Six Wives (107 page)

    Catherine's expression is not noted.

* * *

Four days later, Secretary Wriothesley, who had done well out of the fall of his master Cromwell, wrote to Henry's former brother-in-law, the Duke of Suffolk. He enclosed a letter from the Duchess of Suffolk, who had of course been a witness of the wedding. But he also added his own comments on the bride. Catherine was 'a woman, in my judgement', Wriothesley wrote, 'for virtue, wisdom, and gentleness, most meet for his Highness and I am sure his Majesty had never a wife more agreeable to his heart than she is'. 'Our Lord', he ended piously, 'send them long life and much joy together.'
⁹

Four days later still, on the 20th, Wriothesley forwarded another letter, from Catherine herself to her brother William. Naturally, there is no mention of her own doubts about the marriage. Instead she expresses a simple, heart-felt happiness: 'It [hath] pleased God to incline the King to take her as his wife', she writes, 'which is the greatest joy and comfort that could happen to her.' And she is eager for William to share in her delight, 'as the person who has most cause to rejoice thereat'.

    Some historians have detected a note of cynicism in this last remark, as though Catherine should hint that she had been sacrificed on the altar of her brother's family ambition. But this is to strain both Catherine's language and the facts. William may have (re)introduced Henry and Catherine. But there is no evidence that he played a decisive part in the marriage. And certainly, far away in the north, he can have exercised no direct pressure on his sister. Moreover, Catherine had a straightforward Tudor sense of family honour, and, it is clear, a real affection for her brother. 'Let her sometimes hear of his health', she begs him, 'as friendly as if she had not been called to this honour.' In other words: write to me just as you used to, and forget that I am Queen.
¹⁰

    Wriothesley glossed this letter, too, in a covering note. 'Your good lordship', he wrote, 'shall herewith receive a letter from the Queen's Highness, who is a most gracious lady and to your lordship a most kind sister.' 'I doubt not', he continued, 'but you will earnestly thank God of His goodness, and also frame yourself to be every day more and more an ornament to her Majesty.'
¹¹

    Perhaps, in view of these effusions and his earlier Judas-record, it is not surprising that Wriothesley turned into one of Catherine's most dangerous enemies.

* * *

    Perhaps. But we should remember that Chapuys, in view of the hostility between the Empire and Anne's brother, the Duke of Cleves, was not an impartial witness: he was eager to bring about a final rupture between England and Cleves and eager, too, to get Anne out of the way. But, in any case, Anne's desperate mood did not last. She was not the despairing sort and England, finally, was her destiny.

    The coolest reaction of all to Catherine's wedding came from the radical English merchant Richard Hilles, self-exiled in Strasbourg. 'Our King has, within these two months', he reported in September to Henry Bullinger, 'burned three godly men in one day.' But then, Hilles added, Henry had got married at the same time, 'and he is always wont to celebrate his nuptials by some wickedness of this kind'. Hilles's letter shows that Catherine's own Reformist leanings were as yet unknown outside the Court; indeed, they may even have been unknown to Henry himself.
¹³

    For the moment, perhaps, it was better that way.

* * *

Catherine was proclaimed Queen at Hampton Court on the day of her wedding. It was the barest of formalities. Otherwise, there was no
entrée
into London, or river procession, or any other kind of inauguration ceremony. And the idea of a coronation was not even mentioned, either then or subsequently.

    A few days later, the King and Queen left on what turned out to be a protracted honeymoon that kept them away from the capital for the rest of the year. It began, however, as an ordinary Progress. First they travelled into Surrey, with visits to some of Henry's favourite hunting parks at Oatlands, Woking, Guildford and Sunninghill. Then, in mid-August, the royal party crossed the Thames on their way north. They stayed a few days in Catherine's own house as Queen at Hanworth, near Twickenham, before skirting London to the west on their way to Hertfordshire and Bedfordshire. There they spent the high summer, going from Wolsey's old house at The More, to Ashridge, Dunstable and Ampthill.

