A woman’s life could be ended or ruined by the consequences of sex, a point which was constantly stressed in the hope of encouraging restraint. Virginity, or perhaps more accurately an unsullied reputation, was the most valuable part of an aristocratic lady’s social armor. Without it, she was a defenseless and easy target. Catherine was clearly enjoying her sexual relationship with Francis, while doing her research in how to avoid becoming a mother. Her boast that she knew how to “meddle” with a man without risking pregnancy suggests that she knew something about oral sex—number fourteen in the aforementioned confessors’ manual, between having sex outside the missionary position and homosexuality—or the other rudiments of sixteenth-century contraception. In the rural idyll at Horsham or behind the walls of her grandmother’s London mansion, it was easy to make the mistake of thinking that biology and the disapproving stares of Mary Lascelles were her greatest threats.
Before the Dowager arrived at her pew for morning Mass, her servants gathered the usual pile of letters left there as petitions for her. After a service at Lambeth, one note brought a nasty surprise: it claimed that if the Dowager went up to the maidens’ chamber half an hour after her usual bedtime “you shall see that which shall displease you.”27 The Dowager “stormed” in a rage and only through sheer luck did the girls manage to hide the worst from her. Perhaps it was one night where only a few couples were meeting or most of the men managed to make it into the curtained gallery in time. In any case, the Duchess did not discover that Catherine was seeing Dereham. The note was opaque enough for the Dowager to assume that it referred to another young man called Hastings, whose flirtatious interest in one of Catherine’s roommates had already been noticed. Catherine did not think the tip referred to Hastings, and she was angry enough at the potential embarrassment to break into the Dowager’s rooms again, steal the letter, and take it straight to Francis, who agreed that Henry Manox must have written it, perhaps with the help of one of his friends. Apparently, Manox had wanted to ruin Dereham without ruining his own chances with Catherine. True to form, Francis was almost as angry as the Dowager, if for very different reasons. He found Manox and proceeded to hurl insults at him.28 The two men may have been friends before, since one of Francis’s complaints was that the letter proved Manox had never loved him or Catherine.
Arguments about who had incited the wrath of the Dowager eventually reached the ears of Lord William, who was irritated by the strained atmosphere in the house and went to Manox’s accommodation to add a second dose of criticism, rather awkwardly bringing the subject up in front of Manox’s wife. William was unimpressed by Manox’s churlish troublemaking, as he saw it, and perhaps by the abuse of his position in flirting with Catherine. He was equally bored by the gossiping about it in the maidens’ chamber and the he-said-she-said resulting from the Dowager’s discovery: “What mad wenches!” he said. “Can you not be merry amongst yourselves but you must thus fall out?”29 Lord William’s anger understandably frightened Manox more than Francis Dereham’s. Not long after the contretemps, Manox left the Dowager’s service to work for another family in Lambeth.30 In regards to the temporarily strained environment in the house, Catherine’s glamorous aunt, the Countess, was more sanguine when the scandal broke: the only advice she gave her niece was that staying up too late would “hurt her beauty.”31
While Catherine’s guile and Francis’s bravado saved them and their friends from the worst of her relatives’ suspicions, they were so obviously obsessed with each other that the Dowager eventually noticed.32 She may actually have been the last person in the house to know—even John Walsheman, the Dowager’s elderly porter, realized before she did.33 Years of being told to look at Catherine, to watch her and defer to her, meant that almost everyone in the household knew what their mistress’s granddaughter was doing. The grooms who worked in the Dowager’s chambers knew what was going on, which was unsurprising given that their female colleagues, the Dowager’s maids (known as chamberers), including Dorothy Dawby, who was carrying messages and gifts between the lovers, and the disapproving Mary Lascelles, who had recently been promoted from the nursery, were also aware of the situation.34 The Dowager’s other maids, Lucy and Margery, were talking about the affair, as was the maid Mistress Philip, who brought the news to her mistress, the Countess of Bridgewater.35 Catherine’s uncle William and his wife, Lady Margaret Howard, also knew, with Margaret apparently spotting the obvious signs of infatuation and discussing it with her husband, whose fondness for Dereham prevented him from reacting aggressively or from inquiring too closely into what was happening.36 Andrew Maunsay, another servant, remembered later that “a laundry woman called Bess” knew about the liaison too—an oddly specific memory which raises the possibility that Catherine needed a laundress who could clean her sheets more often than usual, without telling the Dowager.37
