Catherine Howard (4 page)

The family did not content itself with creatures of the royal bounty and social upstarts; the stiff and uncompromising pride of the feudal past was also allied to their family pattern. Catherine’s aunts, who are to be reckoned by the dozen, were all married to peers of highest station, most of whom could claim the dubious distinction of having played at the risky game of treason, and who could count their rightful share of impaled heads above the tower gate of
London
Bridge
. The Howards could boast alliance with earls of
Sussex
,
Bridgewater
,
Oxford
, and
Derby
. More distantly they were connected with John Grey, Viscount Lisle, Lord Dacre of the South and John Bourchier, Lord Berners. Even more distinguished, Thomas Howard, the third Duke of Norfolk, was married to Elizabeth Stafford, the daughter of the Duke of Buckingham, a direct descendant of Edward III, whose blood rights to the throne cost him his head in 1521.
25
The oldest and the youngest blood of the century were united in the Howard veins, and both family and political position conspired to place the Duke, both as a grandee of the realm and as the head of a family empire, at the pinnacle of a veritable dynasty.

Like many houses of ancient lineage, the Howards were ‘puffed up with insatiable pride’ and their dynastic ambitions did not stop with the daughters of dukes and earls. As the representatives of the Mowbray line, they had little use for the Plantagenet blood of the dukes of Buckingham, for their Mowbray ancestors had laid claim to royal descent. As the descendants of kings and in their own dignity as dukes of
Norfolk
, the Howards regarded it as their just deserts to sit as councillors to kings, ride as earl marshals of the host, and supply husbands and wives to royal progeny. The sixteenth-century author Cornelius Agrippa once suggested that there were at least three roads to political advancement in his age. You could win a peerage in war, you could purchase it with money, or, in extremity, you could become ‘a royal parasite, or marry a discarded mistress or illegitimate child of a prince’.
26
The Howards regained their dukedom on the battlefield of
Flodden
, but it was along the last road that they advanced farthest, for above all others, the Howards were the clan from which Henry VIII selected spouses for himself and his family. Two of the third duke’s nieces, Anne Boleyn and Catherine Howard, became Henry’s queens, and though both ended their lives upon the scaffold, the former gave birth to a reigning monarch and
England
’s greatest queen. But this was only the beginning.
Norfolk
’s daughter was wedded to Henry’s illegitimate son, Henry Fitzroy; his son was suggested as a worthy husband for the King’s first-born child, the Princess Mary; his niece, Mary Boleyn, became the King’s mistress, and his half-brother, another Thomas, was briefly, if disastrously, contracted in marriage to Henry’s niece, Margaret Douglas, the grandmother of James I of England.
27

Howard sons and daughters seemed to be everywhere, at every level of society, entrenched in almost every key position. It was no easy matter to keep such a family empire together, and the Howards were forced to pay a heavy price for their matrimonial pre-eminence.
Alliance
with sovereignty won for them the envy of less fortunate clans, while their cherished position of acting as a stud farm for royalty, was fraught with dangers. Lord Burghley is reported to have once remarked that ‘marriage with the blood royal was too full of risk to be lightly entered into’,
28
and though union with the Tudors brought political influence and social prestige, it was rarely accompanied by security or peace of mind. The alliance between the two houses was more than once to prove itself dangerous to the Howard interests. A sixteenth-century proverb observes that ‘there is more to marriage than four bare legs in bed’, and the full significance of that dictum becomes particularly obvious when dealing with royalty, for more than one Howard was to discover that a double standard existed for those of princely blood and those of more humble clay.

