The Last Days of Henry VIII: Conspiracy, Treason and Heresy at the Court of the Dying Tyrant (6 page)

English ambassadors abroad were given an official sanitised description of the king’s grief for consumption at their accredited courts – that his ‘heart was so pierced with pensiveness that long was it before
his majesty could speak and utter the sorrow of his heart to us and finally, with plenty of tears, which was strange in his courage, opened the same’.

Many of those close to Katherine – her family and household – ‘light young men … privy to the naughtiness of the queen and Dereham, besides advancing Dereham to her service’ were dragged off to the Tower. The lieutenant there informed the Privy Council that there were not enough rooms ‘to lodge them all severally’ unless the king and queen’s own lodgings were used. The king agreed to this, but his double keys to the royal apartments could not be found and accommodation for some prisoners had to be arranged elsewhere.
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Meanwhile, Marillac set spies to watch the comings and goings at Hampton Court. They reported that the queen’s jewels and rings had been inventoried and that Cranmer arrived at the palace alone on 8 November.

He was there again to question Katherine, and the archbishop reported later that her state ‘would have pitied any man’s heart to see’. He immediately promised her mercy, if she would only confess, ‘for fear that she would enter into a frenzy’.
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The promise calmed her and she told him, ‘Alas, my lord, that I am still alive, the fear of death grieved me not so much before, as doth now the remembrance of the king’s goodness’ and her thoughts of what ‘a gracious and loving Prince I had’.
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At six o’clock that evening, reported the archbishop, the queen fell into another ‘pang’ which was caused, she said, by her ‘remembrance … for about that time [every day], Master Heneage was wont to bring her knowledge of the king’.
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Was this feminine guile, or the genuine emotional outbursts of an innocent teenager? Cranmer did not mention her marriage, being interested only in the talk of a pre-contract with Dereham as a possible solution to the scandal. Stupidly, Katherine told him there was no such contract, but she admitted that Dereham had carnal knowledge of her. The queen’s statement, written after the archbishop’s interrogation, graphically describes her teenage romps. It said that many times,

[Dereham] hath lain with me, sometime in his doublet and hose and two or three times naked; but not so naked that he had nothing upon him, for he had always at the least his doublet and as I do think, his hose also. But I mean naked when his hose were put down.

And diverse times, he would bring wine, strawberries, apples and other things to make good cheer after my lady [Agnes, Dowager Duchess of Norfolk] was gone to bed.
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After the archbishop left, Katherine’s vice-chamberlain, Sir Edward Baynton,
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told the king that she began to excuse her actions and water down the things she had admitted to Cranmer. She claimed, he wrote, that what Dereham had done to her had been achieved by force.
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On 13 November, Wriothesley went to Hampton Court and, summoning all the members and servants of the queen’s household into the great chamber, ‘there openly afore them declared certain offences that she had done in misusing her body with certain persons afore the king’s time, wherefore he there discharged all her household’.
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Katherine naïvely believed that she would be left alone after making her free confession. When she discovered that her inquisitors were far from finished with her, she refused ‘to drink or eat and weeps and cries like a madwoman, so that they must take away things by which she might hasten her death’, according to her uncle, Norfolk.

The duke cuts an unappealing figure during this
cause célèbre
that struck so close to home and to his political ambitions. Now perhaps fearing the loss of his head, he was at some pains to distance himself from his niece, telling Marillac ‘with tears in his eyes, of the king’s grief’, who had loved Katherine ‘much, and the misfortunes to his [Norfolk’s] house in her and Queen Anne [Boleyn], his two nieces’.
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All this, of course, was faithfully reported to Francis I. Later, Norfolk confided to Chapuys, ‘I wish the queen was burned.’
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What was to be done with her while her fate was decided? Her new domestic arrangements demonstrate the cold efficiency of Henry’s administration. On 14 November, she was sent to the former Bridgettine
nunnery at Syon House, Middlesex, under the charge of Sir Edward and Lady Isabella Baynton and three gentlewomen.
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The accommodation was to be furnished ‘moderately as her life and condition deserved’. Rich, ornate hangings were firmly denied; instead, they were to be ‘mean stuff, without any cloth of estate’. Katherine was allowed six of her favourite dresses, edged with gold and in the fashionable French style. Her jewels were all removed, carefully inventoried and returned safely to the king’s jewel house. At Syon, on the banks of the Thames, in the two rooms allotted to her, she waited anxiously for news of her fate amid constant rumours that Henry would show clemency. Her moods swung between utter despair and adolescent hope. During her wilder optimistic moments, perhaps she fancied that some kind of settlement like that enjoyed by Anne of Cleves could save her head. Her composure certainly returned, for she made ‘good cheer, [and was] fatter and handsomer than ever’ and ‘more imperious and commanding and more difficult to please than ever she was when living with the king’.
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Katherine, in her heart, knew her time to enjoy the trappings of royalty was limited and perhaps she wanted to savour them while she could. She put out of her mind any thoughts of the king’s retribution.