Since aristocratic households kept secrets with the same discretion as a modern workplace or high school, perhaps what was most remarkable about Catherine’s summer romance in 1538 was that nobody else tried to inform the Dowager about it after Manox’s botched attempt to extract revenge. Catherine benefited from the affection she inspired in many of those around her, while those who did not care for her, like Mary Lascelles, were too afraid to spill her secrets to the Dowager. The Duchess’s suspicions were only confirmed one afternoon when she walked in on Catherine and Francis wrapped in each other’s arms, chatting with Joan Acworth, who was acting as Catherine’s woefully inept chaperone. The last time she had caught Catherine in an embrace, the Dowager had slapped her. This time, her blows fell with a more democratic energy—she punched Catherine, Francis, and Joan, then launched herself headlong into a tirade.38 Back in her rooms, she raged to her sister-in-law and companion, Malyn Tilney. Malyn seemed to know or suspect what was going on with Catherine, but chose tact over honesty in dealing with Agnes’s anger and apparently encouraged her belief that what she had just witnessed was the worst of it. Eventually, the Dowager calmed down and contented herself with comments that evolved from acid to arch to accepting and finally to amusement. When anyone asked where Francis was, she replied with comments in the vein of “I warrant if you seek him in Catherine Howard’s chamber ye shall find him there.”39
The fact that Dereham, like Manox before him, was able to keep his job was a poor reflection on the Dowager’s acquittal of her position as a guardian. Properly, either he would have been dismissed or Catherine would have been sent to stay with another relative until the infatuation had passed. Agnes may have failed to act out of a desire to avoid embarrassment for herself—after all, how could she explain the problem without admitting her own dereliction of duty? She was anxious that none of the other girls should breathe a word about it to Catherine’s uncle William and confided these worries to her chaplain, Father Borough.40 At what point she figured out that one of William’s own servants, and his wife, had passed on the household gossip about Francis and Catherine is unclear. For quite some time Agnes seemed to believe, or chose to, that it was only a mutual crush that would soon blow over. Katherine Tilney, who slept in the maidens’ chamber, stated later, and stood by her testimony, that the Dowager Duchess never knew the relationship had been consummated or that there was talk in the house of the couple making it to the altar.
Francis encouraged the idea of a wedding. When a friend asked him if he would “have” her, meaning marry her, Francis replied, “By St. John you may guess twice and guess worse.”41 The gifts passing between the couple took on a domestic character. Catherine gave him bands and sleeves for a shirt; at New Year’s he gave her a gift of a heartsease, a wild pansy with yellow and purple markings, crafted from silk for her to wear. Dereham was with her almost constantly; they nicknamed each other “husband” and “wife,” and he lounged “on one bed or another” to talk to her in the maidens’ chamber and constantly brought up “the question of marriage.”42 When his friends teased Francis about how he could not kiss Catherine often enough, he bantered back by asking wh
y he should not kiss his wife. According to her own recollections a few years later, Catherine did not correct him but instead winked and whispered, “What if this should come to my lady’s ear?”
She was still careful to keep the details from her grandmother. She would not wear the lovely silken flower until she persuaded a family friend and visitor, Lady Eleanor Brereton, to tell the Dowager that she had given the bauble to Catherine as a gift.43 The silk flower was a token Catherine appreciated, and she wanted more. Catherine’s love of clothes and fashion developed, although like most young unmarried girls from the same background, she had almost no money of her own. She had enough pocket money to go to Mrs. Clifton, a housewife in Lambeth who embroidered for her one of Francis’s shirts that he had received as a present from the Dowager at New Year’s. When Francis told her about a hunchbacked lady in London who was said to be a skilled needlewoman, particularly with silk, Catherine was so keen to commission some pieces that Francis offered to lend her the money to buy another silk flower. At a later date, he bought her the fabric she wanted to make a new headdress. He considered it a gift; Catherine intended to pay him back. She took the cloth to the diminutive Mr. Rose, her grandmother’s embroiderer. Trusting in his good taste and perhaps not too interested in the precise details beyond securing the desired color and fabric, Catherine did not give Rose specific instructions beyond what kind of hat she wanted. When it was ready, she regretted her lack of specification. Francis loved the Freer’s knots, symbols of constant love that Rose had stitched into it, but Catherine was less enthused.
