Young and Damned and Fair

by Gareth Russell

  The second stage, the quest to discover what had happened with Culpepper, was settled by the questioning of Thomas and Lady Rochford. It is impossible to decide if Thomas Culpepper thought that only honesty could save him or if he was an almost-ingenious liar. Admittedly, he did not have much leeway for denial. Inspired by how often he had been mentioned by others in the last few days, the council had searched his rooms and discovered the letter the Queen had sent to him when he was unwell. If it was foolish for Catherine to have written it, it was even more so for Culpepper to have kept it. At his interview on Sunday, the 13th, he told the aghast councillors about everything from the meeting at Greenwich on Maundy Thursday to the Queen’s pleas that he not divulge their relationship when he made confession.

  Thomas’s memory had the Queen and Lady Rochford as equal partners in the affair, urging one another on, but he did not say this to paint himself as their pawn or dupe. He knew that meeting at night in a lavatory did not suggest the purest intent. He and the Queen had not, he claimed, committed treason by sleeping together. According to Culpepper, “he intended and meant to do ill with the Queen and that likewise the Queen was so minded with him.”12 That claim, that they would have slept together at some point in the future, is the crux of deciding if Culpepper was confessing honestly or pursuing a strategy of a lie that sounded so shameful that his accusers might have assumed it must be the truth. Adultery with a queen or with a princess of Wales was treason, because it endangered the succession. Culpepper had, physically, not yet endangered the royal bloodline. If he hoped that this claim would save him, he evidently did not have the sharpest legal mind. Misprision of treason pertained to the intention to commit the act, whether it be through withheld knowledge of another’s traitorous desires or one’s own harboring of treasonous thoughts. In response to Culpepper’s account, the Earl of Hertford replied, “That is already too much.” Thomas was sent to the Tower and his goods and houses inventoried, a sign that the Tudor court usually took as a credible token of approaching death.13

  Lady Rochford’s testimonies had more in common with the Queen’s than with Culpepper’s. Despite her vow, it took a lot less than wild horses for her to spill a confusing mixture of half-truths, improvable improbabilities, and complete lies. Like Catherine, Lady Rochford asked too much of credulity in claiming ignorance and thus innocence of things that no human in her position could have missed. She may have been telling the truth when she said she had slept through most of Thomas’s after-hours reunions with the Queen, when she apparently “heard or saw nothing of what passed,” but that sat uneasily with her only significant deviation from the testimonies of Culpepper and the Queen—“She thinks Culpepper has known the Queen carnally.”14

  Afterwards, Lady Rochford was also sent to the Tower and her goods were inventoried.15 Her alternate tale—wisely prefixed with the caveat that it was only in her opinion that Catherine and Thomas had sexual intercourse at some point in the late summer or early autumn based on how she had seen them act towards one another—did not make much difference to the councillors, who remained skeptical about Catherine’s claim that the farthest they had gone was a kiss on the hand, and Thomas’s that they intended to consummate their relationship at a later date. As far as the councillors were concerned, Lady Rochford was not telling them anything they did not already know. For the historian, her suggestion is more interesting and complicating. She cannot be dismissed as a liar intent on stirring up trouble for the Queen. Had she been thinking clearly and willing to fib her way out of it, Jane’s surest bet lay in parroting the line that no physical intimacy had ever taken place. Of course, she may have been bounced into her statement through intimidation or intimations of mercy by the councillors. She may have told them of her own volition what she thought they wanted to hear. Or perhaps she told the truth.

  Lady Rochford’s veracity is undercut by her mental state. When she was sent to the Tower of London, where her husband and sister-in-law were buried close to the recently interred Lady Salisbury, Jane suffered a nervous breakdown. Three days into her incarceration, she was “seized with a fit of madness by which her brain is affected.”16 As it was illegal to execute the insane, Jane was moved out of her prison and into the care of the lord admiral’s wife Anne, Lady Russell, who took her to Russell House, one of the fine mansions along the Strand.17 Lady Russell’s task as warden and nurse was the inverse of Hippocrates. Chapuys told the Emperor that “the King takes care that his own physicians visit her [Lady Rochford] daily, for he desires her recovery chiefly that he may afterwards have her executed as an example and warning to others.”18 She was nursed and tended like a calf being fattened for the slaughter.

