Tudor Women Queens & Commoners

by Alison Plowden

  But Manox's brief ascendancy was already coming to an end. The Duchess had by this time moved with her entourage to Lambeth, and her grand-daughter's horizons were widening. The old lady herself seldom went to Court, but her palatial town house was only just across the river from Westminster, easily accessible to an exciting stream of visitors, and it wasn't long before Katherine had acquired another admirer. Francis Dereham was a member of the Duke of Norfolk's household and a distant connection of the Howards, a handsome, dashing young gentleman of birth and substance and altogether a more attractive proposition than poor Henry Manox, who was ruthlessly discarded. Francis Dereham's face was soon familiar at Lambeth, and he became a regular member of that privileged group of gentlemen who could be sure of a welcome in the girls' dormitory after lights out.

  The door of the 'maidens' chamber' was, in theory, locked at bedtime, but in practice this did not present a very serious barrier; keys could always be stolen or someone persuaded to 'forget' to lock up. The Duchess cannot have been entirely unaware of what was going on but took the easy-going view that girls would be girls (perhaps she thought there was safety in numbers), and as long as they kept their activities within bounds and did not create the sort of scandal she would have had to take notice of, she was prepared to turn a blind eye. So the more adventurous young men continued to sneak off upstairs after the old lady had retired for the night, taking with them wine, fruit and sweetmeats 'to make good cheer' with her maids.

  This sort of merry-making did not, of course, end with midnight feasts. Katherine was older now and sexually fully mature. Dereham was both more enterprising and more experienced than Henry Manox, and they naturally progressed from caresses 'in doublet and hose' to the intimacies of a naked bed. It was impossible to keep this secret from the other inmates of the dormitory - Alice Restwold, Katherine's official bed-mate, later deposed that she at least knew very well what belonged to all that puffing and blowing behind the bed-curtains. But since Katherine and Dereham were by no means the only illicit couple making use of its facilities, the dormitory continued to observe its conspiracy of silence, although some of the older ladies began to complain of being kept awake, and the more sober spirits claimed to be shocked.

  Outside the doubtful privacy of the maidens' chamber, the pair made no particular effort to conceal their attachment, generally behaving as if they were engaged. It was common knowledge in the household that they were 'far in love', and quite a few people believed that Mr. Dereham would have Mrs. Katherine Howard. They could be seen openly kissing and cuddling, and, on one occasion, Dereham had demanded to know why he should not kiss his own wife. In the eyes of the Church they were as good as married - for even such an informal arrangement as this, when consummated with carnal knowledge, could be held to constitute a form of marriage. Dereham unquestionably wanted to get the relationship legalized and pestered Katherine about it, but she refused to commit herself. Far from being the corrupted innocent she is sometimes depicted, Katherine Howard, it must be said, seems to have possessed all the instincts of a natural tart who knew exactly what she was doing. She'd taken the precaution of acquiring some rudimentary knowledge of birth control, boasting rather optimistically that 'a woman might meddle with a man and yet conceive no child unless she would herself, and having discovered the delights of sex, saw no reason to settle for the first man who'd bedded her.

  The affair drifted on for the best part of a year, and perhaps the oddest feature of it was the Duchess's continued indulgence. When she found the couple kissing in the great gallery, she enquired sharply if they thought her house was the King's Court, but she made no effort to separate them. For some reason the old lady had a particularly soft spot for Francis Dereham, but probably the truth was that she didn't take the matter very seriously. While society at large paid lip-service to the ideal of chastity, it also accepted the inevitability of a certain amount of pre-marital intercourse. Youth was naturally lusty, life was short, and there was no point in making too much fuss about something which could hardly be prevented. In some circles, among the respectable bourgeoisie and the lesser gentry for example, it was important that a girl should be a virgin when she married, but aristocrats like the Howards could afford to adopt a more permissive attitude. Unless she had made herself really notorious, very few families were going to turn down the opportunity of a match with a Howard lady. From her knowledge of her grand-daughter, the dowager could feel confident that she would forget Dereham as quickly as she had forgotten Henry Manox the moment some more exciting prospect appeared on the scene; besides, as Katherine knew as well as anyone, in her world love and marriage were two quite separate issues. The family, if they thought about it at all, simply took it for granted that when the time came to settle her future she would be ready to fulfil her obligations as befitted one of her breeding. Meanwhile, no one grudged her a few wild oats.

