by Byrne, Conor
Katherine Howard
Katherine Howard:
A New History
Copyright © 2014
MadeGlobal Publishing
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, except as permitted by the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, without the prior permission of the publisher.
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Contents
1) Thrones and Power
2) A Howard Queen
3) ‘His Vicious Purpose’: A Tainted Upbringing
4) ‘Strange, Restless Years’
5) From Mistress to Queen
6) Katerina Regina
7) Patronage and Power
ILLUSTRATIONS
8) ‘Yours as Long as Life Endures’
9) Downfall and Death
Bibliography
Notes
List of Illustrations
Acknowledgements
Author Biography
One of the least significant of Henry VIII’s victims, she perhaps commands the greatest sympathy’
Fr. Alexander Lucie-Smith, 2011
Sexual beliefs will tell us as much about the social construction of power as they do about actual sexual behavior.
Anne Barstow, Witchcraze: A New History of the European Witch-Hunts
In histories that treat men as three-dimensional and complex personalities, the women shine forth in universal stereotypes: the shrew, the whore, the shy virgin, or the blessed mother.
Retha M. Warnicke, The Rise and Fall of Anne Boleyn: family politics at the court of Henry VIII
This book is dedicated to Katherine Howard,
queen of England, 1540-1
Foreword
by Claire Ridgway
The reassessment of a famous - or, in this case, infamous - historical character is a daunting task for a young history student to take on, but Conor Byrne is not afraid to challenge the theories of historians and biographers and to court controversy. By re-examining the primary source evidence and taking into account the context in which Katherine lived, Conor brings to life a very different Katherine. The reckless airhead of fiction and some history books is gone and in her place is a girl who was used and abused, but who was committed to being the best queen she could be.
Conor examines Katherine’s early life, her marriage to Henry VIII and subsequent downfall from a gendered perspective, giving the reader new insight into what shaped the girl who became Henry VIII’s fifth queen and what brought about her dramatic fall. He has controversial views regarding her relationships with Henry Manox, Francis Dereham and Thomas Culpeper, and is convincing in his arguments. Conor believes that Katherine is as deserving of rehabilitation as her more famous cousin Anne Boleyn and I am sure that this book will go a long way to doing that; it will certainly make readers stop and think.
Claire Ridgway
TheAnneBoleynFiles.com
Author of :
On This Day in Tudor History,
The Fall of Anne Boleyn and
George Boleyn: Tudor Poet, Courtier and Diplomat
Introduction: Historiography
Following her execution on charges of high treason in February 1542, Katherine Howard was consigned to history as a flirtatious and irresponsible teenager who courted disaster through her reckless behaviour and adulterous liaisons, with a succession of lovers under her ageing husband’s nose. Unlike Anne Boleyn or Katherine of Aragon, she has not proved to be a particularly popular subject amongst historians, probably due to the briefness of her reign and the scarcity of relevant source material. However, the historiography relating to Katherine is fascinating in demonstrating how the specific political and social context has informed interpretations of the career of Henry’s fifth queen. Exploring the historiography of this is relevant, from the perspective of this biography, in indicating how problems of evidence and a lack of cultural awareness have obscured most historians’ understandings of Katherine’s story.
The first contemporary writer to explore Katherine’s career in detail was the unknown chronicler of The Chronicle of Henry VIII, more usually known as the ‘Spanish Chronicle’, which was probably composed ten years or more after the events it describes by an unknown Spaniard living in London.1 Characterising Katherine as ‘more graceful and beautiful than any lady in the Court’ when she first met the king, aged around fifteen years, the chronicler created a sympathetic tale of true love, passion and premature death.2 This writer emphasised the queen’s youth, explaining that it created difficulties in her relationship with her elder stepdaughter Mary Tudor, before recounting how her ‘giddy’ nature guided her infatuation with Thomas Culpeper, who had been in love with Katherine before her marriage to the king.3 Downcast with his poor fortune, Culpeper supposedly wrote a letter to the queen, which he passed to her while dancing with her, leading the queen to reply in encouragement. Revealing her secret love for Culpeper to a lady-in-waiting named Jane (perhaps inspired by Lady Jane Rochford), the queen was eventually arrested and charged with treason when that lady informed Edward Seymour about the relationship.4 Later, both the queen and Culpeper were beheaded, professing their love for one another on the scaffold.5 In this chronicle, no mention was made of Francis Dereham, Henry Manox or Jane Rochford, all of whom were implicated in the queen’s downfall and, except Manox, executed alongside Katherine and Culpeper.