  In the next phase of the interrogations, many previous witnesses were brought back for another round of questioning. The reason for the ghastly caprice with which the Queen’s downfall continued to play out lay in what Henry VIII and his councillors came to believe had happened. It was only in the first stage of the investigation and in the early days of the second that they were genuinely responding to information as it came to them. It has already been mentioned that Catherine’s inconsistent mea culpas on the 6th and 7th convinced Cranmer and the council that she had been promiscuous before her marriage and unfaithful after it, and if she had not been, it was only because she had not yet found the opportunity. When Cranmer delivered Catherine’s testimony of November 12, in which she admitted meeting Culpepper in the dead of night and in secret, Henry VIII did not believe that the closest physical contact his wife had ever had with Thomas Culpepper was a kiss on the hand. One of Henry’s principal private secretaries wrote on the King’s behalf that the Queen “hath not, as appeareth by her confession, so fully declared the circumstances of such communications as were betwixt her and Culpepper; at their sundry meetings, as His Majesty would have.”19

  For the council, the issue of whether or not the Queen had slept with Culpepper was settled relatively quickly. The questions about their relationship were asked in the course of seventy-two hours and tidied away by November 16, at the very latest. There was proof, and one confession, of intent, and that was enough to condemn them. For the government, the unanswered question was not what Catherine had done or hoped to do with Culpepper but rather what had gone on with Dereham. The King was certain, as indeed were many of his councillors, that the Queen’s decision to employ him, and her relatives’ apparently friendly interest in him, torpedoed Catherine’s improbable claims of rape and instead suggested a conspiracy to allow Francis back into her bed. This was why several witnesses who had no real way of knowing how Catherine had behaved after she left Lambeth were fetched following November 13. By pursuing anyone linked to the case, the council hoped that “many things may appear and come to light, which be not yet discovered.”20 The King wanted proof of just how much the Howards, specifically the Dowager Duchess, Lord William, and the Countess of Bridgewater, “knew of the former naughty life betwixt the Queen and Dereham” and therefore “that his coming again to the Queen’s service, was to an ill intent of the renovation of his former naughty life.”21

  On November 13, Alice Restwold and Mary Hall were summoned to appear before certain councillors at Whitehall “upon pain of their lives.”22 The servants were divided into pairs recorded in a neat list in Wriothesley’s handwriting—the Duke of Norfolk and Sir John Gage, comptroller of the royal household and constable of the Tower of London, got Joan Acworth, whose wish to be summoned to London had not come true in quite the way she had hoped in 1540; Alice Restwold; the Dowager Duchess’s elderly porter; two of her grooms; three of her chamberers; and Robert Damport. The Earl of Hertford and Sir Thomas Audley were sent in to deal with the Queen’s sister-in-law Anne Howard, wife of her brother Henry; Edward Waldegrave; and the Queen’s chamberers Margaret Morton and Katherine Tilney.23

  The witnesses indicted friends, relatives, and themselves. One of the Dowager’s servants, Andrew Maunsay, remembered seeing Catherine in bed with Francis at Lambeth and told the council
lors that Katherine Tilney could verify his story. The government had compartmentalized the respective testimonials so well that Maunsay had no way to know how unnecessary his revelation about Tilney was. He recalled the old laundry woman, Bess, who knew some of Catherine’s secrets.24 In front of the other panel, Tilney was imparting what she could recall of Lincoln and Margaret Morton’s backstairs snooping when the Queen was gone for hours in Lady Rochford’s bedroom.25 Morton herself proved a gold mine. She remembered everything: the Queen’s out-of-character and foul-tempered rants against some of the chamberers towards the end of the progress, the adoring look she had given Culpepper when they were at the Hatfield Chase, the locked doors night after night at Pontefract. Despite Catherine’s less than commendable tantrums in the north, Morton still refused to blame her and instead described Lady Rochford as “the principal occasion of her folly.” Margaret Morton’s evidence survives today, and at the very bottom of the transcript one can see a small, touching sign of how frightened she must have been. It was only on the third attempt that her handwriting is back to a normal size, unblemished and legible. She smudged her own signature twice.26

