mercifully without any supporting detail. Manox certainly put Catherine under pressure to consummate their relationship and reacted crudely when she ended things between them, but none of this supports a hypothesis of sustained and deliberate abuse. In the first place, we do not know Manox’s date of birth, and given the average age of the group he consorted with, he was likely to have been five years older than Catherine at the very most. Furthermore, the scenario of Manox using their lessons to bully her into a sexual relationship is undercut by reading transcripts from the investigations of 1541, which prove Catherine’s lessons were actually taken by two teachers at the same time – Manox and another man, Barnes – during which Catherine would have been chaperoned.68 However, if not horrible, their relationship was nonetheless inappropriate, on several levels.
Catherine began her lessons with Manox and Barnes in 1536. The attraction between Catherine and Manox seems to have been relatively slow-burning, but eventually the couple were sending each other little gifts, with a young maid called Dorothy Barwick being the first to carry tokens on Catherine’s behalf.69 Manox later claimed that ‘he fell in love with [Catherine] and she with him’, but that was not how others remembered it.70 More honestly and less nobly, he and Catherine found each other very attractive, and the taboo nature of their affair, particularly the difference in class, added a certain inevitable spice. To meet up alone and outside their lessons would have required significant skills of subterfuge. Catherine did not bring Manox into her shared dormitory, so where they found the time and venue to progress along the bases of physical intimacy is anybody’s guess. They had perhaps been meeting on several occasions when the dowager discovered them kissing in an alcove near the chapel one afternoon. She slapped Catherine two or three times and reiterated that they were never to be left alone together.71 They did not obey her, but they had the sense to become more discreet. While it remained an open secret to many other people at Chesworth, they subsequently and successfully hid their relationship from the dowager.
They were still seeing each other in early 1538, when a young woman called Mary Lascelles arrived to serve in the household on a regular basis.72 She was working as a nursemaid to one of Catherine’s infant cousins when the child’s father, Lord William Howard, the dowager’s youngest surviving son, began to spend more time in his mother’s household.73 Tudor house guests sometimes stayed longer than modern tenants, so their servants ended up living and serving alongside the owner’s. Lord William, a diplomat and soldier, had recently been widowed and married again, to Margaret Gamage, the daughter of a Welsh landowner. He had one daughter, Agnes, from his first marriage and at least one son from his second by 1538. Mary the nursemaid was a prim young girl from a family who took the Reformation very seriously, and she was horrified at what she heard about her master’s niece – two fellow maids, Isabel and Dorothy, admitted to her that they had been carrying messages and love tokens from Catherine to Manox.
Concerned, Mary reached out in a spirit of servant solidarity to Manox to warn him of the danger he was in. She told him that if he had any plans to marry Catherine, they were impossible as ‘she is come of a noble house and if thou should marry her some of her blood would kill thee’. Manox was contemptuous: ‘Hold thy peace, woman. I know her well enough.’ With maximum honesty and minimal charm, he explained, ‘I have had her by the cunt and she hath said to me that I shall have her maidenhead though it be painful to her, not doubting but I will be good to her hereafter.’74
Manox’s boast shot through the gossip network of the house, flying with rumour’s customary unerring skill right to the ears of its subject. Catherine’s heart was not exactly warmed when she heard what Manox had said about her, and she ended their affair, even in the face of Manox pleading that he ‘was so far in love with her that he wist [knew] not what he said’.75 Catherine, by then fifteen or sixteen, was disbelieving and unimpressed. She was firm to the point of brutal in her bad temper. During their argument, she pointed out, ‘I will never be nought with you and able to marry me ye be not.’76 This comment is usually interpreted by historians as an example of snobbery on Catherine’s part – a wounding reminder that their respective backgrounds made the idea of marriage absurd. Had Catherine meant to make that point, she would have been unkind and accurate. In fact, it seems that she was actually being more specific. Manox could not marry her because he was already engaged to somebody else or already married. Catherine’s uncle William is mentioned calling ‘on him [Manox] and his wife at their own door’ shortly after Manox’s liaison with Catherine ended.77 That Manox was engaged at the time he became involved with Catherine and married shortly after would explain both their comments about the improbability of their dalliance ending in marriage and her decision to keep their physical intimacy in check. If Catherine did intend to lose her virginity to Manox, despite her reticence, his comments about her and his fiancée gave her the motivation to end things before they went any further. All her life, Catherine hated to be humiliated and reacted strongly when faced with disrespect or embarrassment.
A few days after their quarrel, Catherine had softened and agreed to hear Manox out one last time. The two went for a stroll in the duchess’s orchards. Manox seems to have mistaken this promenade as a sign that the relationship might soon be back on track, but it was only well-meaning politesse on Catherine’s part. Her mood had altered, but her mind was made up, and not long after that she found a replacement for Manox in the form of Francis Dereham, her grandmother’s secretary.
* Lord Daubeney was not elevated to the earldom until 1538. However, for clarity’s sake, especially in differentiating her from her niece, the elder Katherine Howard will usually be referred to as ‘the countess’ from now on.
* This was not the Duke of Norfolk, but his younger half brother with the same name, Lord Thomas Howard. In the same year, another of Agnes’s children, her daughter Lady Elizabeth Radclyffe, died of natural causes.
Chapter 5
For among all that is loved in a wench chastity and cleanness is loved most.
– Bartholomew of England, De proprietatibus rerum (c.1240)
Catherine never could make a clean break of things. Time and time again, she went back to pick at a wound, drawn irresistibly to the drama of the supposed farewell or the intimacy of an emotional conversation. Her tête-à-tête with Manox in the orchard only a few days after she broke off their relationship was the first recorded instance of a trait that left too many of her actions open to misinterpretation. As Manox nursed hopes of reconciliation, Catherine entered a more adult world. The dowager’s household began to spend more time at Norfolk House in her home parish of Lambeth, the Howards’ recently completed mansion on the opposite side of the river to Whitehall, the king’s largest and still-expanding palace. There, Catherine began to see more of the relatives who lived in the capital or at court – her elder half sister, Lady Isabella Baynton, visited the dowager, and their brother Henry had married and brought his new wife to live with him.
Catherine conformed to general contemporary ideals of beauty, which praised women who had
