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

by David Baldwin

  14. Spanish Calendar, vol. viii., Henry VIII, 1546–1547, ed. M. A. S. Hume (1904), no. 386, p. 555.

  15. Ibid., no. 204, p. 318.

  16. Quoted by Anthony Martienssen, Queen Katherine Parr, p. 210.

  17. Letters and Papers Henry VIII, vol. xiii, part 1, ed. J. Gairdner (1892), no. 583, p. 215. Spanish Calendar, vol. v, part 2, Henry VIII, 1536–1538, ed. P. de Gayangos (1888), no. 220, p. 520.

  18. Although Brandon’s biographer, S. J. Gunn, attributes this reward to his recent good service in France. The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, www.oxforddnb.com/view/printable/3260.

  19. Chapuys to the Queen of Hungary, 8 January 1541. Spanish Calendar, vol. vi, part 1, Henry VIII 1538–1542, ed. P. de Gayangos (1890), pp. 305–6.

  20. Foxe, Acts and Monuments, v, p. 547.

  21. Ibid., pp. 555–560.

  22. Goff, A Woman of the Tudor Age, p. 167. Spanish Calendar, vol. ix, Edward VI, 1547–1549, ed. M. A. S. Hume & R. Turner (1912), p. 88–9.

  23. Calendar of State Papers Domestic Series, Edward VI 1547–1553, ed. C. S. Knighton (revised edn, 1992), no. 41.

  4 Tragedy, 1547–1553

  1. The question of how far Henry was aware of this ‘unfulfilled gifts’ clause is discussed in Chris Skidmore’s Edward VI: The Lost King of England (2008), pp. 45–48.

  2. The letter is transcribed in Goff, A Woman of the Tudor Age, pp. 172–3. The full title of the queen’s book was The lamentatio[n] of a sinner, made by the most vertuous Lady Queen Katherin, bewailing the ignorance of her blinde life, set foorth and put in print at the instaunt desire of the right gratious Lady Katherin Duches of Suffolke, and the ernest request of the right honorable Lord William Parr, Marquesse of Northampton.

  3. Grimsthorpe, 24 July 1549. National Archives State Papers Domestic 10/8/35. Read, Catherine, Duchess of Suffolk, p. 72.

  4. 27 August 1549. British Library Lansdowne MSS No. 2, part 17. Goff, A Woman of the Tudor Age, p. 175–6. Linda Porter adds that ‘Even allowing for the duchess’s pecuniary embarrassment (which may have been exaggerated, as was common at the time), it is a thoroughly unpleasant epistle. The picture it paints of an unwanted child, her anxious servants unpaid, and her guardian describing her as a sickness, does the Duchess of Suffolk little credit.’ Katherine the Queen, p. 342.

  5. Ibid., Goff, pp. 176–7.

  6. HMC, Ancaster, p. 453.

  7. Ibid., p. 457.

  8. Goff, A Woman of the Tudor Age, p. 186 & p. 175. CSP Edward VI, nos 205, 429, 430, 474, 512.

  9. John Strype, Ecclesiastical Memorials (1721), ii, part 1, p. 83, quoted by Evelyn Read in Catherine, Duchess of Suffolk, pp. 66–7.

  10. Harkrider, Women, Reform and Community, pp. 53–4.

  11. Foxe, Acts and Monuments, v, p. 570. Goff, A Woman of the Tudor Age, p. 179.

  12. These particulars are taken from Harkrider, Women, Reform and Community, p. 125.

  13. CSP Edward VI, no. 435.

  14. Ibid., no. 439

  15. Ibid., no. 481.

  16. (Thomas) Wilson, Arte of Rhetorique, ed. G. H. Mair (Oxford, 1909), p. 15.

