Young and Damned and Fair

by Gareth Russell

  Catherine began her lessons with Manox and Barnes in 1536. The attraction between Catherine and Manox seems to have been relatively slow burning, but eventually the couple were sending each other little gifts, with a maid called Dorothy Barwick being the first to carry tokens on Catherine’s behalf.67 Manox later claimed that “he fell in love with [Catherine] and she with him,” but that was not how others remembered it.68 More honestly and less nobly, he and Catherine found each other very attractive, and the taboo nature of their affair, particularly the difference in class, added a certain inevitable spice. To meet up alone and outside their lessons would have required significant skills of subterfuge. Catherine did not bring Manox into her shared dormitory, so where they found the time and venue to progress along the bases of physical intimacy is anybody’s guess. They had perhaps been meeting on several occasions when the Dowager discovered them kissing in an alcove near the chapel one afternoon. She slapped Catherine two or three times and reiterated that they were never to be left alone together.69 They did not obey her, but they had the sense to become more discreet. While it remained an open secret to many other people at Chesworth, Catherine and Manox subsequently and successfully hid their relationship from the Dowager.

  They were still seeing each other in early 1538, when a young woman called Mary Lascelles arrived to serve in the household on a regular basis.70 She was working as a nursemaid to one of Catherine’s infant cousins when the child’s father, Lord William Howard, the Dowager’s youngest surviving son, began to spend more time in his mother’s household.71 Tudor houseguests sometimes stayed longer than modern tenants, so their servants ended up living and serving alongside the owner’s. Lord William, a diplomat and soldier, had recently been widowed and married again, to Margaret Gamage, the daughter of a Welsh landowner. He had one daughter, Agnes, from his first marriage and at least one son from his second by 1538. Mary the nursemaid was a prim young girl from a family who took the Reformation very seriously, and she was horrified at what she heard about her master’s niece—two fellow maids, Isabel and Dorothy, admitted to her that they had been carrying messages and love tokens from Catherine to Manox.

  Concerned, Mary reached out in a spirit of servant solidarity to Manox to warn him of the danger he was in. She told him that if he had any plans to marry Catherine, they were impossible as “she is come of a noble house and if thou should marry her some of her blood would kill thee.” Manox was contemptuous: “Hold thy peace, woman. I know her well enough.” With maximum honesty and minimal charm, he explained, “I have had her by the cunt and she hath said to me that I shall have her maidenhead though it be painful to her, not doubting but I will be good to her hereafter.”72

  Manox’s boast shot through the gossip network of the house, flying with rumor’s customary unerring skill right to the ears of its subject. Catherine’s heart was not exactly warmed when she heard what Manox had said about her, and she ended their affair, even in the face of Manox pleading that he “was so far in love with her that he wist [knew] not what he said.”73 Catherine, by then fifteen or sixteen, was disbelieving and unimpressed. She was firm to the point of brutal in her bad temper. During their argument, she pointed out that “I will never be nought with you and able to marry me ye be not.”74 This comment is usually interpreted by historians as an example of snobbery on Catherine’s part—a wounding reminder that their respective backgrounds made the idea of marriage absurd. Had Catherine meant to make that point, she would have been unkind and accurate. In fact, it seems that she was actually being more specific. Manox could not marry her, because he was already engaged to somebody else or already married. Catherine’s uncle William is mentioned calling “on him [Manox] and his wife at their own door” shortly after Manox’s liaison with Catherine ended.75 That Manox was engaged at the time he became involved with Catherine and married shortly after would explain both of their comments about the improbability of their dalliance ending in marriage and her decision to keep their physical intimacy in check. If Catherine did intend to lose her virginity to Manox, despite her reticence, his comments about her gave her the motivation to end things before they went any further. All her life, Catherine hated to be humiliated and reacted strongly when faced with disrespect or embarrassment.

