For almost half a century, our views on medieval childhood have been influenced by the work of the late French historian Philippe Ariès, whose book Centuries of Childhood: A Social History of Family Life argued that childhood was a relatively modern concept, alien to the Middle Ages with its detached style of parenting that sought to accelerate an infant’s path to adulthood.33 This theory has been comprehensively debunked in recent years, and ample evidence survives, both in the relevant documents and from excavated toys, to prove that medieval and early modern children were recognized as a separate category. Games and dolls existed for children; there were debates on the different stages of infancy; the Virgin Mary and Saint Nicholas were popular heavenly protectors of the young. By the standards of many people at the time, Catherine enjoyed a youth that could be described in positive terms—if not as idyllic, then certainly as privileged, affectionate, and happy. She was sincerely liked by many of the people at Chesworth, who appreciated the loyalty she showed towards her family’s servants, the effort she exerted to help them, her high spirits, her generosity, and her sense of mischief and fun. Life could of course be cut short by infant mortality, and youth could be butchered by an arranged marriage, but in Catherine’s case there is no reason to believe that she endured an unhappy or neglected childhood or adolescence.
Festivals, usually religious ones, shaped the calendar. The feast of Saint George, England’s national saint, and Mayday, the start of summer, brought a flurry of celebrations. The twelve days of Christmas, from Christmas Day to the Feast of the Epiphany, were an especially busy time. The Christmas log, usually ash emitting a festive green flame, burned in the great fireplace,II and carols, their melodies faintly reminiscent of a dance, replaced the usual, more somber hymns. Fine food was laid on by and for the Dowager’s staff; wine, ale, and mead fueled the party spirit—the English had a reputation for being great drinkers—while entertainments marked each passing day. Midnight Mass on Christmas Eve was a tradition that stretched back a millennium by the time Catherine huddled inside the local chapel to commemorate the Savior’s arrival. A troupe of itinerant actors might arrive, or have been sent for, to perform a nativity play, another tradition which has survived but evolved to the present day. Symbolism and sentiment pervaded a Tudor Christmas—the holly hung throughout the house emphasized the presence of Easter in the Christmas story, sorrow amid joy, with the holly’s thorns alluding to Christ’s crown at His crucifixion, and its berries to His spilled blood. Saint Francis of Assisi had taught that even animals should share in the joyfulness of the season, originating the custom that cattle, horses, and pets should be given extra food on Christmas morning, and sheaves of corn should be left out to feed the birds struggling through winter.34
In the manor house’s rooms, boughs were built and hung by servants and members of the family. Evergreens were bound together and little gifts wrapped around them, with holders for candles added before the whole thing was hoisted high enough for people to stand underneath it. Mistletoe dangled from the center of the bough, thus explaining its nickname “the kissing bough.” The evergreen bough’s candles were lit for the first time on Christmas Eve, then again every night until Twelfth Night, the colloquial name for the Feast of the Epiphany, when the Magi had arrived at the manger in Bethlehem.35 The boughs were a source of mirth and merriment throughout Yuletide, with mummers (mime artists) or musicians often ending their performance beneath them for comic effect or hopeful flirtatiousness. Unfortunately, Catherine soon took to kissing musicians in other parts of the house without the excuse of Christmas revelry.
To tell the story of Catherine’s early romances and the role her family’s servants played in them, it is necessary to introduce her aunt Katherine, a regular presence after Catherine left Edmund’s care but one who has hitherto been almost completely ignored in most accounts of Catherine’s life. The elder Katherine Howard’s impact on the journey of the younger was significant, and both began spending more time with the Dowager in the same year. Katherine’s betrothal to Sir Rhys ap Gruffydd before her father’s funeral in 1524 has already been mentioned; the marriage ended in a tragedy that nearly destroyed Katherine.
