Henry VIII's Last Love: The Extraordinary Life of Katherine Willoughby, Lady-in-Waiting to the Tudors
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all these three lords were married at one mass, going to church all three together, and the ladies, their wives, following one after another, every one of the young ladies having two young lords going on every side of them, and a young lady bearing up every [one] of their gown trains. At which marriage was present all the great estates of the realm, both lords and ladies; the Lord Chancellor of England and the Duke of Norfolk leading the Lord Bulbeck’s wife home from the church, the Duke of Suffolk and the Lord Marquis of Dorset leading the Lord Neville’s wife, and the Earl of Derby and the Earl of Surrey leading the Lord Roos’s wife. And after Mass, there was a great dinner and diverse great dishes and delicate meats with subtleties [delicacies] and diverse manner of instruments playing at the same, which were too long to express [describe]. And after dinner the King’s Grace came thither in a mask, riding from York Place, with eleven more with him, whereof the King and seven more with him wore garments after the Turkish fashion, richly embroidered with gold, with Turkish hats of black velvet and white feathers on their heads, and visors on their faces; and four others were arrayed in purple sarcenet, like Turks, which were as their pages. And so they danced with the ladies a good while; and then the King put off his visor and showed himself; and then the King had a great banquet of forty dishes, wherein was diverse subtleties and meats, which was a goodly sight to behold. The banquet ended, the King with his company departed thence, and rode again to York Place in their masking garments as they came thither.7
The king enjoyed ‘disguising’ himself, and the guests would have had the good sense to look surprised when his identity was ‘revealed’.
Henry’s break with Rome allowed Protestants in his government – men like Thomas Cromwell and Archbishop Thomas Cranmer – to seek to eradicate forms of worship, praying to saints and the veneration of relics for example, that they regarded as mere superstition. They can hardly be blamed for seizing their opportunity, but what they failed to appreciate was the extent to which most conservative Catholic Englishmen believed their beloved old religion was being dismantled. Henry’s religious changes in general, and the dissolution of some monasteries in particular, were seen as ‘alien and southern’ innovations by many inhabitants of the more traditionally minded north and east of the country, and the ten ‘New Articles of Religion’ introduced in the summer of 1536 proved violently unpopular. Many of the old holidays, particularly those which fell at harvest time, were abolished, and there were loud complaints that ‘they [the Articles] treated of no more than three sacraments (baptism, marriage and communion), where always the people had been taught seven’ (these three plus penance, holy orders, confirmation and extreme unction).
Few would have disputed that the reform of at least the smaller monasteries was desirable, but there was bitter opposition to the wider destruction of an institution that had long helped poor people in times of trouble. Discontent in the south was less formidable but it was still present. A preacher at Sturminster Newton in Dorset told the people to keep their old holidays, to continue to light candles, and to ‘beware of heretics and reading this New Testament in English’ while another said that ‘if the king didn’t go to Hell it was because Satan didn’t live there’. Anne Boleyn’s alleged lovers were widely regarded as victims – ‘put to death only for pleasure’ in the words of one John Hill of Oxford, who also remarked that he ‘hoped to see the King of Scots King of England’. On another level Henry’s cousin, Cardinal Reginald Pole, sent him a book entitled De Unitae Ecclesiae, described as ‘unpleasant, blistering and disrespectful’, in which he compared the king to Emperor Nero and accused him of ‘tearing like a wild beast’ men like the executed Sir Thomas More ‘who were the greatest honour to the kingdom’. He suggested – as a final insult – that Henry, who prided himself on his theological knowledge, should appoint an expert to read the book and give him an unbiased opinion of it. The king stifled his anger and invited Pole to England to talk things over, but the cardinal was too cautious to come.
By the autumn of 1536 Lincolnshire and the north were seething with discontent as the plundering of the smaller monasteries seemed to confirm the populace’s worst fears. On Sunday 1 October, at Louth, the administrative centre of northern Lincolnshire, the local vicar Thomas Kendall preached a rousing sermon denouncing the reforms, and within days much of the county was up in arms.8 The rebels demanded, among other things, reconciliation with Rome, the reversal of all the recent religious innovations, and the removal of the ‘lowborn’ councillors who they believed were responsible for them, but Henry was having none of it. ‘How presumptuous ye are,’ he wrote, ‘the rude commons of one shire, and that the most brute and beastly of the whole realm, to find fault with your prince.’ It was Parliament, not Cromwell, which had decreed the Dissolution of the Monasteries, and he could not, and would not, grant such an unreasonable petition. He instructed Charles Brandon to raise troops to quell the protests ‘to destroy burn and kill man woman and child if necessary’ and the rising collapsed as the duke’s army approached.
