Riots were rare in Henrician England, but tensions were constant, and none were more intense than those caused by the country’s break with Rome. Seven years before Cromwell’s execution, the King had repudiated papal authority and embarked upon his own version of the Reformation in what rapidly became one of the least articulate government policies in British history. There was absolutely no clear strategy for where the Church of England should go once it was commanded from London rather than Rome. The King, who had harnessed anti-clericalism in Parliament to secure his dream of annulling his marriage to Katherine of Aragon, had then hurled himself into what initially looked like the wholesale dismemberment of English Catholicism. The severing of obedience to the Vatican was the initial step in a legal, cultural, and economic revolution. The monasteries were dissolved, or pressured to surrender, first the smaller abbeys, then the larger and wealthier. On the eve of the Reformation, about one-third of the land in England belonged to the Church, and so the seizure of its assets became an unsavory bonanza for the government and its supporters, whose loyalty to the regime was often bought with gifts of land taken from the religious orders.
The first human casualties after the break with Rome had been the conservatives who could not in good conscience abjure their oaths of loyalty to the Pope. There were some among them who, despite their misgivings, were prepared to acknowledge that canon law just about permitted the King’s banishment of Katherine of Aragon and marriage to Anne Boleyn, whom even Thomas More had acknowledged as “this noble woman royally anointed queen,” but under no circumstances could they accept that Henry had the right to make himself supreme head on Earth of the Church of England and Ireland.18 Thomas More, the country’s former Lord Chancellor, and the esteemed scholar Cardinal John Fisher went to the block in 1535. The leaders of the Carthusian order of monks were hanged until they were half-dead, cut down to be castrated, disemboweled, and only then beheaded. The country folk from Hampshire coming into London through Newgate for Cromwell’s death had to pass by the looming, gray-stoned edifice of Newgate Prison, where three hermits, one deacon, and six monks had been stripped, chained to posts with their hands tied behind their backs, and simply left to starve to death in their cells, rotting towards martyrdom in excruciating pain and their own gathering excrement. One plucky Catholic lady, a doctor’s wife, disguised herself as a milkmaid, bribed the guards to let her into the cell, and fed, watered, and bathed the condemned gentlemen. The jailers tightened security after the King irritably asked how the condemned men had remained alive for so long, at which point the brave woman unsuccessfully attempted to continue her mission by climbing onto the prison roof to prize up the tiles and lower herself down into the cell from there.19
Near the prison was Tyburn, the site of near-daily executions of criminals—rapists, horse thieves, forgers, and murderers. It was here that many of the Carthusian monks met their end after being processed through the streets tied to a wicker hurdle pulled by a slow-moving horse. Back at Smithfield, within sight of the grubby walkways of Cock Lane, Father John Forest had been burned to death atop a pyre that consisted of religious statues, including one of Saint Derfel, taken from a pilgrimage center in northern Wales. The symbols of pre-Reformation Christianity used to destroy one of its most vocal sympathizers—there was a hideous poeticism to it.
For the poorest of the poor, the Reformation initially brought a different kind of martyrdom. Admittedly, the Church had not always done all that it could to alleviate poverty, but as medieval Catholicism’s emphasis on charity as a means to secure salvation came under attack by Reformers, beggars would have been a depressingly and increasingly familiar sight for the spectators. This was especially true for those from Smithfield, whose monastic hospital and poorhouse, Saint Bartholomew’s Priory, had been shut down during the dissolutions, leaving the local poor and invalided defenseless, friendless, and often homeless. Throughout London it was the same, with those who had relied on the Church, either for charity or work, wandering the streets, joined by the hundreds who poured in from the countryside where the dissolutions had closed off many traditional forms of employment or benefice. Nor were the seized properties being put to edifying use in the postmonastic world. Courtiers, lawyers, and merchants who benefited from the government’s liberality often turned the former abbeys and churches into stinking tenements, overpacked and overpriced, where families lived in pathetically cramped quarters with rampant disease and indifferent landlords. The church of Saint Martin-le-Grand was demolished to make way for a tavern; Bermondsey Abbey, where Henry VIII’s grandmother Elizabeth Woodville had spent the final few years of her life, became a bullfighting arena, before it was demolished to make way for the private home of a lawyer who worked on the Court of Augmentations, the legal body set up to deal with former monastic lands; the Priory of Saint Mary Overy became a bear-baiting pit. Statues of saints and angels had been torn from their niches and burned in a crusade against the old ways; yet even with such zeal from the iconoclastic Reformers, clear religious policy, vital in an age which still carried the death penalty for heresy, proved elusive.
