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

by Leslie Carroll

  When Henry read the accusations against Kathryn, his first reaction was disbelief. He insisted that the investigation into these allegations be conducted in secret. Meanwhile, his beloved queen was kept at Hampton Court, and Henry developed excuses for not visiting her. In fact, true to form when the going got tough on the domestic front, Henry absented himself. He would never see his wife again.

  The investigative hearings began on November 5, 1541. Kathryn stood accused of fornicating before marriage with both Henry Manox and Francis Dereham. The transcripts of the hearings include testimony so graphic that a twenty-first-century tabloid couldn’t print it without running afoul of the pornography laws.

  Mary Lascelles, the first to testify, claimed that she had reproved Manox for his presumption in thinking that Kathryn would ever be his. She added that on hearing this, Manox had laughed in Mary’s face and boastfully replied, “I know her well enough, for I have had her by the cunt, and I know it among a hundred . . . And she loves me and I love her, and she had said to me that I shall have her maidenhead, though it be painful to her, and not doubting but I will be good to her hereafter.”

  According to Manox, Kathryn had withheld her virginity from him but had promised that he should not go entirely unsatisfied.

  “Yet let me feel your secret place,” the music teacher had insisted. Kathryn assented, “and I felt more than was convenient,” he admitted. However, Manox swore “upon [his] damnation and the most extreme punishment of [his] body” that he never did more with Kathryn than that act of groping, and had never known her carnally. And throughout the hearings, he would not be budged from this testimony. It would ultimately free him, as there was nothing for which he could be convicted. Manox would be the only one implicated in the scandal to walk away with his head on his shoulders.

  But Dereham was another story. Under oath, he confessed “carnal knowledge with the Queen . . . lying in bed by her in [his] doublet and hosen divers times and six or seven times naked in bed with her.”

  Mary Lascelles titillated the investigators with descriptions of Kathryn and Dereham’s marathon lovemaking sessions in the Maidens’ Chamber, “for they would kiss and hang by their bills together as if they were two sparrows.”

  “There was such puffing and blowing between them that [she] was weary of the same,” testified Alice Restwood, Kathryn’s former bedfellow in the Maidens’ Chamber.

  Henry was moved to tears by all this testimony. His virtuous wife had turned out to be nothing but a harlot.

  Even as the council heard witness after witness shred Kathryn’s virtue, the queen herself, holed up at Hampton Court, remained unaware of the investigation. But on November 7, two days after the first day of hearings, when the king’s men came to place her under house arrest and found her making merry with her maids, they informed the queen that it was “no more the time to dance.”

  The evidence against her had been so well rehearsed that a refutation of the charges was impossible. She could only counter them with resignation and abject humility.

  The authorities gave Kathryn every chance to admit a precontract with Dereham, which would have saved her life, as the precontract was itself tantamount to a marriage. If she had been contracted to Dereham, her marriage to Henry would have been null and void, and—if she was not Henry’s wife—he could not possibly charge her with adultery.

  But Kathryn, too hysterical and unable to parse the nuances of the situation, insisted that Dereham had forced himself upon her, averring that she had never welcomed his advances. However, no one believed her because of the duration of the relationship and the numerous love tokens exchanged.

  She was arrested on November 12, 1541. When the king refused to see her, Kathryn wrote him a desperate plea for clemency. She pleaded with Henry for forgiveness, confessing that First, at the flattering and fair persuasions of Manox, being but a young girl, I suffered him at sundry times to handle and touch the secret parts of my body which neither become me with honesty to permit nor him to require.

  Also, Francis Dereham, by many persuasions procured me to his vicious purpose and obtained first to lie upon my bed with his doublet and hose and after within the bed and finally he lay with me naked, and used me in such sort as a man doth his wife many and sundry times, but how often I know not.

  Our company ended almost a year before the King’s Majesty was married to my Lady Anne of Cleves and continued not past one quarter of a year or a little above.

