Young and Damned and Fair

by Gareth Russell

  Secondly, it was quite clear to everyone in sixteenth-century Dublin that the country could not prosper if the Crown’s authority was obeyed by some Irishmen and ignored by others. Everyone who interacted with Irish politics and possessed a modicum of intelligence could see that the country was in urgent need of reform. The Duke of Norfolk, who had been the King’s viceroy for Ireland from 1519 to 1523, and later Thomas Cromwell had both put forward plans for an overhaul of the system.5 An Irish bishop had proposed the idea of changing the King’s style three years earlier on the justification that “they that be of the Irishry would more gladder obey your highness by name of king of this land, than by the name of lord thereof.”6 Those who worked in the government in Dublin hoped that by rejuvenating their sovereign’s Irish title, they would remove it from its earlier associations as a papal endowment and extend the legitimacy of their own administration in Ireland through conciliation and consent, rather than antagonism and aggression.

  The Irish Council had an ambitious program to accompany the act, which included bringing the estranged Gaelic nobility into the fold by granting them titles in the Anglo-Irish peerage while confirming their ancestral grants of land or making new ones. Through a process of assimilation, the Irish Parliament hoped to neutralize the tensions, and threats of rebellion, that had plagued the island and dominated the Irish aristocracy. A representative of the Irish Privy Council told his English colleagues that “being accepted as subjects, where before they were taken as Irish enemies . . . is the chiefest mean, by good wisdom, to continue them in peace and obedience.” It was clear from what they were proposing that the Parliament of Ireland did not want to extend just their government’s power but also its responsibilities, and this threatened enormous costs to Henry’s exchequer. Although he had been prepared to grant titles to loyal Irish peers, like Barnaby Fitzpatrick’s father, Henry balked at the idea of assimilating the Gaelic lordships en masse, even though most of his advisers stressed that without such a change Ireland would descend into anarchy.7

  Henry acted on their advice with poor grace and pointed reluctance. When one Irish nobleman asked to receive the title of an earl, Henry reminded him of the “vile and savage life” he and his ancestors had lived, despite the fact that the man’s fidelity and character had been vouched for by Henry’s representatives and councillors. The insult was even more gratuitous for being couched in a half-acceptance of the man’s petition, which Henry granted with the title of a viscount on the grounds that “the honour of an earl is so great that it is never conferred except by the King in person. If he desires it so much he must repair hither, where it shall gladly be given. If he will be content with the honour of a viscount or a baron, which may be given by letters patent, he shall have it.”8

  Henry’s nitpicking over the Irish legislation dragged on for most of the summer, with messengers bouncing back and forth between London, Dublin, and wherever the court moved on its progress. Some of the paperwork was brought to him when he and Catherine were at Pipewell in Northamptonshire, near to property owned by Dorothy Bray’s lover, and the King was clearly displeased by what he read.9 Would granting the proposed lands to the Irish who lived beyond the pale secure their obedience or simply provide them with resources to fund future rebellions? The King and Queen had moved to Collyweston Palace in the same county when Henry complained that the parliamentary legislation made it sound as if the Irish lords and commons were granting him a title; he wanted every relevant piece of documentation to contain a “plain setting forth of his old right and inheritance.”10 Discussion of the exact wording of the title dragged into the autumn, and it was only in January that it was finally settled upon.11 The Irish got much of what they wanted, although arguably not enough, and their proposal that the kingdom of Ireland should now be bumped up to stand after England and before France in the King’s official style was rejected, despite the fact that English royal presence in Ireland was arguably older and certainly more tangible.12

  Other messengers traveling to and from Collyweston Palace included Eustace Chapuys’s secretary, who arrived with more letters about the still unresolved trade dispute with the empire, and those bearing invitations from the King to three Italian shipwrights who were experts in the construction of war galleys.13 From their council chamber, Henry’s advisers were trying to settle one of the many questions of precedence created by the progress. At Collyweston, it was a competition between representative bodies of the county of Northamptonshire against those from the towns of Peterborough and nearby Stamford about who should welcome the King and Queen, and in what order.14 At their earlier stay at Ampthill, the councillors had examined a local man called Richard Taylor who was accused of papism, and at Pipewell a man was examined, then released, after it was alleged that he had not blotted the Pope’s name out of his prayer book. Upon examination, the council discovered that he had erased the pontiff’s name, but not as thoroughly as his neighbors had.15

