Sex with the Queen (17 page)

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lute and the virginals. Manox fell in love with the fifteen-year-old Catherine who, though not in love herself, was interested in his advances.

Knowing that Manox inhabited too low an orbit to marry, Catherine wisely refused him intercourse. But he pressured her to at least let him feel her private parts. “I am content,” Cather-ine replied, “so as you will desire no more but that.”28 The two met in a dark and empty chapel, and so the thing was done. The dowager duchess, catching the two of them fondling each other, boxed the young man’s ears and sent him on his way.

Having won this much from Catherine, Manox boasted to the other servants that he would marry her. Mary Lassells, the duchess’s maid, upbraided Manox for daring to marry a Howard. But he told her to hold her peace. “I know her well enough for I have had her by the cunt, and I know it among a hundred,” he affirmed. “And she loves me and I love her, and she hath said to me that I shall have her maidenhead, though it be painful to her, and not doubting but I will be good to her hereafter.”29

But by now Catherine had a better prospect than Manox the music master. Francis Dereham, of good birth and some wealth, was a gentleman-pensioner of the duke of Norfolk and visited the duchess’s household regularly. Dereham possessed the ex-quisite manners of a young courtier; he was extremely handsome and well-dressed. Catherine nearly toppled over with love for him at first sight.

The girls’ dormitory was locked every night but the ardent swains intent upon visiting their sweethearts had several options.

They could climb up the lattice to an upstairs window. Some of them could pick the lock of the dormitory door. If all else failed, one of the girls could steal the key from the duchess’s chamber after she had fallen sound asleep. From 1537 to 1539 Catherine made merry with Francis Dereham in the dormitory at night.

Dereham and the other visiting suitors brought with them “wine, strawberries, apples, and other things to make good cheer.”30

It was here, then, if not before with Manox, that Catherine lost her virginity with Francis Dereham. She would later acknowl-m e d i e v a l q u e e n s , t u d o r v i c t i m s 7 5

edge that they had become “carnal lovers.”31 Later, one witness said that Mistress Catherine “was so far in love” with Dereham that they embraced “after a wonderful manner, for they would kiss and hang their bellies together as they were two sparrows.”32

Catherine would draw her heavy bed curtains when Dereham came to call, yet many dormitory residents not so fortunate to have lovers complained about the noise. One of them, Alice Restwold, protested that “she was a married woman and wist what matrimony meant and what belonged to that puffing and blow-ing” that went on in bed.33

Catherine knew something of primitive means of birth con-trol. At one point, when warned that she could get pregnant, she replied that “a woman might meddle with a man and yet conceive no child unless she would herself.”34

Catherine and Dereham considered themselves married and, indeed, in the eyes of the Church, they could have been, if they privately exchanged vows of their intention to marry and had sexual relations. When acquaintances suggested that Dereham show less affection for Catherine in public, he retorted, “Who should hinder him from kissing his own wife?”35 Though from a better family than Manox, even Dereham was no match for a Howard and Catherine must have known it. Dereham pushed her for marriage, and she toyed with him. But Fate had a grander marriage in store for Catherine Howard.

We can picture the Howard clan watching with eagle eyes when Henry first met his new bride, Anne of Cleves, on January 3, 1540. They must have crowed with delight at the royal bride-groom’s horror of his wife’s appearance. She was tall, poorly built, with pockmarked skin and no social graces whatsoever—quite a contrast to plump, petite Catherine. The king dubbed Anne his “Flanders mare.” Two days before the wedding, Henry growled, “If it were not that she had come so far into my realm, and the great preparations and state that my people have made for her, and for fear of making a ruffle in the world and of driv-ing her brother into the arms of the Emperor and the French King, I would not now marry her. But now it is too far gone, wherefore I am sorry.”36

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Henry claimed he could not consummate the marriage be-cause “her body was disordered and indisposed to provoke or ex-cite any lust in him.” He said that he “could not overcome his loathsomeness” of her, “nor in her company be provoked or stirred to the Act.” His doctor advised the king not to force him-self, as this might cause an inconvenient debility of the royal pri-vate parts. Anne was delighted to find that in the divorce agreement, she was given two palaces, a generous income, several carriages, a large retinue of servants, and the right to retain her head.

