Catherine Howard
Page 4
This, then, was Thomas, third Duke of Norfolk and chief of his clan, a man who, in the words of the Warwickshire proverb, was like a bear, for ‘the bear he never can prevail to lion it for lack of tail.’ This was also the family to which the future Queen belonged, a family rigid in its pride and insatiable in its greed for political power. From the start, Catherine knew her duty: to further the interests of her uncle and tribe.
CHAPTER 3
Horsham and Lambeth
To an age accustomed to preserving its documents in bombproof shelters, it seems inconceivable that a queen of England should have neither baptismal record nor death certificate. Today, modern man is besieged with bureaucratic identifications, numerical tabulations and physical reports. From birth to death his path is inundated by a vast ocean of statistical data, testifying to the most intimate aspects of his life. For the age of Catherine Howard, however, the ravages of some four hundred years and the rather random documentation of a society uninterested in immortalizing itself in quadruplicate have left the historian with little upon which to recreate the life and character of even a queen. The gossamer thread of recorded history is often so delicate that it tends to vanish under the scrutiny of historical analysis. An occasional strand, an accidental vestige must suffice to reconstruct the mind and personality that spun the web of history.
The process of historical preservation is devious in the extreme; though Catherine’s father, Lord Edmund Howard, remains a rather shadowy figure, scarcely perceptible through the darkness of history, there is clear evidence that the hapless gentleman suffered from kidney stones. In 1536 he wrote to his friend, Lady Lisle, thanking her for her medical prescription for, ‘it hath done me much good, and hath caused the stone to break so that now I void much gravel.’ Unfortunately for Lord Edmund, the remedy had more than the desired effect, and he complained that ‘your said medicine hath done me little honesty, for it made me piss my bed this night, for the which my wife hath sore beaten me, and saying, “it is childrens’ parts to bepis their bed.” In fact, the poor man was in such a state that he was unable to accept Lady Lisle’s dinner invitation, and he concluded his excuses by suggesting his own antidote. It had been shown him, he said, that ‘a wing or a leg of a stork ... will make me that I shall never piss more in bed, and though my body be simple, yet my tongue shall be ever good, and specially when it speaketh of women.’1
All this is by way of warning the reader that almost nothing is known about the early life of Catherine Howard: the date of her birth is open to speculation, her home is unknown, and except for the more lurid details of her childhood which have been preserved in connection with her trial, we know almost nothing about her early friends and environment. The historian can recreate, he can make judicious guesses, he can and often does indulge in wishful thinking, but the fact remains that except for the accident of being Queen Consort of England, Mistress Catherine would have joined the legion of men and women who lived and died without ever having left their mark on history – those who, in a sense, never lived at all, since they left no monument to their individuality.
Every life is the product of chance, and the secret of Catherine Howard’s career lies in the accident of birth – that her father was born both a Howard and a younger son. Lord Edmund Howard was the third son of a man who sired twenty-three progeny of whom ten lived to marry and further populate the island with Howard sons and daughters. Except for aristocratic blood, Lord Edmund had little with which to commence the struggle of existence. It appears almost as if he were the victim of some ill-natured fairy, for everything conspired to frustrate his career. As one of the younger sons of a family that faced political annihilation as a consequence of the Battle of Bosworth, he was constantly plagued by poverty, and not even the reviving fortunes of his clan seem to have relieved him of his constant burden of debts. Impecuniousness could always be transmuted into opulence by means of royal favour, but Edmund Howard strangely failed to ingratiate himself with his sovereign. He was almost the same age as Henry VIII and might have become one of the King’s cronies who accompanied their sport-loving monarch in his constant and restless quest for chivalric distinction and athletic prowess. Unfortunately, however, Henry evidenced signs of a marked distaste for this young Howard scion.