  The time to settle Katherine's future came in the late autumn of 1539. Her appointment to one of the much-coveted posts in the new Queen's household was, of course, thanks entirely to the patronage of her uncle the Duke, and it would certainly have been impressed upon her that she was being granted a very special opportunity and would be expected to make the most of it. Katherine herself pranced cheerfully off to Court, her head full of the dazzling social life she was about to enjoy in the company of an unlimited number of handsome young gallants, but with apparently no realization whatever that she was leaving the nursery for a dangerous adult world, a world seething with intrigue and violence where no quarter was asked or given.

  Except that it was larger and grander, the structure and hierarchy of the King's household was not so very different from that of the Dowager Duchess of Norfolk. There was the same overcrowding, the same mixture of squalor, confusion and luxurious discomfort; but the Court was also a jungle, the natural habitat of predators whose teeth and claws were only imperfectly concealed by the embroidered satin, the velvet and jewels, and of whom it behooved the weak, the ignorant and the inexperienced to be very wary indeed. Nevertheless, when the grandest and most dangerous predator of all 'cast his fantasy' towards the plump, dainty morsel that was Katherine Howard, her relations were overjoyed. This was just the stroke of fortune which the family needed and had perhaps been angling for. Aunts and cousins descended in flocks to give Mistress Katherine sage advice on how to behave and 'in what sort to entertain the King and how often'. His Highness was welcomed at Lambeth with open arms and the Howards joined in chorus to commend their young kinswoman for 'her pure and honest condition'. Any lingering memories of tales about scufflings behind the bed-curtains were naturally expunged from their collective consciousness.

  Henry was now forty-nine, and the muscle of his superb athlete's body was turning rapidly to fat. But although increasing age and girth had forced him to give up the violent exercise he had once revelled in, he was stilt a fine figure of a man, still active and energetic, and the stimulus of his new marriage seemed to have given him a new lease of life and vigour. Katherine's exuberant vitality, her gaiety and the new-minted quality of her auburn-haired prettiness enchanted the King. She was his rose without a thorn, a jewel of womanhood, and nothing was too good for her. New dresses, expensive furs and jewellery, valuable grants of land, manors and lordships, poured forth in an apparently inexhaustible stream, while life at Court had once more become a continuous round of dancing and feasting. Katherine was still probably no more than eighteen or nineteen when she was 'showed openly as Queen' at Hampton Court on 8 August 1540. The world and the King were suddenly at her feet, and perhaps it is hardly surprising that she should have paid little attention to the duties and responsibilities of her new dignity. Pampered and petted by a doting husband, flattered and fawned upon by the place-seeking multitudes, heedless and shallow by nature, she proceeded to concentrate her considerable energies on indulging a seemingly insatiable appetite for pleasure.

