Young and Damned and Fair

by Gareth Russell

  Mary’s triumph in 1553 brought relief for the Duke of Norfolk, who had lived in the Tower for six years by the time she set him free, as she did most of her father and brother’s prisoners. The Duke did not enjoy his liberty for long. He died in his mansion at Kenninghall on August 25, 1554, at the age of eighty, the same age as his late father when he had expired in the very different world of 1524. Mary I also, unintentionally, gave a kind of reprieve to Catherine. As a young woman, Mary had lost some of her closest friends and allies to acts of attainder, the notorious legal mechanism which allowed for execution without a trial. When she became queen, she retrospectively annulled en masse the condemnations that her father’s government had secured through attainder, meaning that Catherine Howard was legally pardoned by the member of the royal family who had disliked her the most. Mary’s actions brought a husband to Catherine’s former colleague and then her maid, Anne Bassett, whose prospects had been ruined by her stepfather’s arrest in 1540. Bassett had remained single until June 1554, when she married Walter Hungerford, the son of the peer executed on Catherine’s wedding day. Queen Mary danced at Anne’s wedding celebrations, and she restored several of the late Lord Hungerford’s confiscated estates to the newlyweds.23

  By the time Elizabeth I succeeded to the throne in 1558, natural deaths had carried off many of the other men involved in Catherine’s career. Sir Edmund Knyvet, the cousin whose hand she was credited with saving, fulfilled his vow to use his sword-wielding hand in the Crown’s service. He helped suppress a rebellion in Norfolk in 1549 and died at his London town house on May 1, 1551. The two courtiers who were pardoned during the celebrations that marked Catherine’s official entry into London, Sir Thomas Wyatt and Sir John Wallop, returned to royal service, but Wyatt did not survive for long. He had been tasked with escorting a diplomatic mission, and then the Earl of Tyrone, to London when he caught a fever and died eight months after Catherine’s execution. Wallop served in the wars against France and was inducted into the Order of the Garter in 1543. He died in 1551, and his will dutifully acknowledged Edward VI as rightful head of the Church, although, true to the Catholic sympathies which had earned him a spell at the Tower in 1540, it also asked for the intercession of the Virgin Mary in easing his soul’s passage into Heaven.

  Charles de Marillac, whose correspondence provides so much of our knowledge about English court life during Catherine’s career, was recalled as the relationship between the two countries deteriorated. In France, he acquired the favor of King Henri II, who succeeded to the throne in 1547, and during Henri’s reign de Marillac’s careers as clergyman, courtier, and diplomat continued to flourish. He represented his king on embassies to the Hapsburg Empire, the papal states, and the Swiss cantons, and he rose through the Church hierarchy to become Archbishop of Vienne. The last act of his public life was a speech in 1560 in which he begged for toleration for France’s growing number of Protestants. The two pillars of a successful monarchy, he said, were “the integrity of religion and the benevolence of the people. If they are strong, it is not necessary to fear that obedience will be lost.”24 After this advice, given on the eve of France descending into a generation-long trauma with eight religious wars, de Marillac retired, and he died on December 2, 1560. His former adversary, Eustace Chapuys, had passed away in Louvain in January 1556.25

  The sectarian divide, evident in both countries during Catherine’s time as queen, intensified in the decades after her death. Most of her former ladies-in-waiting spent quiet lives as women of property, but in terms of how religion and politics divided and shaped her generation, the fates of Lady Margaret Douglas and the Duchess of Suffolk are revealing.

  After her second brush with disgrace for her liaison with Catherine’s brother, Margaret Douglas wisely reinvented herself as an icon of royal propriety. She submitted to an arranged marriage with the pretty Earl of Lennox in 1544 as part of her uncle’s maneuvers to increase English influence in Scotland.26 Lennox was a French-educated, pro-English Scottish émigré, and Henry provided generously for the couple. Fortunately for Margaret, it was a happy marriage, and the couple also agreed on religion. Whatever her levels of piety during her uncle’s reign, by the time her cousin Mary succeeded to the throne, Margaret was a zealous Roman Catholic.

  Where she had once enjoyed romantic intrigues, a more mature Margaret occupied herself with political aims, usually with the same energy and lack of long-term success. Her faith, her ancestry, and her two healthy sons briefly made her seem like a more attractive candidate as heiress to the throne than her cousin, Princess Elizabeth. Margaret’s favored position at Mary I’s court fueled her delusional belief that she might succeed her as queen, but Mary had come to power on the argument that it was fundamentally wrong to tamper with the succession. In the meantime, Margaret allowed confidence to master good sense when she took to taunting Elizabeth, who suffered from migraines and was notoriously sensitive to strong smells and loud noises, by installing her kitchens immediately above Elizabeth’s apartments at court. The strategy did not pay dividends when Elizabeth became queen and promptly made it clear that Margaret was no longer welcome at court. The animosity between the cousins intensified, and Margaret found herself imprisoned in the Tower for the second time in her life when her eldest son, Lord Darnley, visited Scotland and married Mary, Queen of Scots, a move which Elizabeth interpreted to be the result of his mother’s ambition and a threat to her own position.

  The rest of Margaret’s life was stalked by tragedy. Darnley was detested in Scotland, and at the age of twenty-one his body was found in the smoking ruins of an Edinburgh town house. Scottish politics then claimed the life of Margaret’s husband, who was shot dead by his opponents four years later, and their only surviving child, Charles, died in his early twenties. Despite their animosity, Queen Elizabeth visited Margaret to break the news of her husband’s death in person, and she paid for Margaret to have a state funeral when she died in 1578.27

  Margaret Douglas’s former colleague in the Queen’s household, Katherine Brandon, Duchess of Suffolk, outlived her by two years. Katherine had become as fervent in her Protestantism as Margaret was in her Catholicism. Under Edward VI, she was a generous patroness to evangelical preachers and scholars, delighted in the disgrace of Bishop Gardiner, and described Edward’s reign as a time when “it was merry with the lambs.”28 She endured almost unimaginable heartbreak in 1551 when her only two sons, Henry and Charles, died within hours of each other. They were both students at Cambridge when they contracted the sweat, a strain of the plague that was famous for the speed with which it could claim a victim.29 Katherine, left a widow after the Duke’s death in 1545, married one of her gentleman ushers, and they had two children together, Susan and Peregrine. The family left England in 1555 when Katherine came under pressure from Mary I’s government to convert to Catholicism. They were living as guests of King Sigismund II Augustus of Poland when they heard the news of Elizabeth’s accession and returned home. In old age, Katherine increasingly sympathized with the Puritan cause and despaired at Elizabeth I’s attempts to reach a religious compromise.

  Elizabeth I, who died unmarried and childless after a reign of forty-five years in 1603, may have been indirectly and partly influenced by Catherine in one of the most significant decisions of her life. Elizabeth’s favorite Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester, whose father had served as Catherine’s master of the horse, told a diplomat in the 1560s that he and Elizabeth “had first become friends before she was eight years old. Both then and later (when she was old enough to marry) she said she never wished to do so. Thereafter he had not seen her waver in that decision.”30 Although this admission is often paraphrased to say that Elizabeth developed her aversion to marriage specifically in reaction to Catherine’s death, and it would be unwise to see Catherine’s end as the crucible of the Virgin Queen, Elizabeth was eight years old at the time of Catherine’s execution. Leicester’s remarks indicate that it may, quite naturally, have affected her, even if only as a chil
dish vow which, in light of her subsequent refusal to marry, Leicester chose to regard as decisive.

  For the Howards and the Tudors, Catherine remained persona non grata for the rest of the century. There seems to have been a consensus, even among those charitable enough to view her with pity, that Catherine’s behavior had destroyed herself and unfairly damaged others. From the sanctuary of his beloved library, Lady Rochford’s father, Lord Morley, translated a fourteenth-century text, De Claris mulieribus, from Latin into English. The book structured its chapters around individual lives, in this case the great or notorious women of history and mythology. Lord Morley picked forty-six from the original text’s roster of 104, and his daughter’s modern biographer, Julia Fox, has convincingly argued that in the section on the Trojan princess Polyxena, Morley made a subtle validation of his daughter and condemnation of her mistress. In most places, Morley’s translation is word-perfect, but in his account of Polyxena, who was sacrificed to atone for the mistakes of the adulterous Helen of Sparta, he inserted a sentence bemoaning that “so sweet a maiden should be devoured by the hands of Pyrrhus for to satisfy for another woman’s offence.”31

  As far as we know, only one courtier wrote a full and unambiguous reflection on Catherine’s downfall. In retirement, George Cavendish, a talented writer who had once served as a gentleman usher to Cardinal Wolsey, composed a series of first-person monologues which he put into the mouths of the Henrician court’s most famous casualties, each of which attempted to impart the truth of the person, as Cavendish had known or perceived them, with a wider moral point about why they had fallen. Cavendish, whose brother William had remained at court long after he retired, included the figures of Catherine and Culpepper in his Metrical Visions. Although we do not know if Cavendish ever met either of them, his portraits of Thomas and Catherine are detailed enough to suggest that he at least had access to firsthand information about them. Culpepper was dismissed as an impious rogue, who “drowned in the depth of my own outrage.”32 With Catherine, Cavendish focused almost exclusively on her physical beauty, which he blamed for leading her into sin. Comments on Catherine’s appearance were frequent and effusive in nearly every near-contemporary account of her downfall—when Nikander Nucius, a Greek-born diplomat in service to the Hapsburg Emperor, visited London in 1545, the skulls of Culpepper and Dereham were still being displayed over London Bridge, and Nucius was told that they had perished for falling in love with a Queen who had been “the most beautiful woman of her time.”33 For George Cavendish, Catherine’s loveliness was “the chief cause of my mischief.” Yet, his text does show restrained compassion towards her by suggesting that while beauty inevitably incites lust, which in its turn brings ruin, these dangers are commonplace among the young. Cavendish’s interpretation of Catherine was of a youthful siren damned for adolescent mistakes. His specter of Catherine plaintively admits that it is “hard for youth against vice to fight: for youth is blind and hath no sight.”34 Metrical Visions suggested that Catherine’s epitaph should be:

  By proof of me, none can deny

  That beauty and lust, enemies to chastity,

  Have been the twain that hath decayed in me,

  And hath brought me to this and untoward;

  Some time a queen, and now a headless Howard.

  There was, of course, no epitaph on a grave that remained unmarked. Nor could the Howards have erected a memorial to an attainted traitor, even if they had desired to do so.III As one of Edward VI’s privy councillors wrote, “He that dieth with honour liveth for ever, / And the defamed dead recovereth never.”35 For many, Catherine remained as Cavendish saw her—a beautiful but promiscuous young woman who committed adultery and paid for that mistake with her life. Compared to queens like Anne Boleyn or Katherine of Aragon, who tangibly and deliberately mattered, Catherine has been depicted as an irrelevance, the author of a shallow yet profane queenship.

  It has been argued here that Catherine probably did not commit physical adultery with Thomas Culpepper and that her denials of it were likely truthful, but that adultery would likely have taken place had their liaison not been discovered in November 1541. Despite how often she is described as a queen executed for committing adultery, the treason laws under Henry VIII meant that she could be, and was, condemned for her intention, rather than her actions. A privy councillor wrote later that “before her marriage, she had contaminated her virginity, and afterwards committed or, at the leastwise, sought means to commit adultery.”36 As for her promiscuity, the copious evidence left to us indicates that she had two sexual partners—her first love and her husband.

