In truth, Katherine was as guilty as sin itself. She was also particularly dim-witted. As her passionate affair raged, she had sent a number of love letters to Culpeper via one of her servants. One billet-doux, no doubt found during searches of Culpeper’s rooms at Westminster, survives today amongst the state papers in the National Archives. It leaves little doubt as to where her affections really lay:
I heartily recommend me unto you, praying you to send word how that you do. I heard you were sick and never longed [so] much for anything as to see you. It makes my heart die to think I cannot always be in your company.
She signed herself, ‘Yours, as long as life endures, Katheryn.’ She may as well have been signing her own death warrant.95
Meanwhile, Anne of Cleves travelled to Richmond to be near Henry – she nurtured hopes of reconciliation in the disgrace of her successor96 – but these, inevitably, came to naught. Pathetically, her only contact with the court was a messenger who claimed back a ring given to Anne by the fallen queen.
Lady Jane Rochford, one-time lady-in-waiting to Anne Boleyn and widow of George Boleyn (who was executed in May 1536 for an alleged incestuous relationship with his sister Anne Boleyn), had acted as a procuress for Culpeper. She was too deeply embroiled in the scandal to escape and, inevitably, was one of those arrested and cross-examined at Hampton Court before being taken to the Tower. Lady Rochford was seized with a fit of madness on the third day of her imprisonment ‘by which [her] brain was affected’. Chapuys noted that ‘now and then she recovers her reason and that the king takes care that his own physicians visit her daily, for he desires her recovery chiefly that he may afterwards have her executed as an example and warning to others’.
Katherine’s anxious wait for the king’s verdict lasted less than ten days. On 22 November she lost the title of queen and two days later she was indicted for having led ‘an abominable, base, carnal, voluptuous and vicious life’ before the royal marriage and behaving ‘like a common harlot with diverse persons, as with Francis Dereham of Lambeth and Henry Monox of Streatham, at other times maintaining … the outward appearance of chastity and honesty’. She had misled the king ‘by word and gesture to love her’ and ‘arrogantly coupled herself with him in marriage’. The marriage pre-contract with Dereham had been concealed from Henry ‘to the peril of the King and of his children to be begotten by her’ and after the royal wedding, she had shown Dereham ‘notable favour’ and had incited Culpeper to sexual intercourse, telling him she loved him above the king.97
On 1 December 1541, Culpeper and Dereham were arraigned before the Lord Mayor, Sir Michael Dormer, at the Guildhall, London, for high treason, with Norfolk sitting uncomfortably at his left hand. Culpeper cravenly maintained that he had secretly met the queen only because of her royal commands. Katherine had made all the running in the affair. She was, he alleged, ‘languishing and dying of love for him’.98 Hardly the words or actions of a chivalrous gallant. After a hearing lasting around six hours, Dereham and Culpeper were unsurprisingly found guilty. Both were executed at Tyburn on 10 December, with the king unexpectedly commuting the sentence to simple decapitation for Culpeper alone, rather than the hanging, drawing and quartering99 that Dereham cruelly suffered. It was the last and least act of mercy that Henry had shown Culpeper.
Norfolk, his ambitions now in ashes and facing the prospect of a second niece being executed while queen, wrote to Henry from the safe isolation of his estates at Kenninghall, near Norwich, eloquently deploring the roles played by his family in the scandal and firmly denying any involvement in their ‘false and traitorous proceedings against your royal majesty’. After writing of ‘the abominable deeds by two of my nieces’, with breathtaking temerity he sought reassurance that he still remained in good standing with the king, writing obsequiously:
Prostate at your royal feet, most humbly I beseech your Majesty that by such, as if it shall please you to command, I may be advertised [told] plainly how your Highness doth weigh your favour towards me.
