Young and Damned and Fair

by Gareth Russell

  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 sizable dowry.56 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.

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  I. The monarch’s eldest son and heir is usually styled Prince of Wales, and the duchy of Cornwall is a subsidiary part of that title. However, a ceremony of investiture is customary to become Prince of Wales, which meant that eldest sons were not typically referred to by that title until they were old enough to undergo the ceremony. Until that time, they are often given the courtesy title of Duke of Cornwall.

  Chapter 4

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  The Howards of Horsham

  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 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 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 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

  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

  Like most girls with a similar background, Catherine had grown up with servants, but the sheer number she saw as she was led across the drawbridge of her grandmother’s pretty moated manor could not have been a familiar sight.5 Even if widows usually kept smaller households than a married noblewoman, the scale of the Dowager’s establishment would have been difficult to comprehend for a young girl who had spent her infancy at the mercy of her father’s financial fluctuations. As the fourth highest-ranking woman in the kingdom, Agnes Howard did not keep a small household.6 It would have been considered unseemly for her to do so. Etiquette guides from the time suggested it was appropriate for a duke or duchess to have about 240 servants.7 As with most manners manuals, this was only a guideline, and some peers, like the late Duke of Buckingham who employed nearly 500, preferred to live on the larger side.8

  In the courtyard at Chesworth House, or Chesworth Place as it was sometimes known, Catherine got her first sight of the dozens of men and women who attended her grandmother.I The chief household officers, like the steward who essentially ran the establishment, the treasurer, and the chaplain, Father Borough, who looked after the house’s religious valuables and spiritual needs, wore cloaks sporting the Dowager’s personal crest in bright threads as they walked to or from their offices, all of which were located within the house proper. The chaplain’s deputy, the almoner, was in charge of arranging for charity to be given to the local poor and for any food that was left uneaten to be distributed at the manor gates. Valets, whose job was very different to their more famous Edwardian counterparts, might be on their way to check on the stables’ grain stock, while young grooms cleaned out the stalls nearby. Little page boys, the only servants likely to be on a pittance of a salary or none at all, ran through the house carrying messages, fulfilling errands from their superiors, and trying to find time to attend training to work in another part of the household once they were older. The servants certainly had enough tasks to keep them occupied. Chesworth House had its own orchard, slaughterhouse, large kitchens, a pantry to oversee the production and storage of bread, a buttery that stored the manor’s ale, beers, and wine, and a great hall where the household dined and the Dowager could entertain her guests. A career in service was not considered in any way demeaning—society was hierarchical, and the rewards and security offered by employment with the aristocracy were substantial. All the servants wore uniforms and they were expected to conform to expectations that a good servant should be “neatly clad, his clothes not torn, hands and faces well washed and head well kempt.”9

  As Catherine was ushered down Chesworth’s long corridors, the signs of her grandmother’s fortune were everywhere. This was a woman so wealthy that she kept £800 in silver around the house in case of an emergency—to give an idea of the scale of that hoarding, one of Catherine’s aunts had been expected to maintain a family and a household on about £50 a few years earlier, another lived comfortably on £196.10 Cleaners bustled around placing reeds and rushes on the floor or sweeping them away for hygiene’s sake once they became too dirty. When they entered the Dowager’s presence, Catherine and her brother were expected to bow or curtsey and to repeat that action in miniature every time she asked them a question, “otherwise, stand as still a stone.”11 Like their servants, they were taught that it was impolite to sigh, cough, or breathe too loudly in the lady of the house’s presence.12

  The abundance on display at Chesworth underscored why Edmund Howard was considered such a failure by his contemporaries. Consumption and display were part of the nobility’s duty, a clause in the social contract, by which they generated work for those around them and upheld the class system whose origins were believed to mirror Heaven’s. As part of his Christmas celebrations a few years earlier, Catherine’s uncle Thomas, the Duke of Norfolk, had hosted a dinner for 580 guests one night and then another for 399 five days later.13 An indebted aristocrat was a source of universal contempt in the sixteenth century; a frugal one even more so.

