Catherine was obviously not swept off her feet. On the contrary, it was the music teacher who was captivated, and he begged her, if indeed she loved him, to let him ‘perceive by some token that you love me’. Catherine’s rejoinder made it cruelly evident that she was acutely aware of the social gulf that existed between a duke’s niece and the son of a simple landed family. ‘What token should I show you?’ she answered. ‘I will never be naught with you and able to marry me you be not.’ Manox persisted and begged for a few intimate (very intimate) caresses, to which the lady replied that she was willing to oblige on condition that he ‘desire no more’. They arranged a courting place, and several days later met secretly in the Duchess’s chapel chamber ‘in the dark evening’, where Manox bid Catherine ‘keep her promise wherewith she was content’. There, under the lengthening shadows of the vaulted arches, the young music teacher found this Howard daughter even more responsive than he had hoped, and he later confessed that ‘he felt more than was convenient.’53
Where these intimate caresses behind the altar ended will never be known, but Manox later swore ‘upon his damnation’ that he ‘never knew her carnally’.54 Considering Catherine’s earlier insistence that he should ‘desire no more’ than a token of her love, Manox was probably telling the truth. Moreover, the affair was abruptly interrupted by the outraged Dowager, who discovered them together in their secret meeting-place. This was the second time they had been caught together and the Duchess was thoroughly annoyed. What action she took is not recorded. She may have dismissed Manox from his tutorial post, for he reappears later in the household of Lord Bayment, but more probably she did nothing, viewing the episode as a meaningless escapade and charging that the two should ‘never be alone together’.55 Certainly their relations did not cease; they were merely made more diffifcult, since the young people had to use one of the maids as a go-between to carry tokens back and forth, and it was rumoured in the kitchen circles that the two were secretly engaged.56
While Catherine was exchanging love-tokens with Henry Manox, the Dowager Duchess removed her household to Lambeth, which lay only a few miles from London. At first the love affair continued unabated, since Manox found a position close by in the service of Lord Bayment. In the end, however, the new and exciting atmosphere of Lambeth began to take effect, and while Henry Manox became increasingly confident of his control over Catherine’s heart, the young lady herself was rapidly outgrowing her infatuation for the virginal player.
Norfolk House lay abreast of the king’s highway leading from Lambeth town and directly opposite the archiepiscopal residence of Thomas Cranmer. Its imposing gateway and paved courtyard, its vast chambers, gallery and oratory, and its great hall opening on to the gardens in the rear, were palatial in contrast to the country establishment at Horsham.57 Moreover, it was right across the river from Westminster and the royal court, and Catherine was suddenly introduced to a cavalcade of eligible and fascinating young men who lived on the neighbouring estates, or accompanied her uncle the Duke on his frequent visits to his stepmother’s house. The break came when one of the servants reported to Mary Lassells, the Duchess’s chamberer, the rumour of an engagement between Manox and Catherine. Mistress Lassells did not mince words, and she proceeded to upbraid Manox for his impudence at aspiring to the hand of a Howard lady. ‘Man, what mean thou to play the fool of this fashion,’ she said. ‘Know not thou that if my lady of Norfolk knew of the love betwixt thee and Mistress Howard, she will undo thee.’ Then the chamberer gave a warning: ‘She is come of a noble house and if thou should marry her some of her blood would kill thee.’58
The advice was sage, for sons of yeoman stock married Howards at their peril. Even so the young man refused to be intimidated and he replied scornfully, boasting of his intimacy with Catherine. ‘Hold thy peace, woman,’ he retorted, ‘I know her well enough.’ Then, in unmistakable words, he proceeded to recount exactly how well he did know her, and concluded with the statement that ‘she hath said to me that I shall have her maidenhead though it be painful to her, not doubting but I will be good to her hereafter.’59 Unfortunately for Henry Manox, he had overplayed his hand, for when Catherine was informed of his words she made it cruelly evident that she no longer had any use for him, and she did not hesitate to tell him so to his face. Manox was abashed and murmured as an excuse that he ‘was so far in love with her that he wist not what he said’. Mistress Catherine was as quick to pardon as to anger, and she was seen the following Saturday walking with him in the Duchess’s orchard, ‘they two alone’.60 Though she was incapable of holding a grudge, the affair from Catherine’s point of view was over, for a far more exciting suitor than a mere country-bred music teacher now made his appearance.
