Henry VIII's Last Love: The Extraordinary Life of Katherine Willoughby, Lady-in-Waiting to the Tudors
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what is grievously to be deplored [is that] we have lost some distinguished men; among whom was that most noble youth, the duke of Suffolk, the king’s most intimate friend and contemporary, and brought up together with him. He was a youth of such hopes, that he was considered to have no equal for his age, the king’s majesty alone excepted; and he had made such progress in learning, godliness, and piety, as to be the admiration of every one, and he would shortly have been a great support both to the state and the church. And, that nothing might be wanting to this calamity, his younger brother died with him: so that this summer has been by no means a happy one to the people of England.26
These men were all Protestants and accordingly well disposed towards Katherine, but there were others, adherents of the old religion, who saw the disaster differently. Wilson remarks that
I know the wicked words of some ungodly folk have much disquieted your grace, notwithstanding, God being judge of your natural love towards your children, and all your faithful friends and servants, bearing earnest witness with your Grace of the same: their ungodly talk the more lightly it is to be esteemed, the more ungodly that it is. Nay, your Grace may rejoice rather, that whereas you have done well, you hear evil, according to the words of Christ. Blessed are you when men speak all evil things against you … the harm is theirs which speak so lewdly, and the bliss theirs which bear it so patiently … be your Grace therefore strong in adversity, and pray for them that speak amiss of you, rendering good for evil, and with charitable dealing show yourself long suffering, so shall you heap coals on their heads.27
It was easier for Katherine’s religious opponents to argue that she was being punished because her faith was displeasing to God than it was for men like Wilson to portray the loss of her sons as somehow inevitable or as a kind of long-term benefit. But they had little hope of convincing her that they were right and she was wrong.
It is apparent that Katherine was now more than ever relying on William Cecil’s wise counsel when she had a problem or felt uncertain, and that she set great store by the advice he gave her. Cecil had become Somerset’s secretary in 1548, and had spent two months (November 1549–January 1550) in the Tower after the duke lost the protectorship. On his release he gravitated towards Dudley, becoming third secretary of state and a privy councillor, and his career did not suffer when Somerset was again arrested and executed. On the contrary, he was one of four men knighted when Dudley was created Duke of Northumberland, and he became increasingly prominent in the new government. He had proved himself a survivor, a man who could weather political storms and whose talents were valued by whoever might be in power.
Katherine would have been delighted to learn of her friend’s promotions, partly on a personal level but also because his growing influence meant that he could intercede for her in her own causes. At various times in 1550 she sought his advice on how to approach the Council in her efforts to buy Spilsby chantry, and asked him to ‘show his friendship to this poor bearer, in a certain suit that one of Jersey has against his brother … so that he may return to his garden, for until then I can have no salads or sweet herbs’. She also approached him about disputes which had arisen between her and the inhabitants of Spalding and Market Deeping (Lincs.) over a marsh and a common in her lordship of Pinchbeck and other rights, and sought on several occasions to defend her cousin William Naughton (or Nanton) against an excessive claim made against the proceeds of his office.28 It was, perhaps, inevitable that she would unburden herself on her kind correspondent following her sons’ deaths, and the letter she wrote to him in September 1551 suggests she had taken at least some of Wilson’s admonitions to heart:
I give God thanks, good Master Cecil, for all His benefits, which it has pleased Him to heap upon me; and truly I take this last (and to the first sight, most sharp and bitter) punishment not for the least of His benefits; inasmuch as I have never been so well taught by any other before to know His power, His love and mercy, my own weakness and that wretched state that without Him I should endure here. And to ascertain you that I have received great comfort in Him, I would gladly do it by talk and sight of you. But as I confess myself no better than flesh, so I am not well able with quiet to behold my very friends without some parts of these vile dregs of Adam to seem sorry for that whereof I know I ought rather to rejoice …29
There can be no doubt that the whole episode drained Katherine both physically and emotionally, and she was to lose more than her sons and her tranquillity. Tattershall and other properties granted to her husband and his male issue automatically reverted to the Crown, and on 4 October, the day Dudley became Duke of Northumberland and Cecil was knighted, King Edward created Henry Grey, Marquis of Dorset, her stepdaughter Frances’s husband, Duke of Suffolk. Katherine did not resent this – on the contrary, she spent Christmas with Henry and Frances and their daughters Jane (the future ‘nine days’ queen’), Catherine and Mary – and seems to have regained much of her old composure. Hugh Latimer again became a regular guest at Grimsthorpe, and in June 1552 Katherine sent William Cecil a buck which she had helped to catch herself. Her accompanying letter included an invitation to hunt in her park when it pleased him ‘for I am very glad when any of my friends may have their pastime here, and nothing grieves me more but when I cannot make their pastime with them’, and there is more than a hint of a renewed zest for life in her closing salutation: ‘And so, with my hearty commendations … from Grimsthorpe this present Wednesday at six o’clock in the morning and like a sluggard in my bed [!].’30
Katherine was presumably an early riser in normal circumstances, but a postscript she added to her letter gives a clue to her newfound enthusiasm: ‘Master Bertie is at London to conclude if he can with the heirs. For I would gladly discharge the trust wherein my Lord [her late husband] did leave me before I did for any man’s pleasure anything else.’31 ‘Master Bertie’ as we have already noted, was Richard Bertie, Katherine’s gentleman-usher, a trusted official whose ceremonial role was to walk ahead of her in procession but who also transacted a good deal of business for her. Two years older than his mistress, he had received a Bachelor of Arts degree from Corpus Christi College, Oxford, in 1537, and then spent a short time in the household of Lord Chancellor Wriothesley. He spoke French, Italian and Latin fluently, and – what may have been his greatest recommendation in Katherine’s eyes – he was steadfastly Protestant. Her desire to settle her late husband’s affairs before she ‘did for any man’s pleasure anything else’ could imply that she was considering remarriage, and that she had already formed an attachment to the man who now shouldered much of the burden of running Grimsthorpe and who had safeguarded her interests during her time of trouble. There were, very possibly, those who tut-tutted that the dowager Duchess of Suffolk was marrying beneath herself, but Katherine would have weighed her options carefully. She would have to defer to her husband as the new master of her properties and household, but wedding a commoner ensured that she retained her social seniority and with it a measure of independence.32 She and Richard Bertie were married, very probably by Hugh Latimer, either in July 1552 or at the beginning of 1553.
It is somewhat remarkable that Bertie had reached the then very mature age of thirty-six without (so far as we know) having been married previously. It is possible to suggest that he had been waiting for the right opportunity, that he had always hoped to find a wife whose wealth and social standing would enhance his own prospects; but events would prove that he was genuinely devoted to Katherine and not without reason. Like Thomas Wilson, he presumably admired her because she was ‘of birth noble, and wit [intelligence] great, of nature gentle, and merciful to the poor, and to the godly, and especially to the learned an earnest good patroness and most helping lady above all other’,33 but we have already seen that she could also be acerbic and difficult to live with. She was indisputably a good ‘catch’, but there would certainly have been occasions when Bertie had to watch his step.
It will already be apparent that a good deal
of what we know of Katherine’s own thoughts and feelings is derived from her personal letters, and from her ability to write them herself.34 Today, we assume that reading and writing are mutually complementary, but, as Alison Sim points out, one is considerably more difficult than the other and it is possible to be able to read but not to write.35 Over a hundred letters composed by Margaret Paston, the matriarch of the famous Norfolk gentry family, survive from the latter half of the fifteenth century, although it is clear from internal evidence that she could not write herself. Rather, her correspondence tends to be in the same hand within certain time periods, indicating that she used the services of whichever clerk or literate member of the family happened to be available. But this is not to say that she was unable to read the replies.
One aspect of Katherine’s life that becomes evident from her regular correspondence with William Cecil is how frequently she travelled and changed her abode. In one period of nine months, from May 1550 to February 1551, she was at Kingston in May, at Eresby in August, at Stamford on 3 September, back at Eresby five days later, at Grimsthorpe on the 18th of the month, at Tattershall on 1 October, at Stamford again on 15 November, and in Cambridge the following February before returning to Grimsthorpe. There must have been other travels and sojourns when no letter was sent to Cecil, and the question is whether they were all strictly necessary or whether they reflect a particular trait in her character. As we have seen, she went to Kingston and Cambridge to visit her sons, but it is unclear if the other moves were brief and personal or involved relocating a significant part of the household. Some may have been necessitated by the need to periodically ‘sweeten’ Grimsthorpe, but there is no hint that she disliked these upheavals or sought to avoid them. We do not know how she preferred to travel, but at this time of her life she almost certainly preferred horseback, perhaps side-saddle, to the bumpy alternative of a carriage.
Katherine may have felt that the past few years had already dispensed more than their fair share of tragedy, but fate had not finished with her yet. The youthful King Edward was displaying great promise and many thought he would prove as magnificent a ruler as his late father. In 1551 the Venetian ambassador Daniel Barbaro described him as handsome, affable and of ‘becoming stature’, and noted that in physical activity, literary study and linguistic ability he ‘appears to surpass his comrades and competitors’. He practised the use of arms every day on horseback, hunted regularly, and delighted ‘in every sort of exercise, drawing the bow, playing rackets, hunting and so forth, indefatigably’. It was with his approval that the 1552 Book of Common Prayer abolished old ceremonies that had hitherto been retained along with prayers for the dead together with all references to the Virgin, saints and prophets, and that the forty-two articles of faith published a year later affirmed the Protestant doctrine of justification by faith alone, declared transubstantiation ‘repugnant to the plain words of scripture’ and condemned the ceremonies of the Mass as ‘fables and dangerous deceits’. Protestants like Katherine looked forward to a reign in which their religion would be promoted by a king who was fiercely committed to it, but their hopes were about to be shattered. Edward had contracted what he described in his journal as ‘the measles and the smallpox’ in April 1552, and although he appeared to recover quickly the illness left behind it a fatal legacy. Modern research has shown that measles can suppress natural immunity to tuberculosis, reactivating the bacteria that can survive within healthy lung tissue, and it was to tuberculosis that he succumbed after a period of increasing debility on 6 July 1553. Some further change was now inevitable, but few could have anticipated how dramatic it would prove to be.36
5
THE BID FOR THE THRONE
1553–1554*
When Henry VIII made his last will in December 1546 he bequeathed his throne to his son Edward (as he was bound to do), but some of his other instructions raised eyebrows. If Edward died childless the throne was to pass to his half-sister Mary (notwithstanding that she had been declared illegitimate and there was no precedent for a queen regnant), and if she failed to produce a child it would pass to the no less ‘illegitimate’ Elizabeth. The next heirs were to be the descendants of Henry’s younger sister Mary – the male offspring of Katherine Willoughby’s stepdaughters Frances Grey and Eleanor Clifford – but there was no place for the line of his elder sister Margaret, represented by Mary, Queen of Scots. No previous king had tried to determine the succession in this manner, but Henry was a law unto himself.
There were, of course, sound practical reasons why a woman could not rule a country as well as the more misogynistic arguments of zealots like Knox and Becon. Women could not, did not, lead armies into battle (no one would have cited Joan of Arc as an ‘example’ of a female who had done precisely that), and there was also the vexed question of the queen’s marriage. The husband of a reigning queen would expect to become king consort and govern with and for her – a situation which could exacerbate internal rivalries if she wed one of her own subjects or could threaten national interests if she chose a foreigner. A ‘king’ from a friendly Protestant country could be tolerated, but what if the queen took a husband from France or, still worse, Spain?
