Katherine Howard: A New History (2 page)

Other historians have, for different reasons and from differing perspectives, interpreted Katherine’s life more sympathetically. Joanna Denny, in her 2005 biography, characterised Katherine as a ‘vulnerable and abused child of 11 or 12’ during her affair with Manox; agreeing with Strickland that Katherine was heavily influenced by the examples of her childhood companions within the household of the dowager duchess since she was ‘eager to be part of their inner circle and to be included in their romantic adventures’.
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Later, as ‘a precocious and knowing girl with an attractive figure’, Katherine indulged in a sexual relationship with Dereham, in what could be termed ‘persistent child abuse’.
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At court, the Duke of Norfolk manipulated his niece Katherine ‘to further his own political agenda’, Katherine being ‘the victim of a conspiracy between [...] Thomas Howard, Duke of Norfolk, and Stephen Gardiner, Bishop of Winchester’.
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As queen, Katherine engaged in an adulterous affair with Culpeper as a means of conceiving a child to pass off as the impotent king’s: ‘[...] Katherine was urged to become pregnant as soon as possible, regardless of the paternity. Culpeper’s bastard could be passed off as the King’s legitimate son’.
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David Starkey, in his 2004 study of the lives of the six queens of Henry VIII, disagreed with the prevailing view that Katherine committed adultery with Culpeper in the physical sense. Agreeing with other writers that ‘she knew how to attract men with a skill beyond her teenage years’, Starkey believed that Katherine did not allow Manox to have sexual intercourse with her, ‘not out of virtue, but rather a fierce sense of Howard pride’.
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He was appreciative of her personal qualities, believing that, during her childhood, ‘she […] displayed leadership, resourcefulness and independence’ as ‘a rebel without a cause’.
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Characterising the queen as a ‘love-sick Juliet’ during her relationship with Culpeper, Starkey interpreted their affair as ‘a piece of romantic fiction’.
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Concluding that, while Katherine and Culpeper were strongly attracted to one another, they never engaged in sexual intercourse, Starkey perceived Katherine to be ‘a sympathetic figure’.
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Karen Lindsey’s feminist re-interpretation of the careers of Henry’s queens saw her agree with Starkey that a virtue can be discerned in ‘promiscuity’. Viewing the events of Katherine Howard’s life through a twentieth-century mindset of sexuality and femininity, Lindsey believed that ‘a lot of pity has been wasted on Henry VIII over Kathryn’s infidelity’, arguing that Katherine: ‘was a woman who enjoyed both sex itself and the admiration she got from the men with whom she had her few sexual adventures’. Katherine ‘was a woman who listened to her body’s yearnings, and in spite of all she had been taught, understood that she had a right to answer those longings. She was willing to risk whatever it took to be true to herself.’
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Disagreeing completely with the sort of interpretation favoured by Lindsey, Retha M. Warnicke, viewing the reign of this fifth queen from a gendered and cultural perspective, characterised Katherine as ‘a victim of sexual predators’ from the age of thirteen, believing that: ‘in her short life, she had faced great adversity because of cultural attitudes toward human sexuality. Her male abusers seemed to assume that her reluctance to have sexual relations masked “interior consent”.’
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Only in recent years have historians recognised the fundamental need to analyse Katherine’s life from a gendered approach that pays attention to how her biological sex influenced the nature of her career and her ultimate downfall. This study especially emphasises social customs and cultural values, focusing on Katherine’s experiences from a gendered perspective that concentrates in particular on attitudes to sexual acts, femininity and fertility. It will probe surviving evidence for clues relating to fundamental questions that need to be considered. Why was it, for instance, that highborn women within the Henrician court were readily expected to play critical roles in raising their family’s fortunes and prestige, yet were often accused of heinous crimes such as witchcraft or adultery by male contemporaries who feared these women’s supposed power? Why were acts of sexual deviance viewed with horror, but attributed to the licentiousness and carnal nature of women rather than men? Why were women frequently blamed and condemned for failures in pregnancy and childbirth, resulting in accusations of sorcery or witchcraft? Why, when surviving legal documents, in particular indictments brought against aristocrats in treason trials, were patently flawed and comprised manipulated or false evidence, have such sources been systematically accepted by historians as providing a valid and realistic insight into the true nature of relations between the sexes, when evidence was only contributed unwillingly under unusual and intense conditions?

In asking such questions through critically scrutinising contemporary evidence, this study hopes to offer a more balanced and convincing documentation of the short life of Henry VIII’s fifth queen, who was eventually executed for sexual crimes perceived to be treasonous and abominable to both her husband and to the state. Interpreting such sources from both a critical and a gendered viewpoint illuminates the extent to which early modern men, even in supposedly enlightened England, feared and mistrusted their female contemporaries, who they associated with excessive sexuality and the ability to bewitch or inflict ill upon men. As a result this study will conclude, through considering Katherine’s career in detail following a brief but provoking analysis of the fortunes of Henry’s four previous queens, that not only Katherine but her four predecessors were victims of what will here be termed fertility politics: their ability, or in four cases inability, to provide a male heir to solve the paranoid issues surrounding the Tudor succession. Although the indictments brought against Katherine have begun to be viewed disbelievingly, even sceptically, by some modern historians, only through considering issues of fertility, reproduction and sexuality from a sixteenth-century
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perspective can the full and dramatic story of Katherine’s downfall be convincingly documented in light of such beliefs. The indictments tell us far less about the queen’s real experiences during the spring and summer of 1541 and more about the prejudices and fears of highborn males who resented and distrusted powerful women.

As a result, the prevailing modern notion of Katherine Howard as an immoral and corrupt young woman who blatantly took several lovers must be put aside. Instead, her fate can be considered sympathetically in light of centuries of female oppression, through understanding and appreciating how – and why – her husband’s councillors came to perceive her actions negatively according to their own cultural and social prejudices. As with Mary, Queen of Scots, the evidence produced against Katherine was blatantly manufactured, embroidered and distorted with the intent of fulfilling one aim: her disgrace and execution. Taking this into account, and viewing her life in conjunction with prevailing cultural and social values, it will emerge that Katherine Howard’s downfall and execution was one of the greatest injustices of the Tudor era.

1) Thrones and Power

The accession of Henry VIII to the throne of England in 1509 was viewed positively by his eager subjects, ushering in hopes of dynastic stability following the devastation enacted by the Wars of the Roses in the preceding century. Henry’s accession was the first time in some eighty years that the crown had directly passed from king to son without the challenge presented by a pretender and, in an attempt to further his lineage and bolster his international prestige, he decided to marry the Spanish princess Katherine of Aragon, the widow of Henry’s elder brother Arthur. Indeed, ‘great provision was made for the [...] costly devices of the other [Henry VIII] with that virtuous Queen Katherine, then the king’s wife, newly married’.
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Those present at court in the early years of Henry VIII’s reign were unanimous in their praise for him. The Venetian ambassador Sebastian Guistinian opined that ‘nature could not have done more for him [...] He is much handsomer than any sovereign in Christendom; a great deal handsomer than the King of France, very fair and his whole frame admirably proportioned’.
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That same ambassador went on to record in 1514: ‘His Majesty is the handsomest potentate I ever set eyes upon: above the usual height, with an extremely fine calf to his leg, his complexion very fair and bright, with auburn hair combed straight and short in the French fashion, and a round face so very beautiful that it would become a pretty woman, his throat being rather long and thick.’
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It is helpful to view such statements from a gendered perspective, demonstrating that the ideal of early modern kingship extolled virtuous masculinity, demonstrated through a rigorous physicality combined with an almost godly beauty, which Henry symbolised to foreign observers visiting court.

The new queen was well aware of her marital duties, the state of fertility politics within the English court demanding, as elsewhere in Europe, that she present her husband with several sons in order to perpetuate the continuation of the ruling dynasty and prevent dynastic bloodshed and civil war through failure to do so. Indeed, Katherine had no better example than her own family, for her only brother Juan had died as a teenager, plunging the succession of Spain into turmoil. The repercussions of that in the long-term were to prove problematic, with conflict occurring between Katherine’s father, Ferdinand of Aragon, and her brother-in-law Philip, husband to her sister Juana, as to who had the stronger claim to the throne of Castile.
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It was imperative that Queen Katherine present the new king with male heirs in order to preserve the stability of the Tudor lineage in England.

Within the English court at the onset of Henry VIII’s succession, several English noble families were prominent who could claim royal blood through their descent from Edward I. The most prominent was the Howard family, who one author lyrically writes of thus: ‘What family pervades our national annals with achievements of such intense and brilliant interest as the Howards? As heroes, poets, politicians, courtiers, patrons of literature, state victims to tyranny and revenge, they have been constantly before us for four centuries [...] No story of romance or tragedy can exhibit more incidents to enchain attention or move the heart, than might be found in the records of this great historical family.’
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The Howard family, in particular, were viewed with suspicion if not hostility by Henry VII and later his son, for John Howard, 1
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Duke of Norfolk, had died fighting for Richard III, the last Yorkist king, at Bosworth in 1485. His son Surrey, however, successfully overturned the hostility of the Tudors directed towards the Howard dynasty through demonstrating his loyalty and support of the ruling royal family. As a consequence, by 1501 – the date of Katherine of Aragon’s marriage to Arthur Prince of Wales – Surrey’s lands in East Anglia could be valued at £600 a year and he had risen to Lord Treasurer of England. Surrey conclusively proved his loyalty to the Tudors through his victory against the Scots at Flodden in 1513 aged seventy years old.
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Indeed, ‘long before the Howards won back their ancient titles, the family had been systematically fortifying its political and social position through marital alliances with the most vigorous and distinguished families of the century.’
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This was amply demonstrated in Surrey’s achievement of a marriage alliance in 1495 between his heir and Anne of York, sister of Queen Elizabeth (consort of Henry VII). Proving his closeness and value to the Tudor family, Surrey was also heavily involved in the marriage negotiations of Mary Tudor to Charles of Castile in 1508 when that princess was aged twelve years old.
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Surrey was to act as effective head and representative of the Howard family until his death in 1524, leading to the succession of his eldest son Thomas, Lord Treasurer since 1522, to the dukedom of Norfolk and estates worth over £4,000 per annum.
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Thomas was one of three sons and two daughters who lived to maturity borne to Surrey and his second wife Elizabeth Tylney. Thomas Howard had become Earl of Surrey in February 1514, with an annuity of £20 per annum, receiving two castles and eighteen manors in Lincolnshire in: ‘consideration of the timely assistance he rendered his father [...] at the Battle of Branxton, 9 Sept. last. This creation is made on surrender by the said Duke [...] of the title of Earl of Surrey’.
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In 1513 Surrey’s influence increased further through his marriage alliance with the fifteen year-old Elizabeth Stafford, daughter of Edward, 3
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Duke of Buckingham, thus further bolstering the prestige of the Howard lineage through its alliance with this noble English family, although that duke was to be executed for treason against the king in 1521, with his own father-in-law, the Duke of Norfolk, presiding as Lord High Steward of England at his trial.
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Thomas’s personal characteristics have been shrouded in controversy and mystery, with one author emphatically describing him as a ‘monster [...] ruthless in his cold-blooded use of those around him, including the members of his own family [who were] just pawns for his ambition’.
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This is, however, from viewing the events in the mid-Tudor period with hindsight and a lack of awareness of political and social norms among the English nobility in the sixteenth century. Indeed, one Venetian ambassador lauded Thomas’s ‘liberal, affable and astute’ personality and his desire to associate with anyone regardless of social origins.
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He was experienced and shrewd, pragmatic in setting aside his Roman Catholic faith for the will of the king through his ‘versatile and inconstant humour’, according to the Spanish ambassador.
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