Instead, Catherine settled down to life in the Queen’s household, something that cannot have been too onerous considering their mistress was still on the other side of the North Sea. All the other ranks of ladies-in-waiting were either married or widowed. Catherine’s immediate companions were the other maids of honor, young and unmarried girls like herself from a noble background who had been sent to court to serve the future queen, who would act as both their chaperone and matchmaker. Catherine was joined by her second cousin Katherine Carey, the eldest child of Anne Boleyn’s sister Mary, and Mary Norris, who had been the Duke of Norfolk’s ward ever since her father was executed for treason in 1536.44 Earlier that year, Mary’s brother had managed to win back some of the estates that had been confiscated by the Crown at the time of their father’s death, and her admission to court was another sign of their reviving fortunes.45 The final maid of honor we can be certain of was Anne Bassett, who by her own admission could barely sign her own name in English but who was fluent in French and said to be very pretty.46 Anne, whose stepfather Lord Lisle was King Henry’s uncle, was the only one of the maids to have lived at court before—she had joined Jane Seymour’s household shortly before her death.II Since her parents lived in Calais, Anne spent the next two years residing at court or in the homes of her well-connected mother’s many friends. That autumn, she had gone to her cousin’s house in the country to recuperate from a cold before returning to London.47 She certainly knew how to talk like a courtier—she had been part of the group of ladies invited to a banquet on some of the new warships at Portsmouth. As part of their thanks to the King, they wrote, “We have seen and been in your new Great Ship, and the rest of your ships at Portsmouth, which are things so goodly to behold, that, in our lives we have not seen (excepting your royal person and my lord the Prince your son) a more pleasant sight.”48 Along with the French phrases and little Latinisms with which courtiers liked to liberally pepper their conversations, Catherine was also going to have to learn the knack of laying flattery on with the proverbial trowel.
The period between Queen Jane Seymour’s death on October 24, 1537, and the King’s marriage to Anne of Cleves on January 6, 1540, was the longest period in Henry VIII’s reign in which he was without a wife. The Queen’s household was a lucrative source of aristocratic employment, and its absence in those years had been felt both by the young women who hoped to come to court and by their parents. However, when Henry began to reconvene the household in 1539, he did so after a recent batch of reforms that sought to limit its size. The aristocrats’ jockeying for places attempted to circumvent the monarch’s decision, trying everything from squeezing family connections to sending thoughtful personal presents to those who might help them.49 Anne Bassett was sent into the royal presence with a gift of the King’s favorite marmalade as an accompaniment to a request that her younger sister be allowed to join the household. Reading Anne Bassett’s letters to Calais, it is clear that her mother, Lady Honor Lisle, had been applying pressure to her daughter to be successful in her petition. Anne, who had to dictate her letters to a scribe, reported that she had “presented your codiniac [marmalade] to the king’s highness and his grace does like it wondrous well, and gave your ladyship hearty thanks for it,” but given the number of requests the King was receiving, Anne Bassett apologetically told her mother that she had not been able to press her sister’s suit for “fear how his grace would take it.”50 The palace, at least initially, stood firm and the cap on numbers was maintained.51
The maids of honor, who were the lowest rank in the Queen’s “above stairs” household, bar the chamberers, were out of bed at about six or seven o’clock in the morning to supervise the chamberers, maidservants who would light the fires in the Queen’s apartments and clear away the collapsible beds or mattresses that many of the servants had slept on during the night. Once the Queen arrived from Germany, Catherine and her colleagues were expected to accompany her to Mass and attend to her during her meals. Catherine’s place in the household gave her access to the privy chamber, the Queen’s private rooms, which very few courtiers ever saw. Entry to them was controlled by well-placed servants who acted like watertight doors shielding the royals from the never-ending crowds of petitioners and place seekers who thronged the public rooms. Tudor palaces were constructed with this limiting of access in mind. The Queen’s public