Catherine Howard (6 page)

Only in the field of matrimony did Edmund excel, and like so many of his clan he seems to have inherited his family’s astute eye for selecting women of breeding and wealth. Considering his lack of prospects, Edmund did extraordinarily well, for he married three times and each wife brought land and riches into the itching Howard grasp. His first and only fruitful marriage was with Jocasta Culpeper, the wealthy widow of Ralph Legh, and co-heir of Sir Richard Culpeper of
Aylesford
,
Kent
. Mistress Jocasta can hardly be described as a youthful charmer, since she was considerably senior to her second husband and must have been nearing thirty at the moment of her marriage. Moreover, Edmund married an entire family, since his wife had at least two, and possibly as many as five, children by her previous husband. What this newest Howard bride lacked in appearance, however, she made up in substance, for both the Leghs and the Culpepers were extensive landowners in
Kent
,
Surrey
, and Sussex.
18

There is considerable controversy over the year in which the marriage took place.
19
As with so many other events surrounding Catherine and her family, the truth remains obscure. Probably they were espoused about the year 1514, since it is highly improbable that Edmund, merely as the third son of the Earl of Surrey, could have snared such an eminently respectable and affluent lady. The translation of his father to the dukedom in 1513 must have made a considerable difference to Jocasta’s matrimonial interests in this impecunious gentleman, with nothing but blood and family to his credit. Lord Edmund was free to marry twice more; first Dorothy
Troyes
, another wealthy widow with a family of eight; and second, after 1532, Margaret, widow of Nicholas Jennings.
20
Except for the recurrent theme of wealthy widows and marriage settlements to stay the sagging finances of the Howard groom, there is little of interest about these final marriages. It is with Jocasta Culpeper that the life of Catherine Howard begins.

The only statement that can be made with any degree of certainty about Catherine’s birth is that she was one of the youngest children of a family of ten, and that she was born before 1525, most probably in 1521 (see Appendix). Where she was born and reared is still a total mystery. Some sources indicate
London
, others suggest the Howard residence at Lambeth, while still others favour Oxenheath in
Kent
,
21
the home of Catherine’s maternal uncle, William Cotton. The only really authenticated fact is that Catherine spent her childhood with her step-grandmother, the Dowager Duchess of
Norfolk
, who divided her time between her estates at Horsham in
Sussex
and the Howard suburban residence at Lambeth.

At this juncture some writers cannot refrain from shedding tears over the cruel fate of a young girl whose mother died while she was still in the first decade of life, and whose father was an impoverished if aristocratic ne’er-do-well, who abandoned his daughter to her own devices in the vast entourage of that
Norfolk
matriarch, the ‘testy old’ Dowager Duchess. In the imaginative, if singularly inaccurate, language of Miss Strickland, it was ‘indeed an evil hour for the little Katharine when she left the paternal roof, and the society of the innocent companions of her infant joys and cares, to become a neglected dependant in the splendid mansion of a proud and heartless relative.
22
Possibly by modern standards her lot left something to be desired, but in the opinion of her own society, it was customary to farm out children to the establishments of rich friends and relations where they could learn the ways of polite society and proper respect for their elders and betters. In an age of little formal education, such houses as that of the Dowager Duchess supplied the discipline and training of a boarding school where the offspring of the well-connected could escape what was considered to be the enervating influence of a mother’s love. Catherine’s first cousin, Mary Boleyn, was sent as a maid-in-waiting to the establishment of Margaret of Austria, while Anne Boleyn accompanied Mary Tudor to the court of Louis of
France
. Lord Edmund Howard did not do as well for his progeny, but it was neither his poverty nor the death of his wife that induced him to board his children with his stepmother, it was simply part of the educational process. There in the draughty halls and dormitories at Horsham or Lambeth, and under the titular custody of the Dowager Duchess, the children of innumerable Howard relations and dependants were conditioned to the realities of sixteenth-century life.

It may be charitable to excuse Mistress Catherine’s rather wanton activities as the fault of her heartless step-grandmother, who forced her ‘to associate with her waiting-women’ and ‘compelled’ her to sleep in communal sleeping apartments with ‘persons of the most abandoned description’ who took ‘fiendish delight in perverting the principles and debasing the mind of the nobly-born damsel who was thrown into the sphere of their polluting influence’.
23
There are only two things wrong with this touching thesis. First, Catherine herself was regarded as a pseudo-servant, or rather an apprentice learning the secret of good manners and accomplishments. It was important for children to know that they were expected to ‘rise when their elders and betters’ entered the room, stand while their superiors sat, and curtsy to the Duchess ‘in token of humility and subjection’. These were considered to be social graces best inculcated by treating children as indentured domestics and keeping them from idleness.
24
Menials were customarily viewed as being part of the family, and there tended to be little distinction between those of gentle and humble birth. Anyone who served in the household appeared on the account books as servants, and this applied to the chaplain, the chamberlain, and the secretary, as well as to the scullery urchin. It made little difference that more often than not, the dowager’s ladiesin- waiting were as well-born as their mistress and that her steward might be a close relative. As for the children, they were expected to help their elders’ dress, to wait at table and to fetch and carry on command, and when they failed in their social and educational duties they were beaten with as much vigour as any village maid.

