Young and Damned and Fair

by Gareth Russell

  A suggestion that Catherine hoped to use Culpepper as a stud for the heir she could not get from her husband is often raised in conversations about Henry’s marriages. Henry VIII’s sexual problems have potentially been exaggerated, and it has already been argued here that if he was impotent for prolonged periods of time, his wife’s safest option was to remain barren. For a queen with an impotent husband, prayer and patience were the only courses of action open to her. Neither does the chronology of Catherine’s liaison with Culpepper imply that her goal was pregnancy. She was in her stool house with him at Lincoln for hours on end, talking. Had she later slept with Culpepper, and if the proficiency in contraception she had boasted of during her relationship with Francis Dereham had let her down, she probably would have been able to pass the child off as Henry’s, but her behavior does not suggest that a child was part of her plan or that she approached Culpepper in the spring and summer of 1541 with anything other than feelings of deep attraction that evolved into addling love.

  Thomas Culpepper’s motivation is less clear than Catherine’s. He said all the right things when he was with her, but it is difficult to conclude that he was as infatuated with her as she was with him. Later, nobody suggested that it was Culpepper who was the initiating party. The preposterous idea that he was blackmailing her into meeting with him is impossible to credit from a documentary point of view. Nothing Culpepper or the Queen said, then or later, corroborates that interpretation. A theory that gained currency in the years immediately after their deaths was that it had been a grand love affair, somewhere between the star-crossed hopelessness of the next generation’s Romeo and Juliet and the destructiveness of Helen and Paris. The vignette of Culpepper kissing his queen’s hand in the predawn darkness after professing his love for her and gallantly refusing to go further for honor’s sake is arresting. It happened. It was not, however, the conclusion.

  The most mercenary explanation for Culpepper’s entanglement with Catherine is not that he was blackmailing her. Rather, he knew, like all the gentlemen in the privy chamber, that the King’s health was unpredictable; his weight was increasing, his ulcer remained the great unknown that could close over and kill him at any moment, and Culpepper had seen at firsthand how close Henry had come to dying during the scare in February. When Henry went, Catherine would be left as one of the wealthiest women in the country, even if she did not have children. Widowed queens had remarried before—after Henry I died, his childless widow, Adeliza of Louvain, married a former officer of the royal household called William d’Aubigny. When great widows married, they often did so to men far beneath them in the social hierarchy, with the differences in class helping to offset the legal inequality created by gender. Two of Henry VIII’s great-grandmothers, Queen Catherine de Valois and Jacquetta of Luxembourg, had eloped with handsome servants after their respective first husbands, a king and his younger brother, predeceased them. His aunt Cecily, Lady Welles, both of his sisters, and his sister-in-law Lady Mary Carey had done the same. Along with perhaps some genuine romantic feelings for Catherine, Culpepper potentially had his eye on the long-term advantage of marrying a young and attractive woman, who was likely to become a dowager queen before she was much older. That is speculation, of course, and while it is unlikely that Catherine’s future never crossed Culpepper’s mind, we cannot know if the Queen’s future financial and social desirability outweighed her current personal attraction.

  * * *

  I. It was not discovered until repairs were carried out in 1586.

  Chapter 17

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  The Chase

  I would put amber Bracelets on thy wrists,

  Crownets of Pearl about thy naked Arms:

  And thou sitst at swilling Bacchus feasts

  My lips with charms would see thee from all harms:

  And when in sleep thou tookst thy chiefest Pleasure,

  Mine eyes should gaze upon thine eye-lids Treasure.

