Young and Damned and Fair

by Gareth Russell

  Her influence had its limits, and Chapuys was right in describing “hard conditions” on Wyatt’s rehabilitation. Both men had to confess to wrongdoing for which the King was pardoning them, abandoning their previous protestations of innocence, and Wyatt was required to set up house with his estranged wife after living apart from her for fifteen years, allegedly after he had caught her in bed with a lover.45 He also promised to separate from the two women he had been living in sin with, including the mother of his illegitimate children, and he was warned that if he did not resume “a conjugal life” with his wife “or should he be found to keep up criminal relations with one or two other ladies that he has since loved, he is to suffer pain of death and confiscation of property.”46 Why the details of Wyatt’s private life should have featured so prominently in his pardon is unclear. His wife’s brother, Lord Cobham, may have asked the King to remove the separation as a stain on the family’s honor or Henry may have wished to cast himself as a virtuous prince, capable of reforming morally errant subjects.

  Wyatt’s audience with the King took place at Dover Castle at the end of the month.47 The King had gone to Kent to see the damaged defenses while Catherine stayed behind with her women, which meant she did not have an opportunity to witness the ceremony that marked Wyatt’s rehabilitation.48 Instead, she spent the final weeks of Lent at Greenwich. Breaking the rules of the Lenten fast was a controversial topic in Henry’s England, and traditionalists were upset by Reformers’ tendency to eat meat on the vigils of certain feast days. Shortly before Catherine became queen, the Bishop of Lincoln had complained when one of the Bishop of Worcester’s servants ate buttered chicken on the eve of the Feast of the Assumption.49 At court, the Lenten dietary rules were generally still adhered to, but that did not mean all exhortations for restraint were. Catherine and her husband may have continued sleeping together during the penitential season, and if not, they certainly had in the buildup to it. When Henry returned to Greenwich on April 5 after sixteen days in the south, Catherine informed him that she was pregnant.

  Chapter 14

  * * *

  “For they will look upon you”

  A lady gave me a gift she had not;

  And I received her gift which I took not;

  She gave it me willingly, and yet she would not;

  And I received it, albeit, I could not:

  If she give it me, I force not;

  If she take it again, she cares not.

  Construe what this is, and tell not;

  For I am fast sworn I may not.

  —Sir Thomas Wyatt (d. 1542), “A Riddle of a Gift Given by a Lady”

  On Palm Sunday, Charles de Marillac had an audience with King Henry. The main topic of their conversation was English resentment against Scotland. Evidently, the ambassador talked also with courtiers or informers during his visit because in a subsequent letter to Constable de Montmorency in France he wrote “that this Queen is thought to be with child, which would be a very great joy to this King, who, it seems, believes it, and intends, if it be found to be true, to have her crowned at Whitsuntide. Already all the embroiderers that can be got are employed making furniture and tapestry, the copes and ornaments taken from the churches not being spared. Moreover, the young lords and gentlemen of this Court are practicing daily for the jousts and tournaments then to be made.”1

  It was hardly surprising that as soon as the idea of Catherine’s coronation was floated, gentlemen dusted off their armor and lances to head for the tiltyards. Jousts that accompanied a coronation offered spectacular opportunities for athletic one-upmanship, and preparations for them typically began months in advance.2 Whitsuntide, the suggested date for the coronation, was the seventh Sunday after Easter, which gave enough time for the court athletes to practice and for arrangements to be made to crown Catherine at a point when she would presumably be beginning to show her baby bump but long enough before it would be unwise for her to exert herself with the three or four days’ worth of ceremonies that surrounded it.

  A coronation would raise Catherine’s prestige, and a child, even if she (preferably he) was only second in line after Prince Edward, could help her outshine Jane Seymour, her most successful predecessor. Jane’s portrait still hung alongside images of Henry, his parents, and his late brother Arthur in his private collection. Even during Katherine Parr’s reign, the spectral Queen Jane appeared in her place in dynastic paintings. Catherine’s table was set with Jane’s golden spoons, silver plates for spices, crystal glasses speckled with rubies, and a golden goblet, decorated with diamonds and pearls, that bore Queen Jane’s maxim Bound to Obey and Serve, which, in terms of prostrating oneself at the shrine of a husband, might be the one motto that outdid Catherine’s No Other Will But His.3 A baby would guarantee Catherine’s future. If she had a son, as Duke of York and the future king’s brother he would guarantee her position as a great lady. And if, for whatever reason, Prince Edward shared the fate of his late uncle Arthur and did not live long enough to either succeed or father an heir, then Catherine could find herself as queen mother and potentially regent, if her son succeeded to the throne as a minor, though given past precedent in England that job would likely go to one of her kinsmen.4 In light of how much could change and be secured by a successful pregnancy, it is easy to understand why early modern queens consort were so earnest in their prayers for conception and safe delivery.

  The court’s Holy Week observances of 1541 seem to have been kept, like the King’s offering on Good Friday, “according to the ancient ordering in years past.”5 Conservative prelates would have found nothing to make them uncomfortable in the rituals. To all outward appearances, Henry and Catherine presided over a “Catholic” court. The royal family still kept gilt images of saints such as John the Baptist, Saint Andrew the Apostle, Gabriel the Archangel, Saint Mary Magdalene, and Saint James the Great. The Virgin Mary stood rooted in grief and rendered in silver at the base of their private crucifixes. The life of the Virgin’s father, Saint Jerome, was displayed in tapestries at the Palace of Whitehall; her Assumption decorated the walls at Windsor; the scourging and Passion of her Son were popular topics for weavers. The King and Queen also owned distinctly Catholic aids to morality, such as the allegorical tapestries of the seven deadly sins, which were commissioned by the royal household about three years after it repudiated the authority of the Vatican.6

  The heavy presence of traditionalist art and ritual in the worship of Henry’s court has led to a modern description of the Henrician Church as “Catholicism without the Pope.” It is easy to see how that label has been taken as an aphorism. Henry’s Church defended a Catholic view of the sacraments, particularly the belief that during Holy Communion Christ’s words of hoc est corpus meum became literally true through the miracle of transubstantiation.7 It refused to promote the emerging Protestant view that salvation was a gift that could be acquired through faith alone and that via sola fide the redeemed would be born again through a spiritual catharsis that required them to accept Christ as their savior, trusting in Him and no other to atone for their sins. Instead, the Henrician Church promoted the older interpretation that in a world where belief was almost universal there must also be actions to show one’s faith, a kind of kinesthetic spirituality that encouraged pilgrimages, fasting, mortification of the flesh, and public and private acts of penance. The seven corporal deeds of mercy—to feed the hungry, give drink to the thirsty, clothe the naked, shelter the homeless, visit the sick and the imprisoned, and bury the dead—were seen as useful guides on the efficacy of good deeds in absolving oneself of certain sins.8 The early Church of England would not, to the distress of many Reformers, abolish prayers for the departed and, implicit through them, the country’s belief in Purgatory. Predestination, which was at this stage admittedly a fringe belief held only by the more extreme Protestant sects, drew even more ire—the idea that God had already chosen who was to be saved and who damned struck the majority of English Christians as a brutal, hope-destroying psychosi
s—and it led to Henry’s Church vigorously asserting the contrary doctrine of free will. Henry VIII himself was in many ways a spiritual conservative. In his will, he specifically sought the intercession and protection of the Blessèd Virgin Mary. In 1538, dressed all in white, he personally presided over the heresy trial of a Lutheran preacher called John Lambert, and each time the Eucharist was mentioned during the proceedings, Henry reverently doffed his cap as a sign of respect; he debated with Lambert, refused to offer succor to heretics, and signed a death warrant consigning the preacher to the stake.

  Yet if the outward appearance of English and Welsh Christian worship remained fairly similar to how it had been in the centuries before the schism, the experience was radically different. The subtitle of the Six Articles, usually taken as a legislative victory for traditionalists, was “an act abolishing diversity of opinions,” a reflection of the King’s unhappiness as the aftereffects of the break with Rome opened the floodgates to dozens of different interpretations of the Scriptures.

