Gareth Russell - Young and Damned and Fair - The Life and Tragedy of Catherine Howard at the Court of Henry VIII

William Collins

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This eBook first published in Great Britain by William Collins in 2017

Copyright © Gareth Russell 2017

Maps and family trees by Martin Brown

Extract from Die Lorelei from Collected Poems and Drawings by Stevie Smith, London, Faber and Faber Ltd, 2015. Kind permission granted by the publishers.

Cover image shows ‘Portrait of a Young Woman, 1540–45, oil on wood’, Holbein, Hans the Younger (1497–1543). New York, Metropolitan Museum of Art. The Jules Bache Collection, 1949 (49.7.30) © 2016 The Metropolitan Museum of Art/Art Resource/Scala, Florence.

Gareth Russell asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

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Source ISBN: 9780008128289

Ebook Edition © January 2017 ISBN: 9780008128296

Version: 2017-12-06

For my grandparents,

Robert and Mary Russell

and

Richard and Iris Mahaffy

An antique story comes to me

And fills me with anxiety,

I wonder why I fear so much

What surely has no modern touch?

… There, on a rock majestical,

A girl with smile equivocal

Painted, young and damned and fair

Sits and combs her yellow hair.

– Stevie Smith, Die Lorelei

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Epigraph

Maps

Family Trees

Introduction

1. The Hour of Our Death

2. Our Fathers in Their Generation

3. Lord Edmund’s Daughter

4. The Howards of Horsham

5. Mad Wenches

6. The King’s Highness Did Cast a Fantasy

7. The Charms of Catherine Howard

8. The Queen of Britain Will Not Forget

9. All These Ladies and My Whole Kingdom

10. The Queen’s Brothers

11. The Return of Francis Dereham

12. Jewels

13. Lent

14. For They Will Look Upon You

15. The Errands of Morris and Webb

16. The Girl in the Silver Dress

17. The Chase

18. Waiting for the King of Scots

19. Being Examined by My Lord of Canterbury

20. A Greater Abomination

21. The King Has Changed His Love into Hatred

22. Ars Moriendi

23. The Shade of Persephone

Appendix I: The Alleged Portraits of Catherine Howard

Appendix II: The Ladies of Catherine Howard’s Household

Appendix III: The Fall of Catherine Howard

Acknowledgements

List of Illustrations

Picture Section

Bibliography

Notes

Index

About the Author

By the Same Author

About the Publisher

In the Great Hall at Hampton Court Palace, magnificent tapestries depicting scenes from the life of the patriarch Abraham are on display. Every day, hundreds of tourists pass these enormous works of art which cost Henry VIII almost as much as the construction of a new warship. After centuries of exposure, their colours had faded and the bright sparkle of the threads of beaten gold had worn away, until a lengthy conservation project carried out between the Historic Royal Palaces, the Clothworkers’ Company, and the University of Manchester offered a reconstruction and an academic paper conveying just how vibrant the tapestries would have been when they were first unveiled. Their detail is extraordinary, mesmeric. The reflections of mallard ducks floating on the ponds are visible, reeds sway in the wind, every face is detailed, sandals and toenails are stitched perfectly, bread in a servant’s basket is believably coloured. Crucially, part of the conservation work necessitated turning the tapestries over to look at the threads at the back and see all the ugly, confusing stitch-work that had gone into making the familiar scene on the front possible.

My interest in the story of Henry VIII’s fifth wife, Queen Catherine Howard, began years ago and solidified in 2011 when, under the supervision of Dr James Davis at Queen’s University, Belfast, I completed my postgraduate dissertation on her household.1 As with all Henry’s wives, Catherine’s life had been written about many times in biographies and studies of her husband’s reign. In the year of Henry VIII’s death, an Italian merchant remarked, ‘The discourse of these wives is a wonderful history’, an observation that captures why the Tudors remain one of England’s most famous dynasties.2 In Catherine’s case, the circumstances of her career had already been dissected in A Tudor Tragedy: The Life and Times of Catherine Howard , first published in New York in 1961 and generally judged the standard biography of her. Written by Professor Lacey Baldwin Smith, the central contention of A Tudor Tragedy was that Catherine’s ‘career begins and ends with the Howards, a clan whose predatory instincts for self-aggrandisement, sense of pompous conceit, and dangerous meddling in the destinies of state, shaped the course of her tragedy.’3

I intended to use Catherine’s sixteen-month period as queen consort as a useful framing device to analyse the queen’s household, one of the least-studied but most fascinating components of Henry VIII’s court: how it functioned, who populated it, who dominated it, how it was financed, and how it interacted with the wider court.4 The thesis would place one early modern queen of England, in this case the hapless Catherine Howard, in the context of a life lived not just next to the great men of the early English Reformation but amongst the servants, ladies-in-waiting, and favourites, without whom no great aristocratic lady could function and from whom she was seldom, if ever, separated. I did not, initially, expect to find anything remarkably different about her rise and fall.

Instead, I came to the conclusion that the queen’s household had shaped the trajectory of Catherine’s career. Popular culture often presents Tudor royal households, particularly a queen’s, as beautiful irrelevances. Sumptuously dressed ladies-in-waiting whispering behind their fans, dancing or throwing coy glances, are familiar images of life in the queens’ establishments. In many works of fiction, these characters seem to spend a good deal of their time giggling over something which is not credibly amusing. The reality was far more interesting.