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Our Fathers in Their Generation
Let us now praise men of renown, and our fathers in their generation.
– Ecclesiasticus 44:1
The first recorded mention of Catherine Howard, born as she was in the decade before the government made mandatory parish-level records of each baptism, comes from a will.1 Her maternal grandmother, Isabel Worsley, left a bequest, ‘To Charles Howard Henry George Margaret Catherine Howard XXs [twenty shillings] each.’2 It is a very quiet entrance for a future queen of England – Catherine is even upstaged in the concluding half of the sentence by her younger sister Mary, who, as Isabel’s goddaughter, received a more substantial bestowal of £10.3 Yet it is from the Worsleys and their kin that much of the relevant evidence about Catherine’s early years originates.
Beyond its object as a matter of general historical interest in showcasing how prosperous members of county society chose to dispose of their earthly possessions on the eve of the Reformation – rather touching is Isabel’s stipulation that every housewife in Stockwell, part of Isabel’s home parish of Lambeth, should receive a gift of linen worth twelve pence or, failing that, a monetary gift of the same amount; likewise her decision to set aside £6 to repair a local highway – the will, which went to probate on 26 May 1527, proves that Catherine had been born, with time to spare for a younger sister, by the spring of that year.4 As with all four of Henry VIII’s English-born wives, and many of their contemporaries, we are left to guess when they arrived in the world using fragmentary evidence provided by throwaway or contested remarks from those who knew them or saw them, personal letters, family wills, and comments in contemporary memoirs or chronicles. The analysis of these documents has thus produced a broad spectrum of supposition. In Catherine’s case, suggestions for her birthdate have run the gamut from 1518 to 1527. The promotion of the former date seems motivated mainly by a desire to rehabilitate a particularly dubious portrait, which will be discussed subsequently, while support for the later years partly derives from the account of a Spanish merchant living in London late in Henry VIII’s reign, who described Catherine as ‘a mere child’ at the time of her marriage in 1540.
While both Catherine and her younger sister are mentioned in Isabel’s final testament of 1527, they are absent from the will of her husband, Sir John Leigh, which is usually dated to 1524. Their three brothers, Charles, Henry, and George, are mentioned in both.5 The year 1525, which leaves time for a younger sister to be born and named as Isabel’s goddaughter by 1527, has thus gained understandable acceptance as Catherine’s most likely date of birth in several recent accounts of her career.6 Critics of this conclusion point out that the two sisters’ absence from Sir John’s will proves nothing, because in a patriarchal society like early modern England, it would be unusual for very young female members of a family to be mentioned in the wills of male relatives.
In fact, both conclusions are arrived at by misreading John Leigh’s testament. While codicils pertaining to the distribution of some parcels of land were added in August 1524, the will itself was actually written nearly a year earlier, and dated 16 June 1523. If the Leighs’ documents are to be used as bookends for Catherine’s arrival, they establish a date between the summer of 1523 and the spring of 1527. Furthermore, far from focusing solely on the male members of his line, John Leigh made numerous gifts to young female members of his extended family, including all Catherine’s elder half sisters. They, admittedly, were Leighs, but it seems unlikely that John Leigh would also include all Catherine’s Howard brothers and neglect to mention her at all, unless she was extremely young, a tentative conclusion that leaves us free to accept the one specific contemporary comment on her age, made by the French diplomat Charles de Marillac, who met Catherine on several occasions in 1540 and 1541, and believed that she had been eighteen years old in 1539–40.7 Catherine and de Marillac attended several hunting trips together in the summers of 1540 and 1541, and this seemingly decisive statement from someone well placed to know dates her birth to 1520 or 1521. De Marillac’s credibility is allegedly undercut by the claim that he believed Anne of Cleves to be thirty in 1540, when she was in fact twenty-four, but an examination of the relevant letter shows that on the subject of Anne’s age, de Marillac wrote, ‘Her age one would guess at about thirty.’8 An unchivalrous comment, but not necessarily an inaccurate one.9 It may very well be that, with Catherine, de Marillac was again basing his estimate on how old she looked.
De Marillac’s estimate of Catherine’s age gains more credibility upon examination of the ages of Catherine’s peers when she joined the court as a maid of honour in 1539. None of the girls who served alongside her was born before 1521, the date of birth for Anne Bassett, the most senior of the group, who had been at court since 1537. One of the girls who joined at the same time as Catherine, her second cousin Katherine Carey, was born either in 1523 or 1524, and while we do not have precise dates for the others, all those who joined within twelve months of Catherine were definitely born at some point in the early-to-mid-1520s.10 The implication that Catherine, coming from a similar background into the same position, was five or six years older than the rest – or even three years older than the already established Anne Bassett – stretches credulity. When combined with the evidence of John and Isabel Leigh’s wills, Charles de Marillac’s indirect guess of about 1521 rules out a date as late as 1525, and the biographical details of the other half-dozen or so maids of honour similarly discredit one as early as 1518. None of this is definitive, but when set alongside other circumstantial evidence from Catherine’s life, it suggests 1522 or 1523 as the most probable years of her birth.11
Where she was born is more easily established. Most accounts of Catherine’s life state that her place of birth is a mystery, but in fact regardless of when she was born, it was almost certainly in the parish of Lambeth in the county of Surrey, just south of London.12 Before she was born and throughout her childhood, her father Edmund served as a justice of the peace for Surrey, charged with the ‘conservation of the King’s peace’ and to ‘punish delinquents … [and] hear and determine felonies’ in the king’s name.13 Directives to him from the Privy Council, issued on either side of Catherine’s birth, as well as evidence from family accounts, place him specifically in Lambeth – for a time, he lived in a house on Church Street, part of what is now Lambeth Bridge Road.14 Several members of Edmund’s family had homes in Lambeth, most prominently Norfolk House, a mansion renovated at the command of Edmund’s father which subsequently functioned as the Dukes of Norfolk’s main residence near the capital.15 For a Howard, Lambeth was the most logical place in Surrey to set up residence, and as further examination of his finances make clear, by the 1520s Edmund could only, indeed barely, afford one establishment, so it is highly unlikely that Catherine could have been born anywhere else. It was from his father that Edmund acquired his home on Church Street.16
Lambeth was, to use a modern term but ancient concept, a place of high property prices, favoured by the elite for its proximity to Westminster and the court, and in 1522 the Howards began construction of a family chapel within the
