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

by Amy Licence

  Catherine was a good catch. At almost thirty-one, she was experienced and wise, without being too old that her childbearing years were over. According to John Foxe, she possessed ‘rare gifts of nature, as singular beauty, favour and a comely personage; things wherein the king was delighted’, as well as the ‘virtues of her mind’. Her appearance was ‘lively’ and ‘pleasing’ and her ‘cheerful countenance’, as painted by William Scrots, shows a round, open face with brown or auburn hair and the fashionable pale skin. A second image, a miniature by Lucas Horenbout, depicts her with a slimmer face and lighter hair. In spite of the religious leanings of her second husband, the identification of her mother with the Aragon faction and her friendship with the Catholic Mary, she was passionately interested in religious reform, bordering on Protestantism, and welcomed Hugh Latimer and Miles Coverdale at her house. The iconoclast Latimer had been preaching in favour of an English translation of the Bible since the late 1520s and had recently suffered imprisonment for opposing Henry’s Six Articles; later he would suffer a martyr’s death by burning at the stake. Coverdale was responsible for translating and publishing a 1535 version of the Bible, building on the work of the martyred William Tyndale, although Henry had welcomed this, ordering a copy of Coverdale’s work to be placed in every church. He would become Catherine’s chaplain and almoner in the years ahead. Catherine was well aware of the dangers of her faith; that July, just after her wedding, four men were burned at Windsor for preaching and holding heretical beliefs.

  By January 1543, according to Chapuys, there were rumours that Henry was considering remarriage. He hosted a great feast and summoned Princess Mary and her ladies to court, in order to act as host: ‘This came very apropos for the Princess, who, in default of a queen, was called to court triumphantly, accompanied by many ladies … Many think that before the end of these feasts the king might think of marrying again, but hitherto there is no appearance of it.’ Henry’s interest in Catherine may have predated Lord Latimer’s death and he had probably known her all her life, seeing her grow up around the court. In February, the king paid a tailor’s bill for Catherine and her stepdaughter, for ‘numerous items’ of cotton, linen, buckram, hoods and sleeves, Italian, Venetian, French and Dutch gowns, totalling over £8.10 As with his other wives, one of the first signs was the preferment of her relatives; that March, Catherine’s brother William became a member of the Privy Council and was elected to Knight of the Garter in April. He also granted William a divorce, on 17 April, after his wife, Anne Bourchier, was accused of adultery. By this point she must have become aware of his interest, and she struggled to reconcile what she later came to consider to be God’s will with the brief hope she had glimpsed of personal happiness. Henry needed to ensure his rival, Seymour, was out of the way. Nothing was more effective than putting a large distance between him and Catherine, so in April Thomas received his instructions for a new embassy to Flanders. He left in May. By this point, Henry had probably already proposed to Catherine.

  While the king awaited her reply, news arrived at court of the death of one of his previous loves. Following the scandal of 1536, Mary Boleyn had lived in quiet obscurity with her second husband, William Stafford, at Rochford Hall, Essex. She had lost both her parents too, with Elizabeth Howard dying in 1538 and Sir Thomas Boleyn the following year, from whom she inherited some more property in the area. Mary was fortunate in her quiet life; she had married Stafford for love, stating in the 1530s that she would rather ‘beg [her] bread’ with him than be ‘the greatest queen in Christendom’. She may have borne him a couple of children, in addition to seeing the careers of her son and daughter by William Carey develop, and there are no records of her returning to court. Mary’s final years are as elusive as her first; she had briefly enjoyed the limelight of Henry’s affection, then witnessed the meteoric rise and fall of her siblings, before retreating into what appears to have been domestic harmony. When she died in June 1543, she was the king’s last link with the glittering, dangerous world of a decade ago.

