by Byrne, Conor
Yet Agnes Tylney, Dowager Duchess of Norfolk and second wife of the Earl of Surrey, arguably exacted even greater influence for the Howards by virtue not only of her prestigious status but her noted role at court. She served as godmother to Princess Mary, only surviving child of Henry VIII and Katherine of Aragon, and acted as first lady of the queen’s household after Henry VIII’s sister Mary – higher even in rank than her step-daughter-in-law Anne of York. She was also to play a central role in the coronation of Anne Boleyn, another of her relatives.43 By 1538 she had become the highest ranking duchess in the kingdom and was godmother to both daughters of Henry VIII. The dowager duchess divided her time between her residences at Horsham and Lambeth, and court. Yet, ‘clearly, Lady Norfolk did not govern her household well’.44 By virtue of her prestigious social status and important position within the Howard family, the dowager duchess was expected to fulfil important functions at court, particularly with the ascent of her step-granddaughter Anne Boleyn to the queenship, but this unfortunate arrangement was to have tragic repercussions in the long-term for, in not exacting a firm rule over her household, the dowager duchess exposed her granddaughter Katherine to sexual scandals which corrupted her name and undermined the Howard family.
The examples of Anne of York and Agnes Howard uphold Harris’s claim that Tudor noblewomen ‘participated with enthusiasm, persistence, and success in all the activities connected to forming, maintaining, and exploiting patronage networks’ at court, which strengthened Howard family influence, with females being extensively involved in the politics of marriage.45 Even those Howard women, such as Jocasta Culpeper, who did not hold important influence at court could still bolster the family’s fortunes and enhance its prestige through ensuring that, through marriage, Howard men acquired substantial influence in particular regions through their wives’ rich landowning assets. These female relatives served as important examples for young Howard women, such as Katherine Howard, who by virtue of her birth into a great and noble English family could expect to acquire influence at court and contribute to her family’s greatness through the politics of fertility and marriage and through a position in the household of the queen. With the breakdown of Henry VIII’s marriage to Katherine of Aragon in the late 1520s, the opportunities for the Howard family to become ever more prestigious increased demonstrably. Opportunities in which women within the family would play essential roles.
2) A Howard Queen
In order to appreciate the queenship and eventual downfall of Katherine Howard, it is essential to understand the nature and development of fertility politics at the Henrician court within the period before her marriage, which directly shaped the eventual fortunes and successes of Henry VIII’s queens. The collapse of Henry VIII’s marriage to Katherine of Aragon in the mid-1520s demonstrates how the queen’s inability to bear her determined husband a male heir could cast both her womanhood and her status as queen in doubt. By failing to bear a son she was viewed as not only subjecting her realm to danger and disarray, but failing in her biological duty as a woman.
Later written works chose to believe that it was not Katherine of Aragon’s inability to bear a son that led to the collapse of her marriage, but Henry VIII’s destructive passion for Anne Boleyn as the direct catalyst for the annulment of his first marriage. During the reign of Katherine’s daughter Mary I, the prevailing view in Venice ran thus: ‘[...] after the King her [Mary’s] father had cohabited during 20 consecutive years with the Queen her mother in the most complete love and concord, he became enamoured of a damsel in the Queen’s service, an English girl, by name Anne Boleyn, and wishing to enjoy her [...] as his wife, his flatterers, and principally the Cardinal of York, at that time the King’s chief favourite, and who was unfriendly towards the Queen, had it represented to him by his Confessor that his marriage with Queen Katherine was invalid.’1 Nicholas Sander, a Catholic recusant writing during the reign of Elizabeth I, agreed: ‘Henry was giving the reins to his evil desires, and living in sin [...]’, while Wolsey, ‘[...] seeing that the king was becoming more and more estranged from Catherine [sic], and that his own ambitious temper was extremely offensive to the latter, [...] resolved to bring about the divorce of the king and queen’.2
The reality was markedly different. On acceding to the throne some weeks shy of his eighteenth birthday in 1509, the king had every reason to expect that, through siring several sons, the Tudor dynasty would be made invincible as the ruling family of England, firmly suppressing the dangers of civil war that had plagued every king’s reign since the early fifteenth century. Katherine, aged twenty-three, came from a fertile family and soon became pregnant, bearing a stillborn daughter in January 1510 before finally delivering a son on New Year’s Day 1511, who was, tragically, to die six weeks later. A succession of miscarriages and stillbirths followed, leading to increasing concern about the continuation of the Tudor dynasty, before the queen was delivered of a healthy daughter in 1516. The king informed the Venetian ambassador following this birth that, by virtue of the fact that both king and queen were still young, ‘if it was a daughter this time, by the grace of God the sons will follow.’3 Two years later, the birth of a stillborn daughter effectively signalled that the queen was unable to provide both England and her husband with a male heir.
