Courtiers, like servants and politicians, gossiped only a little less than they breathed, and rumor’s ability to report and magnify meant the news reached Francis back at Lambeth. He stormed up to court demanding to know if it was true that Catherine was going to marry Culpepper. They quarreled, with Dereham predictably insisting that she belonged with him. Catherine, who had already shown her ability to be brutally honest when sufficiently riled, was firmer with him than she had been when they last spoke. “What should you trouble me therewith,” she asked, “for you know I will not have you; and if you have heard such report [about Culpepper], you heard more than I do know.”80 Dereham returned to Lambeth, where he demanded to be released from the Dowager’s service if it meant living there without Catherine. The Dowager thought his desperation would blow over and refused his request.81
By December, Anne of Cleves was at last on her way to England, and the King was impatient to see her for the first time. He wanted her to travel by sea, but the court in her native Düsseldorf preferred her to make most of the journey by land. The winter seas would be treacherous, and Anne was “young and beautiful, and if she should be transported by seas they fear how much it might alter her complexion. They fear lest the time of the year being now cold and tempestuous she might there, though she were never so well ordered, take such cold or other disease, considering she was never before upon the seas, as should be to her great peril and the King’s Majesty’s great displeasure.”82 Moving the princess and her retinue by land meant traveling through Hapsburg and French territory, since the Netherlands were governed by the Emperor’s younger sister Maria of Austria, Dowager Queen of Hungary, who acted as regent on her brother’s behalf.IV Parading the symbol of the alliance against him through the Emperor’s domains struck Henry as a bad idea, and he feared that his fiancée might be detained in order to prevent the marriage. He did not count on the Hapsburgs ladies’ compulsive good manners. Maria promised to “see her well treated in the Emperor’s dominions” and made good on her word when she dispatched a nobleman to escort Anne and her retinue en route to her wedding, “although it displease them,” as an Antwerp-based merchant remarked.83
Thomas Culpepper was sent across the Channel as part of the delegation to welcome Anne when she reached Calais, but they found themselves trapped there with her when storms prevented a return journey. As bitter winds and sleet lashed England, Catherine waited for the woman she was to serve.84 A letter managed to get through from Anne Bassett’s mother, who was hosting the future queen in Calais, which brought the welcome news that the princess was “good and gentle to serve and please.”85 The courtiers and officials were less inclined to be adventurous than the merchants who tried to make it back to England, so letters got through long before Anne did. Finally, two days after Christmas, the weather lifted long enough for her to board a ship “trimmed with streamers, banners and flags” and cross from Calais to England.86
* * *
I. The white rose was the heraldic crest most popularly associated with the House of York, the branch of the Plantagenets who ruled England immediately before the Tudors.
II. Lord Lisle was an acknowledged illegitimate son of King Edward IV, Henry VIII’s maternal grandfather.
III. Although marriages did take place and were often consummated at fourteen or fifteen, several dynasties gave credence to the argument that overexertion in the marital bed could harm an adolescent male’s health. The premature deaths of heirs to the English and Spanish thrones had previously been attributed to this, which might explain why Henry Fitzroy and Mary Howard were kept apart during their short marriage.
IV. The Hapsburg Netherlands covered what is now the kingdoms of Belgium, the Netherlands, the grand duchy of Luxembourg, and part of the French region of Nord-Pas-de-Calais. Daughters or sisters of the monarch ruled the Netherlands as extremely capable deputies for most of the sixteenth century.
Chapter 7
* * *
“The charms of Catherine Howard”
The charms of Catherine Howard, and the endeavours of the duke of Norfolk and the bishop of Winchester, at length prevailed.
