But a better antidote to Manox's attentions appeared in the form of Francis Dereham. Dereham was a Howard cousin and gentlemanservitor. He was of some independent means and so was able to give Catherine trinkets and lovers' tokens, such as 'a heart's-ease of silk for a New Year's gift'. He cut, in short, an altogether more dashing figure than Manox, whom he soon displaced in Catherine's affections. She also permitted him attentions denied to the socially inferior music master. These included admission to the Holy of Holies, the Maidens' Chamber.
6
In theory, the Maidens' Chamber was out of bounds to all men. And, to enforce the rule, the Duchess 'every night . . . would cause the keys of the [Maidens'] Chamber to be brought to her Chamber'. But Catherine quickly saw a way round the problem and suborned the Duchess's chamberer or maid, Mary Lascelles, 'to steal the key and bring it to her'. The door was unlocked and Dereham and other favoured gentlemen were admitted to enjoy the delights within.
7
'They would', the excluded Manox bitterly observed, 'commonly banquet and be merry there till two or three of the clock in the morning.' 'Wine, strawberries, apples and other things to make good cheer' were served and an escape route for the intruders was carefully spied out 'into the little gallery' next door.
8
Jealous, angry and frustrated, Manox decided to inform the Duchess of these midnight feasts by an anonymous letter:
Your Grace
It shall be meet you take good heed to your gentlewomen for if it shall like you half an hour after you shall be a-bed to rise suddenly and visit their Chamber you shall see that which shall displease you. But if you make anybody of counsel you shall be deceived. Make then fewer your secretary.
The letter was laid in the Duchess's pew, where she found it and read it. 'When she came home [she] stormed with her women and declared how she was advertised . . . of their misrule.'
9
* * *
Catherine was determined to get to the bottom of the plot against her. Employing her already developed skills in larceny, '[she] stole the letter out of my Lady's gilt coffer and showed it to Dereham who copied it and thereupon it was laid in the coffer again'. Dereham immediately guessed the authorship of the letter and tackled Manox, calling him 'Knave' and saying 'that he neither loved [Catherine] nor him'.
10
But Dereham need hardly have worried. For, despite the Duchess's occasional outbursts, neither she nor the other senior members of the Household, including Catherine's aunt, the Countess of Bridgewater, and her uncle, Lord William Howard, took her goings-on very seriously. The Countess indeed reproved Catherine for her 'banqueting by night'. But that was because she feared 'it would hurt her beauty', not her morals. Lord William made even lighter of it all, saying 'What mad wenches! Can you not be merry amongst yourselves but you must thus fall out?'
11
* * *
Catherine Howard was, therefore, already a woman with a past when, in late 1539 and in anticipation of Henry's forthcoming marriage, she was appointed one of Queen Anne of Cleves's maidens.
Dereham was distraught, since he knew he would lose her. 'If I were gone', she remembered him saying, 'he would not tarry long in the [Duchess's] house.' Her reply was brutal: 'he might do as he list'.
For she would let nothing and no one stop her promotion. 'All that knew me, and kept my company, know how glad and desirous I was to come to the Court,' she insisted.
12
* * *
Catherine's instincts were right, for she took to the Court like a duck to water. Whitehall and Greenwich, after all, were only Horsham and Lambeth writ large. There were the same preening, predatory young men. There was the same jockeying and rivalry. There were the same fish to catch, only they were bigger.
Catherine's name was soon linked with one of the hotter properties in the Court: Thomas Culpepper, a Gentleman of the Privy Chamber and her relative. He was a handsome, delinquent boy and a favourite of men and women alike. As Henry's former Page, he had sometimes slept in his master's bed, and, when he got older, he had a queue of female admirers. But with Catherine, it seems, it was different. She was his female equivalent and there was an instant, powerful attraction between them. Soon, it was rumoured, they would marry. But there were quarrels and they drifted apart. 'If you heard such a report [that she should marry Culpepper]', Catherine dismissively assured a former admirer, 'you heard more than I do know'.
13
* * *
For meantime Catherine had landed a bigger catch – indeed the biggest of all.
