Young and Damned and Fair

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Young and Damned and Fair Page 34

by Gareth Russell


  On August 25, Francis Dereham arrived unexpectedly at Pontefract. His papers were still locked in a chest at Norfolk House, and whatever he had been promised in return for them, even implicitly, was evidently a debt too long delayed in Dereham’s eyes. His arrival presented Catherine with a crisis, which she had to move quickly to neutralize. Francis had come to her of his own volition after the Dowager Duchess’s patience finally reached a breaking point. They had quarreled, and in her fury she had thrown him out of her house, perhaps, although we do not know for certain, because he made demands about joining Catherine’s service. The fact that he made straight for the touring court after he stormed away from Norfolk House indicates where his priorities lay. Catherine could not afford to alienate him, certainly not after her grandmother had come so close to doing so. There was no obvious vacancy in the household, but necessity birthed invention, and after speaking to him privately in her quarters at Pontefract, Catherine introduced Francis to the rest of her staff as a newly appointed gentleman usher, who had previously worked for the Dowager Duchess of Norfolk.

  Unfortunately, Catherine’s anxiety about Francis’s ego and temper proved justified. He boasted to his friend Robert Damport, who was still in service at Norfolk House, that many people at court hated him because of the favor Catherine showed him at and after Pontefract. More accurately, the Queen’s other servants could not understand why Catherine tolerated such boorish behavior from one of her retainers or why he had been appointed in the first place. Their suspicion and resentment were compounded by Dereham’s remorselessly unappealing manners. He argued with another one of Catherine’s gentlemen ushers, Mr. Johns, who objected to Dereham’s habit of lingering at the table after supper, a privilege reserved for members of the Queen’s council. One evening, after he heard that Dereham was once again still at the table long after the meal had finished, Johns sent a page boy to order him away, with the sarcastic inquiry “whether he were of the Queen’s Council?” Dereham retorted, “Go to Mr. Johns and tell him I was of the Queen’s Council before he knew her and shall be when she hath forgotten him.”26 The exchange between the two men shows not only the recklessness of Dereham’s personality by alluding to some former intimacy with the Queen, but also the importance attached to etiquette within an environment like the Queen’s household. It also highlights how even relatively minor members were constantly being watched by one another. Catherine resorted to personally pressing occasional gifts of money into Francis’s hands, £3 here or £10 there, theoretically in return for “sending [him on] Errands, and writing of letters when her Secretary was out of the way,” in reality to get him to, as she begged during one exchange of money, “take heed what words you speak.”27

  Throughout the spring and summer of 1541, Catherine’s household was festering with private tensions. The indiscretion of Francis Dereham provoked the suspicions of its male members, the ascendancy of Lady Rochford provoked the jealousy of their female equivalents, and Margaret Morton and Luffkyn both thought they were going to be dismissed to make way for two girls suggested by the Dowager Viscountess.28 At the same time as this dangerous dynamic of internal suspicion and self-scrutiny was developing, Catherine’s focus was fixed on Thomas Culpepper, who came to her rooms most evenings at Pontefract and either left to help the King undress for the night or came to her again once the King was in bed and one of Thomas’s colleagues had been tasked with sleeping in the King’s bedchamber.

  Most nights at Pontefract, the Queen locked the doors to her bedroom and only Lady Rochford was allowed to attend her. When Mistress Luffkyn either disobeyed or misunderstood the instructions and tried to enter one evening, Catherine was so angry that she threatened to dismiss both her and Margaret Morton.29 When one of the King’s servants came with a message for the Queen, he found the door bolted on the other side. Like the Queen’s staff, the gentleman said nothing at the time but remembered it later. Lady Rochford ensured that certain doors were left open, and Catherine sent Culpepper the note, “As ye find the door, so to come,” a note which was subsequently used to imply that she had considered inviting him into her bed.

