Catherine Howard

by Lacey Baldwin Smith

  What had taken six long years and a social, religious and political revolution to accomplish against Catherine of Aragon, had now, in the case of Anne of Cleves, been completed in six days. The way was cleared for the monarch’s humble and devoted council, conveniently headed by the ‘King’s own Bishop’ Stephen Gardiner, in alliance with the Duke of Norfolk, to beg Henry ‘to frame his most noble heart to love’ some noble personage by ‘whom his Majesty might have some more store of fruit and succession to the comfort of his realm’. Henry was itching to oblige, for in Catherine Howard he had found what he fondly and blindly believed to be a veritable ‘jewel of womanhood’.

  CHAPTER 6

  ‘Harry With the Crown’

  Henry and Catherine were married on 28 July 1540. Heads had fallen, the international scene had been confounded, and the world cynically speculated upon the life expectancy of this fifth wife of the lusty Harry. The wedding itself was a hurried and unproclaimed affair, and Catherine plighted her troth to Henry on the same day that Thomas Cromwell lost his head. The words of the marriage ceremony, by which the royal spouse took this second Howard bride to be his lawful wedded wife, were those of the time-honoured formula. Catherine murmured in response to Henry’s promises: ‘I, Katherine, take thee, Henry, to my wedded husband, to have and to hold from this day forward, for better for worse, for richer for poorer, in sickness and in health, to be bonair and buxom in bed and at board, till death us depart.’1

  The marriage of a king was customarily a matter of State and public rejoicing – a moment heavy with religious and political significance, in which the deity was called upon to bless with the fruits of matrimony the union of man and woman into ‘one flesh and body’. The state of wedlock was ‘a high and blessed order ordained of God in Paradise’, and husband and wife were cautioned to use the nuptial bed ‘more for the desire of children, than bodily lust’.2

  Legends are born in the imaginations of men and mirror the reputation of heroes, and the story of Henry’s marriage proposal to Catherine has most of the attributes of a first-class fairytale. King, so the poets inform us, ‘went every day to see his son, and one day in the afternoon he entered the room when all the ladies were there’, and called Catherine Howard to him. She knelt before her lord, ‘waiting to see what the King could want with her’. Henry wanted a good deal, for he ‘held out his hand to her and raised her up, saying, “Catherine, from now henceorward, I wish you never to do that again, but rather that all these ladies and my whole kingdom should bend the knee to you, for I wish to make you Queen”.’ Mistress Howard was too stunned to answer and merely made a low bow in reverence to this divine monarch who had asked to be her husband. Henry then hastened to inform the council of his will, and his advisers humbly assured him that ‘if your Majesty so wills it we shall be content; what pleases your Majesty pleases us.’ What pleased the sovereign was to be wedded the following day and he ‘sent for the Bishop of London to come and marry him’.3 The fact that there is hardly a grain of truth in this fable does not in the least detract from the account, but it should be noted for the records that Henry knew Catherine for at least three months before their marriage, while a week before the ceremony it was rumoured that the lady herself was enceinte.4

  This time the King was taking no chances. With the princess of Cleves he had been tricked by a flattering portrait and lulled by the saccharine words of his ministers. His bitterness was aggravated by the fact that he should have known better. Only the previous year, Henry had voiced the innate caution of his sex when he maintained that ‘marriage touches a man too nearly’ to accept blindly the choice of his ministers. Henry was considering a French bride at the time, and he advised the French Ambassador that he would trust no one but himself, and suggested that the French send him several sample damsels to ‘sing to me a few times before I settle’. With Gallic and caustic humour the Ambassador misrepresented the King’s words and ‘with a half smile’ asked whether ‘Your Majesty would perhaps like to try them all, one after the other, and keep the one that suits you best.’ Then, to make the point quite clear, he added: ‘It was not thus, Sire, that the Knights of the Round Table treated their ladies in old times in this country.’5 Legend reports that this produced the only recorded blush ever to colour the royal cheeks. In choosing Catherine, however, Henry was free from doubt, for he had made his own selection and found his ‘rose without a thorn’.

