Young and Damned and Fair

by Gareth Russell

  Perhaps the most famous portrait of “Catherine” is a half-length by Hans Holbein, about twenty-nine inches tall, of a lady in a high-necked dark dress and a white French hood trimmed with gold braid. She wears a golden necklace, waist chain and rings, and a large pendant that seems to depict the angels leading Lot’s family from the biblical destruction of Sodom.28 On either side of the sitter’s head, Holbein has added the biographical detail “ETATIS SV Æ21” (“DURING HER 21ST YEAR”). The original is owned by the Toledo Museum of Art in Ohio, which acquired it in 1926, and copies are housed at the National Portrait Gallery in London and Hever Castle in Kent.29

  It was identified as Catherine by the art historian Sir Lionel Cust in 1909, after he was asked to examine it by its owners, the Cromwell family. The portrait’s association with the Cromwells is enough to prove beyond reasonable doubt that whoever sat for this portrait in the sixteenth century, it was not Catherine Howard. Few families had less of a reason to keep a portrait of her than Thomas Cromwell’s, nor did the family have a tradition of regarding the unidentified lady as one of Henry VIII’s queens. Up until about 1817, they seemed to think it might show Oliver Cromwell’s mother, Elizabeth, but the clothing is at least a generation too early for that.30 Later in the nineteenth century, the rather magnificently named Avarilla Oliveria Cromwell believed it was a likeness of Henry VIII’s youngest sister, an interpretation shared and promoted by the talented amateur artist and historian Sarah Capel-Coningsby, Countess of Essex.31

  Lionel Cust’s findings, published in the Burlington Magazine in 1910, enjoyed wide acceptance for the next forty years, which might explain why the Toledo portrait still crops up on so many souvenirs commemorating Catherine and Henry VIII’s other family members.32 However, as early as 1953 it was being questioned at a Liverpool exhibition, whose organizers preferred to showcase it as an unknown lady, a conclusion shared today by its curators in Toledo, who label it as a Portrait of a Lady, probably a Member of the Cromwell Family.33 When one of its copies was sold in a Christie’s auction room in 1961, it was tentatively marketed to prospective buyers under Avarilla Cromwell’s label of Henry’s sister Mary Tudor, Queen of France and Duchess of Suffolk.II Eight years later, Sir Roy Strong, director of the National Portrait Gallery, argued that it was a portrait of Catherine’s lady-in-waiting Lady Elizabeth Cromwell, Gregory’s wife and Queen Jane’s sister.34 The style of the sleeves suggests it was painted between 1535 and 1540 which, with the sitter’s age given as twenty-one, would put her date of birth between 1513 and 1519. Elizabeth Seymour’s date of birth is usually given either as circa 1513 or circa 1518. As a wealthy married woman and then as Cromwell’s daughter-in-law, she was in a position to afford a portrait by Holbein. Some viewers detect facial similarities between the sitter and Queen Jane in a portrait by the same artist, particularly around the mouth, chin, and nose, and Elizabeth was a member by marriage of the family who owned the portrait from the sixteenth until the early twentieth century.35

  Recent attempts to push Catherine’s date of birth back to the late 1510s are largely motivated by attempts to validate this portrait.36 The dress, though clearly appropriate for a member of the upper classes, is not quite grand enough for a queen, which has prompted some defenders of the portrait’s authenticity to advance a chronology wholly untenable with what we know of Catherine’s biography, namely that it must have been painted before she became queen, around the time she joined the court. This would date the portrait to a time in Catherine’s life when she was paying back Francis Dereham for money she had borrowed to buy a few silk flowers, and require her to have been born between 1516 and 1518, which makes her almost a decade older than some of the other maids of honor in 1539 and negates every piece of evidence we have from her childhood. Holbein painted the great and the good, and he did not come cheap. Even if the Howards had paid the fee during the time Catherine was Henry’s mistress, an unlikely scenario considering the secrecy surrounding the affair and the lengths Henry went to in lying about the reasons for his frequent visits to Lambeth, accepting that this portrait showed Catherine Howard before she became queen requires us to disregard almost everything we know about her life before 1540.

