The Six Wives & Many Mistresses of Henry VIII: The Women's Stories

by Amy Licence

  Suffer no surfeit in thy house at nyght;

  Beware of rere-sopers and of grete excese

  And be wele wary of candyll lyght,

  Of sloth on morow and of idelnes,

  The whych of all vices is chief, as I gesse.10

  Henry initially felt better, but the pain in his legs flared up the following March and he was prescribed rhubarb and advised to keep away from his young wife’s bed. With Catherine left to her own devices, wondering exactly what was happening and believing the rumours that Henry might divorce her for childlessness, it was not a recommendation that would help the royal marriage. Marillac reported in April that ‘this queen is thought to be with child, which would be a very great joy to this king’, and that it was likely that her coronation would take place at Whitsuntide, but neither of these two stories proved to be true.

  Anne of Cleves had made a smooth transition to her position as the king’s sister. On 6 August, when Henry had visited her at Richmond, Marillac was dismissive of rumours that there was a chance that the pair might be reconciled. Even though they dined together ‘so merrily’, the change in their relationship and Anne’s status was marked: ‘She did not sup with him as she did when she was queen, but at another table adjoining his, as other ladies who are not of the blood do when he eats in company.’ Nine days later he related that Anne was ‘as joyous as ever, and wears new dresses every day; which argues either prudent dissimulation or stupid forgetfulness of what should so closely touch her heart’, and on 3 September she was ‘far from appearing disconsolate’ but was ‘unusually joyous and takes all the recreation she can in diversity of dress and pastime’.11 Bearing in mind the invitation extended to Anne to visit court on occasion, she sent Henry a New Year gift of two horses in violet velvet and received gifts back from him. On 3 January, Anne travelled from Richmond to Hampton Court and, according to Chapuys, ‘presented herself’.12

  Anne was conveyed to the queen’s lodgings, where she insisted on addressing her successor on her knees. Catherine ‘showed her the utmost kindness’ and Henry, entering, ‘embraced and kissed her’. Chapuys continues, ‘She occupied a seat near the bottom of the table at supper, but after the king had retired the queen and Lady Anne danced together and next day all three dined together. At this time the king sent his queen a present of a ring and two small dogs, which she passed over to Lady Anne.’ The ex-queen then returned to Richmond. Expenses from that month show rewards being given to Catherine’s minstrels Andrew Newman, William More and Thomas Evans, who received 30s as well as the 13s 4d paid to Mr Berde, the queen’s gentleman usher. A payment of £4 was made to six players of the king’s viols – Vincent and Alex da Venitia, Ambroso da Milano, Albertus da Venitia, Ivam Maria de Cramona [sic] and Anth. de Romano – and other rewards were given to riders, gentlemen of chapel, servants, ushers, clockmakers, coffer makers, players, bowyers, armourers, messengers and those who brought gifts to the king. Two men who brought pheasants received 20s and the same amount went to a man who gave the king perfumed gloves. Payment of 6s 8d was made to George Aynbury for bringing ambergris, John Godsalve for a gold pomander, Cornelius Smith for an iron casket and Anthony Tote for a table of the story of King Alexander. A goldsmith called Bollter who gave a purse garnished with gold and pearl was paid 20s, a woman who gave a ‘book of wax’ was given 5s, 64s was divided between poor men and women who brought capons, hens, eggs, books of wax ‘and other trifles’ and 20s went to the king’s ‘launder’, who gave him handkerchiefs. Henry and Catherine remained at Hampton Court for most of January, making offerings there on all the Sundays of the month. At Candlemas they watched a play in the king’s chamber that was enacted upon a stage or scaffold.13

  On 19 March, Catherine was welcomed into London with a formal river pageant. As Chapuys related, ‘the king lately took his queen to Greenwich, and as it was the first time since her marriage that she had passed through London by the Thames, the people gave her a splendid reception, and the Tower guns saluted her’. He then went on to add that ‘from this triumphal march she took occasion to ask the release of Wyatt’. Here Catherine was interceding on behalf of the poet, who had been imprisoned earlier that year on a charge of treason, liaising with the exiled Yorkist Richard Pole. Henry granted her request, releasing the poet on the condition that he should return to his estranged wife of fifteen years. Wyatt and Elizabeth Brooke had been married as teenagers but he had left her on account of her adultery and was living with a mistress, Elizabeth Darrell. It was a harsh condition for Wyatt, especially considering the later rumours that his wife might become Henry’s sixth wife. Did Catherine take pity on his plight, or was she urged to do so by her family, particularly Wyatt’s fellow poet the Earl of Surrey? Whatever her motivation, the prisoner was released and allowed to return home to Allingham, where his pregnant mistress was living. Wyatt did not enjoy his freedom for long, though, dying at the age of thirty-nine in October 1542.