  The royal groom laid double claim to Catherine’s affections – as king and husband. ‘Harry with the crown’ exercised sovereignty based upon the double pillars of the divine right of inheritance and the authority conferred upon him by a willing and obedient high court of parliament. His title was majestic: Henry was ‘by the grace of God, King of England, France, and Ireland, Defender of the Faith, and in earth, under God, of the Church of England and Ireland the Supreme Head, and Sovereign of the most Noble Order of the Garter’. It was here in this magnificent ‘mirror of wisdom’ that the crown, the court, and the commonweal united into a single symbol of authority. That ‘most serene and invincible prince’ was a living and vital image of the august power of majesty. For better or worse, the structure of government gave full vent to the character and idiosyncrasies of the person who wore the crown. Henry not only reigned, but he ruled; his every taste, the most obscure and trifling facet of his personality, became essential matters of State. Tudor England had not so much to reckon with a sovereign as with a man, who stamped both court and crown with the indelible print of his temperament.

  When Catherine first encountered her sovereign, Henry was forty-eight, and though the monarch could no longer wear his massive tilting armour as if it were a masquing attire and capsize his opponents ‘horse and all’, he was still a magnificent if portly giant of a man. The King was in the autumn of life, a fleeting Indian summer when the agility and vitality of youth still kept at bay the wolves of disease, senility and decay. Henry remained flushed and jovial, fair and graceful; the unwrinkled skin was pink and piggish, and the mammoth frame and bull-like stature continued hard and massive. Like the Colossus of Rhodes, he towered over his subjects, both as a man and as a king. The gargantuan frame, in an age which counted five feet as the average height, measured six feet and more, while the royal chest, garbed in doublet and puffy sleeves designed to accentuate the width of the shoulders, exceeded forty-five inches. The image of the future was only just beginning to emerge. The features had swollen and lost their girlish delicacy; the royal pate was thinning; the auburn beard was flecked with white; and the florid face gave hint of sagging jowls, coarsened nose, and hooded eyes made cruel by disease and suffering. The athlete’s slim waist had crept to fifty inches in girth, while the muscles of his chest were layered with fat.

  For the moment, however, Henry remained incredibly solid, still a magnificent man and a mighty monarch. The effect was increasingly that of a gigantic beer barrel, rotund but tightly corseted, astride shapely legs spread wide to bear the weight of a man who must have tipped the scales at close to two hundred and fifty pounds. It seemed as if both God and man had conjoined to emphasize the Tudor flair for the spectacular; the King’s mantle was of ‘purple velvet, lined with white satin’ and embroidered with ‘thick gold cord’ hung with golden acorns, while the royal doublet was striped with white and crimson satin. Henry had an inexhaustible zeal for the ornate and the exorbitant; his ‘fingers were one mass of jewelled rings’, and around his bull neck he wore a gold collar from which hung a diamond the size of a walnut.6 Part was the consequence of Tudor taste for the prodigious and part was political calculation, but the total effect was to give to Henry’s mortal frame the appearance of a god.

  For a sovereign who has made such a splendid and momentous splash in history, Henry’s character is strangely and frustratingly elusive. To contemporaries and moderns alike, the man appears as a Janus in which the satanic and the angelic are inexplicably opposed. At one moment Henry emerges as a beast, lustful and brutal, grasping and vengeful, vain and obstin
ate beyond belief; at the next instant the image changes, and we perceive the superb athlete, the generous scholar, the accomplished diplomat and the idol of the realm.

  The monarch’s vanity was insatiable, and he was inordinately proud of his physical and athletic prowess. Almost the first question he put to the Venetian Ambassador, after the succession to the throne of the young King of France, was whether his rival brother was as tall as he, as stout, and what ‘sort of legs’ he had? When the Ambassador replied that Francis’s legs were ‘spare’, Henry ‘opened the front of his doublet and placing his hand on his thigh’, said, ‘ “Look here! And I have also a good calf to my leg”.’7 In an age that judged men by the sumptuousness of their dress, Henry was considered the ‘best dressed sovereign in the world; his robes are the richest and most superb that can be imagined.’8 The man loved nothing better than to impress those about him by his every act – the lavish display of his attire, the inexhaustible energy that could tire eight horses in a single day, and the physical prowess that surpassed all at archery, tilting, hunting and hawking.

  The legend of the King’s cavalier handling of his wives, the picture of a monarch who went through spouses ‘as some men go through socks’, is standard historical lore, and his own generation went so far as to note that Henry was ‘inclined to amours’.9 His relations with the opposite sex were notorious even in a society that looked with tolerance upon the marital antics of sovereigns and accepted with amused cynicism the fate of disgraced and barren queens. More than once during the reign it was whispered abroad that Henry’s sexual appetite explained his sterility, and it was reported by one of the King’s more biased critics that the Duchess of Milan had dismissed Bluff King Hal as a possible mate, since she liked ‘not to be wife to such a husband that either putteth away or killeth his wives’.10

  Again on the less savoury side, England’s monarch was a confirmed hypochondriac, combining the healthy man’s distaste for sickness and disease in others with a profound interest in his own ailments. The faintest rumour of the plague was sufficient to send him scampering to the clean air of Windsor Castle, and not even Anne Boleyn’s ‘pretty duckys’ that he hoped soon to fondle, and the memory of his ‘sweetheart’s arms’ were sufficient to lure him back to London.11 Henry evidently agreed with Doctor Boorde that the only sure antidote to the infection was to leave town, but he generously advised those less fortunate than himself to use a prescription consisting primarily of sage, rue, elder and bramble leaves liberally mixed with wine and ginger. ‘Take a spoonful of the same,’ the royal apothecary enjoined, ‘and you shall be safe for twenty-four days.’12 As he grew older and learned that not even his cast-iron constitution was immune to disease and suffering, Henry developed a discriminating medical knowledge. The royal cure for an ulcerated leg was an ointment comprised largely of ground pearls. Yet for all the care and worry about his physical well being, Henry continued to eat and drink prodigiously. In the end he grew so obese that the ground shook when he moved, and he had to be carried up and down the stairs in a sedan chair.

  Both foreign and domestic observers of the English court were at constant pains to comment upon the King’s obstinacy, cruelty and fickleness. Campeggio, the papal legate, reported that even ‘an angel descending from Heaven would be unable to persuade him’ once he had made up his mind, while Castillon, the French Ambassador, observed that he had ‘to do with the most dangerous and cruel man in the world.’13 Another Frenchman was even more critical and suggested that Henry was tainted with three vices ‘which in a king may be called plagues’. These were insatiable covetousness, distrust and fear, and, finally, lightness and inconstancy.14 There is endless evidence to make of Henry a brutal and consummate egotist, a monstrosity of a king, and a devil of a man, and history abounds with those who for both good and bad reasons see him in this light. But behind this ugly face appears another, with features angelic and divine.

  The patriotic humanist, William, Lord Mountjoy, was boundless in his praise of the youthful Henry and he wrote to his good friend Erasmus, saying:

  If you could see how all the world here is rejoicing in the possession of so great a Prince, how his life is all their desire, you could not contain your tears for joy. The Heavens laugh, the earth exults, all things are full of milk, of honey, and of nectar!15

  Mountjoy was certainly not above a certain amount of calculated flattery and deliberate exaggeration, since he wished Erasmus to share in the milk and honey that were expected to flow from this princely paragon. His eulogy can be balanced by the more objective report of the Venetian Ambassador, who could scarcely contain his enthusiasm when he first encountered Henry early in the reign. The young King was, he said, ‘the handsomest potentate I ever set eyes on’. He then noted a fact that would have flattered Henry immensely: he is ‘above the usual height, with an extremely fine calf to his leg, his complexion very fair and bright, with auburn hair’. Not only was England’s monarch fair to behold but he was also astute, prudent and sage; could speak French, Latin and some Italian; was master of the lute and harpsichord; could sing from a book at sight; and draw ‘the bow with greater strength than any man in England’.16 In the circumstances there is little wonder that the world viewed him as being ‘in every respect a most accomplished Prince’, and it was the considered opinion of still another visitor to the court that God had ‘combined such corporal and mental beauty, as not merely to surprise but to astonish all men’.17

  There is no gainsaying that Henry was both fearful of and fascinated by sickness and disease, but this does not mean that he was either a coward or a weakling. He was a notoriously difficult patient, rarely allowing ill health to keep him from the council chamber or the hunt, and in the end it was only the extraordinary vitality of the man that prevented the swollen and abused body from disintegrating into a helpless mass. Moreover, his personal courage and endurance were attested to, time and time again. The royal person may have been too precious to risk upon the battlefield, but the King’s life was in constant jeopardy during the joust at which he so excelled. No one could stand against him as the royal giant, clad in ninety-four pounds of armour, thundered down the jousting course. For hours on end he would test strength and match spears against the bravest of the realm. Monarchs as well as subjects could be killed at this mock warfare, and the King of France lost his life in 1559 while practising the dangerous sport. Twice Harry of England was unhorsed, and once he lay unconscious for two hours. On still another occasion he escaped death by a fraction of an inch, when either by mistake or through sheer bravado he failed to lower the visor of his helmet. The Duke of Suffolk’s lance struck the King scarcely an inch above the opened visor; the impact was so great that the spear shattered and the King’s helmet was filled with bits of splintered wood. By the purest good fortune Henry was not seriously injured, and he announced that ‘none was to blame but himself’ and insisted that his armourer put his helmet back together again so that he could continue to joust, ‘by the which all men might perceive that he had no hurt’.18 Except for the silent and deadly action of the plague, which could destroy and mutilate the most splendid physique, Henry seems to have been beyond fear, and the Spanish Ambassador was probably correct when he noted that the sovereign was always desirous of convincing society that he had ‘no respect or fear of anyone in the world’.19

  Again, the picture of a gross and lustful monster is deceptive. There is no evidence that Henry over-indulged in wine to the point of intoxication, and, if anything, the vast quantities he consumed indicate a strong head and a sturdy constitution. Moreover, his faithfulness to his wives (while he had them) was conspicuous in a monarch who could gratify almost every whim. In contrast to the promiscuous capers of his royal brother across the Channel, Henry’s two recorded mistresses seem the epitome of virtuous domesticity. What sets Bluff King Hal apart from other sovereigns is not the adultery but the legality of his promiscuity. Unlike most kings of his generation, he insisted upon marrying his concubines. Henry ha
s a reputation as a Bluebeard because he had six wives, while Francis I of France has achieved but negligible distinction, despite an infidelity remarkable even in a society that abounded with Lothariois.

  Hernry was also one of the most accomplished diplomats of Europe, and even his enemies conceded that he was a dangerous and cunning foe. Obstinate and ruthless he may have been, but as the Imperial Ambassador acknowledged, he was ‘more accessible to persuasion than to threat’.20 Educated in the Machiavellian atmosphere that knew the value of the adage ‘three may keep counsel if two be away,’ Henry could be both nefarious and merciless,21 but he also had that rarest and most precious of gifts – the ability to inspire loyalty and devotion. For all his brutality, the man had magnificent animal magnetism, and even when old and fat and helpless he could hold men to him. In a strange fashion, all men respected and many loved this bulging bully who wept and blustered, pranced and preened. It may have been that such loyalty was wasted upon a man who would sacrifice both friend and foe, minister and subject, upon the altar of his egotism, and the insight of Sir Thomas More may approach the truth when he predicted that if Henry thought that ‘my head could win him a castle in France it should not fail to go!’22 Nevertheless, councillors were loyal both to the man and to the crown he wore.