  Although its two copies were once dismissed as later reproductions, analysis of the Hever Castle copy’s paneling dates it possibly to the mid-sixteenth century, which again lowers the likelihood of it being Catherine, since after her execution copies of her image were hardly in high demand. Before coming to Hever, that copy was owned by the Dukes of Sutherland, who counted Henry VIII’s youngest sister as one of their ancestresses. The dress is too late in terms of its style for the portrait to be of the elder Princess Mary, but it is from the right time period to show one of her daughters—Frances Grey, Marchioness of Dorset, who was twenty-one in 1538–39, or her younger sister Eleanor Clifford, Countess of Cumberland, who was the same age in 1540–41. Frances Grey inherited her father’s title on her husband’s behalf in 1545 and became Duchess of Suffolk, an ancestress of the Dukes of Sutherland and one of the most prominent figures at the courts of her uncle Henry VIII and cousin Edward VI.37 Unlike Queen Catherine, Frances Grey was the right age and background and was connected to families who might want a copy of her portrait. Who the lady in the Toledo Holbein is cannot be said with certainty. Elizabeth, Lady Cromwell, and Frances Grey, later Duchess of Suffolk, are the most likely candidates, with the available circumstantial evidence supporting either candidate, while none of it supports it being a likeness of Catherine.

  Another alleged portrait of Catherine is a miniature of a lady in a golden dress with furred sleeves and a large ruby-pearl-and-emerald necklace. Two versions exist—one in the Royal Collection and the other in the collection of the Duke of Buccleuch and Queensberry.38 A description that closely matches it places it as one of the pieces recovered by the royal household after the restoration of the monarchy in the 1660s, and it seems to have been one of the pieces perhaps initially accumulated a generation earlier in the treasure trove of Thomas Howard, 21st Earl of Arundel. Lord Arundel was fascinated by his ancestors, especially those who had lived at the court of Henry VIII, and he went to great lengths to acquire portraits of them and their contemporaries.39 Many of his Tudor pieces were inherited from the collection of Lord Lumley, a Catholic peer born in Henry VIII’s reign and a brother-in-law of the 4th Duke of Norfolk, who managed to acquire full-length portraits of Anne Boleyn and Christina of Denmark (Boleyn’s, unfortunately, vanished in 1773, shortly after it was damaged by fire).40 However, it is not clear when this miniature was first identified as a likeness of Catherine. If it did come into the Royal Collection from Lord Lumley via the Earl of Arundel, the absence of a label identifying it as Catherine Howard is problematic in light of Lord Lumley’s ties to the Howards in the generation immediately after Catherine’s death. When it was inventoried by the royal household in 1661, shortly after the restoration of the monarchy, it was described as an unknown lady in the dress of Henry VIII’s era, but by the 1740s the Buccleuch copy had inspired the image of Catherine in a pictorial guide to British history called Heads of Illustrious Persons of Great Britain by Thomas Birch.41 When the version in the Royal Collection was catalogued again, around 1837, the popular identification had stuck and it was listed as Catherine.42

  More recently, the necklace, which is almost identical to one worn in Holbein’s portrait of Jane Seymour, also once part of the Arundel collection and now housed at the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna, has become the key piece of evidence in the debate on the sitter’s identity. The necklace in question is listed in the jewelry collections of Catherine Howard and Katherine Parr, and on that basis David Starkey has suggested that the miniature is of Queen Catherine, perhaps painted to celebrate her wedding in 1540.43 With queens often loaning pieces of their jewelry to friends for special occasions, such as having one’s portrait painted, Susan James has countered that the lady in the miniature may be Lady Margaret Douglas, who would have been in a position to borrow jewelry
from Queen Anne Boleyn or Catherine, or from Katherine Parr after 1543, quite possibly in preparation for her own wedding.44 There is another candidate—Mary, Lady Monteagle—the Duke of Suffolk’s daughter, who was one of Jane Seymour’s ladies-in-waiting and who sat for a sketch by Holbein that now hangs in the Royal Library at Windsor Castle.45 The woman in this sketch does have certain physical similarities to the lady in the miniature, although it is difficult to tell since they are shown from opposite angles. There is unfortunately not evidence enough either to rule the miniature out or to prove that it is Catherine, and the current reference used for it by the Royal Collection, “Portrait of a Lady, perhaps Catherine Howard,” seems the fairest conclusion on it.

