Young and Damned and Fair

by Gareth Russell

  Katherine of Aragon’s happiness that her seven years of uncertainty were over was in step with the general mood at Henry VIII’s accession. Diplomats gushed about a King who was “much handsomer than any sovereign in Christendom”; courtiers wrote to friends abroad that “everything is full of milk and honey and nectar”; it was “the prettiest thing in the world to see him play” tennis, and in physical competitions he “surpassed them all, as he surpasses them in stature and personal graces.”56 Henry was fluent in Latin and French, had a working knowledge of Italian, possessed an imperfect if passionate interest in engineering and architecture, dabbled in mathematics, Spanish, astronomy, Classical Greek, and he was a superb musician. He performed his own compositions before a court that Queen Katherine described as one of “continual feasts.”57

  Capable of parroting, expanding, or critiquing another’s thoughts, but incapable of developing many that were uniquely his, Henry VIII was intellectually skilled, but not brilliant. In itself, that is hardly a great failing or even an insult, but it became a problem because Henry failed to recognize his own limitations. Throughout his life, the majority of Henry’s troubles were caused by the fact that he constantly overestimated himself. On several occasions during the first decade of his reign, he leapt into hugely expensive wars on the Continent after repeatedly trusting in the good intentions of allies, including his father-in-law King Ferdinand, who used England to distract the French long enough to achieve his own goals, then pulled out of the war and left England to fight on alone.58 Henry’s foreign policy was an unending catalogue of aggression, duplicity, myopic eagerness, expense, and defeat. Even his infrequent victories in France carried more than a whiff of Pyrrhus when they conquered towns that proved so costly to defend that in his son’s reign they eventually had to be handed back to the French. The universal acclaim for the pulchritudinous prince of 1509 began to dry up as he was played for a fool by men who were ostensibly his allies, and it evaporated after his quarrel with the Papacy.

  Henry insisted that the death of his son, the Duke of Cornwall, in 1511, and the deaths in utero or shortly after birth of the boy’s male siblings proved that the royal marriage was a contravention of biblical law. Initially, there was no reason to believe that the Vatican would put up too much resistance to the King’s request for his marriage to be dissolved. Popes were often prepared to grant annulments to childless emperors, kings, and princes if it meant preventing the ensuing unrest of a succession crisis. Thirty years earlier, Pope Alexander VI annulled the marriage of King Louis XII of France to the childless Queen Jeanne on grounds that could kindly be considered tenuous, to pave the way for Louis’s marriage to the Duchess of Brittany. Queen Jeanne, who had contested her husband’s blatantly dishonest account of their private lives, had to accept the Pope’s decision, retired to a convent, and subsequently founded an order of nuns dedicated to the Immaculate Conception of the Virgin Mary. It was hoped that the equally pious Queen Katherine might follow suit if Pope Clement VII performed a similar service for Henry VIII.

  Unfortunately, Henry seemed to think the best way to crack a walnut was to drop a brick on it. He wanted the annulment granted on the grounds that the previous pope had exceeded the limits of his office in dispensing what could not be dispensed, namely the word of God. This required Clement VII to curtail the past and future powers of his own office, a prospect which became even less tempting when the Queen’s Hapsburg relatives stepped up their pressure on the Pope to support her. Attempts via the Papal Nuncio to persuade Queen Katherine to mimic the actions of Jeanne of France, by stepping aside and taking the veil, were scuppered by the lady herself, who was determined to fight her proposed demotion every step of the way.

