During the early months of Catherine’s marriage to the Lord’s anointed, Dereham tactfully vanished from court circles, but like everyone else who had ever known the lady, he ended up angling for a fat sinecure and good living in the Queen’s household. The machinery of patronage soon began to operate, and family pressure was exerted on Catherine by the Dowager Duchess to find the young man a position at court. Exactly why the old lady should have been so fond of Dereham is difficult to decide, but he had always been one of her favourites. By the winter of 1540 Catherine had been induced to oblige her grandmother, for she told her aunt that ‘my lady of Norfolk hath desired me to be good unto him, and so I will.’45 She requested the Duchess to bring Dereham to court; she presented him with gifts of money; and finally, in August of 1541, she found him a place in her household as private secretary and usher of the chamber.
The folly of an act whereby an ex-lover was appointed to a position where he might be intimately closeted with the Queen is mitigated by the fact that both Lady Bridgewater and the Dowager thought it quite reasonable and proper that Catherine should make room for and bestow favours upon her old friends and relations. The question remains whether either of the ladies realized the past familiarity that had existed between the two young people. Naturally, both the Duchess and her daughter denied knowledge of such intimacies, but even if they had known or suspected the truth, it is doubtful whether either would have been inordinately shocked or worried by Dereham’s appointment as private secretary. Catherine, on the other hand, did express some slight awareness of the questionableness of the selection, for she warned Dereham to ‘take heed what words you speak’.46 The idiocy of the appointment was immeasurably increased by the unbelievable arrogance of Mr Francis Dereham himself. In fact, he seems to have been a perfect match for Catherine in that he was totally heedless of the cares and consequences of tomorrow, and incredibly boastful and insolent in the security of the moment. The instant he began to receive the Queen’s attentions and favours, he acted in a fashion guaranteed to win enemies and antagonize people. He bragged to his friend, Robert Davenport, that:
many men despised him by cause they perceived that the Queen favoured him insomuch that one Mr John, being gentleman usher with the Queen, fell out with him for sitting at dinner or supper with the Queen’s council after all others were risen, and sent [some] one to him to know whether he were of the Queen’s council, and the said Dereham answered the messenger – ‘Go to Mr John and tell him I was of the Queen’s council before he knew her and shall be there after she hath forgotten him.’47
When the crisis came, Dereham as well as the Queen had his illwishers, who were only too willing to remember or fabricate such conversations.
In the make-believe world of Catherine Howard, dark-haired beauties were by magic transformed into princesses; minstrels and troubadours sang songs of courtly love; and chivalry still retained its hold over the imagination. It is not surprising, then, that a young girl should have thought it romantic and exciting to accept a courtly gallant and play the lady bountiful. The gentleman selected for the role of devoted lover and prince charming, was a courtier eminently suited to the part. Thomas Culpeper appears to have been a young man in his late twenties and a person of considerable wealth and social position. He belonged to the King’s privy chamber as one of the well-born servants, whose appointed task it was to care for the monarch’s personal needs and to oversee the repairing and cleaning of the royal chambers. Culpeper was no stranger to the court; he had been a gentleman of the privy chamber for at least two years before Catherine met him; and there is some reason to suspect that he had been introduced into Henry’s household as a child, working his way up from one of the pages who lit the fire and warmed the King’s clothes, through the station of groom and finally to the cherished office of gentleman of the chamber.48 Certainly he was a royal favourite and a person of sufficient importance for his favour and good-will to be worthy of cultivation. As early as 1537 there had been a discussion between Mr Hussey and Lady Lisle as to whether my lord of Sussex or Mr Culpeper was in a better position to be helpful at court, and which should receive the gift of a hawk. It was soon decided that ‘there is no remedy; Culpeper must have a hawk.’49
There is a rather Gilbert-and-Sullivan tradition that Catherine and her gallant were first cousins and had loved each other with a pure and enduring passion ever since they had romped together as children in the nursery.’50 The biological relationship, unfortunately, seems to have been slightly more distant: a conservative estimate makes them sixth cousins,51 while the bit about a nursery romance is simply wishful thinking on the part of those who are determined to elevate their clandestine amour to the level of high romance.
