Young and Damned and Fair

by Gareth Russell

  The scale of the Scottish defeat stunned as much as their mighty guns had when they first crossed the border—the corpse of King James was found “having many wounds, and naked,” lying in egalitarian horror with about eight thousand of his subjects, including nine earls, fourteen lords, a bishop, two abbots, and an archbishop.25 There was hardly a family in the Scottish nobility who escaped bereavement after Flodden; particularly heartbreaking was the example of the Maxwell clan—Lord Maxwell fell in combat within minutes of all four of his brothers.26 In the immediate aftermath of the carnage, many English soldiers were spotted wearing badges that showed the white lion, the Howards’ heraldic crest, devouring the red lion, an ancient symbol of Scotland.27 English writers later praised the Scots’ “singular valour,” but at the time soldiers on the field were so repulsed by the violence that they refused to grant amnesty to the captured prisoners.28 Queen Katherine shared the attitude of the troops with the victorious lion badges. Edmund’s father wanted to give King James’s remains a proper burial; he, and several councillors, had to talk the Queen out of her original plan of sending the body to Henry as a token of victory. The Queen relented. She dispatched James’s blood-soaked coat to her husband instead of his body and jokingly cast herself as a good little housewife in the accompanying letter, which contained the rather repulsive quip—“In this your grace shall see how I can keep my pennies, sending you for your banners a King’s coat. I thought to send himself unto you, but our Englishmen’s hearts would not suffer it.”29

  Flodden provided the exorcism for Bosworth, and a few months later, on the Feast of Candlemas, the Howards’ dukedom was restored to them.30 Edmund’s bravery was commented upon by his contemporaries, but an anonymous and spiteful letter, regaling the King with the story of how Edmund’s men had deserted him, “caused great heart burning and many words.”31 The King was furious, and it took a lot for his courtiers to calm him down to the point where he ruled that no one should be punished for the crime and humiliation of flight from the field. Nonetheless, the deliberately leaked news meant that there was no escaping the fact that Edmund’s division had been the only section of the English forces to sustain a defeat at Flodden. This might explain why Edmund’s sole reward from the Crown was a daily pension of three shillings and four pence, an amount that could generously be described as nominal.32

  Still, he was able to bask in the reflected glow of his father’s success and benefit from the general climate of exultation, or relief, after the battle. In the autumn of the following year, the government gave Edmund £100 to equip himself in suitable finery for jousting at another major royal event, the marriage of the King’s youngest sister to King Louis XII of France, as the living seal on the postwar treaty. In Edmund’s own words, he was “to prepare myself to do feat of arms in the parts of France at jousts and tourneys” during the celebrations.33 In a theme that was to repeat itself throughout most of their subsequent diplomacy, the English and French vied to outshine one another, with the result that peace between them was less bloody but hardly more cordial than war. Edmund was sent with his father, stepmother, and half sister, the Countess of Oxford, in a delegation that included one hundred horses, numerous retainers, and suitably lavish outfits to conform with the government’s request that everything should be done to advertise the wealth of Henry’s kingdom.34

  At least by then Edmund had steady employment as a justice of the peace in Surrey, thanks in no small way to his family’s influence there.35 Tasked with preserving order in the localities, the JPs and their deputies were supposed to arrest criminals, keep a watch on troublemakers, maintain law and order, supervise foreign nationals, levy fines, and make sure food prices were being set at a fair rate. For the next few years Edmund appears in government documents arranging for safe conduct for a group of Prussian friars on a pilgrimage to Scotland, interrogating six suspected French spies, adjudicating on the alleged kidnapping of a maid by her employers who disapproved of her choice of husband, confining a constable called William Bever to the stocks on Lambeth high street as punishment for ransacking a man’s house in the search for French agents, and obeying government orders to carry out a hunt for vagrants.36

