Catherine’s response to Joan Bulmer does not survive, but on the basis of the latter’s letter some historians have presumed that Joan was appointed to Catherine’s household, as the first example of the Queen’s stupidity in stuffing her household with friends and relatives, many of whom would have been better left in the past. The belief that Joan was invited to court in 1540 has led to other theories about how Catherine ran her household and why her queenship ended in the way that it did in 1542. Joan Bulmer’s admission to the household has been repeated in nearly every biography of Catherine written for the last century and a half, but Joan’s petition to “the queen of Britain” is a cautionary lesson in the power of assumption and repetition during research, because there is no evidence that Joan Bulmer reentered Catherine’s service after she married the King.
When former servants of the Dowager Duchess who had subsequently transferred to Catherine’s household are mentioned in the surviving interrogation records of 1541, it is often with the suffix of “now servant to the Queen” or “now chamberer to the Queen.” In the same documents, Joan is simply referred to as “Young Bulmer’s wife.”12 In a letter to one of the English ambassadors to France, the King’s councillors stated that Catherine had hired “to be one of her chamberers, one of the women” from Horsham, who, in earlier documents from the month in question, was named as Katherine Tilney.13 When Joan was quizzed about Catherine in 1541, she was only asked about Catherine’s life before marriage, and during a later round of interviews she is grouped in the transcripts with people like Mary Lascelles, Catherine’s sister-in-law Anne Howard, or Dereham’s friend Robert Damport, none of whom served in the Queen’s household.14 While most of this evidence is circumstantial, the failure to ask Joan any questions about Catherine’s life after she married the King suggests that her request to come to court in July 1540 had still not been granted by November 1541.
Joan Bulmer had been wrong when she described Catherine as “the queen of Britain”—she was only Queen of England in 1540, if Britain was taken by its proper meaning, the islands rather than any one part of them—but she was right, if not in the way she hoped, when she fawningly suggested that Catherine “will not forget.” Accepting that Joan was not successful in her petition helps give a clearer picture of what the Howards were doing in the wake of Catherine’s unexpected and meteoric ascent. We know from one specific piece of evidence from later in Catherine’s career that when it came to the appointments of ghosts from her life at Chesworth, the young Queen turned to her grandmother and her aunt. The old aristocratic anxiety over what the servants knew festered in the Dowager and even more so in the Countess of Bridgewater.15 The downfall of the Countess of Salisbury and the rest of the Pole family in 1538 had commenced when a servant divulged details of their private conversations. During the final days of Anne Boleyn, her enemies had tried to bully one of her favorite maids.16 Catherine’s uncle William and his wife Margaret knew something about her earlier romances, but based on the evidence imparted later, their role seems to have been far more passive than the Dowager Duchess’s or the Countess of Bridgewater’s. They were the two who knew the most, and the Countess was the one most preoccupied by the damage servants could cause—her first husband’s path to ruin had been marked at every stage by it. During the early stages of his feud, Rhys had accused three of his late grandfather’s servants of “crafty and untrue means” in embezzlement after they abandoned the family to join the household of his enemy, Lord Ferrers.17 At his trial for treason in 1531, one of Rhys’s dependents, James ap Gruffydd ap Hywel, testified against him and, according to the Countess, committed perjury by doing so. The Countess did not forget the circumstances of her first husband’s death, and a family tradition maintained that she spent several years trying to prove that another former servant, Edward Llwyd, had accepted a bribe of 500 marks in return for also providing evidence for Rhys’s prosecution.I18
