A flirtatious gesture met with a putdown or a reminder of contradictory past behavior is always liable to embarrass, and Catherine did not summon Culpepper to her rooms for quite some time after his underwhelming reaction to the cap. Her response to his teasing and her own suggestion that he hide the cap when he left her apartments indicate that she had hoped for, and expected, praise and that she had not given him the hat with purely platonic intentions. This first meeting also conclusively disproves the absurd recent theory that Catherine only ever met with Thomas Culpepper in 1541 because he was blackmailing her with knowledge of her premarital private life.23 Culpepper’s mockery and Catherine’s annoyance at it, as well as everything she said to him at their subsequent meetings, are obviously and without exception the behavior of two outgoing, confident people who were both attracted to one another and accustomed to being the dominant partner in a romantic relationship.
That evening, Catherine was back in chapel to see the altar stripped of its coverings and ornaments. Christ’s arrest had occurred after the Last Supper, and the symbolism of water and wine being poured over an altar that was then wiped clean by a stiff-twigged broom pointed to the forthcoming horror of the scourging and Crucifixion—the wine stood for Christ’s blood, the water for the fluids that spilled from His side when it was pierced postmortem by a Roman soldier’s spear, and the sticks of the broom for the crown of thorns that was twisted into His head as the procession to Golgotha commenced. From the evening service on Spy Wednesday, Tenebrae saw all lights in the chapel being successively extinguished to the sound of chanted Psalms.
On Good Friday, the commemoration of the Crucifixion, the great spiritual theater of Easter reached its apogee. Two pieces of linen decorated the otherwise stripped altar, and they were removed in homage to the fate of Christ’s garments that had been gambled for by His executioners.24 Henry and Catherine removed their shoes and led the congregation as they crept on their knees to kiss a crucifix held before them by two priests. “Creeping to the Cross” on Good Friday was an ancient custom dismissed as superstition by most Protestants, but in 1541 it was still being practiced by the majority of Henry’s subjects. After the adoration, Henry moved to a square enclosure near the altar where he knelt to pray over platefuls of rings. The King as God’s anointed was believed by many people to have sacerdotal powers, none in and of himself but rather as a vessel for God’s blessing, and the rings, known as cramp rings, were anointed by the monarch in the hope that the wearer “may be protected from the snares of Satan.” Psalms were sung as the King lifted up each of the rings individually before they were sprinkled with holy water.II25
In most churches, the venerated crucifix was carried with the consecrated Host to a small makeshift hearse, representing Christ’s burial in the tomb of Saint Joseph of Arimathea, where candles were lit to burn in front of it until the following Friday. Christ was dead and the officiating cleric spoke words from the eighty-seventh Psalm, “I am counted as one of them that go down to the pit.”26 The ritual reminded the congregation not just of Christ’s death on the cross and the subsequent “Harrowing of Hell,” through which the souls of the damned were liberated, but also of their own mortality. On Easter Sunday, the crucifix and sacrament were removed—Christ had risen—and the promise of eternal life and salvation was reiterated to the worshippers. Easter was one of the few occasions in the year when the majority were encouraged to take Holy Communion, which required fasting from the evening before and permission from one’s confessor, since a state of grace by confession and subsequent atonement were necessary before partaking in the “great mystery.” The cap for Culpepper was not something that the Queen needed to seek absolution for. Their meeting was indiscreet, but it was not yet a sin.
