The Catherine Howard Conspiracy

by Alexandra Walsh

  The layout of Mary’s room was the same as hers, so without hesitation Perdita hurried across the room and opened the door to Mary’s office. For the first time, she caught a waft of Mary’s scent — Chanel No. 5 — and she breathed it in hungrily. It felt like a good sign, as though Mary were watching over her. Apart from being kept clean, the office had not been touched; it looked as though Mary had left it moments before. Swallowing the unexpected lump that rose in her throat, Perdita seated herself at her grandmother’s laptop and turned it on. Following Alistair’s instructions, she unlocked the top drawer of the desk, where he had left an envelope containing her grandmother’s passwords.

  “As executor to her will, she insisted on always leaving me with her passwords,” he had explained. “In the immediate aftermath of Mary’s death, we did commandeer her laptop as there was some information on it we needed to access, but we’ve finished with it now. I returned it and the passwords to her rooms a few days ago. The laptop and its contents are yours now, Perdita.”

  “Mine,” she breathed. “Mine and Piper’s.”

  She felt a certain amount of trepidation wondering what she might discover as the laptop blinked into life. Like everything else, it was laid out with precision and it did not take Perdita long to find Mary’s archive of work. Scrolling through, she resisted the urge to check every file, but focused instead on searching for the missing chapter. But, twenty minutes and many searches later, she was slightly flummoxed. If the missing chapter wasn’t here, where could it be? Finally, she braved the folder marked ‘Family Stuff’. Bracing herself, she looked at the contents, there were two documents, one named Perdita and one named Piper.

  “Oh shit,” she murmured but she clicked them open, one after the other, expecting a letter. She was rather startled instead to see a familiar Bible quotation. It was the passage from Susanna that she had read at both her father’s and Mary’s funeral. Glancing at Piper’s message, it was the brief paragraph from George Orwell’s 1984 that she had read.

  To her right was a long oak bookcase and on the top shelf was a leather-bound Apocrypha. On the shelf below, immediately underneath this, was a copy of 1984. It’s too much of coincidence, she thought, Granny must be pointing us toward something. Perdita sprang to her feet and pulled both books off the shelf. Hidden within the pages of the Apocrypha was an envelope addressed to her, in 1984 was one for Piper.

  “Oh Granny, what are you up to?” said Perdita, but she ripped open the letter and unfolded the single page of heavy lilac writing paper.

  Mary’s elegant handwriting filled the page but what caught Perdita’s eye was the date. Her grandmother had written this letter three months before her death. Sitting back at the desk, Perdita spread the paper out in front of her and began to read:

  My darling Perdita, if you are reading this, then Marquess House must now be in the possession of you and Piper. This will mean I have missed my chance of my dreamed of reunion with you, my beautiful girls. My words here must suffice instead: please know this, I love you. I have always loved you and I will never stop loving you. I distanced myself from you both to keep you safe and, I hope, as time goes on, you will understand my motivations and you will forgive me.

  You did not know, but I was never far away. Your father kept me informed of your life and I witnessed many key moments. My favourite was the day I saw you receive your doctorate. A moment of such pride, I nearly broke my own rule and approached you to offer my congratulations. However, your safety was more important, so I resisted.

  Now, I must impart vital information. If Alistair Mackensie has not yet told you about the Watchers, I implore you speak to him immediately, telling him I give my express permission for you to know everything, but if these words do make sense to you, then perhaps the following lines will too. If not, then again, Alistair will explain.

  The missing chapter and the additional information I discovered for my unpublished manuscript The Catherine Howard Anomaly is in my safe. The code is your and Piper’s birth date. I did not publish this book as I always felt it was the cause of your mother’s death. This is the same for my other unpublished work. However, today I received news that has made me realise things have changed and secrecy will no longer keep you safe. You must solve the mystery I inadvertently began to unravel all those years ago. I feel sure it is the only thing now that will save you both.

  Good luck, my beautiful princess.

  I will watch over you always.

