Manners were apparently not high on the list of English diplomatic priorities that winter. On February 2, the French ambassador visited Henry and asked him to recall his representative in Paris.28 The Bishop of London had spoken to King François in an offensive manner and the latter wanted him “replaced by a more prudent and wiser” envoy.29 The French would not let the matter drop, and to appease them Henry eventually decided to appoint Sir John Wallop. In France, the outgoing ambassador, the obstreperous Bishop Bonner, reported that “more [honor] is now made to the Queen than heretofore.”III30 The French courtiers’ attention to their Hapsburg queen suggested that the alliance with the Emperor was still strong, but the English also received some intelligence from other sources about cracks that were beginning to appear over the possession of Milan, which the empire had and the French wanted. Sensing an advantage, Catherine’s uncle Norfolk left London quietly on the King’s orders on February 12, just as the weather was beginning to thaw, and reached the French court four days later.31 His mission was to weaken François’s trust in the Emperor by playing on anxieties about Milan and liaising with courtiers who might be privately hostile to the pact with Austria.32
In this he had no better ally than the French king’s elder sister Marguerite, Queen of Navarre. Navarre, a small kingdom straddling what is now southwestern France and northwestern Spain, had been absorbed by the Hapsburg Empire, a development that unsurprisingly left Marguerite less than enthusiastic about her brother’s diplomatic volte-face. She met with Norfolk and bombarded him with advice—the King of England should grease the palms of those who could help him, including François’s two sons, who had already received expensive gifts from the Emperor.33 They should counteract Queen Eleanor’s influence by winning the support of the King’s mistress, the Duchess of Étampes. Norfolk was sceptical about that last recommendation because he “thought it strange to seek anything at such a woman’s hand,” but Marguerite assured him that she spoke from personal experience, “as she was compelled to do it herself.”34 Norfolk, who thought Marguerite was “the most frank and wise woman he ever spake with,” began gift hunting for the princes and courting the favor of Madame d’Étampes, who was certainly open in her requests for payment—Henry VIII had to buy her two stallions—and Norfolk returned to England at the start of March impressed, and perhaps surprised, at the influence a royal mistress could wield.35
Nineteen weeks passed between Norfolk’s return and Catherine’s wedding. It was assumed, then and later, that Norfolk was the “author of this marriage” in conjunction with his ally Stephen Gardiner, the conservative Bishop of Winchester, who used Catherine to facilitate the downfall of Thomas Cromwell.36 Catherine’s rise coincided with and influenced Cromwell’s demise, but the extent to which she was deliberately and completely used to further her uncle’s goals is difficult to gauge.
Ten years earlier, Norfolk had liked and even supported Thomas Cromwell.37 He had shared bawdy jokes with him about a serving girl’s “tetins” and described himself as “your poor assured friend.”38 Since then, jealousy and political differences had divided them. Norfolk could not forgive Cromwell’s attempts to get the Marchioness of Exeter to incriminate him when she was interrogated during the White Rose Affair.39 Above all, Norfolk was too good a servant to the King to remain loyal to any man who lost his favor, which was Cromwell’s fate in the spring and early summer of 1540. Stephen Gardiner, the son of a cloth merchant from Bury St. Edmunds, was as clever as Cromwell, only moderately less ruthless, and substantially less charming. He had excelled in his legal studies at Cambridge and come to the court’s attention in the early 1520s. He subsequently represented Henry in missions to France, Rome, and Venice, debated the merits of ecclesiastical versus classical pronunciation of ancient Greek, and served for a time as the King’s principal secretary. Although he had written books defending the break with Rome, by 1539 continental Protestants detested him—even Martin Luther knew of, and worried about, his prominence in the English government.40 At home, Gardiner was dogged by accusations that he remained a papist at heart, and during Lent 1540 a radical preacher called Robert Barnes publicly accused him of it.41 Barnes had previously enjoyed Cromwell’s protection, but when Gardiner went to the King to protest this slander, Henry allowed him to bring Barnes in for questioning.42
By April 3, Barnes and two of his colleagues, William Jerome and Thomas Gerrard, were in the Tower. Barnes had not just insulted Gardiner but slandered the Virgin Mary, allegedly proclaiming that she had only been worth something when she was pregnant with Christ, otherwise “our Lady was but a saffron bag.”43 He denied that specific allegation, but he was not quite so definite when it came to refuting the charge that he had argued that a government had no right to “make laws that rule men’s consciences.”44 William Jerome’s sermons had sailed dangerously close to supporting the doctrine of predestination, a belief that the majority of English people still regarded as heresy. Cromwell’s association with these men tainted him at a time when he was already vulnerable, and Gardiner, whose skills as an interrogator were considerable, was determined to make the most of the opportunity.
