Catherine Howard (19 page)
Only positive action was proof of a true heart; the creed demanded that the man who harboured in the secret places of his soul the thought of treason should be purged and exterminated, lest sulky silence and cautious inaction be a sign of ‘evil intention and sure proof of malice’.
71
Men might disagree with the monarch but ‘if misliking’, warned Sir Thomas Wyatt, ‘includes disobeying, I think him no good subject.’
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As the devout Catholic genuflects before the altar in recognition of the king of heaven, so loyal subjects of the Tudor throne dared not tarry, except bareheaded, while they were ‘in the chamber of presence when the cloth of estate is set’.
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The devotion and absolute discipline demanded by the King was little more than a reflection of the despotism existing within society itself. When children were treated only slightly better than chattels, to be farmed out and married off for the sake of family welfare, there is nothing peculiar about Henry VIII, who quite literally regarded himself as ‘a father and nurse to his subjects’, expecting the same kind of self-abnegation on the part of Englishmen. If children were trained to bow and scrape before their elders and to wait upon their betters, it was reasonable that subjects should speak to princes ‘in adoration and kneeling’.
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Discipline was essential to good order, whether it was exercised in the family or in the State, and only in obedience and conformity could the individual claim status and dignity. As Shakespeare’s Kate was ‘a foul contending rebel and graceless traitor to her loving lord’ when she refused his ‘honest will’, so subjects lost not only life but also their justification for existence when they denied their lord, their king, their governor. In doing wrong to her husband, Catherine committed treason against the State. She betrayed her duty as a wife and her loyalty as a subject, and perpetrated the one crime for which society could find no excuse or sympathy.
The effect of marriage upon the ageing sovereign was immediate and miraculous. Suddenly new life was breathed into the elderly limbs and bulging carcass. Henry’s Indian Summer had begun. Only four years before, the King had begun to feel the weight of age close upon him, and sadly confessed that he knew himself to be growing old, ‘and doubted whether he should have any child by the Queen’.
1
Forty-eight months later Henry was filled with fresh vitality and had ‘adopted a new rule of life’, rising between five and six of a morning and hunting until dinner at ten. ‘He tells me,’ the French Ambassador reported, ‘that being so much in the country, and changing his place so often, he finds himself much better in health,’ and the Frenchman confessed that he had ‘never seen the King in such good spirits or in so good a humour’.
2
As Henry grew older he seemed for the moment to ripen and mellow, the love of youth balancing the decay of advancing years. During the summer and winter of 1540, he was the picture of vigorous health, brimming goodwill, and bubbling humour. The King was at peace with the world and with himself, and with almost pathetic fervour he lavished his affections upon his young bride, constantly fondling and caressing her, and so obsessed that he could not find words to express his love. If Henry lacked verbal means to voice his devotion, at least he could vent his ardour by a shower of costly gifts and magnificent spectacles. From the instant Catherine became queen, nothing was denied her, and it was reported that ‘she reigns supreme.’
3
For Catherine it was a dream come true. The old days at Lambeth and Horsham were stark and dull in contrast with the delights of the court; the memory of clandestine meetings and
suppers at the Dowager’s residence were dim shadows that receded before the brilliance of Henry’s affections. The Queen’s confession had about it the ring of truth, when later she begged the King to recollect the frailties of a young girl, ‘so desirous to be taken unto your grace’s favour and so blinded with the desire of worldly glory’ that she had failed to consider how grievous a sin it was to conceal from her lord and husband the truth of her ‘former faults’.
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Whether a young woman under twenty-one, educated to the standards of her society and caught in the amorous advances of a royal suitor, ever for an instant regarded the passing affairs of her youth as being serious sins is doubtful. Certainly she evidenced no sign of remorse until the King’s majestic wrath, the cold and disagreeable interrogations of the Privy council, and the moral homilies of the Archbishop of Canterbury had all impressed Mistress Catherine with the full and abysmal nature of her misdemeanours.
Catherine had reason enough to wax proud and careless in the warmth of Henry’s besotted attentions. As one not very reliable chronicler described the situation: ‘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.’
5
Nothing was too good for the King’s new bride, and Henry endeavoured with his usual literal turn of mind to fulfil his marriage vows when he said: ‘with this ring I thee wed, and this gold and silver I thee give, and with my body I thee worship, and with all my worldly chattels I thee endow.’