It was love at first sight. Or, as the old Duchess heard, 'the King's Highness did cast a fantasy to Catherine Howard the first time that ever his Grace saw her'. When this was is not clear. It might even have been in the autumn of 1539, in the run-up to Anne of Cleves's arrival in England. But, certainly, by the late spring of 1540 a fully developed love affair was under way. It was public knowledge by June, and everyone assumed that the couple had consummated their relationship long before their marriage was celebrated on 8 August 1540 at Hampton Court.
14
There were even strong rumours that Catherine went pregnant to the altar.
It is easy to read Henry's motives. Physically repelled by Anne of Cleves, and humiliated by his sexual failure with her, he sought and found consolation from Catherine. We can also guess that sex, which had been impossible with Anne, was easy with her. And it was easy because she made it easy. Henry, lost in pleasure, never seems to have asked himself how she obtained such skill.
Instead, he attributed it all to love and his own recovered youth.
* * *
Of course, other, less innocent, forces were at work. Norfolk sang his niece's praises. Gardiner, who had something of an eye for the ladies himself, made his episcopal palace available for midnight banquets which far outdid the impromptu entertainments in the Maidens' Chamber at Horsham or Lambeth. And the old Duchess gave Catherine new and fashionable clothes and the benefit of her advice on how to handle Henry.
15
Henry, however, was indifferent or oblivious to such manipulation. Indeed, in so far as it smoothed the path of his relationship with Catherine, he probably welcomed it. For he had eyes, ears and time only for her. Kingship was put on hold, foreign policy stalled, and the block and the stake stood idle as life at Court became one long honeymoon.
Even the weather conspired to help. The summer of 1540 was unusually 'hot and dry'. 'No rain', the chronicler Wriothesley reported, fell from June till eight days after Michaelmas (that is, till 7 October). This summer-long drought inflicted terrible suffering on many of Henry's subjects. Cattle died of thirst, and men and women of plague. But, for the King and Queen, it created a perfect, prolonged hunting season. In August 1540, when Henry was at Windsor, the French ambassador, Marillac, reported that nothing had happened because the King had 'gone to the chase with a small company'. A month later, the Court had moved to Ampthill in Bedfordshire. Otherwise it was the same. 'Nothing being spoken of here,' Marillac noted, 'but the chase and the banquets to the new Queen.'
16
* * *
In September, Marillac visited the Court, probably at Grafton, and had an opportunity to form his own opinion of Catherine. He thought she was graceful, rather than the great beauty he had been led to expect. She dressed herself and her ladies in the French fashion. And she had chosen as her motto '
Non autre volonté que la sienne
[No other wish but his]'.
17
Now, this may be no more than Catherine doing what came naturally. On the other hand, it could be interpreted as an ingenious combination of two of the most successful management techniques of her predecessors: Anne Boleyn's deployment of seductive French fashions in behaviour and dress, and Jane Seymour's carefully calculated submissiveness.
Whatever its origins, however, the result gave Catherine (and her husband) the best of both worlds and Henry was more demonstratively in love with her than with any previous wife. 'The King', Marillac reported, 'is so amorous of her that he cannot treat her well enough and caresses her more than he did the others.'
18
Marillac's picture of an infatuated King is borne out by the inventory of Catherine's jewels, which shows that Henry lavished an Aladdin's cave of precious stones on her. Most formed part of his wedding gift to his new Queen. The gift included an 'upper biliment' or trimming for the top of a French hood, 'of goldsmith work enamelled and garnished with 7 fair diamonds, 7 fair rubies and 7 fair pearls'; a 'square' or shaped necklace 'containing 29 rubies and 29 clusters of pearls being 4 pearls in every cluster', and an 'ouch' or pendant 'of gold having a very fair table diamond and a very fair ruby with a long pearl hanging at the same'.
And these same jewels, minutely depicted, appear in Holbein's miniature of the Queen. Dispute has raged as to whether its subject really is Catherine. But the identification of the jewels settles the issue once and for all. It also establishes, for the first time, her exact appearance. She had auburn hair, pale skin, dark eyes and brows, the rather fetching beginnings of a double chin, and an expression that was at once quizzical and come-hither.
