Young and Damned and Fair

by Gareth Russell

  On March 8, the recovered King and his court left Hampton Court after nearly three months and sailed downriver to the Palace of Westminster.24 They did not plan to stay for long—Westminster was an administrative hub and Parliament met there, but most of the royal apartments had been destroyed by fire in 1512 and never fully rebuilt. The decision to move there for just over a week was motivated by Catherine. Due to the plague that had ravaged London after the summer drought, the Queen had been kept away from the capital until the risk abated. She therefore had not made her ceremonial entry into the city, a queenly rite of passage during which city officials and by extension the commoners they represented would formally greet her and in doing so convey their support for her queenship. For this to happen, she had to cross London’s boundaries. Hence, she would go to Westminster for eleven days, and then when the court traveled to Greenwich Palace on St. Joseph’s Day, the guilds and aldermen of London would acknowledge her in coordinated public ceremonies.

  The business of government continued. Eustace Chapuys was unwell and had temporarily left London to recuperate in the countryside, and the French ambassador was busy quashing rumors that King Henry planned to initiate a rapprochement with the Emperor by offering the hand of Princess Mary in marriage.25 Plans were in motion to issue the necessary papers for summoning a parliament in Dublin, since Ireland had its own House of Lords and House of Commons, and two scarlet robes made from twenty-four yards of fabric were ordered from the King’s tailor to be sent to the Earl of Desmond, the speaker of the Irish House of Lords, and McGilpatrick, who performed the same office for the House of Commons.26 A dispute over trade tariffs with the regent of the Netherlands rumbled on, the Duke of Norfolk was expected back from the borders by the middle of Lent, and talk of the King traveling to Dover to see the dilapidated fortifications had revived now that Henry was in better health.27

  While Catherine was at Westminster, a scandal involving seduction and larceny broke in court circles. With her sense of humor, it is hard to believe she did not find some of its details amusing. It had links to Catherine’s establishment, and in fact its unusual resolution had much to do with that household. The affair began when a London-based goldsmith called William Emlar was brought before the Privy Council after silverware belonging to Eton College, an all-boys boarding school at Windsor, surfaced in the local markets. Eton had been founded just over one hundred years earlier by King Henry VI, Henry VIII’s great-uncle, which meant that it had already endured a plundering of its resources when Edward IV deposed Henry VI in 1461. Building work on the still-incomplete school had resumed under the Tudors, and by 1541 the headmaster, known as the provost, was Nicholas Udall, an Oxford scholar who had written a textbook called The Floures for Latine Spekynge that was used in English classrooms for most of the rest of the century. He had also helped script most of the pageants for Anne Boleyn’s coronation in 1533. The appearance of the Etonian plate and silver in London implied either corruption in the school or, more probably, theft. William Emlar told the council that he had received the items from a former student at Eton called John Hoorde, the nineteen-year-old son of a well-to-do Shropshire gentleman. Hoorde was brought in for questioning, during which he implicated his friend and co-conspirator Thomas Cheney, who was still in his final year at Eton. On March 13, 1541, Cheney was summoned to Westminster, where he confessed to stealing the plate. He also implied that Nicholas Udall, the provost, had been party to the scheme, so Udall was fetched from Windsor to answer questions about his role in the black-marketing of his school’s possessions.

  Udall, who was about thirty-four or thirty-five years old at the time, seemed an unlikely thief. During his early career, the Duke of Norfolk had apparently been one of many court lights who recognized his talent and promoted him. Udall’s work for the 1533 coronation had managed to incorporate scenes that ranged from flattering juxtapositions of the Queen’s physique, status, and heraldry (“Of body small, / Of power regal / She is, and sharp of sight; / Of courage hault, / No manner fault / Is in this falcon white . . .”) to paeans to Queen Anne’s patron saint and clever innuendoes about her crest as it was incorporated into renderings of the Annunciation.28 As a headmaster, Udall had maintained Eton’s tradition of beating recalcitrant or underperforming students on Fridays or “flogging days,” yet he had still acquired a reputation as “the best schoolmaster” during his seven years there.29 He encouraged acting and drama at the school, for which it is still famous, and it is probable that he wrote his play Ralph Roister Doister, the earliest surviving theatrical comedy in the English language, for performance by a student cast.30 His skills as one of the finest Latinists of his generation had stood him in good stead to lead a school where most of the lessons were still conducted in Latin and dunce caps were affixed to the heads of the custos, young gentlemen who talked too much in English in the classrooms, made more than three spelling mistakes in a lesson, or misquoted one of the rules of Latin grammar.

