Young and Damned and Fair: The Life and Tragedy of Catherine Howard at the Court of Henry VIII

From the little chapel at Oatlands and the imposing towers of London, bells tolled out to mark a wedding and a death. Bells still tolled too every second day of November, the Feast of All Souls, the Catholic Day of the Dead, when Christ’s flock on earth were compelled to remember their brothers and sisters in the faith who had gone before them. They would toll again on the fifteenth day of August, the Feast of the Assumption, to mark the entry of the Virgin Mary into Heaven, there to be crowned its queen, as foretold, so the Church taught, in the visions of Saint John in the Book of Revelation.30 Celestial queens had not yet been abolished, despite the best efforts of the Protestant evangelicals and the man who had fallen on Catherine’s wedding day. But in a world where statues of Our Lady could be taken from Norfolk and torched in front of large London crowds with Cromwell watching on, it did not seem as if the Virgin Mary was any more secure on her throne than Katherine of Aragon or Anne Boleyn had been on theirs. It was an age of uncertainty and terrifying possibilities, and Catherine Howard was now its queen.

Chapter 2

Our Fathers in Their Generation

Let us now praise men of renown, and our fathers in their generation.

– Ecclesiasticus 44:1

The first recorded mention of Catherine Howard, born as she was in the decade before the government made mandatory parish-level records of each baptism, comes from a will.1 Her maternal grandmother, Isabel Worsley, left a bequest, ‘To Charles Howard Henry George Margaret Catherine Howard XXs [twenty shillings] each.’2 It is a very quiet entrance for a future queen of England – Catherine is even upstaged in the concluding half of the sentence by her younger sister Mary, who, as Isabel’s goddaughter, received a more substantial bestowal of £10.3 Yet it is from the Worsleys and their kin that much of the relevant evidence about Catherine’s early years originates.

Beyond its object as a matter of general historical interest in showcasing how prosperous members of county society chose to dispose of their earthly possessions on the eve of the Reformation – rather touching is Isabel’s stipulation that every housewife in Stockwell, part of Isabel’s home parish of Lambeth, should receive a gift of linen worth twelve pence or, failing that, a monetary gift of the same amount; likewise her decision to set aside £6 to repair a local highway – the will, which went to probate on 26 May 1527, proves that Catherine had been born, with time to spare for a younger sister, by the spring of that year.4 As with all four of Henry VIII’s English-born wives, and many of their contemporaries, we are left to guess when they arrived in the world using fragmentary evidence provided by throwaway or contested remarks from those who knew them or saw them, personal letters, family wills, and comments in contemporary memoirs or chronicles. The analysis of these documents has thus produced a broad spectrum of supposition. In Catherine’s case, suggestions for her birthdate have run the gamut from 1518 to 1527. The promotion of the former date seems motivated mainly by a desire to rehabilitate a particularly dubious portrait, which will be discussed subsequently, while support for the later years partly derives from the account of a Spanish merchant living in London late in Henry VIII’s reign, who described Catherine as ‘a mere child’ at the time of her marriage in 1540.

While both Catherine and her younger sister are mentioned in Isabel’s final testament of 1527, they are absent from the will of her husband, Sir John Leigh, which is usually dated to 1524. Their three brothers, Charles, Henry, and George, are mentioned in both.5 The year 1525, which leaves time for a younger sister to be born and named as Isabel’s goddaughter by 1527, has thus gained understandable acceptance as Catherine’s most likely date of birth in several recent accounts of her career.6 Critics of this conclusion point out that the two sisters’ absence from Sir John’s will proves nothing, because in a patriarchal society like early modern England, it would be unusual for very young female members of a family to be mentioned in the wills of male relatives.

