Royal Affairs: A Lusty Romp through the Extramarital Adventures that Rocked the British Monarchy

by Leslie Carroll

  Mary’s capitulation did reconcile her with her father. Even if nothing changed legally, at least she was once more treated like a member of the royal family, officially named the second-ranking woman in England after the queen.

  In early January 1537, during the climax of the Twelfth Night pageantry, Jane evidently became pregnant. When courtiers began to whisper about her burgeoning condition, it had also not escaped their notice that the queen had not become enceinte during the six months since her wedding—which says more about the lusty forty-six-year-old king’s possible potency issues than of Jane’s fecundity. In fact, on August 12, 1536, less than three months after the royal wedding, Henry had confided to Chapuys that he was feeling old and doubted he should sire any children with the queen.

  But in October 1537, as Jane gazed upon the panthers and phoenixes that detailed the cornices of her apartments in Hampton Court—the rooms where only eighteen months earlier leopards roamed and Tudor roses bloomed—she went into labor.

  Jane gave birth to Henry’s miracle child—the much desired son, who he nicknamed “God’s imp”—on October 12, in the wee hours of the morning at Hampton Court. After twenty-eight years of rule, the monarch finally had his heir. He was named Edward after his great-great-grandfather and because he was born on the eve of the saint’s feast day. Henry’s infant son was placed in his arms, and witnesses reported that the king wept to see him.

  Bishop Latimer teetered on the verge of heresy when he said, “We all hungered after a prince so long that there was as much rejoicing as at the birth of John the Baptist.”

  Three days later, wrapped in velvet and fur, Jane forced herself to be up and about at her son’s lavish christening. According to custom, she made the official announcement of the prince’s birth. Henry’s daughter Mary was the infant’s godmother. And Elizabeth, though only a toddler, was given the honor of holding her stepbrother’s christening garment.

  A game but hopelessly fatigued Jane stood on her feet for nearly the entire day to receive the compliments of the hundreds of guests who were permitted to witness the ceremony and take part in the celebrations afterward. She carried out her consort duties in Hampton Court Chapel, and the festivities went on into the wee hours of the next morning. Jane’s family was granted additional honors the following week.

  But the exertion of childbirth and the exigencies of playing hostess when her body was utterly exhausted contributed to Jane’s swift demise. She fell ill within a day or two after giving birth, possibly due to a tear in her perineum, which became infected, owing to the general ignorance of and inattention to hygiene, particularly in medical situations. Jane developed puerperal (or childbed) fever, which turned into septicemia and eventually led to delirium. The king was wont to place the blame “through the fault of those that were about her, who suffered her to take great cold and to eat things that her fantasy in sickness called for.” Twelve days after giving birth, on October 24 at eight a.m., Jane’s confessor was summoned. After receiving extreme unction, she died shortly before midnight, at all of twenty-eight years old.

  Was Henry present as Jane slipped into the next world? It is not likely. This king of passive-aggressive behavior had a history of running away when it came time to dispose of, or otherwise lose, a wife. The man renowned for ordering executions was unable to deal with death.

  The inconsolable king ordered the churches to be draped in black. On November 12, 1537, Jane’s body was taken in great pomp and solemnity to Windsor, the only one of Henry’s six queens to be buried in St. George’s Chapel there. A decade later the dying Henry requested that he be interred beside her.

  Jane Seymour’s epitaph, inscribed in Latin, translates roughly to: HERE LIES JANE, A PHOENIX

  WHO DIED IN GIVING ANOTHER PHOENIX BIRTH.

  LET HER BE MOURNED, FOR BIRDS LIKE THESE

  ARE RARE INDEED.

  Henry wore full black mourning for three months, but despite his grief, he agreed with surprising alacrity to the notion of taking a fourth wife. After all, he had but one heir, and for “insurance” purposes, someone had to give birth to the requisite spare.

  Edward, Prince of Wales, acceded to the throne on his father’s death in 1547, to become Edward VI. He died in 1553, at the age of fifteen, of a pulmonary disease, possibly consumption, his constitution already weakened by a previous case of the measles.

