Young and Damned and Fair

by Gareth Russell

  Yours as long as life endures,

  Katheryn

  One thing I had forgotten and that is to instruct my man to tarry here with me still for he says whatsomever you bid him he will do it.

  The Scottish visit remained the priority on either side of the first visit to Hull. The rendezvous between the two kings in York would be the first time Catherine had met fellow royalty or interacted with social equals since her wedding. James would probably bring his wife, who, like Catherine, had been born into the nobility and married into royalty.11 The last time Henry had hosted a foreign monarch was during a short visit to Calais in 1532 when he and Anne Boleyn met with François I. Impressing the Scottish visitors with displays of English wealth was a matter of national pride. The court would be beneath the spotlight in front of an audience many of whom would be predisposed to find fault where they could, and as its leading lady everything Catherine did, said, and wore would be critiqued by her Scottish guests.

  For Catherine, the preparations for James V’s arrival likely proved stressful. They were certainly noisy. In the courtyards and land around St. Mary’s, about twelve hundred workmen toiled night and day to spruce up anything that had been damaged during the dissolution. Tents and pavilions were erected to house James’s entourage as messengers were sent south to fetch some of the court’s best tapestries, plate, and outfits from the royal wardrobes. Even the archers and privy chamber servants were to have their finest liveries for James’s visit. If there was any doubt about the fact that Henry valued impressing James more than impressing his own people, it was dispelled by the flow of accoutrements that arrived in York, all of which had apparently been judged too good to risk transporting for procession in front of the northerners, but were considered necessary to dazzle foreign visitors. Orders were given to draw up letters guaranteeing safe conduct for King James and any Scots who accompanied him. The gentry were told to stand down the armed men that they had fielded from their estates in case of trouble from Scots or northern malcontents.12 Since the visit had still not been announced publically, the work at St. Mary’s and the arrival of treasures from storerooms in the south gave rise to talk in York that Catherine was going to be crowned in a ceremony at the Minster or even that she was pregnant and might stay long enough to give birth to a future Duke of York in his “home” city.13

  Some of those watching the activity in York guessed that an interview between the kings was being organized. Charles de Marillac, who had followed the court to York as its guest after the Hatfield hunt, had heard enough from his contacts at the French court to predict that James V did not want to travel into England. A few men in Henry’s retinue, too shrewd to state their views publicly in light of how much time and money their monarch had spent in preparation for it, discreetly shared de Marillac’s belief that the conference would never take place.

  They were right. The expense at St. Mary’s was confidence attempting to create a reality. Henry had already sent letters asking James to make a firm commitment about when he would arrive in York. As Henry told his nephew, the meeting would have to take place before the end of September, at the very latest, in view of “our distance from the parts where we accustom most to live, with also the time of the year which will shortly much impair the ways, which should be much tedious specially for the carriage of ladies and gentlewomen being here with us.”14 Henry also had it from his spies, and from his sister, that James’s court was riddled with political divisions that had already successfully torpedoed several proposed visits. The Dowager Queen Margaret had warned Henry of the strength of the clerical lobby on James’s council, who, for perfectly obvious reasons, were strongly opposed to their monarch meeting with the excommunicated heretic across the border.15 Scottish councillors who saw merit in a meeting generally preferred that it take place in a town closer to the border, like Newcastle, so that James did not have to travel far into his uncle’s territory.16 Even those who had previously promised to lobby for peace or a meeting, like Queen Marie, who had politely spoken to English delegates about it in 1540, did not raise their voices in favor of a visit as far south as York.17 The French government had also made it very clear to James’s envoy, Cardinal Beaton, that they would not support any conference between James and Henry unless François was also invited, a caveat that intentionally rendered the proposal all but impossible.18 James, who was a canny politician, may have counted on these oppositions from preventing him ever meeting Henry, no matter how many times he personally promised to do so. However deeply the game of manipulation ran, the truth was that even if James had sincerely wanted to talk face-to-face with his uncle at York, and there is precious little evidence that he did, he would have been opposed every step of the way by most of his courtiers, clergymen, and councillors.

