Henry VIII's Last Love: The Extraordinary Life of Katherine Willoughby, Lady-in-Waiting to the Tudors

by David Baldwin

  First published 2015

  Amberley Publishing

  The Hill, Stroud

  Gloucestershire, GL5 4EP

  www.amberley-books.com

  Copyright © David Baldwin, 2015

  The right of David Baldwin to be identified as the Author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyrights, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  ISBN 9781445641041 (PRINT)

  ISBN 9781445641133 (eBOOK)

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without the permission in writing from the Publishers.

  British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data.

  A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

  Typesetting and Origination by Amberley Publishing

  Printed in the UK.

  CONTENTS

  Introduction

  Genealogical Tables

  Prologue: A Most Remarkable Letter

  1 - Childhood, 1519–1533

  2 - The Brandon Marriage, 1533–1545

  3 - King Henry’s Last Love, 1545–1547

  4 - Tragedy, 1547–1553

  5 - The Bid for the Throne, 1553–1554

  6 - Escape, 1554–1555

  7 - Exile, 1555–1559

  8 - Lady of the Manor, 1559–1565

  9 - A Bed of Nails, 1565–1580

  Postscript: The Ravages of Time

  Picture Section

  Appendix 1 - Katherine Willoughby’s Correspondence with William Cecil

  Appendix 2 - Portraits of Katherine Willoughby

  Notes and References

  Select Bibliography

  List of Illustrations

  INTRODUCTION

  Katherine Willoughby is one of the most interesting women of the Tudor period.

  Muriel St Clare Byrne, The Lisle Letters (Chicago, 1981), vol. iv, p. 131

  Katherine Suffolk was one of the most remarkable women of her time.

  Leanda de Lisle, The Sisters Who Would Be Queen (2010), p. 19

  Katherine Willoughby is today less well known than some other Tudor ladies, but was at the forefront of the profound political and religious changes that transformed England in the reigns of King Henry VIII and his children, Edward VI, Mary I and Elizabeth I. She was born at Parham Old Hall, near Framlingham (Suffolk), in 1519, the only surviving child of William, eleventh Baron Willoughby and his wife, Maria de Salinas, a Spanish lady-in-waiting to Queen Catherine of Aragon. She inherited the family properties on her father’s death in 1526, but her uncle Sir Christopher Willoughby claimed that some manors had been promised to him under the terms of an earlier settlement. The resulting dispute soured their relationship for four decades, and became the first of the many threats she would encounter in the course of her long life.

  Katherine was married to Charles Brandon, Duke of Suffolk, King Henry’s closest friend, at the age of just fourteen. The death of his previous wife, Henry’s sister Mary, had robbed Brandon of a significant part of his income; but he loyally supported the king against the rising known as the Pilgrimage of Grace and was rewarded with authority in Lincolnshire and additional wealth in the form of lands forfeited by dissolved monasteries. Katherine became a great lady, ruling over her houses at Grimsthorpe and Tattershall, and was frequently a guest at Henry’s banquets and weddings. She grew to know the king well – in 1538, only three months after Queen Jane Seymour’s death, it was reported that they had been ‘masking and visiting’ together – and in 1543 she became a lady-in-waiting to his sixth wife Catherine Parr. Henry had a reputation for tiring of his wives once the excitement of the pursuit was over – particularly if they had failed to give him male children – and in February 1546, only six months after Charles Brandon’s death, it was rumoured that the king meant to wed her himself if – and when – he could end his present marriage. Catherine Parr’s Protestant religious views, which often ran contrary to the king’s, were potentially treasonable, and that summer it appeared that she was about to be arrested and executed. But Henry forgave her or changed his mind at the last moment, and Katherine Willoughby never became his seventh queen. Instead she took her gentleman usher, Richard Bertie, as her second husband, and retained a degree of independence she would not have enjoyed if she had married another peer.

