by Julia Fox
Manox was easy to find. He had in fact done rather well for himself after leaving the duchess’s employment. He had married Margaret, the widow of Nicholas Jennings, a wealthy London alderman, and now lived very comfortably with her in the late alderman’s residence in Streatham. He too proved most forthcoming. He agreed that he had asked to touch “her secrets,” a favor he demanded as a special sign of her love. Clearly dismissing his request as unimportant, Catherine had consented on the condition “that he would desire no more” for, she had asserted, “I will never be naught [wicked or sinful] with you and able to marry me you be not.” Although he had touched her private parts quite often, he maintained that that was all he ever had done but he too confirmed that Dereham had replaced him in the fickle Mistress Howard’s affections. Dereham, Manox said, and his friend, Edward Waldegrave, who was infatuated by another maiden, “haunted nightly” Catherine’s chamber “and would commonly banket [banquet] and be merry there till two or three of the clock in the morning.” Indeed, Manox had felt so jealous of his successor that he had written an anonymous letter to the duchess to advise a random check on her maidens’ bedchamber to see whether it contained more than maidens.
Catherine would surely be able to remember the incident. And she could hardly have forgotten her intimacies with Dereham, now so meticulously documented from the statements of Mary Hall and so many other deponents. Dereham, who was “seriously examined,” a code for torture, confessed “that he hath had carnal knowledge with the Queen afore marriage, being in bed with her in his doublet and hose divers times and six or seven times in naked bed.” When Dereham’s close friend, Robert Davenport, was also interrogated “seriously,” and imprisoned alongside him in the Tower, he corroborated Dereham’s statement. He had, he affirmed, “seen the said Dereham and Catherine Howard kiss oft and lie together upon the bed.” He had even heard Katherine Tylney, who at that time had to share Catherine’s bed, plead, “I pray you Mr Dereham, lie still.” Since Davenport went on to say that he could “hear Dereham blow and strive to have had his will,” poor Katherine Tylney’s entreaties for a peaceful night were evidently ignored. Davenport also mentioned other times when Dereham had visited Catherine’s chamber and “no woman was with her.”
The councilors were thoroughness epitomized. All evidence was carefully substantiated, cross-checked and cross-referenced, no possible witness ignored. They took particular care to track down any servants who had left the duchess’s employ but might possess valuable information. One such was Andrew Maunsay. He swore that “he thrice saw the Queen, then Mrs. Catherine Howard, lie in her bed and one Durnand [Dereham], a gentleman then in the house, lie suspiciously on the bed in his doublet and hose.” Unaware that she had already been interrogated, he suggested that the councilors should contact Katherine Tylney who “lay in the bed at the time and can tell more.”
Still Catherine continued to lie. When, finally, she decided to cooperate and start to tell the truth, up to a point at least, Cranmer felt sorry for her. He “found her in such lamentation and heaviness, as I never saw no creature,” he wrote to Henry. “It would have pitied any man’s heart in the world to have looked upon her,” he continued. She wept, she raged, she worked herself up into a “frenzy” of fear. She did admit her relationship with Dereham but swore that all that he “did unto her was of his importune forcement, and, in a manner, violence, rather than of her free consent and will.” Yet she hoped for a miracle: that Henry might pardon her. Calling herself his “most sorrowful subject and most vile wretch in the world,” she begged him to take into account her “youth,” her “ignorance,” her “frailness.” Although she acknowledged herself “worthy of most extreme punishment,” she trusted to his “infinite goodness, pity, compassion and mercy.” Her written confession was so perfectly pitched to tug at Henry’s heartstrings as to suggest that she was given help to compose it.