  A few days after their quarrel, Catherine had softened and agreed to hear Manox out one last time. The two went for a stroll in the Duchess’s orchards. Manox seems to have taken this promenade as a sign that the relationship might soon be back on track, but it was only misleading and well-meaning politesse on Catherine’s part. Her mood had altered, but her mind was made up, and not long after that she found a replacement for Manox in the form of Francis Dereham, her grandmother’s secretary.

  * * *

  I. Chesworth House, which is privately owned, currently contains part of the brickwork that Catherine would have known, including a southeast range built in brick between 1514 and 1524. However, due to neglect in the seventeenth century, the house today is very different to the one which Agnes Howard occupied, with additions from the seventeenth, eighteenth, and twentieth centuries.

  II. The tradition arose from a popular legend that the logs that were burned to warm the stable in Bethlehem at the time of Christ’s birth had been from ash trees.

  III. Lord Daubeney was not elevated to the earldom until 1538. However, for clarity’s sake, especially in differentiating her from her niece, the elder Katherine Howard will usually be referred to as “the Countess” from now on.

  IV. This was not the Duke of Norfolk, but his younger half brother with the same name, Lord Thomas Howard. In the same year, another of Agnes’s children, her daughter Lady Elizabeth Radclyffe, died of natural causes.

  Chapter 5

  * * *

  “Mad wenches”

  For among all that is loved in a wench chastity and cleanness is loved most.

  —Bartholomew of England, De proprietatibus rerum (c. 1240)

  Catherine never could make a clean break of things. Time and time again, she went back to pick at a wound, drawn irresistibly to the drama of the supposed farewell or the intimacy of an emotional conversation. Her tête-à-tête with Manox in the orchard only a few days after she broke off their relationship was the first recorded instance of a trait that left too many of her actions open to interpretation. As Manox nursed hopes of reconciliation, Catherine entered a more adult world. The Dowager’s household began to spend more time at Norfolk House in her home parish of Lambeth, the Howards’ recently completed mansion on the opposite side of the river to Whitehall, the King’s largest and still-expanding palace. In Lambeth Catherine began to see more of the relatives who lived in the capital or at court—her elder half sister, Lady Isabella Baynton, visited the Dowager, and their brother Henry had married and brought his new wife to live with him.

  Catherine conformed to general contemporary ideals of beauty, which praised women who had “moistness of complexion; and [are] tender, small, pliant and fair of disposition of body.”1 Contrary to the still-repeated tradition that she was “small, plump and vivacious,” the few surviving specifics about Catherine’s appearance describe her as short and slender.2 A former courtier subsequently described her as “flourishing in youth, with beauty fresh and pure.”3 She was comfortable with admiration and attention. Manox was not the only servant who was smitten; a young man called Roger Cotes was also enamored.4 As she got older, Catherine was given servants of her own, including her roommate Joan Acworth, who became her secretary. How much correspondence Catherine actually had at this stage in her life is unknown, but it clearly was not enough to create a crushing workload for Joan.

  It was through her secretary-cum-companion that Catherine found Manox’s successor. Francis Dereham was good-looking, confident to the point of arrogance, and a rule breaker who possessed a blazing temper which Catherine initially chose to regard as thrilling proof of his affection for her. He was also a ladies’ man, who had already notched his bedpost with several fellow
servants, including Joan Acworth.5 Their fling had since ended, and Joan cheerfully moved on, even singing his praises to Catherine, who began to show an interest in him in the spring of 1538—at the very most within a few weeks of ending things with Manox.6

  By then, Francis had been in the Dowager’s service for nearly two years.7 Distantly related to her, he was the son of a wealthy family in the Lincolnshire gentry where he learned the upper-class syntax and mannerisms necessary to pass as one of the club.8 The Dowager was fond of Francis, and he eventually carried out secretarial work for her. When he first arrived at Chesworth House, he and his roommate Robert Damport were given tasks like buying livestock for the household, perhaps a boring pursuit but an important one considering that many aristocratic households spent nearly one-quarter of their expenditure on food.9 Dereham and Damport were sent to get animals ready for the annual cull on Martinmas, a religious festival that fell every year on November 11. Not all the livestock were killed then, and it is not true that most meat served in winter was heavily salted or covered in spices to hide its decay; households generally fed the animals intended for table with hay throughout the colder months to keep the food as fresh as possible.10

  One of Francis’s closest friends in the household was his wingman Edward Waldegrave, who gamely chased the friends of Francis’s lovers and helped organize nighttime visits to the maidens’ chamber, arriving with wine, apples, strawberries, and other treats pinched from the kitchens. Talking, drinking, and flirting continued into the small hours, often to two or three o’clock in the morning, and if anyone from downstairs unexpectedly came to inspect, there was a small curtained gallery at the end of the maidens’ chamber where the men could hide until danger had passed. The idea to hide them in there was Catherine’s.11 She was not the only girl with a sweetheart—for instance, Francis’s friend Edward was courting one called Mistress Baskerville. To make the numerous rendezvous easier, Catherine took the initiative and snuck into her grandmother’s room one evening, stole the relevant key, had a copy made, and then ensured the door to the staircase that led to the maidens’ chamber was unlocked after the Dowager went to bed.12

  Within a couple of months, the reluctance Catherine had expressed to Manox about losing her virginity had evaporated. She and Francis began lying on her bed during the clandestine parties; this progressed to kissing, foreplay, and then sex. There was not much privacy in the maidens’ chamber, but Catherine was “so far in love” that it did not seem to deter her.13 One of the Dowager’s maids, Margery, who later married another servant in the household called John Benet, spied on them and saw Francis removing Catherine’s clothes. Later, Francis told Margery that he knew enough about sex to make sure Catherine did not end up pregnant.

  In much the same way as life in university halls can erode a sense of propriety, years in the maidens’ chamber left the girls feeling extremely comfortable in one another’s presence. When the bed hangings were pulled shut, the noises the couple made left no doubt about what they were doing. Their lovemaking was so energetic that their friends took to teasing Francis about being “broken winded” once it was over.14 The couple were drunk on one another, kissing and cuddling like “two sparrows,” and the memories of the people who saw them in 1538, written down in 1541, prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that their relationship was consensual.15 It has already been mentioned that it was customary for young people of the same sex to share a bed—in the way Francis did with Robert Damport—and on several occasions, perhaps after too much of the purloined wine, another girl was in the bed when Francis and Catherine got down to business.16 Alice Wilkes was so irritated by the couple’s “puffing and blowing” that she insisted on switching beds to get a better night’s sleep.17 Alice, who was soon to marry another member of the household called Anthony Restwold, tried to speak to Catherine about the terrible risks she was taking. Any girl would find herself ruined by a pregnancy out of wedlock, let alone the Duke of Norfolk’s niece. Catherine dismissed her concerns by pointing out that “a woman might meddle with a man and yet conceive no child unless she would herself,” much the same stance taken by Francis in his earlier conversation with Margery.18 A rebuffed Alice then shared her fears with Mary Lascelles, who had held a low opinion of Catherine ever since she found out about her involvement with Henry Manox. “Let her alone,” she advised, “for [if] she hold on as she begins we shall hear she will be nought in a while.”19

  Mary Lascelles’s sour-sounding reflection on Catherine’s impending comeuppance was based as much on hard-nosed pragmatism as on religious sensibility. Lascelles’s advice to Henry Manox about the consequences of becoming involved with a noble girl showed that she appreciated the practical dangers implicit in these kinds of upstairs-downstairs romances. The potential consequences of sin were awful, particularly in a society where God was liable to prove far more forgiving than His earthly flock. Religion was omnipresent in Catherine’s world. It was not separated from the world, but rather it influenced everything in society, from the ecstatic to the banal, and was in its turn influenced—sixteenth-century villagers playing football after Mass sang songs celebrating the skills of Saint Hugh of Lincoln in bouncing the ball up and down from the tips of his toes.20 Eroticism and sexuality could be incorporated into the Divine as much as the mundane. Christianity’s blushes about nudity were at least a century away—prayer books handed out to children might show a naked Bathsheba bathing in the moonlight; icons of pure and brave Saint Agatha often depicted her bare breasts seconds before the pagan Romans tore them from her as part of her martyrdom; the loincloth-wearing Saint Sebastian was usually shown as lean and muscular as the arrows of the unbelievers pierced him for his faith in Christ.21

  None of these devotional images were supposed to excite lust, of course, but nude images, no matter how holy their intent, at the very least ran the risk of provoking impure thoughts in some of their audience, and this reflected a society in which theological teachings on sexuality were often torturously contradictory. There were tensions between, and within, theological writings on sex and medical thoughts on the same subject. Views on what constituted a danger to one’s spiritual or physical health swung depending on which writer you consulted—a monk from the Franciscan order, for instance, was historically likely to be less censorious than one from the Dominican tradition. Medical wisdom held that “men fall into various illnesses through retaining their seed with them,” while in Catherine’s lifetime the Bishop of Rochester argued that an orgasm damaged a man’s health more “than by shedding of ten times so much blood.”22 A large part of the dichotomy stemmed from the age-old question of whether sex was something to be enjoyed or endured and if, in circumstances like marriage or procreation, it might become something praiseworthy. The philosopher Silvester Prierias Mazzolini, who died around the time of Catherine’s birth, argued that any deviation from the missionary position was a contraceptive, itself a sin, and that the pursuit of sexual pleasure, even within wedlock, was fundamentally dangerous. Couples who were engaged often began a sexual relationship before the actual wedding service, a custom with which certain members of the priesthood had no quarrel but others found to be objectionable.

  Almost none of Catherine’s contemporaries disregarded the Church’s teachings on sex in their entirety, but equally there is plenty of evidence that very few accepted them in full. Moralists noted with concern, disappointment, and apparent surprise that very few men admitted to masturbation when they confessed their sins.23 The suggestion that couples should wait three days before consummating a marriage was almost universally ignored.24 Clerical tomes lambasted homosexual activity, masturbation, foreplay, oral sex, and anal sex, lumping them all together as sodomy, but even here there were inconsistencies. For every morality guide that ranked homosexual sex in the same category of vice as masturbation, there were others that ranked it just above bestiality, such as the manual written to help confessors in the assigning of penance which carefully ranked every sexual transgression from the
least severe (an unchaste kiss) to the worst (bestiality). In the same list of ascending vice, incest was number eleven, while masturbation was jarringly ranked as number twelve, which was four ranks worse than the rape of a virgin, itself classed as marginally worse than the rape or abduction of a married woman. Many lay Christians found these debates absurd and correspondingly ignored thundering assertions like the one that claimed that if a sinner “has foully touched his own member so that he has polluted himself and poured out his own semen, this sin is greater than if he had lain with his own mother.”25

  However, even if people did not always pay attention to the obsessively detailed denunciations from the guardians of sexual morality, there was still widespread acceptance of the importance of chastity, especially in women, and a belief that sexual intercourse created a bond between two people that could not easily be broken. Medicine taught that women were more lustful than men, more illogical, more emotional, and more susceptible to biological impulses. Female orgasm was believed to be desirable in securing a conception, perhaps one of the few pieces of medical advice that worked in a lady’s favor in the 1530s. The rest seemed to focus either on women’s emotional volatility or the horrors that sex could inflict on them—childbirth, after all, killed many, and contemporary textbooks acknowledged that some women endured great pain during sex itself, perhaps because of a dropped womb or some other infirmity, when “such women cannot endure a man’s penis because of the size of it, and sometimes they are forced to endure it whether they would or not.”26