In fact, both conclusions are arrived at by misreading John Leigh’s testament. While codicils pertaining to the distribution of some parcels of land were added in August 1524, the will itself was actually written nearly a year earlier, and dated 16 June 1523. If the Leighs’ documents are to be used as bookends for Catherine’s arrival, they establish a date between the summer of 1523 and the spring of 1527. Furthermore, far from focusing solely on the male members of his line, John Leigh made numerous gifts to young female members of his extended family, including all Catherine’s elder half sisters. They, admittedly, were Leighs, but it seems unlikely that John Leigh would also include all Catherine’s Howard brothers and neglect to mention her at all, unless she was extremely young, a tentative conclusion that leaves us free to accept the one specific contemporary comment on her age, made by the French diplomat Charles de Marillac, who met Catherine on several occasions in 1540 and 1541, and believed that she had been eighteen years old in 1539–40.7 Catherine and de Marillac attended several hunting trips together in the summers of 1540 and 1541, and this seemingly decisive statement from someone well placed to know dates her birth to 1520 or 1521. De Marillac’s credibility is allegedly undercut by the claim that he believed Anne of Cleves to be thirty in 1540, when she was in fact twenty-four, but an examination of the relevant letter shows that on the subject of Anne’s age, de Marillac wrote, ‘Her age one would guess at about thirty.’8 An unchivalrous comment, but not necessarily an inaccurate one.9 It may very well be that, with Catherine, de Marillac was again basing his estimate on how old she looked.

De Marillac’s estimate of Catherine’s age gains more credibility upon examination of the ages of Catherine’s peers when she joined the court as a maid of honour in 1539. None of the girls who served alongside her was born before 1521, the date of birth for Anne Bassett, the most senior of the group, who had been at court since 1537. One of the girls who joined at the same time as Catherine, her second cousin Katherine Carey, was born either in 1523 or 1524, and while we do not have precise dates for the others, all those who joined within twelve months of Catherine were definitely born at some point in the early-to-mid-1520s.10 The implication that Catherine, coming from a similar background into the same position, was five or six years older than the rest – or even three years older than the already established Anne Bassett – stretches credulity. When combined with the evidence of John and Isabel Leigh’s wills, Charles de Marillac’s indirect guess of about 1521 rules out a date as late as 1525, and the biographical details of the other half-dozen or so maids of honour similarly discredit one as early as 1518. None of this is definitive, but when set alongside other circumstantial evidence from Catherine’s life, it suggests 1522 or 1523 as the most probable years of her birth.11

Where she was born is more easily established. Most accounts of Catherine’s life state that her place of birth is a mystery, but in fact regardless of when she was born, it was almost certainly in the parish of Lambeth in the county of Surrey, just south of London.12 Before she was born and throughout her childhood, her father Edmund served as a justice of the peace for Surrey, charged with the ‘conservation of the King’s peace’ and to ‘punish delinquents … [and] hear and determine felonies’ in the king’s name.13 Directives to him from the Privy Council, issued on either side of Catherine’s birth, as well as evidence from family accounts, place him specifically in Lambeth – for a time, he lived in a house on Church Street, part of what is now Lambeth Bridge Road.14 Several members of Edmund’s family had homes in Lambeth, most prominently Norfolk House, a mansion renovated at the command of Edmund’s father which subsequently functioned as the Dukes of Norfolk’s main residence near the capital.15 For a Howard, Lambeth was the most logical place in Surrey to set up residence, and as further examination of his finances make clear, by the 1520s Edmund could only, indeed barely, afford one establishment, so it is highly unlikely that Catherine could have been born anywhere else. It was from his father that Edmund acquired his home on Church Street.16

Lambeth was, to use a modern term but ancient concept, a place of high property prices, favoured by the elite for its proximity to Westminster and the court, and in 1522 the Howards began construction of a family chapel within the pretty riverside church of St Mary-at-Lambeth. That chapel has now all but vanished, although the church itself remains, significantly renovated by the Victorians and preserved as a horticultural museum. As in Catherine’s lifetime, the building nestles in the shadow of Lambeth Palace, principal residence of the archbishops of Canterbury.

In the 1520s, the Church prohibited even the grandest families from carrying out private christenings in the intimate chapels that were ubiquitous in any aristocratic dwelling. Baptism inducted a soul into the community of the faithful, and so unless the baby looked likely to die shortly after its birth, the clergy insisted that christenings could only be carried out at the local parish church. Given her father’s residency as a JP for Surrey and her family’s ties to St Mary’s, then the local parish church, it is more than probable that shortly after her birth, Catherine was brought to its porch by her godparents and midwife.17 Regrettably, there is no record of who they were.

