Amid the dimple praising, the English diplomats seem to have underestimated Christina’s intelligence. She came from a family of clever and self-assured women. When an envoy told Christina that Henry VIII was “the most gentle gentleman that liveth, his nature so benign and pleasant that I think no man hath heard many angry words pass his mouth,” the princess struggled to keep a straight face.6 Like the French court before them, the Hapsburgs were left cold by Henry’s wooing techniques. His belligerence on the subject of the Pope’s authority, which both the Hapsburg Emperor and the King of France still acknowledged, irritated almost as much as the superior and slightly hectoring tone he used in his correspondence. Even as Henry was inaccurately claiming that his hand in marriage was desired by all the great powers of Europe, his representatives noticed that whenever they sought a subsequent audience with Christina, she had scheduled yet another fortuitously timed hunting trip with her aunt, the Dowager Queen of Hungary.7
For most of Henry VIII’s reign, England’s foreign policy had been predicated on the assumption that France and the Hapsburg Empire would be in a state of enmity, with England able to alter the balance in favor of one or the other. France, ruled by the womanizing François I, had been alarmed by the increase in Hapsburg power when his contemporary Charles V inherited the central European territories of his father’s family and the expanding Spanish empire of his mother’s. The Emperor’s attempts to dominate the northern half of the Italian peninsula as thoroughly as he did the southern became the two countries’ central point of contention, aggravated by personal rivalries and decades of hostility. Then, in the summer of 1538, the two monarchs signed a ten-year truce which received the blessing of Pope Paul III, who, a few months later, published a bull excommunicating Henry VIII for his schismatic disobedience and iconoclasm.8 For the English government, a rapprochement between the empire and the French was as unwelcome as it was alarming. At best, there was a concern that the alliance might provide aid or encouragement to discontented aristocrats in Ireland, who were opposed to the King’s religious policies.9 At worst, there was the terrifying possibility that the former enemies would invade England themselves and punish a king who had, in one cardinal’s words, “rent the mystical body of Christ which is His Church.” Fear of attack produced stories that the country would be divided, with the French occupying Wales, Cornwall, and the southern shires, while the Emperor annexed everything north of the Thames.10
To defend the realm, strongholds were built along the coastline, from Berwick in the northeast to Falmouth in the southwestern county of Cornwall. The King inspected many of them personally, while the Earl of Hertford was sent to assess the fortifications in Calais, where the French would certainly attack first.11 The suspicion that the Pope had “moved, excited and stirred divers great princes and potentates of Christendom, not alonely to invade this realm of England with mortal war, but also by fire and sword to extermin[ate] and utterly destroy the whole nation” helps to explain not just the nervous atmosphere in London but also the slew of arrests and interrogations, subsequently known as the White Rose Affair, which affected Catherine’s family and took place around the time she began her relationship with Francis Dereham.I
Margaret Pole, Countess of Salisbury, was an aged grande dame of the English aristocracy when she was arrested. A niece of two kings, Edward IV and Richard III, cousin of Henry’s late mother Elizabeth of York, and godmother to his eldest daughter, she was “the last of the right line and name of Plantagenet,” the royal family who had ruled England in one form or another between 1154 and 1485.12 Her third son, Reginald, had never accepted the legality of the break with Rome and chose life abroad, where he became a cardinal who wrote stinging tracts criticizing Henry VIII’s morals and policies. Henry knew that Reginald Pole was actively encouraging the papal initiative for a joint Franco-Hapsburg invasion, which was especially worrying given that his mother, who was the fifth or sixth richest person in England, had sizable estates on the southern coast.13 If imperial troops landed there, Henry suspected that her loyalty could not be counted upon.
