by Alison Weir
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There can be little doubt that Dereham did enter into a precontract with Katheryn, although the scene in which he makes her give her promise is fictional. A precontract was a promise to wed and it was as binding as a marriage; only an ecclesiastical court could break it. Dereham stated he had asked Katheryn if he might have leave to call her “wife,” and she agreed, promising to call him “husband,” and they had fallen into the habit of using these terms, and did so before witnesses. This, and the fact that they were having sex, was sufficient to constitute a marriage.
At the time of her fall, Katheryn was too naive to realize that, by admitting to a precontract, she could have saved her life, for, if she had never been the King’s legal wife, she could not be accused of adultery, only bigamy, with the second marriage being rendered invalid. Bigamy was seen as a spiritual offense and could be dealt with by the ecclesiastical courts, who had the authority to pronounce on the validity of a marriage; it did not become a felony until 1604. It could have been argued that concealing the existence of a precontract constituted, in Katheryn’s case, misprision of treason, because it endangered the royal succession, but for that, the penalty was only imprisonment. The reformist Council was aware of this and, after Cranmer’s initial interrogation, deliberately avoided giving Katheryn the chance to admit to a precontract.
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The sound of ghostly chanting in the historic church at Fotheringhay has been reported on several occasions. Katheryn’s odd feelings in front of the fireplace in the great hall of Fotheringhay Castle are indeed portentous, because Mary, Queen of Scots, would be beheaded on a scaffold on that spot forty-six years hence.
There is no historical basis for the poignant tale of Katheryn evading her guards. A long-established legend tells how, in disordered white garments, wild with fear, she ran to intercept the King, bent on pleading for mercy, when he attended Mass in the Chapel Royal, but was caught as she reached the royal pew, and dragged back screaming to her apartments. Her ghost has allegedly reenacted the scene in the so-called Haunted Gallery at Hampton Court, from which the entrance to the holy day closets and the royal pew leads off. The gallery is right by the site of the new Queen’s Lodgings built for Anne Boleyn and refurbished for Jane Seymour, which Katheryn occupied, and where she was held prisoner. A recent investigation suggests that the ghost story was a fabrication by an occupant of a grace-and-favor apartment who wanted a pretext to leave it for a better one.
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Before her execution, Katheryn was almost certainly held in the Lieutenant’s Lodging in the Tower of London. So many people had been arrested on her account that, weeks before her arrival, the Constable had informed the Council that “there are not rooms to lodge them all severally in the Tower, unless the King’s and Queen’s lodgings be taken.” He begged “that the King will send hither his double key or permit them to alter the locks, or else signify whether the great personages may be committed to the Tower and the rest to other custodies until rooms may be prepared for them.” The Council instructed that “the King’s and Queen’s lodgings in the Tower are to be used. The King does not remember that he has any double key and is content that the locks be altered.”
Even with the royal lodgings being used, not all the prisoners could be accommodated in the Tower, and some had to be sent to other London prisons. Katheryn therefore could not have lodged in the old Queen’s apartments in the royal palace, since they were full, and she was not going to be in the Tower for long enough to justify moving the occupants out. Sir John Gage was ordered “to take the Queen to his own lodging,” the half-timbered Lieutenant’s Lodging, newly rebuilt in 1540. One source says she was assigned a small chamber with hangings and rugs, barely furnished.
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When writing the novel, I could not use most of the vast amount of research I did on Katheryn’s fall because she was kept very much in the dark as to the investigations into her misconduct. I had to determine what she would have been told or managed to find out. But I used the detailed material from the depositions of witnesses and those accused with her to construct the story of her earlier years. In the novel, Katheryn never finds out who first laid information against her. In fact, it was John Lascelles, who went to Archbishop Cranmer in the autumn of 1541, after his sister Mary told him about the immoral life Katheryn had led.
