Young and Damned and Fair
Page 2
I have spelled Catherine’s name with a “C” to differentiate her from other Katherines in a generation with many. Her name has been given as Katherine, Katharine, Catharine, and Kathryn in other biographies, and standardized spelling was never a sixteenth-century priority. For clarity’s sake, Catherine’s two stepdaughters are usually referred to here as princesses. Each sister had been styled as a princess from the time of her birth until the annulment of her mother’s marriage, after which they were both addressed by the honorific of Lady, even when they were rehabilitated into the line of succession. During their brother’s reign, they were interchangeably referred to by both titles, due to their positions as first and second in line to the throne, and Elizabeth was often referred to as Princess Elizabeth during Mary’s time as queen. To mark them out from the other Marys and Elizabeths, I have decided to err on the side of politesse in giving both women the higher title when they are mentioned in passing. For similar reasons, I have sometimes given the names of foreign princesses in their native language—hence Maria of Austria and Marie de Guise, rather than the anglicized Mary. Where possible, I have tried to be consistent—Maria of Austria was also known as Mary of Hungary, Catherine’s sister Isabella is Isabel in some sources. Likewise, the surnames of many of those involved in Catherine’s story vary—Culpepper is Culpeper; Dereham is given as Durham, Durant, or Deresham; Edgcumbe or Edgecombe; Habsburg or Hapsburg; Knyvet or Knyvett; Mannox, Manox, or Mannock; Damport or Davenport. Where required, I have chosen a common spelling.
I have modernized the spelling in quotations from the original documents. All quotations from the Bible are taken either from the Douay-Rheims or King James editions. I have avoided giving estimations of modern equivalents to Tudor money, since they are often misleading and, at best, imprecise. Prior to 1752, England operated under the Julian calendar, and the new calendar year commenced on March 25, the Feast of the Annunciation, rather than on January 1. By our reckoning, Catherine Howard was executed on February 13, 1542, but her contemporaries in England would have given 1541 as the year of her death. Almost all historians give the modern dating and I have followed suit.
Chapter 1
* * *
The Hour of Our Death
Renounce the thought of greatness, tread on fate,
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 his peace. So when Thomas Cromwell was led out to his death on July 28, 1540,1 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 minister walked cheerfully towards the scaffold.2 He even called out to members of the crowd and comforted his nervous fellow prisoner Walter, Lord Hungerford, who was condemned to die alongside him for four crimes, all of which carried the death penalty. Lord Hungerford, whose sanity was questionable, had allegedly committed heresy, in appointing as his private chaplain a priest rumored to remain loyal to the Pope; witchcraft, by consorting with various individuals, including one named “Mother Roche,” to use necromancy to guess the date of the King’s death; treason, in that both his chaplain’s appointment and the meeting with the witch constituted a crime against the King’s majesty; and 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
Rumors, 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 practiced 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 None of those charges were ever mentioned in the indictments leveled 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 his defense.
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 the Queen 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 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.
Within the Tower’s sheltered courtyards, 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 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 bejeweled 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 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 vitality. But living well, as Anne Boleyn had noted at her trial, also meant dying well.8 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 honored its God. Before they were marched to the hill, Cromwell told Lord Hungerford that “though the breakfast w
hich we are going to be sharp, yet, trusting to the mercy of the Lord, we shall have a joyful dinner.”9 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 coreligionists. 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.
To many of their contemporaries, there was an inextricable link between Cromwell’s submission to mortality and the ascent in royal favor of the Duke of Norfolk’s niece, a view vividly captured by the juxtaposition of Cromwell’s death and the King’s marriage to the orphaned Catherine Howard on the same day. In the countryside, beyond the stench and sweat of the crowd assembled to watch Cromwell and Hungerford’s deaths, Edmund Bonner, Bishop of London, prepared to preside over the King’s wedding service. 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.10 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 orchard was new, but the trees were not. They had been uprooted from Saint Peter’s Abbey 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 expansion 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, bejeweled table services, and beds hung with cloth of silver were all processed into Oatlands, there was little outward sign of the tribulation that had gone into making it suitable for the royal household.11
Edmund Bonner was an Oxford graduate in his early forties. 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.12 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 all of Cromwell’s former dependents turned their faces from him, as if he had never existed.
A celebrated person’s execution, his final public performance, was such an exciting event that people made the journey into London especially for it. Vast numbers of people surged through the city, 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 favor 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 was 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 shaping 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.13 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 a traditionalist uprising’s attempts to remove him from power, but he could not survive the loss of the King’s favor 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 July 28, 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 traveling in from the Hampshire countryside entered through Newgate, while those from 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 strong point. The southern city of Exeter had renamed one of its rivers Shitbrook, because of the amount of feces 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 Saint Mary the Virgin down to the entrance of Oriel College.14
Rather more elegant sights awaited those who were traveling 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 had eventually been replaced by the Hospital of Saint 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 put-down before the internment, was now where professional water-sellers traded their wares, taking 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, but even at this early stage of what turned out to be the hottest summer of the sixteenth century, the Westminster plumbing was struggling to provide the capital’s wealthiest region with the water it needed.15
There was no sign of similar deprivations at Oatlands, where any eastern- or western-facing windows above the quadrangle provided views either of the orchard with its purloined apple trees, an octagonal dovecote, or ornamental gardens circling the fountains. 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 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.
Catherine was in her late teens, slender, like most of the Howard women, with a “very delightful” appearance, according to the French ambassador.16 The court’s temporary reduction in size and then its removal to the relative obscurity of Oatlands fueled speculation that she was already pregnant; Catherine’s petite frame gave 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.17 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 center 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.
Back in the capital, along the banks of the Thames, formerly semirural 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!”