Henry VIII's Last Love: The Extraordinary Life of Katherine Willoughby, Lady-in-Waiting to the Tudors

by David Baldwin

  Also listed under ‘Necessaries’ are a number of entries which at first glance may appear puzzling. In October 1560 William King was allowed 21s 4d ‘for the loss sustained by proclamation in 59 French crowns and five pistilates at the fall of gold’ – a benefit also extended to several others – and the keeper of the book noted in December that ‘I am to be allowed for loss sustained in £5 8s 4d Spanish money … in four Phillips and four in dallers, 11s 6d’. The problem was devaluation. In 1542 Henry VIII, who was desperately in need of funds to fight the French, instructed the Mint to add six ounces of copper to every ten ounces of sterling silver it used to make pennies. This adulteration, which increased to as much as thirteen ounces of copper per pound in Edward VI’s reign, allowed the government to spend more in the short term, but at the same time caused rampant inflation leading to widespread protests. It was left to Elizabeth to call in the debased currency and refine out the copper, but people like the Berties’ servants, who had been – or who continued to be – paid with money that was not worth its face value (and this evidently included gold and silver coins from abroad), felt cheated. Katherine and her husband were sympathetic – or prudent – enough to make the deficiency good.11

  The next five sections, ‘Bakehouse and Pantry’, ‘Brewhouse and Buttery’, ‘Cellar’, ‘Spicery, Chaundry [where candles were kept] and Laundry’ and ‘Kitchen’, can be conveniently taken together. The first heading included everything that was required to bake bread on the premises and ‘one dozen silver plate trenchers’ bought by Katherine in May 1562; the second ‘four barrels of double beer and eight barrels of small beer’ purchased in November 1561, followed by ‘three barrels of strong beer and thirty-five of double beer’ bought three months later for a total of £11 15s 4d. It is reasonable to assume that most members of the household drank it on a daily basis, and the entries under ‘Cellar’ indicate that the family and probably the more senior servants also consumed large quantities of wine. Claret was bought by the hogshead (a cask containing 52½ gallons), and also popular were Rhenish varieties, ‘sack’, dry white wines imported from southern Europe, bitter ‘wormwood’ and spiced hippocras.

  The seasonings kept in the spicery included aniseed, cumin, pepper, ginger, cinnamon, cloves, and maces derived from nutmeg, the prices paid ranging from 8d a pound for cumin to 14s a pound for maces. ‘Eight pounds and a half of wax’ (for candles) cost 8s, ‘a stone of candlewicks’ 3s 8d and ‘Mother Welcher’ was paid 3d a dozen for washing thirty-three dozen ‘pantry cloths’ every month. The family and more senior members of the household enjoyed veal, mutton, pork, red and fallow deer, geese, woodcocks, herons and partridges, but fish was a major component of everyone’s diet. ‘Eight hundred salt fish’ cost £26 13s 4d and ‘half a hundred lings’ £7 in October 1560, while in January £7 was paid for ‘six barrels of white herrings’ and £3 12s for ‘six “cades” of red herrings’. Each ‘cade’ contained about 600 herrings, and quantities of other comestibles purchased were on a similar scale: 400 oranges cost 3s 10d, 420 eggs 5s 10d, and ‘half a peck’ of onions (‘peck’ used in the archaic sense of a large number) 14d. The Berties believed in stocking up out of season when prices were lower and, perhaps where heavier items were involved, the roads were more passable. Large quantities of coal for cooking purposes were purchased in April, May, June and July of 1562, and cost a total £15 18s 8d. The fires in the house itself burned wood.

  Our sixteenth-century ancestors had no concept of a healthy or balanced diet, and we can only wonder how many members of the Grimsthorpe household suffered from gout, constipation or related ailments. Foods high in protein were on every menu, not least because they were more expensive and being able to afford them was a mark of gentility. Vegetables and salads that peasants grew in their gardens and apples that could be picked from trees for nothing (for example) were beneath the dignity of aristocrats like Katherine, and there is no evidence that the children were given milk to drink, again, because it was cheap and commonplace. The only fruits mentioned in the accounts are relatively costly items like figs and oranges – if there was any ‘five a day’ here it was five different cuts of meat!

  The entries made in another, shorter book, The booke of records for the Kychyn for March 1561,12 show that mealtimes at Grimsthorpe were strictly formal, with everyone being seated – and fed – according to his or her rank. The master’s table was served the best fare followed by that of the gentlemen of the household, then the clerks, the yeomen and so on. The proportion of fish to meat served grew ever greater as the status of the individuals diminished, and fresh butter was reserved exclusively for the higher tables – those seated below the clerks had to make do with the salted alternative. Curiously, the family and those seated at the top table were still served two or three dishes of meat and a great variety of fish during Lent while the rest of the household made do with simpler food. They may have reduced the number of courses voluntarily, as a penance, but it could also be a case of ‘do as I say, not as I do’.

  The strict hierarchy of precedence that defined the household was breached only on one occasion – at Christmas, when a peasant or junior servant was created Lord (or King, Bishop or Abbot) of Misrule for the duration of the festivities. His task was to preside over the masques, plays and feasts arranged for everyone’s amusement, and he was frequently given a mock ‘court’ and received comic homage from the revellers. In December 1560 Katherine and Bertie gave George, Mr Pelham’s man, 40s ‘to furnish himself Lord of Christmas, and his men in a livery’, and he subsequently received 10s as a personal gift from ‘my master’. His ‘furniture’ cost 6s 2d.13

  We noticed earlier that the Berties paid visits to other members of the local ‘godly community’, but by far their most regular journey was to London. When Katherine travelled to the capital in October 1561 she was on the road for three days and the cost of meals and accommodation for herself and her entourage amounted to £10 17s. She spent her first night at Huntingdon, having covered about forty miles from Grimsthorpe with only a stop for refreshment at Stilton in Cambridgeshire. Next day she entered Hertfordshire, pausing at Royston for dinner before moving on to Puckeridge for the night, a journey of about thirty-five miles. London was still fifty or so miles distant, but was reached late on the third day after stops for drinks at Walsworth, Ware and Hoddesdon, and dinner at Waltham Abbey. Spending many hours on poor roads either on horseback or in a conveyance without springs would have been both uncomfortable and tiring,14 but it was essential to mix and mingle in the ‘best’ society and to appear both well attended and generous. Richard Bertie was accompanied by a ‘train’ of eighteen men and horses ‘besides strangers’ (costing £18 17s 1½d) when he undertook another journey in February 1560–1, and in November, Katherine paid 11s 4d ‘for the suppers of twenty-four persons at the “Swan” at Charing Cross which attended upon her Grace to the court’.

  The final heading, ‘Stable’, included food and equipment for the horses and everything necessary for their care. In October 1560 Archibald Bernard was paid £5 for a horse ‘if my master likes him’, and Katherine bought a ‘silk fringe for a new pillion cloth’ and ‘a harness and trimming for the same’ for 45s. ‘A pair of silk reins for my Lady’ set her back another 26s 8d, and two others, evidently of less quality, ‘for the gentlewomen’ 4s. On a more practical level, 8d was spent on ‘frankincense to smoke sick horses’ in October 1560, and 6s on ‘3 strik of dried peas’ (‘strik’ is an old Lincolnshire word for bushel) in February 1561. The routine costs of the stable – horseshoes, saddles, straw, grain, bran, etc. – amounted to between £9 and £10 in most months.

  The expenses noticed above have been categorised in the way that they appear in the account book, but this is inevitably at the expense of context. Some of the items found under different headings relate to the same moment in time, or occasion, and it may be useful to give just one example of how they can sometimes be brought together to paint a more rounded picture. Lady Goff suggests that one f
actor which prompted Katherine to travel to London in October 1561 was a dispute over ‘some land in Lincolnshire which formerly belonged to a Mr Fulston and which was now in question between the queen and the Duchess of Suffolk’.15 Richard Bertie was probably there already since Mistress Ashley’s man had given him access to the queen’s private garden in August, and it may have been Elizabeth’s response – or the lack of it – that prompted him to send for Katherine. En route, she gave a total of 2s to the prisoners at Huntingdon and a poor woman she met ‘in the way’, and it was in November, shortly after her arrival, that she bought ‘a silk fringe for a new pillion cloth’ with a decorated harness and treated twenty-four attendants to supper at the ‘Swan’ at Charing Cross. She evidently meant to cut a figure in the streets of the capital, but before the month was out had caught smallpox – a circumstance which necessitated stuffing the cracks in her room with brown paper and employing Mr Rose and his musical daughters to help while away the hours. ‘Journeying’ records that hiring a ‘car’ ‘to bring a bed from my Lady Katherine Capell’s to [the] Barbican when her Grace was sick’ cost 4d (Katherine had been staying at the court at Greenwich prior to her illness), and ‘Gifts and Rewards’ notes that ‘Mistress Ashley’s man that brought her Grace to [the] Barbican with a little wagon’ (when she was clearly ‘out and about’ again), was paid a shilling in May 1562. She was apparently much improved by February when Dr Keynes received a silver-gilt cup for his services, and the intervening months had not been wasted. In January, the queen was given the costly New Year presents described earlier, and the Lord Chief Justice and his colleague received their ‘standing cups’ soon afterwards. Whether all this effort (and expense!) produced the outcome she and her husband sought is not recorded, but in March she bought a canary from a seaman and Bertie donated 6s 8d towards the repair of St Paul’s steeple. Her second pet bird, a parrot, was acquired shortly before she returned to Grimsthorpe in June.

  Richard Bertie did not remain in London for the whole of this period. There would have been matters in Lincolnshire that required his attention, and he was certainly there in February when 18s was spent on a silk hat, ‘garnished and [with] a band of gold for my master at his coming to Grimsthorpe’. The frequent references to ‘my master’ in the accounts are added proof that although Katherine was socially superior to her husband she always deferred to him in public. When James of the kitchen was given 8d for ‘well dressing my Lady’s dinner’ it was ‘by my master’s commandment’, and the same applied to the shilling she received ‘in single pence, to play at tables in her sickness’. Katherine could be dominant when she chose to be and most of the family’s wealth belonged to her; but her marital arrangements were strictly conventional and entirely in keeping with her reformed faith.

  It is difficult to put the Berties’ expenses into context because we have no knowledge of their income and how it related to their outgoings, but there are occasional hints in the accounts that from time to time they suffered from what we would today call ‘cash-flow’ problems. In November Mr Bland, a skinner, was paid £14 in part [my italics] for furs to make Richard a gown, and a mercer, Clement Newce, got only £60 of the £178 7s 6d he was owed for ‘sundry silks taken of him for my master, her Grace, the children and their servants’ the following June. But there is nothing to suggest that (unlike some other aristocratic families) they were living hopelessly beyond their means, and no indication that their gambling ever threatened to ruin them. Not a little of the credit for this happy state of affairs must be given to Richard Bertie – Katherine might have married ‘beneath’ herself but she had chosen well.

  9

  A BED OF NAILS

  1565–1580

  By the late 1560s Katherine was approaching fifty – a good age for a Tudor lady – and doubtless hoped that her last years would be largely peaceful. But she had not reckoned with a number of events that were destined to cause her much trouble. Her first surprise came in the autumn of 1565 when she learned that her step-granddaughter Mary, the youngest of the three Grey sisters, had also contracted a secret marriage. Mary was now nineteen or twenty, small and, in the words of the Spanish ambassador, ‘crook-backed and very ugly’.1 In the course of her duties as one of the queen’s maids of honour she had formed an attachment to Thomas Keyes, the sergeant porter, a widower twice her age and possibly almost twice her size. She did not dare to seek Elizabeth’s permission – she had no hope of obtaining it in the aftermath of her sister Catherine’s deceptions – but may have thought that marrying beneath herself would make her cousin2 more forgiving. She wed Keyes at Whitehall on 16 July 1565 while the queen and most of the court were attending another, grander ceremony at Durham House on the Strand.

  The marriage may have been secret but it was not private – one estimate puts the number of witnesses at eleven – and it was almost inevitable that it would be gossiped around the court. Whatever Mary’s hopes, Elizabeth could not tolerate another act of studied disobedience, and her reaction was entirely predictable. The lovers were separated, Mary being sent to Sir William Hawtrey’s recently rebuilt country house at Chequers in Buckinghamshire, while Keyes, whose position of trust as head of the palace guard made his behaviour still more shocking, was clapped into the Fleet prison. Mary was incarcerated in a room twelve feet square, maintained at minimal expense, and forbidden to meet anyone; but she cannot have suffered as much as her husband, who was kept in solitary confinement in a cell scarcely large enough to contain his huge body. Pleas for forgiveness and even an attempt to dissolve the marriage were rejected, and it may have been with some relief that Mary learned that she was to be transferred to the custody of her grandmother Katherine Willoughby. She and Hawtrey arrived at the Minories (a house near the Tower where Katherine was staying) on 7 August 1567.

  Katherine was aware of her new responsibility, but the speed and the circumstances of her granddaughter’s coming seem to have taken her by surprise. Mary appeared to have few of the possessions she would need to maintain herself within the household, and two days later Katherine wrote to William Cecil seeking his help:

  According to the Queen’s commandment, on Friday at night last, Mr Hawtrey brought my Lady Mary to the Minories to me even as I was appointed to have gone to Grimsthorpe … The truth is, I am so unprovided of stuff here myself as at the Minories [the letter was written from Greenwich], I borrow of my Lady Eleanor and here of Mistress Sheffield; for all the stuff that I had left me when I came from the other side of the sea, and all that I have since provided for and gotten together will not sufficiently furnish our houses in Lincolnshire … I was fain to declare the same lack of stuff to Mr Hawtrey, praying that my Lady’s stuff might come before her, for the dressing up of her chamber. But would God you had seen what stuff it is! He before told me that she occupied his and none of her own [i.e. Hawtrey had himself provided for her], and now I see it I believe him well. I am sorry that I am not so well stowed for her as he was, but am compelled to borrow it from my friends in the town. She had nothing but an old livery feather bed, all too torn and full of patches, without either bolster or counterpane, but two old pillows, the one longer that the other, an old quilt of silk so torn as the cotton of it comes out, such a little piteous canopy of red sarcenet [fine thin silk] as were scant good enough to hang over some secret stool [toilet], and two little pieces of old, old hangings, both of them not seven yards broad. Wherefore I pray you heartily consider of this, and if you shall think it meet, be a mean for her to the Queen’s Majesty that she might have the furniture of one chamber for herself and her maid, and she and I will play the good housewives and make shift with her old bed for her man.3 Also, I would if I durst beg further some old silver pots to fetch her drink in, and two little cups … one for beer another for wine. A basin and a ewer [for washing] I fear were too much, but all these things she lacks and were meet she had, and hath nothing in this world. And truly, if I were able to give it her, she should never trouble her Majesty for it; but look ye, what it shall
please her Majesty to appoint for her shall be always ready to be delivered in as good case as by her wearing of it, it shall be left, whensoever it shall please her Majesty to call for it. I hope she will do well hereafter, for notwithstanding that I am sure she is now glad to be with me, yet I assure you she is otherwise, not only in conscience but in very deed, so sad and ashamed of her fault (I think it is because she saw me not since before) so that I am not yet sure she can get her to eat, in all that she hath eaten now these two days not so much as a chicken’s leg. She makes me even afraid of [for] her, and therefore I will be the gladder for them [the items requested]. I think a little comfort would do well.4

  If readers feel they have been here before they should turn back some twenty years and five chapters to the time when Katherine was asked to look after little Mary Seymour. Her protests then sound strangely familiar, and both are examples of her reluctance to contribute to the maintenance of someone who (in her eyes) was not her responsibility. She may indeed have had to refurbish her houses after her return from exile, but she was surely not so ill-provided seven years later that she could not find Mary Grey a decent bed and a few pots. Again, the burden was unwelcome and she was nobody’s fool.

  Mary remained with Katherine for almost two years until she was moved to the London home of the rich merchant Sir Thomas Gresham in June 1569. Not much is known of this phase of her life, but she was further saddened by the deaths of her sister Catherine (in January 1568) and her husband Thomas Keyes, in late August or the beginning of September 1571. Keyes had been released from the Fleet a year earlier and given a post at Sandgate Castle in Kent; but his tentative request to be permitted to live with his wife was rejected and they never saw each other again. It was perhaps small consolation that Elizabeth could now take the view that whatever threat Mary posed to her had been lifted, and could accede to Gresham’s request to discharge her in May 1572. After spending some months with her stepfather Adrian Stokes at Beaumanor in Leicestershire she secured a house of her own in London, and her income increased as she was gradually restored to royal favour. She was again appointed a maid of honour to the queen at the end of 1577,5 but died, possibly from plague, on 20 April the next year. In her will she left her mother’s gold bracelets and a ‘mystic ruby’, thought to have magical properties, to ‘her very good lady and grandmother’ Katherine Willoughby, with the request that Katherine give something to Suzan. Suzan was the chief mourner at her funeral, held in Westminster Abbey on 14 May.