    Ampthill, where Henry was a frequent visitor because of the excellence of the sport and 'the cleanness of air', had its usual rejuvenating effect. Or perhaps it was his new marriage. For, during the royal visit, carpenters were set to work on a new spiral staircase to give Henry access from his Privy Chamber to the gardens and park, while in the park itself they erected three new standings from which the King could view the hunt and shoot at the game.

    After Ampthill, the King and Queen turned west into Buckinghamshire and Oxfordshire. They reached Woodstock in the middle of September, and they remained there till the end of the month.
¹⁴

    Usually, the Progress would have ended about then. But the plague, which had been particularly virulent in London in the summer, raged all the autumn and interrupted the ordinary routines of public life. The sessions of the Law Courts were moved from London to St Albans while the King and Queen returned to safety at Ampthill, where they spent much of October and November. Henry paid a flying visit to Whitehall on 20–21 December, but then withdrew once more to spend Christmas at Hampton Court.
¹⁵

* * *

The effect of all this was to throw Catherine together with her new husband almost uninterruptedly for six months. It also gave Henry his most prolonged taste of family life for almost two decades.

    He seems rather to have enjoyed it.

    It had all begun in the run-up to Catherine's marriage. As we have seen, Catherine seems to have told Henry of her decision to accept him at Greenwich on about 20 June. Mary and Elizabeth were at Court as well and the assumption must be that they had been summoned to meet their new step-mother. Was this Henry's doing? Or Catherine's?

    Catherine's predecessor, Catherine Howard, had made a similar attempt at bringing Henry's children together. But it took place several months after her marriage and followed a sticky patch with her difficult eldest step-child, Mary. Between them, Catherine and Henry were con triving to get matters off to a much smoother start. Mary and Elizabeth were honoured guests at their wedding, and, on the wedding day itself, Catherine gave Mary a very substantial present of £20 and no doubt made a similar gift to Elizabeth as well. The two half-sisters then continued at Court with their parents for the first leg of the Progress. After that, they went their separate ways.
¹⁶

    The fact was reported with glee by Chapuys. 'The King continues to treat [Mary] kindly', he wrote on 13 August, 'and has made her stay with the new Queen, who behaves affectionately towards her.' 'As to Anne Boleyn's daughter', he continued disparagingly, 'the King has sent her back again to stay with the Prince, his son.'
¹⁷

    Here, however, it is Chapuys's own prejudices that speak. In reality, there was a perfectly proper reason for the contrasting treatment of Catherine's two step-daughters. Mary was in her mid-twenties: gracious, as attractive as she ever would be, and an ornament to the Court. Elizabeth, on the other hand, was just ten. She was growing up quickly. But she was still more suited to the schoolroom than the Court and it was to her schooling that she returned.

    There would be plenty of other opportunities for Catherine to get to know her better.

* * *

For the moment, then, it was Catherine's relationship with Mary that flourished. Her own mother's long years of service to Mary's mother, Catherine of Aragon, would have provided the key bond. Probably indeed Catherine still had Maud Parr's bequest of the 'beads of lignum always dressed with gold, which the . . . Queen's Grace gave me'. The rosary was not something to be shown to Henry. But, with Mary, it would have been an instant passport to her affection and trust. Besides, with only a four-year gap between them, step-mother and daughter were almost of an age. And they shared the same interests, from scholarship to dancing.
¹⁸

    As the Progress continued, however, circumstances would also have brought Henry's other children to Catherine's attention. Probably this was planned as well. Their nursery-houses were located in and around Hertfordshire, which was the destination of the second half of the Progress. Here Henry was killing several birds with one stone: he was eager to inspect his houses at Dunstable, where he was converting the nunnery in which Cranmer had granted his first divorce, and at Ampthill, which he planned to turn into a palace. But the royal couple also visited Ashridge, where Elizabeth and Edward seem to have been staying. And the unexpected return of the Court to the area in the autumn brought fresh opportunities. Mary's accounts for these months show that messengers were sent to and from the other royal Households in the vicinity and servants exchanged. Almost certainly, family meetings and visits took place as well – though just who met whom is impossible to establish.
¹⁹

