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

by David Baldwin

  What factors produced this dramatic – and ultimately uncompromising – change of heart? It can have had little to do with her husband, whose attitude to religion was as pragmatic and cautious as his approach to politics, and who did not lean towards either conservatives or reformers. ‘Brandon’s chaplains were more administrators, lawyers, teachers, and poets than preachers, [and] he held the middle ground out of an incalculable blend of mediocrity and cunning, at times, no doubt, even of confusion. He preserved an ambiguity which not even his clergy and officers – and quite possibly not even he himself – could penetrate.’16 Unsurprisingly, he concurred with all his royal master’s religious changes, and his willingness to temporise, to see both sides of an argument, made him popular with both Protestants and Catholics. When he and Katherine attended court they frequently came into contact with reformers like Edward Seymour, Earl of Hertford, the future Duke of Somerset, and John Dudley, Viscount Lisle, the future Earl of Northumberland, and were challenged by the arguments of the Protestant divine Hugh Latimer, who often preached before the king in the 1530s. When Augustine Bernher dedicated his sermons to Katherine in 1562, he recalled how God had used Latimer in ‘Henry’s days to be a singular instrument to set forth his truth, and by his preaching to open the eyes of such as were deluded by the subtle and deceitful crafts of the popish prelates’.17

  Hugh Latimer was born at Thurcaston, in Leicestershire, some years before the turn of the century. The only son of yeoman farmers, his parents recognised his ‘ready, prompt, and sharp wit’ (Foxe) very early, and were prepared to invest some of their hard-earned wealth in his education. He went up to Cambridge at the age of fourteen, and was awarded the degrees of Bachelor of Arts (1511), Master of Arts (1514) and Bachelor of Theology (1524). His views in these early years were entirely conventional, and he used his examination sermon for his B.Th to denounce the teachings of Martin Luther’s disciple Philip Melanchthon. Listening in the audience that day was the reformer Thomas Bilney, and he afterwards visited Latimer in his study. What happened next Latimer described in the first of the sermons on the Lord’s Prayer he preached at Grimsthorpe in Katherine’s presence many years later:

  Here I have to tell you a story which happened at Cambridge. Master Bilney, or rather Saint Bilney, that suffered death for God’s Word’s sake [he was burnt in the Lollard’s pit at Norwich in 1531], the same Bilney was the instrument whereby God called me to knowledge; for I may thank him, next to God, for that knowledge that I have in the Word of God. For I was as obstinate a papist as any was in England, insomuch that when I should be made bachelor of divinity, my whole oration went against Philip Melanchthon and against his opinions. Bilney heard me at that time, and perceived that I was zealous without knowledge; and he came to me afterwards in my study, and desired me, for God’s sake, to hear his confession. I did so; and to say the truth, by his confession I learned more than before in many years. So from that time forward I began to smell the Word of God, and forsook the school doctors and such fooleries.18

  The secrecy of the sacrament of confession allowed men like Bilney to voice ‘heretical’ opinions to fellow priests in complete confidence and he seized his opportunity – although Latimer’s conversion to full-blown Protestantism was as gradual as Katherine’s. As early as 1529 he advocated translating the Bible into English – something which was then illegal – but did not begin to seriously reappraise the Eucharist until the late 1540s. It was thanks to the patronage of Katherine’s enemy, the reform-minded Queen Anne Boleyn, that he was invited to preach before the court from 1530 onwards and appointed Bishop of Worcester in 1535. His opinions were often at odds with Henry’s19 – his later sermons refer to narrow escapes that ‘left his friends trembling in fear on his behalf’ – and his situation became still more precarious after he voiced opposition to the king’s Six Articles of Religion in 1539. Forced to resign his bishopric, he was imprisoned ‘expecting every day to be led to execution’; and although he was released unharmed and granted a modest pension he was not allowed to preach again in Henry’s lifetime. Anne Askew (discussed later) asked to see him after her condemnation, and he was again sent to the Tower under suspicion of heresy when the religious conservatives tried to undermine their opponents in the closing months of the reign.20