  Another prisoner in the Tower was to be less fortunate. Margaret Pole, Henry’s mother’s cousin, had long been a feature of his court. The daughter of George, Duke of Clarence, she had served Catherine of Aragon from the days of her marriage to Arthur, being reappointed to the queen’s service in 1509. As Henry’s increasing irritation with Margaret’s sons, the exiled Pole brothers, failed to secure their capture, he had resorted to imprisoning their mother in November 1538. Margaret had been a familiar face to Henry all his life; a wife, mother, countess and paragon of virtue and faith who had attempted to persuade her sons to desist from their papist ‘follies’. It was not enough. Along with her son Henry and the king’s cousin Exeter, also a bastion of the royal court from the start, Margaret was attainted and sentenced to death. She was executed on 27 May, with the inept axeman needing to strike ten blows in order to sever her head. It was a sign of the darker direction the king was taking in the later 1530s, which claimed other former friends, family and servants such as Sir Nicholas Carew, Edward Neville and Lord Lisle as its victims.

  Early in May, Chapuys related that Catherine was the instigator of a visit he and Henry made to Prince Edward, then aged two and a half, at Waltham Holy Cross: ‘The king and queen went a week ago to visit the prince at the request of the princess, but chiefly at the intercession of the queen herself’.14 Catherine’s relations with Henry’s elder daughter, Princess Mary, were less cordial. With Mary several years older than her stepmother, Catherine did not feel the princess had treated her with due respect and threatened to reduce her number of maids until Mary ‘found means to conciliate her’ and kept her ladies with her. A few weeks later, when Henry granted his daughter permission to live at court full time, Catherine ‘countenanced it with good grace’.15 The following month, the court departed for a long progress into the north, taking a wealth of travelling tents and equipment to accommodate the vast panoply of royalty as Henry prepared to visit cities further from home than he had travelled before. By the time they rode away from the capital, Queen Catherine had fallen deeply in love. Unfortunately, it was not with her husband.

  54

  An Old Fool, 1541–42

  What Monster is this? I never heard none such

  For look how much more I have made her too much,

  And so far at least she hath made me too little.1

  It was during the spring of 1541, if not before, that Catherine found herself drawn to a handsome young man in the king’s privy chamber. That March, when Henry visited Dover and left her behind at Greenwich, she sought the company of her distant cousin Thomas Culpeper, reputed to be a very handsome man and still unmarried even though he was probably in his mid- to late twenties. She may initially have solicited his advice about the king, or whiled away the time in conversation and dancing, but the innocent friendship quickly developed into a dangerous romantic attachment. In her loneliness, the queen may have desired the flattering attentions of a male friend; perhaps the pair simply indulged in some harmless flirtation, or maybe she thought she could pursue her own personal pleasur
e as well as keeping the king satisfied. There is even a chance that Catherine hoped to fall pregnant by the young man, in the light of Henry’s disappointment at her failure to conceive. All these have been suggested as reasons for Catherine embarking on an illicit liaison that would eventually cost her her head. Yet history may have judged the young queen too harshly; no actual evidence survives to prove that she and Culpeper actually committed adultery and treason by sleeping together.

  Culpeper may have been attractive, but he was hardly the romantic hero of romantic fiction. He was born around 1515 at the family seat of Bedgebury Manor, near Goudhurst in south-west Kent, and was a distant cousin of Catherine’s mother, Jocasta Culpeper. He started his court life as a page, then became a groom and finally had progressed to being a Gentleman of the Privy Chamber, tending to Henry’s most intimate needs, including the treatment of his bad legs. Yet Culpeper had a dark side. A man of the same name had previously been pardoned after raping the wife of a park keeper and killing a villager who had attempted to come to her aid. One account, written by a London merchant in 1541, describes the rape as taking place in a thicket while ‘three or four of his most profligate attendants were holding her at his bidding’.2 Whether this was Thomas, or his elder brother who bore the same name and was previously involved in a knife brawl, is still being debated by historians although the general consensus errs on the side of the younger man’s guilt. If Catherine’s Culpeper had been permitted by the king’s favour to escape justice for two such serious crimes, he may have thought himself exempt from the dangers incurred by dallying with his wife.

