Catherine Howard (5 page)
If Thomas Howard is to be classified at all, it is as the rough and ready military man, more at home in camp life than in that pavilion of Renaissance brilliance and wit which was Henry’s court. Efficient and thorough, if unimaginative, he found the weight of medieval armour a lighter burden than the intricate game of court politics and international diplomacy. The King, his master, went straight to
Norfolk
’s greatest weakness when he wrote: ‘We could be as well content to bestow some time in the reading of an honest remedy as of so many extreme and desperate mischiefs.’
41
Like many military men, the Duke tended to be an alarmist who could offer a military remedy, but rarely a lasting political solution. An inveterate intriguer, but politically inept, he never won the recognition after which he grasped, because he was both too inconstant and too cautious. Taciturn and often tactless, his brusque and arrogant methods lost him valuable friends at court, while his constant aspiration ‘for greater elevation’, together with family insolence, antagonized both friend and foe. ‘Never,’ the Duke expostulated, was gold ‘tried better by fire and water’;
42
never did a man more loyally do his duty. One suspects, however, that
Norfolk
never attained his ambitions because his loyalty and service were offered more for the sake of reward than from a feeling of devotion to the Crown.
It is dangerous to underestimate Thomas Howard’s abilities or his influence. He may have been constantly grasping after the realities of power and confusing it with its shadow, but he was never the foul-mouthed illiterate of history books. His brother William may have been a veritable ‘block-head’, but it is well to remember that the Duke’s son, Henry, Earl of Surrey, was a major literary luminary, and his grand-niece was
England
’s most accomplished sovereign. He may have belonged to an older tradition which considered that it was sufficient if a nobleman could blow lustily upon the horn and carry his hawk with experience, but he was far from being in a class with his ill-educated ducal colleagues who were almost illiterate. Thomas was proud of his son’s ‘proficiency and advancement in letters’, while his own knowledge of French and Latin was better than might have been expected of an old soldier.
43
Above all else, the third Duke of Norfolk was an Englishman with all the inherent characteristics of his breed and class – instinctively conservative, suspicious of newfangled ideas, and mistrustful of mincing society, foreign fashions, and unorthodoxy in religion. He once informed Cardinal Wolsey that he gave not ‘a straw’ for the cardinal’s legatine and foreign powers, but that he honoured the man because he was an archbishop and cardinal of the Church ‘whose estate of honour surmounteth any duke now being within this realm’.
44
A subject was to be known and esteemed for his social position within the English hierarchy, and not by some intruding authority of the Pope in
Rome
. The Duke could accept separation from the papacy because for him, as for other loyal subjects of the throne, the Holy See represented a corrupt and alien influence, but in all else he was essentially conservative. ‘He had never read the Scripture nor ever would’, and he suggested that
England
was a far merrier place before ‘this new learning came.up’.
45
But for all that, the man was a realist, and when he was asked what he thought about priests having wives, he answered that ‘he knew not whether priests had wives but that wives will have priests’.
46
The theological niceties of the issue were quite beyond him; they were the pastime of scholars and ecclesiastics and beneath the dignity of a nobleman. No matter what the duke’s personal sympathies may have been for the Holy See, it was sufficient for
Norfolk
and his kind to support the decision of the King when Henry ‘had distinctly declared his will more for one thing than for the other’.
47
This was Thomas Howard’s creed, and he warned Sir Thomas More that ‘By the mass, Master More, it is perilous, striving with princes. And therefore I would wish you somewhat to incline to the King’s pleasure. For by God’s body, Master More,
Indignatio principis mors est
!’
48
Tottenham Court
would turn French before cautious
Norfolk
disobeyed his prince.
Crafty, servile, compromising, and versatile, Thomas learned his lesson well; so well that neither the family which was so much a portion of his life, nor the feudal past which was so much a part of his instincts, was allowed to stand in the way of obedience. The clothing of a complacent and obedient Tudor servant might sit ill upon the self-seeking, self-interested shoulders of this Howard duke, but at least the feudal wolf, whether Henry VIII believed it or not, had in fact been domesticated, and like any tamed wild animal,
Norfolk
was neither a very pleasant nor a very enviable creature.
Not only did personality and tradition place the Duke in an impossible position, but in terms of his leadership of the Howard clan and political faction at court, this senior member of the family spent a lifetime chasing after the unattainable. Though he was the titular head of the Howard dynasty, the Duke found it almost impossible to hold his family empire together. There was little to endear the tactless and inept magnate to his more polished and talented relatives. Married to the daughter of a descendant of Edward III, and his sisters espoused to members of the old nobility,
Norfolk
was by breeding and sympathy a member of the feudal aristocracy, and he tended to hold himself aloof from the newer men of the reign, even though they were associates of his own tribe. The younger and bolder set of the Boleyns, the Norrises, the Knyvets, and the Brians, may have been better educated and more cultured, but in the eyes of the ancient caste this was not necessarily the mark of a gentleman. The old maxim was often reiterated that ‘a Prince may make a nobleman but not a gentleman.’ The Howard dynasty was imposing enough on paper, but it was not what it might have been a century earlier – the vast feudal following of an independent magnate to whom the lesser sort owed personal fealty.
