Tudor Women: Queens and Commoners (13 page)

Katherine Basset evidently had to resign herself to staying where she was, in the service of the Countess of Rutland; but among the successful candidates for preferment with more influential relatives to pull strings on her behalf was the Duke of Norfolk's niece, young Katherine Howard, a vivacious, ripely attractive teenager. By Easter it was public knowledge that the King's volatile fancy had once more been captured, and the stage was set for a palace revolution led by the formidable Howard clan.

The disposal of Anne of Cleves proved unexpectedly painless.

The fact that she had once been tentatively betrothed to the Duke of Lorraine's son offered a convenient toehold for Henry's conscience, and by midsummer enough legal confusion had been created over the exact nature of this pre-contract to provide grounds for divorce. On 9 July Convocation unanimously pronounced the King's fourth marriage to be null and void, and four days later an obedient Parliament ratified the judgement of the clergy. The Supreme Head of the Church could reasonably expect the cooperation of his own bishops, but two additional factors had helped to smooth his path: one being that the fragile truce between the two great European power blocs was already breaking up, thus relieving England's isolation and making the German alliance expendable; while the other was the helpful attitude adopted by the Queen.

Henry had sent Anne down to Richmond in the middle of June, 'purposing it to be more for her health, open air and pleasure', though he himself remained to seek his pleasure in the capital, paying frequent visits to Mistress Katherine Howard at her grandmother's house in Lambeth. The Queen would not, of course, have understood all the ramifications of the power struggle currently in progress at Court (they remain more than somewhat obscure to this day), but she was certainly alarmed by the sudden arrest of Thomas Cromwell on a charge of high treason, which took place a few days before her own banishment. Cromwell had been the chief architect of the Cleves marriage, and Anne naturally regarded him in the light of a friend and mentor. Whether she was really afraid that she might soon be joining him in the Tower is difficult to say, but in the circumstances she could hardly be blamed for feeling nervous about her future. According to one account, she fell to the ground in a dead faint when a delegation headed by the Duke of Suffolk arrived at Richmond, believing they had come to arrest her. Her visitors, however, quickly reassured her. They had, on the contrary, been instructed to offer her what Henry considered generous terms in exchange for his freedom: an income of five hundred pounds a year, the use of two royal residences, with an adequate establishment, plus the position of the King's adopted sister with precedence over every other lady in the land except the next queen and the princesses.

Anne's immediate reaction was one of transparent relief, and she accepted with so much alacrity that Henry was surprised and even a trifle disconcerted. Some protestation, a few regretful tears, would, he felt, have been more appropriate in the face of such a sacrifice, and he insisted that Anne should write home at once, explaining how honourably she was being used and how willingly she had consented to the divorce. Until this letter had been written, Henry could not be easy in his mind, since all would depend on a woman's word, which, as any sensible man knew, meant little or nothing. It was in women's nature to be changeable, and so for a woman to promise 'that she will be no woman' was a contradiction in terms and could not be relied upon.

Anne showed no sign whatever of going back on her word, but she wrote obediently to her brother, telling him that the King, whom she could not justly have as her husband, had shown himself a most kind, loving and friendly father and brother, and had so provided for her. It was her wish, she went on, that the knot of amity concluded between their two countries should remain unbroken, and she ended: 'Only I require this of you, that ye so conduct yourself as for your untowardness in this matter I fare not the worse, whereunto I trust you will have regard.' Having dissolved their marriage, Henry had, of course, no shadow of right to keep his ex-wife in England, and he was, in effect, holding her hostage for the good behaviour of her brother and the other German princes. The Duke of Cleves was naturally not at all pleased by the turn events had taken and was anxious for his sister's return, but he and his ambassador could do little in the face of her repeated assurances that she only wished to please the King her lord, that she was being well treated and wanted to stay in England. 'God willing,' she wrote, 'I purpose to lead my life in this realm.'

