Charms of Catherine Howard
The charms of Catherine Howard, and the endeavours of the duke of Norfolk and the bishop of Winchester, at length prevailed.
– Gilbert Burnet, Bishop of Salisbury, The History of the Reformation of the Church of England (1679)
On 4 January 1540, Catherine stood outdoors in the cold afternoon air wearing a new gown, her face framed by a French hood, a round headdress that curved around the back of the head with a veil flowing down behind it. This was to be her first glimpse of her employer, and the ladies and maids were expected to start serving immediately. Before they saw Anne of Cleves, Catherine and all the other members of the queen’s household had to listen to an oration delivered in Latin by Dr Daye, the queen’s almoner, which was answered in a similar style by a representative of the Duke of Cleves. Two of the king’s nieces, Lady Margaret Douglas and her twenty-two-year-old cousin the Marchioness of Dorset, led a delegation of ladies from the high nobility to greet their mistress as she stepped out of the carriage ‘she had ridden [in] all her long journey’. Anne of Cleves was twenty-four, tall and dignified, with a swarthy complexion and a prominent nose. After another round of presentations to the princess, ‘she with all the Ladies entered the tents, and there warmed them a pace’.1 For the first week after her arrival in England, she wore the opulent yet unflattering fashions of her homeland, to the distress of her attendants and courtiers, who described German fashion as ‘monstrous habit and apparel’.2
A blast of trumpets outside the tent announced the approach of the king on horseback, accompanied by his councillors, his gentlemen attendants, bishops, and nobles. The new division of the royal bodyguard, the Gentlemen Pensioners, were on hand, along with ten young footmen, garbed in gold, who stood nearest the king, assisted by pages dressed in crimson velvet. Anne, flanked by Catherine and her other women, emerged from the tent wearing a dress of cloth of gold with a pearl-encrusted bonnet on her head. She was helped into a saddle decorated with heraldic devices associated with her family in Cleves and rode over to her husband, who cut no more of a minimalist figure with the buttons on his purple velvet coat made of pearls, rubies, and diamonds, and the handle of his sword glittering with the numerous emeralds attached to it. As Henry and Anne spoke, the crowds who had gathered to watch them began to cheer. In the words of one Member of Parliament, ‘O what a sight was this to see so goodly a Prince & so noble a King to ride with so fair a Lady of so goodly a stature & so womanly a countenance … I think no creature could see them but his heart rejoiced.’3
For the journey to Greenwich Palace, where the royal wedding was to take place two days later, Catherine and the other gentlewomen were put in carriages and taken in procession with the other attendees. As they travelled, the queen’s ladies ‘beheld on the wharf how the Citizens of London were rowing up & down the Thames’ with banners and flags streaming from barges out to celebrate, despite the chill. Once they were behind the palace walls, Henry accompanied Anne and her servants to her private apartments, from where they could hear cannons in the City firing welcoming salutes.
Catherine spent the next month of her life at Greenwich, a riverfront palace of red brick. The queen’s apartments overlooked the west side of the inner courtyard, and it was from there on 6 January, the Feast of the Epiphany and the last of the traditional twelve days of Christmas, that Catherine helped escort the queen to her nuptial Mass.4 Royal weddings in Tudor England were not usually great state occasions. The last public royal union had been Prince Arthur’s four decades earlier, and apart from Mary I’s marriage to Prince Philip of Spain in 1554, all subsequent British royal weddings took place in relatively private palace chapels until the children of King George V decided tentatively to embrace the media age in the 1920s.5 Henry VIII’s fourth wedding was conducted in the queen’s closet at Greenwich at eight o’clock in the morning. He wore cloth of gold, decorated with silver flowers, and a crimson satin coat clasped by diamonds. The bride came in another cloth-of-gold gown, with decorative flowers crafted from pearls; her long blonde hair hung loose, topped by a small crown, and she wore a necklace full of ‘jewels of great value’.6 Count von Overstein, a nobleman in her brother’s service, gave her away, and Mass was celebrated by the Archbishop of Canterbury.7 When it was over, the dukes of Norfolk and Suffolk escorted the new queen back to her rooms, where Catherine and all the other women of the household kept her company while the king went to change his outfit.
The wedding afternoon was taken up with a procession and the royal couple’s first public meal together as husband and wife, followed by enough time for the queen to change into a dress trimmed with ermine, which she wore to Evensong with her ladies. That night, the court was entertained with banquets and dancing before the king and queen were ceremonially put to bed. The drapes were closed, the servants retreated, and, so everyone assumed, the deed was done. Five days later, with snow still on the ground, Catherine and the other women saw Queen Anne in English attire for the first time when they accompanied her to a celebratory joust.8 Those around her judged the sartorial change a huge improvement ‘which so set forth her beauty and good visage, that every creature rejoiced to behold her’.9
The chronicler’s rhapsody about Queen Anne’s beauty at the joust may have been the result of florid patriotism rather than honest reporting. By the time the court moved to Westminster on 5 February, no one in it could have missed the rumours about the king’s latest wedding night. The whispers had even reached the ears of the Queen of France. Thomas Cromwell, who obviously had a vested interest in seeing the marriage work, thought Anne had ‘a queenly manner’, and many people, including the French ambassador, agreed that her carriage and manners were commendable, though revealingly the latter reported it in the context that ‘people who have seen the lady close say that she is neither as young as was expected, nor as pretty as she was reported to be. She is tall, and her face and carriage have a force in them which shows she is not without mind. The spirit and sense will perhaps supply the deficiency of beauty.’10
Initially, a date in February had been mooted for Anne of Cleves’s coronation. That was then pushed back to Whitsuntide, in early summer. On 22 February, Marie de Guise was crowned queen consort in Scotland at Holyrood Abbey, an event which may have exacerbated Anne’s worry about why her own had not been arranged. She dropped heavy hints about it to some of the king’s councillors when they called on her in early spring, by which point they must have known that there would never be a coronation.11 Some of the gentlemen in the king’s privy chamber had started to criticise earlier reports from Cleves that had praised Anne’s beauty. Her later reputation as the ‘Flanders Mare’, a grotesque caricature of ugliness, is the product of imaginative histories written in the eighteenth century, but it does seem that she failed to live up to expectations.12 When she first landed in England, Henry had ridden in disguise to surprise her. Anne was the first foreign princess to arrive in the country to marry a reigning English monarch since Margaret of Anjou wed Henry’s great-uncle Henry VI, ninety-five years earlier. Henry VI had gone disguised as a messenger to Southampton to deliver a letter from himself to Margaret, who, unfortunately for the hoped-for moment of a romantic recognition, assumed he actually was a servant and kept him kneeling while she absentmindedly read his letter.13 Anne of Cleves’s first encounter with her husband was even less encouraging. She failed to pay much attention to the corpulent messenger in front