Assuring your Highness that unless I may know your Majesty to continue my good and gracious Lord, as ye were before their offences [were] committed, I shall never desire to live in this world any longer …100
Henry’s reaction to the letter is not known, but the noble house of Howard suffered grievously. Norfolk was soon to discover that his influence at court had waned for ever. For hiding Katherine’s promiscuity, his step-brother Lord William Howard and his wife Margaret, Lady Katherine Bridgewater (the queen’s aunt), Anne Howard (wife of her brother Henry), and her step-grandmother Agnes (the ‘old and testy’ dowager Duchess of Norfolk) were found guilty at Westminster Hall on 22 December of misprision101 of treason and forfeited their estates and possessions. They were also sentenced to perpetual imprisonment – although within a year, all were pardoned and released.
Chapuys wrote on 3 December that Henry ‘wonderfully felt the case of the Queen … and that he has certainly shown greater sorrow and regret at her loss than at the faults, loss or divorce of his preceding wives’. The ambassador added shrewdly:
I should say that this king’s case resembles very much that of the woman who cried more bitterly at the loss of her tenth husband than she had cried on the death of the other nine put together.102
On Saturday 11 February 1542, Royal Assent was given by a commission, appointed by letters patent, to an Act of Attainder103 condemning Katherine to death for treason, to spare Henry the pain of having to hear ‘the sorrowful story and wicked facts’ all over again.104 Henry wasted no time. The previous day she had been transferred to the Tower of London. The cold light of reality had hit her like a douche of icy water and she had panicked, resisted and had to be forced, screaming, into a small covered boat at Syon. Four of her ladies, with four sailors to man the vessel, accompanied her. She was brought down the river in a sombre little procession, escorted by the Duke of Suffolk and a troop of armed soldiers in a large barge and the Earl of Southampton, Lord Privy Seal, in another, all propelled by oars. Nearing the end of her journey, Katherine’s boat would have shot the narrows beneath London Bridge where the severed heads of her former lovers had been impaled. One hopes that, in the fading light of that grim afternoon, she was spared the gruesome spectacle. A few minutes later, dressed appropriately in black velvet, she landed at the steps of Traitor’s Gate ‘with the same honours and ceremonies as if she was still reigning’,105 before being taken to the comfort of the queen’s lodgings within the Tower.
On Sunday 12 February, Katherine was finally told that she was going to die the following day and should therefore ‘dispose her soul’. That night she asked, with a curious morbid fascination, to see the headsman’s block, ‘pretending that she wanted to know how she was to place her head on it. This was granted and the block being brought in, she herself tried and placed her head on it by way of experiment,’ reported Chapuys.106 The next morning at a little after seven, she was swiftly beheaded on Tower Green. ‘After her body had been covered with a black cloak, the ladies of her suite took it up and put it on one side.’107 Lady Rochford immediately followed her on to the bloodstained straw of the scaffold, her madness apparently calmed. Always anxious to cover his actions with the cloak of legality, the king had hurried an Act through Parliament permitting the execution of insane persons who had committed treason.108
Both women were acquiescent in their fate. Neither spoke much on the scaffold, merely confessing their guilt and dutifully praying for the king’s welfare and prosperity. This reticence was not just mere misplaced loyalty or tradition (although it satisfied the onlookers from the Privy Council).109 The queen was absolutely terrified. Katherine, reportedly ‘so weak [from fear] that she could hardly speak’, died, mercifully, with one sweep of the axe severing her once frivolous, dizzy head cleanly from her young body. Henry’s fifth marriage was over and his wife’s corpse was buried in the Church of St Peter ad Vincula within the Tower of London – alongside that of Anne Boleyn, Henry’s second wife, who had been exec
uted almost six years earlier.