  Much has been made by historians of the surviving letter Catherine wrote to Culpeper, the composition of which has been placed both before the progress, as early as April 1541, and during it, in the summer or early autumn. It begins conventionally enough – ‘Master Culpeper, I heartily recommend me unto you, praying you to send me word how that you do’ – but develops into something more personal, as the queen has taken considerable ‘pain … in writing to you’ and had ‘heard that you were sick and never longed so much for anything as to see you and speak with you, the which I trust shall be shortly now’. She invited him to visit when Jane, Viscountess Rochford, was in attendance, as ‘then I shall best leisure to be at your commandment … it makes my heart die to think I cannot always be in your company’ and added that ‘my trust is always in you that you will be as you have promised me’.3 She signed the letter ‘yours as long as life endures’. Exactly what the nature of this promise was remains unclear, but Catherine’s attachment to Culpeper cannot be doubted. What, though, were his motives, knowing the danger he must have been in, only four years since the Boleyn scandal? Did he genuinely fall for Catherine, or allow himself to be seduced, as he later suggested? Or was the affair a cynical move on his part, hoping to gain influence over her in the event of the king’s incapacity or death?

  The strain was already showing in the royal marriage before they left London, with Catherine shutting herself away in her royal chambers instead of dancing and amusing herself. Henry was reported to be avoiding her company, perhaps through displeasure at her failure to conceive after a year of marriage, perhaps as his resurfacing ill-health emphasised their age gap. That February, he had started walking with a stick. Yet the journey was designed to present a show of strength and majesty to the rebellious north. Whatever may have been happening in their bedroom, or not, Henry wanted his wife beside him, dressed in her finery, as a figurehead of his power and potency. On 1 July they were at Enfield, moving on three days later to St Albans, then Dunstable on 8 July and Ampthill on 9 July. The party had moved on to Grafton Regis by 15 July, where Catherine was reported to be ill and kept to her rooms. Given the details that later came out, this may have been a cover story to allow her to meet with Culpeper in secret.

  The next stop was at Collyweston House, which had been a possession of Henry’s grandmother, Margaret Beaufort, and during this time was reputed to have a great walnut tree in the outer courtyard. From there the party travelled to Grimsthorpe on 7 August, where they were hosted by Charles and Catherine Brandon, Duke and Duchess of Suffolk, who had prepared for their arrival by ordering provisions from the Earl of Shrewsbury a month before: ‘Desires the Earl to send him a fat stag by the 5th Aug, at which time the king intends to visit him at Grymsthorpe. Grymsthorpe, 3 July.’4

  On 10 August, the royal party arrived at Temple Brewer, seven miles outside the city, where tents had been erected for Henry and Catherine to replace their crimson and green velvet clothing with cloth of silver and gold. An account of their arrival lists the order of precedence as they rode into the city:

  The heralds put on their coats, the gentlemen pensioners and train rode according to the ancient order, then came lord Hastings bearing the sword, then the king, then his horse led by the Master of the Horse, then the children of honour, each after other on great coursers, then the earl of Rutland, queen’s chamberlain, then the queen, then her horse of estate, then all the ladies, then the Captain of the Guard and the Guard, then the commoners.5

  They were welcomed by the mayor and other city dignitaries to the ringing of church bells before processing to the cathedral, where stools, carpet and cushions of gold had been set out for them. Doused in incense, they heard Mass before retiring to their lodgings. It was here that Catherine arranged a secret meeting with Culpeper, using a secret door that led to a set of backstairs giving direct access to her bedchamber. Exactly what happened when the two were together until the early hours of the morning remains unclear.

