by Amy Licence
On the night of 6 November, Henry left Hampton Court for Whitehall. There, in a council meeting that ran from midnight until the early hours, Henry broke down in tears, lamenting his ‘ill-luck in meeting with such ill-conditioned wives’ and calling for a sword so that he might kill her himself, so ‘that wicked woman [would have] never such delight in her incontinency as she should have torture in her death’.10 Left behind at Hampton Court, Catherine would never see him again.
The queen must have sensed something was wrong. For Henry to depart without a word of explanation was ominous enough and she kept to her chambers, telling her musicians there is ‘no more time to dance’.11 She did not have to wait long. On the evening of the following day, a delegation of the council confronted her with their findings, which she initially denied. At a meeting with Cranmer later than night, however, she admitted her guilt and made a full confession, tearful and distraught, ‘in such lamentation and heaviness as I never saw no creature, so that it would have pitied any man’s heart to have looked upon her’. She explained her misconduct in a way that sounds quite plausible and rings of truth: she had been ‘blinded with desire of worldly glory’ so that she had not considered ‘how great a fault it was to conceal my former faults from your majesty’. On hearing this, Henry was inclined to be merciful. She had sinned before their marriage and her greatest fault had been not to admit this to him; a pre-contract with Dereham would allow her marriage to the king to be judged invalid. She was taken to Syon House, where she would await developments, ‘and there lodged moderately as her life hath deserved’, wearing dresses ‘without stone or pearl’.12 But then, on 11 November, under torture, Dereham admitted that he had been succeeded in the queen’s affections by Thomas Culpeper.
This was treason. Under questioning, Catherine admitted that she had met with Culpeper in secret on three occasions at Lincoln, Pontefract and York, but laid the blame for it at his door and that of Jane Rochford, who had been their confidant and helped arrange their trysts. She categorically denied sleeping with him: ‘as for the act … she denieth upon her oath, or touching any bare part of her but her hand’. Yet the evidence seemed conclusive. Her waiting woman, Katherine Tilney, also from Horsham and Lambeth, was questioned on 13 November about the queen’s movements at Lincoln, and stated that Catherine
went two nights to lady Rochford’s chamber, which was up a little pair of stairs by the queen’s chamber. [She] and her fellow Marget went with her, but were sent back. Marget went up again eftsoons, and examinate went to bed with Friswyde. When Marget came to bed, about 2 o’clock, examinate said, ‘Jesus, is not the queen abed yet?’ She replied, ‘Yes, even now.’ The second night the queen sent the rest to bed … but she was in a little place with Lady Rochford’s woman and could not tell who came into Lady Rochford’s chamber.13
Another of the queen’s ladies, Margaret Morton confessed that ‘she never mistrusted the queen until at Hatfeld she saw her look out of her chamber window on Mr Culpeper after such sort that she thought there was love between them. There the queen gave order that neither Mrs Lofkyng “nor no nother” should come into her bedchamber unless called’. Mrs Morton had also been asked to carry ‘a sealed letter … to my lady of Rochford’, who prayed her to keep it a secret.14 Jane Rochford must have been terrified as the story was uncovered, only four years after the adultery charges that had led to the deaths of her husband and sister-in-law. She was quick to cooperate and place the blame on Catherine, in the hope that it would save her, as it had done in 1536. Although quick to claim ‘she heard or saw nothing’ on some occasions, she was so deeply implicated that she had to confess that Catherine had asked for Culpeper daily and that she had witnessed him pick the lock to her chamber in Lincoln. She added that, in her opinion, ‘Culpeper has known the queen carnally’.15 But had he?
