Sex with the Queen (18 page)

It was no surprise that Catherine fell in love. Thomas Culpeper, a gentleman of the king’s privy chamber and a favorite of Henry’s, was in his late twenties, personable and polished.

Culpeper was young while the king was old, slender and healthy while the king was fat and sick, merry while the king was sullen.

Trim and athletic, the virile Culpeper offered her exquisite de-lights instead of the rising disgust she must have felt in bed with Henry. There was no festering sore on his muscular thigh, no mountain of fat on his tight belly.

Every queen must be aided and abetted by a loyal lady-in-waiting to hide her love affair, and Catherine was assisted by Lady Jane Rochford, who had been married to Anne Boleyn’s brother. Every few weeks when the court moved to a different palace, Lady Rochford chose for the queen the rooms with an easy escape route, a secret staircase or garden door. In the only extant letter written entirely in her own hand, Catherine wrote Culpeper, “Come when my Lady Rochford is here for then I shall be best at leisure to be at your commandment.”45

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When Henry made a royal progress through northern En-gland in the fall of 1541, Catherine and Culpeper had sex on sev-eral occasions. The obliging Lady Rochford whispered to Culpeper how and when to enter the queen’s chamber. While staying at Pontefract Castle, the king knocked loudly on the queen’s door while she was in bed with her lover, and only after some time did Lady Rochford open the door.

Courtiers could see that the queen was in love with Culpeper by simply looking at her when she spoke to him. Indeed, every-one seemed to know except Henry, living in a state of second youth and marital bliss. The day before he found out about Catherine’s unchaste past, the king gave a public thanksgiving for his virtuous queen. As courtiers tried to keep a straight face, the king proclaimed, “I render thanks to thee, O Lord, that af-ter so many strange accidents that have befallen my marriages, Thou hast been pleased to give me a wife so entirely conformed to my wishes as her I now have.”46

The plotters and planners of the queen’s downfall could not move too hastily. They needed time, needed evidence. Indeed, it was a servant who suddenly caused the house of cards to fall, John Lassells, whose sister Mary Lassells, chamber woman to the dowager duchess, was well aware of Catherine’s loud nighttime activities in the dormitory. One day when the fiercely Protestant John Lassells was bemoaning the rise of the Catholic faction, his sister, now Mary Hall, said of the queen, “Let her alone, for if she holds on as she begins we shall hear she will be nought within a while.”47 Mary, furious that she had not been given a plum po-sition at court by Catherine, as so many other dormitory girls had been, told how Manox had boasted that he had fondled the queen’s private parts. Delighted, John Lassells informed the council in London.

In October 1541 the three ministers left in charge of London during the king’s progress were informed by John Lassells that the queen had “lived most corruptly and sensually.” The power-ful Howard council members were traveling with the king and the three members left behind were all Howard enemies, includ-ing Jane Seymour’s still influential brother Edward. They were 8 0

s e x w i t h t h e q u e e n

delighted at the accusation, though no one had the courage to tell the king the news. Finally, Archbishop Thomas Cranmer wrote a delicately worded letter and handed it to the king when he returned.

Instead of becoming angry at the accusation, Henry was per-plexed. He thought it was probably idle gossip sprung from jeal-ous women, or a plot set afoot by religious reformers displeased by a Catholic queen. Nonetheless, he instructed the council to investigate the rumor. John Lassells and Mary Hall were both in-terviewed. Based on their testimony the music master, Henry Manox was called in and admitted that he “used to feel the secret and other parts of the Queen’s body.” Unwilling to remain the focus of the investigation, Manox tipped off investigators to the existence of his more successful rival, Francis Dereham. Hauled before the inquisitors, a trembling Dereham foolishly admitted that he “had known her carnally many times, both in his doublet and hose between the sheets and in naked bed.”48

Henry met with the privy council who read him the confes-sions of Manox and Dereham. Black rage bubbled up in him like poison. And the sudden realization swept over him that he was old, that he was obese, that he was repulsive in every way. She had never loved him. She had pretended.
Pretended
to love him as she pocketed his jewels and costly gifts, as her ambitious family grasped at pensions and appointments.