As early as 1514, when the king was aged only twenty-three, rumours had circulated in Europe that he ‘meant to repudiate his present wife [...] because he is unable to have children by her’. The Duke of Buckingham, connected with the Howards and executed for treason in 1521, stated that ‘God would not suffer the King’s Grace’s issue to prosper, as it appeareth by the death of his son, and that his daughters prosper not, and that the King’s Grace has no issue male’.4 Not only was Katherine unable to ensure the continuation of Henry VIII’s lineage through providing him with a son, but matters of honour were at stake that negatively affected both king and queen, particularly since ‘it is women who confirm male honor and not the reverse [...]’5 Henry VIII’s belief that it was his queen who was to blame for failures in childbirth reflects not only his own confidence in his fertility and ability to sire a male heir, but illustrates his ignorance about the female body, which was shared with many male contemporaries who could express fear and wonder at its workings. Understanding the blame received by Katherine of Aragon for her supposed barrenness can be meaningfully understood in context of the fact that ‘the body formed not only a vital part of female personal identity but was also a significant component of their public role’, with expressions of shame directed towards the reproductive process during this period because of discomfort associated with the fluids and processes of female physiology.6 Menstruation, in particular, was viewed with disgust as it was believed to demonstrate the ‘power’ of the female body that had the ability to deceive and ensnare unsuspecting men.7 From this perspective, the cruel comment made by the French king in 1519 about the English queen during Henry and Katherine’s marital difficulties can be understood in context of her failures in pregnancy and how this impacted upon her husband: ‘He has an old deformed wife, while he himself is young and handsome’.8
Despite the unsettling nature of the Tudor succession during his first marriage, the king promoted Mary as his heir and afforded her an excellent education suitable for a European princess living in the wake of the Renaissance. She was educated in classical and modern languages, history, mathematics, theology, and was granted her own household as Princess of Wales in 1527. However, Henry could not have been encouraged in view of the state of the English succession when, aged eleven, the princess met with her father and she was found to be ‘so thin, spare and small’.9 Katherine’s failure to provide Henry VIII with a male heir effectively placed both her femininity and her title as queen in jeopardy. ‘No matter how successful the queen was politically, or how influential culturally, her primary duty was to produce a male heir.’10 In context of prevailing beliefs about gender roles, particularly within a monarchical context, this is unsurprising
, since ‘contemporaries usually blamed women for failures in childbirth and conception’.11 Ultimately, as this situation was to prove, the success of a queen consort was firmly judged in terms of whether she was able to preserve the stability of the succession through bearing male sons. Her failure to do so, despite the suitability of her personal qualities and international lineage, have proved to Henry that Katherine was not a successful wife.
The situation was compounded by, as Sander vituperates, Henry VIII’s ‘evil desires’ and ‘sin’ with other women, remarking that the king was known to enjoy pleasures with more than one of Katherine’s maids-of-honour at a time.12 The king’s lust was well-known, although it was viewed as being less outrageous when compared with the behaviour of the French king, Francis I: ‘King Henry gave his mind to three notorious vices – lechery, covetousness, and cruelty, but the two latter issued and sprang out of the former’.13 The marital situation between the royal couple was worsened in 1519 when Henry’s mistress, Elizabeth Blount, bore the king a son, Henry Fitzroy. Six years later, that bastard son was rewarded with the titles of the dukedoms of Richmond and Somerset and the earldom of Nottingham, the appointment of Lord High Admiral of England, Lieutenant North of the Trent, and Warden General of the Marches.14 The queen was personally insulted, particularly as the prevailing international situation, which had led to the king’s disfavour with her family, the Habsburgs, further threatened her position as Queen of England.