The king was suddenly single once more, and the successful candidate would be much more than his mistress; she would be queen of England. Seizing on Henry’s clear interest in Cather-ine, the duke of Norfolk dangled her in front of the king like bait. Catherine, the neglected, impoverished niece who had been sent to court with modest attire, suddenly began appearing in a tantalizing array of gowns and glittering jewels. Her large tribal family showered the court with praise for “her pure and honest condition.”37 Eager to please her family, the king began to swing his ponderous bulk away from religious reform and back in the direction of orthodoxy.

But silly Catherine was a poor candidate for queen. Like a good-natured dog, she thought only of present enjoyment or pain. Thinking of past errors or future repercussions seemed beyond her limited intellectual capacity. She enjoyed each mo-ment to the utmost until the master’s voice bellowed loud and threatening. Then she feared and, like a dog, did not under-stand the words but only that she would undergo imminent pun-ishment.

Nonetheless, pushed by her ambitious relatives, flattered by the urgent suit of the king, Catherine married Henry on July 28, 1540. Almost immediately, the queen was obliged to fill her household with Howard relatives and supporters. She persuaded Henry to grant manor houses, rich estates, and revenues to her relatives and their friends. In August 1541 she was foolish enough to make Francis Dereham—her former lover and per-haps her legal husband—her private secretary.

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Bitter jealousy arose at court among those who had lost their positions to the Howards. The Seymour family in particular were furious that many of them had been replaced by the queen’s supporters. A more intelligent woman would have used her posi-tion as queen to make peace among the factions, strewing some appointments and favors in the enemy’s direction to maintain equilibrium. But Catherine was the thoughtless tool of her re-lentlessly ambitious uncle and obediently fulfilled all his com-mands.

Only five years earlier, Catherine’s first cousin, the brilliant and manipulative Anne Boleyn, had fallen to her enemies. How was the harebrained Catherine to survive in a scorpion’s nest of intrigue? Sitting at the apex of Howard ambitions, Catherine was the weakest link in their faction. If the silly girl were to fall, so would they all.

Initially she was protected by Henry’s extravagant demonstra-tions of love. Recapturing the passions of youth for the last time, the king called Catherine a “jewel of womanhood”38 and his

“rose without a thorn.”39 The French ambassador reported that he had “never seen the King in such good spirits or in so good a humor.”40 One chronicler wrote, “the King had no wife who made him spend so much money in dresses and jewels as she did, who every day had some fresh caprice.”41 For Christmas and New Year’s gifts in 1540, Henry gave her a brooch “containing 27

table diamonds and 26 clusters of pearls,” another brooch made of 33 diamonds and 60 rubies surrounded by pearls; and a

“muffler of black velvet furred with sables containing 38 rubies and 572 pearls.”42

Catherine, though she loved the jewels, gowns, and parties that came with her new position, was bored in her husband’s presence and repulsed by him physically. At fifty, the king was often ill, cantankerous, and impatient. He had swelled to some 350 pounds. Each day a festering ulcer on his thigh had to be drained of foul-smelling liquid. When it clogged up, the king suffered painful fevers until the liquid ran free again. The French ambassador wrote home after one bout of fever, “This King’s life was really thought to be in danger not from the fever s e x w i t h t h e q u e e n

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but from the leg which often troubles him because he is very stout and marvelously excessive in eating and drinking.”43

Household accounts from around this time show several bills from tailors for letting out the king’s doublets. According to one courtier, “The King was so fat that three of his biggest men that could be found could get inside his doublet.”44 Even his beds had to be enlarged and given extra supports to accommodate his increasing bulk.

Let us imagine the queen’s duties in the royal four-poster.

The king would likely have suffocated his petite bride if he had perched on top of her. He must have required her to ride astride him, careful not to disturb the stinking wound on his thigh. She who had played with the charming Manox, who had rutted with the sexy Dereham, now had to perform loathsome sex acts on an obese and smelly old man. We can picture the happy king, per-fectly sated, snoring, as his young wife lay silently beside him, her heart sinking. And the following day her bright eyes wandered to the young and handsome courtiers dancing gracefully before her as she sat on the throne next to Henry, who was too fat to dance.