Catherine Howard

by Lacey Baldwin Smith

  Laxity and simple laziness plagued every branch of the organization, and efforts were made to root out or at least to curb the natural lassitude of mankind. Strict orders were issued that those who had duties to perform should execute them promptly and not delegate them to their servants. The highborn grooms of the privy chamber were ordered to refrain from using their ‘pages and servants and other mean persons’ to ‘make ready the fire, dress and straw the chamber, purging and making clean the same of all manner of filthiness’, so that the King’s Highness might find the ‘chamber pure, clean, wholesome and meet without any displeasant air or thing’. All these tasks were assigned to the grooms of gentle and noble blood, and they were commanded to be in the King’s chamber by six and seven in the morning so as to complete their menial duties. At the same time that the grooms were sweeping and cleaning, the gentlemen of the chamber were to attend to the ‘apparel and dress’ of the monarch, ‘putting on such garments in reverent, discreet, and sober fashion’49 Fines were levied if the groom-porter failed to collect the remains ‘of torches and other wax remaining overnight by nine of the clock in the morrow’. A signing in and out system was introduced for those who attended upon the King’s person, so that there would always be the correct number of gentlemen and grooms to minister to Henry’s desires. Even the members of the royal council had to be disciplined, and the lord steward, the lord treasurer, and the comptroller were evidently not above playing truant, since they were commanded to be daily ‘in the Comptinghouse between the hours of eight and nine in the morning’. Finally the tendency for courtiers to shirk their ceremonial duties and to seek a certain degree of privacy had to be curtailed, for ‘sundry noblemen, gentlemen, and others do much delight and use to dine in corners and secret places not repairing to the King’s chamber nor hall’, and consequently orders were given that all should eat at their allotted dining-places.50

  Efforts were also made to discourage the chronic dishonesty and peculation which plagued the court. Decrees were issued that the clerks of the greencloth were to:

  View and see that the said meat be served forth wholly and entirely and in due proportion, to such places as it is provided for, without fraud, embezzling or diminution of any part thereof as they will answer to their uttermost perils.

  The practice of petty stealing to supplement insufficient wages was almost universal. The yeomen of the pantry were sorely tempted to cut off pieces of bread and sell them back to those in charge of feeding the royal mastiffs, while the ordinances of the household noted that ‘the relics and fragments of such meat and drink as daily hath been spent in the King and Queen’s chamber and household, have not been duly distributed unto poor folks by way of alms.’ Instead, they were ‘embezzled and purloined’ to the profit of dishonest servants. In fact, commands had to be given that, when the King ventured forth on progress visiting the houses of his subjects, strict vigilance be observed that ‘locks of doors, tables, forms, cupboards, trestles and other implements of household be [not] carried, purloined, and taken away by such servants and others as be lodged in the same houses and places.’51

  Strict control, in theory at least, was maintained over infection and disease. Greyhounds, mastiffs and hounds were barred from the court, to keep the household ‘sweet, wholesome, clean, and well furnished’. The only exception to this regulation was that ladies’ spaniels and lap-dogs were sanctioned, since it was thought ‘wholesome for a weak stomach to bear such a dog in the bosom’.52 Likewise, the royal barber was commanded to take:

  Especial regard to the pure and clean keeping of his own person and apparel; using himself always honestly in his conversation, without resorting to the company of vile persons or of misguided women in avoiding such dangers and annoyance, as by that means he might do unto the King’s most royal person.

  These rudimentary hygienic measures were extended to the kitchen, where the three master-cooks received twenty marks a year to pay the scullery boys, so that they should ‘not go naked or in garments of such vileness as they now do, and have been accustomed to do’, and should have a place to sleep other than the kitchen hearth. Moreover, sanitary principles were recognized to the extent that the cooks were enjoined to have the kitchens scrubbed and swept twice daily to free them from ‘noisome filth’.53 To what extent these regulations were enforced or observed is difficult to say. Probably the rules remained nominal, considering the natural inertia of any large and traditionridden establishment. Brutality, violence, and slovenliness were far too prevalent at all levels of society to be checked merely by a written code of household etiquette. As with the law of the realm, the enforcing agencies were not very effective, and sloth as well as passion and brutality went unpunished.

  For those who were inaccurately, if flatteringly, called polite society, there was a more subtle variety of restraint upon passion, viciousness and crudity. It has been said that ‘nothing but ceremony, rigid and complicated, will be strong enough to prevent mere nastiness of behaviour.’54 One might add to this formula that nothing but ceremony was able to curb a society which lacked most of our modern methods of social control, and in which animal instincts of survival were dangerously close to the surface. Rather like some monster lightly chained, cruelty and violence were checked by nothing except the slender constraint of ceremony.

