Catherine Howard Read online

  LACEY BALDWIN SMITH

  AMBERLEY

  This edition first published in Great Britain 2011

  Copyright © Lacey Baldwin Smith, 2009, 2010, 2011

  This electronic edition published 2011 by Amberley Publishing

  Amberley Publishing

  The Hill, Stroud

  Gloucestershire, GL5 4EP

  www.amberleybooks.com

  The right of David Loades to be identified as the Author of this work has been asserted

  in accordance with the Copyrights, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

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  eISBN 978-1-44560-0681-1

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  Contents

  Genealogical Table I

  Author’s Note

  Chapter 1: Alpha and Omega

  Chapter 2: The Howard Dynasty

  Chapter 3: Horsham and Lambeth

  Chapter 4: London Town

  Chapter 5: Rival Queens

  Chapter 6: ‘Harry With the Crown’

  Chapter 7: Indian Summer

  Chapter 8: Road to Traitors’ Gate

  Picture Section

  Abbreviations

  Genealogical Table II

  Appendix

  Notes

  List of Illustrations Bibliography

  Genealogical Table I

  Author’s Note

  The truth is that this book is the product of many minds, and of much labour by a number of persons other than the author. I am particularly indebted to my colleagues Wallace Douglas, J. Lyndon Shanley and Frederick Stimson for their careful reading of the text, and to Walter Richardson for his many helpful suggestions. Though it would be inaccurate to describe this biography as being ‘pure Neale’, it does, nevertheless, reflect considerable Nealean influence and a vast amount of hard work by Sir John, who read and criticized the manuscript, for which I am deeply grateful.

  CHAPTER 1

  Alpha and Omega

  At seven o’clock on the morning of 13 February, 1542, a young woman stepped out into the cold of the great courtyard of the Tower of London. Slowly she was escorted across the yard and carefully helped up the steps of the wooden scaffold. Only a small group of sightseers had gathered to watch the death of a queen; there was no weeping, no remorse, only chilly curiosity. The axe rose and fell, a life ceased, an episode came to an end, and the little band of privy councillors, ambassadors and citizens dispersed to their several duties.

  Such indifference poses a problem: wherein lies the drama and tragedy of Catherine Howard’s death? Is it to be sought for in the picture of vital youth so abruptly and mercilessly concluded? Possibly, but compassion for the unfulfilled promise of youth is dampened by the knowledge that her audience came not to mourn her death but to view it. Is the tragedy to be found in the brutality of an act of state necessity? Hardly, for few could find in the inner reaches of their hearts the conviction that Mistress Catherine Howard was undeserving of her fate. Possibly then the nature of her crime adds meaning to her death. The Queen was accused of having been a woman of ‘abominable carnal desires’ who had craftily and traitorously misled her royal spouse into believing she was ‘chaste and of pure, clean and honest living’. Worse still, she had followed ‘daily her frail and carnal lust’ and had actually ‘conspired, imagined, and encompassed’ the final destruction of the King. Adultery can add zest to a narrative and treason lend stature to a life, but in the case of Catherine Howard the records reveal neither grand passion nor high ideals. Catherine’s life was little more than a series of petty trivialities and wanton acts punctuated by sordid politics. It is, however, exactly here that one senses the ultimate tragedy. It is somehow shocking to our sense of justice to perceive the naked perversity of casual relationships that can transform juvenile delinquency into high treason.

  There is a disproportion about Catherine’s career that both repels and fascinates. She was a victim of inconsequentialities which somehow combined to produce a conclusion monstrously disproportionate to the myriad of petty causes. This book is an analysis of a life and a multitude of circumstances that culminated in violent death; a study of how chance and personality, morality and adultery, deliberate malice and good intentions, when operating within the limits set by environment, can create a single act in time – the swift descent of the executioner’s axe.

  Catherine’s death is not simply a lesson in Tudor morality. It is an exercise in historical causation and encompasses the entire ‘sink and puddle’ of palace politics and backstairs bickering which throve so abundantly within the garden of Henry VIII’s government. It stands as a grim reminder not only of the consequences of inadvertent folly, but also of the fact that all men are in some fashion victims of their age. Catherine’s execution attains the level of grand tragedy only in terms of her milieu – that of the vast Howard dynasty and its ambitions in an age of scarcely veiled ‘despotism’, when men played the risky game of politics with their lives and women were hapless pawns in the complex scheme of dynastic ambitions. Catherine Howard’s lighthearted idiocy was fatal only when fostered and distorted by family greed, royal absolutism, social callousness and violence, and a political theory that stripped the individual of all defence and left him alone and unprotected to face the truth that ‘the King’s wrath is death.’ Only when taken in their entirety do the random events merge into a design, which at no point was ever predetermined or even necessary, but which tempts one to ask of that final tragedy enacted in the courtyard of the Tower of London: How else could it have ended?