  The Dowager Duchess of Norfolk was only fifty-four years old when Catherine first came into her care. The daughter of two gentry families from Lincolnshire, Agnes had come to the late Duke’s attention when his first wife, Agnes’s kinswoman, passed away. Agnes’s brother Philip had then been the Duke’s steward, a position often given to members of one’s extended affinity, and despite—or because of—the fact that he was
nearly thirty-five years older, the Duke was sufficiently smitten with Agnes’s charms to marry her regardless of the fact that she brought him little in the way of a dowry. She was thus technically Catherine’s step-grandmother, since Edmund was born from the Duke’s first marriage.

  Agnes’s late husband had left her twenty-four manors, and the tetchy, opinionated Dowager used them to finance a life of luxury and convenience, expressing her opinions as and when they came to her. She wrote chatty letters full of unsolicited medical advice to Cardinal Wolsey, perhaps patronized poets like John Skelton, and made sarcastic quips at the expense of everyone from the royal court to her stepson the Duke.14 During an outbreak of the plague in 1528, she told a visitor that the reason the sickness had affected some of the Duke’s servants was because of the slipshod management of his household staff.15 Time was to show that Agnes did not have a firm hand on the rudder of her own retinue either, but like most witty people she did not let accusations of hypocrisy stand in the way of a memorable put-down. She was a generous employer, an inveterate gossip, and conscious of the magnificence of her position—one of the many jewels she owned was a personalized initial “A,” crafted from pearls and set with diamonds.16 To her wards, the Dowager Duchess was a strict but inconsistent guardian. The pearls, the diamonds, and the lady herself were often away from Catherine for extended periods, mainly at court.17

  In the meantime, Catherine settled into life at Chesworth and its acres of fine deer-hunting country.18 Our image of the rough-and-tumble Middle Ages, replete with belching men with earthy appetites gnawing at chicken legs, and buxom serving wenches, is not a world that Catherine or her contemporaries would have recognized. From infancy, she was expected to learn etiquette and to behave appropriately. Guides and manuals from the era laid out in great detail how the children of the gentry and nobility should behave from the moment they woke up in the morning—“Arise from your bed, cross your breast and your forehead, wash your hands and face, comb your hair, and ask the grace of God to speed you in all your works; then go to Mass and ask mercy for all your trespasses. When ye have done, break your fast with good meat and drink, but before eating cross your mouth, your diet will be better for it. Then say your grace—it occupies but little time—and thank the Lord Jesus for your food and drink. Say also a Pater Noster and Ave Maria for the souls that lie in pain.”—to how long they should nap and how they should enter a room.19 When Catherine was brought into her grandmother’s company, she was expected to “enter with head up and at an easy pace” and say “God speed” by way of greeting, before sinking into a curtsey.20 Obeisance was worked on ad nauseam. A clumsy dip was an embarrassment that no girl could afford in Tudor high society—one Howard had a servant repeat a perfect bow a hundred times after the poor man had been in such a rush that he admitted his previous attempt had been made on “a running leg.”21 Catherine was told to look straight at whoever was speaking to her, to listen carefully to whatever they were saying, to make sure they knew that she was paying attention—“see to it with all your might that ye jangle not, nor let your eyes wander about”—and “with blithe visage and diligent spirit” set herself to the task of being as charming and interesting as possible. Her anecdotes and stories should be entertaining and to the point, since too “many words are right tedious to the wise man who listens; therefore eschew them.”22 Above all, she must learn to act like a lady in front of her relatives—to stand until they told her otherwise, to keep her hands and feet still, never to lean on anything, or scratch any part of herself, even something as innocuous as her face or arms.23

  This curriculum was part of the rationale behind the farming out of English aristocratic children to their relatives, a custom which foreign visitors often found peculiar. It was believed that parents might spoil or indulge their own children and thus neglect their education. Even if Edmund had not gone to Calais, Catherine would at some point probably have found herself attached to the Dowager’s household. It was not just her new home, but her classroom and her finishing school where she would learn by example to behave like the great ladies of her family. Like the generation before her, Catherine was taught that good manners were essential to “all those that would thrive in prosperity.”24 Etiquette was drilled into her at a young age and into hundreds of other girls just like her. One of her cousins was praised for being “stately and upright at all times of her age” and never “diminishing the greatness of birth and marriage by omission of any ceremony.”25 There were rhymes to help her remember the rules of placement, books aimed at children and adolescents that stressed how rude it was to point or to be too demonstrative in conversation—“Point not thy tale with thy fingers, use not such toys.” There were rules that would hardly be out of place in a modern guide, like enjoinders to keep one’s hands “washèd clean / That no filth in thy nails be seen,” not to talk with your mouth full, to keep cats and dogs away from the dinner table, and to only use one’s best dinner service for distinguished guests, but there were also instructions on where to put cutlery, how to cut bread (it was never to be torn with the hands), and a culture that almost elevated propriety into a religious duty.26 One children’s textbook on the proper way of doing things began with:

  Little children, draw ye near

  And learn the courtesy written here;

  For clerks that well the Seven Arts know,

  Say Courtesy came to earth below,

  When Gabriel hailed Our Lady by name,

  And Elizabeth to Mary came.

  All virtues are closed in courtesy,

  And vices all in villainy.27

  They were lessons that Catherine swallowed whole. For the rest of her life, she remained devoted to the niceties. Few things seemed to cause her greater stress or anguish than the fear that she might make a mistake in public. She seldom did. Compliments on her polite gracefulness followed her into the grave.

  This decorum subjugated and elevated Catherine, for while it kept her firmly kowtowing at the feet of her guardian, it also affirmed her superior position to those around her. Since the Victorian era, when the cult of domesticity was at its height, many writers have bewailed Catherine’s childhood as one of gilded neglect in which the poor young girl was cast adrift by a “proud and heartless relative” to live amongst a group of servants who delighted in corrupting her.28 However, by looking closely at all the available evidence that has survived from Catherine’s life at Chesworth House, it is difficult to escape the conclusion that throughout her time there she was treated differently to the other young people. In almost every instance, it was Catherine who remained in control of her roommates, Catherine who confidently issued orders and had access to all the chambers and keys of the mansion. If she or her brother Henry entered a room, the servants were supposed to back away discreetly. This did not mean that they flung themselves against the wall, more that they gave them space, and they were expected to continue paying them attention for as long as they were speaking.29 Catherine was initially one of only two people under the roof who was the grandchild of a duke, and the deference she was shown throughout her childhood, even by those she counted as close friends, nurtured her confidence and habit of command.

  When the household ate, Catherine and her brother were on display, both before the rest of the household and under the watchful eye of the Dowager or, if she had gone to court, her steward. At meals, often taken in the Great Hall, if the Dowager was present and showed Catherine a sign of affection, such as allowing her to take a drink from the same cup, Catherine knew to reach out with both hands as she took it, then to pass it back to the servant who had brought it over to her. Even if there were no guests and the Duchess chose to dine more privately, her establishment sat in order of precedence. Before Catherine and her family arrived in the hall, the tables were wiped down, then three layers of fresh linen were spread, with care taken to ensure each hanged evenly. Eight loaves of the best bread to come out of the bakery that day were put at the top table, while servants with napkins slu
ng from their necks to their arms covered the Dowager’s cutlery with a cloth until she was ready to use it. If a servant was in doubt about the way to fold the linen or wrap the bread before consumption, there were etiquette manuals for that, as well. Basins with hot and cold water for washing one’s hands were brought out and last-minute checks conducted to make sure the salt was “fine, white, fair, and dry” as required.30 The Dowager’s carvers would sharpen their knives before the meal, politely holding them with no more than two fingers and a thumb when it came time to carve the meat. It was a time that regarded carving as an art, with textbooks produced specifically to discuss the correct way to slice and serve.31

  One place where etiquette did relax was the maidens’ chamber, the room where Catherine slept, in essence a form of dormitory, such as might be found in a traditional boarding school. Certainly, the maidens’ chamber engendered similar feelings of camaraderie and corresponding lack of privacy. Bedrooms were a rare luxury in Tudor households; sharing beds was common and sleeping in group accommodation even more so. (The Dowager’s dependents were lucky to have beds; many lesser households handed out straw mattresses and glorified sleeping bags.) In the maidens’ chamber, Catherine bunked down with other young women in her grandmother’s care and service. She befriended the forceful and brash Joan Acworth, who had a string of beaux and the confidence of a girl who expected life to treat her well; there was also Alice Wilkes, who seems to have enjoyed agreeing with the prejudices of whoever she was gossiping with at the time, as well as girls related to the Dowager’s natal family, like young Katherine Tilney. With these comrades, Catherine wiled away an unremarkable early adolescence. Some of her friends, like Joan, were a few years older, others were the same age or a little younger.32