These thoughts weighed heavily on the mind of the Duke of Northumberland when it became apparent that Edward VI was dying. If the Catholic Princess Mary succeeded she would almost certainly seek to restore the old religion, and there was no guarantee that he and his family would retain their pre-eminence in government even if the Crown passed to the Protestant Princess Elizabeth. Frances and the now deceased Eleanor were the mothers of daughters, but Frances had not had a child for eight years and the daughters were all unmarried. Northumberland could have pressed Edward to restore Frances to her natural place in the succession, but he did not do so – perhaps because few relished the prospect of her ineffectual husband Henry Grey becoming king consort. Instead, he focused his attention on Lady Jane, Frances’s eldest surviving child, whose accession, it seemed to him, would secure the future of both Protestantism and his own house.
So much has been written about Lady Jane Grey that it would be superfluous to chart her young life in any detail. Suffice it to say that she was as committed to Protestantism as her step-grandmother and precocious to a fault. Born, probably, in May 1537 (six months before Edward VI),1 she was sent at the tender age of ten to live with Queen Catherine Parr and her new husband Thomas Seymour. It was Seymour (whose mad schemes to wed Princess Elizabeth and capture the young king have already been noticed) who had convinced her parents that he could ‘arrange’ her marriage to Edward, and who persuaded them to allow her to rejoin his household after she had returned home following Catherine Parr’s death. But his ambitions were greater than his influence, and nothing had been accomplished when he was executed for treason. Fate had freed Jane from the clutches of one political manipulator, but was about to deliver her into the hands of another.
It is unclear when Northumberland first contemplated solving the ‘problem’ of the succession by making Jane queen, but the plan was certainly forming in his mind when he accepted a suggestion (made, possibly, by the resolutely Protestant Marquis of Northampton) that she should marry his fifth and youngest son Guildford in April 1553.2 At the same time her sister Catherine would wed Lord Herbert, the son of his ally the Earl of Pembroke, and his own daughter (also Catherine) would be joined to the eldest son of another potential supporter, the Earl of Huntingdon. The three couples were united in marriage at Durham House, the duke’s London home, on 25 May, but in circumstances that reflected the contrived nature of the occasion. The king was too ill to be present, the two princesses were not invited, and the two Grey girls seem to have returned home with their parents after the ceremony.3 The reasons for this are uncertain because Jane, now just sixteen, was old enough to live with her husband even if the same could not be said of the twelve-year-old Catherine. It has been suggested that Northumberland thought that non-consummation would make the annulment of their unions easier if the pol
itical situation changed (if, by some chance, his scheme faltered),4 but it was perhaps at the insistence of Jane’s father, who realised that his own family would lose its pre-eminence if she gave birth to a Dudley son.
If Katherine Willoughby was among the ‘great concourse of the principal persons of the kingdom’5 who attended this grand wedding she would have seen the three young couples attired in silver and gold fabrics (valuables seized from the executed Duke of Somerset) obediently complying with their parents’ wishes. Undoubtedly, she would have disapproved of the overtly political nature of the unions, a criticism justified by Jane and Guildford’s apparent want of affection for one another and by the lack of concern for Pembroke’s son Lord Herbert, who had been brought from his sickbed to stand beside Catherine. If she saw the king or heard rumours about his health during her visit she may have begun to suspect where events were leading and discussed the situation with Frances or William Cecil, but she would not have supposed that this would be the last time she would see the Duke of Northumberland and some of his – and her – other friends.
Soon after the onset of what was to be Edward’s last illness, he decided to put his own plans for the succession into writing. Only a few strokes of the pen were needed to exclude Frances and her daughters, the Scottish line, and his two half-sisters,6 but the problem was that none of his preferred male successors – Frances’s son(s) and grandson(s) – had yet been born. There was every reason, at that point, to assume that such an heir would soon be forthcoming, but as Edward’s health deteriorated he was obliged to accept that the next sovereign would be a woman. He could have nominated Frances as a short-term ‘caretaker’, but decided – or was persuaded – that her eldest daughter would prove a better guarantor of his religious settlement. Northumberland must have watched with great satisfaction as Edward returned to his ‘device for the succession’ and bequeathed his crown to ‘the Lady Jane and her heirs male’ (my italics).