Anne has often been dismissed as dull and spiritless for her meek acceptance of Henry's rejection, but her situation was totally different from that of Catherine of Aragon, and in any case the alternatives open to her were strictly limited. Had she attempted to fight the case, she would inevitably have lost it. Had she insisted on going home, she would have forfeited her alimony, and having now seen something of a wider world and the pleasures it had to offer, the prospect of returning penniless to her needlework in the narrow confines of the ducal palace at Cleves offered little attraction. She had escaped from one loveless and frightening marriage and seems to have had no inclination to try again; besides which, there was no guarantee that any other European power would recognize her English divorce. On the other hand, by accepting Henry's terms and staying on in England, she would keep a measure of financial independence and social status in a country whose people and customs she clearly found congenial. Anne evidently considered that she was getting a fair bargain and, like a sensible woman, settled down to make the best of it. Indeed, she made the most of it. In September the French ambassador reported that 'Madame of Cleves has a more joyous countenance than ever. She wears a great variety of dresses and passes all her time in sports and recreations.'

Meanwhile the King had taken his fifth wife.

Katherine Howard was in her late teens at the time of her marriage, the youngest of a family of ten children and an orphan. Her father, Lord Edmund Howard, a younger brother of the Duke of Norfolk, had been something of a ne'er-do-well, and her mother, Joyce Culpeper, had died when her youngest daughter was quite a small child. Although Lord Edmund married again, most of Joyce's family were brought up by their Howard grandmother, along with a whole tribe of Howard cousins and connections. This was in accordance with the common practice of farming out one's children, but in Lord Edmund's case it no doubt also helped to ease his chronic financial distress.

The modern trend was towards smaller households, more supervision and regulation, and greater privacy for the family; but Agnes, Dowager Duchess of Norfolk, was something of a survival from an earlier, more casual age, and her establishments at Horsham in Sussex and at Lambeth were run on generously mediaeval lines. Upwards of a hundred persons (her ladyship herself could probably not have put an exact number to them) crowded under her various roofs - family, hangers-on, poor relations, children, secretaries, tutors, servants, servants' servants, servants' families and friends - all eating, sleeping, working or not working, gambling, playing, quarrelling and making love in cheerful, insanitary propinquity. Katherine Howard and her cousins shared the maids' dormitory (two or three to a bed) with the dowager's waiting gentlewomen and what might loosely be described as the upper female servants, drawn chiefly from the daughters of the neighbouring gentry who regarded the Duchess as their natural patron. This was not an unusual arrangement - a bed to oneself, let alone a bedroom to oneself, was a luxury enjoyed only by the very greatest personages - and communal living was still accepted as the norm by most people.

Katherine was about ten years old when she came under her grandmother's care, to learn obedience, good manners, some social graces and the rudiments of household management; enough, in short, to fit her for marriage to the husband who would in due course be chosen by the family - perhaps some rising man at Court whom it would be useful to attach to the Howard interest. She was taught to read and write, but the dowager had no patience with any new-fangled notions about higher education for women and, besides, Katherine was not academically inclined. A pretty child, but bird-brained and barely literate, she grew naturally into an empty-headed adolescent, one of a bevy of giggling, chattering girls who thought of precious little but clothes, young men and how to squeeze as much fun as possible out of life before they were inexorably claimed by marriage and the painful drudgery of child-bearing. The Duchess was not deliberately neglectful of her responsibilities, but she was a busy woman, not over-gifted with imagination, and saw no reason to pay special attention to her orphaned grand-daughter. The child was getting a Christian upbringing among her kinsfolk and all the education that was good for her. She was no worse off in that respect than any of her contemporaries and would have to take her chance with the rest.

Katherine took her first chance when she was fourteen or so. She may not have possessed much in the way of intellectual equipment, but she was fully aware of her own developing body and of its effect on the opposite sex - especially on one Henry Manox, who had recently come to Horsham to give the young ladies music lessons. Katherine Howard learned more from Henry Manox than how to strike graceful chords on the lute and virginals, and they were soon making assignations to meet in unfrequented corners, where Manox became familiar with the 'secret parts' of Mistress Katherine's body. The Duchess caught them at it on at least one occasion, but she didn't seem unduly disturbed, merely scolding the guilty pair and giving orders that they were never to be left alone in future. In spite of this, the romance continued for a while, the young people exchanging messages and tokens via sympathetic third parties - a traffic which, of course, soon led to rumours of an engagement between them. Manox, in fact, was growing so confident of Katherine's affection that he boasted openly that she had promised him her maidenhead, 'though it be painful to her'. This piece of indiscretion prompted a stern warning from Mary Lassells, the Duchess's chamberer, who told him plainly that he was asking for trouble. The Howards might take a tolerant view of a bit of youthful kissing and fumbling, but they would certainly not permit one of their kinswomen to tie herself up to a mere music teacher, and if Manox persisted, he would find himself undone.

