by Alison Weir
He would have been horrified had he known what the Queen had been up to during the progress. During the King’s illness in the spring, Katherine had rashly begun a secret flirtation with Thomas Culpeper, which soon developed into something more serious. At every stop made by the court on progress, they contrived to meet, after Katherine had made a point of “seeking for the back doors and back stairs herself.”30 This was done with the connivance of Lady Rochford, who acted as a bawd, and some of the Queen’s maids of honour. At Hatfield, Margaret Morton saw such significant “looks pass between the Queen and Culpeper” that she thought “there was love between them.”31 At Lincoln, Katherine “went two nights out of her chamber, when it was late, to Lady Rochford’s chamber.” Margaret Morton acted as lookout, and did not retire until 2 A.M., when Katherine Tilney awoke and asked, ‘Jesus! Is not the Queen abed yet?”32 All these women must have been aware of the danger they were courting: at Pontefract Castle, they were thrown briefly into a panic by unfounded fears that the King had discovered what was going on and had ordered his guard to watch them.
On 27 August, while the court was still at Pontefract, the net tightened around Katherine still further when her former lover, Francis Dereham, came to her seeking employment, with a recommendation from the Dowager Duchess of Norfolk. Perhaps bowing to blackmail, the Queen made him her private secretary and usher of her chamber, but he proved a liability because he was prone to boasting arrogantly that, if the King died, he was certain that Katherine would marry him. He also hinted at the favours she had already granted him 33 and aroused Culpeper’s jealousy. Dereham had a violent temper: he attacked another gentlemen usher, John Fell, who had objected to his remaining seated at table after the Queen’s Council had risen, and laid him out. It was fortunate for Dereham that this escaped the attention of his superiors. However, it would not be long before he was in more serious trouble than he could ever have imagined.
57
“Little, Sweet Fool”
While the King was away, Prince Edward had fallen ill with a fever, possibly malaria, but was now, to his father’s immense relief, completely recovered. 1 To minimise the risk of further infection, Henry sent the boy to Ashridge, having imposed strict limits on the number of servants that his attendants were permitted.
During the progress, the King’s delight in his young wife had been reawakened, and at his instance, on All Saints’ Day, 1 November, special services were held up and down the land to give thanks for “the good life he led and trusted to lead” with this “jewel of womanhood.” 2 On that day, however, as Henry arrived in the royal pew in the chapel royal to render thanks, he found a sealed letter awaiting him.
Among the women of the Duchess of Norfolk’s household was a chamberer, Mary Lassels, who had been overlooked when her companions had been found places in the Queen’s household. Festering resentment drove Mary Lassels to complain to her brother John, an ardent reformist who would one day be burned for his Protestant beliefs, and reveal to him what she knew of Katherine Howard’s promiscuous past. Seeing an opportunity of bringing down the Catholic Queen and her party, Lassels went straight to the Council and divulged what he had been told.
Archbishop Cranmer, who also wished to see the conservative faction toppled from power, immediately laid the sordid facts before the King in the letter discreetly left in his pew. When Henry read it, his first reaction was one of disbelief. But when, during a Council meeting at Winchester Palace in Southwark, incontrovertible evidence was laid before him, he called for a sword so that he could slay the Queen, then broke down in tears, complaining of his misfortune in meeting with “such ill-conditioned wives” 3 and blaming the Council, who had “solicited” him to marry her, for what had happened.4
The Queen and Lady Rochford were both placed under house arrest at Hampton Court, Katherine being told it was “no more the time to dance.”5 There is a poignant tale that she broke free of her guards and ran to intercept the King when he attended mass in the chapel royal, but was intercepted and dragged screaming back to her apartments. This incident is said to have happened in the so-called Haunted Gallery, but recent research has shown that Katherine would not have taken this route from her apartments to the chapel,6 so the tale is certainly a romantic fabrication. However, there is plenty of evidence that she was in an hysterical state during the days after her arrest and the interrogations conducted by Cranmer.
The King left Hampton Court, without seeing Katherine, on 5 November, to solace himself with hunting, and returned before 8 November, when Marillac observed him putting on a brave front, “socialising with the ladies, as gay as I ever saw him.”7
So far, however, the evidence pointed only to misconduct before marriage, which was not a crime and had occurred before Henry began paying court to Katherine. But Cranmer, backed by Hertford, the Howards’ bitter enemy, would not let the matter rest there. Dereham, taken to the Tower, would admit only that he and Katherine had been precontracted. Since a precontract was as binding as a marriage, and could be annulled only by an ecclesiastical court, this would render Katherine’s marriage to the King invalid.
Katherine might have escaped the fate awaiting her had she admitted to the precontract, but, in a futile effort to save herself, she denied that one had ever existed, although she confessed that she had had intercourse on many occasions with Dereham during their affair, and that she had practised some form of birth control. When Dereham was questioned again, he was asked if he had had sexual relations with the Queen since her marriage, but denied it, asserting that Thomas Culpeper “had succeeded him in the Queen’s affections.”8 When, on 10 November, the King was informed that his beloved Culpeper was under suspicion, he left Hampton Court “suddenly after dinner” and rode to Whitehall, a broken man.9 The court followed soon afterwards, leaving the Queen behind in the deserted palace.
Katherine, now in much greater peril, was asked about her relationship with Culpeper, but would admit only that she had flirted with him, met him by the back stairs, given him gifts, and called him her “little, sweet fool.”10 Although she had signed a letter she sent him with the words “Yours as long as life endures,”11 she firmly denied having committed adultery with him, and accused Lady Rochford of having encouraged her to do so, then of having spread the vile rumour that they had been lovers.12 When questioned, Lady Rochford denied this and, throwing Katherine to the wolves, stated her belief that adultery had indeed taken place. The couple had met in her rooms with her standing guard, and also in the Queen’s apartments. Once, when the King came to claim his marital rights and found the door locked, Lady Rochford kept him waiting until Culpeper had escaped down the back stairs.13
Under interrogation, the Queen’s maids gave detailed depositions of what had been going on both before her marriage and during the progress, but none had actually witnessed any act of adultery. However, when one revealed that Katherine and Culpeper had resorted to meeting in her stool chamber, the Council naturally believed the worst. Culpeper, when arrested and questioned under the threat of torture, agreed that he and the Queen had met in secret on many occasions, but insisted that they had never “passed beyond words,”14 although “he intended and meant to do [so] with the Queen, likewise the Queen so would to do with him.”15 Hertford observed that his evil intent constituted in itself high treason. Culpeper insisted that Katherine had been the prime mover in the affair, while Lady Rochford had encouraged it and acted as a procuress. According to Margaret Morton, Lady Rochford was “the principal occasion of the Queen’s folly.”16 Historians have speculated endlessly as to her motives, yet the only plausible inference is that she obtained a vicarious thrill through her involvement in this illicit liaison.
On 13 November, Wriothesley went to Hampton Court and summoned all the members of the Queen’s household into the great chamber, where, having declared to them their mistress’s offences and announced that she had forfeited her title of Queen, he discharged most of them.17 Only Anne Bassett was allowed to remain at
court; as her stepfather Lord Lisle was in prison, the King had undertakem to arrange a suitable marriage for her.18 The Queen’s coffers and chests were sealed and placed under guard while an inventory was taken; Sir Thomas Seymour later came to collect the Queen’s jewels and return them to the King. In 1542, Katherine’s emblems would be removed from all the royal palaces.