Through the ensuing scramble to pass the blame, both Catherine and Culpeper insisted they had not slept together. It may have been out of self-preservation, but both stated they were guilty of the desire to fornicate; they ‘intended to do ill’, although they had stopped short of the act. Culpeper admitted to secret meetings and receiving gifts from the queen, depicting the relationship as taking place at her instigation. She had given him gifts, with the instruction to conceal them under his cloak, sent him fish dinners when he was ill, and they had talked for several hours in her stool room at Lincoln. He related how she had said to him that ‘if I had tarried still in the maidens’ chamber I would have tried you’16 but he had kissed her hand and told her ‘he would presume no further’. It cannot be conclusively proven that they did have sex, which both would have known was an act of treason bearing the death penalty; to cross that line would have been an act of incredible folly. The only other person able to verify this was Jane Rochford, whose accusation stands alone regarding their adultery. Culpeper was sent to the Tower on 12 November and the inventories of his goods made in the following days were a powerful statement of his fate. Dead men did not need velvet caps, bedsteads and harnesses. Along with Francis Dereham, he was tried at the Guildhall for treason on 1 December and condemned to death. One of the concluding statements left little doubt as to the belief of the council, and king, that he and Catherine were guilty of adultery as charged:
Also the said queen, not satisfied with her vicious life aforesaid, on the 29 Aug. 33 Hen. VIII., at Pomfret, and at other times and places before and after, with Thos. Culpeper, late of London, one of the gentlemen of the king’s privy chamber, falsely and traitorously held illicit meeting and conference to incite the said Culpeper to have carnal intercourse with her; and insinuated to him that she loved him above the king and all others. Similarly the said Culpeper incited the queen. And the better and more secretly to pursue their carnal life they retained Jane lady Rochford, late wife of Sir Geo. Boleyn late lord Rochford, as a go-between to contrive meetings in the queen’s stole chamber and other suspect places; and so the said Jane falsely and traitorously aided and abetted them.17
On 4 December, two of Catherine’s ladies, Jane Rattsey and Catherine Bassett, sister to Anne, were summoned to the king’s council for gossip. Their idle questions, asking if ‘God [is] working to make Anne of Cleves queen again’ and ‘what a man is the king! How many wives will he have’, saw them committed to jail. Nine days later, Dereham suffered the full traitor’s death of hanging, quartering and disembowelling at Tyburn, while Culpeper was beheaded. Afterwards, their heads were placed on spikes on London Bridge as a macabre and powerful deterrent.
The weeks passed. Catherine waited at Syon as Christmas was succeeded by New Year. All may have seemed quiet in the seclusion of the old abbey but the king’s council were working furiously to pass the legislation required to allow her downfall. In late January, an Act of Attainder made it treason for a woman to become the king’s wife without ‘plain declaration before of her unchaste life’ and confirming that adultery, to facilitate adultery, or the failure to admit adultery, was treason. Before this, Catherine had hoped she might still gain Henry’s forgiveness; Chapuys described her ‘making good cheer, fatter and more beautiful than ever, taking great care to be well apparelled and more imperious and troublesome to serve than even when she was with the king’.18 Yet, the new Act made her death inevitable. Her accomplices had died in December and Catherine’s death had been delayed in order for the legal process to take its due course, although it moved considerably slower than it had for Anne Boleyn. It is entirely possible that Henry was waiting to be completely sure that she was not pregnant. Even if the child had not been his, it was standard practise in Tudor law to establish that a condemned woman was not expecting, usually by examination carried out by a panel of matrons. Catherine was not pregnant; either by Culpeper or the king.
On 10 February, Catherine was conveyed from Syon House to the Tower ‘with some resistance’, dressed in black velvet. Two days later, she was informed that she would die the following morning, and ‘wept, cried and tormented herself miserably without ceasing’,19 befor
e requesting that the block be sent to her, in order to place ‘her head on it by way of experiment’.20 Catherine and Jane Rochford were executed one after the other, early in the morning on 13 February, on the same spot where Anne Boleyn had died. Their bodies joined hers in the Tower’s chapel of St Peter ad Vincula.
