href="#litres_trial_promo">36 Andrew Maunsay, another servant, remembered later that ‘a laundry woman called Bess’ knew about the liaison too – an oddly specific memory which raises the possibility that Catherine needed a laundress who could clean her sheets more often than usual, without telling the dowager.37
Since aristocratic households kept secrets with the same discretion as a modern workplace or high school, perhaps what was most remarkable about Catherine’s summer romance in 1538 was that nobody else tried to inform the dowager about it after Manox’s botched attempt to exact revenge. Catherine benefited from the affection she inspired in many of those around her, while those who did not care for her, such as Mary Lascelles, were too afraid to spill her secrets to the dowager. The duchess’s suspicions were only confirmed one afternoon when she walked in on Catherine and Francis wrapped in each other’s arms, chatting with Joan Acworth, who was acting as Catherine’s woefully inept chaperone. The last time she had caught Catherine in an embrace, the dowager had slapped her. This time, her blows fell with a more democratic energy – she punched Catherine, Francis, and Joan, then launched herself headlong into a tirade.38 Back in her rooms, she raged to her sister-in-law and companion, Malyn Tilney. Malyn seemed to know or suspect what was going on with Catherine, but chose tact over honesty in dealing with Agnes’s anger and apparently encouraged her belief that what she had just witnessed was the worst of it. Eventually, the dowager calmed down and contented herself with comments that evolved from acid to arch to accepting and finally to amusement. When anyone asked where Francis was, she replied with comments in the vein of ‘I warrant if you seek him in Catherine Howard’s chamber ye shall find him there.’39
The fact that Dereham, like Manox before him, was able to keep his job was a poor reflection on the dowager’s acquittal of her position as a guardian. Properly, either he would have been dismissed or Catherine would have been sent to stay with another relative until the infatuation had passed. Agnes may have failed to act out of a desire to avoid embarrassment for herself – after all, how could she explain the problem without admitting her own dereliction of duty? She was anxious that none of the other girls should breathe a word about it to Catherine’s uncle William and confided these worries to her chaplain, Father Borough.40 At what point she figured out that one of William’s own servants, and his wife, had passed on the household gossip about Francis and Catherine is unclear. For quite some time she seemed to believe, or chose to, that it was only a mutual crush that would soon blow over. Katherine Tilney, who slept in the maidens’ chamber, stated later, and stood by her testimony, that the dowager duchess never knew the relationship had been consummated or that there was talk in the house of the couple making it to the altar.
Francis encouraged the idea of a wedding. When a friend asked him if he would ‘have’ her, meaning marry her, Francis replied, ‘By St. John you may guess twice and guess worse.’41 The gifts passing between the couple took on a domestic character. Catherine gave him bands and sleeves for a shirt; at New Year’s he gave her a gift of a heartsease, a wild pansy with yellow and purple markings, crafted from silk for her to wear. Dereham was with her almost constantly; they nicknamed each other ‘husband’ and ‘wife’, and he lounged ‘on one bed or another’ to talk to her in the maidens’ chamber and constantly brought up ‘the question of marriage’.42 When his friends teased Francis about how he could not kiss Catherine often enough, he bantered back by asking why he should not kiss his wife. According to her own recollections a few years later, Catherine did not correct him but instead winked and whispered, ‘What if this should come to my lady’s ear?’
She was still careful to keep the details from her grandmother. She would not wear the lovely silken flower until she persuaded a family friend and visitor, Lady Eleanor Brereton, to tell the dowager that she had given the bauble to Catherine as a gift.43 The silk flower was a token Catherine appreciated, and she wanted more. Catherine’s love of clothes and fashion developed, although like most young unmarried girls from the same background, she had almost no money of her own. She had enough pocket money to go to Mrs Clifton, a housewife in Lambeth who embroidered for her one of Francis’s shirts that he had received as a present from the dowager at New Year’s. When Francis told her about a hunchbacked lady in London who was said to be a skilled needlewoman, particularly with silk, Catherine was so keen to commission some pieces that Francis offered to lend her the money to buy another silk flower. At a later date, he bought her the fabric she wanted to make a new headdress. He considered it a gift; Catherine intended to pay him back. She took the cloth to the diminutive Mr Rose, her grandmother’s embroiderer. Trusting in his good taste and perhaps not too interested in the precise details beyond securing the desired colour and fabric, Catherine did not give Rose specific instructions beyond what kind of hat she wanted. When it was ready, she regretted her lack of specification. Francis loved the Freer’s knots, symbols of constant love that Rose had stitched into it, but Catherine was less enthused.
She was starting to withdraw from him. Francis’s ardour was suffocating, his attentiveness more possessive than protective, and his volatile temper now struck Catherine as a predictable and irritating liability. After their few months together, Francis Dereham was stripped of his appeal. To his frustration, she evaded giving him a firm answer about a wedding. Their marital pet names for each other fell by the wayside, as Catherine tried to slow down Francis’s march to the altar. At the time, a pre-contract referred to a commitment between two people who were pledged to marry at a future date. With it in place, many couples began to sleep together, partly because of the belief that sex created a bond as unbreakable as marriage. Obviously, in practice it did not always work that way, but pre-contracts were a serious business, especially for the upper classes. One could be disinherited if evidence was found or manufactured suggesting a parent had been pre-contracted to someone else before their marriage, thus rendering their future children bastards in the eyes of the law.44 A real problem lay in the fact that the details of what constituted a pre-contract were infamously blurred, not least because there was no real requirement for them to be written down. At what point did talk of marriage become an unbreakable pledge? As far as Francis Dereham was concerned, he and Catherine were bound to one another. She, it seems, did not view the situation in quite the same way.
On 19 March 1539, her father died.45 After his second wife’s death, Edmund had married Margaret Jennings, a forceful lady who rather ruled the roost at their home in Calais.46 His last few years had been plagued by bad health and the monetary problems he had tried so hard to escape. One evening, shortly before he was due to arrive as a dinner guest of Lord and Lady Lisle, he had to send a letter to his hostess, addressed with the words, ‘To the Right Honourable the Viscountess Lisle this be delivered – Haste, post haste, haste, for thy life.’ In it, he confessed that he could not attend because the medicine he was taking to cure the pain of kidney stones ‘made me piss my bed this night, for the which my wife hath sore beaten me, and saying it is children’s parts to bepiss their beds’. There is a commendable sense of undaunted humour in Edmund’s letters, perhaps a clue to some of the qualities that had won his contemporaries’ praise so many years ago. It was Lady Lisle who had recommended the medicine that made him so ill – ‘You have made me such a pisser,’ he joked, ‘that I dare not this day go abroad [outside], wherefore I beseech you to make mine excuse to my lord … for I shall not be with you this day at dinner.’47 Two years before he passed away, his colleagues in Calais had voted to elect him their mayor, a move that surprised everyone and raised a few eyebrows in London. Those on the ground in the town advised the government to approve the election, as they customarily did, because the result had been a popular one with ‘the Caliciens’.48 Evidently,