The Dowager and the Countess’s decision to find jobs for nearly everyone who knew enough to destroy Catherine is usually dismissed as “dangerous idiocy.”19 But the truth is that they took their time, with a policy that aimed to charm the witnesses by arranging audiences with Catherine, as part of a wider strategy to keep the most dangerous, or indiscreet, away from regular attendance at court. It was still a risk-filled strategy, but that does not mean it was axiomatically stupid. All the Howard ladies had to go on was the evidence of past crises, such as servants’ roles in the destruction of the Countess’s first husband in 1531 or the Poles in 1538. In July 1540, Catherine’s family did not know if or how disaster would overtake them, simply that it might and that somehow they had to at least try to prevent it. The unknowns were the servants and companions who had witnessed Catherine’s romance with Dereham at firsthand. Short of sliding into the worst kind of moral depravity and having them all killed, the Howards had to prevent their former retainers from blabbing to the wrong people. If all the witnesses had a vested interest in seeing Catherine remain undamaged by her past, then there was less chance of anyone going to the council with the information that Catherine had not been a virgin when she married the King. The Howards did not appoint the Chesworth alumnae en masse, and it was only in August and September of the year after Catherine’s marriage that there was a steady trickle of former Lambeth or Chesworth employees entering the royal household or being invited to visit as the Queen’s guests. There is enough evidence left to us to support the theory that the Howards who knew something about Catherine’s affair with Dereham—the Queen, the Dowager Duchess, the Countess of Bridgewater, her brother Lord William, and his wife Margaret—decided to proceed with caution.20 Each appointee was treated differently—Katherine Tilney, who knew more than anyone at Chesworth since she had actually been in the bed one night when Francis and Catherine began canoodling, was a safe early appointment because of her blood relationship to the Queen and the Dowager Duchess. Joan Bulmer did not exhibit any clear animus to Catherine in 1541, which raises the possibility that she was fobbed off with the promise that she would be sent for in due course, a policy which the Howards repeated later.21
One more factor is important in understanding the policy embarked upon by Catherine’s childhood guardians in 1540. They were solely concerned with containing the matter of Francis Dereham. Although most modern accounts of Catherine’s career state that she also appointed Henry Manox to her staff as a musician, they are incorrect, and interviews from November 1541 clearly show that he was still living and working in Lambeth.22 Manox was completely overlooked, as were any of the girls who had not shared the maidens’ chamber with Catherine, most damagingly the censorious Mary Lascelles, who had served as nursemaid to Catherine’s young cousin Agnes. Manox and Catherine had never consummated their relationship, and it was highly unlikely that she ever confessed to her grandmother or aunt about how far they had gone physically, with the result that they seem to have dismissed it as a matter of no real importance, or else forgotten it entirely. Dereham, on the other hand, had spoken of marrying Catherine; he had made a spectacle of himself when she left him for life at court, and there were plenty of people, from the Countess’s maid to the Dowager’s porter, who knew about the liaison. If anyone repeated Dereham’s claim that he and Catherine were legally precontracted in the fullest sense possible, then she could be divorced by the King and ruined. Dereham, who was God knows where when Catherine walked down the aisle, would still have to be taken care of as the most dangerous and unreliable witness of all, if he ever returned.
Only a few ladies and gentlemen of the privy chamber were present as witnesses as Henry and Catherine stood before Bishop Bonner. As at her baptism, the Church required a declaration of consent and both answered that they wished to be married. Henry, his high voice issuing from thin lips, vowed, “I, Henry, take thee to my wedded wife, to have and to hold from this day forward, for better or worse, for richer for poorer, in sickness and in health, till death do us part, and thereto I plight thee my troth.” Catherine replied, “
I, Catherine, take thee to my wedded husband, to have and to hold from this day forward, for better for worse, for richer for poorer, in sickness and in health, to be bonny and buxom in bed and at board, till death us do part, and thereto I plight thee my troth.” As her slightly longer vow made clear, a wife had a certain set of duties and emotional obligations when it came to serving her husband. When the ring slid over her slender finger, guided by the bejeweled and plump hands of the forty-nine-year-old groom, she became his property. A king ruled over his subjects, but they were not his possessions; in contrast, a wife had no separate legal identity to her husband and could not even leave a will of her own until she became a widow. Marital rape was regarded as an oxymoron, and domestic abuse was frowned upon only if it reached the stage where the wife’s health or life were endangered.
