Young and Damned and Fair

by Gareth Russell

  Following their tiff on Maundy Thursday, Catherine kept away from Thomas Culpepper for a short period of time, until the attraction that had prompted her to send for him through Lady Rochford and the usher Henry Webb reasserted itself. After standing on the water’s edge for months, she dipped her feet in. At some point when they were back at Greenwich, between either May 12 and 31 or June 4 and 18, Culpepper was ill for a few days and Catherine sent one of her page boys, Morris, with dinners for the patient.25 Young Morris went several times with food from the Queen’s kitchens, meat most days and fish on Fridays or holy days. Morris was only a page, whose main function in the palace was running errands, and Catherine was not technically doing anything wrong, but sending dinner trays to a sickly man’s room was a flirtatious kind of charity.

  In some aspects, the previous year had been a difficult one for Thomas Culpepper. He had lost both of his parents, Sir Alexander and Lady Constance Culpepper, who died within a year of each other.26 On the positive side, he was still benefiting from the King’s fondness for him, expressed through gifts, grants of land, and get-of-jail-free cards for him and his servants.27 In March, royal indulgence had helped one of Culpepper’s servants, William Brice, escape punishment after he was reprimanded by the Privy Council for brawling in Southwark.28 Far more seriously, the King may also have intervened to save Thomas from the consequences of his actions a few years earlier, when he was accused of rape and murder.

  The only surviving account of this case is in a letter written in 1542 by an English Protestant merchant called Richard Hilles to the Swiss theologian Heinrich Bullinger. On this subject Hilles claimed that Culpepper

  two years before, or less, had violated the wife of a certain park-keeper in a woody thicket, while, horrid to relate!, three or four of his most profligate attendants were holding her at his bidding. For this act of wickedness, he was, notwithstanding, pardoned by the king, after he had been delivered into custody by the villagers on account of this crime, and likewise a murder which he had committed in his resistance to them, when they first endeavoured to apprehend him. God, who is just, will not always suffer wickedness, either here or elsewhere, to go unpunished.29

  Hilles, who fled England on account of his Protestant faith in 1540 or 1541 and had settled in Strasbourg by the time he wrote this letter, dates the attack to two or so years before early 1542, either when he was still living in London or had only very recently left. He also provides enough anecdotal detail about the affray and the King’s role in making the charges disappear to suggest that it had happened. Culpepper’s servants appear in the other records helping him pick locks, arrange potentially sexual assignations, or brawl in the streets. It is therefore, unfortunately, not beyond possibility that they held down a married woman at their employer’s behest or that they helped him take down one of his opponents when he was apprehended. If it did happen as Hilles described, it would have been around the time of Culpepper’s first romance with Catherine, which makes it difficult to believe she did not hear about it.

  Hilles’s story can be questioned on three points, the first being that it is not mentioned anywhere else, even in subsequent criticisms of Culpepper by Parliament or the French ambassador. The second is that Hilles could have confused Culpepper with somebody else, which was easily done because Culpepper had an elder brother with the same Christian name. Admittedly, the two Culpepper brothers were usually differentiated in grants or court documents concerning them, but these were official communications, not city gossip.30 It is possible that the elder Thomas Culpepper was responsible for the crime described in Richard Hilles’s letter and that his younger brother used his influence to have him pardoned.

  There are enough alternative explanations to Hilles’s version of what happened to prevent its acceptance as fact about the Thomas Culpepper associated with Catherine Howard. Equally, there are too many details for it to be dismissed as a fabrication, and short of the discovery of new documents, a satisfactory conclusion on Hilles’s story is likely to remain elusive.

  We can be more confident in describing Culpepper as unashamedly promiscuous with consensual partners. He seems to have had a mildly flirtatious relationship with Lord Lisle’s wife when he served in their household, and Lady Rochford acknowledged how attractive he was. Several of his partners are alluded to, and one named, in the surviving documents that mention him. The named lady was Elizabeth Harvey, usually referred to as Bess. She had been Culpepper’s mistress for some time when he began his late-night conversations with the Queen. She had once been attached to Anne Boleyn’s household, from which she had been dismissed on grounds that may have had something to with her alleged immorality. She remained at court, perhaps in some other lady’s service, although she was retired from the Queen’s household with an annual pension of £10, the salary of a maid of honor. She was still at court in 1540–41, when she became Culpepper’s latest mistress.

  Catherine had spent most of her married life on the move, and she was already familiar with the upheaval that came with each relocation, but the progress to the north in 1541 was a new experience not just for the Queen but for everyone around her. Most of the royal family’s residences were in the Thames valley and accessible by water, the court’s preferred mode of transport, and those that were not tended to be smaller and within riding distance. The tour of 1541 took them to houses that most of the court had never visited, in parts of the country that the King had never seen. Everything would have to be moved by land, making their journey more dependent on the weather than if they had been traveling on the Thames.

  Each department of the royal household had carts, chariots, and horses, as nearly everything that belonged to it moved with it from place to place—clothes, jewels, books, carpets, linens, furniture, even the irons for the King and Queen’s fires were transported. Catherine’s officers and councillors went north with her, as most of the Privy Council did for the King, since government was located with the King’s person. A rump council was left behind in London as caretakers of the capital. Some officers rode ahead to liaise with local suppliers to ensure the court had everything it needed by the time it arrived. The surveyor of the King’s works went with a team to inspect the next stop and repair anything that had fallen apart since the last time the house was visited, and Henry’s personal locksmith, Henry Romains, traveled with his assistants to check the locks, before handing over a set of keys to the King and Queen, whose chosen privy attendants would have copies made for the duration of their stay. The Queen’s servants unpacked her furniture, and the maids and women pointed out where it needed to be put; fires were made, beds dressed, and clothes unpacked.31

  The size of the royal party as it moved north from Westminster on June 30 was also unusual. With about four to five thousand horses, compared to the usual thousand, two hundred tents, and artillery sent from London by sea to the northeast, it looked more like a military operation than a royal progress, and it intensified speculation that Henry was rediscovering his aspirations for battle.32 As de Marillac watched the preparations, including the renewed interest in the southern and northern defenses, and restrictions placed on the movements of foreigners living in London, he told his government, “whether for offence or defence, the English are thinking of war.”33

  It had always been in France that English armies had won their most memorable victories. As well as this legacy, Henry VIII was also heir to an antique claim that had been repeated at his coronation in 1509, when he had been crowned Henry, by the Grace of God, King of England, France, and Lord of Ireland. The roots of this claim went back to the fourteenth century, when England’s King Edward III, a grandson of King Philippe IV of France on his mother’s side, believed that he was his grandfather’s heir to the French throne after a run of dynastic ill fortune so improbably catastrophic that it fueled a legend that Philippe’s entire immediate family had been cursed. The different claimants eventually sparked a war that ran on and off for the next 116 years. Its later name, the Hundred Ye
ars’ War, is thus technically a misnomer, poetic rather than pedantic.

  The great moments of the Hundred Years’ War entered into the English imagination as an integral part of their identity. The naval victory at Sluys, the sieges of Harfleur and Rouen, the Black Prince’s capturing of King Jean the Good after victory at Poitiers, and the battles of Crécy and Agincourt acquired a totemic value in the national memory. An imperfect comparison today might be the ways in which the evacuation of Dunkirk, the cracking of the Enigma code, “Blitz spirit,” and the King and Queen’s visits to a bomb-flattened East End of London have become something which most British people know about, however imprecisely. In America, it might be the crossing of the Delaware, the firing on Fort Sumter, or the Gettysburg Address—complex events separated by years or even decades yet still understood as important parts of the communal narrative. They may be lovingly if imprecisely remembered by many, and through that they continue to matter and vitally so. Today, all of this may appear as ludicrous. The English claim that their monarchs were the lawful sovereigns of France might seem like an exercise either in absurdity or fanciful nostalgia, depending on how charitable the interpretation—something that might have been a joke had it not cost so many lives—but the early modern view of war fueled its cultural importance. Pursuing a rightful claim was part of the cult of chivalry. For many of Henry VIII’s subjects, particularly the upper classes, that was justification in itself, and they rode into battle with minds unencumbered by later generations’ doubts that a just war might be a paradox.

  Henry’s advancing age—he turned fifty in June 1541—the reminder of his mortality at the start of Lent, and the fact that he might soon be too old to pursue dreams of securing his posthumous reputation on the battlefield also helped focus attention on an invasion of France in the near future. If that happened, the potential for Scottish involvement in the north of England had to be negated. The last time Henry had attacked France, James IV’s campaign against England ended in defeat at Flodden. Thanks to the King’s mishandling of the Pilgrimage of Grace and the trail of broken promises in its wake, the north remained England’s unbolted back door. A royal visit would, as Catherine’s uncle Norfolk believed, give the King an opportunity to get his house in order before he attacked somebody else’s.

  Henry and Catherine’s four-month progress was tied in many different ways to these aspirations. The Wakefield conspiracy and rumors of Scottish involvement in it made peace in the north a priority as it had never been at any other point in Henry’s reign, even when most of it had been convulsed by rebellion in 1536. The Duke of Norfolk had been encouraging the King to go on progress there for four years. Henry agreed whenever the idea was mentioned, but it inevitably vanished into the ether. Norfolk’s report that English defenses on the border with Scotland required repairs had received similar agreement followed by amnesia until his trip during Lent in 1541, when he was accompanied by a military engineer called Stefan van Haschenperg, who was charged with strengthening the fortifications. Norfolk had also visited two of the great northern magnates—Ralph Neville, Earl of Westmorland, who had previously helped suppress disorder in the region, and Henry Clifford, Earl of Cumberland, who as governor of Carlisle Castle, ten miles from Scotland, had the responsibility of preserving peace on the western sections of the border. Norfolk left the two earls to be ready if the Scottish threat materialized.34

  Increasing English military presence on the border would hopefully intimidate the Scottish government, while an impressive royal progress would stimulate loyalty and obedience in the northern English. For the visit itself, a policy of honey and vinegar would be enacted, whereby the King would forgive those who had sided with the rebellion in 1536, after they or their representatives formally prostrated themselves in a public ceremony which acknowledged their collective faults. These ceremonies made a virtue out of necessity, since in the aftermath of the Pilgrimage of Grace, if the government had punished all of the uprising’s supporters or those who had allowed the unrest to happen, either through fear of the rebels or sympathy with their aims, then the entire governing class of most of the northern counties would have vanished at a stroke.

  Catherine was thus being marched into a situation that had the potential to end in disaster. Her uncle and those pushing for the tour could be wrong in their predictions that it would revitalize royal control over the region. The precautions taken to protect the royal party were extensive. Significant and loyal northerners were told not to travel to greet the King and Queen, but to stay in their localities to suppress any signs of trouble.35 Like Catherine herself at this stage in her queenship, the progress embodied a juxtaposition of arrogance and insecurity.

  One of Catherine’s companions on the journey was her eldest stepdaughter.36 Physically, Mary Tudor resembled her father, most noticeably around the mouth. Charles de Marillac joked that Mary’s voice was as unexpectedly low for a woman’s as her father’s was high for a man’s.37 She had an excellent complexion which made her look five or so years younger than she was. Marillac thought she looked about eighteen or twenty in 1541, when she turned twenty-five that February. The long days of the progress did not strain a woman who kept herself physically active with two- or three-mile walks most mornings, weather permitting. Emotionally, she was less robust. She suffered from depression, what de Marillac called her “ennuy” when he heard about it from her servants, who noticed that it lifted when she was no longer out of favor with her father, a state so horrible it had the power to break a woman known for her courage and determination.38 Like her late mother, Katherine of Aragon, Mary was deeply religious, but unlike Katherine she had ended her rustication from court by swearing oaths that acknowledged her father’s headship of the Church and, equally painful, her own illegitimacy. Mary Tudor’s motto was Truth, the daughter of Time; in her case, an apt declaration since twelve years later she led England’s brief resubmission to papal authority. As with many people on the progress to the north and even more of those watching as it passed by, Mary’s religious views corresponded with the rebels’ of 1536, something which she was intelligent enough to keep hidden for the time being.

  In the sixteenth century, likenesses of royalty and glimpses into the lifestyle of the privileged and famous were few. The procession of the King, the Queen, and their court through the towns, villages, and hamlets of the provinces offered a spectacle that most people north of London had never seen. The progress trooped along the Great Northern Road which ran like a spine through England, connecting London with the capital of Scotland. Accounts told of the court’s transports and baggage train sinking into mud as the roads turned to sludge because “the rains have since been so great and incessant, and the weather so unseasonably cold and stormy.”39 Crops were damaged and diseases spread. Catherine saw little of the observers curious or loyal enough to brave the weather and line the road to see her pass by. As the rain thumped on the canopy of her horse-drawn litter, Catherine suffered with each jolt. The weather had made her so unwell that some people thought the progress would or should be called off.40 It was saved by the amount of preparation that had gone into it, which made the prospect of cancellation too horrible to actualize, and by the time the Queen left Grafton, the last stop that she was familiar with, the decision to press ahead with the visit to the north had been taken.41

  * * *

  I. The freed member of the gang was John Cheney (killed in battle in 1544), son of Sir Thomas Cheney, treasurer of the royal household from 1539 to 1558.

  Chapter 16

  * * *

  The Girl in the Silver Dress

  O, you wake then! come away,

  Times be short, are made for play;

  The humorous moon too will not stay . . .

  —Ben Jonson, Oberon, the Faery Prince: A Masque (1611)

  On July 7, 1541, while she was still at Dunstable, Catherine received a new title when heralds at Greenwich proclaimed her the first queen consort of Ireland.1 The Irish Parliament had been summ
oned in spring, met from June 13 to July 20, and its first statute was a proposal to change Henry’s title from lord to king of Ireland. The bilingual Earl of Ormond translated the relevant speeches into Irish to the “contention [contentment]” of fellow lords who did not speak English, and the motion was “joyously agreed to by both Houses.”2 Those hearing the news on the streets of Dublin could not have been more emphatically supportive. Prisoners were pardoned, the council dispensed free wine to the revelers who were dancing and lighting bonfires in the streets, Dubliners organized celebratory feasts in their homes, and two thousand people attended a thanksgiving Mass at Saint Patrick’s Cathedral.3 The kings of England had been styled lords of Ireland for the last three centuries, since the reign of Henry II, when his intervention after a series of local disputes culminated with him being acknowledged as overlord by Ireland’s local kings and chieftains, with the apparent blessing of the papacy.4

  The Dublin Parliament wanted to use the Crown of Ireland Act to fix a plethora of problems facing their country, and while many foreigners, and historians, assumed that the kingly elevation in Ireland was Henry’s idea, it was an initiative born in Dublin. In his capacity as lord of Ireland, Henry had ruled on the vicious side of indifference—when he did involve himself in the island’s issues, it was seldom pleasant. The first reason for proposing a change in his title was that a king had a certain set of expected responsibilities, far more clearly defined than a lord’s, and as king, Henry would be expected to work harder at the island’s good government.