A lot of people believe that Francis Dereham unfairly suffered a traitor’s death, merely because he had slept with Katheryn before she married the King. That is a misconception. The Council was convinced that his joining her household when she was queen “was to an ill intent. He traitorously imagined and procured that he should be retained in the service of the Queen to the intent that they might continue their wicked courses.” It was the intention that was treasonous. Under the Treason Act of 1534, anyone who did “maliciously wish, will or desire by words or writing, or by craft imagine, invent, practice, or attempt any bodily harm to be done or committed to the King’s most royal person, the Queen’s or the heirs apparent” was guilty of treason. The word “maliciously” implied evil intent, and it appears throughout the Act.
It was the same Act that brought Culpeper to the block. Although he stated that he and Katheryn “had not passed beyond words”—and her evidence corroborated that—fatally, “he confessed his intention to do so.” Manox escaped punishment because he had married and shown no further interest in Katheryn.
We do not know for certain if Henry VIII originally intended to keep Katheryn in prison for life. In January 1542, an Italian diplomat, Giovanni Stanchini, reported from Fontainebleau in France to Cardinal Farnese “that the King meant to condemn the Queen and an aunt of hers who helped her, to perpetual prison.” We do not know how Stanchini came by this information, or what happened (if anything) to change the King’s mind about the Queen’s fate.
A theme I was unable to develop in the novel, because it was written entirely from Katheryn’s viewpoint, was the possibility that Henry VIII did not want her to die. He had loved her so much, and his grief went so deep, that he may have balked or wavered about having her executed. He was lenient in his treatment of her: he did not send her to the Tower while her offenses were investigated, but to the dissolved abbey of Syon. He did not immediately deprive her of the status of queen, which he did only after her affair with Culpeper came to light. It was said that “he would bear the blow more patiently and compassionately and would show more patience and mercy than many might think—a good deal more tenderly even than [Katheryn’s] own relations wished.” He was unusually merciful in commuting Culpeper’s sentence—this was a privilege customarily extended only to peers of the realm. He kept six of the jewels Katheryn had worn; they had perhaps been her favorites.
But the reformist radicals who dominated the Council and had brought down the Howards at a stroke were not about to collude in their restoration. Under the pretext of sparing Henry pain, they took charge of the investigation with zealous, unremitting thoroughness and a studied determination to find evidence of adultery. The Council carried out the investigation on its own, with the King sanctioning further action as necessary. Having raged against Katheryn in Council, then broken down in tears, Henry removed himself from the investigation, “with no company but musicians and ministers of pastime.” In his grief, he refused to deal with business, which allowed his councillors a free hand. He did not order that Katheryn be tried in court, but referred the matter to Parliament.
In a speech to Parliament, Lord Chancellor Audley “aggravated the Queen’s misdeeds to the utmost,” as did everyone else involved in the investigation of her offenses. The councillors’ insistence on not publicly mentioning the precontract with Dereham, “which might serve for her defense,” shows how determined the reformist faction was to bring down the Queen. An annulment was not enough, for there remained the risk that
Henry’s anger and grief would abate to the point where he was ready to forgive his erstwhile darling.
In Parliament, the Lord Chancellor expressed Henry’s concern that Katheryn “had not liberty to clear herself.” After she was condemned, “the King, wishing to proceed more humanely, and more according to forms of law, sent to her certain councillors and others of the said Parliament, to propose to her to come to the Parliament chamber to defend herself,” which was unusual in the attainder process. “It would be most acceptable to her most loving consort if the Queen could clear herself in this way.” Clearly, the lords were aware that the King was hoping she would do so.
Giovanni Stanchini had heard that Henry “meant to condemn the Queen to perpetual prison.” The Imperial ambassador, Eustache Chapuys, wondered: “Perhaps, if the King does not mean to marry again, he may show mercy to her or, if he find that he can divorce her on the plea of adultery, he may take another thus.” The unreliable “Spanish Chronicle” (perhaps not so unreliable in this case) stated: “The King would have liked to save the Queen and behead Culpeper, but all his Council said, ‘Your Majesty should know that she deserves to die, as she betrayed you in thought and, if she had had an opportunity, would have betrayed you in deed.’ So the King ordered that they should both die.”