  CHAPTER 2

  The Howard Dynasty

  Catherine Howard’s life is comprehensible only in terms of her family; she was born a Howard, a member of a clan whose predatory instincts for self-survival, urge towards tribal aggrandizement, a sense of pompous conceit, and dangerous meddling in the destinies of state, shaped the course of her tragedy. Her career begins and ends with the illustrious house of Howard, which had its origins back in the shadowy years of the fifteenth century.

  Every age has its pushing young particles, families who are grasping after the golden apple of social respectability. But the early decades of the sixteenth century experienced something approaching a social revolution where upstart and adventurer, caitiff and villain, successfully rubbed shoulders with pedigreed nobles and peers of ancient lineage. No longer was it possible to discern a gentleman by dress alone, and one sixteenth-century snob inelegantly compared the social aspirants of his day to hatters’ blocks, since they ‘wear what is worthier than themselves.’1 Lacking in social status and family inheritance, the new courtiers who garnished the Tudor court and the parvenu gentlemen who found favour in the eyes of a nouveau riche dynasty were quick to manufacture what they could not claim by blood. Imposing pedigrees could always be devised, so long as sufficient money and political influence were available to induce a quizzical society to accept what it knew to be fabricated. Brute force, not legitimacy, lucre not blood, had
entrenched the Tudor monarchs upon the throne of England, and when the royal person sanctioned the work of eager and artful genealogists there were few subjects so bold as to challenge the subsequent document. It took but a minimum of artistry to contrive a series of noble forbears, and the royal heralds were pestered with the questionable armorial assertations of obscure families whose sudden rise to political and social distinction made it mandatory that they be ‘right worthily connected’.

  In theory the College of Arms granted the privilege to bear arms and the dignity of a gentleman only to those ‘of good name and fame and good renown’ who could substantiate their gentle breeding with an annual rental of £10. In actual fact there was constant complaint that grants of arms were being issued ‘to vile persons, bondsmen, and persons unable to take upon them any honour of noblesse’. The ancient order was constantly endeavouring to exclude those of more recent origin, and Hugh Vaughan, gentleman usher to Henry VII, was barred from jousting before the King by those of more credible ancestry because he ‘was no gentleman nobled to bear arms’.2 Not even his newly-conceived pedigree, properly sanctioned by the Garter King-of-Arms, was sufficient to win him recognition, until Henry decreed that his gentleman usher should joust with whom he pleased and should bear the arms issued him by the royal herald. Criticism was easily stifled when men became gentlemen by royal mandate. Only towards the end of the century did the social circulation begin to contract and claimants to gentle status have to prove their rights with more factual evidence.

  Even the Howards, who joined in their veins the blood of the most honoured families of the realm, had once been viewed by those of more ancient descent as social upstarts. Until marriage and political power had secured their house, they were held as new and strange men, ‘wild as a wild bullock’.3 A fortunate marriage and a series of propitious deaths miraculously translated them from stolid East Anglia stock into the heirs to the dukedom of Norfolk. Unimpeachable as their pedigree was, the Howards, like others of their kind, were not above a certain amount of ancestry manipulation, and by the seventeenth century they were asserting Saxon and early Norman blood as their heritage. The actual series of events, however, that elevated their house to noble pre-enunence commenced only in the year 1398, when Thomas, Lord Mowbray, tenth Earl and first Duke of Norfolk, was banished from the realm as a consequence of his political rivalry with Henry, Duke of Hereford, first cousin to Richard II. A year later, exiled and a vagrant in Central Europe, he died of what the chroniclers romantically describe as a broken heart, and the rights to the Dukedom passed to his four children – Thomas, who was conveniently executed five years later; John, who succeeded his brother; and two daughters, Isabel and Margaret. It is at this point that the Howards began the series of marriages that was to transform them into the most powerful dynasty of the sixteenth century, second only to the Tudors themselves, for Sir Robert Howard had the foresight to marry Margaret Mowbray. Auspicious as this union was, it could hardly have included ducal aspirations, since John Mowbray was presented with both a son and a grandson to carry on his name and title. Three generations passed, and suddenly in 1475 the last of the male Mowbrays died, and the rights to the barony and Dukedom were eventually bestowed upon the son of Sir Robert Howard and Margaret Mowbray.4

  This Howard child proved to be an exceptional man. Most men acquired wealth and power during those closing years of the fifteenth century by wearing their honour upon their sleeve and putting their military reputation up for auction to the highest bidder. John Howard was different; it was through steadfast devotion to the Yorkist cause during the civil Wars of the Roses, that he earned the trust of both Edward IV and Richard III. Armed with a sword in one hand and a bag of gold in the other, he joined the Yorkist ranks in 1461; twentytwo years later that consistency was finally acknowledged when Sir John, as co-heir to the Mowbray estates and titles, became the first Howard Duke of Norfolk, while his son, Thomas, was created Earl of Surrey.