The atmosphere in the queen’s apartments during the next few days was tense. Their routine interrupted, her ladies tried to calm and comfort Catherine as more and more revelations came to light. The agony of suspense was so much worse for Jane. While every new disclosure was horrifying enough, she knew it was but the tip of the iceberg. Even the once fun-loving Catherine was far too apprehensive for amusement. “Whereas, before, she did nothing but dance and rejoice,” Marillac informed Francis, “now, when the musicians come they are told that it is no more the time to dance.” Soon, Hampton Court was strictly guarded. For as long as the interrogations focused only on Catherine’s life before her wedding, both she and Jane felt that they might survive. It could be a matter of holding their nerve. The king would be furious, he would be disillusioned, he would be hurt, but he would not be branded a cuckold for the second time. He might, therefore, be compassionate. The Duchess of Norfolk, oblivious to her own impending imprisonment, was optimistic. Davenport told his interrogators, Sir John Gage, Sir Richard Rich, and Henry Bradshaw, that he had heard the duchess say that she believed Dereham and Catherine were in trouble “for some matter done when they were here,” in which case they “should not die for it.” She may have been right, for Cranmer himself had at one point reassured Catherine that the king was inclined to mercy.
And there could have been a way out. If Catherine and Dereham had agreed to marry and had then copulated, that could amount to a precontract. Since Anne of Cleves’s presumed precontract with the son of the Duke of Lorraine had provided the principal cause for the annulment of her union with Henry, a comparable situation could now arise. But Catherine refused to grasp the lifeline. While she admitted that Dereham had left the huge sum of one hundred pounds with her for safekeeping when he had gone away, and that marriage talk had been bandied about between them, she would not concede that it amounted to a precontract. The archbishop reported back to the king that what she had said was “not so much as I thought,” but he still believed it “sufficient to prove a contract.” Unfortunately, further revelations would make the precontract escape route irrelevant.
Until that happened, it was a waiting game. The queen hoped that her confession would stop the questions. It did not; the questions went on, moving in ever widening directions. Sooner or later, the councilors would latch on to Catherine’s more recent conduct and that would entrap Jane as well. A distraught Catherine almost lost her mind with worry. She “refuses to drink or eat and weeps and cries like a madwoman, so that they must take away things by which she might hasten her death,” wrote a well-informed Marillac to the French king. Although less serious than the damning facts that so far lay undiscovered, an additional complication was that Catherine had had fresh contact with Dereham. Her relationship with Manox had indeed petered out once he had carved himself a new life with his rich widow, and for a while she had lost touch with Dereham too. Much to the suspicion of the investigating councilors, he had gone to Ireland when his frolics with Catherine had come to an end. It would have been better for both had he stayed there. But the break was only temporary. In a gesture that could be misinterpreted as acquiescence to blackmail, which maybe it was, the queen had employed Joan Bulmer, an acquaintance from her Horsham days, after Joan had written to her seeking a position for old times’ sake. Stupidly, the queen had also welcomed Dereham into her household upon his return from Ireland. Now there were questions about whether they had resumed their affair. Since she had met her former lover within the confines of her privy chamber “divers times” and had once publicly advised him to “take heed what words you speak,” a belated nod toward discretion, there was yet more scope for Henry’s unremitting investigators.
And discretion was not Dereham’s watchword. Recklessly, he had boasted of his connection with the queen. Davenport, under pressure again, described a particularly telling incident. When Dereham had come back to court, Davenport related, he “fell out” with Mr. Johns, Catherine’s gentleman usher, and therefore one of her most important male servants, because the queen “favored him” (Dereham) and because Dereham obstinately sat with the quee
n’s councilors for meals, a place to which he was not entitled. A furious Mr. Johns had sent over a messenger to ask sarcastically whether Dereham was one of the Queen’s Council. “Go to, Mr. Johns,” spat back Dereham, “and tell him I was of the Queen’s Council before he knew her and should be when she hath forgotten him.” The councilors solemnly wrote down all of Davenport’s recollections but it was still not quite enough to nail Dereham for anything more than sleeping with a flirtatious Catherine before her marriage. However, Davenport suddenly delivered the coup de grâce. He asked his jailers to fetch someone from the King’s Council because he had something to tell them. Three council members hurried to the Tower before he changed his mind. What they heard was worth its weight in gold: according to Davenport, Dereham had said that should the king die, “I am sure I might marry her.” It was a capital crime to imagine the king’s death. Davenport had condemned his friend.
He had not condemned Catherine, however. She had already managed that for herself, for she had embarked upon an entirely new relationship within months of becoming queen. Manox and Dereham were her past. Thomas Culpepper was her present. “The Queen 3 or 4 times every day since she was in this trouble,” Jane confessed later, would ask her “what she heard of Culpepper.” Since Jane had become entangled in Catherine’s illicit passion from its early stages, the queen’s disquiet was no surprise. What was surprising was that Catherine had indulged in such folly to begin with. Reveling in the pleasures of the flesh as a girl was one thing but giving way to similar temptation as a queen was quite another, particularly with her own cousin’s death at the hands of the Calais swordsman providing a pertinent reminder of the consequences.
It is true that Culpepper had many obvious attractions and that Catherine had met him and appears to have liked him when she was serving Anne of Cleves. A very distant relation of Catherine’s, he came from a respectable and fairly wealthy gentry family and was well established within the king’s privy chamber. He was also unmarried, probably charming, courteous, and solicitous, and close to Catherine’s age. The contrast between this appealing young man and Henry, with his thinning hair, bloated body, and suppurating ulcers, could not have been more marked. Perhaps, for Catherine, it was as simple as that. Certainly, she was not deterred by an unsavory story associated with the young man that linked him to the rape of a park keeper’s wife whom his attendants “held down for him in a thicket” and then to a “murder committed when some villagers tried to apprehend him for the crime.” She told Jane that she “trusted Culpepper more than her own brother.” In fact, she more than trusted him. She loved him. She said as much in her one surviving, incriminating letter to him. “I heard you were sick,” she wrote, “and never longed so much for anything as to see you. It makes my heart die to think I cannot be always in your company. Come when my Lady Rochford is here, for then I shall be best at leisure to be at your commandment.” She signed it, “Yours as long as life endures, Catherine,” scarcely the tone to be expected of a queen to a subject, not least since at the time the word company had a well-known sexual resonance.
Catherine’s desire for Culpepper led her to abandon caution. It was to cost the queen her life, but it was also to cost Jane hers. We shall never know whether Jane realized what she was getting into when the Culpepper fiasco commenced. The most viable explanation for Jane’s behavior is that what started innocently enough developed, with terrifying speed, into a deadly vortex of deceit and intrigue. When the queen first ordered her to take a note, a token, or a verbal message to Culpepper, Jane had to make a split-second decision. She had no real reason to think that the queen’s request was connected to a passionate affair. Attendants were expected to run errands; that was part of their function. Indeed, when Culpepper received gifts from Catherine, the queen told a male servant, Henry Webb, to escort him to her apartments. Jane had clawed her way back into a senior post within the royal household and she wanted to stay there. That meant she must obey her mistress. Although not born to rule, Catherine could be as imperious and demanding as her royal husband. To blatantly refuse her instructions was unthinkable.
If she had done, Jane’s career would have been over. It would have meant permanent withdrawal from court to the tranquillity, or boredom, of Blickling. When her jointure had been agreed, Jane had rejected that lifestyle. Alternatively, she could have gone to the king and told him that his wife was communicating with one of the gentlemen in his privy chamber. But should it have come to the queen’s word against hers, there would have been no contest. Henry could easily have dismissed the missives as innocuous and blamed Jane for tale-bearing. Even had she decided to risk it, the sheer practicality of gaining access to the king posed almost insuperable obstacles. As a woman, especially one about whom a whiff of treason might still linger, she could not approach him directly. She would have needed a male go-between. Cromwell would have been the ideal choice but the minister had perished. As for her father, Jane knew his interests were intellectual rather than political. Lord Morley was not unworldly: he came to court when required, he fulfilled his duty by sitting on the various panels of peers, he was not averse to accumulating ex-monastic property despite his religious convictions. In particular, he was contentedly settling into his new estate of Markhall in Essex, the childhood home of Alice Middleton, Sir Thomas More’s widow, which he had purchased in 1538, the very year that Jane’s jointure was agreed. However, he was at his happiest when engrossed in his books and his translations. Never one to raise his head above the parapet, he was hardly likely to break the habit of a lifetime now. Clearly, Jane did not approach her father, nor is there any hint that she consulted her brother, Sir Henry Parker. She was on her own, as she had been during other key episodes in her life, and she chose the path of silence. For her, it was much trod.