Baby Catherine had no right to look upon the interior of the church proper until she had been baptised. The local priest arrived in the porch to greet the baptismal party, which, as was customary, did not include the parents.18 He inquired after the child’s gender. When they told him that they had brought a girl, the padre placed Catherine on his left side – boys went to the right. As the door into the interior opened, the sign of the cross was made on Catherine’s forehead, and the priest, his hand resting on her forehead, asked her name. After answering ‘Catherine’, her godparents handed the priest some salt and he put a little into Catherine’s mouth. Prayers were intoned over her during the ‘exorcism of the salt’, a symbolic banishing of the taste of sin that the Devil had brought to Eden, and the sign of the cross was made over her forehead twice more. More homage was paid to Holy Scripture when the priest spat into his left hand, dipped the thumb of his right hand into the spittle, and rubbed it onto Catherine’s nose and ears to remind the party of how Christ had healed a deaf and dumb man who sought His aid.19 As the sign of the cross was made on Catherine’s tiny right hand, the priest told her that all this was done ‘so that you may sign yourself and repel yourself of the party of the Enemy. And may you remain in the Catholic faith and have eternal life and life for ever and ever. Amen.’20 Now, at last, she could enter the hallowed ground, and before she passed from porch to church, the priest announced, ‘Catherine, go into the temple of God.’

The clergyman, the baby, and her guardians took a few steps to the font, where Catherine was stripped of her christening robe and her godparents answered questions on her behalf, confirming not just her admission to the Catholic faith but also their role as sponsors of her spiritual development. Even if they did not speak Latin, the adults knew enough from a lifetime of services in that language to respond with ‘Abrenuncio’ when the priest asked, ‘Abrenuncias sathane?’ After renouncing the Devil, they responded with the same answer to the question, ‘Et omnibus operibus eius?’ (‘And all his works?’) Likewise for the final question, ‘Et omnibus pompis eius?’ (‘And all his pomp?’) With oil on his fingers, the priest made the sign of the cross on Catherine’s chest and back, before asking the godparents, ‘Quid petis?’ They answered that they sought ‘Baptismum’. To clarify that they wished to see her admitted to the eternal Church, the priest pressed, in ecclesiastical Latin, ‘Vis baptizari?’ (‘Do you wish to be baptised?’) And they answered, simply, ‘Volo.’ (‘I do.’) The priest then shifted Catherine in his arms so that her head faced the east, and he intoned the words, ‘Et ego baptizo te in nomine patris’ just before he fully submerged her in the holy water. (‘And I baptise you in the name of the Father.’) Then he plucked the infant from the font, turned to face the south, immersed her again in the name of the Son and then, this time upside down, in the name of the Holy Spirit. Finally, the priest passed what was quite probably a crying baby into the arms of her most senior godparent, who held Catherine as she was bundled into a chrisom, a hooded robe that covered her forehead and body to preserve the signs of her baptism.

Her godparents held a candle in Catherine’s little hands as the priest prayed, ‘Receive a burning and inextinguishable light. Guard your baptism. Observe the charge, so that when the Lord comes to the wedding, you may be able to meet him with the saints in the hall of heaven.’21 That duty was stressed to the godparents, who were also enjoined to make sure she knew her Our Father, Hail Mary, and Apostles’ Creed. Catherine was taken home in the borrowed chrisom; her mother would return the garment when she was ready to rejoin society.

Within a year or so of her birth, Catherine’s father joined most of the other Howards at Framlingham Castle in Suffolk for his father’s funeral. In May 1524, there was little outward sign that they all stood on the precipice of an unfamiliar world. The Reformation, the real undertaker of the Middle Ages, was not quite seven years old, and its influence had yet to be significantly felt by the majority of Tudor subjects. There was no deviation from the centuries-old Catholic liturgy as the Howards gathered to bury their patriarch, and saviour, Thomas Howard, 2nd Duke of Norfolk, dead at the age of eighty in the county of his birth.22