  Other detainees, like Joan Bulmer, only corroborated what the government already knew. Lord William Howard’s wife, Lady Margaret, relayed some suspicions and idle palace gossip. Alice Restwold’s recollection of the Queen’s recent invitation to join her at Lord and Lady Russell’s house, en route back from the north, and her generosity struck the council as yet another poor reflection on the Queen’s honesty about her earlier life. Initially, they did not seem to hold Restwold culpable for being the recipient of apparent blackmail.27 They even sent a note to her husband Anthony’s employers asking them to excuse him for a few more days, since he was chaperoning his wife while she was questioned.28

  The chief victims of the councillors’ attempts to squeeze the participants or witnesses for evidence of treason were Francis Dereham and the wholly innocent Robert Damport, both of whom were tortured. In Francis’s case, on numerous occasions. In early December, the council ordered that “both he [Damport], and Dereham shall be seriously examined again.” “Seriously examined” was usually a euphemism for torture; admittedly, in this case, it was also used in instructions for “the serious examination of the Duchess of Norfolk,” who certainly was not tortured.29 Unusually, the records of Dereham and Damport’s imprisonment specifically mention torture on several occasions, and it is hard to believe that they were referring to psychological pressure. When Damport claimed to remember a comment that Dereham had made in 1540 about marrying Catherine if the King died, the council were suspicious since when they had originally asked him to confess about any conversations on that subject, Damport “would not do it for any torture he could before be put to.”30 Francis seems to have been subjected to sporadic bouts of torture from mid-November until the first week of December. At the earlier date, the King wrote to Archbishop Cranmer encouraging “persevering in your diligence to attain knowledge of the truth, by all ways and means” and Henry personally authorized torture to be used on the two friends on December 6.31 How they were savaged is unknown. The rack seems the most likely, particularly in Dereham’s case, but a story that was still doing the rounds in court circles a decade later had it that Robert Damport had his teeth pulled out one by one until he confessed his crime of knowing his friend had once slept with a girl who went on to become Queen of England.

  Between November 13 and 24, the Privy Council waged a war for control of the story. They could not afford to be delicate, even if some people in London thought it was unusual or inappropriate for the full details of the Queen’s behavior to be publicized as they were.32 The secrecy and inconsistencies in the case against Anne Boleyn had convinced even some of her bitterest enemies of her innocence. The same reaction had been generated by the downfall of the Pole family. In Catherine’s case, the government was working with more information, which had the unfamiliar benefit of plausibility. They took full advantage of the opportunity “to open and make manifest the King’s Highness’s just cause of indignation and displeasure, so as the world may know and see that which is hitherto done, to have a just ground and foundation.”33 As lord chancellor, Sir Thomas Audley officially broke the news to all of the King’s other councillors and advisers, most of whom probably already knew that the source of the recent tension in the palace was “the abominable demeanour of the Queen.” As per his instructions, Audley was careful not to mention specifics, especially Catherine’s alleged precontract with Francis Dereham, “which might serve for her defence” by giving anyone inclined to help Catherine a tip on the government’s case against her.

  The same policy was adopted when the Queen’s household were gathered into one room at Hampton Court and officially disbanded. The servants would be paid an advance of quarter year’s worth of wages and sent to the homes of family or friends. Mary Tudor was asked to reside with her brother’s household temporarily. Sir John Dudley was to escort her there “with a convenient number of the Queen’s servants” who did not have anywhere to go. Lady Margaret Douglas, whose mother had recently died in Scotland, was to accompany Catherine’s cousin, the Dowager Duchess of Richmond, to stay as a guest of the Duke of Norfolk in his mansion at Kenninghall.34 After the official announcement was made, Lady Margaret was taken to one side by Archbishop Cranmer, who apparently had not yet been set free from his recent task of reprimanding royal ladies. Margaret’s flirtation with the Queen’s brother Charles may have been winked at while Catherine was still in the ascendant, but with her gone and Charles banished, the King was displeased. The day before, Henry had ordered one of his secretaries to send instructions to the Archbishop that “His Majesty’s pleasure is, also, that tomorrow, after this declaration made, ye shall call a part unto you my Lady Margaret Douglas; and first declare unto her, how indiscreetly she hath demeaned herself towards the King’s Majesty, first with the Lord Thomas, and now secondly with Charles Howard; in which part ye shall, by discretion, charge her with overmuch lightness, and finally give her advice to beware the third time, and wholly apply herself to please the King’s Majesty, and follow and obey that shall be His Highness’s will and commandment; with such other exhortations and good advices, as, by your wisdom, ye can devise to that purpose.”35

