Catherine Howard

by Lacey Baldwin Smith

  Culpeper and Dereham were drawn from the Tower of London to Tyburn, and there Culpeper, after an exhortation made to the people to pray for him, he standing on the ground by the gallows, kneeled down and had his head stricken off; and then Dereham was hanged, membered, bowelled, headed, and quartered [and both] their heads set on London Bridge.66

  Meanwhile the entire Howard dynasty had been shaken to its core, and all who had in any way been associated with Catherine either at Lambeth or at court were imprisoned. In fact, so many members, servants and retainers of the clan were involved that the Tower failed to house them all, and makeshift prisons had to be found elsewhere. The council had been on the trail of various of the Queen’s relatives for well over a week, but now that Culpeper and Dereham were dead, room was made in the Tower for new suspects. Lord William was incarcerated on the 9th, the Dowager Duchess was seized on the 10th, and the Queen’s aunt, Lady Bridgewater, was removed to the Tower on the 13th. While the less fortunate were gloomily meditating upon their sins in a stone cell in the Tower, other members of the Howard tribe were frantically endeavouring to dissociate themselves from the Queen’s disgrace. Norfolk was shocked into horrified and transparent activity, and he exclaimed with tears in his eyes that his own anguish and horror were caused by the thought of the King’s grief at this his second betrayal. Actually it was the fear of the King’s wrath directed at the uncle of two adulterous wives that spurred the Duke into frenzied action. He sat with the rest of the council at the trial of Culpeper and Dereham and was remarked to have laughed loudly during the examination of the prisoners, ‘as if he had cause to rejoice’.67 He took excellent care to avoid his stepmother, the Dowager Duchess, and later boasted that it was he who had first revealed her treason when she broke open Dereham’s chests and burned some of the contents. In a final effort to escape the consequences of his niece’s dishonour and to ward off the political debacle that threatened, Norfolk tactfully retired to his country estate and wrote Henry a letter in which he hysterically denied any knowledge of the crimes committed by his ‘ungracious’ stepmother, his ‘unhappy’ brother, and his ‘lewd’ sister. Norfolk was terrified that the King would ‘conceive a displeasure’ against him, and he besought his sovereign, ‘prostrate at your royal feet’, to forgive him the sins of his seditious family and to ‘continue my good and gracious Lord’.68 The Duke was not alone in his efforts to disown his niece; Catherine’s brothers and cousins, along with the relatives of the unfortunate Culpeper, were all in a frenzy to extricate themselves from the web of scandal. Catherine and her suitors stood alone, for they had placed themselves outside the limits of blood and family; they faced alone and unloved the truth that the King’s wrath is death.

  For a moment it appeared as if the Queen’s disgrace would result in the family and political catastrophe for which the Protestant elements of the realm piously hoped. On 22 December the Howard tribe, with the exception of the Duke, were tried and found guilty of misprision and forfeited all their goods and possessions to the Crown and their bodies to perpetual imprisonment. Henry’s vengeance, however, was short-lived. The Duke of Norfolk escaped completely and returned to London with only slightly tarnished authority; Margaret, the wife of Lord William Howard, and Anne, the wife of Catherine’s brother Henry, were released from the Tower and pardoned of the crime of misprision within two months; the testy old Duchess was let out in May; and Lord William was pardoned in August of 1542.

  Charles Howard, the Queen’s brother, found it politic to remove himself from court and seek fame and fortune in the defence of Christendom against the infidel. Within a year he was back again, the government having decided to overlook his family misfortunes and his own dangerous flirtation with the King’s niece. The sovereign’s clemency and charity even included another brother, Henry Howard, who received within a month of his sister’s execution a gift from the Crown of £10 given ‘intuitu charitatis’.69 Only Lady Rochford, who had been the messenger and agent provocateur of Catherine’s presumptive adultery with Culpeper, suffered the full penalty of the law.