If Thomas Howard failed as a family patriarch, he was no more successful as a politician at court. There is something pathetically inconsequential, almost tragically futile, about the duke. Always fascinated by the lamp of power, he fluttered aimlessly about the source of light and authority, accomplishing little and occasionally burning himself rather severely. As Earl Marshal of the kingdom and the ranking peer of the realm, his traditional place was beside the King, both on the field of battle and in the Privy council. But what once belonged to the barons by feudal right, the Tudors now bestowed only as a reward for single-hearted service. Thomas Howard and his father had proved their loyalty and had in part wiped clean the sins of their ancestors, but the new devotion demanded by the Tudor monarchs was a self-destroying faith which could countenance no rivalry. The Howards could never quite overlook their ancient connections and traditions, and consequently Henry VIII hesitated long before rewarding or depending upon a family which claimed status and authority from a source outside the royal bounty. Norfolk was constantly complaining that he was not receiving his just deserts, and that he and his kind were being replaced in government by parvenus and upstarts, but the Duke was careful to limit himself to querulous outbursts about the ‘thieves and murderers’ who were placed in positions of high office.
49
Once, in 1536, Henry pointedly snapped back saying, ‘If there be any ... of what degree soever he be, that will not serve as lowly, and as readily under the meanest person We can put in authority, as under the greatest Duke in our realm, We will neither repute him for our good subject nor ... leave him unpunished.’
50
Since there were only two dukes at the time, Norfolk took the hint and swallowed his annoyance. The decline of the old standards finally reached the point where one of
Norfolk
’s own nieces, by virtue of her marriage to the sovereign, could scold him as if he were a ‘dog, so much so that
Norfolk
was obliged to quit the royal chamber’ in a towering rage, but all he dared do was call her a ‘big whore’ under his breath.
51
This, then, was Thomas, third Duke of Norfolk and chief of his clan, a man who, in the words of the Warwickshire proverb, was like a bear, for ‘the bear he never can prevail to lion it for lack of tail.’ This was also the family to which the future Queen belonged, a family rigid in its pride and insatiable in its greed for political power. From the start, Catherine knew her duty: to further the interests of her uncle and tribe.
To an age accustomed to preserving its documents in bombproof shelters, it seems inconceivable that a queen of
England
should have neither baptismal record nor death certificate. Today, modern man is besieged with bureaucratic identifications, numerical tabulations and physical reports. From birth to death his path is inundated by a vast ocean of statistical data, testifying to the most intimate aspects of his life. For the age of Catherine Howard, however, the ravages of some four hundred years and the rather random documentation of a society uninterested in immortalizing itself in quadruplicate have left the historian with little upon which to recreate the life and character of even a queen. The gossamer thread of recorded history is often so delicate that it tends to vanish under the scrutiny of historical analysis. An occasional strand, an accidental vestige must suffice to reconstruct the mind and personality that spun the web of history.
The process of historical preservation is devious in the extreme; though Catherine’s father, Lord Edmund Howard, remains a rather shadowy figure, scarcely perceptible through the darkness of history, there is clear evidence that the hapless gentleman suffered from kidney stones. In 1536 he wrote to his friend, Lady Lisle, thanking her for her medical prescription for, ‘it hath done me much good, and hath caused the stone to break so that now I void much gravel.’ Unfortunately for Lord Edmund, the remedy had more than the desired effect, and he complained that ‘your said medicine hath done me little honesty, for it made me piss my bed this night, for the which my wife hath sore beaten me, and saying, “it is childrens’ parts to bepis their bed.” In fact, the poor man was in such a state that he was unable to accept Lady Lisle’s dinner invitation, and he concluded his excuses by suggesting his own antidote. It had been shown him, he said, that ‘a wing or a leg of a stork ... will make me that I shall never piss more in bed, and though my body be simple, yet my tongue shall be ever good, and specially when it speaketh of women.’
1
All this is by way of warning the reader that almost nothing is known about the early life of Catherine Howard: the date of her birth is open to speculation, her home is unknown, and except for the more lurid details of her childhood which have been preserved in connection with her trial, we know almost nothing about her early friends and environment. The historian can recreate, he can make judicious guesses, he can and often does indulge in wishful thinking, but the fact remains that except for the accident of being Queen Consort of
England
, Mistress Catherine would have joined the legion of men and women who lived and died without ever having left their mark on history – those who, in a sense, never lived at all, since they left no monument to their individuality.