  17. Ibid., quoting Wordsworth’s Ecclesiastical Biography.

  18. Quoted by Lady Goff in A Woman of the Tudor Age, p. 187

  19. B. Hall, ‘Martin Bucer in England’, Martin Bucer: Reforming Church and Community, ed. D. F. Wright (Cambridge, 1994), p. 146. Katherine’s close personal attachment to Bucer is evident in a letter she wrote to William Cecil on 17 February 1551 – ‘At Bucer’s request and partly for my own commodity I ask you to see this his letter enclosed speedily delivered. If you cannot help, advise the bearer how it may be done. Why I require this you shall perceive from his letter, which he sends open. Considering his sickness, give it more than I am worth.’ CSP, Edward VI, no. 508.

  20. The disease vanished as abruptly as it had appeared. The last reported outbreak was in 1578.

  21. Wilson, Arte of Rhetorique, p. 68.

  22. Ibid., pp. 14–16.

  23. Ibid., p. 66.

  24. Ibid., pp. 75–6, & p. 84.

  25. We may wonder how far Katherine was consoled by arguments such as ‘If your children were alive, and by the advice of some wicked person, were brought to a brothel house, where enticing harlots lived, and so were in danger to commit that foul sin of whoredom, and so led from one wickedness to another’. But they have been delivered ‘from this present evil world, which I count none other than a brothel house, and a life of all naughtiness’. Ibid., pp. 72–3.

  26. H. Robinson (trans & ed.), Original Letters Relative to the English Reformation written during the reigns of King Henry VIII, King Edward VI, and Queen Mary, chiefly from the archives of Zurich, 2 vols (Cambridge,1846–7), ii, p. 496.

  27. Ibid., pp. 84–5.

  28. Goff, A Woman of the Tudor Age, p. 184. CSP Edward VI, nos. 438, 441, 472, 473, 459, 467, 481, 488, 493.

  29. CSP Edward VI, no. 554. Read, Catherine, Duchess of Suffolk, pp. 85–6.

  30. CSP Edward VI, no. 669. Read, Catherine, Duchess of Suffolk, p.88.

  31. Ibid.

  32. Katherine’s stepdaughter Frances (Brandon) followed her example when she wed her groom, Adrian Stokes, in March 1555, just over a year after her first husband’s execution.

  33. Wilson, Arte of Rhetorique, p. 15.

  34. David Cressy has estimated that 90 per cent of London women and perhaps 95 per cent of those who resided outside the capital could not write at this period. See S. W. Hull, Chaste, Silent and Obedient: English Books for Women 1475–1640 (1988), p. 4.

  35. Sim, The Tudor Housewife, p. 39.

  36. This paragraph is based on Skidmore, Edward VI, especially pp. 197–8 & 231–2.

  5 The Bid for the Throne, 1553–1554

  * My summary of the Lady Jane Grey conspiracy is drawn from several contemporary and modern sources, all of which differ in matters of detail. In all cases of doubt I have used the version which, on balance, seemed most likely to be true.

  1. Although Nicola Tallis argues for an earlier date, perhaps June 1536 (personal communication).

  2. Northumberland’s elder sons were married already. One of them was Robert Dudley, who was later to become Queen Elizabeth’s great favourite but whose life could have ended on the block had he been single in 1553.

  3. One source says that Katherine was sent to reside with her in-laws at Baynard’s Castle – but she and her husband did not live together as man and wife.

  4. H. W. Chapman, Lady Jane Grey (1962), p. 70.

  5. Alison Plowden, Lady Jane Grey and the House of Suffolk (1985), p. 87, quoting the Venetian envoy Giulio Raviglio Rosso.

  6. It is worth pointing out that if Mary and Elizabeth were illegitimate, then whom they married no longer mattered. But it is possible that Edward been planning to deny the crown to Mary (who he feared would undo his religious settlement) for some time.

  7. The phrase is Hester Chapman’s, Lady Jane Grey (1962), p. 109. According to the Chronicle of the Grey Friars of London, ed. J. G. Nichols (Camden Society, 1852), p. 78, Ridley called both Mary and Elizabeth bastards whereupon ‘alle the pepull was sore anoyd with hys worddes, so uncherytabulle spokyne by hym in soo opyne ane awdiens’.

  8. Noted by Eric Ives, Lady Jane Grey: A Tudor Mystery (Wiley-Blackwell, 2011), p. 189.

  9. A potentially decisive factor was that Northumberland assumed that Mary’s men would be no match for his artillery, and it was only when he reached Bury that he learned that she had acquired cannon too.

  10. Foxe, Acts and Monuments, vi, pp. 390 & 419.

  11. The Chronicle of Queen Jane and of two years of Queen Mary, ed. J. G. Nichols (Camden Society, 1850), pp. 19 & 25.

  12. Quoted by Hester Chapman, Lady Jane Grey, p. 169.

  13. Spanish Calendar, vol. 12, Mary, January–July 1554, ed. Royall Tyler (1949), p. 87.

  14. Foxe, Acts and Monuments, vi, p. 416. There can be little doubt that a conversation like the one recorded by Foxe took place, but, as on other occasions, h
e must be viewed with caution.

  15. Quoted by Leanda de Lisle in The Sisters Who Would Be Queen, p. 147.

  16. Chronicle of Queen Jane, p. 54.

  6 Escape, 1554–1555

  1. A later version was that Cecil had signed only as a witness, but Eric Ives describes him as ‘Northumberland’s right-hand man’. In Ives’s opinion, ‘the most charitable view of his excuses is that, to save his skin, he was decidedly “economical with the truth”’. Lady Jane Grey, pp. 164–5.

  2. This paragraph is based on Susan Wabuda’s article in the Oxford DNB.

  3. All these quotations are taken from Foxe, Acts and Monuments, viii, pp. 569–71.

  4. This paragraph is based on Thomas S. Freeman’s article in the Oxford DNB.

  5. Project Canterbury. http://anglicanhistory.org/reformation/ps/ridley/letters22-34.pdf. This letter is no. 25. The value of the royal, or ryall, varied. It is said to have been worth 11s 3d in 1 Henry VIII, 13s 6d in 2 Edward VI, and 15s in 2 Elizabeth I.

  6. Foxe, Acts and Monuments, viii, p. 571.

  7. The Barbican, later called Willoughby House (probably to distinguish it from the street called Barbican), had belonged to Katherine’s parents. Lady Goff refers to an ‘old print’ of Katherine setting out on her journey preserved in the Ashmolean Museum which depicts the Barbican as ‘a large, square, embattled building, with a cupola surmounted by a cross at each corner and a large flag, bearing the Ufford cross, in the centre of the building’. But there is no date or indication of how ‘imaginative’ the reconstruction might be.

  8. Foxe, Acts and Monuments, viii, pp. 571–2.

  9. Ibid., p. 572.

  10. Ibid.

  11. Goff, A Woman of the Tudor Age, p. 226. No reference is given for this statement, and I have been unable to trace the source.

  12. Foxe, Acts and Monuments, viii, p. 572.

  13. Ibid. British Library Additional MSS 33271, ff. 9v–10, quoted by Melissa Harkrider in Women, Reform and Community, p. 104.

  7 Exile, 1555–1559

  1. Foxe, Acts and Monuments, viii, p. 572.

  2. The Protestant inhabitants of French Flanders.

  3. Foxe, Acts and Monuments, viii, p. 573. Katherine had supported Perusell financially and politically when he had been minister of the French Strangers’ Church in London.

  4. Ibid.

  5. Landsknechts were European mercenary soldiers, feared for their rapacity and brutality.

  6. Foxe, Acts and Monuments, viii, p. 573.

  7. Ibid., pp. 574.

  8. Ibid. Read, Catherine, Duchess of Suffolk, p. 113.

  9. See Alison Weir, Elizabeth of York. The First Tudor Queen (2013), p. 228. We have to assume that Peregrine was a full-term baby. Recent studies have suggested that gestation can vary by up to five weeks.

  10. Foxe, Acts and Monuments, viii, p. 574.

  11. Goff, A Woman of the Tudor Age, p. 229. The ambassador was Charles Bertie and the year was 1681.

  12. The term ‘ensign’ usually refers to an individual junior officer, but Lady Bertie suggests that in this instance it should be read as ‘enseignes’, meaning battalions or companies. Lady Georgina Bertie, Five Generations of a Loyal House Pt. 1, Containing the Lives of R. Bertie and His Son Peregrine, Lord Willoughby (Rivingtons, 1845; reprinted ULAN, 2012), p. 29.

  13. Harkrider, Women, Reform and Community, p. 103. For the exile community’s forms of government and worship see pp. 102–3.

  14. Read, Catherine, Duchess of Suffolk, p. 121. Harkrider, Women, Reform and Community, pp. 110–11.

  15. A palsgrave is defined as ‘a count or earl who has the overseeing of a prince’s palace’. Samuel Johnson, A Dictionary of the English Language, 2 vols (1824), ii, p. 272.

  16. John Brett, ‘A Narrative of the Pursuit of English Refugees in Germany under Queen Mary’, ed. I. S. Leadham, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, New Series, xi (1897), pp. 122–9.

  17. Women, Reform and Community, p. 107.

  18. Remains of Myles Coverdale, Bishop of Exeter, ed. G. Pearson, Parker Society (Cambridge, 1846), letter xxxv, pp. 527–8. The letter has been assigned to 20 September 1543 (probably because Coverdale had previously worked at Bad Bergzabern as a schoolmaster between 1543 and 1547), but this is unlikely on several counts: Coverdale did not live in Wesel at this period, and Charles Brandon, Katherine’s then husband, was serving as king’s lieutenant in the north of England between January 1543 and March 1544. He also writes that she ‘owed’ nothing to Bucer rather than ‘owes’. There is therefore no reason to doubt the accuracy of Pearson’s revised date.

  19. Francis Guevara was the son of Katherine’s mother’s sister Inez de Salinas. He was subsequently rewarded with an annuity of £30 charged on their estates.

  20. Katherine and Bertie controlled their income to the extent that they were able to instruct Herenden and Alice Bertie to repay creditors, but government attempts to prevent monies reaching them inevitably reduced their resources. Bertie and Herenden discussed the best means of sending funds to them without provoking the Crown’s anger. Harkrider, Women, Reform and Community, p. 109.

  21. Although Melissa Harkrider says that Lord William ‘nearly succeeded in winning them’. Women, Reform and Community, p. 107.

  22. Strictly speaking, Sigismund II Augustus only became King of Poland on his father’s death in 1548, but had been his co-regent since 1529.

  23. Foxe, Acts and Monuments, viii, p. 574.

  24. This is a mistake. Barlow was Bishop of Bath and Wells from 1548 to 1553 – he did not become Bishop of Chichester until 1559.

  25. Foxe, Acts and Monuments, viii, p. 574–5.

  26. Ibid., p. 576.

  27. Both Lady Goff and Mrs Read refer obliquely to these presents, but neither gives a reference.

  28. National Archives, State Papers Domestic, 12/2/10. Transcribed by Lady Georgina Bertie in Five Generations of a Loyal House, pp. 34–5.

  29. National Archives. State Papers Domestic. 12/3/9. Letter dated 4 March 1559.

  30. Certain Godly Sermons, made upon the Lord’s Prayer, preached by the right reverend father and constant martyr of Christ, Master Hugh Latimer, before the right honourable and virtuous Lady Katherine, Duchess of Suffolk, in the year of Our Lord 1553, gathered and collected by Augustine Bernher (1562). From Bernher’s introduction (no pagination).

  31. Quoted by Mrs Read in Catherine, Duchess of Suffolk, p. 129.

  8 Lady of the Manor, 1559–1565

  1. Calendar of the Patent Rolls, Elizabeth I 1558–1560 (1939), p. 25. National Archives, State Papers Domestic, 12/6/2.

  2. College of Arms, Arundel, no. 35, ff. 5–9, quoted by Leanda de Lisle in The Sisters Who Would be Queen, p. 196 & note 10.