But Manox's brief ascendancy was already coming to an end. The Duchess had by this time moved with her entourage to Lambeth, and her grand-daughter's horizons were widening. The old lady herself seldom went to Court, but her palatial town house was only just across the river from Westminster, easily accessible to an exciting stream of visitors, and it wasn't long before Katherine had acquired another admirer. Francis Dereham was a member of the Duke of Norfolk's household and a distant connection of the Howards, a handsome, dashing young gentleman of birth and substance and altogether a more attractive proposition than poor Henry Manox, who was ruthlessly discarded. Francis Dereham's face was soon familiar at Lambeth, and he became a regular member of that privileged group of gentlemen who could be sure of a welcome in the girls' dormitory after lights out.

The door of the 'maidens' chamber' was, in theory, locked at bedtime, but in practice this did not present a very serious barrier; keys could always be stolen or someone persuaded to 'forget' to lock up. The Duchess cannot have been entirely unaware of what was going on but took the easy-going view that girls would be girls (perhaps she thought there was safety in numbers), and as long as they kept their activities within bounds and did not create the sort of scandal she would have had to take notice of, she was prepared to turn a blind eye. So the more adventurous young men continued to sneak off upstairs after the old lady had retired for the night, taking with them wine, fruit and sweetmeats 'to make good cheer' with her maids.

This sort of merry-making did not, of course, end with midnight feasts. Katherine was older now and sexually fully mature. Dereham was both more enterprising and more experienced than Henry Manox, and they naturally progressed from caresses 'in doublet and hose' to the intimacies of a naked bed. It was impossible to keep this secret from the other inmates of the dormitory - Alice Restwold, Katherine's official bed-mate, later deposed that she at least knew very well what belonged to all that puffing and blowing behind the bed-curtains. But since Katherine and Dereham were by no means the only illicit couple making use of its facilities, the dormitory continued to observe its conspiracy of silence, although some of the older ladies began to complain of being kept awake, and the more sober spirits claimed to be shocked.

Outside the doubtful privacy of the maidens' chamber, the pair made no particular effort to conceal their attachment, generally behaving as if they were engaged. It was common knowledge in the household that they were 'far in love', and quite a few people believed that Mr. Dereham would have Mrs. Katherine Howard. They could be seen openly kissing and cuddling, and, on one occasion, Dereham had demanded to know why he should not kiss his own wife. In the eyes of the Church they were as good as married - for even such an informal arrangement as this, when consummated with carnal knowledge, could be held to constitute a form of marriage. Dereham unquestionably wanted to get the relationship legalized and pestered Katherine about it, but she refused to commit herself. Far from being the corrupted innocent she is sometimes depicted, Katherine Howard, it must be said, seems to have possessed all the instincts of a natural tart who knew exactly what she was doing. She'd taken the precaution of acquiring some rudimentary knowledge of birth control, boasting rather optimistically that 'a woman might meddle with a man and yet conceive no child unless she would herself, and having discovered the delights of sex, saw no reason to settle for the first man who'd bedded her.

The affair drifted on for the best part of a year, and perhaps the oddest feature of it was the Duchess's continued indulgence. When she found the couple kissing in the great gallery, she enquired sharply if they thought her house was the King's Court, but she made no effort to separate them. For some reason the old lady had a particularly soft spot for Francis Dereham, but probably the truth was that she didn't take the matter very seriously. While society at large paid lip-service to the ideal of chastity, it also accepted the inevitability of a certain amount of pre-marital intercourse. Youth was naturally lusty, life was short, and there was no point in making too much fuss about something which could hardly be prevented. In some circles, among the respectable bourgeoisie and the lesser gentry for example, it was important that a girl should be a virgin when she married, but aristocrats like the Howards could afford to adopt a more permissive attitude. Unless she had made herself really notorious, very few families were going to turn down the opportunity of a match with a Howard lady. From her knowledge of her grand-daughter, the dowager could feel confident that she would forget Dereham as quickly as she had forgotten Henry Manox the moment some more exciting prospect appeared on the scene; besides, as Katherine knew as well as anyone, in her world love and marriage were two quite separate issues. The family, if they thought about it at all, simply took it for granted that when the time came to settle her future she would be ready to fulfil her obligations as befitted one of her breeding. Meanwhile, no one grudged her a few wild oats.