was as unwelcome as it was alarming. At best, there was a concern that the alliance might provide aid or encouragement to discontented aristocrats in Ireland, who were opposed to the king’s religious policies.9 At worst, there was the terrifying possibility that the former enemies would invade England themselves and punish a king who had, in one cardinal’s words, ‘rent the mystical body of Christ which is His Church’. Fear of attack produced stories that the country would be divided, with the French occupying Wales, Cornwall, and the southern shires, while the emperor annexed everything north of the Thames.10
To defend the realm, strongholds were built along the coastline, from Berwick in the northeast to Falmouth in Cornwall. The king inspected many of them personally, while the Earl of Hertford was sent to assess the fortifications in Calais, where the French would certainly attack first.11 The suspicion that the pope had ‘moved, excited and stirred divers great princes and potentates of Christendom, not alonely to invade this realm of England with mortal war, but also by fire and sword to extermin[ate] and utterly destroy the whole nation’ helps to explain not just the nervous atmosphere in London but also the slew of arrests and interrogations, subsequently known as the White Rose Affair, which affected Catherine’s family and took place around the time she began her relationship with Francis Dereham.12
Margaret Pole, Countess of Salisbury, was an aged grande dame of the English aristocracy when she was arrested. A niece of two kings, Edward IV and Richard III, cousin of Henry’s late mother Elizabeth of York, and godmother to his eldest daughter, she was ‘the last of the right line and name of Plantagenet’, the royal family who had ruled England in one form or another between 1154 and 1485.13 Her third son, Reginald, had never accepted the legality of the break with Rome and chose life abroad, where he became a cardinal who wrote stinging tracts criticising Henry VIII’s morals and policies. Henry knew that Reginald Pole was actively encouraging the papal initiative for a joint Franco-Hapsburg invasion, which was especially worrying given that his mother, who was the fifth or sixth richest person in England, had sizeable estates on the southern coast.14 If imperial troops landed there, Henry suspected that her loyalty could not be counted upon.
One of the Poles’ servants betrayed the family by revealing that they were still in contact with the traitorous Reginald and that they had warned him about English plots to have him assassinated. The government homed in on the Countess of Salisbury’s youngest son, Sir Geoffrey Pole, and questioned him relentlessly. The Poles had certainly been indiscreet – at home, they had lamented the destruction of the monasteries and ‘plucking down of the Abbeys’ images’, and criticised the king’s dishonesty in how he had negotiated with the northern rebels of 1536. One of their cousins had described Henry as ‘a beast and worse than a beast’, and Geoffrey’s eldest brother, Lord Montagu, had commented hopefully on the life-shortening potential of the king’s infected leg after an ulcer had closed over earlier that year and, for ten days, the monarch writhed in agony.15
Under interrogation, Geoffrey provided enough evidence to destroy them all except, frustratingly for the government, his mother. It was not through lack of trying on their part. An unsubstantiated contemporary rumour claimed that Thomas Cromwell threatened Geoffrey Pole with torture.16 Sir Geoffrey insisted that while his family regretted the changes to the Church, they had never imitated Reginald by plotting the king’s deposition. A particularly horrible aspect of the case was the poor man’s attempt to exonerate even as he accidentally condemned. He affirmed or confessed conversations that the government used as evidence of treason, which he relayed to prove nothing more serious than private dissatisfaction. There were more arrests, more interrogations, and on 9 December 1538, Geoffrey’s eldest brother was executed alongside their kinsmen, the Marquess of Exeter and Sir Edward Neville. Three of their servants were hanged, then drawn and quartered, their limbs displayed throughout London, and the Countess of Salisbury was attainted and imprisoned in the Tower. In an age when self-destruction was regarded as a mortal sin, a guilt-addled Geoffrey made several suicide bids – twenty days after his brother was beheaded, he attempted to suffocate himself in his cell at the Tower.17 He was pardoned in recompense for his testimony and eventually went abroad, where he was reunited with his brother Reginald, who had to take care of the broken man for the rest of his life.18
Worryingly for the Howards, they heard later that when the Marquess of Exeter’s wife had been brought in for questioning, Cromwell had spent a great deal of time trying to get her to incriminate the Duke of Norfolk. Luckily for them, Lady Exeter held firm in denying that Norfolk had anything to do with her husband’s alleged politics, but the duke did not forget, or forgive, Cromwell’s attempts to implicate him during the White Rose Affair.19 The deteriorating relationship between the duke and Henry’s chief minister helped shape Catherine’s career when she arrived at court a few months after Lord Exeter’s execution.
Within court circles, at least officially, the reaction to the cull was to express ‘how joyful tidings it must be to all Englishmen to know that such great traitors have been punished’.20 Unofficially, by the time Catherine was spending more time near the capital, the government seems to have been aware of how badly the executions had played with the public. No firm reason for the deaths had been given. Beyond warning a close relative of a plot to murder him, the Poles did not seem to have had any communication with a foreign power. The secrecy of Lord Exeter’s trial invited suspicion, as did Cromwell’s attempts to magnify their crimes beyond what they had been accused of, or even what was credible.21 No one seriously believed that Lord Exeter had been plotting to murder the king and all his children or the king’s claim that the Poles, the Nevilles, and the Courtenays had been plotting treason for a decade.22 When yet more court figures, including the king’s longtime friend Sir Nicholas Carew, were publicly executed in the aftermath of the White Rose intrigue, Cromwell had one of his employees, Richard Morrison, publish a defence of the purge, entitled An invective against the great and detestable vice, treason, wherein the secret practices, and traitorous workings of them that suffered of late are disclosed. Yet still it offered no clear details of the alleged conspiracy, beyond insisting that the accused were papists.23
As the limbs of the Poles’ dead servants rotted in the streets, the public mood was one of thinly veiled disquiet. There was discontent about impending tax increases, preparations against the possible invasion, and continuing religious tensions.24 Food prices were rising in the west of England, the decision to cut the number of saints’ days was unpopular in dioceses in the south, and, as if to give credence to the worst fears about the international situation, the king, flanked by his courtiers, inspected parades of troops mobilised to guard the capital if the kingdom was attacked.25
It is inconceivable that Catherine would not have heard of the White Rose Affair – the questions about the conservatism of her uncle were enough to make the Howards uneasy – but how much she knew about the rest of the problems facing the country in 1538 and 1539 is unclear. She was young, privileged, and politically sheltered. It is quite possible that many of the nuances, and much of the unhappiness, bypassed her completely. The rising cost of food in Bristol was unlikely to disturb a girl laughing, flirting, and crying behind the red brick walls of Norfolk House.
One event that she cannot have missed was the death of the Hapsburg empress consort,