The king was now aged fifty-one, in poor health and grown very stout. For the first time after ridding himself of a wife in thirty tempestuous years of wedlock, there were no plans to find him another, even though Parliament had now passed an Act making it a treasonable offence for a woman to marry the king without disclosing her unchaste past. This measure was, in the bland words of today’s Whitehall civil servants, intended purely as an enabling measure ‘to avoid doubts for the future’, as well as providing Queen Katherine’s demise with a more substantial veneer of legitimacy, albeit retrospective. Chapuys, in a thinly veiled comment on the notoriously loose morals of Henry’s household, wrote: ‘Few, if any, ladies of the court nowadays [are] likely to aspire to such an honour of becoming one of the king’s wives or to desire that the choice should fall on them.’110
It was not that Henry did not feel the need for female company in his declining years. There were some who believed that Henry’s amorous habits would die hard and that he would swiftly seek another wife; some hopefuls even suggested, vainly, that Anne of Cleves, now apparently grown ‘half as beautiful again since she left court’, could attempt a return match with the English king. Elizabeth Basset and Jane Rattsey, two of her ladies-in-waiting, were hauled up before Henry’s Council on 4 December 1541 and jailed for adding fuel to the fire of rumour by indiscreetly asking, ‘What! Is God working his own work to make the Lady Anne of Cleves queen again?’ and ‘What a man is the King! How many wives will he have?’111 No doubt, many of his 2.7 million subjects may have pondered the same question.
In truth, he now required a consort to look after his three children by different mothers: Mary, aged twenty-six and still without a husband, Elizabeth, eight-and-half, and Edward, approaching five. He also needed a woman’s tender touch in dressing his painful and debilitating ulcerated legs, to comfort him in the loneliness of his old age and to distract him from the daily problems of kingship. The idea of further procreation to produce a Duke of York may have finally disappeared from Henry’s mind with his poor health, increasing corpulence and the searing pain of Katherine Howard’s betrayal. For the king had again taken to food as a solace in his grief: Marillac, in his diplomatic dispatches, talks openly of the monarch’s ‘marvellous excess’ in eating and reports him ‘daily growing heavier’. Henry’s weight had increased so substantially that his great bed of walnut in the Palace of Westminster had to be widened and strengthened to support his growing bulk.
Chapuys, the mischievous Spanish ambassador, suggested to William Paget, then clerk of the king’s Council (who for ‘a long time [has] been on intimate terms with me’), that if Henry cast Katherine aside
on account of her having had connexion with a man before her marriage to him, he would have been justified in doing the same with Madam dé Cleves, for if the rumour current in the Low Countries was true, there were plenty of causes for a separation considering the queen’s [Anne of Cleves’] age [and] her being fond of wine, as they [the English] might have had occasion to observe, it was natural enough to suppose she had failed in the same manner. The Clerk did not deny the strength of my argument, but said he did not believe the King would again retake her or marry another woman until Parliament positively forced him to it.112
Ambassadors always deal in rumours, and here the gossipy Chapuys was being unkind to Anne of Cleves, as the talk of her lack of chastity seems totally unfounded. There were, however, some official attempts by the Duchy of Cleves to reinstate Anne to the unlikely royal affections. Its ambassador sought to speak to Henry about Anne, ‘but as the king’s grief did not permit it’ he had to make do with addressing the Privy Council in the middle of December 1541. After passing on the Duke of Cleves’ thanks for Henry’s ‘liberality to his sister, he prayed them [to find] means to reconcile the marriage’ and restore Anne as queen. The Council, on the king’s behalf, answered ‘that the separation had been made for such just cause that he [Henry] prayed the duke would never make such a request’. The ambassador, perhaps experiencing difficulty with his English, asked for this very definite statement to be repeated. Bishop Gardiner ‘with every appearance of anger, said that the king would never take back the said lady and that what was done was founded on great reason, whatever the world might allege’. The man from Cleves dared not reply, Marillac reported to Francis I, ‘for fear that they might take occasion to treat [Anne] worse’.113
Aside from mischief-making in the corridors of Westminster, Chapuys meanwhile had more important diplomatic imperatives: the envoy was at some pains to dissuade Henry from the possibility of seeking a sixth wife in France. Chapuys reported to his imperial master how the English king had told him that