Other contemporary sources found Katherine a less interesting subject. Lord Herbert, writer of The life and raigne of King Henry the Eighth6, spent at most four pages in a work comprising over six hundred on the brief reign of Katherine, overwhelmingly focused on her downfall in 1541. Herbert concluded his brief account with the detail of Katherine’s execution alongside Lady Rochford.7 Nicholas Harpsfield, an English historian and Catholic apologist and priest writing during the reign of Mary I, scarcely mentioned Henry VIII’s fifth queen, but recounted her ‘pain and shame’ at being found ‘an harlot before he [Henry] married her, and an adulteress after he married her’.8 George Cavendish, writing during the 1550s, similarly opined, emphasising, like the writer of The Chronicle of Henry VIII, Katherine’s ‘floryshyng [...] youthe with beawtie freshe and pure’. Cavendish made mention of Katherine’s youth several times, while indicating that the queen’s ‘blazing beautie’ brought her ‘myschefe’. Believing, like the Spanish chronicler, that Katherine and Culpeper had indulged in a romantic liaison, Cavendish wrote: ‘Culpeper yong, and I, God wott, but fraylle, we bothe to feeble our lusts for to resist.’ Culpeper allegedly ‘folowed [his] pleasure’ through his ‘pride and viciousnes’ in choosing to seduce Queen Katherine, eventually resulting in his execution.9 Nicholas Sander, who wrote a treatise attacking Henry VIII and his annulment of his marriage to Katherine of Aragon, ignored Katherine Howard entirely but for his satirical comment that ‘but as the king was faithful neither to God nor to his first wife, so also his wives were not faithful to him’, explaining that Katherine had sinned with both Francis Dereham and Culpeper.10
The first modern historian to discuss Katherine’s career in detail was Agnes Strickland, writing in the Victorian age, whose Lives of the Queens of England was published in twelve volumes between 1840 and 1848. Heavily influenced by pervading Victorian values, Strickland characterised Katherine’s life as ‘a grand moral lesson’, denigrating ‘the vanity of female ambition’ and Katherine’s personal ‘guilt’.11 Strickland seemed to view Katherine sympathetically, blaming the ‘polluting infl
uence’ of individuals within the household of the Dowager Duchess of Norfolk who took ‘a fiendish delight in perverting the principles and debasing the mind of the nobly born damsel’.12 Strickland doubted that Katherine committed adultery with Culpeper, believing that the testimony of Katherine’s ladies was ‘unfavourable’ to their mistress and prompted by the ‘deadly malice’ of the enemies of the Howards.13 Strickland also remarked bitterly that ‘Katharine Howard was led like a sheep to the slaughter, without being permitted to unclose her lips in her own defence’.14
Henry Herbert’s short book on the queens of Henry VIII, published in 1860, similarly viewed Henry’s fifth queen with sympathy, believing that ‘history [...] has no sadder tale than this of the young, beautiful, unhappy Howard’, remarking that ‘from the stones of the Tower yard, [her] blood still cries for vengeance’.15 Martin Hume, who edited The Chronicle of Henry VIII, in which Katherine was presented as a youthful beauty who was forced to marry an ageing monarch despite her affections for his courtier, suggested in his biography of Henry’s queens, published in 1905, that Katherine was ‘a very beautiful girl of about eighteen’, who had participated in ‘immoral liberties’ with the musician Henry Manox ‘while she was yet a child, certainly not more than thirteen’, before she fell ‘deeply in love’ with Dereham. Hume concluded that Katherine ‘had erred much for love [...] but taking a human view of the whole circumstances of her life, and of the personality of the man she married, she is surely more worthy of pity than condemnation.’16
Lacey Baldwin Smith’s biography of Katherine in 1961, however, was a watershed in the historiography of Henry VIII’s fifth queen, for it was the first full-length study of this consort and the circumstances of her reign. Like Strickland, Baldwin Smith was heavily influenced by the social and cultural values present in his own day while adhering to traditional gender stereotypes. Believing that Katherine was deserving of her eventual fate, Baldwin Smith believed that her life was ‘little more than a series of petty trivialities and wanton acts punctuated by sordid politics’.17 As with Strickland in the Victorian age, Baldwin Smith believed that Katherine’s life could be interpreted as ‘a lesson in Tudor morality’.18