  —Richard Barnfield, The Affectionate Shepherd (1594)

  After three days in Lincoln, Catherine and the court made the eighteen-mile trip to the town of Gainsborough for another round of receptions, gifts, and reconciliations.1 Lincolnshire was often marshy terrain, and it did not have enough bridges to make transport easy, so the household had to cross the Humber River by ferry in what must have been a lengthy process.2 It is unclear where Catherine stayed during her four-day visit to Gainsborough; the most likely spot was Gainsborough Old Hall, home of the ornery Lord Burgh, an explosively temperamental Protestant sympathizer who had once served as lord chamberlain to the Queen’s household before retiring to his home county, where a lot of his time seemed to be occupied with making life difficult for his family and servants.I Local legend has it that Henry and Catherine slept in the upper bedchamber of Gainsborough Old Hall’s tower. It is certainly possible that Catherine stayed in that room, which can still be seen today, but wherever they stayed the King and Queen would have been given separate bedrooms as a matter of routine.

  From Gainsborough, they followed the Great Northern Road to a manor house in Scrooby, where they stayed for two nights.3 At smaller towns or villages like this, the royal arrival was scaled back—the King, the Queen, and Princess Mary rode down streets that had been cleaned and decorated, escorted by inhabitants “going before him on their little geldings in their ordinary clothes,” with about seventy archers, bows pointedly drawn, marching behind the courtiers.4 The next major stage of the progress would be the King’s entry into Yorkshire, which, with Lincolnshire, had formed the heartland of the 1536 uprisings. Before Yorkshire, Henry and Catherine stopped for a long hunting weekend at Hatfield Chase, an area of prime hunting land that straddled the county borders.5 Between Thursday, August 18, and Sunday, August 21, a steady stream of guests joined the King, his gentlemen, and his nobles for long days hunting, shooting, and fishing. Both dukes were there, and Norfolk took the opportunity to talk for the first time in weeks with Charles de Marillac, who had also been invited, a gesture appreciated by the French King, who could be forgiven if he hoped it was an indication that de Marillac’s recent assessment that England was preparing for a war had either been wrong or presaged a strike against the Emperor.6 The papal nuncio in France judged that the French court’s view of Henry was best summarized as “if not their friend, he is not their enemy.”7

  De Marillac’s personal and political rival, Eustace Chapuys—the two loathed one another and their feud spiraled into each man telling increasingly inventive lies about the other—had been asked to join the King and Queen at Collyweston in July, but had to decline the invitation on grounds of poor health.8 De Marillac was pleasantly surprised by the level of luxury he experienced at Hatfield—he confessed in a letter to François that he had not expected any comfort in the “barbarous and mutinous” provinces—so the effort the King’s servants went to on his behalf was doubly appreciated.9 The weekend passed in an orgy of organized slaughter. Two hundred stags were felled on the first day, a similar number on the second. The greyhounds took down many of the deer, which were then served at the guests’ dinner tables. Courtiers were rowed out onto the Chase’s ponds and marshes, where they caught young swans and two boat-fulls of river birds, and fished out pikes. De Marillac joined Henry for dinner in his tent, where his host leaned on him to give a full report in his next letter to François of the good hunting he had experienced. The ambassador was genuinely impressed by the scale of the hunt and Henry’s wealth. He told François that there were so many bucks at Hatfield that Henry regarded them “as if they were mere cattle.” He did not know that shortly before the progress arrived, the Earl of Shrewsbury had been tasked with moving more stags into the area, in return for which he angled for, but did not receive, the honor of hosting the King and Queen as guests.10

  When de Marillac took the opportunity to talk with Catherine’s uncle, Norfolk did not mention his strained relations with the Queen. When they had last met, back in London, the Duke and the ambassador had discus
sed ways to solidify the peace between their two countries. At the hunt, Norfolk shot down French interest in marrying one of King François’s sons to Princess Elizabeth. Since Elizabeth was his great-niece, Norfolk told de Marillac that he could not publicly support any attempt to arrange such an advantageous match for her, since he would be suspected by other councillors of seeking to aggrandize his house.11 Instead, he suggested de Marillac focus on a betrothal between Princess Mary and François’s second son, the Duke of Orléans, something which he knew the French royal family had been keen on for some time. He also revealed, allegedly confidentially but doubtless with Henry’s permission, the plans to restore Mary to the line of succession. She would be second after her little brother, and it would remain a “great secret” until it was announced. Norfolk omitted that Elizabeth would also be restored, as third in line.