  The Howard star so fortunately born of a propitious marriage a hundred years before now went into sudden and disastrous eclipse. Loyalty to the Yorkist crown had engendered fame and honour in success; in defeat it led to imprisonment and death. On 22 August 1485, the Yorkist faction was vanquished upon the high ground two miles from the market town of Bosworth. Richard III was left dead upon the field of battle, while the white rose of his family was trampled underfoot by the victorious army of Henry Tudor, Earl of Richmond. The Howards, father and son, were creatures of the Yorkist monarchy. Their dignity and estates had been bestowed as rewards for faithful service, and their rank and influence were but reflections of royal authority. As such they represented a new breed of nobility – the domesticated aristocrat. Unlike the Nevilles, the Percys, the Stanleys, and other baronial clans, they were tools of royalty, not custodians of ancient rights and feudal privileges. While Lord Thomas Stanley and his brother William maintained the doubtful tradition of king-making by a policy of cautious waiting that aimed at controlling the military balance between the opposing armies, Norfolk and his son fought for their liege lord, King Richard. The Duke was killed with his master, while Thomas was brought a prisoner to the Tower, his title and rights to the dukedom attainted by Act of Parliament, and his estates forfeited to the new sovereign.

  The victory of the Earl of Richmond at Bosworth augured nothing but continued civil strife – a prolonging of that unsavoury feudal game which had commenced sixty years before as factional rivalry over who should whisper self-interested advice into the King’s ear and had deteriorated into open civil war to decide which parry candidate should actually wear the crown. Behind the rival sovereigns stood the great baronial families, who sought to use the royal government to enlarge their estates, arrange their family alliances, assure their inheritance, and maintain their political and social influence. Thus the Wars of the Roses were marked more by the rifling of the royal coffers and the confiscation of land than by rapine and destruction. Bosworth was but another swing of the pendulum, and in the act of attainder against Thomas Howard, the supporters of the red rose of the house of Lancaster had what they wanted – the estates of their enemies. The old Duke of Norfolk was dead, while his son was little more than a political cipher, the fallen creature of a fallen monarch. Consequently Thomas was allowed to keep his head, and even in the midst of deprivation he was not totally bereft of comfort. The new King was surprisingly generous and paid to the Lieutenant of the Tower forty shillings a week for the Earl’s board and keep, and a further seven shillings and sixpence to maintain his three servants. Considering that the normal fee ranged between three and six shillings a week, it would appear that Thomas Howard lacked little except his freedom.5

  At this juncture historical fact gives way to family fable – legends that have the ring of truth but may be little more than Howard efforts to revamp history more to the family’s tastes. Presumably there were two occasions on which the attainted Earl came to the attention of Henry VII. The first story involves the Battle of Bosworth when Surrey was brought captive before the Conqueror. Henry Tudor is purported to have reproached his prisoner for having fought for that ‘tyrant’, Richard III; in answer, Thomas Howard said: ‘He was my crowned King, and if the Parliamentary authority of England set the Crown upon a stock I will fight for that stock. And as I fought then for him, I will fight for you, when you are established by the said authority’.6 Verisimilitude is a deceptive matter, and on the face of it Howard’s words were uncharacteristic of his age and most certainly unwelcome to the ears of a new monarch who claimed his crown by God, by right and by conquest, and not by the authority of parliament. On the other hand, Henry VII recognized the legal dilemma involved, for how could the Earl of Surrey be attainted for high treason for supporting in battle his legal sovereign? A solution was discovered by the simple expedient of maintaining the fiction that the new reign had commenced the day before the Battle of Bosworth so that, legally, all those who had fought against Henry had in fact committed treason against their liege lor
d.

  Might was quite capable of creating its own right, but once the throne had been secured, Henry VII may well have appreciated the value of fostering those who supported the crown, irrespective of the man who wore it. In the long run Thomas Howard was a more reliable and useful instrument of the monarchy than the two Stanleys, whose actions at Bosworth had won Henry his crown but who operated in the tradition of the irresponsible right of aristocracy, as opposed to the divine right of kings. Nor was it accident that the Earl of Surrey was eventually liberated from his confinement in the Tower and became a devoted Tudor work-horse, while Sir William Stanley in 1494 ended his life on the scaffold, having connived at treason against the Tudor crown.

  The second episode fits the same pattern of events. In 1487 the Earl of Lincoln, nephew of Edward IV and Richard III, staged one of the last efforts of the Yorkist faction to regain the throne. When the Earl landed in England, it first appeared as if the sides would be evenly matched, and before the decisive battle was fought, rumours were circulated that Henry Tudor had in fact met the Yorkist forces and been defeated. In the face of these reports, the Lieutenant of the Tower offered Thomas Howard his freedom. In an excess of what the Howard records prefer to regard as virtuous devotion, Thomas stoutly maintained that ‘he would not depart thence unto such time as he that commanded him thither should command him out again.’