  Latimer was perhaps the greatest influence on Katherine’s religious thinking, but another seminal inspiration was Henry’s sixth and last queen, Catherine Parr. The king had married his fifth wife, Catherine Howard, only three weeks after his divorce from Anne of Cleves, and had sent her to the block little more than a year later. The promiscuous teenager had wed Henry without disclosing her previous sexual experiences, and when it was discovered that she had held secret meetings with Thomas Culpeper, a gentleman of the king’s privy chamber, after her marriage, contemporaries assumed the worst. The king and queen had stayed with Brandon and Katherine at Grimsthorpe in August 1541, and it was later said that this was one of the very few places on their tour ‘where Catherine Howard had not misbehaved herself’.21 Catherine may have been foolish rather than unfaithful, but Henry was sufficiently chastened by the experience to choose for his next wife a lady who was a decade older than her predecessor and a twice-married widow.22 Katherine was one of only eighteen persons invited to attend the wedding, and it is likely that she and the new queen were already on terms of some intimacy. Catherine Parr was a committed Protestant, and admission to her circle may have helped crystallise thoughts which had been forming in Katherine Willoughby’s mind for some years.

  Prayer and Bible study were part of everyday life in Queen Catherine’s household, and Katherine and her other ladies joined her in searching the scriptures and seeking a closer, personal relationship with God. Sermons preached by ‘well learned and godly persons’ stressed the authority of the Bible while emphasising the errors of Catholicism, and Queen Catherine composed a series of homilies entitled Prayers Stirring the Mind unto Heavenly Meditations in 1545. Thirty copies were distributed to her ladies and other reformers who used it to engage in what have been described as ‘vigorous theological debates’ on the doctrines of sin and salvation.23 Many hours must have been passed in this manner, but again, not all Protestants would have approved of women taking such a leading role in expounding their faith.

  Katherine’s sojourn in Catherine Parr’s household would have separated her from her home and family for long periods, but Charles Brandon knew better than anyone how much they owed to royal service. In April or May 1544 Katherine bade farewell to her now sixty-year-old husband when he embarked on what was to be his last military campaign in France. He distinguished himself at the siege of Boulogne, and Henry honoured him by inviting him to formally occupy the town after it surrendered on 14 September. He had spent the previous eight years buying up properties that complemented his and Katherine’s Lincolnshire estate whenever he had the opportunity, and on his return was allowed to add the lands of Tattershall College to his portfolio of forfeited monastic assets for less than half their true value. Although still not fully in control of the county, he had achieved a position of dominance greater than he had formerly enjoyed in East Anglia, and had proclaimed his new wealth and authority by substantially rebuilding Grimsthorpe. The house has been much altered in the intervening centuries, but the southern and eastern fronts still incorporate much of his work.

  Brandon remained in France until November 1544 and was apparently still reasonably active for a man of his years, but he died, quite suddenly, at Guildford, on 22 August 1545. He was widely respected and no doubt proud of his attractive wife and growing sons, but his later years were clouded by his relationship with his two daughters by Anne Browne and their husbands. Mary’s spouse, Lord Monteagle, proved so impecunious that Brandon had to take over his lands and pay his debts on several occasions, and her sister Anne also needed money after Lord Powis obtained a legal separation on the grounds of her adultery. We know nothing of Katherine’s relations with her two stepdaughters after Duchess Mary’s
funeral, and there is no record of them exchanging gifts or letters. They were both ten and more years her senior, and may have treated her with the coolness that children of a previous marriage often feel towards a younger, second wife.

  Brandon had made his will during the siege of Boulogne on 24 August 1544. In it he asked to be buried in the collegiate church near Tattershall Castle, but his old friend King Henry insisted that he be interred in St George’s Chapel, Windsor, at royal expense. Katherine regained full control of her own lands, and in accordance with standard practice was granted a dower third of her late husband’s properties. Her eldest son Henry would inherit the remaining two-thirds when he came of age, and in the meantime she was able to buy his wardship and marriage from the Crown for £1,500 payable in seven instalments. Significantly, six of the seven courtiers who stood surety for her payment were prominent Protestants: Sir John Gates, Sir Philip Hoby, the king’s physician George Owen, Sir Ralph Sadler, William Herbert, and Sir Anthony Denny. The seventh, Sir William Paget, had some evangelical sympathies, but his true religious views are less clear.