  Katherine was by this time the most fervent of English Protestants – although her mother had been a committed Roman Catholic – and the tragedy of losing both her sons by the duke to the ‘sweating sickness’ in 1551 did nothing to diminish her belief in the divine goodness. She avoided involvement in the conspiracy built around her step-granddaughter Lady Jane Grey in 1553, but was still obliged to spend four eventful years in exile in Europe beyond the reach of the Catholic Queen Mary. Here she lived from hand to mouth, gave birth to another son, and moved from city to city to avoid the attentions of the queen’s agents before finally finding sanctuary in Poland. She returned home when Elizabeth succeeded, but was bitterly disappointed that the new queen’s approach to religious matters was always more pragmatic and less enthusiastic than her own. Her sufferings for the Protestant cause earned her a place in Foxe’s Book of Martyrs; her last years were clouded by her son’s waywardness and her dislike of, and differences with, her daughter-in-law; and at the end she feared that Elizabeth was about to have her executed – a fear expressed in dramatic terms in her letter to the Earl of Leicester discussed in the Prologue. Hers was a life of privilege mixed with tragedy and danger, but she kept her head on her shoulders when many of her contemporaries lost theirs for less cause.

  It is more than half a century since a full-length biography of Katherine was published, and the approach of the quincentenary of her birth seemed an appropriate moment to re-examine her place in Tudor history. Both previous memoirs of her have been long out of print: Lady Cecilie Goff’s pioneering if rather disconnected study was published in 1930, and Evelyn Read’s highly romanticised ‘life’ appeared in 1962. Both are based on a commendable amount of original research, but Lady Goff’s book is arguably overlong – for example, she devotes many pages to events such as the Pilgrimage of Grace in which Katherine was not involved directly – while in Mrs Read’s biography she seems to spend much of her time admiring the view and smelling the flowers. Both books are erratically referenced, and Mrs Read’s has a very limited index.

  Many accounts of individuals who lived in this period are handicapped by a lack of real evidence, but in Katherine’s case the information that has survived is both personal and comparatively plentiful. Foxe’s account of her sufferings for the Protestant cause and the adulatory opinions of her expressed by some of her co-religionists all need to be used with caution; but there is much of interest in the Ancaster family papers preserved in the Lincolnshire Archives and in the extant twenty-two letters she wrote to William Cecil in Edward VI’s reign, followed by the same number in Queen Elizabeth’s. The Ancaster documents are more formal – inventories, household accounts and the like – but her letters to Cecil give us an insight into the real Katherine – outspoken and opinionated, often complaining, sometimes having to apologise for her intemperate words or for being slow to answer, and characterised by the single-minded conviction that her view of religion was the only one acceptable to God. I have quoted freely from these documents in th
e belief that they give us more of the flavour of the period than would a paraphrase in my own words.

  Katherine is an altogether fascinating lady. She was the wife of one Duke of Suffolk, became the mother of two others and the (step)mother-in-law of a fourth. And if the rumour that the King of Poland became enamoured of her is accurate she might have married not one monarch but two. Henry VIII, who received the title ‘Defender of the Faith’ from Pope Leo X when she was aged two, had broken with Rome by the time she was fifteen; and although the idea of a queen regnant was unthinkable when she was born in 1519, few would have challenged a woman’s right to rule when she died in 1580. Her story is that of much of the Tudor age.

  I have incurred a number of debts in the course of preparing this book, and would like to thank members of staff at the National Archives, the British Library, Lincolnshire Archives, Patrick Barker at Westhorpe and Ray Biggs at Grimsthorpe for their assistance. I am especially grateful to Nicola Tallis for reading and commenting on my manuscript, to Geoffrey Wheeler for supplying some of the illustrations and drawing the map, and to my wife Joyce for happily spending holidays visiting places associated with Katherine and for helping in many other ways.

