the courtyard at Chesworth House, or Chesworth Place as it was sometimes known, Catherine got her first sight of the dozens of men and women who attended her grandmother.9 The chief household officers, like the steward who essentially ran the establishment, the treasurer, and the chaplain, Father Borough, who looked after the house’s religious valuables and spiritual needs, wore cloaks sporting the dowager’s personal coat of arms in bright threads as they walked to or from their offices, all of which were located within the house proper. The chaplain’s deputy, the almoner, was in charge of arranging for charity to be given to the local poor and for any food that was left uneaten to be distributed at the manor gates. Valets, whose job was very different to their more famous Edwardian counterparts, might be on their way to check on the grain stock in the stables, while young grooms cleaned out the stalls nearby. Little pageboys, the only servants likely to be on a pittance of a salary or none at all, ran through the house carrying messages, fulfilling errands from their superiors, and trying to find time to attend training to work in another part of the household once they were older. The servants certainly had enough tasks to keep them occupied. Chesworth had its own orchard, slaughterhouse, large kitchens, a pantry to oversee the production and storage of bread, a buttery that stored the manor’s ale, beers, and wine, and a great hall where the household dined and the dowager could entertain her guests. A career in service was not considered in any way demeaning – society was hierarchical, and the rewards and security offered by employment with the aristocracy were substantial. All the servants wore uniforms and they were expected to conform to expectations that a good servant should be ‘neatly clad, his clothes not torn, hands and faces well washed and head well kempt’.10
As Catherine was ushered down Chesworth’s long corridors, the signs of her grandmother’s fortune were everywhere. This was a woman so wealthy that she kept £800 in silver around the house in case of an emergency; to give an idea of the scale of that hoarding, one of Catherine’s aunts had been expected to maintain a family and a household on about £50 a few years earlier, another lived comfortably on £196.11 Cleaners bustled around placing reeds and rushes on the floor or sweeping them away for hygiene’s sake once they became too dirty. When they entered the dowager’s presence, Catherine and her brother were expected to bow or curtsey and to repeat that action in miniature every time she asked them a question, ‘otherwise, stand as still a stone’.12 Like their servants, they were taught that it was impolite to sigh, cough, or breathe too loudly in the lady of the house’s presence.13
The abundance on display at Chesworth underscored why Edmund Howard was considered such a failure by his contemporaries. Consumption and display were part of the nobility’s duty, a clause in the social contract, by which they generated work for those around them and upheld the class system whose origins were believed to mirror Heaven’s. As part of his Christmas celebrations a few years earlier, Catherine’s uncle Thomas, Duke of Norfolk, had hosted a dinner for 580 guests one night and then another for 399 five days later.14 A frugal aristocrat was a source of universal contempt in the sixteenth century; an indebted one even more so.
The Dowager Duchess of Norfolk was only fifty-four years old when Catherine first came into her care. The daughter of two gentry families from Lincolnshire, Agnes had come to the late duke’s attention when his first wife, Agnes’s kinswoman, passed away. Agnes’s brother Philip had then been the duke’s steward, a position often given to members of one’s extended affinity, and despite – or because of – the fact that he was nearly thirty-five years older, the duke was sufficiently smitten with Agnes’s charms to marry her regardless of the fact that she brought him little in the way of a dowry. She was thus technically Catherine’s step-grandmother, since Edmund was born from the duke’s first marriage.
Agnes’s late husband had left her twenty-four manors, and the tetchy, opinionated dowager used them to finance a life of luxury and convenience, expressing her opinions as and when they came to her. She wrote chatty letters full of unsolicited medical advice to Cardinal Wolsey, perhaps patronised poets including, quite possibly, the famous John Skelton, and made sarcastic quips at the expense of everyone from the royal court to her stepson the Duke of Norfolk.15 During an outbreak of the plague in 1528, she told a visitor that the reason the sickness had affected some of the duke’s servants was the slipshod management of his household staff.16 Time was to show that Agnes did not have a firm hand on the rudder of her own retinue either, but like most witty people she did not let accusations of hypocrisy stand in the way of a memorable put-down. She was a generous employer, an inveterate gossip, and conscious of the magnificence of her position – one of the many jewels she owned was a personalised initial ‘A’, crafted from pearls and set with diamonds.17 To her wards, the dowager duchess was a strict but inconsistent guardian. The pearls, the diamonds, and the lady herself were often away from Catherine for extended periods, mainly at court.18
In the meantime, Catherine settled into life at Chesworth and its acres of fine deer-hunting country.19 Our image of a rough-and-tumble Tudor England, replete with belching men with earthy appetites gnawing at chicken legs, and buxom serving wenches, is not a world that Catherine or her contemporaries would have recognised. From infancy, she was expected to learn etiquette and to behave appropriately. Guides and manuals from the era laid out in great detail how the children of the gentry and nobility should behave from the moment they woke up in the morning – ‘Arise from your bed, cross your breast and your forehead, wash your hands and face, comb your hair, and ask the grace of God to speed you in all your works; then go to Mass and ask mercy for all your trespasses. When ye have done, break your fast with good meat and drink, but before eating cross your mouth, your diet will be better for it. Then say your grace – it occupies but little time – and thank the Lord Jesus for your food and drink. Say also a Pater Noster and Ave Maria for the souls that lie in pain’ – to how long they should nap and how they should enter a room.20 When Catherine was brought into her grandmother’s company she was expected to ‘enter with head up and at an easy pace’ and say ‘God speed’ by way of greeting, before sinking into a curtsey.21 Obeisance was worked on ad nauseam. A clumsy dip was an embarrassment that no girl could afford in Tudor high society; one Howard had a servant repeat a perfect bow a hundred times after the poor man had been in such a rush that he admitted his previous attempt had been made on ‘a running leg’.22 Catherine was told to look straight at whoever was speaking to her, to listen carefully to whatever they were saying, to make sure they knew that she was paying attention – ‘see to it with all your might that ye jangle not, nor let your eyes wander about’ – and ‘with blithe visage and diligent spirit’ set herself to the task of being as charming and interesting as possible. Her anecdotes and stories should be entertaining and to the point, since too ‘many words are right tedious to the wise man who listens; therefore eschew them’.23 Above all, she must learn to act like a lady in front of her relatives – to stand until they told her otherwise, to keep her hands and feet still, never to lean on anything, or scratch any part of herself, even something as innocuous as her face or arms.24
This curriculum was part of the rationale behind the farming out of English aristocratic children to their relatives, a custom which foreign visitors often found peculiar. It was believed that parents might spoil or indulge their own children and thus neglect their education. Even if Edmund had not gone to Calais, Catherine would at some point probably have found herself attached