By Easter, members of Catherine’s household were noticing her preference for the company of Jane Boleyn, Dowager Viscountess Rochford, the lady of the privy chamber who had helped arrange the Queen’s private meeting with Thomas Culpepper on Maundy Thursday. Lady Rochford had been born Jane Parker, sometime around 1505, making her only a year or so younger than her future husband, George Boleyn.27 Her father Henry, Lord Morley, was a bibliophile who had grown up in the household of Henry VIII’s grandmother Margaret, Countess of Richmond, but kept away from court life as he grew older. He signed his letters as “Harry Morley,” and correspondents included European philosophers, scholars at Oxford and Cambridge, and fellow aristocrats.28 Lord Morley’s preference for his library over the corridors of power was not shared by his eldest daughter, although she later used her own wealth to become the “most special patroness” of a scholar based at King’s College, Cambridge.29 Jane joined the Court in her adolescence, and she never really left it. During the Shrovetide celebrations of 1522, she was given the role of “Lady Constancy” in a masque called Château Vert, where she appeared alongside six other dancers, including the King’s youngest sister and Anne Boleyn, who had recently returned from her education in France. She married Anne’s brother George sometime between 1522 and January 1526, when Cardinal Wolsey authorized an extra £20 per annum to be granted to “young Boleyn for him and his wife to live on.”30
Jane’s marriage took place before her sister-in-law became the King’s fiancée, and as Anne rose, Jane went with her. In 1532, she was chosen as one of Anne’s companions on a trip to meet the King of France at Calais, and three years later Anne turned to Jane for help when they concocted a plan that would force Henry’s latest mistress to leave the court.31 Unfortunately, Jane’s enthusiasm for intrigues was not quite commensurate with her skill for them, a recurring problem in her career, and the King reacted by temporarily banishing her, rather than his mistress.32 Queen Anne’s decision to reach out to Jane discredits the historical tradition that the two women despised each other and that Jane was pathologically jealous of her.
By the 1530s, Jane enjoyed the courtesy title of Lady Rochford, since her husband was heir-presumptive to the earldoms of Ormond and Wiltshire. The couple were also given use of Beaulieu Palace in Essex, a large country house that had once belonged to the Boleyns, before they sold it to the King for £1,000 in 1516.33 She was a woman of great wealth and prominence when her world came crashing down around her after her husband was arrested on May 2, 1536, for allegedly committing incest with his sister the Queen. In their histories of the English Reformation, John Foxe, writing in the sixteenth century, and Gilbert Burnet, Bishop of Salisbury, writing in the seventeenth, both accused Jane of providing false evidence which condemned the Boleyn siblings to death. Their criticism stuck, but Jane’s modern biographer Julia Fox has raised enough questions about the evidence linking Jane to perjury in 1536 to suggest that she did not betray her husband or actively seek his death.34 George trusted her to speak to their friends at court on his behalf, which he is unlikely to have done if their marriage was as unhappy as is usually assumed.35 If she did give any evidence during the fall of the Boleyns, then it is possible that she did so in her husband’s defense and her testimony was later subverted by Thomas Cromwell at the Queen’s trial or Lord Rochford’s. Either way, Jane found herself in dire straits after her husband’s execution on May 17, 1536, and it was her natal family’s connections that came to her rescue when she and they had to bring pressure to bear on her father-in-law, who was reluctant to give her the income owed to her as his son’s widow.36 When he was finally compelled to give in, he did so “alone to satisfy the King’s desire and pleasure” and in a letter peppered with complaints about Jane’s extravagance and righteous reminders that when he was a young man he and his wife had lived on a lot less, with a growing family, than childless Jane was now demanding for life as a femme sole.37
In 1539, Jane was able to join the household of Anne of Cleves, where she had been one of the women who pressed the Queen about her chances of conceiving and subsequently gave evidence about it during the royal annulment hearings.38 Like most of her colleagues, Jane then transferred smoothly to Catherine’s service, where, by the spring, she had establ
ished a firm friendship with the new Queen.
Historians are divided on what to make of Anne Boleyn’s sister-in-law and Catherine Howard’s confidante. The assessment of one biographer, that Lady Rochford was “a pathological meddler, with most of the instincts of a procuress who achieves a vicarious pleasure from arranging assignations” strikes a judgmental note, especially when compared to more recent sympathetic depictions of her as “very much the grand lady . . . elegant, poised and animated.”39 Unlike some of Catherine’s other companions, Lady Rochford had lengthy experience of life at court, having been a member more or less constantly since 1522 and quite possibly since 1520, but these two decades of life at Henry VIII’s court do not seem to have translated into a prudent attitude towards its dangers. There is some evidence, though it may admittedly be hearsay, that in the mid-1530s she had discussed intimate information about the King’s behavior in bed.40 She had been involved in intrigues in the households of Anne Boleyn and Anne of Cleves, and in both cases her discretion had been poor. Like many courtiers, she delighted in gossip and she had an addiction to palace life that predisposed her to participate in its plots, particularly if they raised her standing. Proximity to royalty was important in Henry’s palace, but knowing their secrets gave a courtier even greater credit.
