Archbishop Cranmer and the two colleagues left behind with him in London during the progress, the Lord Chancellor Sir Thomas Audley and Edward Seymour, Earl of Hertford, had spent most of the council meeting on All Saints’ Day informing the other councillors of what had happened in their absence, hearing and reporting any news that had been left out of their many letters during the tour of the north, and discussing the situation with Scotland.4 There was one item of new business that the three men did not share with the rest of the Privy Council—an audience that Cranmer had granted to an evangelical called John Lascelles, who had arrived at Lambeth Palace, the Archbishop’s official London residence, asking to speak with him.
Cranmer might reasonably have expected Lascelles to have news about the religious radicals he knew and admired, several of whom had relocated to Germany after Thomas Cromwell’s execution. Instead, Lascelles told the Archbishop that his younger sister Mary, now Mary Hall, had once worked as a servant at Norfolk House, the Dowager Duchess’s residence that was about a two-minute walk from Lambeth Palace’s gatehouse. Mary, a married woman living in Sussex by 1541, had been a nursemaid to Lord William Howard’s eldest daughter and then a chamberer to the Dowager when the future Queen Catherine lived in the same household as a ward. During a recent visit to his sister and brother-in-law, Lascelles encouraged Mary to petition for a place in Catherine’s household. A year earlier, Lascelles had lamented Cromwell’s downfall and worried that the ascent of a Howard queen consort might seriously damage the English Reformation. His fears had apparently abated, and he could not understand why Mary would not take advantage of her earlier ties with the Queen. Mary answered that she would not be comfortable serving a woman with Catherine’s morals, because she was “light, both in living and conditions.” She offset her criticism with the caveat that although she disapproved of her she “was very sorry for the Queen.” Lascelles, naturally, pressed her to be more specific, and Mary rewarded his curiosity with the story of Catherine’s romances with Henry Manox and Francis Dereham. It had been Mary who tried to warn Manox off his pursuit of Catherine and was rewarded with his charming boast “I have had her by the cunt,” which, according to Manox, he would recognize amongst a hundred. Lascelles put it a tad more delicately when he told the Archbishop that Manox “knew a privy mark on her body,” perhaps a birthmark on her thigh or near her vagina.5
Lascelles had consulted with friends, who agreed that it was his duty to bring Mary’s revelations to somebody on the Privy Council. Lascelles’s religious enthusiasm and his choice of Cranmer as a confidant fueled suspicions later that he divulged the information as part of a political agenda to unseat a queen associated with a conservative family. It cannot be ruled out as part of his motivation—one could fairly speculate if Lascelles would have dashed to Lambeth with the same urgency had his sister told him similar things about a reformist queen. Where that speculation should end is with Cranmer, whose involvement in the case was, from start to finish, thorough, slightly regretful, and never motivated by a desire to embarrass Catherine.
Cranmer too discussed the story with friends, in his case Audley and Hertford, who gave the Archbishop the same advice John Lascelles’s friends imparted to him: he had no choice but to pass on what he knew. If it ever emerged that the Queen had been unchaste before her marriage and the Archbishop of Canterbury knew but had not passed the information on to the King, Cranmer would probably find himself disgraced or imprisoned by association. With the tact he was known for, and just the faintest whiff of the cowardice his enemies often accused him of, Cranmer wrote the whole thing down and left it for the King to pick up after divine service on All Souls.
The prelate’s fear of how the King would take it must have been exacerbated when he heard Bishop Longland praise the Queen, quite literally, to the Heavens the day before Cranmer was due to drop Lascelles’s bombshell. Henry sent for Cranmer once he had read the missive, and the King seemed perfectly calm as he stated that the story must have been fabricated, either by Lascelles or by his sister. The other men in the room with Cranmer and the King were some of the latter’s favorite and most trusted advisers—William Fitzwilliam, Earl of Southampton and lord privy seal; Lord Russell, the lord admiral who had hosted the King and Queen at his house only a week earlier; the King’s master of the horse, Sir Anthony Browne; and Sir Thomas Wriothesley.