If her wedding night at Oatlands was the first time Catherine slept with Henry VIII, she cannot have had a particularly pleasant evening, even disregarding the necessary inconvenience of pretending to lose her virginity. Since his third marriage, Henry’s physical appetite had grown, his sporting capacities had faded, and his waist had expanded. An ulcer on his leg regularly oozed puss. Rather than heal, it periodically closed over. When that happened, Henry’s face became discolored with the pain he endured.23 Mercifully for Catherine, the man in the long embroidered nightgown who climbed into bed next to her was not syphilitic, despite how frequently that has been asserted in the years since his death. The idea that Henry had syphilis was not suggested prior to an article published in 1888, which did not make much of an impact until its findings were revived in “The Medical Problems of Henry VIII,” a piece written by the Danish historian Ove Brinch in 1958. Brinch argued that some portraits from later in Henry’s life show a ridge in the nose consistent with a syphilitic gumma.24 Syphilis was a relatively new phenomenon in the sixteenth century, the cause célèbre of early modern diseases, with the result that when it appeared it was hardly ever misdiagnosed and it was nearly always treated with mercury. None of Henry VIII’s medical records, which survive intact, contain bills or lists of mercury. Furthermore, he did not exhibit many of the symptoms associated with secondary or tertiary syphilis.
Along with its fixture in popular culture, the syphilis myth was recently resurrected in biographies of Anne Boleyn and Catherine, despite having been conclusively disproved decades ago when Henry’s medical history was thoroughly examined in two mid-century texts—Frederick Chamberlin’s The Private Character of Henry the Eighth (1932) and Sir Arthur MacNalty’s Henry VIII: A Difficult Patient (1952).25 Chamberlin compiled a full medical report on Henry’s physical symptoms, his wives’ miscarriages, his children’s health, and the treatments he received and sent it to medical experts in Britain and the United States with the request that they return an opinion on whether it was possible, in light of what they had read, for Henry VIII to have suffered from syphilis. Sir D’Arcy Power, vice president of the Royal College of Surgeons, wrote back that “there does not seem to be the least reason, on the surgical side, for supposing that he ever had syphilis.” John Whitridge Williams, professor of obstetrics at Johns Hopkins University in Maryland, replied that “there is nothing in the histories of either Mary or Elizabeth [Henry’s daughters] to indicate that they had congenital syphilis.” Dr. Eardley Lancelot Holland, editor of the Journal of Obstetrics and Gynaecology of the British Empire, told Chamberlin that in his opinion “it is improbable that Henry suffered from syphilis,” and Professor Philip F. Williams at the University of Pennsylvania concluded that any evidence trying to link Henry with the disease was “insufficient” to support a diagnosis.26
Were there other problems for Catherine to deal with on her wedding night? Henry’s private life was so improbable that it has provoked many theories as possible explanations, some more plausible than others. One which has gained widespread credence in academic accounts of Henry’s life over the last fifty years is the idea that Henry was more or less impotent after he entered middle age. This is a more tenable theory than the one that posits he was syphilitic. The more thoughtful exponents of the impotence theory argue that the psychological pressures to sire an heir led to physical problems masked by a larger-than-life personality, which according to one of Henry’s recent biographers “covered up this weakness with male braggadocio.”27 There were moments when the mask seemed to slip. When the Hapsburgs’ ambassador made an innocuous comment about small families, the King shouted, “Am I not a man? Am I not? Am I not?”28 Another piece of evidence central to a discussion of the King’s bedroom problems is Anne Boleyn’s alleged complaint to her sister-in-law that sex with the King was not enjoyable, but at least it did not last very long.29 Much of Henry’s behavior seems explicable when looked at in this light, from minor details in his everyday appearance—even someone ambivalent about the nuances of Freud might wonder at the increasing size of the King’s codpieces—to the public humiliations of his first, second, and fourth wives and the neurotic preoccupation with sexual performance that pushed him to flout convention by choosing wives he already knew himself to be attracted to.
