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

by David Baldwin

  Suzan was by this time in her mid-twenties, and in late 1570 or early 1571 had married Reginald Grey, heir to the earldom of Kent. Given her mother’s strong views on the subject, we may assume that Reginald was Suzan’s own choice, but his situation was far from satisfactory. His half-uncle, Richard, Earl of Kent, had gambled away so much of the family fortune that Henry, his father, lacked the wherewithal to claim the title, and Katherine felt she must do everything she could to help him recover it. At the same time she hoped the queen would confer her barony of Willoughby d’Eresby on her husband Richard, notwithstanding his relatively humble origins, and asked William Cecil to again be her friend.

  Her first letter on the subject to Cecil is dated 29 July 1570, and was written from Wrest, the Greys’ house in Bedfordshire, ‘bleared’, as she terms it, by a ‘grieved heart’ and a ‘shaking hand’. In it, she asks him to hand her request to Elizabeth personally but discreetly, so as not to alert potential opponents. She vouchsafes that Richard Bertie will give his son-in-law land worth £100 as a dowry, and trusts that Cecil will ‘find both honour and comfort in helping such a one as will be ever ready to do what in him lies to deserve his [Cecil’s] courtesy and to account him patron of all his good hopes’.6 Five days later she thanks him for his answer ‘with his good furtherance of the same, praying him, as occasion shall serve, to help perfect what is well begun’. She has been cheered by his apparent expectation that her son-in-law to be would be granted the earldom – ‘of Mr Grey you speak somewhat comfortably’ – but expresses concern that there had been little or no mention of Bertie’s barony. The main thing, she implies, is that there are some positive developments before she has to face the guests at Suzan’s wedding.7

  Richard Bertie would doubtless have liked to become Lord Willoughby, to be ‘upwardly mobile’, but knew he would encounter opposition in what was still a markedly conservative and hierarchical society. In a letter to Cecil written at the beginning of September he complains that the Earl of Arundel ‘told the queen I was no gentleman … [but] I am no wit ashamed of my parents, being free English, neither villains nor traitors. And if I would, after the manner of the world bring forth old abbey scrolls for matter of record, I am sure I can reach back as far backward as Fitzalan [Arundel]’. He admits that he is ‘not a gentleman of the first escutcheon’, but emphasises that his father’s right to bear arms was confirmed by the heralds in Henry VIII’s time.8

  Cecil urged Katherine to raise these matters with the queen herself ‘when her Majesty comes near’, but this only threw her into a greater quandary. Elizabeth was then at Penley, only about twelve miles from Wrest, but Katherine had heard that she was shortly to depart for Kenilworth and asked her friend to advise precisely when and where it would be best to approach her. If he thought sooner was better than later, could he, she asked, arrange for the royal harbingers to provide her with accommodation about the court at Penley, because it would not be possible for her ‘to go home the same night’.9

  Unfortunately, we again lack Cecil’s side of the correspondence and so cannot say exactly what happened next or when; but there is evidence that both he and Elizabeth began to find Katherine’s constant importuning tiresome. There were more letters and a face-to-face discussion with the queen in April and May 1571, but the omens were no longer propitious. Cecil had apparently given her short shrift on one occasion – Katherine blamed his gout when he made ‘such haste’ from her – and she was troubled by ‘Her Majesty’s strange countenance and your Lordship’s short words’.10 After meeting the queen again she wanted to tell him what had passed between them, ‘but seeking you in your chamber I could not find you’.11 Even old friendships can be strained sometimes, and one cannot help wondering if this was an occasion when Cecil made himself scarce!

  The fact of the matter is that although there were few things more important to Katherine than her husband and her son-in-law, Cecil and his royal mistress had far more to worry them than two questionable claims to peerages. In May 1568 Mary, Queen of Scots escaped from Lochleven Castle and came south hoping that her ‘good sister’ Elizabeth would help her recover her kingdom. She found, however, that she had only exchanged one prison for another, and her continued detention in England made her a focus of opposition for the next nineteen years. In the winter of 1569 the Catholic earls of Northumberland and Westmoreland rose in a short-lived revolt ‘for the reformation of religion and preservation of the person of the Queen of Scots’,12 a rebellion that served to remind Elizabeth that not all her subjects were devoted to her. The situation became still more acute in February 1570 when Pope Pius V formally declared her deposed and absolved English Catholics of their allegiance, a decision that allowed opponents at home and abroad to conspire against her without searching their consciences or endangering their immortal souls.