The king doubtless hoped that this would be the end of the matter, but no sooner had the trouble in Lincolnshire been dealt with than a new, and potentially far more serious, threat to royal authority engulfed much of northern England. The ‘Pilgrimage of Grace for the Commonweal’, led by Robert Aske, a capable lawyer and local squire, repeated the petitions of the Lincolnshire rebels, and further demanded that no man living north of the Trent should be compelled to attend any court except York. Aske established himself in Pontefract Castle, and soon had an army boasting four peers, many gentry, and 30,000 ordinary people (many of them ‘warlike men and well appointed’) at his back. The Duke of Norfolk, Henry’s commander in the region, decided not to risk a battle and instead persuaded the ‘Pilgrims’ that the king would forgive them and listen sympathetically to their grievances if they dispersed quietly. Norfolk rode to London taking two of the rebels with him, and they returned with the offer of a free pardon, a new Parliament to re-examine the religious changes, and an invitation to Aske to discuss the matter with Henry personally. The meeting went well, and Aske felt so sure of the king’s goodwill that in January 1537 he took the bold step of ordering his followers to disband. But no sooner was the crisis over than he was made prisoner, dragged on a hurdle through York, and hung in chains.
Henry’s revenge continued throughout the spring and summer. In Yorkshire abbots and local gentlemen were among those executed, while thirty-six of the commons were hanged in Lincolnshire together with seventy-four in Carlisle. ‘You shall in any wise,’ wrote Henry, ‘cause such dreadful execution to be done upon a good number of the inhabitants of every town, village and hamlet that have been offenders in the rebellion, as well by hanging them up in trees as by quartering of them and the setting of their heads and quarters in every town, great and small, as they may be a fearful spectacle to all other hereafter that would practice a like manner.’ The Pilgrims fell into the trap of believing that the king was, in a sense, one of them, that he was genuinely concerned for their well-being and happiness, and that their grievances were the fault of others. They failed to appreciate that, in reality, nothing could be done without royal approval, and that the religious changes were essentially Henry’s even if Cromwell and others drove them forward. Their naivety, their rather touching faith in the goodness of the Lord’s anointed, appears vaguely absurd to our way of thinking, but they could conceive of no other form of government. The blind trust (in Richard II) which had been the ruin of Wat Tyler’s rebels in 1381 proved the Pilgrims’ nemesis in 1536.
The Pilgrims had wanted to turn back the religious clock, but their failure only hastened the destruction of the greater monasteries and with them the whole ethos of medieval monastic life in England. The monks of these houses, who Parliament had previously accepted ‘kept and observed religion right well’, were accused of encouraging their tenants to join the uprising, and abbots who resisted the royal will were severely punished. Some became martyrs for the fai
th to which they were devoted, but the majority kept both their lives and their incomes. Those who opted to retire gracefully were granted livings or received generous pensions, and a few heads of houses may have shared the relief of the abbot of Beaulieu, who commented, ‘Thank God I am rid of my lewd monks.’ Katherine may have known Abbot Reeve of Bury St Edmunds, described as ‘a merry old man, fond of the ladies, fond of his glass, fond of the gardens of his country houses’ who was allowed the generous sum of 500 marks (£333 6s 8d) per annum, but who died of old age within six months.
Charles Brandon had been ordered to remain in Lincoln to prevent further trouble in the eastern counties unless the situation in the north became critical, and Katherine was able to keep in touch with him by letter and to join him in person later. In October 1536 she wrote to inform him that there was a ‘great bruit’ (rumour) in Suffolk that the king’s army had been defeated and that the government meant to seize poor people’s cattle (a curious contrast), and they were together by 7 December when Brandon told Henry that he intended to come to court at Christmas, ‘leaving his wife in these parts’.9 It is likely that she was again heavily pregnant since one authority has it that Charles, their second son, was born early the following year.