Speculation about Henry’s poor performance as a lover has resulted in several other theories about the King and his marriages, the oddest of which is the claim that his wives, faced with their husband’s impotence, took to adultery to provide an heir and save themselves. This theory only holds water if the essential facts of sex, impotence, and conception are ignored. If Henry had been impotent, he would have known that his wife’s pregnancy was the result of infidelity. Even if Anne Boleyn did admit to her sister-in-law that she did not enjoy sex, and whether she ever said it is contested, her comment did not imply that Henry was impotent. If anything, it confirmed the opposite.
If Henry was affected by intermittent erectile dysfunction rather than long-term impotence, any wife tempted to stray for the sake of a child would have been more sensible to cling to the hope that her husband would perform again soon as he clearly had performed at one time with all of them except Anne of Cleves. Childlessness might end a queen’s career; adultery certainly would. In light of Henry’s obesity in later life, flagging sexual performance was inevitable, but it is difficult to see much evidence of impotence in his relationship with Catherine.
No joint portrait of Henry and Catherine as man and wife was ever painted to celebrate their marriage—the fashion for portraits like that did not take off in England until the reign of the happily married Charles I in the following century—but Henry certainly emerged from his fifth bridal chamber in far better spirits than those in which he had emerged from his fourth.30 Marital bliss was very much the mood as they set off on a ten-day hunting trip through the new Court Chase. Catherine had married a man who, while much older than her and putting on weight, was still an impressive figure, or perhaps it would be more accurate to describe his appearance as inspiring, not just in terms of his height and confidence, but also in the way he could give her everything she had ever wanted—jewels, land, money, limited power, and significant influence. Having only had space in the palace stables for one horse of her own when she was a maid of honor, Catherine now had her own master of the horse, the ambitious and athletic John Dudley, who oversaw everything to do with the steeds a queen had access to.31 Henry VIII often sent to Europe for the best horses for the royal studs. Palfreys, generally agreed to be the finest kind of horse and certainly one of the most expensive, were ranked in the stables according to which of the five shades of the desired gray they sported. Surviving inventories list royal saddles covered with silk or fine leather, with black-silk-and-gold reins and copper-fringed buttons and tassels.32
One place the newlyweds could have visited en route back to London was Henry’s latest hunting lodge with the none-too-subtle name of Nonsuch, inspired by and built to eclipse the French royal family’s châteaux in the Loire Valley, such as Amboise or Chenonceau. Construction on Nonsuch had started two years earlier and was almost completed by 1541, though some parts of the palace were not finish
ed until 1545. Its cost and magnificence did not translate into a large palace. It only had one public reception room. Its primary purpose was to accommodate the King and his riding household, the reduced entourage he took with him on small hunting trips like the one with Catherine in 1540.33
Nothing survives of Nonsuch today—by the time it was gifted to the Queen Mother, Henrietta Maria, in 1660, it was already beginning to crumble.34 Part of the reason why Nonsuch was in such a shambolic state by the time it passed to Henrietta Maria was doubtless due to the neglect it had suffered during and after the English Civil War, but far more harm was done by the way in which it and nearly all of Henry VIII’s palaces had been built. During the reign of his youngest daughter, Henry had acquired a posthumous reputation in England as “a perfect Builder as well of fortresses as of pleasant palaces.”35 At the start of Elizabeth’s reign, her father’s palaces still retained their splendid appearance and stood as expressions of Henry’s interest in architecture, masonry, and the arts. They suggested that he had been the multifaceted Renaissance prince he aspired to be. However, with the exception of a few wine cellars now occasionally used by the Ministry of Defence to host receptions, the only bit of Whitehall Palace that survives today is its banqueting house, which was built on the orders of James I. When most of the rest of the palace burned down in an accidental fire in 1698, its sturdiest buildings had been added by the Stuarts. Hampton Court, the largest surviving Tudor palace, had its foundations laid under the watchful aegis of Cardinal Wolsey, and St. James’s Palace, which also remains, was a lesser residence that may ironically have weathered the centuries ahead because Henry did not take much interest in it while it was being built.
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