  His irritation over the Irish proposals aside, Henry and Catherine were enjoying themselves more than the councillors. On July 14, the King hunted and killed a great stag and two fat bucks, which he then sent as personal gifts to the lord mayor of London.16 The Queen was in “merry” spirits by the time she entered Northamptonshire on July 21, the first county on the progress that she had never visited before.17 That week, the Queen gave her chamberer Margaret Morton a note to deliver to Lady Rochford’s rooms.18 Morton, noticing that the Queen’s letter was unaddressed and devoid of any seal, handed it over to Lady Rochford, who asked her to tell the Queen that she would have a response for her in the morning. The next day, when Margaret went to fetch the reply, Lady Rochford sent it with a warning for “her Grace to keep it secret and not lay it abroad.” Morton, who disliked Lady Rochford intensely, thought the errand and the Viscountess’s subsequent instructions about the Queen needing to be careful with her correspondence were odd. She remembered both anomalies later.

  The next royal residence which Catherine visited was Collyweston Palace. Collyweston had originally been owned by the King’s paternal grandmother, Margaret, Countess of Richmond, and her crest could still be seen in the palace’s four great bay windows with their fine views over the nearby Welland valley. Following the devout Countess’s death in 1509, the palace had been maintained but seldom lived in; it was passed over to the King’s bastard son, the Duke of Richmond, until his death in 1536. Catherine stayed in a house that still reflected the tastes of its original owner. She had access to summer houses reached by gravel paths that ran through herb gardens and beside ponds. By the woods and near the orchard, there was a little clearing where the Countess of Richmond had once listened to outdoor concerts given by her choristers, who had been taught in the now abandoned schoolroom beside the chapel. Catherine’s apartments, originally built for Henry’s mother when she visited, overlooked the gardens, which she could access by a private staircase. The palace had a fortified jewel house where Catherine’s treasure trove could rest as securely as the Countess of Richmond’s had half a century earlier.19

  From Collyweston, the court moved into the county of Lincolnshire to spend three days at Grimsthorpe Castle, the recently renovated and expanded home of the Duke and Duchess of Suffolk.20 Grimsthorpe was part of the Duchess’s inheritance, but it became the Duke’s at the time of their marriage, since before 1870 a married woman could not own any property in her own right under English law. The couple who stood outside to greet them were very familiar to the King and Queen. The Duke, born Charles Brandon, was the greatest landowner in Lincolnshire by 1541.21 The son of a man who had fallen for the Tudor cause at the Battle of Bosworth, Brandon had grown up in close proximity to the royal household, where he matched the young Henry VIII in athletic ability and good looks. In their days as jousting champions, the King and the future duke were so similar that they had been compared to brothers, and Brandon’s influence was significant enough that a Hapsburg envoy referred to him, with marginal exaggeration, as a “second king.”22 B
randon had seen service on land and sea in Henry’s wars, and he had scaled the ranks of the nobility through a combination of valor and devotion. Since then, he had gone to seed in the same direction, if not quite with the same speed, as his king. He too had grown fat, his hair was gray, and when he went to the House of Lords he often had to remain seated.23 He also resembled but did not quite match Henry when it came to marital misadventures. As a young man, Brandon had been engaged to one of Katherine of Aragon’s ladies-in-waiting. They had started sleeping together, and she was pregnant in time for him to jilt her for her wealthy widowed aunt, whose property Suffolk sold off at great value to himself before he annulled the marriage on grounds that it was incestuous due to his previous sexual relationship with his wife’s niece, whom he went back to and, this time, married. She died not long after the birth of their second daughter, and Suffolk caused one of the great scandals of the reign by eloping with the King’s youngest and recently widowed sister, Mary. A mea culpa accompanied with lavish gifts from Mary’s inheritance from her first husband, King Louis XII of France, helped soothe royal outrage, and the couple had four children, three of whom lived past infancy.