  She occasionally feared that they might be lured into a trap, that her husband might already suspect something and set a watch to catch Culpepper in her rooms.30 They were briefly separated in the second week of September when Culpepper accompanied the King while he inspected the northeastern port of Hull, an unscheduled visit and one of several that was now made possible by the promise to remain in the north until Henry’s summit with King James. It does not seem as if Catherine or her ladies accompanied the jaunt to Hull, since she is not mentioned in the accounts of the King’s arrival there.31 Even in her glistening silence, a demure and beautiful accessory at Henry’s side, the Queen was too important a person to be omitted in accounts of a royal reception if she had been present.

  Her reunion with her husband on September 15 was also her chance to resume her midnight meetings with Thomas. Catherine begged him never to confess what they were doing to a priest. One of Catherine’s twentieth-century biographers accredited this plea to Catherine’s vigorous credulity in believing that her husband, as God’s anointed, might actually have some kind of magical power to hear what was said between priest and penitent.32 More probably, Catherine jittered at the fact that her husband was head of the Church, with vast and as yet poorly understood powers. If Henry asked a priest to break the vow of secrecy that usually surrounds the sacrament of confession, or if the cleric felt duty-bound to tell him, the old rules of confidentiality might no longer apply. Culpepper, who was no more the wide-eyed bumpkin than Catherine, promised her that he would never tell anyone about them, even a priest.

  In her more relaxed and happier moments, Thomas made Catherine laugh and vice versa. One night when they were at York, he arrived through the usual open door and the Queen joked that she had a whole “store of other lovers at other doors as well as he.” Thomas batted back that he had no doubt about that. She sent him bracelets to keep his arms warm, a private joke between them that, before her, his arms had been kept warm by other women. Now he needed the bracelets because, according to the promises he had made to her in Lincoln, there was no one but the Queen.

  * * *

  I. Anne Herbert’s elder sister Katherine had been married to Lord Burgh’s eldest son, and after his premature death she married another northern nobleman, Lord Latimer.

  II. It is still pronounced this way among a dwindling number of denizens of a particular strain of Received Pronunciation, who have historically used it and a thousand other antiphonetic nomenclatures as linguistic bear traps to weed out conversational interlopers and demarcate the tribe. It is not generally pronounced that way in Pontefract itself, although the survival of the alternative form elsewhere preserves a link to the Tudors and Shakespeare.

  Chapter 18

  * * *

  Waiting for the King of Scots

  Driven by desire I did this deed,

  To danger myself without cause why,

  To trust the untrue not like to speed,

  To speak and promise faithfully.

  —Sir Thomas Wyatt (d. 1542), “On Trusting Suddenly”

  On September 18, Queen Catherine had her first sight of York, described by a visitor in the next generation as “the second city of England, the finest of this region and indeed of the whole North, as well as its principal fortress. It is pleasant, large, and strongly fortified, adorned with private as well as public buildings, crammed with riches and with people, and famous as the seat of the archbishop.”1 Two miles of walls encircled the religious and administrative capital of the north, home to the King’s Council in the Northern Parts, regional branches of the Star Chamber, and an archdiocese that served about one in ten of the English Christian population. Five fortified gateways led into York from the farmland and marshes surrounding it; the bridges over the Ouse and Foss rivers were, like similar conduits in London, crammed with multistoreyed residences, shops, taverns, and small c
hapels. It was an impressive and important city that had felt keenly the insult of no royal visit since that of Henry VIII’s father in 1487. That arrival had managed to win over a city that had hitherto remained defiantly loyal to “their” king, Richard III, head of the House of York at the time he fell and recalled in the city records as “the most famous prince of blessed memory King Richard late deceased.”2 The Duke of Norfolk, who knew and understood the north far better than Henry VIII did, hoped that Henry VIII’s arrival in his kingdom’s second city might have the same effect, banishing lingering regional resentment against the Royal Supremacy. In October 1536, the city gates had been opened to the rebellion, with no more than a halfhearted pretense at resistance. Incense and Latin chants had floated through the air in the city’s cathedral, York Minster, praying for the Pilgrims of Grace to be successful in turning back the tide of dissolutions and religious revolution. The uprising’s Council of War had met in York, and when it failed its most famous leader, Robert Aske, had been hoisted outside its castle to die of exposure.3 York had willingly handed itself over to the Pilgrimage, and retrospective protestations by its officials that it had done so only because it feared the rebels’ numbers looked even weaker in light of the collapse of the Wakefield conspiracy of 1541, when eleven of its supporters were brought back to their home town of York to be executed.4

