trial_promo) There was hardly a family in the Scottish nobility who escaped bereavement after Flodden; particularly heartbreaking was the example of the Maxwell clan – Lord Maxwell fell in combat within minutes of all four of his brothers.26 (#litres_trial_promo) In the immediate aftermath of the carnage, many English soldiers were spotted wearing badges that showed the white lion, the Howards’ heraldic crest, devouring the red lion, an ancient symbol of Scotland.27 (#litres_trial_promo) English writers later praised the Scots’ ‘singular valour’, but at the time soldiers on the field were so repulsed by the violence that they refused to grant amnesty to the captured prisoners.28 (#litres_trial_promo) Queen Katherine shared the attitude of the troops with the victorious lion badges. Edmund’s father wanted to give King James’s remains a proper burial; he, and several councillors, had to talk the queen out of her original plan of sending the body to Henry as a token of victory. The queen relented. She dispatched James’s blood-soaked coat to her husband instead of his body and jokingly cast herself as a good little housewife in the accompanying letter, which contained the rather repulsive quip, ‘In this your grace shall see how I can keep my pennies, sending you for your banners a King’s coat. I thought to send himself unto you, but our Englishmen’s hearts would not suffer it.’29 (#litres_trial_promo)

Flodden provided the exorcism for Bosworth, and a few months later, on the Feast of Candlemas, the Howards’ dukedom was restored to them.30 (#litres_trial_promo) Edmund’s bravery was commented upon by his contemporaries, but an anonymous and spiteful letter, regaling the king with the story of how Edmund’s men had deserted him, ‘caused great heart burning and many words’.31 (#litres_trial_promo) The king was furious, and it took a lot for his courtiers to calm him down to the point where he ruled that no one should be punished for the crime and humiliation of flight from the field. Nonetheless, the deliberately leaked news meant that there was no escaping the fact the Edmund’s division had been the only section of the English forces to sustain a defeat at Flodden. This might explain why Edmund’s sole reward from the Crown was a daily pension of three shillings and four pence, an amount that could generously be described as nominal.32 (#litres_trial_promo)

Still, he was able to bask in the reflected glow of his father and benefit from the general climate of exultation, or relief, after the battle. In the autumn of the following year, the government gave Edmund £100 to equip himself in suitable finery for jousting at another major royal event, the marriage of the king’s youngest sister to King Louis XII of France, as the living seal on the postwar treaty. In Edmund’s own words, he was ‘to prepare myself to do feat of arms in the parts of France at jousts and tourneys’ during the celebrations.33 (#litres_trial_promo) In a theme that was to repeat itself throughout most of their subsequent diplomacy, the English and French vied to outshine one another, with the result that peace between them was less bloody but hardly more cordial than war. Edmund was sent with his father, stepmother, and half sister, the Countess of Oxford, in a delegation that included a hundred horses, numerous retainers, and suitably lavish outfits to conform with the government’s request that everything should be done to advertise the wealth of Henry’s kingdom.34 (#litres_trial_promo)

At least by then Edmund had steady employment as a justice of the peace in Surrey, thanks in no small way to his family’s influence there.35 (#litres_trial_promo) Tasked with preserving order in the localities, the JPs and their deputies were supposed to arrest criminals, keep a watch on troublemakers, maintain law and order, supervise foreign nationals, levy fines, and make sure food prices were being set at a fair rate. For the next few years Edmund appears in government documents arranging for safe conduct for a group of Prussian friars on a pilgrimage to Scotland, interrogating six suspected French spies, adjudicating on the alleged kidnapping of a maid by her employers who disapproved of her choice of husband, confining a constable called William Bever to the stocks on Lambeth High Street as punishment for ransacking a man’s house in the search for French agents, and obeying government orders to carry out a hunt for vagrants.36 (#litres_trial_promo)

Approaching forty, he found a wife in Joyce Leigh, a widow with five children from her first marriage to another local official.37 (#litres_trial_promo) Joyce, whom the Howards tended to refer to by the slightly grander name of ‘Jocasta’, was nearly the same age as her new husband; she had first been married off at the age of twelve, then left a woman of substance by both her father and her first husband.38 (#litres_trial_promo) Her money as well as her standing within the Lambeth community were useful to Edmund, since by 1514 there were signs that he was accumulating debts and that the blue-blooded security conveyed by his visit to France for the royal wedding was a slowly unravelling illusion.39 (#litres_trial_promo)

In November 1519, shortly after his marriage to Joyce, riots in Surrey resulted in Edmund being hauled in front of the Star Chamber, a panel set up to administer justice to the kingdom’s elite if there was a fear that common courts and judges might be too intimidated to hand down a fair sentence on a nobleman. As a body, the chamber was particularly concerned with the maintenance of public order. Consisting of legal experts from the common courts and members of the Privy Council, the royally appointed body of men that still constituted the main organ of government in early Tudor England, the Star Chamber could pass its defendants over to the commons if they felt their misdemeanours constituted crimes that could and should be adequately and publicly punished. The Star Chamber played on concepts of honour and the corresponding power of shame to bully errant peers into compliance. Even if they were pardoned, as many of them were, the summonses alone were enough to set tongues wagging.

