plans for him. Over the course of his reign, Henry paid for three series of tapestries that depicted scenes from David’s life.42 According to the Bible, in middle age David spotted a young beauty called Bathsheba bathing one evening, was overcome with lust, and ruthlessly pursued her until she became his queen.43 Given his fascination with King David and his subsequent marriage to Catherine, the dowager’s claim that he ‘cast a fantasy’ on their first meeting might suggest a similarly single-minded pursuit. However, if Henry did notice Catherine when she was first presented at court in the autumn of 1539, any flirtation seems to have been obvious, if the dowager duchess is to be believed, but short-lived. After that first meeting and perhaps some subsequent slightly lecherous displays of fondness towards her when she was in his company, there are no further signs of royal interest in Catherine for several months. Considering that Anne of Cleves had not yet arrived in England and the king had such high hopes for his forthcoming marriage to her, it would be odd if the Howards had planned to put Catherine in the unenviable position of being her employer’s competition, especially when all the signs initially suggested that Anne would enjoy her husband’s support and affection.44
Instead, Catherine settled down to life in the queen’s household, something that cannot have been too onerous considering their mistress was still on the other side of the North Sea. All the other ranks of ladies-in-waiting were either married or widowed. Catherine’s immediate companions were the other maids of honour, young and unmarried girls like herself from a noble background who had been sent to court to serve the future queen, who would act as both their chaperone and matchmaker. Catherine was joined by her second cousin Katherine Carey, the eldest child of Anne Boleyn’s sister Mary, and Mary Norris, who had been the Duke of Norfolk’s ward ever since her father was executed for treason in 1536.45 Earlier that year, Mary’s brother had managed to win back some of the estates that had been confiscated by the Crown at the time of their father’s death, and her admission to court was another sign of their reviving fortunes.46 The final maid of honour we can be certain of was Anne Bassett, who was very pretty and fluent in French and English, but struggled with writing the latter to the extent that she used a scribe for letters home.47 Anne, whose stepfather, Lord Lisle, was King Henry’s uncle, was the only one of the maids to have lived at court before – she had joined Jane Seymour’s household shortly before her death.48 Since her parents lived in Calais, Anne spent the next two years residing at court or in the homes of her well-connected mother’s many friends. That autumn, she had gone to her cousin’s house in the country to recuperate from a cold before returning to London.49 She certainly knew how to talk like a courtier – she had been part of the group of ladies invited to a banquet on some of the new warships at Portsmouth. As part of their thanks to the king, they wrote, ‘We have seen and been in your new Great Ship, and the rest of your ships at Portsmouth, which are things so goodly to behold, that, in our lives we have not seen (excepting your royal person and my lord the Prince your son) a more pleasant sight.’50 Along with the French phrases and little Latinisms with which courtiers liked to liberally pepper their conversations, Catherine was also going to have to learn the knack of laying flattery on with the proverbial trowel.
The period between Queen Jane Seymour’s death on 24 October 1537 and the king’s marriage to Anne of Cleves on 6 January 1540 was the longest period in Henry VIII’s reign in which he was without a wife. The queen’s household was a lucrative source of aristocratic employment, and its absence in those years had been felt both by the young women who hoped to come to court and by their parents. However, when Henry began to reconvene the household in 1539, he did so after a recent batch of reforms that sought to limit its size. The aristocrats’ jockeying for places attempted to circumvent the monarch’s decision, trying everything from milking family connections to sending thoughtful personal presents to those who might help them.51 Anne Bassett was sent into the royal presence with a gift of the king’s favourite marmalade as an accompaniment to a request that her younger sister be allowed to join the household. Reading Anne Bassett’s letters to Calais, it is clear that her mother, Lady Honor Lisle, had been applying pressure to her daughter to be successful in her petition. Anne, dictating to a scribe, reported that she had ‘presented your codiniac [marmalade] to the king’s highness and his grace does like it wondrous well, and gave your ladyship hearty thanks for it’, but given the number of requests the king was receiving, Anne Bassett apologetically told her mother that she had not been able to press her sister’s suit for ‘fear how his grace would take it’.52 The palace, at least initially, stood firm and the cap on numbers was maintained.53
The maids of honour, who were the lowest rank in the queen’s ‘above stairs’ household, bar the chamberers, were out of bed at about six or seven o’clock in the morning to supervise the chamberers, maidservants who would light the fires in the queen’s apartments and clear away the collapsible beds or mattresses that many of the servants slept on during the night. Once the queen arrived from Germany, Catherine and her colleagues were expected to accompany her to Mass and attend to her during her meals. Catherine’s place in the household gave her access to the privy chamber, the queen’s private rooms, which very few courtiers ever saw. Entry to them was controlled by well-placed servants who acted like watertight doors shielding the royals from the never-ending crowds of petitioners and place seekers who thronged the public rooms. Tudor palaces were constructed with this limiting of access in mind. The queen’s public apartments, where she granted audiences and hosted foreign dignitaries, were separated from her privy rooms by a short gallery that ensured that even when the doors opened from the public rooms, the crowds still could not glimpse into the royals’ private chambers. Servants sped up and down stairs to this gallery, bringing up plates of food from the queen’s privy kitchen, which then had to be handed over to the maids of honour, pages, or chamberers, who would take the plates from them at the privy apartment doors. The same routine was repeated when clothes were ordered up from Her Majesty’s cavernous wardrobe. The maintenance of the queen’s wardrobe required soft brushes, and furs in particular had to be properly cleaned at least once a week, even if she was not using them, ‘for moths be always ready to alight in them and engender’.54
The gallery had two little rooms jutting off from it – one held a small altar and the other, separated by a lattice grille, contained a prie-dieu. The queen went there to hear Mass every day, accompanied by a few of her maids of honour. The queen’s priests were not technically members of her elite privy chamber staff, and so to prevent them or their altar boys entering the inner sanctum, a small devotional space was set aside in the gallery. It was only on holy days that the queen joined her husband to progress through the throngs of courtiers to attend Mass in one of the palace’s public chapels.55
Along with memorising the complex rules of who could pass through which door and no further, maids of honour were expected to look the part. They were to be stylish enough to complement their mistress without outshining her. Catherine’s early purchases during her time with Francis Dereham showed her appreciation for fashion, but life at court required more than a few tasteful silk flowers. The court was obsessed with appearances and everyone wanted to make sure their clothes advertised their position in the hierarchy. Pins held together the voluminous folds of noblewomen’s dresses – the king’s eldest daughter ordered 10,000 of them for her wardrobe – and the extortionate cost of the dresses meant that hand-me-downs were greatly appreciated.56 Catherine’s family were expected to provide for her when she made her debut, particularly her wardrobe, but as an unmarried girl she was also one of