Thomas Cromwell, rising to power during the break with Rome and then securing his position at the King’s side thanks to his indefatigable work on the dissolutions, was seen as the Reformation’s henchman by its opponents and “an organ of Christ’s glory” by its supporters; he seems to have believed in the Reformation’s mission and to have risked much to support those who shared his spirituality.20 Whether he was as indifferent to its human cost as is usually supposed is unclear, but that he never shirked from unpleasant tasks is certain. The quartered limbs and parboiled heads of dead traitors were on prominent display throughout the capital, with the skulls of the most famous offenders sitting atop pikes that jutted out over the nineteen arches of London Bridge. They would stay there until they had been stripped clean by birds and the elements.
Bile and viciousness increased on both sides of the confessional divide as the King, with God in one eye and the Devil in the other, brooded like Shelley’s Ozymandias over a kingdom riven with divisions. Who was in and who was out at the center of government changed constantly, and unlike most of his predecessors Henry VIII seemed to want his fallen favorites to vanish into the vast silence of mortality rather than simply leave the sunlight of his presence. Cromwell had previously helped arrange the exits of other favorites; now he was enduring the same agony.
We may know now that the Tudor dynasty was successful in holding on to power, and in preventing both civil war and foreign invasion, in the same way we know that the United States and her allies prevailed in the Cold War, but those attending Cromwell’s execution had no such assurances, and paranoia was rampant, a communal insecurity for which the King’s glamorously bizarre behavior must bear a large portion of the blame. To have embarked upon something as seismic as the schism with the Vatican without having a clear strategy for the years ahead was foolish, but to then change his mind as often as he did with something as sacred and vital to his people’s understanding of themselves was criminally incompetent. When Henry VIII had exhausted the wealth of the Church, he began to lose interest in the Reformation; his natural conservatism reawakened, and he was appalled by the many Protestant sects that were using the newfound availability of the Bible to interpret God’s Word for themselves, in many cases reaching conclusions that Henry regarded as rank heresy. The pendulum began to swing in the opposite direction, with legislation known as the Six Articles reaffirming the government’s commitment to Catholic theology. Protestants nicknamed the laws “the whip with six strings,” and the arrests of religious radicals began once their patron, Cromwell, was no longer in a position to protect them. As events were to show, he could no longer even save himself. Back at Smithfield, the local authorities were busy setting up another pyre to burn three Lutherans—Robert Barnes, Thomas Gerrard, and William Jerome—who had once preached their gospel with Cromwell’s support. They were to die on the 30th, two days after Cromwell. With int
imidation, espionage, cancerous fears of enemies foreign and domestic, and bitter sectarian tensions, Henrician England and Ireland were countries tottering permanently on the edge, and many blamed Thomas Cromwell for organizing the march to the precipice.
The King had arrived at Oatlands earlier that day. Lucrezia Borgia’s twenty-three-year-old son, Francesco, Marquis of Massalombarda, had been visiting London for the last week and he was due to leave that evening; the King had entertained him with visits to his palaces at Greenwich and Richmond and given him two fine horses as a parting gift.21 It was unusual for a traveler to begin a journey in the evening when visibility was poor, so perhaps the marquis had delayed his departure to make sure he witnessed the executions on Tower Hill. If he did attend, his status would have vouchsafed for him a place at the front of the crowd.