  By this stage, Henry was no longer able to keep pace with his younger self, who had spent his summers “shooting, singing, dancing, wrestling, casting of the bar, playing at the recorders, flute and virginals, and in setting of songs, making of ballads . . . jousts and tourneys.”59 His youthful prettiness had settled into an impressive and mature presence by the time he turned forty in 1531, captured in Joos van Cleve’s portrait of him, which shows a confident monarch piously clutching a scroll with an extract from the Gospel according to Saint Mark, “Go ye into all the world, and preach the gospel to every creature.”60 An evangelist monarch was how Henry saw himself as his frustration with the Pope turned to anger. Anne Boleyn was the most prominent person close to the King whose Catholicism was tinged with enough sympathy with the cries for reform and the protests of Martin Luther to make her a powerful critic of Clement VII’s inaction, but she was not the only one. The break with Rome was solidified by 1533, the same year as the new Archbishop of Canterbury ruled in Henry’s favor, dissolved the marriage to Katherine of Aragon, and crowned Anne Boleyn at Westminster Abbey. Three years later, Anne was dead on manufactured charges of adultery and treason, and within eighteen months her successor had followed her into the grave, twelve days after giving Henry the legitimate son he needed.

  As dissatisfaction turned to protest, the death toll in England mounted in opposition to the religious changes. The northern rebellion of 1536 may have had the potential to bring Henry’s entire regime crashing down around him had the palace-bound aristocracy not remained loyal to their king.61 Earlier that year, Henry had been competing in a jousting tournament when he was thrown from his horse and knocked unconscious. That incident has featured prominently in several theories that seek to explain the increasing terror of Henry’s final decade in power by postulating that he suffered sufficient brain damage from the fall to bring about a decisive and terrible shift in character.62 There have also been suggestions that Henry perhaps suffered from a genetic disorder like McLeod syndrome, which usually accelerates in middle age, when it can cause heart failure, physical pain, and behavioral changes, or Cushing’s syndrome, which can cause skin to heal poorly, a possible explanation for the problems Henry endured as a result of his leg ulcer, along with high blood pressure, abdominal obesity, migraines, exhaustion, and painful deposits of fat between the shoulder blades.63

  Many of the modern speculations on the symbiosis between Henry VIII’s mental and physical health are well written, well researched, and thought-provoking. They are inevitably based on speculation, since the surviving records make it far easier to rule out what Henry VIII did not suffer from than to diagnose what he did endure. It is possible that he suffered from a severe illness in the later years of his life—type II diabetes would explain many of his ailments and fit with his increasingly unhealthy lifestyle—but there is a fundamental flaw in the argument that a medical explanation is needed to explain why the latter half of Henry’s reign was more bloody than the earlier years.64 The break with Rome created a trauma in the body politic, even for those who were enthusiastically in favor of it and were later appalled by the government’s exploitation of it. After 1533, a king who detested disobedience had embarked upon a policy that was controversial enough to generate a lot of it. Yet his execution of his father’s unpopular advisers Richard Empson and Edmund Dudley in 1510 and the destruction of the Duke of Buckingham in 1521 showed that Henry had always been capable of morally and legally questionable savagery. Henry VIII was a man who had somehow gone rotten without ever being ripe.

  After the tangible disappointment of having no heir was banished by Prince Edward’s birth in 1537, words and images flowed from the pens of Tudor servants and wrapped themselves around Henry VIII, casting him as the father of his people, the custodian and dispenser of true religion in the ilk of Old Testament hero-kings like Asa or Jehoshaphat. Frontispieces in new editions of the Bible portrayed the bearded King handing down the gospel to his grateful subjects, flanked by wise and demure councillors. The overwrought rhetoric was the product of a stomach knot of fear which never quite left the illustrated councillors’ real-life counterparts, as they struggled to serve a consistent inconsistency. Henry VIII’s government may have appeared as one of brutal lunacy to frequently appalled foreign observers
, but those close to Henry were often as dazzled by his charisma as they were terrified by his chilling cruelty to those who disappointed him. The King’s manners were flawless, his charm and munificence capable of eliciting compliments even from those diplomats who were usually revolted by him. He was large but not yet obese, and so there was still an air of majesty about him rather than bloated despotism. The physique helped distract from the fact that the King was a pathological hypochondriac, paradoxically laying waste to his own health with mounting portion sizes and too much alcohol at his meals. Despite his pious protestations about marrying her for the sake of his country at the time of his wedding to Anne of Cleves, Henry appeared obsessed with romantic love, and at least one of his courtiers seemed to hold the private opinion that he was shirking a prince’s duty by expecting to marry as happily as an ordinary gentleman.65 This was the man who visited Catherine’s apartments at night and on whom she was completely dependent.

