Catherine Howard

by Lacey Baldwin Smith

  For all his cruelty, vanity and egotism, Henry was immensely aproachable. He may have delighted in basking in the reputation of being ‘kind and affable’ and full of ‘graciousness and courtesy’, yet he was willing to pay the price for such renown. Sovereignty was constantly on display. The endless and peripatetic progresses about the realm, the ceaseless royal appearances, and the incessant ceremony that enveloped every action were all matters of calculatcd statecraft, and, like any illusion, the pomp and circumstance of sovereignty were achieved at the cost of personal exhaustion and tedium. Henry never seemed to mind the grimy, grasping hands of the frenzied citizens of London, or their badbreath, noxious clothes and boisterous manners. Once when a throng of ecstatic subjects stripped their sovereign to his hose in a delirium of devotion and souvenir-hunting, Henry passed the affair off as a delightful game.23 If this was play-acting to feed his self-esteem, then at least it was done magnificently, for King Hal was a past master at catching and holding men’s imagination. Whatever the ultimate verdict may be, the indisputable fact remains that the sixteenth century held him to be both a great king and a great man, ‘undoubtedly the rarest man that lived in his time’.24 Even Cardinal Pole, whom Henry had done his best to destroy and whose family he had systematically liquidated, wrote at the monarch’s death that he ‘was the greatest king who ever ruled that realm’.25 Possibly the final and most balanced judgment comes from the observer who, years before, had maintained that Henry was the most dangerous and cruel man on earth. With grudging praise, Castillon wrote that ‘he is a wonderful man and has wonderful people about him; but he is an old fox.’26

  Ever since he died on 28 January 1547, apologists and critics have been struggling to penetrate the ambivalence of Henry’s personality. Two images keep merging and reappearing: the angelic-faced athlete who inherited a brimming treasury, a stable throne and boundless good health, and the Henry of later years who, in the most extreme language, died ‘a pustular, syphilitic mass’, degenerate both in body and in soul. How was it that the pleasant portrait of a cherubicfaced youth who heard up to five masses a day and coveted not his neighbour’s goods should slowly give way to the harsh profile of a self-willed, if still charming, egotist with a suspicious and scheming mind that harbours its own counsel? The answers are many and contradictory. Henry may have concealed timidity and insecurity behind the bully’s defences; his prodigious vanity, his blustering gestures, and ostentatious desire to excel may have been the brittle veneer of over-compensation. Since the sixteenth century never experienced our modern pastime of psyscho-analysis and preferred to reveal the hidden reaches of the mind and soul to the priest and not to the psychiatrist, history has been spared the knowledge of whether the King did in fact suffer from a complex, Oedipus or otherwise. A more fruitful, if equally elusive, explanation is that he suffered from a disease of the mind – from megalomania brought on by a society that viewed its sovereign as the only possible bulwark against a renewal of civil war, and that was determined to worship him both as a paragon of a man, and as the symbol of public peace and security. Certainly ‘the worship of man as a god is apt to make him a devil.’27

  Sickness of mind and soul may have been accompanied by disease of the body, and the theory that Henry suffered from syphilis has never been totally dispelled. The evidence is entirely circumstantial, resting on what appears to be a marked deterioration in the King’s character, his ulcerated leg, and the dreary list of miscarriages that plagued his first two wives.28 Another equally circumstantial thesis is that the King suffered a serious brain injury when, in 1536, at the age of forty-four, he was thrown from his horse and lay unconscious for two hours. Possibly it is not coincidence that it was in the following years that the ulcer on the leg first began to give serious trouble, or that it is after 1536 that we begin to perceive the picture of a man who is suffering from chronic headaches, is reduced to a staff and felt slipper for his game leg, and is constrained to forsake the violent exercise of his youth. In the circumstances, it is not surprising if Catherine found her royal spouse overweight, irascible, melancholic, unpredictable and brutal.29