  Yet Henry was keen to plunge into married life again. In reality, Catherine had little choice but to accept his offer and the necessary licence was issued by Cranmer on 10 July. Two days later, Catherine and Henry were married in the queen’s closet and Hampton Court by Bishop Gardiner, ‘in the presence of noble and gentle persons’ but ‘privately and without ceremony’.11 After feasting, the wedding night was spent in the palace, with Catherine, already experienced in the ways of one ageing husband, awaiting the arrival of a king whose physical dimensions must have restricted his movements and ability to perform. It was also a time of unease, with plague breaking out in the capital, causing a proclamation to be issued three days later to ‘prevent Londoners from entering the gates of any house wherein the king or queen lie, and forbidding servants of the court to go to London and return to court again’.12 Perhaps it was this that prompted Henry and Catherine to depart for Oatlands later that month. From there, Catherine wrote to her brother describing the marriage as ‘the greatest joy and comfort that could happen’ to her. He replied that it ‘revived my troubled spirit and turned all my care into solace and rejoicing’.13 From Oatlands, the newly weds set off on a summer progress through the Home Counties.

  Catherine’s household included her close friend Catherine, Duchess of Suffolk, and her cousin Maud, along with many ladies who had formerly served Henry’s previous wives: Mary, Countess of Arundel; Joan, Lady Denny; Lady Margaret Douglas; Jane Dudley, Lady Lisle; Anne Bassett; Jane, Lady Wriothesley; and Mary Wotton, Lady Carew. There was also Thomas Seymour’s sister-in-law, Anne Stanhope, Lady Hertford, who must have served as a reminder of Thomas and, possibly, a source of information about him during his absence. A Francis Goldsmith, writing to thank Catherine for giving him a place as chaplain in her household, lavished her with praise: ‘God has so formed her mind for pious studies, that she considers everything of small value compared to Christ. Her rare goodness has made every day like Sunday, a thing hitherto unheard of, especially in a royal palace. Her piety cherishes the religion long since introduced, not without great labour, to the palace.’14 The new queen appears to have been very popular, even among those who might resent her new position. Catherine had maintained good relationships with her Latimer stepchildren and now responded with warmth to Henry’s three offspring, assisted by the fact of her longstanding friendship with Mary. While they were away in August, she persuaded Henry to detour on their way to Ampthill to visit his children at Ashridge in Hertfordshire. The only sour note was sounded by Anne of Cleves, disappointed that Henry had married a woman she believed to be ‘not nearly as beautiful as she’.15

  An inventory of 1547 gives a glimpse into Catherine’s opulent world at Hampton Court. Along with a withdrawing chamber for the queen it lists the king’s bedchamber, which led to the queen’s gallery and on to her bedchamber, from which three more privy chambers were accessible for her use.16 In addition to her ladies, her household included George Day, Bishop of Chichester, as almoner and humanist scholar Sir Anthony Cope as her vice-chamberlain, along with her master of the horse, secretary, chaplains, physicians, apothecary, clerk of the closet and her learned council, which contained lawyers and clerks. There were fifty-one men in her immediate service, including ushers, grooms, pagers, sewers, waiters and yeomen, as well as her own messengers, goldsmith, tailor and those who cared her for animals.17 In addition to this, she had another set of servants for the kitchen and service of meals, which mirrored that of the king, as well as her laundresses and the menial staff who lit fires and lamps, swept the floors and carried wood or water. She also had her own jester, a woman named ‘Jane the Fool’.

  Catherine has often been cast as the nurse of Henry’s twilight years, through his terrible afflictions with his ulcerated legs. This is far from the truth. Henry possessed sufficient nurses to tend to his health, which would have been unseemly for a woman of Catherine’s status. Instead, he wanted her to be an ornament to his court, to divert him with pl
easure, to which end he happily indulged her passions for dancing and music, clothes and flowers. Daily payments were made for flowers and perfumes for her rooms and she kept a group of Italian viol players. She was also reputed to bathe in milk18 to soften her skin and some medical manuals of the time do recommend this, along with the use of flowers and herbs, perhaps in the new bathrooms Henry had installed at the Tower and Whitehall in the 1540s. Henry showered her with gifts: a pet spaniel named Rig who wore a collar of crimson velvet and gold, a parrot that was fed on hemp seeds, diamond brooches, tablets with bejewelled initials and ostrich feathers and portraits of himself painted on gold.