  Curfew for the Queen’s staff was at nine o’clock. If Catherine was hungry, and the King had chosen not to visit her, the maids usually brought her a bedtime snack in the hour before curfew.66 Leaving the food, they curtseyed out of her presence and left her in the enormous canopied bed, while a lady-in-waiting slumbered nearby in case the Queen needed anything in the small hours. Given her newfound position as head of the largest female-dominated domestic establishment in England, Catherine seemed lucky to have spent most of her formative years in a large female-dominated establishment like the Dowager Duchess of Norfolk’s. Unfortunately, Catherine’s childhood and adolescence at Horsham and Lambeth were to shape her subsequent career in predominantly negative ways. Her education had rendered her poised, elegant, and immaculately mannered, with a talent for music and dancing that equipped her to succeed in a court with a King who loved the former and had once excelled at the latter, but it had also left her woefully unprepared for a position that required her to psychologically distance herself from her daily companions. Her youthful romances and easy dominance of her friends at Horsham gave her a taste for gossip and backstairs intrigue which she never had a chance to grow out of. The examples of her friends’ behavior and the extent to which she had escaped censure at Chesworth and Lambeth had also desensitized her to the opprobrium that such behavior could elicit in other environments.

  Separate to that and with their own potential to harm her were attitudes within the court towards the institution of the Queen’s household. Both Katherine of Aragon and Anne Boleyn had been criticized for the secretive natures of their households and the dangerous independence of the female bonds established within them—Katherine from her reliance on one of her disreputable confessors and Anne through her closeness to various ladies-in-waiting—which invited suspicion and resentment from the male courtiers and even the household’s own members.67 The climate of self-scrutiny in the household was almost as intense as the watchful stares from outsiders. Household members were encouraged to report colleagues who slept in or broke curfew to the vice chamberlain.68 Servants noticed if a male retainer stayed too long at the dinner table after the food was cleared away, since the right to dally was reserved solely for officers of the household.69

  In a world sealed within the walls of a palace and moderated by decorum and hierarchy, arguments were magnified and the seemingly trivial crushed friendships and reputations. Feuds were endemic. The Countess of Sussex, once a benefactress, regarded Anne Bassett with cold dislike, and while a mutual friend’s letter does not give us the cause of the dispute, it confirms that “though the matter is forgiven, she has not forgotten it.”70 Queen Catherine, significantly younger than any of Henry’s previous queens and with the least experience of life at his court, bar Anne of Cleves, had inherited a household, newly formed and swiftly transferred from one mistress to the other, which knew many secrets and was constantly suspected of knowing more.

  * * *

  I. The gentlewomen of the privy chamber were generally members of the gentry, perhaps linked to the aristocracy on their mothers’ sides and married to up-and-coming court-based knights or expectant sons. Once a husband was knighted, his wife could style herself a lady.

  II. Prior to 1861, and under various names, a kingdom covering most of the southern Italian peninsula and, at different stages, the islands of Sicily and Sardinia.

  Chapter 10

  * * *

  The Queen’s Brothers

  The many pleasures that I bring

  Are all of youth, of heat, of life and spring . . .

  We see, we hear, we feel, we taste,

  We smell the change in every flow’r,

  We only wish that all could last,

  And be as new still as the hour.

  —Ben Jonson, The Vision of Delight (1617)

  The least used part of Catherine’s arsenal of jewelry was the crown inherited from her predecessors. Its sapphires, six large and many small, twinkled next to thirty-two pearls, capped by a gold cross with an inset diamond. Its golden base, decorated with six gold-sapphire-and-pearl crosses, was lined by a cap of purple velvet that made it more comfortable to bear.1 Crowns were generally only worn on state occasions, which diminished in number and certainly in splendor as the King continued to hemorrhage funds over the course of his long reign. Shortly before his marriage to Catherine, Henry had asked Parliament for more money, a request that raised eyebrows, but few voices, given how much the government must have pocketed from the dissolution of the monasteries.2 The inheritance left by Henry VII had long ago been damaged by the reign’s earlier squabbles with France and Scotland. Yet even if there had been more ready cash, Catherine’s crown would have likely remained purely ceremonial.