  In his determination to increase the family’s position as magnates, Suffolk bought the wardship of young Katherine Willoughby, heiress to the deceased Lord Willoughby de Eresby. The Duke brought Katherine to the Suffolk household with the intention of marrying her to his son once they were both of age. Gossip in the household of Anne Boleyn, who was then on the rise and never much enamored with the Duke or his wife, made arch hints that the Duke’s interest in his son’s fiancée was not entirely proper—an accusation that turned out to be a polished arrow when Suffolk’s wife died of tuberculosis in June 1533 and he broke off his son’s engagement to Katherine and married her himself that September.24 When the son himself also died of tuberculosis a year later, Queen Anne and her clique were not slow to exploit the Duke’s private failings to undermine his position at court.25

  By contemporary standards, Brandon and Willoughby’s marriage had been successful in that the new Duchess provided her husband with two sons to replace the one who died in 1534. The twenty-two-year-old hazel-eyed Duchess was one of Catherine’s more outspoken and intelligent ladies-in-waiting. Although her mother had been a childhood friend from Spain of Katherine of Aragon’s and the Duchess had been named in the latter’s honor, she did not share her namesake’s devotion to the old religion. Earlier that year, the Suffolks’ chaplain, a Scottish evangelical called Alexander Seton, had been forced to publicly recant in London after he preached a sermon that sailed too close to the Protestant doctrine of justification by faith alone.

  After the chamberers had unpacked everything at Grimsthorpe, the Queen told Katherine Tilney to find Lady Rochford and ask her if she had the thing she had promised her. Lady Rochford promised to bring her word herself when it arrived, an odd and cryptic answer to a similarly unusual question, both sent through a confused chamberer.26 The Queen and her favorite had talked about Thomas Culpepper throughout the progress. Lady Rochford told the Queen that another of the King’s privy chamber gentlemen, Thomas Paston, was also captivated by her.27 Paston, who was twenty-four, about Culpepper’s age, was unmarried, and in fact two years later he married Queen Catherine’s niece Agnes Leigh, daughter of her much older half brother, Sir John Leigh of Stockwell. Like most privy chamber gentlemen, Paston and Culpepper were permitted to socialize with the Queen’s ladies in her apartments, when off duty during the day, and it was presumably there that Lady Rochford noticed Paston’s interest in the Queen. Flirtation was a way of life in most Renaissance courts, a way of passing time and advertising one’s nimbleness in speech. Courtly love was a fad that made it very difficult to tell when the usual patter, perhaps like Thomas Paston’s, had been replaced by the real thing, as seemed to be happening with Thomas Culpepper.

  Catherine was not interested in Thomas Paston, but she was becoming obsessed with Culpepper. Since their conversation at Greenwich, messages and gifts had passed between them. Catherine had worried about Culpepper when he was unwell. But there had been no opportunity for them to meet privately. Lady Rochford had been tasked with arranging a meeting, and if the wording recalled by Margaret Morton and Katherine Tilney about the two ladies’ messages was correct, the widowed Viscountess promised to do so. Every time they arrived at a new house, Lady Rochford would inspect the stairs leading to and from the Queen’s rooms to see if there was a suitable venue for the discreet conversations her mistress and Culpepper wanted. Thus far, she had not found anything suitable, and if she had, Culpepper could not be absent from the privy chamber if he was on duty that night, or the King had demanded his company.

  The day before they left Suffolk’s house at Grimsthorpe for the county capital, the kingdom’s other duke arrived. Norfolk had said his farewells to Henry and Catherine shortly before they left London, with the intention of joining them at Lincoln, after he made another round of inspections of the border. His return may not have been welcomed by Catherine, since there is evidence that her relationship with her uncle had deteriorated. Her quarrel with Norfolk is mentioned in a history of the English Reformation penned a century later by the Bishop of Salisbury, who wrote, “The king went in progress with his queen, who began to have great influence on him; and, on what reason I do not know, she withdrew from her uncle, and became his enemy.”28 It would be possible to remain skeptical about Bishop Burnet’s version of events, except for two facts in its favor. Burnet’s The History of the Reformation of the Church of England was researched and published in 1679, and he had access to many original documents about the Tudor court that were later and sadly lost in an accidental fire at the Cotton Library in London in 1731. Where Burnet quoted or discussed documents that were available in his time and have survived to ours, we can see that he generally reproduced them faithfully. That documents recording a chill between the Queen and her uncle in 1541 may have existed only to be lost in the eighteenth century is seemingly corroborated by a lengthy, self-pitying, and vitriolic letter written by the Duke of Norfolk five years later. By that point, he had temporarily lost royal favor, and he used his letter as an opportunity to accuse everyone around him of betraying him over the last two and a half decades. He specifically mentioned his two nieces “that it pleased the king’s highness to marry” for the “malice” they had both shown to him, which “is not unknown to such ladies . . . as my lady Herbert, my lady Tyrwhit, my lady Kingston, and others, which heard what they said of me.”29 Norfolk, whose ability to play the victim was matched by a determination never to play the role quietly, had once complained that Queen Anne Boleyn drove him from her presence with words that one would not use to a dog, which if nothing else was inaccurate on the basis that she liked her dogs far more than she did her uncle.30

