Young and Damned and Fair

by Gareth Russell

  The Tower is always locked and sealed at sundown. Catherine heard the gates shutting and the locks turning as she faced her last night. At about seven o’clock in the morning, the privy councillors arrived to witness her execution. Her cousin, Lord Surrey, attended, just as he had Thomas Cromwell’s eighteen months earlier, though not in the same boisterous spirits. The only councillors to miss it were the Duke of Suffolk, who had been compelled to sit for health reasons during most of his recent speeches in the House of Lords and whose ill health may have been exacerbated by the expedition on the freezing river to fetch Catherine on Friday, and her uncle Norfolk, who had abandoned not only her but Lady Rochford, his niece by marriage, and his brother, sister, sister-in-law, and “ungracious” stepmother in a letter to the King in which he disavowed all affection for them and knowledge of their crimes.24 Norfolk had attended sessions of the Privy Council the day before the beheading, so it was apparently a diplomatic choice to stay away from Catherine’s death.25

  She was escorted out into the chilly morning air and led to a scaffold that stood on the same site where Anne Boleyn had been executed.II26 Catherine’s hope that the execution would be private was not granted, although the decision to hold it within the confines of the Tower saved her from dying in front of a crowd as large as Cromwell’s and Lord Hungerford’s. One of the men watching her was Ottwell Johnson, a London-based merchant with family ties to Calais, where Catherine’s father had sought refuge in the twilight of a dwindling life. Edmund, who had endured so much humiliation, had fathered a daughter aggressively averse to it. Now, a demure and fragile figure in a dark gown, her feet moved up the steps to the scaffold. Johnson watched Catherine with admiration as she made steady progress towards the headsman. He did not write down her exact words, but he told his brother two days later that she died well.III That day, at the palace, her husband was bouncing from room to room overseeing preparations for the guests who had been invited to attend a banquet with him the day after, the feast of Saint Valentine. Catherine’s marriage ended as it had begun, with a celebration and a slaughter. For her last performance, she was, as ever when in public, note perfect. She spoke of Christ and the redemption promised to all who believed. She urged the crowd to learn from her example and effusively praised the justice of her sentence and the good government of the King. There were no last-minute protestations of love, nor was there admission of guilt for the adultery she was suspected of but had not formally been condemned for.

  A few women from her suite stood by to perform their last service for Catherine, who sank to the straw and nuzzled her neck, bare and exposed, into the embrace of the block. She had made it familiar. She would leave with dignity. The feared final humiliation was avoided as the axe rose into the air, then descended at rapid speed to slice through Catherine’s neck with one clean and merciful stroke. Blood gushed forth onto the scaffold; the dead woman’s head thudded into the straw; the ladies moved forward with a cloak that they threw over the little body and then they lifted it, and the head, over to one side of the scaffold. Jane Boleyn, Lady Rochford, was brought out to follow her mistress. She sang from the same hymn sheet—she was a wretched sinner, as all Christians were, she begged for mercy from God and prayers from the bystanders, she praised the King—and knelt down. For her too the end was swift. A whistle in the air, a momentary trauma, and the play was over.

  No one recorded Jane’s final speech either, but Ottwell Johnson wrote, “I saw the Queen and the Lady Rochford suffer within the Tower, the day following, whose souls (I doubt not) be with God, for they made the most godly and Christians’ ends, that ever was heard tell of (I think) since the world’s creation; uttering their lively faith in the blood of Christ only, and with goodly words and steadfast countenances.”27 Had Catherine lived out a normal span and died with the title she acquired on her wedding day, representatives of London guilds would have lined the route her coffin took through the city. Hundreds of flaming torches would have flickered in the darkness over the many days it took to inter her. One maiden for each year of her earthly life would have carried a taper, while anthems and requiems rang out to pray for her soul’s entry into paradise. Mountains of black cloth would have been issued to every member of the royal households, down to the page boys, all of whom would have appeared in the procession, honoring their departed mistress. Hundreds of poor folk, encouraged to pray for her soul, would have moved with knights and noblemen on horseback, carrying displays of Catherine’s heraldry and images of her patron saints. While her bier rested in the chapel, six women would have kept vigil, on rota, kneeling throughout. Alms would have been issued in the dead queen’s name. All the panoply and pomp of monarchy would have accompanied her off the face of the earth. Bishops would have blessed her grave before her body was lowered into it, after which her chamberlain, his deputies, the officers of her household, and her gentlemen ushers would have broken their staffs, symbols of their office, and hurled the broken pieces into the grave to symbolize that their service to the Queen was at an end.28