—Gilbert Burnet, Bishop of Salisbury, The History of the Reformation of the Church of England (1679)
On January 4, 1540, Catherine stood outdoors in the cold afternoon air wearing a new gown, her face framed by a French hood, a round headdress that curved around the back of the head with a veil flowing down behind it. This was to be her first glimpse of her employer, and the ladies and maids were expected to start serving immediately. Before they saw Anne of Cleves, Catherine and all the other members of the Queen’s household had to listen to an oration delivered in Latin by Dr. Daye, the Queen’s almoner, which was answered in a similar style by a representative of the Duke of Cleves. Two of the King’s nieces, Lady Margaret Douglas and her twenty-two-year-old cousin the Marchioness of Dorset, led a delegation of ladies from the high nobility to greet their mistress as she stepped out of the carriage “she had ridden [in] all her long journey.” Anne of Cleves was twenty-four, tall and dignified, with a swarthy complexion and a prominent nose. After another round of presentations to the princess, “she with all the Ladies entered the tents, and there warmed them[selves] a space.”1 For the first week after her arrival in England, she wore the opulent yet unflattering fashions of her homeland, to the distress of her attendants and courtiers, who described German fashion as “monstrous habit and apparel.”2
A blast of trumpets outside the tent announced the approach of the King on horseback, accompanied by his councillors, his gentlemen attendants, bishops, and nobles. The new division of the royal bodyguard, the Gentlemen Pensioners, were on hand, along with ten young footmen, garbed in gold, who stood nearest the King, assisted by pages dressed in crimson velvet. Anne, flanked by Catherine and her other women, emerged from the tent wearing a dress of cloth of gold with a pearl-encrusted bonnet on her head. She was helped into a saddle decorated with heraldic devices associated with her family in Cleves and rode over to her husband, who cut no more of a minimalist figure with the buttons on his purple velvet coat made of pearls, rubies, and diamonds, and the handle of his sword glittering with the numerous emeralds attached to it. As Henry and Anne spoke, the crowds who had gathered to watch them began to cheer. In the words of one member of Parliament, “O what a sight was this to see so goodly a Prince & so noble a King to ride with so fair a Lady of so goodly a stature & so womanly a countenance. . . . I think no creature could see them but his heart rejoiced.”
For the journey to Greenwich Palace, where the royal wedding was to take place two days later, Catherine and the other gentlewomen were put in carriages and taken in procession with the other attendees. As they traveled, the Queen’s ladies “beheld on the wharf how the Citizens of London were rowing up & down the Thames” with banners and flags streaming from barges out to celebrate, despite the chill. Once they were behind the palace walls, Henry accompanied Anne and her servants to her private apartments, from where they could hear cannons in the city firing welcoming salutes.
Catherine spent the next month of her life at Greenwich, a riverfront palace of redbrick. The Queen’s apartments overlooked the west side of the inner courtyard, and it was from there on January 6, the Feast of the Epiphany and the last of the traditional twelve days of Christmas, that Catherine helped escort the Queen to her nuptial Mass. Royal weddings in Tudor England were not usually great state occasions. The last public royal union had been Prince Arthur’s four decades earlier, and apart from Mary I’s marriage to Prince Philip of Spain in 1554, all subsequent British royal weddings took place in relatively private palace chapels until the children of King George V decided to tentatively embrace the media age in the 1920s.3 Henry VIII’s fourth wedding was conducted in the Queen’s Closet at Greenwich at eight o’clock in the morning. He wore cloth of gold, decorated with silver flowers, and a crimson satin coat held together by diamonds. The bride came in another cloth-of-gold gown, with decorative flowers c
rafted from pearls; her long blond hair hung loose, topped by a small crown, and she wore a necklace full of “jewels of great value.”4 Count von Overstein, a nobleman in her brother’s service, gave her away, and Mass was celebrated by the Archbishop of Canterbury.5 When it was over, the dukes of Norfolk and Suffolk escorted the new Queen back to her rooms, where Catherine and all the other women of the household kept her company while the King went to change his outfit.