  Anne Boleyn’s feud with Norfolk is better documented than Catherine’s, but the three ladies-in-waiting mentioned by the Duke prove that Burnet was truthful when he wrote that Catherine also came to dislike her uncle. Anne Herbert was in both queens’ households; Lady Mary Kingston only waited on Queen Anne in the final weeks of the latter’s life, but Elizabeth Tyrwhitt was a lady in Catherine’s service, never Anne Boleyn’s. The inclusion of her name on Norfolk’s list confirms that at some point she, and quite possibly Anne Herbert, heard Catherine’s plummeting opinion of the Howard patriarch.

  Why Catherine turned against the Duke is unclear. The most obvious conclusion is that as she grew more comfortable in her role, she felt she needed him less. It has been suggested here that the Duke’s role as Catherine’s Svengali in the early days of her marriage has been exaggerated, which undermines the image of the ingénue turning against her patron. Nor was Catherine the only member of the family to develop an animosity for the Duke. Along with Queen Anne Boleyn, the Countess of Bridgewater’s first husband “confessed,” in Norfolk’s words, “that of all men living he hated me most.”31 Norfolk’s second wife despised him and later gave evidence against him. At
various times, his relationships with his surviving children were strained. The Duke of Norfolk was not the feeble-minded ogre of popular legend; in biography and fiction he is so often presented as a cretinous boor pining for wars against France or a return to the Wars of the Roses, with nothing to commend him to Henry VIII’s government except his title. It is easy to forget that the Duke could be charming, engaging, and courteous. He was also a Francophile, with real military skill but little hunger for war. On many occasions, his advice should have been listened to, for example on Ireland in 1520, the north in 1536, and the Anglo-Scottish border in 1539. Yet he was also prone to faintly hysterical reactions and incapable of admitting he was in the wrong—when defending himself in 1546, he did not mimic many of his contemporaries by acknowledging his own wretchedness in disappointing the King, but instead hit back with “In all times past unto this time, I have shewed my self a most true man to my sovereign lord”—and when he lost his temper, Norfolk was accusatory, offensive, and aggressive. He tried too hard to control members of his family, which they resented, objected to, and often rebelled against. There are enough quarrels with his other relatives throughout Norfolk’s life to lend credence to the stories told by Elizabeth Tyrwhitt, and probably by Anne Herbert as well, referenced by Norfolk in 1546 and then repeated in 1679 by Bishop Burnet—that by the time they met again at Grimsthorpe Castle in August 1541, Catherine was contemptuous of her uncle and discussed those feelings in front of her women.

  The royal party left Grimsthorpe on the morning of August 8 and traveled to the market town of Sleaford, roughly halfway in the forty miles between Grimsthorpe and Lincoln.32 The local manor had once been the patrimony of the Hussey family, until Lord Hussey of Sleaford was beheaded for supporting the Pilgrimage of Grace. The visit to his home may have brought up unpleasant memories for Mary Tudor, since Lord Hussey had been one of her chamberlains. The next morning the court headed to Temple Breuer, a spot about seven miles from Lincoln where the cavalcade stopped to have dinner and send messengers to inform the authorities in Lincoln that the King and Queen were about to arrive. When Catherine, in a crimson velvet gown, rode toward the walls of Lincoln, she could see a forest of red robes, swaying into bows as she approached. They were Lincoln’s mayor, burgesses, and aldermen, who stood as representatives of the commoners of the region, while the gentry’s delegation sat on horseback near a tent that had been erected for Henry and Catherine to change before their ceremonial entry into the city itself. Henry, resplendent if enormous in green velvet—the Tudors’ color but also, by happy coincidence, one traditionally associated with Lincoln—listened to an address in Latin delivered by the cathedral’s archdeacon, dean, and clergymen. The priests then rode off to the minster to prepare for the service Henry and Catherine were due to attend after receiving gifts from the other castes, who admitted their wrongdoing in 1536 in return for gestures of pardon from the King.