  Granny Mary xxx

  Perdita was on her feet and across the room. Her safe was hidden behind a very beautiful but extremely old tapestry of a mermaid. In the same position on Mary’s wall was one of her father’s swirling abstract paintings. Pulling the corner, it swung forward, revealing the safe door. Keying in her birth date, she heard a click and wrenched it open. A box file filled most of the space. Perdita pulled it out and the label on the top read: The Catherine Howard Anomaly. Placing it on the floor, she searched to see what other treasures her grandmother had stowed in the safe, but there was nothing else.

  I wonder if she put it in there every night, thought Perdita, slamming the door and returning her father’s painting to its correct place. I suppose at eighty-six years old, you never take a sunrise for granted.

  Gathering the box file, the letter and Mary’s laptop, Perdita returned to her own room, unable to bear being among her grandmother’s possessions any longer. Everywhere she turned was heartache and loss caused by this secret. Her grandmother may have spent years protecting them from it but, in her own words, she had told her granddaughter things had changed. Quite what had prompted this unexpected turnaround was not clear, and Perdita intended to question Alistair as soon as possible.

  Now she had a purpose and, more strikingly, her grandmother’s permission to finish the manuscript that Mary had begun all those years ago. It was not something she needed, but she was glad to be working with her grandmother rather than being haunted by the constant feeling she might be letting her down by returning to her abandoned research.

  Back in her own room, Perdita took up her position on the sofa again and reread her grandmother’s letter. The only line that jarred was the last one. She had not expected her grandmother to use the pet-name ‘princess’. I obviously don’t know her as well as I think, mused Perdita. Then, carefully placing the letter on the table where she could see her grandmother’s writing, she opened the box file.

  It was full to the top and the first item in the pile was a plastic wallet containing the missing chapter of her grandmother’s manuscript. Perdita glanced at the documents below but they were mostly earlier drafts and photocopies from books. Quickly, realising they were the references for the final chapter, she put them to one side and pulled the missing chapter out of its protective wallet. She noted the date was the day before her grandmother had died, and she began to read.

  Chapter 26: Life Beyond Death

  This work has so far concentrated on the life and anomalies of Catherine Howard and her loyal court of ladies: Lady Isabel Baynton, Lady Margaret Arundell, Lady Margaret Douglas and Lady Kathy Knollys. There have been references to Catherine’s predecessor in Henry VIII’s bed, Anne of Cleves, and discussion of the baffling Jane Boleyn, Lady Rochford. However, now, to bring their tale to a conclusion, I must take you briefly down another path.

  In 1953, at the age of twenty-one, I inherited Marquess House from my mother, Eleanor Fitzroy. My mother had died shortly after the birth of my younger sister, Cecily, in 1940. Her estate had been left to me as the eldest, with a sizeable trust fund for Cecily. Staggered to be the owner of such a vast property, I began to sort through the massive archive which I now owned, along with the house. Expecting to find nothing of interest, I was surprised when I discovered, what has become known to me and my team at Marquess House as The Catherine Howard Codex and which has provided the bulk of the of primary source material for this book.

  It had been put into storage with the household accounts and, at first, I paid it n
o attention. My interest became piqued after the visit of my friend, Lady Pamela Johnson, who had inherited her title and estate when her brother, her only living relative, had died. She knew I was interested in documents from the Tudor era, and had some she wanted to sell in order to pay the heavy death duties. I agreed, again not expecting to find anything of interest but because I was in a position to be able to help her. It was she who first began to read the codex and it was her brilliance that connected it to some letters she had discovered in her own family home.

  She recognised one particular piece of handwriting, the delicate hand of Lady Isabel Baynton, half-sister through their mother, Jocasta or Joyce Culpepper, to Henry VIII’s fifth queen, Catherine Howard. Lady Pamela was descended from Isabel’s husband’s family and had seen letters written by Lady Isabel before. Surprised, I began studying the codex and discovered not only letters from Isabel but also from Lady Kathryn Knollys, Lady Margaret Douglas, Lady Margaret Arundell and another woman who signed herself in a number of different ways: ‘C’, ‘K’, ‘Kitty’, ‘Kitten’ and on a few occasions ‘Catherine’. It was this woman who intrigued me.