  Instead, her body was taken, with Lady Rochford’s, to the chapel of Saint Peter-ad-vincula a few yards away, and the stones beneath the altar were prised up. Jane Boleyn and Catherine Howard were buried quickly next to the moldering remains of Lady Salisbury, Thomas More, Jane’s husband, and another queen of England. The prayers for the faithfully departed were hastily intoned, the cannons fired out over London, the stones were returned, the few attendees genuflected to the altar and walked out of the little church into the courtyard, where the scaffold still stood. The body of Catherine Howard was left to a vast silence. In all probability, she had not yet reached her twenty-first birthday.

  * * *

  I. A catch-all term that can refer to any kind of behavior that offends or harms the dignity of the sovereign. In social matters, it can sometimes refer to egregious rudeness. In this case, it was a crime that undermined the monarch.

  II. The spot on Tower Green, still exhibited to tourists today and marked with a memorial plaque, is almost certainly not the site of the actual scaffold on which Catherine perished. It was shown by a colorful yeoman to Queen Victoria, who had a fascination with Anne Boleyn and Lady Jane Grey, but the actual spot of Anne and Catherine’s scaffolds lay on what is now the parade ground near the White Tower.

  III. The story that she proclaimed “I die a Queen, but I would rather die the wife of Culpepper” is apocryphal and comes from an account which claimed Catherine had been interrogated by Thomas Cromwell.

  Chapter 23

  * * *

  The Shade of Persephone

  Her?

  Don’t even mention her—she no longer exists.

  —Sophocles, Antigone (c. 441 BC)

  Twelve days after Catherine’s death, Maria of Austria wrote to Eustace Chapuys. The majority of the letter was occupied by a précis of her brothers’ activities in the Hapsburg Empire. On English affairs, the Queen regent told the ambassador, “We cannot do otherwise than thank you most cordially for the good service you are doing by continually informing Us of occurrences in that country.”1 This was Maria’s only oblique reference to Catherine’s death. The former queen had already passed beyond relevance. Glaziers were paid to remove her arms from the windows and niches of the English royal palaces, and seventeen months later, Henry married Katherine Parr, an elegant and intelligent widow in her early thirties.2

  The apparent desire to draw a veil over an embarrassing incident, now that a blood sacrifice had been offered in atonement, saved Catherine’s friends and family from their sentences of life imprisonment. All were pardoned and set free, most in May 1542. After that, the majority of those servants and friends who had known Catherine, and come perilously close to dying with her, vanished into the safety of anonymity. Francis’s friend Edward Waldegrave even managed to return to service for the Prince of Wales, and by 1545 he had sufficient good standing at court for the new queen to refer to him as “our well-beloved Edward Waldegrave, servant to our most
dear and entirely beloved son the lord prince.”3 Waldegrave married a Chesworth alumna, Francis’s former lover and Catherine’s friend Joan Bulmer, after she became a widow. Her first marriage had never been a happy one and, after her imprisonment, her first husband had refused to be reconciled with her.4 She and her second husband had five children together and retired to a manor house in Warwickshire, purchased by Edward.5 He died there in 1584, and Joan outlived him to die on December 10, 1590, the forty-ninth anniversary of Francis Dereham’s execution. The couple are still buried in Saint Mary’s Church in Lawford, near their home, which has since been demolished; their tomb bears the inscription The end of the just is peace.6

  The Dowager Duchess of Norfolk also left the Tower in the spring of 1542 and after she died in 1545 she was buried next to her husband, whom she had outlived by just over two decades. In her grave, Tudor politics managed to disturb Agnes one last time. With the last of the priories and remnants of the monasteries closing, the Howards moved her body to St. Mary-at-Lambeth, the church near Norfolk House. Agnes’s bones remain there, but because of significant Victorian renovations to the church, which is now a museum, her resting place, along with that of Anne Boleyn’s mother, who was buried there in 1538, is no longer marked.I