  December was a bleak and dreary month for the King. There was neither music nor festivities during the Christmas season, and Henry entertained himself with hunting and restless perambulation on the outskirts of the city. Old, weary and disillusioned, he waited for the new year and the new parliament. The assembly of lords and commons met on 16 January. The King himself was present and listened while Thomas Audley, the Lord Chancellor, gave the speech from the throne. The royal heart, so buffeted by his wife’s betrayal, may have found solace in the words of his chancellor and the reaction of his devoted servants in parliament. Thomas Audley congratulated the assembled throng upon the good fortune that permitted so fine and wise a sovereign to rule over them; then, as the King’s name was spoken, every member rose and bowed. Everyone must have recognized the nature of the monarch’s sorrow and the unsavoury task that confronted the High Court of Parliament in regard to the Queen’s fate. The Lord Chancellor, however, was at considerable pains to impress his audience with the notion that they had been called together to produce sound law, firm justice and good authority, and not for the sake of a single individual. When Audley had concluded, the lords and commons rose again, ‘as if to acknowledge the truth of his words’, and to give ‘thanks to Almighty God who had preserved for so long a time such an exceptional prince over this kingdom’.70

  Five days later, on the 21st, the Bill of Attainder against the Queen was introduced into the upper house. Evidently the peers were not altogether happy with the procedure against the Queen, for an act of attainder could condemn a person to death without a hearing or defence, and the Lord Chancellor suggested that they should not proceed too hastily for the ‘queen was in no sense a mean and private person but an illustrious and public one. Therefore her cause had to be judged with such integrity’ that no whisper of injustice might spread abroad. Consequently he proposed that a deputation be sent to Syon to calm Catherine’s ‘womanish fears’, and allow her to speak in her own defence, for it was ‘but just that a princess should be tried by equal laws’ with peers of the realm.71 Though a committee of the lords did visit the Queen, she was not given a chance to defend herself at law. Suddenly it was decided to go through with the act of attainder, with the important proviso that Henry himself would not be present at the passing of the Bill. Instead, the monarch would give his assent in absentia, ‘by letters-patent under the great seal of England’ so as to spare himself the grief and pain of hearing once again the ‘wicked facts of the case’.72 A week later, the Bill received a second reading; on 8 February it was read for a third time; and on 11 February the Queen’s death warrant became law.

  The statute under which Catherine and Lady Rochford suffered was unique. It set forth the high treason committed by the Queen, and then went on to reaffirm and give parliamentary sanction to the trial and condemnation of Culpeper and Dereham, and the sentence of misprision received by the various members of the Howard family. The royal assent by letters-patent was asserted to be ‘as good strength and force as though the King’s person had been there personally present, and had assented openly and publicly to the same’. Finally, the act locked the stable door after the horse had been stolen: it declared that should the King again ‘take a fancy to any woman’, esteeming her ‘a pure and clean maid when indeed the proof may or shall after appear contrary’, and should such a lady ‘couple herself with her Sovereign Lord’ without declaring to him the existence of ‘her unchaste life’, then ‘every such offence shall be deemed and adjudged High Treason.’73

  Throughout the long dreary weeks of tension and despair Catherine had been running true to form – alternating wild hysteria and agonizing self-appraisals with haughty disdain and senseless cheerfulness. Catherine is not easy to judge or to analyse. It may not be accident that no one seems to have been surprised by the revelation of her past life except the King, and it may be significant that no one came to her defence or appears to have pitied her fate.
This was in part a matter of social ethics and political expediency, for she had placed herself outside the pale of sympathy. Others of the King’s wives, however, had won passionate avowals of innocence, and even in the face of the monarch’s wrath, men had risked much to express their trust and love. Catherine of Aragon, Anne Boleyn and Anne of Cleves all had their champions, but Catherine Howard had none. It may have been because she was shallow and brittle, arrogant in success and servile in distress.