Believing that Katherine was a tool of her ambitious family, Baldwin Smith suggested that she was orthodox in her religion and ‘naively credulous’.19 He argued that Katherine willingly and knowingly engaged in sexual activities with both Henry Manox and Francis Dereham, accepting the indictments at face value in which Katherine was presented as the instigator in both relationships: ‘that Catherine knew exactly what she was doing is undeniable.’20 During her teenage years, Baldwin Smith stated that Katherine ‘was a bundle of contradictory passions and desires’ who was pretty, passionate, mercurial and giddy, but who sought to advance her family’s fortunes at court.21 Believing that Katherine rashly committed adultery with Culpeper with the aid of Lady Rochford, Baldwin Smith concluded his study of the queen’s life with his pessimistic opinion of her: ‘[...] the end would have been the same, history would have been unchanged, had she never lived or died [...] the Queen never brought happiness or love, security or respect into the world in which she lived. She enacted a light-hearted dream in which juvenile delinquency, wanton selfishness and ephemeral hedonism, were the abiding themes.’22
Other modern historians have been similarly critical of Katherine’s behaviour. Alison Plowden, in her book Tudor Women, published in 2003, believed that Katherine ‘possessed all the instincts of a natural tart who knew exactly what she was doing [...] having discovered the delights of sex, [she] saw no reason to settle for the first man who’d bedded her’.23 Alison Weir, in her 1991 study of the six queens of Henry VIII, agreed, believing that Katherine was ‘certainly promiscuous’ while, during her adulterous affair with Culpeper, she ‘had not only been playing with fire, but she had also been indiscreet about it, and incredibly stupid’.24 Similarly, in her collective biography, Antonia Fraser voiced criticism of Henry VIII’s fifth wife, although believing that ‘a less moralistic age will feel more sympathy for the girl whom the freak wave of the King’s desire threw up so cruelly ill-prepared on the exposed shore of history’, but stated that, in relation to Katherine’s involvement with Culpeper, ‘the repeated confessions and reports of clandestine meetings between a man notorious for his gallantry and a woman who was already sexually awakened really do not admit of any other explanation than adultery’.25
Other historians have, for different reasons and from differing perspectives, interpreted Katherine’s life more sympathetically. Joanna Denny, in her 2005 biography, characterised Katherine as a ‘vulnerable and abused child of 11 or 12’ during her affair with Manox; agreeing with Strickland that Katherine was heavily influenced by the examples of her childhood companions within the household of the dowager duchess since she was ‘eager to be part of their inner circle and to be included in their romantic adventures’.26 Later, as ‘a precocious and knowing girl with an attractive figure’, Katherine indulged in a sexual relationship with Dereham, in what could be termed ‘persistent child abuse’.27 At court, the Duke of Norfolk manipulated his niece Katherine ‘to further his own political agenda’, Katherine being ‘the victim of a conspiracy between [...] Thomas Howard, Duke of Norfolk, and Stephen Gardiner, Bishop of Winchester’.28 As queen, Katherine engaged in an adulterous affair with Culpeper as a means of conceiving a child to pass off as the impotent king’s: ‘[...] Katherine was urged to become pregnant as soon as possible, regardless of the paternity. Culpeper’s bastard could be passed off as the King’s legitimate son’.29
David Starkey, in his 2004 study of the lives of the six queens of Henry VIII, disagreed with the prevailing view that Katherine committed adultery with Culpeper in the physical sense. Agreeing with other writers that ‘she knew how to attract men with a skill beyond her teenage years’, Starkey believed that Katherine did not allow Manox to have sexual intercourse with her, ‘not out of virtue, but rather a fierce sense of Howard pride’.30 He was appreciative of her personal qualities, believing that, during her childhood, ‘she […] displayed leadership, resourcefulness and independence’ as ‘a rebel without a cause’.31 Characterising the queen as a ‘love-sick Juliet’ during her relationship with Culpeper, Starkey interpreted their affair as ‘a piece of romantic fiction’.32 Concluding that, while Katherine and Culpeper were strongly attracted to one another, they never engaged in sexual intercourse, Starkey perceived Katherine to be ‘a sympathetic figure’.33