The situation has always had a fatal fascination for maudlin authors who perceive in the relationship between Henry, Culpeper and Catherine the makings of an eternal triangle. Henry is obviously suited for the role of the villainous and bloated husband; Catherine is presented as the innocent and youthful wife who has been forced by her heartless family to marry a repulsive husband, and is led astray by a pure and sustaining love. Finally, the elegant Mr Culpeper is cast as the hero who sacrifices life and chattels for a few fleeting meetings with his true love. The ‘romance’ of Catherine Howard started within a generation of her death, when a Spanish chronicler, who may have been at Henry’s court, wrote a delightful and sympathetic, if singularly inaccurate, account of her career.52 According to this version, Culpeper was so infatuated with the fair Catherine that he went into a marked decline at the news that she was being forced to marry her sovereign lord. Our hero contained his true feelings for the Queen as long as flesh and good sense would endure, but finally risked all by writing her a letter ‘and one day whilst he was dancing with her he was bold enough to slip’ into her hand a note revealing his passion. Catherine answered by the same peculiar method, and ‘Culpeper was overjoyed beyond measure.’ When the terrible truth of their love was revealed to the King, and Culpeper had been cast into prison and threatened with the rack, he boldly dismissed his interrogators by saying:
Gentlemen, do not seek to know more than that the King deprived me of the thing I loved best in the world, and, though you may hang me for it, I can assure you that she loves me as well as I love her, although up to this hour no wrong has ever passed between us. Before the King married her I thought to make her my wife, and when I saw her irremediably lost to me I was like to die.
The young and heroic gentleman then swore on his honour that he knew nothing more, to which the Duke of Somerset replied ‘You have said quite enough, Culpeper, to lose your head.’ This last was absolutely correct, and it is the only part of the legend that could possibly be true.
According to the story, Catherine behaved in the proper manner of all neglected and misunderstood heroines, for when Cromwell, who seems to have come back to life for the occasion, went to interview her, he found ‘her nearly dead’. When she was accused of allowing the Devil to overcome her so soon, she said ‘If I deserve to die for that you had better kill me, and you shall know no more.’ At this point Henry is reported to have been so overcome by his former love for Catherine that he would have saved her, except that his council warned him that she deserved to die, ‘as she betrayed you in thought, and if she had an opportunity would have betrayed you in deed.’ Whether fictitious or not, this last statement is probably correct. Finally, Catherine mounted the scaffold to pay the ultimate price for her thwarted love and instantly became ‘utterly memorable’ by saying: ‘I die a Queen; but I would rather die the wife of Culpeper. God have mercy on my soul. Good people, I beg you, pray for me.’
There is, alas, no evidence that any of this ever took place. In fact, there is considerable proof to the contrary. The Duke of Somerset, who is mentioned as Culpeper’s inquisitor, would not become a duke for another six years; Cromwell, who interviewed the Queen, was peacefully in his grave at the time; Catherine vigorously denied that she had ever loved Culpeper, and at her
death she did not say she would rather have died his wife;53 and Culpeper, on careful scrutiny, turns out to be anything but the dashing and noble-minded hero of chivalric fiction.