The wedding afternoon was taken up with a procession and the royal couple’s first public meal together as husband and wife, followed by enough time for the Queen to change into a dress trimmed with ermine, which she wore to Evensong with her ladies. That night, the court was entertained with banquets and dancing before the King and Queen were ceremonially put to bed. The drapes were closed, the servants retreated, and, so everyone assumed, the deed was done. Five days later, with snow still on the ground, Catherine and the other women saw Queen Anne in English attire for the first time when they accompanied her to a celebratory joust.6 Those around her judged the sartorial change a huge improvement “which so set forth her beauty and good visage, that every creature rejoiced to behold her.”7
The chronicler’s rhapsody about Queen Anne’s beauty at the joust may have been the result of florid patriotism rather than honest reporting. By the time the court moved to Westminster on February 5, no one in it could have missed the rumors about the King’s latest wedding night. The whispers had even reached the ears of the Queen of France. Thomas Cromwell, who obviously had a vested interest in seeing the marriage work, thought Anne had “a queenly manner,” and many people, including the French ambassador, agreed that her carriage and manners were commendable, though revealingly the latter reported it in the context that “people who have seen the lady close say that she is neither as young as was expected, nor as pretty as she was reported to be. She is tall, and her face and carriage have a force in them which shows she is not without mind. The spirit and sense will perhaps supply the deficiency of beauty.”8
Initially, a date in February had been mooted for Anne’s coronation. That was then pushed back to Whitsuntide, in early summer. On February 22, Marie de Guise was crowned queen consort in Scotland at Holyrood Abbey, an event which may have exacerbated Anne’s worry about why her own had not been arranged. She dropped heavy hints about it to some of the King’s councillors when they called on her in early spring, by which point they must have known that there would never be a coronation.9 Some of the gentlemen in the King’s privy chamber had started to criticize earlier reports from Cleves that had praised Anne’s beauty. Her later reputation as the “Flanders Mare,” a grotesque caricature of ugliness, is the product of imaginative histories written in the eighteenth century, but it does seem that she failed to live up to expectations.I When she first landed in England, Henry had ridden in disguise to surprise her. Anne was the first foreign princess to arrive in the country to marry a reigning English monarch since Margaret of Anjou wed Henry’s great-uncle Henry VI, ninety-five years earlier. Henry VI had gone disguised as a messenger to Southampton to deliver a letter from himself to Margaret, who, unfortunately for the hoped-for moment of a romantic recognition, assumed he actually was a servant and kept him kneeling while she absentmindedly read his letter.10 Anne of Cleves’s first encounter with her husband was even less encouraging. She failed to pay much attention to the corpulent messenger in front of her, and when he tried to get her attention by kissing her she, naturally, recoiled.II Henry was disappointed by her behavior and her appearance. In a conversation with the papal nuncio, the Queen of France, Eleanor of Austria, remarked “that the new Queen [of England] is worthy and Catholic, old and ugly.”11 Eleanor must have received her report from the French ambassador to England because she was able to tell Cardinal Farnese about Anne’s unflattering Teutonic wardrobe, which had been described in a letter to Eleanor’s husband, along with de Marillac’s description of Anne as “tall and thin, and not particularly pretty.”12 Amid dripping disdain for the English court’s mimicry of her own, Queen Eleanor managed to correct the English accounts that had Anne improving herself via English fashion. The styles en vogue at Henry VIII’s court may be popular with the English nobility, but they had originated in France.
At some point, a few of Queen Anne’s ladies took it upon themselves to find out exactly what was happening in the royal marriage. A well-aimed compliment would bring information, through the Queen’s denial or acceptance of it, and one afternoon while Anne was with three of her women—the Countess of Rutland and the widowed ladies Edgecombe and Rochford—they expressed the loyal hope that she might soon be pregnant and give birth to a Duke of York, a title that had been given to second sons in the royal family since the reign of Edward IV.13 The Queen took the bait by saying she was certain that she was not pregnant and stuck to it even when the women gamely pressed her on how she could be absolutely certain. Faced with the Queen’s persistence, Lady Rochford joked, “By Our Lady, I think your Grace is a maid still indeed.” The Queen answered, “How can I be a maid and sleep every night with the King?” Lady Rochford made the obvious jest of how a bit more than sleep was required to make a prince, but Anne did not seem to know how much more—“When he comes to bed, he kisses me and taketh me by the hand and biddeth me, ‘Goodnight, sweetheart’; and in the morning kisses me and biddeth me, ‘Farewell, darling.’ Is that not enough?” Confronted by the Queen’s naïveté, Lady Rutland stopped laughing and replied, “Madam, there must be more than this, or it will be long ere we have a Duke of York.”14
Queen Anne’s ignorance of sex and conception still stuns and confuses. On the one hand, it is perfectly believable that a woman who had been brought up with a limited education, no knowledge of music or dancing, who spoke and understood no language except German when she was shipped off to England, and who had spent her entire life under the watchful eye of her adoring but strict mother, could have been innocent enough to think that sharing a bed with a man constituted full marital intimacy.15 Especially since, at a later date, Henry admitted that he had gone so far as digital penetration which, to a very innocent person, might conceivably equate with consummation. On the other, there is the possibility that Anne of Cleves was playing up her simplicity to give herself an out from embarrassing conversations. It is worth noting that despite asking, “Is that not enough?” at the end of the conversation, she had insisted at the start of it that she knew that she could not be pregnant.