  The Queen's behaviour may have been understandable, but it was not very wise. As long as the
King remained besotted and as long as her old playmates were kept sweet with positions in her household, there seemed small danger of her past catching up with her - who, after all, would be so foolish as to kill the goose which was laying so many delicious golden eggs? -but it was not only Katherine's past which made her vulnerable. Assisted by the King's timely infatuation, the Howards had climbed back into power and favour over the dead body of Thomas Cromwell and were now unashamedly enjoying the sweets of victory. Howard arrogance alone would have made them unpopular, but they and their party also represented the reactionary right wing in both religion and politics, and as such they were feared and resented by the progressive faction, which advocated a far more radical programme of religious reform than the King had yet been prepared to sanction. The progressives, who numbered many able and ambitious men among their ranks, watched angrily as the Queen's relations dug themselves in around the throne, and meditated a counter-stroke. The flighty Howard queen, symbol and source of the family's ascendancy, offered a natural target for the family's enemies, and unfortunately Katherine was to demonstrate that, like her cousin Anne Boleyn, she had quite a useful talent for making enemies on her own account. She was jealous of the Princess Mary and quarrelled with her, thus offending the Princess's friends. She had surrounded herself with old friends from Lambeth days: Alice Restwold, Joan Bulmer, Katherine Tylney and Margaret Morton were all found places as chamberers and were so intimate with the Queen that other, more superior ladies of the bedchamber complained they were being ousted and ignored. Even more foolishly, the Queen had also welcomed another old friend, giving Francis Dereham, of all people, the post of private secretary and usher of the chamber. Worse still, Katherine had taken another lover. Within six months of her marriage she was casting languishing glances at Master Thomas Culpeper, gentleman of the privy chamber and yet another distant cousin. Soon, with an almost incredible lack of the most basic kind of common sense, she was sending him presents and snatching secret meetings, with the connivance of Lady Rochford (widow of Anne Boleyn's brother George), who seems to have possessed all the instincts of a natural procuress. In the summer of 1541 the King made his long-postponed visit to the North, progressing with great pomp and splendour as far as York, and all along the route Thomas Culpeper was being smuggled up the backstairs to keep late-night rendezvous with the Queen. Just as at Lambeth, it was impossible to keep this sort of thing quiet. Some people's suspicions had been aroused simply by seeing the way Katherine looked at Culpeper. Others had begun to notice that the Queen never seemed to go to bed and was curiously unanxious for company in the evenings, admitting only Lady Rochford and her friend Katherine Tylney to her apartments. By the time the Court returned to London at the end of October, gossip was running like wildfire through the household. Only the King remained in complacent ignorance - but not for much longer.

  While the unwieldy cavalcade was still jolting on its homeward way, one John Lassells, whose sister Mary had once served the old Duchess of Norfolk both at Horsham and at Lambeth, had laid certain information before the Archbishop of Canterbury. Lassells was a convinced member of the reformist party, and so, though he was careful not to make it too obvious, was Thomas Cranmer. As he listened to John Lassells' detailed account of the Queen's shameless behaviour with her former music master and of her disgraceful goings-on with Francis Dereham in the dormitory at Lambeth, the Archbishop at once perceived its 'weight and importance'. It was, of course, just the sort of scandal which the anti-Howard faction had been waiting for. The problem was how best to pass it on to the King. Although, after fifteen months of marriage, Katherine had shown no signs of becoming pregnant, Henry's affections were still 'so marvellously set' upon her that no one really fancied the task of destroying his illusions. In the end, it fell to Cranmer, but even he, privileged old friend though he was, could not bring himself to break the news in person. Instead he wrote a letter, which he handed to the King in the chapel at Hampton Court, begging him to read it in private.

  Henry's first reaction to the accusations against his wife was one of furious disbelief, and he ordered an enquiry to be put in hand immediately to discover those responsible for slandering the Queen. But Mary Lassells, now Mary Hall, confirmed her brother's story, and Manox and Dereham both admitted their past misdeeds, Dereham confessing that he had had intercourse with Katherine many times, 'both in his doublet and hose between the sheets and in naked bed'. Katherine herself began by denying everything, but in a private interview with Cranmer on 8 November she broke down and, between floods of hysterical tears, told him how Dereham had lain with her and used her 'in such sort as a man doth use his wife many and sundry times'. In a confession addressed to the King, she threw herself on his mercy and as much blame as possible on others, beseeching her husband 'to consider the subtle persuasions of young men and the ignorance and frailness of young women'. True, she had succumbed to the flattery of Manox and had allowed Francis Dereham to procure her 'to his vicious purpose'; but, this ingenuous document continued: T was so desirous to be taken unto your Grace's favour and so blinded with the desire of worldly glory that I could not, nor had grace, to consider how great a fault it was to conceal my former faults from your Majesty, considering that I intended ever during my life to be faithful and true unto your Majesty after.'