Francis Dereham, a young gentleman of birth and substance, was one of the Duke’s gentlemen-pensioners, one of those feudal vestiges of the days of liveried retainers whom a few of the great magnates still retained. He was young, he was handsome, and he was well bred, and Catherine Howard fell before his manifest charms. Exactly when Dereham began to haunt the Dowager’s Lambeth residence is not recorded. He was merely one of the many young gallants who were attracted to the ‘maidens’ chamber’, and at first his attentions were directed not towards Catherine but to Joan Bulmer, another of the young ladies of the household.61 In theory, the door to the girls’ dormitory was locked every night, but this evidently constituted only a trifling barrier. The lock could be picked, athletic lovers could climb the lattice, or the maidens themselves could steal the key from the Duchess’s bedchamber, once she was safely asleep.
It was not Catherine’s decision alone to turn the dormitory into a rendezvous for young lovers; there were other ladies equally interested in having a secret and uninterrupted hour with the gentleman of their choice, and years later Catherine stubbornly insisted that the door was unlocked ‘as well at the request of me, as of others’.62 Alice Restwold, her bedmate, seems to have been particularly adept at arranging entry into the women’s quarters, while more than one lady-in-waiting was charmed to co-operate in making her bedchamber available to the eligible gallants of the neighbourhood. The only element in the least remarkable about the whole arrangement was the fact that word of what was going on did not percolate down to the Duchess sooner. The girls evidently took the view that what their elders did not know would not hurt them, and there seems to have been a singularly successful conspiracy of silence maintained for a considerable period of time. How many of the young men in service with the Duke or with the other noble households of the area availed themselves of the pleasure of an evening with the Dowager’s maidens it is impossible to say, but the two names that have been preserved are those of Francis Dereham, esquire, and Henry Manox’s cousin, Edward Waldgrave, esquire.63
It is not difficult to reconstruct what occurred during those months between 1537 and 1539 when Catherine became so fatally involved with her lover. The maidens generally retired early, while their admirers, loaded with delicacies left over from banqueting in the great hall below stairs, would insinuate themselves into the communal bedchamber. ‘Wine, strawberries, apples, and other things to make good cheer’ were served at these midnight sessions, and careful arrangements were worked out lest a suspicious Duchess make an unexpected visit, for there was always the ‘little gallery’ into which the young men could hide if taken unawares.64 From clandestine feasting to secret love-making was only a short step, and Dereham and Waldgrave would lie upon their mistresses’ beds, making the most of the quiet hours before dawn. That Catherine became Dereham’s paramour is indisputable, but it is far from clear how long the alliance lasted. Later, Catherine insisted that they had been ‘carnal lovers’ for only a quarter of a year – presumably during the autumn and winter of 1538, but a rather exaggerated rumour reported that Dereham had been systematically corrupting the girl for five years, since she was thirteen.65
All the instruments of courtship were utilized; they exchanged intimate tokens of their love, Catherine receiving a sh
irt of fine linen in return for an armband for her lover’s sleeve. Francis Dereham was a gentleman of considerable means and evidently could gratify his mistress’s fancy, for he presented her with velvet and satin for her gown, a ‘quilted cap of sarcenet’ and an embroidered friar’s knot to symbolize their love.66 More than once they were caught kissing in the great gallery by the Dowager, who vented her annoyance in words and blows, and caustically asked whether they thought her home was Henry VIII’s court. But the old Lady of Norfolk seems to have done little to obstruct their meetings.
