Young and Damned and Fair

by Gareth Russell

  Catherine had enough jewelry to be generous with it. So much was flung at Catherine in the opening months of her queenship that she may have struggled to keep up with it all. The glittering avalanche began with the official pieces which had decorated the necks of her predecessors, and they were soon augmented by new trinkets from the King. When the ladies dressed Catherine in the morning, they might help her into one of the three “upper habiliments,” the outward part of a dress, she had recently received that were decorated with eight diamonds and seven rubies each.19 Her clasps were capped off by emeralds, her buttons were set with diamonds, and for her broaches rubies were crafted into the shape of flowers, then trimmed with diamond and pearl petals.20 If something was still felt to be missing from the top of her outfit, there were dozens of other broaches to choose from, like one of black agate that showed scenes from the Passion of Christ on one side and the Resurrection on the other, with rubies and small diamonds smattered around the base.21 There were earrings and French hoods trimmed with gold. She had seven diamond-and-gold rings.22 The ladies of the privy chamber circled Catherine’s little waist with golden girdles or double rows of pearls routinely interrupted by rubies.23 From these, it was fashionable to hang pomanders that contained pleasing scents in the bottom capsule, or little books at the end of a golden chain. As Queen, Catherine’s dangling books included one that had belonged to Jane Seymour with a gold enameled cover and a clock set into it—“upon every side of which book is three diamonds, a little man standing upon one of them, four turquoises and three rubies, with a little chain of golden hanging at it.” If that did not suit on a particular day, there was another gold book garnished with twenty-seven rubies, another “having a fair sapphire on every side and viii rubies upon the same,” or the ruby quota could be increased by selecting a gold-trimmed book “containing xii diamonds and xl rubies.”24

  Care of the jewels was entrusted to another of the privy chamber women, Mrs. Anne Herbert, who had ginger hair, a clear complexion, a prim smile, and a growing belly by the time of Catherine’s wedding.25 A career courtier and the daughter of two more, Anne Herbert’s mother had been a lady-in-waiting to Katherine of Aragon, her paternal grandmother had served Richard III’s queen, and her paternal great-grandmother had been a member of the royal household in the mid-fifteenth century.26 Born Anne Parr in 1515, she had joined Anne Boleyn’s retinue shortly after her mother’s death left her an orphan in 1531, and taken an oath of loyalty to Jane Seymour when there was a change in command in 1536, shortly before her own marriage to William Herbert, an insatiably ambitious Welsh soldier who had a contested claim to the defunct earldom of Pembroke.27 Technically, there was a male officer to monitor Catherine’s jewels, but the day-to-day running of the Queen’s household was a study in the art of delegation. It was Anne Herbert who sent for pieces from the wardrobe, liaised with the relevant clerks, and dispatched items that would not be used for a while into storage at Baynard’s Castle in London, where most of the Queen’s wardrobe went if she was unlikely to use pieces for a few weeks.

  The other women of the privy chamber were Anne Herbert’s kinswoman Mrs. Elizabeth Tyrwhitt, Mrs. Joyce Lee, and Mrs. Susanna Gilmyn.28 The latter was a talented artist, born Susanna Horenbout in the Netherlands; her brother was the portraitist Lucas Horenbout, and as a young woman her images of Christ had been praised by Albrecht Dürer, who admitted surprise that a woman had been capable of creating such beauty. Susanna’s first husband had been John Parker, the man in charge of the maintenance of the Palace of Westminster, and after his death she married a London merchant, John Gilmyn, in September 1539. Life had never given Susanna as many opportunities as it had her brother, but she was well liked and respected by many of her contemporaries, including Henry VIII’s daughter Mary, who gave her a gift of twelve yards of black satin in 1544.29 She had come into the Queen’s household thanks to her fluency in German, which she used to help Anne of Cleves with her English, but like the rest of the Privy Chamber women, Susanna remained to serve Catherine after Anne’s rustication.30

  These women orbited Catherine, and their daily duties were arranged in something like shifts, since all eight were seldom needed at one time. If she wanted to take a nap after dinner, the ladies were ready with water and towels to refresh her when she woke, though contemporary guides discouraged too much sleep during the day on the grounds that it “dulls the wits and hurteth the brain.”31 When she wanted to bathe, they arranged it and waited on her throughout. At Hampton Court, hot and cold running water was pumped through golden taps into a sunken stone bathtub for the King or a lead-lined one, draped in linen, for the Queen. At Whitehall, there were stoves to make sure the royal bathrooms never became too cold.32 The dozens of linen towels, bathrobes, curtains, and cloths used during the Queen’s baths were passed to the household’s team of laundresses, while her bedsheets and menstrual cloths, strips of fine Holland linen, were sent to the Queen’s personal laundress.33 Life as queen removed discomfort even from the mundane. Catherine would never again have to visit the “house of easement” with its utilitarian rows of toilets. Instead, she was accompanied to her stool chamber, with its crimson velvet canopy, by one of the privy women, who left her while she used a toilet capped with a crimson velvet seat.34 When she was finished, a red silk cloth was tied over it and pinned down with gilt nails. Later, another servant would arrive to open up the wooden box, take out the removable pan, empty it, clean it, and return it.35