She was starting to withdraw from him. Francis’s ardor was suffocating, his attentiveness more possessive than protective, and his volatile temper now struck Catherine as a predictable and irritating liability. After their few months together, Francis Dereham was stripped of his appeal. To his frustration, she evaded giving him a firm answer about a wedding. Their marital pet names for each other fell by the wayside, as Catherine tried to slow down Francis’s march to the altar. At the time, a precontract referred to a commitment between two people who were pledged to marry at a future date. With it in place, many couples began to sleep together, partly because of the belief that sex created a bond as unbreakable as marriage. Obviously, in practice it did not always work that way, but precontracts were a serious business, especially for the upper classes. One could be disinherited if evidence was found or manufactured suggesting a parent had been precontracted to someone else before their marriage, thus rendering their future children bastards in the eyes of the law.44 A real problem lay in the fact that the details of what constituted a precontract were infamously blurred, not least because there was no real requirement for them to be written down. At what point did talk of marriage become an unbreakable pledge? As far as Francis Dereham was concerned, he and Catherine were bound to one another. She, it seems, did not view the situation in quite the same way.
On March 19, 1539, her father died.45 After his second wife’s death, Edmund had married Margaret Jennings, a forceful lady who rather ruled the roost at their home in Calais.46 His last few years had been plagued by bad health and the monetary problems he had tried so hard to escape. One evening, shortly before he was due to arrive as a dinner guest of Lord and Lady Lisle, he had to send a letter to his hostess, addressed with the words “To the Right Honourable the Viscountess Lisle this be delivered—Haste, post haste, haste, for thy life.” In it, he confessed that he could not attend because the medicine he was taking to cure the pain of kidney stones “made me piss my bed this night, for the which my wife hath sore beaten me, and saying it is children’s parts to bepiss their beds.” There is a commendable sense of undaunted humor in Edmund’s letters, perhaps a clue to some of the qualities that had won his contemporaries’ praise so many years ago. It was Lady Lisle who had recommended the medicine that made him so ill—“You have made me such a pisser,” he joked, “that I dare not this day go abroad [outside], wherefore I beseech you to make mine excuse to my lord . . . for I shall not be with you this day at dinner.”47 Two years before he passed away, his colleagues in Calais had voted to elect him their mayor, a move that surprised everyone and raised a few eyebrows in London. Those on the ground in the town advised the government to approve the election, as they customarily did, because the result had been a popular one with “the Caliciens.”48 Evidently, in his new home Edmund had managed to build up a decent supply of goodwill, but when the letter announcing the election was read out to the King, he “laughed full heartily” and vetoed it. Thomas Cromwell was ordered to write to the burgesses and aldermen of Calais to inform them “that the King’s Majesty will in no wise that my Lord Howard be admitted unto the Mayoralty.”49 A few months after the King torpedoed his promotion, Edmund’s religious conservatism got him into trouble.50 Then, on Saint Joseph’s Day, a long and frustrating life came to its end.