  After piecing together the information available, I created a workable hypothesis that this unnamed woman could be Catherine Howard. Although, if this was the case, then I had discovered a bigger mystery than I had ever expected. If the dates on the letters were to be believed, Catherine Howard was still alive in May 1542. My initial thought was, it must be another noble woman with the same name as the unfortunate fifth bride of Henry VIII, because Queen Catherine was supposed to have been executed three months earlier on 13 February 1542.

  Once more, Lady Pamela’s remarkable archive shed light on this perplexing puzzle. In among this batch of letters — the first of many caches of Tudor and Stuart documents that she sold me over the years — was one from a friend of Joan Bulmer’s, lamenting her loss. Joan Bulmer was a contemporary of Catherine Howard’s and as young girls, they had both been boarded out at Lambeth House, the property owned by Agnes Tilney, the dowager duchess of Norfolk. Historical legend tells us that Bulmer and Howard shared a lover, Francis Dereham. He was first introduced to the house while he was involved with Joan, then rapidly turned his attention to Catherine who, with her Howard blood, was a far better catch.

  When Catherine became queen, Joan wrote to her offering advice and, it has been assumed by some historians, requesting a place in Catherine’s household. However, there are no official records placing Joan in the queen’s court. Yet, this letter claimed Joan had indeed been at court during Catherine’s reign and that she had been executed. In it, the writer begged the recipient (whose name unfortunately has been lost to time and mice) not to think badly of Joan but to feel pity. It was dated the 24 February 1542.

  Intrigued, I spoke to a friend who worked at the Tower of London and asked about their execution records, but upon checking the dates, explained there was no record of the execution of Joan Bulmer, only Jane Boleyn.

  It was a revelation. Jane Boleyn has always been one of the unexplained characters in the tale of Catherine Howard and her rapid downfall. Historians have never been able to fully explain what would have motivated this previously canny survivor to throw in her lot with the young queen, risking everything to supposedly facilitate the queen’s affair with the courtier Thomas Culpepper. Now I had been presented with this new information, I couldn’t help looking at the two names and noticing their similarity. I wondered if this could explain the mystery of Jane Boleyn’s supposed execution:

  JOAN BULMER

  JANE BOLEYN

  It would not take much to alter one to the other, they were the same length, the same initials and similar in the letter span. I began to wonder, had Joan Bulmer been executed instead of Jane Boleyn? If so, why? What had happened to Jane Boleyn? And why had the names been changed?

  After a great deal of painstaking research, I was able to procure Jane’s family Bible, that of the Parker’s of Great Hallingbury, Essex, and discovered something curious, but which gave me confidence in my theory. In the front was the usual list of births, marriages and deaths. Jane’s triumphant marriage to George Boleyn and her rise to become Viscountess Rochford as his wife were detailed.

  Surprisingly, so was a second marriage in February 1541, to Thomas Culpepper, a member of the king’s privy chamber. Most interesting, however, was the entry of later in 1541, recording the deaths of first Thomas Culpepper on 29 August 1541, followed by Lady Jane Culpepper two months later and the details of their joint tomb in the Parker family vault. If Jane Boleyn, now Lady Culpepper, died in October 1541, how could she possibly have been executed alongside Catherine Howard on 13 February 1542?

  Similarly, if Catherine Howard was, as the letter I had discovered suggested, still alive in May 1542, who was executed in her stead? Was this the reason why the Bill of Attainder that sentenced both Catherine and her lady-in-waiting, Jane Boleyn, to death was never signed by the king but by using his dry seal, because it was never theirs in the first place?

  Feeling certain this was the case for Jane Boleyn, further investigation revealed a possible candidate who may have been executed instead of Queen Catherine: Katherine Tilney. She was another member of the extended Howard family and many historical documents place her in the vicinity of Joan Bulmer. She and Joan both disappear from official records at the same time. Again, the similarity in name length struck me. The same first name, which could be spelled in a number of variations, followed by six letters in the surname.

  KATHERINE TILNEY

  CATHERINE HOWARD

  But, if my hypothesis was correct, it begged the questions: why were Tilney and Bulmer executed? And who altered their death warrant, the Bill of Attainder that had been presented to Parliament?

  There is also the question of Thomas Culpepper. Like Jane Boleyn, Culpepper is another person in the tale of Catherine Howard who mystifies historians. As Jane was a career courtier, so was Culpepper. He had risen through the ranks of the Henrician court to hold a trusted position in the king’s privy chamber. Would he really throw away his life’s work to bed the queen?

  As I have discussed here, there is evidence he was married to Jane Boleyn. If this was the case, how is it possible that he stood trial at the Guildhall in London and was convicted of treason in December 1541? History tells us he, along with Francis Dereham, was executed on 10 December 1541. Yet, according to the Parker family Bible, Culpepper had died in August of that year.

  I would suggest that if a Thomas Culpepper did stand trial, it was not the man who had been in the privy chamber. It is well documented that there were two Thomas Culpeppers in the same family. The elder was a violent rapist, the younger a career courtier. If the Bill of Attainder for Tilney and Bulmer was altered, could it be that the transcript of the trial for a man named Thomas Culpepper was altered in order to implicate a different Culpepper? One who bore the same name but who would have been of a high enough rank to seduce a queen, thus causing the downfall of Catherine Howard?

  My suggestion is that Jane died, possibly as the result of a nervous collapse following the death of her second husband, Thomas Culpepper. However, for reasons I cannot explain, forever afterwards, Culpepper has been linked romantically to Catherine rather than Jane.

  While this offered a workable hypotheses for Jane Boleyn and Thomas Culpepper, what of Catherine Howard? If she was not executed on that fateful day, where did she go? On 12 July 1543, Henry VIII married Katheryn Parr, so his fifth bride had certainly disappeared from his life.

  It was as I puzzled over this, studying the details of the codex, that I began to notice something I had previously dismissed as trivial, but I now began to wonder if the answer had been in hidden in plain sight all along. The intriguing woman signing herself Kitty, seemed to have adopted a motto: Spe et nereidum — hope and mermaids — something that reminded me of my arrival at Marquess House as a child of seven.

  In January 1940, my mother, Eleanor Fitzroy, had removed us from our London
residence to take refuge for the duration of the Second World War in her family’s home in Pembrokeshire. I had been unimpressed until I had caught my first glimpse of our new home, Marquess House. With its tower and crenellations, it was bigger than any property I had ever seen and, as it twinkled in the winter sun, I thought we had come to live in a fairy tale castle.

  Marquess House, it transpired, was a paradise of freedom and fun, especially once I had made friends with Bethan Bridges, whose family managed our estate’s farm. We were inseparable and, as the dark days of winter gave way to a golden spring, we investigated Marquess House and the surrounding area, usually with our gang of friends. One of our favourite places was the mysterious island that sat in the middle of our lake, Llyn Cel, and this was largely due to Bethan’s grandmother.

  She was known to all as Old Mrs B and was a source of endless local tales. Our favourite was the story of the Llyn Cel mermaid.

  On stormy nights, the Llyn Cel mermaid, a beautiful and terrible creature, was supposed to leave her watery home, discard her tail and walk on land searching for her lost love. The tale dated back to the sixteenth century, when it was said a noble lady, who had fled her cruel husband and their violent marriage, had taken refuge with the nuns at the tiny priory on the island, where she gave birth to twins, a girl and a boy. The children were taken from her and raised by other families who did not know their true identities in order to keep them all safe from her powerful husband.

  In time, the woman fell in love with a local fisherman but, because she was still legally married, they could not be together. Both were devastated as they were deeply in love. Then one day, news came that the woman’s husband had died and the pair planned to marry. They agreed to meet in the porch of the church that night but, while he was out fishing on the stormy lake, the fisherman was washed overboard and drowned. The legend says the woman waited and waited, until eventually the priest told her the sad news. She was so distraught, she threw herself into the water determined to find her lover. As soon as the waves closed over her head, the onlookers swore they saw her legs turn into a tail and she vanished beneath the water.