by a miscarriage, the Empress Isabella had succumbed to a fever, possibly influenza, at the age of thirty-five, and one Spanish courtier observed that ‘to describe the sadness which His Majesty felt at her tragic death will need many pages’.26 Royal etiquette was inviolable, unaffected by passing trivialities like the threat of war or diplomatic crises, so when news arrived of Isabella of Portugal’s death in Toledo, the Tudor court acted as if the spouse of a cherished ally had passed away, rather than the empress of a country expected to invade within the year. Henry ordered his court to wear mourning for fifteen days, and a service was organised at St Paul’s Cathedral, which began with five heralds carrying banners of the Virgin Mary and St Elisabeth, the late empress’s patron saint. The archbishops of Canterbury and York participated, and both the country’s surviving dukes, five earls, and Thomas Cromwell attended, along with the Lord Mayor of London and all his aldermen, dressed in black robes. Their attire blended in with the dark velvet and hangings that covered the enormous church, broken only by the light of the candles, the golden letters reading Miserere mei Deus on the empty hearse, and the colourful Hapsburg coats of arms, which had been installed especially for the service. No one in the capital could escape the obsequies for the empress – every parish church in London was ordered to light candles and sing a requiem for her.27 St Mary-at-Lambeth, the church that stood less than a minute’s walk from the dowager’s town house, was not exempt.
Beneath the façade, diplomatic tensions simmered. English councillors noted that the French and imperial ambassadors turned up to the service at St Paul’s together, a pointed display of their countries’ continued amity, and King Henry sent his Lord Chancellor to represent him, rather than attend in person. Even less tactfully, eleven days after the service the king and various members of his entourage were in public to watch a performance on the Thames in which two galleys engaged in a mock battle that culminated with actors dressed as the pope and the college of cardinals losing and being tossed into the river. The disgusted French ambassador refused to attend a spectacle he described as a ‘game of poor grace’.28
The anti-papal river pageant took place in June 1539, probably before Catherine joined the court. Her debut and the months immediately after are the least documented part of her adult life.29 Nonetheless, it is possible to piece together a broad picture of events in the final third or quarter of 1539, beginning with the acceleration of the king’s plans to marry again that ultimately brought Catherine to court for the first time as a maid of honour.
The invasion threat settled the choice of who would be the next queen consort. The English ambassador to Paris reported home that the Queen of France, a Hapsburg archduchess by birth, was doing everything in her power to strengthen the alliance between her husband and her brother.30 Accepting that the Franco-Hapsburg pact could not be broken for the time being, Henry decided to look for friends elsewhere. Englishmen at the imperial court noticed that the emperor could not mask his irritation at news that Henry VIII had sent a delegation to meet with King Christian III in Copenhagen – years earlier, Christian had deposed the emperor’s brother-in-law and driven the then Danish royal family into exile, including the aforementioned Princess Christina.31 Riling the Hapsburgs temporarily became the driving force behind English foreign policy, and it was in this mood that attention turned to Duke Wilhelm of Cleves, a German nobleman who was involved in a territorial dispute with the emperor over possession of the county of Gueldres. His eldest sister, Sybilla, was married to the head of the Schmalkaldic League, a federation of German rulers who were generally sympathetic to the Reformation and wary of the Hapsburg emperor who technically remained their overlord. An alliance with the league, through one of Sybilla’s unmarried sisters, meant that if the empire and France attacked, England would have allies who could distract them by starting a war in the Hapsburgs’ German territories. In the first week of October 1539, the negotiations ended with the announcement that Henry VIII would marry the Duke of Cleves’s middle sister, Anne.32
Once the tentative timetable for the royal wedding had been established, more and more women returned to court to take, or seek, their places in the re-formed household. Catherine was still in her grandmother’s care by the first week of August, when her name is absent from a thank-you note signed by ladies of the court to the king, after they were taken to Portsmouth for a banquet and tour of the navy’s new ships.33 Further circumstantial evidence suggests that she should have been at court by 5 November, when the king announced that he expected his fiancée to arrive in the next twenty days.34 That optimistic estimate was defeated by the atrocious weather conditions which delayed the princess’s arrival by a month, but the king’s hope suggests that Catherine and many of the other ladies had already arrived in the palace. Preparations for the future queen’s numerous official receptions had started by 24 October, which supports a timeline that has Catherine ending her romance with Francis Dereham in the late summer of 1539 and arriving at court before the autumn.
By Catherine’s own admission, she was keen to go. She later told the Archbishop of Canterbury, ‘all that knew me, and kept my company, knew how glad and desirous I was to come to the court’.35 Many of her friends were also leaving the dowager’s household – Joan Acworth became Joan Bulmer and moved north to York to live with her husband, along with one of the dowager’s maids who had married a city official there. Lord William found a new job for Alice Wilkes as she prepared to marry Anthony Restwold, who planned to join the administration in Calais. The disapproving Mary Lascelles became Mary Hall after she married and moved to Sussex. Dereham’s friend Edward Waldegrave was, like Catherine, entering royal service by joining the household of the infant Prince of Wales.36 Some of the old group remained in the dowager’s service, including Robert Damport and, to his immense frustration, Francis Dereham.37
Catherine’s enthusiasm for entering the glamorous uncertainty of palace life was not shared by everybody. Some peers, such as the earls of Arundel and Shrewsbury, were notably infrequent attendees, preferring to leave the necessary networking to their relatives. Poets like John Skelton and Thomas Wyatt, who knew the court well, mercilessly satirised its mores. One of Wyatt’s most severe criticisms of his fellow courtiers was the way in which daughters, sisters, and nieces could be farmed out for their family’s political advantage.38 In the oft-repeated narrative of Catherine’s life, this was her fate – brought to court and groomed by her relatives to seduce the ageing king, maximise their influence over him, weaken Queen Anne’s position, and in doing so destroy Thomas Cromwell, the architect of her marriage. The chronology of Catherine’s rapid rise to prominence does not support this narrative, nor do the memories of those who knew her. Rather, it seems to have been coincidence, not design, which first brought Catherine into the limelight.
The dowager duchess did not accompany Catherine to court, but Norfolk House was close enough for the girl to visit and for the dowager to keep informed of what was going on at court.39 On several subsequent occasions, the dowager expressed variations on the remark ‘that the King’s highness did cast a fantasy [attraction or fancy] to Katharine Howard the first time that ever his Grace saw her’.40 The dowager made her claims in conversation with several of the king’s councillors in 1541 and tellingly they did not correct her – they simply wanted to know who had told her.41 Her recollections suggest that the king’s initial attraction to Catherine was a spontaneous case of lust at first sight.
Throughout his life, Henry
