Catherine Howard (7 page)

For Catherine and the other maids of the Dowager’s household, it was sufficient if they learned obedience and the inner mysteries of domestic organization. It is magnificently ironic that it should have been the Duchess’s efforts to bring a touch of refinement into her granddaughter’s life that resulted in the first of those fatal acts for which Catherine eventually paid with her life. What began as playing on the virginal and the lute under the tender care of Mr Henry Manox ended in clandestine meetings in the dark places under the chapel stairs. In the other, if less dangerous arts, Catherine seems to have been neither an especially apt nor a well-trained pupil, but she was certainly not the illiterate and neglected damsel of the history books. She was as well-educated as most of the ladies of the period, and could both read and write, which is more than can be said for other ladies-in-waiting at Henry’s court.
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Catherine, however, never transcended the narrow educational and intellectual horizons of her kind. Reared under the strict and conservative influence of the old Duchess, she was orthodox in religion and naively credulous. She learned her paternosters, but was quite content to leave matters of theology and interpretation to those who knew better, happily mixing ceremonial punctiliousness with a firm belief in supernatural omens and signs. Catherine’s world was crowded with blue crosses above the moon, flaming horseheads and swords, and church steeples demolished by the Devil’s hand.
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It mattered little, however, whether this Howard girl could write courtly love sonnets, appreciate theological niceties, or even sign her name, for when the moment came, Henry was not looking for a second Anne Boleyn who could match his own amorous love-letters. With Catherine he was seeking a less vicarious experience.

Born into a family of ten children, reared in the peripatetic household of a father who constantly sponged on both friend and relation, and accustomed to the rough and ready existence of sixteenth-century childhood, Catherine was probably prepared for almost everything that she might encounter at the Duchess’s country house at Horsham – except perhaps its size. Agnes, Dowager Duchess of
Norfolk
, who presided over the manors of Horsham and Chesworth in Sussex
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and the school for young relatives in her household, was herself something of an anachronism. Stiff-necked, testy and old-fashioned, she harkened back to the Wars of the Roses and the irresponsible anarchy of the old nobility. Rigidly religious, balancing the sins of her youth with a hair-shirt in the twilight of her life, the old Dowager was under it all a kind-hearted if shorttempered matriarch. She had most of the strength and shortcomings of her generation. She rarely went to court except on business or command, and she must have represented almost everything that Henry and the new men of the age most disliked. Her acid tongue, her stubborn defence of Henry’s first wife, Catherine of Aragon, her studied disregard for the refinements of high society, and her total disdain for courtly etiquette must have made her distinctly unpopular at court. But under this starched and feudal façade lay both shrewdness and knowledge of the ways of the world, and despite her outward religious orthodoxy, there remained a good deal of amused toleration of the antics and escapades of youth. Officially frowning upon what went on in her ‘maidens’ chambers’ at night, the Dowager probably knew a good deal more about such ‘goingson’ than Catherine and her companions gave her credit for. She knew full well where a certain Mr Francis Dereham was prone to spend his evenings, and more than once she was heard to exclaim: ‘I warrant you if you seek him in Catherine Howard’s chamber ye shall find him there.’
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All she required was that the younger generation should not flaunt their love-affairs in her face, and when she stumbled upon Catherine and Dereham kissing in the corridor she flew into a rage, boxed her granddaughter’s ears and upbraided Dercham for his liberties. Yet for all the Duchess’s vinegary words and violent fashions, she seems to have liked the full-blooded adventurer, and when Catherine finally grew weary of Dereham’s attentions she found a perverse pleasure in reminding Mistress Howard of her early fascination.
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Life was too short and too complex for her to be burdened with the morals of her household, and all she asked was that the lusty youth conform to outward appearances. Her time was filled with the multitude of tasks related to the running of a vast and disorganized estate. As one of the richest widows in the realm, she was chronically being hounded by poor relations, and her son, Lord William, was constantly plaguing her for money and an advance upon his inheritance. In an age when banking facilities were almost non-existent, the old lady resorted to the proverbial sock (she confessed in later life that she had some £800 in cash hidden about the house), and rapidly acquired a reputation for being something of a miser.
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But the care of money was not her only consideration. In the paternalistic society of the sixteenth century, her responsibilities reached out into the surrounding countryside, where she cared for her sick neighbours and prescribed ‘treacle and water imperial’ as a sure cure for all their ailments. The Duchess was evidently something of an apothecary, for she suggested to Cardinal Wolsey that ‘vinegar, wormwood, rosewater and crumbs of brown bread is very good and comfortable to put in a linen cloth to smell unto your nose.’
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This was her remedy for the various noxious odours that pervaded the Tudor world.

Most important and time-consuming of all was the management of her own household. How many people were involved in such an organization it is impossible to say, and very likely the old lady of
Norfolk
was not sure herself. Considering the size of other noble establishments, there may have been well over a hundred persons, ranging in a carefully graduated hierarchy from the dirty and naked scullery-boys who scrubbed the cauldrons in the great kitchen to the most important household officials, such as the steward, the chamberlain and the cellarer. Whether the Dowager had a house at both the manors of Horsham and Chesworth is not clear, but the Chesworth house itself consisted of five great rooms below stairs – not counting such ‘necessary rooms’ as the kitchen, pantry, and storage places – and five rooms upstairs, plus a garret. Then there were the malt-house, the barn, the stable, the cow barn, and four acres of orchards and gardens plus ‘divers fish ponds’. At one time there had evidently been a moat, while the park of 223 acres harboured a herd of 100 deer.
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Like other large estates, Horsham and Chesworth were self-sustaining organizations, splitting their own wood for the insatiable Tudor fireplaces, carding their own flax, weaving their own clothes, and producing food for guests and retainers. Hams had to be smoked, bacon cured, vegetables preserved, fruit stored, ale brewed, bread baked, for the whole household, and goose-down collected for the mistress’s bed. Agnes Howard was in charge of all this, and though she had her steward, her secretary, and her cellarer to assist her, the ultimate responsibility for the establishment rested on her shoulders.

It was into such a household that Catherine, aged approximately ten, entered, so as to become versed ‘in the worthy knowledges which do belong to her vocation’ – that of a prospective housewife to a Tudor gentleman.
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Life at Horsham must have been the epitome of luxurious discomfort. Early Tudor mansions were cold, damp, and dirty. The stone floors of the draughty halls remained bare, except for rushes that were rarely changed as often as they should have been, and the cavernous fireplaces did little to cut the chill. The sanitary facilities were both primitive and infrequent, and at best a house the size of the Dowager’s would boast but a single ‘house of easement’ which was usually in cellar or the corner of the courtyard; occasionally, however, they were supplied with double seats. Chamber-pots were usually furnished in the various ‘privy chambers’, and their contents were disposed of with careless and dangerous abandon.

Such an establishment was not only labyrinthine and selfsufficient, it was also crowded and intimate to a degree unimaginable to modern society. Privacy was almost unknown; eating was a formal and communal function; and not even the Duchess herself slept alone. The sixteenth century was not particular where or with whom it slept, and the usual arrangement consisted of dormitories divided between men and women. Only in the most elevated and distinguished cases did married couples sleep together, and more often than not two couples shared the same bed. It is dillicult to conceive of a society in which the bed was a household luxury, where chairs were scarce and kings ate at collapsible trestle tables. In the early part of the century, even in the homes of the rich and powerful, linen was a rarity, and a down mattress or a feather bed was a possession worthy of mention in one’s last will and testament. Probably only the Duchess and a few honoured visitors were esteemed deserving of such luxury. For Catherine and her dormitory-mates a straw mattress and dagswain blanket with ‘a good round log under their heads’ sufficed, while pillows were kept for women in childbirth.
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Moreover, society made little distinction in assigning beds, and where children were concerned, servants and noble progeny were indiscriminately mingled.

So far the life of Catherine Howard in
Sussex
has been merely a historical reconstruction – the surroundings of any girl given a similar position in society. Historical reality commences in the year 1536 when Catherine had reached the ‘fire of full fourteen’ and Henry Manox, the son of the Duchess’s neighbour, George Manox, was summoned to Horsham to instruct the children of the house in the art of playing the virginal and the lute.
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Henry Manox, like so many others of the Dowager’s entourage, occupied a tenuous position somewhere between that of a servant and a gentleman; nor was he the only member of his family to be in service at Horsham, since his cousin, Edward Waldgrave, was one of the gentlemen-inwaiting to the old lady of Norfolk. He may have been something of a cad, but he certainly was not the systematic corrupter of innocent youth portrayed by some historians. In a society which left children to their own devices behind the back stairs, it is not surprising that Manox flirted with his pretty, auburn-haired pupil, who seems to have shown no sign that she in any way resented his advances or was ignorant of his designs.

Catherine was obviously not swept off her feet. On the contrary, it was the music teacher who was captivated, and he begged her, if indeed she loved him, to let him ‘perceive by some token that you love me’. Catherine’s rejoinder made it cruelly evident that she was acutely aware of the social gulf that existed between a duke’s niece and the son of a simple landed family. ‘What token should I show you?’ she answered. ‘I will never be naught with you and able to marry me you be not.’ Manox persisted and begged for a few intimate (very intimate) caresses, to which the lady replied that she was willing to oblige on condition that he ‘desire no more’. They arranged a courting place, and several days later met secretly in the Duchess’s chapel chamber ‘in the dark evening’, where Manox bid Catherine ‘keep her promise wherewith she was content’. There, under the lengthening shadows of the vaulted arches, the young music teacher found this Howard daughter even more responsive than he had hoped, and he later confessed that ‘he felt more than was convenient.’
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Where these intimate caresses behind the altar ended will never be known, but Manox later swore ‘upon his damnation’ that he ‘never knew her carnally’.
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Considering Catherine’s earlier insistence that he should ‘desire no more’ than a token of her love, Manox was probably telling the truth. Moreover, the affair was abruptly interrupted by the outraged Dowager, who discovered them together in their secret meeting-place. This was the second time they had been caught together and the Duchess was thoroughly annoyed. What action she took is not recorded. She may have dismissed Manox from his tutorial post, for he reappears later in the household of Lord Bayment, but more probably she did nothing, viewing the episode as a meaningless escapade and charging that the two should ‘never be alone together’.
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Certainly their relations did not cease; they were merely made more diffifcult, since the young people had to use one of the maids as a go-between to carry tokens back and forth, and it was rumoured in the kitchen circles that the two were secretly engaged.
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While Catherine was exchanging love-tokens with Henry Manox, the Dowager Duchess removed her household to Lambeth, which lay only a few miles from
London
. At first the love affair continued unabated, since Manox found a position close by in the service of Lord Bayment. In the end, however, the new and exciting atmosphere of Lambeth began to take effect, and while Henry Manox became increasingly confident of his control over Catherine’s heart, the young lady herself was rapidly outgrowing her infatuation for the virginal player.

Norfolk House lay abreast of the king’s highway leading from Lambeth town and directly opposite the archiepiscopal residence of Thomas Cranmer. Its imposing gateway and paved courtyard, its vast chambers, gallery and oratory, and its great hall opening on to the gardens in the rear, were palatial in contrast to the country establishment at Horsham.
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Moreover, it was right across the river from Westminster and the royal court, and Catherine was suddenly introduced to a cavalcade of eligible and fascinating young men who lived on the neighbouring estates, or accompanied her uncle the Duke on his frequent visits to his stepmother’s house. The break came when one of the servants reported to Mary Lassells, the Duchess’s chamberer, the rumour of an engagement between Manox and Catherine. Mistress Lassells did not mince words, and she proceeded to upbraid Manox for his impudence at aspiring to the hand of a Howard lady. ‘Man, what mean thou to play the fool of this fashion,’ she said. ‘Know not thou that if my lady of
Norfolk
knew of the love betwixt thee and Mistress Howard, she will undo thee.’ Then the chamberer gave a warning: ‘She is come of a noble house and if thou should marry her some of her blood would kill thee.’
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