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

by David Baldwin

  It is clear that Katherine was very much a ‘hands-on’ reformer, who later would risk royal displeasure by sending money to the imprisoned Bishop Ridley and by forwarding his tracts and letters to her Protestant friends Joan Wilkinson and Anne Warcup. She shared the ‘heretical’ books she kept in her library with others, and helped the Protestant Dutch and French congregations in London obtain permission to worship according to their own rituals in their own newly acquired church. After her husband’s death in 1545 she increasingly promoted evangelicals to the livings under her authority, and six years later used chantry land she acquired at Spilsby to found a grammar school – with the proviso that she and her heirs would have the right to choose the (Protestant) schoolmaster. It was not for nothing that Thomas Some and Augustine Bernher dedicated their collections of Latimer’s sermons to her, or that John Day and other reformist printers decorated their publications with her coat of arms.

  But Katherine did not always see eye to eye with her co-religionists. She criticised reformers who schemed to cause trouble for one another, and (as we will see) decried parents who arranged marriages for their children for financial or political reasons without considering their future happiness.10 Her old adversary Bishop Gardiner had been committed to the Tower in the summer of 1549 for his continuing opposition to the government’s religious changes, and one day when Katherine was in London she saw him looking out from a window of his prison. According to Foxe the bishop saluted her by doffing his bonnet, but she rejected the gesture with the words ‘that it is merry with the lambs now the wolf is shut up’. Lady Goff suggests that she still resented the killing of Anne Askew, not by Gardiner but by others who shared his views.11

  We saw how Katherine could be contemptuously dismissive of those who did not share her religious opinions, but there were still occasions when she helped or befriended some who disagreed with her. Her commitment to reform did not prevent her from appointing former conservative monks who had ties to her family to some of her livings, and she remained on good terms with some of her Lincolnshire neighbours who still adhered to the old faith. In Queen Elizabeth’s reign she developed a cordial relationship with John Copledike, the son of a client of her late husband, who sent her gifts and occasionally visited her at Grimsthorpe, and was aided by Sir Edward Dymoke with whom she discussed a cousin’s marriage prospects and shared remedies for rheumatism. Dymoke even agreed to use his influence to help secure a lucrative benefice for one of her ‘godly’ ministers, and offered to provide an alternative if he failed.12 The inference is that her approach was essentially practical, and more tolerant than some of her statements would suggest.

  Katherine could justifiably feel that the world was turning in her favour after many years of uncertainty, but all was not well in the Protestant camp. Protector Somerset was an able soldier who won a resounding victory over the Scots at Pinkie in September 1547, but his authoritarianism, his self-aggrandisement, coupled with his religious and social policies contrived to alienate almost all sections of society. A scheme to garrison the Lowlands in the aftermath of Pinkie failed to establish a permanent English presence in southern Scotland, and French backing for the Scots made it more difficult for the government to defend Boulogne and Calais. Landlords resented attempts to enforce the laws restricting enclosures (the seizing of common land for sheep grazing), but ordinary people in more religiously conservative areas of the country were no less offended by innovations that included the use of English in the first Book of Common Prayer (1549) and the whitewashing of church walls. A popular uprising against enclosures and in favour of ‘the old and ancient religion’ began in the West Country in May 1549 and spread quickly across southern England to East Anglia where a tanner and farmer named Robert Kett captured Norwich. Somerset vacillated between offering the rebels pardon and threatening them with the most dire consequences if they persisted in their opposition, and although the trouble was over by August it was thanks mainly to the determined action taken by John Dudley in Norfolk and Lord John Russell in the west. By now the great majority of the peers had lost confidence in the Protector’s leadership, and he was committed to the Tower on 15 October. The conservatives, led by Wriothesley, would have had him charged with treason and executed, but the young king did not want to lose a second uncle and Dudley sought to win the boy’s favour by arguing that his rival should be pardoned. The reprieve was only temporary, however. Attempts to recover his former authority brought him into renewed conflict with Dudley, and he was again arrested in October 1551, the same month that the latter was created Duke of Northumberland. This time there was no one to intercede for him, and he was executed on 22 January 1552.

