Young and Damned and Fair

by Gareth Russell

  At the time of her restoration to her uncle’s favor, Margaret was so relieved that she wrote, “I pray our Lord sooner to send me death than that,” meaning a return of the King’s anger.46 Her affair with Thomas Howard had been decried by her contemporaries as a “presumptuous act [and] he was attained of treason . . . and so he died in the Tower, and she was long there as prisoner.”47 Either Charles Howard was sufficiently enthralling to override this warning or Margaret’s own irrepressible confidence produced a spell of amnesia, because by 1541 the lady with the “pretty face, a very beautiful complexion [and] well-proportioned physique,” as judged by the Venetian ambassador, was once again romantically involved with a member of Catherine’s family.48

  There is some confusion about when this affair was discovered, and several modern accounts repeat that the King found out about it when he and Catherine reached Windsor Castle on October 20, 1540. He allegedly banished Margaret to another spell of house arrest at the disused abbey of Syon; Charles tactfully decided to pursue a military career abroad, and Margaret was only moved from Syon to make way for Catherine herself in November 1541.49 The evidence proves that Margaret was still a member of Catherine’s household in late 1541, when she is mentioned as joining the Dowager Duchess of Richmond on a visit to Kenninghall. Nor does Charles Howard seem to have fled the country in autumn 1540, since grants were still being issued to him as a member of the Privy Chamber in July 1541.50

  The confusion over the liaison’s dates may have arisen either from Margaret’s earlier detention at Syon in 1537 or from the fact that upon returning to Windsor in October 1540, Charles de Marillac observed that the King was in a poor mood, which his ministers could not explain.51 As Henry raged in his apartments, for whatever reason, rain was at last falling over England. The miserable drought had broken around Michaelmas, the feast of Saint Michael the Archangel that was typically associated with the harvest.

  When Margaret Douglas and Charles Howard began their affair is even harder to pinpoint than when it ended. Orders from the council in November 1541 suggest that it may have been an open secret for some time, at least among members of the Queen’s household, and it is difficult to believe that Catherine herself was unaware of her brother’s liaison. Of course, it is not impossible that Charles could have kept such a secret from a sibling, but later events indicate that Catherine kept her finger firmly on the pulse of court gossip. Even if we accept that she did not know, or suspect, what was happening between her brother and one of her ladies-in-waiting, there were others at court who had long-standing concerns about the role of the Queen’s household, who were liable to see validation of their worries in Charles and Margaret’s affair. Among those keeping a close eye on Catherine’s intimates was her brother-in-law Sir Edward Baynton, who was significantly older than them, born circa 1495, and who had served in the Queen’s household since Katherine of Aragon’s time.

  Baynton had risen to the position of vice chamberlain and he had managed to keep the King’s favor for over a decade. In 1540, along with his eldest son, Andrew, he received a grant of land, a dissolved monastery’s, from the Court of Augmentations in September, part of several gifts the Bayntons received from the Crown over the years.52 Despite the relative longevity of his service, Baynton had a strong antipathy towards what he saw as feminine independence under the protection of the Queen’s household.53 In 1536, he had provided the then lord treasurer, William Fitzwilliam, with a list of women favored by Queen Anne Boleyn and helpfully offered to apply pressure to them himself to elicit evidence that might help condemn the Queen at her trial.54

  Baynton’s eagerness to assist Cromwell and Fitzwilliam in their 1536 case against his employer, who had once generously loaned him nearly £200 , suggests how flimsy the oaths of loyalty could be within the Queen’s household, particularly across the gender divide.55 From Baynton’s point of view, the refusal of the women to cooperate with his requests for testimony and, in particular, the obstreperous loyalty of Margery Horsman, one of Boleyn’s favorite maids, indicated how dangerous the ties of allegiance could be within the women of the household. Even in happier times, Baynton had been quick to criticize the frivolity of Anne’s ladies and the cavalier attitude towards men that the household supposedly encouraged. In a letter to Anne Boleyn’s brother, Lord Rochford, Baynton wrote, with more than a touch of the killjoy, “As for pastime in the queen’s chamber, [there] was never more. If any of you that be now departed have any ladies that ye thought favoured you and somewhat would mourn at parting of their servants, I can no wit perceive the same by their dancing and pastime they do use here, but that other take place, as ever hath been the custom.”56