  The new queen inherited her predecessor’s wardrobe, which was customised to fit her by the royal tailor John Scut, who had served all Henry’s wives. The process must have required some additional material, perhaps panels and fringes to lengthen skirts, as Catherine Howard was reputed to be very short while Catherine Parr’s coffin would measure five feet and ten inches in length. She also commissioned new clothes, sending for silks to Antwerp, and was noted by the Duke of Najera for her elegance and opulence, dressed in a robe of cloth of gold over a brocade kirtle, sleeves lined with crimson satin, a two-yard-long train, a gold girdle adorned with pendants, diamonds in her headdress and more on the jewel she wore. He also noted the two crosses around her neck.19 Catherine may have been pious, intelligent and devout but she was also something of a sensualist.

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  More than an Ornament, 1544–45

  Too dearly had I bought my green and youthful years,

  If in mine age I could not find when craft for love appears.1

  Catherine’s experiences of Henry as a lover, at the age of fifty-five, with ulcerated legs and a waist of fifty-three inches, were vastly different from those of his first two wives. The bedrooms that he shared with his last wife, at Greenwich, Hampton Court or Oatlands, Woodstock, Nonsuch or Whitehall, were gorgeously hung with tapestries and furnishings like those listed among the 1536 effects of Catherine of Aragon. The ageing king may have reclined on blue velvet bedsheets embroidered with roses and fringed with red silk, shielded by bed curtains of Turkish gold damask fringed with purple silk and gold tissue. Over his head in its nightcap were stretched canopies like that which combined yellow cloth of gold with green and blue velvet embroidered with crowned roses and lined with purple sarsenet, fringed with green silk and Venetian gold. To either side, on top of the sheets of fine Holland cloth and crimson counterpane, were scattered cushions of red and gold tissue or embroidered green damask, some of them more than a yard long. However, with his doublets now large enough for three men to fit inside and his weeping sores necessitating a brand-new pair of hose almost every day, Henry’s love life in his twilight years must have been a more sedate affair.

  Catherine had promised to be ‘bonaire and buxom’ in her wedding vows and no doubt she made an effort to please her husband, as Henry’s contentment with the marriage suggests. Although it can hardly have been satisfying for her, she considered it in the way of a calling, perhaps seeing herself in a position to become an advocate of the new faith, and keeping the king happy in bed was all part of that plan. The sentiments of Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey, poet and courtier, may express something of the ageing king as lover, as the words of his friend Thomas Wyatt had done so in Henry’s youth:

  Thus thoughtful as I lay, I saw my wither’d skin,

  How it doth shew my dented chews, the flesh was worn so thin.

  And eke my toothless chaps, the gates of my right way,

  That opes and shuts as I do speak, do thus unto me say:

  ‘Thy white and hoarish airs, the messengers of age,

  That shew, like lines of true belief, that this life doth assuage;

  Bid thee lay hand, and feel them hanging on thy chin;

  The which do write two ages past, the third now coming in.

  Hang up therefore the bit of thy young wanton time:

  And thou that therein beaten art, the happiest life define.’

  Increasingly, Henry suffered from the impotence and frustration that he claimed had been instigated by his physical dislike of Anne of Cleves. Yet now, two wives later, there was no disguising his inability to perform as he had in his youth, which must have required delicate handling, both metaphorical and literal, from Catherine. No doubt she had to pay as much attention to the king’s sense of pride as his decaying body. Surrey wrote,

  The rich old man that sees his end draw on so sore,

  How he would be a boy again, to live so much the more.

  And his contemporary Thomas, Lord Vaux, added,

  My lusts they do me leave,

  My fancies all be fled,

  And tract of time begins to weave

  Grey hairs upon my head.

  Yet Henry was to have one last Indian summer. He might have been incapable of making love to the last Catherine with the vigour he had expended on the first, but he would certainly attempt to recapture something of the glory of his youth in another respect. He would invade France.