Both Anne Boleyn and Catherine Howard lost their heads because they failed in their essential function, both as Howards and royal wives; neither could cement the union with a male heir, and both ladies allowed the breath of adulterous scandal to touch their lives. As mere mortals they deserved death twice over for their double sins. The Howards learned to their cost that marriage to royalty is a public, not a private, affair. Lord Thomas, the Duke’s half-brother, died in the
Tower
of
London
in 1536 for ‘having tried in the presence of witnesses to contract a marriage’ with Lady Margaret Douglas, the King’s niece. Elopement and high romance may be permissible in the lesser sort, but for royalty, wedlock was strictly a business proposition, and Henry was justifiably annoyed at the thought of squandering such a valuable diplomatic pawn as a Tudor niece upon a mere subject, even though he was a Howard. Moreover, the royal uncle placed a dangerous interpretation upon the foolhardy actions of the young Howard gallant, and it was rumoured abroad that Thomas had been ‘led and seduced by the Devil’ and was obviously aspiring to ‘the imperial crown by reason of marriage in so high a blood.’
29
The Lady Margaret seems to have had a persistent and fatal penchant for Howard striplings, and five years later she was again in disgrace for having had an affair with Catherine’s brother, Charles.
30

The Tudors were constantly on the watch that the Howards limit their ambitions to Tudor women and refrain from casting greedy eyes upon the Tudor crown. Henry Howard, first cousin to Catherine and heir to the dukedom, was relieved of his head in 1546 for having ‘openly used, and traitorously caused to be depicted, mixed, and conjoined with his own arms and ensigns, the said arms and ensigns of the King.’
31
The heraldic pretensions of the Howard family were tantamount to an assertion that Howard blood was the equal of Tudor blood, and that a Howard might yet succeed a Tudor upon the throne. The folly of young Henry Howard was twofold, for not only did he arouse the most fundamental and predatory instincts of the Tudors, but he also exposed himself and his family to the enmity of personal and dynastic hatred. The Howards were envied by those who coveted their dignity, intrigued against by those who feared their power, and detested by those who abhorred their policy. Once the artful and persuasive whisper of the opposing faction had inflamed the King’s natural suspicions, Henry Howard’s fate was sealed. Social status, political influence, and marriage to royalty were coveted dignities, but the price came high: the Howards found themselves surrounded by a host of rivals who were only too willing to replace them in the blissful and lucrative light of royal favour.

At the moment of Catherine’s birth the head of the Howard clan was Thomas, third Duke of Norfolk, who had been waiting none too patiently for over half a century to enter into his ducal dignity when his father, hoary and full of years, finally died in 1524. The Duke was a nobleman of limited mentality, few inhibitions, and inordinate ambitions, who succeeded regularly in transforming the banal into the burlesque. When Thomas blundered, he did so with magnificent stupidity; when he fought, he operated with terrifying efficiency; when he married, he espoused first the daughter of Edward IV and then the heiress of the greatest grandee of the realm, Edward Stafford, Duke of Buckingham; when he dreamed, he saw before him the dazzling spectre of the crown; and when he quarrelled with his wife, he ordered his servants to pin her to the floor, where they sat on her until she spat blood. The only thing that was in any fashion commonplace about the Duke was his intelligence, which was never able to penetrate the window-dressing of sixteenth-century diplomacy and politics. It is only too easy to paint
Norfolk
as a ‘ponderous, cold-hearted, chicken-brained Duke, moving sluggishly in the mists of the feudal past like some obsolete armoured saurian’.
32
Thomas Howard represented a contradiction in terms – the domesticated feudal magnate. The third Duke stood midway between his father, who advocated the self-destroying creed of absolute duty to the monarchy and who would defend the crown irrespective of the man who wore it, and his son, who betrayed signs of family and feudal megalomania and whose long, arrogant face and stiffnecked pride were almost a symbol of what the Tudors felt most obliged to liquidate – the divine right of aristocracy. Sir Thomas Palmer once remarked of the Duke’s brother and Catherine Howard’s father, Lord Edmund Howard, that ‘though he be a lord, yet he is not God.’
33
By the third and fourth generation the Howards tended to be increasingly forgetful of their purely mortal origins.