When the Howards distinguished themselves at the Battle of Flodden Field, and a grateful sovereign rewarded the Earl of Surrey with the dukedom of Norfolk, Edmund Howard was still denied entry into the warm and rewarding light of royal favour. Catherine’s father stood on the right wing of the battle in command of 1,500 Cheshire and Lancashire men. Once again his luck held true to form, and Lord Edmund sustained the only serious defeat of the day when his soldiers were routed by the lord chamberlain of Scotland and his family banner trampled under foot. His personal bravery was beyond dispute; twice he fell and twice lie rose to fight again, but it took the opportune arrival of Lord Thomas Dacre to save the right wing from total annihilation. His father knighted the young man on the field of battle for his heroism, but the royal bounty was singularly niggardly. His father was elevated to the ducal title, but Edmund received merely a pension of three shillings and fourpence a day, which was abruptly terminated after three years.2 Again, in August of 1537, when as a mark of popularity he was elected mayor by the assembly of the city of Calais, it was the King who quashed the election, and Thomas Cromwell wrote saying that ‘the King will in no wise that my lord Howard be admitted to the mayoralty.’3 Finally, just before his death in 1539, he was removed from his position as Controller of Calais with little certainty of any future post.
Why Henry was so reluctant to bestow honours upon the younger son of a family on which he had heaped the highest rewards of state, is something of a mystery, but there is no escaping the fact that Edmund Howard was never a favourite at court. Possibly he was too stiff and proud, for like many a younger son his only asset was his name and blood. Vainglorious and indigent, trained in little except the art of war, he lacked the intellectual agility and social polish to adapt himself to life at court. He belonged to that set in society that regarded the aspiring courtiers around the throne as jays ‘chattering in a golden cage’, and his family pride and class arrogance won him powerful enemies.
The only evidence that Lord Edmund was anything more than another incompetent aristocrat who harked back to the happy, carefree days of the fifteenth century, is the fact that in 1510 he entered the Middle Temple.4 It would appear that he did not take kindly to the law, for in the following year he was back again at the more congenial pastime of jousting, in a tournament in honour of the birth of a royal son. In fact, what little he knew about the law he misused, for in 1516 he was hauled before Cardinal Wolsey and the Court of the Star Chamber for ‘maintaining, embracing and bearing’ his friends and relations at law and having undermined ‘the good rule and execution of justice within the county of Surrey’.5 Edmund Howard represented almost every characteristic that the Tudor government sought to exterminate – the irresponsible nobleman who sets himself above the law of the realm.
In 1519 he again found himself the subject of royal and official ire for having instigated riots in Surrey. The Howard influence at court was sufficient to obtain a royal pardon, but his friend and colleague, Lord Ogle, fared less well, and this unfortunate gentleman was turned over to the normal course of the common law, with the royal reminder that his actions had resulted in the murder of one of the King’s subjects, ‘which great offence is not only to us but to God.’6 If we add to this that Catherine’s father was suspected of harbouring pro-papal sentiments, then there is little wonder that he was distinctly persona non grata in court circles.7
As a consequence, Edmund Howard seems to have endured a penurious existence upon the periphery of wealth and status encircling the monarch. He often appears in the accounts of the more festive activities of Henry’s reign, and in 1514 he was awarded £100 from the royal exchequer, ‘to prepare himself to do feats of arms’ in honour of the marriage of Henry’s sis
ter to the aged and ailing Louis XII of France.8 Occasionally he was utilized by the government for less glamorous if more essential duties, when he was placed on various commissions of the peace, and for three years he received a salary of twenty shillings a day for ‘taking thieves’.9 He profited briefly when his family fortunes at court were enhanced by the patronage controlled by his niece, Anne Boleyn, who exercised her dangerous influence over Henry’s affections from 1528 to 1536. He was offered the post of Controller of Calais in April of 1531 and four years later, through the instigation of the Queen and his brother, the Duke of Norfolk, he succeeded in inveigling his reluctant monarch into presenting him with the goods and chattel of Master Skell, a condemned felon.10 In the end, fate dealt the final irony, for he died only a few months before his daughter Catherine had accomplished what he himself had signally failed to do – win the royal affection.
Not only did this ill-starred gentleman have to struggle against a chilly reception at court, but he was constantly confronted with the dreary fate in store for a younger son. It is sometimes argued that English history owes much to that peculiar social system of primogeniture, whereby the eldest son takes all, for it forced the scions of noble and landed families either to make their own fortunes or to marry someone else’s, and it ensured a steady flow of wellconnected young men into the paths of commercial enterprise and empire-building. Salutary as this social system may have been as a historical phenomenon, it was not altogether a happy lot for those born into it. One young gentleman towards the end of the century analysed the situation, by writing that the estate of a younger brother ‘is of all stations for gentlemen most miserable, for if our father possess 1,000 to 2,000 l. yearly at his death, he cannot give a foot of land to his younger children in inheritance.’ Yet for all the obvious iniquities of such a system, the writer admits in a singularly broad-minded fashion that it ‘doth us good someways, for it makes us industrious to apply ourselves to letters or to arms, whereby many times we become my elder brothers’ masters, or at least their betters in honour and reputation’.11
Unfortunately, Edmund Howard neither took kindly to letters nor became his elder brother’s master. Instead, poverty and misadventure dogged his footsteps. Nor was he the man to accept his misfortune with the stoic optimism of the previous writer. In 1527 he grovelled before Cardinal Wolsey, announcing that he was ‘utterly undone’ and that his debts were such that he dared not ‘go abroad, nor come at mine own house, and am fain to absent me from my wife and my poor children,’ for fear of being cast into a debtor’s prison. He implored Wolsey to give thought to his miserable condition and his ten starving children, and begged that the great man employ him in the projected voyage of discovery to Newfoundland. Then in tragic words he summed up the plight of his kind by saying ‘if I were a poor man’s son, I might dig and delve for my living’, but because of his noble dignity he could not labour without bringing great reproach and shame to himself and all his blood.12 Even when he did finally attain a government position at Calais, he continued to be plagued with financial difficulties and found the Controller’s salary of £80 per annum too little to maintain a household worthy of a Howard and a government servant.
Chronic poverty rarely enhances the character, and Lord Edmund has come down to us through history as a pitiful and not very stalwart personality – cringing, begging, and threatening his way to a few extra pennies. The verse awarded him as one of the heroes of Flodden Field:
And Edmund Howard’s lion bright, Shall bear them bravely in the fight,13
has been more than eclipsed by his flood of pleading letters and futile efforts to win a financially secure niche in governmental circles. In 1527 his monetary affairs were so desperate that he was actually forced to send his wife to plead in his name before the Cardinal, since he himself did not dare show his face abroad lest he be caught and imprisoned for debt.14 Five years later a well-meaning, if not over-perceptive, friend made the mistake of going surety for Lord Edmund, and for his efforts found himself wrested by his friends’ creditors.15 Nor was the reputation of Catherine’s father any better among his own kin; Sir John Legh carefully wrote into his will that ‘if the Howards trouble the Executors they are to have nothing.’ The Leghs seem to have been darkly suspicious of Edmund, and Dame Isabel Legh, his mother-in-law, went to great pains to curtail his control over his wife’s patrimony by insisting that her daughter receive the bulk of her estates only on ‘condition that her husband redeem all lands [that are] the inheritance of my daughter in the county of Kent from her father, Richard Culpeper, and her brother, Thomas Culpeper, so that the lands descend to her heirs.’16 This may, of course, be dismissed as mother-in-law trouble, but considering Lord Edmund’s general insolvency, it seems unlikely. Catherine’s father was constantly seeking and never attaining, and the full tragedy of his life is testified by his own hand in a letter he wrote to the low-born Thomas Cromwell. He said that he had heard from his brother, Lord William, that Cromwell had promised to advance his petition to the King. He acknowledged that he owed all to the Vicar-General and would never forget such kindness, for he was so ‘smally friended’ and so ‘beaten in the world’ that he knew what a treasure it was to have a faithful friend.17