  Brandon’s executors were his ‘entirely beloved wife’, the Lord Chancellor Thomas Wriothesley, William Paulet Lord St John (another religious ‘trimmer’), and Sir Anthony Browne, Anne Browne’s half-brother and another long-standing friend of King Henry. He had assigned fifteen years’ revenue from lands worth £620 a year to pay his debts, provide for his younger son Charles, and fund other legacies, and additionally, the generous sum of 8,000 marks (£5,333 6s 8d) was assigned to Charles to secure him an estate or, alternatively, to ‘buy or obtain one gentlewoman having lands and tenements of inheritance’ whom he would marry. Katherine, and Brandon’s two daughters by Mary – Frances, Marchioness of Dorset, and Lady Eleanor Clifford – were left plate and jewels, but there was nothing for Lady Powis. Mary, Lady Monteagle, had died in 1544.

  Katherine clearly enjoyed her husband’s confidence, but there was one caveat. Brandon declared that she was to ‘keep herself sole [single] and marry not after my death therewith’ or she would lose her right to distribute the residue of his estate (‘plate, jewels, household stuff, other goods and profits of land’) in accordance with his wishes. His concern was that a second husband would persuade her to act in ways that were not in the heirs’ best interests, but he need not have worried. She did not remarry until after her sons’ deaths and in March 1546 the other executors allowed her to administer the bequests unsupervised because of the ‘special trust and confidence that they bear towards [her]’. In a moment of blind perspicacity he asked the king to ‘extend and continue his accustomed goodness towards my said entirely beloved wife, the Lady Katherine aforesaid’. He knew Henry liked her, but would have laughed at any suggestion that she might become his queen.24

  Charles Wriothesley lamented the loss of Brandon, who ‘had been so valiant a captain in the king’s wars … to the great damage and loss of the king’s enemies’, while Ellis Gruffyd commented that ‘he was the flower of all the captains of the realm and had the necessary patience to control soldiers’.25 They could have added that he was a competent administrator and an astute landlord, loyal to both his king and his family. The chronicler Edward Hall was in no doubt that he was ‘a hardy [confident] gentleman and yet not too hardy, as almost of all estates and degrees of men high and low, rich and poor, heartily beloved’,26 and King Henry himself is said to have remarked that throughout his career he had never sought by word or deed to injure anyone. His early misalliances were a stain on his character and he was once (in 1515) accused of giving Sir William Compton ‘a pain in the leg by sorcery’,27 but his behaviour in later years had been exemplary. There is no reason to doubt that Katherine and their sons mourned his passing, but she was twenty-six, wealthy, and attractive. The inexperienced and perhaps sometimes awkward teenager of the 1530s had become an accomplished young woman, one who could manage her household and extensive properties and take her place among the senior ladies of the kingdom. For many, the onset of widowhood marked the beginning of the end of life rather than a new opportunity, but for her, life had only just begun.

  3

  KING HENRY’S LAST LOVE

  1545–1547

  For the first time in her life Katherine was no longer subject to the authority of either her parents or her husband, and it is worth pausing to ask what sort of person she had become. A portrait painted at about this time shows an auburn-haired young woman wearing a black fur-trimmed gown and headdress with pleasant features and a slightly sad expression. In another likeness, produced a few years later in 1548, the black clothes are no longer decorated, she holds a prayer book, and her demeanour is more serious and confident. The change reflects both her passage into widowhood and her growing commitment to her Protestant faith.

  Katherine was much admired by her Evangelical co-religionists, some of whose opinions bordered on hagiography. To the churchman and historian John Bale, writing in 1547, she was an example of those ‘godly women’ who were ‘learned in the scriptures’ and who bore comparison with ‘such widows and wives as Paul, Peter and John commendeth in their epistles’,1 while John Parkhurst, who was briefly one of Charles Brandon’s resident chaplains before transferring to Catherine Parr’s household in 1543 and who in his spare time composed short Latin epitaphs and eulogies, almost ran out of superlatives:

  Aeternum salve, princeps clarissima mentis

  Dotibus, eximiis ad numeranda viris

  Vix dici poterit, quantum tribuat tibi vulgus,

  Quantum magnates, docta que turba virum.