  The diplomatic crisis, which Catherine had witnessed the acceleration of in the summer and autumn of 1541, culminated with English invasions of Scotland and France, wars that changed, or ended, the lives of many whom Catherine had known. Her brother-in-law Sir Edward Baynton, who had served and then abandoned her, died in the French campaign. Sensibly, Baynton made a will before he crossed the Channel, which included bequests to Archbishop Cranmer and Richard Rich. In France, Baynton was in charge of overseeing the transport home of sick and wounded soldiers. It is possible that he contracted an illness from this work that resulted in his death on November 27, 1544.7 Catherine’s sister Isabella subsequently married the MP Sir James Stumpe, who had been her stepson-in-law until his first wife, Bridget Baynton, died. Isabella, who married again after Stumpe’s death, passed away in 1573.8

  Thanks to Henry’s wars, the Countess of Bridgewater was never able to reunite her family. Her daughter Anne seems to have returned to her care and was eventually betrothed to Lord Stourton, who died before they were married, though as proof of his affection he left Anne “all my plate of silver gilt.”9 The Countess’s son Gruffydd took up his mother’s quest to have his father posthumously pardoned; he became an MP and one of his sons, Walter, fought for Elizabeth I.10 Her youngest son Thomas did not return. At the time of the Countess’s arrest, the Crown had placed Thomas in ward to the Bishop of Carlisle and sent him north to join the Bishop’s household. Evidently, Thomas detested his time there, because he ran away and, to ensure he was not sent back, crossed the border and offered his services to the Scottish Crown. He had inherited the Howard skill on the battlefield, because in 1544 he commanded two hundred men at the Battle of Blar-na-leine. The skirmish, which aimed to crush an insurrection, “began,” in one contemporary’s account, “with the discharge of arrows at a distance; but when their shafts were spent both parties rushed to close combat, and, attacking each other furiously . . . a dreadful slaughter ensued.”11 The Countess’s son was, at the age of about nineteen or twenty, among the dead. Like his cousin Catherine, he was buried without pomp, and today his remains probably rest somewhere near the ruins of Beauly Priory in Aird, Scotland.

  We know very little of Charles Howard’s movements following his rustication in 1541, but one seventeenth-century account states that he was killed fighting in France three years later.12 None of Catherine’s brothers seem to have fathered children, and the same source states that Henry Howard died at a relatively young age. The only brother to grow old was George, who soldiered in the war against Scotland, where, like his father long before him, he was knighted.13 He successfully revived his career at court, where he remained until his death in May 1580. He served as a gentleman usher to his second cousin, Queen Elizabeth I, was elected a member of Parliament for the new constituency of Reigate in 1563, and, like his father, became a justice of the peace.14 His uncle, Lord William Howard, predeceased him by seven years. He too revived his career at court following Catherine’s death. After helping to suppress a rebellion against her, Mary I made William Lord High Admiral, a baron in his own right, and, later, Lord Chamberlain of her household. He served as a trusted Privy Councillor to his great-niece, Elizabeth I, and died at Hampton Court Palace on January 12, 1573. His widow, Margaret, passed away in 1581.

  In the months and years after Catherine’s death, Henry VIII’s moods acquired a new unpredictability. His health collapsed as his weight increased, and he died, morbidly obese, at the Palace of Whitehall on January 28, 1547, aged fifty-five. The snow and ice made the roads to the palace almost impassable, and by the time Cranmer made it to Henry’s bedside, there was no time for the last rites. Instead, the Archbishop cradled the King’s hand as he passed away. His will, which confirmed his self-created position as “in earth immediately under God the Supreme Head of the Church of England and Ireland,” passed the throne to his nine-year-old son as King Edward VI.15 Henry’s body was interred at Windsor Castle, next to that of the new King’s mother, Queen Jane Seymour. During the journey to Windsor, the procession stopped for a night at crumbling Syon, the abbey where Catherine had spent her last winter. A story circulated later that as Henry’s coffin rested in Syon’s chapel, a putrid liquid leaked from it and local dogs sniffed around it the next morning, fulfilling, in some Catholics’ view, a prophecy made against Henry that dogs would one day lick his blood, as they had with Ahab, a wicked and idolatrous king in the Old Testament.16 Henry left instructions for a magnificent sepulchre to be constructed at Windsor, but his children lacked either the funds or inclination to complete it. His grave is marked today by a plain black marble slab, installed in the reign of the nineteenth century’s William IV.