It is useful to understand how the nature of fertility politics within the English court at this time set in chain the events that eventually resulted in the annulment of the king’s marriage to Katherine of Aragon. Although later Catholic writers such as Sander blamed, alternately, both Cardinal Wolsey and Anne Boleyn for the breakdown of the royal marriage, the reality was that, had the queen borne the king a healthy male heir, both her marriage and her status as queen would never have been in doubt. These two actors were, initially, external to the personal crisis that opened up between king and queen as doubts set in as to whether the king’s first marriage was lawful. Holinshed, writing later, disputed whether the cardinal had put doubt in Henry’s mind about his marriage to Katherine, commenting that: ‘howe soever it came about, that ye king was thus troubled in conscience concernyng his mariage, this folowed, that like a wise prudent Prince, to have the doubt clearely removed, he called together the beste learned of the realme [...]’15 Indeed, George Cavendish, who served in Wolsey’s household, intriguingly stated that ‘Wolsey on his knees sought to dissuade him but could not affect him’, directly suggesting that it was the king who planned to look further into whether or not his marriage was contrary to the will of God, despite the cardinal’s attempts to dissuade him from doing so.16
The marital crisis between the king and queen in 1526-7 experienced further difficulties with the king’s love for Anne Boleyn, who had served the queen as a maid-of-honour since 1522 following her return from the French court. Henry was captivated by this enchanting gentlewoman, who Lancelot de Carles praised: ‘for her behaviour, manners, attire and tongue she excelled them all, for she had been brought up in France. No one would ever have taken her to be English by her manners, but a native-born Frenchwoman.’17 Other evidence presented by William Forrest during the reign of Mary I suggests that it was only after he had decided to annul his fruitless marriage to Queen Katherine that Henry VIII fell in love with Anne and resolved to marry her; describing how: ‘in the Courte [...] theare dyd frequent a fresche younge damoysell, that cowld trippe and go, to synge and to daunce passinge excellent, no tatches shee lacked of loves allurement; she cowlde speake Frenche ornately and playne, famed in the Cowrte [...] Anne Bullayne.’18 The king’s intention to marry Anne was plain, promising her that: ‘I will take you for my only mistress, casting off all others besides you out of my thoughts and affections, and serve you only.’19
For the purposes of this study, it is significant that Anne Boleyn was firmly entrenched within the Howard family, for her mother Elizabeth was the younger sister of Thomas Howard, Duke of Norfolk, and elder sister to Edmund, father of Katherine, making Anne and Katherine first cousins. Moreover, the association between the Howards and Boleyns became ever stronger during the period when Henry VIII began his courtship of Anne, for not only had her elder sister Mary enjoyed a time as the king’s mistress some years previously, but the Howard family’s closeness with the Parker clan (Lord Morley’s family) presented the opportunity for the youngest Boleyn child, George, to wed Jane Parker in around 1524, the probable year of their cousin Katherine Howard’s birth.20 The Howards’ association with the Parkers had developed some years previously when Alice Lovel, mother of Henry Parker, Lord Morley, and grandmother of Jane, married Sir Edward Howard, the Lord Admiral who died at Brest in 1513 and who was uncle to both Anne and Katherine.21 Now, during her relationship with Henry VIII, Anne confidently expected to be supported by her maternal relatives, the Howards, in the bid for her rise to the queenship. Her ambitious uncle, the Duke of Norfolk, could only have welcomed this opportunity for the Howard family to consolidate their prestige and their growing influence with the Tudor dynasty.