  A final work, currently housed at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, shows a young girl with auburn hair, dark eyes, pale skin, and full lips.46 Her low-cut navy dress has golden pins holding together its sleeves, which are interspersed with crimson, and a gold-decorated French hood sits so far back on her head it requires a strap beneath her chin, like a bonnet. Like Holbein’s probable portrait of Elizabeth Cromwell or Frances Grey, where the same style is worn, the headdress trend helps date the portrait, along with the lower cut of the bodice and the shape of the sleeves. The Metropolitan portrait seems to have originated from the workshop of Hans Holbein the Younger between circa 1540 and 1545. The museum, which acquired the portrait along with the rest of the Jules Bache collection in 1949, identifies it as “Unknown lady, c. 1540–5, aged 17,” a piece of information provided in original gold lettering on either side of the girl’s head.

  The latter detail fits with other circumstantial evidence of Catherine’s life. If the Metropolitan portrait is of her, the age given puts her date of birth at circa 1523; it supports de Marillac’s assessment of a graceful and pretty young woman, and there are some physical similarities to other women in the extended Howard family, noticeably to Catherine’s cousin, the Dowager Duchess of Richmond.47 The details on the dress, decorated with pearls and gold and set off by a matching broach and necklaces, narrows the pool of who it could be down to someone wealthy enough to dress this way and retain Holbein as a seventeen-year-old member of Henry VIII’s court in the early- to mid-1540s. Some of the possible alternatives, such as Lady Elizabeth Fitzgerald, the Earl of Kildare’s daughter, are ruled out by their other portraits, which show no similarity with the woman in the Metropolitan Museum’s piece.48 Others, like Anne Bassett, who turned seventeen sometime around 1539, did not have enough money for this kind of portrait following her stepfather’s incarceration. Lady Anne Manners, the eldest daughter of the Earl and Countess of Rutland, and the baronesses Bray and Sheffield, respective daughters of the earls of Shrewsbury and Oxford, were of the right age and background, though none of them were regularly at court in the last decade of Henry’s reign, which leaves Catherine as a possible, if by no means definite, candidate.

  Brett Dolman’s suggestion that searching for Catherine’s portrait may be a futile quest given the transience of her career is depressing but inescapably fair.49 Of the six images associated with her, only two, the Royal Collection’s Holbein miniature and the Metropolitan Museum’s Holbein half-length, stand up to scrutiny and, tantalizingly, might show us the face of Catherine Howard.

  Eustace Chapuys’s account of his first meeting with Catherine is as unrevealing as some of her alleged portraits. The King dined with his wife that day and then went to a council meeting, during which the ambassador visited the Queen and chatted with the Earl of Hertford, who had been tasked with keeping Chapuys company until the King was free to discuss the ongoing trade dispute with the Netherlands. An account of that conversation took up most of Chapuys’s subsequent letter to Maria of Austria, the Emperor’s governor in the Netherlands.50 It was only after their second meeting, on the last day of Christmas, that Chapuys wrote about Catherine in detail.

  Between their two encounters, Catherine’s wardrobe had acquired several hundred new sparkles as Christmas turned into a deluge of gifts, a single one of which would probably have been enough to lift her father out of debt. A necklace of two hundred pearls was among the first treats of the season, followed by a golden crucifix decorated with thirty-two diamonds and clusters of pearls. Another necklace, with six diamonds and five rubies interspersed in sequence by pearls, accompanied one made of sixteen diamonds. She received large square broaches for the front of her gowns, such as the one made of twenty-six clusters of pearls and twenty-seven diamonds, and a gold-and-diamond broach that showed the King handing down true religion to his adoring, obedient subjects. Two more necklaces, thirteen golden girdles that matched the golden pomander to hang from her waist on a gold chain, flecked with thirty-two pearls and a smattering of rubies, and three more ornamental bejeweled books to alternate on her other pomanders arrived before Catherine could guard her hands against the January chill in a black velvet muff lined with sable that hung from her neck on a chain of thirty pearls held together by small pieces of gold. Thirty-eight rubies and another flourish of pearls decorated the exterior of the muff, lest the dark velvet and fur seem a tad austere. By Twelfth Night, she also had three new bodices, each decorated with eight diamonds and seven rubies to choose from.51