  Approaching forty, he found a wife in Joyce Leigh, a widow with five children from her first marriage to another local official.37 Joyce, whom the Howards tended to refer to by the slightly grander name of “Jocasta,” was nearly the same age as her new husband, first married off at the age of twelve, then left a woman of substance by both her father and her first husband.38 Her money, as well as her standing within the Lambeth community, were useful to Edmund, since by 1514 there were signs that he was accumulating significant debts and that the blue-blooded security conveyed by his visit to France for the royal wedding was a slowly unraveling illusion.39

  In November 1519, shortly after his marriage to Joyce, riots in Surrey resulted in Edmund being hauled in front of the Star Chamber, a panel set up to administer justice to the kingdom’s elite if there was a fear that common courts and judges might be too intimidated to hand down a fair sentence on a nobleman. As a body, the Chamber was particularly concerned with the maintenance of public order. Consisting of legal experts from the common courts and members of the Privy Council, the royally appointed body of men that still constituted the main organ of government in early Tudor England, the Star Chamber could pass its defendants over to the commons if they felt their misdemeanours constituted crimes that could and should be adequately and publically punished. The Star Chamber played on concepts of honor and the corresponding power of shame to bully errant peers into compliance. Even if they were pardoned, as many of them were, the summonses alone were enough to set tongues wagging.

  The relationship between rulers and ruled in Tudor England was characterized by elaborate anxiety. Political theorists, like Sir Thomas Elyot who published his treatise on good government in 1531, preached that “everything is order, and without order nothing may be stable or permanent.”40 This belief was occasionally both shaken and strengthened by the fact that the century proved to be one of social mobility, wider literacy, growing towns, and an expanding population. Elite views of social unrest were inevitably influenced by their own childhood curriculums that were generally heavy on the classics, in which rebellion was cited as a chief cause for the fall of Ancient Rome, encouraging a belief that popular protest led to mob rule, “which of all rules is most to be feared.”41 No one wanted the poor to be miserable, but nearly everyone wanted them to be obedient. In both town and countryside, outdoor and entertaining activities were encouraged in every season, because it was understood that people needed to enjoy themselves and, in doing so, dissipate their energy.

  The belief that the plebeian urban classes were naturally credulous, easily distracted, and prone to overreaction placed the blame for any outburst of civil unrest squarely on the shoulders of their immediate superiors. Edmund and a colleague “were indicted of riots, and maintenance of bearings of diverse misdoers within the county of Surrey.”42 The recent disturbances in the county were a poor reflection on the King’s deputies, and Edmund’s fiery temper, or ill standing with the sovereign, did not help. Both defendants were shamed but pardoned, while another, Lord Ogle, was passed over to the common courts after riots blamed on his dereliction of duty resulted in the death of a bystander.43

  The years following the Star Chamber hearing saw Edmund’s career stagnate and his debts increase. Joyce Howard’s properties were mortgaged and re-mortgaged, despite opposition from her mother and stepfather. Years earlier, after the death of Joyce’s father, Richard Culpepper, who had been a wealthy landowner in Kent, her mother Isabel had remarried to Sir John Leigh then swiftly arranged a wedding between Joyce and John’s younger brother, Ralph. This meant that John and Isabel had a doubly vested interest in monitoring Joyce’s inheritance, with Isabel mindful of the Culpepper estates and John equally concerned about the disposal of the Leigh bequests from Joyce’s first husband.44 The couple evidently came to dist
rust Edmund Howard, and both their wills attempted to limit his ability to interfere in their daughter or grandchildren’s inheritance.

  This distrust was not entirely undeserved—Edmund’s debts had all but taken over his life by 1527. Despite being a public figure tasked with the maintenance of the law, on one occasion Catherine’s father had only dodged arrest as a debtor thanks to a tip-off from a friend.45 Aristocratic poverty, of course, was not quite the same as the agony of the actual condition, and the names of at least two of Lord Edmund’s servants crop up in subsequent correspondence.46 But by the end of the 1520s, he was undeniably struggling and badly so, to the extent that he began to borrow heavily from his friends, even persuading one, John Shookborough, to stand as surety for his debts.47 The idea of getting another job, a profession that would pay a consistent wage, was considered abhorrent, something that would bring “great reproach and shame to me and all my blood,” in Edmund’s words. At least on the surface, he claimed to resent the position he was born into, citing his aristocratic heritage as something that had condemned him to a life of genteel struggle.