It is somewhat difficult to unearth the truth about Thomas Culpeper because he had an elder brother of the same name. In an era of high child mortality it was not unusual for families to give to the first-born sons the same name, in the hope that one child at least might live to preserve the name and family. The situation is further complicated by the fact that both brothers were at court, and one is never quite sure which Thomas is doing what at any given moment. But it is fairly clear that Thomas junior was a gentleman of the privy chamber, while his elder brother – Thomas senior – was one of Cromwell’s minions and servants. The Culpeper brothers were a passionate, swashbuckling, grasping pair, and the records are filled with their efforts to procure monastic lands, sinecures at court and pensions from the crown. The elder brother was on one occasion actually involved in a knife fight over a question of disputed land claims.54
As for Thomas Culpeper junior, he seems to have been an elegant young gentleman with a wayward air and considerable sex appeal. At the international joust held in May of 1540, in which the knighthood of England challenged all comers, he participated in the defence of national honour while Henry and Catherine looked on from the King’s new gatehouse at York palace. The only drawback to the occasion was that Thomas had the misfortune to be defeated and overthrown by Sir Richard Cromwell. If, however, Culpeper fared poorly in mock war, he found easy victory with the ladies, for Lady Lisle sent him a coy and touching note, enclosing two bracelets of her colours and saying that, ‘they are the first that ever I sent to any man.’55 Moreover, the picture of Culpeper in the guise of an Arthurian hero who is willing to risk life and limb for the Queen’s sake, is further marred by the report, which is in part substantiated by official evidence, of a particularly ugly scandal indicating that the gentleman was not quite as saintly as fiction requires. At the time of Culpeper’s arrest and execution, a London merchant wrote to a friend in Germany mentioning that only two years previously Culpeper:
had violated the wife of a certain park-keeper in a woody thicket, while, horrid to relate! three or four of his most profligate attendants were holding her at his bidding. For this act of wickedness he was, notwithstanding, pardoned by the King, after he had been delivered into custody by the villagers on account of this crime, and likewise a murder which he had committed in his resistance to them, when they first endeavoured to apprehend him.56
Royal favouritism could go far in protecting a man from the consequences of his violence. The law applied to all subjects, but the Crown could enforce it with rigid brutality or suspend its operation altogether.
History might have been able to overlook the questionable activities of youth and dismiss the ugly story of rape and violence as another example of the uninhibited vitality of the Tudor age, except for the fact that Mr Thomas Culpeper seems to have refrained from the proper heroic sentiments and actions during his interrogation and trial, for his role in the Queen’s disgrace and treason. His evidence was totally contradictory, which is not surprising because torture was presumably used on him. But instead of steadfastly assuming the responsibility and defiantly telling his inquisitors not to investigate further into the ways of true love, he consistently endeavoured to shift the blame to Catherine, hinting that there were other gentlemen besides himself involved, and that he had met the Queen in secret only at her imperious demand. Worse still, instead of pining away as a result of unrequited passion for Catherine after her marriage to the King, he seems to have been happily sharing another lady’s bed.’57
There is no evidence that Catherine and her distant cousin were brought up together, but they certainly met before she became Queen, for Culpepcr himself reported that Catherine said to him that, had she ‘tarried still in the maidens’ chamber’, she ‘would have tried’ him.58 Moreover, there were persistent rumours of a marriage between the two, reported not only by the lovelorn Francis Dereham but also by the Dowager Duchess. It is difficult to piece together the truth of their relationship. Culpeper in one breath said that the Queen, while still a maid at court, had been so desperately in love with him that, ‘she could not but weep in the presence of her fellows’, and in the next instant he reported that he had ‘found so little favour at her hands’ before her marriage to the Kung that ‘he was then moved to set by others’.59 Certainly Catherine vigorously denied ever being in love with him, and she claimed that she had awarded him those dangerous and secret midnight meetings simply to please him, since he had pleaded for these treasured moments. On the other hand, Culpeper later stated that he had come to the backstair conferences only at the bidding of the Queen herself, who was ‘languishing and dying of love for him’.60 Finally, to complicate the situation still further, we must reckon with that remarkable female, Lady Rochford, who functioned as agent provocateur and liaison officer between the young people. She was a Howard by marriage, having wedded George Boleyn, Lord Rochford, who was Anne Boleyn’s brother and at the time of the Queen’s death had been accused and executed for incest with his sister. Lady Rochford went into retirement after her husband’s death but returned to court to serve in Catherine Howard’s household as one of the ladies of the privy chamber. She seems to have won the new Queen’s trust, which was unfortunate since the lady was a pathological meddler, with most of the instincts of a procuress who achieves a vicarious pleasure from arranging assignations.