  Historically, Catherine’s tenure as queen consort occurred at the end of a long period of decline for the office in England. Today, she and Henry’s five other wives are among the most famous queens in English history, but they certainly were not the most powerful. The political clout and relative independence of the Anglo-Saxon and Norman consorts in the tenth, eleventh, and early twelfth centuries dwarfed that of their successors. This decline in power seems to have begun under Henry II, who drove his wife Eleanor of Aquitaine to rebellion by constantly sidelining her from the government of her own duchy. By the thirteenth century, queens who pursued their own agendas were often criticized as acting ultra vires, and fifteenth-century consorts, particularly Margaret of Anjou, who played a pivotal role in the early Wars of the Roses, were generally exonerated by their supporters on the grounds that kingly incapacity had made their assertive actions necessary. The implication of such a defense was that under normal circumstances, no good queen would dream of adopting such a stance.

  The Tudors had intensified this trend by altering and then abandoning some of the traditions surrounding a queen consort’s coronation. Prior to Henry VII, English queens were usually crowned shortly after their weddings, if they married a reigning monarch, or at the first available opportunity following their husband’s succession. There were only two exceptions—Edward I’s second wife, Marguerite of France, who was never crowned, and Edward III’s queen, Philippa of Hainault, whose delayed coronation was generally blamed on her mother-in-law, Queen Isabella, who had to buckle once Philippa became pregnant.3 Any other significant delays, like Matilda of Flanders’s in 1068 or Eleanor of Castile’s in 1274, were because the queen in question had been away from England when her husband became king. Excepting Philippa of Hainault, there was no suggestion of waiting until a queen was with child, much less until after she had delivered, before organizing her coronation. In contrast, Henry VII married Elizabeth of York at Westminster Abbey in January 1486, but she was not crowned until November 1487, by which point she had already given birth to her husband’s heir.

  By waiting twenty-two months after their wedding and nearly two years after his own coronation, Henry VII had tried to distance himself from the suggestion that he owed his crown to his marriage to Elizabeth, who was the niece, sister, and daughter of his three immediate
predecessors. A promise to marry her had been an incentive for many people to support Henry Tudor’s bid for the throne in 1485, but after he triumphed Henry was nervous at any implication that it was Elizabeth’s hand rather than his own victory in battle and distant descent from Edward III that had secured his kingship. The corresponding delay in Elizabeth of York’s coronation marked a significant break with the customs of the last five centuries. It suggested that the queen’s role was optional and her coronation a conditional that should only be brought about if she fulfilled her part of the bargain in providing the kingdom with an heir. The mystical investiture, with its oils, incense, pageantry, chants, and primal, evocative ritual, that had for centuries cast England’s queens as earthly handmaidens of the Virgin Mary was debased by the demands of realpolitik, and while Henry VIII did return to the medieval norm by having his first two wives crowned at the first available opportunity, after 1533 he reverted to the example of his father. It may have been the expense involved in a coronation which prompted this, although it is revealing that talk of crowning the wives that followed only surfaced once they were thought to be pregnant. Henry VIII’s first wife had occasionally outshone him, his second wife argued with him, and his third was reminded “not to meddle in his affairs,” lest she meet the fate of the last queen who had debated with him.4 He had no interest in elevating his wife through a public ceremony which gave her an identity that was uniquely special. In the final decade of his life, the greatest attribute Henry prized in his wives was an obedience as total as he expected from his subjects. In this regard, Catherine Howard was suited to the position she acquired in 1540. If the Queen’s role was to greet dignitaries and shine like an ornament at the King’s side, then Catherine was, at least on the surface, the perfect candidate.