Young and Damned and Fair

by Gareth Russell

  The other palaces’ long-term problems reveal a great deal about the King’s mind and capabilities. Henry was impatient to see his ideas realized, and he had no interest in allowing them the time they needed to be well executed. The royal household’s accounts are littered with overtime payments to workmen who toiled through the night once the King had decided that he would be inspecting his latest renovation in a few days, weeks if not months before he should have. Charcoal braziers were dashed around the palaces to dry the paintwork as the King approached.36 Under pressure from the King, the decoration of the palaces was perfected at the cost of their longevity; the workmanship in most of Henry VIII’s homes was in fact slipshod, rushed, and insufficient, which is why so few of them managed to last much more than a century. The same was true of the fortresses he had ordered into being when he feared an invasion. The French ambassador, who saw some of them, remarked that they looked impressive but he doubted how strong they were given the haste in which they had been built.37

  Catherine’s honeymoon played out in a mood of sticky somnolence. The fiction of plague as an excuse to move Anne of Cleves to Richmond had become a reality as England struggled with drought and stultifying heat. One MP wrote later that in the summer of 1540 there was suffering “universally through the realm [and] great death, by reason of new hot agues and Fluxes, and some Pestilence, in [the] which season was such a drought, that wells and small rivers were clean dried, so that much cattle died for lack of water: and the Thames was so shallow, and the fresh water of so small strength, that the Salt water flowed above London bridge.”38 Henry, however, did absolutely nothing, and it was left to urban authorities to organize things like penitential parades through the streets, begging God to send them relief and rain.39 The King’s indifference to his subjects’ needs was a long-running theme in his reign. He had, after all, pitched them headlong into a generation of political instability, and unlike his great-uncle, father, and two daughters, he never pushed forward any legislation which could improve his subjects’ lot in life. Today, there is an oft-repeated view that Henry VIII was a popular monarch, because his people admired his flamboyant personality and possibly exaggerated machismo, but the sources from the time record complex attitudes that veered from loyalty through frustration to outright loathing in almost equal measure. A year before Catherine’s wedding, one of her countrymen remarked that “if the King knew every man’s thought, it would make his heart quake.”40 In the sixteenth century, it was a rare man who could unite the vanguard of the Protestant and Catholic reformations, but Henry VIII managed to be hated by both of them. The German Reformer Philip Melanchthon described him as “the English Nero” and prayed “May God destroy this monster!”; another called him “godless,” while an Italian Catholic priest concluded that because of Henry, “never before was Christianity in such turmoil as today. The King of England triumphs in his ruin.”41 In Ireland, priests denounced him as the “worst man in the world.”42

  A few weeks after Catherine’s wedding, the celebrant vividly and horribly demonstrated his repudiation of his former patron Cromwell by overseeing the arrest, torture, and trial for heresy of a fourteen-year-old apprentice boy called Richard Meekins. Meekins’s burning stunned a city that had already witnessed more than its fair share of horrible and controversial exterminations.43 There was a sense in London of repulsed malaise at the cost of Henry’s religious policies. Meekins’s only crime was having heard Protestants speak against the Mass, at a time when Henry’s government had allowed them to do so, and then to gullibly repeat what they said to someone who, in their turn, reported it to the diocesan officials. Henry’s religious policy had changed and what was once publicly preached had now been deemed heresy. Reacting to the events of the summer of 1540, a Huntingdonshire man called Robert Swinerton was hauled before the council for saying, “O Jesus, what a world is this that so many men shall die, and all for one man’s sake!”44 In London, people jokingly asked if the two-year-old Prince of Wales, whose mother had died giving birth to him, would turn out to be as great a murderer as his father since “he must be a murderer by kind for he murdered his mother in his birth.”45

  Like all those around Henry, Catherine was careful to express her views of her husband only in terms of the most abject obedience and adoration, but there are comments from those who knew Henry’s courtiers, but were not courtiers themselves, that this was playacting. Even some comments made by Catherine in future conversations with Thomas Culpepper suggest that she was deeply afraid of the King. The Prince of Salerno, an Italian nobleman who spent just over a week at Henry’s court a month before Catherine’s wedding, held his peace while he was in London, but Henry’s generosity could not sway the prince’s opinion of him. Salerno later told his countrymen that the King was “like a pig,” and he was even less impressed by the environment at court. He felt that he had been treated like a spy, with the courtiers’ good manners failing to mask the sense of eyes at keyholes and ears behind the walls. No wonder Salerno had been treated like a spy; at Henry VIII’s court, nearly everyone was. The French ambassador had informants watching the Duke of Norfolk and the King’s eldest daughter, servants stole letters, sensible people wrote in ciphers, and the Hapsburgs’ ambassador knew that an Italian physician who dined with him was “the King’s spy . . . I had no difficulty in guessing, by various loose remarks he made, who had sent him on to me.”46 The Prince of Salerno blamed the King for the atmosphere. “Everything is descending into chaos,” he wrote of his time in England, “and it seems like Hell.”47

