Katherine Howard: A New History (18 page)

These historians seem to have failed to recognise that the only evidence for Katherine’s personal traits and behaviour exist in hostile legal documents intended on presenting her in the most abominable and shocking light, in an attempt to gain sympathy for the king and widespread revulsion at her supposed crimes. These councillors took advantage of contemporary misogyny prevalent in society, assuming that women were naturally prone to transgression and eager to entrap men in sexual encounters, to construct a scandalous portrayal of the queen and blacken her reputation irretrievably. To rely solely on such material unquestioningly and uncritically is to distort any perception of Katherine, her life and the nature of her reign, and to prevent a profound understanding of the social and cultural values inherent in the Tudor court.

According to court observers, the summer of 1540 was the hottest in living memory, ‘so that no raine fell from June till eight daies after Michaelmas’, leading to ‘sicknes among the people’ and the deaths of cattle.
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Within the court itself, following her marriage, the queen’s family were in high favour with their monarch, and the Duke of Norfolk must surely have congratulated his niece on her personal success while emphasising to her the necessity of producing a male heir. Only Katherine herself knew whether her new husband was physically able of fathering a son on her, for his previous queens had been accused of rendering him impotent, reinforcing contemporary understandings that believed women were capable of bewitching men and damaging their fertile capabilities.

Following the king’s new marriage, he shortly afterwards set out on progress with his queen, who by virtue of her beauty, youth and, most importantly in his eyes, her chastity, he was eager to show off to his subjects. On 22 August, exactly two weeks after Katherine was first presented as queen to the court at Hampton Court, the royal couple departed from Windsor Castle to Reading, before travelling to Ewelm, Rycott, Notley, Buckingham and Grafton (associated with the family of Elizabeth Woodville). In September, the court journeyed to Ampthill and to the Moor in Hertfordshire, the former residence of Cardinal Wolsey and later Katherine of Aragon. What Katherine Howard and her new husband spent their time doing at these residences is unknown, although the French ambassador reported that there was nothing to speak of at court ‘but the chase and the banquets to the new Queen’.
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Henry appears to have been entirely besotted with his new wife. Although he was undoubtedly enchanted by her beauty, her youth and her pleasing personality, it was almost certainly her apparent fertility that demonstrated in his eyes her suitability as a consort. Her mother had given birth to at least ten children, six of whom had been fathered by Edmund Howard, and the king was surely aware that three of those were sons. Marillac confirmed Henry’s love for the queen when he attended the court on progress: ‘The new Queen has completely acquired the King’s Grace and the other [Anne of Cleves] is no more spoken of than if she were dead.’
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He also stated that the king caressed her openly more than he had his other queens.

Despite this marital happiness, damaging rumours about the queen had already begun to surface, threatening both her personal and political security months into her marriage. While the court was at residence in Grafton in late August, a Windsor priest had allegedly ‘spoken unfitting words of the Queen’s Grace, questioning her moral integrity’.
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The exact circumstances that provoked this criticism remain unknown, but the likeliest of explanations relies on the events of June 1540, when the king first openly demonstrated his love for Katherine and his desire to marry her while still married to Anne of Cleves. There is no evidence to suggest that this priest was aware of Katherine’s childhood and the scandalous experiences she had been forced to undergo.

It is interesting, however, to speculate that Francis Dereham may have had some connection with the affair. Following Katherine’s appearance at court, Dereham had apparently vanished from the scene, leading her step-grandmother the dowager duchess to speculate as to his whereabouts. When she asked Katherine, she was informed that Katherine did not know.
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However, when Dereham returned from Ireland shortly after the king’s marriage to Katherine, he sought appointment at court and there made the unguarded claim that, were the king to die, he believed he might still marry Katherine. If his remarks had been made public, and observers such as the Windsor priest had become aware of them, it might have been concluded that the new queen was unfit for her position since rumours connected her with marital alliances advanced by other men. More simply, slandering powerful women through sexual insults such as ‘whore’ was a common practice in early modern Europe utilised by jealous male contemporaries who sought to damage their reputations irretrievably. If the Windsor priest was hostile to the Howards, he could have sought to damage the queen’s reputation by spitefully questioning her moral integrity.

