How many victims these epidemics claimed is impossible to say, but in 1540 the French Ambassador reported that the parish records ‘show that for a month past, 300 persons have died each week within the circuit of the town.’26
The shock of death which could transform in an instant ‘thy beautiful face, thy fair nose, thy clear eyes, thy white hands, thy goodly body’ into ‘earth, ashes, dust, and worm’s meat’ constantly haunted the sixteenth-century mind.27 Poets and preachers were at pains to emphasize the frailty of beauty, pride, and youth, which ‘shall vanish quite within an hour as fire consumes the ice’. Nothing was more popular than the sermon that pictured the ‘burning fire of hell’ that awaits the unsuspecting and unprepared sinner struck down in the instant of life, or which lashed out against the vanities of the world. London was viewed by the righteous as a veritable sink of vice and pollution, the citadel of the Devil himself. Towards the end of the century, Thomas Nashe warned that ‘we here in London, what for dressing ourselves, following our worldly affairs, dining, supping, and keeping company, have no leisure’ to watch against sin. Then he thundered an exhortation: ‘In pranking up our carcasses too proudly, we lift up our flesh against God.’28 Life was regarded by many conscience-stricken men of the century as being short and transitory, and the lustful pride of rich attire was evidence of the power of Satan and the ‘dalliance of thy doom’. What indeed was beauty, Nashe demanded of his audience, other than ‘a wind-blown bladder’ which in life was ‘the food of cloying-concupiscence’ and in death ‘the substance of the most noisome infection.’29
Ministers of God were not the only ones to decry the foolish vanity of this world and the wanton disregard for the everlasting life to follow. In a society in which men refrained from masking death behind the marble façade of the funeral parlour, almost every imagination was touched with a form of necrophilia. Under Henry VII the macabre ‘Dance of Death’ depicted upon the walls of the cloister of St Paul’s continued to exercise a hideous fascination over men’s thoughts. Even such a balanced individual as Sir Thomas More could not help but reflect upon the physical details of the act of death. With clinical accuracy he described the dying man as:
Lying in thy bed, thy head shooting, thy back aching, thy veins beating, thy heart panting, thy throat rattling, thy flesh trembling, thy mouth gaping, thy nose sharping, thy legs cooling, thy fingers fumbling, thy breath shortening, all thy strength fainting, thy life vanishing and thy death drawing on.30
The cathedral spire had not given way to the skyscraper. Morally and financially, the Church had not been succeeded by the insurance company. Most men, both Catholics and Protestants, continued to live within the shadow of eternity, and of a Church that made the mystery of life and death both endurable and explicable.
Common suffering and insecurity can produce acts of supreme charity, but they can also breed callousness, fatalism and extravagance, and London had its share of all of them. Fear, despondency and depression had once dulled men’s senses and chilled their souls, but by the third decade of the sixteenth century the emphasis had shifted, and the very imminence of death now made life all the more precious. A generation was born which was ‘urged to dare all’. Verve, vitality and daring, however, are purchased at a price – the price of insensitive indifference to the fate of others and the icy stoicism that accepts the dictum: ‘my lot today, tomorrow may be thine.’ Even the plague was transformed by some into a source of profit; it struck down the rich and greedy, exposing their bodies to the indignities of desperate men willing to risk death to snatch rich apparel, and costly finery from disease-ridden corpses. As one hardened beggar put it: the rich man’s loss ‘is our luck; when they become naked, we then are clothed’, for ‘their sickness is our health, their death our life.’31 The laws of the kingdom may have been ferocious, but the hearts of men were equally savage.
It should not be too difficult for the twentieth century, conditioned as it is by the memory of Buchenwald and Dachau, to appreciate the atmosphere of the society into which Catherine Howard stepped once she left the care of the Dowager Duchess. It might, of course, be argued that the picture painted in these pages is a portrait of the crawling, stinking masses and not representative of court and noble society, but Henry’s household cannot be dissociated from the ethics of the age. Fine gentlemen and fair damsels may have been slightly more refined than the jostling crowds of London with their ‘malevolent look of pigs deprived of their trough’, but the difference was merely one of degree, not of kind. Polite society was almost as violent, almost as crowded and credulous, almost as brutal as the ‘lesser sort’. Though a gentleman might hesitate to rob a plague-infested corpse of its riches, he eagerly plundered the estates of fallen ministers and luckless courtiers, and often he did not have the decency to wait until the victim was dead. Catherine’s life and personality are only comprehensible in terms of the ethical atmosphere that encompassed all levels of society, from Henry VIII himself to the local executioner who lived with the knowledge that eventually his own criminal activities would destroy him.
Reflecting the city – at once its economic heart and social paradigm – was the royal and peripatetic court of the sovereign, where, in glittering microcosm, high society mirrored the macrocosm of the metropolis in showy ostentation, violence and stinking congestion. As one historian has put it, the mental picture of court life in the sixteenth century must include ‘perpetual crowding, chronic disorder, and elaborate ceremony’.32 To this trinity of characteristics must be added yet another – that of the unrestrained fury so distinctive of the street life of the city. It was this compulsive violence of mind and unsublimated sensualism of emotions that underlay the extravagance of decoration, brilliance of dress, excess of brutality, and intricacy of pomp and ceremony, all of which formed the dominant motifs of court society.
Henry’s court was both a public and a private organization – the private retinue of kings and the public centre of government. It was a clumsy, pulsating mass of humanity, surrounding the royal person. Wherever the King was in residence, whether at Whitehall or Baynard’s Castle, Hampton Court or Richmond, the court was in attendance. Ministers of state, servants of the Crown, social and political aspirants, patron seekers and vendors, parasites and sages, they were all drawn into the King’s household.
Being the personal household of the King, the court was organized like any private residence. It was infinitely larger, vastly more chaotic, and teeming with intrigues and violence, but structurally it differed little from what Catherine had experienced either at Lambeth or at the Duchess’s country estate at Horsham. The immediate area surrounding the sovereign, his privy chamber, was referred to as the ‘above stairs’ of the household. Over it presided the lord chamberlain, who attended to the personal wants of the king and organized the ponderous ceremony which encircled his royal person, protecting him and gracing his every action with the divine dignity that doth hedge about a king. ‘Below stairs’ was the domain of the lord steward, who was responsible for the domestic needs of the entire staff. Under him was an army of domestics ranging in importance from the controller, the four masters of the household, the master of the jewels, and the King’s fool, down to the children of the squillery, the apprentice cooks of the kitchen, and the groom of the stool.33
The division between the two parts of the household was essentially that of the master’s suite versus the servant’s quarters, but the distinction between the two tended to become blurred on the upper levels. In many baronial homes the steward or chamberlain was often a relative of the family; so at court, the high officials of the house, though they performed duties below stairs, socially belonged to the upper household. Technically, the Duke of Norfolk, as lord treasurer, came under the jurisdiction of the Lord steward, but in actuality he had entree above stairs, as one of the ordinaries of the kings’s privy chambers.
In theory, the professional activities of the lord steward were multitudinous and endlessly varied. He catered for the needs
and peculiarities of the entire entourage. He saw to the feeding of strangers and to the ‘exclusion of boys and vile persons’; he insisted that members of the court eat at the prescribed hour and place; he disbursed bouche of court or the daily ration of bread, beer, wine and faggots allotted to gentlemen and ladies and upperclass servants, according to their rank and service. Catherine, for instance, as one of the maids-in-waiting to the Queen, received not only room and dining privileges, but also shared daily with the other maids two loaves of coarse bread and three of white, four gallons of ale, and a half pitcher of wine. From the last day of October to the first day of April, the maids were issued three torches a week, six candles a day, six talshides of wood, and six bundles of faggots, amounting in value to over £24 a year.34
One of the lord steward’s most vexing and complex tasks was the feeding of this hungry army of courtiers, maidens and domestics, in an age when both sexes ate prodigiously, at length, and with vast ceremony. The gastronomic well being of Englishmen in the sixteenth century was proverbial, and rarely did a foreign traveller refrain from commenting upon the fact that farmers and yeomen ate almost as well as gentlemen and nobles. In a period of three days, Elizabeth’s court managed to consume 67 sheep, 34 pigs, 4 stags, 16 bucks (used to make 176 meat pies), 1,200 chickens, 363 capons, 33 geese, 6 turkeys, 237 dozen pigeons, 2,500 eggs and 430 pounds of butter, plus a cartload and two horseloads of oysters.35 Such abundance was limited to State functions, but Henry VIII regularly spent over £1520 a year on food for himself and his Queen, and the Duchess of Norfolk commonly sat down to a table set for twenty and served as her first course two boiled capons, a breast of mutton, a piece of beef, seven chevets, a swan, a pig, a breast of veal, two roasted capons, and a custard.36 When Mr Henry Machyn, the undertaker, could polish off with the help of eight friends half a bushel of oysters, a quantity of onions, red ale, claret, and malmsey at eight in the morning,37 the extent of royal consumption, though still prodigious, no longer appears disproportionate to that of the rest of society. The usual royal fare consisted of such fattening delicacies as venison, mutton, carp, veal, swan, goose, stork, capon, conies, custard, fritters, and six gallons of beer and a sextet of wine to wash down what was only the first course. Then followed jellies, cream of almond, pheasant, hem, bittern, partridge, quail, cock gulles, kid, lamb, tarts, more fritters, eggs, butter, and finally fruit with powdered sugar.38 Not content with mere quantity, the eye as well as the stomach had to be satiated, and on special occasions dishes were transformed into a riot of colour and form, representing heraldic, historic and classical scenes. The rich man’s table was loaded to overflowing and appetites matched the supply, but it must be remembered that ‘waste’ was an economic necessity. Everybody from the household servant to the passing beggar was expected to make do with the leftovers.
For all its size, the court still retained something of its original private and family atmosphere. The royal store-houses were still the King’s private storage rooms; the great dignitaries of State remained the King’s servants, and Henry’s first wife, Catherine of Aragon, continued to count her husband’s linen. Ceremonial exclusiveness, brittle ritual, and the divinity that invests a king, had not yet destroyed all traces of the familiar informality of the medieval past. Henry VIII, for all his massive dignity and consuming egotism, was strangely accessible, and his restless and vital personality stamped every facet of his household. The energy of the man was inexhaustible; at fifty he kept the court alive with music and masquing, tennis and dancing, archery and hunting, tournaments and hawking. Possibly some of the brilliance of Henry’s early court – which one observer described as glittering with ‘jewels and gold and silver, the pomp being unprecedented’39 – may have become somewhat tarnished by 1539, but to a girl in her teens, both the monarch himself and his royal household must have appeared impressive beyond comparison.
The organization into which Mistress Catherine found her way was a strange and fascinating balance of opposites – an establishment which Erasmus lavishly described as being more a museum of genius than a royal residence, but which also sanctioned spitting on the floor, picking one’s teeth in public, and eating with one’s fingers. But the most profound dichotomy of all lay in the sumptuous elegance of the decor and the primitive discomforts of life within the gilded cage of the court. It was here in the magnificence of Tudor architecture and the richness and lushness of colour that the parvenu love of the extravagant and ostentatious joined hands with the medieval taste for the vivid and the picturesque. Sixteenth-century art broke out into a riotous profusion of azures, golds, reds and whites. The severe majesty of Gothic Perpendicular was shattered into a myriad of baroque fragments achieving the fairyland quality of a late medieval illumination. In part, this gaudy out pouring of colour and detail was pseudo-classical in form – terracotta medallions of Roman emperors pasted upon Gothic faqades – but mostly it was garish ostentation, the luxuriant proof of the ability to pay and the fertility of the human imagination.
Much of the full impact of Tudor pretentiousness has vanished with the weathering and darkening of timber and the fading and flaking of brilliant paints, so that the effect has become one of gloomy panelled chambers and impressive but ill-contrived Gothic Perpendicular. Today, where the eye perceives shapeless shadows, the mind should paint in gilded heraldic beasts, initials entwined with lovers’ knots, and armorial emblems. The ornamental and ornate ceilings were once alive with colour, and the papiermâché ribs and pendent balls of Tudor design were painted in gold and blue, the octagonal and lozenge-shaped depressions in the ceilings each enclosing a gaudy escutcheon. Where today stands the grey stone of a heraldic badge or the chipped terracotta of some long-forgotten motto, there were once rich and gilded forms, while whole palaces were ablaze with the vivid colours of Tudor heraldry. Rooms were hung with costly and marvellous tapestries of ‘pure gold and fine silk’ garnished with pearls and precious stones, and at Hampton Court there were entire suites done in blue and crimson cloth and lush velvets of green, and brown, and yellow.40 It is hardly surprising that a papal legate remarked that, ‘the wealth and civilization of the world are here.’41 The image that comes to mind is that of the rich fantasy and sensuous extravagance of costume jewellery. Inside and out the aim was the same – exuberant display and primitive hues.
As if to rival the décor, polite society presented a merry dance of noblemen in velvets, prelates in silks, and courtiers in cloth of clashing colours. Slashed doublets with artfully padded shoulders, carefully tapered waists, and extravagant codpieces, were all contrived to enhance the personality, magnify the vanity, and display individuality. ‘Whole estates’ were worn on courtiers’ backs; cloak, doublet, pleated shirt, and hose were cut from the most expensive materials, embroidered with gold, and studded with jewels. Sir Nicholas Vaux’s garments were valued at £1,000, and the Duke of Buckingham dressed in a cloak wrought with gold and lined with satin that cost £1,500.42 The ‘excess of apparel’ was such that Bishop Skip complained that ‘a man cannot well discern a gentleman from a yeoman, a lord from a gentleman, a prince from a lord,’ and he warned that more than one young gallant had ended his life in a debtor’s prison or dangling from a gibbet for having squandered a fortune on the silly vanity of dress.43
In marked contrast to gilded ceilings, costly tapestries and princely attire were stark floors covered with rushes, trestle tables, and wooden benches in the great hall and draughty corners. Chairs were a rarity and reserved for women, who generally preferred to sit on pillows and cushions on the floor. Sanitation at court, in an age that could scarcely conceive of cleanliness rivalling godliness, was on a level with Horsham. The slush bucket continued to be the standard method of disposal, and people were not particular about throwing refuse on the floor. It is not surprising that Cardinal Wolsey, when he ventured either into the lower regions of his own residence or risked the pervasive odours of the streets of London, commonly carried a spice-ball to counteract the stench. In fact, the Ca
rdinal’s sense of smell need not have been very acute, since immediately outside the great door of St Paul’s was an open urinal which induced one visitor to comment that it gave ‘a pleasant odour to the passers-by’!44
Catherine’s world and the society of the court was a strange mixture of richness and squalor, of sumptuousness and primitiveness. Perhaps the final paradox is found in the description of the materials used in the construction of Henry VIII’s close-stool. It cost £4, and was covered in black velvet, stuffed with 3 pounds of down for the seat, arms and side, and was held together with 2,000 gilt garnishing nails and 26 ‘bullion’ nails, but no matter how it was decorated, it still remained a chamber-pot.45
In an atmosphere of prodigious confusion and magnificent filth, which neither gold nor precious jewels could entirely cloak, and in a society where passions were close to the surface, rigid discipline and brittle ceremony became essential to a well-ordered organization. Both Cardinal Wolsey and Thomas Cromwell endeavoured to introduce into the snarl of the royal household some slight notion of routine, so as to mitigate the laxity and dishonesty that flourished in the rich soil of confusion. They aimed at introducing at least a minimum of restraint that might bridle the violence, wantonness, and dangerous neglect for hygienic principles, within the court.
The officers of the household were strictly commanded to search for strangers at meal-times and for ‘rascals and vagabonds’ who were constantly creeping into the system and passing themselves off as servants of the Crown.46 Efforts to achieve a certain degree of economy and system were not limited to denying food and board to those who had no right at court. Strenuous, if not always successful, attempts were made to curb the number of menials who surrounded every person of rank. Labour shortage was still a curse of the future, and every gentleman or nobleman was waited upon by a clamorous throng of hangers-on who endured a hungry existence on the periphery of a great man’s following. The desire to keep servants had more to do with prestige than with service, and if the court regulations had not strictly limited the number, the household would have been hopelessly jammed. The allocation was carefully made according to status. The King’s councillors, the lord chamberlain, the captain of the guard and the master of the horse, plus the six gentlemen of the privy chamber were each allowed to keep ‘one page to attend upon the court so that always he be a gentleman born, well mannered and apparelled, and well conditioned’. Other more lowlyborn servants were ordered ‘to remain in town or elsewhere out of the court’, and sergeants-at-arms, heralds, messengers, minstrels, falconers, and the like were commanded not to bring boys, rascals, or others of their servants into the court, on pain of severe fine and possible expulsion.47 Likewise the number both of beds and of horses was limited according to title. A duke could claim twenty-four horses and nine beds for his retainers, and an earl could have eighteen horses and seven beds. The gradations were minutely worked out: a dowager duchess could command seven beds, the Queen’s maids, three; the master of the jewels, one; the lord chamberlain, seven; and the grooms of the privy chamber were given two between the four of them.48
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