Young and Damned and Fair

by Gareth Russell

  For the first few months of her marriage, Catherine was not yet immersed in the official functions of a queen consort.5 After a brief stop at Hampton Court for her official proclamation, Catherine stayed away from London for the rest of the summer and all of the autumn. From summer to Michaelmas, many courtiers were given permission to go home to tend to their estates in the country. The French royal household had the same custom, and in the interim Henry wanted to enjoy a reduced household, greater freedom, and blue skies by hunting deer and, when that season passed, hawking.6 With Henry, Catherine moved from one smaller home to another, through Reading, Grafton, Ampthill, Dunstable, and St. Albans, to grander houses like the More, before she and the King returned to Windsor Castle on October 20.7

  Their eight-day stay at Reading was a reminder, if anyone cared to be reminded, of the recent gruesome past. The last abbot of the now abandoned monastery had been hanged, drawn, and quartered for treason ten months earlier.8 Some of his confiscated land and possessions were deeded to Catherine five months after her visit to Reading.9 Grafton Regis Manor in neighboring Northamptonshire had more pleasant associations—tradition had that it was at Grafton that Henry’s maternal grandparents had eloped in 1464, giving England its first native-born queen consort since the eleventh century. Henry had bought the house from his cousin, the Marquess of Dorset, in 1526 and spent a significant sum renovating and expanding it. Catherine benefited from the refurbishment, and her rooms had views over the idyllic countryside with the “pleasant and healthful” airs Grafton was praised for.10

  After eight days there, they moved on to Ampthill, another royal hunting lodge with a reputation for clean airs and smells. From the great bay windows and stone towers, Catherine had a view of the little market town that sloped down the hill into the valley and the forests that stretched out behind the castle. At Ampthill, her lady-in-waiting Anne Herbert turned over the keys for Catherine’s jewelry caskets to her colleague Elizabeth Tyrwhitt, who was to oversee day-to-day management of the jewels for the next four months, while Anne was absent from court to have her first baby.11 As Anne Herbert left, Catherine and the other women congregated in a stand in the castle grounds where they could relax and watch the hunting on any day when the Queen did not feel like participating. Servants brought them drinks and snacks as the unbroken sunlight shone through the stand’s glass windows, which had been added six years earlier for the comfort of Anne Boleyn and her women.

  Catherine and Henry stayed at Ampthill for just over three weeks then moved on to spend the night at Dunstable, which had two shuttered monasteries, followed by a two-night stopover in St. Albans, before the More came into view and the party could be let loose on the five hundred or so deer living on the estate. The difference in the King’s mood now that he was free from Anne of Cleves was obvious. “The King has taken up a new rule of living,” wrote one diplomat—Henry rose between five and six o’clock in the morning, heard Mass in private at seven, and went out riding until dinner, which was served at ten in the morning.I12

  At the More, Catherine’s servants unpacked her things and set out her furniture in her one public room—her presence chamber—and in her private rooms, such as her dressing room (known as a “raying room” in the sixteenth century), her privy chamber, her bedroom, her closet, and her watching room, a reception room. The servants moved up and down two staircases with white walls and yellow ochre details, set aside exclusively for the Queen’s household. Her watching room had the same decorative patterns and color scheme; it gave Catherine views of the moat, where her husband and his men liked to fish when they were not hunting, and gardens also overlooked by a 253-foot private gallery, from the windows of which the King practiced his shooting.13 He may have practiced with arrows, but Henry and his companions were some of the few men in England who had the money to pursue the new pastime of shooting with pistols. Man-shaped targets had already been made by one of the King’s joiners for Henry to practice against.14 As the baking summer turned into a more endurable autumn, there were also games of tennis and bowls, archery and more fishing, especially when fish had to be substituted for meat on Fridays. The King even occasionally enjoyed sawing blocks of wood or turning his hand to blacksmithing.15