  Perhaps such woeful excuse-making was why his relatives’ aid seems to have dried up between 1524 and 1531, a time when Edmund became increasingly desperate. During one spell of hiding to avoid the possibility of being apprehended by his creditors, he sent his wife to petition Cardinal Wolsey, the King’s then chief minister, on his behalf. According to his accompanying letter to the cardinal, unless Edmund received financial help he would either have to seek sanctuary in a religious institution or flee abroad. The panic and unhappiness apparent in Edmund’s letter remains uncomfortable to read. Quotations from it are usually cited in the various biographies of Catherine, but it is by reading the majority of the text—including his astonishing offer to serve on a mission to the Americas—that one can fully appreciate the depth of Edmund Howard’s desperation. Addressed to My Lord Cardinal’s Grace, in haste, it reads:

  My duty remembered, humbly I beseech your grace to [be] my good Lord, for with out your gracious help I am utterly undone. Sir so it is that I am so far in danger of the King’s laws by reason of the debt that I am in, that I dare not go a broad, nor come at mine own house, and am fain to absent me from my wife and my poor children, there is such writs of executions out against me; and also such as be my sureties are daily arrested, and put to great trouble, which is to my great shame and rebuke. Sir there is no help but through your Grace and your good mediation to the King’s Grace, in the which is my singular trust: and your gracious favour showed unto me . . . shall not only be meritorious but shall be the safeguard of my life and relief of my poor wife and our ten children, and set me out of debt. And humbly I beseech your Grace for such poor service as I have done the King’s Grace, and trust for to do, that I be not cast away; and if the King’s Grace or your Grace should command me to do any service I would trust to do acceptable service; and liver I had to be in his Grace’s service at the farthest end of Christendom than to live thus wretchedly, and die with thought [without?] sorrow and care. I may repent that ever I was nobleman’s son born, leading the sorrowful life that I live, and if I were a poor man’s son I might dig and delve for my living and my children and my wife’s, for whom I take more thought than for my self: and so may I not do but to great reproach and shame to me and all my blood. Sir if there be any creature living that can lay to me other treason, murder, felony, rape, extortion, bribery, or in maintaining or supporting any of these, and to be approved on me, then let me have the extremity of the King’s laws; and I trust there shall none lay against me any thing to be approved to my reproach but only debt. Sir I am informed there shall be a voyage made in to a newfound land with divers ships and captains and sogears [soldiers or sea-goers?] in them; and I am informed the voyage shall be honourable and profitable to the King’s Grace and all his realm. Sir if your Grace think my poor carcass any thing meet to serve the King’s Grace in the said voyage, for the better passion of Christ be you my good lord there in, for now I do live a wretched a life as ever did gentleman being a true man, and nothing I have to live on, nor to find me my wife and my children meat or drink; and glad I would be to venture my life to do the King’s service, and if I be put there unto I doubt not but I shall do such service as shall be acceptable and redound to his Grace[’s] honour. And Sir I have nothing to lose but my life, and that I would gladly adventure in his service trusting thereby to win some honesty, and to get somewhat toward my living; and if it shall please the King’s Grace to have my body do him service in the said voyage, humbly I beseech your Grace that I may know your pleasure therein. Sir I ensure you there shall be nothing nor nother friend nor kin let me, but with a willing heart I will go, so it shall stand with the King’s pleasure and yours. The King’s Grace being so good lord to me through your good mediation . . . and assign my bill the which I now do sue for, or to set me out of debt some other ways. Sir I beseech your Grace to pardon me that I came not to your Grace myself according to my duty, but surely Sir I dare not go a broad, and therefore I have been thus bold to write to your Grace. All the premises considered I humbly beseech your Grace to be my good lord, for the passion of Christ and in the way of charity and piety. I beseech your Grace to pardon me for this my bold writing, but very poverty and need forceth me thus to do, as knoweth our Lord Jesus, who have you in his blessed tuysseone [?]. Written with the hand of him that is assuredly yours, Edmund Howard, Knight.48

  If help did come from Wolsey, it was piecemeal. Edmund was head of a large household, which added to his financial woes. The elder girls, Isabella and Margaret, along with Catherine’s full siblings Charles, Henry, George, another Margaret, and their younger sister Mary, were all still living at home. Interestingly, a later survey also mentions Jane Howard, a sister born after Mary, who, if she existed at all, must have been born before 1527 and died in infancy, perhaps sometime after 1530.49 Catherine’s two eldest half brothers, John and Ralph, had moved out by the time she was a child. On turning twenty-four, John inherited a manor in Stockwell from his grandfather, and Ralph had been left a trust fund to finance his training as a lawyer in London. Her half sister Joyce was also married and out of the house.50 Even by including Jane, Edmund’s claim that he had to maintain ten children in 1527 does not seem to be entirely accurate, but debt seldom stimulates a compulsion toward honesty.

  Catherine’s early life is thus difficult to trace—one of the youngest in a large family amid a wealth of contradictions. She possessed one of the most respected surnames in the country, but at least initially it brought her little in terms of material comfort or security. Her father was theoretically one of the pillars of the local community, but in practice he spent most of her childhood hiding from his creditors and resorting to increasingly desperate methods to get his hands on the money they needed. Whether her time in her father’s household was happy or not, we have no way of knowing. It was certainly short. Her mother died in about 1528 or 1529 and her father swiftly remarried another widow, Dorothy Troyes. This marriage, too, seems to have been short, since Dorothy’s will was made in the early summer of 1530, by which point Catherine’s first cousin, Anne Boleyn, was firmly established at court as queen-to-be.51 Anne possessed the natural assertiveness that bordered on bossiness common in someone who was often found, or believed herself, to be more competent than those around her. She set out to find her hapless uncle Edmund a job, and when the death of Sir William Hussey opened up a vacancy for the post of comptroller to the civic authorities of Calais, a port on the northern coast of France then under English jurisdiction, she pounced.52 Putting Edmund in the post of comptroller with its heavy financial duties was a little like putting the poacher in charge of the game. With unintentional irony, the decision was finalized on April Fool’s Day 1531.53

  For Edmund, the chance to get safely across the Channel could not have come at a more fortuitous time. Within a few months of his departure, his friend John Shookborough had been arrested as guarantor for Edmund’s debts. Rea
lizing that the net was closing in around him, and horrified to discover the extent of his friend’s financial deceptions, Shookborough tried to catch the attention of Thomas Cromwell as he attended Mass at the Augustinian friary near his home in Austin Friars, hopeful that a message could be passed on to the court through him. Unfortunately, Cromwell did not see Shookborough in the crowd, and as the latter returned into the city, he was arrested for £26 of Lord Edmund’s debts. In a letter to Cromwell, he admitted “I am surety for more, and dare not go abroad in the city.” To avoid prison, Shookborough had to pledge two of his family’s best items of clothing to the creditors, and he offered Cromwell a gelding “for your favour” in helping him out of the mess in which friendship with Edmund had landed him.54

  Edmund arrived in Calais on Saint Nicholas’s Day 1531, amid the December chill, with an introductory letter from Anne Boleyn clutched in his hands. He took it to the town’s vice treasurer, Thomas Fowler, who was canny enough to realize the tacit instructions implicit in Anne’s avalanche of complimentary charm: “At his coming here on St. Nicholas Day,” he told his brother, “he [Edmund] brought me a letter from my lady Anne, directed to you and me, which my lord commanded me to open, giving us great thanks for our kindness to my lord Edmund.”55