  More than brain damage and a draining ulcer are involved in the transformation of the royal character: we must include the nature of kingship and the personality of the sovereign. For all the splendid display and costly glamour that surrounded the monarch, the position of kingship had marked drawbacks. Ultimate authority is a lonely station, and when Henry alluded to himself as ‘King, Emperor and Pope in his dominions’,30 he had to pay a fearful price in terms of normal human relationships. As the ‘father and nurse to his subjects’, the King was the final arbiter of national policy. Henry might sanctimoniously announce that he contented himself with what was his own, and wished only ‘to command my own subjects’, but he also added the proviso that ‘I do not choose any one to have it in his power to command me, nor will I ever suffer it.’31

  The irony, of course, was that many men conspired to command the sovereign, and a few actually manipulated him, breathing selfinterested advice into the royal ear. All roads converged upon the King’s person, and the councillor who could plant the seeds of policy in Henry’s impressionable mind might elevate his family, win title and estate, and determine the political and spiritual fate of the kingdom. Consequently, each facet of the King’s personality, every aspect of his health and well being, was avidly observed, dissected and analysed. His every act, his every need, and his most trivial fancy, became matters of grave concern. Traitors dreamed that the King’s ulcerated leg would kill him and ‘then we shall have jolly stirring’;32 the state of Henry’s intestinal tract was a topic worthy of constant conversation;33 and the royal person was incapable of retiring into even the most ‘secret place’ without a cluster of ambitious courtiers, office-seekers and hopeful policy-makers crowding in upon him for fear lest some privileged and intimate friend whisper dangerous counsel to the King when he was at his most vulnerable.34 Henry may have stamped his personality upon both his court and his kingdom, but he was also a helpless prisoner of his office, and constantly had to be protected from the swarming clutch of nagging petitioners, office-seekers and supplicants who pervaded every inch of the royal household. All men came to ‘hammer at this anvil, some for money and some for favour’, and those about the sovereign had to be warned against molesting the ‘King’s person with suits’. Such petitions were to be presented in writing and delivered to a special council appointed to review them.35

  These precautions were rarely satisfactory or effective. They might guard the sovereign from the approach of the lesser sort, but they could not save him from the artful requests and pregnant hints of those who were in constant attendance about his person. Moreover, Henry’s wandering and amorous eye was always a subject of intense speculation, for a royal mistress or spouse might influence the mind as well as the passions of the man who shared her bed. Later in the century, popular interest in the subject of a royal mate for Queen Elizabeth was so much a matter of national discussion that gambling odds were given on almost anyone who received even the slightest recognition at court. When, for instance, Sir William Pickering arrived in London and was accepted with manifest favour, the bets were running twenty-five to a hundred that he would be king.36 Henry himself was constantly being ‘solicited by his council and nobles of his realm to frame his heart to the love and favour of some noble personage to be joined with him in lawful matrimony’, so that His Majesty ‘might have some more store of fruit and succession to the comfort of the realm’.37 Not only were the King’s matrimonial inclinations a question of immense international and domestic importance, but so was Henry’s virility, and when the Imperial Ambassador questioned the King as to whether he thought he would be able to produce more progeny, Henry’s temper snapped and he demanded thrice over: ‘Am I not a man like others?’38 What Henry forgot was that he was something more than a man; he was not only a King to be obeyed, but an idol to be worshipped’.39

  The sovereign was a victim of y
et another weakness of his office, for he was constantly at the mercy of flatterers and fortune-seekers. The oily blandishments of professional panderers and flatterers were the most destructive and vicious elements within the monarchical system, for such men made it a policy to ‘shamefully and flatteringly give assent to the fond and foolish sayings of certain great men’.40 Yet for all the susceptibilities of both the man and his office, Henry had neither sycophants nor toadies as companions on the hunt or servants in the privy chamber, and generally he was told the truth no matter how unpleasant it might be. But even so, kings lived with the nagging doubt that the truth, both of a man’s motives and his information, might not appear on the surface, and Henry was painfully aware that the reports of courtiers and bureaucrats could easily be cut to suit the royal temper. In a frenzy of frustration, he once upbraided and lectured his council as if they were a group of wilful and rebellious school boys, and he stormed that ‘most of his privy council, under pretence of serving him, were only temporizing for their own profit, but he knew the good servants from the flatterers’ and ‘he would take care that their projects should not succeed.’41 The safety of kings may be built upon the fears of their subjects, but as the French Ambassador pointed out, Henry would never ‘cease to dip his hand in blood’ so long as he continued to doubt his people.42 For all his keen sense of character and the magnetism that held men to him, it is little wonder that the young prince learned to harbour doubt and suspicion, or that the ageing monarch grew to distrust most men. When Marillac wrote to his master that Henry’s ‘subjects take example from the Prince, and the ministers seek only to undo each other to gain credit, and under the colour of their master’s good each attends to his own’, it may have been that the Ambassador had the situation reversed.43 The King may have taken example from his subjects.

