Notorious Royal Marriages: A Juicy Journey through Nine Centuries of Dynasty, Destiny, and Desire

by Leslie Carroll

  After Henry’s death in 1547, Anne evidently expressed the desire to return to Cleves, telling her brother that she remained a foreigner in England; but she never did depart for her homeland. Anne made her last public appearance at Mary I’s coronation and banquet on September 29, 1553, riding beside the Princess Elizabeth, a place of honor. She died of “a declining illness” at Chelsea Manor on July 16, 1557, at the age of forty-one. In her will, Anne left jewelry to her two stepdaughters, Mary and Elizabeth, and bequeathed gifts to nearly everyone who had served her during her lifetime. Her funeral was held at Westminster Abbey on August 4.

  Anne’s peers always treated her with tremendous respect, complimenting her “accustomed gentleness” and her religious devotion. It might not have seemed so at first glance, but Henry’s high honor of considering her his “good sister” was, in his own way, a mark of the genuine esteem in which he held her character, if not, alas, her face and figure.

  HENRY VIII

  and

  KATHRYN HOWARD

  (“NO OTHER WILL THAN HIS”)

  1521(?)-1542

  married 1540-1542

  “What a gracious and loving prince I had . . . the fear of death grieved me not so much before, as doth now the remembrance of the king’s goodness.”

  —Kathryn Howard’s last confession to Thomas Cranmer, Archbishop of Canterbury

  BY THE BEGINNING OF 1540, HENRY HAD GROWN SO massive that three large men could fit inside one of his doublets. The corsets he wore, which made him creak when he walked, little constricted his girth. But he still considered himself quite the stud and desperately wanted another son.

  The king had married Anne of Cleves on January 6, 1540. But by April, tongues were wagging about his new infatuation with the curvaceous redheaded girl the French ambassador had marked for her exceptional grace.

  The previous December, Kathryn Howard, another dark-eyed auburn-haired niece of the powerful Duke of Norfolk, had come to court to serve the new queen as a lady-in-waiting. Kathryn’s father and Anne Boleyn’s mother were siblings, making the young women first cousins. But Kathryn, who was raised as a traditional Catholic rather than as an evangelical, lacked Anne’s intelligence, canniness, and political acumen. She also had no qualms about bestowing before marriage what Anne so assiduously withheld. Kathryn was still a teenager when she arrived at court, as much as thirty years Henry’s junior, but the king was utterly thunderstruck by her, behaving like an adolescent boy in love, positively giddy with desire.

  Many things about Kathryn Howard’s early life remain a mystery because they are not well documented, if they are recorded at all. 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. Her date of birth is also a subject for conjecture, variously given as anywhere from 1518 to 1527. But if she was born at the latter end of the spectrum, she would have been just thirteen years old in 1540, when she married Henry, yet had already been sexually active for years. In Kathryn’s case, pinning down a birth date is crucial since it makes all the difference between a lusty teenager capable of making more informed decisions about her body and a sexually precocious child. The latter possibility is the opinion of historical biographer Joanna Denny, who believes that Kathryn was “sexually abused” when she was as young as ten years old.

  Denny surmises that Kathryn had to have been born between 1524 and 1527, simply because she is named in a will written in 1527 by Kathryn’s step-grandmother Isabel Legh, whereas she is not referred to in a 1524 will written by Isabel’s husband, John. Denny speculates that Isabel wanted to wait until Kathryn survived infancy to name her as a beneficiary, which is why Kathryn could have been a toddler at the time of the 1527 will. While Kathryn’s inclusion in Isabel Legh’s last will and testament offers a plausible argument for a birth date later than 1520 or so, it is equally possible that any previous omission from a will was an oversight; or that more closely related beneficiaries had already died off; or merely that Legh would not have been under any obligation to include a step-grandchild in her will. Too much is open to conjecture to rely on the will of Isabel Legh as an accurate anchor for pin-pointing Kathryn’s date of birth.

  Another factor to consider in arriving at a relatively accurate birth date for Kathryn is Henry’s sexual proclivity—which, even in his own youth, had never been for prepubescent girls. Both Anne Boleyn and Jane Seymour were in their mid-twenties when he became infatuated with them. Even his earliest mistresses, like Bessie Blount and Mary Boleyn, were in their late teens. And in 1539 he had deliberately chosen the elder of the two Cleves sisters because he thought that a narrower age gap would increase their chances of marital compatibility.