Writers who assume Henry initially entertained no suspicion against his wife are perhaps taking too seriously his protestations of good faith and apparent confidence that Lascelles’s story was a lie.6 In the same interview, Henry ordered the men to ascertain the truth and remarked that “he could not believe it till the certainty was known.”7 Whilst Henry may not have entirely believed the contents of Cranmer’s letter, to order the investigation at all suggests that on some level he did not find the charges against Catherine as risible as he initially claimed. Regardless of any conflicting feelings, Lascelles’s story had to be verified. Either he was breaking the law by defaming the Queen, or the King’s marriage might have to be annulled. Henry’s only other stipulation to the five men in his chamber was that all their inquiries were to be handled with the utmost discretion, a condition which suggested that any suspicions Henry had were still outweighed by the hope or belief that it would turn out to be a misunderstanding or a malicious lie.
Catherine remained in her apartments for the rest of the day with no idea of the disaster hurtling towards her. As the chosen councillors went about their business on the King’s behalf, they did not give any clue that something was wrong. Sessions of the whole Privy Council adhered to workaday agendas—a crackdown on smuggling was discussed later on All Souls, enlarging the King’s hunting demesnes on the Hampton Court Chase the day after, and the Crown of Ireland Act the day after that.8 Meanwhile, the investigators worked quickly and within seventy-two hours had interviewed all of the witnesses mentioned in Mary Hall’s story.
Lord Southampton went into London to quiz Lascelles, who confirmed the Archbishop’s précis of his declaration, “saying he had made it only for the discharge of his duty.” A day or so later, Mary Hall and her husband were interrupted at home in Sussex by a group of hunters, who asked if they could break their ride at the Halls’. The double-chinned Southampton managed to get the lady of the house on her own long enough to reveal that their hunting trip was a ruse to prevent her husband from knowing that the King had sent them.9 He asked Mary if she would stand by what she had told her brother about the Queen. She would. Meanwhile, Wriothesley had left Hampton Court for Lambeth, where he found Manox’s house and asked him to tell his version of events. Wriothesley, accompanied by Archbishop Cranmer, did not get to Manox until the 5th, three days after he was asked to—either it took time to discover where he was living or the King’s desire for secrecy meant that Saturday the 5th was the first point Wriothesley could get away from the palace without attracting unwanted attention. Cranmer’s sources in Lambeth may have helped locate Manox’s home.
The gentle-mannered Archbishop and the intimidating Wriothesley were the archetypal good and bad inquisitors. In their presence, Manox did not just confirm what Mary Hall had said, first to her brother and then to the Earl of Southampton, he also provided information so excruciatingly anecdotal that it was impossible to disbelieve him. He told them which rooms in the Duchess’s house he and Catherine had used for their trysts, he told them about the tip-off he sent to the Dowager about men being invited to the maidens’ chamber after sunset, then of Catherine’s theft of that letter and Manox’s subsequent tussle with Francis Dereham. He gave a list of everyone he could remember who had known about his fling with Catherine—the Duchess’s maid Dorothy, who had carried love tokens between him and Catherine; Katherine Tilney; Francis’s partner in seduction, Edward Waldegrave, who had gone on to serve in the Prince of Wales’s establishment; the Dowager’s sister-in-law Malyn Tilney; and Joan Bulmer, or Joan Acworth as she had been then, whom Manox seemed to nurture a special grudge against, since he told Cranm
er and Wriothesley the slightly unnecessary biographical detail that Joan had also been sexually involved with Francis at some point during their time at Chesworth.10 Manox also mentioned Mary Hall in his list of people to contact as witnesses, which implies that Cranmer and Wriothesley did not tell him who their original source was, in case Manox tailored his confession to suit what he thought Mary might know. When pressed on how far he had gone with Catherine, Manox momentarily played coy and admitted that he “had felt more than was convenient.” They encouraged him to return to his earlier frankness and believed him when he insisted, over and over again, that he and Catherine had never gone beyond foreplay. Manox’s version of events, which was confirmed by everyone else interviewed, was that he had wanted to take Catherine’s virginity and had suggested it to her many times; she had refused, he had been angry and indiscreet, and she had moved on to Francis Dereham.11