  From there, the progress moved to Gainsborough on 12 August and Hatfield Chase, where they rested for a while in a village of splendid tents and enjoyed hunting and feasting. Here Catherine was observed by her women looking out of a window to watch Culpeper, with such an expression on her face that it remained in their minds. The pair enjoyed more illicit meetings at Pontefract Castle, from 23 August, where Henry sent his servant Denny to Catherine and found her bedroom door bolted. That September they arrived in York, hoping that King James of Scotland would be able to meet them, although they waited in vain. In the meantime, a thousand men worked night and day to complete the conversion of the dissolved abbey of St Mary’s into a royal palace, sparking rumours that Catherine was to be crowned there. No coronation took place. By the beginning of October they had arrived in Hull, and after a sojourn there began the long journey south. It was at Ampthill, in Bedfordshire, that the king suffered an attack of malaria which exacerbated the ulcers in his legs, forcing him to stay in bed. Once he had recovered, as was often his pattern, Henry showered his wife with gifts, presenting her with a gold brooch set with diamonds and rubies. On 29 October they arrived back at Hampton Court, where Henry gave ‘most humble and hearty thanks’ for his good life with Catherine, which he ‘trusted to lead’ in the future. The next day, the storm broke.

  Catherine had previously admitted some of her old friends to her household, including Francis Dereham himself, who was appointed secretary at Hampton Court in August 1541, perhaps in order to buy his silence over his past relationship with the queen. Dereham himself proved to be something of a loose cannon, clearly harbouring resentment over the end of his relationship with Catherine. He courted trouble, getting into an argument with one of Catherine’s gentleman ushers, Mr Johns, when he breached court etiquette by lingering over a meal in a way that was only permitted to senior members of the household. When Johns posed the question of whether Dereham was a member of the council, to highlight this inappropriateness, Dereham made a dismissive and foolish response: ‘I was of the queen’s council before he knew her and shall be when she hath forgotten him.’ With the intimate connotations of a man and woman ‘keeping council’, it was a reply that could only set tongues wagging.

  Yet it was not Dereham who leaked Catherine’s secret. He may have had a loose tongue, but it was not in his interests to bite the hand that was feeding him and incur the wrath of the king and queen. He was shrewd enough to kno
w it would mark the end of his career, although he could not have predicted that it would also cost him his life. Another of the witnesses from the maiden’s chamber now returned to haunt her. Mary Hall, née Lascelles, either applied to join Catherine’s court and was rejected or refused to apply on the grounds of the queen’s former ‘light behaviour’, both in living and condition. On hearing this, her brother John, a religious reformer and sewer in the king’s privy chamber, reported her account of the queen’s past behaviour to Cranmer in the early autumn. A later Protestant martyr, Lascelles may have been motivated by a desire to strike against the Catholic Howards, but his information was true enough. Cranmer knew that to withhold such details could be fatal, so he was forced to act. On 2 November, as Henry went to attend Mass in his private closet, he found a letter on his seat. Knowing the affection in which the king held his young wife, it was a wise move on Cranmer’s part to lay down all the evidence against the queen in writing, to allow Henry to read it as his leisure and defuse the inevitable dramatic scene that would arise. At first the king refused to believe the report, but he nevertheless ordered an investigation into Catherine’s behaviour prior to her marriage. It was this process, over the first two weeks of November, which led to the uncovering of her relationship with Culpeper.

  The evidence was damning. On 5 November, Mary Hall related Henry Manox’s words that Catherine had promised him her maidenhead and his boast that ‘I have had her by the cunt and I know it among a hundred’.6 Hauled in for questioning, Manox admitted on the same day that he had asked Catherine, ‘Let me feel your secret and then I shall think indeed that you do love me.’ To this Catherine replied that she was content ‘so as you will desire no more but that’.7 As a result, in the darkness of the duchess’s chapel at Horsham, he had ‘felt more than was convenient’. Dereham was also called in for questioning that day, admitting that he had lain ‘in bed by her in his doublet and hosen divers times and six or seven times in naked bed with her’. Mary Hall added she had seen them ‘hang by their [lips] together [as if] they were two sparrows’. Another witness, Margaret Benet, had seen them through a hole in a door, when Dereham lifted Catherine’s clothes ‘above her navel so that [she, Margaret] might well discern her body’ and heard him claim that ‘although he used the company of women … yet he would get no child except he listed’.8 More servants came out of the woodwork: an Andrew Maunsay described Dereham lying in bed with Catherine, which had also been witnessed by a laundress named Bess.9