Later, when the more intimate details of their relationship became public knowledge, one witness confessed that Mistress Catherine ‘was so far in love’ that they kissed ‘after a wonderful manner, for they would kiss and hang by their bellies together as they were two sparrows.’67 Nor, if the evidence is to be believed, were Catherine’s heavy brocaded skirts any protection against Dereham’s experienced advances, and on the occasions when he visited her in the communal bedchamber it was inevitable that abandoned caresses carried on in doublet and hose should end in ‘naked bed’. Mr Dereham was such a constant visitor behind the heavy curtains of the bed that the other inmates of the dormitory knew exactly who he was, and would remark: ‘Hark to Dereham broken winded.’68 Some of the ladies, who were not so fortunate as to have their Derehams and Waldgraves, complained about being kept awake at night, while others, the married ones, were shocked. Alice Restwold later, if not quite accurately, claimed that she was disgusted by the whole affair and announced to a friend that ‘she was a married woman and wist what matrimony meant and what belonged to that puffing and blowing’ that went on in her bed.69
That Catherine knew exactly what she was doing is undeniable, and in response to the warning that she was taking a grave risk she retorted that ‘a woman might meddle with a man and yet concieve no child unless she would herself.’70 Before a more inhibited age passes judgment on a girl in her teens, it might be well to judge first the moral standards of her generation. Foreign observers were shocked by the moral laxity of the English, but exactly why they should have felt this way is something of a paradox, considering what went on in such places as the French court. Possibly it was because the English were not as adept at the game of courtly love and took their amours where they found them, in an easygoing, unembarrassed fashion, not bothering to garb their sex in a glitter of sonnets and formality. Such a code would have to wait until the golden age of Elizabeth, when an entire nation became enthralled by the fascinating game of courting its virgin queen.
Almost every foreigner commented in wonder and with distaste at the manner in which the English treated their women, and allowed them such unchaperoned freedom. Nicander Nucius remarked that ‘one may see in the market and streets of the city married women and damsels in arts and bartering and affairs of trade, undisguisedly.’ The English displayed, he added, ‘great simplicity and absence of jealousy in their usages towards females. For not only do those who are of the same family and household kiss them on the mouth with salutations and embraces, but even those too who have never seen them.’71 Nucius could not understand why such behaviour appeared ‘by no means indecent’ to the English, while another traveller, later in the century, concluded that England was ‘a paradise for women, a prison for servants, and a hell or purgatory for horses’.72
Tudor women were regarded as valuable financial assets, sources of obvious pleasure, and the mothers of lusty children to ensure family succession. That old warrior the Duke of Norfolk did not hesitate to offer Thomas Cromwell, by way of hospitality, the wife of one of his minions with whom he could ‘be sure of a welcome’, and if the Vicar- General lusted ‘not to dally’ with the wife, why then Norfolk knew of ‘a young woman with pretty proper tetins’.73 Thomas Howard was not the man to bestow what he himself had failed to savour, and he infuriated his wife and shocked his stepmother by publicly flaunting his own mistress in their faces. What filled the Duchess with rancour, however, was not that Bess Holland was her husband’s concubine, but that she was a ‘churl’s daughter’ and laundress in her nursery. The outraged lady complained that when she had grown violent over the duke’s infidelity, she was seized by common serving-girls and bound and sat upon till she spat blood. The Duchess complained bitterly that she was ‘a gentlewoman, born and brought up daintily’, and had been forced to flee her home in self-defence.74 How much of this is true it is difficult to discern, for Elizabeth Howard tended to be more imaginative than truthful, and the Duke dismissed her claims as great and ‘abominable lies’.75
The lady seems to have been willing to pass over the extra-marital activities of her husband, but what she could not forgive was that her own children ignored her plight. ‘Never’, she wept, had a woman conceived ‘so ungracious an eldest son and so ungracious a daughter and so unnatural.’76 These unsympathetic children were Catherine’s first cousins. The elder of them, the Earl of Surrey, once suggested to his sister Mary that she should seek the King’s ‘fantasy’ and strive to become his mistress, so as to foster the Howard interests at court. Mary Howard indignantly refused, claiming that she would rather cut her own throat than Consider the bed of that obese and dying monarch.77
The girl who vigorously and successfully defended her virtue was an exception in early Tudor England, and the Imperial Ambassador thought it unlikely that Henry’s third wife could still be a virgin at twenty-five. ‘You may imagine’, he satirically remarked of Jane Seymour, ‘whether being an Englishwoman, and having been so long at court, she would not hold it a sin to be still a maid.’78 The educational theory may have been given lip service – that ‘a woman who giveth a gift, giveth herself; a woman who taketh a gift, selleth herself,’ but in actual practice ladies of Catherine’s station both gave and received gifts to the full. All that was required was that a certain minimum of decorum be maintained and the necessary precautions taken. Only when the unmistakable signs of unfaithfulness were perceived did society feel constrained to take a stand, and when Mary Boleyn, after four years of widowhood, did the one thing a lady of breeding could not explain – that is, become pregnant – the Howard family was justifiably annoyed and disowned her, if only because of her foolish neglect.79 In the circumstances it was just as well that Catherine Howard appears to have known something about the rudiments of birth control.
Nor is there any evidence that when Catherine’s amour with Francis Dereham was finally brought to the attention of her elders, they were particularly shocked. The agent of revelation was that discarded and neglected gentleman, Henry Manox, who grew frantic at the thought of Dereham and Waldgrave’s admission to pleasures of which he was deprived. In a burst of righteous indignation, he announced that the Duchess’s household was being ‘dishonoured’ by such activities, and sanctimoniously he and his friend, Barnes, took it upon themselves to warn the Dowager. They composed a letter which they left in the old lady’s church pew, suggesting that the Duchess inspect the activities of her gentlewomen. ‘For if it shall like you,’ they wrote, ‘half an hour after you shall be abed to rise suddenly and visit their chamber, you shall see that which shall displease you.’80 Agnes of Norfolk went through her usual verbal storming at her servants for their negligence, but evidently she did not associate the warning with Catherine Howard and dismissed it as being of no great significance. Unfortunately for Mr Manox, Catherine spotted the letter in her grandmother’s pew and later stole it from her coffer and showed it to Dereham, who turned in a towering rage on Manox.81 This seems to have been the end of the virginal player, for he shortly thereafter acquired a more suitable lady for a wife, and disappeared from the scene. Though the Dowager may have been unaware of the full extent of the relationship between the two lovers, Catherine’s aunt, the Countess of Bridgewater, and her uncle, Lord William Howard, were not so blind. Lady Bridgewater, however, was more worried by the nightly banqueting than by anything else, and she wisely warned her niece that ‘if she used that sort [of thing] it would hurt her beauty.’82 Lord Willi
am’s reaction was to blame Manox for stirring up needless trouble, and he made light of the affair saying: ‘What mad wenches! Can you not be merry amongst yourselves but you must thus fall out.’ Since Lord William was himself having an affair with one of Catherine’s dormitory-mates, his position is quite understandable.83
Catherine was a mirror of her age. Scantily educated, plagued by few inhibitions, and impetuously passionate, she simply reflected the standards of a society which accepted as natural a certain amount of promiscuity. Moreover, Catherine’s relations with Dereham by no means fell outside the existing bounds of propriety. The two lovers acted as if they were engaged, and in the eyes of the Church they were in effect married – a fact that will become increasingly important as the story unfolds. Whether Catherine recognized any legal obligation to her young man is not clear, but Dereham obviously felt he had some form of lawful right. On one occasion when the two had been found cuddling in the gallery, he asked why he should not kiss ‘his own wife’. When one of the witnesses remarked that it appeared as if ‘Mr Dereham shall have Mrs Catherine Howard’, he answered, ‘By St John you may guess twice and guess worse.’84 Even Catherine confessed that during those intimate months she had been content to call him husband.85 Though such an informal agreement, consummated as it was by carnal knowledge, constituted a form of marriage, both lovers must have realized that they were reckoning without the final decision of the Dowager and the Duke. Dereham seems to have been cognizant of this, for as the socially inferior, he was constantly endeavouring to legalize their union, and he persistently pestered Catherine with ‘the question of marriage’.86
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