  Henry’s death saved Catherine’s uncle Norfolk from following her to the scaffold by a matter of hours. In the last year of his reign, Henry had turned on the Howards again, having convinced himself that the family’s patriarch and heir were both plotting against him. Catherine’s cousin, the Earl of Surrey, had led one of the English armies to defeat at the Battle of Saint-Etienne in France. Surrey was so aghast at his actions that he apparently begged his companions to “stick their swords through his guts and make him forget this day,” but his contrition and shame did not stop a burst of suicidal egotism when he commissioned a portrait of himself with a coat of arms clearly advertising the Howards’ descent from Saint Edward the Confessor and King Edward III.17 It looked, to a paranoid Henry, as if the Howards were planning to snatch power from him or his son, and Surrey was executed for treason on January 19, 1547, the last political casualty of Henry’s torturous reign. His father was condemned by act of attainder on January 27, 1547, but with the King’s death a day later, the guardians of the new regime were too nervous to open the reign with the execution of the country’s highest-ranking peer.18 Instead, Norfolk was kept in the Tower.

  As with Surrey, the violent vagaries of contemporary politics claimed many of those involved in Catherine’s story. One of her brothers-in-law, Sir Thomas Arundell, was executed for treason on February 26, 1552. Both of the Seymour brothers met similar ends—Thomas, who had inventoried Catherine’s jewels when she fell, was beheaded on March 20, 1549, and clever Edward Seymour, Earl of Hertford, the first man to tell Thomas Culpepper that his thoughts about the Queen were enough to condemn him to death, on January 22, 1552.19 Catherine’s former master of the horse, Sir John Dudley, became the most powerful man in Edward VI’s government as Duke of Northumberland; he was executed for treason on August 22, 1553. John Lascelles, the devout evangelical whose conversation with Archbishop Cranmer in 1541 had set into motion Catherine’s downfall, was burned for heresy on July 16, 1546. Ten years later, Cranmer, Catherine’s most reluctant but zealous interrogator, perished on the same charge when the gove
rnment of Catherine’s stepdaughter, Queen Mary I, condemned him to burn in the center of Oxford. The site of his stake is marked by a small metal cross on Broad Street.II

  Mary Tudor’s succession, after the death of her half brother Edward VI at the age of fifteen in 1553, was hard-won. Mary was popular and tenacious enough to defeat a coup that aimed to disinherit her in favor of her young and conveniently Protestant cousin, Lady Jane Grey. Anne of Cleves, still a mistress in the art of pragmatic supplication, waited quietly in the countryside to see if Mary or Jane would emerge victorious, swore loyalty to Mary, and received a state funeral at Westminster Abbey when she died, possibly from cancer, in 1557.20 Until the very end, she was praised for her generosity to her servants, her cheerfulness, and the good table she offered as a hostess.21

  Cardinal Reginald Pole, the son of the butchered Countess of Salisbury, returned to England after decades in exile. In Henry VIII’s time, Reginald had been referred to as “the Archtraitor Reginald Pole, enemy to God’s word and his natural country”; in 1556 he replaced Cranmer as Archbishop of Canterbury, and he served Mary until his death in 1558.22 Mary’s reign also benefited two clergymen closely associated with Catherine’s queenship. Her uncle’s ally Stephen Gardiner, Bishop of Winchester, had languished in prison for most of Edward VI’s reign. Under Mary, Gardiner became lord chancellor, a post he held until he died of natural causes at his episcopal palace in Southwark in November 1555. Edmund Bonner, the bishop who had wed Catherine to Henry in 1540, was less lucky. He used the Marian regime’s crackdown on radicals to pursue anyone suspected of Protestant sympathies, earning himself the nickname of “Bloody Bonner” in the process. When Mary died in November 1558, her sister and successor, Elizabeth, was so revolted by Bonner’s behavior that she had him degraded from his diocese and imprisoned. He died as an inmate in the Marshalsea Prison in 1569.