Katheryn Howard, the Scandalous Queen

by Alison Weir

  The door opened. Katheryn’s heart juddered. Sir John stood there, flanked by the guards, who had their halberds raised.

  “It is time, Madam. It is nearly nine.” He pressed into her hand a purse of coins. “This is the executioner’s fee; you must give it to him.”

  Isabel threw her arms around Katheryn and they clung to each other briefly in a last embrace.

  God gave Katheryn the strength to walk out of the Lieutenant’s Lodging. Sir John lent her his arm, and she leaned on him as they crossed Tower Green, escorted by a detachment of yeomen warders. Ahead of them, in front of the House of Ordnance, a crowd of people had gathered. As she neared them, Katheryn recognized most of the King’s Council, although when she looked for her uncle of Norfolk and the Duke of Suffolk, she could not see them. Her cousin Surrey was there, but he would not meet her eye.

  The crowd parted to clear a path to the scaffold. It was three or four feet high and hung with black cloth. As she approached it, she could see the block standing on a bed of straw and the headsman wearing his mask and apron. By the time she got to the steps, she was trembling so much that she could hardly stand.

  Sir John had told her that it was customary to make a speech, and that she should do so, provided she did not speak ill of the King or question his justice. Standing there, looking down on the sea of expectant faces, she was struck dumb and feared she had forgotten what she meant to say. Her heart was racing wildly and she felt dizzy with fear, but she had to make a good end.

  I am not alone.

  Suddenly, she found her voice, although it sounded weak and husky. “I die having faith in the blood of Christ,” she began. “I desire all Christian people to have regard to my worthy and just punishment for my offenses against God, heinously, from my youth, in breaking all His commandments, and also offending against the King’s Royal Majesty very dangerously; wherefore, being justly condemned by the laws of the realm and Parliament to die, I require you, good people, to profit by my example, amend your ungodly lives, and gladly obey the King in all things, for whose preservation I do heartily pray, and I will you all to do so. And now I commend my soul to God and call upon Him to have mercy on me.”

  The moment was upon her. She turned to the headsman and gave him the purse of coins. He surprised her by kneeling and begging her forgiveness for what he must do.

  “I forgive you,” she whispered. “Pray hasten with your office.”

  Isabel came forward and removed her gown and hood, leaving her standing there shivering in her kirtle and coif. She then tied on a blindfold and Katheryn knew a leap of panic as she realized she had looked her last upon the world. Every instinct was urging her to flee, but she knew it would avail her nothing. There was no escape for her.

  She fell to her knees before the block and braced herself for the blow, her flesh shrinking.

  “God have mercy on my soul,” she prayed aloud. “Good people, I beg you pray for me! God have mercy—”

  On December 22, 1541, as Katheryn languished at Syon, Lord William Howard, his wife, Margred Gamage, Katherine Tilney, Alice Restwold, Joan Bulmer, Ann Howard (wife of Katheryn’s brother Henry), Robert Damport, Malyn Tilney, Margaret Bennet, Edward Waldegrave, and William Ashby were found guilty of misprision of treason and sentenced to forfeit all their possessions to the Crown and perpetual imprisonment. Lady Rochford was attainted with Katheryn and executed the same day. Agnes Tilney, Dowager Duchess of Norfolk, and her daughter, Katherine Howard, Countess of Bridgewater, were attainted for misprision of treason and sentenced to perpetual imprisonment, with confiscation of all their property. The Act of Attainder condemning all four women was remarkable for one clause, which declared it treason in future for any woman to marry the King without disclosing if her life had been unchaste beforehand.

  Lady William Howard and eight others, mostly women, received pardons on the last day of February 1542; but Lord William and the Dowager Duchess of Norfolk were kept in prison until May 5, when the Duchess, too, received a pardon. Lord William was released at the end of August.

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  I am deeply grateful to the wonderful publishing teams at Ballantine in the USA and Headline in the UK for their support and creative contributions to this book, and to my commissioning editors, Susanna Porter and Mari Evans. Flora Rees, as ever, has been a brilliant editor; working with her is a joy. At Ballantine, I owe a great debt of gratitude to Emily Hartley, Melanie DeNardo, Kim Hovey, and the rest of the dynamic team. At Headline, huge thanks go to Frankie Edwards, Caitlin Raynor, Jo Lidiard, Katie Sunley, and Emily Patience.