  In late August, the French ambassador was invited to join the King and Queen for a few days at the chase. Charles de Marillac was an urbane and acerbic French clergyman in his late twenties who had previously trained as a lawyer and represented his master at the court of Sultan Süleyman the Magnificent in Constantinople. The hunting trip gave the ambassador the opportunity to observe Catherine properly for the first time.16 From his sources in London, he had heard that Catherine was “a lady of great beauty,” but in person he thought she was “graceful rather than beautiful,” a dissenting view since others tied to the court described her as possessing “blazing beauty.”17 William Thomas, a man then in service to the King’s master of the horse, considered Catherine “a very beautiful gentlewoman.”18 De Marillac observed that “the King is so amorous of her that he cannot treat her well enough.” That devotion was sensibly reciprocal: the Queen had chosen as her personal motto a prostrate declaration of adoring obedience, “No other will but his.” De Marillac gave it in French in his letter, “Non autre volonté que la sienne,” but we do not know if that was simply his translation or if, like many queens, she chose to have her device in another language.19 There is no record of her heraldic device, which replaced Anne of Cleves’s in the palaces. In early 1541, Galyon Hone, the King’s glazier, was paid for the installation of the Queen’s arms in stained glass in some of the royal lodgings, but thanks to the thoroughness with which they were erased when she fell from favor, we do not know what they were. Traditionally, a queen consort would have a coat of arms and one or two heraldic beasts, often from mythology, which conveyed a political or dynastic message. In Catherine’s case, it may be that she simply preferred to use the Howard arms combined with the royal crest, and when it came to badges and creatures, it is possible that, like Anne Boleyn, who had occasionally used the male griffin associated with her family’s Irish peerage of Ormond, Catherine opted for animals that had traditionally appeared in the Howards’ heraldry.20

  On the basis of their meeting at the hunt, subsequent accounts of Catherine’s career claimed that de Marillac gave the young Queen credit for reintroducing the French hood and other Gallic fashions which had been popularized by Anne Boleyn and thus apparently discouraged by Jane Seymour. However, Henry VIII’s inventories show that Queen Jane owned French hoods, and other accounts mention women of the court wearing them before Catherine became queen, including at Anne of Cleves’s arrival in January 1540.21 It was later writers who made this mistake in attribution, not de Marillac, since in regards Catherine’s dress sense his letter simply states, “She and all the Court ladies dress in French style.”22

  Another myth from this period in Catherine’s life is that her husband gave her the nickname Rutilans rosa sine spina (“The dazzling rose without a thorn”). The legend, which originated in a best-selling nineteenth-century account of English queens, was based on a coin minted in Henry’s reign with the King’s coat of arms on one side and a rose with the aforementioned motto in Latin on the other.23 Alas for the romantic fable which claimed the coin was struck in Catherine’s honor shortly after her honeymoon, the rose motto did not refer to any of Henry’s wives but to the King or, rather, to the dynasty. The Tudor rose was the flower without a thorn, a royal succession that would inflict no more wounds on the nation. Coins bearing this device were first issued in 1526. There is no contemporary account of Catherine being referred to by this nickname, likewise for the story that she chose the rose as her personal crest after the coin went into circulation.24

  Although the coin was not one of them, Catherine did receive treats from her rejuvenated husband as they hunted, including three golden belts for her wardrobe and a broach with scenes from the life of Noah crafted from thirty diamonds and fifteen rubies.25 Serious poli
tics were abandoned as a preferred topic of conversation, except inside the great chambers where the Privy Council met.26 After the stress of the previous year, the rest of the royal household seemed eager to forget matters of state and focus instead on the constant entertainments thrown in Catherine’s honor. “Nothing [is] spoken of here,” de Marillac wrote, “but the chase, and the banquets to the new Queen.”27