Unlike a christening, most aristocratic farewells in the sixteenth century were neither an intimate affair nor a single ceremony. The late duke had nine surviving children by the time he died in May 1524, several of whom had children of their own, giving Catherine kinship to most of the great landed families.23 Catherine’s aunt Elizabeth was married to Sir Thomas Boleyn, head of one of the wealthiest families in Kent and currently in pursuit of his right to succeed his Irish grandfather as Earl of Ormond.24 Anne Howard was already a countess through her marriage to the head of the de Vere family. In the months preceding the duke’s death, Edmund’s unmarried sisters were affianced, and the fractious negotiations concerning their dowries and widows’ rights were tidied up. The second youngest, also confusingly christened Elizabeth,* was betrothed to the heir of Lord Fitzwalter, another prominent East Anglian landowner.25 Katherine, the youngest and fieriest of the late duke’s daughters, was accompanied to the funeral by her handsome if equally temperamental fiancé Rhys, scion of a successful political family in south Wales – Rhys had an ailing grandfather who was not expected to live much longer.26 In Wales, the young man was known as Rhys ap Gruffydd, but the English often preferred to anglicise the couple’s surname to ‘Griffiths’.27 The only Howard sister left unattached at the time of their father’s funeral was Lady Dorothy, but her father had ‘left for her Right, good substance to marry her with’, and the family eventually arranged a wedding with the Earl of Derby.28

That will left Edmund’s stepmother Agnes as one of the wealthiest independent women in England. As dowager duchess, she would no longer have access to Framlingham Castle as her home, but she had periodic use of Norfolk House in Lambeth and full-time access to a sizeable country estate near the village of Horsham in Sussex. With the exception the eldest son, none of the old duke’s surviving children, including Edmund, expected much of a windfall from their father’s final testament. While provisions were usually made to fund younger sons’ education or early careers, to prevent the destruction of the family’s patrimony by generations of division by bequests, the nobility endeavoured to pass the inheritance more or less intact to the next in line.29 The other siblings’ absence from the will was not therefore a matter for shock or confusion; younger sons could and often did parlay their family name and connections into successful careers of their own. One of the most remarkable aspects of the system was the extent to which even those left out of the posthumous treasure trove seemed to support it as necessary for the common good.

However, two of the Howard siblings had reason to rue the custom that dictated an undiluted inheritance for the new patriarch: Edmund and Anne, both of whom had come to rely on their father’s help.30 Anne was trapped in a miserable marriage to the twenty-five-year-old Earl of Oxford, who, two years earlier, had been sent to live in his father-in-law’s household like an errant child when the royal court decided that his immoderate drinking, dereliction of duty, and reckless spending were besmirching one of the oldest names in the country.31 With the duke dead, the chances of the adult earl being allowed to return to his hedonism were much improved, and Anne, like most wives, remained dependent on her husband’s generosity.32 For Edmund, his father’s death robbed him of his principal benefactor and patron, adding to the financial worries afflicting him at the time of Catherine’s birth.

In addition to a very large family, their surnames reading like a who’s who of Henry VIII’s England, the Duke of Norfolk’s funeral was also attended by thousands of others, including ‘many great Lords, and the Noble men of both Shires of Norfolk and Suffolk’, who arrived at Framlingham to pay their respects to the old duke and solidify ties to the new.33 The kaleidoscope of different servants’ liveries danced through the other guests, the priests, monks, guards, squires, and common people who gathered in the shade of the castle’s walls or lined the route to the Benedictine priory at Thetford, where the duke’s tomb had been prepared.

When Framlingham’s gates, crowned by the Howard coat of arms, swung open, the long cavalcade of choreographed grief snaked its way under the arch and down the hill, passing two artificial lakes, with a dovecote on the manmade island in the middle of the largest body of water. Combined, Framlingham’s two lakes, which were constructed after the damming of a nearby stream, covered nearly twenty-three acres, a perfect reflecting pool for the castle’s thirteen towers, slightly lowered on the Howards’ order to further emphasise the impressive size of the walls. Fashionable red brick extensions, remodelled gardens, new chambers, and the latest in Renaissance design had also been added at the family’s instructions.