  Earlier signs that contradicted Henry’s confidence in the conference taking place had been ignored. On September 3, Sir Thomas Wharton, deputy warden of the West Marches, had written from the borders to the council and told them that there was no possibility of James coming to York in person. James and his wife had in fact gone north, away from the border, to stay at Falkland Palace.19 Wharton’s warning was partly confirmed by a subsequent letter from James to Henry, addressed from Falkland, in which James discussed the old issue of prisoners, without mentioning a visit.20 When the point was pressed by the English, the Scots cited the distance from Edinburgh to York, which was countered by English councillors at York when they loyally tackled James’s representative by pointing out that a few years earlier James had visited the French court and asked if “the king’s highness your master might with a great deal less danger repair hither than he lately went into France, having no sea to pass as he then had, no going to a stranger but to his natural uncle, who can not but love and tender him.”21 King James later claimed that there were disturbances that required his attention in Scotland, a story that Henry, correctly, interpreted as a polite lie. If the Scottish government had told Bellenden to offer a meeting in the hope of knocking the English off their aggressive course, they failed to anticipate how badly Henry wanted to see his nephew in person. Henry’s decision to alter the progress’s schedule, wait at York, and spend a great deal of money preparing accommodation for visitors who never intended to arrive meant that when the “promise” of a meeting fell through, the English King’s attitude to Scotland hardened into open and murderous hatred. On the other hand, if Bellenden had simply casually mentioned the possibility of a conference at some unspecified point in the future and that was then jumped upon by an overeager Henry, accustomed to getting his own way and bent on intimidating the elusive James, then Henry’s subsequent anger stemmed from embarrassment and pique.

  Henry finally accepted in the last week of September that the King of Scots was not coming.22 A wryly amused de Marillac headed back to the south separately from the court, which planned to meander home over the course of the next four weeks. It was the time of year for magnates to visit their estates, and they were allowed to leave at the same time as de Marillac. To the Queen’s presumable relief, that included her uncle Norfolk, who planned to stay at Framlingham Castle after one more tour of the border, which had again become a priority following James V’s failure to visit.23

  Anglo-Scottish relations went into a tailspin after York. Scotsmen on the borders took matters into their own hands and launched retaliatory attacks on their English counterparts. Henry fired off angry letters about it to James, which did not acknowledge that his own subjects had been behaving with equally lawless aggression for the past few months.24 James, trying to balance preservation of the peace with independence from his uncle’s agenda, sent a courtier called Adam Logan to Henry with a gift of falcons.25 In the meantime, the Duke of Norfolk answered a series of questions from officials who had been ordered to expel any Scots living on the English side of the border, ostensibly because of the recent raids, but more probably because of James’s apparent snub. If a Scotsman had married an Englishwoman and they had a child together, what
was to be done with the family? Were they to be banished? Did employment make any difference? Were Scottish servants or apprentices to be sent away? What about Scotsmen who had married Englishwomen but did not have children? Was that different? Who was to seize their goods when they were expelled, since, presumably, they were not to be allowed to take them? What would happen in regards to any debts the refugees might have? Also, were those selected for deportation to be marked or perhaps branded and, if so, in what way?26

  Other questions were discussed at the court in transit as well. Important news arrived for the King, still in a foul mood over the Scottish fiasco, in a letter from a Hapsburg courtier, the Dutch nobleman Baron Jeorjus ab Heideck, who informed him that a force commanded by the Emperor’s younger brother, the Archduke Ferdinand, had suffered a terrible defeat at the hands of an Ottoman army outside Budapest.27 Henry broke the news to de Marillac before he left the court and asked him if he had heard about the disaster in Budapest, which he had not.28 Only France hated the Hapsburgs enough to want to see them lose against the Sultan’s forces. The eastern borders of their empire allowed the Hapsburgs to don the mantle of defenders of Christendom against the unbelievers who, not a century before, had conquered the Christian city of Constantinople. Byzantium’s greatness was long behind it in anything except architectural beauty and Christian imagination when it fell, but that did not stop a chill of fear shooting through the West at the thought that the Ottoman sultans would soon be able to build mosques within riding distance of Vienna—“the Turkish beast coming into Europe,” in Chapuys’s hardly impartial turn of phrase.29 Henry also demanded an apology from his councillors left behind in London after he heard that they had put men caught robbing Windsor Castle in an ordinary jail. Henry felt they should have gone to the Tower and that a run-of-the-mill prison implied stealing from the King was an unremarkable crime, when it was clearly an example of petty treason.30 The council in Dublin received an irate letter from their sovereign, who had found new spleen to vent about their generous proposals for land distribution to the Irish peers, established, disgraced, and aspirant.31