  De Marillac did not see much of the Queen during his visit. He barely mentioned her in his letters, and she seems to have spent much of her time with her ladies back at the house, rather than out in the field. She was in her rooms one day when she saw Culpepper on his way to or from the hunt. Margaret Morton, who was standing nearby, “saw her look out of her chamber window on Mr. Culpepper after such sort that she thought there was love between them.”12 Margaret had been curious about the Queen’s behavior since she left London, but before Hatfield Chase she seems to have put it down to her fondness for Lady Rochford. Once she saw the look Catherine gave Culpepper, she had an explanation that made more sense and struck more dread. If she kept this observation to herself, Morton might have been the only one to understand why the Queen issued an unusual and insulting order that no one was allowed to come into her bedchamber unless she specifically summoned them, except, of course, Lady Rochford.13

  At this point during the progress, the King’s developing relationship with Scotland forced a change in the itinerary.14 By 1541, Anglo-Scottish tensions were at a breaking point over Scottish encouragement of Irish and English rebels, as well as its asylum for political, and especially religious, English exiles. The latter were a particular gripe for Henry, since James V promised that if he found any English political refugees in his kingdom he would hand them over, but refused to violate sanctuary claimed by a clergyman. In retaliation, Henry refused to extradite Scottish criminals. The Duke of Norfolk’s recent inspections and the subsequent building work on defenses in border towns like Berwick and Carlisle alarmed the Scottish government, as did King Henry’s arrival with a large retinue of armed guards in the north of England. In the hope of applying pressure on James about the religious émigrés to Scotland, Henry’s underlings encouraged English raids on Scottish property just across the border. This suggests that in 1541 Henry VIII was pursuing three interrelated policies when it came to Scotland—to intimidate King James, through the border raids and partial mobilization of forces commanded by northern magnates such as the earls of Cumberland and Westmorland, into negotiations about papist clergy who had fled to Scotland from England; to bolster, through Norfolk’s inspections, England’s defenses against possible Scottish attacks during any future war; and to pacify the north of England, through the progress, in the hope that there would be no more English rebels looking to Scotland for support.

  Fearful of the danger this put them in, the Scottish government decided on a strategy of preparing for the worst while hoping for the best. Cardinal Beaton, one of the most influential men at James V’s court, was sent to Paris, where he sought, and received, the backing of their French allies, who promised to help Scotland if England attacked. At the same time, the Scottish court dispatched Thomas Bellenden, a justice clerk, to meet Henry during the progress.15 At his audience, Bellenden unexpectedly offered the possibility of a meeting between his king and Henry, something Henry had been trying to arrange for the best part of a decade only to have the plans frustrated every time by James’s steady stream of excuses. It is unclear if Bellenden, who belonged to a set at the Scottish court who thought the two British monarchs should meet, had overstepped his brief in suggesting the conference or if he had been told to do so in the hope of throwing the English off course long enough for Scotland to arrange for her defense in conjunction with France.16

  Henry was pleased. A face-to-face encounter with his nephew would give Henry the chance to encourage James to imitate the English Reformation and reject papal authority. There were absolutely no signs that James had any inclination towards a schism with Rome, as his defense of English priests, monks, and nuns who sought asylum in Scotland should have made clear. James had been so repulsed by the religious views expressed in one of his uncle’s letters that he threw it into the fire.17 Henry’s diplomats were frequently ordered to deliver communications from Henry that sounded more like scolding or lecturing; James had once responded that he had no need to take his uncle’s advice since he was adequately obeyed, respected, and loved in his own kingdom.18 Considering the Pilgrimage of Grace, that was quite a jab at Henry’s own political record. However, James V was also careful never to go too far in alienating his southern neighbors, and although the Scottish court was split on the issue, Henry knew from his informers that James sided with those who did not want another war with England.19 In light of the current tensions, a pro-peace James seemed prepared to cross the border and meet his uncle. To facilitate this, Henry rescheduled his arrival in York to a later date and planned to stay for longer.

