Tudor Queens of England

by David Loades

  Catherine was less fortunate. The day after the Council meeting, on 7 November, Cranmer went to Hampton Court to interrogate her and to make sure that she remained under restraint. At fi rst she wept copiously and denied that she had been guilty of any offence but the following day either broke down or decided that confession was the best way to turn aside wrath. The whole story came out, interspersed with fi ts of hyster

  ics.15 Meanwhile, Francis Dereham had confessed to intercourse with her at Horsham but claimed that there had been a contract of marriage between them. If that had been the case, it would of course have meant that her marriage to Henry had been null from the start and, since she could not cuckold a man to whom she had never been married, the whole charge of treason would have fallen to the ground. She would have been guilty of deception, and possibly of bigamy, but not of adultery. It was, perhaps, a measure of Catherine’s stupidity that she would not entertain this line of defence. Either she was unable to understand its implications, or she was too proud to consider that a Howard could ever have married a Dereham. For whatever reason, she denied that any such pre-contract had ever existed, and thus effectively laid her head on the block. A few days later she wrote out a full and abject confession and threw herself on the King’s mercy. In this confession, which still survives, she described her relations with both Mannox and Dereham in graphic detail, but claimed that her affair with the latter had ended ‘… almost a year before your majesty was married to my lady Anne of Cleves’ – that is in January 1539. ‘I was so desirous’, she went on, ‘to be taken into your grace’s favour 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 aft

  er …’16 The line of defence is clear. Yes, she had been guilty of deception and had not come to Henry as a virgin bride but that was all. All charges of adultery since her marriage, she continued to deny vehemently. The council did not immediately respond, being concerned at that point mainly with the issue of pre-contract, which was not even mentioned. However, shortly after they were confronted with Dereham’s confession, and as a result Thomas Culpepper was arrested. He in his turn confessed to a sexual relationship with Catherine since her marriage

  – during that problematic summer progress. This was confi rmed in a sense by Jane Rochford, who was now struggling painfully in the toils that she had 148

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  created for herself. She declared that to the best of her knowledge, Culpepper was right, and that intercourse had taken plac

  e.17 Catherine continued her denials, but her attempts to draw a line under her earlier indiscretions were now fatally compromised. If she had behaved in such an irresponsible fashion before her marriage, what was to prevent her from carrying on in the same manner? She was removed from Hampton Court to the former monastery of Syon, with four ladies and a dozen servants. On 13 November her household was closed down and her jewels were inventoried. All the accused were now in desperate straits and Cranmer and Wriothesley made another attempt to persuade the Queen to confess. As a result the story became more circumstantial – and more tangled. Catherine admitted indiscreet nocturnal meetings but continued to deny that they went further than dalliance and talk. Culpepper also changed his story. While admitting that he had intended sexual intercourse, a desire which he claimed was mutual, he now denied that it had taken place and that the sexual relationship which had admitted to earlier had amounted to no more than that. At the same time he claimed that these encounters had been arranged by Jane Rochford, who was thus made to appear as Catherine’s pander. 18 Although it would have been convenient if the Queen had admitted her guilt, it was not really necessary. The statute of 1534 had laid down that if any person should ‘… by craft imagine, invent, practice or attempt any bodily harm to be done or committed to the king’s most royal person, or the Queen’s, or the heir apparent’s …’19 then that person was guilty of treason. Culpepper had certainly ‘by craft imagined’

  bodily harm to Catherine, so that the fact that he had not actually succeeded in violating the Queen did not matter in terms of defi ning the crime. The fact that the Queen had condoned and even encouraged his action was neither here nor there. By not denouncing his actions at the time, she was guilty of conspiring her own bodily harm. Had she fallen pregnant, it would automatically have been assumed that the child was the King’s and a gross deception would have been practised on the realm.

  Throughout the third week of November the interrogations continued intensively, and it is likely that both Culpepper and Dereham were racked. Despite the King’s threats, Catherine was not subjected to any such ordeal – indeed the only woman known to have been tortured throughout this period was the heretic Anne Askew, who added defi ance to her demerits.

  20 Nevertheless, the case against Catherine built up damningly and by 22 November the Council was convinced of the guilt of all three. On that day it was decreed that Catherine was no longer to be styled Queen but only the Lady Catherine Howard. This had no judicial signifi cance, but was perhaps a pointer to the way in which it had been decided to proceed against her. On 1 December the two men were arraigned and both

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  pleaded guilty. In fact Dereham’s guilt was by no means established because, despite the opportunities that his position in the household had created, there is no proof that he had either resumed or attempted to resume, an intimate relationship. He seems to have been mainly the victim of the King’s malice for having ‘spoiled’ his innocent bride. However, his plea of guilty resolved the matter so far as the court was concerned and both men were taken to Tyburn on 10 December. Because he was a member of the Privy Chamber, Culpepper was beheaded ‘by the king’s mercy’ but Dereham suffered the full penalty of hanging, drawing and quartering. Both men allegedly ‘made a good end’, confessing their faults and asking the assembled people to pray for them. What the crowd’s reaction may have been is not recorded. It was not every day that gentlemen were despatched in such a fashion and curiosity probably assembled a good number. As was customary, their heads were displayed on London Bridge, and Catherine’s fate was sealed.

  21 As the French ambassador commented, Dereham had been executed because

  ‘… his coming to the queen was to an ill intent’, and by the same criterion, the Queen had ‘traiterously imagined and procured’ that he should be so positioned

  ‘that they might resume their wicked courses’. In other words, Catherine was as guilty as her love

  rs.22 The appointment of another of her former associates, Katherine Tylney as a chamberer (like Joan Bulmer who was not named), was also construed as ‘proof of her will to return to her abominable life …’ The same observer also remarked that Culpepper had been suffi ciently intimate with the King as to ‘share his couch’ – by which he meant that he had been trusted with guard duty in the royal bedchamber, which involved sleeping on a pallet bed at the King’s feet – and ‘apparently wished to share the Queen’s too’. For whatever reason, Catherine was never brought to trial. Anne Boleyn had been tried by her peers, but this time an Act of Attainder was used. It may have been felt that the public trial of a second Queen for adultery within the space of six years would have brought the King to ridicule, but it is more likely that the usefulness of such a procedure had been demonstrated in the meanwhile by the case of Thomas Cromwell, and it was simply selected as a convenient way of sparing Henry’s feelings, which were still pretty raw at the end of December 1541. Lord Chancellor Audley apparently had some qualms about proceeding in this fashion, fearing that justice would not be seen to be done, but the King’s wishes prevailed. 23 After a singularly cheerless Christmas, Parliament reconvened on 16 January and the Bill of Attainder was introduced in the House of Lords on 21

  January. This confi rmed the
attainders of those who had already been executed, which was a standard procedure, and declared Catherine to have been guilty of treason. Rather surprisingly, the other person who was similarly condemned 150

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  was Jane Rochford. Jane had (by modern standards) not been guilty of anything except crass stupidity, but her own confession told against her. If, as she claimed, Culpepper had been guilty of intercourse with the Queen, then she was guilty by association. However, as we have seen, there is every reason to doubt whether that had actually happened and while the wish might have been suffi cient to condemn the principals, such an outcome should have exonerated Jane. On the other hand it could well have been argued that if she was an unsuccessful pander, it was not for want of trying. The Bill passed its fi nal reading in the Commons on 8 February, and would normally have had to await the royal assent at the end of the session, on 1 April. However, Henry did not want to prolong the business any further, and a special assent was delivered by Letters Patent on 11 February. The two women were warned for death.

  Catherine’s mood over the previous two months or so is hard to assess. Under interrogation she had been by turns tearful and hysterical and that phase seems to have been succeeded by violent fl uctuations. Sometimes she would collapse in weeping and lamentation but sometimes she appeared more preoccupied with her clothes than with the fate that hung over her. As late as Christmas she seems to have been unable to grasp the seriousness of her situation. On 10 February, the decision having been made, she was moved by river from Syon to the Tower, not to the royal apartments but to an appropriate dungeon, and two days later her fate was communicated to her. At this point she seems to have collapsed into a sort of numb acquiescence. As far as we know, she did not even appeal to her erstwhile husband for mercy – perhaps she realized that it would be pointless. All she did was to request a swift and secret death. The former was granted, and the latter refused, because it was necessary to have witnesses to so important a sacrifi ce. So it came about that a large crowd was gathered on Tower green in the bleak dawn of Monday, 13 February. An eyewitness account of the event survives in the reports of Charles de Marillac, the French ambassador, who was pr

  esent.24 The hapless Catherine was almost too distraught to know what was happening, and almost too weak to ascend the scaffold. She was able to utter just a few words, confessing her faults and ‘desiring all Christian people to take regard to her worthy and just punishment’. It was generally agreed that she made a Godly and Christian end, more becoming of respect than anything that she had done in her life. She was just 20 years old, a mere child, broken on the wheel of her own desires. Jane Rochford reacted very differently. She had far more cause to feel that she had been unjustly used, but no such sentiment was aired. It would have been almost unthinkable for anyone condemned for treason to protest their innocence, or rail upon their judges. Under the stress of the occasion, however, Jane became voluble to the point of incoherence. Her

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  confession and pious exhortation rambled on until the patience of the offi cials and of some of the crowd was exhausted. Both women died cleanly under the axe and both were interred in the nearby chapel of St Peter ad Vincula. Jane was expendable, and in the circumstances a fi tting object of the royal wrath, but whether Catherine would have suffered the ultimate penalty if she had not been the tool of a powerful aristocratic faction is another matter. If she had not been the Queen, the confessional and a suitable penance would have awaited her rather than the headsman’s axe. The fate of a disgraced and repudiated woman in the sixteenth century was not enviable, but many ordinary girls endured it and lived to tell the tale. It was typical of the period that a woman guilty of such offences should be ostracized and condemned, whereas her male partner would escape unscathed unless he was identifi ed as the father of a bastard child. Fornication was not an offence in the common law but was reserved to the Church Courts, and the judgement of society. However, none of this applied at the highest level and the Queen as whore was an almost unthinkable insult to the royal honour. Catherine, moreover, carried a heavy load of political baggage, just as Anne Boleyn had done. Anne had had to die because she was personally dangerous, Catherine had to die because her kindred were. There can be little doubt that Catherine’s disgrace was more than personal; it carried an indictment of the whole Howard family. There would have been little point in arresting the Dowager Duchess of Norfolk if her offence had been merely bad household management. The charge of misprision of treason was based upon the thesis that she had been party to a conspiracy to foist a wanton girl on the King – not as a mistress (which might have been acceptable) but as a wife. Such charges were suffi cient to destroy the family as a political force and for that same reason Catherine’s status as a whore had to be substantiated and the full penalty of treason exacted. It was probably a guilty awareness on Henry’s part that he had contributed to his own humiliation, which prevented the charges against Agnes from being pursued. By the time that she was pardoned they had had their political effect – and Catherine was dead.

  The infl iction of capital punishment upon women was comparatively rare in the early sixteenth century. Females were executed for murder and robbery but on nothing like the scale of their male contemporaries and Anne Boleyn was the fi rst gentlewoman to suffer on the block in living memory. Witchcraft, while claiming many women’s lives in the early seventeenth century, was hardly an issue in the reign of Henry VIII. A few female Lollards had been burned, but the execution of Anne Askew in 1546 was notorious partly because it was so rare. Margaret Pole had been despatched for high treason in the summer of 1541, but adultery was the treason of Queens and the simultaneous despatch of two women 152

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  for that offence in February 1542 was a very notable event. Nobody has ever had much good to tell of Catherine. She was an instrument of her family, who was broken in the effort largely because of the defects in her own personality. She was obviously very attractive to men and may well have had others, in addition to Henry Mannox, of whom we know nothing because it was in no one’s interest to disclose them. Having discovered this fact at an early age, she was quite unable to discipline herself and became, in effect, a ‘girl who couldn’t say no’. In her original confession, she claimed to have put her wanton past behind her and after her marriage to have kept herself for the King. What she did not, of course, say was that Henry was a very unsatisfactory lover and that, even by her own admission, she had sought solace in fl irtations which were second nature to her. Her confession was not accepted as satisfactory at the time, and has become no more convincing today. She was in effect just a silly girl in the wrong place at the wrong time – and for that her family can be largely blamed.

  As we have seen, Henry took her behaviour very hard. She had infl icted more psychological damage upon him in a few short months than several successive Popes, or Francis of France over many years. By the summer of 1540 his abortive encounter with Anne of Cleves had warned him that all was not well but Catherine had appeared to offer rejuvenation. The lustful, potent Henry who had wrought havoc with the damsels of the court was back! Then he was forced to confront the truth. He was old, tired and periodically sick. His once magnifi cent frame was now grossly overweight and regularly overtaxed. The sexual potency that had once kept Catherine of Aragon in a state of regular pregnancy was now unable to satisfy a young girl who had fewer years than his own daughter. A consort was supposed to maintain a King’s honour, but this ignorant child had humiliated him in the most intimate possible way. Fortunately, international affairs did not await the King’s mood or convenience. During the ill-fated summer progress of 1541 Henry thought that he had persuaded James V of Scotland to meet him at York. James’s council persuaded him otherwise, and the English king took his non-appearance as an insult. Then at about the same time, on 10 July, Charles and Francis resumed their i
nterminable confl ict, and these two events shook the diplomatic kaleidoscope. Negotiations had been going on for a marriage between Mary and the duc d’Orleans, but these had foundered on the reef of Mary’s illegitimacy. Early in 1542, at the same time that Catherine was awaiting the attentions of the executioner, Henry began secret negotiations for a renewal of his old Imperial alliance. In June plans were settled for a joint invasion of France in 1543, and through the autumn ships and guns were gathered for the impending action.

  25 No doubt these bellicose preparations restored a measure of vitality and confi dence to the King, and perhaps they were intended to do just

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  that. However, the fi rst action came against Scotland. Remembering what had happened a generation earlier, Henry was minded to exclude the Scots from the forthcoming action, by a treaty preferably, but if not by intimidation. The treaty option did not work, and in October 1542 the Duke of Norfolk launched a brief but savage raid into the lowlands. It was by doing his master’s bidding in such ways that the Duke crept back into favour after his niece’s disgrace. James could not fail to respond to such provocation and early in November he launched 20,000 men into the debateable ground north of Carlisle. His army walked into a well-laid trap and was routed at the battle of Solway Moss on 23 October. It was not a bloody defeat like Flodden but it left a lot of Scottish nobles as prisoners in English hands. It also took Scotland out of the forthcoming continental war because not only had its main fi eld army been destroyed but James V himself died about a week later of unrelated causes, leaving his infant daughter Mary as his heir. These events, and the prospect of action in France, restored some youthful bounce to the decrepit Henry, and as his black moods retreated he began to contemplate marriage again. As we have seen, by March 1543 he was showing a serious interest in Lady Latimer.