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

by David Baldwin

  10. 3 September 1550. Thanks Cecil for his help with William Naughton’s ‘matter’ and proposes a further settlement. CSP 1, no. 459, p. 170.

  11. 8 September 1550. Thanks Cecil for unspecified ‘good news’ received two days earlier. CSP 1, no. 460, pp. 170–1.

  12. 18 September 1550. Again asks Cecil to use his influence to assist William Naughton. CSP 1, no. 467, p. 172.

  13. 1 October 1550. Seeks arbitration in two local property disputes. CSP 1, no. 472, p. 172.

  14. 2 October 1550. Seeks intervention on behalf of the brother of an unnamed person in a dispute with ‘one of Jersey’. CSP 1, no. 473, p. 174.

  15. 2 October 1550. Refers to commercial dealings with Cecil, and uses mercantile terminology to express relief that, after spending two months in the Tower after Somerset’s fall, he has been restored to favour as a privy councillor and third Secretary of State. CSP 1, no. 474, p. 174.

  16. 8 October 1550. Complains that Somerset has favoured Fulmerston against Naughton – hints at the malevolence of his duchess. CSP 1, no. 481, p. 175.

  17. 15 November 1550. ‘Help me to have the warrant for Spilsby Chantry we sued for.’ Fears she will not be able to ‘rule’ her ‘foolish choler’ if Naughton does not receive justice. CSP 1, no. 488, pp. 177–8.

  18. 19 November 1550. Naughton’s case finally settled. Expresses her gratitude to Cecil and the Somersets and apologises for her ‘coarseness in this matter’. CSP 1, no. 493, p. 179.

  19. 17 February 1551. Asks Cecil to facilitate delivery of a letter written by Martin Bucer – ‘why I require this you shall perceive from his letter, which he sends open’. CSP 1, no. 508, p. 193.

  20. September 1551, Monday. ‘I thank God for all His benefits, and take this last (at first sight most bitter) punishment not the least of them.’ (Her two sons had died on 14 July.) CSP 1, no. 554, p. 206.

  21. 13 May 1552. ‘Weary with writing … Monson troubles me with complaints to the Lord Chancellor.’ CSP 1, no. 618, p. 235. This was presumably Robert Monson, one of her Protestant friends among the Lincolnshire gentry – it is unclear why they were at odds at this time.

  22. June 1552, Wednesday ‘in bed’. Sends Cecil a buck with an invitation to hunt. CSP 1, no. 669, pp. 243–4.

  In Queen Elizabeth’s reign:

  23. 4 March 1559. From ‘Crossen’ (Crozen in Lithuania). Fears that the queen’s commitment to Protestantism is only lukewarm and urges Cecil to promote the true faith. CSP 2, p. 123.

  24. 30 October 1563. Thanks Cecil ‘for his proffers of service; with a postscript from Richard Bertie refusing a public employment’. Lansdowne, Num. 6, 35, p. 16.

  25. 9 August 1567. Complains that Lady Mary Grey has been sent to her without proper furniture, utensils, etc., and asks Cecil to persuade the queen to lend her some. CSP 2, p. 297.

  26. 29 March 1569. Reminds Cecil of a suit made by a poor Dutchman who desires to bring his wife and goods to England, and reflects on the misery of those who suffer abroad for conscience sake. CSP 2, p. 332.

  27. 8 October 1569. Thanks him for writing to inform her of the northern (Catholic) rebellion of the earls of Northumberland and Westmoreland; with a postscript from Richard Bertie. Lansdowne, Num. 11, 51, p. 27.

  28. 29 July 1570. A long, indifferently spelt communication expressing her frustration that the queen has not advanced her husband to the barony of Willoughby or her son-in-law Reginald Grey to the earldom of Kent, and asking Cecil to deliver a letter to Her Majesty on her behalf. Salisbury, part 1, no. 1507, pp. 477–8.

  29. 5 August 1570. Thanks Cecil for delivering her letter, and asks him ‘to help to perfect what is well begun’. A postscript from Richard Bertie emphasises that she fears her suits will fail unless her friends commend them to the queen. Salisbury, part 1, no. 1511, pp. 479–81.

  30. 10 August 1570. Seeks Cecil’s advice about when and where she should approach the queen in person. Salisbury, part 1, no. 1512, p. 481.

  31. 1 September 1570. Richard Bertie thanks Cecil for his letters which have eased Katherine’s ‘extreme fits’, and explains why he considers himself worthy to have the barony conferred on him. Salisbury, part 1, no. 1516, pp. 482–3.

  32. 15 April 1571. Reports a discussion with the queen about Reginald Grey’s claim to the earldom. CSP 2, p. 410.

  33. April 1571. Thanks Cecil for his courteous enquiries after her health, and excuses herself for not having waited on the queen. CSP 2, p. 411

  34. 2 May 1571. Reminds Cecil of their old friendship and asks him to do all he can to promote her son-in-law’s claim to the earldom. CSP 2, p. 412.

  35. 25 May 1571. Thanks Cecil for befriending Reginald Grey, but is perplexed by ‘Her Majesty’s strange countenance’ towards her. CSP 2, p. 413.

  36. 16 June 1571. Describes her most recent conversation with the queen and rejects what she calls ‘common talk’ that what she really wants is a ‘high place’ for Suzan. CSP 2, p. 415.

  37. 30 June 1572. Asks Cecil to give Peregrine good counsel ‘to bridle his youth’, and to send him from court to his father. Lansdowne, Num. 28, 62, p. 64. (Misdated 1579 in the catalogue.)

  38. 2 July 1577. Expresses reservations about her son Peregrine’s wish to marry Mary de Vere with whom she has had a ‘difficult’ face-to-face conversation, and hopes Cecil (whose daughter was unhappily married to Mary’s brother, the Earl of Oxford) will use his influence to persuade the queen to forbid it. Salisbury, part 13, no. 202, pp. 146–7.

  39. 14 July 1577. Encloses letter from Richard Bertie (who is away from home) expressing his opposition to the marriage, adding that she has not yet told her husband the full story of Peregrine’s ‘wilfulness and uncourteous dealings’ with them. Salisbury, part 2, no. 464, p. 156.

  40. 21 July 1577. Has heard that Cecil is on a journey, and is sorry she will not be able to thank him in person. Salisbury, part 2, no. 466, p. 156.

  41. 15 December 1577. Proposes a plan to reconcile the Oxfords by encouraging the earl to become fond of their child. Lansdowne, Num. 25, 27, p. 57.

  42. 12 March 1578. Asks Cecil to do her several favours, including granting her son and daughter-in-law a bill ‘of impost’ for two tuns of wine to be taken at Hull or Boston. Salisbury, part 2, no. 505, p. 173.

  43. 23 September 1579. Assures Cecil that although ill she is not ‘altogether senseless’ as a foolish servant of hers had led him to think. Lansdowne, Num. 28, no. 65, p. 64.

  44. 4 April 1580 (Easter Monday). Asks Cecil to obtain the queen’s permission for Peregrine to travel abroad. Lansdowne, Num. 30, 39, p. 68.

  Appendix 2

  PORTRAITS OF KATHERINE WILLOUGHBY

  The best known image of Katherine is the miniature after Hans Holbein the Younger, painted in her early womanhood. In a second portrait at Grimsthorpe dated 1548, three years after she was widowed, she is soberly dressed and her demeanour is altogether more serious. The bust on her monument at Spilsby (which is more finely carved than the rest of the edifice and may have been intended for another location) shows her in her old age.

  Another three-quarter-length portrait at Grimsthorpe (not illustrated) depicts a lady who has been variously identified as Mary, Queen of Scots and Lady Jane Dudley (Jane Grey). It is clearly not of Mary, and Jane’s name has been attached to a number of paintings, none of which can be authenticated. A detailed scientific analysis of the work could help to identify the sitter, but there is no likelihood of this being undertaken in the near future. All we can say is that this lady’s features very closely resemble those of Katherine in her other portraits.

  There is also a drawing of ‘The Dutchess of Suffolk’ by Holbein now in the Royal Collection. Holbein returned to England in 1531, so the person depicted could be the then duchess, Mary, Henry VIII’s sister, who died in 1533, or Frances, Katherine’s stepdaughter, if the suggestion that the captions were not added until between 1555 and 1557 is accurate. No conclusions can be drawn from the sitter’s apparent age because Katherine was actually two years younger than Fran
ces. All we can say is that Katherine, who was Duchess of Suffolk from 1533 to 1545 (before becoming dowager duchess), is perhaps a more likely candidate than the other two.

  NOTES AND REFERENCES

  Prologue: A Most Remarkable Letter

  1. Transcribed from a letter in the possession of Mr Charles Cottrell Dormer of Rousham, Oxfordshire, and previously printed by Lady Cecilie Goff in A Woman of the Tudor Age (1930), pp. 315–6. I have modernised the spelling.

  1 Childhood, 1519–1533

  1. The descent of the baronies of Willoughby and Wells is fully described in G. E. Cokayne et al., The Complete Peerage, xii, part 2 (1959).

  2. Luis Caroz de Villaragut, Spanish Ambassador in England to Friar Juan de Eztuniga, Provincial of Aragon, 6 December 1514. Calendar of Letters, Despatches and State Papers relating to the Negotiations between England and Spain, Preserved in the archives at Simancas and elsewhere, vol. ii, Henry VIII 1509–1525, ed. G. A. Bergenroth (1866), no. 201, p. 248.

  3. These figures are taken from J. Guy, Tudor England (Oxford, 1988), pp. 32 & 38. Similarly, agricultural prices as represented by 100 in the period 1450–1499 had reached 115 by 1519 and 154 a decade later, p. 35.

  4. Historical Manuscripts Commission, Report on the Manuscripts of the Earl of Ancaster preserved at Grimsthorpe (1907), p. 468.

  5. The Willoughby inheritance dispute was extremely complicated, and I have here reduced it to its bare essentials. For a fuller discussion see M. F. Harkrider, ‘Women, Reform and Community in Early Modern England: Katherine Willoughby, Duchess of Suffolk, and Lincolnshire’s Godly Aristocracy, 1519–1580’. Studies in Modern British Religious History (2008), pp. 33–5.

  6. S. J. Gunn, Charles Brandon, Duke of Suffolk, c. 1484–1545 (1988), p. 1.

  7. His objections were mere technicalities – that his grandmother had been related to Dame Margaret’s first husband, for example – but they were sufficient to annul a marriage at that time.

  8. British Library Cotton MS Caligula D. vi, fol. 186r, quoted by S. J. Gunn in his article on Brandon in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, ed. H. C. G. Matthew & B. Harrison, 60 vols (Oxford, 2004), vol. 7, p. 355.

  9. The relevant passages are Leviticus, chapter 18, verse 16, and chapter 20, verse 21, and Deuteronomy, chapter 25, verse 5. The quotation is from Luke, chapter 20, verse 28.

  10. Letters and Papers, Foreign and Domestic, of the Reign of Henry VIII, vol. vi, ed. J. Gairdner (1882), no. 1558, p. 628.

  11. Frances and Henry Grey were married between 28 July 1533 and 4 February 1534, so the ceremony would have taken place after Mary’s death but could have been before or after Brandon’s marriage to Katherine.

  12. These paragraphs are based on the description of the funeral in M. A. E Green, Lives of the Princesses of England from the Norman Conquest, 6 vols (1849–1855), v, pp. 138–141.

  13. According to Anthony Martienssen, Katherine was educated at court by the Valencian humanist scholar Juan Luis Vives, who had been employed to tutor the seven-year-old Princess Mary and the nine-year-old Catherine Parr in 1523. He maintains that other girls, including Frances and Eleanor Brandon, Joan Guildford (the daughter of another lady-in-waiting), and Katherine herself were added to the class as they reached a similar age, but unfortunately does not give the source of his information (Queen Katherine Parr (1975), p. 31). Linda Porter, whose authoritative study of the queen was published in 2010, states plainly that ‘we do not know who Katherine Parr’s tutors were or precisely what she studied’ (Katherine the Queen: The Remarkable Life of Katherine Parr, p. 34).

  2 The Brandon Marriage, 1533–1545

  1. Spanish Calendar, vol. iv, part 2, Henry VIII, 1531–1533, ed. P de Gayangos (1882), no. 1123, pp. 788–9.

  2. S. J. Gunn, Charles Brandon, p. 176.

  3. Ibid. Chapuys was writing to the Emperor on Wednesday 3 September. ‘Next Sunday’ was the 7th.

  4. Alison Sim, The Tudor Housewife (Stroud, 1996), chapter 4.

  5. Brandon worked hard at this, but was never able to recover some 22 per cent of the former de la Pole estate. See Gunn, Charles Brandon, p. 42.

  6. Letters and Papers Henry VIII, vol. x, ed. J. Gairdner (1887), no. 284, p. 106. There was a story that Lady Maria was subsequently buried with Queen Catherine, but no second body was discovered when the grave was opened in 1884.

  7. Charles Wriothesley, A Chronicle of England During the Reigns of the Tudors, from A.D. 1485 to 1559, ed. W. D. Hamilton, 2 vols (Camden Society, 1875 & 1877), i, pp. 50–1.

  8. Local rivalries also played a part in the troubles. It can hardly be coincidence that many of Christopher Willoughby’s supporters joined the rebellion – his heir, William, even served as ‘Grand Captain’ of the Horncastle contingent – but Lady Maria Willoughby’s servants and clients did not.

  9. Letters and Papers Henry VIII, vol. xi, ed. J. Gairdner (1888), no. 650, p. 255 & no. 1267, p. 517.

  10. Melissa F. Harkrider has calculated that Katherine’s network encompassed kinship relationships with twenty gentry families in Lincolnshire and East Anglia, patronage ties with seventy-three families in Lincolnshire and at court, and fifty-five ecclesiastical contacts in this region. Women, Reform and Community, p. 19.

  11. Quoted by Linda Porter in Katherine the Queen, p. 50.

  12. Honor, Lady Lisle to her husband, 15 November 1538. The Lisle Letters, ed. M. St C. Byrne, 6 vols (Chicago, 1981), v, no. 1270, p. 283. Robert Warner informed Lord Fitzwater that ‘on the Wednesday before he [the king] made a banquet, at which were the Duke of Suffolk and his wife, my lord my master, and my lady [the Earl and Countess of Sussex], the Earl of Hertford and his wife, and my Lady Lisle, with other maids that were the queen’s women. They lay all night in court and had banquets in their chambers, and the king’s servants to wait upon them, and did not take their leave till four o’clock after dinner next day.’ Letters and Papers Henry VIII, vol. xiii, part 2, ed. J Gairdner (1893), no. 884, p. 369. Prince Edward’s christening is described in H. W. Chapman, The Last Tudor King (1958), pp. 28–9.

  13. Leanda de Lisle explains that ‘The term Protestant only began to be used in England in the mid–1550s. The more usual term for those we would now think of as Protestant was ‘evangelical’. They were so named because they wishes to return to the ‘evangelium’ or ‘good news’ of the gospel, stripping away church traditions they believed had no biblical basis in favour of a more fundamental reading of scripture’. The Sisters Who Would Be Queen. The Tragedy of Mary, Katherine and Lady Jane Grey (2010), p. 17.

  14. These particulars are taken from C. D. C. Armstrong’s article on Gardiner in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, vol. 21, pp. 433–445.

  15. The Protestant divine Hugh Latimer argued that no one could earn salvation, rather, ‘our saviour teacheth us that we can do nothing of ourselves … [he] merited the kingdom of heaven for us through his most painful death and passion’. Quoted by Melissa Harkrider, Women, Reform and Community, p. 54.

  16. Gunn, Charles Brandon, pp. 229 & 164.

  17. Quoted by Melissa Harkrider in Women, Reform and Community, p. 43.

  18. Quoted by Evelyn Read in Catherine, Duchess of Suffolk: A Portrait (1962), pp. 54–5.

  19. One of his favourite targets was purgatory which is never mentioned by name in the Bible – but Henry told him bluntly that his arguments were based on ‘carnal wit’ and that ‘purgatory may yet stand’.

  20. This paragraph is based on Susan Wabuda’s article on Latimer in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, vol. xxxii, pp. 632–9. Henry’s ‘toleration of doctrinal innovation waned with shocking suddenness’ she writes, and the Six Articles ‘represented an almost complete return to a traditional understanding of the nature of the Eucharist [the ‘real presence’], and a tacit recognition that masses benefited the departed’.

  21. Martienssen, Queen Katherine Parr, p. 143.

  22. This is an estimate. Catherine Parr was born in 1512, Catherine Howard at some time between 1518 and 1524,
probably nearer the latter date.

  23. See Harkrider, Women, Reform and Community, p. 49, on which this paragraph is based.

  24. Wills From Doctors’ Commons, ed. J. G. Nichols & J. Bruce (Camden Society, 1863), pp. 33–4, 37. Gunn, Charles Brandon, p. 208. I am grateful to Nicola Tallis for checking the original of this for me.

  25. Quoted in Ibid., p. 221, and in Gunn’s article on Brandon in The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, vol. vii, p. 357.

  26. Quoted in Ibid., p. 70.

  27. Edward Halle, The Union of the Two Noble and Illustrious Families of Lancaster and York (1550, reprinted Menston, 1970), The xxxvii year of King Henry the Eighth, folio cclx.

  3 King Henry’s Last Love, 1545–1547

  1. Quoted by Melissa Harkrider in Women, Reform and Community, p. 50.

  2. John Strype, Annals, ii, part 2, p. 347, quoted by Evelyn Read in Catherine, Duchess of Suffolk: A Portrait, p. 52. The translation is by Professor Kenneth Setton of the University of Pennsylvania.

  3. The Lisle Letters, iv, no. 871, p. 128. National Archives Lisle Papers (S.P.3, xi, no. 103). Letters and Papers Henry VIII, vol. xii, 1, ed. J. Gairdner (1890), no. 680, pp. 298–9.

  4. The Lisle Letters, iv, no. 854a, p. 70.

  5. Ibid., iv, no. 901, p. 178. Katherine Bassett was by this time in Lady Rutland’s service.

  6. Ibid., v, no. 1409, p. 474.

  7. Ibid., v, no. 1423, p. 485; no. 1436, p. 512. See also nos. 1420, 1425, 1427 & 1453.

  8. Katherine asked that the wine be sent to her husband, but he then sent two-thirds of it to her – a nice touch.

  9. Ibid., v, no. 1457a, p. 543.

  10. Ibid., v, no. 1525, p. 634.

  11. The Lisle Letters, v, no. 1526, pp. 634–5. British Library Cotton MS. Vespasian F. xiii, f.154. Letters and Papers Henry VIII, vol. vii, ed. J. Gairdner (1883), no. 1080, p. 419.

  12. Quoted by Melissa Harkrider in Women, Reform and Community, pp. 54 & 79.

  13. The Acts and Monuments of John Foxe (4th edn, 1877), ed. J. Pratt, viii, p. 570.