  A typical day at the hunt began with Catherine arriving at the meet in a velvet riding jacket, dress, gloves, and cap, a style that had allegedly been introduced to England by Richard II’s queen, Anne of Bohemia. Picnics were organized for the courtiers, while scouts beetled to and from the master of the game with reports about where the best prey was hiding. Contemporary fashion for the gentlemen who escorted Catherine and her ladies from one activity to another was designed to flatter any man with an athletic build, particularly the hose which ran up a man’s leg in fabric cut on the bias to cling. The detachable codpiece, padded more with each new fad, was still the subject of ribald teasing and puns in court circles.28 Some of the ladies perched around the refreshments before the hunt wore gowns in a simpler style and a looser cut; they were the women who took the chase more seriously and intended to keep pace with it. Nearby, Irish greyhounds, the most expensive breed, lounged in the sun, their collars marked with their owner’s initials glinting in the light. When the horns sounded, the hounds leapt up for the pursuit. Catherine, with her embellished spur, was helped into her saddle, and the party rode off in chase of the stag, the in-season quarry that was often seen as the most “noble” kill, hence the tradition of its head being mounted on the wall in a hall. In the evenings, there were banquets and dancing.29

  Some of the courtiers seem to have been carried away by the convivial atmosphere. The King’s former brother-in-law, Sir Thomas Seymour, was expected to receive a heavy fine for brawling within the confines of the court, something that was strictly forbidden, and on September 18 Catherine’s brother-in-law and vice chamberlain, Sir Edward Baynton, was given orders, along with sixteen other household servants, to make sure that members of both the King’s and Queen’s households remembered to behave in “sober and temperate order” when they were in the royal apartments.30

  One person who was not there to enjoy the halcyon days of Catherine’s early queenship was her uncle the Duke. Like many nobles, Norfolk went home in the late summer and early autumn. He did not rejoin the court until November 21, when he briefly attended a Privy Council meeting at Windsor Castle, then left the next day to interrogate Lord Leonard Grey, the disgraced former lord deputy of Ireland, who was in the Tower charged with treason.31 In late December, the Duke was still permitted to skip council meetings to tend to affairs on his estates, and his prolonged absences from court for most of Catherine’s first six months as queen upsets the traditional image that has Norfolk pulling the strings of a willing puppet to ensure that Catherine’s queenship functioned as a gaudy free-for-all for her relatives.32 Clearly Norfolk felt comfortable enough in his position to take time away from palace life, when previously the thought of doing so had caused him anxiety, particularly as his rivalry with Cromwell escalated. Watchers of the royal court had a long history of exaggerating the importance of the Queen consort’s family, since they assumed a queen “always exerted herself to aggrandise her relations.”33 Admittedly, several had, since custom and concepts of loyalty encouraged it. Henry’s grandfather, King Edward IV, had defended his generosity to his wife’s family on the grounds that it was “most reasonable that we should do more than for others who are not so nearly connected with us,” but Henry VIII was never as close to his in-laws as earlier kings such as Edward IV or Henry III.34

  Relatives by marriage who did receive promotions through their ties to Henry VIII were usually men who already had long careers of service to the Crown or who capitalized on royal intervention to swing a long-running dispute in their favor—hence Thomas Boleyn was finally able to settle his legal pursuit for his late grandfather’s earldom of Ormond in 1529, after the case had dragged on for fourteen years, and William Parr recovered his father-in-law’s earldom of Essex in 1543, three years after the latter’s death. There also seems to have been a tentatively proportional relationship between rewards and talent for a queen’s relatives. For instance, Jane Seymour’s cleverest brother, Edward, received far more by way of promotions, missions, and influence than his more impulsive sibling Thomas. Similar trust was shown in George Boleyn and William Herbert, Katherine Parr’s brother-in-law. If her relatives were not deemed talented enough, Catherine did not possess the influence necessary to promote them into government. A few years later, courtiers agreed that Katherine Parr’s brother had done better out of his sister’s marriage to the King than the Howard brothers had in 1540.35 That is not say that Catherine’s family received nothing. Her uncle’s ally Stephen Gardiner got the chancellorship of his alma mater, Cambridge, from the deceased Cromwell, and Catherine’s cousin Lord Surrey was made a member of the Privy Council.36 The Queen’s half sister, Lady Isabella Baynton, and her two children both received 100 marks from the King as a gift, and Catherine and Isabella’s brother George was given the same amount as an annual pension.37 Charles Howard received several properties from the King, £100 a year, a license to import one thousand tons of Gascon wine and French timber, and a place as a gentleman of the Privy Chamber. But in comparison to the treasures that were heaped upon them in popular legend, the Howards were left wanting. When Catherine’s elder sister, Lady Margaret Arundell, came to London with her husband in October 1540, they chose to stay as guests of Sir Richard Rich in his town house at Smithfield, which not only suggests that Catherine was not particularly close to this sibling but also that the Arundells did not expect to benefit from the munificence of the royal household.38