Much as a hush falls when a bride enters a church, a silence settled over the spectators as Cromwell began his final speech.22 He delivered it perfectly, thanking God for allowing him to die this way, in full knowledge of what lay ahead, and confessing readily that he was a wretched and miserable sinner who had, like all Christians, fallen short of the standards hoped for by Almighty God: “I confess that as God, by His Holy Spirit, instructs us in the truth, so the devil is ready to seduce us—and I have been seduced.” Then he began to pray—for the King, for “that goodly imp” the heir apparent—and to ask for prayers for himself, though as a Reformer he was careful not to ask for prayers for his soul after he was dead but solely “so that as long as life remaineth in this flesh, I waiver nothing in my faith.”23
As Catherine, a svelte young woman with a throat now glittering with pieces from the royal collection, knelt before Edmund Bonner, Cromwell knelt in the sawdust of the scaffold and prayed aloud, “O Lord, grant me that when these eyes lose their use, that the eyes of my soul might see Thee. O Lord and father, when this mouth shall lose his use that my heart may say, O Pater, in manus tuas commendo spiritum meum.”24 Hungerford, his sanity now snapped entirely, kept interrupting, writhing and screaming at the executioner to get on with his bloody business.25 Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey, stood at the forefront of the crowd and watched the scene without pity. He was missing his cousin’s wedding to be here to see his family’s bête noire finished off. Later that day, he could not conceal his good mood. It felt to him like a settling of scores: “Now is the false churl dead, so ambitious of others’ blood.”26
More of the Howards may have been at Oatlands to help Catherine, steady any nerves, and as ever, offer advice. A few days earlier, in preparation for the wedding, the King had granted Catherine’s eldest brother, Charles, five properties in London, while their half sister Isabella got a manor house in Wiltshire and all the lands that had once belonged to Malmesbury Abbey. As a gift for performing the service, Bishop Bonner’s debts were paid off by the royal household, and he was given a set of gold dining plate that had been confiscated from his predecessor during the dissolutions.27 The newly enriched Isabella, wife to the Queen’s vice chamberlain, was almost certainly in attendance in her capacity both as Catherine’s sister and lady-in-waiting. This was the second queen Isabella would serve and her husband’s fifth. Both were too clever to give any thought to the merry-go-round of queens consort, or rather, any voice. A woman would soon be imprisoned for asking of the King, “How many wives will he have?”28
At the Tower, Lord Hungerford’s wish that the headsman should acquit his task quickly was not to be fulfilled. Edward Hall described Cromwell’s executioner as “ragged [and] butcherly,” who “very ungoodly performed his office.”29 No more details are provided about what went wrong with the beheading, but rumor began with the claim it had taken three strokes to cut through the minister’s thick neck. By the end of the month, entertainment had triumphed over plausibility with stories that it had taken two headsmen half an hour to kill him and allegations that Cromwell’s enemies, who had been seen banqueting and celebrating throughout the week preceding his death, had taken the executioner out to feast him the night before, to get him drunk and hope that with a hangover he would give Cromwell as painful a death as possible. All we know for certain is Edward Hall’s remark that the executioner had carried out the task in an “ungoodly” manner and that afterwards Cromwell’s head was taken with Lord Hungerford’s to gaze and rot from the top of the pikes at London Bridge.
From the little chapel at Oatlands and the imposing towers of London, bells tolled out to mark a wedding and a death. They would toll again on the fifteenth day of August, the Feast of the Assumption, to mark the entry of the Virgin Mary into Heaven, there to be crowned its queen, as foretold, so the Church taught, in the visions of Saint John in the Book of Revelation.30 Celestial queens had not yet been abolished, despite the best efforts of the Protestant evangelicals and the man who had fallen on Catherine’s wedding day. But in a world where statues of Our Lady could be taken from Norfolk and torched in front of large London crowds with Cromwell watching on, it did not seem as if the Virgin Mary was any more secure on her throne than Katherine of Aragon or Anne Boleyn had been on theirs. It was an age of uncertainty and terrifying possibilities, and Catherine Howard was now its queen.
Chapter 2
* * *
“Our fathers in their generation”
Let us now praise men of renown, and our fathers in their generation.
—Ecclesiasticus, 44:1.
The first recorded mention of Catherine Howard, born as she was in the decade before the government made mandatory parish-level records of each baptism, comes from a will.1 Her maternal grandmother, Isabel Worsley, left a bequest, “To Charles Howard Henry George Margaret Catherine Howard XXs [twenty shillings] each.”2 It is a very quiet entrance for a future queen of England—Catherine is even upstaged in the concluding half of the sentence by her younger sister Mary, who, as Isabel’s goddaughter, received a more substantial bestowal of £10.3 Yet it is from the Worsleys and their kin that much of the relevant evidence about Catherine’s early years originates.
Beyond its object as a matter of general historical interest in showcasing how prosperous members of county society chose to dispose of their earthly possessions on the eve of the Reformation—rather touching is Isabel’s stipulation that every housewife in the Stockwell area should receive a gift of linen worth twelve pence or, failing that, a monetary gift of the same amount; likewise her decision to set aside £6 to repair a local highway—the will, which went to probate on May 26, 1527, proves that Catherine had been born, with time to spare for a younger sister, by the spring of that year.4 As with all four of Henry VIII’s English-born wives, and many of their contemporaries, we are left to guess when they arrived in the world using fragmentary evidence provided by throwaway or contested remarks from those who knew them or saw them, personal letters, family wills, and comments in contemporary memoirs or chronicles. The analysis of these documents has thus produced a broad spectrum of supposition. In Catherine’s case, suggestions for her birth date have run the gamut from 1518 to 1527. The promotion of the former date seems motivated mainly by a desire to rehabilitate a particularly dubious portrait, which will be discussed subsequently; support for the later years partly derives from the account of a Spanish merchant living in London late in Henry VIII’s reign, who described Catherine as “a mere child” at the time of her marriage in 1540.
While both Catherine and her younger sister are mentioned in Isabel’s final testament of 1527, they are absent from the will of her husband, Sir John Leigh, which is usually dated to 1524. Their three brothers, Charles, Henry, and George, are mentioned in both.5 The year 1525, which leaves time for a younger sister to be born and named as Isabel’s goddaughter by 1527, has thus gained understandable acceptance as Catherine’s most likely date of birth in several recent accounts of her career.6 Critics of this conclusion point out that the two sisters’ absence from Sir John’s will proves nothing, because in a patriarchal society like early modern England, it would be unusual for very young female members
of a family to be mentioned in the wills of male relatives.
In fact, both conclusions are arrived at by misreading John Leigh’s testament. While codicils pertaining to the distribution of some parcels of land were added in August 1524, the will itself was actually written nearly a year earlier, and dated June 16, 1523. If the Leighs’ documents are to be used as bookends for Catherine’s arrival, they establish a date between the summer of 1523 and the spring of 1527. Furthermore, far from focusing solely on the male members of his line, John Leigh made numerous gifts to young female members of his extended family, including all of Catherine’s elder half sisters. They, admittedly, were Leighs, but it seems unlikely that John Leigh would also include all of Catherine’s Howard brothers and neglect to mention her at all, unless she was extremely young, a tentative conclusion that leaves us free to accept the one specific contemporary comment on her age, made by the French diplomat Charles de Marillac, who met Catherine on several occasions in 1540 and 1541, and believed that she had been eighteen years old in 1539–1540.7 Catherine and de Marillac attended several hunting trips together in the summers of 1540 and 1541, and this seemingly decisive statement from someone well placed to know places her birth to 1520 or 1521. De Marillac’s credibility is allegedly undercut by the claim that he believed Anne of Cleves to be thirty in 1540, when she was in fact twenty-four, but an examination of the relevant letter shows that on the subject of Anne’s age de Marillac wrote, “Her age one would guess at about thirty.”8 An unchivalrous comment, but not necessarily an inaccurate one.9 It may very well be that, with Catherine, de Marillac was again basing his estimate on how old she looked.
Young and Damned and Fair Page 3