As was customary for the aristocratic elite, a wax effigy topped the duke’s bier, rendered as lifelike as possible by the artisans entrusted with the task. One hundred smaller wax effigies had been placed beneath it, representing those who mourned, while space for 700 candles had been set aside, so that even when it travelled at twilight or rested at night, the Duke of Norfolk, and through him the House of Howard, could be illuminated for those hoping to catch a glimpse. Four hundred men, hooded as a sign of mourning and penitence, were assigned to carry torches. Ten thousand people received charitable bequests under the terms of the duke’s will, with the money paid out at the time of the funeral in the hope of encouraging prayers for his posthumous redemption, as well as to display the largesse that the aristocracy prided themselves on. In total, the funeral cost nearly £1,300, at a time when the average weekly income of a skilled worker was about twenty-six pence, and pre-decimalisation of the currency there were 240 pence in every pound.34

The Howards’ quartered coat of arms was displayed on pennants and a thousand cloaks throughout the parade. Four lions could be found on the shield and one as the crest, the motif broken in the third quarter by a chequered blue-and-gold field that advertised their possession of the earldom of Surrey. The first quarter had the original Howard coat of arms scaled down to make room for the arms that proclaimed their descent from King Edward I, in the second quarter, and beneath that, the earls of Arundel.

No less than many of their contemporaries, Catherine’s family were fascinated with the tangled limbs and roots of their family tree. She could claim distant descent from Adeliza of Louvain, a twelfth-century queen who was subsequently the Countess of Lincoln and Arundel.35 Later generations of the Howards eulogised Adeliza, with only marginal exaggeration, as ‘a Lady of transcendent beauty, grace and manner, of peculiar gentleness of disposition, added to true virtue and piety’.36 However, there were other less exalted ancestors who had played a more deliberate role in pushing the Howards to the apex of English society – the first recorded mention of the family places them to the village of East Winch in Norfolk, about three centuries before Catherine’s birth. From there, a family associated with law and commerce had risen through a shrewd policy of exemplary civil service, coupled with unions with the daughters of similarly wealthy businessmen and, eventually, the sons and daughters of the local nobility. They had been introduced to the court of King Edward I and used their money to raise troops for the king’s wars and those of his son, Edward II.37 In the fourteenth century, they had married into the powerful de Mowbray family, which eventually brought them the dukedom of Norfolk after they continued to serve the Crown and, crucially, supported the winning side in the dynastic conflicts of the 1400s.

Their luck seemed to have deserted them when the first Howard duke, John, enjoyed his new dukedom for just over two years, until he was killed supporting King Richard III at Bosworth Field in August 1485. That battle brought the Tudors to power after decades of exile on the Continent, and unsurprisingly they took a decidedly dim view of the Howards’ Ricardian loyalties. Fortunately, unlike Edward IV or Richard III, Henry VII understood that irreversible punishments turned the aristocracy into implacable enemies. Instead of destroying the Howards, he therefore decided to demote them and then promote them again, at his pleasure. Luckily, the Howards had not lost their genetic knack for climbing and they proved adept at playing the unpleasant game the new king set for them.

John Howard’s heir and Catherine Howard’s future grandfather, thirty-nine-year-old Thomas, had also fought for King Richard III at Bosworth. Unlike his lord father, he was wounded but survived the battle.38 Much was made later of Thomas’s insistence that he would always fight for England’s true king, regardless of who that king was, but even such protestations of patriotic zeal made over Richard III’s not-quite-cold corpse were insufficient to convince the Tudors that Howard should go unpunished.39 Henry VII could not afford to be seen as weak, particularly where the aristocracy was concerned. His late uncle, the deeply unfortunate Henry VI, had ended his life deposed and murdered in the Tower of London. For a medieval king, unfettered mercy could create as many problems as unchecked tyranny. Thomas Howard was therefore temporarily banned from inheriting his father’s titles, a large slice of the Howard fortune was handed over to the Tudor loyalist, the Earl of Oxford, and Howard himself was sent to the Tower of London, where he spent the next three years as a prisoner.40