A year after her father’s death and a few months into her marriage, the elder Katherine Howard’s grandfather-in-law died. An early supporter of the Tudor claim to the throne and a stalwart loyalist ever since, the old man’s position as the monarchy’s satrap in southern Wales was expected to pass to his grandson and heir, Rhys, who was in his early twenties.36 However, mourning had barely concluded before the government appointed the thirty-six-year-old Lord Ferrers instead. The decision was widely perceived as a humiliation for a family who had devoted their lives to serving the Tudors, and the sting worsened when young Rhys was excluded from the council that advised the royal household’s outpost in Wales. The marriage between Katherine and the attractive but hotheaded Rhys was a happy one, and she was outraged on her husband’s behalf, particularly since she believed that the decision to elevate Lord Ferrers, who had, after all, been judged too incompetent to serve as her brother’s successor as Lord Lieutenant of Ireland four years earlier, was part of a deliberate policy to humble her husband’s family.37 When Rhys and two of his servants were set upon by an unknown gang as they traveled past the University of Oxford, she began to suspect that Ferrers meant to harm or kill him.38 Rhys and his family were popular in Wales; a contemporary noted that “the whole country turned out to welcome him, and this made Lord Ferrers envious and jealous.” When Ferrers overplayed his hand and arrested Rhys for disturbing the peace, Katherine rallied hundreds who marched with her on Carmarthen Castle, including the Bishop of Saint David’s and many representatives of the local gentry.39 Katherine threatened the castle under cover of darkness, making sure to display her strength through the guise of delivering a message that asked for her husband and his men be freed. If they were not, then she promised Ferrers that her men would burn down the castle door to fetch them, a threat which rather undercut her claims that she had no intention of causing further disturbances. Ferrers managed to disperse Katherine’s supporters, but the lull was temporary. Chaos began to spread in the region. Servants of the two factions were ambushed and killed, Rhys was freed to be taken once more, Katherine and her men attacked one of Ferrers’s homes, lives were lost and property ruined. In his letters to his superiors in London, Lord Ferrers described Katherine and Rhys as leaders of a “great Rebell[ion] and Insurrection of the people.”40
Eventually, Rhys was arrested one last time and brought to London to stand trial for treason. He was accused of discussing prophecies that concerned the downfall of the King and of conspiring with Scotland to foment another invasion. Some of his own servants provided evidence against him. The case, which resulted in a conviction, was overseen by an on-the-rise Thomas Cromwell, who also helped arrange some of the logistics of Rhys’s execution on December 4, 1531. It is unclear to what extent Rhys had been driven to contemplate allying with a foreign power in order to recapture his family’s position in south Wales; the common view at the time seems to have been that he was “cruelly put to death, and he innocent, as they say, in the cause.”41 Allegations of financial corruption, his feud with Lord Ferrers, and the resultant threat to peace in Wales made his destruction a matter of convenience for the central government.
While we may never know exactly how much his own actions brought about Rhys’s death, we can be certain of the devastating effect it had on his widow. She had been intimately involved in her husband’s quarrel, and so the possibility that she would be accused of complicity in his alleged treason was tangible. Left to forge prospects for their three young children—Anne, Thomas, and Gruffydd—and fearful for herself, Lady Katherine followed in the footsteps of her elder brother Edmund and flung herself on the mercy of their niece, Anne Boleyn.42 Once again, the family’s dark-eyed golden girl did not disappoint.43 She may even have tried to limit the damage for her aunt and young cousins shortly before Rhys’s execution. Rhys had
been attainted at the time of his conviction, meaning that the Crown could seize his goods and property, but his act of attainder specifically and unusually made provisions for his widow, who was left with an annual income of about £196.44 If Anne could not save Rhys, she worked hard to salvage his family’s situation. It is incorrect that his two boys, both under the age of seven, were packed off to live in the care of another family, as has been stated. All three of the siblings stayed in their mother’s care, and she swiftly married Lord Daubeney, a widower nearly two decades her senior. Anne Boleyn had not had much time to deploy her matchmaking skills, and the sickly Daubeney was hardly as easy on the eye or heart as Rhys had been, but he enjoyed royal favor, and in such pressing circumstances that was more important than personal preference.45 A few years later, Daubeney was created Earl of Bridgewater by Henry VIII, making Katherine a countess, but the marriage that saved her from going under with her first husband was not a happy one.III It was mutually miserable to the point that within three years, the pair were living apart and complaining about one another to anyone who would listen.46 The Countess’s sons joined Catherine as their grandmother’s wards, though they had ample opportunity to see their mother who, accompanied by her maid Mistress Philip, began to spend much of her time residing with her mother.47