Before Gardiner struck against them, English Reformers and radicals had their hopes raised by the King’s marriage to “a pious woman, by whom, it is hoped, the Gospel will be diffused.”45 Unfortunately for them, they overestimated the Queen’s influence and her allegiance to Protestantism. The Queen of France was closer to the mark when she identified Anne of Cleves as a Catholic whose family, like Henry, had quarreled with the Pope.46 Raised hopes perhaps inevitably led to raised voices, and the three men had preached sermons that stepped far beyond what Henry’s government was prepared to tolerate. By Easter, many English evangelicals seem to have realized their mistake. On April 12, another Protestant clergyman in Gardiner’s custody committed suicide by hanging himself in his cell.47 After Cromwell was gone, some of the fierier sort of Protestants chose lives or careers abroad.48
In this ugly battle, Henry’s physical attraction to Catherine was obviously very useful to Gardiner and the Duke. Subsequent accounts of her rise to the throne often cast Norfolk and Gardiner as an unsavory cross between Catherine’s chaperones and her pimps, hosting banquets at which they pushed a singing, smiling Catherine into the King’s sights. Gardiner’s modern biographer, Glyn Redworth, has cast doubt on this version of events, and there is room for skepticism, not least because this narrative of Catherine’s rise is too neat.49 The Dowager Duchess’s previously mentioned recollection of Henry’s instant attraction to Catherine provides evidence that the initial stage of their relationship was spontaneous and apparently inconsequential. The likelihood is that the King flirted with Catherine, probably quite obviously, but the impending arrival of Queen Anne made it little more than a social diversion. Once the King decided that he “abhorred” his new wife, his interest in Catherine revived.50
That Norfolk was responding to circumstances as they unfolded is supported by the fact that he clearly knew very little about his niece. There is, for instance, absolutely nothing to suggest that he was aware of her previous romances with Henry Manox or Francis Dereham. The Dowager did not rush to enlighten him. If the Howards had wanted to entice Henry VIII, they would not have chosen Catherine. She was damaged goods. Had they been as Machiavellian as the usual presentation of them suggests, at some point in the vetting process either the Dowager Duchess or the Countess of Bridgewater could have pointed out that elevating Catherine would put them all at risk in the long run. Rather, the King’s infatuation seems to have caught them all off-guard, and while her family then played the hand dealt to them—they would have been foolish not to—that is not the same thing as stacking the deck.
Confronted with the King’s frequent demands for her company, Catherine sought the wisdom of her relatives. They gave her advice on the proper way to behave when she was with him, “in what sort to entertain the King’s Highness and how often,” as it was put later.51 On one of her trips back to Lambeth t
o visit her grandmother, Catherine discovered that Francis Dereham had absconded without telling anyone where he was going. The Dowager asked Catherine if she knew where he had gone, but she answered, probably quite truthfully, that she had no idea.52 After he heard about the King’s interest in his beloved, Francis confided his despair to a friend, and since the indulgent Dowager consistently refused to give him permission to leave, Francis had taken matters into his own hands and fled.53 He had called on Catherine before he left and gave her £100 of his savings to look after in his absence. If he did not return, he told her she could do what she liked with the money. Thoroughly unmoved by these cryptic and melodramatic comments, Catherine asked where he was going but did not press him when he refused to answer her. At Norfolk House, she asked their old friend Katherine Tilney if she knew where Francis had gone, but like Catherine and the Dowager, Tilney had no idea.