And once she had decided to take that first message, and that message became part of a series, Jane had passed the point of no return. “Come when my Lady Rochford is here,” the queen had written to Culpepper. What may have started harmlessly had taken on a momentum of its own and Jane could not extricate herself. It was now too late to crave country air or to attempt to see the king. Her situation was actually worse than that of John Hall’s when he listened, probably with mounting horror, to his sister’s unsolicited confidences. Mary Hall had heard Catherine’s lovemaking and had helped her procure the key to the maidens’ chamber, but Catherine then had been as free as a wild bird—she had not been the king’s wife. When Jane became immersed in Catherine’s intrigues, the bird was caged and the king kept the key. Because she had not acted immediately, Jane had drastically reduced her options. If she opened her mouth now, charges of misprision of treason would loom and all of the property she had so painstakingly regained since George’s death would be forfeit yet again.
All she could do, even though her danger intensified when Catherine’s romance went beyond the letter stage to nocturnal trysts, was to go along with it, do her best to minimize the dangers and hope that, somehow, it would not be discovered. Paradoxically, as Jane may have realized, should Catherine become pregnant, the baby could be their savior. Henry was still sleeping with his wife, his optimism undiminished; if Catherine did have a child, it could as easily be Henry’s as Culpepper’s. And, should it be a boy, Henry would be so overjoyed that Catherine would be his precious jewel forever. If that were so, the loyal Viscountess Rochford’s place within the bedchamber would be secure too.
But this scenario had depended on secrecy. The exposure of Catherine’s youthful adventures had jeopardized everything. For the few days that the archbishop and the councilors questioned the queen about her years at Horsham and Lambeth and about Manox and Dereham, Jane was in limbo. Catherine told her that if the Culpepper “matter came not out, she feared not for nothing.” Unfortunately, too many of those already rounded up knew enough about it to make sure that come out it would. It was just a question of time.
CHAPTER 31
“That Bawd, the Lady Jane Rochford”
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nbsp; A WEEK AFTER HENRY had sat back in his small barge while his bargemen rowed him upriver from Hampton Court to Westminster and his waiting councilors, the Culpepper fiasco was out in the open. It could hardly have been otherwise. Catherine, Jane, and Culpepper must each have known that their chances of escaping detection were slim once the councilors really set to work. According to Marillac, the French ambassador, it was Dereham who first blew the whistle. Desperate that his forceful interrogators should believe his protestations that he had not slept with Catherine after her marriage to the king, he said that “Culpepper had succeeded him in the Queen’s affections.”
That was enough. For Catherine to say to Jane, as she did, that if the “matter” of Culpepper “came out…she would never confess it” and to demand that Jane should “deny it utterly” was pointless. Catherine had already cracked under pressure from Cranmer about Manox and Dereham, her transparent lies quickly exposed. She would fare no better now; neither would Jane. By the time that Henry’s diligent councilors had worked their magic in tracking down every potential witness, they were able to compile a formidable dossier. They had times, places, the names, and statements of those whose suspicions had been aroused, and they were soon ready to take depositions from the three most fatally implicated: Culpepper, Catherine, and Jane. Henry was determined to “find out the bottom of the pot.”
Her normal household dispersed, their ears buzzing with lurid details of their mistress’s immorality, Catherine was taken from a desolate Hampton Court along the Thames to the former nunnery at Syon where she was to live in much reduced circumstances. Three chambers were prepared for her, hung with “mean stuff, without any cloth of estate.” She was cared for by four gentlewomen, one of whom was to be Lady Isabel Baynton, and two chamberers. Jane, of course, was separated from her. Sir Edward Baynton was deputed by the king to be in overall charge of the queen’s establishment. Catherine had to leave behind the more ostentatious trappings of royalty, such as her fabulous jewels. The king even specified the clothes that she was allowed to take with her. She could have six French hoods, six pairs of sleeves, six gowns, and six kirtles. She could wear satin damask or velvet. Her hoods could be edged with gold, but she was to have no precious stones or pearls on any of her garments. It was quite a comedown for this jewel of womanhood. It could have been worse. Culpepper was conveyed to the Tower. So was Jane, and she would have barely enough time to collect her thoughts before the questioning would start.
