held that ‘men fall into various illnesses through retaining their seed with them’, while in Catherine’s lifetime the Bishop of Rochester argued that an orgasm damaged a man’s health more ‘than by shedding of ten times so much blood’.22 A large part of the dichotomy stemmed from the age-old question of whether sex was something to be enjoyed or endured and if, in circumstances such as marriage or procreation, it might become something praiseworthy. The philosopher Sylvester Prierias Mazzolini, who died around the time of Catherine’s birth, argued that any deviation from the missionary position was a contraceptive, itself a sin, and that the pursuit of sexual pleasure, even within wedlock, was fundamentally dangerous. Couples who were engaged often began a sexual relationship before the actual wedding service, a custom with which certain members of the priesthood had no quarrel but others found to be objectionable.
Almost none of Catherine’s contemporaries disregarded the Church’s teachings on sex in their entirety, but equally there is plenty of evidence that very few accepted them in full. Moralists noted with concern, disappointment, and apparent surprise that very few men admitted to masturbation when they confessed their sins.23 The suggestion that couples should wait three days before consummating a marriage was almost universally ignored.24 Clerical tomes lambasted homosexual activity, masturbation, foreplay, oral sex, and anal sex, lumping them all together as sodomy, but even here there were inconsistencies. For every morality guide that ranked homosexual sex in the same category of vice as masturbation, there were others that ranked it just above bestiality, such as the manual written to help confessors in the assigning of penance which carefully ranked every sexual transgression from the least severe (an unchaste kiss) to the worst (bestiality). In the same list of ascending vice, incest was number eleven, while masturbation was jarringly ranked as number twelve, which was four ranks worse than the rape of a virgin, itself classed as marginally worse than the rape or abduction of a married woman. Many lay Christians found these debates absurd and correspondingly ignored thundering assertions like the one that claimed that if a sinner ‘has foully touched his own member so that he has polluted himself and poured out his own semen, this sin is greater than if he had lain with his own mother’.25
However, even if people did not always pay attention to the obsessively detailed denunciations from the guardians of sexual morality, there was still widespread acceptance of the importance of chastity, especially in women, and a belief that sexual intercourse created a bond between two people that could not easily be broken. Medicine taught that women were more lustful than men, more illogical, more emotional, and more susceptible to biological impulses. Female orgasm was believed to be desirable in securing a conception, perhaps one of the few pieces of medical advice that worked in a woman’s favour in the 1530s. The rest seemed to focus either on their emotional volatility or the horrors that sex could inflict on them – childbirth, after all, killed many, and contemporary textbooks acknowledged that some women endured great pain during sex itself, perhaps because of a prolapsed uterus or some other infirmity, when ‘such women cannot endure a man’s penis because of the size of it, and sometimes they are forced to endure it whether they would or not’.26
A woman’s life could be ended or ruined by the consequences of sex, a point which was constantly stressed in the hope of encouraging restraint. Virginity, or perhaps more accurately an unsullied reputation, was the most valuable part of an aristocratic lady’s social armour. Without it, she was a defenceless and easy target. Catherine was clearly enjoying her sexual relationship with Francis, while doing her research in how to avoid becoming a mother. Her boast that she knew how to ‘meddle’ with a man without risking pregnancy suggests that she knew something about oral sex – number fourteen in the aforementioned confessors’ manual, between having sex outside the missionary position and homosexuality – or the other rudiments of sixteenth-century contraception. In the rural idyll at Horsham or behind the walls of her grandmother’s London mansion, it was easy to make the mistake of thinking that biology and the disapproving stares of Mary Lascelles were her greatest threats.
Before the dowager arrived at her pew for morning Mass, her servants gathered the usual pile of letters left there as petitions for her. After a service at Lambeth, one note brought a nasty surprise: it claimed that if the dowager went up to the maidens’ chamber half an hour after her usual bedtime ‘you shall see that which shall displease you’.27 The dowager ‘stormed’ in a rage and only through sheer luck did the girls manage to hide the worst from her. Perhaps it was one night where only a few couples were meeting or most of the men managed to make it into the curtained gallery in time. In any case, the duchess did not discover that Catherine was seeing Dereham. The note was opaque enough for the dowager to think that it referred to another young man called Hastings, whose flirtatious interest in one of Catherine’s roommates had already been noticed. Catherine did not think the tip referred to Hastings, and she was angry enough at the potential embarrassment to break into the dowager’s rooms again, steal the letter, and take it straight to Francis, who agreed that Henry Manox must have written it, perhaps with the help of one of his friends. Apparently, Manox had wanted to ruin Dereham without ruining his own chances with Catherine. True to form, Francis was almost as angry as the dowager, if for very different reasons. He found Manox and proceeded to hurl insults at him.28 The two men may have been friends before, since one of Francis’s complaints was that the letter proved Manox had never loved him or Catherine.
Arguments about who had incited the wrath of the dowager eventually reached the ears of Lord William, who was irritated by the atmosphere in the house and went to Manox’s accommodation to add a second dose of criticism, rather awkwardly bringing the news up in front of Manox’s wife. William was unimpressed by Manox’s churlish troublemaking, as he saw it, and perhaps by the abuse of his position in flirting with Catherine. He was equally bored by the gossiping about it in the maidens’ chamber and the he-said-she-said resulting from the dowager’s discovery: ‘What mad wenches!’ he said. ‘Can you not be merry amongst yourselves but you must thus fall out?’29 Lord William’s anger understandably frightened Manox more than Francis Dereham’s. Not long after the contretemps, Manox left the dowager’s service to work for another family in Lambeth.30 In regards to the temporarily strained environment in the house, Catherine’s glamorous aunt, the countess, was more sanguine when the scandal broke: the only advice she gave her niece was that staying up too late would ‘hurt her beauty’.31
While Catherine’s guile and Francis’s bravado saved them and their friends from the worst of her relatives’ suspicions, they were so obviously obsessed with each other that the dowager eventually noticed.32 She may actually have been the last person in the house to know – even John Walsheman, the dowager’s elderly porter, realised before she did.33 Years of being told to look at Catherine, to watch her and defer to her, meant that almost everyone in the household knew what their mistress’s granddaughter was doing. The grooms who worked in the dowager’s chambers knew what was going on, which was unsurprising given that their female colleagues, the dowager’s maids (known as chamberers), including Dorothy Dawby, who was carrying messages and gifts between the lovers, and the disapproving Mary Lascelles, who had recently been promoted from the nursery, were also aware of the situation.34 The dowager’s other maids, Lucy and Margery, were talking about the affair, as was the maid Mistress Philip, who brought the news to her mistress, the Countess of Bridgewater.35 Catherine’s uncle William and his wife, Lady Margaret Howard, also knew, with Margaret apparently spotting the obvious signs of infatuation and discussing it with her husband, whose fondness for Dereham prevented