  These matters concerned Cecil as much – if not more – than they concerned Elizabeth, but at least the queen was not burdened with the multiplicity of relatively minor problems that crossed Cecil’s desk every working day. Tudor ministers, as M. A. R. Graves points out, were also bureaucrats; no protocols defined what matters a Secretary of State should, or should not, deal with, and Cecil found himself attending to ‘high policy’ in one moment and to ‘pettifogging detail’ in the next.13 During part of the period under consideration (i.e. 1567–9) we find him dealing with letters from a Mr Waad expressing the view that Piers Edgcombe was a fit man to be knighted, from James Spencer who wrote from Danzig ‘concerning forces raising for the Prince of Orange and for the King of Denmark’, and from the Archbishop of Canterbury recommending a scheme to make the river to Canterbury navigable. A Mr Stene asked that he might not in his old age be discharged from his rectory of Higham, John Lauson wrote to him ‘concerning Laurence Thornton’s committing a burglary upon his brother’, and the redoubtable John Foxe petitioned that ‘a law for printing that allows not of above four strangers in one place’ be dispensed with so that his martyrology ‘might be soonest printed’. Peter Osborne asked that trade with Portugal should be ‘free and open’, Bernard Randolph, the Common Sergeant of London, wrote about ‘a person who was apprehended for stealing brass and copper from the tomb of Henry VII’, and the Bishop of London sought his aid in obtaining dowries for his three orphaned nieces. One correspondent, John Gordon, wrote to him in six languages (Syriac, Ethiopic, Arabic, Hebrew, Greek and Latin) ‘owning his relieving him when destitute and begging some employment’ – it is perhaps hardly surprising that the Bishop of Ely compared him to Moses and Joseph when he congratulated him on his ‘good management of the public affairs’.14

  In the end Katherine’s petitions were partially successful. Reginald Grey did indeed become Earl of Kent for a short period (he died in March 1573), but there was to be no barony for Richard Bertie. Bertie sent Cecil a collection of court rolls and other papers relating to his claim in April 1572. The Attorney General, Sir Gilbert Gerrard, and the Solicitor General, Thomas Bromley, gave their opinions, and he was led to believe that Elizabeth would soon reach a decision. But nothing happened, and he had to accept that, in his case, his wife’s wishes would not be granted. Prejudice and snobbishness were certainly to blame in some measure, but another factor was the possibility that he might outlive Katherine, perhaps by many years. As matters stood, Peregrine would become Lord Willoughby on the death of his mother, but if Bertie were to be ennobled he would have to wait for his father to die too.

  Unsurprisingly perhaps, Bertie corresponded with Cecil on other matters that affected both his and his wife’s interests. In September 1568 he proffered his thanks for previous favours, and when, three years later, he heard that the queen was about to grant a lease of customs, begged Cecil to use his influence to ensure that their rights in the port of Boston were not affected.15 In 1569 he took time to remind their good friend of the suit of a poor Dutchman who was anxious to return to Holland to collect his wife and goods; and the following June he sought his backing for efforts he was making to settle ‘stran
ger [foreign] artificers’ in Stamford. He also spent long hours writing a rebuttal to Knox’s First Blast of the Trumpet Against the Monstrous Regiment of Women, which, as we have seen, raised strong objections to female authority. As a staunch Protestant himself, Bertie might have been expected to share Knox’s opinions, but in some areas both he and Katherine seem to have been considerably in advance of their times.16

  Peregrine Bertie was not particularly like his father, nor, for that matter, like Katherine’s other sons. When he grew older he would make his reputation as a soldier rather than as a scholar or administrator, and he did not, apparently, display the meek obedience of his two half-brothers. In his youth he was sent to reside in William Cecil’s household, ‘boarded out’ after the custom of the era, but word reached his mother that his behaviour there was not always satisfactory. On one occasion she asked Cecil ‘to give that young man my son some good counsel, to bridle his youth, and with all haste to dispatch him the court, that he may go down to his father while I trust all is well’.17 Perhaps he was more wilful, more determined to enjoy life, than her other children, and she found it hard to accept that her only surviving son was not as ‘perfect’ as she would have wished.

  Peregrine’s choice of a wife also caused his mother much heartache. When he was about seventeen, he was linked with Elizabeth Cavendish, daughter of the infamous Bess of Hardwick; but nothing came of the proposal and in 1578 he wed the Earl of Oxford’s sister, Mary de Vere. Oxford was unhappily married to Ann, William Cecil’s daughter, and Katherine appears not to have liked either him or Mary; but such was her aversion to ‘arranged’ or enforced unions that her opposition was limited to unburdening herself on Cecil and confronting Mary with her usual forthrightness. On 2 July 1577 she told her friend,

  It is very true that my wise son has gone very far with my Lady Mary Vere: I fear too far to turn. I must say to you in counsel what I have said to her plainly, that I had rather he had matched in any other place, and I told her the causes. Her friends made small account of me. Her brother did in him lay to ‘defase’ my husband and my son. Besides our religions agreed not, and I cannot tell what more. If she should prove like her brother, if an empire followed her [i.e. even if she were one of the greatest ladies in Christendom] I should be sorry to match so. She said that she could not rule her brother’s tongue, nor help the rest of his faults: but for herself she trusted so to ‘use’ her as I should have no cause to mislike of her; and seeing it was so far forth between my son and her, she desired my good will, and asked no more. That is a seemly thing, quoth I, for you to live on; for I fear that Mr Bartrey [Bertie] will so mislike of these dealings, that he will give little more than his good will if he give that. Besides if her Majesty shall mislike of it, sure we turn him to the wild world. She told me how Lord Sussex and Mr Hatton had promised to speak for her to the Queen, and that I would require you to do the like. I told her her brother used you and your daughter so ‘elve’ [evil] that I could not require you to deal in it. Well, if I would write, she knew you would do it for my sake; and since there was no undoing it she trusted I would for my son’s sake help now. [several sentences mutilated] … and therefore kept him from the Court till her Majesty found fault with me and said I did it ‘in a stomach’ against her; but God knows I did it not so, but for fear of this marriage and quarrels. Within this fortnight there was one spoke to [me] for one Mistress Gaymege, an heir of [a] thousand marks land, which had been a meeter [better] match for my son.18

  Lady Mary had clearly tried to distance herself from her brother in the hope of winning Katherine over, but the outcome would depend ultimately on whether their respective friends could persuade the queen to give her consent to the match or withhold it. Katherine implied that she was reluctant to ask Cecil to become involved in the matter, but only twelve days later wrote to him again from Willoughby House (as she now termed the Barbican) enclosing a letter from her husband expressing his reservations. Bertie was (presumably) at Grimsthorpe, and Katherine made it clear that she had not told him the full story ‘because if he knew as much as I of Lord Oxford’s dealings, it would trouble him more; but the case standing as it doth, I mean to keep it from him’. She adds, sorrowfully, ‘I cannot express how much it grieveth me that my son in this weightiest matter hath so forgotten himself to the trouble and disquiet of his friends.’19

  Unfortunately for Peregrine, Oxford disliked the Berties as much as they loathed him, and he soon realised that the earl would not welcome him as a prospective brother-in-law. This and the uncertainty over whether the queen would, or would not agree to the union caused him considerable anguish, a disquiet that punctuates almost every line of a letter he wrote to Mary in the autumn of 1577:

  My own good Lady, I am not little grieved that I have not or this time resolved the doubt I left you in, and so much the more as I fear it hath caused your unquietness, in whom I make more account of than of myself or life, and therefore, resolve yourself that if I had had fit time, I would not [have] so slightly overpassed it. But the truth is, by other troubles, I have yet heard nothing of that matter worth the sending, yet, did I think not to lose so much occasion, since I know not when to recover it again, as to let [you] understand how uncourteously I am dealt with by my Lord, your brother, who, as I hear, bandeth against me, & sweareth my death, which I fear nor force not, but lest his displeasure should withdraw your affection towards me, otherwise I think no way to be so offended as I can not defend. And thus good Lady persuade yourself no less than you shall find I will give cause or perform. Above all things if you wish me well let nothing grieve you whatsoever you shall hear do hap. For my own part my good or evil fortune consisteth only in you, whom I must request to accept as well this scribbled well meaning as better eloquence, excusing my imperfections with my troubled mind, which am locked up so fast as I could scarce get pen & paper to be the present messengers of my poor good will, and thus end a wilful man, having received new occasion by your letter at this instant to trouble you more hereafter withal. From Willoughby House. Yours more than his own and so till his end. Peregrine Bertie.20

  He need not have worried. The queen gave her consent, probably soon after Christmas, and Oxford and the Berties were obliged to accept her decision. In July, Katherine had told Cecil that ‘if her Majesty could be won to like of it, my husband would be the easier won to it, if Lord Oxford’s great uncourtesy do not too much trouble him’,21 and she herself decided that it would be better to make a friend of Mary when it seemed there was no going back. By December they were conspiring to effect a reconciliation between Oxford and his estranged wife by tricking the earl into showing affection for his infant daughter whom he had hitherto refused to see. Katherine informed Cecil that

  on Thursday I went to see my Lady Mary Vere. After other talks, she asked me what I would say to it if my Lord her brother would take his wife again. ‘Truly,’ quoth I, ‘nothing would comfort me more, for now I wish to your brother as much good as to my own son.’ ‘Indeed,’ quoth she, ‘he would very fain see the child and is loth to send for her.’ ‘Then,’ quoth I, ‘and you will keep my counsel, we will have some sport with him. I will see if I can get the child hither to me, when you shall come hither, and whilst my Lord your brother is with you I will bring in the child as though it were some other of my friends’ and we shall see how nature will work in him to like it, and tell him it is his own after.’ ‘Very well,’ quoth she, ‘we agree thereon.’ … I mean not to delay in it otherwise than it shall seem good to your Lordship and in that sort that may best like you. I will do what I can either in that or in anything else that may any way lay in me.22

  Later that day Katherine thoughtfully wrote to Cecil’s wife Mildred, who had been caring for the child, apologising for seeking to deprive her of her granddaughter, but there is no evidence that the ruse was ever attempted. Perhaps Cecil advised against it? In any event, the Oxfords were reconciled, although not until several years later.

  After Peregrine and Mary were marrie
d they set up home at Grimsthorpe while Katherine and Bertie took a house in Hampstead away from the bustle of central London. The newly-weds should have been more than content with their situation after so many uncertainties, but instead began to drink heavily and neglect the property. Their behaviour alarmed Katherine, and once again it was Cecil who had to listen to her troubles poured out in a letter dated 12 March 1578. ‘My daughter[-in-law] Mary and her husband,’ she complains, ‘will in any wise use a house out of hand, and I fear will so govern it as my husband and I shall have small comfort of it and less gain; for what disorders they make we must pay for it, but neither the young folk nor my husband so considers of it yet.’ She admits that ‘my Lady [Mary] loves wine who knows her that knows not that … and my son hates it not’; but still asks Cecil to send them two tuns of the stuff, perhaps, as Mrs Read suggests, to keep them at Grimsthorpe rather than have them turn up in the capital – ‘if they outrage not too much so as we shall not be able to bide it’.23

  The situation was apparently no better by September when Thomas Cecil, William’s eldest son, proposed to call at Grimsthorpe in the course of what he calls ‘a little progress into Lincolnshire’. He tells his father that he will have better knowledge of ‘such disagreements as have fallen out there’ after his visit, but that he understands ‘that my Lady of Suffolk’s coming down from London was to appease certain unkindness grown between her son and his wife’.24 Peregrine and Mary were clearly not ‘getting on’ well together, but the well-meaning mother-in-law’s intervention only served to alienate Mary and led to the situation described in the Prologue. On Easter Monday 1580 Katherine wrote what was to be her last letter to Cecil (the last one that has been preserved), asking him to use his influence to persuade the authorities to allow her son to go abroad: