Catherine Howard (13 page)
The men who strove to tear down whatever obstacles they encountered in the path of their ambitions were insistent upon the importance of conventional formalism and rigid etiquette. Ceremony did two things: it elevated many of the more servile and disagreeable services surrounding the royal person into cherished honours, and it tended to obscure and at times even restrain sordid brutality and offensiveness by encompassing both in a thick veil of pomp and circumstance. The sixteenth century was well aware that ‘in pompous ceremonies a secret of government doth much consist.’ It was the single check that strong and egotistical men would accept, and it was the one restraint that was capable of raising society out of its Hobbesian state of nasty brutishness.
The degree to which ceremony could mask even the most predatory actions is evidenced in the close encounter that Catherine Howard’s cousin experienced with Tudor law. In 1541 Sir Edmund Knyvet had a row on the tennis court with Thomas Clere, a gentleman retainer of the Duke of Norfolk and an old crony of the Earl of Surrey. The quarrel may have had its origins in the mutual distaste existing between Sir Edmund and the Earl, but the immediate brawl probably had to do with sportmanship, for Sir Edmund administered a resounding punch upon Thomas Clere’s nose.
59
This kind of rowdiness was far too common at court, and Henry decreed by statute that offenders should lose their right hand as punishment – a typical example of Tudor belief that the punishment should fit the crime. Sir Edmund was duly tried and sentenced, and the arrangements for the execution fell to the royal surgeon, whose appointed duty it was to supervise the torturing and maiming of State prisoners. Besides the surgeon, other members of the household combined both private and public activities by participating in the proceedings. The sergeant chirurgeon officiated with his surgical equipment; the sergeant of the woodyard was on hand with his mallet and block on which Sir Edmund’s hand was placed; the King’s mastercook supplied the execution knife; the sergeant farrier, the searing iron; and the sergeant of the poultry, the cock which ‘should have his head smitten off upon the same block, and with the same knife’. Finally, the yeoman of the scullery came with coal to heat the searing iron, and the sergeant of the cellar supplied wine, ale, and beer for the occasion. ‘Thus every man in his office [was] ready to do the execution.’
60
Sir Edmund pleaded that his left hand be taken, so that his right might continue to do good service for the King. Actually, as the French Ambassador reported, the knight was ‘more frightened than hurt’ since, at the pleading of Catherine Howard, the sentence at the very moment of execution was stayed and the culprit reprieved.
61
Eating as well as justice was surrounded by the most intricate and elaborate forms. Each person had his allotted and ceremonial task; the sewer supervised the building of the fire, the clerk of the ewery set the table and issued the towels with which the carver and the panter handled all the food and silver. The assay or tasting of the King’s food involved numerous individuals, who handled and nibbled the royal menu with appropriate flourishes and ritual.
62
The closer to the royal presence, the greater the degree of elaborate ceremony, until one reached the epitome of pompous regulation in the organization of the King’s privy chamber. The number of individuals who could claim entrance into the inner sanctum of the royal presence was rigidly limited and defined. The monarch was to be waited upon by six gentlemen, two gentlemen ushers, four grooms, a barber, and a page, all of whom were appointed for ‘their good behaviour and qualities’, and who diligently attended upon the royal person, doing ‘humble, reverent, secret, and lowly service’. The grooms of the chamber were not to ‘lay hands upon the royal person or intermeddle with preparing or dressing’ the King. This responsibility was the much sought-after task of the gentlemen of the bedchamber, who received the royal clothes at the door of the inner chamber, after they had been carefully warmed before the fire.
63
Later in the reign the size of the entourage about the King was more than doubled to allow these well-born servants a certain degree of relief from their constant vigilance and domestic cares.
Equally intricate was the process by which the royal bed was prepared each morning. Both the straw mattress and the box on the bedstead had to be rolled upon by one of the yeomen of the bedchamber to test it for hidden daggers. On top of the mattress was laid a canvas cover and feather bed, which again was tested for ‘treacherous objects’. Finally came embroidered sheets and soft blankets until all was completed except the concluding ceremonial flourish of placing the King’s sword at the head of the bed, while each of the four yeomen kissed the places where their hands had touched the royal couch.
64
Even the humble process of supplying the monarch with between-meal snacks was a matter of a complex chain of command, rather like A. A. Milne’s monarch who desired a little bit of butter for his bread. It was ordered that:
In case the King’s grace will have bread or drink that one of the gentlemen ushers of the privy chamber shall command one of the grooms of the same to warn the officers of the buttery, pantry and cellar to bring the said bread and drink to the door of the said privy chamber, where one of the ushers taking the assay, shall receive the same bringing it to the cupboard.