Secondly, on closer inspection, Catherine appears to have been no better born than those ‘abandoned persons’ who presumably took such ‘fiendish delight’ in systematically corrupting her innocent mind. Her brothers and sisters were all under the Dowager’s care at various times, and the children of her aunt, the Countess of Bridgewater, were her constant associates.
25
It emerges that her bedmates, those immoral temptresses, were her cousins, for both Katherine and Malyn Tylney were relatives of the Duchess, while Dorothy Baskerville, Margaret Benet, and Alice Restwold were of lesser but eminently respectable landed stock. As for her paramours, one was a neighbour, the other a distant kinsman. Henry Manox, who taught her to play on the virginal, and possibly a good deal else, came from a neighbouring gentry family, and Francis Dereham was a cousin. Both gentlemen formed part of the Howard
ménage
– the former as music teacher to the Howard children, and the latter as one of the Duke’s pensioners and later as a member of the Dowager’s service at Lambeth.
26
Even that ‘drab’ Elizabeth Holland, who carried the doubtful title of laundress and was for years the Duke’s mistress, was sister to the Duke’s secretary and related to Lord Hussey of Sleaford.
27

The effect of sending children away from home at an early age was fatal to any sense of family solidarity, since the progeny of the upper classes might live to manhood without laying eyes on their parents, and the relationship between father and son was often one of bitter enmity and rivalry. Even when the educational process took place in the home, the pedagogical maxim of the age was spare the rod and spoil the child. Not for nothing did one mother mention as a normal occurrence that her daughter had been beaten ‘twice in one day and her head broken in two or three places’.
28
Children were generally regarded as being important financial assets, and it was in no way remarkable that Sir John Fastolf sold the marriage rights of his stepson to Sir William Gascoigne for 500 marks and then bought them back again.
29
In a very real sense, children were considered as being the goods and possessions of their parents, to be disposed of as their elders saw fit. Romance and courtly love may have been suitable for chivalric tales of the past, but neither was in the least concerned with marriage. Throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, society was generally convinced that love marriages led only to trouble, and one lady quite honestly asked whether there was ‘any thing thought so indiscreet, or that makes one more contemptible’ than marrying for love.
30
Land and financial settlements were the considerations at stake, and slight value was placed upon the wishes or sentiments of the bride or bridegroom. The Duke of Norfolk’s daughter was married at fourteen to a lad of fifteen; the Duke of Suffolk’s brother, a boy of eighteen, was espoused to a widow of fifty; and young Master Robert Barre, aged three, had to be lured with an apple to get him into the church, to celebrate his engagement to Elizabeth Rogerson.
31

Child marriages were the constant custom of the age, and most of Catherine’s relatives were married young. Her mother, at the age of twelve, had taken as her first husband a man who belonged to a previous generation;
32
and the Earl of Surrey had his marriage arranged for him at thirteen and was betrothed by the age of fourteen.
33
It is true that this was beginning to exceed the legal limits, since the law prohibited the marriage of boys under fourteen, and legally the ‘flower of a female’s age’ was twelve.
34
But as Bishop Latimer complained, a society that regarded marriage primarily as the joining of ‘lands to lands, and possessions to possessions’ paid scant heed to either the physiological or psychological factors involved.
35
When it was rumoured that Sir Brian Stapleton had been offered 1,200 marks in ready gold and land worth 100 marks for the hand of his son and heir ‘and yet he trusteth to have more’,
36
one could hardly expect anxious parents to have waited until their progeny reached the legal age. This, of course, did not necessarily mean that girls of twelve, or even the ‘forward virgins’ of fourteen, were exposed to the doubtful care of their spouses, and they often lived at home until eighteen lest they endanger themselves through childbearing. As far as the parents were concerned, the essential aspect of wedlock had been established, for once the marriage settlement was signed then the estates involved were fixed and settled by law. When we come to Catherine Howard’s youthful escapades and her marriage to a sovereign, it might be well to remember how the Howards regarded the subject of marriage and the contemporary view: the girl ‘who strikes the fire of full fourteen, today [is] ripe for a husband.’

The education and training of a young lady or gentleman of good birth was geared to these considerations. ‘A good housewife is a great patrimony’, and the honest wife, who also had an honest income of her own, was even more highly treasured. It was not necessary that a young lady be accomplished in the arts.
37
That both Queen Elizabeth and Queen Mary were highly educated ladies is the royal exception, and not the common rule. Catherine Howard had few intellectual accomplishments, and it was considered unnecessary that she should. It was a ‘gentleman’s calling to be able to blow the horn, to hunt and hawk’, and to leave learning to the ‘clodhoppers’ who made scholarship a substitute for birth.
38
For a young gentlewoman, it sufficed if she was of honest, humble and of a wifely disposition. As late as 1598, Robert Cleaver could write that parents had only four duties that they owed their children – to instruct them in the fear of God, to instil in them a love of virtue and a hatred of vice, to keep them from idleness, and (the most important of all ) to rear them to acknowledge the strict authority of the father, whose judgment must be obeyed at all times, especially in matters of matrimony.
39
It was this last duty that was most often discussed, and Roger Ascham bewailed that ‘our time is so far from that old discipline and obedience’ that not only young gentlemen but even girls dared to marry ‘where they list and how they list’ without respect to ‘father, mother, God, good order and all’.
40

Though Ascham’s condemnation may have been justified as far as court circles were concerned, the country families still maintained that the ‘principal commendation in a woman [is] to be able to govern and direct her household, to look to her house and family’, and ‘to know the force of her kitchen’.
41
It was to learn such honest and wifely duties that Catherine was sent to live with her stepgrandmother. The finer accomplishments of life were not needed to enhance her eligibility as the wife of some country squire within the Howard circle, or some strategic courtier who might be useful to the family interests. No one, least of all Catherine, had any notion that she would be consulted when the time for connubial selection arrived, or that a Howard daughter would be thoughtlessly thrown away on just any hopeful aspirant to her hand.