Having shown the potential of the stick, Henry VII moved to the carrot. In 1489, Thomas was allowed once again to style himself Earl of Surrey, a subsidiary title previously used as a courtesy by the Duke of Norfolk’s eldest son and heir. Two years earlier, Thomas had an opportunity to gain his freedom from the Tower during the Earl of Lincoln’s ill-fated rebellion against Tudor rule. He wisely chose to stay put to demonstrate that he remained faithful to his king, even while a prisoner – a decision for which he must have given hearty thanks after Henry VII remained secure on his throne and Lord Lincoln ended his life as a sword-pierced corpse.41 When Thomas was eventually released from the Tower, he further proved his fidelity by helping to suppress anti-taxation riots in Yorkshire and deputising for the king’s son, Prince Arthur, who, at the age of three, was understandably considered too young to police the Anglo-Scottish border himself.42 In return for each act of service, another title, another piece of land, another sign of royal favour, was handed back to the Howards. Thomas’s first wife, Elizabeth, became a lady-in-waiting to the new queen, Elizabeth of York, and eventually godmother to the king and queen’s eldest daughter, Princess Margaret.43 The Howard children were allowed to come to court, and the boys were given positions in the royal households.44 The message from the Tudors’ throne was clear, if not always easy to follow. Where Edward IV had turned the Howards into enemies whose only chance of prosperity lay with toppling his lineage, Henry VII had turned them into servitors whose hope lay in doglike obedience.45

Thomas Howard’s tribe of children were expected to do their part in the rebuilding of the family – either through royal service, advantageous marriages, or both. The most spectacular match was that of the family’s heir, young Thomas, who married Henry VII’s sister-in-law, Anne of York; when she died in 1511, Thomas wed Henry VIII’s cousin, Lady Elizabeth Stafford, the younger sister of the Duke of Buckingham.46 The marriage of two of the Howard sisters, Elizabeth and Muriel, to members of relatively ‘new’ families like the Boleyns and the Knyvets, might seem curious given the numerous subsequent accounts of the era that describe them as families of knights or country gentlemen, apparently far removed from the aristocratic pedigree the Howards had built for themselves. However, the idea of a binary of gentry and aristocracy is a misleading modern conceit. The few centuries before Catherine’s birth had seen enormous changes in the personnel of the elite – of the 136 lords who attended Parliament at the end of the thirteenth century, the direct descendants of only sixteen of them were around to perform similar duties at the start of the sixteenth.47 The aristocratic caste was simply too narrow to socialise or marry solely within itself, particularly if it is defined as those in possession of, or the offspring of someone with, one of the five titles of the nobility – in ascending order in England, baron, viscount, earl, marquess, and duke, or their female equivalents, baroness, viscountess, countess, marchioness, and duchess. In everyday social interactions, the nuances of aristocratic etiquette drew little distinction between the children of respected gentry families and those from certain families in the nobility – for instance, the offspring of a viscount, a baron, or a gentleman were not entitled to style themselves ‘lord’ or ‘lady’, unlike those born to a duke, marquess, or earl.

To give an idea of how small the high nobility was as a group, compared to the thousands who thronged the court and enjoyed a privileged lifestyle, by 1523 there were only two dukes, one marquess, and thirteen earls in the combined English and Irish peerages.48 Of those sixteen, fewer than half possessed a title that had been in the family for more than three generations. The idea of being ‘gently born’, meaning into a class of landowners who did not have to till their land themselves in order to generate an income from it, bonded the English upper classes together far more than a distinction between who was technically an aristocrat as opposed to a member of the gentry. Families like the Arundells, who owned 16,000 acres in the south-west, were technically ‘only’ gentry, but they were still referred to as a ‘great’ family by their contemporaries, and like most upper-class clans they benefited from their peers’ tendency to count the maternal ancestry as being equally important as the paternal.49 There was certainly a pecking order, and under Henry VIII it worked in the Howards’ favour, but, as ever, people tolerate in their friends what they deplore in their enemies, and it was often only once people quarrelled over other things that truly vicious hauteur reared its head.50

The Howards’ return to the dukedom they had lost at Bosworth was accomplished after twenty-nine years when, in 1514, Henry VIII restored the title in recognition of Thomas Howard’s leadership of the English forces at the Battle of Flodden. Thomas Howard certainly showed no sense of snobbery towards his sons-in-law, and they seem to have been promoted and patronised alongside his own boys.51 In his old age, those men continued to rise after he effectively retired from public life, spending most of his time, in his family’s words, at the ‘Castle of Framlingham, where he continued and kept an honourable house unto the hour of his death. And there he died like a good Christian prince.’52