  Apparently, the ladies of the privy chamber did not much care for the house of easement, either, and they were not above using their position to secure some privileges of their own. The Queen’s closed stool cost more than her vice chamberlain received in annual salary. Nevertheless, the household paid for six for the privy women. Some of these presumably made their way to the double lodgings, two rooms allocated to ladies of the Queen’s privy chamber, each with a fireplace and a separate “garderobe” where the new toilets could be placed.36

  Once Catherine was dressed, the maids of honor carried out the tasks she had once performed for Anne of Cleves. They gave her one of her three private prayer books and then, carrying her beads and cushions, accompanied her from her privy chambers into the little gallery where she could listen to Mass being celebrated by one of her four chaplains from behind a grille. While she was at prayer, the chamberers went into her bedroom to strip the clothes off her bed, lightly beat the feather bed to plump it for her, changed the sheets if they were not clean, and then rearranged everything, finishing with the cushions and pillows. They would then check her carpets, tapestries, and room cushions to see if they were clean and send for someone if they thought the fire in the grate, if lit, was about to die out.37

  After Mass, the maids of honor accompanied Queen Catherine back to her privy apartments. There was a high turnover in the maids of honor who were after all at court with the goal of securing a husband. Katherine Carey had been the first maid to depart when she left Queen Anne’s service shortly after Easter to wed Francis Knollys, who brought her to his family’s manor house in Oxfordshire, where she began the business of giving birth to the first of their sixteen children.38 Mary Norris had married Sir George Carew. Catherine gave Mary Carew a necklace as her wedding present.39

  It was only Anne Bassett who remained to walk a few decorous steps behind her former-colleague-turned-mistress. The arrest of her stepfather for treason and her mother’s subsequent mental collapse left Anne financially shipwrecked, dependent on the generosity of her superiors or extended relatives and, without a dowry, bereft of any real chance of a proposal. She was now flanked by newcomers—Margaret Garneys, Margaret Copledike, and Damascin Stradling, whose Welsh mother was kin to the Queen’s aunt, Lady Margaret Howard. Even they did not stay for long, and within a year Margaret Garneys had married Walter Devereux, Viscount Hereford, a match that cannot have been approved of by the Queen’s aunt, Lady Bridgewater, since before being elevated to the viscounty of Hereford, Walter Devereux had been Lord Ferrers, t
he man who had quarreled with, and arrested, the Countess’s first husband, Rhys ap Gruffydd. A replacement maid of honor was Dorothy Bray, one of the younger daughters of the recently ennobled Lord Bray. In later life, Dorothy had a reputation as a bluestocking—in Queen Elizabeth’s reign, she kept two hundred books in her private rooms at her London mansion. In Catherine’s time, a young and ebullient Dorothy balanced any nascent literary interests with a flare for romances which seemed to remind the Queen of her younger self.40

  Catherine’s fifth maid of honor is listed as “Lady Lucy” in the accounts, and she must have been Lady Lucy Somerset, the eldest daughter of the Earl of Worcester, who was the only peer with a daughter called Lucy in 1540.41 A great-granddaughter of Edward IV on her mother’s side, she was born sometime around 1524, which made her roughly the same age as the rest of the young girls who were sworn in as maids of honor between 1539 and 1541.42 Lucy’s stepmother had been a favorite lady-in-waiting of Anne Boleyn’s and had retired from court life after that Queen’s execution.

  If, during the day, Queen Catherine wanted some semblance of privacy, she could retreat to her closet. It was a small and intimate room where the Queen could go to read or write letters or conduct private conversations. Her closet would have been the most probable place for her to chat with her grandmother or aunts if they needed to speak with her. They remained in regular contact. It was also where she could summon her secretary when they were going over her correspondence. Because of this, the closet featured prominently in lurid sixteenth-century fantasies of libidinous secretaries seducing their wealthy patronesses. Ordinarily, a private meeting between two people of the opposite gender was considered inappropriate, but a great lady could not expect to discuss her communications in public, giving rise to the habit of the secretary conferring with his employer in her closet. Filthy puns on secretaries having a key to the most private lock abounded. Nor were noblemen exempt from the deluge of winking innuendo about the closets. Some complained that “jealous women and some men” were apt to think that a man who spent a great deal of time in the closet with scholars he patronized or male secretaries he employed must “useth his servants in his chamber.”43

  Catherine generally preferred company to solitude, and the nine “ladies of exalted rank” provided her rooms with a constant hum of activity.44 Favored guests were often entertained in the Queen’s galleries, which, like her gallery at Hampton Court, usually had a view of the gardens and were stuffed full of folding chairs and card tables, their walls hung with portraits and tapestries. Maids of honor stood nearby with basins and ewers so the Queen’s guests could wash their hands, while gossip and ideas passed back and forth among the women gathered around the tables.45