  Her actions can be excused on the grounds that she was an ignorant child of nature, but the evidence does not point that way. Catherine was just as well-educated as most of her contemporaries of an equivalent social position; she certainly had enough sense to conceal as long as possible the affair with Culpeper; and she appears to have had something resembling a guilty conscience since she warned Culpeper not to mention their meetings, even in the confessional, for fear that the King, being head of the Church, would in some mysterious and mystical fashion come to hear of it. The only deed that Catherine accomplished with splendid deliberation and studied magnificence was to die as befitted a queen and a Howard, for she shared in the universal conviction of her age that the ‘chief care [of life] was to leave a good opinion in the people’s minds now at parting’.74 There was a peculiar pride in dying well. Not only was it necessary to the soul’s salvation to die humble and repentant, confessing one’s faults, but there was also a perverse pride in not wishing to manifest fear in the face of the inevitable. Breeding and training determined that on the eve of her death, Catherine should request that the block be brought to her cell so she might learn, ‘how she was to place her head on it’.75

  Just before the Queen was taken to the Tower she received a deputation of lords who were anxious to hear her cause before the act of attainder was passed. She ‘openly confessed and acknowledged to them the great crime of which she had been guilty against the most high God and a kind prince’. Then, recalling that she was still a Howard, she ‘begged them all to implore his majesty not to impute her crime to her whole kindred and family’. Lastly, she besought:

  his majesty that it would please him to bestow some of her clothes on those maid-servants, who had been with her from the time of her marriage, since she had nothing now [with which] to recompense them as they deserved.76

  No words could have been more appropriate to the occasion, and the peers left Syon feeling deeply gratified that Catherine should not only acknowledge the justice of her death, but also act the role of a queen even on the threshold of death.

  On 10 February 1542, she was escorted by water to the Tower. There was one anguished moment when the full impact of what was in store suddenly broke upon her and she had to be conducted forcibly into her barge. The small flotilla was led by a galley containing the Lord Privy Seal and other members of the council, plus a number of guards and servants. The Queen’s vessel then followed, which was closed to inquisitive eyes; and finally the Duke of Suffolk in a barge crowded with soldiers, brought up the rear. As the procession drifted downstream it passed under London Bridge, with its impaled remains of Messrs Culpeper and Dereham, and finally came to rest at Traitors’ Gate. There Catherine was accorded the full honours due to a queen, and, dressed in black velvet, she mounted the stairs to her prison chamber.

  The time of the execution had not yet been determined, and it was not until the evening of the 12th that Catherine was commanded to ‘dispose her soul and prepare for death’, for she was to die on the following Monday morning. At seven the next morning the entire council, the foreign ambassadors, and a handful of curious Londoners gathered at the Tower – all, that is, except Norfolk who wisely remained in self-imposed exile, and Suffolk who had been taken suddenly ill.77 At nine the executions commenced; Catherine suffered first. She was so weak that she had to be helped up the scaffold and could scarcely speak the customary words of edification and confession. Everything indicates that she made the ‘most godly and Christian end that ever was heard tell of since the world’s creation’. Both Catherine and Lady Rochford:

  desired all Christian people to take regard unto their worthy and just punishment with death for their offences [for they had sinned] against God heinously from their youth upward, in breaking all his commandments, and also against the King’s royal Majesty very dangerously.

  They had been, they confessed, ‘justly condemned by the laws of the realm and parliament to die’, and they begged ‘the people to take example of them’, to amend ‘their ungodly lives, and gladly to obey the King in all things, for whose preservation they did heartily pray’.78 After the severed body of Catherine Howard had been covered with a cloth, Lady Rochford took her place on the platform. She was still suffering from nervous shock, but she also died well except that one observer felt that she took too long in enumerating the ‘several faults which she had committed in her life’.79

