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

by David Baldwin

  In spite of their differences Feckenham was sufficiently impressed by Jane to again ask the queen to show mercy, but his efforts were thwarted by Bishop Gardiner, who had been released from prison when Mary entered London and who was now her Lord Chancellor. On Sunday 11 February Gardiner preached a powerful sermon before Mary in her private chapel in which he equated Protestantism with treason and emphasised how some of those she had pardoned for their part in the July conspiracy had been responsible for the more recent troubles. He was a formidable figure, with ‘frowning brows, eyes an inch within the head … [and] great paws like the devil’ according to John Ponet, the Protestant Edwardian Bishop of Winchester,15 and he exhorted Mary to be ‘merciful to the body of the commonwealth’ rather than to undeserving individuals who deserved only to be ‘cut off and consumed’.16 He had no reason to love any member of the House of Suffolk, but we can only wonder how far Katherine Willoughby’s studied rudeness towards him had hardened his attitude towards Jane.

  The execution of Jane and Guildford the following day must have appalled Katherine, but being on the point of giving, or having just given, birth to Suzan, her first child by Richard Bertie, she could do nothing to prevent it. If she wrote to Queen Mary begging clemency for the young couple her letter has not survived, and she may have feared that, as with Somerset years earlier, her intervention would do more harm than good. She could have held Northumberland and Suffolk primarily responsible for what had happened, but one was her friend and the other her stepdaughter’s husband. From a Protestant perspective they had given their lives to preserve true religion and prevent Mary’s Spanish marriage (Suffolk had gone to the block ten days after Jane), and she surely regarded them as patriots and martyrs. It is more likely that, in her eyes, the real culprits were the nobles who had sworn to maintain Jane as queen but who had betrayed both her and their faith at the first opportunity, men for whom she now felt nothing but contempt. A dark cloud had descended on both Grimsthorpe and Protestant England, and she could only wonder how her family and her religion would fare now.

  6

  ESCAPE

  1554–1555

  It will be evident from the little that has been written this far that Lady Jane’s supporters can be divided into two distinct groups: those who were forgiven by Queen Mary (even if, in many cases, they had to pay dearly for the privilege), and those who were not. Katherine’s two closest friends, Hugh Latimer and William Cecil, fared very differently. Of the two, Cecil’s involvement was undoubtedly the greater, but he was a layman and a politician. Latimer was both more committed and less slippery, and in Mary’s eyes an incorrigible heretic. The fate of the former would have given Katherine grounds for optimism, but the latter’s would have brought her close to despair.

  William Cecil now held the position of third secretary, and as a member of the Council had signed Edward’s ‘Declaration’ and fulfilled his duties during Jane’s short ‘reign’. He submitted to Mary at the first opportunity, claiming that he had signed the document with great reluctance and that he had attended Council meetings only when ‘sent for’, i.e. when he had no alternative.1 The truth of this cannot now be established, neither can his other assertions that he had secretly blocked orders to supply men and horses to Northumberland’s army, plotted with the Marquis of Winchester to gain control of Windsor Castle (for Mary), and personally won over the Earl of Arundel and Lord Darcy. Mary forgave him, partly perhaps because his sister-in-law, Anne Bacon, was one of her favourites; and although he retired from public office he remained on good terms with her government during the difficult next five years.

  Hugh Latimer was less fortunate. Appointed Bishop of Worcester in 1535, he had been obliged to resign his see when he opposed Henry VIII’s stance on some traditional theological doctrines four years later. He resumed his advocacy of reform under Edward, but his forthright condemnation of Catholic beliefs was anathema to his opponents in Mary’s party. He could not, would not, seek to excuse himself after the manner of a Cecil, and made no attempt to slip quietly into exile after Jane’s ‘reign’ ended. For a time he lived at his family home at Baxterley (Warks.), but was arrested in September 1553 and burned at the stake with Bishop Ridley two years later. Katherine paid for the publication of many of his sermons from 1548 onwards, and it is thanks to her (and to his amanuensis, his Swiss servant Augustine Bernher), that so many of his words can be read today.2

  Katherine’s political and religious opinions were as well documented as Cecil’s and Latimer’s, but she presented an altogether more difficult target than a county knight and an ex-bishop. Lord Chancellor Gardiner seems to have accepted that her recent confinement made it impractical to summon her to London (or perhaps he did not relish a face-to-face confrontation with this feistiest of opponents), and it was Richard Bertie he ordered to appear before him. He could have requested Bertie’s attendance in a non-belligerent albeit still formal manner, but instead instructed the Sheriff of Lincolnshire ‘to attach [arrest] the said Richard immediately, and without bail bring him up to London’. The sheriff clearly thought this unnecessary and accepted his bond ‘with two sureties in a thousand pounds’ that he would present himself before Gardiner on 23 March 1554 (Good Friday); but when he arrived at the chancellor’s house ‘by St Mary Overy’s’ he was brusquely told that the latter was too preoccupied with his devotions to interview him. Gardiner finally appeared for a few moments, but only to accuse Bertie of ignoring two previous subpoenas (of which he knew nothing), and threatening ‘to make him an example to all Lincolnshire for his obstinacy’.

  65. Katherine Willoughby, Duchess of Suffolk, a miniature after Holbein showing her as a young woman. (Private collection)

  66. An old postcard of Parham Hall, Suffolk, where Katherine was born in 1519. Pevsner calls it a ‘wonderful’ example of a moated early sixteenth-century timber-framed house.

  67. Two bosses from the Lady chapel of Southwold Church, Suffolk, said by an old postcard to represent Charles Brandon and Mary Tudor, although the style of the man’s beard and the woman’s headdress are earlier. They may have lived at Henham, near Southwold, for a time after Henry VIII ‘forgave’ their impulsive marriage. (Geoffrey Wheeler)

  68. Suffolk Place, Charles Brandon’s town house on the west side of Borough High Street in Southwark, a detail from Wyngearde’s panorama of London around 1550. It was a ‘large and sumptuous house’ (Stow) surmounted by polygonal turrets and cupolas, but in 1536 the king obliged Brandon to exchange it for the Bishop of Norwich’s house near Charing Cross.

  69. After Charles Brandon took up residence in Lincolnshire he converted the thirteenth-century fortress at Grimsthorpe into a modern, comfortable dwelling. This engraving by Kip shows the house as it appeared in 1674.

  70. The burning of Anne Askew and others, 15 July 1546, from John Foxe’s Acts and Monuments. She was convicted of heresy under Henry VIII’s 1539 Act of Six Articles, which had made denying the real presence of Christ in the sacrament a capital offence, and became the first Protestant to be executed for her religious beliefs. She knew both Catherine Parr and Katherine Willoughby, and was tortured by religious conservatives in an unsuccessful attempt to obtain evidence against those who shared her views.

  71. Henry VIII in old age, posthumous engraving by Cornelis Metsys, redrawn by Geoffrey Wheeler. Of all the pictures of the king, this one may best portray him at the time he was romantically linked to Katherine Willoughby.

  72. Martin Bucer, from Foxe’s Acts and Monuments. Katherine enjoyed a close, albeit brief, friendship with Bucer after he was appointed Regius Professor of Divinity at Cambridge, and is said to have helped nurse him in his last illness.

  73. Stephen Gardiner, Bishop of Winchester, had been Katherine’s friend when they were both committed to the ‘old’ religion, but their relationship deteriorated badly after she became a Protestant.

  74. Hugh Latimer preaching before Edward VI from the ‘preaching place’, the pulpit Henry VIII had built in the palace garden at
Whitehall. From Foxe’s Acts and Monuments.

  75. Edward VI’s ‘Device for the Succession’ composed entirely in his own handwriting, naming Lady Jane Grey his heir. The original designation ‘to the Lady Jane’s heirs male’ has been amended to read ‘to the Lady Jane and her heirs male’. (Jonathan Reeve CD 2 b20p987 15001550)

  76. Myles Coverdale. Best known for his translation of the Bible, he aided Katherine during her exile and lived in her house for almost five years after their return to England.

  77. Title page from the first (1563) edition of John Foxe’s Acts and Monuments or Book of Martyrs. Katherine never became a martyr, but was still considered a heroine of the Protestant cause.

  78. Richard Bertie, Katherine’s second husband, from a picture by Holbein painted in 1548 when he had just turned thirty. From Georgina Bertie, Five Generations of a Loyal House part 1 (1845).

  79. Peregrine Bertie, Lord Willoughby, Katherine’s only surviving son, ‘in the dress of the Low Countries’. From Georgina Bertie, Five Generations of a Loyal House part 1 (1845).

  80. Suzan Bertie, Katherine’s only daughter. A portrait by ‘the Master of the Countess of Warwick’ dated to 1567, when she would have been about thirteen.

  81. The arms of Bertie, Willoughby, Beke and Ufford, from Georgina Bertie, Five Generations of a Loyal House part 1 (1845). Note how they have been incorporated into the design of Katherine and Richard Bertie’s monument at Spilsby.

  82. Katherine and Richard Bertie’s arms ‘with the crest of the Uffords, Earls of Suffolk’. From Georgina Bertie, Five Generations of a Loyal House part 1 (1845).

  Bertie asked Gardiner to ‘suspend his displeasure’ until the matter had been investigated, whereupon the chancellor ordered him not to depart without leave and to wait upon him again the next morning ‘at seven of the clock’. When he did so he found that he was no longer accused of ignoring the earlier summonses – perhaps Gardiner had discovered his error – but it was put to him that Charles Brandon had owed the Crown £4,000 for which Katherine, as his executor, was responsible. Bertie protested that the debt had been ‘estalled and truly answered’, i.e. settled in instalments, in Edward VI’s reign under terms agreed with the king’s father, and Gardiner promised that ‘if it be true that you say, I will show you favour’. But now he turned to what was almost certainly the real reason for their meeting, the question of religion. He did not, he claimed, doubt Bertie, ‘whose mother I know to be as godly and catholic as any within this land’, but Katherine was a different matter. He rehearsed the occasions when she had slighted him – when she had named her dog after him and dressed it in a rochet, when she had chosen him as the man she loved worst to escort her into dinner, and when she had referred to him as the ‘wolf’ whose imprisonment made the Protestant ‘lambs’ safer – and asked Bertie sarcastically if she ‘was now as ready to set up the Mass, as she was lately to pull it down’.

  Bertie made what excuses he could. Her words, he said, ‘though in that season they sounded bitter to your lordship, yet if it would please you without offence to know the cause, I am sure the one will purge the other’. In the matter of the dog he protested that ‘she was neither the author, nor the allower’; but he was astute enough to recognise that it was not so much these old quarrels which troubled Gardiner as Katherine’s attitude towards the old religion and the new order. He cautiously pointed out that the reformed faith had held sway in England in King Edward’s reign, and argued that while coercion could force individuals to pay lip service to Catholicism their minds would only be changed by persuasion. Gardiner asked him bluntly if he thought Katherine could be persuaded to alter her opinions – to which Bertie replied, perhaps with less than complete honesty, ‘Yea, verily … for she is reasonable enough.’ With that he dismissed him, observing wryly that ‘it will be a marvellous grief to the prince of Spain, and to all the nobility that shall come with him, when they shall find but two noble personages of the Spanish race within this land, the queen and my lady your wife; and one of them gone from the faith’.3

  The content of these meetings between Bertie and Gardiner (and virtually the entire story of Katherine’s escape and exile), has been preserved by the Protestant martyrologist John Foxe, whose Acts and Monuments was first published in 1563. Foxe cannot be regarded as a wholly reliable source of information, not least because much of the research and writing of his great work was undertaken by others; but he knew Latimer and Cecil, who partially funded him, and stayed with Katherine (or possibly with her stepdaughter Frances) before he was ordained deacon by Nicholas Ridley in 1550. It is likely therefore, that in this case he obtained some of his material personally and at first hand, but his aim was always to emphasise how much his subjects had suffered for their faith rather than to minimise it. Even if he heard the gist of Bertie’s conversations with Gardiner directly from the former he was not standing at his elbow with a shorthand notepad; and other possible exaggerations will be noted as our story unfolds.4

  Bertie returned home to Katherine and Suzan, not a little troubled and deep in thought. Gardiner had seemed ready to accept his explanations and assurances, but was he merely biding his time? Bertie knew that Katherine had recently sent Latimer and Ridley money to ease the rigours of their imprisonment, and feared that, if this was discovered, it would result in their own arrest and condemnation. The two clergymen were cautious after a fashion. Ridley made no mention of the gift when he wrote to Katherine, but in another letter asked Augustine Bernher to thank her in person:

  Brother Augustine … I have received my lady’s grace’s alms, six royals [ryalls], six shillings and eight pence. I have written a letter here unto her grace, but I have made no mention thereof; wherefore I desire you to render her grace hearty thanks. Blessed be God, as for myself, I want nothing, but my lady’s alms cometh happily to relieve my poor brother’s [Latimer’s] necessity … Read my letter to my lady’s grace. I would Mistress [Joan] Wilkinson and Mrs [Anne] Warcup had a copy of it; for although the letter is directed to my lady’s grace alone, yet the matter thereof pertaineth indifferently [equally] to her grace and to all good women which love God and His word in deed and truth. Yours in Christ, N.R.

  Again, Ridley did not name the ‘lady’s grace’ he wished to thank, but another hand has added, ‘This alms was sent him by the Lady Catherine Duchess of Suffolk, to whom again he wrote again a worthy letter, which is lost, and many other written both to her and others’.5

  It seemed clear to Katherine and Bertie that it would only be a matter of time before they were themselves arrested or before the government demanded an unacceptable degree of religious conformity, and they decided to seek liberty in flight. Their plan was that Bertie should first go to Protestant Europe to see what arrangements he could make for them, but how could he leave England without arousing suspicion? His solution was to propose to Gardiner that he should seek to recover sums of money still owed to Charles Brandon’s estate by a number of Continental debtors, one of whom was the Emperor. Gardiner suggested that it would be better to wait until Philip (the Emperor’s son) had married Queen Mary, but Bertie argued that, on the contrary, the Emperor would be less likely to settle the matter once the marriage had taken place and he had obtained everything he wanted. Gardiner saw the sense of this reasoning, and a few days later Bertie received a royal licence ‘not only to pass the seas, but to pass and repass them so often as to him seemed good, till he had finished all his business and causes beyond the seas’.6

  Bertie left England in June 1554. It is unclear if he returned at intervals during the remainder of the year, but at some point Katherine moved from Grimsthorpe to the Barbican, her London town house, in readiness for her escape.7 They confided their plans to a trusted friend ‘an old gentleman [servant] called master Robert Cranwell, whom master Berty had specially provided for that purpose’, and on New Year’s Day, ‘betwixt four and five of the clock in the morning’, Katherine emerged into the chill darkness carrying little Suzan in her arms. She was d
ressed as a merchant’s wife and was accompanied by Cranwell and six servants who had been told of her plans only at the last moment – Foxe says they had been chosen for their ‘meanness … for she doubted the best would not adventure that fortune with her’. They were a gentlewoman (the same Margaret Blakborn who had been her sons’ governess and who hardly fits Foxe’s description), a laundress, and four men, ‘one a Greek born which was a rider of horses, another a joiner, the third a brewer [and] the fourth a fool, one of the kitchen’.

  Their leaving was not without incident. The inevitable hustle and bustle roused a man named Atkinson, whom Foxe describes as ‘a herald, keeper of her [Katherine’s] house’ who came to investigate. Whoever Atkinson was, Katherine did not trust him, and in her haste was compelled to leave behind a ‘mail’ (a pack or bag) containing clothes for her daughter and ‘a milk-pot with milk’. She quickly ordered the five men with her to go ahead to Lion Quay, between London Bridge and Billingsgate, from where they intended to set sail, while she and her two women concealed themselves in the shadows of the nearby Charterhouse. Atkinson peered out from the gate of the Barbican, saw nothing but the abandoned ‘mail’, and decided to take it back into the house to investigate its contents. Katherine breathed a sigh of relief and began her journey into the unknown.8