One of the Poles’ servants betrayed the family by revealing that they were still in contact with the traitorous Reginald and that they had warned him about English plots to have him assassinated. The government homed in on the Countess of Salisbury’s youngest son, Sir Geoffrey Pole, and questioned him relentlessly. The Poles had certainly been indiscreet—at home, they had lamented the destruction of the monasteries and “plucking down of the Abbeys’ images,” and criticized the King’s dishonesty in how he had negotiated with the northern rebels of 1536. One of their cousins had described Henry as “a beast and worse than a beast,” and Geoffrey’s eldest brother, Lord Montagu, had commented hopefully on the life-shortening potential of the King’s infected leg after an ulcer had closed over earlier that year and, for ten days, the monarch writhed in agony.14
Under interrogation, Geoffrey provided enough evidence to destroy them all except, frustratingly for the government, his mother. It was not through lack of trying on their part. An unsubstantiated contemporary rumor claimed that Thomas Cromwell threatened Geoffrey Pole with torture.15 Geoffrey insisted that while his family regretted the changes to the Church, they had never imitated Reginald by plotting the King’s deposition. A particularly horrible aspect of the case was the poor man’s attempt to exonerate even as he accidentally condemned. He affirmed or confessed conversations that the government used as evidence of treason, which he relayed to prove nothing more serious than private dissatisfaction. There were more arrests, more interrogations, and on December 9, 1538, Geoffrey’s eldest brother was executed alongside their kinsmen, the Marquess of Exeter and Sir Edward Neville. Three of their servants were hanged, then drawn and quartered, their limbs displayed throughout London, and the Countess of Salisbury was attainted and imprisoned in the Tower. In an age when self-destruction was regarded as a mortal sin, a guilt-addled Geoffrey made several suicide bids—twenty days after his brother was beheaded, he attempted to suffocate himself in his cell at the Tower.16 He was pardoned in recompense for his testimony and he eventually went abroad, where he reunited with his brother Reginald, who had to take care of the broken man for the rest of his life.17
Worryingly for the Howards, they heard later that when the Marquess of Exeter’s wife had been brought in for questioning, Cromwell had spent a great deal of time trying to get her to incriminate the Duke of Norfolk. Luckily for them, Lady Exeter held firm in denying that Norfolk had anything to do with her husband’s alleged politics, but the Duke did not forget, or forgive, Cromwell’s attempts to implicate him during the White Rose Affair.18 The deteriorating relationship between the Duke and Henry’s chief minister helped shape Catherine’s career when she arrived at court a few months after Lord Exeter’s execution.
Within court circles, at least officially, the reaction to the cull was to express “how joyful tidings it must be to all Englishmen to know that such great traitors have been punished.”19 Unofficially, by the time Catherine was spending more time near the capital, the government seems to have been aware of how badly the executions had played with the public. No firm reason for the deaths had been given. Beyond warning a close relative of a plot to murder him, the Poles did not seem to have had any communication with a foreign power. The secrecy of Lord Exeter’s trial invited suspicion, as did Cromwell’s attempts to magnify their crimes beyond what they had been accused of, or even what was credible.20 No one seriously believed that Lord Exeter had been plotting to murder the King and all his children or the King’s claim that the Poles, the Nevilles, and the Courtenays had been plotting treason for a decade.21 When yet more court figures, including the King’s longtime friend Sir Nicholas Carew, were publicly executed in the aftermath of the White Rose intrigue, Cromwell had one of his employees, Richard Morrison, publish a defense of the purge, entitled An invective against the great and detestable vice, treason, wherein the secret practices, and traitorous workings of them that suffered of lat
e are disclosed. Yet still it offered no clear details of the alleged conspiracy, beyond insisting that the accused were papists.22
As the limbs of the Poles’ dead servants rotted in the streets, the public mood was one of thinly veiled disquiet. There was discontent about impending tax increases, preparations against the possible invasion, and continuing religious tensions.23 Food prices were rising in the west of England, the decision to cut the number of saints’ days was unpopular in dioceses in the south, and, as if to give credence to the worst fears about the international situation, the King, flanked by his courtiers, inspected parades of troops mobilized to guard the capital if the kingdom was attacked.24
It is inconceivable that Catherine would not have heard of the White Rose Affair—the questions about the conservatism of her uncle were enough to make the Howards uneasy—but how much she knew about the rest of the problems facing the country in 1538 and 1539 is unclear. She was young, privileged, and sheltered. It is quite possible that many of the nuances, and much of the unhappiness, bypassed her completely. The rising cost of food in Bristol was unlikely to disturb a girl laughing, flirting, and crying behind the redbrick walls of Norfolk House.