Every life is the product of chance, and the secret of Catherine Howard’s career lies in the accident of birth – that her father was born both a Howard and a younger son. Lord Edmund Howard was the third son of a man who sired twenty-three progeny of whom ten lived to marry and further populate the island with Howard sons and daughters. Except for aristocratic blood, Lord Edmund had little with which to commence the struggle of existence. It appears almost as if he were the victim of some ill-natured fairy, for everything conspired to frustrate his career. As one of the younger sons of a family that faced political annihilation as a consequence of the Battle of Bosworth, he was constantly plagued by poverty, and not even the reviving fortunes of his clan seem to have relieved him of his constant burden of debts. Impecuniousness could always be transmuted into opulence by means of royal favour, but Edmund Howard strangely failed to ingratiate himself with his sovereign. He was almost the same age as Henry VIII and might have become one of the King’s cronies who accompanied their sport-loving monarch in his constant and restless quest for chivalric distinction and athletic prowess. Unfortunately, however, Henry evidenced signs of a marked distaste for this young Howard scion.
When the Howards distinguished themselves at the Battle of Flodden Field, and a grateful sovereign rewarded the Earl of Surrey with the dukedom of
Norfolk
, Edmund Howard was still denied entry into the warm and rewarding light of royal favour. Catherine’s father stood on the right wing of the battle in command of 1,500
Cheshire
and
Lancashire
men. Once again his luck held true to form, and Lord Edmund sustained the only serious defeat of the day when his soldiers were routed by the lord chamberlain of
Scotland
and his family banner trampled under foot. His personal bravery was beyond dispute; twice he fell and twice lie rose to fight again, but it took the opportune arrival of Lord Thomas Dacre to save the right wing from total annihilation. His father knighted the young man on the field of battle for his heroism, but the royal bounty was singularly niggardly. His father was elevated to the ducal title, but Edmund received merely a pension of three shillings and fourpence a day, which was abruptly terminated after three years.
2
Again, in August of 1537, when as a mark of popularity he was elected mayor by the assembly of the city of
Calais
, it was the King who quashed the election, and Thomas Cromwell wrote saying that ‘the King will in no wise that my lord Howard be admitted to the mayoralty.’
3
Finally, just before his death in 1539, he was removed from his position as Controller of
Calais
with little certainty of any future post.
Why Henry was so reluctant to bestow honours upon the younger son of a family on which he had heaped the highest rewards of state, is something of a mystery, but there is no escaping the fact that Edmund Howard was never a favourite at court. Possibly he was too stiff and proud, for like many a younger son his only asset was his name and blood. Vainglorious and indigent, trained in little except the art of war, he lacked the intellectual agility and social polish to adapt himself to life at court. He belonged to that set in society that regarded the aspiring courtiers around the throne as jays ‘chattering in a golden cage’, and his family pride and class arrogance won him powerful enemies.
The only evidence that Lord Edmund was anything more than another incompetent aristocrat who harked back to the happy, carefree days of the fifteenth century, is the fact that in 1510 he entered the Middle Temple.
4
It would appear that he did not take kindly to the law, for in the following year he was back again at the more congenial pastime of jousting, in a tournament in honour of the birth of a royal son. In fact, what little he knew about the law he misused, for in 1516 he was hauled before Cardinal Wolsey and the Court of the Star Chamber for ‘maintaining, embracing and bearing’ his friends and relations at law and having undermined ‘the good rule and execution of justice within the
county
of
Surrey
’.
5
Edmund Howard represented almost every characteristic that the Tudor government sought to exterminate – the irresponsible nobleman who sets himself above the law of the realm.
In 1519 he again found himself the subject of royal and official ire for having instigated riots in
Surrey
. The Howard influence at court was sufficient to obtain a royal pardon, but his friend and colleague, Lord Ogle, fared less well, and this unfortunate gentleman was turned over to the normal course of the common law, with the royal reminder that his actions had resulted in the murder of one of the King’s subjects, ‘which great offence is not only to us but to God.’
6
If we add to this that Catherine’s father was suspected of harbouring pro-papal sentiments, then there is little wonder that he was distinctly
persona non grata
in court circles.
7
As a consequence, Edmund Howard seems to have endured a penurious existence upon the periphery of wealth and status encircling the monarch. He often appears in the accounts of the more festive activities of Henry’s reign, and in 1514 he was awarded £100 from the royal exchequer, ‘to prepare himself to do feats of arms’ in honour of the marriage of Henry’s sister to the aged and ailing Louis XII of France.