  Henry Howard, the brother Catherine had spent most of her time with when they had both been attached to the household of the Dowager Duchess, does not seem to have joined their other brothers at court, at least not on a permanent basis, for reasons which are unknown. Henry Howard was already married, while the other two were not.39 George, who had the longest career at court, was the youngest of the brothers and he had inherited their father’s skills as a jouster.40 Luckily, the King was too out of shape to joust by 1540, which removed the possibility that George might harm his prospects with the same lack of tact as Edmund had displayed thirty years earlier.41 George Howard’s position in his brother-in-law’s service is difficult to specify. A grant made to the two brothers a year after their sister’s wedding refers to Charles as a “gentleman of the Privy Chamber” and George by the Latin description “chironorum nostrorum,” an example of the court’s tendency to refer to its members in vaguely classical terms. As a colloquialism, it could just about be taken as the Latin equivalent of “our right-hand man,” but that would be to vastly overstate the importance of the Queen’s youngest brother. In Ancient Rome, a chironorum was a public newsreader, a kind of town crier whose proclamations of the news were accompanied by explanatory hand gestures, and “chironomos” could mean one who gesticulated according to the rules of a particular art or style. From there, a logical deduction would be a herald, but George’s name does not appear in the College of Arms volume in Survey of London, which lists all of the heralds who served Henry VIII. The closest position one can find that makes sense is a sewer in the King’s household, an attendant who oversaw the arrangement of the King’s table at meal times, tasted and served his dishes, and oversaw the placement of his guests. A working knowledge of etiquette was essential for the execution of this post, ensuring the appointment of young gentlemen, like George Howard.42

  Charles Howard seems to have had the Howard charisma seeping out his fingertips, and if he was not quite the stuff of the council chamber, he at least fitted in perfectly to the merrymaking routine that dominated the court in the latter half of 1540. His place as a gentleman of the Privy Chamber implies that he had the skills required in most of his colleagues—to be
articulate, charismatic, and sporting—and he soon put those qualities to use by flirting with the King’s twenty-five-year-old niece, Lady Margaret Douglas, who had already incurred her uncle’s displeasure by eloping with Charles’s and Catherine’s late uncle, the unfortunate Lord Thomas Howard, who had died of a fever in the Tower four years earlier.

  Margaret Douglas was the only child of Henry’s elder sister Margaret, Queen Mother of Scots, and her second husband, Archibald Douglas, 6th Earl of Angus. She had spent most of her childhood in France, after her father snatched her from her mother’s care during their acrimonious separation, and then most of her adulthood in England, where she had lived with various members of the court, including her cousin Princess Mary, and then with Anne Boleyn, who seemed to like her. A French diplomat who saw her during Anne Boleyn’s tenure described Margaret as “beautiful and highly esteemed here.”43 Due to her mother’s rank, Margaret Douglas was sometimes inaccurately referred to as “the Princess of Scotland” by foreign visitors to Henry’s court, but since a royal title could not pass down through a foreign-born female who had remarried, Margaret Douglas was instead technically a member of the Scottish nobility who, in London, enjoyed the privileges of an extended member of the English royal house, including double lodgings at most of the palaces.44 Her secret betrothal to Catherine’s uncle Thomas in 1536 had earned Margaret a spell in the Tower as well and rustication from court which only ended when the birth of her cousin Prince Edward bumped her so far down the line of succession that her uncle relaxed enough to bring her back. In October 1538, the King had reminded Margaret of her purpose when she was dangled on the international market as bait in a last-ditch attempt to prevent Charles V’s impending alliance with François I.45