  That Bluff King Hal suffered from megalomania is beyond dispute; for lesser men had become puffed up with the satanic pride that they could do no wrong. Early in the reign, when the monarch was engrossed in the pleasures of the joust, the masque and the hunt, Cardinal Wolsey, the King’s alter ego, had fallen prey to the same selfdestroying egotism. He started out his career humbly saying that ‘His Majesty will do so and so’, but subsequently and by imperceptible degrees he developed the habit of announcing ‘We shall do so and so.’ Finally, he attained the ultimate conceit of claiming ‘I shall do so and so.’ 44 The Cardinal’s disgrace and death were apparent and obvious evidence that power rested elsewhere. He was simply the King’s creature, the bubble of whose egotism was pricked by the sharp reality that final authority rested with his master. Henry, on the other hand, was nobody’s creature except his own. The monarch was responsible to God alone and the will of the deity tended to become the voice of Henry’s conscience – something he showed remarkable ability at manipulating to fit almost any occasion.

  Henry united the well-disciplined inner conviction of the consummate egotist with the conscience-stricken religious orthodoxy of his generation. No one was more solicitous of his soul’s health; no one was more scrupulous in his conformity to the prescribed religious formula of the day. In the midst of the pleasures of youth and the excitement of the chase he found time for three masses each day, while on holy days he insisted on five masses.45 Regularly he chastised and humbled the royal frame by crawling on his knees to the cross, and he was constantly testifying ‘his zeal for the faith’ with all the ‘resources of his mind’ and body.46 Henry was fortunate in the simple nature of his faith, and he remained strong in the naive conviction that God was on his side. The relationship between Henry and his deity was elementary; in return for a punctilious fulfilment of his religious duties, God rewarded him with material success and eternal salvation. Very early in life the King confessed to the Venetian Ambassador that he could not see that there is ‘any faith in the world, save in me, and therefore God Almighty, who knows this, prospers my affairs.’47 Should God remove his blessings and plague the King with misfortune, then it was assumed that somewhere, somehow, Henry had failed to propitiate the divine wrath. When Catherine of Aragon failed to secure the succession by a male heir, Henry searched his conscience for the source of such obvious divine malediction, and discovered that he had been living in unconscious sin ever since his marriage to his brother’s widow. The monarch’s religious convictions were grounded upon the prevailing belief that every good and every evil stems from God, and as the burning of a candle before the image of the Virgin might be expected to cure foot and mouth disease, so the removal of sin would regain for the King his material well being.

  Henry may have been many things but he was never a hypocrite, for righteousness was always on his side. He constantly lived up to his side of the bargain, defending the Church by both the sword and the pen. ‘We have done what became us’, he once wrote, ‘for [the] better discharge of our conscience, and found the truth so manifest that it ought to be allowed on all hands.’48 Knowing himself ‘to be in the right’, the King never for an instant doubted that he merited salvation and all the good things that God could bestow in this world, for ‘where there is the Spirit of God, there is freedom.’49 Others might suffer from a sense of their own inadequacies, and Luther might hurl inkpots at the devil of doubt and fear, but Henry remained serene in the citadel of his faith. As a man, as a Christian, and as a king, he claimed God as his ally, and though he denied it to his subjects, he asserted for himself the ultimate Protestant position that ‘though the law of every man’s conscience be but a private court, yet it is the highest and supreme court for judgment or justice.’50 No Christian Church has ever denied that eventually each individual must make his peace with his own god, but the conviction that God stands always at one’s elbow, ready and willing to confer his blessings, is a dangerous self-deception for any man, whether he be priest, puritan, or king. Any act of violence, any level of monstrosity is sanctioned when a sovereign believes as Henry did that ‘God and his conscience were perfectly agreed.’51

  Royal self-deception went further than the confusion between the still small voice of conscience and the mandates of the deity, for the very essence of sovereignty is the art of deception. Every action must be performed upon a public stage; every move must be attired with the pomp and circumstance that fashion the spell of majesty. The monarch must feign grief when he feels only chilly apathy, must fabricate enthusiasm when pressed down with the weight of exhaustion, must listen with sympathy and understanding to those who stimulate nothing but anger and boredom. Deception is the badge of royal office, and in the end one suspects that Henry lost the ability to distinguish between what was real and what was simulated so that eventually his conscience fell victim to the self-deception of his office. As a young man, Henry once wrote a tender and moving melody in which he concluded:

  My mind shall be;

  Virtue to use,

  Vice to refuse,

  Thus shall I use me.52

  Harry lived and died in the happy conviction that he had fulfilled the very letter of that virtuous standard, and two years before his death he had found no cause to change his mind or to doubt his principles, for he wrote that he ‘had been all his life a prince of honour and virtue, who never contravened his word, and was too old to begin now, as the white hairs in his beard testified’53 Whatever later generations might think, Henry himself presented his soul to God in the firm faith that he had lived a good and godly life. In his own estimation he remained a man more sinned against than sinning. The decision is not ours to make, but into the scales must be thrown the activities of Catherine Howard, fifth in the sad sequence of Henry’s wives.

  In any circumstances, marriage to Henry was fraught with danger, but what in the end proved fatal was the fact that Catherine’s husband was something more than a man or even a king. He was also a semi-divine monarch, upon whose altar Tudor England sacrificed both friend and foe. Harry was a ‘god on earth’, a ‘king among the stars’, and a ‘lion among beasts’. In contrast with the majesty of the sovereign, the nobi
lity were mere ‘ants in little hills’, for all subjects received ‘their nourishment from the King’, even as the light of small stars ‘proceedeth from the sun alone’.54 The king and his crown were inseparable in a society which still comprehended the functions of State in anthropomorphic terms. In the sixteenth century, political abstractions were animate, and as heroism is a vacant concept without a flesh and blood hero, so the crown without a regal wearer lost most of its dignity and became unthinkable. Power, majesty, and divinity remained human, anthropomorphic symbols harnessed to the chariot of State. For Catherine and her generation, government was simple and personal: it was ‘Harry with the crown’ who was the source of authority.55

  The lavish ceremony of the royal household was contrived to elevate this demigod, the man who wore the crown, above the lesser sort. His every act, his most humble and biological needs had to be transformed into actions of dazzling dignity. Only by the most rigid and pompous ritual could society manufacture the illusion of a monarch who ‘does not seem a person of this world but one descended from heaven’56 Almost by definition, Tudor England had to destroy the dangerous and seditious opinion held by Edward Foster, gunner in His Majesty’s navy, who impudently and impiously asked ‘if the King’s blood and his were both in a dish or a saucer, what difference were between them, or how should a man know the one from the other?’57 Such queries were tantamount to the most transparent treason, for once the divinity that doth hedge a king was doubted, the very essence of government collapsed. Princes were ‘not as common people be, who die and perish with a few men’s tears’, for when they fail, ‘the state doth whole default, the realm is rent in twain in such a loss.’58 To an age that was only dimly aware of the ubiquitous nature of Leviathan, and the distortion of justice that could be perpetrated in the name of State necessity, justification for governmental action continued to rest upon the difference between the sacred blood of kings and the pale equivalent that coursed through the veins of common men. The time was not far distant when Englishmen would view judicial murders as pragmatic necessity, but for the generation of Henry VIII most men preferred to dignify social expediency by calling it divine necessity and not raison d’etat. Catherine married not simply a mortal monarch, but also the Lord’s anointed governor on earth.