Uniting the county blood of the Howards with the ancient race of the Mowbrays, the Duke equivocated; he was never able to decide whether he was a strange new man whose dignity was simply a mirror of royal authority, or a feudal baron with his roots in the impenetrable past. He nurtured a positive phobia for Cardinal Wolsey, not because the cardinal monopolized political power about the King, but because he was a presumptuous upstart, the son of an
Ipswich
butcher, and the Duke boasted that he would some day eat that butcher’s cur alive.
34
Yet the Venetian Ambassador observed that Thomas was ‘liberal, affable and astute’ and would associate with everybody, no matter what his origins.
35
Above all else Norfolk was a realist and, though his instincts were feudal both in politics and religion, he realized the political expediency of compromising with the powers that be, for he had learned the lesson of the proverb that ‘enjoins our kissing the hand we are unable to cut off’.

Of all the facets of Thomas Howard’s personality, the one most often exposed to criticism is his servility, which later generations have stigmatized as ‘unbecoming his rank and station’. This indeed is the ultimate irony – to rebuke the feudal wolf for his good behaviour! Of all the great barons of Henry’s reign,
Norfolk
had the most reason and the greatest occasion to try his hand at treason. Yet he remained true to a crown that struck down his father-in-law, executed two of his nieces, shocked his religious sensibilities, elevated men of no social consequence to high dignity and authority, and viewed the Duke himself with deep suspicion, lest the feudal wolf revert to its predatory nature.

At least twice he sacrificed personal popularity to accomplish his sovereign’s nefarious plans. During the Evil May Day riots of 1517, the apprentices of
London
gave vent to their narrow nationalism and economic hatred by looting the homes and shops of foreign merchants and lynching Flemish and Venetian traders. Thomas and his brother Edmund and his father were called in to suppress the turmoil, and enforce brutal royal justice, while Henry VIII himself played the pleasing role of gracious pardoner after legal vengeance had been administered.
36
Again in 1536,
Norfolk
was called out of political exile as being the only man capable of curbing the feudalreligious uprising of the northern counties during the Pilgrimage of Grace that rocked the Tudor throne to its foundations. The Howards, as the heroes of Flodden Field against the Scots in 1513, were immensely popular in the northern shires, and had the Duke harboured treasonous thoughts he could easily have joined the insurgents. Thomas put aside any such ideas and became the willing instrument of Henry’s vengeance that enjoined the Duke to ‘cause such dreadful execution upon a good number of the inhabitants, hanging them on trees, quartering them, and setting their heads and quarters in every town, as shall be a fearful warning.’
37
The memory of the silent figures swinging from a hundred gibbets was more than enough to transform the Duke’s popularity into bitter hatred, and the final paradox was attained when lordly
Norfolk
and low-born Cromwell were associated in the popular mind, which wished to see both strung up from the same gallows.
38

The slight, dark-haired, swarthy man who held the ducal title may have been an unscrupulous dynast, greedy for personal power and family aggrandizement, but in Tudor times security rested on calculated servility and cautious recognition of the political facts of life. All the Howards had to dance nimbly the Tudor fandango, lest their suspicious sovereign reach down and pluck from them their family titles, or lest their political opponents interpret bristling dynastic pride as high treason. Retirement into secure political nonentity was impossible, for whether Thomas Howard desired it or not, the ducal dignity and feudal blood were always the magnetic centre for political organization and traitorous sentiments. Howard blood conjoined with Plantagenet descent made the Duke and his son possible successors to the throne should Henry VIII die without a male heir. During the crisis of Henry’s divorce of Catherine of
Aragon
and the break with
Rome
, the Pope suggested that Catherine’s daughter, the Princess Mary, might marry
Norfolk
’s son and ‘thus gain many adherents and overthrow her father’.
39
The faintest rumour of such a suggestion was enough to place the duke’s head in jeopardy, and the Howards learned to move cautiously in the midst of plots and counterplots, any one of which might have cost them their lives. In 1536, during the rebellion of the north, it was hoped that
Norfolk
would join others of the feudal discontented, and the old nobility revealed to the Imperial Ambassador that they ‘counted in case of need’ on the Duke to ‘support the cause of Faith and Church’. The Ambassador, however, shrewdly noted that ‘owing to the said duke’s versatile and inconstant humour’ no one could ‘rely on him’.
40
Norfolk
was too experienced a campaigner and too agile a politician to risk his neck in defence of either faith or Church.