Young and Damned and Fair

by Gareth Russell

  Catherine thought she would be left alone at Syon, but the anesthetic of life in the Middlesex convent was denied her when the councillors came to confront her with the constant drip of information provided by her servants. As with Lady Rochford, but to a lesser extent, the steady thump of harassment caused a collapse. De Marillac heard that “she thought that after her free confession they would not enquire further; but, finding the contrary, refuses to drink or eat and weeps and cries like a madwoman, so that they must take away things by which she might hasten her death.”42 On November 22, a proclamation was issued from Hampton Court that stripped Catherine of her royal title on the grounds that “she had forfeited her honour, and should be proceeded against by law, and was henceforth to be named no longer Queen, but only” as Catherine Howard.43

  The final scene now looked like it could have no venue bar the scaffold. Catherine’s confessions had not convinced. The government would press ahead with a charge of adultery, either in deed or intent, with Thomas Culpepper and, if they could find the proof they were searching for, with Francis Dereham as well. Catherine’s reputation had been torn asunder by courtiers. Her uncle Norfolk, who described her in one conversation as little better than a prostitute, led the charge. She was also betrayed closer to home by her brother-in-law and her sister Isabella. The Bayntons were with Catherine at Syon throughout that odd winter. Sir Edward, who ate with the other servants in one of Catherine’s three rooms, had been sent with the instruction that “the King’s pleasure” was that Baynton “should attend upon the Queen, to have the rule and government of the house.”44

  Isabella had been questioned earlier in the month. As the Queen’s half sister and a lady of the privy chamber, she was naturally under suspicion. She was saved by the favor Catherine had shown to Lady Rochford over the previous months. De Marillac reported to Paris that “the Queen’s sister is released as innocent,” though he overstated the reasons for her acquittal and assumed Isabella had actually been dismissed from Catherine’s service for Lady Rochford, when they had remained colleagues throughout.45 It was not compassion that prompted Henry to send the Bayntons to Syon with Catherine. Sir Edward’s willingness to assist the council in their investigations of Queen Anne Boleyn in 1536 and his antipathy towards the household he served made him a reliable jailer and a trustworthy informant. Baynton was the one who told Cranmer how Catherine behaved when the Archbishop left her rooms in the first few days of her disgrace. In the same month as she was questioned and released, Isabella received from the King the grant of a small parcel of land in Wiltshire, which, rather than being the usual lifetime bequest, was to pass “to the heirs of the body of the said Isabella.”46 Henry’s men did not doubt Isabella Baynton’s innocence, but that he gifted Isabella with land in the same month as her half sister was incarcerated and their brother Charles was banished from court leads to a conclusion that she had done far more than clear herself of complicity. Edward Baynton’s appointment to Syon and the grant to Isabella suggest that they sent the Privy Council reports on Catherine’s behavior.

  The information coming out of Syon painted a bleak picture: Catherine’s appetite had vanished, her moods were volatile, and she was often hysterical. When he was quizzed later about his involvement with Catherine, Thomas Culpepper reported, with far more literal accuracy than he intended, that Catherine “pined for him, and was actually dying of love for his person.”47 By the end of November, when the arrangements for his trial were under way, it did not look as if she would be the first or the only victim of their infatuation.

  Chapter 21

  * * *

  The King Has Changed His Love into Hatred

  Why should the private pleasure of some one

  Become the public plague of many more?

  —William Shakespeare, The Rape of Lucrece (1594)

  Culpepper and Dereham were escorted into the Great Hall at the Guildhall, center of London’s civic government, on Thursday, December 1, by Sir John Gage, constable of the Tower, where they had spent the last few weeks. Michael Dormer, Lord Mayor of London, presided over the trial, in conjunction with, amongst others, Lord Chancellor Audley; Lord Russell; the earls of Southampton, Hertford, and Sussex; the Duke of Suffolk and the Duke of Norfolk. Knights from the counties where the Queen’s crimes were allegedly committed had been summoned as petty juries. Also present was John Sackville, sheriff in Lambeth, where Catherine and Dereham’s affair had taken place years earlier, as was a jury from Kent, Culpepper’s native county and the location of Greenwich Palace, where his first inappropriate meeting with the Queen had taken place back in April. In a show of solidarity, every Privy councillor attended, including the Queen’s cousin, Lord Surrey.

  Both men pleaded not guilty. The Queen’s deposition, which claimed a coerced sexual relationship with Dereham but none with Culpepper, was read aloud to the court. The details gleaned from the interrogations about her premarital romance with Dereham and summer interactions with Culpepper were also relayed. The allegation that Dereham had intended to resume his affair with the Queen after he joined her household at Pontefract was lent unfortunate credence by a joke Catherine had made about Culpepper to Lady Rochford during the progress, when she had apparently said that if Culpepper did not visit her that night, she could find another man behind a door who, in de Marillac’s early modern French, was “ung aultre qui ne demandoit pas meilleur party,” which could translate either as another who would cause less hassle or someone who represented a “making the best of things” choice. The Queen had made similar jibes when she teased Culpepper that she had a store of lovers waiting to replace him in York. In the hands of a skilled prosecutor, those words could be twisted and magnified as an allusion to Francis Dereham, who denied any aspirations to treasonable adultery, despite the torture he had endured, and admitted only to sleeping with Catherine in the Dowager Duchess’s establishment in the belief that he and Catherine were betrothed.