The Countess’s case showed the extent to which the new Queen’s loyalty to her family could prove invaluable. It was not the same thing as infallible—she had saddled Edmund with a job he was manifestly unqualified for and Katherine with a husband she came to loathe—but in difficult circumstances, Queen Anne was a worthwhile ally. Young Catherine was one of dozens of the Queen’s cousins, nieces, aunts, uncles, and extended relatives who would look to her for advancement, especially in bringing them to court to serve her in lucrative obedience. In Calais, rumor had it that Catherine’s father did not plan to live out his life as a comptroller but “hopes to be here in the court with the King or the Queen, and have a better living.”48 But court gossip was vicious and mercurial, savaging those it had once nurtured. Just as an anonymous letter years earlier had damaged Edmund’s standing in the aftermath of the Battle of Flodden, whispers on the court grapevine tried to harm the Countess. “I have none to do me help except the Queen,” she wrote in a letter, “to whom am I much bound, and with whom much effort is made to draw her favour from me.”49 The more Howards around Anne, the better, and even if she was not destined to serve at the Queen’s side, Catherine needed to continue learning the courtly graces. She was not going to spend her whole life at Chesworth House.
On May 2, 1536, the ground shifted beneath the family in the most devastating fashion since their defeat at Bosworth. Shortly after lunch, the Queen was arrested and rowed upriver to the Tower of London, where, seventeen days later, she bowed off the earthly stage after tucking the hem of her dress under her shoes, hoping to preserve her dignity once her body collapsed forward into the straw.50 Two days earlier, another of Catherine’s cousins, Lord Rochford, had perished as collateral damage in the quest to ruin the Queen, along with Sir William Brereton, a Welsh landowner who had once been supported by the Countess’s first husband.51 In seventeen days, the Howard women had been robbed of their most celebrated kinswoman, and while it is tempting to think that the people at Chesworth spoke of Anne’s fate in much the same horrified, incredulous way as distant relatives like the Ashleys or the Champernownes seem to have, it is equally possible that Catherine’s friends discussed the events of 1536 with the same unthinkingly gleeful acceptance that greets so many political or royal scandals, no matter how improbable their details.52 The government’s version of events that had Anne as a bed-hopping, murderous adulteress certainly made for a good story, so good in fact that its manifest falsities still cling to popular perceptions of its victims, almost five hundred years later.
If the family was not already nervous enough, within weeks of the Queen’s execution Catherine’s younger uncle Thomas was also sent to the Tower, after his secret betrothal to the King’s niece, Lady Margaret Douglas, was discovered.IV The King was apoplectic and chose to see the romance as part of a plot to place the Howards closer to the throne.53 The couple were separated and while Margaret was eventually released, Thomas died of a fever after eighteen months in prison. His body was handed back to the Dowager, who was granted permission to bury her son next to his father at Thetford on condition that “she bury him without pomp.”54
Throughout the scandal caused by Thomas’s elopement, the Pilgrimage of Grace rebellion convulsed the north of England. Thousands rose in protest at the closure of the monasteries and the gathering pace of religious revolution. Even a young girl growing up in a country house in the south cannot have missed the changes affecting England after the break with Rome. Catherine’s family were initially sympathetic to the King’s quarrel with the Pope, but by 1536 they were beginning to feel a mounting sense of dread. Edmund Howard had sworn the mandatory oath acknowledging the King as head of the Church in 1534, yet a few years later he and his colleagues in Calais were accused of failing to implement the King’s latest spiritual policies.55 Even the late Queen, the alleged harbinger of the English Reformation, had shown signs of swinging towards theological conservatism in the months before her death.56 When news of a northern uprising known as the Pilgrimage of Grace reached Horsham, the Dowager showed herself supremely reluctant to honor her feudal obligations and provide men to help suppress it.57 Her sons and stepsons felt differently, perhaps mindful of their precarious position in the King’s favor after the events of the summer, and it was Lord William Howard who eventually had the lucky honor of kneeling at Henry’s feet with the news that the north had submitted.58
At this point, Catherine was about thirteen or fourteen years old. Sometime between her cousins’ executions and her uncle’s death in prison, she began formal music lessons. Thirteen was a little late to start the music lessons that many children in her position had been taking from the ages of six or seven, so it is possible that she had some lessons earlier, though Catherine’s formal education does seem to have been somewhat neglected. Unlike several of her relatives, she was never singled out for praise for her musical or literary abilities. By autumn of 1536, her schooling had focused on teaching her how to read, write, walk, talk, stand, dance, and move in a way guaranteed to please her contemporaries, but not much else.