    By Christmas, Henry's new-found domesticity was becoming a subject of speculation in foreign Courts. In the Netherlands, for example, the Lady Regent, Mary of Hungary, asked the English ambassador 'how the Queen's Grace, my Lord Prince, my Lady Mary and my Lady Elizabeth did, and whether [the King] and they continued still in one household?'
²⁰

    It made a change from deaths and divorces.

* * *

But we must not sentimentalise too much, or exaggerate Catherine's own role. No doubt she facilitated. But the accommodation with Henry's children took place because he, Henry, wanted it. And it was a prelude to a much more momentous decision: on 16 January 1544 the Court returned to Whitehall for a new session of Parliament whose principal item of business would be to legislate a new, radical settlement of the Succession.
²¹

    The existing law had been laid down by the Second Succession Act, which was passed in 1536 after the Seymour marriage. This Act determined the order of succession as Henry's heirs male by Queen Jane; his heirs male 'by any other lawful wife'; his female heirs by Queen Jane, and his female heirs by any future wife. At the time, these provisions seemed to cater for any foreseeable eventuality. But, eight years later, time and dynastic luck were, it appeared, threatening to run out.
²²

    Henry was fifty-two. He remained capable of extraordinary bursts of energy, as on the Progress of 1543. But, in general, he was ageing visibly and rapidly. On the other hand, Prince Edward, his heir and sole legitimate offspring, was only a boy of six. He was a healthy and vigorous child. Even so, sixteenth-century mortality rates made it an open question whether he would live to marry and have children.

    Equally open to doubt was the fertility of the new Queen, on which rested the possibility of any further legitimate children, male or female. For contemporaries, as we have seen in the case of Chapuys, looked at Catherine's two previous marriages, which were childless, and drew the conclusion that she was sterile. The conclusion, as it turned out, was wrong and when she married a husband who was potent she conceived almost immediately, despite being in her mid-thirties. But that lay in the unknown future and, meanwhile, the doubt remained.

    The result was that a real and pressing uncertainty now bedevilled the whole future descent of the Tudor crown. This the new Succession Act frankly admitted. 'It standeth', it acknowledged, 'in the only pleasure and will of Almighty God whether the King's Majesty shall have any heirs begotten and procreated between his Highness and his . . . most entirely beloved wife Queen Catherine.' 'Or whether', it continued, 'the said Prince Edward shall have issue of his body lawfully begotten.'
²³

    If, God forbid, the worst happened and both these lines of descent failed, then an alternative was necessary. The solution proffered in the Act was to restore Catherine's step-daughters, Mary and Elizabeth, in that order, to the succession. They remained bastardised. And the Act envisaged that special conditions would be imposed on them by the King. Nevertheless, they were now acknowledged heirs presumptive to the crown.

    Thus the 'one Household', in which Henry had lived with his new wife and his three children for much of the time since his marriage to Catherine, had found its legal expression. And there is every reason to believe that Catherine had encouraged Henry in this decision, which, for better and for worse, shaped the future of England for the rest of the sixteenth-century and beyond.

* * *

The other principal concern of the 1544 Session of Parliament was religion. And here again Catherine's influence was strong, although historians have been slow to recognise the fact. But they are hardly to be blamed, in view of the intractability of the sources. These consist of a series of stories and reminiscences, to be found either in Foxe's
Book of
Martyrs
or in Foxe's working papers. The stories, as usual with Foxe, are more or less undated. But, it turns out, the prolonged Progress of 1543, which I have just documented here for the first time, provides the clues which both pin-down and validate the incidents narrated by Foxe.
²⁴