  Katherine would have found herself torn between her instincts as a landowner and her friend Hugh Latimer’s sympathy for the peasants who protested against enclosures, but that was by no means her only difficulty. Early in 1550 she received a letter from William Cecil asking her to come to London to intercede with the Council on behalf of the imprisoned Somerset, but feared that her intervention at what was clearly a charged and delicate moment might only damage him:

  The matter between the Council and my Lord and the state of his cause, seemeth by your letter not to differ from that which before I heard. But of my greater fear [presumably that Somerset would be executed] you have quieted me … Wherefore I trust my journey will be less needful … If I might be anyways persuaded that I might do my Lord any good I would gladly put myself in any venture for him. But alas, if I come and am not able to do for him that I would … then shall I not only do him no good but rather harm … I will bethink me how I can master that froward and crooked mind of mine before I come, and if I can bring that to pass then I will not fail with speed to accomplish your desire and mine.

  Fortunately, just as she was penning her reply on 25 March she heard ‘very good news and great hope’ that the duke would soon be released and this decided her: ‘Wherefore now, I am better determined to stay till their goodness be past, lest otherwise, if I come up whilst it is still moving, they think I come to take away their thanks.’13

  Two months later Dudley proposed a marriage between Katherine’s eldest son Henry, now a youth of fifteen, and Anne Seymour, Somerset’s daughter, but Katherine rejected it. Her reasons, set out in a letter to William Cecil, made much of her belief that the young couple should have some say in the matter, but she may have thought Somerset’s recent troubles a bad omen and feared that his rehabilitation might only be temporary:

  No unasked bonds between a boy and girl can give such assurance of good will as hath been tried already. And now they, marrying by our orders and without their consents, as they be yet without judgement to give such consent as ought to be given in matrimony, I cannot tell what more unkindness one of us might show another, or wherein we might work more wickedly than to bring our children into so miserable a state not to choose by their own liking … I know none this day living that I rather wish my son than she, but I am not, because I like her best, therefore desirous that she should be constrained by her friends to have him whom she might peradventure not like so well as I like her; neither can I yet assure myself of my son’s liking … It is best that we keep our friendship and let our children follow our examples, to begin their loves of themselves without forcing them. Although both might feel bound by their parents’ pleasures, the loss of their free choice is enough to break the greatest love.14

  In the event Anne married Dudley’s son Lord Lisle (the parties were presumably not prepared to wait to see if she and Henry developed an affection for one another), and Somerset was perhaps less than pleased with the whole business. Katherine wrote to Cecil in October complaining that he had paid scant regard to a suite of her cousin’s, ‘although’, she added in a postscript, ‘I could blame my lady [the Duchess of Somerset] for my lord’s fault’.15

  Young Henry Brandon had spent some time in the company of Edward VI, who was two years his junior, and early in 1549 visited France where he displayed his abilit
y to ride wearing armour and made such a notable oration in Latin that those present ‘wondered at his learning’.16 He rejoined the king on his return, but that autumn Katherine decided that both her sons should complete their education at Cambridge University. Her choice of college was St John’s, William Cecil’s alma mater, and she rented a house in Kingston, a village five or six miles to the west of the city, in order to be near them. St John’s had been founded by Henry VII’s mother Margaret Beaufort, although the formal foundation charter was not sealed by her executors until 1511, two years after her death. Henry and Charles would have joined some 150 other undergraduates whose principal studies were in the fields of theology and the liberal arts.

