Francis Dereham entered a land fueled by the tense but dependent relationship between these two groups whose alleged ancestral differences were now largely imaginary after centuries of intermarriage. The east coast merchants provided the wine, salt, and luxury items the Gaelic aristocracy wanted, while the Irish heartlands in return produced most of the goods exported from Dublin and the other ports. The Gaelic lords both preyed on and protected Irish merchant ships—in the harbors and straits where the government’s control was lackluster, the local lord expected a fee which could be paid by the captains or forcibly taken from them by the lord’s retainers. Identifying what passed for unregistered trade, as opposed to smuggling or outright piracy, was thus nearly an impossible task that plagued Irish parliaments for years—the issue was still being debated in parliaments that met in the reigns of Elizabeth I and James I.19 While he was in Ireland, Francis exploited this economic ambiguity to the extent that he was eventually accused of piracy.20 Although he was not prosecuted for it, it may have been the reason he chose to return to Lambeth.
Upon hearing of his return, a Howard family servant who knew or suspected the truth about Francis and Catherine remarked to Lord William’s wife, “If I were Dereham I would never tell to die for it.”21 The problem with that statement was that it presupposed a rational dignity that Francis quite simply did not possess. Something had to be done to buy his silence. He was impulsive, besotted, possessive, and loquacious.22 Even the Dowager’s coy affection for him did not blind her to the fact that this was the worst possible combination of traits, and her harvesting of all the incriminating evidence from a man she knew to possess the emotional equilibrium of a toddler gave the Howards possession of the documents that could have been used to push Catherine off the throne if they fell into the wrong hands.23
Francis wanted a job in Catherine’s service. Refusing him or accepting him were both dangerous. The Dowager Duchess went to the Queen to discuss it. Judging from subsequent queries, the Countess of Bridgewater supported her mother’s suggestion that Catherine should grant an audience to Francis and perhaps show him some sign of her favor. Lord William Howard, who had known Francis for years, and his wife Margaret, who served as one of Catherine’s ladies-in-waiting, would help facilitate a meeting at court, under the guise of reintroducing the Queen to a family retainer. That was as far as they were prepared to go; there is nothing to suggest that anyone else in the family even knew about the agreement with Dereham, outside these four and the Queen. Catherine had no affection for Francis, then or later, and he caused her nothing but anxiety from the moment he reentered her life, but shortly before All Hallows Eve, on a prearranged day, she asked her aunt Margaret where Dereham was. Lady Margaret curtseyed and answered, “Madam, he is here with my lord.” Lord William, who did not leave on his embassy to France until January, had brought Francis to court that day as part of his retinue, which gave Catherine an opportunity to summon him without inviting suspicion. “My lady of Norfolk hath desired me to be good unto him,” the Queen answered, “and so I will.”24
Most accounts of Catherine’s career believe that at this point or shortly afterwards, she made Francis her private secretary, but this long-established story is disproved by the household records.25 A Queen’s private secretary managed her correspondence, took dictation from her, and drafted replies to any official letters she had to issue. It was a prestigious position, not just because of its intimate knowledge of the Queen’s affairs but also because the secretary was entitled to “bouche of the court,” meaning all his material needs were met along with three stable places and four servants in residence of his own.26 Sir William Paget had held the job of secretary for Anne of Cleves, in tandem with a German gentleman called Matthew.27 Shortly after the divorce, Paget was recruited as clerk of the Privy Council, and a man called Thomas Derby took over as secretary for the new Queen. Derby was still in the job by the middle of November 1540, nearly three weeks after Lord William brought Francis Dereham for his meeting with Catherine.28 When Derby left his post, he was not replaced by Dereham but by a man called John Huttoft, who served Catherine until the end of her career.29
Francis was not appointed to her household staff in any capacity in November 1540, and the half-baked compromise that Catherine and some of her relatives came up with shows how uncertain they were about what to do with him. He could not be given an official post, certainly not as her secretary, since he was too young, unknown at court, and manifestly unqualified to serve as an officer of the Queen’s household, even if he had once taken some dictation for the Dowager Duchess of Norfolk. Everything about their actions in the early winter of 1540 supports a scenario in which the Howards, who had known and even liked Francis, decided to keep him close enough to control him through apparent acts of favor and the confiscation of his private papers, but not so close as to provoke speculation about his friendship with the Queen. They must have known that it would not content Francis indefinitely, but a long-term plan is not always possible for those treading water. Unfortunately, Dereham, whose decision to keep the papers linking him to Catherine did not bode well for his future quiescence, had lost none of his flair for a public scene or his aggressive temper, and fleeting proximity to the girl he wanted to marry eventually proved too difficult for him.