65
In the sixteenth century, kings had to be blessed with endless patience if they desired anything to eat.
Such elaborate routine kept a host of unnecessary hands industrious, but its essential function was to create a mysterious and splendid atmosphere of pomp and elegance about the sovereign, and to supply a degree of dignity and discipline to an otherwise uninhibited society. Those may have been ‘but painted days, only for show’,
66
but the paint was nevertheless necessary. As cosmetics and perfumes are not a substitute for cleanliness but make the consequence of foulness less noxious, so ceremony did not prevent disorder, filth and violence, but it did at least limit and restrain them. The intent was not unlike the objective of Tudor gardens – the imposing of human determination upon the wild vitality of nature. Here in the Tudor garden, medieval delight in the exotic,
nouveau riche
bad taste, and the Renaissance desire to make nature conform to the will of man, united to produce a riot of artfully contrived and ‘marvellous beasts as lions, dragons’ and other heraldic fantasies. Human imagination and ingenuity knew no bounds, and the landscape was festooned with garlanded creations of Tudor whites, reds and greens.
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The design had not yet attained the mathematical perfection of seventeenth-century clipped hedges and paths laid out with geometric precision, but the execution, though crude, was the same – the effort to impose humanity’s will upon the confusion and violence of nature in the same way that the prodigious magnificence of flamboyant and elaborate ceremony imposed restraints upon the violence and bestiality of man’s nature and instincts.
Life at court and in the city was harsh and dangerous, yet Catherine accepted the brutality of law, the callousness of ethics, and the extremism and violence of society for what they were part of the normal fabric of life. Catherine herself could be both cruel and generous, coarse and charming, meek and arrogant, with no thought of inconsistency. Reflecting every facet of society, her emotions were unbridled, and she moved easily from the frenzied bitterness of remorse and self-criticism into ecstasies of reckless love and heedless passion. If she was proud and indifferent to the suffering of others, if she frantically endeavoured to compress into a single moment the pleasures of an entire life, then she did no more than the rest of society that lived on the brink of destruction.
The moment Catherine Howard was rowed across the
Thames
to take up residence at the court at
Westminster
, she found herself in a hornet’s nest of political, religious and personal intrigue. The activities of statesmen, the designs of sovereigns, and the fond fancies of preachers were all converging upon a crisis that marked the conclusion of the first stage of the English revolution in religion. Upon the broad chessboard of domestic and international events, bishops were donning mitre and cassock in readiness for a religious sweep, knights were preparing their nimble-footed political leaps, and kings were ponderously planning their devious designs. Only the red and black queens were missing from the board, and the two ladies put in their appearance in December of 1539, when the Lady Anne of
Cleves
stepped ashore at
Deal
Castle
and Mistress Catherine Howard won her heart’s desire by receiving an appointment at court.
Each side marshalled its forces; the black of instinctive conservatism in religion and feudal inclination in politics stood arrayed against the red of spiritual and political revolution. The most powerful man under the monarch, the King’s Vicar-General in matters spiritual, Thomas Cromwell, faced that polished prelate and consummate manipulator of men and words, Stephen Gardiner, Bishop of Winchester, and his temporal, if less able, confrére, Thomas Howard, third Duke of Norfolk. The concluding months of 1539 found the two sides relatively balanced. The parry of reform and revolution rejoiced that the princess of
Cleves
was journeying to
London
to consummate the alliance of schismatic
England
with Protestant Germany and become Henry’s fourth wife in six years. The conservatives, on the other hand, continued to control a majority of spiritual and temporal lords within the house of peers, and they had not entirely given up the hope of influencing their susceptible sovereign by means of feminine guile. The absence of a black queen, it was true, constituted a serious handicap, but as yet the red queen of
Cleves
was an untried quantity, known in
England
only by her highly flattering Holbein portrait. The precedent for replacing queens had already been established, and it was no idle dream that some Agile and comely pawn might be transformed overnight into royalty by the magic of the King’s affection.
Just exactly when Catherine was selected by the conservative party for such a role is not known. It could not have been when she first arrived at court in late November or early December of 1539, for as yet no one suspected that Henry would evidence such a positive distaste for his new bride that he would risk political and international crisis to free himself. There is some indication that Catherine’s fate was irrevocably written the instant Henry laid eyes upon her, for it was reported to the Dowager Duchess at Lambeth that the ‘King’s Highness did cast a fantasy to Catherine Howard the first time that ever his Grace saw her.’
1
If the Dowager was so apprised, one can feel assured that those two astute and well-informed gentlemen, the Duke of Norfolk and the Bishop of Winchester, also knew of this important and hopeful event and planned their strategy accordingly. The first positive indication that the King’s conscience had again crept too near another lady of the court, appeared in April of 1540, when Mistress Catherine became the recipient of a steady flow of royal gifts and favours.
If the sequence of events leading to the political crisis of 1540 did not necessarily begin when the King’s Highness first ‘cast a fantasy to Catherine Howard’, it might be said that it did so when he first beheld the other lady. The German princess of
Cleves
had landed at
Deal
Castle
on
Greenwich
. Henry, with his accustomed impatience and impetuousness, could not wait to judge the words of his Vicar-General, who had assured him that his future wife excelled the Duchess of Milan in beauty as ‘the golden sun did the silver moon’.
2
Disguised and laden with gifts, he waylaid his bride at Rochester and dumbfounded the conventionalminded Flemish maiden by prancing unannounced into her tent. The meeting, even under the most auspicious circumstances, was likely to have been strained, for Anne knew no tongue but her own and Henry spoke no German. Linguistic difficulties only in part caused the King’s tongue-tied silence, for it was reported that his grace was ‘marvellously astonished and abashed’ by the sight of his new bride; and later Henry growled that the lady was ‘nothing so well as she was spoken of’.
3
The thunderhead of the storm that cost Thomas Cromwell his head, lost Anne of Cleves her regal dignity, and swept Norfolk and Gardiner into political pre-eminence in the wake of the King’s marriage to Catherine, had begun to form many months before the fateful meeting with Anne at Rochester. The twenty embarrassed and hurried words that the King managed to blurt out, and his hasty retreat in the face of the lady’s phlegmatic and pockmarked features, were only the signal for the storm to break. The instant that Henry ‘very sadly and pensively’ fled back to Greenwich and complained that he was not well handled by his councillors,
4
the man who had been responsible for the fiasco walked in the shadow of the block. The cruel and reproachful eye of an unhappy and embarrassed sovereign was constantly upon the Vicar-General, and Cromwell’s enemies took new hope that the King’s emotional disappointment and brooding disposition would bring about the eventual destruction of the hated upstart. Their fondest hopes were realized in July of 1540 when Henry claimed his Vicar-General’s head, but the political convulsions that led to Cromwell’s death had their roots back in the reaches of Tudor history. The scheming and manoeuvring of the early summer of 1540 represented the culmination of three quite separate but intimately related crises in religion, in foreign policy, and in personalities; and Catherine Howard found herself hopelessly enmeshed in all three.
The term Reformation is at best a deceptive word. In
England
it is a singularly inaccurate description for the religious upheaval that took place when Henry’s tender conscience was strained beyond endurance by the fascination of Anne Boleyn and by his failure to beget a male heir by his first wife, Catherine of Aragon. Little was reformed by the English Reformation under Henry VIll, but much was transferred; the temporal authority of the Pope in
Rome
was assumed by the King in
London
; much of the spiritual power claimed by the vicar of Christ was shouldered by God’s anointed lieutenant on earth; and the monastic lands were turned over to a national aristocracy. As one disillusioned and embittered Lutheran complained: ‘Harry only wants to sit as anti-christ in the
temple
of
God
, and that Harry should be Pope. The rich treasures, the rich incomes of the Church, these are the Gospel According to Harry.’
5
The Reformation in
England
was never the work of a single will. The seizure of the ecclesiastical machinery in
England
, the denial of papal supremacy, and the destruction of an independent clerical organization were in a sense the culmination of the main currents of English and Western European history. The eighth Henry achieved what the second had failed to do – the subjugation of an international priestly order that recognized an authority beyond and above that of the national monarch. The Pope was a foreigner living in dissolute luxury in
Rome
, and Englishmen had for centuries resented the jurisdiction and financial extractions of an alien potentate. The Tudor sovereigns were dedicated to the destruction of any supremacy outside their own, and as the feudal magnates of the northern shires ended their lives upon the scaffold, so did those abbots and bishops who acknowledged a law higher than that of the Crown. They died upon the altar of the sovereign national state that recognizes no power on earth except its own.
Whether or not momentous events are the result of inevitable forces that underlie the sweep of history, or simply further evidence of the infuriating perversity of human destiny that can transform the loss of a horseshoe into the loss of a kingdom, the indisputable fact remains that the English Reformation was an act of State. What began, however, simply as an extra-legal manipulation of the constitutional structure governing a cosmopolitan Church with its head in
Rome
, rapidly involved the entire fabric of Tudor society. The royal divorce quickly became a social, economic, and emotional revolution in which far more was at stake than mere political expediency. Henry VIII did not have to be told the truth of one confirmed Protestant’s warning that ‘if there be no better stay for the maintenance of these godly preachers, the King’s authority concerning his supremacy shall lie post alone, hidden in the act of parliament, and not in the hearts of his subjects.’
6
It was far safer if political necessity could be linked with religious conviction, and consequently the State found and fostered the support of that militant minority, which was confident that Mistress Rose of Rome was in fact the ‘stinking whore of Babylon’ and looked upon the Reformation as not only politically wise but spiritually just and godly.
The English Reformation may have received its characteristic features from the fact that its driving force was political and governmental rather than religious and emotional, but it is a tragic misconception to view the events in
England
of the 1530s as separate from the spiritual crisis that was convulsing all Christendom. When in 1555 Hugh Latimer turned to Nicholas Ridley, as both stood chained to the stake, and said: ‘Be of good comfort, Master Ridley, and play the man. We shall this day light such a candle, by God’s grace, in England, as I trust shall never be put out,’
7
the defrocked Anglican bishop was speaking the simple truth. It was not Henry’s ‘great matter’, not the need for a male heir, nor the fact that the Pope was un- English, that kept the candle burning and gave the Protestant martyrs the strength to ‘play the man’; it was the conviction and discovery that in Protestantism they had something worth the torments of the Stake – a sense of spiritual satisfaction and personal salvation.
The faith that moved these Protestants was deep and esoteric; it glowed with the intense flame of inner conviction, which alone was sufficient to sustain them. They needed none of the props which the medieval Church had afforded the average man, and they were impervious to the beauty of religious ceremony or the magnificence of stained glass windows. There could be no mediator between the faithful and the Divinity other than Christ himself, for it was faith and faith alone that could open the gates to the kingdom of heaven. It was this profound belief – this passionate insistence that they alone in a depraved and sinful world were the elect of God – that gave to the reforming Protestant divines the determination not merely to deny papal authority, but to spiritualize the world and to create on earth the standards of heaven. It was not enough simply to denounce the Bishop of Rome and abhor idolatry and superstition; the man who sought the joys of the afterlife on the sands of such insincerity was told to ‘depart in the devil’s name, thou wicked person, to eternal pain’.
8
No excuses could be made for the busy citizen who complained that ‘I am busied about matters of the common-wealth’, or who argued that it was not for him to read and study the scriptures.
9
Uncompromising in their morality, destructive in their determination to improve both men and society, and rigid in their idealism, the Protestant radicals became invaluable storm-troopers in the army of the Lord’s anointed. For them, the divorce and constitutional break with
Rome
were merely first steps – a prelude to the future community of saints on earth. They saw the existing Church as deformed and debased, a harlot grovelling in the lust of the flesh and in the pride of life – a mockery saddled with sumptuous and unbelieving prelates, idolatrous ceremonies, fornicating clerics, and the Devil’s disciple presiding in
Rome
. It was not enough that the strange voice of the Bishop of Rome be silenced in
England
; instead the Church of
England
had to be thoroughly revised and revitalized, and the cry went up to ‘get rid of the poison with the author’. ‘Our King,’ lamented Bishop Hooper, ‘has destroyed the Pope, but not popery.’
10
Henry’s divorce had loosed upon the realm a force that would not be controlled, and the inner spiritual drive that belonged to Protestantism did not always sit easy with the cautious doctrines of political expediency and constitutional manipulation. Men who felt close upon them the fires of hell and the joys of salvation turned their eyes heavenward, not earthward; they felt obliged to control life, not countenance it. The militant soldiers of the Protestant ranks were the useful, if unruly, revolutionaries of their age and the godly, if dangerous, allies of the Crown.
Political advisability stood behind the original break with
Rome
and the advent of the Reformation in
England
, but by 1539 the forces of carefully controlled religious change were evincing an alarming tendency to deteriorate into unrestrained revolution. As one contemporary Catholic put it: Henry ‘was like to one that would throw down a man headlong from the top of a high tower and bid him stay when he was half way down.’
11
The King remained the Defender of the Faith, and for him the faith continued to be the ancient creed – with the slight modification that it was Catholicism without the Pope. Unfortunately, by the late 1530s such a middle position was becoming increasingly difficult to maintain, for the monarch, in consolidating his constitutional revolution, had placed the safety of the new regime in the hands of individuals who had no intention of stopping half-way.