  Catherine’s uncle William was about to end his embassy in France and had been summoned home, possibly with the intention of sending him to represent the King at another court, but in the meantime he would reside in London with his wife, children, and royal niece.32 Lord William Howard had wanted to leave France for some time, but his letters, which balanced politics with tidbits from the Valois court, had been appreciated by the King and his entourage. Thanks to William’s reports, the women of the French royal household could provide fodder for conversation as Catherine traveled back to the capital at a snail’s pace. Now that she had recovered, the French court revealed that Queen Eleanor had been so unwell for most of the summer that her doctors feared for her life.33 The old and new generations of the French royal household were also butting heads in their Loire valley châteaux—the King’s mistress, the Duchess of Étampes, had developed a powerful dislike for Diane de Poitiers, who, despite being a decade older than the Duchess and just past her forty-second birthday, had become the mistress of the King’s twenty-two-year-old heir. Pro-Inquisition Diane, with her cloud of blond hair and statuesque elegance, was described as one of the most beautiful women of her generation by all but the most blinkered of her opponents; she espoused radically different politics to the soft-on-Protestantism Duchess of Étampes. Gliding around the French palaces in her monochrome gowns of black and white, a demure expression of virtuous widowhood, Diane’s sedate grace struck her glittering rival as rank hypocrisy, and the two women’s prosecution of a stealthy feud had already given diplomats, and foreign courtiers, a giggle. Perhaps less amusing was the story that the Dauphin’s Italian wife, another Catherine, was stoically trying to face down threats of divorce because, after eight years of marriage, the royal nursery remained empty.34

  The route south brought Queen Catherine to places she knew from the outward journey, like the stopover at the Suffolks’ home at Grimsthorpe Castle and then two nights at Collyweston, as well as royal residences that she had never seen before, such as Richard III’s birthplace at Fotheringhay Castle, where they rested behind its gray walls for two nights.35 From October 24, she spent two nights as a guest of the Lord High Admiral, the privy councillor in charge of the Royal Navy. The gray-bearded John, Lord Russell, welcomed the King and Queen into his lovely and recently completed redbrick home, Chenies Manor House, where he introduced them to Lady Russell and their teenage son, Francis, who would soon begin his studies at Cambridge.36

  On the court’s second day at the Russells’, Alice Wilkes, now Mrs. Alice Restwold, was brought into Catherine’s presence by Francis Dereham, acting as an usher, and Katherine Tilney, both of whom, like Alice, had once been servants to the Dowager Duchess of Norfolk. Catherine greeted Alice with lavish charm, raised her to her feet, kissed her, and invited her to stay as her guest with Katherine Tilney and the other chamberers. While Alice acclimatized herself to her former friend’s change in circumstances, Lady Rochford arrived with jewelry, French hoods, and dresses trimmed with gold thread for her—gifts from the Queen.37 At Chesworth House, Alice had once asked to switch beds rather than sleep next to Catherine and Dereham’s rambunctious lovemaking. Quite possibly, Francis’s admittance to her service prompted Catherine to think of other loose ends from her girlhood. Alice had been helped and patronized by members of the Howard clan before, specifically Catherine’s uncle William, who had helped find her a new job after she was married, but Catherine’s generosity, and the two people she chose to fetch Alice, suggest a desire to buy the silence of another potential witness.38

  Chenies was followed by a stop at the recently burgled Windsor Castle.39 By the time they reached it on October 26, Henry and Catherine would have received the news from the council in London that Henry’s only surviving sibling, Queen Margaret, had died at Methven Castle on Scotland’s eastern coastline eight days earlier. The Queen Mother had suffered a “palsy,” a stroke, on a Friday evening four days before her death.40 She had left all her possessions to her daughter Lady Margaret Douglas, but if Henry’s court went into mourning for his sister and the mother of Catherine’s highest ranking lady-in-waiting, there is no record of it and they were not wearing it by the time they reached Hampton Court Palace ten days after Margaret passed away.41 Henry had ordered public Masses and eleven days of black in honor of the Empress Isabella in 1538; for the sister he had exploited and ignored, who had been the daughter, niece, and granddaughter of kings of England, the English court cannot have expressed anything but the most perfunctory mourning.