  Salerno’s view was held, in one way or another, by most Europeans who encountered Henry in his later years. Two days before Catherine’s honeymoon ended, the French ambassador to England, Charles de Marillac, gave his unvarnished assessment of Henry VIII to his superior, the Constable de Montmorency.II It is perhaps one of the most detailed and honest accounts of Henry’s rule by a contemporary:

  First, to commence with the head, this Prince seems tainted, among other vices, with three which in a King may be called plagues. The first is that he is so covetous that all the riches in the world would not satisfy him. Hence the ruin of the abbeys, spoil of all churches that had anything to take. . . . Hence, too, the accusation of so many rich men, who, whether condemned or acquitted, are always plucked; and it is unlikely that he should pardon the living who troubles even the dead, without fearing the offence to the religion of the world which reveres them as saints, witness St. Thomas of Canterbury, who, because his relics and bones were adorned with gold and jewels, has been declared traitor. Everything is good prize, and he does not reflect that to make himself rich he has impoverished his people, and does not gain in goods what he loses in renown. As it seemed difficult to attain his desires after withdrawing obedience from the Holy See, he got preachers and ministers to persuade the people that it was better to employ the Church revenue on hospitals, colleges, and other foundations tending to the public good than to fatten lazy and useless monks. Having under this pretext taken to himself what had been consecrated to God, when the same preachers and ministers exhorted him to fulfil his duty and remit it to better uses they have been condemned and burnt as heretics, as they said at their execution, to the scandal of everyone. And although they well deserved to be the end of that of which they had been the beginning, still, those who commanded them are not free from blame, for, if they showed repentance for what was done, they should restore what they have demolished; but they easily find a thousand ways to take things to themselves and not a single one to give them up.

  Thence proceeds the second plague, distrust and fear. This King, knowing how many changes he has made, and what tragedies and scandals he has created, would fain keep in favour with everybody, but does not trust a single man, expecting to see them all offended, and he will not cease to dip his hand in blood as long as he doubts his people. Hence every day edicts are published so sanguinary that with a thousand guards one would scarce be safe. Hence too it is that now with us, as affairs in
cline, he makes alliances which last as long as it makes for him to keep them.

  The third plague, lightness and inconstancy, proceeds partly from the other two and partly from the nature of the nation, and has perverted the rights of religion, marriage, faith and promise, as softened wax can be altered to any form.

  The subjects take example from the Prince, and the ministers seek only to undo each other to gain credit, and under colour of their master’s good each attends to his own.48

  Two days after this letter was written, Catherine made her first public appearance as queen consort at Hampton Court Palace.49 The news of the royal wedding was announced there at the same time.50 A week later, on the Feast of the Assumption, she was included in the prayers for the royal family for the first time.51 In the descent into the chaos described by the Prince of Salerno, the office had already seen one queen banished into internal exile after twenty-three years of marriage, a second publically butchered on charges that would have raised eyebrows at the court of Agrippina, a third who lay dying while her husband debated whether to cancel his hunting trip to Esher, and a fourth who had been metaphorically stripped bare before the public as every fold, sag, and blemish was discussed in excruciating detail to justify why she was too grotesque to please her husband.52 Just over a year later, the Privy Council claimed that everyone had expected Catherine to succeed where the others had failed because “after sundry troubles in marriage,” Henry had found in her “a Jewel for womanhood.”53

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  I. The Countess’s quest to prove that the witnesses against her husband had acted from greed or fear resulted in future generations’ resilience in trying to overturn what they saw as a miscarriage of justice. The family’s last attempt to have Rhys’s verdict posthumously revoked was through a petition to King James I in 1607.

  II. The constable was, in effect, the King of France’s chief minister, and all of the other great officers of the French Crown were subordinate to him.

  Chapter 9

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  “All these ladies and my whole kingdom”

  I am a spirit of no common rate;

  The summer still doth tend upon my state;

  And I do love thee: therefore, go with me;

  I’ll give thee fairies to attend on thee,

  And they shall fetch thee jewels from the deep,

  And sing while thou on pressed flowers dost sleep . . .

  —William Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night’s Dream (c. 1595)

  One heavily romanticized version of Catherine’s ascent claimed that Henry first noticed her when she was serving in the nursery of his two year-old son, Edward. Visiting his child one afternoon, the King spotted Catherine curtseying with the rest of the women. He marched over, raised her to her feet, and told her, “Catherine, from henceforward, I wish you never to do that again, but rather that all these ladies and my whole kingdom should bend the knee to you, for I wish to make you Queen.” Catherine made a suitably self-effacing response, as virtuous maidens inevitably did, and the King “sent for the Bishop of London to come and marry him” that very same day.1

  That story is fiction. Despite living in London at the time, the Spanish merchant who wrote it managed to get the order of Henry’s marriages to Anne of Cleves and Catherine in reverse order. His account does nonetheless capture something of the suddenness with which Catherine made the transition from courtier to queen consort. Compared to her immediate predecessors, she had comparatively little experience of life at court before becoming one of its principal figures: Katherine of Aragon had been Princess of Wales and then Dowager Princess for nearly eight years by the time she became queen in 1509; for most of her childhood, Anne Boleyn had lived in the household of the Queen of France, then the Queen of England’s from 1521 to 1527, and enjoyed her own household as de facto first lady throughout the six years of the King’s first annulment; and Jane Seymour had served in the households of both Queen Katherine and Queen Anne. Catherine, in contrast, was a resident at court for no more than eight months by the time she became queen—a short apprenticeship before being promoted to the top job.

  Catherine’s household was a vast entity with a corresponding income. She and her servants had access to her own granary, bakery, brewery, buttery (to dispense wine and ale to the staff), cellar, garderobe of spices, a chaundry (to allocate the candles and tapers for the Queen’s rooms and those rationed to her retainers), a ewery to house her table linen, and a private kitchen which was supplied by her own slaughterhouse, scullery, and wood yard. There were some hardships, admittedly, since unlike the King, the Queen had to make do without her own confectioner or a wafery, a specific department set aside to take care of her biscuits. Her kitchens also lacked a separate department for poultry, meat, and fishes.2 Within each of these departments, there were different staff members and competing agendas. Maintaining goodwill in the Queen’s household required a nimble grasp of decorum to avoid giving offense, and even the Queen had to respect that. For instance, when a bill came into the household from an apothecary, it was considered a faux pas if the Queen signed it. Payment should be authorized by her vice chamberlain, Sir Edward Baynton.3

  On the male side of her staff, Catherine had ten officers of her household, headed by her chamberlain Thomas Manners, 1st Earl of Rutland, a peer who was roughly the same age as her husband and who delegated most of his work to Baynton. There was also a clerk of the Queen’s council; a sergeant at arms; a clerk in charge of her wardrobe; eight titled positions in her stables; two wardens attached to her wardrobe; two sewers of her chamber, who had the job of tasting her food and guiding her guests to sit in the proper spots at dinner; four gentlemen ushers; two gentlemen waiters; twenty-one grooms; three pageboys, who carried out odd jobs and errands; four footmen, seven yeomen, and two grooms extraordinary for busy occasions in the Queen’s household; two men who cleaned and arranged Catherine’s litter when she traveled; and seven sumptermen, who packed and led the workhorses when the court moved to a different residence.

  While these male servants were vital to the running of the household, it was the ladies, as those who came into regular contact with the Queen, who were the most important people in the establishment. These thirty-four women, excluding laundresses and kitchen staff, were grouped into five ranks—six great ladies, four ladies, and four gentlewomen of the Queen’s privy chamber; nine ladies of exalted rank; five maids of honor; one “mother of the maids,” who watched over the maids of honor on the Queen’s behalf; and four or five chamberers.4

  Of these women, the six great ladies were the women with the least day-to-day interaction with Catherine. As their collective name suggests, they were drawn exclusively from the icing on the upper crust. At the start of her queenship, this group consisted of the King’s niece Lady Margaret Douglas; Catherine’s cousin Mary Fitzroy (née Howard), Dowager Duchess of Richmond and Somerset; her uncle William’s wife, Lady Margaret Howard; Katherine Brandon (née Willoughby), Duchess of Suffolk; Mary Radclyffe (née Arundell), Countess of Sussex; and the King’s former mistress, the lovely Elizabeth (née Blount), Lady Clinton, mother of the late Duke of Richmond. Shifts and positions in the Queen’s households were frequently adjusted to suit its members’ pregnancies, and the great ladies as a group were often thinned out by the requirements of childbed. The Countess of Sussex left royal service to give birth to her son, Lord John Radclyffe, shortly before Lady Clinton departed and never returned after she died giving birth to a daughter.5 The other great ladies were only required on state occasions, when their rank was used to convey the government’s respect for its visitors.