  As the Earl of Sussex was shown into Catherine’s presence on January 4, what to wear was not her most pressing concern. Catherine was about to host Anne of Cleves in a charade designed to broadcast the King’s insistence that his most recent divorce had been legal, amicable, and unavoidable. By mutual consent, at least officially, Anne was a member of the English royal family and thus accorded all the legal rights of a king’s sister. Although New Year’s was legally marked in England on March 25, the nobility often observed the European date of January 1 as another excuse to give gifts during Yuletide, and Anne sent her ex-husband “two fine and large horses caparisoned in mauve velvet, with trappings and so forth to match.”52 She was invited to join the King and Queen at Hampton Court on January 4 and escorted to the palace gates by Catherine’s uncle William, who had apparently accidentally met her retinue with his own while en route to Hampton Court and who “could not well, for courtesy’s sake, refuse to accompany her to the gates.”53 The Duchess of Suffolk greeted her inside, sent at the head of a delegation by their new mistress to accompany their old to the apartments that had been prepared for her visit. Once Anne had viewed the rooms and her servants swarmed in to begin unpacking her things, the Duchess of Suffolk and the Countess of Hertford, who was not one of the Queen’s women, escorted Anne to the doors of the rooms she had never had the chance to enjoy during her own brief time as consort. There, they were asked to wait. The delay was not part of the schedule. Inside, Catherine was panicking.

  She had sent for the Earl of Sussex, who was the King’s lord great chamberlain, and the lord chancellor, Lord Audley, to reassure her about the proper etiquette for greeting a woman in Anne’s position.54 Audley, who was the government’s chief legal authority, might have been more used to deploying his skills in treason trials, a field where he was generally regarded as an expert, but his knowledge of the law was needed to shore up Sussex’s mastery of decorum. Catherine’s nerves were understandable. The two men must have struggled to find a precedent that could serve as a facsimile for greeting Anne. This was not the same as greeting a dowager queen, since Anne was not Henry’s widow or a former queen, a legal conundrum that had presented itself only twice in English history thus far.55 The King insisted that Anne had never been his wife and, at least in public, she agreed. Etiquette is predicated on the idea of behavior properly reflecting the situation of the interaction and the social position of the participating individuals. How did one treat a queen who had never been a queen? The two women who had endured similar limbo before, Elizabeth Woodville after her son’s deposition in 1483 and Katherine of Aragon after her annulment in 1533, had refused to accept the legality of their demotion and because of it had not returned to court.56 Even the obvious fallback of treating Anne with the decorum shown to o
ne of Henry’s sisters, one now dead and the other living in Scotland, was made difficult by the fact that for decades the procedure for greeting them had been based on the rank they acquired when they married their husbands. How Anne was received would not only reflect on Catherine personally, but it would also convey to the assembled guests, many of them representatives of foreign governments, the security of the King’s most recent divorce. Henry’s vanity and reputation were at risk.

  Eventually, the Queen and her advisers seem to have hit upon the idea of bending the rules in favor of lavish kindness. Catherine could smooth over any potential awkwardness by displays of spontaneity prompted by deep admiration for her guest. When the doors were at last opened and Anne was announced, it was apparent that she too had decided that no one ever erred in choosing the side of civility. She sank into the deepest curtsey possible and spoke to Catherine from her spot on the floor, from which she refused to budge despite the Queen’s pleas for her to stand. The manners one-upmanship continued when Henry entered the room and made “a very low bow to the Lady Anne,” whom he embraced before they processed to supper. Protocol always has the potential to turn from a caress to a slap, particularly when its minutiae are adhered to at the expense of overall effect, and at the supper table that evening, Anne was given a spot near the bottom, though her face did not betray any sign of annoyance.57