8
Occasionally he was utilized by the government for less glamorous if more essential duties, when he was placed on various commissions of the peace, and for three years he received a salary of twenty shillings a day for ‘taking thieves’.
9
He profited briefly when his family fortunes at court were enhanced by the patronage controlled by his niece, Anne Boleyn, who exercised her dangerous influence over Henry’s affections from 1528 to 1536. He was offered the post of Controller of Calais in April of 1531 and four years later, through the instigation of the Queen and his brother, the Duke of Norfolk, he succeeded in inveigling his reluctant monarch into presenting him with the goods and chattel of Master Skell, a condemned felon.
10
In the end, fate dealt the final irony, for he died only a few months before his daughter Catherine had accomplished what he himself had signally failed to do – win the royal affection.
Not only did this ill-starred gentleman have to struggle against a chilly reception at court, but he was constantly confronted with the dreary fate in store for a younger son. It is sometimes argued that English history owes much to that peculiar social system of primogeniture, whereby the eldest son takes all, for it forced the scions of noble and landed families either to make their own fortunes or to marry someone else’s, and it ensured a steady flow of wellconnected young men into the paths of commercial enterprise and empire-building. Salutary as this social system may have been as a historical phenomenon, it was not altogether a happy lot for those born into it. One young gentleman towards the end of the century analysed the situation, by writing that the estate of a younger brother ‘is of all stations for gentlemen most miserable, for if our father possess 1,000 to 2,000
l
. yearly at his death, he cannot give a foot of land to his younger children in inheritance.’ Yet for all the obvious iniquities of such a system, the writer admits in a singularly broad-minded fashion that it ‘doth us good someways, for it makes us industrious to apply ourselves to letters or to arms, whereby many times we become my elder brothers’ masters, or at least their betters in honour and reputation’.
11
Unfortunately, Edmund Howard neither took kindly to letters nor became his elder brother’s master. Instead, poverty and misadventure dogged his footsteps. Nor was he the man to accept his misfortune with the stoic optimism of the previous writer. In 1527 he grovelled before Cardinal Wolsey, announcing that he was ‘utterly undone’ and that his debts were such that he dared not ‘go abroad, nor come at mine own house, and am fain to absent me from my wife and my poor children,’ for fear of being cast into a debtor’s prison. He implored Wolsey to give thought to his miserable condition and his ten starving children, and begged that the great man employ him in the projected voyage of discovery to
Newfoundland
. Then in tragic words he summed up the plight of his kind by saying ‘if I were a poor man’s son, I might dig and delve for my living’, but because of his noble dignity he could not labour without bringing great reproach and shame to himself and all his blood.
12
Even when he did finally attain a government position at
Calais
, he continued to be plagued with financial difficulties and found the Controller’s salary of £80 per annum too little to maintain a household worthy of a Howard and a government servant.
Chronic poverty rarely enhances the character, and Lord Edmund has come down to us through history as a pitiful and not very stalwart personality – cringing, begging, and threatening his way to a few extra pennies. The verse awarded him as one of the heroes of Flodden Field:
And Edmund Howard’s lion bright, Shall bear them bravely in the fight,
13
has been more than eclipsed by his flood of pleading letters and futile efforts to win a financially secure niche in governmental circles. In 1527 his monetary affairs were so desperate that he was actually forced to send his wife to plead in his name before the Cardinal, since he himself did not dare show his face abroad lest he be caught and imprisoned for debt.
14
Five years later a well-meaning, if not over-perceptive, friend made the mistake of going surety for Lord Edmund, and for his efforts found himself wrested by his friends’ creditors.
15
Nor was the reputation of Catherine’s father any better among his own kin; Sir John Legh carefully wrote into his will that ‘if the Howards trouble the Executors they are to have nothing.’ The Leghs seem to have been darkly suspicious of Edmund, and Dame Isabel Legh, his mother-in-law, went to great pains to curtail his control over his wife’s patrimony by insisting that her daughter receive the bulk of her estates only on ‘condition that her husband redeem all lands [that are] the inheritance of my daughter in the
county
of
Kent
from her father, Richard Culpeper, and her brother, Thomas Culpeper, so that the lands descend to her heirs.’
16
This may, of course, be dismissed as mother-in-law trouble, but considering Lord Edmund’s general insolvency, it seems unlikely. Catherine’s father was constantly seeking and never attaining, and the full tragedy of his life is testified by his own hand in a letter he wrote to the low-born Thomas Cromwell. He said that he had heard from his brother, Lord William, that Cromwell had promised to advance his petition to the King. He acknowledged that he owed all to the Vicar-General and would never forget such kindness, for he was so ‘smally friended’ and so ‘beaten in the world’ that he knew what a treasure it was to have a faithful friend.
17