  David Baldwin

  October 2014

  Note: Contemporaries would have spelt the name ‘Katherine’ with a ‘K’ as opposed to a ‘C’. I have referred to Katherine Willoughby as ‘Katherine’ throughout, but have used the alternative form for others, Catherine of Aragon, Catherine Howard, Catherine Parr, etc., to help distinguish them when their names occur together. Similarly I have consistently used the surname Willoughby, although Katherine was more properly Katherine Brandon and Katherine Bertie at different times in her life. The spelling of all quotations from contemporary letters and other documents has been modernised.

  GENEALOGICAL TABLES

  Prologue

  A MOST REMARKABLE LETTER

  On a spring day in March 1580, Katherine Bertie, née Willoughby, dowager Duchess of Suffolk, sat down to write to Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester, Queen Elizabeth’s favourite and a powerful influence at court. Her relations with her daughter-in-law Mary, her son Peregrine’s wife, had never been easy, and now Mary was spreading rumours about her which threatened more than her reputation. According to Katherine’s letter, Mary had claimed that her mother-in-law was secretly trying to harm her (precisely how is not stated), and she had retaliated by circulating an earlier letter written by Katherine which appeared to call her loyalty to Elizabeth into question. Katherine was in no doubt that what she had written, presumably in all honesty, was being deliberately misinterpreted, and her letter to Dudley refers again and again to the possibility that it would result in her execution. She was by now nearly sixty, elderly by the standards of her era, and while she had not always seen eye to eye with the queen, she had never directly confronted her or thought to deprive her of her throne:

  To the right honourable, & my very good lord, the earl of Leicester. I am very sorry that it is my evil fortune to be troublesome to any of my friends, specially being brought to the same by the evil hap of my dear son’s marriage, by whom I had hoped to have comfort in my old days, which, by any his deserts towards me, I have found no other cause of grief than by his unadvised & unlucky choice of a fair lady [foreign] to full manners. Now, I hear by some of my friends [that she] hath in these few days, shown such a letter of mine, as doth show how near I went to lose my head, if she had not by good hap, escaped some dangers, as it seemeth, wrought to her by me. What they were, I know not. But it shall please Her Majesty to be so much my gracious lady, to appoint any to examine me of any doings towards her. I trust they shall find no likelihood in me of losing my head, nay, nor wrong in writing of my sharp letter, all circumstances considered. And as for Treason, I am sure that it is far from my heart as it could never be written by my hand. So far, I am sure, there is no cause to part my head from my body, & for felony, or murder any ways meant by me to my fair lady, as that might be a hanging matter, so I will not wish that to either of us that deserved it best, but [will] leave the revenge to God to whom I pray to deliver my innocence from wicked & most malicious slanders. I thank God, I am not the beginner of complaints, & even so I trust, by his help, in the end, if I may be heard, [that] the shame will rest where it should. But I lament that I have deserved no better of such good lady, as hath given so sad [serious] judgment of me as the loss of my head. God be praised, that hath not ordained such to take away life at the hearing of the first tale. Surely such hasty judges may be thought rather to consent to murder, than ever I shall be proved, by word, or deed, and lest I might be wrong taken in these words, I will open myself. Now, by their judgements, I escaped well that I had not lost my head. As, if I had deserved it, than it had been but just. But to give such a sentence before they proved of my deserts, must needs proceed from a murderous mind. But He that rules all & knows all, I trust will move Her Majesty’s heart to think no worse of me for any such words, than she hath found me, & so, by God’s grace, shall find me to the end. And this concludes with my hearty thanks to them that helped me. And being so [desirous] to you, my good Lord, to give me your good word & furtherance that I may be brought by some good means to my trial of these foul slanders (wherein I shall have cause to think myself most bounden to you), which I will pray God to requite though I cannot. And so [I] commit you to Him, from my little unwholesome house of Hampstead, whither I fled to seek quiet from these brawls, but seeing it pleaseth God to [expose] me to them even here, I now have no other shift to fly but to His special grace to give me patience to bear all these things & to keep me from deserving of shame.1

  Katherine’s prose may be convoluted, but there is no doubting her anxiety. Earlier in the letter she speaks as though she had been tried and condemned already, although her closing appeal to Dudley makes it clear that this was not the case. Her usual confidant, when she needed advice or found herself in difficulty, was William Cecil, her near-neighbour in Lincolnshire and now Elizabeth’s first minister; but we may suppose that on this occasion she judged that even Cecil’s influence with the queen was unlikely to prove sufficient. It would be interesting to know how Dudley responded, but regrettably his answer has not survived.

