Katherine Howard: A New History (9 page)

Why Manox decided to abuse his position as music master and seduce the young Katherine cannot be known from the indictments, although most modern historians, following Mary Lascelles’ beliefs, suggest that he may have hoped to marry Katherine and align himself with the prestigious Howard family. To be sure, that could account for his persistent attempts to seduce Katherine, believing that she consented to his advances, for the ‘age of consent to marriage was [...] tied to an understanding of the age at which young people were deemed capable of having sex and so of conceiving children’.
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However, the timing of this affair in context of the Howard family’s current position at that time could suggest Manox’s desire to sexually manipulate the young step-granddaughter of the dowager duchess at a time when the Howards were perhaps perceived to be more vulnerable. Anne Boleyn’s downfall that year had placed the Howards in a more ambivalent position, particularly since her uncle had been tainted with the disgrace of his niece, although he had willingly served his monarch in acting as high steward at her trial and personally sentencing her to death. Perhaps believing that the Howards were in a weaker position than they had been hitherto, Manox presumed to take control of Katherine’s future through taking advantage of his position and seducing her, despite the attempts of both Katherine and Mary Lascelles to discourage Manox from this pursuit. Later, subscribing to notions of aggressive female sexuality and believing that Katherine had willingly assented to his advances, Manox blamed her for the affair, insisting that he had only acted because she had entrapped him into loving her. Yet there is a pressing need for ‘the sensitivity to hear the female voices embedded in documents’, for there is no evidence that Katherine enjoyed the affair, or that she ever encouraged Manox in his seduction of her.
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During these events, Katherine had not yet reached her thirteenth birthday.

In Lambeth, Katherine became acquainted with Francis Dereham, who was distantly connected to the Howard family and served as one of the Duke of Norfolk’s gentleman-pensioners. Initially, Dereham had been involved in a liaison with Joan Bulmer, one of Katherine’s acquaintances who served the dowager duchess and who permitted Dereham to visit the ‘maidens’ chamber’ at Lambeth. It was not long, however, before Dereham’s attentions were transferred from Joan, who was then aged around nineteen having been born in 1519, to her fourteen year-old companion Katherine. It will here be argued, from a careful reading of the evidence produced in the indictments against a backdrop of early modern views about female sexuality and sexual deviance, that Dereham sexually abused the niece of his master, possibly going so far as to rape her.
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The chamber in which Katherine dwelled with other young gentlewoman was frequently visited by young gentlemen who resided within the household of the dowager duchess, as Katherine was later to recall, remembering how the door of the chamber was unlocked ‘as well at the request of me, as of others’.
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Edward Waldegrave, cousin of Manox and an esquire, was one such frequent visitor, alongside his fellow esquire Francis Dereham. Having seduced Joan Bulmer, Dereham moved to flatter Katherine, having heard that her affair with Manox had shortly concluded beforehand. Charles de Marillac, who served at the court of Henry VIII as the French ambassador, later reported that Dereham had violated the young Katherine from her thirteenth year, five years before her downfall, placing their liaison in around 1537.
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Although Marillac was incorrect about the duration of this affair, he seems to have been truthful in recounting the true nature of the relationship between Katherine and Dereham, for there is little evidence to suggest, as with Manox, that Katherine consented to Dereham’s advances, both sexual and material.

According to the indictments some years later, gifts were exchanged between the two. Dereham provided Katherine with a French fennel, some velvet and satin for a billiment (part of a French hood) and sarcenet for a quilted cap. An embroidered friar’s knot was also presented to Katherine, apparently as a symbol of the love between the two. Katherine also recalled that she had given him a band and sleeves for a shirt and, during the 1541 progress, £10 as payment for his earlier gifts. Following Katherine’s appointment to court in 1539, Dereham left an indenture and obligation of £100 at Lambeth following his move to Ireland which, he promised, would be hers if he never returned.
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Many seductions during this period began with games, joking or direct sexual touching, as a means of implying the woman’s consent to sexual activity.
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One observer within the maidens’ chamber later reported how Katherine ‘was so far in love’ that the couple kissed ‘after a wonderful manner, for they would kiss and hang by their bellies together as they were two sparrows’.
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However, as Roper compellingly notes: ‘the language men and women use in criminal trials is clearly forced discourse. In other contexts, men and women would have spoken differently about sexuality.’
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Like Manox, Dereham believed that Katherine consented to his advances, failing to appreciate that her desire to maintain the honour of her family and her personal chastity prevented her from doing so.

When Manox discovered that Dereham had made sexual advances towards Katherine, he angrily wrote an anonymous letter to the dowager duchess informing her of the night time escapades occurring in the maidens’ chamber:

Your Grace, it shall be meet you take good heed to your gentlewomen for if it shall like you half an hour after you shall a-bed to rise suddenly and visit their Chamber you shall see that which shall displease you. But if you make anybody of counsel you shall be deceived. Make then fewer your secretary.
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Manox’s comment ‘you shall see that which shall displease you’ may have been a veiled reference to the exact nature of the sexual acts taking place under the dowager duchess’s roof, for contemporaries strongly prohibited sexual practices that deviated from those advocated by the church as a means of procreation. Canon lawyers of the age held that if a woman engaged in sexual positions other than the approved one (beneath her partner) it was utterly sinful, being worse than incestuous relations with a male relative.
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In view of contemporary notions about female sexuality, it has been suggested that ‘the female offender’s deviation from her ascribed role, therefore, was not only an offence against an individual, but a serious threat to the entire system of order’.
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In light of this, Katherine’s experiences with Dereham take on new meaning. If Manox was aware that the two had taken part in what he, and other contemporaries, would deem to be unnatural sexual practices, then it was imperative that the dowager duchess learn of the relationship in order to put a stop to it. It is surely ironic that Manox sought the assistance of the dowager duchess, for had she been aware that he had been systematically abusing her step-granddaughter from the age of twelve, she would likely have expelled him from her household sooner for putting the honour of the Howard family in jeopardy. Manox may also have resented his loss of control over Katherine, for sexual jealousy and cuckoldry anxiety amongst men in early modern England was common. This, of course, explains why the regulation of female sexuality was favoured by men in an attempt to safeguard their own honour and sense of masculinity, perhaps accounting for Manox’s interference.
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Katherine, however, was desperate to maintain her personal honour and to avoid placing her family name in disrepute she consequently ‘stole the letter out of my Lady’s gilt coffer and showed it to Dereham who copied it and thereupon it was laid in the coffer again’.
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Probably, she revealed the letter to Dereham as a means of warning him of the danger his seduction of her placed both her and her family in, and may have signalled to him that he should leave her alone as a result. The dowager duchess, when she discovered the goings on in the maidens’ chamber, reacted with understandable fury, for this placed the honour of the Howard name in danger and cast doubts on the suitability of herself as guardian for young people within her household.

Scattered pieces of evidence from the indictments, when read in light of cultural customs, suggest that not only did Katherine fail to consent to Dereham’s sexual advances, but indicate that he may have used force on her. According to the queen’s confession in 1541, ‘Frauncez Derame by many persuasions procured me to his vicious purpose and obteyned first to lye uppon my bedde with his doblett and hose and after within the bedde and fynally he lay with me nakyd and used me in suche sorte as a man doith his wyff many and sondry tymez but howe often I knowe not.’
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Possibly, in referring to Dereham treating her sexually as if she were his wife, Katherine was making an oblique reference to abuse among spouses, for this was a common occurrence in early modern England. Wife-beating was favoured as central to early modern patriarchy, and probably occurred persistently within English households from the sixteenth century onwards.
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Indeed, ‘[...] of all the women who suffer violence, the greatest number are wives whose husbands abuse them’.
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Suggesting that she did not consent to the advances of Manox or Dereham, Katherine was to plead the king to take into account her ‘youthe, my ignorans [and] my fraylnez’.
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Following her confession, Katherine reported to Archbishop Cranmer that Dereham’s actions constituted ‘importune forcement, and in a manner, violence, rather than of her own free consent and will’.
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The reference to Dereham’s ‘vicious purpose’ and ‘many persuasions’ establish direct similarities with Manox’s relentless seduction of Katherine, suggesting that, like Manox, Dereham had perceived the Howard family’s influence to be less prominent than hitherto and, consequently, had desired to forcibly take advantage of Katherine’s lineage and connections in an attempt to bolster his own influence. Although the psychological motives of individuals living in different conditions several hundred years ago can only be guessed at, it is possible that Dereham forced himself sexually upon Katherine as a means of asserting his claims to her and, in effect, warning Manox off.