  After all is said and done, one is tempted to ponder the whys and wherefores of Catherine’s life. The brilliant spectacle of her career soon faded, leaving nothing but a King grown suddenly grey and aged, and a law declaring it to be treason for a lady to marry the King unless she were a virgin, which, it was noted, rather limited the number of candidates. When Henry stood before his council listening to the story of his wife’s infidelities, the tears trickled down his cheeks as the illusions and obsessions of his life shattered around him. The King could never forgive Catherine for what she had taken from him – the image of his youth. But even in doing her royal husband wrong, Catherine is strangely inconsequential; Henry would surely have grown old and senile, even without the knowledge that he had been cuckolded and cheated. There is a certain inevitability in the tragedy that occurred, but somehow one feels that the shallow motives, the juvenile desires, and petty and vain considerations of the Queen had little to do with the final calamity – the end would have been the same, history would have been unchanged, had she never lived or died. Possibly no worse verdict can be passed upon a human life. Here in a twisted, obscure sort of way lies the essential failure of Catherine Howard’s life: although she was caught up in the game of politics and was never a free agent, the Queen never brought happiness or love, security or respect, into the world in which she lived. She enacted a light-hearted dream in which juvenile delinquency, wanton selfishness, and ephemeral hedonism, were the abiding themes. Who is to say whose fault it was – Catherine’s or that of her age?

  Picture Section

  1. and 2. Henry VIII and Catherine Howard as depicted in the Window of King Solomon and the Queen of Sheba, King’s College Chapel. There is no authenticated likeness of Catherine. The only statement that can be made with any degree of certainty about Catherine’s birth is that she was one of the youngest children of a family of ten, and that she was born before 1525, most probably in 1521.

  3. and 4. Portraits of Henry in later life, when he had become very overweight.

  Sixteenth-century London as Catherine would have known it. The panoramas are from Anthony Van den Wyngaerde’s Panorama of London, Westminster and Southwark, produced in 1544. Where Catherine was born and reared is still a total mystery. Some sources indicate London, others suggest the Howard residence at Lambeth, while still others favour Oxenheath in Kent, the home of Catherine’s maternal uncle, William Cotton. The only really authenticated fact is that Catherine spent her childhood with her step-grandmother, the Dowager Duchess of Norfolk, who divided her time between her estates at Horsham in Sussex, and the Howard suburban residence at Lambeth.

  5. The Palace of Whitehall.

  6. and 7. London Bridge where the heads of Catherine’s lovers, Francis Dereham and Thomas Culpeper, were impaled on spikes following their execution.

  8. and 9. Old St Paul’s Cathedral.

  10. and 11. Greenwich Palace.

  12. Westminster.

  13. Richmond Palace.

  14. Henry VIII in Council.

  15. Anne Boleyn was Catherine’s cousin.

  16. Thomas Howard, the Third Duke of Norfolk, the a
mbitious uncle of both Anne Boleyn and Catherine. He encouraged Henry’s courtship of his niece, Catherine, in spite of her unsuitability for the role of queen.

  17. The Red Queen, Anne of Cleves.

  18. The most widely used portrait of Catherine but not an authenticated likeness of her.

  19. It fell to Archbishop Thomas Cranmer to inform Henry of his young wife’s adultery.

  20. At Hampton Court there is what is described as the ‘haunted gallery’, which adjoins the Queen’s chambers and Henry’s chapel. It is there that Catherine is said to have eluded her guards, and sought out her husband, who was hearing Mass. Just as she reached the door, she was seized and forced back to her chambers, while her screams resounded up and down the gallery. This presumably is the explanation of the female form, dressed in traditional white, which drifts down the gallery to the door of the chapel, and then hurries back, ‘a ghastly look of despair’ upon its face and uttering ‘the most unearthly shrieks’, until the phantom disappears through the chamber door at the end of the gallery.

  21., 22. and 23. Catherine passed through Traitors Gate on 10 February 1542 and on to her short stay at the Tower of London.

  24. and 25. The Chapel of St Peter ad Vincula and the site of the scaffold on Tower Green, where Catherine was beheaded by a single axe blow on Monday 13 February 1542. She was later buried in the Chapel.