Lady Rochford’s ascendancy in Queen Catherine’s affections provoked curiosity in the household and then, after several months, hostility. She was not an obvious candidate for the Queen’s favor. By 1541, Jane Boleyn was about thirty-six years old, old enough to be the Queen’s mother by contemporary standards. Although they were distantly related to each other thanks to the Parkers’ kinship to the Tilneys and the Boleyns’ to the Howards, Catherine had far closer relatives in her household, including her sister Isabella, who was in the privy chamber with Lady Rochford and found herself being edged out of her sister’s favor by the latter.41 There was a childhood friend in Katherine Tilney or women closer in age, like Anne Bassett or the Duchess of Suffolk. The reasons for this unusual and damaging friendship are therefore difficult to determine, but given what happened next and what we know of both ladies’ personalities, it does seem as if a shared love of scandal and intrigue brought them together—a conclusion supported by the fact that Jane was instrumental in arranging Catherine’s secret Maundy meeting with Culpepper.
The Queen’s family were all in relatively good health that spring. Uncle William, although keen to come home, remained on his embassy in France, and gossip that Catherine’s aunt would reconcile with her estranged husband, the Earl of Bridgewater, had come to nothing. The Earl was a wealthy man and the Countess had secured enough money to maintain a town house of her own at Lambeth, while her sons were still wards of the Dowager Duchess, as Catherine had once been.42 Catherine’s brothers Charles and George continued to do well at court—the King made a grant to Charles during Lent.43 On Saint George’s Day, April 23, the King went to Westminster for the annual chapter meeting of the Most Noble Order of the Garter, the highest chivalric order available to an English subject, a group of twenty-four “companions” of the order founded by Edward III in 1348 to promote chivalry, loyalty, and fraternity in battle. It was dedicated to England’s patron saint, George, and on his feast day new members were usually brought in to fill any vacant stalls. There were three spaces available in April 1541, one of which went to Catherine’s cousin, Lord Surrey.44 His father was already a companion knight, as his grandfather and great-grandfather before him had been, meaning that Surrey’s promotion had more to do with the favor the Howards stood in by the spring of 1541 than with a specific policy of rewarding the Queen’s family in light of her pregnancy. For the Howards, this was fortuitous because by the time Catherine’s brother George received a grant from the King in May, preparations for the Queen’s coronation had stopped along with any talk of her having a child.45
What precisely happened with Catherine’s pregnancy is unclear, and a variety of explanations are all equally possible. The first is that the pregnancy had ended in a miscarriage at a very early stage. A second possibility is that Catherine had, either of her own volition or at the instigation of others, invented the story in order to restore herself to the King’s favor after the upset their relationship had suffered during his spell of poor health. She perhaps hoped to make her lie into a truth at the earliest available opportunity. At some point, biological chronology would have given her away, but by that stage Henry might have been so pleased with the anticipated arrival of a new Duke of York that he would have forgiven her earlier “mistake.” There is a possible explanation as to why Catherine might have lied, found in Chapuys’s correspondence. Chapuys believed that the deception started with the King, who had faked his illness at Lent to avoid seeing Catherine, because, for a few weeks, he had considered divorcing her.
Last Lent I wrote to Your Majesty that this king, feigning indisposition, was ten or twelve days without seeing his queen or allowing her to come into his room; that during all that time there had been much consultation and talk of a divorce; but that, owing to some presumption that she was in the family way, or because the means and ways to bring about a divorce were not yet sufficiently prepared, the affair dropped.46
Alternative correspondence, from the Privy Council to the Duke of Norfolk and Charles de Marillac to François I, confirms that Chapuys’s suspicions about Henry’s illness were unjustified. Henry was genuinely and seriously ill during Lent, as was Chapuys himself at the same time, which might explain how he was confused about events later. It is possible that Catherine or some of her ladies feared the sickness was a ruse or that the King’s decision to keep his distance from her while he was unwell encouraged Catherine to try to buy herself some time by claiming she was pregnant.47 A third possibility is that Catherine, or those around her, made a genuine mistake in diagnosing her condition.