6
The royal bounty knew no limits. Not only did the Queen receive as her marriage jointure the castles, lordships and manors that had once belonged to Jane Seymour, but she profited from the more recent political convulsions that had ended with the triumph of her party. Henry lavished upon his wife the lands of the late lamented Thomas Cromwell, Walter, Lord Hungerford, and Hugh, late Abbot of Reading, who with his colleague from
Glastonbury
had been, ‘rotting on a gibbet near his abbey gate’. Of more apparent and immediate value were the jewels and rich apparel presented by a doting husband. At Christmas and again at New Year of 1540-41 Catherine was bedecked with the costly evidence of Henry’s love. Among other extravagant gifts she received a ‘square containing 27 table diamonds and 26 clusters of pearls’; a brooch constructed of 33 diamonds and 60 rubies with an edge of pearl; and a ‘muffler of black velvet furred with sables containing 38 rubies and 572 pearls’.
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Not only was Catherine presented with the wealth and riches of the Tudor treasury, but every evening witnessed a radiant and giddy round of banqueting and dancing. Overnight the daughter of a Howard ne’er-do-well was elevated to the estate of royalty. When she travelled between Chelsea and Baynard’s Castle, the Queen had her private barge with twenty-six bargemen and twenty other gentlemen ‘serving the train’, while fresh rushes and rosemary were spread on the deck.
8
In honour of her first State entrance into London, the lord mayor and aldermen, with all the guilds of the city, rowed out ‘in barges goodly hanged and set with banners’ to meet the royal couple as they passed down the river, and the great cannons of the Tower and the guns of the fleet shot salvoes as the royal barge passed by.
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Then there was the Queen’s household, for Henry spared no expense in bestowing upon his bride an entire domestic organization including a lord chamberlain, a chancellor, a master of the horse, a secretary, a solicitor and an auditor. The new Queen also had her four gentlemen ushers, two gentlemen waiters, a cup-bearer, a clerk both of her council and of her wardrobe, two chaplains, six great ladies, four ladies of the privy chamber, nine attendants of exalted rank, five maids with a ‘mother of maids’, twelve yeomen of the chamber, four footmen, seven sumptermen, two litter men and seventeen grooms – all at the annual cost of slightly over £4,600.
10
The dignity of a Queen was laden with responsibilities, for Catherine was expected to receive petitions, listen to requests to influence her husband, administer her household and estates, and, like any worthy wife, conduct herself in a discreet, chaste, good, meek, patient, and sober fashion. Unfortunately, Catherine did did not see fit to spend her days in the sober administration of her house and in duties becoming her wifely station. Instead, she was ‘the most giddy’ of the King’s wives and spent her time dancing, rejoicing and enjoying the riches of the moment. The process by which a lady of fashion dressed and adorned herself was so tedious that a ship could sooner be ‘rigged by far, than a gentlewoman made ready’.
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It was no simple matter for ladies of the age to garb themselves in bodices, farthingale hoops, smocks, petticoats, kirtles, gowns and cloaks. Then there was the problem of cosmetics. Extensive use of face powders was just beginning to become fashionable in court circles, and society had not yet adopted the painted mask of the Elizabethan belle who could scarcely ‘blush with [the] sense of her own shame’. Ladies of elegance in Henry’s generation, however, adorned ‘their face, neck, and pappis with ceruse’ or white lead, and coloured their cheeks with red ochre, vermilion, and purple, achieving a rather garish and artificial effect of peaches and cream. Eyebrows were plucked, and court ladies tempered their ‘eyes by art’, brightening them with belladonna and endeavouring to make them appear wide apart.
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The peaked and winged caps, rather like that of the Queen of Hearts, and the tightly-dressed hair, parted in the middle and combed close to the forehead, were designed to accentuate the eyes, which were regarded as the most exquisite feature of the feminine form.
When that worthy and dignified ecclesiastic, Bishop Stubbs, suggested that the homely features of Henry’s wives were ‘if not a justification, at least a colourable reason for understanding the readiness with which he put them away’,
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he was judging by relatively modern standards of beauty. Tudor England demanded striking effccts wherever the hand of man could devise them, and society would have dismissed as dull and faded the unpainted faces of Victorian beauties, or even the more colourfully arrayed ladies of the twentieth century. Sparkling eyes set far apart, with whitened skin unmarred by freckles and tinted with a high and contrasting colouring, was regarded as the epitome of feminine loveliness. Both Catherine and her cousin, Anne Boleyn, had these characteristics, and although the Venetian Ambassador was not captivated by Anne’s charms, he admitted that her eyes were ‘black and beautiful’ and that these more than anything else pleased the King.