  Her story is, like so many lives, one which was predominantly shaped not by intention or design, but by the unquantifiable power of luck. This may be frustrating when we try to construct an easily understood narrative, but Catherine, whose life is often seen as one molded and ended by conspiracy, exemplifies the impact of the unpredictable and the improbable. It was improbable luck that first brought her to the King’s attention in 1539–40, and it was appalling circumstance that led from Mary Hall’s revelations to Catherine’s execution four or five months later. Had Mary retracted her statement, if John Lascelles had decided it was too dangerous to bring to Cranmer, or Henry had dismissed the latter’s letter, had Culpepper burned Catherine’s note, Francis Dereham stayed in Ireland, or if he had not quarreled with the Dowager Duchess and traveled to Pontefract in August 1541, had Lady Rochford withheld gossip about Culpepper’s infatuation, if Catherine had held her nerve and not attempted to lie so clumsily during her interrogations, or had Henry decided not to prosecute her to the end, when even some in the House of Lords were uncertain about the merits of executing her—if any of these had played differently, the outcome of the scandal might have been disgrace but survival, rather than death.

  In Greek myth, Persephone was the daughter of Spring, snatched from the land of the living by the god of death to keep him company. As queen, Catherine made many mistakes, but it was not a foregone conclusion that she should pay for those errors with her life. At every stage of Catherine’s fall, after the first revelation, her husband’s hand can be seen guiding her into the grave as punishment for her betrayal and humiliation of him. Catherine’s career offers a window into the mesmerizing brutality of Henrician England as it lurched through the final decade of Henry’s reign and the first of the English Reformation. In this world, Catherine Howard did not have the impact of other English queens, before or after, and it would be disingenuous to claim otherwise, but that augments, rather than lessens, her particular tragedy. Looked at in detail, the portrait that emerges of Henry’s fifth wife is of an elegant, beautiful, and vivacious young woman. Her faults were obvious, but usually trivial. She could be vain, quick-tempered, egotistical, reckless, and when in a temper, capable of great rudeness. Catherine was mediocre in everything, except her appearance and her charm. She was a girl whom many of us may know or have known.

  In his letter to his brother and family in Calais, in which he gave them, and us, the only extant eyewitness account of Catherine Howard’s final moments, the merchant Ottwell Johnson added a postscript: “I pray you let them be made partakers of this news, for surely the thing is well worth the knowledge.”37

  * * *

  I. The Countess of Bridgewater was also interred there, in 1554.

  II. Many of the leaders and victims of the Tudor state were buried in the same chapel as Catherine and Lady Rochford. Lady Jane Grey was interred there after her execution in 1554. Cardinal Fisher, Thomas More, the Countess of Salisbury, and Catherine’s kinsman Philip Howard, 20th Earl of Arundel, who died imprisoned for his faith in 1595, rest in Saint Peter’s, as does Thomas Cromwell, both of the Seymour brothers, John Dudley, Catherine’s brother-in-law Thomas Arundell, and two more of her kinsmen—the 4th Duke of Norfolk, executed for treason in 1572, and William Howard, 1st Viscount Stafford, beheaded during the anti-Catholic hysteria of the Popish Plot in 1680. Catherine is thus buried in a chapel that houses the remains
of three saints, two beatified Catholic martyrs, three dukes, one marquess, four earls, and three queens.

  III. Catherine’s grave was not marked with a plaque until the reign of Queen Victoria. During renovations of the chapel, the Queen ordered that those buried there should be commemorated. Excavations were carried out on the chancel at the same time, but Catherine’s body was not among those exhumed.

  APPENDIX

  The Ladies of Catherine Howard’s Household

  An asterisk indicates where the lady described is, in the author’s opinion, the most likely candidate, but not a certainty.

  The Great Ladies of the Household

  LADY MARGARET DOUGLAS (1515–1578), daughter of Archibald Douglas, 6th Earl of Angus (d. 1557), and Margaret Tudor, Dowager Queen of Scots (d. 1541). Subsequently, Countess of Lennox and mother-in-law to Mary, Queen of Scots.

  MARY FITZROY, Dowager Duchess of Richmond and Somerset (c. 1519–1557), daughter of Thomas Howard, 3rd Duke of Norfolk (d. 1554), and widow of Henry Fitzroy, 1st Duke of Richmond and Somerset (d. 1536).

  KATHERINE BRANDON, Duchess of Suffolk (1519–1580), daughter of William Willoughby, 11th Baron Willoughby de Eresby (d. 1526), and wife of Charles Brandon, 1st Duke of Suffolk (d. 1545).