When King Henry created Brandon Duke of Suffolk his objective was primarily to fill the void left in the governance of the region by the execution of Edmund de la Pole in 1513. Brandon was expected to bind the local gentry more firmly to the new ruling dynasty and at the same time help frustrate the claims of Edmund’s exiled brother Richard to both the duchy and the kingdom. The danger receded after Richard was killed at Pavia in Italy in 1525, and in the aftermath of the troubles of 1536 Henry ordered Brandon to reside in Lincolnshire permanently. There was some little delay while Katherine recovered from ague and their son Henry from smallpox, but they were back in the county by June 1537. The duke’s lack of a substantial landed power-base there initially limited his authority, but the king gave him Tattershall Castle as his principal residence, and he acquired Lady Maria’s dower third of the Willoughby properties (which included Grimsthorpe and Eresby) on her death in May 1539. With the Willoughby estates came a close network of local gentry supporters whose first loyalty was to Katherine and to Brandon as her husband.10 She did not outrank him socially (as Mary Tudor had) and he assumed leadership of the ‘connection’ on her behalf.
We might suppose that Katherine was excited by the prospect of moving to Lincolnshire, but this is by no means certain. Many southerners (in the broadest sense of the word), regarded the inhabitants of the fenlands as uncouth and ‘different’, and we have already noted Henry VIII’s description of them as the most ‘brute and beastly’ of his subjects.11 The late fifteenth-century belief that rude and economically backward ‘northerners’ were looking for an excuse to rob and pillage in the wealthier south had not entirely dissipated, and Katherine may have felt that she was leaving the polite society of the court-orientated south-east for a place on the very edge of civilisation. But duty called, and duty had to be performed.
All the evidence suggests that by the late 1530s Brandon and Katherine were regarded as an exemplary couple and were on excellent terms with King Henry. Jane Seymour had given birth to a son, Edward, on 12 October 1537, and Brandon was invited to be one of the child’s godfathers when he was baptised a week later. One source says that, when all was over, Katherine carried the infant back to his apartments followed by a 400-strong entourage, and she was again with the king and her husband when they attended a lavish banquet held at Hampton Court Palace in November 1538, a feast described by one guest as ‘the best that ever I was at’.12 At the same time she formed an attachment to the Princess Mary, playing cards and corresponding with her, and exchanging gifts. Mary had opposed her father’s rejection of her mother and his religious changes, submitting only when threatened with dire consequences. She was now in her early twenties, and may have found Katherine’s company a welcome distraction from the troubles of the recent past.
Queen Jane died of puerperal fever, or perhaps of a retained placenta, only twelve days after her son’s birth, and the search for a new, fourth wife for Henry began almost immediately. At least nine European ladies were considered, and the choice fell on Anne, the twenty-four-year-old sister of the Duke of Cleves. Brandon and Katherine led the party that welcomed Anne to Dover at the end of December 1539, and Katherine became one of the six ‘great ladies’ of her household. But it all ended disastrously. Henry complained that his bride failed to excite him – which was another way of saying that he was becoming increasingly impotent – and they were divorced in July 1540. Brandon, who himself sired no more children after 1537, was instrumental in persuading Anne to accept the role of ‘king’s sister’, and Cromwell, the principal architect of the union, paid with his head.
We noted that old Lady Willoughby’s death in 1539 had helped Brandon establish himself in Lincolnshire, and it may have been significant for an entirely different reason. Throughout the 1530s Katherine had remained a staunch Roman Catholic – ‘as earnest as any’ in the opinion of the conservative Bishop of Winchester, Stephen Gardiner – but in the next decade began to embrace evangelicalism, or Protestantism.13 Gardiner recalled later that she had once been his ‘gossip’, a term typically used by godparents of their godchildren but also to imply close friendship, and it is likely that it was the removal of her mother’s influence – and undoubted disapproval – that allowed her to change her views.
Stephen Gardiner was a Cambridge-educated canon lawyer who entered Cardinal Wolsey’s service in 1524 and took a prominent part in negotiations with the papacy designed to resolve the king’s ‘Great Matter’. In 1529 he became Henry’s principal secretary and his efforts were rewarded with promotion to the wealthy bishopric of Winchester two years later; but it was only with some difficulty that he accepted the king’s decisions to divorce Queen Catherine without papal approval and make himself master of the Church in England. The more devoted Thomas Cromwell had replaced him as royal secretary by April 1534, but he partially regained Henry’s goodwill by writing books defending the royal supremacy and the execution of Bishop Fisher. Privately, however, he hoped for reconciliation with Rome, and again managed to annoy the king by suggesting that he should make concessions to the leaders of the Pilgrimage of Grace. He remained out of favour until after Cromwell’s execution in July 1540 when Henry sought his expertise in canon law to annul his marriage to Anne of Cleves and restored him to the Council. His position was again threatened when his nephew and secretary Germaine Gardiner was executed in 1544 on charges of denying the royal supremacy; but he continued to serve Henry on diplomatic missions and survived further reformist attempts to discredit him. He presumably only met, or noticed, Katherine after she became Duchess of Suffolk, and what had initially been an entirely cordial relationship soured as her religious stance altered. Matters were not improved when her friend John Dudley struck him in the face at a Council meeting in 1546.14
Katherine’s conversion was to affect the rest of her life so profoundly that it seems appropriate to try to summarise what the differences between Catholics and Protestants really were. Today, we live in a generally tolerant society in which religion is (with some notable exceptions) essentially a private and personal matter; but this was not the case in the sixteenth century, when failure to conform was potentially as great an offence as committing treason. One of the main contrasts between the Tudor century and our own is that disagreements between the two faiths were often matters of life and death. Protestants desired a less elaborate, more direct, form of worship, one which did not require saints and priests to act as intermediaries. Accordingly, they saw no merit in undertaking pilgrimages to shrines, and believed that the ‘Word of God’ (the Bible) was an infinitely superior authority to the ‘human traditions’ of the papacy. They rejected transubstantiation, the Catholic belief that in the Eucharist the bread and wine became Christ’s body and blood (the doctrine of the Real Presence), but
adhered strongly to the concept of justification by faith. Catholics believed that salvation was attained by a combination of faith and (good) works, but the Protestant view was that it was a gift of God granted in return for faith and for faith alone.15 Protestants denied the existence of purgatory, the idea that there was a kind of half-way house where sinners could do penance for their wrongdoing, and scorned the notion that the prayers of the living could determine whether a deceased went to heaven or hell. They also considered images of saints to be potentially idolatrous, and thought that Catholic devotion to the Virgin as Queen of Heaven diverted the faithful from the proper worship of Christ. The radical preacher Thomas Becon carried this view a step further, arguing that in the Bible ‘such as ruled and were queens were for the most part wicked, superstitious, and given to idolatry and to all filthy abominations as we may see in the histories of Queen Jezebel’. Soon it was being said that women should not be allowed to govern in any circumstances, and John Knox’s First Blast of the Trumpet Against the Monstrous Regiment [Rule] of Women held that feminine authority was unacceptable to God.
It is important to stress that these ideas developed over time, and that not all Protestants were as radical, or extreme, as others. Katherine’s own spiritual journey began with the belief that scripture was the one authoritative guide to faith, and only later extended to a denial of transubstantiation and acceptance of justification by faith alone. Her correspondence shows that by the late 1540s she no longer believed in the physical presence of Christ in the Eucharist, and was wholly of the opinion that charitable acts could not expunge an individual’s transgressions. She had long since ceased to use saints’ days to date her letters, something Protestants avoided because of their opposition to the cult of saints and pilgrimages, and did her utmost to ensure that every parish in Lincolnshire had an English Bible. In the 1550s she embraced the doctrines of predestination and election, the beliefs that God ‘ordered all things for the best’ (even the most tragic events were part of His divine purpose), and that certain individuals, the ‘elect’, were guaranteed salvation. She became increasingly critical of clergy whose fondness for ornate robes and elaborate ritual (which the reformers associated with Catholicism) conflicted with her own preference for simple worship, and on one occasion dressed her dog, which she mockingly called Gardiner, in the white rochet, or vestment, of a bishop. In the early years she had to tread carefully – Henry VIII, for all his wrecking, never ceased to believe in transubstantiation and in the need for good works – but ultimately, this daughter of a Roman Catholic mother became one of the most fervent Protestants of her day.