Francis was their next point of attack. He had already been apprehended, probably on the 3rd or possibly late on the 2nd.12 Since he was one of the Queen’s ushers and his detention might alert his employer, they put about the story that they were reinvestigating old claims that he had participated in piracy during his time in Ireland. The questions they put to Francis once they had him were more focused on why he had gone to Ireland in the first place and why he had returned, not what he had done while he was there. Francis’s appointment to Catherine’s service after she became queen rang alarm bells for Wriothesley and the Archbishop, even at this stage. Francis told them that he been invited into Catherine’s privy apartments and about the gifts of money she had given him, along with her pleas to “take heed what words you speak.”13 He confessed that “he had known her carnally many times” when they lived under the Dowager Duchess’s roof, and as with Manox, the details he provided were intimate and specific enough to banish any doubt that he was only telling his questioners what he thought they might want to hear—he could remember that he was “in his doublet and hose between the sheets” when they first began to touch each other, later “in naked bed,” and the female friends who had seen him and Catherine making love.14 If they did not question him in the Tower by the 5th, they sent him there not long afterwards.
Corroboration was sought from the others mentioned by Mary Hall and Henry Manox. Initially, they did not have time to get to all of them, but Sir Ralph Sadler wrote a few weeks later that “eight or nine” were questioned and that they all “sang with one tale.”15 Two of Catherine’s women—her aunt Lady Margaret Howard and her friend Katherine Tilney—were asked what they knew. Lady Margaret admitted that she had suspected a liaison between her niece and Dereham before the former came to court, and yes, since then she had heard a few servants gossiping about what would happen if the truth ever came out. Tilney provided a testimony that unknowingly confirmed some of Mary Hall’s testimony and most of Francis Dereham’s. Dereham’s friend Edward Waldegrave was fetched from the Prince of Wales’s household and, like Tilney, told a story similar in detail to the others. Two of the Dowager Duchess’s former maids, Margaret Benet and Alice Restwold, the recent recipient of the Queen’s generosity, were summoned. Neither of them offered anything radically different.16 Sadler was generalizing but not misleading when he said they all sang the same song—the slight variations only helped convince those asking the questions that the story was true in essence.
On November 6, the councillors went to the King to tell him what they had learned. They had interviewed and dismissed another young man who had been at Chesworth House at the same time as Catherine, Roger Cotes, who had also once been romantically interested in her. From what they could tell, Catherine had not reciprocated Cotes’s affections and he was guilty of absolutely nothing beyond hoping for a job at court after she became queen.17 There was no reason to doubt that Mary Hall had told the truth about the Queen and the other two men. It would have been impossible for her, her brother, Manox, and Dereham to plan a conspiracy of deception—they lived too far apart and had not seen each other in years—and in any case, even if they had been lying, they should have told any story but the one imparted. As their findings were relayed to him, the King sat in a thunderously loud silence that dragged on until he began to weep, a sight that few of the councillors had encountered before and one “which was strange in his courage.”18 Orders were dispatched to the quarantined Duke of Norfolk, demanding his return to court, and to the Duke of Suffolk, who had recently been granted permission to stay at home at Grimsthorpe Castle until Christmas.19
