The first problem they encountered was that neither Katherine nor her women knew how to reach their intended destination. But they had a stroke of good fortune. Foxe says that ‘she [Katherine] took the way that led to Finsbury-field, and the others walked the city streets as they lay open before them, till by chance, more than discretion, they met all suddenly together a little within Moorgate, from whence they passed directly to Lion-quay’. They found the barge that Cranwell had arranged would transport them, and after persuading the reluctant steersman to ‘launch out on a morning so misty’, reached Leigh, below Tilbury, later that day.9
At Leigh, Cranwell arranged for Katherine to stay with a friend, a London merchant named William Gosling who had a married daughter who was not known in the area. Gosling simply informed the curious that his ‘daughter’ had come to pay him a visit, and Katherine took the opportunity to replace the necessities she had left behind at the Barbican. What arrangements had been made to accommodate the other members of the party is not stated, but at some point Bertie made his appearance and was reunited with his wife. Foxe says that they were obliged to spend their last night in England at an inn in the town, where they were ‘again almost betrayed, yet notwithstanding, by God’s good working she escaped that hazard’.10
It is not entirely clear how long the couple had to wait before safe passage could be found for them. Logically, they would not have delayed a moment longer than necessary, but Lady Goff mentions ‘an account of the inquisition that was taken in Kent of their goods and chattels [in which] it is stated that Bertie and the duchess sailed in the same ship from Gravesend on the fifth of February, 1555’.11 Three times they set sail and twice were carried ‘almost into the coast of Zealand’ before contrary winds forced them back to England. ‘And at the last [second] recoil, certain persons came to the shore, suspecting that she [Katherine] was within that ship; yet having examined one of her company that was a-land for fresh achates [provisions], and finding, by the simplicity of his tale, only the appearance of a mean merchant’s wife to be a-shipboard, [they] ceased any further search.’12
Foxe’s theme throughout his narrative is that Katherine stood in constant danger of arrest and punishment, but this is not altogether consistent with the known facts. He notes that after she fled the Barbican ‘as soon as the day permitted, the council was informed of her departure; and some of them [the councillors] came forth to her house, to inquire of the manner thereof, and took an inventory of her goods’. An order to ‘search and watch to apprehend and stay her’ was issued, but this may have been no more than a formality, or gesture on the part of the government. Mary had been queen for a full eighteen months when Katherine and Bertie made their bid for freedom, and anyone charged with keeping them under surveillance could have discerned their intentions. News of the sale of their furniture at Grimsthorpe had circulated in Lincolnshire and London, and Katherine had not hesitated to share her plans with those closest to her. A trusted servant had been charged to administer their estates in their absence, and they had made no attempt to encourage Gardiner to believe that they would reconvert to Catholicism. On the contrary, Bertie had written to him defending the couple’s shared commitment to evangelicalism, and informed him that he would support his wife in her faith as ‘all the rest in her I love, embrace, and honour even unto the grave’.13
The implication then is that the Marian government suspected, even knew, that Katherine and her husband were planning to go into exile but did not seriously try to prevent them. It was impossible to burn or even imprison everyone who held Protestant opinions, and Queen Mary would have been mindful of the sacrifices Maria de Salinas had made for her own mother. If Katherine had remained in England she would have been at best an irritation or at worst a focus for opposition; but in Europe she would be out of sight and largely out of mind. It is worth repeating that Foxe wanted to emphasise his subjects’ courage and the difficulties they experienced (a theme which, as we will see, he maintained throughout his account of Katherine’s exile), but it is likely that Gardiner and others felt more relief than frustration when they learned she had finally ‘escaped’.
7
EXILE
1555–1559
Foxe says that ‘so soon as the duchess had landed in Brabant, she and her women were apparelled like the women of the Netherlands with hukes [long hooded cloaks]; and so she and her husband took their journey towards Cleveland [the Duchy of Cleves, in the Holy Roman Empire], and being arrived at a town therein called Santon [modern Xanten], took a house there, until they might further devise of some sure place, where to settle themselves’.1 They hoped to find permanent refuge in Wesel, another of the Duke of Cleves’s towns some eleven miles distant, ‘wither divers Walloons2 were fled for [their] religion and had for their minister one Francis Perusell, then called Francis de Rivers, who had received some courtesy in England at the duchess’s hands’.3 Through Perusell, Bertie asked the Wesel authorities to grant them a permit of residence, and Foxe implies that he obtained it the more readily because the chief magistrate knew who they really were.
But even while their application was being considered their presence in Santon aroused suspicion. It was rumoured that they ‘were greater personages than they gave themselves forth’ i.e. than they were pretending to be, and Bertie was warned that the Bishop of Arras, Antoine de Perrault, was planning to question them about their reasons for being there and their religious opinions. They decided that they must leave for Wesel immediately, and one cold February afternoon, ‘about three of the clock’, set out on foot ‘without hiring of horse or waggon for fear of disclosing their purpose’. They took only two servants with them, and again carried baby Suzan in their arms.4
Their journey was far from easy. In the late afternoon ‘there fell a mighty rain of continuance, whereby a long frost and ice, before congealed, was thawed, which doubled more their weariness’. As darkness fell, they sent their servants into the villages they passed to attempt to hire a cart or other conveyance, but none was available and they were obliged to struggle on as best they could. They reached Wesel at between the hours of six and seven, but Bertie did not know where to find Perusell and could obtain no shelter for his family. ‘For going from inn to inn offering large money for small lodging, they were refused of all the inn-holders, suspecting Berty to be a lance-knight [landsknecht],5 and the duchess to be his woman. The child for cold and sustenance cried pitifully; the mother wept as fast; [and] the heavens rained as fast as the clouds could pour.’6
With their situation becoming ever more desperate, Bertie left the others in the porch of St Willibrord’s church while he tried to find someone who could direct him to Master Perusell’s dwelling. He supposed his fluency in French, Italian and Latin would stand him in good stead, but found that none of the locals he approached could understand him. Finally, when he had almost given up hope, he overheard two boys speaking Latin, and offered to reward them if they would take him and his family ‘to some Walloon’s house’. By chance, they led them to the very house where Perusell happened to be dining that evening, and when he came to the door ‘beholding master Berty, the duchess, and their child, their faces, apparels, and bodies so far from their old form, deformed with dirt, weather, and heaviness, [he] could not speak to them, nor they to him, for tears. At length recovering themselves, they saluted one another, and so together entered the house, God knoweth full joyfully; master Berty changing his apparel with the good man [the householder], the duchess with the good wife, and their child with the child of the house.’7
Perusell was able to tell Katherine and Bertie that he had obtained permission for them to settle in Wesel, and with his help ‘within a few days after’ they rented ‘a very fair house in the town’. It was either now – or perhaps, as Evelyn Read suggests, just before they fled into the late afternoon twilight – that Katherine was able to tell her husband that, at the age of thirty-six, she was again pregnant. It goes without saying that if Bertie was aware of his wife�
��s condition when they left Santon his concern for her well-being would have been still greater.8 There are too many unknowns to arrive at anything like a reliable estimate, but Katherine would arguably have conceived between 20 and 28 January, between 257 and 265 days before her son Peregrine (so called for their travels, or peregrinations), was born on 12 October.9 If she and her family did not make their escape until near the end of February she may well have detected the first signs of pregnancy, but it is a tight time frame. Foxe could have learned this from Richard Bertie, or merely seized upon it as a means of adding more pathos to an already pitiful tale.
Foxe clearly delighted in emphasising, perhaps even exaggerating, his subjects’ sufferings, and there are some other aspects of his description of this first phase of Katherine’s exile that are puzzling and not wholly believable. It is unclear why Bertie did not ask Perusell to help them find sanctuary in Wesel until they reached Santon (it is a poor reflection on the six months he had allegedly spent making arrangements for them to settle on the Continent), and we can only wonder why he did not try to meet him in person. Why, at some point, did he not ride or walk the eleven miles from Santon to discover where their friend lived and how their application to reside in Wesel was progressing? And why did they go from inn to inn seeking shelter when they knew his name and presumably his address? Letters were sometimes entrusted to carriers and left at a place the recipient was known to visit, but again, we are left with the impression that a little forethought would have smoothed their path considerably. It is, of course, possible that Bertie had done some or all of these things, but that making him appear dilatory and at times hapless added greatly to the drama of Foxe’s account.
Foxe also has the story that ‘it was by this time [common knowledge] throughout the whole town what discourtesy the inn-holders had showed unto them [the family] at their entry, insomuch that on the Sunday following, a preacher in the pulpit openly, and in sharp terms, rebuked that great incivility towards strangers, by allegation of sundry places out of holy Scriptures, discoursing how not only princes sometimes are received in the image of private persons, but angels in the shape of men’. Again, it is possible to allow that something of this sort actually happened, but Katherine and Bertie, who had always tried to avoid attracting attention in each place where they had sought refuge, would surely have wished he had spoken otherwise. The last thing they wanted was to have their whereabouts shouted from the rooftops – even if the shouter was on their side!10
Map of Katherine’s travels in Europe 1555–1557, drawn by Thomas Bohm after Geoffrey Wheeler.
Foxe does not say how long the Berties lived in Wesel, but his statement that they still had only one child born to them when they were obliged to move again is not supported by other evidence. The contemporary register records that Peregrine was baptised in ‘our church in the suburbs, called Upper Mathem, by Hen. Bonichus, minister’, on 14 October, and his birth in the town was reportedly commemorated by the erection of no fewer than two ‘monuments’ in St Willibrord’s eastern porch. Lady Goff reports that the first of these ‘having been defaced by the destroying hand of time and by military violence, one of his [Peregrine’s] descendants who visited Germany as Royal Ambassador toward the close of the reign of Charles II, in veneration of his memory, and proud of ancestors, who had been honoured to suffer exile for the Protestant Religion, caused another stone to be substituted in its place bearing an appropriate inscription’.11 The joy Katherine and her husband felt at the birth of a son would have been tempered by the news that Hugh Latimer had been burned at the stake in Oxford only two days after the baptism, and they are unlikely to have drawn much comfort from Bishop Gardiner’s death a month later.
At some point during the winter of 1555/6 they were warned by Sir John Mason – Queen Mary’s ambassador to the Netherlands no less – that they were again in danger. Lord Paget, who as Sir William Paget had stood surety for Katherine after the death of her first husband and was now the Queen’s Keeper of the Seals, had ‘feigned an errand to the baths’ that would bring him to Wesel, and had arranged for the Duke of Brunswick ‘who was shortly with ten ensigns12 to pass by Wesel for the service of the house of Austria against the French king’, to take the Berties into custody. They decided, says Foxe, to seek refuge in the Palatinate, ruled then by the staunchly Protestant Prince-Elector Otto Heinrich. Otto and his late brother had been on friendly terms with Martin Bucer, and they felt sure he would welcome them there.
This may be only part of the story, however. The Berties’ presence in Wesel had encouraged other fugitives from Marian England to join the exile community in the town, and before long they numbered nearly a hundred. In October 1555 they acquired a building in which they could meet separately; but the city fathers, who were committed to the tenets of the Lutheran statement of faith, the ‘Confession of Augsburg’, would not allow them to celebrate communion after their own manner. The exiles saw no merit in attending services conducted in a language they did not understand and which still retained what, in their view, were elements of popery, and a further clash led to the revocation of their permit to worship independently. Melissa Harkrider says that ‘Willoughby and other English exiles left Wesel rather than compromise’, and it is likely that the ban influenced their decision to some extent.13
Foxe says that they decided to go to Windsheim, but he was perhaps confusing unfamiliar place names. Their destination was Weinheim in the Odenwald, not (Bad) Windsheim in Bavaria some 85 miles to the east. He says nothing about their journey, but an almost 200-mile voyage up the Rhine as far as Mannheim, undertaken in winter with two small children, would have taxed all their resources. Mannheim is only a dozen miles from Weinheim, but it would still have been necessary to hire horses and a cart to reach their destination. It must have been a tired, somewhat bedraggled group of travellers who, in April 1556, finally arrived at what they hoped would become their new, permanent home.
Weinheim, writes Mrs Read, lay ‘in a curve of the mountains protected from the cold north-east winds, and had a warm, gentle climate. Citron grew there, and even some dwarf palms; but beech trees and occasional oaks reminded the Berties of Lincolnshire and here and there a field of grain waved on the steep hillsides.’ Myles Coverdale, the Bible translator who had been the Wesel community’s first minister and who was now living in the Palatinate, had contacted the prince-elector on their behalf, and with his help ‘the little family settled down in a castle [Windeck] high on a hill by the town, a castle with thick walls and gates’. The grant of the place included household provisions, hunting rights, and the services of Christopher Landschade, the resident steward.14
Katherine and her husband had put more miles between themselves and Queen Mary’s England, but found that, even here, they were not entirely beyond the government’s reach. In July 1556 one John Brett arrived in the town bearing what were almost certainly warrants ordering the couple to return immediately to England. ‘I went up the hill a good half English mile high,’ he tells us, ‘[but] when I came before the castle gates I found them fast shut and a stripling like an English lackey standing before them. Of him I demanded if the said duchess and Bertie were within.’ The ‘lackey’ confirmed that this was the case, demanded to know Brett’s name and business, and told him to remain where he was while he informed his master and mistress. After waiting for a short time Brett and his attendant heard the noise of stones being moved in the window of a turret over the gate, and looking up saw two men who began to shout ‘kill them, kill them’ in French. A missile lobbed from above narrowly missed Brett’s head, injuring his hand, and before he could recover himself some of Katherine’s servants rushed from the gateway ‘with great fierceness’, forcing him to retire down the hill. His assailants followed him into the town where the noise of their shouts soon attracted a crowd of onlookers. ‘The Englishmen,’ he writes, ‘cried to move the people against me and my man [saying] that we were thieves and papists come into those parts with purpose to carry away th
e duchess their lady or by some secret means to poison her and their master, favourers of the Gospel and truth.’ He won breathing space by protesting that his errand ‘was not to the confusion of their lady as they alleged but rather to her singular comfort’, but could not prevent his attackers from stealing his horses from the inn where he was lodging and taking them up to the castle.
A senior local official whom Brett calls a Kelder now appeared on the scene and both parties repeated their arguments, Brett maintaining that he meant Katherine no harm and that delivering letters from the Queen of England to two of her subjects did not diminish the prince-elector’s authority in his own country. The Kelder ordered that Brett and his servant should be detained at their inn until he had learned Katherine’s ‘pleasure’ in the matter (clearly, he was aware that she stood high in Otto-Heinrich’s favour), and when he returned brought with him William Barlow, the deprived Bishop of Bath and Wells who acted as her chaplain, and ‘three or four’ others. Barlow claimed the Berties were unhappy with their servants’ behaviour, and asked Brett if the letters he carried were ‘missives’ (i.e. unthreatening), in which case they would consent to receive them, or ‘process’, instructions they could not lawfully disregard. Brett refused to divulge the contents, so Barlow appealed to the Kelder who insisted that they could only be delivered with the approval of another official, the Palsgrave.15 Procrastination seemed useless, so Brett, anxious to avoid being ‘ryffled’ by Barlow and those with him, handed the documents to the Kelder on the understanding that they would not be opened or shown to anyone unless he was present. He was then again confined to his inn where, he tells us, he was ‘very evil entreated and lodged’.
Five days later the Palsgrave sent two men at arms with instructions to bring Brett to Heidelberg, the capital of the Palatinate, some fifteen miles distant. Before he left his letters were returned to him and he supposed that he would also recover his horses; but the Kelder told him he must travel on foot and only belatedly (and after much argument) agreed to provide him with a cart. At Heidelberg he was detained for a further eighteen days in what he again describes as poor and unsatisfactory conditions until, finally, he was informed that he would not be permitted to deliver his letters and must moreover pay the costs of his detention. The decision undoubtedly pleased some of Katherine’s people who had also travelled to Heidelberg, and they now approached him more civilly asking him not to report their part in the episode to the authorities in England. They returned the horses stolen at Weinheim and told his servant that they would ‘provide well for his wife’, but Brett was taking no chances. He announced that he would travel to Worms on leaving Heidelberg, but instead made for ‘the forest towards Spyres [and] for better execution of my charge and to eschew the perils intended against me took my way towards Italy … and arrived [safely] at Venice on Sunday, August 16th’.16
Henry VIII's Last Love: The Extraordinary Life of Katherine Willoughby, Lady-in-Waiting to the Tudors Page 12