On the morning of 14 November, the former Queen, henceforth to be known as the Lady Katherine Howard, was taken to Syon Abbey, accompanied by Sir Edward and Lady Baynton, three gentlewomen, two chamberers and a confessor, who would “wait on her until the King’s further pleasure.” 19 Lady Margaret Douglas, who had been languishing in disgrace at Syon, had been sent with the Duchess of Richmond to Kenninghall. That same day, Lady Rochford and Culpeper also left Hampton Court, bound for the Tower, 20 where Lady Rochford found the strain of repeated interrogations so great that she suffered what seems to have been a complete nervous collapse, although her contemporaries concluded that she had gone mad. Thanks to this “fit of frenzy,” she could not legally stand trial. But the King was determined to have his revenge, and sent his physicians to her every day to treat her and report on her progress.21
After Katherine had gone to Syon, Henry returned to Hampton Court. When Anne of Cleves heard the news of the Queen’s fall, she moved immediately to Richmond to be near at hand in case Henry should wish to take her back, but the only messenger who came was a privy councillor who had been ordered to retrieve the ring that Katherine had given her.22
On 1 December, Dereham and Culpeper were arraigned at the Guildhall for high treason and condemned to death. The King commuted the sentence of hanging, drawing, and quartering to decapitation, and they were both beheaded on 10 December. Their heads were set on spikes on London Bridge, where they remained until at least 1546.23
Few members of the Howard family escaped the King’s displeasure. Charles Howard was dismissed from the Privy Chamber. The Dowager Duchess of Norfolk; Lord William Howard and his wife Margaret; Katherine, Countess of Bridgewater; and Anne, wife of Henry Howard, the former Queen’s brother, were all tried and imprisoned for misprision of treason, having been found guilty of concealing the Queen’s misbehaviour; they were also sentenced to forfeiture of their possessions. Within a year, however, the King had pardoned and released all of them. Norfolk and Gardiner, who had done more than anyone else to promote the King’s marriage to Katherine Howard, escaped censure, although Norfolk would never again stand so high in the King’s favour. Prudently, he retired from court for a time to attend to affairs at Kenninghall, from whence he wrote grovellingly to the King, deploring the misconduct of his niece and other relatives, and begging for “some assurance of favour.” 24 His son, Surrey, remained untouched by the scandal, and continued to bask in Henry’s love and esteem.
The eclipse of the conservatives left the Privy Chamber firmly under the control of the radical reformist party led by Hertford and Anthony Denny, who would remain the dominant faction for most of the rest of the reign.
During these terrible weeks, Henry could tolerate “no company but musicians and ministers of pastime, and spent most of his time hunting, seeking to forget his grief.”25 He would not stay in one house for long, but moved about restlessly. Christmas at Greenwich was a dismal affair, with only a small company in attendance. The King, observed Marillac, was “sad, and disinclined to feasting and ladies,” while his councillors were “pensive and melancholy.”26
In January 1542, Henry was looking “old and grey, after the mishap of the last Queen.” Chapuys reported that he had never seen him “so sad, pensive and sighing.”27 Clues to his state of mind may be found in the passages he marked in his devotional books, all of which refer to the folly of becoming involved with loose women; one, in the Book of Proverbs, reads, “My son, why wilt thou have pleasure in a harlot?”
The King, who had rapidly gained weight after the tragedy of Jane Seymour’s death, was solacing his grief over Katherine Howard’s perfidy by indulging in what Marillac called “marvellous excess” in eating and drinking. Already “very stout,” he was “daily growing heavier,” and beginning to look more and more like his maternal grandfather, Edward IV, who had been similarly given to overindulgence.28 Soon, it would be said that “the King was so fat that three of the biggest men that could be found could get inside his doublet,”29 while during 1542 his great bed of walnut wood at Whitehall was enlarged to measure seven feet six inches long and seven feet wide, to accommodate his increasing bulk.
The physician Andrew Boorde—known as “Merry Andrew” because he believed that laughter was the best medicine—saw Henry in 1542 and reported that his hair was still plentiful and red, although thinning on top, that his pulse was strong and regular, and that his digestive system was functioning well. Yet Boorde was concerned about the King’s excessive overeating and obesity, while some of the royal doctors were of the opinion that he was “not of constitution to live long.”30
When Parliament met in January 1542, it passed an act declaring it treason for an unchaste woman to marry the King without first revealing her past.31 “Few, if any, ladies at court would henceforth aspire to such an honour,” commented Chapuys acidly.32 Yet the King was soon in better spirits and once more “feasting ladies.” On 29 January, the day Parliament introduced the Act of Attainder that would condemn Katherine Howard to death, he entertained twenty-six ladies to supper, with another thirtyfive at another table, making them “great and hearty cheer”33 and paying marked attention to Wyatt’s estranged wife, Jane Haute, and Anne Bassett, “a pretty young creature with wit enough to do as badly as the others, if she were to try.”34
Meanwhile, Katherine Howard had been keeping up her spirits at Syon, although she had no illusions as to what her fate would be. Yet after the Act of Attainder against her was passed in February, and the lords of the Council came to escort her to the Tower, she panicked and had to be manhandled into the waiting barge. Once there, however, she regained her composure and asked that the execution block be brought to her room so that she could practise making a good death. On the morning of 13 February, so weak with fear that she could hardly stand, she was decapitated with an axe on Tower Green, where her cousin Anne Boleyn had died less than six years before. Among the crowd of onlookers was another cousin, the Earl of Surrey.
Lady Rochford followed Katherine to the block. Seeing no improvement in her hysterical state, the King had demanded that Parliament pass an act making it lawful for him to execute an insane person who had committed treason. However, by the time Lady Rochford reached the scaffold, she was calm and resigned, and confessed her faults.35
Katherine, who was probably no more than seventeen at the time of her execution, was buried near Anne Boleyn beneath the altar pavement in the chapel royal of St. Peter ad Vincula within the Tower; the Victorian historian Lord Macaulay would later call this “the saddest spot on earth.”
58
“A Nest of Heretics”
By March 1542, the court was returning to normal. Within a week of Katherine Howard’s execution, the King was hosting pre-Lenten banquets for his privy councillors, nobles, and men of law. One such banquet was given for a number of ladies, whose company Henry appeared to relish “as a man nurtured among them.” On the morning beforehand, he personally inspected the lodgings that had been prepared at court for the ladies, going from chamber to chamber checking the hangings and bedcoverings to ensure they were the best that could be provided. When his guests arrived, he received them “with much gaiety” and “made them great and hearty cheer, without showing special affection to any particular one.”1
In July, the court was diverted by news that the volatile Earl of Surrey had challenged Sir John Leigh, one of the King’s servants, to a duel, provoking an angry Henry to consign him to the Fleet Prison in London. A fortnight later, after writing an abject letter to the Council admitting that “the fury of restless youth” had got the better of him, and pointing out that he was “not the first youn
g man to have enterprised matters that he afterwards regretted,” Surrey was released on a surety of the huge sum of £6,666 (nearly £2 million).2
The young Earl was soon to replace Wyatt as the premier English poet. Wyatt, who was elected a Knight of the Shire for Kent in 1542, had grown weary of the diplomatic service, and longed to retire to the peace of his Kentish home, but in the autumn of 1542 the King sent him to Falmouth to welcome an imperial emissary and escort him to court. Wyatt never reached Falmouth: in October, he died of pneumonia at Sherborne, Dorset.
Few mourned him more sincerely than his fellow poet Surrey, who wrote in an epitaph:
A tongue that serv’d in foreign realms his King,
Whose courteous talk to virtue did influence
Each noble heart; a worthy guide to bring
Our English youth by travail unto fame.3
Surrey’s works were already much admired at court. His broad knowledge of classical and Renaissance literature lent his work an elegance and form not yet seen in England. Surrey popularised the Petrarchan sonnet, adapting it to his own purpose as Wyatt had done; wrote a rhyming version of the Book of Ecclesiasticus as well as graceful love poems; and made a brilliant translation of Virgil’s Aeneid, in which he introduced blank verse into the English language. His genius was to inspire the works of later generations of poets, among them Sir Philip Sidney, William Shakespeare, and John Milton.
In November, the Lady Mary presided over court feasts “in default of a queen.”4 The King, however, was preoccupied with deteriorating relations with Scotland, and in November sent north a military force under Norfolk to prevent James V and his army from crossing the border. This was the Duke’s chance to regain his sovereign’s confidence, and he and his son Surrey, who was seeing military service for the first time, acquitted themselves well.