Karen Lindsey’s feminist re-interpretation of the careers of Henry’s queens saw her agree with Starkey that a virtue can be discerned in ‘promiscuity’. Viewing the events of Katherine Howard’s life through a twentieth-century mindset of sexuality and femininity, Lindsey believed that ‘a lot of pity has been wasted on Henry VIII over Kathryn’s infidelity’, arguing that Katherine: ‘was a woman who enjoyed both sex itself and the admiration she got from the men with whom she had her few sexual adventures’. Katherine ‘was a woman who listened to her body’s yearnings, and in spite of all she had been taught, understood that she had a right to answer those longings. She was willing to risk whatever it took to be true to herself.’34 Disagreeing completely with the sort of interpretation favoured by Lindsey, Retha M. Warnicke, viewing the reign of this fifth queen from a gendered and cultural perspective, characterised Katherine as ‘a victim of sexual predators’ from the age of thirteen, believing that: ‘in her short life, she had faced great adversity because of cultural attitudes toward human sexuality. Her male abusers seemed to assume that her reluctance to have sexual relations masked “interior consent”.’35
Only in recent years have historians recognised the fundamental need to analyse Katherine’s life from a gendered approach that pays attention to how her biological sex influenced the nature of her career and her ultimate downfall. This study especially emphasises social customs and cultural values, focusing on Katherine’s experiences from a gendered perspective that concentrates in particular on attitude
s to sexual acts, femininity and fertility. It will probe surviving evidence for clues relating to fundamental questions that need to be considered. Why was it, for instance, that highborn women within the Henrician court were readily expected to play critical roles in raising their family’s fortunes and prestige, yet were often accused of heinous crimes such as witchcraft or adultery by male contemporaries who feared these women’s supposed power? Why were acts of sexual deviance viewed with horror, but attributed to the licentiousness and carnal nature of women rather than men? Why were women frequently blamed and condemned for failures in pregnancy and childbirth, resulting in accusations of sorcery or witchcraft? Why, when surviving legal documents, in particular indictments brought against aristocrats in treason trials, were patently flawed and comprised manipulated or false evidence, have such sources been systematically accepted by historians as providing a valid and realistic insight into the true nature of relations between the sexes, when evidence was only contributed unwillingly under unusual and intense conditions?
In asking such questions through critically scrutinising contemporary evidence, this study hopes to offer a more balanced and convincing documentation of the short life of Henry VIII’s fifth queen, who was eventually executed for sexual crimes perceived to be treasonous and abominable to both her husband and to the state. Interpreting such sources from both a critical and a gendered viewpoint illuminates the extent to which early modern men, even in supposedly enlightened England, feared and mistrusted their female contemporaries, who they associated with excessive sexuality and the ability to bewitch or inflict ill upon men. As a result this study will conclude, through considering Katherine’s career in detail following a brief but provoking analysis of the fortunes of Henry’s four previous queens, that not only Katherine but her four predecessors were victims of what will here be termed fertility politics: their ability, or in four cases inability, to provide a male heir to solve the paranoid issues surrounding the Tudor succession. Although the indictments brought against Katherine have begun to be viewed disbelievingly, even sceptically, by some modern historians, only through considering issues of fertility, reproduction and sexuality from a sixteenth-century male perspective can the full and dramatic story of Katherine’s downfall be convincingly documented in light of such beliefs. The indictments tell us far less about the queen’s real experiences during the spring and summer of 1541 and more about the prejudices and fears of highborn males who resented and distrusted powerful women.