It is apparent that Norfolk became extensively involved in the matters pertaining to the king’s efforts to obtain an annulment of his marriage to Katherine of Aragon. Never particularly favourable to Cardinal Wolsey, the cardinal’s downfall in 1529 was perceived to have been engineered by Norfolk acting with the Duke of Suffolk, with Anne as the figurehead. While it is true that ‘noblemen such as Norfolk and Suffolk had for years been irritated and frustrated by the proud way in which Wolsey had flaunted his possessions and power’, contemporary documentation does not strongly support the notion that the Howards, acting with Anne, and the Duke of Suffolk conspired to achieve the downfall of Cardinal Wolsey.22 As late as the summer of 1528, Anne maintained friendly relations with the cardinal. Despite this, the imperial ambassador’s hostile comment that ‘if the Lady Anne chooses the Cardinal will be dismissed, and his affair settled; for she happens to be the person in all this kingdom who hates him most and has spoken and acted the most openly against him’, while certainly overstated, can be interpreted as accurately evidencing the developing hostility of Anne and her Howard relatives towards the cardinal, who they perceived to be obstructing the annulment of Henry’s marriage.23 Cardinal Wolsey was aware of Anne’s anger towards him, writing: ‘if the displeasure of my Lady Anne be somewhat assuaged, as I pray God the same may be, then it should be devised that by some convenient mean she be further laboured [...] All possible means must be used for attaining of her favour.’24
The hostility of the Howard family towards the cardinal is further demonstrated in the dispatches of Eustace Chapuys, the imperial ambassador, although it is essential to recognise the limitations of this ambassador’s writings since he vehemently opposed Anne and her relatives.25 Nevertheless, the report in February 1530 that Norfolk ‘began to swear very loudly that rather than suffer this he would eat him up alive’26 in relation to the cardinal is plausible in consideration of this family’s belief that the cardinal was preventing not only the annulment of Henry VIII’s marriage, but the rise of their relative, Anne, to the queenship and the consequent consolidation of their own position within the kingdom. It is clear from contemporary reports that ‘faction’, in the modern sense of the word, did not exist within the Henrician court. Rather, alliances and friendships were centred on ties of kinship, often consolidated through marriage and fertility, in which women played essential roles. As Starkey credibly suggests, Henrician faction cannot be seen as ‘a universal, but rooted in certain institutions, and not as a constant, but flourishing or being repressed in accordance with the character and policies of certain crucial figures – and the monarch above all’.27 In view of this, there was nothing particularly strange about the power and influence headed by Anne Boleyn personally during this time for, as has been made apparent, women were essential in the Tudor court in providing their family with power, prestig
e and influence.28 It is intriguing to analyse and interpret Tudor politics from a gendered perspective, since ‘looking at politics from women’s point of view alters our understanding of the development of the [Tudor] monarchy.’29
Nonetheless, this did not mean that women who played important political roles within the operation of the Tudor court were universally accepted or perceived to be political players on a par with their male counterparts. Quite the opposite was true. This should be viewed in context of cultural and social norms prevailing within the sixteenth-century court, for not only were women’s bodies constructed in this period as the absolute Other, but women’s chastity and unchastity was continually proscribed, ridiculed and feared, which led to a preoccupation and obsession with notions of honour and dishonour.30 Dishonour focused overwhelmingly on sexual sins and eventually ‘dismantled the trappings of higher status women’s rank.’31 The female body itself was widely feared by men for it ‘was believed to have magical effects, bewitching a lover, serving as an aphrodisiac, assisting in conception’.32 In view of this, the visible influence and power wielded by Anne within the Tudor court opened her up to ridicule which her male relatives, including the Duke of Norfolk, did not face by virtue of their biological sex. It is unsurprising that male commentators, such as the unknown chronicler of The Chronicle of Henry VIII, blamed Anne for the annulment of Katherine’s marriage to Henry VIII, opining how ‘he was ruined by Anne Boleyn’, while castigating Anne’s ‘wickedness’ and ‘the pleasure she took in doing harm to the blessed Queen Katharine’.33