Catherine almost certainly saw her father again shortly before his death. The previous spring, he had returned to England, and Lambeth, to act as one of the chief mourners at the funeral of his younger sister Elizabeth Boleyn, Countess of Ormond.51 Elizabeth was buried in the Howard crypt in St. Mary-at-Lambeth, so it is highly probable that Catherine and others from Norfolk House made the short journey to attend. This would have been the first time father and daughter had seen one another in nearly seven years; it does not seem as if Edmund permanently relocated, firstly because the hoped-for job at court never materialized and secondly because he could not stay while he remained in debt to so many people. His death in 1539 made Catherine an orphan, and the responsibility to find her a good position in life rested even more with the other Howards. Luckily, an opportunity presented itself, which would also have the added advantage of getting her away from Francis Dereham. Her uncle William had been involved in several missions abroad to scout eligible princesses for Henry VIII. By summer 1539, he was well placed to know that the Queen’s household was going to be revived to serve the Duke of Cleves’s younger sister, Anne, who would arrive in England for her wedding within the year. The Duke of Norfolk and his allies at court were unenthusiastic about the King’s choice. Many of them would have preferred an alliance with the French or the Hapsburg Empire, whereas the queen-to-be’s relatives were part of a German cabal against Europe’s most powerful family. Even more upsettingly, the match was seen as a victory for its chief architect, Thomas Cromwell. Politics aside, the Queen’s household was an ideal place for a well-bred young girl, particularly if she still needed a husband, since she would be exposed to the most eligible men in the country. Catherine’s uncle Norfolk sent word to Norfolk House that Catherine had been selected to join the court as a maid of honor.
The fantastic new life opening up in front of her gave Catherine the push she needed to break things off with Francis. As with Manox, the two talked things over in the orchard at Lambeth. Francis claimed later that Catherine wept hysterically, sobbing that she had to obey her family’s orders. In her memory, she lost her temper at his numerous agonized questions about his future—she replied that he “might do as he list,” since his plans were no longer her concern.52 Both versions of their conversation may contain some element of truth. Perhaps Catherine did weep at seeing how upset he was—it is entirely possible to feel grief for a relationship that one nonetheless intends to end. The hesitation or mixed emotions resulted in another failure to drive the point home. She did not make clear to Francis that she considered this a permanent goodbye, nor did she state firmly that she had never considered their talk of marriage to constitute a binding precontract. Francis, who was both enraged and devastated by this turn of events, still believed there was a chance he would one day be Catherine’s husband.
Chapter 6
* * *
“The King’s highness did cast a fantasy”
And it came to pass in an eveningtide, that David arose from off his bed, and walked upon the roof of the king’s house: and from the roof he saw a woman washing herself; and the woman was very beautiful to look upon.
And David sent and enquired after the woman. And one said, “Is this not Bathsheba . . . ?”
—II Samuel, 11:2–3.
Catherine’s arrival at the Tudor court was made possible by royal deaths and the fluctuations of international diplomacy. Two years before Catherine left the Dowager’s care, Queen Jane Seymour died shortly after giving birth to a son who, to the relief of nearly everybody, survived. The Queen’s funeral and the hunt for her replacement were not separated by a significant passage of time.1 English diplomats were mobilized to find the King a wife and, through her, an alliance for a country that had found itself politically isolated since the break with Rome. Several princesses were considered, with the daughters of the Hapsburg and Valois families the front runners for most of the negotiations, as a bride from one of the two continental rivals seemed like the obvious choice. Catherine’s uncle William was dispatched to France to keep an eye on Marie de Guise, the twenty-four-year-old widow of the Duke of Longueville.2 The French were increasingly offended by King Henry’s demands to see the lady before he married her, until the exasperated French ambassador in London felt the need to point out to Henry that the well-born women of his country were not accustomed to being appraised like horses at market.3 Marie eventually dropped out of the race to marry the King of Scots, and her younger sister Renée, who was also considered, took the veil.4 After her, the favorite was Christina, a seventeen-year-old Danish princess who had lived in exile since her father’s deposition. On her mother’s side, Christina was a Hapsburg, and she had been under their care since Queen Elisabeth’s death in 1526. Married at thirteen and widowed at sixteen, Christina of Denmark was still wearing mourning for her husband, the Duke of Milan, when English envoys began to court her by proxy for their master. Letters to Cromwell and the King described her as “a goodly personage of excellent beauty”; her dimples were lauded along with “the great majesty of her bearing and the charm of her manners,” as well as her faint lisp which “doth nothing misbecome her.”5
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