  Henry was far more upset to hear that his son was bedridden with a fever. He summoned some of the best doctors in England to inspect Edward, and they agreed that the fever was serious enough to put the prince’s life in danger. It was at this point that the King began to notice the indulgence of the heir’s servants in feeding him not just too often but also with whatever food the child demanded, even if it was not good for him. De Marillac managed to bribe one of the doctors into telling him “that, apart from this accident, the Prince was so fat and unhealthy as to be unlikely to live long.”42 The physician was wrong. Edward recovered and his establishment was subsequently subjected to more frequent inspections by the King’s councillors.

  Catherine returned to her enormous high-ceilinged apartments at Hampton Court on October 28. In three days’ time, she would be on public display again at Mass in the Chapel Royal for All Saints, followed by All Souls a day later, when the departed were commemorated in prayer. All Saints, which honored everyone in Christian history who had the right to appear in iconography with a halo, was sometimes known in England as All Hallows, from the Anglo-Saxon word for halo. The vigil or preceding eve of the feast, All Hallows Eve or Hallowe’en, was the start of three days when superstition held that the souls of those trapped in Purgatory wandered the Earth and the living and the dead stood side by side.

  Chapter 19

  * * *


  “Being examined by my lord of Canterbury”

  Who is this? and what is here?

  And in the lighted palace near

  Died the sound of royal cheer;

  And they cross’d themselves for fear,

  All the knights at Camelot . . .

  —Alfred, Lord Tennyson, “The Lady of Shalott” (1842)

  A day or so after they returned to Hampton Court, Katherine Tilney stepped into Lady Rochford’s presence: the Queen had sent her to ask if “she should have the thing she promised her.” Tilney was sent back with a message which was difficult to interpret but easy to construe as something secret or inappropriate—that Lady Rochford “sat up for it, and she would next day bring her word herself.”1 The last part of Lady Rochford’s sentence may have been a subtle plea for Catherine to rein in an impatience that was causing her to send chamberers on errands bound to provoke their curiosity. The incident proves that Catherine’s relationship with Culpepper had not been a summer passion. Regardless of the dangers of meeting him in a palace like Hampton Court, where any anomalies in locked doors or behavior could not be put down to the court residing in an unfamiliar building, Catherine intended to keep seeing Thomas. Lady Rochford dutifully waited up in the hope that Culpepper might be able to shirk his colleagues in the privy chamber for long enough to visit the Queen. It was frustrating for Catherine, though there was potentially good news for her as well—the Duke of Norfolk, one man she did not want to see, was asked to stay away from court for fifteen days when, genuinely this time, one of his servants died from the plague.2

  At the All Saints’ Mass in the Chapel Royal, Catherine received a public tribute from the King for her behavior in the north. The celebrant was the King’s confessor and one of the couple’s progress hosts, John Longland, Bishop of Lincoln, and in his prayers for All Saints he had been asked on the King’s behalf to “give thanks with him for the good life he led and hoped to lead with [the Queen].”3 The next day, on All Souls, Catherine went through her morning toilette and either heard Mass in her apartments or progressed to the Chapel Royal for a second public service. The sources do not say. All Souls’ Mass was not usually considered a public holy day in the same way as All Saints. Had she gone, Catherine would have not seen much of her husband anyway. At services in the Chapel Royal, the Queen arrived with her ladies, processed to light candles, prayed at the altar rail, then exited a different way from the King, who sat in a gallery on the second floor. As a young girl, Catherine had seen petitioners and inferiors leave notes, letters, and written requests in her grandmother’s pews at Horsham and Lambeth. The same thing typically happened for the King, although access to his in-tray was more tightly controlled. For the second time in her life, Catherine’s private life was about to be upended by a letter left for a relative during Mass. This time, no amount of determined charm would save her from the consequences.