apartments, where she granted audiences and hosted foreign dignitaries, were separated from her privy rooms by a short gallery that ensured that even when the doors opened from the public rooms, the crowds still could not glimpse into the royals’ private chambers. Servants sped up and down stairs to this gallery, bringing up plates of food from the Queen’s privy kitchen, which then had to be handed over to the maids of honor, pages, or chamberers, who would take the plates from them at the privy apartment doors. The same routine was repeated when clothes were ordered up from Her Majesty’s cavernous wardrobe. The maintenance of the Queen’s clothes required soft brushes to clean the wardrobe, and furs in particular had to be properly cleaned at least once a week, even if she was not using them, “for moths be always ready to alight in them and engender.”52
The gallery had two little rooms jutting off from it—one held a small altar and the other, separated by a lattice grille, contained a prie-dieu. The Queen went there to hear Mass every day, accompanied by a few of her maids of honor. The Queen’s priests were not technically members of her elite privy chamber staff, and so to prevent them or their altar boys entering the inner sanctum, a small devotional space was set aside in the gallery. It was only on holy days that the Queen joined her husband to progress through the throngs of courtiers to attend Mass in one of the palace’s public chapels.53
Along with memorizing the complex rules of who could pass through which door and no further, maids of honor were expected to look the part. They were to be stylish enough to complement their mistress without outshining her. Catherine’s early purchases during her time with Francis Dereham showed her appreciation for fashion, but life at court required more than a few tasteful silk flowers. The court was obsessed with appearances. Christ had declared “By their fruits, ye shall know them,” and everyone at court wanted to make sure their clothes advertised their position in the hierarchy.54 Pins held together the voluminous folds of noblewomen’s dresses—the King’s eldest daughter ordered ten thousand of them for her wardrobe—and the extortionate cost of the dresses meant that hand-me-downs were greatly appreciated.55 Catherine’s family were expected to provide for her when she made her debut, particularly her wardrobe, but as an unmarried girl she was also one of the few ladies in the Queen’s service who received a salary. She and the other maids of honor received £10 a year, a sum she immediately used to pay back Francis Dereham what he had loaned her to buy some clothes back in Lambeth.56 It was a further indicator of her desire to move on from their relationship.
Discipline was harsh in the royal household, with a warning for the first offense and dismissal for the second.57 Many of the palace’s rules were hygiene related—residents were forbidden from leaving half-eaten food or dirty dishes around, and if any were found the servants had to clear them away immediately.58 Urinals were built near most of the major courtyards, though as any attendee at a modern festival or large-scale outdoor event will know, even the most adequate provisions did not always satisfy men who were either in a rush or drunk. To combat this, palace officials at Greenwich daubed white crosses on some of the palace’s outer brickwork, counting on the fact that the symbol of Christ’s crucifixion would prevent anyone from defacing it. For Catherine, the proper toilets were called the “common house of easement,” a large building where the toilets were covered by a plain piece of wood with a hole over a large tank. Depending on how old the palace was, the tank’s contents were either periodically flushed away or cleared out by a gang of laborers once the court had moved on to another residence. In the newer or renovated buildings, water from the palace moat was used to flush, but pipes ensured the filth was ta
ken away from the moat itself, which was kept clean as a breeding ground for carp and other fish that ended up on the palace tables.59