  Nor was Baynton alone in his concern that the women in the household were behaving inappropriately under the protection of the Queen and in the absence of a stabilizing male authority. Katherine of Aragon had been separated from one of her favorite female attendants when the latter was accused of encouraging the Queen’s unhappiness at her husband’s adultery, and Sir Anthony Browne, the King’s master of the horse, had quarreled with his sister Elizabeth, Countess of Worcester, over the freedom she enjoyed when she served Anne Boleyn and the subsequent estrangement her residency in the household had apparently created with her husband.57 Queen Anne had not only paid the Countess’s midwifery bills, but loaned her £100 without Lord Worcester’s knowledge.58 It may have been that, like Joan Bulmer in 1540, the Countess of Worcester hoped to exploit the anomalous position of the Queen’s household to extricate herself from an unhappy domestic life, fueling the neuroses of men like Baynton and Browne.

  The rumors about Margaret Douglas and Charles Howard helped focus attention on the Queen’s household, and although Queen Catherine escaped censure for her brother’s behavior in 1540–41, she also seems to have failed to realize that tolerating such behavior would never reflect well on her. In the early winter of 1540, her confidence was understandable. She seemed secure to the point of untouchable. Less than two weeks after the rain returned, de Marillac reiterated in his letters that “the new Queen has completely acquired the King’s grace, and the other [Anne of Cleves] is no more spoken of than if she were dead.”59

  * * *

  I. Supper was the name generally used for a later meal.

  Chapter 11

  * * *

  The Return of Francis Dereham

  For my sweet thoughts sometime do pleasure bring:

  But by and by, the cause of my disease

  Gives me a pang that inwardly doth sting,

  When that I think what grief it is again

  To live and lack the thing should rid my pain.

  —Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey (d. 1547)

  From its earlier days under the Norman and Plantagenet kings, the Queen’s household had derived its income from a set of properties that funded her lifestyle as well as her political or charitable activities. Individual queens had access to different perks, exemptions, and parcels of land, and there was usually an undignified scramble over how to fund a dowager if there was more than one queen alive early in a reign, but by and large the portfolio was passed from one generation to the next. Medieval queens consort who possessed ambitious or aggressive agendas, such as Henry III’s wife, Eleanor of Provence, were often strapped for cash, but otherwise the long-term dilution of a queen consort’s independence had at least helped stabilize their finances. Catherine’s lands included six castles and more than one hundred manors, mills, farms, parks, and forests that were rented out to generate about £3,352 per year.1 Henry’s first two wives had been given more or less the same estates once owned by Henry’s mother, but the dissolution of the monasteries helped swell Queen Jane’s coffers.2 Like Queen Jane, Catherine became the passive beneficiary of the misfortune of others when she received manors and estates left by Cromwell, Lord Hungerford, and the Marquess of Exeter, more from the recently executed Abbot of Reading, and some confiscated from the still-living but ruined Countess of Salisbury, who had remained in the Tower
since her incarceration during the White Rose intrigue.3 Her properties made the Queen consort one of the greatest magnates in the kingdom.

  Anne Boleyn, who had also held lands in Wales in her capacity as Marchioness of Pembroke, and Katherine Parr, who followed Catherine, took their duties as landowners seriously, and they were heavily involved in the running of their estates, in contrast to Catherine, who passed many of the responsibilities on to others.4 However, Catherine’s failure to assume as proactive a role in her finances as Anne Boleyn or Katherine Parr, both of whom had some relevant experience in the management of estates before they became queens, need not be interpreted as crass indifference, especially in light of her ignorance when it came to land management.