  Nil tam suspiciunt homines tua stemmata clara

  Insignes dotes quam, Katharina tuos.

  (Hail for ever, illustrious princess! The endowments of thy mind place thee on a level with men of the highest distinction. One can scarcely say how much all people – the common folk, nobility and men of learning alike – esteem thee, holding thee in high regard, O Katherine, not so much for thy glorious heritage as for thy singular talents.)2

  Arguably, these reformist clergymen were bound to think highly of someone in authority who shared their opinions, but they were not alone. In March 1537 Honor, Lady Lisle, the wife of the deputy of Calais, was seeking to place Anne and Katherine Bassett, the daughters of her first marriage, in great households, and John Husee, her confidential agent in England, arranged for Sir William Coffin, a knight of the king’s privy chamber, to approach Katherine Willoughby. Katherine indicated her willingness to accept Katherine Bassett, and Husee was sure that, with careful handling, the matter would be brought to a satisfactory conclusion:

  And touching the suit to be made for Mrs [sic] Katherine [Bassett], I trust the same be now at a good stay, for your ladyship [Honor Lisle] shall understand that Mr [sic] Coffin hath moved the Duchess of Suffolk of it, and hath so handled the matter that her Grace hath made him grant thereof, so that he willed me to write to your ladyship in it. And now, since, it is chanced that there is one dead in my Lord of Suffolk’s house, so that neither he ne my Lady shall for a time come to the Court. But in the meantime [he continues in his rather laboured style] Mr Coffin thinketh that it should be well done that your ladyship and my Lord [Lisle] both did write so gentle letters unto my Lady Suffolk, declaring by the same how that you have had knowledge that by Mr Coffin’s suit her Grace hath vouchsafed to accept your ladyship’s daughter to her service, for the which my lord and your ladyship doth render her most entire thanks, and trusteth that she shall do her Grace good service; and also how that your ladyship hath heard that there is one dead in my lord’s house, by reason whereof her Grace doth absent herself from the Court for a time, which notwithstanding, your ladyship desireth to know her pleasure when you shall send your said daughter. And this Mr Coffin thinketh best and that she shall be so much the better received.3

  Honor Lisle expressed some reservations, perhaps because Katherine Willoughby was only just eighteen in March 1537, although Husee assured his mistress that she was ‘virtuous, wise and discreet’.4 He w
as still trying to persuade her in October when he remarked that ‘as for Mrs Katherine [Bassett], my Lady Sussex and my Lady Rutland saith that your ladyship cannot better bestow her than with my Lady Suffolk’,5 but Honor may not have been entirely responsible for the plan’s failure. It seems that Katherine Willoughby was one of life’s procrastinators, someone who put things off from day to day, from week to week, and ultimately, from month to month, without weighing the effect on those who were expecting a response from her. Two years later, in 1539, the Lisles again tried to cultivate the Brandons, although this time the reason is uncertain. Husee says only that ‘touching my Lady Suffolk, I have written her Grace according to your ladyship’s [Honor’s] pleasure, and am promised shortly to have an answer’,6 but if he thought that the gift of a spaniel sent to Katherine in February would bring a swift and positive outcome he was mistaken. In letter after letter he informs Honor that ‘as yet I hear nothing from my Lady Suffolk’s grace’, and ‘my Lady Suffolk’s answer is not yet come, whereat I do marvel’,7 and although the Brandons were grateful for a quantity of wine the Lisles sent them in June, they did not, apparently, thank them personally.8 About 22 June Husee approached Brandon who told him that ‘the duchess’s grace, his wife, was now in Lincolnshire and that his Grace [Brandon] was riding thitherward; and that at his Grace’s coming thither he would consult with her Grace, and thereupon to make your ladyship [Honor] such an answer as you should be pleased withal’,9 but again, nothing happened. Finally, Brandon’s man, Francis Hall, was asked to use his good offices, and on 29 August he was able to tell Honor that he was forwarding a letter from his mistress ‘written with her own hand after midnight at Sheffield Castle in Hallamshire, as I shall tell you more at leisure at our next meeting with the grace of God’.10 As is often the case with belated thanks, Katherine’s were fulsome and included several expressions of friendship, but there is no mention of Honor’s suit: