Young and Damned and Fair

by Gareth Russell

  The unkind attacks on Catherine’s morals were illegal under the Treason Act of 1534, but they only constituted a threat if they came from someone who actually knew something specific about her involvement with Francis Dereham. In May 1541, comments about her sexuality could be dismissed as the febrile ramblings of bored and ill-informed commoners, while mutterings about her spending and dancing simply did not matter. Wisely so, given the nature of her rise to prominence, Catherine’s focus continued to be her husband. To please him was the only way to guarantee her position.

  It is interesting that after a period when she felt real doubt and insecurity, Catherine threw herself into the role of a model queen consort—conduit of royal mercy, stepmother, suppressor of discord—and found herself to be very good at it. At the same time, she began to pine for some of the excitement she had known as a younger woman, with men like Thomas Culpepper. It would be tempting to pin this as the point at which Catherine’s behavior underwent a definitive change and argue that after it she acted either with greater circumspection or greater recklessness. The truth is that she did both. Human beings are a mass of contradictory emotions. If one was to try to summarize Catherine’s life from this point on, it would be that she excelled in public but made more and more mistakes in private. She was aware of the tenuousness of her position, yet met in quasi-secret with an old admirer. She interceded for prisoners like Thomas Wyatt and John Wallop, but did not help others who posed too great a risk to become involved with. She continued to respond to the hearsay being fed to her by her ladies, and she inflamed the household’s volatile atmosphere by favoring Lady Rochford over other women of the privy chamber, including her own sister. Catherine was the most observed woman in the country. Her every move was watched and judged by the courtiers and servants around her. When she mentioned that Thomas Culpepper continued to stare at her, even after she had made it very clear that she wanted nothing more to do with him because of his rudeness to her on Maundy Thursday, Lady Rochford answered with an observation that could be true of the nature of queenship—“Yet must you give men leave to look, for they will look upon you.”78

  * * *

  I. The number was based on one for each year of the sovereign’s life, thus despite the fact he turned fifty in 1541, it was Henry VIII’s fifty-first year.

  II. The custom of blessing the cramp rings on Good Friday was discontinued by Henry’s youngest daughter, Elizabeth I.

  III. Katherine Ashley following her marriage in 1545.

  Chapter 15

  * * *

  The Errands of Morris and Webb

  To have beheld him naked as he stood,

  Ready to leap into the silver flood;

  But might not: for the laws of heaven deny,

  To shew men’s secret to a woman’s eye:

  And therefore was her sad and gloomy light

  Confin’d unto the secret-keeping night.

  —Francis Beaumont, Salmacis and Hermaphroditus (1602)

  On the morning after Chapuys wrote to the Emperor’s sister about Catherine’s fears regarding Anne of Cleves, the sixty-seven-year-old Margaret de la Pole, Countess of Salisbury, was wakened in her rooms at the Tower of London with the news that the King had decided she was to be executed in the next few hours. She had been condemned by act of attainder during the White Rose intrigue, which meant the death sentence against her could be enacted whenever the King saw fit. Throughout her interrogation in 1538, the Countess had consistently refused to confess to treason. The Earl of Southampton, one of her inquisitors, remarked that in defense of herself and her family Lady Salisbury “showed herself so earnest, vehement and precise that more could not be.”1 She was in a similar spirit when they told her about her execution. She argued with her jailers and demanded to know the justification for her impending death. It was only once she realized that there was no way out that she went quietly out of the Tower to a green near Tower Hill called East Smithfield.2 There was no scaffold, only a small block that rested on the ground, and there were 150 witnesses, including the lord mayor. After the pious old lady had entrusted her soul to the mercy of God, she prayed for Catherine and all the other members of the royal family, with the exception of Elizabeth, whose legitimacy she had never acknowledged. Her prayers for the King, the Queen, and the Prince of Wales seemed more duty than inclination when compared to those for her goddaughter Princess Mary, whose mother she had once served as a lady-in-waiting and to whom Lady Salisbury had remained loyal until her death from cancer in 1536.3 She was not allowed to continue much longer. Her handlers rushed her through her speech, chivvying her to hurry up and put her head on the block. It was reported later that she refused them because she was not a traitor, and therefore had to be wrestled into place by her executioner, but that story originates from the seventeenth century. Such extraordinary behavior would have been commented on by her contemporaries, none of whom mention it in their accounts of her death.

  When Lady Salisbury turned to submit herself to her executioner, she saw “a wretched and blundering youth” instead of the usual headsman, who had been dispatched north to deal with the men convicted of complicity in the recent plot against the King. She placed her head on the block. When the first blow of the axe fell, it was clear just how inexperienced the stand-in executioner was. A horrified Chapuys heard from eyewitnesses that the headsman “literally hacked her head and shoulders to pieces in the most pitiful manner.” When, at last, the deed was done, her remains were taken for swift interment in the chapel of Saint Peter-ad-vincula inside the Tower. On the same day, three men were hanged, drawn, and quartered in the city for their role in the northern intrigue.4

  The Countess of Salisbury’s execution had been carried out with no advanced warning, and later that afternoon many people in London still doubted that it had happened. Once the news was confirmed, it was not well received. Even Reformers who had abhorred the ultra-conservative Lady Salisbury’s refusal to let her servants read the Bible in English were uncomfortable with what had happened.5 It looked as if she had been dispatched to punish her for a failed rebellion that she had no part in. If she had been spared at the time of her eldest son’s execution, then what could she possibly have done as a prisoner in the Tower? The inescapable conclusion was that she had suffered because the King hated her greatly, her son Reginald even more so, and that he wanted, in de Marillac’s view, to empty the Tower before he went on his prolonged visit to the north.6

  Predictably, the international reaction was stronger. What Chapuys described as “the very strange and lamentable execution of Mme. de Salisbury” intensified many western Europeans’ already-low opinion of Henry VIII. In Italy, Henry was accused of having “wrongfully murdered the Cardinal’s mother, his brother, and so many other nobles that it should all be too long to rehearse.”7 To defend Henry, the best that loyal Englishmen could come up with when foreigners asked them how they could possibly obey such a tyrant was that Lady Salisbury’s death was “nothing so marvellous nor so cruel as it is made [to sound] here in Italy.”8 As Cardinal Pole’s mother, the Countess had a reputation as “a most virtuous and honourable lady,” and comments were passed on the disparity between Henry’s presentation of himself as God’s instrument and the ways his concept of justice had “come to women and innocent children.”9 Lady Salisbury’s grandson Henry and Lord Exeter’s fourteen-year-old son remained in custody in the Tower. Cardinal Pole, who was widely respected in Catholic Europe as a man “whose virtue and learning seemeth rare unto the world,” described Henry as comparable in wickedness to Herod, Caligula, and Nero.10 Long after it had happened, Henry’s continental critics were still citing Lady Salisbury’s horrible end, alongside the executions of Cardinal Fisher and Thomas More in 1535, or Queen Anne’s in 1536, as unanswerable examples of his tyrannical nature.11

  Four days after Lady Salisbury’s death, Catherine and the King went to Westminster while Greenwich was cleaned. The decomposing heads of traitors usually jutted out from pikes on Tower
Bridge, but they had all been taken down “in order that the people may forget those whose heads kept their memory fresh.”12 De Marillac, still repulsed by the Countess’s execution, surmised that it would not be long before the old heads were replaced by new ones.

  Shortly after Catherine’s return to a refreshed Greenwich, two of her husband’s guards were convicted of robbery and hanged “in example of all other.”13 Pour encourager les autres was very much the maxim of Henry’s government—that summer more obviously than ever before. De Marillac was not alone in thinking that more deaths would follow the Countess’s; Chapuys told the Emperor’s sister that Lady Salisbury’s grandson was no longer allowed to take the air in the Tower courtyards and “it is supposed that he will soon follow his father and grandmother. May God help him!”14

  The government swung between reprieve and repression, confounding those who tried to guess the next move. The day after the two guards were executed, a courtier called Sir Edmund Knyvet was surrounded by officers of the King’s household as they prepared to cut off his hand as punishment for brawling within the confines of the court. He had punched Thomas Clere, a young poet attached to the household of Lord Surrey, on April 27, when the two men had come to blows at the palace tennis courts.15 Whether he had caused a nosebleed or thrown a punch that packed more force than expected, Knyvet was in real trouble due to the fact that he had technically “shed blood” in the precincts of the court, a misdemeanor that required the courtier to lose his right hand as the price of his rehabilitation. The King’s surgeon was standing by with his instruments, an official from the woodyard had brought in the block, the King’s master cook had provided the knife, another sergeant from the household stood by with the irons heating in the fire to sear the wound after the amputation, and officers from the King’s cellar and ewery had organized beer, wine, ale, basins, and towels for the ceremony, when Sir Richard Long, a gentleman of the Privy Chamber, entered to say that the King wanted Knyvet’s hand to be cut off after dinner. Knyvet was Catherine’s first cousin—his mother, Muriel, who died in childbirth when Edmund was about four years old, was another of Edmund Howard’s sisters and given his name, Catherine’s father may even have stood as one of Edmund Knyvet’s godfathers. It may have been Catherine’s influence that saved him from the cleaver, though it did not spare him the game of cat and mouse that accompanied Henry’s reprieves. Knyvet, who begged that his left hand should be severed so he could still use the right to wield a sword in the King’s service, was fully pardoned after dinner and allowed to keep both hands with the warning that there would be no reprieve if he repeated his offense, or mercy for anyone else who behaved in the same way.16

  Despite his ties to the Queen, the case against Edmund Knyvet had proceeded so far that many people were surprised when he was forgiven, hands intact. With equal confidence, observers expected Lord Dacre of the South to walk free after he and a group of friends accidentally killed a man as they set out on a poaching expedition in Sussex. They had met in Lord Dacre’s mansion to plot their illegal hunting trip, which technically put him in the position of ringleader. On their way, they encountered two men called James Busebryge and Richard Somener. Fearful that they might tell people about a crew of young men with hunting dogs and nets, Lord Dacre’s group attacked them. How much force they intended to use was contested, but eight against two resulted in some rough blows falling on the innocent bystanders, and Busebryge later died as a result. At his trial, Lord Dacre denied that they had ever intended to take a life, but he was told that the over-excitable conversations in his home and the unnecessary violence used against the two men constituted “sufficient and probable evidence.” Accepting the point, Lord Dacre changed his plea to guilty and threw himself on the King’s mercy. The clerk of the Privy Council, Sir William Paget, brought the news of Dacre’s supplication to the King “hoping thereby to move his Majesty to pardon.”17 Dacre’s judges, who had wept as they sentenced him to death as the law required, went as a group to beg the King to spare his life. Chapuys, who confused Dacre with Knyvet when he described him as “son of the duke of Norfolk’s sister, and cousin of this queen,” recorded other courtiers’ hopes that Dacre would be pardoned. There was a general feeling that as horrible and undeserved as Busebryge’s death had been, it had not been intended nor had it been the fault of the entire group. Chapuys heard that Dacre’s crime was “having belonged to a set of eight rakish youths, one of whom had killed a poor old man in a sudden unpremeditated affray.” That the twenty-five-year-old Lord Dacre was considered “the handsomest and best bred man that could be seen here in England” certainly helped his standing with his peers.18

  Less than twenty-four hours after Lord Dacre’s trial, his kinsman John Mantell, who had served in the King’s guard, six of their companions, and two huntsmen were hanged for their part in the poaching and manslaughter.19 The following day, in defiance of the usual protocol that gave aristocrats an axe instead of the noose, Lord Dacre was dragged through the streets of London to “the most ignominious gibbet possible.” It was a calculated degradation that culminated in quite possibly one of the nastiest and most deliberate twists in any Tudor execution. As with Edmund Knyvet, at the very last minute a messenger arrived from the King ordering them to delay the execution until after two o’clock that afternoon. At three o’clock, the crowd’s expectation of a pardon ended when the trapdoor was opened.20 The deliberately mercurial nature of royal justice could not have been more clearly displayed. “But the most strange thing, and one at which people were wonderfully taken aback, was that on the very same day on which Milord Dacres [sic] was hung,” wrote Chapuys, “another young man, son of the treasurer of the Royal household, who was one of the lot, and had also been present at the old man’s death, was freely pardoned by the King, though he had already been tried for some like misdemeanour, whereas his friend and companion Dacres met, as I have related, such a piteous death.”I21 The fact that the royal demesnes benefited from the confiscation of Lord Dacre’s estates was also commented upon by Londoners. In the same week, Lord Leonard Grey, the former lord deputy of Ireland, who had been questioned by the Duke of Norfolk in November, was condemned to death for treason. One of several charges against him was that he had allowed his pro-papal nephew to escape Ireland for Europe rather than arrest him. Grey was beheaded three days after the verdict.

  A Tudor courtier had to cultivate a studied indifference in the face of such horrors and the possibility that family, acquaintances, and friends could be removed at a moment’s notice. Queen Catherine’s household kept its reputation for gaiety and extravagance, a place where the musicians accompanied the dancing as often as the Queen’s passion for it required. The delicious, titillating rustle of gossip and innuendo accompanied the men of the privy chamber who called on the Queen’s ladies to flirt, tease, converse, and dance. Queen Catherine was supposed to occupy the role of goddess among the nymphs, an object of collective adoration, but never a participant. For a time, she lived vicariously through her women and tolerated far more than her predecessors might have. Even if we accept that Catherine did not know or may not have been certain about what was happening with her brother and Lady Margaret, there is still her failure to halt another affair embarked upon by her latest maid of honor, Dorothy Bray.

  At the age of twenty-seven, the blond and blue-eyed William, Lord Parr, had all the accomplishments needed for life as a middle-of-the-road courtier—fluent in French, a skilled hunter and musician, elegant in his manners, and a patron of the arts. He was only a boy when his father died, and his mother had worked hard to get him an heiress for a wife. Lady Maud Parr must have been tenacious, because William went down the aisle at thirteen with ten-year-old Lady Anne Bourchier, the only surviving child of the Earl of Essex. As Anne’s husband, William stood a good chance of succeeding her father to become an earl suo uxoris. Due to the bride’s youth, the marriage had still not been consummated when its matchmaker died in 1531, though even in death Maud took no chances with
her son’s future and left Anne a substantial amount of jewelry, which would be hers “when she lieth with my son.”22 The bequest was not enough to bring sparkle to a miserable union. William wanted to spend his life in the corridors of power, and he gravitated towards the company of bright clever young courtiers like the Earl of Surrey, while his wife went to court rarely and reluctantly. In their prayers, William leaned towards Protestantism, like his sisters and Lord Surrey; his wife was a religious conservative. Alas, the rosary was not enough to lasso Lady Parr away from sin when she ran off with a penniless clergyman, conceived a bastard child with him, and told her husband, in no uncertain terms, “that she never loved him, nor never would.” Lord Parr had no choice but to wear his horns in public, since Anne defied nearly all of the social conventions for aristocratic women and proclaimed that “she would take her pleasure and do as she listed.”23 William Parr may have been unfaithful to his wife before this scandal. If he had not been, he considered that her departure freed him of his obligations, and he fell into bed with Dorothy Bray, who was about sixteen or seventeen at the time.

  Given that Queen Catherine was supposed to be acting as the guardian of her maids’ reputations and future marital prospects, her failure to censure Bray’s relationship with a married man is revelatory. That she knew about Dorothy Bray’s affair and may even have found it entertaining is made quite clear by a conversation she had later with her own admirer, Thomas Culpepper. The fury of Anne Boleyn, Mary I, and Elizabeth I when their ladies’ moral standards slipped stands in stark contrast to Catherine’s indifference or obliviousness.24 A servant’s actions reflected on her mistress, and a queen who was incapable of controlling the morals of her staff was likely to be considered incapable of governing her own. To have allowed Dorothy Bray to indulge in the same kind of activity which she and her friends had undertaken whilst living at Horsham indicates that Catherine did not realize or did not care that, as queen, she could not encourage, and certainly could not indulge in, the behavior of her adolescence.