Although Catherine had grown up in the aristocracy and its households, nothing in her past could have prepared her for the splendor of palace life. In terms of size and magnificence, the English royal establishment had no peer in the British Isles. Her own family’s vast wealth paled in comparison to the King’s. One modern estimate puts Henry’s income at nearly forty times more than the Duke of Norfolk’s.60 The court was the great theater of political display, and under Henry VIII it seemingly had enough funds to glitter. Foreign visitors remarked that the prettiest of the King’s houses were Greenwich Palace, Hampton Court, and Windsor Castle, but his favorite residence was also his largest, the Palace of Whitehall, which in 1539 was still sometimes referred to in courtiers’ conversations by its old name of York Place.61 A sprawling complex of buildings, Whitehall was the largest palace in Europe, and it only yielded the accolade to Versailles after an accidental fire in 1698. It stood, like nearly all of Henry’s largest homes, on the bank of the Thames, and when Catherine first arrived there as a resident in the fall of 1539, preparations were under way for a series of renovations and expansions, including the construction of a set of riverside rooms for the King’s eldest daughter.62 The expansion of Whitehall would cost nearly £30,000. To put the scale of its expense in its context, the construction of the entirety of the King’s fabulous new hunting lodge at Nonsuch had finished at £24,500. For the palace expansion 12,600 yards of land was reclaimed from the Thames via a 700-foot stone dyke that would help create the space needed for the new gatehouse, banqueting hall, outdoor preaching auditorium, orchards, and enlarged gardens. Whitehall already had the largest set of royal apartments in England, four tennis courts, two bowling alleys, and a tiltyard. An entire suburb of Westminster had been bought up and demolished to make room for its twenty-three acres—compared to six at Hampton Court. It was so large that a gatehouse was necessary to straddle the busy London street that divided the park side, with most of the palace gardens, from the public rooms, stables, and accommodations on the other side.63
Life in this splendid maze brought Catherine into more regular contact with other members of her family. Her elder half sister Isabella was also in the Queen’s household, as one of the ladies of the privy chamber, an elite band of eight who helped the Queen to dress and tended to her in her most intimate moments. Isabella and her husband, Sir Edward Baynton, who was to serve as vice chamberlain of the same household, were beneficiaries of sustained if restrained royal favor, having received two countryside properties in grants earlier that year.64 Catherine’s paternal uncle the Duke was still a vital man at the age of sixty-six and a prominent presence at court. The Howard fortunes had admittedly stuttered after the execution of Queen Anne Boleyn and then Lord Thomas’s elopement with the King’s niece, but the Duke’s military and diplomatic skills meant the government had come to rely on him again after the Pilgrimage of Grace and during the attempts to prevent an invasion. His ability to win three of the maid-of-honor spots for members of his affinity reflected his continued influence at court, as did his pension from the French government, letters from petitioners, such as those who hoped he could use his position to save the monastery of Our Lady in western Ireland, and his regular attendance of the privy council.65
Catherine did not know this uncle, with his patrician nose and thin lips, as well as she knew her uncle William or her aunt Katherine, Countess of Bridgewater, but she would have been presented to him before he brought her to court. Sometimes, when it was too dark for him to travel back from any business in Lambeth safely, the Duke was invited to stay at his stepmother’s house, but he was not as close to Agnes as her own children were.66 His marriage to the late Duke of Buckingham’s daughter was unhappy enough to warrant comparisons to Jason and Medea, and there were contested allegations that Norfolk had beaten his wife along with the uncontested fact that he was now living in sin with a mistress called Bess Holland.67 To his wife’s distress, their three surviving children—Henry, Mary, and Thomas—had all sided with their father, although it seems that the eldest at least did so under duress.68 The eldest two were regular fixtures at court by the time Catherine joined it. Henry Howard, the Duke’s twenty-two-year-old heir apparent, enjoyed the courtesy title of Earl of Surrey, but his father kept a tight control of the purse strings, which might explain why he was able to win his son’s loyalty.69 Surrey was married in his teens to the Earl of Oxford’s daughter, and she was pregnant with their fourth child when Catherine went to court for the first time.70 A superb horseman and intellectually brilliant, Surrey was a celebrated poet who helped pioneer several new verse forms in English, most notably blank verse and the English sonnet.71 Like many of his relatives, he had a flammable temper, unassailable pride in his ancestry, and the same views about the damage being done, as they saw it, to the social hierarchy by men like Thomas Cromwell. Unlike his father, Surrey’s religious views leaned towards reform.
