Catherine Howard (21 page)

On the other hand, it was almost inevitable that Catherine should have played into the hands of those who conspired against her. To a girl who had many of the characteristics of a juvenile delinquent, who was spoiled, fawned upon, and flattered, the role of a meek, patient, dutiful and efficient wife and queen was extremely unpalatable. Once the first flush of novelty had disappeared, there was little left to occupy her time except to gossip and intrigue. If Catherine played at the risky game of courtly love and romance, she had plenty of examples before her. While she was still a maid to Anne of Cleves, it was a notorious bit of gossip that Dorothy Bray, another of the Queen’s maids, had an accepted lover over whom she exercised absolute rule.
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At the same time, Catherine’s brother, Charles, was carrying on his dangerous flirtation with Lady Margaret Douglas, the King’s niece. In the circumstances, it was inevitable that Francis Dereham should reappear on the scene and that Catherine should lose her silly head over the dashing Mr Thomas Culpeper.

Francis Dereham had been left fretting in the Dowager’s service at Lambeth, while Mistress Catherine – as one of the Queen’s maids – had moved into the new and vivid world of the court. He had endeavoured to get a release from the Duchess, and finally took leave of her service without warning or permission. Rumour had it that he had fled to
Ireland
to nurture a broken heart, since Catherine had refused his pleas for marriage. This was the story that the elderly and romantic matriarch of Norfolk spread abroad.
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Since Dereham left Catherine the custodian of £100 to be kept for him until his return, and took himself off to Ireland to win a fortune by activities that the government later chose to view as piracy, it would seem that the basis for the tale that he had run away to ‘Ireland for the Queen’s sake’ originated in the Duchess’s fanciful imagination. Moreover, Dereham seems to have been somewhat surprised at the notion. Whatever his true sentiments, Catherine herself certainly did not know where he had gone, and did not contact her former paramour until his return to
England
some time in the late spring of 1540.
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The young gentleman arrived in
London
to discover a markedly changed state of affairs. Catherine Howard was no longer one of the maidens of the Dowager’s dormitory, a country girl with whom a young man of birth but of no particular prospects might safely dally. Instead, she was the centre of attraction and eagerly sought after by a swarm of eligible suitors. How many youthful gallants of the court were caught in the circle of her admirers is not known, but certainly two were noticeably smitten by her charms. These were two gentlemen of the King’s privy chamber, Thomas Paston and Thomas Culpeper, junior; and Francis Dereham shortly learned that in his absence rumours had spread that the fashionable Mr Culpeper and Catherine Howard were shortly to be married.
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Dereham may possibly have felt that his own prospects were not entirely blighted by this new development, but all calculations were promptly upset by the evidence of the King’s obvious infatuation for the young lady. The lesser suitors inconspicuously and judiciously faded into the background, leaving the field to royalty. Dereham, on the other hand, refused to take warning. Despite Catherine’s blunt order not to trouble her further, ‘for you know I will not have you’, he still persisted in publicly stating that ‘I could be sure’ of Mistress Catherine, ‘if I would, but I dare not,’ for a simple country squire could hardly hope to compete with his sovereign. Dereham was willing to bow out to Henry but not to Thomas Culpeper, and he very unwisely remarked to friends that, were the King dead, ‘I am sure I might marry her.’
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During the early months of Catherine’s marriage to the Lord’s anointed, Dereham tactfully vanished from court circles, but like everyone else who had ever known the lady, he ended up angling for a fat sinecure and good living in the Queen’s household. The machinery of patronage soon began to operate, and family pressure was exerted on Catherine by the Dowager Duchess to find the young man a position at court. Exactly why the old lady should have been so fond of Dereham is difficult to decide, but he had always been one of her favourites. By the winter of 1540 Catherine had been induced to oblige her grandmother, for she told her aunt that ‘my lady of Norfolk hath desired me to be good unto him, and so I will.’
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She requested the Duchess to bring Dereham to court; she presented him with gifts of money; and finally, in August of 1541, she found him a place in her household as private secretary and usher of the chamber.