  Kathryn’s father, Lord Edmund Howard, was the third son of the 2nd Duke of Norfolk. He had acquitted himself bravely as a soldier and was knighted in 1515, but the world beat him down, and his lifetime was hampered by poverty as he endeavored to provide for an enormous family while keeping one step ahead of the bailiffs. The best that he and Kathryn’s mother, Jocasta Culpeper, could do was to place some of their large brood with more affluent relatives who could afford to give them a better upbringing.

  Jocasta had already passed away when Kathryn was sent to live with her other step-grandmother, Agnes Howard, the Dowager Duchess of Norfolk. Most historians agree that Kathryn was around twelve years old at the time, one of a number of poorer female Howard relations who served the duchess as junior ladies-in-waiting; they were also schooled and boarded in the duchess’s homes—Chesworth, her estate in Horsham, Sussex, or her London home at Lambeth.

  Kathryn was housed with the other girls of her ilk in a large room known as the Maidens’ Chamber. And it was during her years in the duchess’s household that Kathryn received her sexual initiation, flirting and petting with her music tutor, Henry Manox. When the dowager duchess caught them, Kathryn spurned Manox for one of her clerks, a distant relation named Francis Dereham. Although the duchess locked the Maidens’ Chamber every evening and pocketed the key, Kathryn bribed Lady Agnes’s maid, Mary Lascelles, into stealing it night after night. For several months, if not for close to five years, depending on the source, Francis Dereham became Kathryn’s nightly visitor.

  The duchess’s solution, now that her charge had been compromised? Send Dereham back to Ireland, and find a position for the spirited Kathryn at court. But when Dereham departed, he left a hundred pounds—a vast sum, especially for a clerk—in Kathryn’s safekeeping, which suggests that they might have entered into some form of a precontract of marriage.

  Kathryn had not been at court for long when she took notice of one of Henry’s higher-ranking courtiers, Thomas Culpeper. Thomas was her distant relation on her mother’s side, and one of the king’s Privy Chamber. When rumors of marriage plans between them began to spread, Kathryn hotly contradicted the gossip, stating, “If you heard such a report, you heard more than I do know.” It was only a matter of weeks before Kathryn would make a far bigger conquest.

  By this time, the king was already head over heels in lust with her. Although he was married to Anne of Cleves, Henry courted Kathryn in a big way. On April 24, 1540, Henry made her a gift of lands that had been confiscated from a felon. A month later, Kathryn received several bolts of silk. The French ambassador reported that Henry could not “treat her well enough.” She was showered with jewels, and given such authority and power as she had never known—all heady stuff to a teenager who had been raised in genteel poverty.

  On the twentieth of June, Queen Anne complained of Henry’s attraction to Kathryn to Karl Harst, the Duke of Cleves’s ambassador. Harst reported to the duke that the royal affair had been going on for months.

  Within days of Anne’s complaint the king had their marriage annulled. And on July 28, in the middle of a particularly hot and dry summer, he and Kathryn wed at Oatlands Palace in Surrey in a secret ceremony conducted by Bishop Bonner. Kathryn vowed to be “
bonair and buxom in bed,” and to cherish her husband “in sickness and health, till death us depart.”

  The king’s ambassadors to foreign lands were informed of his nuptials in a statement issued on August 8, 1540, that “upon a notable appearance of honor, cleanness and maidenly behavior . . . [and that] 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 queenly motto, Kathryn had chosen the submissive phrase non aultre volonté que le sienne—no other will than his—an unfortunately ironic selection, as things turned out.

  Henry’s king-sized ego blinded him to the flaws of his diminutive new bride. “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—over $26 million in today’s economy—to maintain Kathryn’s personal establishment.

  Kathryn found places in her household for most of the young ladies from her Maidens’ Chamber days. And when her former lover Francis Dereham turned up at her doorstep, she made him one of her clerks, a move that was ill-advised at best; but her step-grandmother, the dowager duchess, had pressed her for the favor. There may also have been another motive for the plum appointment: blackmail.

  But if Kathryn had expected to purchase Dereham’s silence regarding their former love affair, her plan backfired ostentatiously. 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 of autonomy too literally.