  Immediately after the Chase, Catherine went to Pontefract Castle, famous and infamous as one of the great English castles, for a twelve-night stay, one of the longest stops in the progress. Pontefract was pronounced “Pomfret” in Catherine’s era.II Shakespeare had it that way in his plays, and its name is written phonetically in most accounts of the 1541 progress. When Catherine and her retinue rode into it on August 23, they saw that, up close, Pontefract had a slightly dilapidated air. A report from three years earlier had recommended extensive repair work.20 The tiny chapel dedicated to Saint Clement, which dated from the eleventh century, was showing its age, and another makeshift chapel had sprung up for the castle’s regular inhabitants in the meantime. Pontefract stood on a rocky outcrop, its nine towers rising five or six storeys around a series of courtyards built over the course of the last four centuries. Edward I had once called it “the key to the North,” and a painting of the castle by Alexander Keirincx in its last years gives some idea of its size.21 At its height in the Middle Ages, the key to the North ordered 2,140 dishes for a household of about four hundred. It had bakeries, breweries, and bowling greens, with stone benches set into the garden walls for spectators.

  Pontefract’s dungeons were to become the stuff of horror stories after the civil war in the next century, and even in Catherine’s lifetime, the castle had a notorious reputation. Shakespeare characterized it as a “bloody prison / Fatal and ominous” after Richard II died there in 1400.22 Richard, whose court was beautiful but his policies less so, was overthrown by his cousin Henry, Duke of Lancaster, Pontefract’s master, in 1399. It was through the latter’s succession that Pontefract became a property of the Crown. The deposed Richard was sent to his rival’s impregnable castle; plots which aimed to free him and restore him to the throne were foiled. These were enough to frighten Henry of Lancaster, by then Henry IV, into ordering his cousin’s death. The weight of evidence suggests that the horror of regicide, spilling the quasi-sacred blood of God’s anointed, was technically avoided by inflicting an even more terrible death: the prisoner at Pontefract was simply denied adequate food until he starved to death. Thus, Richard II was not technically murdered on Henry IV’s orders. Instead, he died of “natural” causes. The Victorians believed the deed was done in the Gascoigne Tower. It would have been macabre poeticism to kill a king born in Gascony in a tower named after his natal province, but although the nineteenth-century version of Richard’s death is still preserved in the modern tourist signs at Pontefract Castle, it is far more likely that Richard was taken to lodge and died in the King’s Tower, where Henry VIII stay
ed in 1541.23 Catherine was the first queen consort to lodge in the Queen’s Tower, which had been named in honor of Henry IV’s stepmother.24 Catherine and Henry’s accommodations at Pontefract were probably linked to the castle’s Great Hall and, through it, to each other. Although they had seen better days, the still-impressive royal apartments had a privy kitchen, and once the servants had unpacked their possessions, Henry and Catherine would not have lacked for comfort.

  Catherine’s old mixture of overconfidence and nervous insecurity had been magnified by the successes and strains of the progress. In the privacy of her apartments, her moods were irascible. She was jumpy, tired, heedless of how strangely she was behaving, and she was treating her servants terribly, snapping at them and issuing orders that confused or upset them. Katherine Tilney was sent to Lady Rochford with messages so imprecise and puzzling that she did not know how to word them; the Queen’s sister Isabella was one of the privy chamber staff unceremoniously shoved from the privilege of entering the Queen’s bedchamber, as privy women were supposed to do, and the chamberers were being dragged around back stairwells to spend half the night waiting in alcoves. Two of the chamberers, Margaret Morton and Mistress Luffkyn, had been on the receiving end of the Queen’s frayed nerves when she thought they were spying on her. Luffkyn in particular irritated the Queen greatly.25