  The one constant in Henry’s religious policy was his sincere belief that he was rightfully head of the Church in England, the custodian and shepherd of the country’s conscience, while the Pope was the heir to centuries of usurpation. To Tudor loyalists, Henry VIII was not a revolutionary but a restorer of what had, and should always have, been. He was resurrecting the legacy of early Christian Roman emperors such as Constantine the Great and Justinian, who had presided over early Church councils and involved themselves in their theological disputes. With sublime self-belief, Henry accepted the propaganda that cast him as a latter-day Old Testament king-cum-spiritual-leader—Solomon building the Temple and Jehoshaphat casting down idols. It has been argued that the Buggery Statute of 1533 was partly inspired by Henry’s fascination with Levitical law after his first divorce. His attempt to replicate the behavior of King Jehoshaphat, who had attacked homosexual activity in various pagan cults, according to the Bible’s first Book of Kings, was evidenced in the role that accusations of sodomy played in bringing down English monasticism in the 1530s.9 The ransacking of the shrines and the abbeys also had an Old Testament precedent when, in the Books of Kings, one biblical monarch “took all the sanctified things which . . . his fathers the kings of Juda[h] had dedicated to holy uses, and which he himself had offered: and all the silver that could be found in the treasures of the temple of the Lord” and put them to national use.10

  All this scriptural justification for his ecclesiastical policies may endow Henry VIII with too much moral credit. After all, if Pope Clement VII had allowed him to marry Anne Boleyn, it is hard to foresee a set of circumstances that could have persuaded Henry to rebel against the Holy See at such enormous cost to himself and risk to his kingdom. Henry’s inquisitiveness and changing views after 1531 gave both Reformers and conservatives cause for hope and despair at different times. Yet whatever one might make of the morality or impact of his decisions, the one salient feature of his Reformation was the King’s total belief that he was God’s anointed. Having convinced himself of that, he never waivered. His moods and his theological debates pulled the Church in different directions, but they were always anchored by the Royal Supremacy. Henry was impressed by some reformist ideas and appalled by others. Thomas Cromwell wrote that Henry “leaned neither to the right nor to the left hand.”11 A more critical eye might dismiss the Henrician Church of England as a syncretic misfire led by an erratic megalomaniac caught somewhere between the liturgical certainties of his childhood and the storm-following-sunshine appeal of new and untested philosophies.

  For Catherine, as Queen and wife to one of God’s self-appointed earthly lieutenants, Holy Week was a time when she was expected to be on display by attending services in the Chapel Royal at Greenwich. The ceremonies and customs of the week were designed to inspire the faithful through relevant biblical readings, symbolic gestures, and public processions. On Palm Sunday, Catherine heard the story of Christ’s entry into Jerusalem, as told in the Gospel according to Saint John, followed by anthems and a parading of the Blessed Sacrament. Priests and choristers knelt and kissed the ground in front of the Sacrament’s resting place. Saint Matthew’s version of the entry to Jerusalem rang forth from the choir with the words of the evangelist, Christ, and the crowd sung in different keys.

  Holy Monday and Holy Tuesday generally stressed Christ’s role as the Messiah who fulfilled the prophecies of the Old Testament. Rather than interpreting it as a linear narrative, a sequential divine revelation, as Protestants increasingly came to do, medieval Christian theology stressed the interconnectedness of the Bible as a divinely inspired mirror that constantly reflected itself in past and present. For adherents of this view, the Virgin Mary’s first mention was not in Saint Luke’s Gospel, when she is referenced by name, but in the third chapter of Genesis, when a woman who will crush a serpent beneath her heel was foretold at the Fall of Man.12 In much the same way as defenders of transubstantiation insisted that the elevation of the Host during Mass marked a moment out of time, Holy Week and Easter tried to stress the concept that time was a human construct that, through Christ’s life, had interacted with something that was eternal, neither past nor present.

  From Wednesday, the ceremonies Catherine attended began to center more clearly on biographical details from the Gospel narratives of the Passion of Christ—Judas’s betrayal on the Wednesday, the Last Supper on the Thursday.13 The Queen had been a passive observant for the first four days of Holy Week, but on the Thursday she was required to perform public acts of piety. Maundy Thursday took its name from Christ’s command or mandatum at the Last Supper—Mandatum novum do vobis ut diligatis invicem sicut dilexi vos ut. (“A new commandment I give unto you: That you love one another, as I have loved you . . .”)14 After the Supper, Christ had washed the feet of the twelve apostles to convey the importance of humility and serving others. In homage to this, since the reign of Edward I the English monarchy had performed a Maundy ritual on the Thursday of Holy Week whereby various members of the royal family publicly washed the feet of the local poor.15 Henry IV had established the custom of the number of attendees growing to reflect the monarch’s age, and so, in 1541, fifty-one poor men had their feet bathed by a kneeling Henry VIII, who then handed them purses of money.I16 We know less about Catherine’s performance of the Maundy obeisance than we do about some of her predecessors’, but Catherine would have followed the custom of having an apron tied around her gown as some of her ladies followed her with basins, cloths, and water that she used as she washed and wiped the feet of pauper women. Frustratingly, considering that we do not know Catherine’s date of birth, the records do not state how many women were invited to the Queen’s Maundy ritual in 1541. If they had, we would know for certain what age Catherine was when it happened.

  When Henry returned to his apartment and set down his black velvet-lined Mass book in the same little room next to his bedchamber where his two copies of the Great Bible were kept alongside a book of Aristotle, discussion turned from the betrayal of Christ to betrayal of the King.17 A minor plot against him, the Wakefield conspiracy, had been uncovered and foiled in the north. The news was circulating at court by Easter Sunday, when a council meeting was held to discuss it, which means it must have reached the King a day or so earlier. The details of the failed intrigue were vague. Rumors that the ringleaders had been in league with the Scottish government or Cardinal Pole were voiced, as was a story that they had planned to kidnap the King’s deputy, the Bishop of Llandaff, president of the Council of the North. Some observers, such as Eustace Chapuys, were unsurprised that the north remained fertile soil for treachery after how terribly the region had been treated in the aftermath of the Pilgrimage of Grace—“The people’s indignation against the King has risen to a higher pitch since then,” he wrote, “owing to the cruelties and exactions that followed the rebellion in the North.”18 The discovery of the Wakefield conspiracy riled Henry’s already lively sense of paranoia, and the presence of some very distant relativ
es of the Countess of Salisbury in the rebel cabal brought the imprisoned dowager back into his mind’s eye.

  A map of England hung in Henry’s gallery at Greenwich.19 It was as close as Henry had ever come to seeing the northern half of his kingdom. Unlike his parents, he had never visited it, but the collapse of the Wakefield conspiracy prompted him to reconsider his entrenched residency in the south.20 The Duke of Norfolk was back at Greenwich for the council meetings about the plot, and by Sunday the word round court was that the King, “fearing lest [in] the North there should exist other conspiracies of the same kind, or perhaps more dangerous ones still, has announced his intention to go thither immediately after these festivities.”21

  In her apartments on Maundy Thursday afternoon, after the public charity, the Queen was handing out more gifts. Accompanied only by her chamberer Katherine Tilney and Lady Rochford, one of her privy chamber ladies, Catherine met her old beau Thomas Culpepper in the small corridor that linked the Queen’s public and private rooms. Since their flirtation in the weeks before Anne of Cleves’s arrival had ended with Culpepper transferring his affections to another woman, Culpepper had remained in service in the privy chamber, where he was a great favorite of the King. Thomas and Catherine’s earlier romance had apparently been so fleeting and inconsequential that Henry had never heard about it, but evidently Catherine remained fascinated. Lady Rochford had arranged the meeting on the Queen’s behalf, and Henry Webb, one of the Queen’s ushers, had gone to fetch Culpepper from the presence chamber. Culpepper already had two fine velvet caps that had been gifts from the King, but the Queen’s present of a cap was not given in the same spirit. She begged him to keep the cap under his cloak until he was back in his rooms, in case anyone saw it.22 Culpepper flirtatiously bantered back, “Alas, Madam, why did you not this when you were a maid?” This reference to Catherine’s apparent lack of enthusiasm for him when she first came to court as a single woman did not land well. She retorted, “Is this all the thanks ye give me for the cap? If I had known ye would have these words you should never have had it.”