  We do not know how the boys responded to life at Cambridge, but they would have found the regime at the university very different to the comfortable existence they had enjoyed at Grimsthorpe or in London. They rose at between four and five in the morning, and spent an hour in prayer and listening to a sermon until six. They then attended lectures or studied with their tutors until ten when they paused for a frugal dinner of beef broth and oatmeal, after which they were subjected to another eleven or twelve hours of learning and ‘reasoning’ punctuated only by a supper ‘not much better than the dinner’ at around five. On retiring to their cold, unheated rooms at nine or ten at night, they would have shared the discomfort of other students who were obliged to ‘walk or run up and down half an hour to get a heat on their feet’ before going to bed.17

  Even mealtimes afforded no opportunity for relaxation. The Cambridge don Thomas Wilson, who wrote a Latin life of the boys and who was to become a privy councillor in Queen Elizabeth’s reign, observed how ‘during dinner, one of them read a chapter of the Greek testament, and did afterwards translate into English; then they said Grace in turns; and did afterwards propound questions, either in philosophy or Divinity; and so spent all the time at meat in Latin disputation. When there was any public disputation, they were always present; every morning, they did read and afterwards translate some of Plato in Greek, and at supper present their labours. Every day was devoted to private lectures, and the residue they did account for’.18 We can only hope that Henry and Charles enjoyed learning dead languages, and that there were occasions in their short lives when they were able to behave as boys usually do.

  It was in Cambridge that Katherine formed a close but all too short-lived friendship with the German theologian Martin Bucer, who had come to England at the invitation of Archbishop Cranmer in April 1549 and had been appointed Regius Professor of Divinity before the end of the year. Bucer was almost thirty years older than Katherine and in poor health, but they spoke the same religious language. She is said to have attended some of his lectures, to have befriended his wife Wibrandis and their children when they arrived to join him, and to have helped to nurse him in the weeks before his death, probably from tuberculosis, in February 1551. Bucer’s colleague Paul Fagius jokingly advised Wibrandis not to delay her coming to England ‘because the Duchess of Suffolk is a widow’.19

  Bucer’s death must have caused Katherine great sadness, but worse was to follow. That summer there was an outbreak of the so-called ‘sweating sickness’ in Cambridge, and many left the city to avoid becoming infected. The sickness was a mystery illness which began with a sudden sense of apprehension, followed by sometimes violently cold shivers, giddiness, pain in the head, neck shoulders and limbs, and a general feeling of exhaustion. The ‘cold’ phase could last from half an hour to three hours, and was succeeded by the characteristic sweating accompanied by delirium, rapid pulse and intense thirst. Sufferers seldom recovered, and usually died within a day from a combination of lethargy and exhaustion. It was said to have been brought to England by the foreign mercenaries who landed at Milford Haven with Henry Tudor on 7 August 1485, although Thomas, Lord Stanley, had used it as an excuse to avoid joining Richard III about the 15th, a week before the battle was fought.20

  Katherine’s sons and their cousin George Stanley were sent first to Kingston, and then, after Stanley died, to Buckden, the home of Lady Margaret Neville, Catherine Parr’s stepdaughter by her second marriage to Lord Latimer. But it was already too late. Thomas Wilson described their last hours as follows:

  They both were together in one house, lodged in two separate chambers, and almost at one time both sickened, and both departed. They died both dukes, both well learned, both wise, and both right Godly. They both gave strange tokens of death to come. The elder, sitting at supper and very merry, said suddenly to that right honest matron and godly gentlewoman [probably Mrs Margaret Blakborn, who had acted as their governess and who would later share Katherine’s exile], ‘O Lord, where shall we sup tomorrow at night?’ Whereupon, she being troubled, and yet saying comfortably, ‘I trust, my Lord, either here, or elsewhere at some of your friends’ houses.’ ‘Nay,’ said he, ‘we shall never sup together again in this world, be you well assured,’ and with that, seeing the gentlewoman discomfited, turned it unto mirth, and passed the rest of his supper with much joy, and the same night after twelve of the clock, being the fourteenth of July, sickened, and so was taken the next morning, about seven of the clock, to the mercy of God. When the eldest was gone, the younger would not tarry, but told before (having no knowledge thereof by anybody living) of his brother’s death, to the great wondering of all that were there, declaring what it was to lose so dear a friend, but comforting himself in that passion, said, ‘Well, my brother is gone, but it makes no matter for I will go straight after him,’ and so did within the space of half an hour.21