Only in the field of matrimony did Edmund excel, and like so many of his clan he seems to have inherited his family’s astute eye for selecting women of breeding and wealth. Considering his lack of prospects, Edmund did extraordinarily well, for he married three times and each wife brought land and riches into the itching Howard grasp. His first and only fruitful marriage was with Jocasta Culpeper, the wealthy widow of Ralph Legh, and co-heir of Sir Richard Culpeper of Aylesford, Kent. Mistress Jocasta can hardly be described as a youthful charmer, since she was considerably senior to her second husband and must have been nearing thirty at the moment of her marriage. Moreover, Edmund married an entire family, since his wife had at least two, and possibly as many as five, children by her previous husband. What this newest Howard bride lacked in appearance, however, she made up in substance, for both the Leghs and the Culpepers were extensive landowners in Kent, Surrey, and Sussex.18
There is considerable controversy over the year in which the marriage took place.19 As with so many other events surrounding Catherine and her family, the truth remains obscure. Probably they were espoused about the year 1514, since it is highly improbable that Edmund, merely as the third son of the Earl of Surrey, could have snared such an eminently respectable and affluent lady. The translation of his father to the dukedom in 1513 must have made a considerable difference to Jocasta’s matrimonial interests in this impecunious gentleman, with nothing but blood and family to his credit. Lord Edmund was free to marry twice more; first Dorothy Troyes, another wealthy widow with a family of eight; and second, after 1532, Margaret, widow of Nicholas Jennings.20 Except for the recurrent theme of wealthy widows and marriage settlements to stay the sagging finances of the Howard groom, there is little of interest about these final marriages. It is with Jocasta Culpeper that the life of Catherine Howard begins.
The only statement that can be made with any degree of certainty about Catherine’s birth is that she was one of the youngest children of a family of ten, and that she was born before 1525, most probably in 1521 (see Appendix). Where she was born and reared is still a total mystery. Some sources indicate London, others suggest the Howard residence at Lambeth, while still others favour Oxenheath in Kent,21 the home of Catherine’s maternal uncle, William Cotton. The only really authenticated fact is that Catherine spent her childhood with her step-grandmother, the Dowager Duchess of Norfolk, who divided her time between her estates at Horsham in Sussex and the Howard suburban residence at Lambeth.
At this juncture some writers cannot refrain from shedding tears over the cruel fate of a young girl whose mother died while she was still in the first decade of life, and whose father was an impoverished if aristocratic ne’er-do-well, who abandoned his daughter to her own devices in the vast entourage of that Norfolk mat
riarch, the ‘testy old’ Dowager Duchess. In the imaginative, if singularly inaccurate, language of Miss Strickland, it was ‘indeed an evil hour for the little Katharine when she left the paternal roof, and the society of the innocent companions of her infant joys and cares, to become a neglected dependant in the splendid mansion of a proud and heartless relative.22 Possibly by modern standards her lot left something to be desired, but in the opinion of her own society, it was customary to farm out children to the establishments of rich friends and relations where they could learn the ways of polite society and proper respect for their elders and betters. In an age of little formal education, such houses as that of the Dowager Duchess supplied the discipline and training of a boarding school where the offspring of the well-connected could escape what was considered to be the enervating influence of a mother’s love. Catherine’s first cousin, Mary Boleyn, was sent as a maid-in-waiting to the establishment of Margaret of Austria, while Anne Boleyn accompanied Mary Tudor to the court of Louis of France. Lord Edmund Howard did not do as well for his progeny, but it was neither his poverty nor the death of his wife that induced him to board his children with his stepmother, it was simply part of the educational process. There in the draughty halls and dormitories at Horsham or Lambeth, and under the titular custody of the Dowager Duchess, the children of innumerable Howard relations and dependants were conditioned to the realities of sixteenth-century life.