  Henry wasn’t entirely sure she had committed any offense with Dereham since it had all taken place long before she had become queen. Why not be merciful? Kathryn was guilty of being young and lusty, something Henry understood firsthand. For that, he could consign her to a convent, but at least her life would be spared. In fact, on November 14, Henry did tell Kathryn, “to a nunnery, go!” packing her off to Syon, a former convent, while the whole sordid business could be sorted out.

  But Henry’s council, realizing how much his passion for Kathryn might soften his resolve, couldn’t allow him to be lenient. They convinced him that to forgive Kathryn’s transgressions was a sign of regal weakness.

  Conveniently for the council, Kathryn’s Lady of the Bedchamber, Jane Rochford (the sister-in-law of the late Anne Boleyn), decided to unburden her conscience. The scheming yet craven Lady Rochford had acted as go-between and gatekeeper on numerous occasions when Kathryn was wont to admit Thomas Culpeper to her bedchamber.

  Now Kathryn’s ordeal took on a different tone, and the stakes could not have been higher. If Kathryn had slept with Culpeper during the Royal Progress, she had indeed committed adultery—high treason because she had cuckolded a king. And the penalty was death.

  A rapid-fire round of finger-pointing began. Francis Dereham told the council that the reason Kathryn had terminated their relationship was because the queen had fallen for Thomas Culpeper.

  Kathryn blamed Lady Rochford, insisting that her lady-in-waiting had encouraged her to consort with Culpeper, convincing her that she could get away with it. Kathryn admitted that she had indeed given Culpeper some relatively insignificant gifts, but that it had not been her idea; Culpeper had asked for them.

  On November 12, 1541, Culpeper was arrested and taken to the Tower. His rank prohibited him from being subjected to torture or undue duress, but he did have more to say on the matter. Though he insisted that Kathryn had initiated their relationship, he did admit his feelings for her. Since some historians have painted Culpeper as an ambitious schemer and Kathryn the dupe of her own hormones, it’s almost refreshing to note that—since everyone was to die for it—at least Culpeper did care for her.

  At the Tower, Culpeper delineated in chapter and verse the extent of his affair with the queen, stating that on Maundy Thursday (April 14, 1541), he was summoned by one of Kathryn’s servants to the queen’s presence, where Kathryn gave him “by her own hand a fair cap of velvet garnished with a brooch, along with three dozen pairs of aglets [decorative pins] and a chain. ‘Put this under your cloak [and let] nobody see it,’ ” Kathryn had allegedly told Culpeper. To which he claimed to have replied, “Alas, madam, why did you not do this when you were a maid?”

  This was not what Kathryn wanted to hear, according to Culpeper, because at their next encounter, she had grumpily asked him, “Is this all the thanks ye give me for the cap? If I had known ye would have [said] these words, you never should have had it.”

  They’d been playing a flirtatious high-stakes game of cat and mouse; the more one of them withheld their favors or interest, the more it sparked the other’s flame. And yet in a rare moment of self-awareness, Kathryn had told Culpeper that their love was impossible—which he had interpreted as a directive to satisfy his urges elsewhere.

  “I marvel that ye could so much dissemble as to say ye loved me so earnestly and yet would and did lie so soon with another,” she’d complained.

  Culpeper replied that Kathryn “was married [to the king] afore [he] loved the other,” adding that he had “found
so little favor at her hands at that time, that [he] was rather moved to set by other.”

  Although she was not ready to give herself to him, Kathryn did fear that Culpeper would forget her, so she sent him a pair of bracelets “to keep his arms warm.”

  As early as April 1541, when Culpeper had become ill at Greenwich, Kathryn had taken a keen interest in his welfare and dispatched her pages to bring him meat and fish for dinner, a gesture that could be construed as coming from the kind heart of a sovereign—but what would consign Kathryn to the block was the letter she subsequently wrote to her paramour: Master Culpeper,

  . . . It was showed me that you was sick, the which thing troubled me very much till such time that I hear from you, praying you to send me word how that you do. For I never longed so much for a thing as I do to see you and to speak with you, the which I trust shall be shortly now. . . . it makes my heart to die to think what fortune I have that I cannot be always in your company.

  My trust is always in you that you will be as you have promised me, and in that hope I trust still, praying you then that you will come when my Lady Rochford is here, for then I shall be best at leisure to be at your commandment. . . .

  I would you were with me now, that you might see what pain I take in writing you.

  Yours as long as life endures,

  Katheryn

  Though this letter provides no proof of sexual passion, let alone intercourse, to write it and send it was spectacularly ill-advised. No court is without its intrigue and surely the note was bound to come to light.

  Culpeper confessed that their affair had heated up during the summer’s Royal Progress. It had been Thomas and his servant who had picked the lock to Kathryn’s bedchamber door in Lincoln after the watchman had shut it. Culpeper admitted that when he entered the queen’s rooms he found only Kathryn and Lady Rochford there, and they stayed up throughout the night reminiscing about old times and old loves. He acknowledged that Kathryn had been very anxious about the watch, fearing they’d be discovered.

  Culpeper’s volubility at the Tower continued to condemn himself as well as the queen, admitting that at Pontefract, during the Progress, Kathryn had sent him a note: “As ye find the door, so to come.”

  And though she was probably jesting, during a lovers’ spat Kathryn had boasted to Culpeper when the Progress stopped at York that “she ‘had store of other lovers at other doors as well as he,’ ” to which Culpeper claims to have replied, “It is like enough.”

  Although there is no evidence of any other paramours, with all the dangers of being overheard, it was not a bright thing for Kathryn to say.

  But there is more to Kathryn than the heedless hedonist, and it doesn’t do her justice to paint her in broad strokes as an empty-headed, oversexed ninny. She is not a fictional character intended to represent an archetype. During these all-night tête-à -têtes with Culpeper, Kathryn’s vulnerability emerged. Admitting that Kathryn did have “communication with him how well she loved him,” Culpeper testified that the queen had poured out her heart to him, confiding that “when she was a maiden how many times her grief was such that she could not but weep in the presence of her fellows.”

  Acknowledging that she and Culpeper were playing with fire, Kathryn admitted that she feared Henry, urging Culpeper not to mention anything about their relationship when he went to confession, or ask to be shriven for it, because “surely the king, being Supreme Head of the Church, should have knowledge of it.”

  “No, madam, I warrant you,” Culpeper had assured her.

  It was an open-book test—the painful lesson of Anne Boleyn’s fall from grace staring at her from the pages of recent history—and still, Kathryn managed to fail it.

  Perhaps they were not having sex all those nights they spent together during the Progress. Perhaps it was just a friendship, but, as Culpeper admitted, it was flirting with intent. He “meant to do ill with the Queen, and that likewise the Queen so minded with him.”

  And it would be enough to convict them both.

  It was tough on the royal ego to face the possibility that this time his wife had thrown him over, rather than the other way around. The Howards had sold Henry a damaged bill of goods and he had been cuckolded in the bargain. The entire court knew it. And so would the rest of the world, once the foreign ambassadors sent their dispatches.

  It’s hard not to feel somewhat sorry for Henry, so self-deluded was he about his virility. Or was he? To condemn Kathryn was to air his own fragile insecurities about his age, his health, and his sexual prowess. More than anything else, he wanted a son, and the older he got, the more he realized that Holy Grail of paternity was slipping from his grasp. Though he would not acknowledge it publicly, Henry could see just as well as anyone else did that he was hugely obese, and that for nearly fifteen years he’d endured an oozing, ulcerous wound on his leg that often gave him a fever, made him limp, and stank to high heaven when it was time to change the dressing. His mortality mocked him, and with each passing day it became more important to insure the succession of his crown and the propagation of the Tudor dynasty. Yet court insiders claimed that Henry seemed to age overnight when he learned that his beloved rose without a thorn might have played him for a fool.

  The imperial ambassador, Chapuys, reported that he had never seen the king “so sad, pensive and sighing,” and “. . . He has certainly shown greater sorrow and regret at her loss, than at the faults, loss or divorce of his preceding wives.”

  Henry openly “regretted his ill luck in meeting with such horribly ill-conditioned wives.” He called for his sword that he might kill her “that he loved so much.” All the pleasure “that wicked woman” had derived from her “incontinency” should not equal the pain she should receive from torture. Her suffering should be of a far greater magnitude.

  Kathryn had been demoted from queen on November 22, 1541, to be called simply Kathryn Howard from then on. That day she was indicted for having led “an abominable, base, carnal, voluptuous, and vicious life before her royal marriage,” behaving “like a common harlot with divers persons, maintaining however the outward appearance of chastity and honesty.” She was accused of leading the king “by word and gesture to love her,” and “arrogantly coupled herself with him in marriage,” concealing her precontract with Francis Dereham “to the peril of the king and his children to be begotten by her.” She was also accused of seducing Culpeper and telling him that she preferred him to the king.

  A passel of Kathryn’s relatives were conveyed to the Tower, including the elderly dowager Duchess of Norfolk, all charged with misprision of treason, in knowing that Kathryn had either committed treason or planned to do so. The only relation who emerged unscathed was Kathryn’s uncle, the Duke of Norfolk, who had distanced himself from Kathryn as vociferously as he had once promoted her.

  On December 1, 1541, although both men refused to confess carnal knowledge with Kathryn after she had become queen, Culpeper and Dereham were tried for treason and found guilty.

  They were executed on December 10. Dereham was dragged on a hurdle from the Tower to Tyburn, where he was hanged. Then, while he was still alive, he was castrated and disemboweled. Finally, he was beheaded, and quartered—and all that for sleeping with a lusty teenage girl who had not yet met Henry VIII.

  Because of his rank and his position as a member of the King’s Bedchamber, Culpeper received a more lenient sentence. He was simply beheaded.

  In mid-January 1542, a Bill of Attainder in the form of a petition was drawn up, permitting Henry to execute Kathryn and her lady-in-waiting Lady Rochford for high treason, the penalty for which was “death and the confiscation of goods.” Although Kathryn had never confessed to adultery with Culpeper, Henry decided to put her to death under the “violent assumption” that she had been unfaithful to him.

  Additional clauses of the act were ridiculously retroactive, stating that it was treason if any nonvirgin should marry the king “without plain declaration before of her unchaste life unto
his majesty.” Adultery by or with the queen or the wife of the Prince of Wales was likewise a treasonable offense. It was also considered misprision of treason for anyone to conceal knowledge of such an offense—and that’s what convicted Lady Rochford.

  There was some hesitation about using an Act of Attainder against the queen without her being afforded the opportunity to speak for herself, so a delegation was dispatched to Syon House to hear her side of the story.

  But Kathryn refused to defend herself, openly acknowledging her guilt instead. She did request that Henry spare her relations from being punished, that he “would not impute [her] crime to [her] whole kindred and family.” She also asked that Henry give some of her fine attire to her household, “since she had nothing now to recompense them as they deserved.”

  On February 10, Kathryn, clad in black velvet, was taken by barge from Syon to the Tower, amid a bout of perfectly understandable last-minute hysterics. At least her boat was fully canopied, sparing her the sight of two recently decapitated heads—Dereham’s and Culpeper’s—rotting atop pikes on London Bridge. In the Queen’s Apartments at the Tower, according to the Calendar of State papers, Kathryn spent her final days enjoying the same honors and ceremonies that had been accorded to her when she was Queen of England, despite the fact that she had been stripped of her title.

  The following day, the Act of Attainder received Henry’s assent in absentia. Although the words “le roi le veut” (the king wills it) had been printed at the top of the document, Henry never actually signed it—and both women would meet their gruesome ends without the king’s formal imprimatur.

  Kathryn was brought before Cranmer to make her confession. It was a pitiful sight. Cranmer said, “I found her in such lamentation and heaviness as I never saw no creature, so that it would have pitied any man’s heart in the world to have looked upon her.”