The next few council meetings ran at odd hours, with the King in attendance. Both facts were unusual enough to set tongues wagging, especially when Norfolk, who had not been expected back for at least another week, emerged from the sessions noticeably anxious and unsettled. Eustace Chapuys thought Norfolk had come back for more discussions with de Marillac about Princess Mary’s proposed marriage to the Duke of Orléans.20 Others thought there had been trouble in Ireland or that there was about to be a declaration of war against Scotland.21 Clergymen could be seen arriving at Hampton Court, reminding courtiers and servants of the fate of Anne of Cleves a year earlier. Despite the best efforts of the piracy subterfuge, Dereham’s apprehension, like the summoning of the theologians, intensified and focused speculation on the Queen. Andrew Pewson, one of the Dowager Duchess of Norfolk’s retainers, was either running errands to Hampton Court for his mistress or had been sent there on that pretense once she heard rumors that Dereham had been taken. Servants to Catherine’s master of the horse were able to confirm to Pewson that Francis had been detained—news which Pewson carried back posthaste to Norfolk House. The pall of present uncertainty and approaching disaster settled onto the Queen’s apartments as Catherine was asked to keep to her rooms for the time being. De Marillac heard that “whereas, before, she did nothing but dance and rejoice, and now when the musicians come they are told that it is no more the time to dance.”22
Council meetings were held in various members’ residences, perhaps to confuse suspicion about the topic of conversation. One session took place at Cranmer’s London residence, Lambeth Palace, on Saturday, the 5th, and like most over the past few days, it ran late into the evening. As he was preparing to leave Lambeth, Norfolk was approached by one of the Dowager’s servants, Robert Damport, who had brought an invitation for the Duke to spend the night at Norfolk House, since it was too late for the journey back to London.23 Norfolk sent polite regrets to his stepmother, with an explanation that he must return to court on the King’s business, regardless of the hour. The Dowager’s offer of hospitality almost certainly had an ulterior motive. She wanted to know what was happening with the Queen. Robert Damport returned to a household cracking under the first signs of panic. The Dowager had summoned her chaplain, Father Borough; her comptroller; Robert Damport; a servant called William Ashby, who also knew Dereham; and her sommelier, a man called Dunn, “who played the smith’s part” and broke open the locks on Francis Dereham’s coffers.24 The Dowager, with a candle in her hand, reached into the chest and took out every piece of paper she could find, then retreated to her bedroom and would not let any of the servants see them. The tattle-tale note from Henry Manox was there, still in Dereham’s possession three years after Catherine had stolen it from her grandmother and passed it over to him; there were ballads, too, sheets of music, and letters. The men she had summoned saw the Dowager “cast back into the chest the writings she liked not,” and it was a few nights later that she handed some of the retrieved paper trail to Ashby with the instruction to deliver it to the Duke.25 The Dowager appeared to be helping the council’s investigation, but neither Ashby, Dunn, Damport, or Father Borough could be certain later if she had not incinerated the most damning pieces before handing over ephemera to her stepson.26
In front of her servants, Agnes gave the appearance of a woman who would commit misprision of treason without a qualm if it would save her or her granddaughter. The Dowager clung to the meager comfort that if a precontract was proved, the Queen would be str
ipped of her title and humiliated, but after that the principle of De minimis non curat lex would save her from further repercussions for her youthful affair with Francis. The night she sent him to the Archbishop’s palace, the Dowager told Damport on several occasions that no matter what was said about them, Catherine and Francis would escape with their lives, since premarital sex was not a crime that carried the death penalty. She wondered if Catherine would be divorced and then “shall become [un]to me home again.”27
The next day, the King went on a hunting trip in the Chase, and that night he made for the empty Palace of Whitehall. An old legend, preserved in tours of Hampton Court, has it that when Catherine realized the danger she was in, she made a dash from her apartments and down the gallery that ran past the King’s entrance to the Chapel Royal and the Privy Council chamber. She was caught by her guards and dragged away screaming before she could reach her husband. If it happened, and it remains an unknown, then it took place before or during Mass on Sunday, the 6th, by which point three or four days of nervous uncertainty had combined to push her over the edge. Her brother Charles had been kept away from her rooms and then banished from court without a reason given; Francis Dereham had been taken in for questioning, ostensibly about Ireland, but he had not returned and was rumored to be kept as a prisoner in the Tower.28
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