  In his interrogation before the council at Westminster, Udall denied complicity in the theft but instead startlingly confessed to “buggery with the said Cheney sundry times.”31 According to Udall, the last time student and headmaster had sex was only eight days before Udall’s testimony. There was no good reason for Udall to confess to the crime of sodomy to try to exculpate himself from one of larceny. The Buggery Statute of 1533 had made homosexual activity a capital offense. It had been one of the accusations laid against Lord Hungerford, who had been executed nine months before Udall confessed to similar behavior. The only explanation for Udall’s startling admission was that it was the truth. It is possible that Cheney had already confessed their liaison in the hope that Udall’s senior age and position would drag attention off him for helping to steal the silver. The councillors in session that day—the Duke of Suffolk, the Earl of Southampton, the Earl of Sussex, Sir Anthony Wingfield, Sir Thomas Wriothesley, and Cromwell’s onetime ward Sir Ralph Sadler—signed an order for Udall to be incarcerated in the Marshalsea Prison in Southwark, which may indicate some sympathy for Udall or, just as likely, respect for his social position. Compared to other London prisons, the Marshalsea was relatively comfortable in the sixteenth century, and while prisoners were prepared to pay through the nose for its amenities, there were many other jails where Nicholas Udall would have paid as much and suffered more.

  The council sent messengers to Shropshire and Buckinghamshire for the fathers of the two Etonians involved to come to London. Thomas Cheney’s father, Sir Robert Cheney, arrived a few days before Richard Hoorde, John’s father. In the meantime, the Privy Council established a version of events in which Cheney and Udall had been sleeping together while Cheney and his friend Hoorde had worked with one of Udall’s servants, a man called Gregory, to rob the college of various images, plate, and silver that they then attempted to sell in London. Udall, it seems, was not party to the scheme, though the fact that he had been in debt beforehand raises the possibility that he could have been. So while he would not be charged with theft, his sexual relationship with a male student, with which he may have been blackmailed to keep quiet about Cheney’s theft, could still wrap a noose around his neck.

  At this point, the affair goes quiet. Everyone involved ultimately escaped punishment. John Hoorde went home to Shropshire, where he eventually married a local woman called Katherine Oteley and lived well into the reign of Queen Elizabeth I. Thomas Cheney married Frances Rotherham, a woman from his mother’s home county of Bedfordshire. He died in the spring of 1554, when he was in his early thirties. Most unexpectedly of all, Udall was released from prison and was soon once again in favor with the great personalities of the court—he helped Princess Mary with her translation of a biblical commentary, Paraphrases upon the New Testament, was patronized by Henry VIII’s last wife, Queen Katherine Parr, recruited to Bishop Gardiner’s household, and after Princess Mary succeeded to the throne in 1553, Udall was appointed headmaster of the Westminster School in London, where he served until his death two year
s later.

  Three of the councillors who quizzed Emlar, Hoorde, Cheney, and Udall had wives in Catherine’s service, but it was one in particular who had a vested interest in the case. Sir Thomas Wriothesley had, like Sir Ralph Sadler, risen to the Privy Council thanks to his ties to Thomas Cromwell, and again like Sadler, he had managed to avoid ruin when the minister fell in 1540. Holbein’s portrait of Wriothesley shows a bearded man with auburn hair and, even allowing for artistic embellishment, piercing and watchful blue eyes.32

