Young and Damned and Fair

by Gareth Russell

  Elizabeth was to be better educated and substantially so. Within a few years of Wriothesley’s observations, her schooling was farmed out to tutors like the regius professor of Greek at Cambridge. In 1541, when Catherine met her presumably for the first time, Elizabeth’s accomplishments were largely due to the intelligence and forcefulness of her governess, Katherine Champernowne.III Katherine, whom Elizabeth and nearly everyone else referred to as Kat, was determined to make the most of Elizabeth’s natural aptitude and pushed ahead with a rigorous program despite objections from some of the princess’s staff, who compared her style of teaching to a servant pouring too much wine into too small a goblet. Elizabeth regarded Kat Champernowne as a second mother and in later life praised her for providing most of the love and encouragement she could remember from her childhood.57

  Kat may have been part of the reason for the meeting between her charge and Queen Catherine at Chelsea, because her sister Lady Joan Denny was one of Catherine’s ladies-in-waiting. Kat shared her sister’s brains and her Protestant sympathies. Later, Joan’s husband used his position in the King’s privy chamber to suggest men known to favor religious reform as potential tutors for Elizabeth and her younger brother, something that played a significant role in the two siblings’ future commitment to a Protestant England, albeit to varying degrees. Kat was also ambitious for and protective of her charge, and she knew that the favor of the Queen could help Elizabeth’s future prospects, which must, given her position, be made or broken by the King’s goodwill. It is possible that the relationship between Elizabeth’s governess and Catherine’s lady-in-waiting saw Lady Denny lobbying for a meeting on Elizabeth’s behalf.

  Catherine’s own familial bond to Elizabeth may also explain why she went out of her way to meet her at Chelsea. The trip from Baynard’s was unusual enough in itself; despite being the Queen’s official London residence, the castle was hardly ever used for overnight stays by Tudor queens consort, but it was clearly used as a base for Catherine to talk with Elizabeth, who moved to Chelsea by barge on May 5, the day before Catherine was taken there by her twenty-six oarsmen.58 On her mother’s side, Elizabeth was Catherine’s second cousin—Elizabeth’s maternal grandmother, the late Countess of Ormond, had been Edmund Howard’s younger sister. In relative terms, the necklaces Catherine gave to Elizabeth as a gift were not remarkably expensive and paled in comparison to the rubies Princess Mary had received from their father at Christmas, but it was more than Catherine had ever given to Mary personally or willingly.

  Four days afterwards, Catherine rejoined her husband to accompany him to Waltham Holy Cross in Essex, where the Prince of Wales was staying with the Princess Mary and their respective households. When she saw him for the first time, Edward was three years old, “handsome, well-fed and remarkably tall for his age,” and waddled over to her in an infant-sized man’s doublet set off with a floor-length skirt.59 Royal and noble-born boys were generally dressed in feminine clothes from the waist down until around the age of seven, when they were “breeched” and began wearing clothes similar in style to an adult’s. Edward was not breached until his sixth birthday, so he would still have worn the clothes of an aristocratic infant in May 1541.60 A squad of well-born boys kept him company in the schoolroom, including Barnaby Fitzpatrick, the young man who became the Prince’s closest friend.61 Barnaby was the son of an Irish lord who had a distant bloodline claim to one of the ancient Irish sub-kingdoms but wanted to trade that in for a title in the contemporary Anglo-Irish nobilities. The invitation for Barnaby to join the Prince of Wales’s household was a boon for the Fitzpatricks, and it indicated that the King was interested in rehabilitating potentially rebellious Irish nobles by bringing certain families into more regular contact with the court. One month after Catherine’s visit to Waltham, Barnaby’s father was created Baron Fitzpatrick of Upper Ossory.

  Edward, who became Edward VI upon his father’s death, died shortly before his sixteenth birthday, which resulted in subsequent descriptions of him as a sickly child. The irony of the sought-after son being the least healthy in the litter is one too tempting for many writers to ignore, but Edward’s death in 1553 was probably the result of a short-term illness.62 As a teenager, he was physically robust, with a passion for jousting and hunting that rivaled his father’s as a young man. In his childhood, there were spells of ill health, inevitable and often exacerbated by those who were tasked with protecting him. When Catherine first met her most valuable stepchild, she saw a boy who had been cosseted in a household that went to obsessive and self-defeating lengths to keep him away from any potential infection. From time to time, this cloistering mixed badly with the servants’ tendency to give the heir whatever he asked for and produced a lifestyle that a court physician described as “gross and unhealthy.”63

  That Edward was the King’s sole surviving son and legitimate child was never far from the minds of servants or courtiers, many of whom feared the chaos that would be unleashed if the son predeceased the father. After Henry I’s only son was lost at sea in 1120 and the beautiful young Queen Adeliza failed to produce a new heir, the country had descended into a generation-long civil war when the King died in 1135. Since then, there had been four kings who succeeded their fathers because elder brothers had died before them. Henry VIII was one of them.64 The conversation the ladies-in-waiting had with Anne of Cleves about the absence of a Duke of York revealed how much the spare to the heir was on everyone’s mind, as did the joyous rush to prepare for Catherine’s coronation once the King believed she was pregnant, and the subsequent abandonment of the ceremony when it was discovered that she was not.

  The visit to Essex to see the little heir was judged a success. It ended with the King inviting Mary back to court, and “the Queen has countenanced it with a good grace.”65 Mary had been pressing for her father to visit Edward more often—she was over twenty years older than her brother and she had a protective and caring attitude towards him. However, Chapuys was quite clear in his letter to the Emperor that the deciding factor was Catherine’s enthusiasm for the trip—he told Charles V that Henry and Catherine had gone “to visit the Prince at the request of the Princess, but chiefly at the intercession of the Queen herself.”66 This implies that Catherine was eager to meet with all three of Henry’s children and apparently to reconcile with the eldest. Her different attitudes towards the two Tudor sisters leaves little doubt about which one she preferred, while the “good grace” that she displayed when Mary was invited back to London was another example of her tendency to choose kindness once she had calmed down about an earlier slight.

  Catherine’s rapprochement with Mary may have had pragmatic motivations as well. It is speculative, but two months later the Duke of Norfolk revealed in conversation with the French ambassador that there were “secret” plans to restore Mary to the line of succession.67 For the good of the realm, there would have to be a clearly designated second-in-line. Since three of Henry VII’s offspring had lived long enough to produce children of their own and Henry VIII had bastardized two of his, the issue was murky, with too many claimants, none of whom was in a strong enough position to succeed without a challenge. Henry’s matrimonial and diplomatic escapades had even managed to raise doubt in Catholic Europe about Prince Edward’s legitimacy, on the grounds that he was the son of an excommunicate, conceived at a time when England was in schism from the Holy See.68 This admittedly was a minority view, and both the Emperor and François I recognized Edward as Henry’s heir apparent, but who would come after him was nonetheless a fraught question. The pursuit of the answer was liable to prove bloody. Henry VII had seven acknowledged and uncontested grandchildren alive in 1541—James V, King of Scots and his half sister, Lady Margaret Douglas, were the children of Henry VII’s eldest daughter, Margaret Tudor, Queen of Scots; there were also Henry VIII’s three children by three different wives, and the two surviving daughters of Henry VII’s youngest daughter Mary, Duchess of Suffolk—Frances Grey, Marchioness of Dorset, and Eleanor Cli
fford, Countess of Cumberland. Of those seven, only Frances had children of her own—so far, two girls. There were thus nine direct bloodline claimants to the English throne, who could be divided into three groups—the direct Tudor line in Henry’s children, the Stewart or Scottish line via Queen Margaret’s, and the Suffolk line in the late Duchess’s daughters and granddaughters.

  If Catherine bore any children, they would rank after Edward but before his sisters, regardless of their gender, but until that happened who followed Edward was frighteningly ambivalent. Since both of Henry’s daughters had been declared illegitimate after their respective mothers’ demotions, James V and any future descendants could plausibly claim the English inheritance if Edward died without heirs. James, after all, was a man and the product of an uncontested royal marriage. It seemed unlikely that either of the Suffolk sisters would try to advance their lineage at the expense of their Tudor cousins, though as events were to prove in the next decade the improbable could happen. A fracas with Scotland seemed likely. To resolve the ambiguity, Henry planned to put his two daughters after Edward and any heirs he might father, with Mary as the eldest ranking above Elizabeth. These plans were not formalized until 1544, but the French ambassador’s correspondence proves they were being discussed as early as 1541. It may be that Catherine knew of her stepdaughter’s rising prominence—even if Mary never became queen, acknowledging her as second-in-line was a clear sign of her restoration to her father’s favor—and decided that it would be sensible to remain on good terms with her. Mary’s rumored restoration and Catherine’s attempts to build a better relationship with her, and her younger sister, occurred shortly after the end of Catherine’s alleged pregnancy. It is possible that the debacle forced Catherine to realize that, if she did not have children of her own, her future as a widow would be determined by one of her stepchildren. The rumors of Mary’s return to the line of succession may also have arisen from Henry’s doubts about Catherine’s fecundity, after the embarrassment at Easter.

  Perhaps what is most telling about the visit with Elizabeth at Chelsea and then with Edward and Mary at Waltham Holy Cross four days later was when it took place. Catherine did not rush into the role of loving stepmother. From the evidence left to us, she first met Elizabeth and Edward ten months after she married their father. The only reason she knew Mary was because she was the only one old enough to live at court. Going to see Edward did not carry any great risks, but the trip to meet Elizabeth does seem to have required some organization and genuine interest on Catherine’s part. So much of her behavior in spring 1541 can only be explained by accepting that she was growing in confidence and that her successful execution of her duties as queen during the Christmas at Hampton Court had bolstered her self-esteem. Catherine had always liked to organize people; she was friendly, charming, and had the kind of charisma that aimed to make people smile while remaining the center of attention. The intercession for Wyatt and Wallop, the brief rendezvous with Thomas Culpepper, the meeting with Elizabeth Tudor, and then the trip to Waltham are all the actions of a woman who felt that she could get away with more and began to behave accordingly.

  That is not to say that a sense of insecurity vanished completely. Her husband’s brush with death during Lent and the fiasco of her alleged pregnancy were not things that a childless queen was likely to remain unaffected by. Alongside the confidence, there was also a jitteriness to Catherine which occasionally expressed itself through what she was prepared to believe. A week after their visit to the Prince of Wales, Henry noticed that Catherine was in low spirits, and when he asked her why “she said it was owing to a rumour that he was going to take back Anne of Cleves.” That story was not new—it had circulated in London in September—but this time, Catherine reacted to it and even, in her weaker moments, found it credible. Henry’s comforting of his wife made up for in sincerity what it lacked in finesse—“The King told her she was wrong to think such things, and even if he were in a position to marry he had no mind to take back Anne.”69

  Reading between the lines, the Cleves rumor seems to have been resuscitated by Scottish involvement in the Wakefield conspiracy. Chapuys thought that whoever was spreading the story must know nothing about Henry VIII’s personality “as his love never returns for a woman he has once abandoned” and that whispers of Anne’s restoration at Catherine’s expense arose because “many thought he would be reconciled to her for fear of the King of France making war on him at the solicitation of the duke of Cleves and the king of Scotland.”70 Since the divorce, France had allied with Cleves. On the same day as Catherine’s visit with her stepson, Lord William had written from Paris with the news that the Duke of Cleves was at the French court as a guest of the royal family.71 If Henry reconciled with Anne of Cleves, it might negate the possibility of France’s alliance with Scotland and Cleves causing problems.

  Fortunately for England, Lord William’s reports made it clear that the Duke of Cleves had no intention of risking his diplomatic credibility on his sister’s behalf. The two men met at a supper party hosted in the Duke’s honor by the King and Queen of France—Duke Wilhelm embraced the English ambassador, asked after the health of King Henry, and said absolutely nothing about his sister.72 Of course, those chatting about the merits of putting Anne of Cleves back on the consort’s throne did not have access to the ambassador’s letters to know how unimportant Anne’s position was to Cleves’s foreign policy, but a lack of precise information did not stop them talking or Catherine from listening. Her brief unhappiness reflected the power of the rumor mill at court and the speed with which members of the household could bring almost absurd stories to their mistress’s ears.

  There were other problems facing Catherine in 1541, arising from the realm of public opinion, where she was intermittently accused of low morals and wild spending. Catherine’s tactfulness, deportment, and her kindness to Anne of Cleves, Thomas Wyatt, and John Wallop were praised at court and in diplomatic correspondence, as was her desire to see her stepchildren. A member of the Privy Council later described Catherine’s behavior in public as that of “a very virtuous and chaste creature,” but others were less enamored.73 The demotion of Anne of Cleves had not been popular in the capital, which was a tribute to Anne’s public persona, since she had had very little time to establish herself as queen before she was divorced, and Catherine had first come to the wider population’s notice as a potential mistress receiving surreptitious nighttime visits from the King on his barge. Talk in London had already referred to Catherine as a harlot and a woman of “poor character.” Accusations of whoredom were an occupational hazard for royal women, who held a place in people’s imaginations that was usually either patriotic or prurient. Vices were not so much magnified as imagined. Anne Boleyn had been referred to as “a strong whore” and “a goggle-eyed whore,” it was assumed that Jane Seymour could not be a virgin because of her age when she married, and in 1511 a man was imprisoned for implying that Katherine of Aragon’s newborn son was illegitimate.74

  Catherine’s high spirits also encouraged criticism. What might appear as vivacious loveliness to some can be interpreted as irritating garrulousness by others. A Spanish merchant living in London, who admittedly never let fact stand in the way of a good story, claimed later that “the King had no wife who made him spend so much money in dresses and jewels as she did, who every day had some new caprice.”75 She certainly liked to have a good time and in her apartments Catherine “did nothing but dance and rejoice.”76 A defense of her spending can be mounted by pointing out that it does not seem so great when set in its wider context. Her jewelry acquisitions in the summer and winter of 1540, for instance, compare favorably in cost to those commissioned by or for Anne Boleyn, even before she became queen.77 However, Catherine’s extravagance was not ameliorated by any particular displays of piety or memorable largesse, as it had been by some of her predecessors.