maids of honour received £10 a year, a sum she immediately used to pay back Francis Dereham what he had loaned her to buy some clothes in Lambeth.57 It was a further indicator of her desire to move on from their relationship.
Discipline was harsh in the royal household, with a warning for the first offence and dismissal for the second.58 Many of the palace’s rules were hygiene related – residents were forbidden from leaving half-eaten food or dirty dishes around, and if any were found the servants had to clear them away immediately.59 Urinals were built near most of the major courtyards, though as any attendee at a modern festival or large-scale outdoor event will know, even the most adequate provisions did not always satisfy men who were either in a rush or drunk. To combat this, palace officials at Greenwich daubed white crosses on some of the palace’s outer brickwork, counting on the fact that the symbol of Christ’s crucifixion would prevent anyone from defacing it. For Catherine, the proper toilets were called the ‘common house of easement’, a large building where the toilets were covered by a plain piece of wood with a hole over a large tank. Depending on how old the palace was, the tank’s contents were either periodically flushed away or cleared out by a gang of labourers once the court had moved on to another residence. In the newer or renovated buildings, water from the palace moat was used to flush, but pipes ensured the filth was taken away from the moat itself, which was kept clean as a breeding ground for carp and other fish that ended up on the palace tables.60
Although Catherine had grown up in the aristocracy and its households, nothing in her past could have prepared her for the splendour of palace life. In terms of size and magnificence, the English royal establishment had no peer in the British Isles. Her own family’s vast wealth paled in comparison to the king’s. One modern estimate puts Henry’s income at nearly forty times the Duke of Norfolk’s.61 The court was the great theatre of political display, and under Henry VIII it seemingly had enough funds to glitter. Foreign visitors remarked that the prettiest of the king’s houses were Greenwich Palace, Hampton Court, and Windsor Castle, but his favourite residence was also his largest, the Palace of Whitehall, which in 1539 was still sometimes referred to in courtiers’ conversations by its old name of York Place.62 A sprawling complex of buildings, Whitehall was the largest palace in Europe, and it only yielded the accolade to Versailles after an accidental fire in 1698. It stood, like nearly all of Henry’s largest homes, on the bank of the Thames, and when Catherine first arrived there as a resident in the autumn of 1539, preparations were under way for a series of renovations and expansions, including the construction of a set of riverside rooms for the king’s eldest daughter.63 The expansion of Whitehall would cost nearly £30,000. To put the scale of its expense into context, the construction of the entirety of the king’s fabulous new hunting lodge at Nonsuch had finished at £24,500. For the palace expansion 12,600 yards of land were reclaimed from the Thames via a 700-foot stone dyke that would help create the space needed for the new gatehouse, banqueting hall, outdoor preaching auditorium, orchards, and enlarged gardens. Whitehall already had the largest set of royal apartments in England, four tennis courts, two bowling alleys, and a tiltyard. An entire suburb of Westminster had been bought up and demolished to make room for its twenty-three acres – compared to six at Hampton Court. It was so large that a gatehouse was necessary to straddle the busy London street that divided the park side, with most of the palace gardens, from the public rooms, stables, and accommodations on the other side.64
Life in this splendid maze brought Catherine into more regular contact with other members of her family. Her elder half sister Isabella was also in the queen’s household, as one of the ladies of the privy chamber, an elite band of eight who helped the queen to dress and tended to her in her most intimate moments. Isabella and her husband, Sir Edward Baynton, who was to serve as vice chamberlain of the same household, were beneficiaries of sustained if restrained royal favour, having received two countryside properties in grants earlier that year.65 Catherine’s paternal uncle the duke was still a vital man at the age of sixty-six and a prominent presence at court. The Howard fortunes had admittedly stuttered after the execution of Queen Anne Boleyn and then Lord Thomas’s elopement with the king’s niece, but the duke’s military and diplomatic skills meant the government had come to rely on him again after the Pilgrimage of Grace and during the attempts to prevent an invasion. His ability to win three of the maids of honour places for members of his affinity reflected his continued influence at court, as did his pension from the French government, letters from petitioners, such as those who hoped he could use his position to save the monastery of Our Lady in western Ireland, and his regular attendance of the Privy Council.66
Catherine did not know this uncle, with his patrician nose and thin lips, as well as she knew her uncle William or her aunt Katherine, Countess of Bridgewater, but she would have been presented to him before he brought her to court. Sometimes, when it was too dark for him to travel back from any business in Lambeth safely, the duke was invited to stay at his stepmother’s house, but he was not as close to Agnes as her own children were.67 His marriage to the late Duke of Buckingham’s daughter was unhappy enough to warrant comparisons to Jason and Medea, and there were contested allegations that Norfolk had beaten his wife along with the uncontested fact that he was now living in sin with a mistress called Bess Holland.68 To his wife’s distress, their three surviving children – Henry, Mary, and Thomas – had all sided with their father, although it seems that the eldest at least did so under duress.69 The eldest two were regular fixtures at court by the time Catherine joined it. Henry Howard, the duke’s twenty-two-year-old heir apparent, enjoyed the courtesy title of Earl of Surrey, but his father kept a tight control of the purse strings, which might explain why he was able to win his son’s loyalty.70 Surrey was married in his teens to the Earl of Oxford’s daughter, and she was pregnant with their fourth child when Catherine went to court for the first time.71 A superb horseman and intellectually brilliant, Surrey was a celebrated poet who helped pioneer several new verse forms in English, most notably blank verse and the English sonnet.72 Like many of his relatives, he had a flammable temper, unassailable pride in his ancestry, and the same views about the damage being done, as they saw it, to the social hierarchy by men such as Thomas Cromwell. Unlike his father, Surrey’s religious views leaned towards reform.
His younger sister, Mary, had been married at fourteen to the king’s bastard son, the Duke of Richmond, and became a widow at seventeen when her husband was left sufficiently weakened by a virus to succumb to a subsequent bacterial infection.73 Mary was as bright as her brother, which meant that her father thought she was too clever for a woman. Compared to Catherine, her education had been exhaustive. She was also attractive and tenacious – since her husband’s death, Mary and her family had been fighting to get the widowhood settlement promised to her at the time of the marriage. As Dowager Duchess of Richmond and Somerset, she was owed an annual income of £1,000 from the government, but because the marriage had never been consummated, owing to the couple’s youth, the king claimed that there was some doubt about whether Mary had any right to the inheritance.* He turned the matter over to a panel of lawyers and judges, even though all impartial experts, including the Archbishop of Canterbury, believed that Mary was owed the money as Richmond’s widow, with or without a consummated marriage.74 Since no attempt was ever made to take the titles she acquired through marriage from her, the king