In truth, Katherine was as guilty as sin itself. She was also particularly dim-witted. As her passionate affair raged, she had sent a number of love letters to Culpeper via one of her servants. One billet-doux, no doubt found during searches of Culpeper’s rooms at Westminster, survives today amongst the state papers in the National Archives. It leaves little doubt as to where her affections really lay:

I heartily recommend me unto you, praying you to send word how that you do. I heard you were sick and never longed [so] much for anything as to see you. It makes my heart die to think I cannot always be in your company.

She signed herself, ‘Yours, as long as life endures, Katheryn.’ She may as well have been signing her own death warrant.
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Meanwhile, Anne of Cleves travelled to Richmond to be near Henry
– she nurtured hopes of reconciliation in the disgrace of her successor
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– but these, inevitably, came to naught. Pathetically, her only contact with the court was a messenger who claimed back a ring given to Anne by the fallen queen.

Lady Jane Rochford, one-time lady-in-waiting to Anne Boleyn and widow of George Boleyn (who was executed in May 1536 for an alleged incestuous relationship with his sister Anne Boleyn), had acted as a procuress for Culpeper. She was too deeply embroiled in the scandal to escape and, inevitably, was one of those arrested and cross-examined at Hampton Court before being taken to the Tower. Lady Rochford was seized with a fit of madness on the third day of her imprisonment ‘by which [her] brain was affected’. Chapuys noted that ‘now and then she recovers her reason and that the king takes care that his own physicians visit her daily, for he desires her recovery chiefly that he may afterwards have her executed as an example and warning to others’.

Katherine’s anxious wait for the king’s verdict lasted less than ten days. On 22 November she lost the title of queen and two days later she was indicted for having led ‘an abominable, base, carnal, voluptuous and vicious life’ before the royal marriage and behaving ‘like a common harlot with diverse persons, as with Francis Dereham of Lambeth and Henry Monox of Streatham, at other times maintaining … the outward appearance of chastity and honesty’. She had misled the king ‘by word and gesture to love her’ and ‘arrogantly coupled herself with him in marriage’. The marriage pre-contract with Dereham had been concealed from Henry ‘to the peril of the King and of his children to be begotten by her’ and after the royal wedding, she had shown Dereham ‘notable favour’ and had incited Culpeper to sexual intercourse, telling him she loved him above the king.
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On 1 December 1541, Culpeper and Dereham were arraigned before the Lord Mayor, Sir Michael Dormer, at the Guildhall, London, for high treason, with Norfolk sitting uncomfortably at his left hand. Culpeper cravenly maintained that he had secretly met the queen only because of her royal commands. Katherine had made all the running in the affair. She was, he alleged, ‘languishing and dying of love for him’.
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Hardly the words or actions of a chivalrous gallant. After a hearing lasting around six hours, Dereham and Culpeper were unsurprisingly found guilty. Both were executed at Tyburn on 10 December, with the king unexpectedly commuting the sentence to simple decapitation for Culpeper alone, rather than the hanging, drawing and quartering
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that Dereham cruelly suffered. It was the last and least act of mercy that Henry had shown Culpeper.