Chapter 12
* * *
Jewels
Ceremony, though it is nothing in itself, yet it doth everything . . .
—William Cavendish, 1st Duke of Newcastle (1592–1676)
The King was in good spirits when he left Windsor Castle for Woking Palace on November 23 with his wife and a small retinue of about eighty people.1 Despite its designation as a palace, Woking did not have space to hold the entire court. Half of its eight acres were taken up by manicured gardens, orchards, fishponds, and lawns that overlooked an area used for deer coursing, though it was from hawking, in season by late autumn, that the palace derived its reputation as an excellent hunting spot. For two weeks, Catherine and her entourage could look out from the great bay window in the Queen’s privy chamber onto the moat and the nearby River Wey.2 After breakfast and morning prayers, they rode out hawking with the gentlemen and the King, who was thrilled to be hunting in the countryside again.
This trip was a break from the usual royal itinerary, which saw the King spend most of the colder months in London. The revitalized joie de vivre that so many people had noticed in the King after he married Catherine seems to have prompted the change in schedule, and he told a guest at Woking that “he feels much better than when he resided all winter at his houses at the gates of this town [London].”3 The bracing winter winds that accompanied the King’s new routine did not thrill his attendants quite as much as their master. Catherine’s uncle William tried to turn it into a compliment when he praised the King for being “so little in the house, but either hawking or hunting, were it never so cold, when divers of your servants had liever be home,” but it is not difficult to detect the longing for warmth beneath William’s praise for the King and the great outdoors.4
On December 7, the courtiers had a new venue to shiver in when the hawking jaunt was extended by an eleven-day trip back to Oatlands.5 When the party went out to hunt, servants were responsible for bringing the wooden frames, known as cadges, carrying hooded birds of prey that were then placed “on the creep,” that is, on the hunter’s glove, and un-hooded before they soared off to retrieve their targets. In wooded areas, hawks were generally used. These birds used by the royal family and nobility were as prized and in many cases as expensive as good horses, if not more so. The most desired falcons were the peregrines, with their rapid speed, and the beautiful white gyrfalcons. The cadge and the hoods were necessary to prevent the birds from unhelpfully attacking each other—a trait which, in a hunting party, was something of a liability.