  Relations between England and the Auld Alliance, of Scotland and France, had been deteriorating for some time. After James V had failed to meet Henry in York on his summer progress of 1541, hostilities over religious change deepened and an English army had achieved a resounding victory at Solway Moss in November 1542. Two weeks later, James died of a fever – or reputedly heartbreak at the shame – leaving a six-day-old daughter, Mary, to inherit his kingdom. With the Scots in submission, Henry concluded a secret alliance with the Emperor and turned all £650,000 worth of his military force against his old friend and adversary Francis I. Better still, in spite of the agony in his legs and his frequent inability to walk, he would lead the army in person, clad in his giant-sized newly made armour. That February, when his ulcers had flared up again, leaving him bedridden in a fever, Catherine requested that her bed be moved into a closet leading off his bedchamber, ordered plaster and sponges, comfits and pastilles from her apothecary and was glimpsed sitting with his bad leg in her lap.2 Henry’s doctors urged him not to travel to France in person but to deputise the role, as he had done in Scotland. It seemed impossible to think of a man who could barely stand leading an army across the channel. Nothing would change the king’s mind, though.

  On 7 July, Henry appointed Catherine as regent in his absence, stipulated that his process of government would pass to her and that ‘a commission for this be delivered to her before his departure’. She was to be assisted by Cranmer as Archbishop of Canterbury; Lord Chancellor Wriothesley; Edward Seymour, Earl of Hertford; Stephen Gardiner, Bishop of Winchester; and secretary Sir William Petre, who were to report to her once a month on ‘the state of the country’. Catherine was also granted the manors of Chelsea, Hanworth and Mortlake. It marked the height of her influence. At the end of the month, she accompanied Henry to the wedding of his niece Lady Margaret Douglas to the Earl of Lennox, which took place in the chapel royal of St James’ Palace. His health had significantly improved by the arrival of the campaign, to the extent that Edward Seymour commented that he was in ‘as good health as I have seen his Grace at any time this seven year’.3

  Henry was in France from 14 July until 30 September, laying siege to Boulogne, which finally fell to him after almost two months. In his absence, Catherine played the role of the ‘humble, obedient loving wife and servant’, writing soon after his departure that ‘the want of your presence, so much beloved and desired by me, makes me that I cannot quietly enjoy anything until I hear from your Majesty’ and that ‘love and affection compels me to desire your presence’. Yet she combined this with the strength and steel required to oversee the running of the country, from dealing with Scottish prisoners to equipping the French campaign. Only 25 July she was at Hampton Court, where she wrote to Henry to inform him that a further £40,000 was being advanced to him by the council and that 4,000 men were ready to be sent as reinforcements at an hour’s notice.4 A week later, she wrote again from the palace with
news from the Lieutenant of the North and enclosing other letters of business, concluding with her usual reassurance that the children were all in good health. They had all spent a brief spell together at Enfield and Oakham Castle, to exchange the dangerously pestilent air of the capital for that of the countryside. Catherine was back at Greenwich on 6 August and reported that rumours were circulating that the French had landed on the English coast, knowing that ‘such vain rumours fly fast, and this may have reached the king’5 and on 9 September she was at Westminster to issue proclamations to deal with deserters: ‘for the examination of persons returning from the king’s army in France and punishing of such as have insufficient passports to do so’ and for the containment of a fresh outbreak of the plague.6

  Henry left Calais disappointed, knowing his victory was a pyrrhic one, with the Emperor and Francis immediately reconciling. He crossed the channel in a despondency that would last into the autumn, anticipating French retaliation. It came in the summer of 1545, when a fleet of Francis’s galleys burned Brighton on the Sussex coast, then a small fishing village, before moving west and sinking the Mary Rose. A month later, his troops in Portsmouth were mutinous as John Dudley, now Lord Lisle, wrote: ‘The army cannot return to the sea for lack of victual and men, for the men had rather be hanged than go forth again. The common people grudge that their king has been at great charge and nothing done.’7 While he was digesting this information, Henry received word that his oldest and closest friend, and one-time brother-in-law, Charles Brandon, Duke of Suffolk, had died. It was a shattering loss of a man who had been present in the king’s life since his early childhood and a reminder that his own days were numbered. The mood at court that autumn must have been a sombre one, especially as it had been a terrible year for Henry’s health.