At the time of Katheryn’s fall, Henry would not hear of taking another wife, possibly because he could not come to terms with her loss. He was unlikely, at his age and in his state of health, to find again the kind of love he had enjoyed with her; all he now had to look forward to were encroaching illness, old age, and death. Understandably, his councillors might well have feared that he would relent and take her back.
Petitioning Henry not to “vex himself with the Queen’s offense” and to give the royal assent to the Bill of Attainder by letters patent under his great seal, so that the Lord Chancellor could expedite matters in the King’s name, reflects a determination on the part of the councillors that their master should have little opportunity to relent, and that the Queen must die, “specially because the King could not marry again while she lives.” The lords were already begging and urging him to marry again, doubtless hoping he would take a reformist bride, which he in fact would do in 1543, when he married his sixth wife, Katharine Parr.
The lords had their way. Katheryn died, and the King lifted no finger to save her.
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Katheryn’s reflections on her offenses and her youth, and those of Jane Rochford, are based on verses in George Cavendish’s Metrical Visions. Cavendish had been gentleman usher to Cardinal Wolsey and evidently maintained close links with the court, having been personally acquainted with some of the people who feature in his poems. It is fitting to end with his epitaph on Katheryn Howard:
By proof of me, none can deny
That beauty and lust, enemies to chastity,
Have been the twain that hath decayed me
And hath brought me to this end untoward,
Sometime a queen, and now [a] headless Howard.
Yet pray ye to God, although that I have swerved,
That my soul may have better than my body deserved.
To our lovely neighbors, with thanks for so many good times:
Shelley, Burnell, Caroline, and David
BY ALISON WEIR
FICTION
SIX TUDOR QUEENS
Katheryn Howard, The Scandalous Queen
Anna of Kleve, The Princess in the Portrait
Jane Seymour, The Haunted Queen
Anne Boleyn, A King’s Obsession
Katherine of Aragon, The True Queen
The Marriage Game
A Dangerous Inheritance
Captive Queen
The Lady Elizabeth
Innocent Traitor
NONFICTION
ENGLAND’S MEDIEVAL QUEENS
Queens of the Conquest
The Lost Tudor Princess: The Life of Lady Margaret Douglas
Elizabeth of York: A Tudor Queen and Her World
Mary Boleyn: The Mistress of Kings
The Lady in the Tower: The Fall of Anne Boleyn
The Mistress of the Monarchy: The Life of Katherine Swynford, Duchess of Lancaster
Queen Isabella: Treachery, Adultery, and Murder in Medieval England
Mary Queen of Scots and the Murder of Lord Darnley
Henry VIII: The King and His Court
Eleanor of Aquitaine: A Life
The Life of Elizabeth I
The Children of Henry VIII
The Wars of the Roses
The Princes in the Tower
The Six Wives of Henry VIII
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
ALISON WEIR is the New York Times bestselling author of the novels Anna of Kleve, The Princess in the Portrait; Jane Seymour, The Haunted Queen; Anne Boleyn, A King’s Obsession; Katherine of Aragon, The True Queen; The Marriage Game; A Dangerous Inheritance; Captive Queen; The Lady Elizabeth; and Innocent Traitor and numerous historical biographies, including Queens of the Conquest, The Lost Tudor Princess, Elizabeth of York, Mary Boleyn, The Lady in the Tower, Mistress of the Monarchy, Henry VIII, Eleanor of Aquitaine, The Life of Elizabeth I, and The Six Wives of Henry VIII. She lives in Surrey, England, with her husband.
alisonweir.org.uk
alisonweirtours.com
Twitter: @AlisonWeirBooks
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