On December 18, the Queen returned to Hampton Court on the same day that one of her ladies-in-waiting, Elizabeth Cromwell, born Elizabeth Seymour, became a baroness.6 Elizabeth�
��s husband Gregory, Thomas’s son, was raised to the peerage, which either suggested that the King did not intend to punish him for his father’s wrongs or that Gregory Cromwell’s matrimonial alliance with the Seymours had saved him from ruin by surname.7 Two days later, some of Thomas Cromwell’s lands were given to Thomas Culpepper, in a gesture that showed Henry balancing the scales to remind everyone who was in charge.8
Lady Cromwell was one of Queen Jane Seymour’s younger sisters, and she had spent most of her childhood at the Seymour family’s home at Wulfhall in Wiltshire.9 Unusually, Elizabeth married before her elder sister.10 Her first husband had been the much-older Sir Anthony Ughtred, with whom she had a son and lived as chatelaine of the Château de Mont-Orgueil, home of the governors of Jersey, a post Ughtred was appointed to in 1532. Ughtred died in 1534 and his widow moved to the north of England. Elizabeth does not seem to have been close to her royal sister. She was not appointed to the household when Jane became Queen in May 1536, and she was still living in the north in March 1537, though she did visit the court and took the opportunity to ask for Thomas Cromwell’s help in acquiring land from some of the closed monasteries in Yorkshire. Cromwell subsequently helped the widow Ughtred by arranging her marriage to his son and heir, Gregory. Another of Elizabeth’s suitors wrote, “If I do tarry here in the country, I would have been glad to have had you likewise, but sure it is, that some Southern lord shall make you forget the North.”11 Elizabeth and Gregory’s wedding took place at Wulfhall in the summer of 1537. It was the start of a close and happy marriage, with a child a year for the first four, and when he was away from her—for example, serving as a member of the delegation sent to Calais to greet Anne of Cleves in 1539—he playfully addressed his letters to “my right loving bedfellow” and wrote, “I am, thanks be to God, in health, trusting shortly to hear from you like news, as well of your self as also my little boys, of whose increase and towardness be ye assured I am not a little desirous to be advertised.”12
For Catherine, the return to Hampton Court meant beginning her public duties in earnest, and on December 21 she sat beneath the cloth of estate in her audience chamber to formally receive the incoming Hapsburg ambassador, Eustace Chapuys, a thin, middle-aged man with soft features and dark eyes.13 Catherine was one of the few people at the English court who was unknown to Chapuys—he had previously served as the Emperor’s representative in London from 1529 to 1539. Chapuys would have preferred to stay in Europe, reestablishing a relationship with his bastard son Césare and busying himself with philanthropic projects such as setting up scholarships or funding the foundation of colleges and grammar schools in his hometown of Annecy.14 His expertise and the Emperor’s command put those projects on hold, and he arrived back in London in the summer of 1540. Time away had not improved Chapuys’s ever-diminishing opinion of Henry VIII. He returned at the same time as Cromwell was being beheaded, the apprentice boy Meekins was being fed to the flames, and Katherine of Aragon’s former chaplain Dr. Thomas Abel and Princess Mary’s former tutor Father Richard Featherstone were being dragged through the city streets to be quartered for papism, alongside a fellow Catholic priest and three Protestant clergymen, who were butchered on charges of heresy so flimsy and imprecise that even the officiating sheriff could not answer the dying men’s questions about why they were being executed. Ten men followed them four days later, on the same day as the last monk in England, Brother Thomas Epsam, was put on trial for treason at Newgate and had his habit torn from him in front of his judges.15 “This,” wrote his contemporary Edward Hall, “was the last Monk that was seen in his clothing in England.”16
Chapuys was an intelligent man and passionate in his loyalties. He had been distressed by Henry’s treatment of Katherine of Aragon but magnanimous enough to express horror at the fate of Anne Boleyn and her brother.17 Many times in his career, Chapuys overstepped his brief from the Emperor through acting as a confidant to Henry’s eldest daughter. His advice to her was often flawed, but it was unfailingly given with the best intentions, and it is easy to understand why Mary Tudor regarded him with such affection. Chapuys’s political views were suspected but unproven by most of his acquaintances in England, some of whom had accused him of supporting the Pilgrimage of Grace uprising; he told the Emperor that he knew that he was being spied upon within weeks of his return.18
The court’s tour of the best hunting spots in the southeast meant that December 21 was Chapuys’s first opportunity to meet with the new Queen, hence the need for a formal audience.19 Catherine’s reception of Chapuys was a prelude to his more important meeting with the King, who had not seen Chapuys since he returned to England. Struggling with the onset of gout, Chapuys bowed and walked towards Catherine’s dais. He may have had mixed emotions about her. Even before they met, it was Chapuys who had warned Mary about Catherine’s plans to dismiss two of her maids in retaliation for the princess’s behavior. On the other hand, for an imperialist, almost anyone was preferable to Anne of Cleves, even the niece of a man like Norfolk, whose Francophile sympathies were well known and long-standing.
What did Eustace Chapuys see when he knelt before Catherine? She was in her late teens, slender, elegant, and described by almost everyone except de Marillac as beautiful, but none of the surviving physical descriptions of her go into much detail, a shortcoming that could be made good by a portrait. There are three problems confronting any assessment of Catherine’s portraiture. The first is that after her execution there is a good chance that any images of her would have been destroyed or ignored until their identity became a subject of debate to later generations. A miniature alleged to show Catherine as painted by Hans Holbein was sold at Antwerp in 1668, then vanished from history.20 The allure of the lost is always potent, but even this portrait may have been mislabeled, as there is no documentary evidence that Catherine ever had her portrait painted, the second serious difficulty, and so it may be that Brett Dolman was correct in his recent paper when he argued that in searching for a surviving likeness of Catherine Howard we may very well be hunting for the impossible.21 The paperwork could, of course, have been lost, in which case one could argue that a surviving portrait or portraits would be the most obvious pieces of evidence that Catherine did sit for an artist.
The third and final problem is the enthusiasm with which collections and patrons hope to own or view an image of one of Henry VIII’s six wives. Many people would rather discover a portrait of Queen Catherine Howard than they would find one of Elizabeth Cromwell or Baroness Monteagle. The changing identifications of many Tudor portraits is thus a proverbial game of musical chairs. For example, a miniature allegedly showing Anne Boleyn by Lucas Horenbout has absolutely nothing to support that identification.I22 The same miniature had previously been identified as Jane Seymour and then Katherine of Aragon, before it was floated as a potential likeness of Mary Boleyn or her sister-in-law, Lady Rochford.
There are six original images, most with copies or derivatives, which have been identified as likenesses of Catherine. An incomplete Holbein sketch in the Royal Collection that shows a pretty young woman with auburn hair and a gentle smile was first formally indentified as Catherine in 1867 on no compelling ground beyond optimism. There was no tradition placing it as Catherine before the eighteenth century and precious little in the way of documentary support afterwards.23 There is also a miniature currently held at the Yale Center for British Art in New Haven that has been floated as a potential image of Catherine.24 The sitter’s clothes place it to approximately the right time for it to be Catherine, and the current tentative re-attribution to Lucas Horenbout rules out earlier hypotheses that it depicts either Elizabeth I or Lady Jane Grey, since Horenbout was dead before either queen was of the right age; the lady in the Yale miniature does bear a certain physical resemblance to the future Mary I.25 It cannot, of course, absolutely be ruled out as a likeness of Catherine, especially given the style of costume, but there are other candidates whom the Yale miniature is far more likely to depict.
In the chapel of King’s College, Cambridge, the east window is one magnificent stained-glass monument among many. It shows the scene The Queen of Sheba Bringing Gifts to Solomon, and the marked physical similarities between the biblical king, sitting on his golden throne beneath a cobalt-blue canopy, and Henry VIII prompted the theory that the face of the Queen of Sheba was inspired by Catherine.26 The stained-glass Queen wears a gown of green and white, the Tudor colors, with ruby, pink, and gold details. Gold bands rope around her dress like chains as she prostrates herself at Solomon/Henry’s feet, proffering a golden vessel in tribute and flanked by her sturdy guards and ladies-in-waiting in amethyst fur-lined robes and ruby gowns. The inclusion of the traditional crest and motto of the Prince of Wales elsewhere in the same window means that it must have been completed after Edward’s birth in 1537, while the presence of the initials “HK” gives us a date between July 1540 and January 1547, the period after Edward’s birth when Henry was married to women called Katherine. It also rules out recent speculation that the Queen of Sheba’s face might have been inspired by Anne Boleyn’s.27 It is possible that the east window at King’s was finished during Henry’s sixth marriage, to Katherine Parr, and even if it did take place during his time with Catherine Howard, as seems probable, the depiction of the Queen of Sheba is neither clear nor detailed enough to provide us with much of an idea of the young Queen’s appearance.
Young and Damned and Fair Page 22
