a lawyer in London. Her half sister Joyce was also married and out of the house.50 Even by including Jane, Edmund’s claim that he had to maintain ten children in 1527 does not seem to be entirely accurate, but debt seldom stimulates a compulsion toward honesty.
Catherine’s early life is thus difficult to trace – one of the youngest in a large family amid a wealth of contradictions. She possessed one of the most respected surnames in the country, but at least initially it brought her little in terms of material comfort or security. Her father was theoretically one of the pillars of the local community, but in practice he spent most of her childhood hiding from his creditors and resorting to increasingly desperate methods to get his hands on the money they needed. Whether her time in her father’s household was happy or not, we have no way of knowing. It was certainly short. Her mother died in about 1528 or 1529 and her father swiftly remarried, to another widow, Dorothy Troyes. This marriage, too, seems to have been short, since Dorothy’s will was made in the early summer of 1530, by which point Catherine’s first cousin, Anne Boleyn, was firmly established at court as queen-to-be.51 Anne possessed the natural assertiveness that bordered on bossiness common in someone who was often found, or believed herself, to be more competent than those around her. She set out to find her hapless uncle Edmund a job, and when the death of Sir William Hussey opened up a vacancy for the post of comptroller to the civic authorities at the port of Calais, she pounced.52 Putting Edmund in the post of comptroller with its heavy financial duties was a little like putting the poacher in charge of the game. With unintentional irony, the decision was finalised on April Fool’s Day 1531.53
For Edmund, the chance to get safely across the Channel could not have come at a more opportune time. Within a few months of his departure, his friend John Shookborough had been arrested as guarantor for Edmund’s debts. Realising that the net was closing around him, and horrified to discover the extent of his friend’s financial deceptions, Shookborough tried to catch the attention of Thomas Cromwell as he attended Mass at the Augustinian friary near his home in Austin Friars, hopeful that a message could be passed on to the court through him. Unfortunately, Cromwell did not see Shookborough in the crowd, and as the latter returned into the city, he was arrested for £26 of Lord Edmund’s debts. In a letter to Cromwell he admitted, ‘I am surety for more, and dare not go abroad in the city.’ To avoid prison, Shookborough had to pledge two of his family’s best items of clothing to the creditors, and he offered Cromwell a gelding ‘for your favour’ in helping him out of the mess in which friendship with Edmund had landed him.54
Edmund arrived in Calais on St Nicholas’s Day 1531, amid the December chill, with an introductory letter from Anne Boleyn clutched in his hands. He took it to the town’s vice treasurer, Thomas Fowler, who was canny enough to realise the tacit instructions implicit in Anne’s avalanche of complimentary charm: ‘At his coming here on St Nicholas Day,’ he told his brother, ‘he [Edmund] brought me a letter from my lady Anne, directed to you and me, which my lord commanded me to open, giving us great thanks for our kindness to my lord Edmund.’55
At some point between April and December 1531, between the announcement of Edmund’s new post and his assumption of his duties, his household in Surrey was broken up. Two of the girls were married – Isabella Leigh to Sir Edward Baynton, a widowed courtier with seven young children, and Margaret Howard to Thomas Arundell, a close friend of the Earl of Northumberland and son of a Cornish gentry family who were wealthy enough not to need a sizeable dowry.56 Edmund’s other children were old enough to begin the process of education in another’s household; we do not know where the others went, but both Catherine and, at some unknown point, her brother Henry, were invited to live as wards of their wealthiest female relative, the Dowager Duchess of Norfolk.
Chapter 4
But oh, young babies, whom blood … hath endowed with grace, comeliness, and high ability … it were great pity but that ye added to sovereign beauty virtue and good manners.
– Dr Furnivall, ‘The Babees’ Book or A Little Report on how young people should behave’ (c.1475)
When Catherine Howard arrived in the Sussex village of Horsham in 1531, she had every reason to feel thankful for the fact that her gender had spared her a grammar school education similar to those endured by her grandfather and many of her peers.1 Contemporary gossip was rife with horror stories of how young, upper-class boys were disciplined at their boarding schools – the philosopher Erasmus of Rotterdam relayed tales of students beaten nearly to the point of unconsciousness by their masters, forced to swallow salt, vinegar, or urine as a form of punishment, and how the schools ran on ‘howling and sobbing and cruel threatenings’.2 When Elizabeth I, ‘being a learned Princess’, visited Westminster School a few decades later, schools’ reputation for unchecked corporal punishment was so widespread that she bypassed the official meet-and-greet to talk directly to one pupil ‘of a fair, and ingenious countenance’. The queen stroked the young man’s head and ‘demanded him to tell her how often he had been whipped’. The boy paused, but ‘being witty’ he answered the royal query by quoting Virgil’s Aeneid, ‘Most gracious Queen, you do desire to know, / A grief unspeakable and full of woe.’3
Instead, Catherine, about eight or nine years old in 1531, could expect her education to be conducted privately through a set of tutors chosen by her grandmother, whose principal manor, Chesworth House, sat on the edge of Horsham village, where life continued in much the same way as it had for decades. The Howard influence in Horsham remained strong. They hand-selected its Member of Parliament, often predictably picking a member of their extended family. The provisions needed to feed, clothe, and heat the dowager and her staff accounted for a significant chunk of the area’s economy, a relationship replicated across Tudor England, where the nobility stimulated and sustained the employment of tens of thousands of people – not just those who farmed and traded in the supplies they needed, but also those who served them. From the figures available to us, it seems that nearly two-thirds of people aged between fifteen and twenty-four worked as servants in this period, either to the aristocracy or to the middle classes, and somewhere between a quarter and half of the total population were in domestic service at some point in their lives.4
Like most girls with a similar background, Catherine had grown up with servants, but the sheer number she saw as she was led across the drawbridge of her grandmother’s pretty moated manor at Chesworth could not have been a familiar sight.5 Even if widows usually kept smaller households than a married noblewoman, the scale of the dowager’s establishment would have been difficult to comprehend for a young girl who had spent her infancy at the mercy of her father’s financial fluctuations. As the fourth highest-ranking woman in the kingdom, Agnes Howard did not keep a small household.6 It would have been considered unseemly for her to do so. Etiquette guides from the time suggested it was appropriate for a duke or duchess to have about 240 servants.7 As with most manners manuals, this was only a guideline, and some peers, such as the late Duke of Buckingham who employed nearly 500, preferred