One event that she cannot have missed was the death of the Hapsburg Empress consort, which occurred during Catherine’s final irritation-filled months with Francis Dereham. Weakened by a miscarriage, the Empress Isabella had succumbed to a fever, possibly influenza, at the age of thirty-five, and one Spanish courtier observed that “to describe the sadness which His Majesty felt at her tragic death will need many pages.”25 Royal etiquette was inviolable, unaffected by passing trivialities like the threat of war or diplomatic crises, so when news arrived of Isabella of Portugal’s death in Toledo, the Tudor court acted as if the spouse of a cherished ally had passed away, rather than the empress of a country expected to invade within the year. Henry ordered his court to wear mourning for fifteen days, and a service was organized at Saint Paul’s Cathedral, which began with five heralds carrying banners of the Virgin Mary and Saint Elisabeth, the late Empress’s patron saint. The archbishops of Canterbury and York participated, and both of the country’s surviving dukes, five earls, and Thomas Cromwell attended, along with the Lord Mayor of London and all his aldermen, dressed in black robes. Their attire blended in with the dark velvet and hangings that covered the enormous church, broken only by the light of the candles, the golden letters reading Miserere mei Deus on the empty hearse, and the colorful Hapsburg coats of arms, which had been installed especially for the service. No one in the capital could escape the obsequies for the Empress—every parish church in London was ordered to light candles and sing a requiem for her.26 St. Mary-at-Lambeth, the church that stood less than a minute’s walk from the Dowager’s town house, was not exempt.
Beneath the façade, diplomatic tensions simmered. English councillors noted that the French and imperial ambassadors turned up to the service at Saint Paul’s together, a pointed display of their countries’ continued amity, and King Henry sent his lord chancellor to represent him, rather than attend in person. Even less tactfully, eleven days after the service the King and various members of his entourage were in public to watch a performance on the Thames in which two galleys engaged in a mock battle that culminated with actors dressed as the Pope and the college of cardinals losing and being tossed into the river. The disgusted French ambassador refused to attend a spectacle he described as a “game of poor grace.”27
The anti-papal river pageant took place in June 1539, probably before Catherine joined the court. Her debut and the months immediately after are the least documented part of her adult life.28 Nonetheless, it is possible to piece together a broad picture of events in the final third or quarter of 1539, beginning with the acceleration of the King’s plans to marry again that ultimately brought Catherine to court for the first time as a maid of honor.
The invasion threat settled the choice of who would be the next queen consort. The English ambassador to Paris reported home that the Queen of France, a Hapsburg archduchess by birth, was doing everything in her power to strengthen the alliance between her husband and her brother.29 Accepting that the Franco-Hapsburg pact could not be broken for the time being, Henry decided to look for friends elsewhere. Englishmen at the imperial court noticed that the Emperor could not mask his irritation at news that Henry VIII had sent a delegation to meet with King Christian III in Copenhagen—years earlier, Christian had deposed the Emperor’s brother-in-law and driven the then Danish royal family into exile, including the aforementioned Princess Christina.30 Riling the Hapsburgs temporarily became the driving force behind English foreign policy, and it was in this mood that attention turned on Duke Wilhelm of Cleves, a German nobleman who was involved in a territorial dispute with the Emperor over possession of the county of Gueldres. His eldest sister, Sybilla, was married to the head of the Schmalkaldic League, a federation of German rulers who were generally sympathetic to the Reformation and wary of the Hapsburg Emperor who technically remained their overlord. An alliance with the League, through one of Sybilla’s unmarried sisters, meant that if the empire and France attacked, England would have allies who could distract them by starting a war in the Hapsburgs’ German territories. In the first week of October 1539, the negotiations ended with the announcement that Henry VIII would marry the Duke of Cleves’s middle sister, Anne.31
Once the tentative timetable for the royal wedding had been established, more and more women returned to court to take, or seek, their places in the re-formed household. Catherine was still in her grandmother’s care by the first week of August, when her name is absent from a thank-you note signed by ladies of the court to the King, after they were taken to Portsmouth for a banquet and tour of the navy’s new ships.32 Further circumstantial evidence suggests that she should have been at court by November 5, when the King announced that he expected his fiancée to arrive in the next twenty days.33 That optimistic estimate was defeated by the atrocious weather conditions which delayed the princess’s arrival by a month, but the King’s hope suggests that Catherine and many of the other ladies had already arrived in the palace. Preparations for the future queen’s numerous official receptions had started by October 24, which supports a timeline that has Catherine ending her romance with Francis Dereham in the late summer of 1539 and arriving at court before the autumn.
By Catherine’s own admission, she was keen to go. She later told the Archbishop of Canterbury, “all that knew me, and kept my company, knew how glad and desirous I was to come to the court.”34 Many of her friends were also leaving the Dowager’s household—Joan Acworth became Joan Bulmer and moved north to York to live with her husband, along with one of the Dowager’s maids who had married a city official there. Lord William found a new job for Alice Wilkes as she prepared to marry Anthony Restwold, who planned to join the administration in Calais. The disapproving Mary Lascelles became Mary Hall after she married and moved to Sussex. Dereham’s friend Edward Waldegrave was, like Catherine, entering royal service by joining the household of the infant Prince of Wales.35 Some of the old group remained in the Dowager’s service, including Robert Damport and, to his immense frustration, Francis Dereham.36
Catherine’s enthusiasm for entering the glamorous uncertainty of palace life was not shared by everybody. Some peers, like the earls of Arundel and Shrewsbury, were notably infrequent attendees, preferring to leave the necessary networking to their relatives. Poets like John Skelton and Thomas Wyatt, who knew the court well, mercilessly satirized its mores. One of Wyatt’s most severe criticisms of his fellow courtiers was the way in which daughters, sisters, and nieces could be farmed out for their family’s political advantage.37 In the oft-repeated narrative of Catherine’s life, this was her fate—brought to court and groomed by her relatives to seduce the aging King, maximize their influence over him, weaken Queen Anne’s position, and in doing so destroy Thomas Cromwell, the architect of her marriage. The chronology of Catherine’s rapid rise to prominence does n
ot support this narrative, nor do the memories of those who knew her. Rather, it seems to have been coincidence, not design, which first brought Catherine into the limelight.
The Dowager Duchess did not accompany Catherine to court, but Norfolk House was close enough for the girl to visit and for the Dowager to keep informed of what was going on at court.38 On several subsequent occasions, the Dowager expressed variations on the remark “that the King’s highness did cast a fantasy [attraction or fancy] to Katharine Howard the first time that ever his Grace saw her.”39 The Dowager made her claims in conversation with several of the King’s councillors in 1541 and tellingly they did not correct her—they simply wanted to know who had told her.40 Her recollections suggest that the King’s initial attraction to Catherine was a spontaneous case of lust at first sight.
Throughout his life, Henry VIII was fascinated by the story of King David, the Old Testament hero who, while flawed, nonetheless fulfilled God’s plans for him. Over the course of his reign, Henry paid for three series of tapestries that depicted scenes from David’s life.41 According to the Bible, in his old age David spotted a young beauty called Bathsheba bathing one evening, was overcome with lust, and ruthlessly pursued her until she became his queen.42 Given his fascination with King David and his subsequent marriage to Catherine, the Dowager’s claim that he “cast a fantasy” on their first meeting might suggest a similarly single-minded pursuit. However, if Henry did notice Catherine when she was first presented at court in the autumn of 1539, any flirtation seems to have been obvious, if the Dowager Duchess is to be believed, but short-lived. After that first meeting and perhaps some future displays of slightly lecherous fondness for her when she was in his company, there are no further signs of royal interest in Catherine for several months. Considering that Anne of Cleves had not yet arrived in England and the King had such high hopes for his forthcoming marriage to her, it would be odd if the Howards had planned to put Catherine in the unenviable position of being her employer’s competition, especially when all the signs initially suggested that Anne would enjoy her husband’s support and affection.43
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