  York had been, if not the origin, the eventual center of the rebellion, and so Catherine’s journey towards it through its county of Yorkshire was paved with more public prostrations. At every stage, in each new locality, she saw hundreds (on one occasion, thousands) on horseback or on their knees, describing themselves as “wretches,” vowing never to swerve again in their loyalty or their prayers for the long life and happy reign of King Henry of “bountiful heart and liberal grant,” his Queen, and his heir.5 Supplicants were split into two groups—those who had supported the rebellion, “grievously, heinously and wantonly,” and those who had remained loyal. The Archbishop of York, Edward Lee, approaching sixty and the highest ranked churchman in the land after Thomas Cranmer, sank into the grass with three hundred offending priests, passed £600 into Henry’s ring-heavy hands, and lauded him for the mercy he had shown to them. Archbishop Lee was the most famous of the Yorkshire ambiguous. He was ranked with those who had rebelled, even though he insisted and the government claimed to believe that he had only tolerated the uprising’s presence at York because he was terrified at what might happen to innocent people if it was defied. His letters from 1536, which had been sent to the King and his councillors, revealed where his sympathies had lain, when he expressed his happiness in a mistaken belief that the rebels had been pardoned and some of their demands listened to by London.6 Those whose thoughts remained more opaque but who had offered little resistance to the rebels were generally ordered to kneel with the “guilty” side of the submissions. The treason laws introduced to stifle opposition to the break with Rome had criminalized disloyal thoughts. Even knowledge of another’s misdeeds or animus towards the King was categorized under the lethal, catch-all legal term “misprision of treason.”

  Henry, Catherine, and their courtiers listened as York’s reception committee praised the “inspiration of the Holy Ghost replete with mercy and pity as evidently hath been shewed by your grace to your Subjects later offenders in these North parts.”7 In the distance, they could see the spires of York Minster, a cathedral dedicated to the patronage of Saint Peter, “Prince of the Apostles,” a project that had taken thousands of hands 242 years to build.8 Its white-and-gold vaulted ceiling soared above Catherine’s head as an ecclesiastical procession welcomed her when she and Henry arrived there. Shafts of royal purple and blue light shone on the floor, alongside a green so dark it was almost emerald. Catherine and her husband passed a statue of King John, participant in the most famous English royal quarrel with the papacy before Henry VIII’s, on their left, and his reverent son Henry III on their right. The Plantagenet monarchs formed part of a set that fanned out from the entrance screen and showed every king of England in chronological order from William the Conqueror on the far left to Henry VI on the opposite right. After his murder in 1471, the latter had been venerated as a martyr by many of his former subjects. Suspicious of populist cults, Thomas Cromwell’s commissioners had ordered Henry VI’s image to be removed from the carved lineup at York Minster. If Catherine had had time to really examine the twelfth plinth, she might therefore have noticed that poor Henry VI’s statue was wooden, a rushed job in comparison to his stone-and-gold ancestors. Henry VI was Henry VIII’s great-uncle, and his posthumous popularity had been an early plank of Tudor justifications for seizing the throne from the House of York. On Henry VIII’s orders, the image of the last Lancastrian king had been put back where he belonged. The stand-in would suffice until a new statue could be carved or, as events outmaneuvered human plans, until Protestants gained the upper hand again in the next decade and had “Saint” Henry VI scattered on a rubbish heap for a second time.

  Following the service, Henry and Catherine rode the two or three minutes from the Minster down to Petergate, one of the five gateways, and over to the closed Benedictine abbey of St. Mary, where the dismissed abbot’s redbrick mansion would serve as their home while they stayed in York. The street from the Minster to Petergate was one of the most prosperous parts of the city, home to skilled craftsmen, many of whom worked for the archdiocese. On their way into York, even any last-minute attempts to spruce up the ramshackle collection of timber houses and unpaved roads could not have hidden the narrow quarters and filthy streets. York’s collective memory looked back on the century preceding the Wars of the Roses as their “golden age,” after which the city had slipped into decline. Richard III had blamed trouble from the Scots for retarding the area’s prosperity; Henry VII suspected incompetence in the mayor and his officials. Numerous plague outbreaks, frequent and virulent in the first decade of the sixteenth century, had accelerated the city’s deterioration. The York aldermen encountered by Henry VII in 1487 may have been inept, but there were signs that the degeneration was happening across the north. Both Hull and Lincoln had informed the King in 1541 that they were facing similar problems.9 The half-sung requiem for York turned out to be obsequies over an empty bier—its fortunes revived significantly under Elizabeth I—though when Catherine alighted at a gutted St. Mary’s, halfway on its own road to ruin, she and the Yorkers accompanying her could have been forgiven for thinking that the rot was terminal and that King Henry did not necessarily regard that as a negative development.

  In the Queen’s rooms at St. Mary’s, Lady Rochford showed Catherine a ring belonging to Culpepper, which he had sent after stealing one of the batch of holy cramp rings that had been blessed by the King at Greenwich on Good Friday. When Lady Rochford told her of the good-natured larceny, Catherine sent Thomas another one from the batch she, as queen consort, had been handed during the Easter ceremonies. One evening when they were together, Catherine also brought up his betrayal of her when she was a maid of honor, to which he tried to use the dishonest defense that he had not slept with any other women until it was clear Catherine was going to marry the King. For someone who was usually so proud and preferred brittle one-upmanship in her flirtations, Catherine was unashamedly forthright with Culpepper when she told him about how she had wept in front of the other maids of honor when she heard he “loved another.”10

  At some point on the progress, probably at York, Culpepper was again unwell and Catherine wrote to him. It has been conjectured that this letter, which is the only one of Catherine’s known to survive in full, might date from Culpepper’s sickness at Greenwich earlier in the summer, but with its tone and details, including the fact that she cannot see him every day and the open declarations of love, it seems to belong to a later date in the summer. The Queen mentions that he will “depart from me again,” which could place it in the first week of September, after Pontefract and either just before or after the King’s trip to Hull, when Culpepper would hav
e been gone with his master for just over a week.

  Master Culpeper,

  I heartily recommend me unto you, praying you to send me word how that you do. It was showed me that you was sick, the which thing troubled me very much till such time that I hear from you praying you to send me word how that you do, for I never longed so much for a thing as I do to see you and to speak with you, the which I trust shall be shortly now. That which doth comfortly me very much when I think of it, and when I think again that you shall depart from me again it makes my heart die to think what fortune I have that I cannot be always in your company. Yet my trust is always in you that you will be as you have promised me, and in that hope I trust upon still, praying you that you will come when my Lady Rochford is here for then I shall be best at leisure to be at your commandment, thanking you for that you have promised me to be so good unto that poor fellow my man which is one of the griefs that I do feel to depart from him for then I do know no one that I dare trust to send to you, and therefore I pray you take him to be with you that I may sometime hear from you one thing. I pray you to give me a horse for my man for I had much ado to get one and therefore I pray send me one by him and in so doing I am as I said afor, and thus I take my leave of you, trusting to see you shortly again and I would you was with me now that you might see what pain I take in writing to you.

 

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