  From prison, Nicholas Udall wrote a groveling, hysterical letter to his “Right worshipful and my singular good Master.” Apart from illustrating that Udall really did love Latin and the classics as much as his previous job had required him to—the text is peppered with references to Pliny, promises of rehabilitation couched in didactic examples from the lives of Greek philosophers, and Latin pieties about the value of mercy—his letter to Sir Thomas Wriothesley provides clues as to why a scandal that should, according to the law of the land, have taken Udall’s life ended with him walking free. Udall’s decision to throw himself on Wriothesley’s good graces is the first oddity, for while the letter does hint that Wriothesley had patronized Udall before 1541, he was nonetheless a strange choice. Wriothesley did not exactly have the reputation of an angel of mercy. A few years later, he was nearly ruined when allegations surfaced that he had personally tortured a female prisoner on the rack by twisting the roller himself after the professionals at the Tower refused to keep going.33

  The second point of interest is the plan that they concocted or, to be more precise, Wriothesley offered and Udall gratefully acquiesced to. Udall’s letter states that Wriothesley had tried to get him his old job back, “my restitution to the room of Schoolmaster of Eton,” then, once that ploy had failed, Udall begged for the opportunity to meet with Wriothesley in person to outline a strategy for Udall’s rehabilitation that would enable him “to shake it off within two or three years at the uttermost.” Judging by his subsequent relationships with Mary Tudor, Katherine Parr, and Stephen Gardiner, it evidently worked. This leaves the question of why Wriothesley was prepared to undertake “travail, pains, and trouble” on Udall’s behalf despite, as Udall wrote, being full of “displeasure and indignation” at his actions.

  The answer lies in the relationship between Thomas Cheney, the student at the center of the outrage, and one of Catherine’s ladies-in-waiting, Lady Jane Wriothesley, Sir Thomas’s wife. Lady Wriothesley may have briefly left the court around the time of Catherine’s marriage to give birth to a son, Anthony, who sadly died shortly afterwards. By the time the Eton affair was playing out in the council chambers at Westminster, Lady Wriothesley was back in the Queen’s service. Before her marriage, she had been Mistress Jane Cheney from Chesham Bois, the same manor in Buckinghamshire that eventually belonged to Thomas Cheney’s father, Sir Robert. The exact familial relationship between Lady Wriothesley’s father and Thomas Cheney’s is difficult to specify, but given their respective ages and the fact that they both hailed from the same manor, the logical conclusion is that they were either siblings or first cousins. The affiliation between Sir Thomas Wriothesley’s wife and the student who possibly seduced and certainly robbed Nicholas Udall explains why Wriothesley advocated the unthinkable suggestion of sending Udall back to Eton as if nothing had happened—because that was what the Cheney-Wriothesley families wanted, so that their kinsman’s name would not become associated with a buggery scandal. Lady Wriothesley was kin to Bishop Gardiner, in whose service Udall eventually began his climb back to steady employment and social respectability, and she was the half sister of the Bishop’s secretary, confidante, and nephew Germaine Gardiner.34 It was in the Wriothesleys’ best interests to help Udall by sweeping the scandal under the rug. All the events in the affair support the conclusion of a cover-up based on who Thomas Cheney was related to.35 Chatter about the flow of silver and scandal from Eton to London cannot have missed the alcoves and galleries of the Queen’s household. Even if, presumably, Lady Wriothesley might have preferred to stay tight-lipped about the whole thing, the Duchess of Suffolk and the Countess of Sussex both had husbands who were involved in the questioning of the associated parties.

  Hoorde and Cheney’s fathers were still on their way to meet the council when the royal household left Westminster for Greenwich on the afternoon of March 19. It was two years to the day since Catherine’s father had died in debt and thwarted in his dreams of a career at court. From the palace, Catherine walked down the steps to the royal barge. To mask the smell from the river, its decks were strewn with rosemary-scented rushes and herbs burned in sconces. The King and various members of her household accompanied Catherine, taking their places before the twenty-six oarsmen pushed off into the current.36 As they sailed past the Tower, its heavy gates rising from the filthy waters of the Thames, salvoes of cannon fire rang out in salute. Directly ahead, they could see brightly decorated barges, hung with cloth and banners flapping from their masts. The lord mayor of London and his aldermen were on one of those boats, between the Tower and London bridges, and they were rowed over to welcome Catherine to the city. Catherine Howard, the private gentlewoman, had been to London many times, but “this was the Queen’s Grace first coming to London since the King’s Grace married her,” and as a result “the people of this city honoured her with a most splendid reception.”37