The precise chronology of Catherine’s affair with the King is unclear. A few clues are provided in grants made to her by the royal household, one of which made Catherine a woman of moderate means in her own right—at the end of April, the goods of two condemned criminals, a father and son both called William Lidbeter, who had been convicted of murder, were signed over to her.54 By modern standards, the secondhand goods of two killers might lack in romance, but the Tudors were incorrigible recyclers. In May, the King bought her twenty-three brand-new quilts of sarsenet, a light silk, which was perhaps a welcome choice of fabric given the mounting temperature in the capital.55
At some point, her family decided to move Catherine and her silk quilts back to Lambeth for propriety’s sake. During her courtship with the King, Anne Boleyn had insisted on being accompanied by her mother for a chaperone, while Edward Seymour and his wife fulfilled the honors for an unmarried Jane in 1536. Henry’s barge, the Lyon, was difficult to miss given its size and gilding, so when he began paying evening visits to Lambeth, people talked, and when the official reason was that the King had called to pay his respects to the Dowager Duchess of Norfolk, they guffawed.56 Whether the relationship with Catherine was sexual at this stage is unknown. The royal barge’s visits provoked gossip, but Henry was historically impressed by women who preferred to wait for a wedding ring. If Catherine was his mistress, or if she would have become it had the relationship lasted much longer, is unclear. A London merchant with ties to the court heard the affair was “whispered by the courtiers, who observed the king to be much taken with another young lady of very diminutive stature.”57 Queen Anne found out about the liaison and confided her unhappiness on June 20 to a fellow Clevian called Karl Harst, who lived in London. By that stage the King’s relationship with Catherine was well advanced, and events in Europe had combined with those in London to make the young, lovely, “diminutive” and vivacious Catherine a serious contender for Anne’s crown.
Yet even with these setbacks, Henry’s interest in Catherine and Gardiner’s detention of the preachers, Cromwell’s fate was not a foregone conclusion. His downfall was more of a cockfight than a fox hunt. Up until the very last moment, it was not clear to outside observers who would emerge as victor.58 At the start of March, the Earl of Essex broke his neck in a horse-riding accident, and instead of the title passing, as expected but not confirmed, to his son-in-law, it went to Thomas Cromwell two weeks after his three former protégés ended up in the Tower.59 When one of the Duke of Norfolk’s servants died, Cromwell tried to have the Duke kept from the King’s presence on the grounds that the man might have been a victim of the plague. Norfolk pointed out that there had been fourteen other people living with the man at the time, none of whom had subsequently fallen sick, and even if it had been the plague, the Duke had been miles away when the death occurred.60 As part of the counterattack against his opponents, Cromwell arrested the conservative Bishop of Chichester, then made heavy hints that five more bishops who were suspected of secret loyalty to Rome would soon be taken.61 Given the allegations of papism already made against Gardiner, it was not difficult to guess who one of the five might be.