  Next to him, Culpepper claimed that although the Queen had “pined for him,” encouraged to do so by an interfering Lady Rochford, they had never gone to bed together. Nonetheless, his admission before the council two weeks earlier that he had “intended and meant to do ill” was enough to damn him. The charges against Thomas focused on the fact that although he had not passed beyond words with the Queen, he had confessed his intention to do so, and that even if he had never consummated his relationship with her, such conversations between a subject and a Queen “deserved death.” The specifications of where they had met to plan their adultery were kept vague. The indictments stated that Queen Catherine had “on the 29 Aug. 33 Henry VIII., at Pomfret, and at other times and places before and after, with Thos. Culpepper, late of London, one of the gentlemen of the King’s privy chamber, falsely and traitorously held illicit meeting and conference to incite the said Culpepper to have carnal intercourse with her; and insinuated to him that she loved him above the King and all others. Similarly the said Culpepper incited the Queen.”I Thomas’s prosecutors did not have much truck with the idea that there had been an instigator and a passive recipient in the relationship.

  After the jury retired, they returned a verdict that “sufficient and probable evidence” had been produced to justify the death sentence. With that, each prisoner chose to follow the well-established script of submission. One could not say the law, the foundation of order, was unjust and so Dereham and Culpepper changed their pleas to acknowledge that they had been found guilty. Full prostration before the Crown was their only chance at salvation once a jury had reached that decision. Since neither of them was an aristocrat, there was no legal precedent for any other kind of traitor’s death sentence than hanging, drawing, and quartering, which is what they received. Even his friends could not conceal their disapproval at the sight of Norfolk laughing as the sentence was handed down.1

  What had they really been condemned to die for? Dereham and Culpepper were trapped not by what they had done but what they had planned to do. Their actions—in Culpepp
er’s case the covert meetings and in Dereham’s joining Catherine’s household—were taken, not unreasonably, as proof that they both had the goal of seducing the King’s wife. Dereham was also guilty of withholding knowledge of Catherine’s treasonous conduct, because he had not alerted the government to their precontract and her unsuitability to be queen at the time of her marriage. The documents about Dereham’s last two weeks alive are frustratingly imprecise. De Marillac, who, like all the other major embassies in London, had accepted the Privy Council’s invitation to send witnesses to the Guildhall trial, only confirms that Dereham confessed after the jury had found him guilty. Yet it seems unlikely that he confessed, as Culpepper did, to a plan to become the Queen’s lover. Although de Marillac does not specify, Dereham’s submission at the end of the six-hour trial probably related to his failure to alert the Privy Council about Catherine’s lack of virginity by 1540. This left Dereham in a legal gray area. It was, after all, also illegal to slander the Queen consort. Which law should he have broken? The situation was further complicated by Catherine’s insistence that any talk of marriage between them had been a joke. Francis’s death sentence could only be fully justified if it was proven beyond reasonable doubt that he had hoped for something unambiguously treasonous because of his feelings for Catherine—either that the King would die or that Catherine would consent to an adulterous relationship. The King harbored no doubts that Francis had entertained one or both of those thoughts, despite the fact that no amount of torture could bring Francis to admit to either.

  With his own trial fast approaching, Robert Damport buckled and asked to see some of the Privy Council. They visited him in his cell in the Tower, as Catherine’s three brothers rode through the streets of London with Lord Surrey and Thomas Culpepper’s brother to advertise that they were free men, untainted by suspicion of their kinsman’s treason, an absolution on horseback.2 Damport told his visitors that when the King’s affair with Catherine first began, Dereham fell into despair during which he reflected hopefully that if the King died, he might be able to resume his relationship with Catherine. The exact words he reported were “I could be sure to Mistress Catherine, and I would; but I dare not. The King beginneth to love her; but, and he were dead, I am sure I might marry her.”3 The councillors were skeptical, considering that both Damport and Dereham had been pressed for such information before and denied it. Damport also made this revelation on December 6, five days after Francis was condemned to death, quite possibly after the verdict against his friend sufficiently frightened him into telling a lie. If Francis was going to perish anyway, perhaps by perjuring himself Damport might live. His story was, almost certainly, a fabrication. He had not admitted it while he was tortured the first time, Francis denied it up to the very end, and even the councillors, who had wanted this testimony earlier, seemed surprised at Damport’s revelation after Dereham had already been condemned. There is also the fact that the chronology of Francis’s visit to Ireland does not quite fit with Damport’s claim. According to Damport, Dereham was distraught because the King began “to love” Catherine, which would place the conversation in the spring or early summer of 1540. Every other piece of evidence relating to Francis’s decision to leave London suggests that their last quarrel had been over Thomas Culpepper.4

  The circumstances of Damport’s revelation and the tenacity with which Dereham, who had admitted his earlier romps with Catherine, stuck to his denial even when the King, inspired by Damport’s claim, ordered both men to be subjected to another round of torture, also suggests that Damport’s final, desperate revelation was untrue.5 Even as Francis’s family ransacked their resources for an offering to the government that might have their son acquitted or his sentence at least commuted to beheading, and he was reduced to begging for the latter, he would not budge from his claims that he had never hoped for or planned the King’s death, nor had he planned to commit adultery with the Queen. De Marillac expected Dereham and Culpepper to be executed on the Saturday two days after their trial. Instead, some of Francis Dereham’s last few days alive were spent at the mercy of torturers and another round of questions.

  The information, or lack of, provided by the torture sessions was sent to Henry by his nervous councillors, who had persuaded him to decamp to the countryside until the affair was resolved, with only musicians, one or two advisers, and privy chamber gentlemen for company. De Marillac heard that “this King has changed his love for the Queen into hatred,” and the councillors bore the brunt of his mood swings as he grappled with the realization that his wife had preferred another man to him. There was no repetition of the nighttime river banquets that had occurred when Anne Boleyn was imprisoned in 1536 or the cheery plays Henry had penned about it and shown to a discomfited Bishop of Carlisle. In 1541, he was absolutely certain that Catherine had deceived him, and his grief was so severe that at one point his entourage feared for his sanity. He lurched from his seat at the council table with a sudden call for horses without any indication of where he was planning to go. He cried for a sword so that he could kill “that wicked woman” himself and vowed that he would have her tortured to death to ensure she felt as much pain in her demise as she had delight in her lust. There were echoes of the Lenten rants about Cromwell as he blamed his councillors for their poor service and less threatening yet still uncomfortable scenes during which the King again wept in front of his servants.6

  Despite this erratic behavior, Henry remained in control of the case against his wife and her family, even from his rural retreats. His guiding hand can be seen throughout the paperwork, where phrases like “This is His Majesty’s opinion . . .” and instructions to wait “till the King’s pleasure should be further known” proliferate, along with his orders of whom to arrest, whom to pardon, why and when; his citation of previous legal cases to convince the judges that treason had taken place; his sanctioning of the use of torture on Robert Damport and Francis Dereham; his interest in sending his own physicians to nurse Lady Rochford back to health to secure her execution; and his direct involvement in arranging the seizure of Howard goods and the relocation of the clan’s dependents.7 His grief did not touch everyone. The King of France sent several letters which were, on the surface, comforting but on closer reflection seem masterfully patronizing. François’s platitude that “the lightness of women cannot bind the honour of men” reads like a reassurance designed to accentuate what it claimed to dispel.8 Eustace Chapuys, who had seen too many of Henry’s matrimonial misdemeanors, was even less sympathetic. In a letter to the young Bishop of Arras, one of Maria of Austria’s councillors, Chapuys gave his unvarnished assessment of Henry’s mood that December:

  The king has wonderfully felt the case of the Queen, his wife, and that he has shown greater sorrow and regret at her loss than at the faults, loss, or divorce of his preceding wives. In fact, I should say that this king’s case resembles very much that of the woman who cried more bitterly at the loss of her tenth husband than she had cried at the death of the other nine put together, though all of them had been equally worthy people and good husbands to her: the reason being that she had never buried one of them without being sure of the next, but that after the tenth husband she had no other one in view, hence her sorrow and her lamentations. Such is the case with the King, who, however, up to this day does not seem to have any plan or female friend to fall back upon.9

  Two days after Chapuys wrote this, an unstable Catherine received a delegation at Syon who wanted to know more specifically why she had allowed Francis back into her service.10 Considering that Francis was already condemned to death, the queries sought evidence to incriminate her family as the case against them gathered momentum, as per the King’s instructions. The ex-queen was part of a group who found themselves unexpectedly pestered in their prison cells or homes. Joan Bulmer and Alice Restwold were brought back, the former to answer questions mostly pertaining to the Dowager Duchess’s knowledge of the affair and the latter pressed on what Lord William, who had helped find her a
job after she left Norfolk House, knew or suspected. The two women endured three days of interrogation, spread out over a nine-day period.11 Edward Waldegrave trawled his memory to provide answers about Dereham’s intentions towards Catherine and actions after she became queen.12 The Dowager Duchess’s maids were asked if they had witnessed her incinerating any of Dereham’s papers, a charge which the Dowager consistently denied, heightening the King’s suspicions since he could not understand why the Duchess had Francis’s coffers broken into unless it was “to conceal letters of treason.”13 Katherine Tilney and her former colleagues William Ashby and Andrew Maunsay were also quizzed about the Dowager, who had taken to her bed in Norfolk House with the claim that she was too ill to receive visitors, much less be moved for questioning.14