  Julian Alexander, my literary agent, has, as usual, been wonderfully supportive of me during the writing of this book, and I am warmly grateful.

  Love and thanks go, as always, to my rock when I’m in a hard place, my husband, Rankin.

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  Numerous sources, most of them contemporary to the Tudor period, have informed this novel, or rather, the revised and expanded biography on which it is based, the original version of which was published in my book, The Six Wives of Henry VIII, in 1991. I am indebted in particular to Dr. Nicola Tallis, for sending me a copy of her unpublished DPhil thesis, All the Queen’s Jewels, 1445–1548. While the novel is based chiefly on original sources, I should like to acknowledge the works by Katheryn Howard’s biographers, Lacey Baldwin Smith, Josephine Wilkinson, David Loades, Gareth Russell, and Joanna Denny. Marilyn Roberts’s website, Trouble in Paradise (www.queens-haven.co.uk), proved most useful.

  The part titles are taken from George Cavendish’s verses about Katheryn Howard in his book Metrical Visions, written in the 1550s and comprising a series of tragic poems reflecting on the bloody fates of those who had perished on the scaffold under Henry VIII.

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  Katheryn Howard was born either at Lambeth or Lady Hall in Essex. As Justice of the Peace for Surrey, her father, Lord Edmund Howard, had a house in Church Street (now part of Lambeth Bridge Road) in Lambeth, one of two properties given him by his father, probably when he married. The other was in Epping Forest. In 1538, in desperate need of funds, Edmund alienated to his brother, the Duke of Norfolk, a messuage (a house with outbuildings and land) called Lady Hall (or Ladyhall) in the Howard manor of Moreton, Essex, which had passed down in the family from the first Duke of Norfolk. The manor of Lady Hall was later divided into those of Nether Hall and Over Hall. In 1708, Lady Hall was the manor house of Over Hall, and was also called Over Hall or Upper Hall, by which name it is now known. In 1818, it was described as standing in a field a short distance from Moreton parish church. The house that survives today is a late-sixteenth-century T-shaped timber-framed and tiled building, situated on the site of Lord Edmund’s house. There could not have been much land attached to Lady Hall, for, in 1532, Edmund told Thomas Cromwell, “I have no lands.”

  Katheryn’s date of birth is disputed. All contemporary writers are agreed that she was very young when she married the King in 1540. She was certainly born before April 1527, when, in a letter to Cardinal Wolsey, her father stated that he had ten children, “my children, and my wife’s.” As the date of Lord Edmund’s marriage is not known, it is not possible to estimate a date of birth for their eldest son, Charles, but Charles and his brothers, Henry and George, were born before June 12, 1524, when they were mentioned in the will of John Leigh, their mother’s stepfather. Katheryn and her sister Mary are not mentioned in this will, although Katheryn is named in the will of John Leigh’s wife, Isabella, made on April 11, 1527, suggesting that Mary was not yet born. Some have inferred from the wills that Katheryn was not yet born in 1524, and that she was born in or around 1525.

  In July 1540, Richard Hilles, a London merchant, described Katheryn as “a very little girl,” which some have taken to refer to her age as well as her diminutive stature. The “Spanish Chronicle” (see below) called her “a mere
child” and “so young.” The French ambassador, Charles de Marillac, who knew Katheryn personally, stated in 1541 that her relationship with her kinsman, Francis Dereham (pronounced Derham, as it is spelled phonetically in the sources), lasted from when she was thirteen until she was eighteen. As it ended around January or February 1539, this would place her date of birth around 1520–21, a date many historians accept. If that was the case, it might be concluded that Katheryn was excluded from John Leigh’s will of 1524 because she was a girl. According to Marillac, she would have been thirteen in 1533–34, yet her liaison with her music teacher, Henry Manox, cannot have begun before 1536, when he entered the Dowager Duchess’s service. Marillac was therefore wrong in this respect. But he was probably on firmer ground in stating that she was eighteen when her affair with Dereham ended early in 1539.

  A birth date of 1520–21 correlates with the age given on Hans Holbein’s portrait of an unnamed young woman “in her twenty-first year” (according to the Latin inscription), probably painted around 1535–40. The subject bears some resemblance to a young lady who appears in two Holbein miniatures, in the Royal Collection and the Buccleuch Collection, and can be identified on good grounds as Katheryn. Her cloth-of-gold bodice, rich jewels, and fur sleeves show her to have been a lady of high rank, and she is wearing an ouche and necklace that appear in portraits of Jane Seymour and Katharine Parr, and which were clearly in the jewel collection handed down from consort to consort. Furthermore, her hood with its biliment of goldsmith’s work can be identified with one in the inventory of Katheryn’s jewels.

  Holbein’s original portrait of the unnamed woman hangs in the Toledo Museum of Fine Arts, Ohio, and there are copies in the National Portrait Gallery, in a private collection, and at Hever Castle. Again, the rich clothing and jewelry proclaim that the lady depicted was of high rank. The brooch on her breast depicting Lot and his family guided away from Sodom by the angel was designed by Holbein, whose original drawing of it survives. The jewel at her waist shows God the Father flanked by angels. The jewels have been tentatively identified with items in Katheryn Howard’s inventory, and the sleeves with items in an inventory of Whitehall Palace taken in 1542, although the latter could have belonged to the King or anyone else, not necessarily Katheryn, and descriptions of the jewels do not tally exactly with those in the portrait.

  The portraits in Toledo and the National Portrait Gallery were once in the possession of the Cromwell family, so the sitter was probably a member of that family. The likeliest candidate is Elizabeth Seymour, sister of Queen Jane Seymour; she married Thomas Cromwell’s son, Gregory, in August 1537. Securing such a desirable bride for his son would have been reason enough for Thomas Cromwell to commission both jewel and portrait from Holbein and would account for there being more than one copy of the portrait. Elizabeth Seymour’s birth date is unrecorded, but she was younger than her sister Jane, who was born around 1508; if this is her marriage portrait, then she was born around 1517.

  If this portrait is discounted as evidence of Katheryn’s date of birth, we must look at the other evidence, the best of which is probably Marillac’s statement that she was eighteen in early 1539, suggesting that she was born around 1520–21. Therefore, she was nineteen when Henry married her, and twenty-one when she died.

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  I know Lambeth quite well. I was christened in St. Mary’s Church by Lambeth Palace and, during my childhood, we lived in St. Thomas’s Mansions, now demolished, by Westminster Bridge, facing County Hall. I walked over Lambeth Bridge daily to my school off Horseferry Road. It was easy for me to imagine Katheryn’s life at Lambeth.

  In the novel, Katheryn refers to the Dowager Duchess of Norfolk as her “grandam.” It derives from the French grande dame and is an archaic word for “grandmother,” but it also means a female ancestor or old woman, so it seemed appropriate for a step-grandmother.

  After Katheryn’s music master, Henry Manox, was dismissed in disgrace from the Dowager Duchess of Norfolk’s household, he is stated to have become tutor to the children of Lord Bayment, who lived nearby in Lambeth. Yet there is no record of a Lord Bayment, or even of a Lord Beaumont, in the peerage of that time.

  Batrichsy is the old spelling of Battersea.

  The details of Katheryn’s relationships with Henry Manox, Francis Dereham, and Thomas Culpeper come from the depositions of witnesses at the time of her fall. I wove those testimonies into a chronological thread that gave me my narrative for these sections of the book. I have modernized speech where Tudor English looks out of place in a modern text. Apart from fictionalizing the historical record, I have invented very little.

  Marillac stated in 1541 that Katheryn’s relationship with Francis Dereham lasted for five years, but he was probably misinformed. Katheryn herself claimed that the affair lasted for three to four months, from around October 1538 to January 1539. Yet she lied elsewhere in her testimony (for example, in regard to the Duchess’s keys), and no doubt felt it prudent to play down the length—and seriousness—of the affair. Her statement that she slept with Dereham for more than a hundred nights suggests it lasted longer, as does his bringing strawberries, which would have been well out of season, to their trysts.

  For a long time, historians writing about Katheryn Howard relied heavily on the colorful account of her in the anonymous mid-sixteenth-century Chronicle of King Henry VIII, or the “Spanish Chronicle,” as it is commonly known, which covers the period 1537 to 1549 and was mostly written prior to 1550. We know that the author was an associate of the Imperial ambassador, Eustache Chapuys, but not a close one. Internal evidence in the chronicle suggests that he lived at St. Katharine’s by the Tower. His work is full of glaring inaccuracies; there are barely any dates in it, and the chronology is confused, so that Katheryn Howard becomes Henry VIII’s fourth wife and Anna of Cleves his fifth. He was an eyewitness to certain events, in which respect his work is valuable, but it is clear that much of it is based on unreliable hearsay or gossip.

  The Spanish chronicler spins a garbled tale about Katheryn’s affair with Culpeper, telescoping events and getting the facts hopelessly wrong. He is the source for a speech she allegedly gave on the scaffold, in which she stated, “I die a queen, but I would rather die the wife of Culpeper.” But this differs significantly from eyewitness reports of Katheryn’s execution. Although I have made creative use of one or two extracts from the Spanish Chronicle, I have otherwise avoided it as a source.

  There is good evidence that Katheryn and Culpeper were in love before Henry VIII resolved to marry her. Culpeper’s plea to Katheryn to tell Henry that they planned to marry comes from the “Spanish Chronicle.” His illness after her marriage is documented in more reliable sources.

  It appears that Culpeper committed rape and murder. On May 10, 1542, when Culpeper’s infamy was notorious, Richard Hilles, a London merchant with radical religious views who had fled abroad to the safety of Strasbourg, expressed outrage in a letter to the German reformer Henry Bullinger that “one of the parties who was first hanged, and afterward beheaded and quartered, for adultery with the Queen was one of the King’s chamberlains, and two years before, or less, had violated the wife of a certain park-keeper on a woody thicket while, horrid to relate, three or four of his most profligate attendants were holding her. For this act of wickedness, he was, notwithstanding, pardoned by the King, after he had been delivered into custody by the villagers on account of this crime and, likewise, a murder, which he had committed in his resistance to them, when they first endeavored to apprehend him.”

  We don’t know where these crimes took place, for there is no corroborating evidence, but they can be dated to 1539 or 1540. The guilty man is not named, and it has been suggested that Culpeper’s brother and namesake, who served Thomas Cromwell, was the culprit, but Hilles was clear that it was a servant of the King who was executed for adultery with Katheryn Howard. He was incorrect in the details: Cul
peper was not hanged, drawn, and quartered, but merely beheaded, and he was not a chamberlain of the King, but a gentleman of the Privy Chamber; living abroad, however, Hilles might be forgiven for confusing the offices and the manner of his dying. Thus, the man guilty of rape was almost certainly Culpeper. It may be significant that both his parents excluded him from their wills, which were drawn up after the likely date of the crimes. Was it because they were sufficiently appalled at their son’s behavior to disinherit him? Or did they feel that the King’s bounty was provision enough for him?

  Henry VIII’s government took a dim view of rape and murder. In 1540, an Act had been passed depriving those guilty of such crimes of the right to seek sanctuary. Murder and rape were usually excluded from general royal pardons granted by Henry, except for one in 1540, in which rape was not on the list of exclusions. Possibly Culpeper benefited from this general pardon, despite the fact that murder was excluded. In his case, murder may have been represented as manslaughter; after 1533, juries were able to acquit anyone who had killed someone who had tried to murder or rob them.

  The practice of the monarch granting individual pardons accelerated in Tudor times; such pardons did not exclude crimes such as murder and rape. If Henry did pardon Culpeper, the bedfellow whom he greatly favored, he was apparently content to harbor in his service a rapist and murderer who might often come into contact with his Queen. Possibly, as in the novel, Culpeper persuaded Henry that his offenses had been misrepresented.

  Given that Culpeper became so notorious, it is surprising that no other source mentions this pardon for rape and murder. If Hilles had heard of it, others must, too, and we might expect to find ambassadors’ reports of it. It may be that Hilles was reporting gossip that had become exaggerated in the repeated telling, and that the offense was not as serious as he made it sound.