  From the Tower, Catherine and Henry continued to Greenwich, where they disembarked at a wharf that led to a staircase exclusively for the royal family’s use. At Greenwich, the King announced his intention to free Thomas Wyatt and John Wallop, a decision accredited to Catherine’s influence. Queens traditionally interceded for compassionate causes, mirroring the Virgin Mary’s role in Catholic theology whereby Mary acted as a conduit of mercy while God functioned as the font of justice. The trope of the intercessor queen featured heavily in medieval romances and popular tales. Earlier in Henry VIII’s reign, his first wife had publicly begged him to free a group of xenophobic apprentice boys after they rioted against the presence of wealthy foreigners in London, and his second had asked him to intervene with the French government on behalf of a man condemned to burn for heresy.38

  On several occasions, a queen’s intervention seemed too well staged to be genuine—for instance, in the apprentice boys’ case, Katherine of Aragon had fallen to her knees with Cardinal Wolsey and the court nobility following suit. The consort’s role as mediatrix at the heart of government could be used by her husband as an acceptable reason to reverse a policy, lest he appear weak or inconsistent in doing so of his own volition. There were those on Henry’s council who were worried at the prospect of putting Wyatt on trial, in case his eloquence resulted in embarrassment for the government, as George Boleyn’s had at his trial in 1536. Pardoning Wyatt at the Queen’s behest, which was distinctly different to an exoneration, would allow the Crown to maintain that it had been right to imprison him, while avoiding any prospective fallout from his defense of himself. The Privy Council pretended that Wyatt’s admission of guilt in return for mercy had been “spontaneous,” when it had been anything but.39 Considering that Wyatt and Wallop’s detentions look, in hindsight, like Henry reminding factions at his court of his dominance over them, it is possible that Catherine was asked to publicly beg for their lives as a touching dénouement to a scene that Henry had always intended to culminate with the two men walking free.

  Yet comments from the Privy Council in a letter to the Queen’s uncle William in France, a report written by Eustace Chapuys for Maria of Austria, and another by Charles de Marillac for King François I all state that Catherine had been lobbying on the gentlemen’s behalf for quite some time.40 In a letter written one week after the King’s decision, the council told Lord William that Wallop, his predecessor as ambassador to France, had been freed after “great intercession was made for him and Wyatt by the Queen.” Chapuys wrote that after her official entry into London “the Queen took occasion and courage to beg and entreat the Ki
ng for the release of Master [Wyatt], a prisoner of the said Tower, which petition the King granted, though on rather hard conditions,” and de Marillac, who had previously been almost certain that Wyatt would only leave the Tower in a coffin, praised Catherine for her “great and continual suit” to have the two men pardoned. So while it is possible that Henry knew of Catherine’s plans to ask for Wallop and Wyatt’s liberty on the day of her official entry to London, it seems as if Catherine had been working on her husband for quite some time.

  One of the men who had ended up in prison in the fallout of the Wyatt affair was John Leigh, a relative of Catherine’s late mother. He had served in some of Wyatt’s embassies and stood accused of papist sympathies.41 Some of those who cared for Wyatt seem to have spoken to the Queen in the hope that she would have the bravery and prominence lacked by other courtiers who were too afraid to plead on his behalf. Her kinsman’s fate perhaps helped focus the Queen’s interest in the detentions.42 Wyatt’s most recent biographer has surmised that Catherine’s cousin, Lord Surrey, may have been one of those who talked to Catherine about Wyatt’s plight.43 Surrey and Wyatt were close friends, and Surrey would eventually compose Wyatt’s elegy in which he praised him as a man “with virtue fraught, reposed, void of guile.”44 Catherine had already shown herself indifferent or perhaps even hostile to the machinations of court faction through her friendliness towards Archbishop Cranmer, and she liked to help people. While she never risked her standing with her husband if she knew the case had been judged treasonous, it is clear that in this case she went to some effort for both men, regardless of their political backgrounds, and in doing so earned more admiration from diplomats and some courtiers.