How this gossip personally affected Katherine is unknown, but it is likely that both she and her family were disturbed, since the position of the queen consort was expected to be utterly safeguarded from any type of scandal. It also cast doubt on the king’s honour, for as the author of the
Court of Good Counsell
(1607) advocated, there was ‘no greater plague [or] torment’ than an ‘untoward, wicked and dishonest wife’. Undoubtedly, women were believed to ‘confirm’ male honour and, if they were then associated with promiscuity and scandal, this substantially damaged the reputation of their husbands.
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Norfolk himself may have been greatly concerned, for without knowledge as to his niece’s childhood, it was probably the first time he had been acquainted with a connection between his niece and sexual immorality, despite her probable blamelessness.

Although the matter was quickly dealt with - the Windsor priest was warned to remain within his diocese and be ‘more temperate in the use of his tongue’ - the slander upon her honour must have brought home to Queen Katherine the necessity of maintaining a modest and chaste appearance and the need for her past to be irrevocably forgotten. In an age in which powerful women were regularly slandered by rivals through the medium of sexual insults, Katherine’s position as queen remained insecure and fragile. Only by bearing the longed for second male heir would she survive as Henry’s fifth queen consort.

7) Patronage and Power

From her marriage to the king in July 1540, Katherine Howard was well aware that, amidst the luxury and splendour of the court, political and religious rivals surrounded her, eager to utilise scandalous gossip against her for their own advantages, in an age when female consorts were identified with promiscuity and misbehaviour. It was essential for her to bear the king a second male heir, for while only one prince survived, the English succession would always remain somewhat uncertain should that prince suddenly die. Moreover, the man whom Katherine had married was intensely focused on preserving a stable dynasty, destined for long-term success well after his own death. In light of this, the brutal downfall of Anne Boleyn and the humiliating dismissal of Anne of Cleves made sense from Henry’s perspective, for a fertile bride was essential in order to remedy the uncertainty of the Tudor dynasty. Already in 1532 the king had lamented that ‘I am forty-one years old, at which age the lust of man is not so quick as in lusty youth’.
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His personal insecurities were evident in an insistent response to the imperial ambassador in 1533, when questioned as to whether or not he could sire a son with his new queen: ‘Am I not a man like other men? Am I not? Am I not?’
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In light of her predecessor’s uncomfortable experiences and dismissal, Katherine cannot have failed to have been aware of the pressing expectations she faced regarding her duty to provide a second male heir.

While this study seeks to shed new light on Katherine’s character, it is also essential to understand the nature of the man she married in 1540. Henry VIII began his reign as a golden prince and was beloved by his subjects. William Blount Lord Mountjoy described the king in the first year of his reign thus:

When you know what a hero [Henry VIII] now shows himself, how wisely he behaves, what a lover he is of justice and goodness, what affection he bears to the learned, I will venture that you will need no wings to make you fly to behold this new and auspicious star. If you could see how all the world here is rejoicing in the possession of so great a prince, how his life is all their desire, you could not contain your tears of joy. The heavens laugh, the earth exults, all things are full of milk, of honey, of nectar. Avarice is expelled from the country. Liberality scatters wealth with bounteous hand. Our King does not desire gold or gems or precious metals, but virtue, glory and immortality.
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English subjects were confident and hopeful about their new king, and for the first twenty years or so of his reign they were not disappointed. However, as Suzannah Lipscomb convincingly argued, the year 1536 profoundly changed Henry VIII’s character due to a series of ground-breaking personal, political and physical crises that encompassed the deaths of two wives, the deaths of two sons, a serious fall in a joust and the largest rebellion ever faced by an English monarch. Lipscomb suggested that this year catalysed Henry’s development into a suspicious, irascible and brooding tyrant who reacted brutally and violently to betrayal, as evidenced in Anne Boleyn’s downfall in that tumultuous year of 1536.
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There is evidence to support Lipscomb’s interpretation. The French ambassador described the king a few weeks after his marriage to Katherine Howard thus:

This Prince seems tainted, among other vices, with three which in a King may be called plagues. The first is that he is so covetous that all the riches in the world would not satisfy him... Everything is good prize, and he does not reflect that to make himself rich he has impoverished his people, and does not gain in good what he loses in renown... Thence proceeds the second plague, distrust and fear. This King, knowing how many changes he has made, and what tragedies and scandals he has created, would fain keep in favour with everybody, but does not trust a single man, expecting to see them all offended, and he will not cease to dip his hand in blood as long as he doubts his people. Hence every day edicts are published so sanguinary that with a thousand guards one would scarce be safe... The third plague, lightness and inconstancy, proceeds partly from the other two... and has perverted the rights of religion, marriage, faith and promise.
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Henry’s later actions in response to Katherine’s downfall support both this point and Lipscomb’s argument. He refused to grant his queen a public trial and threatened to kill her himself. The use of attainders has been described as follows:

In total, in Henry VIII’s reign, sixty-eight people were condemned without trial by common law. Thirty-four of them were executed [...] Many of these had been condemned by parliamentary attainder
precisely because they had either not technically committed treason or there was insufficient evidence to prove their guilt
, leaving the record vague and unspecific as to their crimes.
It was a legalistic way of evading the law, of acting illegally
[my italics].
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It was enough to Katherine’s disadvantage that she was singularly inexperienced, having only served at court for a maximum of eight months when she became queen of England, in contrast to her predecessors Anne Boleyn and Jane Seymour, who had enjoyed long years in royal service. When her youth and relatively limited education is added to this, one senses serious difficulties with her attempts to establish a secure and successful foundation as queen of England. But taking Lipscomb’s argument into account, these difficulties were exacerbated by the personal situation Katherine found herself in. She was married to a paranoid, suspicious and irascible monarch who feared betrayal and treachery at every corner. It has been credibly suggested that the Henrician court became a darker place in the last decade of Henry VIII’s reign, a period when the court was rocked by political scandal, heightened religious controversy and factional conflicts. It might be going too far to suggest that Katherine was doomed from the beginning, but her eventual downfall just over a year after her marriage might, in view of the increasingly tyrannical nature of Henry VIII and the poisoned nature of the court, convincingly be characterised as resulting from the queen being placed ‘in circumstances beyond her control’.
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Although the rumours alleging that the new queen was pregnant in the summer of 1540 turned out to be false, Katherine was introduced to the Tudor dynasty in a different form through her relations with Henry’s three surviving children by his first three marriages. It is likely that, of Henry’s three children, it was Princess Mary, daughter of Katherine of Aragon, with whom the new queen first became acquainted with, according to court reports and Mary’s own residence within the court. Following the downfall of Anne Boleyn, Mary had agreed that her parents’ marriage was invalid and consequently had been restored to favour, residing at court where she enjoyed amicable relations with Queen Jane. She had served as godmother at the christening of Prince Edward, and her father took steps to negotiate foreign marriage alliances with European princes. The downfall and disgrace of the family of Mary’s former governess, Margaret Pole, in 1538-9 personally endangered Mary’s security, for her own position to the throne remained suspect.
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Despite this, her place at court remained secure and she probably personally greeted Queen Katherine shortly after her marriage. Most modern historians, however, characterise relations between the two women as difficult if not openly hostile.
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At Christmas 1540, the imperial ambassador, who had enjoyed a warm relationship with Mary for much of the preceding decade, reported that the queen sought to remove two of Mary’s maids as a punishment for her failure to treat Katherine with the same respect with which she had shown Jane and Anne of Cleves. Chapuys remained positive, however, stating that Mary had ‘found means to conciliate her, and thinks her maids will remain’.
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