to be a list of women attached to the household of Catherine’s predecessor, Anne of Cleves, gives the women by their title or surname, and for a few of the figures I had to undertake some guesswork based on Tudor women with the right background, name, and family ties to court. It was, however, possible to prove that several candidates who are usually identified as her ladies-in-waiting were never in Catherine’s service – the 9th Earl of Kildare’s daughter, Lady Elizabeth Fitzgerald, was not one of her maids of honour and the ‘Lady Howard’ mentioned was neither Catherine’s stepmother nor one of her sisters, but her aunt by marriage, Lady Margaret Howard (née Gamage). Neither was the Dowager Duchess of Norfolk or the Countess of Bridgewater asked to join the household, despite their closeness to the queen. The more I researched, the more convinced I became that the influence and intentions of Catherine’s family had been exaggerated or, at least, misrepresented, and acting on the advice of a professor, I began to consider a full-length study of Catherine’s horribly compelling story.
The result, this book, is as much a study of Catherine Howard’s world as it is a study of her personal life. Some biographies have a tendency to inflate and isolate their subjects, by endowing them with more importance or independence from the world around them than they actually possessed. The impact of religious changes, international diplomacy, and court etiquette will all be discussed in depth, not just because they are fascinating topics in their own right, but because directly or indirectly they shaped Catherine’s story. Like the Hampton Court tapestries, it is the details of the background figures and the threads weaving behind them which together produced the image.
Putting her household, and her grandmother’s, at the centre of a biography of Catherine makes her story a grand tale of the Henrician court in its twilight, a glittering but pernicious sunset, in which the king’s unstable behaviour and his courtiers’ labyrinthine deceptions ensured that fortune’s wheel was moving more rapidly than at any previous point in his vicious but fascinating reign. Accounts of the gorgeous ceremonies held to celebrate the resubmission of the north to royal control saw Catherine, the girl in the silver dress, gleaming, Daisy Buchanan-like, safe and proud above the hot struggles of the poor – the perfect medieval royal consort. Until, like a bolt out of the heavens, a scandal resulted in an investigation in which nearly everyone close to Catherine was questioned and which ultimately wrapped itself in ever more intricate coils around the young queen until, to her utter bewilderment, it choked life from her entirely.
The downfall of Catherine Howard took place from 2 November 1541 to 13 February 1542. To narrate and analyse what happened, I have relied on four or five different types of documents. There are the official proclamations and correspondence from Henry’s government, principally but not exclusively orders issued by the Privy Council which help establish the broad chronology of Catherine’s fall and the Crown’s eventual version of events. There are numerous surviving if incomplete transcripts of interrogations held between the first week of November and third week of December 1541, to which we might add the subcategory of the queen’s own confessions, framed as letters to her husband. The diplomatic correspondence of the Hapsburg, French, and Clevian ambassadors are invaluable, not least because, while they were initially confused about what was happening, they ultimately left the fullest accounts of events as they unfolded to an outsider’s gaze, particularly Charles de Marillac and Eustace Chapuys. Lastly, there are a few surviving letters or chronicles that give clues to the English public’s reaction to the affair.
Interpretation of this evidence is fraught with difficulty. Many supporting or referenced documents did not survive the Cotton Library fire of 1731 and some that did were badly damaged by the smoke.5 That many interviews with those who served either Catherine or her family were conducted but have not survived to the present is proved by the councillors’ notes, where they jotted down their intention to summon a witness for a second or third round of questioning, the transcripts of which have since been lost. We know, for instance, that Catherine was rash enough to send Morris, one of her pageboys, to the rooms of her alleged lover Thomas Culpepper with food for Culpepper when he was ill. Yet if young Morris was questioned about what he had brought to Culpepper’s rooms, as seems probable, then the transcripts of his interrogation do not survive. Nor do those of Catherine’s former secretary Joan Bulmer, who must have been questioned given the fact that she was subsequently incarcerated for her actions. The queen’s fleeting mention of Morris’s involvement in bringing gifts to Culpepper, usually overlooked, reminds us that numerous members of the household must have been aware, or at the very least suspicious, of the queen’s actions and that much of the evidence concerning her behaviour most likely came from sources other than the principals.
The extant records of the interrogations were written quickly, as the deponent gave his or her testimony, and so translating the increasingly illegible scrawl or deciphering the mounting number of abbreviations present their own challenges.6 Many of these transcripts were translated in full for the first time by David Starkey for his book Six Wives: The Queens of Henry VIII (2003). Anyone studying Catherine Howard’s life is indebted to Dr Starkey for that, particularly his work on Thomas Culpepper’s testimony and Henry Manox’s. I wonder if I might have suffered deeply from doubt at my translations of some of Manox’s biological vocabulary had I not already known that ‘the worst word in the language’ had been spotted by another.
Separate to the illegible and the vanished, there is of course the question of intent. A common supposition about Catherine’s downfall is that the people who were quizzed lied, because their interrogators or their own panic pressured them into doing so. At least two of the main witnesses were tortured later in the interrogation and one of them almost certainly faced similar horrors earlier. Another witness gave a piece of evidence damning Catherine that can neither be refuted nor verified. It is up to the reader to interpret it as an honest mistake, an accurate testimony, or a lie born of malice or fear.
Yet, even with all these shortcomings, acknowledged and grappled with, there is enough for us to piece together the various stages of the process of Catherine’s downfall and its dominant characteristics. Scraps of achingly intimate detail survive – we know that the Dowager Duchess of Norfolk held a candle as she stood over a broken-into chest and the colour of the dress Catherine wore for her final journey by river. Beyond reasonable doubt, what happened in 1541 was not a coup launched with the intention of destroying the queen or her family. Some, if not many, of those involved may have been delighted to embarrass or undermine the Howards, but it was never the primary motivating factor. The government was responding to an unprecedented and unexpected set of developments. In the scrawl of ink on singed or water-damaged pages, amid lists upon lists of questions and the panicked, scratched-out signatures of frightened servants, there is nothing to suggest that Henry VIII’s advisers were doing anything other than pursuing the evidence in front of them. Some of their conclusions may have been wrong, but they were not incomprehensible or unreasonable. When torture was used, it did not produce any evidence to contradict the testimonies of those whose bodies had not been brutalised. The fact that Queen Catherine shared a set of grandparents, a husband, and a similar finale with Anne Boleyn has produced a misleading impression that the two queens’ fates were broadly similar. To compare them in detail is to produce a study in contrast. The circumstances of Anne Boleyn’s downfall are notorious, and the weight of modern academic opinion supports the scepticism of many of her contemporaries about her guilt. Anne’s queenship collapsed over seventeen days in May 1536, the evidence against her was given by the only deponent from a background humble enough to allow torture and, as Sir Edward Baynton wrote, in the queen’s household in May 1536 there was ‘much communication that no man will confess any thing against her’.7
The implosion of Catherine’s marriage was a very different affair. Three months were taken to determine her fate, Parliament was consulted, embassies were invited to send representatives to the trials of the queen’s co-accused, witnesses were fetched back for multiple rounds of questions, and a thorough agenda was set for each interrogation. So the interpretation of Anne Boleyn’s downfall as one in which a powerful but