the French were continually presenting him ladies to marry [but] I answered that no doubt they would do as they had done when he himself pursued the princess who is now the queen of Scotland114 and that in point of marriage, the French had always employed their usual tactics, and gone against the treaties between England and France … Since the French had not been ashamed to do such things openly and to his very face, they must all the time have played him in secret more devilish tricks still; adding, the more to darken the picture, many anecdotes I knew of King Francis and his ministers.115
Henry’s spirits were dramatically lifted by a new English victory against the Scots at Solway Moss on 24 November 1542,116 quickly followed by the death of their king, James V, on 14 December from a fever and despair that his wife had delivered a daughter. On 15 January 1543, Chapuys wrote that
ever since his late queen’s misconduct [Henry] has been sad and dejected, showing no inclination for carousels and pageants or paying his court to ladies. No sooner did the news from Scotland arrive than he began to invite and entertain them at court.117
Princess Mary was recalled from her quarters at Hunsdon, Hertfordshire, to act as hostess at her father’s palaces. She was greeted warmly and was given rings, silver plate and other jewels including two rubies of ‘inestimable value’ by Henry as New Year gifts. Chapuys added:
Many here think that in the midst of all this feasting and carousing, the King may well take a fancy to some lady of the court and marry her, but I must say I see no appearance of that.118
Henry returned to staging the grand court occasions he had loved so much. At the end of January, he threw a great supper for sixty-one ladies at the Palace of Westminster, having personally stumped around their lodgings beforehand, fussily checking that everything was in pristine readiness for his guests. The king’s rheumy old eyes dwelt upon a number of the laughing company around him, including Anne Basset, a girl reportedly of very limited intellect. Marillac afterwards described her as a ‘pretty creature with wit enough to do as badly as the other [Katherine], if she were to try’. While watching Anne Basset’s silly, giggling frivolity at his dinner table, Henry was perhaps painfully reminded of his last executed queen.119 Youth, beauty and gaiety were not now requirements for a king’s consort; morality, companionship and kindness would be more proper attributes in anyone else Henry sought to keep him warm at night. Although he received the ladies ‘with much gaiety’, he showed no ‘particular attention for any of them’, according to Chapuys.
At this time, a central character in the last days of Henry VIII emerged: Katherine Parr, who was to become his sixth and final wife.
The king would have known her for much of her life; indeed, her brother William was a long-time favourite of his. Probably born in 1512, she was the eldest child of a powerful northern magnate, Sir Thomas Parr of Kendal in Cumberland, who was knighted at Henry’s coronation in 1509 and fought at the Battle of the Spurs against the French in 1513. Her mother had been a lady-in-waiting to the king’s first wife, Catherine of Aragon. Katherine Parr had been married at fifteen to the ailing Edward, Lord Borough of Gainsborough, Lincolnshire, who suffered from a ‘distracted memory’, and she was widowed, childless, in 1529. In the late spring of 1532, she had married the rich widower John Neville, Baron Latimer o
f Snape Castle, Yorkshire. He was forty-two, more than twenty years older than his bride, had been married twice before and had two children, a son and a daughter. The Latimers were to be caught up dangerously in the northern Pilgrimage of Grace rebellion in 1536. Katherine’s husband was taken hostage by the ringleaders and became their spokesman to the king’s Council in London, before switching sides to rescue Katherine and her stepchildren unharmed from the hands of the rebels at Snape. During Thomas Cromwell’s subsequent virulent witch-hunt for those in any way involved in the rebellion, the Duke of Norfolk came to the Latimers’ aid, pointing out that he was unable to find any evidence that Katherine’s husband had done anything wrong, except when under the duress of violence. He added, ‘No man was in more danger of his life,’ and so they were spared from the heavy hand of Henry’s chief minister’s retribution.
Katherine was frequently at court: her sister, Anne, married William Herbert, one of Henry’s confidants amongst the Gentlemen of his Privy Chamber, then an esquire of the king’s body, whose father was an illegitimate son of the 1st Earl of Pembroke.120 Latimer, sick and infirm, died in London, probably in December 1542, and Katherine arranged for him to be buried in St Paul’s Cathedral beneath an impressive tomb, recorded as having been ‘broken all in pieces’ seventy years later.121 His will was proved in March 1543.
The Last Days of Henry VIII Page 5