The relationship between rulers and ruled in Tudor England was characterised by elaborate anxiety. Political theorists, such as Sir Thomas Elyot who published his treatise on good government in 1531, preached that ‘everything is order, and without order nothing may be stable or permanent’.40 (#litres_trial_promo) This belief was occasionally both shaken and strengthened by the fact that the century proved to be one of social mobility, wider literacy, growing towns, and an expanding population. Elite views of social unrest were inevitably influenced by their own childhood curriculums that were generally heavy on the classics, in which rebellion was cited as a chief cause for the fall of Ancient Rome, encouraging a belief that popular protest led to mob rule, ‘which of all rules is most to be feared’.41 (#litres_trial_promo) No one wanted the poor to be miserable, but nearly everyone wanted them to be obedient. In both town and countryside, outdoor and entertaining activities were encouraged in every season, because it was understood that people needed to enjoy themselves and, in doing so, dissipate their energy.

The belief that the plebeian urban classes were naturally credulous, easily distracted, and prone to overreaction placed the blame for any outburst of civil unrest squarely on the shoulders of their immediate superiors. Edmund and a colleague ‘were indicted of riots, and maintenance of bearings of diverse misdoers within the county of Surrey’.42 (#litres_trial_promo) The recent disturbances in the county were a poor reflection on the king’s deputies, and Edmund’s fiery temper, or ill standing with the sovereign, did not help. Both defendants were shamed but pardoned, while another, Lord Ogle, was passed over to the common courts after riots blamed on his dereliction of duty resulted in the death of a bystander.43 (#litres_trial_promo)

The years following the Star Chamber hearing saw Edmund’s career stagnate and his debts increase. Joyce Howard’s properties were mortgaged and remortgaged, despite opposition from her mother and stepfather. Years earlier, after the death of Joyce’s father, Richard Culpepper, who had been a wealthy landowner in Kent, her mother Isabel had remarried to Sir John Leigh then swiftly arranged a wedding between Joyce and John’s younger brother, Ralph. This meant that John and Isabel had a doubly vested interest in monitoring Joyce’s inheritance, with Isabel mindful of the Culpepper estates and John equally concerned about the disposal of the Leigh bequests from Joyce’s first husband.44 (#litres_trial_promo) The couple evidently came to distrust Edmund Howard, and both their wills attempted to limit his ability to interfere in their daughter or grandchildren’s inheritance.

This distrust was not entirely undeserved – Edmund’s debts had all but taken over his life by 1527. Despite being a public figure tasked with the maintenance of the law, on one occasion Catherine’s father had only dodged arrest as a debtor thanks to a tip-off from a friend.45 (#litres_trial_promo) Aristocratic poverty, of course, was not quite the same as the agony of the actual condition, and the names of at least two of Lord Edmund’s servants crop up in subsequent correspondence.46 (#litres_trial_promo) But by the end of the 1520s, he was undeniably struggling and badly so, to the extent that he began to borrow heavily from his friends, even persuading one, John Shookborough, to stand as surety for his debts.47 (#litres_trial_promo) The idea of getting another job, a profession that would pay a consistent wage, was considered abhorrent, something that would bring ‘great reproach and shame to me and all my blood’, in Edmund’s words. At least on the surface, he claimed to resent the position he was born into, citing his aristocratic heritage as something that had condemned him to a life of genteel struggle.

Perhaps such woeful excuse-making was why his relatives’ aid seems to have dried up between 1524 and 1531, a time when Edmund became increasingly desperate. During one spell of hiding to avoid the possibility of being apprehended by his creditors, he sent his wife to petition Cardinal Wolsey, the king’s then chief minister, on his behalf. According to his accompanying letter to the cardinal, unless Edmund received financial help he would either have to seek sanctuary in a religious institution or flee abroad. The panic and unhappiness apparent in Edmund’s letter remains uncomfortable to read. Quotations from it are usually cited in the various biographies of Catherine, but it is by reading the majority of the text – including his astonishing offer to serve on a mission to the Americas – that one can fully appreciate the depth of Edmund Howard’s desperation. Addressed to ‘My Lord Cardinal’s Grace’, in haste, it reads:

My duty remembered, humbly I beseech your grace to [be] my good Lord, for with out your gracious help I am utterly undone. Sir so it is that I am so far in danger of the King’s laws by reason of the debt that I am in, that I dare not go a broad, nor come at mine own house, and am fain to absent me from my wife and my poor children, there is such writs of executions out against me; and also such as be my sureties are daily arrested, and put to great trouble, which is to my great shame and rebuke. Sir there is no help but through your Grace and your good mediation to the King’s Grace, in the which is my singular trust: and your gracious favour showed unto me … shall not only be meritorious but shall be the safeguard of my life and relief of my poor wife and our ten children, and set me out of debt. And humbly I beseech your Grace for such poor service as I have done the King’s Grace, and trust for to do, that I be not cast away; and if the King’s Grace or your Grace should command me to do any service I would trust to do acceptable service; and liver I had to be in his Grace’s service at the farthest end of Christendom than to live thus wretchedly, and die with thought, sorrow and care. I may repent that ever I was nobleman’s son born, leading the sorrowful life that I live, and if I were a poor man’s son I might dig and delve for my living and my children and my wife’s, for whom I take more thought than for my self: and so may I not do but to great reproach and shame to me and all my blood. Sir if there be any creature living that can lay to me other treason, murder, felony, rape, extortion, bribery, or in maintaining or supporting any of these, and to be approved on me, then let me have the extremity of the King’s laws; and I trust there shall none lay against me any thing to be approved to my reproach but only debt. Sir I am informed there shall be a voyage made in to a newfound land with divers ships and captains and sogears [soldiers or sea-goers?] in them; and I am informed the voyage shall be honourable and profitable to the King’s Grace and all his realm. Sir if your Grace think my poor carcass any thing meet to serve the King’s Grace in the said voyage, for the better passion of Christ be you my good lord there in, for now I do live a wretched a life as ever did gentleman being a true man, and nothing I have to live on, nor to find me my wife and my children meat or drink; and glad I would be to venture my life to do the King’s service, and if I be put there unto I doubt not but I shall do such service as shall be acceptable and redound to his Grace[’s] honour. And Sir I have nothing to lose but my life, and that I would gladly adventure in his service trusting thereby to win some honesty, and to get somewhat toward my living; and if it shall please the King’s Grace to have my body do him service in the said voyage, humbly I beseech your Grace that I may know your pleasure therein. Sir I ensure you there shall be nothing nor nother friend nor kin let me, but with a willing heart I will go, so it shall stand with the King’s pleasure and yours. The King’s Grace being so good lord to me through your good mediation … and assign my bill the which I now do sue for, or to set me out of debt some other ways. Sir I beseech your Grace to pardon me that I came not to your Grace myself according to my duty, but surely Sir I dare not go a broad, and therefore I have been thus bold to write to your Grace. All the premises considered I humbly beseech your Grace to be my good lord, for the passion of Christ and in the way of charity and piety. I beseech your Grace to pardon me for this my bold writing, but very poverty and need forceth me thus to do, as knoweth our Lord Jesus, who have you in his blessed tuysseone. Written with the hand of him that is assuredly yours, Edmund Howard, Knight.48 (#litres_trial_promo)

If help did come from Wolsey, it was piecemeal. Edmund was head of a large household, which added to his financial woes. The elder girls, Isabella and Margaret, along with Catherine’s full siblings Charles, Henry, George, another Margaret, and their younger sister Mary, were all still living at home. Interestingly, a later survey also mentions Jane Howard, a sister born after Mary, who, if she existed at all, must have been born after 1527 and died in infancy, perhaps sometime after 1530.49 (#litres_trial_promo) Catherine’s two eldest half brothers, John and Ralph, had moved out when she was a child. On turning twenty-four, John inherited a manor in Stockwell from his grandfather, and Ralph had been left a trust fund to finance his training as a lawyer in London. Her half sister Joyce was also married and out of the house.50 (#litres_trial_promo) Even by including Jane, Edmund’s claim that he had to maintain ten children in 1527 does not seem to be entirely accurate, but debt seldom stimulates a compulsion toward honesty.

Catherine’s early life is thus difficult to trace – one of the youngest in a large family amid a wealth of contradictions. She possessed one of the most respected surnames in the country, but at least initially it brought her little in terms of material comfort or security. Her father was theoretically one of the pillars of the local community, but in practice he spent most of her childhood hiding from his creditors and resorting to increasingly desperate methods to get his hands on the money they needed. Whether her time in her father’s household was happy or not, we have no way of knowing. It was certainly short. Her mother died in about 1528 or 1529 and her father swiftly remarried, to another widow, Dorothy Troyes. This marriage, too, seems to have been short, since Dorothy’s will was made in the early summer of 1530, by which point Catherine’s first cousin, Anne Boleyn, was firmly established at court as queen-to-be.51 (#litres_trial_promo) Anne possessed the natural assertiveness that bordered on bossiness common in someone who was often found, or believed herself, to be more competent than those around her. She set out to find her hapless uncle Edmund a job, and when the death of Sir William Hussey opened up a vacancy for the post of comptroller to the civic authorities at the port of Calais, she pounced.52 (#litres_trial_promo) Putting Edmund in the post of comptroller with its heavy financial duties was a little like putting the poacher in charge of the game. With unintentional irony, the decision was finalised on April Fool’s Day 1531.53 (#litres_trial_promo)