14
Catherine Howard was not unlike her cousin, and legend has it that she was Henry’s most beautiful queen. Whatever the truth, all her critics agree that she had auburn hair, was small, plump and vivacious – overflowing with so much vitality that Marillac could write that he had nothing to report except a continuous round of banqueting and dancing at court.
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Marriage to a monarch had its drawbacks, and wedlock to the Lord’s anointed could be both disillusioning and difficult. Henry had a highly precise notion of the proper submission to be found in a wife, and he strenuously advocated the principle that ‘all women in their degree should to their men subject be.’ He must have felt it quite natural that Catherine selected as her device the words: ‘No other wish save his.’
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Spoiled, pampered and adored, it could not have been easy for the Queen to live up to her husband’s high and demanding ideal.
Moreover, it soon became apparent that Henry’s Indian summer had more than a touch of winter mixed with it, and he grew increasingly difficult to handle as the months slipped by. Slowly, reluctantly, but inevitably, Henry made concessions to man’s mortality. The aching and ulcerated thigh forced the once indefatigable dancer, who could cut capers the whole night through, to hobble painfully on a staff. It was increasingly obvious that the sovereign’s chronic headaches and attacks of gout ‘sharpened the King’s accustomed patience’.
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Only two years before, Henry had rudely awakened to the fact that there were limits to even his Herculean frame, and that after all he was not immortal. In May of 1538, when he was forty-six, his draining ulcer suddenly clogged so that he was ‘like to have stifled’ and was ‘without speaking, black in the face, and in great danger’.
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Imperceptibly men grew accustomed to the thought that the King could die. By the time Catherine had become the centre of the monarch’s middle-aged but still lusty affections, Henry had reluctantly given up the joust and contented himself with watching others accomplish the feats of arms to which he could no longer attain. Though he had to forgo the pleasures of the all-day hunt, the King still ignored physical suffering and the pleas of his physicians by persisting in several hours of hard riding between mass at seven and dinner at ten in the morning. Even so, the energy of the man was running down. The reserves of stubborn determination were tremendous, but in contrast to the early years of the reign, Henry was becoming more and more like his grandfather, Edward IV, ‘in loving rest and fleeing trouble’.
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The unpredictable nature of his moods was such that it was remarked that the King was ‘often of a different opinion in the morning than after dinner’.
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He began to evidence signs of nervous restlessness and sought release in ceaseless perambulations between Windsor and Westminster, Greenwich and Richmond, in the hope that a change of air might arrest the steady advance of sickness, age and indisposition. Catherine may have married a semi-divine king, but as a man Henry was growing fretful and ‘waxen fat’.
Union
with a god is at best a hazardous adventure. When that god is peevish and petulant, it becomes downright dangerous, and the Queen was soon to discover that not even her most winning smile provided immunity against her husband’s fickle moods and violent passions.
In March of 1541 the chronic ulcer on his leg again suddenly closed and for almost a week it was thought that the King might die. Henry recovered, but the dream of renewed youth that had been symbolized by his marriage to Catherine had vanished, and it was reported that ‘besides the bodily malady he had a
mal d’esprit
.’ Nothing was able to please him; he complained that he ‘had an unhappy people to govern whom he would shortly make so poor that they would not have the boldness nor the power to oppose him’; he lectured his privy council, accusing them of ‘temporizing for their own profit’; and in a huff he spent the festival days before Lent without music, dancing, or company, so that ‘his court resembled more a private family than a king’s train.’
21
More and more Henry fluctuated between extremes of moody and introverted nagging about his ailments and encroaching age, and vigorous bouts of youthful vitality. In one breath he demanded as a wife a nursemaid and companion to his dotage, while the next instant he craved a symbol of his youth, a doll upon which to lavish all the luxury and display of Tudor imagination. At twentyone Catherine Howard, temperamentally, was quite capable of acting the role of the pampered and irresponsible child bride, but she lacked the wit, patience and understanding to play the companion.
There is an old sixteenth-century adage that a woman is ‘an angel at ten, a saint at fifteen, a devil at forty and a witch at eighty’.
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Catherine was precocious; at twenty-one she was ambivalent – both saint and devil. Cheerful, plump, and eagerly indulging in each new caprice, but totally incapable of appreciating the consequences of her actions, the Queen had most of the characteristics of the pampered child. Sulking when crossed, constantly demanding assurance of her own importance, and hysterically gyrating between poles of tearful remorse and haughty indifference, she existed in a hothouse environment that tenderly fostered most of her worst traits of personality.