PART NINE
Catherine Parr
55
The Learned Widow, 1542–43
When Summer took in hand the winter to assail,
With force of might, and virtue great, his stormy blasts to quail:
And when he clothed fair the earth about with green,
And every tree new garmented, that pleasure was to seen:
Mine heart gan new revive, and changed blood did stir,
Me to withdraw my winter woes, that kept within the dore.1
As early as the day of Catherine Howard’s arrest, rumours were flying regarding the identity of Henry’s next wife. According to Marillac, court gossip favoured his return to Anne of Cleves ‘who has conducted herself wisely in her affliction, and is more beautiful than she was’2 and had been invited to Greenwich at New Year, where she presented the king with pieces of crimson cloth and received a gift of glass pots and flagons in return. Having played the waiting game, accepting Henry’s repudiation of her and prostrating herself before Catherine Howard, Anne may have believed herself to be in with a chance of being restored to the king’s favour. Her ambassador, Harst, attempted to speak to Brandon and Cranmer regarding a remarriage and received a number of letters from German Princes in support, which he hesitated to show to Henry on account of the king’s continuing grief. Arrangements were also well underway for the marriage of Anne’s erstwhile fiancé to Christina of Milan, which removed the impediment on which the English match had floundered. A tract published in Europe in late 1541 might have contributed to her false hopes.
The Remonstrance of Anne of Cleves was printed by John of Luxembourg, Abbot of Ivry. It depicted Anne as overwhelmed with sorrow, taking the form of a direct appeal from her to Henry, lamenting that ‘wives are given to men to obey them … if then the king chooses to leave you and take another, ought you to go contrary to his will?’ All the clothes and jewels, properties and lands she had received at his hands had ‘been contaminated and defiled by the bad treatment, the wrong and the injury, exhibited by him to her’. This fictional ‘Anne’ continued ‘if it be said that she is not so personally attractive in the king’s eyes as he desired to find her, let it be replied that she did not seek the king, but he sought her’ and by ‘becoming entirely conformed to his desires … she should be far more agreeable to him than any of those whose company he might [with scandal and sin] desire to use’.3 The French ambassador, William Paget, implored Francis I to suppress the tract, but without success. It was an embarrassment but it did nothing to advance Anne’s case, if she was even aware of its existence. Henry continued to treat her as his sister; that March, when she lay ill at Richmond with ‘tertian fever’, he sent his doctors there to tend her.
On 29 January, two weeks before Catherine Howard was executed, Henry started to emerge from the depressive pall that had weighed him down since her arrest. Chapuys related that ‘until then this king had never, since he detected the queen’s conduct, shown joy; as he has done since, hosting a supper and banquet for over fifty ladies, twenty-six of whom sat at his table, with another thirty-five adjoining it’.4 According to Chapuys, he ‘showed most favour and affection’ to Elizabeth Brooke, the estranged wife of Thomas Wyatt, ‘a beautiful girl, with wit enough, if she tried, to do as badly as the others’.5 Born in 1503, the daughter of Lord Cobham, Elizabeth, was then approaching forty and had produced one legitimate son. She would remarry after Wyatt’s death that year but some have speculated that her age meant that Chapuys had confused her identity with that of her niece, who bore the same name and was then aged sixteen. Both women are likely candidates for the king’s attention. Wyatt’s wife was probably older than Henry hoped for in a wife, if he was still clinging to the possibility of fathering a Duke of York, but after Catherine Howard he may have decided not to set his sights on a young girl. His next wife would be a more mature woman, twice widowed. At the banquet of 29 January, he may have been simply seeking pleasant company, without intention of marriage, so this does not rule the elder Elizabeth Brooke out. Her niece, born in 1526, had been a maid to Catherine Howard and would soon cause a scandal at court by living in open adultery with William Parr, soon to become Henry’s brother-in-law. Chapuys also identified two other possible candidates for Henry’s hand, ‘a daughter of the wife of Monsieur Lisle, formerly deputy of Calais, by her first marriage’,6 which must have been Anne Bassett, and a mysterious daughter of ‘Madame Albart, niece of the Grand Esquire, Mr Anthony Brown’. However, the woman Henry would choose as his next wife still had a husband; it would be a full year before the king remarried.