  Elsewhere in his Arte of Rhetorique, Wilson is still more fulsome in his praise of the two youngsters:

  Their towardness was such, and their gifts so great, that I know none which love learning, but hath sorrowed the lack of their being. And I know that the only [mere] naming of them will stir honest hearts to speak well of them … In their youth, their father died, the eldest of them being not past nine years of age. After whose death their mother, knowing that wealth without wit is like a sword in a naked man’s hand, and assuredly certain that knowledge would confirm judgement, provided so for their bringing up in all virtue and learning, that two like were not to be had within this realm again … The elder’s nature was such that he thought himself best when he was among the wisest, and yet contemned none, but thankfully used all, gentle in behaviour without childishness, stout of stomach without all pride, bold without all wariness and friendly with good advisement … The other, keeping his book among the Cambridge men, profited (as they well know) both in virtue and learning, to their great admiration. For the Greek, the Latin, and the Italian, I know he could do more than would be thought true by my report. I leave to speak of his skill in pleasant instruments, neither will I utter his aptness in music, and his toward nature to all exercises of the body.22

  Katherine was unwell at Kingston when her sons fell ill, and although she rose from her sickbed and hurried to Buckden when she received the news Henry died before she was able to reach him. She may have been able to comfort Charles in his last moments, and could have reflected on the cruel irony of how this disaster had come upon her in the very place her late husband had delivered his stark message to Catherine of Aragon eighteen years earlier. Her boys were buried in the church there with all the heraldic splendour to which they were entitled as, successively, the second and third dukes of Suffolk. Lady Goff speculates that an altar tomb now in the churchyard may be their memorial; if so it has presumably been moved from the interior of the building at some time in the intervening years.

  The loss of both her children was a devastating blow, and Wilson wrote that ‘I, seeing my Lady’s Grace, their mother, taking their deaths most grievously, could not otherwise, for the duty which I then did, and ever shall owe unto her, but comfort her in that her heaviness, the which undoubtedly at that time, much weakened her body’.23 He tried to console her by urging that

  whereas for a time, your Grace much bewailed their lack, not only absenting yo
urself from all company, but also refusing all kind of comfort, almost dead with heaviness, your body being so worn with sorrow, that the long continuance of the same is much like to shorten your days: I will desire your Grace, for God’s love, to refer your will to God’s will, and whereas hitherto, nature has taught you to weep the lack of your natural children, let reason teach you hereafter to wipe away the tears … How could your Grace think, that when you saw ancient wisdom in the one, and most pregnant wit in the other, marvellous sobriety in the elder and most laudable gentleness in the younger, both of them most studious in learning, most forward in all feats, as well of the body as of the mind, being two such and so excellent, that they were like long to continue with you … And thus your Grace may ever rejoice, that you had two such, which lived so virtuously and died so Godly, and though their bodies be absent from your sight, yet the remembrance of their virtues shall never decay from your mind.24

  Katherine doubtless appreciated his concern for her, but may have been less than impressed by his ‘explanation’ that God was punishing society for the policy of enclosure and the general wickedness of the era. Her sons had undoubtedly been saved from exposure to ‘the danger of further evil and most vile wretchedness’,25 but she may have thought it a harsh punishment for her own sins and the sins of others.

  The Spanish ambassador reported that the news of his young friends’ deaths greatly saddened the boy king. Edward did not express his sorrow openly, but later devoted one of his orations to the subject of mourning the deaths of friends. Among other expressions of regret, the great Latinist Walter Haddon, another friend of Martin Bucer, delivered a eulogy, and Sir John Cheke, who was Regius Professor of Greek at Cambridge as well as the king’s tutor, wrote an epitaph. Their appreciations, couched in similar terms to Wilson’s, appear excessively laudatory to our way of thinking, but they were not alone. The Italian theologian Peter Martyr, writing from Oxford to Henry Bullinger in Zurich on 6 August, expressed relief that he had not caught the ‘English sweating sickness’ himself, and remarked that