A further comment made by Katherine, often misinterpreted by historians, indicates that Dereham may actually have used force on her in an attempt to fulfil his own sexual desires. Margaret Benet, a fellow maiden at Lambeth, later reported that she had heard Dereham say: ‘that although he used the company of a woman a C [hundred] times yet he would get no child except he listed and that the queen [Katherine] made answers thereto and likewise that a woman might meddle with a man and yet conceive no child unless she would for herself.’
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Baldwin Smith took this to mean that Katherine was referring to the use of contraception, as have other modern historians.
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It is possible, however, in light of prevailing sixteenth-century beliefs about fertility, sexual intercourse and reproduction, that Katherine meant something else, for contemporaries continued to adhere to the accepted medieval notion that ‘conception was believed to take place only if the woman omitted a seed, which she would do only if the experience of sex was pleasurable’.
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Since Dereham viewed Katherine as his wife, it seems unlikely that he would have permitted the use of contraception, for were she to fall pregnant, it might force her family to marry them in a hasty attempt to conceal the true nature of this disgraceful affair. It is likely that, knowing that contemporaries believed that women were expected to enjoy sexual intercourse in order to conceive a child, Katherine’s reference to not conceiving a child indicates that she had not enjoyed her sexual encounters with Dereham, and when read in light of her later remarks that he had forced her ‘viciously’ to engage in sexual intercourse, establishes the possibility that he had sexually assaulted, if not raped, her. Thus ‘if she did not wish to have sexual relations with him, then she would have considered herself forced to please him and would have found the experience unpleasant. She could believe, therefore, that her emotions controlled whether she became pregnant’.
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Katherine’s comment also offers a further clue to her age. During this period, estimates of the average age of menarche range from fourteen to seventeen.
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Katherine, therefore, might not have fallen pregnant by Dereham both because she did not enjoy his sexual advances and because, if she were, as seems likely, aged about fourteen in 1538, she may not have been capable of conceiving for some years. Speculatively, this might also account for why she later failed to fall pregnant by Henry VIII.

The behaviour of Katherine and the nature of her relationships with both Manox and Dereham have been unsatisfactorily explained by the majority of modern historians, who conclude that Katherine was morally lax, flighty and the motivator in both affairs. This approach, which has paid sustained attention to sixteenth-century customs and beliefs about female sexuality, honour and fertility, has suggested that this young woman was sexually abused by both men under the household of her step-grandmother, despite her desperate attempts to preserve the honour of her family, for she was well aware that she would be ruined if news of these escapades reached her uncle the duke. The dowager duchess’s inability to protect her charges added to the dilemma, for her duties at court simply meant that she could not, on a regular basis, manage the daily life of her household. In the indictments drawn up against her, Katherine was repeatedly blamed for both affairs, which is not surprising when beliefs regarding female sexuality prevalent in the mid-sixteenth century are considered. Moreover, in early modern Europe at this time, rape and seduction became more closely aligned and linked more greatly with normative male heterosexual behaviour, meaning that, perhaps, Dereham’s persistent seduction of Katherine did not shock observers who continued to adhere to the accepted belief that women desired to be raped, by virtue of their overflowing carnal desires.
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However, rape and sexual assault were prohibited by law and condemned as sexually deviant by both lawyers and clerics, who regarded it as unlawful and offensive to God. How Katherine later presented her experiences at the hands of both Dereham and Manox probably depended a great deal on the gender of her accusers for, aware that these male prosecutors viewed her by virtue of her sex in a negative and suspicious light, it was necessary to emphasise the degree of force she had suffered. In contrast, her fellow females within the duchess’s household may have been able to work out for themselves more clearly Katherine’s reaction to her ordeals.
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