His younger sister, Mary, had been married at fourteen to the King’s bastard son, the Duke of Richmond, and became a widow at seventeen when her husband was left sufficiently weakened by a virus to succumb to a subsequent bacterial infection.72 Mary was as bright as her brother, which meant that her father thought she was too clever for a woman. Compared to Catherine, her education had been exhaustive. She was also attractive and tenacious—since her husband’s death, Mary and her family had been fighting to get the widowhood settlement promised to her at the time of the marriage. As Dowager Duchess of Richmond and Somerset, she was owed an annual income of £1,000 from the government, but because the marriage had never been consummated, due to the couple’s youth, the King claimed that there was some doubt about whether Mary had any right to the inheritance.III He turned the matter over to a panel of lawyers and judges, even though all impartial experts, including the Archbishop of Canterbury, believed that Mary was owed the money as Richmond’s widow, with or without a consummated marriage.73 Since no attempt was ever made to take the titles she acquired through marriage from her, the King may have known they were right and simply did not want to part with the money. A year before Catherine left Norfolk House, there had been talk of marrying the lovely Mary to Sir Thomas Seymour, the late Queen’s brother. Mary, it seems, had resisted because she suspected that a remarriage would not only cost her the rank of a dowager duchess, twice over, but also diminish her chances of getting the revenue promised to her in 1533.74 In 1539, she too was appointed to the new Queen’s staff, though given her rank as a duchess she joined it as one of the great ladies, the six highest-ranking members of it after the Queen. She was, at this stage at least, still far above her cousin from Lambeth.
With Francis Dereham back at Norfolk House, Catherine enjoyed a new flirtation that winter. Thomas Culpepper was the son of a gentry family who had rebelled against Richard III, which meant they were well placed to enjoy royal favor after the Tudors came to power. Catherine’s mother had been a Culpepper, but subsequent accounts of Catherine’s career that describe Thomas as her cousin are incorrect. There were several branches of the Culpeppers, and Thomas was one of the Bedgebury Culpeppers, meaning that he and Catherine were sixth cousins. Even in the world of sixteenth-century kinship where the word “cousin” was stretched to elastic limits, they hardly qualified as related.
He was exactly her type. He served as one of the King’s gentlemen of the privy chamber, all of whom, according to the household’s ordinances, had to “be well-languaged, expert in outward parts, and meet and able to be sent on familiar messages.”75 He was handsome, athletic, and if he had any insecurities, they were extremely well hidden. Even some relatively prim women seemed to forget themselves in Culpepper’s company—Anne Bassett’s mother, Lady Honor Lisle, coyly sent him her colors to wear during a jousting tournament, accompanied by a letter confessing she had never done anything like that before.76 In his younger days Culpepper had served as on
e of Lord Lisle’s servants and apparently flirting with his master’s wives was a habit he never grew out of.
An inventory of his possessions taken in 1541 shows that Culpepper was a dapper dresser with “numerous gowns, coats and other articles of apparel.”77 The King, who liked to be surrounded by men younger than himself, perhaps in an attempt to recapture something of his own vanished youthfulness, adored him, and the profitable side to royal employment ensured that the unmarried Thomas was a wealthy man by 1539. He owned several properties, including lands from a shuttered monastery in Kent, seven manors, and a fifteen-roomed town house at Greenwich. Like many young men, he seemed slightly more interested in clothes and other immediate outgoings like gambling and high living than in long-term investments. He did not spend much on decorating the town house, which was described as having “hangings (mostly old) and some very scanty furniture in hall, parlour, and 13 other chambers and a chapel.”78 Given that he spent most of his time at court, perhaps he felt decorating was an unnecessary expense.
He noticed Catherine shortly after her arrival at court. They were both young, unattached, and good-looking. They flirted and he pursued her. Catherine demurred, apparently holding Thomas at arm’s length. Thomas was persistent, and he told Catherine that he loved her. Their attraction to one another became a topic of conversation between Catherine and the other maids of honor. When she was in Thomas’s company, Catherine continued to play hard to get. From remarks he made a year later, it seems clear that he wanted and expected a sexual relationship, which she was not prepared to give.79 Thomas, who expressed love more easily than he felt it, did not deal well with sexual frustration, and so he moved on to somebody else, an unexpected turn of events that caused Catherine to break down in tears in front of her fellow maids. The rejection certainly came as a jolt to someone who had only ever been the object of lavish, even cloying, devotion and pursuit. Prior to Culpepper, Catherine had always been the one to end a relationship, and she had never been replaced by another woman. Henry Manox had apparently even ranked his fiancée after Catherine. Thomas’s rejection was thus a new and unwelcome sensation for Catherine, made worse by the fact that she does seem to have developed genuine feelings for him.
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