Norfolk, his ambitions now in ashes and facing the prospect of a second niece being executed while queen, wrote to Henry from the safe isolation of his estates at Kenninghall, near Norwich, eloquently deploring the roles played by his family in the scandal and firmly denying any involvement in their ‘false and traitorous proceedings against your royal majesty’. After writing of ‘the abominable deeds by two of my nieces’, with breathtaking temerity he sought reassurance that he still remained in good standing with the king, writing obsequiously:

Prostate at your royal feet, most humbly I beseech your Majesty that by such, as if it shall please you to command, I may be advertised [told] plainly how your Highness doth weigh your favour towards me.

Assuring your Highness that unless I may know your Majesty to continue my good and gracious Lord, as ye were before their offences [were] committed, I shall never desire to live in this world any longer …
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Henry’s reaction to the letter is not known, but the noble house of Howard suffered grievously. Norfolk was soon to discover that his influence at court had waned for ever. For hiding Katherine’s promiscuity, his step-brother Lord William Howard and his wife Margaret, Lady Katherine Bridgewater (the queen’s aunt), Anne Howard (wife of her brother Henry), and her step-grandmother Agnes (the ‘old and testy’ dowager Duchess of Norfolk) were found guilty at Westminster Hall on 22 December of misprision
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of treason and forfeited their estates and possessions. They were also sentenced to perpetual imprisonment – although within a year, all were pardoned and released.

Chapuys wrote on 3 December that Henry ‘wonderfully felt the case of the Queen … and that he has certainly shown greater sorrow and regret at her loss than at the faults, loss or divorce of his preceding wives’. The ambassador added shrewdly:

I should say that this king’s case resembles very much that of the woman who cried more bitterly at the loss of her tenth husband than she had cried on the death of the other nine put together.
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On Saturday 11 February 1542, Royal Assent was given by a commission, appointed by letters patent, to an Act of Attainder
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condemning Katherine to death for treason, to spare Henry the pain of having to hear ‘the sorrowful story and wicked facts’ all over again.
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Henry wasted no time. The previous day she had been transferred to the Tower of London. The cold light of reality had hit her like a douche of icy water and she had panicked, resisted and had to be forced, screaming, into a small covered boat at Syon. Four of her ladies, with four sailors to man the vessel, accompanied her. She was brought down the river in a sombre little procession, escorted by the Duke of Suffolk and a troop of armed soldiers in a large barge and the Earl of Southampton, Lord Privy Seal, in another, all propelled by oars. Nearing the end of her journey, Katherine’s boat would have shot the narrows beneath London Bridge where the severed heads of her former lovers had been impaled. One hopes that, in the fading light of that grim afternoon, she was spared the gruesome spectacle. A few minutes later, dressed appropriately in black velvet, she landed at the steps of Traitor’s Gate ‘with the same honours and ceremonies as if she was still reigning’,
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before being taken to the comfort of the queen’s lodgings within the Tower.

On Sunday 12 February, Katherine was finally told that she was going to die the following day and should therefore ‘dispose her soul’. That night she asked, with a curious morbid fascination, to see the headsman’s block, ‘pretending that she wanted to know how she was to place her head on it. This was granted and the block being brought in, she herself tried and placed her head on it by way of experiment,’ reported Chapuys.
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The next morning at a little after seven, she was swiftly
beheaded on Tower Green. ‘After her body had been covered with a black cloak, the ladies of her suite took it up and put it on one side.’
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Lady Rochford immediately followed her on to the bloodstained straw of the scaffold, her madness apparently calmed. Always anxious to cover his actions with the cloak of legality, the king had hurried an Act through Parliament permitting the execution of insane persons who had committed treason.
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Both women were acquiescent in their fate. Neither spoke much on the scaffold, merely confessing their guilt and dutifully praying for the king’s welfare and prosperity. This reticence was not just mere misplaced loyalty or tradition (although it satisfied the onlookers from the Privy Council).
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The queen was absolutely terrified. Katherine, reportedly ‘so weak [from fear] that she could hardly speak’, died, mercifully, with one sweep of the axe severing her once frivolous, dizzy head cleanly from her young body. Henry’s fifth marriage was over and his wife’s corpse was buried in the Church of St Peter ad Vincula within the Tower of London – alongside that of Anne Boleyn, Henry’s second wife, who had been executed almost six years earlier.