  Etiquette elevated Catherine as queen in the same way but to far greater heights than it had every day since her childhood. When she sat in public or in her apartments, her chair was canopied by a cloth of estate. Everyone around her had to “stand still as a stone” until she spoke, according to the strictures of an etiquette manual.6 Before she entered a public space, her servants cleared a route for her. In he
r guard chamber, her yeomen ushers were on hand to gently whisper advice and “receive, teach, and direct every man” about the intricacies of court decorum.7 When Catherine sneezed, a forest of caps undulated in the air from her male servants and all, regardless of gender, politely blessed her.8

  When she awoke, usually at about seven o’clock in the morning, she was greeted by the women who had, until June, been her superiors. Once, she had been expected to stand and curtsey when they entered a room. Now, as they dressed her and prepared her for her day, they were her underlings. They placed a footstool beneath her feet as they combed her hair.9 The girl who less than a year ago had been borrowing money to pay for a few silk trinkets now waited while the bejeweled hands of a countess fastened a diamond-and-pearl crucifix around her throat. The morning toilette was always performed by the ladies of Catherine’s privy chamber. Theoretically, they ranked beneath the great ladies, but in practice they were far closer to the Queen, because of the intimate nature of their tasks. They consisted of four ladies, born or married into the nobility, and four married gentlewomen.I The neat division in the group was supposed to allude to the support of both nobility and commoners for their sovereign’s wife, part of the constant play on symbolic gestures to confirm acceptance of the status quo in early modern politics.

  Nearly all the women of Catherine’s privy chamber were significantly older than her. Her half sister Isabella Baynton was a mother and stepmother. Two of the ladies, Lady Rochford and Lady Edgecombe, were widows—Jane Boleyn, Dowager Viscountess Rochford, was in her mid-thirties, and Katherine, Dowager Lady Edgecombe, was in her forties.10 Their colleague Eleanor, Countess of Rutland, was about the same age as Lady Rochford. She was a Paston by birth, a long-established family of the Norfolk gentry who, decades earlier, had detested the Howards as aggressive arrivistes.11 Those quarrels were long dead by 1540. Lady Rutland had the easy grace and casual generosity of someone who was born into great money and married more. Her husband was an old jousting buddy of the Duke of Suffolk, and the Countess had named their daughter, born a year earlier, in honor of the Duchess of Suffolk, another of Catherine’s ladies-in-waiting.12 Lady Rutland was effusively polite, a hostess par excellence—at the family’s country seat of Belvoir Castle she had the servants keep a room ready specially for the Duke of Suffolk, a frequent visitor, as was the Countess of Westmorland, the King’s kinswoman.13 Like many socialites, Lady Rutland stood at the center of a vast network of patronage and mutual favors, underscored by frequent gifts and notes dripping with gratitude and hyperbolic affection.14 Presents among the Tudor aristocracy could be anything—those exchanged between courtiers during Catherine’s career included stags killed and sent as a gift from the hunter, golden broaches with scenes from the life of Saint John the Baptist, pieces of furniture, hawks and other prized birds, shirts stitched by the giver, French wine and other delicacies for a friend’s table, such as quails, baked partridge, herring, carp, and marmalade.15 Even eye medicine was dispatched, with noblewomen such as Catherine’s grandmother and Lady Lisle priding themselves on their apparent expertise.16 In the treacherous and fraught world of the court, the Countess of Rutland’s good standing with her peers was a testament to her charm. When Anne Bassett’s younger sister found that she was to complete her education at the house of a family friend, she was relieved to be sent to Lady Rutland rather than the Countess of Hertford, since Lady Rutland treated her wards like daughters, while Lady Hertford treated them like servants.17 Queen Catherine clearly grew fond of her as well and gave her a necklace from her own collection.18