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

by David Baldwin

  I am ashamed to be so troublesome to your Lordship and others of my good Lords of her Majesty’s honourable council, specially in so uncomfortable a suit as for licence of their assent of the absence of my only dear son, in whose company I hoped with comfort to have finished my last days. But … either I must see his doleful pining and vexed mind at home, which hath brought him to such a state of mind and body as so many knoweth and can witness it, or else content myself with his desire to seek such fortune abroad as may make him forget some griefs and give him better knowledge and experience to serve her Majesty and his country at his return. The time he desireth for the same is five years, so I am never like after his departure to see him again; yet am I loath he should so long be out of her Majesty’s realm wherefore I cannot consent to any more than three years. Oh, my good Lord, you have children and therefore you know how dear they be to their parents, your wisdom also is some help to govern your fatherly affections by … but alas, I a poor woman which with great pains and travail many years hath by God’s mercy brought an only son from tender youth to man’s state … so hoping now to have reaped some comfort for my long pains … in place of comfort I myself must be the suitor for his absence, to my great grief and sorrow. But God’s will be fulfilled, who worketh all for the best to them that love and fear Him; wherefore were not that hope of Him thoroughly settled in me, I think my very heart would burst for sorrow. I understand my sharp letters be everywhere showed, but were the bitter causes that moved them as well opened and known, I am sure my very enemies … would not only pity me and my husband’s wrongs but both my children’s … I most humbly beseech her Majesty even for God’s sake therefore to give him leave to go to sea and live in all places where it shall please God to hold him, always with the duty of a faithful subject to serve … her Majesty …25

  In the event Peregrine did not go abroad until two years after his mother’s death, and her fears for him proved groundless. His marital difficulties were resolved – he and Lady Mary produced five sons and a daughter – and his skill in the art of warfare earned him not only fame but the gratitude of his queen.

  It would, however, be wrong to give the impression that Katherine spent much of the 1570s fretting about her husband, her son, and her son-in-law. On the contrary, she remained dedicated to her interpretation of religion, and few things mattered more to her than persuading her tenants and members of the wider Lincolnshire community to see things her way. England was now once more a Protestant country, but in many local parishes congregations sought to keep their altars and rituals while the clergy continued to dress after the old manner. Katherine had no time for the veneration of saints’ images or the wearing of surplices (to name just two practices she would have associated with Catholicism), but the queen, as we have already noticed, was more tolerant. The Elizabethan religious settlement had embraced some of the old customs within a Protestant framework, and seeking further reform – exceeding the official line on such matters – risked bringing the reformers into conflict with the state.

  In the years after her return from exile, Katherine re-established her ‘godly household’ at her principal residences in Lincolnshire and London, appointed reformers as her chaplains, employed itinerant Protestant ministers as preachers, and bought Bibles and other devotional literature for her dependants. On two occasions she interceded for her spiritual mentor John Browne when the Council obliged him to defend his criticisms of the established church in the Star Chamber, and gave financial help to others who shared her opinions. Her main task, however, was to bring those who were in error (as she saw it) to a ‘right’ understanding of the gospel, and it was to this end that she reached beyond her homes and her circle into the wider community. She held, or presented clergy to, no fewer than twenty-two benefices in Lincolnshire in the course of her lifetime, and used her influence to advance suitably ‘godly’ incumbents and promote Protestantism through education. The fact that eight of the nine clerics whose marital status is known were married is itself proof of their detachment from the old faith; and it is no coincidence that with one exception they all resided in their parishes. It helped to ensure that the message was rammed home.26

  Katherine was not greatly troubled by illness in the earlier part of her life – she is reported as suffering from ague (alternate sweating and shivering) in 1537 and we have already noticed her brush with smallpox over the winter of 1561/2 – but she was increasingly troubled by health issues as she grew older. She was very sick in the late summer of 1568 when Richard Bertie referred in a letter to Cecil to ‘the rumour of the duchess’s dangerous illness spreading over the land [that] could not be hid from the court’; but by the time he wrote he was able to pass on the information that ‘my Lady, though she continue a bedwoman, and not a footwoman, yet, God be praised, she groweth a little stronger than her sickness, and sendeth to you, and to my lady, your wife, as strong and hearty commendations as ever she did’.27 We do not know what this ailment was or whether Katherine ever fully recovered from it, but in August 1570, when she was at Wrest trying to secure the earldom of Kent for her future son-in-law, Bertie apparently had to be sent for, although on his arrival he found her ‘somewhat eased of her extreme fits’.28 When Cecil inquired after her health the following April she told him she ‘was yet not very well, for that I took upon me a greater journey that I was well able to endeavour after my long sickness’.29

  Katherine still had another nine years to live at this point, but could have feared it would be much less at this moment. She was apparently reasonably well in 1577 if her attempts to influence her son’s marriage and improve the relationship between Cecil’s daughter and the Earl of Oxford are anything to go by, but the deterioration in her health became more marked thereafter. By September 1579 she was so unwell that one of her footmen apparently hinted to Cecil that she was losing her grip, a suggestion which upset her and which she rebuffed in the strongest terms:

  I beseech you my good Lord not to think, though I be sickly that I am altogether senseless as my foolish footman hath given your Lordship rather to think. I assure you, since yesternight that my daughter came from London and told it me, I have not been quiet, as this bearer can tell whom I have dispatched so soon as my extremity would suffer me to write this letter. And where it pleaseth you of your goodness to consider of any by his foolish talk … I beseech your Lordship for God’s sake there may be no more words of it … Craving your pardon both for my foolish man and myself … at Hampstead, in pain of body as this bearer can tell.30

  Katherine still retained all her old feistiness, but the end was now approaching. She died a year later, on 19 September 1580, although whether at Grimsthorpe or in London is not known.

  Postscript

  THE RAVAGES OF TIME

  Katherine’s death would have saddened not only her husband and children but also her servants, who had found her a fair-minded mistress, and those in the wider Protestant community who knew her as a loyal and committed friend. Richard Bertie must have received many expressions of condolence, but only one survives among the family papers. This was written by Johan Landshade de Steinach from Turlaco (Spain) on 24 November 1580, and praises Katherine’s piety and virtues, particularly the fortitude with which she bore her exile, before reflecting on the undoubted happiness of her present state. He goes on to express his gratitude towards her for maintaining his son in her household for the past three years, and says that he would willingly leave him in Bertie’s care; but because the boy’s mother is anxious to see him he has ‘yielded to her pleadings’ and asked Mr Bartholomew Hylles ‘to send him back by some merchant coming to the next Frankfurt fair’.1

  Katherine’s elegantly arranged funeral took place at Spilsby on Saturday 22 October 1580. The chief mourner was her daughter Suzan, and the ten women who accompanied her included four titled ladies, ‘the Lady Zouche widow, the Lady Willoughby of Parham, the Lady “Sicill” and the Lady Wrey’. Margaret, Lady Willoughby of Parham, was her cousin by marriage, Lady �
��Sicill’ was presumably Mildred Cecil, who should more properly have been styled Lady Burghley, and Anne, Lady Wrey (Wray), was the wife of Sir Christopher Wray of Glentworth (Lincolnshire), judge and sometime speaker of the House of Commons. The identity of Lady Zouche is less certain because the widows of the eighth and tenth Lords Zouche of Harringworth were still living in 1469 and we have no date of death for either of them or for the widow of the ninth lord. The tenth lord’s widow, Mary or Margaret Welby, came from Moulton in Lincolnshire, about twenty miles from Grimsthorpe, so perhaps she is the most likely candidate of the three.2

  These ladies were escorted by two ‘assistants to the chief mourner’ (Peregrine, now Lord Willoughby de Eresby, and William, Lord Willoughby of Parham), the preacher, the Dean of Lincoln, and the great banner bearer, Sir William Skipwith. Then came the four ‘bearers of the bannerolles’, the four bearers of the corpse, the four assistants to the bearers, the two ‘officers’ and the two gentlemen ushers. Only men were allowed to occupy these positions, and those chosen included long-standing associates like Edmund Hall and Francis Guevara, who have already featured in our story, together with four members of the Jenny family, Ralph Chamberlain, George Metham and William Fitzwilliam. The Jennys were distant relatives, Chamberlain a Catholic gentleman who had been on good terms with Katherine, Metham had served as standard bearer at Charles Brandon’s funeral, and Fitzwilliam was presumably the sometime Lord Deputy of Ireland who was a cousin of Mildred Cecil. Most were provided with mourning garments – gowns with hoods made from different lengths of material according to rank – and the peers and peeresses received apparel for their servants as well.

  The manner of proceeding to the church and the order in which the mourners made their offerings were also governed by strict precedence. ‘Poor men, poor women, singing men and chaplains’ led the procession followed by the invited mourners, Garter king of arms and Somerset herald, and lastly, ‘the body with assistants under a canopy’ and ‘the chief mourner between two lords’. This was reversed for the offering, where Suzan offered first and the others after her. Unfortunately, our narrative ends at this point, but when the solemnities concluded the guests would have been liberally entertained and the poor who had attended given some money.3

  One person who – surprisingly, to our way of thinking – was not present on this occasion was the grieving widower Richard Bertie. The reason was that it was not then customary for husbands to attend their late wives’ funerals, possibly because the deceased’s closest female relative always acted as chief mourner. This was one occasion when a younger brother did not automatically take precedence over an older sister – Suzan was pre-eminent at her mother’s obsequies although her brother Peregrine, the heir to the title, was also present, and readers may recall that it was Frances, and not her brother the young Earl of Lincoln, who had fulfilled the role at their mother Mary Brandon’s funeral. Charles Brandon, her widower, likewise had no part to play.4

  Katherine’s finest memorial is her monument in the Willoughby chapel at Spilsby. Like the rest of the effigies in the chapel, it is in a remarkably good state of preservation, and has fortunately avoided the attentions of puritan iconoclasts. It is somewhat curious that Katherine and Bertie should have sought to preserve their memory in stone after the manner of their Catholic ancestors, and stranger still to find that five of the six texts on the western-facing side of the structure are written in Latin. This sits oddly with their desire to make the Bible widely available in translation, and could imply that even they found some of the old customs hard to abandon. To the south is an image of Peregrine standing in an arched niche above a semi-reclining effigy of his only daughter, Catherine, who died in childbed in 1610.

  A church enjoys a permanence not always extended to more secular buildings, and several of Katherine’s dwelling houses have all but disappeared. Suffolk Place in Southwark, where Charles Brandon entertained Henry VIII and the Emperor Charles V in 1522, was demolished forty years later, and Willoughby House exists only in a name given to part of the modern Barbican development in Cripplegate. The same is true of Westhorpe House in Suffolk. In The Historic Sites of Suffolk, published in 1839, John Wodderspoon recorded that ‘the workmen are now pulling it down, as fast as may be, in a very careless and injudicious manner. The coping bricks, battlements, and many other ornamental pieces are made of earth, and burnt hard, and as fresh as when first built. They might, with care, have been taken down whole, but all the fine chimnies and ornaments were pulled down with ropes, and crushed to pieces, in a most shameful manner. There was a monstrous figure of Hercules, sitting cross-legged with his club, and a lion beside him, but all shattered to pieces.’5 No image survives, but many pieces of debris recovered from the moat in the 1990s bear traces of finely carved reliefs.

  Fortunately, three of the other properties Katherine occupied at various times, Parham, Tattershall and Grimsthorpe, have fared rather better. Parham (now Moat) Hall, where she was born, is described by Pevsner as a ‘wonderful survival … a moated early sixteenth-century timber-framed house with substantial brick parts’. There are two- and three-light windows with arched lights, ‘rather low on the ground floor, tall and with transom on the first floor’, and a fine gable to the west. The gateway has a four-centred arch and two niches with wild men, heraldic symbols of the Willoughby family’s Ufford ancestors.6

  The first castle at Tattershall was begun by Robert de Tateshale in 1231, but it was Ralph, Lord Cromwell, Henry VI’s treasurer, who built the great tower and constructed a second outer moat to embrace three new ranges of service buildings between 1432 and 1448. Cromwell’s design was intended more to create an impression than to withstand a siege, and the complex dominated the surrounding countryside when the king granted it to Charles Brandon in 1537. It was subsequently owned and occupied by the earls of Lincoln, but became derelict and ruinous around 1700. Over the years many of the outer buildings were demolished, the moats were filled in, and even the four great fireplaces were no longer in situ when Lord Curzon acquired the site in 1911. His intervention frustrated a plan to demolish the tower brick by brick and ship it to America, and he arranged for the return of the fireplaces while securing the remainder of the structure and the other surviving buildings. The property has been in the care of the National Trust since 1925.

  Brandon’s greatest building project was at Katherine’s house at Grimsthorpe in Lincolnshire which became their permanent country residence in the aftermath of the Lincolnshire rebellion. This time he used stone – easily obtained from the nearby redundant abbey of Vaudey – and constructed the basic form of the house we still see today. The north front was redesigned by Sir John Vanburgh at the beginning of the eighteenth century and a new Tudor-style west front was erected after 1811, but much of Brandon’s work remains in the south and east ranges. Inside, the great hall, with its full-length figures of monarchs who favoured the family, is perhaps Vanburgh’s greatest achievement, but other parts of the house retain something of their Tudor ambience. It is still occupied by the present Lady Willoughby de Eresby.7

  Reminders of Katherine are not, however, confined only to bricks and mortar. The forty-four letters she wrote to William Cecil (listed in Appendix 1), reveal her personality in a way that no building project or biographer writing for a patron could ever do, and despite all their infelicities are still arguably her finest memorial. A glance at the list is enough to show that there were occasions when two or three letters were written in quick succession, but that there are also ‘gaps’ in the correspondence of several years duration. It is highly improbable that Katherine sometimes failed to write to Cecil for years on end (except, perhaps during Queen Mary’s reign when she was in exile), and the only logical conclusion is that, in common with Cecil’s others papers, much has survived but much has also been lost. Katherine must have written many letters to others, family members and private individuals, that have long since vanished, but enough remains to inform us that here was a single-minded woman of
unshakable conviction. ‘A woman,’ as Lady Goff called her, ‘of the Tudor Age.’

  1. Katherine Willoughby, Duchess of Suffolk, in a detail of a portrait painted in 1548 when she was twenty-nine. Her first husband, Charles Brandon, had died three years earlier, and she married Richard Bertie, her gentleman-usher, in 1552 or 1553.

  2. Charles Brandon, Duke of Suffolk, portrayed in his later years when he was married to Katherine. An engraving by W. H. Mote published in Portraits and Memoirs of the Most Illustrious Personages of British History Encyclopedia in 1836.

  3. Westhorpe (Suffolk). The three-arched Tudor bridge over the moat. Katherine lived in the now demolished brick and figurative terracotta mansion as the ward of Charles Brandon, Duke of Suffolk, who she married after his third wife, Mary Tudor, died in 1533.

  4. Westhorpe (Suffolk). Charles Brandon’s arms, now set into the outer wall of Westhorpe Hall Residential Care Home.

  5 & 6. Westhorpe (Suffolk). Some of the heraldic images that once adorned the hall were recovered when the moat was cleared in the 1990s. The heraldry displayed included Charles Brandon’s crowned lion with a protruding tongue and the Tudor rose.