  So far there had been no suggestion of adultery - Dereham utterly denied any misconduct with the Queen since her marriage - and so far the worst crime Katherine could legally be charged with was bigamy. But although she admitted having called Dereham 'husband' during the period of their intimacy, she refused, from either pride or pig-headedness, to admit the existence of any pre-contract or engagement between them. Nevertheless, it looked as if she might still escape with divorce and social disgrace. Then the Council's bloodhounds picked up the scent of Thomas Culpeper, and the whole complexion of the case was changed.

  Questioned on 'the matter now came forth concerning Culpeper', Katherine admitted the clandestine meetings; she confessed to having called him her 'little sweet fool' and giving him a cap and a ring, but she denied 'upon her oath' that she had ever gone to bed with him. Characteristically, she accused Culpeper of having pestered her with his attentions and blamed Lady Rochford for encouraging him and deliberately acting as an agent provocateur. Lady Rochford, naturally enough, maintained that she had performed the services of go-between on the Queen's explicit orders, adding that she thought Culpeper had known the Queen carnally, 'considering all the things that she hath heard and seen between them'.

  Despite the Council's best efforts, actual adultery was never conclusively proved, though the presumption that the King had been systematically cuckolded must be pretty strong, and, in any case, Culpeper confessed that 'he intended and meant to do ill with the Queen and in likewise the Queen so minded to do with him'. This was quite enough to condemn them both, and when a friend of Francis Dereham's conveniently remembered that individual's once saying he was sure he might still marry the Queen if the King were dead, that was enough to condemn him too. Under the 1534 Treason Act, evidence of evil intent against the Crown was all that was needed for a conviction.

  Dereham and Culpeper were tried together at the beginning of December and executed together ten days later, but Katherine was not even accorded the courtesy of a trial. Parliament met in January, 1542, and proceeded to pass an Act of Attainder against the Queen, setting forth her treason and carefully locking the stable door after the horse had been stolen. In future, it was laid down that if the King should take a fancy to a woman, innocently believing her to be 'a pure and clean maid' when proof to the contrary was later forthcoming, or if such a woman coupled herself with her sovereign lord without first disclosing the existence of her unchaste life, then every such offence would be deemed and adjudged high treason - a provision which, as the cynics did not fail to point out, was likely to limit the monarch's field of choice pretty severely.

  Katherine was brought by water from Syon House, where she had spent the last w
eeks of her life, to the Tower on 10 February and two days later was warned to 'dispose of her soul and prepare for death'. Although so weak that she had to be helped up the steps to the scaffold, she died well. The sixteenth century considered it important to die well, with dignity and proper repentance for one's sins - not merely for the sake of the soul's salvation, but 'to leave a good opinion in the people's minds' - and the Queen had summoned up sufficient reserves of courage and self-command to enable her to make a final appearance worthy of a Howard lady.

  Katherine Howard was an extreme, but by no means untypical example of the way in which her world regarded its womenfolk as pawns in the game of high politics. Silly, feckless and over-sexed, she'd been incapable of meeting the demands made upon her and had become the inevitable victim of a system which ruthlessly eliminated its failures.

  The King's self-esteem had been grievously wounded by his young wife's betrayal. Back in the days when Anne Boleyn was being accused of adultery on a far grander scale than poor Katherine's, Eustace Chapuys remarked of Henry that he had never seen prince or man who wore his horns more pleasantly. But things were different now, and Chapuys, still in England, still observing the antics of the islanders with a coldly clinical eye, probably came near the truth when he wrote that the King's case resembled very much 'that of the woman who cried more bitterly at the loss of her tenth husband than she had on the death of the other nine put together ... the reason being that she had never buried one of them without being sure of the next, but that after the tenth husband she had no other in view, hence her sorrow and her lamentations.'