The folly of an act whereby an ex-lover was appointed to a position where he might be intimately closeted with the Queen is mitigated by the fact that both Lady Bridgewater and the Dowager thought it quite reasonable and proper that Catherine should make room for and bestow favours upon her old friends and relations. The question remains whether either of the ladies realized the past familiarity that had existed between the two young people. Naturally, both the Duchess and her daughter denied knowledge of such intimacies, but even if they had known or suspected the truth, it is doubtful whether either would have been inordinately shocked or worried by Dereham’s appointment as private secretary. Catherine, on the other hand, did express some slight awareness of the questionableness of the selection, for she warned Dereham to ‘take heed what words you speak’.
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The idiocy of the appointment was immeasurably increased by the unbelievable arrogance of Mr Francis Dereham himself. In fact, he seems to have been a perfect match for Catherine in that he was totally heedless of the cares and consequences of tomorrow, and incredibly boastful and insolent in the security of the moment. The instant he began to receive the Queen’s attentions and favours, he acted in a fashion guaranteed to win enemies and antagonize people. He bragged to his friend, Robert Davenport, that:

many men despised him by cause they perceived that the Queen favoured him insomuch that one Mr John, being gentleman usher with the Queen, fell out with him for sitting at dinner or supper with the Queen’s council after all others were risen, and sent [some] one to him to know whether he were of the Queen’s council, and the said Dereham answered the messenger – ‘Go to Mr John and tell him I was of the Queen’s council before he knew her and shall be there after she hath forgotten him.’
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When the crisis came, Dereham as well as the Queen had his illwishers, who were only too willing to remember or fabricate such conversations.

In the make-believe world of Catherine Howard, dark-haired beauties were by magic transformed into princesses; minstrels and troubadours sang songs of courtly love; and chivalry still retained its hold over the imagination. It is not surprising, then, that a young girl should have thought it romantic and exciting to accept a courtly gallant and play the lady bountiful. The gentleman selected for the role of devoted lover and prince charming, was a courtier eminently suited to the part. Thomas Culpeper appears to have been a young man in his late twenties and a person of considerable wealth and social position. He belonged to the King’s privy chamber as one of the well-born servants, whose appointed task it was to care for the monarch’s personal needs and to oversee the repairing and cleaning of the royal chambers. Culpeper was no stranger to the court; he had been a gentleman of the privy chamber for at least two years before Catherine met him; and there is some reason to suspect that he had been introduced into Henry’s household as a child, working his way up from one of the pages who lit the fire and warmed the King’s clothes, through the station of groom and finally to the cherished office of gentleman of the chamber.
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Certainly he was a royal favourite and a person of sufficient importance for his favour and good-will to be worthy of cultivation. As early as 1537 there had been a discussion between Mr Hussey and Lady Lisle as to whether my lord of
Sussex
or Mr Culpeper was in a better position to be helpful at court, and which should receive the gift of a hawk. It was soon decided that ‘there is no remedy; Culpeper must have a hawk.’
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There is a rather Gilbert-and-Sullivan tradition that Catherine and her gallant were first cousins and had loved each other with a pure and enduring passion ever since they had romped together as children in the nursery.’
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The biological relationship, unfortunately, seems to have been slightly more distant: a conservative estimate makes them sixth cousins,
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while the bit about a nursery romance is simply wishful thinking on the part of those who are determined to elevate their clandestine amour to the level of high romance.

The situation has always had a fatal fascination for maudlin authors who perceive in the relationship between Henry, Culpeper and Catherine the makings of an eternal triangle. Henry is obviously suited for the role of the villainous and bloated husband; Catherine is presented as the innocent and youthful wife who has been forced by her heartless family to marry a repulsive husband, and is led astray by a pure and sustaining love. Finally, the elegant Mr Culpeper is cast as the hero who sacrifices life and chattels for a few fleeting meetings with his true love. The ‘romance’ of Catherine Howard started within a generation of her death, when a Spanish chronicler, who may have been at Henry’s court, wrote a delightful and sympathetic, if singularly inaccurate, account of her career.
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According to this version, Culpeper was so infatuated with the fair Catherine that he went into a marked decline at the news that she was being forced to marry her sovereign lord. Our hero contained his true feelings for the Queen as long as flesh and good sense would endure, but finally risked all by writing her a letter ‘and one day whilst he was dancing with her he was bold enough to slip’ into her hand a note revealing his passion. Catherine answered by the same peculiar method, and ‘Culpeper was overjoyed beyond measure.’ When the terrible truth of their love was revealed to the King, and Culpeper had been cast into prison and threatened with the rack, he boldly dismissed his interrogators by saying:

Gentlemen, do not seek to know more than that the King deprived me of the thing I loved best in the world, and, though you may hang me for it, I can assure you that she loves me as well as I love her, although up to this hour no wrong has ever passed between us. Before the King married her I thought to make her my wife, and when I saw her irremediably lost to me I was like to die.

The young and heroic gentleman then swore on his honour that he knew nothing more, to which the Duke of Somerset replied ‘You have said quite enough, Culpeper, to lose your head.’ This last was absolutely correct, and it is the only part of the legend that could possibly be true.

According to the story, Catherine behaved in the proper manner of all neglected and misunderstood heroines, for when Cromwell, who seems to have come back to life for the occasion, went to interview her, he found ‘her nearly dead’. When she was accused of allowing the Devil to overcome her so soon, she said ‘If I deserve to die for that you had better kill me, and you shall know no more.’ At this point Henry is reported to have been so overcome by his former love for Catherine that he would have saved her, except that his council warned him that she deserved to die, ‘as she betrayed you in thought, and if she had an opportunity would have betrayed you in deed.’ Whether fictitious or not, this last statement is probably correct. Finally, Catherine mounted the scaffold to pay the ultimate price for her thwarted love and instantly became ‘utterly memorable’ by saying: ‘I die a Queen; but I would rather die the wife of Culpeper. God have mercy on my soul. Good people, I beg you, pray for me.’

There is, alas, no evidence that any of this ever took place. In fact, there is considerable proof to the contrary. The Duke of Somerset, who is mentioned as Culpeper’s inquisitor, would not become a duke for another six years; Cromwell, who interviewed the Queen, was peacefully in his grave at the time; Catherine vigorously denied that she had ever loved Culpeper, and at her death she did not say she would rather have died his wife;
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and Culpeper, on careful scrutiny, turns out to be anything but the dashing and noble-minded hero of chivalric fiction.

It is somewhat difficult to unearth the truth about Thomas Culpeper because he had an elder brother of the same name. In an era of high child mortality it was not unusual for families to give to the first-born sons the same name, in the hope that one child at least might live to preserve the name and family. The situation is further complicated by the fact that both brothers were at court, and one is never quite sure which Thomas is doing what at any given moment. But it is fairly clear that Thomas junior was a gentleman of the privy chamber, while his elder brother – Thomas senior – was one of Cromwell’s minions and servants. The Culpeper brothers were a passionate, swashbuckling, grasping pair, and the records are filled with their efforts to procure monastic lands, sinecures at court and pensions from the crown. The elder brother was on one occasion actually involved in a knife fight over a question of disputed land claims.
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As for Thomas Culpeper junior, he seems to have been an elegant young gentleman with a wayward air and considerable sex appeal. At the international joust held in May of 1540, in which the knighthood of
England
challenged all comers, he participated in the defence of national honour while Henry and Catherine looked on from the King’s new gatehouse at
York
palace. The only drawback to the occasion was that Thomas had the misfortune to be defeated and overthrown by Sir Richard Cromwell. If, however, Culpeper fared poorly in mock war, he found easy victory with the ladies, for Lady Lisle sent him a coy and touching note, enclosing two bracelets of her colours and saying that, ‘they are the first that ever I sent to any man.’
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Moreover, the picture of Culpeper in the guise of an Arthurian hero who is willing to risk life and limb for the Queen’s sake, is further marred by the report, which is in part substantiated by official evidence, of a particularly ugly scandal indicating that the gentleman was not quite as saintly as fiction requires. At the time of Culpeper’s arrest and execution, a London merchant wrote to a friend in Germany mentioning that only two years previously Culpeper: