and Katherine with a husband she came to loathe – but in difficult circumstances, Queen Anne was a worthwhile ally. Young Catherine was one of dozens of the queen’s cousins, nieces, aunts, uncles, and extended relatives who would look to her for advancement, especially in bringing them to court to serve her in lucrative obedience. In Calais, rumour had it that Catherine’s father did not plan to live out his life as a comptroller but ‘hopes to be here in the court with the King or the Queen, and have a better living’.50 But court gossip was vicious and mercurial, savaging those it had once nurtured. Just as an anonymous letter years earlier had damaged Edmund’s standing in the aftermath of the Battle of Flodden, whispers on the court grapevine tried to harm the countess. ‘I have none to do me help except the Queen,’ she wrote in a letter, ‘to whom am I much bound, and with whom much effort is made to draw her favour from me.’51 The more Howards around Anne, the better, and even if she was not destined to serve at the queen’s side, Catherine needed to continue learning the courtly graces. She was not going to spend her whole life at Chesworth House.
On 2 May 1536, the ground shifted beneath the family in the most devastating fashion since their defeat at Bosworth. Shortly after lunch, Queen Anne Boleyn was arrested and rowed upriver to the Tower of London, where, seventeen days later, she bowed off the earthly stage after tucking the hem of her dress under her shoes, hoping to preserve her dignity once her body collapsed forward into the straw.52 Two days earlier, another of Catherine’s cousins, Lord Rochford, perished as collateral damage in the quest to ruin the queen, along with Sir William Brereton, a Welsh landowner who had once been supported by the countess’s first husband.53 In seventeen days, the Howard women had been robbed of their most celebrated kinswoman, and while it is tempting to think that the people at Chesworth spoke of Anne’s fate in much the same horrified, incredulous way as distant relatives like the Ashleys or the Champernownes seem to have, it is equally possible that Catherine’s friends discussed the events of 1536 with the same unthinkingly gleeful acceptance that greets so many political or royal scandals, no matter how improbable their details.54 The government’s version of events that had Anne as a bed-hopping, murderous adulteress certainly made for a good story, so good in fact that its manifest falsities still cling to popular perceptions of its victims, almost five hundred years later.
If the family was not already nervous enough, within weeks of the queen’s execution Catherine’s younger uncle Thomas was also sent to the Tower, after his secret betrothal to the king’s niece, Lady Margaret Douglas, was discovered.* The king was apoplectic and chose to see the romance as part of a plot to place the Howards closer to the throne.55 The couple were separated and while Margaret was eventually released, Thomas died of a fever after eighteen months in prison. His body was handed back to the dowager, who was granted permission to bury her son next to his father at Thetford on condition that ‘that she bury him without pomp’.56
Throughout the scandal caused by Thomas’s elopement, the Pilgrimage of Grace rebellion convulsed the north of England. Thousands rose in protest at the closure of the monasteries and the gathering pace of religious revolution. Even a young girl growing up in a country house in the south cannot have missed the changes affecting England after the break with Rome. Catherine’s family were initially sympathetic to the king’s quarrel with the pope, but by 1536 they were beginning to feel a mounting sense of dread. Edmund Howard had sworn the mandatory oath acknowledging the king as head of the Church in 1534, yet a few years later he and his colleagues in Calais were accused of failing to implement the king’s latest spiritual policies.57 Even the late queen, the alleged harbinger of the English Reformation, had shown signs of swinging towards theological conservatism in the months before her death.58 When news of the northern uprising reached Horsham, the dowager showed herself supremely reluctant to honour her feudal obligations and provide men to help suppress it.59 Her sons and stepsons felt differently, perhaps mindful of their precarious position in the king’s favour after the events of the summer, and it was Lord William Howard who eventually had the lucky honour of kneeling at Henry’s feet with the news that the north had submitted.60
At this point, Catherine was about thirteen or fourteen years old. Sometime between her cousins’ executions and her uncle’s death, she began formal music lessons. Thirteen was a little late to start the music lessons that many children in her position had been taking from the ages of six or seven, so it is possible that she had some lessons earlier, though Catherine’s formal education does seem to have been somewhat neglected. Unlike several of her relatives, she was never singled out for praise for her musical or literary abilities. By the autumn of 1536, her schooling had focused on teaching her how to read, write, walk, talk, stand, dance, and move in a way guaranteed to please her contemporaries, but not much else.
Her principal music teacher was a young man called Henry Manox, brought in by the dowager, possibly on the recommendation of his kinsman, Robert Damport, who was already in her service.61 Manox deviated little from the stereotype of an arrogant, young, emotionally impulsive musician. He set the mould for the type of man Catherine was subsequently drawn to – handsome, cocky, more brawn than brain, and passionate to the point of possessive. Several of Catherine’s friends already had romantic entanglements with the young gentlemen of the household – as with most establishments before the late seventeenth century, women were in the minority on the dowager’s staff – and Catherine and Manox began a flirtation that eventually progressed to kissing and fondling. In modern parlance, they fooled around but did not go all the way.62
This relationship forms the first piece of ‘evidence’ in a recent theory about Catherine’s life, namely that she was the victim of repeated sexual abuse throughout puberty, with Manox being the first of several men to groom her.63 Variations on this narrative describe Manox as a predator or simply the first in a succession of men, such as Francis Dereham, who repeatedly raped her. The latter interpretation can only be sustained by either wilful or accidental ignorance of almost every piece of relevant surviving evidence. It requires misrepresenting Catherine’s personality, disregarding the biographical details of everyone around her, and twisting beyond recognition every comment made by most of the people who knew her. This is not to suggest that such abuse did not happen – the young Elizabeth I was molested and horribly manipulated by her stepfather, Thomas Seymour, in a relationship that was not just quite clearly one we would characterise as abuse, but which was described as such in contemporaries’ vocabulary for it.64 Cases of child abuse were reported and prosecuted, and the concept was understood in the early modern era, so it is untrue to say that there was no perception of victimhood or coercion.65 The memoirs of the fourteenth-century merchant’s wife Margery Kempe recounted an argument that contained a threat of what would now clearly be recognised as marital rape, if the husband did not get what he wanted.66 Admittedly, Catherine herself would later claim that she had been forced into sexual relations at this stage in her life, but it can be shown that she was lying, and doing so in desperate circumstances.67 Against that claim, which no one at the time believed, there is a mountain of precise evidence, from those who knew her and from the men involved, about when her relationships began, how they began, their consensual basis, and above all, Catherine’s role in ending them when she lost interest.
The