For Edmund, the chance to get safely across the Channel could not have come at a more opportune time. Within a few months of his departure, his friend John Shookborough had been arrested as guarantor for Edmund’s debts. Realising that the net was closing around him, and horrified to discover the extent of his friend’s financial deceptions, Shookborough tried to catch the attention of Thomas Cromwell as he attended Mass at the Augustinian friary near his home in Austin Friars, hopeful that a message could be passed on to the court through him. Unfortunately, Cromwell did not see Shookborough in the crowd, and as the latter returned into the city, he was arrested for £26 of Lord Edmund’s debts. In a letter to Cromwell he admitted, ‘I am surety for more, and dare not go abroad in the city.’ To avoid prison, Shookborough had to pledge two of his family’s best items of clothing to the creditors, and he offered Cromwell a gelding ‘for your favour’ in helping him out of the mess in which friendship with Edmund had landed him.54 (#litres_trial_promo)

Edmund arrived in Calais on St Nicholas’s Day 1531, amid the December chill, with an introductory letter from Anne Boleyn clutched in his hands. He took it to the town’s vice treasurer, Thomas Fowler, who was canny enough to realise the tacit instructions implicit in Anne’s avalanche of complimentary charm: ‘At his coming here on St Nicholas Day,’ he told his brother, ‘he [Edmund] brought me a letter from my lady Anne, directed to you and me, which my lord commanded me to open, giving us great thanks for our kindness to my lord Edmund.’55 (#litres_trial_promo)

At some point between April and December 1531, between the announcement of Edmund’s new post and his assumption of his duties, his household in Surrey was broken up. Two of the girls were married – Isabella Leigh to Sir Edward Baynton, a widowed courtier with seven young children, and Margaret Howard to Thomas Arundell, a close friend of the Earl of Northumberland and son of a Cornish gentry family who were wealthy enough not to need a sizeable dowry.56 (#litres_trial_promo) Edmund’s other children were old enough to begin the process of education in another’s household; we do not know where the others went, but both Catherine and, at some unknown point, her brother Henry, were invited to live as wards of their wealthiest female relative, the Dowager Duchess of Norfolk.

Chapter 4

The Howards of Horsham (#ulink_83fbc907-3f63-5791-9bf8-093fc9e55aa8)

But oh, young babies, whom blood … hath endowed with grace, comeliness, and high ability … it were great pity but that ye added to sovereign beauty virtue and good manners.

– Dr Furnivall, ‘The Babees’ Book or A Little Report on how young people should behave’ (c.1475)

When Catherine Howard arrived in the Sussex village of Horsham in 1531, she had every reason to feel thankful for the fact that her gender had spared her a grammar school education similar to those endured by her grandfather and many of her peers.1 (#litres_trial_promo) Contemporary gossip was rife with horror stories of how young, upper-class boys were disciplined at their boarding schools – the philosopher Erasmus of Rotterdam relayed tales of students beaten nearly to the point of unconsciousness by their masters, forced to swallow salt, vinegar, or urine as a form of punishment, and how the schools ran on ‘howling and sobbing and cruel threatenings’.2 (#litres_trial_promo) When Elizabeth I, ‘being a learned Princess’, visited Westminster School a few decades later, schools’ reputation for unchecked corporal punishment was so widespread that she bypassed the official meet-and-greet to talk directly to one pupil ‘of a fair, and ingenious countenance’. The queen stroked the young man’s head and ‘demanded him to tell her how often he had been whipped’. The boy paused, but ‘being witty’ he answered the royal query by quoting Virgil’s Aeneid, ‘Most gracious Queen, you do desire to know, / A grief unspeakable and full of woe.’3 (#litres_trial_promo)

Instead, Catherine, about eight or nine years old in 1531, could expect her education to be conducted privately through a set of tutors chosen by her grandmother, whose principal manor, Chesworth House, sat on the edge of Horsham village, where life continued in much the same way as it had for decades. The Howard influence in Horsham remained strong. They hand-selected its Member of Parliament, often predictably picking a member of their extended family. The provisions needed to feed, clothe, and heat the dowager and her staff accounted for a significant chunk of the area’s economy, a relationship replicated across Tudor England, where the nobility stimulated and sustained the employment of tens of thousands of people – not just those who farmed and traded in the supplies they needed, but also those who served them. From the figures available to us, it seems that nearly two-thirds of people aged between fifteen and twenty-four worked as servants in this period, either to the aristocracy or to the middle classes, and somewhere between a quarter and half of the total population were in domestic service at some point in their lives.4 (#litres_trial_promo)