  Cliques are unavoidable in any large establishment, and Catherine’s household was no exception. One group orbited the Duchess of Suffolk, whose religious sympathies lay increasingly with Protestantism. It was a circle of palace intellectuals, with the ladies debating religion, financing scholars at Oxford or Cambridge, translating books on theology, or even writing their own. A few years later, several women in this group would risk their lives to support a young female Protestant preacher, though they ultimately failed to save her from death in the flames. Lady Joan Denny, whose husband Anthony was one of the gentlemen of the King’s Privy Chamber, was an enthusiastic patron of the new learning. She was also reputed to be one of the most intelligent of Catherine’s ladies-in-waiting, as well as very beautiful.46 Like many women in Catherine’s household, Lady Denny was often prepared to go further than her husband in matters of religion, and the cloistered environment of the Queen’s rooms gave her the opportunity to do so. While the crackdown on the theological independence of the Queen’s household began several years after Catherine’s career ended, the provocation developed throughout her time as consort. The Duchess of Suffolk named her pet dog “Gardiner,” that way the ladies could order at least one Gardiner to desist in making such a mess.47 There is no record of Catherine being particularly close to this set of women—who included her cousin the Dowager Duchess of Richmond, Anne Herbert, Elizabeth Tyrwhitt, and the shy Lady Jane Dudley, whose husband Sir John served as Catherine’s master of the horse—however there is also nothing to suggest any animus, and Catherine seems to have clicked along quite happily with these women, who gave her every outward sign of deference.48

  She remained close to Katherine Tilney, her old friend and bedmate from Chesworth, who now served as one of her chamberers. It was Tilney, or one of her colleagues, who opened the door at six o’clock in the evening when Sir Thomas Henneage, one of the King’s gentlemen, arrived with a report on how the King’s day had gone. Sir Thomas’s wife, Lady Katherine Henneage, served as one of Catherine’s nine ladies attendant, and the couple lived together in court accommodation. At Hampton Court, they had a fine two-storey brick house on the palace grounds. The King did not visit his wife every day, but if Henneage informed Catherine that the King would dine with her that evening, the meal usually served as a prelude to sex, which took place in her apartments.49 On these occasions, none of Catherine’s ladies or gentlewomen of the privy chamber would sleep in a pallet bed at the foot of hers, as they usually did. Instead, she would be left alone with her husband.

  Catherine’s husband was born on June 28, 1491, the third child and second son of Henry VII and his queen, Elizabeth of York. The dynasty’s grasp on power was not yet six years old, and Henry’s earliest public appearances, like his investiture as Duke of York on his third birthday, aimed to appropriate the legacy of the Tudors’ predecessors and discourage the dwindling number of Yorkists who hoped that fortune’s wheel might turn again in their favor. His Welsh father was tall, lean, and athletic, with dark hair and watchful brown eyes. As he grew, young Henry looked far more like his mother’s side of the family—fair hair, muscular build, and a height that made him about a head taller than most of his contemporaries. He spent most of his childhood in the same household as his sisters Margaret and Mary, two of the four siblings who survived the perils of infant mortality to make it past their fourth birthdays. He charmed nearly everybody he met—the European philosopher Erasmus of Rotterdam was formally presented to Henry when he visited England in 1499, and in 1501 Henry escorted Katherine of Aragon down the aisle of Saint Paul’s Cathedral at her wedding to his eldest brother, Arthur. On both occasions, the prince’s dignity and confidence won praise.50

  Shortly before his eleventh birthday, Henry’s life changed irrevocably when Arthur died during an outbreak of the sweating sickness. Arthur’s sixteen-year-old widow had also been infected, and for a few weeks her life hung in the balance. When she recovered, the preservation of the Anglo-Spanish alliance prompted a petition to the Vatican for the Pontiff to dispense the biblical prohibition of a brother marrying his spouse’s widow.51 Pope Julius II obliged, since there was some confusion among experts in exegesis about the Bible’s intentions—it was banned in Leviticus, but permissible in Deuteronomy—and similar dispensations had already been granted for families across the social spectrum in Christendom, including Katherine of Aragon’s.52

  Postnatal complications carried off Henry’s mother less than a year after Arthur’s passing. There was talk of his father’s remarriage to the buxom Dowager Queen Giovanna of the Naples,II and English diplomats tried to inspect her gowns to see “her breasts and paps, whether they be big or small,” but the Neapolitan match came to nothing, and a darker, more repressed atmosphere settled over the royal family’s daily lives.53 Henry VII’s popularity diminished with each new tax hike and as the new heir young Henry was guarded by his father with a zeal that the Spanish ambassador characterized as obsessive.54 His eldest sister traveled north to marry King James IV of Scots, despite her grandmother’s fears that a thirteen-year-old was too young for wedlock.55 Henry’s father briefly considered breaking off the proposed marriage between Henry and Katherine of Aragon, who was still living in London in increasing unhappiness at the delay, and feelers were put out abou
t the possibility of a match with the Archduchess Eleanor of Austria. Those plans came to nothing when Henry VII succumbed to tuberculosis on April 23, 1509. The new King made it clear that he wanted to marry Katherine at the first available opportunity, and Eleanor of Austria went on to marry François I of France.