left Norfolk House, there had been talk of marrying the lovely Mary to Sir Thomas Seymour, the late queen’s brother. Mary, it seems, had resisted because she suspected that a remarriage would not only cost her the rank of a dowager duchess, twice over, but also diminish her chances of getting the revenue promised to her in 1533.75 In 1539, she too was appointed to the new queen’s staff, though given her rank as a duchess she joined it as one of the great ladies, the six highest-ranking members of it after the queen. She was, at this stage at least, still far above her cousin from Lambeth.
With Francis Dereham back at Norfolk House, Catherine enjoyed a new flirtation that winter. Thomas Culpepper was the son of a gentry family who had rebelled against Richard III, which meant they were well placed to enjoy royal favour after the Tudors came to power. Catherine’s mother had been a Culpepper, but subsequent accounts of Catherine’s career that describe Thomas as her cousin are incorrect. There were several branches of the Culpeppers, and Thomas was one of the Bedgebury Culpeppers, meaning that he and Catherine were sixth cousins. Even in the world of sixteenth-century kinship where the word ‘cousin’ was stretched to elastic limits, they hardly qualified as related.
He was exactly her type. He served as one of the king’s gentlemen of the privy chamber, all of whom, according to the household’s ordinances, had to ‘be well-languaged, expert in outward parts, and meet and able to be sent on familiar messages’.76 He was handsome, athletic, and if he had any insecurities, they were extremely well hidden. Even some relatively prim women seemed to forget themselves in Culpepper’s company – Anne Bassett’s mother, Lady Honor Lisle, coyly sent him her colours to wear during a jousting tournament, accompanied by a letter confessing she had never done anything like that before.77 In his younger days Culpepper had served as one of Lord Lisle’s servants and apparently flirting with his master’s wives was a habit he never grew out of.
An inventory of his possessions taken in 1541 shows that Culpepper was a dapper dresser with ‘numerous gowns, coats and other articles of apparel’.78 The king, who liked to be surrounded by men younger than himself, perhaps in an attempt to recapture something of his own vanished youthfulness, adored him, and the profitable side to royal employment ensured that the unmarried Thomas was a wealthy man by 1539. He owned several properties, including lands from a shuttered monastery in Kent, seven manors, and a fifteen-roomed townhouse at Greenwich. Like many young men, he seemed slightly more interested in clothes and other immediate outgoings such as gambling and high living than in long-term investments. He did not spend much on decorating the townhouse, which was described as having ‘hangings (mostly old) and some very scanty furniture in hall, parlour, and 13 other chambers and a chapel’.79 Given that he spent most of his time at court, perhaps he felt decorating was an unnecessary expense.
He noticed Catherine shortly after her arrival at court. They were both young, unattached, and good-looking. They flirted and he pursued her. Catherine demurred, apparently holding Thomas at arm’s length. Thomas was persistent, and he told Catherine that he loved her. Their attraction to one another became a topic of conversation between Catherine and the other maids of honour. When she was in Thomas’s company, Catherine flirted but apparently hid the depth of her feelings. From remarks he made a year later, it seems clear that he wanted and expected a sexual relationship, which did not occur.80 Thomas, who expressed love more easily than he felt it, did not deal well with sexual frustration, and so he moved on to somebody else, an unexpected turn of events that caused Catherine to break down in tears in front of her fellow maids. The rejection certainly came as a jolt to someone who had only ever been the object of lavish, even cloying, devotion and pursuit. Prior to Culpepper, Catherine had always been the one to end her relationships, and she had never been replaced by another woman. Henry Manox had apparently even ranked his fiancée after Catherine. Thomas’s rejection was thus a new and unwelcome sensation for Catherine, made worse by the fact that she does seem to have developed genuine feelings for him.
Courtiers, like servants and politicians, gossiped only a little less than they breathed, and rumour’s ability to report and magnify meant the news reached Francis back at Lambeth. He stormed up to court demanding to know if it was true that Catherine was going to marry Culpepper. They quarrelled, with Dereham predictably insisting that she belonged with him. Catherine, who had already shown her ability to be brutally honest when sufficiently riled, was firmer with him than she had been when they last spoke. ‘What should you trouble me therewith,’ she asked, ‘for you know I will not have you; and if you have heard such report [about Culpepper], you heard more than I do know.’81 Dereham returned to Lambeth, where he demanded to be released from the dowager’s service if it meant living there without Catherine. The dowager thought his desperation would blow over and refused his request.82
By December, Anne of Cleves was at last on her way to England, and the king was impatient to see her for the first time. He wanted her to travel by sea, but the court in her native Düsseldorf preferred her to make the journey most of the way by land. The winter seas would be treacherous, and Anne was ‘young and beautiful, and if she should be transported by seas they fear how much it might alter her complexion. They fear lest the time of the year being now cold and tempestuous she might there, though she were never so well ordered, take such cold or other disease, considering she was never before upon the seas, as should be to her great peril and the King’s Majesty’s great displeasure.’83 Moving the princess and her retinue by land meant travelling through Hapsburg and French territory, since the Netherlands were governed by the emperor’s younger sister Maria of Austria, Dowager Queen of Hungary, who acted as regent on her brother’s behalf.84 Parading the symbol of the alliance against him through the emperor’s dominions struck Henry as a bad idea, and he feared that his fiancée might be detained in order to prevent the marriage. He did not count on the Hapsburgs ladies’ compulsive good manners. Maria promised to ‘see her well treated in the Emperor’s dominions’ and made good on her word when she dispatched a nobleman to escort Anne and her retinue en route to her wedding, ‘although it displease them’, as an Antwerp-based merchant remarked.85
Thomas Culpepper was sent across the Channel as part of the delegation to welcome Anne when she reached Calais, but they found themselves trapped there with her as storms prevented a return journey. As bitter winds and sleet lashed England, Catherine waited for the woman she was to serve.86 A letter managed to get through from Anne Bassett’s mother, who was hosting the future queen in Calais, which brought the welcome news that the princess was ‘good and gentle to serve and please’.87 The courtiers and officials were less inclined to be adventurous than the merchants who tried to make it back to England, so letters got through long before Anne did. Finally, two days after Christmas, the weather lifted long enough for her to board a ship ‘trimmed with streamers, banners and flags’ and cross from Calais to England.88
* Although marriages did take place and were often consummated at fourteen or fifteen, several dynasties gave credence to the argument that overexertion in the marital bed could harm an adolescent male’s health. The premature deaths of heirs to the English and Spanish thrones had previously been attributed to this, which might explain why Henry Fitzroy and Mary Howard were kept apart during their short marriage.
Chapter 7