  3. British Library Lansdowne MSS 35, no. 90. Read, Catherine, Duchess of Suffolk, p. 167.

  4. Lincolnshire Archives, Ancaster MSS, v/B/4. See also Historical Manuscripts Commission, Report on the Manuscripts of the Earl of Ancaster preserved at Grimsthorpe (1907), pp. 459–473.

  5. Mentioned in Henry Machyn’s diary, The Diary of Henry Machyn A.D. 1550–1563, ed. J. G. Nichols (Camden Society, 1848), p. 308. Machyn blames ‘a French man that kept the place’ and notes that ‘a part burned’.

  6. The accounts are Lincolnshire Archives, Ancaster MSS, vii/A/2. See also Historical Manuscripts Commission, Report on the Manuscripts of the Earl of Ancaster preserved at Grimsthorpe (1907), pp. 459–473.

  7. David Daniell, ‘Miles Coverdale 1488–1569’, www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/6486.

  8. A simple purchasing power calculator would say that the relative value is £6,303, the percentage increase in the RPI between 1560 and 2013, but a calculation based on economic power considerations gives a figure of £1,883,000. www.measuringworth.com/ukcompare/relativevalue.php.

  9. Edmund Hall, described as ‘earnest in religion’ entered Katherine’s service in the 1540s and subsequently sat in Parliament. During Elizabeth I’s reign, he handled her property disputes, and sent her gifts in rec
ognition of her patronage. See Harkrider, Women, Reform and Community, p. 122.

  10. Grogram was a coarse, often stiffened fabric made from silk, mohair or wool or a combination of them.

  11. In The Alchemist, Ben Jonson alleges masters regularly sought to rid themselves of devalued currency by paying their servants with it.

  12. Lincolnshire Archives, Ancaster MSS, vii/A/5.

  13. ‘The ‘Abbot of Unreason’ (suppressed in 1555) had a similar role in Scotland, while a ‘Boy Bishop’ led the children’s Christmas festivities in the choir schools. The court ceased to appoint a Lord of Misrule after Edward VI’s death, and the practice was abolished in the reign of James I.

  14. The shorter distances covered on the first two days leave the question of precisely what form of transportation was used open, but Katherine would almost certainly have been mounted in order to cover approximately fifty miles on the third.

  15. Goff, A Woman of the Tudor Age, p. 272.

  9 A Bed of Nails, 1565–1580

  1. Calendar of Letters and State Papers relating to English Affairs preserved in the archives at Simancas and elsewhere, vol. 1 Elizabeth, 1558–1567, ed. M. A. S. Hume (1892), p. 468.

  2. Strictly speaking, they were first cousins once removed.

  3. Whatever Mary’s misdeeds, she was still a relative of the queen, and had been allowed to retain the services of a waiting woman and a groom.

  4. National Archives, 12/43/40. Read, Catherine, Duchess of Suffolk, pp. 143–5.

  5. Mary’s appointment as a ‘Maid’ surely reflects Elizabeth’s reluctance to accept that she had been a married woman.

  6. Historical Manuscripts Commission, Calendar of the Manuscripts of the Marquis of Salisbury preserved at Hatfield House, Hertfordshire, part 1 (1883), no. 1507, pp. 477–8.

  7. Ibid., pp. 479–80.

  8. Ibid., pp. 482–3.

  9. Ibid., p. 481.

  10. National Archives, 12/78/18. CSP Domestic 1547–1580, p. 413.

  11. National Archives, 12/78/42. CSP Domestic 1547–1580, p. 415.

  12. Quoted by Leanda de Lisle in The Sisters Who Would Be Queen, p. 277.

  13. M. A. R. Groves, Burghley: William Cecil, Lord Burghley (1998), p. 4. Groves points to an anonymous biographer who records that Cecil’s work as a judge ‘drew upon him such multitudes of suits as was incredible … there was not a day in a term wherein he received not threescore, fourscore, and an hundred petitions, which he commonly read that night, and gave every man answer himself the next morning … [and that] besides foreign letters, he received not so few as 20 or 30 other letters in a day’, p. 5.