  The following February, Kathryn ended up presiding over the court entertainments on her own, because Henry’s mobility was sorely restricted due to his painful ulcerated leg wound. Preferring solitude to the company of others, he lapsed into severe melancholia, described by the French ambassador Marillac as a mal d’esprit. By this time, Henry was positively Leviathan; although he was extremely self-conscious about his girth, he continued to eat and drink like a glutton. His irascibility and mood swings were noticed by the court, and remarked upon, with Marillac reporting to his sovereign that “people say he is often of a different opinion in the morning than after dinner.”

  In July 1541, Henry deemed it the right time to finally make a Royal Progress, an official tour of his kingdom that had been postponed several times because of various northern uprisings.

  During this journey, a change in Kathryn’s behavior began to be noted. At their stop in Lincoln, Henry retired early, but the queen’s apartments 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. After fumbling with the lock, they slipped wordlessly into the queen’s rooms.

  A few days later, Henry took the court 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.

  So—did they become lovers? As history has made all too clear, Kathryn’s position depended on giving the king another son. Henry’s numerous infirmities, his enormity, and his advancing age might have already rendered conception improbable, if not impossible. Nonetheless, for the good of the realm (and of the Howard family), the Duke of Norfolk was impatient for his niece to become pregnant. Time was of the essence; already a year of marriage had come and gone. It was not beneath the duke’s morals to suggest that Kathryn hasten the process. If she could not conceive with the king, then Kathryn could pass off Culpeper’s bastard as Henry’s, on the assumption that the egotistical monarch would cheerfully claim paternity because it would confirm his virility.

  Kathryn later insisted that she and Culpeper had a platonic 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 thanksgiving service, ironically enumerating among his blessings the virtuous-ness of his wife.

  With theatrical timing, the following day Thomas Cranmer, Archbishop of Canterbury, approached Henry with the document that would destroy the king’s fantasies and bring down the fragile house of cards of his fifth marriage. Early in October, Cranmer had received a letter from John Lascelles informing him of Kathryn’s infidelity. John was the brother of the Dowager Duchess of Norfolk’s maid, Mary Lascelles—the same Mary Lascelles who used to procure the keys to the Maidens’ Chamber so that Francis Dereham could sneak into the room to have orgiastic sex with Kathryn. And Kathryn had managed to find a place in her establishment for all of her former acquaintances—except Mary Lascelles.

  So Mary had a motive for destroying Kathryn.

  But there was more to the picture. The Lascelles family were staunch Reformers, as was Cranmer; and the Reformers wanted nothing more than 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.

  When Henry read the accusations against Kathryn, his first reaction was disbelief. He insisted that an investigation into these allegations be conducted in secret. Meanwhile, Kathryn was kept at Hampton Court while Henry developed excuses for not visiting her. In fact, 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, adding 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 maiden-head, though it be painful to her. . . .”

  According to Manox’s version of events, although Kathryn had withheld her virginity from him, she had promised that he would not go entirely unsatisfied. “Yet let me feel your secret place,” the music teacher cajoled. According to Manox, 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.

  Throughout the hearings, Manox 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. Referring to their sexual hijinks in the Maidens’ Chamber, long before Kathryn came to court, 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.” He further admitted that on two separate occasions,
after the commencement of his employment in her household, Kathryn had bribed him to keep quiet about their shared past.

  Mary Lascelles, who averred that Kathryn was “light in both living and conditions,” offered a lurid description of the lovers’ canoodling, “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.

  Another eyewitness was just as much of a voyeur. Margaret Benet, also a former resident of the Maidens’ Chamber, told the council she peered through the hole in a door, “and there saw Dereham pluck up Kathryn’s clothes above her navel so that [Margaret] might well discern her body.” Margaret overheard Dereham say “that although he used the company of a woman . . . yet he would get no child except he listed [desired to have one].” The voluble Miss Benet had heard Kathryn reply that “a woman might meddle with a man and yet conceive no child unless she would herself.”

  Dereham’s friend Robert Davenport confessed that he had heard Francis Dereham call Kathryn “his own wife” before witnesses, which would certainly imply a precontract of marriage between them. Even more damaging was his testimony regarding Dereham’s recent boast that if Henry “were dead I am sure I might marry her.” According to the 1534 treason act, maliciously desiring the death of the king was a treasonable offense—enough to condemn Dereham to death regardless of whatever else he might have done with Kathryn.