  HENRY VIII and Kathryn Howard (“No Other Will Than His”) 1521-1542 Queen of England 1540-1542

  KATHRYN HOWARD and Francis Dereham ?-1541 and Thomas Culpeper 1514-1541

  After Jane Seymour died, the king waited three years before nuptializing number four, Anne of Cleves, on Twelfth Night, January 6, 1540. The match was the brainchild of Henry’s Chief Minister, Thomas Cromwell, who believed that Henry would strengthen his ties to Protestantism by espousing a German princess. But Henry was famously repulsed by Anne’s physical appearance and lack of hygiene. So by April, tongues were wagging about his new infatuation with the girl the French ambassador had marked for her exceptional grace.

  The previous December, Kathryn Howard, yet another auburn-haired niece of the powerful Duke of Norfolk, had come to court to serve the new queen as a lady-in-waiting. Kathryn was still a teenager, as much as thirty years Henry’s junior, but the king was utterly thunderstruck, behaving like an adolescent boy in love, positively giddy with desire over the dark-eyed, curvaceous redhead. Evidently, Kathryn was exceptionally diminutive, described by one contemporary as “parvissima puella” (a really tiny girl). Next to Henry, who had grown so massive that three large men could fit inside one of his doublets (in 1540, his waist measured fifty-four inches and his chest a whopping fifty-seven), she must have resembled half of a Tudor Mutt and Jeff cartoon.

  Kathryn’s father and Anne Boleyn’s mother were siblings, making the young women first cousins, but Kathryn lacked Anne’s intelligence, canniness, and political acumen. Her father, Lord Edmund Howard, was the third son of the 2nd Duke of Norfolk. Being so far down the line of inheritance, he had little hope of advancement. The best that he and Kathryn’s mother, Jocasta Culpeper, could do was to place some of their brood with more affluent relatives who could afford to give them a better upbringing.

  Many things about Kathryn Howard’s early life remain a mystery because they are not well documented. The spelling of her name has been variously Catherine, Katherine, and Kathryn—the last of which, though a contemporary spelling, comes closest to the way she spelled it herself (Katheryn) in a love letter to her paramour.

  Her date of birth has been variously given as anywhere from 1520 to 1525. If she was born at the latter end of the spectrum, she would have been only fifteen years old in 1540 when she married Henry. I chose to fall closer to the earliest date, given the level of sexual experience Kathryn had by the time she came to court.

  Kathryn’s mother had already passed away when her father sent her to live with her step-grandmother, Agnes Howard, the dowager Duchess of Norfolk. Kathryn was supposedly twelve years old at the time, one of a number of poorer female Howard relations who served the duchess as ladies-in-waiting of a sort and were schooled and boarded in her homes.

  Kathryn was housed, dormitory-style, with the other girls in the Maidens’ Chamber. More or less orphaned when she needed the guidance of her parents most of all, desperate for love, attention, and approbation, the pubescent Kathryn devoted herself to the pursuit of hedonism.

  The music tutor, Henry Manox, who taught the virginal Kathryn the virginals, also provided her training wheels in carnality. But even as she flirted with the lowly musician, Kathryn haughtily reminded him, “I will never be naught with you, and able to marry me ye be not.”

  When the duchess caught them canoodling, she “gave Kathryn two or three blows and gave straight charge both to her and to Manox that they should never be alone together.”

  But soon Kathryn moved on, commencing a torrid affair with one of her step-grandmother’s clerks, Francis Dereham. Although the duchess locked the Maidens�
�� Chamber every night and pocketed the key, Kathryn contrived to bribe Agnes’s maid, Mary Lascelles, into stealing it. Dereham became Kathryn’s regular nocturnal visitor. He called Kathryn his “wife,” and she called him “husband,” and they may have entered into some form of a precontract of marriage. The adolescent girl saw nothing wrong with their carnal knowledge of each other, since she considered herself Dereham’s wife.

  The two of them enjoyed fruits and wine and foreplay in Kathryn’s bed and exchanged love tokens. But the jealous Manox arranged to have an anonymous letter delivered to the duchess, disclosing her niece’s affair with Dereham.