  Governments abroad were next on Henry’s list. By carefully controlling the information sent to foreign courts, the Privy Council hoped to prevent any contrary versions of events, especially any which might harm the King’s reputation. The Queen’s uncle William, still due to return from his stint as ambassador in France, apparently remained in the dark about the situation as late as November 15. His mother’s anxiety about his ignorance was justified. No one had dared warn him and he was due home within the fortnight. On November 12, he wrote home with news that the Duchess of Étampes was basking in political victory after she had secured the restoration to favor of one of her protégés, Admiral de Brion.36 Three days later, William’s correspondence to the Privy Council was taken up with musings on the Franco-Scottish alliance.37 Four days after that, blissful ignorance was dispelled either during or shortly before his audience with King François, who had just received letters from England about Queen Catherine’s “wondrously lewd” behavior. William Howard’s colleague in France, Sir William Paget, ruefully reported that French courtiers who promoted closer ties with the Emperor were having a field day laughing at Henry’s expense.38

  Explanatory letters were dispatched to England’s other representatives abroad, who then in turn had to make a full report to foreign heads of state.39 In London, Norfolk was sent to discuss the case with Charles de Marillac, who joked in his letters home that Culpepper had once shared the King’s bed as one of the men of the privy chamber but “apparently wished to share the Queen’s too.” Before questioning some of those who had served his stepmother and niece, Norfolk had somehow gotten hold of the story that Catherine had enjoyed eight or nine lovers before her marriage. When he spoke to de Marillac again on Monda
y, the 14th, he confirmed that they only had proof that she had slept with Dereham before and Culpepper after. His eyes filled with tears as he told Marillac about the Queen’s activities at Lincoln.40

  The Hapsburg embassy was accorded the courtesy of a visit by Lord Russell, who told the ambassador’s secretary on Thursday, the 17th, that Dereham, Culpepper, and Lady Rochford had all been sent to the Tower, because Dereham had known the Queen carnally before her marriage and Lady Rochford helped arrange meetings and “many loving presents” between Thomas and Catherine over the last two months. A day later, the Earl of Southampton called on Chapuys personally to confirm what he had heard through his secretary. Southampton thought Catherine might make it out alive, though he told Chapuys that if she did it would be despite her uncle Norfolk, not because of him. Norfolk had worked himself up into a rage at a scandal that had blindsided him and threatened to weaken his position through a niece he was not even particularly close to. In his account to the Emperor of Southampton’s visit, Chapuys could not hide his disdain for the Duke’s attitude—“The duke of Norfolk has declared—God knows why—that he wishes the Queen to be burnt alive.”41

  On Monday, the 14th, Catherine was escorted from the Queen’s apartments at Hampton Court. The rooms were stripped after she left, and Sir Thomas Seymour arrived to inventory Catherine’s jewelry collection. She walked past the stone lions, yales, and unicorns towards the barge that bore her to Syon, once the wealthiest abbey in England, now a vast nothing. Its famous library had been gutted by Henry’s antiquarians. Its masonry from the previous century bore little cracks, incipient proof of its neglect. Catherine walked through the same gatehouse the sisters had left by two years earlier when they became one of the few monastic communities to choose collective exile to the Hapsburg Empire rather than disbandment via the dissolution. Back at Hampton Court, Thomas Seymour made his list of the Queen’s jewels, relinquished to his temporary custody by Anne Herbert, who was now, like all the other women of the household, technically unemployed. Catherine left her sable muff on its ruby-and-gold chain, pearls counted in their hundreds, diamonds dotting scenes from the life of Noah, golden girdles, bejeweled crucifixes, all their sister pieces, the glittering detritus of a failed life, and walked into three sparsely furnished rooms in an abandoned monastery. On the council’s orders, there was no cloth of estate over her chair, and she was not allowed access to her wardrobe. Six dresses had been provided for her, in silk, damask, and velvet, with six French hoods trimmed with gold thread and “such things” as usually went with a lady’s wardrobe. But, again by specific instruction, none of them were to be augmented by pearls or precious stones. The King’s secretary had helpfully sent a book on etiquette to guide Sir Edward Baynton and the remaining servants in how they should serve her.