In her short career as queen, Anne of Cleves elicited great praise for her public behavior, and several sources confirm that she managed to make herself very popular with the people of London.16 Her correspondence with her family revealed how happy she was in “such a marriage that she could wish no better.”17 She tried to learn English as quickly as she could, and was apparently successful in her endeavors since she had mastered it by the end of 1540.18 She asked to be taught the rules of the card games her husband enjoyed, and she sought advice on how she could make herself more agreeable to him. Deciphering much of Anne’s behavior, including the aforementioned conversation with her ladies-in-waiting, is frustrated by the same problem facing the French ambassador when he explained to his master that it was impossible to tell if Anne’s preternatural calm and good nature were the result of “either prudent dissimulation or stupid forgetfulness.”19 She was capable of losing her temper, and during one very mild disagreement, Henry complained that she “began to wax stubborn and wilful,” which suggests that she was not quite as docile as she pretended.20 There were also some indicators that she understood that she was in difficulty, without perhaps realizing until the final move that she had lost before she started playing.
After the farce of their first meeting, Henry VIII had entered into their marriage determined to dislike her, and the intention created the reality. Before Anne arrived, the Archbishop of Canterbury had tried to warn Cromwell that an arranged marriage was a risk for someone like Henry, who set such high store on his personal happiness. It would
be “most expedient the King to marry where that he had his fantasy and love, for that would be most comfort to his Grace,” advice which Cromwell ignored.21 Henry even tried to get out of going through with it on the morning of the wedding, asking “Is there no remedy but to put my neck in the yoke?” before Cromwell reminded him that jilting Anne meant losing the alliance.22
He was right. As long as the pact between the Hapsburgs and the French monarchy remained, England could not sacrifice its ties to Queen Anne’s family. Cleves still seemed like a valuable ally, particularly after another nosedive in relations between the English court and the Emperor’s.23 The latter had chosen not to wear his insignia as a member of the English Order of the Garter on Saint George’s Day, as was customary, a fact not missed by the English, who complained about it later to his ambassador.24 In Spain, then part of the Hapsburg Empire, several men under the protection of the English Crown had been tossed into the jail cells of the Inquisition.25 The English ambassador, Sir Thomas Wyatt, who suspected the men had been imprisoned in retaliation for his country’s alliance with Cleves, had an audience with Charles V in which he mistakenly used the word “ingratitude” to describe the Emperor’s attitude towards Henry.26 Charles, whose letters from his servants were often addressed to “His Sacred Imperial and Catholic Majesty” and whose dominions stretched from the Americas to the Alps, had been listening politely to Wyatt but “then stopped him, and made him repeat it, asking who it was he charged with ingratitude.”27 When Wyatt failed to take the hint and repeated his faux pas, the Emperor made it very clear to Wyatt that “he owed his master nothing, and the term ingratitude could only be used by an equal or a superior.” His Sacred Imperial and Catholic Majesty proceeded to take several swipes at Henry’s concept of justice, which caused Wyatt to behave even more rudely.
Young and Damned and Fair Page 13