  Gentlemen were swift to anger and unrestrained in the use of the dagger. Justice Anthony Sonds on one occasion fell out with Mr Culpeper, while at supper, over the disposition of certain monastic estates. Strong words ensued: Culpeper accused the justice of lying ‘like a fool’, while Sonds rejoined that Culpeper ‘lied like a knave’. Words spoken in anger led to drawn daggers and bloodshed until the two were forcibly separated by friends. The argument was prevented from being settled next morning on Fynnesbery Field only by Mr Anthony Sonds’s timely recollection that he was a justice of the peace.55 It was customary that both master and servant should go armed with dagger and rapier, and nothing was more common than the sight of fighting ‘about taking the right or left hand, or the wall, or upon any unpleasing countenance’.56 Clashing swords furnished daily music in the streets, and men were wont to act first and ask questions afterwards, as when the Duke of Norfolk with twenty retainers attacked and murdered a kinsman of the Duke of Suffolk, over a supposed slight to the Duke’s honour.

  The code of fair play had few if any rules that might curb a man in anger. Paid assassins were not uncommon, and John Stanhope did not hesitate to attempt the liquidation of his opponent, Sir Charles Cavendish, by overpowering him with twenty professional murderers.57 The days of private feuds and clan wars had not completely vanished from England’s broad and pleasant lands, and the ugly spectre of bloody encounters besmirched society with alarming regularity. One need only contemplate the fate of Marlowe in a Tavern brawl to sense the truth that violence in Renaissance England was regarded ‘as a characteristic of greatness’.58

  The men who strove to tear down whatever obstacles they encountered in the path of their ambitions were insistent upon the importance of conventional formalism and rigid etiquette. Ceremony did two things: it elevated many of the more servile and disagreeable services surrounding the royal person into cherished honours, and it tended to obscure and at times even restrain sordid brutality and offensiveness by encompassing both in a thick veil of pomp and circumstance. The sixteenth century was well aware that ‘in pompous ceremonies a secret of government doth much consist.’ It was the single check that strong and egotistical men would accept, and it was the one restraint that was capable of raising society out of its Hobbesian state of nasty brutishness.

  The degree to which ceremony could mask even the most predatory actions is evidenced in the close encounter that Catherine Howard’s cousin experienced with Tudor law. In 1541 Sir Edmund Knyvet had a row on the tennis court with Thomas Clere, a gentleman retainer of the Duke of Norfolk and an old crony of the Earl of Surrey. The quarrel may have had its origins in the mutual distaste existing between Sir Edmund and the
Earl, but the immediate brawl probably had to do with sportmanship, for Sir Edmund administered a resounding punch upon Thomas Clere’s nose.59 This kind of rowdiness was far too common at court, and Henry decreed by statute that offenders should lose their right hand as punishment – a typical example of Tudor belief that the punishment should fit the crime. Sir Edmund was duly tried and sentenced, and the arrangements for the execution fell to the royal surgeon, whose appointed duty it was to supervise the torturing and maiming of State prisoners. Besides the surgeon, other members of the household combined both private and public activities by participating in the proceedings. The sergeant chirurgeon officiated with his surgical equipment; the sergeant of the woodyard was on hand with his mallet and block on which Sir Edmund’s hand was placed; the King’s mastercook supplied the execution knife; the sergeant farrier, the searing iron; and the sergeant of the poultry, the cock which ‘should have his head smitten off upon the same block, and with the same knife’. Finally, the yeoman of the scullery came with coal to heat the searing iron, and the sergeant of the cellar supplied wine, ale, and beer for the occasion. ‘Thus every man in his office [was] ready to do the execution.’60 Sir Edmund pleaded that his left hand be taken, so that his right might continue to do good service for the King. Actually, as the French Ambassador reported, the knight was ‘more frightened than hurt’ since, at the pleading of Catherine Howard, the sentence at the very moment of execution was stayed and the culprit reprieved.61

  Eating as well as justice was surrounded by the most intricate and elaborate forms. Each person had his allotted and ceremonial task; the sewer supervised the building of the fire, the clerk of the ewery set the table and issued the towels with which the carver and the panter handled all the food and silver. The assay or tasting of the King’s food involved numerous individuals, who handled and nibbled the royal menu with appropriate flourishes and ritual.62

  The closer to the royal presence, the greater the degree of elaborate ceremony, until one reached the epitome of pompous regulation in the organization of the King’s privy chamber. The number of individuals who could claim entrance into the inner sanctum of the royal presence was rigidly limited and defined. The monarch was to be waited upon by six gentlemen, two gentlemen ushers, four grooms, a barber, and a page, all of whom were appointed for ‘their good behaviour and qualities’, and who diligently attended upon the royal person, doing ‘humble, reverent, secret, and lowly service’. The grooms of the chamber were not to ‘lay hands upon the royal person or intermeddle with preparing or dressing’ the King. This responsibility was the much sought-after task of the gentlemen of the bedchamber, who received the royal clothes at the door of the inner chamber, after they had been carefully warmed before the fire.63 Later in the reign the size of the entourage about the King was more than doubled to allow these well-born servants a certain degree of relief from their constant vigilance and domestic cares.

  Equally intricate was the process by which the royal bed was prepared each morning. Both the straw mattress and the box on the bedstead had to be rolled upon by one of the yeomen of the bedchamber to test it for hidden daggers. On top of the mattress was laid a canvas cover and feather bed, which again was tested for ‘treacherous objects’. Finally came embroidered sheets and soft blankets until all was completed except the concluding ceremonial flourish of placing the King’s sword at the head of the bed, while each of the four yeomen kissed the places where their hands had touched the royal couch.64 Even the humble process of supplying the monarch with between-meal snacks was a matter of a complex chain of command, rather like A. A. Milne’s monarch who desired a little bit of butter for his bread. It was ordered that:

  In case the King’s grace will have bread or drink that one of the gentlemen ushers of the privy chamber shall command one of the grooms of the same to warn the officers of the buttery, pantry and cellar to bring the said bread and drink to the door of the said privy chamber, where one of the ushers taking the assay, shall receive the same bringing it to the cupboard.65

  In the sixteenth century, kings had to be blessed with endless patience if they desired anything to eat.

  Such elaborate routine kept a host of unnecessary hands industrious, but its essential function was to create a mysterious and splendid atmosphere of pomp and elegance about the sovereign, and to supply a degree of dignity and discipline to an otherwise uninhibited society. Those may have been ‘but painted days, only for show’,66 but the paint was nevertheless necessary. As cosmetics and perfumes are not a substitute for cleanliness but make the consequence of foulness less noxious, so ceremony did not prevent disorder, filth and violence, but it did at least limit and restrain them. The intent was not unlike the objective of Tudor gardens – the imposing of human determination upon the wild vitality of nature. Here in the Tudor garden, medieval delight in the exotic, nouveau riche bad taste, and the Renaissance desire to make nature conform to the will of man, united to produce a riot of artfully contrived and ‘marvellous beasts as lions, dragons’ and other heraldic fantasies. Human imagination and ingenuity knew no bounds, and the landscape was festooned with garlanded creations of Tudor whites, reds and greens.67 The design had not yet attained the mathematical perfection of seventeenth-century clipped hedges and paths laid out with geometric precision, but the execution, though crude, was the same – the effort to impose humanity’s will upon the confusion and violence of nature in the same way that the prodigious magnificence of flamboyant and elaborate ceremony imposed restraints upon the violence and bestiality of man’s nature and instincts.

  Life at court and in the city was harsh and dangerous, yet Catherine accepted the brutality of law, the callousness of ethics, and the extremism and violence of society for what they were part of the normal fabric of life. Catherine herself could be both cruel and generous, coarse and charming, meek and arrogant, with no thought of inconsistency. Reflecting every facet of society, her emotions were unbridled, and she moved easily from the frenzied bitterness of remorse and self-criticism into ecstasies of reckless love and heedless passion. If she was proud and indifferent to the suffering of others, if she frantically endeavoured to compress into a single moment the pleasures of an entire life, then she did no more than the rest of society that lived on the brink of destruction.

  CHAPTER 5

  Rival Queens

  The moment Catherine Howard was rowed across the Thames to take up residence at the court at Westminster, she found herself in a hornet’s nest of political, religious and personal intrigue. The activities of statesmen, the designs of sovereigns, and the fond fancies of preachers were all converging upon a crisis that marked the conclusion of the first stage of the English revolution in religion. Upon the broad chessboard of domestic and international events, bishops were donning mitre and cassock in readiness for a religious sweep, knights were preparing their nimble-footed political leaps, and kings were ponderously planning their devious designs. Only the red and black queens were missing from the board, and the two ladies put in their appearance in December of 1539, when the Lady Anne of Cleves stepped ashore at Deal Castle and Mistress Catherine Howard won her heart’s desire by receiving an appointment at court.

  Each side marshalled its forces; the black of instinctive conservatism in religion and feudal inclination in politics stood arrayed against the red of spiritual and political revolution. The most powerful man under the monarch, the King’s Vicar-General in matters spiritual, Thomas Cromwell, faced that polished prelate and consummate manipulator of men and words, Stephen Gardiner, Bishop of Winchester, and his temporal, if less able, confrére, Thomas Howard, third Duke of Norfolk. The concluding months of 1539 found the two sides relatively balanced. The parry of reform and revolution rejoiced that the princess of Cleves was journeying to London to consummate the alliance of schismatic England with Protestant Germany and become Henry’s fourth wife in six years. The conservatives, on the other hand, continued to control a majority of spiritual and temporal lords within the hous
e of peers, and they had not entirely given up the hope of influencing their susceptible sovereign by means of feminine guile. The absence of a black queen, it was true, constituted a serious handicap, but as yet the red queen of Cleves was an untried quantity, known in England only by her highly flattering Holbein portrait. The precedent for replacing queens had already been established, and it was no idle dream that some Agile and comely pawn might be transformed overnight into royalty by the magic of the King’s affection.