  Responsibility for caring for her estates fell to the Queen’s Council, which consisted of her receiver, her surveyor, her attorneys, her solicitors, her auditors, and the clerk of the council. They met at Westminster under the leadership of Catherine’s chancellor, Sir Thomas Denys.5 From their offices, the council could summon, in the Queen’s name, tenants whose rents to the household were in arrears. Those tenants could then either negotiate an extension or pay when summoned, options sadly unavailable to the silkwomen and tailors who complained about how slow the council was in settling its own outstanding bills.6 Queen Catherine was not close to her councillors, and she made no effort to help Thomas Smith, her clerk of the council, when he earned himself a spell in the Fleet prison in London for quarreling within the confines of the court.7

  Catherine was, at heart, a pragmatist. It was how she approached the public execution of her queenship. Her failure to help Thomas Smith reflects her streak for self-preservation. Smith had been accused of papist sympathies, apparently evident in an exchange of insulting poetry with William Grey, a former servant of Thomas Cromwell.8 Whether Catherine acted out of studied or genuine ambivalence, her disregard for Smith’s plight reinforces the view that she was not a political queen. Unlike Anne Boleyn, or later queens consort such as Katherine Parr, Henrietta Maria of France or Caroline of Ansbach, Catherine had no clear political or religious agenda. Any books dedicated to her during her time as queen, such as the English translation of a German medical textbook on midwifery, were devoid of overt political or religious tones and seem to have been dedicated to her solely because of the position she occupied, rather than any expressed interest on her part.9

  However, she may have attempted to exert some political influence very early on in her career. A tantalizing glimpse of her nascent ambitions comes via her letter to Thomas Cranmer, the Archbishop of Canterbury, penned shortly before her wedding, in which she assured the Archbishop that he would not suffer once she replaced Anne of Cleves. She promised him “you should be in better case than ever you were,” which simultaneously suggests an overestimation of her power and her refusal to play at factional politics, since Cranmer was regarded as one of the key advocates of reformism and had been a close ally of Thomas Cromwell’s.10 It is quite possible, even probable, that some of her relatives advised Catherine to make some gesture of goodwill to Cranmer, who was one of the councillors genuinely and consistently liked by Henry VIII, but her implication that she would have the power to make him more prosperous than he had been before was absurd. At some point, very early on, Catherine learned her lesson. Henry was not above reminding his wives, as he once had Jane Seymour, to keep out of affairs of state.

  As a result, Catherine’s focus narrowed, and she seems to have taken an aggressive delight in playing the role of Lady Bountiful by helping her servants. A surviving letter to Catherine from Edward Lee, Archbishop of York, is a regretful response to her request that he accept one of her chaplains as an archdeacon. As a landowner in the region, Catherine technically had the right of advowson, to nominate someone for a vacant ecclesiastical post, but it seems that in her zeal to help her chaplain she may have overreached. The popular fantasy of being a queen is one that carries with it the promise of a life without restrictions, when, in reality, it contains more. Archbishop Lee told Catherine that “I never granted advowson saving at the King’s command, but one, which I have many times sore repented,” and while he acknowledged her complaint that he had not properly responded to an earlier letter she had written on behalf of another clergyman in her household, Dr. Mallett, he reminded Catherine, perhaps a tad pointedly, that not only had she unhelpfully failed to specify which dependent she wanted to nominate as archdeacon, but that the archdiocese had already given a nod towards the Queen’s household when it had promised Catherine’s chaplain, Dr. Lowe, a living that would bring him an extra £40 once it became available.11

  Catherine had the personality traits nurtured by lifelong popularity among her peers, including an affable bossiness that became tart when defied. Years earlier, Catherine had been quick to rebuke Henry Manox for embarrassing her in his conversations with Mary Lascelles. Her exchange with the Archbishop of York displayed her insistence, perhaps to the point of sensitivity, on respect from those around her, as well as her tendency to back down when presented with a satisfactory explanation. If an argument persisted and no apology was offered, a less pleasant side of Catherine’s character revealed itself.

  That autumn, a series of slights came from her eldest stepdaughter, Mary, the only surviving child of Henry’s first marriage. Mary, who was referred to as “the princess” by her Hapsburg relatives but who had been legally classed as “Lady Mary” since her father disinherited her at the age of seventeen, disliked her new stepmother and she was not blessed with gifts of subtlety any more than Catherine was with patience in the face of an insult. This was not how Mary had treated Anne of Cleves, and someone who had been at court was able to tell Catherine that Mary had also been more respectful towards Jane Seymour. Mary Tudor was a clever woman, fluent in several languages. Like many upper-class women who benefited from a Renaissance education, she was as comfortable choosing jewels and gowns as she was translating books of theology, a task which presented a pleasant challenge for someone who was a good linguist, if somewhat shaky on the finer points of grammar.12 However, if she was clever, Mary was not always wise, and she badly underestimated the new Queen’s temper.