Whatever the truth, the fragility of the royal line of succession was brought home by shocking news from the Scottish court in May. At the same time as Catherine announced her pregnancy, the Scottish queen consort, Marie de Guise, was preparing to give birth. The child was a boy, a younger brother to King James’s one-year-old heir, James, Duke of Rothesay. Some sources give the new prince’s name as Arthur; others suggest that he was christened Robert.48 Officially, he was referred to as the Duke of Albany in his eight short days alive. On May 14, Sir Thomas Wharton, writing from the border, sent the news that not only had the newly born Albany died, but within a day his elder brother had also passed away.49 De Marillac, who had a vested interest in Scottish news since Scotland was France’s ally and its queen was a French noblewoman by birth, wrote that “the queen of Scotland was brought to bed of her second son, but that, within eight days after, he died, and the eldest also, at which there was great sorrow there.”50 According to Wharton, the catastrophe, at once a political and personal tragedy for the Scottish monarchy, “perplexes all.” Queen Marie, who perhaps needless to say was “very sickly and full of heaviness,” wrote in anguished letters to her mother, Antoinette, Duchess of Guise, that the tragedy seemed so horribly improbable that she believed her babies must have been poisoned.51
Henry VIII was not close to his Scottish relatives. Leaving aside his political disagreements with his nephew, he refused to provide support or financial help to his sister Margaret, Queen Mother of Scots, who had remarried twice after her first husband’s death at the Battle of Flodden and found herself permanently strapped for cash. Her French daughter-in-law was doing her best to heal the rifts that Margaret’s remarriages had created between her and her son King James, but in the meantime Margaret had written many times to her brother begging him for a pension so that she could “live like a princess, as the King their father intended.”52 The death of the two princes also coincided with English suspicions about the Scottish government’s involvement in recent unrest in Ireland and the north of England, so it is perhaps unsurprising, if equally unlovely, that there was no trace of sympathy emanating from the Tudor court at the news.
Children were on Catherine’s mind in May 1541. In the same week as Wharton’s letter about the deaths in Scotland, Catherine visited her stepchildren. Until that point, she had only interacted with the eldest, twenty-five-year-old Mary, and she wanted to meet the other two. The visit to her stepson was discussed in one of Chapuys’s letters to the governor of the Netherlands, but he failed to mention—and perhaps did not know—that on Friday May 6 the Queen’s barge brought her to Chelsea Old Palace, where she received the Princess Elizabeth.53 The night before, Catherine had stayed at Baynard’s Castle, her official residence in London, while the King visited his son’s household in Essex, and it is interesting that Catherine took the opportunity to meet Elizabeth away from the girl’s father, before she was introduced to the Prince of Wales.54
The seven-year-old Elizabeth was the youngest, least loved, and most ignored of Henry’s children. She had her mother’s dark eyes, her father’s coloring, and the long Tudor nose of her grandfather Henry VII. She was two and a half when her mother was beheaded, and her first two stepmothers had respectively lacked the inclination or the opportunity to take much interest in her.55 She spent most of her life in the smaller countryside palaces where royal children were housed to keep them safe from the noxious, harmful airs in the city. Her mother’s execution on charges of adultery cast a pall over Elizabeth’s life, not just because it robbed her of the mother who had showered her with attention and gifts, but also because it left her legitimacy open to question. Chapuys, with a touch more spite than was necessary, consistently and pointedly referred to her in his letters as “Anne Boleyn’s daughter,” rather than as “the King’s bastard,” which was the official government line after legislation removed her from the line of succession in 1536. A few months after her mother’s death, Elizabeth’s then governess wrote to Thomas Cromwell to explain that Elizabeth had outgrown all her clothes and needed new ones, which could not be bought because the court had forgotten to pay the ex-heiress’s bills. Elizabeth’s modern biographers who read this as the result of forgetful neglect in the excitement of her father’s third marriage rather than deliberate cruelty are probably right. It may have been that Queen Anne was more involved than Henry in the management of their daughter’s household and it took Lady Bryan’s complaint for Cromwell to realize that no one had stepped into the void to make sure Elizabeth had everything she needed. Even with those explanations, it is a poor reflection on Henry VIII’s interest in his youngest daughter, and although she, like her eldest sister, had her own suite of rooms at Greenwich Palace, she was seldom invited to court, on account of her age, and her father did not visit her in her own houses after Queen Anne’s execution. Despite this, Elizabeth impressed nearly everyone she met, and even at this early stage in her life observers were quick to notice her self-possession and her intelligence. A year earlier, Sir Thomas Wriothesley had gone to see her and written that when he spoke to her, Elizabeth replied “with as great gravity as she had been 40 years old. If she be no worse educated than appears she will be an honour to womanhood.”56
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