  Katherine does not say precisely how she had criticised or appeared to challenge Elizabeth, but there can be little doubt that it concerned the vexed question of religion. She had written to Cecil as early as March 1559 urging both him and the queen to embrace full-blown Protestantism, and was disappointed when they sought a settlement the majority of subjects could accept rather than one that compelled them to follow what (in Katherine’s opinion) was the only right course of action. Similar, increasingly strident, missives almost certainly followed, and it is likely that it was one of these that Lady Mary brought to Elizabeth’s attention. Mary’s brother, the Earl of Oxford, was unhappily married to Cecil’s daughter, and it is easy to see how such a letter could have found its way into the ‘wrong’ hands.

  Today, when many people adopt a ‘take it or leave it’ attitude towards religion, it is not always easy to grasp how much it mattered to our sixteenth-century forebears. Acceptance of the teachings of the Church was as essential as obedience to the state, and when Henry VIII made himself head of the Church in England, religious nonconformity became potentially treasonable. Henry adopted a religion that retained some of the beliefs and practices of the old Catholic faith while rejecting others, and many of his subjects met early deaths because they could not share his view of what was, or was not, acceptable. Protestants were burned at the stake as heretics and Roman Catholics were hanged, drawn and quartered as traitors in the topsy-turvy world of Tudor England. Katherine’s criticisms were concerned mainly with the pace, and extent, of the ‘reform’ of religion, but that, in itself, was no excuse.

  It would be easy to suppose that Katherine was exaggerating, that there was really no question of her being beheaded for what amounted to a difference of opinion, but she could not assume that
her age, sex and status would somehow protect her. Margaret Pole, Countess of Salisbury, Edward IV and Richard III’s niece, was in her late sixties, a peeress in her own right, and a former governess to Henry VIII’s daughter Princess Mary: but she had passed her royal Yorkist blood to her sons, and the increasingly paranoiac king had her executed in 1541. Margaret had been careful to avoid involvement in anything that might be construed as treasonable, and was almost certainly ‘framed’ by her enemies. A Parliamentary Act of Attainder obviated the need for a trial (her accusers did not have to risk having the evidence against her tested in court), and her condemnation was a foregone conclusion. Margaret’s fate was one of the more extreme examples of Tudor butchery, but Katherine was right to be concerned.

  Yet, in the end, there was no execution and, it would seem, no formal indictment either. Katherine’s death only six months later may have precluded this, but it is perhaps more likely that Robert Dudley and William Cecil smoothed matters over. Unlike many of her religious persuasion, she died in her bed; but this daughter of a Spanish Roman Catholic mother who became the staunchest of Protestants and was included in Foxe’s Book of Martyrs was more than just a survivor. She might even have married a king.

  1

  CHILDHOOD

  1519–1533

  Katherine Willoughby was born on 22 March 1519 at Parham Old Hall in eastern Suffolk, the only daughter – and ultimately the only surviving child – of William, eleventh Baron Willoughby and his Spanish wife, Maria de Salinas. The couple had two sons, Henry, who was possibly older than Katherine, and Francis, who may have been named for the King of France shortly after his father accompanied Henry VIII to the Field of the Cloth of Gold in 1520; but both seem to have died in infancy. Like most noblemen, Lord Willoughby would have preferred a male successor and had named his brother Christopher his heir after his first marriage had proved childless; but it was Katherine who succeeded to the barony when he died in 1526.