  The duchess sent Dereham back to Ireland and found a position at court for the spirited Kathryn. Luckily for the dowager, absence from Dereham made Kathryn’s heart grow colder. In late 1539, when she was about to join the train of Anne of Cleves, Kathryn made it clear to him that she was moving on. “All that knew me and kept my company, know how glad and desirous I was to come to the court,” she told Dereham.

  She had not been at court for too many months when she noticed one of Henry’s higher-ranking courtiers, Thomas Culpeper, a distant relation on her mother’s side, and a gentleman of the king’s Privy Chamber.

  Culpeper was in his mid-twenties at the time. He and Kathryn were the male and female equivalent of each other—gorgeous, ambitious, charming, and oversexed. There were rumors of marriage plans between them, but Kathryn hotly contradicted the gossip: “If you heard such a report, you heard more than I do know.”

  In fact, Kathryn had caught the eye of the biggest fish of all: His Majesty.

  Kathryn was courted by Henry in a big way. On April 24, 1540, the king bestowed upon her a gift of lands that had been confiscated from a felon. A month later, she received several bolts of silk. The French ambassador reported that Henry could not “treat her well enough.” She was showered with jewels, depicted in them by the king’s Master Painter, Hans Holbein, and given such authority and power as she had never known—all heady stuff to a teenage orphan who had been raised in genteel poverty.

  Around that time, Kathryn consented to come to the king’s bed. Little did Henry know that his new mistress was a skilled seductress and quite experienced in the boudoir. He was a guy; she was great in bed. Who needed to ask questions?

  The king had his marriage to Anne of Cleves annulled as swiftly as possible. On June 24, the queen was utterly blindsided when she received a document declaring her marriage to Henry invalid. It had never been consummated because the German princess’s homeliness repulsed Henry to the point where he could not even get an erection. It’s entirely possible that the king wasn’t impotent at all at this stage in his life; he was simply disgusted by the thought of making love to Anne.

  Anne’s wedding ring had been inscribed with the words “God send me well to keep.” But Henry had unceremoniously discarded her instead. Queen of England for less than seven months, Anne was demoted to the role of the king’s “good sister.” At first, she was hysterical, crying for days in her chamber. But she came away from the deal with palaces and property, and most important, her head. The only thing she’d lost to Henry’s insensitivity was her heart. Although she had arrived in her adopted country in December 1539 without a word of English, she had fallen in love with the stout sovereign, and genuinely wanted to make a go of it as his devoted wife. She was terrified that if Henry sent her back to her brother, the Duke of Cleves would kill her with his own hands for mucking up the marriage and embarrassing their royal house.

  So Henry arranged for Anne to remain in England for the rest of her days, and she gamely put up with the king’s new wife. Things could have become awkward between them, particularly since Anne had been beloved by all at court but Henry. But when the roles were reversed and the former queen had to pay homage to her recent lady-in-waiting, Anne was all humility and Kathryn all graciousness. Anne addressed her replacement on her knees, whereupon, according to Eustache Chapuys, the ambassador from the Holy Roman Emperor, Kathryn begged Anne to rise and “received her most kindly, showing her favor and courtesy.”

  On July 28, during the middle of a particularly hot and dry summer, in a secret ceremony conducted by Bishop Bonner, Kathryn and Henry were wed. That same day, Henry’s former Chief Minister Thomas Cromwell was executed on Tower Green for, among other things, having been the architect of the king’s disastrous marriage to Anne of Cleves.

  Henry’s ambassadors to foreign lands were informed in a statement issued on August 8, 1540, that “upon a notable appearance of honor, cleanness and maidenly behavior . . . His Highness was finally contented to honor that lady with his marriage, thinking in his old days—after sundry troubles of mind which had happened to him by marriage—to have obtained such a perfect jewel of womanhood and very perfect love towards him as should have been not only to his quietness but also to have brought forth the desired fruits of marriage.”

  For her motto, Kathryn chose the submissive phrase “non aultre volonté que le sienne” (no other will than his). On the royal properties, the stone and stained glass were embellished with Hs entwined with Ks. Because Kathryn was Henry’s “blushing rose without a thorn,” she selected a crowned rose as her emblem.