It is easy, in short, to understand what Henry saw in her and why the rain of gifts continued. He gave her others, at The More in October 1540, perhaps on the occasion of the anniversary of their first meeting; while Christmas and New Year 1540–1 provided an excuse for yet more lavish presents, including a 'square' set with thirty-three diamonds and sixty rubies and bordered with pearls, and a jewelled sable muffler.
Henry was caught. And nothing, save Catherine's own mistakes, could ever release him. 'The new Queen', Marillac informed his government in November, 'has completely acquired the King's Grace and the other [Anne] is no more spoken of than if she were dead.'
19
* * *
The ambassador's exaggeration is a pardonable one. Nevertheless, Anne of Cleves was very much alive and her presence as a sort of ghost from the past continued to be an embarrassment – for Henry, for Anne herself and, perhaps above all, for Catherine. For, despite her short reign, Anne had become remarkably popular. Her divorce, Marillac reported, had been 'to the great regret of this people, who loved and esteemed her as the sweetest, most gracious and kindest Queen they ever had or would desire'. This assessment might be dismissed as ambassadorial gossip. But Marillac's judgement is confirmed by the English chronicler Wriothesley. '[It] was great pity', he commented, 'that so good a lady as she should have lost her great joy.' And Wriothesley's verdict carries the more weight, since, as a religious conservative, he had no reason to be committed to the Cleves marriage. Instead, it must have been Anne's own personal qualities of modesty and goodness which had won his regard.
20
Modesty and goodness, on the other hand, were not, perhaps, Catherine's strongest suits. Nevertheless, Anne had to be fitted into a world in which she, as the King's adoptive sister, could play a comfortable second fiddle to Catherine, as Henry's wife and Queen.
As part of the divorce settlement, Henry had assured Anne of a welcome at Court. But, wisely, the offer was neither extended nor taken up for the first few months of the King's new marriage. At New Year 1541, however, the ice was broken. Chapuys's account, on which we largely depend, makes Anne take the initiative. But equally she must have received permission for her planned visit to Court.
21
Anne began by sending Henry a magnificent New Year's gift of two fine horses caparisoned in mauve velvet. Then, on 3 January, she presented herself at Hampton Court. There was a delay while Chancellor Audley and the Earl of Sussex, who, as Cromwell's successor as Lord Great Chamberlain, was ceremonial head of the royal Household, briefed Queen Catherine on the delicate question of etiquette presented by her meeting with ex-Queen Anne. There were no precedents and they must have resorted to a mixture of common sense and invention.
Finally, Catherine was ready and Anne was admitted to the Queen's presence. Only a few months before, Catherine had been one of Anne's women. She had knelt in her presence and spoken to her only when spoken to. How, everyone must have wondered, would Anne cope with the role reversal?
She did so by giving a virtuoso performance of humility. 'Having entered the room', Chapuys reported, 'Lady Anne approached the Queen with as much reverence and punctilious ceremony as if she herself were the most insignificant damsel about Court.' 'All the time', he continued, 'addressing the Queen on her knees'.
But Catherine was not to be outdone. Her schoolgirlish humour must have tempted her to laugh. But her sense of decorum and her coaching carried the day and she was all graciousness. She asked Anne, nay begged her, to rise and 'received her most kindly, showing her great favour and courtesy'.
So far, Henry was not to be seen. Instead, he left it to the two women in his life to establish the appropriate relationship between them – of submission, on Anne's part, and gracious acceptance, on Catherine's. But, once it was safely accomplished, he appeared and, if anything, outdid Catherine in his courtesy to Anne.
'The King', Chapuys reported, 'entered the room, and, after making a very low bow to [the] Lady Anne, embraced and kissed her.' Then all three sat down to supper at the same table. Throughout the meal, they kept 'as good a mien and countenance and look[ed] as unconcerned as if there had been nothing between them'. The conversation continued a while after supper until Henry withdrew, leaving the two women once more to themselves. They passed the time in dancing: first with each other and then with two Gentlemen of the King's Household.