We can picture the Howard clan watching with eagle eyes when Henry first met his new bride, Anne of Cleves, on January 3,1540. They must have crowed with delight at the royal bridegroom’s horror of his wife’s appearance. She was tall, poorly built, with pockmarked skin and no social graces whatsoever— quite a contrast to plump, petite Catherine. The king dubbed Anne his “Flanders mare.” Two days before the wedding, Henry growled, “If it were not that she had come so far into my realm, and the great preparations and state that my people have made for her, and for fear of making a ruffle in the world and of driving her brother into the arms of the Emperor and the French King, I would not now marry her. But now it is too far gone, wherefore I am sorry.”36
Henry claimed he could not consummate the marriage because “her body was disordered and indisposed to provoke or excite any lust in him.” He said that he “could not overcome his loathsomeness” of her, “nor in her company be provoked or stirred to the Act.” His doctor advised the king not to force himself, as this might cause an inconvenient debility of the royal private parts. Anne was delighted to find that in the divorce agreement, she was given two palaces, a generous income, several carriages, a large retinue of servants, and the right to retain her head.
The king was suddenly single once more, and the successful candidate would be much more than his mistress; she would be queen of England. Seizing on Henry’s clear interest in Catherine, the duke of Norfolk dangled her in front of the king like bait. Catherine, the neglected, impoverished niece who had been sent to court with modest attire, suddenly began appearing in a tantalizing array of gowns and glittering jewels. Her large tribal family showered the court with praise for “her pure and honest condition.”37 Eager to please her family, the king began to swing his ponderous bulk away from religious reform and back in the direction of orthodoxy.
But silly Catherine was a poor candidate for queen. Like a good-natured dog, she thought only of present enjoyment or pain. Thinking of past errors or future repercussions seemed beyond her limited intellectual capacity. She enjoyed each moment to the utmost until the master’s voice bellowed loud and threatening. Then she feared and, like a dog, did not understand the words but only that she would undergo imminent punishment.
Nonetheless, pushed by her ambitious relatives, flattered by the urgent suit of the king, Catherine married Henry on July 28, 1540. Almost immediately, the queen was obliged to fill her household with Howard relatives and supporters. She persuaded Henry to grant manor houses, rich estates, and revenues to her relatives and their friends. In August 1541 she was foolish enough to make Francis Dereham—her former lover and perhaps her legal husband—her private secretary.
Bitter jealousy arose at court among those who had lost their positions to the Howards. The Seymour family in particular were furious that many of them had been replaced by the queen’s supporters. A more intelligent woman would have used her position as queen to make peace among the factions, strewing some appointments and favors in the enemy’s direction to maintain equilibrium. But Catherine was the thoughtless tool of her relentlessly ambitious uncle and obediently fulfilled all his commands.
Only five years earlier, Catherine’s first cousin, the brilliant and manipulative Anne Boleyn, had fallen to her enemies. How was the harebrained Catherine to survive in a scorpion’s nest of intrigue? Sitting at the apex of Howard ambitions, Catherine was the weakest link in their faction. If the silly girl were to fall, so would they all.
Initially she was protected by Henry’s extravagant demonstrations of love. Recapturing the passions of youth for the last time, the king called Catherine a “jewel of womanhood”38 and his “rose without a thorn.”39 The French ambassador reported that he had “never seen the King in such good spirits or in so good a humor.”40 One chronicler wrote, “the King had no wife who made him spend so much money in dresses and jewels as she did, who every day had some fresh caprice.”41 For Christmas and New Year’s gifts in 1540, Henry gave her a brooch “containing 27 table diamonds and 26 clusters of pearls,” another brooch made of 33 diamonds and 60 rubies surrounded by pearls; and a “muffler of black velvet furred with sables containing 38 rubies and 572 pearls.”42
Catherine, though she loved the jewels, gowns, and parties that came with her new position, was bored in her husband’s presence and repulsed by him physically. At fifty, the king was often ill, cantankerous, and impatient. He had swelled to some 350 pounds. Each day a festering ulcer on his thigh had to be drained of foul-smelling liquid. When it clogged up, the king suffered painful fevers until the liquid ran free again. The French ambassador wrote home after one bout of fever, “This King’s life was really thought to be in danger not from the fever but from the leg which often troubles him because he is very stout and marvelously excessive in eating and drinking.”43
Household accounts from around this time show several bills from tailors for letting out the king’s doublets. According to one courtier, “The King was so fat that three of his biggest men that could be found could get inside his doublet.”44 Even his beds had to be enlarged and given extra supports to accommodate his increasing bulk.
Let us imagine the queen’s duties in the royal four-poster. The king would likely have suffocated his petite bride if he had perched on top of her. He must have required her to ride astride him, careful not to disturb the stinking wound on his thigh. She who had played with the charming Manox, who had rutted with the sexy Dereham, now had to perform loathsome sex acts on an obese and smelly old man. We can picture the happy king, perfectly sated, snoring, as his young wife lay silently beside him, her heart sinking. And the following day her bright eyes wandered to the young and handsome courtiers dancing gracefully before her as she sat on the throne next to Henry, who was too fat to dance.
It was no surprise that Catherine fell in love. Thomas Culpeper, a gentleman of the king’s privy chamber and a favorite of Henry’s, was in his late twenties, personable and polished. Culpeper was young while the king was old, slender and healthy while the king was fat and sick, merry while the king was sullen. Trim and athletic, the virile Culpeper offered her exquisite delights instead of the rising disgust she must have felt in bed with Henry. There was no festering sore on his muscular thigh, no mountain of fat on his tight belly.
Every queen must be aided and abetted by a loyal lady-in-waiting to hide her love affair, and Catherine was assisted by Lady Jane Rochford, who had been married to Anne Boleyn’s brother. Every few weeks when the court moved to a different palace, Lady Rochford chose for the queen the rooms with an easy escape route, a secret staircase or garden door. In the only extant letter written entirely in her own hand, Catherine wrote Culpeper, “Come when my Lady Rochford is here for then I shall be best at leisure to be at your commandment.”45
When Henry made a royal progress through northern England in the fall of 1541, Catherine and Culpeper had sex on several occasions. The obliging Lady Rochford whispered to Culpeper how and when to enter the queen’s chamber. While staying at Pontefract Castle, the king knocked loudly on the queen’s door while she was in bed with her lover, and only after some time did Lady Rochford open the door.
Courtiers could see that the queen was in love with Culpeper by simply looking at her when she spoke to him. Indeed, everyone seemed to know except Henry, living in a state of second youth and marital bliss. The day before he found out about Catherine’s unchaste past, the king gave a public thanksgiving for his virtuous queen. As courtiers tried to keep a straight face, the king proclaimed, “I render thanks to thee, O Lord, that after so many strange accidents that have befallen my marriages, Thou hast been pleased to give me a wife so entirely conformed to my wishes as her I now have.”46
The plotters and planners of the queen’s downfall could not move too hastily. They needed time, needed evidence. Indeed, it was a servant who suddenly caused the house of cards to fall, John Lassells, whose sister Mary Lassells, chamber woman to the dowager duchess, was well aware of Catherine’s loud
nighttime activities in the dormitory. One day when the fiercely Protestant John Lassells was bemoaning the rise of the Catholic faction, his sister, now Mary Hall, said of the queen, “Let her alone, for if she holds on as she begins we shall hear she will be nought within a while.”47 Mary, furious that she had not been given a plum position at court by Catherine, as so many other dormitory girls had been, told how Manox had boasted that he had fondled the queen’s private parts. Delighted, John Lassells informed the council in London.
In October 1541 the three ministers left in charge of London during the king’s progress were informed by John Lassells that the queen had “lived most corruptly and sensually.” The powerful Howard council members were traveling with the king and the three members left behind were all Howard enemies, including Jane Seymour’s still influential brother Edward. They were delighted at the accusation, though no one had the courage to tell the king the news. Finally, Archbishop Thomas Cranmer wrote a delicately worded letter and handed it to the king when he returned.
Instead of becoming angry at the accusation, Henry was perplexed. He thought it was probably idle gossip sprung from jealous women, or a plot set afoot by religious reformers displeased by a Catholic queen. Nonetheless, he instructed the council to investigate the rumor. John Lassells and Mary Hall were both interviewed. Based on their testimony the music master, Henry Manox was called in and admitted that he “used to feel the secret and other parts of the Queen’s body.” Unwilling to remain the focus of the investigation, Manox tipped off investigators to the existence of his more successful rival, Francis Dereham. Hauled before the inquisitors, a trembling Dereham foolishly admitted that he “had known her carnally many times, both in his doublet and hose between the sheets and in naked bed.”48
Henry met with the privy council who read him the confessions of Manox and Dereham. Black rage bubbled up in him like poison. And the sudden realization swept over him that he was old, that he was obese, that he was repulsive in every way. She had never loved him. She had pretended. Pretended to love him as she pocketed his jewels and costly gifts, as her ambitious family grasped at pensions and appointments.
Trembling with rage, the king called for a sword to kill the woman who had betrayed him, swearing she would never have “such delight in her incontinency as she should have torture in her death.”49 Then he collapsed into a fit of weeping. Wiping tears from his fat cheeks, the king bewailed his “ill luck in meeting such ill-conditioned wives” and blamed his council for “this last mischief.”50 By the time his tears had dried, his youth had vanished forever.
Catherine, oblivious to the danger, was dancing in her chamber with her maidens when the guards came to arrest her. The captain told her it was “no more the time to dance.”51 On November 7 the queen herself was interrogated by Archbishop Cranmer who reported, “I found her in such lamentation and heaviness as I never saw no creature, so that it would have pitied any man’s heart to have looked upon her.”52 He actually feared for her sanity.
Sobbing, Catherine denied she had done anything wrong. Initially she claimed that Dereham had forced her with “violence rather than of her free consent and will.”53 Then she admitted in some confusion that Dereham had “lain with me, sometimes in his doublet and hose, and two or three times naked; but not so naked that he had nothing upon him, for he had always at least his doublet and as I do think, his hose also, but I mean naked when his hose were put down.”54
She submitted a confession of sorts to the king, begging his forgiveness. “I your grace’s most sorrowful subject and most vile wretch in the world, not worthy to make any recommendations unto your most excellent majesty, do only make my most humble submission and confession of my faults.” She explained, “First at the flattering and fair persuasions of Manox, being but a young girl, [I] suffered him at sundry times to handle and touch the secret parts of my body which neither became me with honesty to permit nor him to require. Also Francis Dereham by many persuasions procured me to his vicious purpose and obtained first to lie upon my bed with his doublet and hose and after within the bed and finally he lay with me naked, and used me in such sort as a man doth his wife many and sundry times, but how often I know not….”55
She excused herself for not telling the king during their courtship of her unchaste past because “I was so desirous to be taken unto your grace’s favor and so blinded with the desire of worldly glory that I could not, nor had grace to, consider how great a fault it was to conceal my former faults from your majesty, considering that I intended ever during my life to be faithful and true unto your majesty after.”56
The queen refuted any marriage precontract with Dereham, which would have invalidated her royal marriage and could have saved her from the wrath of Henry if he had never legally been her husband. Dereham, however, asserted that they were precontracted to each other, pleading that he was therefore innocent of debauching a maiden. But Henry was less concerned at the technicalities of a possible precontract than by the fact that Catherine had taken Dereham into her service at court. If she had been truly sorrowful about her unchaste past, why would she want her former lover there as a constant reminder? Did she take Dereham into her bed after marriage?
At this point Catherine’s crime was—perhaps—bigamy. There was no law on the books requiring candidates for the position of queen to tell the king of all past sexual activities. Catherine must have been praying that her escapades with Culpeper would not be revealed. But it was Dereham, clapped in prison, who led investigators to her extramarital affair. In a cowardly attempt to prove he had not slept with the queen since her marriage, he pointed out that Thomas Culpeper had been the sole object of her desires.
When questioned about Culpeper, Catherine said that it was Lady Rochford who had pushed her into his arms, arranging secret meetings with him that Catherine wanted to avoid. Lady Rochford, for her part, said she was merely following the queen’s orders to arrange meetings for the two. She believed “that Culpeper hath known the queen carnally considering all things that she hath heard and seen between them.”57
Lady Rochford went mad on the third day of her imprisonment. Such information extracted from her about the queen’s adultery was only available during her brief moments of lucidity. Perhaps guilt had driven her mad, guilt at sending her husband to the scaffold with a pack of lies years before. Revenge for his not wanting her, for ignoring her as she lay in bed panting with desire, while he went out to find a man. Now, with exquisite irony, she would meet the identical fate as George Boleyn. The Spanish ambassador wrote, “Lady Rochford would have been tried and sentenced at the same time, but on the third day of her imprisonment she went mad. She recovers her reason now and then, and the King… gets his own physicians to visit her, desiring her recovery that he may afterwards have her executed as an example.”58
Under interrogation, Culpeper insisted that he was the innocent victim of the queen’s unquenchable desire. Catherine, he said, demanded they meet, as she was “languishing and dying for love for him.”59 He finally confessed that “he intended and meant to do ill with the queen and that in like wise the queen so minded to do with him.”60 This was Catherine’s death blow, for if Henry could have forgiven her for an unchaste past before she met him, he could never do so for sullying the marriage bed and taking the risk of presenting him with a spurious heir.
Howard enemies, seizing upon this good fortune, tried to implicate the entire clan in a conspiracy, hoping to topple the too-powerful duke of Norfolk. Many Howard relatives and supporters were imprisoned for weeks or months. Indeed, so many were thrown into the Tower that the constable had to move out and give his own rooms to prisoners.
The duke of Norfolk, who had placed two queens on Henry’s throne, both of whom were accused of adultery, was seen stumbling about the palace wiping tears from his eyes, bewailing that his nieces had caused the king such pain. He wrote a pitiful letter to Henry begging him not to “conceive a displeasure” against him, who was “prostrate at your royal fe
et.”61 He called Catherine his “ungrateful niece” and loudly proclaimed that she should be burned alive.62
His histrionics must have worked, for everyone in the clan remotely involved in the case was tossed in prison except for the duke. Even the squawking old dowager duchess was thrown in jail, though her worst fear was that Catherine, rejected by the king, would be sent back to make trouble once more in the dormitory. She was shocked when all Howard prisoners were tried, found guilty of concealing treason, and sentenced to life imprisonment and forfeiture of goods.
Over the ensuing months, however, one by one the prisoners were quietly released and their goods restored to them. Those relatives fortunate enough to avoid prison put on their richest finery and paraded through the streets to show they did not care about Catherine’s fate. The French ambassador reported to his king that such behavior was “the custom and must be done to show that they did not share the crimes of their relatives.”63
Imprisoned for three months in Syon House outside of London, Catherine seemed not to understand what was happening. Her spirits bounced back and she spent her time “making good cheer, fatter and handsomer than ever.”64 She spent hours in front of the mirror trying on jewelry.
Dereham and Culpeper were sentenced to the full rigor of a traitor’s death, but Culpeper, being a gentleman at court with influential friends, found his sentence commuted to a merciful beheading. It is ironic that the man who had slept with Catherine after her marriage was given a lesser punishment than the man who had slept with her before. On December 10, 1541, the sentences were carried out. Dereham, for having robbed the queen of her virginity, was hanged until nearly unconscious, cut down, his private parts cut off and thrown into the fire as he watched; he was then slit open and disemboweled, and finally beheaded. The heads of Dereham and Culpeper adorned Tower Bridge and slowly rotted; Dereham’s arms and legs graced other buildings.
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