  Constantly caressing her in public, “the king’s affection was so marvelously set upon that gentlewoman, as it was never known that he had the like to any woman,” wrote Ralph Morice, secretary to Archbishop Cranmer. He spent more on Kathryn’s gowns, jewels, and household expenses than he had for any of his other wives. It cost Henry £46,000 a year—nearly $36 million in today’s economy—to maintain Kathryn’s personal establishment.

  Although Kathryn was indeed something of a good-time girl, she was warm and loving, a good-natured soul who just wanted everybody to be happy. And unlike each of Henry’s previous wives, she had no political agenda of her own.

  Kathryn found places in her household for most of the young ladies from her Maidens’ Chamber days. And at Agnes Howard’s insistence, she made her former lover Francis Dereham one of her clerks, a move that was ill-advised at best, but the dowager duchess had pressed her for the favor. During her brief tenure as queen, Kathryn’s detractors accused her of favoritism in making these appointments, but this was an accepted practice at the time—protocol observed by each of Henry’s queens, as well as by the king himself.

  But Dereham abused his position, behaving like one of his betters. When he was caught lingering over his dinner, a perquisite reserved for members of the Queen’s Council, he retorted somewhat cryptically, “I was of the Queen’s Council before [his accuser] knew her, and shall be when she hath forgotten him.”

  In October 1540, the Queen Consort Act was passed by Parliament, giving Kathryn the right to “act as a woman sole, without the consent of the King’s Highness.” Unfortunately, the teen queen would end up taking her privileges too literally.

  The following July, the court embarked on a Royal Progress, and it was during this journey that a change in Kathryn’s behavior began to be noted.

  At their stop in Lincoln, Henry retired to his apartments early, but the queen’s rooms were lit until the wee hours of the morning. The night watchman observed that the door to her back stairs was ajar, so he locked it; but not too much later, he saw two figures approach the door. They fumbled with the lock and somehow got it open, slipping wordlessly into the queen’s rooms.

  A few days later, on a hunting break at Hartfield Chase, Kathryn’s ladies spied her glancing out the window of her bedchamber at Thomas Culpeper, fixing him with a look of purest lust. It was a gaze her minions would long remember.

  The next destination on the Royal Progress was Pontefract Castle. A page, sent by the king to Kathryn’s bedchamber (presumably to summon her to the royal fourposter), found the door bolted shut. Apparently, he did not dare report this to His Majesty. Did he tell Henry instead that he found Kathryn fast asleep, snoring loud enough to shake the battlements?

  Kathryn later claimed that she and Culpeper had a platoni
c relationship and were simply conversing all night, but a locked door never looks good.

  On November 1, with the Progress over and the court back in London, Henry declared his happiness in a solemn thanks-giving, ironically (or perhaps pointedly) giving thanks for the virtuousness of his wife. Immediately after his pronouncement of perfect bliss, everything turned ugly. A Hollywood screen-writer couldn’t have done better with the timing.

  Sliding into the pew beside him, Thomas Cranmer, the Archbishop of Canterbury, approached Henry with news that would destroy the king’s fantasies and bring down the fragile house of cards that was his fifth marriage. Cranmer had received a letter from John Lascelles advising him of Kathryn’s infidelity. John was the brother of Mary Lascelles, the maidservant at step-gran Agnes Howard’s house who used to procure the keys to the Maidens’ Chamber so that Francis Dereham could sneak in to have orgiastic sex with Kathryn. And Kathryn had made a cardinal goof by finding a place in her royal household for each of her former acquaintances—except Mary Lascelles.

  But there was more to the picture. The Lascelles family were staunch Reformers (as was Cranmer—who in happier days had been the sidekick of the über-Reformer Anne Boleyn). The Reformers wanted to bring down the powerful (and Catholic) Howards before they gained so much influence at court that Henry would become dissuaded from reforming the religion. Cranmer didn’t really have anything against Kathryn per se, but he weighed the consequences and concluded that it would be all right with his conscience to sacrifice the queen if it meant saving his infant Church.