Trembling with rage, the king called for a sword to kill the woman who had betrayed him, swearing she would never have

“such delight in her incontinency as she should have torture in her death.”49 Then he collapsed into a fit of weeping. Wiping tears from his fat cheeks, the king bewailed his “ill luck in meet-ing such ill-conditioned wives” and blamed his council for “this last mischief.”50 By the time his tears had dried, his youth had vanished forever.

Catherine, oblivious to the danger, was dancing in her chamber with her maidens when the guards came to arrest her.

The captain told her it was “no more the time to dance.”51 On November 7 the queen herself was interrogated by Archbishop Cranmer who reported, “I found her in such lamentation and m e d i e v a l q u e e n s , t u d o r v i c t i m s 8 1

heaviness as I never saw no creature, so that it would have pitied any man’s heart to have looked upon her.”52 He actually feared for her sanity.

Sobbing, Catherine denied she had done anything wrong.

Initially she claimed that Dereham had forced her with “violence rather than of her free consent and will.”53 Then she admitted in some confusion that Dereham had “lain with me, sometimes in his doublet and hose, and two or three times naked; but not so naked that he had nothing upon him, for he had always at least his doublet and as I do think, his hose also, but I mean naked when his hose were put down.”54

She submitted a confession of sorts to the king, begging his forgiveness. “I your grace’s most sorrowful subject and most vile wretch in the world, not worthy to make any recommendations unto your most excellent majesty, do only make my most humble submission and confession of my faults.” She explained, “First at the flattering and fair persuasions of Manox, being but a young girl, [I] suffered him at sundry times to handle and touch the se-cret parts of my body which neither became me with honesty to permit nor him to require. Also Francis Dereham by many per-suasions procured me to his vicious purpose and obtained first to lie upon my bed with his doublet and hose and after within the bed and finally he lay with me naked, and used me in such sort as a man doth his wife many and sundry times, but how often I know not. . . .”55

She excused herself for not telling the king during their courtship of her unchaste past because “I was so desirous to be taken unto your grace’s favor and so blinded with the desire of worldly glory that I could not, nor had grace to, consider how great a fault it was to conceal my former faults from your majesty, considering that I intended ever during my life to be faithful and true unto your majesty after.”56

The queen refuted any marriage precontract with Dereham, which would have invalidated her royal marriage and could have saved her from the wrath of Henry if he had never legally been her husband. Dereham, however, asserted that they were pre-s e x w i t h t h e q u e e n 8 2

contracted to each other, pleading that he was therefore inno-cent of debauching a maiden. But Henry was less concerned at the technicalities of a possible precontract than by the fact that Catherine had taken Dereham into her service at court. If she had been truly sorrowful about her unchaste past, why would she want her former lover there as a constant reminder? Did she take Dereham into her bed
after
marriage?

At this point Catherine’s crime was—perhaps—bigamy. There was no law on the books requiring candidates for the position of queen to tell the king of all past sexual activities. Catherine must have been praying that her escapades with Culpeper would not be revealed. But it was Dereham, clapped in prison, who led in-vestigators to her extramarital affair. In a cowardly attempt to prove he had not slept with the queen since her marriage, he pointed out that Thomas Culpeper had been the sole object of her desires.

When questioned about Culpeper, Catherine said that it was Lady Rochford who had pushed her into his arms, arranging se-cret meetings with him that Catherine wanted to avoid. Lady Rochford, for her part, said she was merely following the queen’s orders to arrange meetings for the two. She believed “that Culpeper hath known the queen carnally considering all things that she hath heard and seen between them.”57

Lady Rochford went mad on the third day of her imprison-ment. Such information extracted from her about the queen’s adultery was only available during her brief moments of lucidity.

Perhaps guilt had driven her mad, guilt at sending her husband to the scaffold with a pack of lies years before. Revenge for his not wanting her, for ignoring her as she lay in bed panting with de-sire, while he went out to find a man. Now, with exquisite irony, she would meet the identical fate as George Boleyn. The Spanish ambassador wrote, “Lady Rochford would have been tried and sentenced at the same time, but on the third day of her imprison-ment she went mad. She recovers her reason now and then, and the King . . . gets his own physicians to visit her, desiring her re-covery that he may afterwards have her executed as an example.”58

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