  In a letter from December 5, the Emperor’s ambassador to London informed Mary’s cousin, Maria of Austria, Dowager Queen of Hungary: “The Princess, having heard from me that the attempt lately made to take away from her two of her maid servants proceeded entirely from this new Queen, who was rather offended at her not treating her with the same respect as the two preceding ones, has found some means of conciliation with her, so that she thinks that for the present, at least, her two maids will not be dismissed from her service.”13

  A subsequent letter, written by the ambassador two months later to the Dowager Queen, indicates that the reconciliation between Catherine and Mary only lasted a few weeks, at the very most, and when it broke down Catherine made good on her threat. On February 6, 1541, the ambassador told Maria that her cousin was “thank God, in good health just now, though exceedingly distressed and sad at the death of one of her favourite damsels, who has actually died of grief at her having been removed from her service by the King’s order.”14 While he did not specifically state that the deceased woman was removed from Mary’s service at the Queen’s behest, the dismissal so soon after it was raised as a threat by Catherine, and the fact that Mary had seemed to be in her father’s good graces over the intervening Christmas season, strongly suggests that the banishment of Mary Tudor’s maid was the unfortunate conclusion of an earlier quarrel with the Queen.

  Catherine was still at Windsor, and her feud with Mary Tudor fermenting, when Francis Dereham returned to London. Despite having left the Dowager Duchess’s service without her permission, he visited his old employer at Norfolk House, where a deal of sorts was struck; to piece together precisely what they agreed can only be done, and then imperfectly, by sifting through the transcripts of interrogations that took place in the autumn of 1541. At some point in 1540, the Dowager had made
discreet legal inquiries about the possible ramifications of a precontract like Francis and Catherine’s and if there was any form of general pardon that might spare those involved.15 She also seems to have asked for any written proof he had about his relationship with Catherine, including ballads she knew he had written about her. If this request was made, then Francis did not fully comply. All the documents were locked in a chest, which was kept at Norfolk House. Agnes knew where that chest was and that the papers were in it, though she did not have the key, strongly suggestive of a compromise between the two. Some members of the Privy Council believed, probably correctly, that this was how Francis kept the Dowager’s favor after abandoning her service.16 We cannot know for certain if the Dowager, with her long-standing affection for Francis, had encouraged him to leave London until Catherine was safely married, or if her story that he left without her knowledge is true. On the balance of probability, the latter seems more likely, especially in light of the Howards’ subsequent uncertainty about what to do with him.

  For most of 1540, Francis had ostensibly been earning his living as a merchant in Ireland. There were plenty of reasons for him to go to there, aside from the helpful sea separating him from Henry VIII. Dublin was the sixth largest city in the British Isles, and the island’s eastern ports, like the expanding Drogheda and Limerick, dubbed “a little London” by a visitor in 1536, did a lively trade with their English and Welsh counterparts.17 In the southern ports, fishing boats skimmed alongside trading ships to and from Europe. Ireland was also a society of ambiguity, a constant grinding mess of tensions and contradictions between de jure sovereignty, de facto authority, and outright criminality. The pale around Dublin and her sister towns on the eastern coast remained generally loyal to the Crown. In many ways, Dublin replicated the culture, architecture, mores, and mannerisms of any other Tudor city. Within its walls, the so-called Anglo-Irish, the descendants of long-ago settlers borne across the Irish Sea by the first English intervention in the twelfth century, were at their most influential and numerous. In the south and west of the island, the Gaedhil (natives) spoke a different language, dressed differently, and remained openly hostile to the Reformation. The Irish nobility were split between those led by the Earl of Ormond, who espoused obedience to the monarchy, and other noble families who might have been prepared to acknowledge the feudal system that made Henry VIII their overlord, but who also continued to dominate their own ancestral lands and benefited from the ambiguities of life outside the pale.18