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

       INTRODUCTION

      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.

      Establishing who Catherine’s ladies-in-waiting

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