Her principal music teacher was a young man called Henry Manox, brought in by the Dowager, possibly on the recommendation of his kinsman, Robert Damport, who was already in her service.59 Manox deviated little from the stereotype of an arrogant, young, shallow, emotionally impulsive musician. He set the mold for the type of man Catherine was subsequently drawn to—handsome, cocky, more brawn than brain, and passionate to the point of possessive. Several of Catherine’s friends already had romantic entanglements with the young gentlemen of the household—as with most establishments before the late seventeenth century, women were in the minority on the Dowager’s staff—and Catherine and Manox began a flirtation that eventually progressed to kissing and fondling. In modern parlance, they fooled around but did not go all the way.60
This relationship forms the first piece of “evidence” in a recent theory about Catherine’s life, namely that she was the victim of repeated sexual abuse throughout puberty, with Manox being the first of several men to groom her.61 Variations on this narrative describe Manox as a predator or simply the first in a succession of men, like Francis Dereham, who repeatedly raped her. This interpretation can only be sustained by either willful or accidental ignorance of almost every piece of relevant surviving evidence. It requires misrepresenting Catherine’s personality, disregarding the biographical details of everyone around her, and twisting beyond recognition every comment made by most of the people who knew her. This is not to suggest that such abuse did not happen in the past—the young Elizabeth I was molested and horribly manipulated by her stepfather, Thomas Seymour, in a relationship that was not just quite clearly one we would characterize
as abuse, but which was described as such in contemporaries’ vocabulary for it.62 Cases of child abuse were reported and prosecuted, and the concept was understood in the early modern era, so it is untrue to say that there was no perception of victimhood or coercion.63 The memoirs of the fourteenth-century merchant’s wife Margery Kempe recounted an argument that contained a threat of marital rape if the husband did not get what he wanted.64 Admittedly, Catherine herself once claimed that she had been forced into sexual relations at this stage in her life, but it can be shown beyond reasonable doubt that she was lying and doing so in desperate circumstances.65 Against that claim, which no one at the time believed, there is a mountain of precise evidence from those who knew her and from the men involved about when her relationships began, how they began, their consensual basis, and above all, Catherine’s role in ending them when she lost interest.
The idea of Henry Manox as a pedophile preying on his young charge is a grotesque one, but mercifully without any supporting detail. Manox certainly put Catherine under pressure to consummate their relationship and reacted tastelessly when she ended things between them, but none of this supports a hypothesis of sustained and deliberate abuse. In the first place, we do not know Manox’s date of birth, and given the average age of the group he consorted with, he was likely to have been five years older than Catherine at the very most. Furthermore, the scenario of Manox using their lessons to bully her into a sexual relationship is undercut by reading transcripts from the investigations of 1541, which prove Catherine’s lessons were actually taken by two teachers at the same time—Manox and another man, Barnes—during which Catherine would have been chaperoned.66 However, if not horrible, their relationship was nonetheless inappropriate, on several levels.
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