Catherine Parr was probably born in 1512, to Sir Thomas Parr, a descendant of Edward III and Maud Green, a cousin of Edward IV’s wife, Elizabeth Wydeville. She probably arrived at the new family home in Blackfriars, which had been recently granted to the Parrs by Henry VIII, for their services to the Crown. Maud was a lady-in-waiting to Catherine of Aragon, so it was convenient for the family to be raised close to the court, as well as in their other main property of Rye House, Hertfordshire. Her education included the traditional regime of womanly accomplishments, but she was also able to speak French and Italian and, as her later writing and pursuits proved, she was clearly the possessor of a formidable curiosity and not little intelligence. More than that, she was pious, virtuous and an honest woman of good fame. Yet her fate was intended to be that of most women of her class. Catherine was married at the age of seventeen to Sir Edward Burgh, or Borough, sometimes confused with his grandfather of the same name. Her father-in-law, Thomas, had been appointed Anne Boleyn’s chamberlain and carried her coronation train in May 1533 but received a severe warning after he had seized Catherine of Aragon’s barge and violently ripped off her coat of arms. What Catherine thought of Anne is unrecorded, although her childhood connection to Princess Mary and her mother might suggest where her sympathies lay. The young couple lived first at Gainsborough Old Hall and then, in 1530, after a visit from her mother, set up home at Kirton-in-Lindsey. There were no recorded surviving children from the marriage on Edward’s death three years later.
A year later, Catherine remarried. Her new husband was John Neville, Lord Latimer, a widower of the old faith with two children, who lived a quiet life away from court after having served in Henry’s 1513 French campaign. The bride was then twenty-one, the groom forty-three. Their married life was mostly spent at Snape Castle in Yorkshire, a sprawling residence with solid square turrets built of yellow-grey stone. It was a good career move for Catherine, taking her up a social step and providing her with a good home and public standing, although her husband’s unfortunate involvement with the Pilgrimage of Grace, the northern Catholic rebellions of 1536–37, made the future of the Latimers less certain. It was unclear to Henry exactly what role Latimer had played in the uprising, whether he was a supporter of the rebels or forced by necessity to negotiate with them to ensure the safety of his family at Snape, but, with family assistance, Latimer was given the benefit of the doubt, although his reputation never recovered. The exact date of his death is unclear; it may have been as early as December 1542 or as late as March 1543, when his will was proved. It is likely to have been closer to the former as, in early February, Catherine was already at court, to visit her siblings and perhaps to renew her friendship with Princess Mary, whom she had known as a child. She may also have been hoping to make a new marriage, to the man who had already captured her heart: Prince Edward’s handsome uncle Thomas Seymour.
Catherine was left a wealthy woman. Having gone through two marriages of duty, and with both her parents dead, she was now ready to embrace the chance to take a husband of her own choosing. The marriage of Jane Seymour had catapulted her brothers into
prominence as uncles of a future king. Thomas was a dashing, handsome figure, described as ‘hardy, wise and liberal … fierce in courage, courtly in fashion, in personage stately, in voice magnificent, but somewhat empty of matter’. He also had an air of danger about him, and in September 1540 the Privy Council had bound him and Edward Rogers to keep the peace towards each other, at a penalty of £1,000 each.7 Like many of his noble contemporaries, Seymour had benefited from Henry’s policy of dissolving the monasteries. In June 1541 he had been granted lands that belonged to the late monastery of Cirencester, and the following month he gained the manor attached to that at Amesbury, receiving further land in Berkshire and Westmorland before the end of the year.8 Described as Henry’s ‘trusty and well-beloved servant … knight, one of the gentlemen of his grace’s privy chamber’, Seymour had been ambassador to Vienna for eight months by the end of 1542. He wrote to Henry from Nuremburg on 29 December, where he was considering the possibility of hiring mercenaries to fight for the king, although he ‘hoped to return to England shortly’.9 He was back at court in the early spring, at which point Catherine hoped he would make her his wife. However, the emergence of a more significant suitor would delay this love match for another four years.