Out of this tangle of fiction and falsehood two truths emerge: first, the Queen, her paramour, and Lady Rochford, all acted with unbelievable imbecility; second, neither Catherine nor Culpeper behaved in the high-minded and self-sacrificing fashion expected of heroes and heroines, but instead consistently lied and endeavoured to wriggle out of the consequences of their folly by blaming each other. The Queen accused Culpeper and Lady Rochford, claiming that the latter ‘would at every lodging search the back doors’ and secret meeting-places. Moreover, Catherine insisted that she had promised to speak to Culpeper only at the constant nagging of Lady Rochford, and had done so only after Lady Rochford had sworn ‘upon a book’ that Culpeper ‘meant nothing but honesty’. Catherine was willing to oblige, but she warned: ‘Alas, madam, will this never end? I pray you, bid him desire no more to trouble me or send to me.’61 Jane Rochford naturally had an entirely different story to relate, claiming that she had acted at all times upon the Queen’s explicit instructions.62
As far as the facts are concerned, we know that Catherine was showing Thomas Culpeper marked favours in March and April of 1541, some eight months after her marriage to Henry, and that she presented him with a velvet cap garnished with a jewelled brooch. That she realized this was an action capable of being misrepresented is evidenced by the warning which accompanied the gift – Culpeper should put it under his cloak, ‘that nobody see it’.63 Presumably it was during the same month that Catherine wrote her only extant letter; a note, as she confessed, written with considerable pain by an inexperienced hand, and, one is tempted to add, by a singularly naive young lady:
Master Culpeper, I heartily recommend me unto you, praying you to send me word how that you do. It was showed me that you was sick, the which thing troubled me very much till such time that I hear from you praying you to send me word how that you do, for I never longed so much for [a] thing as I do to see you and to speak with you, the which I trust shall be shortly now. The which doth comfortly me very much when I think of it, and when I think again that you shall depart from me again it makes my heart to die to think what fortune I have that I cannot be always in your company. It my trust is always in you that you will be as you have promised me, and in that hope I trust upon still, praying you then that you will come when my Lady Rochford is here, for then I shall be best at leisure to be at your commandment, thanking you for that you have promised me to be so good unto that poor fellow my man which is one of the griefs that I do feel to depart from him fo
r then I do know no one that I dare trust to send to you, and therefore I pray you take him to be with you that I may sometime hear from you one thing. I pray you to give me a horse for my man for I have much ado to get one and therefore I pray send me one by him and in so doing I am as I said afor, and thus I take my leave of you trusting to see you shortly again and I would you was with me now that you might see what pain I take in writing to you.
Yours as long as life endures
KATHERYN
One thing I had forgotten and that is to instruct my man to tarry here with me still for he says whatsomever you bid him he will do it.64
The expression ‘yours as long as life endures’ was quite enough to cost the Queen her head, and does not sound like the words of a girl who is meeting a young man simply to be obliging. In fact, the evidence, such as it is, indicates that the initiative came from Catherine, and if we can believe the interrogations of the Queen’s servants, it was Catherine herself who pestered Lady Rochford, asking her ‘when she should have the thing she promised her’.65 The Queen was not disappointed, for Lady Rochford successfully arranged a number of secret meetings between Catherine and Culpeper in which softly-spoken words were whispered in dark corners. Only Lady Rochford was present as chaperon, and on one occasion the lady claims to have been asleep during most of the meeting. Not even the King’s long-delayed progress to the northern counties in the late summer and autumn of 1541 prevented the meetings, and along the route Catherine and the helpful Lady Rochford arranged means whereby Culpeper could be notified of the proposed hour and place.
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