One victim of Cromwell’s counterattack was Catherine’s fellow maid of honor, Anne Bassett, who was interrogated but released after her stepfather Lord Lisle was imprisoned in the Tower. He was accused of papism and potentially treasonous communications with hostile foreign powers. Bassett’s mother, who suffered a nervous breakdown when her husband was taken, had been seen throwing potentially incriminating letters “into the jaques,” that is, the toilets.62 Lord Lisle’s detention was a setback for Cromwell’s opponents, but they rallied quickly. Norfolk had already asked for a commission to investigate heresy in the Pale of Calais, where Lord Lisle had served as governor, and he used his investigation to furnish the King with proof that Cromwell had been influential in allowing radicals and suspected heretics to escape to the colony.63 Of the thirteen men who were shipped from Calais back to London to stand trial for heresy in the spring of 1540, five of them had previously been the recipients of Cromwell’s patronage. Over the previous few years, a significant amount of Henry’s attention had been spent trying to crush “the sedition likely to arise from the diversity of opinion in religion,” and Norfolk’s hunt in Calais suggested that Cromwell had been thwarting that objective.64
The atmosphere in the palace was nightmarish, and another member of the Queen’s household fell victim to the tit for tat when one of the grooms, a young man with the surname Mandeville, was hanged for sacramentarian heresy, the Protestant belief that the Eucharist during Holy Communion was purely symbolic rather than the older belief that, through the miracle of transubstantiation, it became the Body and Blood of Christ.65 Watching from the sidelines, the French ambassador concluded “things are brought to such a pass that either Cromwell’s party or that of the Bishop of Winchester must succumb.”66
At the time of his wedding in January, Henry had justified going through with it because to abandon Anne would “be a mean[s] to drive her brother into the hands of the Emperor and the French king.”67 By the end of spring, Cleves had transformed from an asset into a liability. English spies reported that the anti-Hapsburg clique at the French court was gaining ground.68 Marguerite of Navarre defended King Henry in her conversations, and the English received signs that Queen Eleanor was the only member of the French royal family intent on preserving the alliance with the Emperor.69 A servant of Catherine de Medici, the Dauphine of France, arrived in London with messages for Henry from the Dauphine, Madame d’Étampes, and Queen Marguerite.IV70 While he could not take any action that publicly contradicted his father’s policy, the presence of his wife’s servant in London strongly suggests that the Dauphin’s views correlated, in this instance, with his aunt’s. At the same time, English fears that the Duke of Cleves’s aggression might drag them into a war over the issue of Gueldres solidified.71 The Emperor warned Henry “not to interfere between him and his subject,” by which he meant the Duke of Cleves, who was technically his vassal, and following his suppression of a rebellion against his rule in Ghent, there were concerns that the Emperor would now turn his attention to Cleves.72 The treaty between England and Cleves was mutually defensive, but the English had only ever intended for it to be invoked if they were attacked. As the Emperor’s alliance with France cracked open over the issue of Milan, Henry VIII could safely wash his hands of his in-laws.73 In May, he informed the Emperor that he had no intention of declaring war on Cleves’s behalf.74 At the same time, noblemen from the empire, like the Prince of Salerno and the Marquis of Massalombarda, were granted the Emperor’s permission to visit England, albeit in a private capacity.75
With the alliance gone, Queen Anne’s position was no longer tenable. On May 22, Henry received news that a prince, the Duke of Rothesay, had been born in Scotland as heir to Henry’s nephew, King James V, who wrote to his uncle that God, in His great goodness, had sent “a son and prince fair and lively to succeed to us and this our realm.”76 There was no chance of Henry fathering a spare prince if he remained trapped in a marriage to a useless and repe
llent woman. He desperately wanted out. Years later, Bishop Gardiner believed that it was this failure to arrange a dignified divorce for the King that sealed Cromwell’s fate.77 One of his colleagues warned the minister, “For God’s sake, devise for the release of the king; for, if he remains in this grief and trouble, we shall all one day smart for it.”78 In one of the rare missteps of his career, Cromwell would not accept defeat.79 Quite possibly, the prospect that Norfolk’s niece would become queen in Anne’s place compelled him to try shoring up the marriage to the extent of giving the Queen advice, via her servants, on how to make herself more alluring to her husband.80 That apparent dereliction of duty, when combined with his links to radical preachers, the campaign against him by his rivals, and the breakdown of the Franco-Hapsburg alliance, left Cromwell fatally vulnerable.81 Henry did not forgive failure easily, and embarrassment even less so. Cromwell was arrested at a council meeting on June 10, where Norfolk, along with some of Cromwell’s former friends, helped tear decorations from his coat and joined in the cries of “Traitor!” as the minister was taken to the Tower. Observing Cromwell’s ruin, the French ambassador wrote, “They had only reduced thus a personage to the state from which they raised him and treated him as hitherto everyone said he deserved.”82 Cromwell, or “Thomas Essex,” as he had proudly taken to signing himself a few weeks earlier, had been completely forsaken. As the ambassador noted, the only courtiers left “on his side [are] the archbishop of Canterbury, who dare not open his mouth, and the lord Admiral, who has long learnt to bend to all winds, and they have for open enemies the duke of Norfolk and the others.”83
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