Tower: An Epic History of the Tower of London (34 page)

The council now had enough evidence for a charge of adultery with Culpeper to be brought against the queen. All they needed for the case to be closed was Katherine’s own confession. Cranmer and Wriothesley journeyed upriver to Syon to confront her. But the distraught Katherine desperately persisted in her denials. Nonetheless, the council considered their case watertight enough to tell Henry that his thornless rose had pricked him most intimately. Katherine was stripped of the title of Queen on 22 November. Her ruthless family, desperate to distance themselves from the wreckage, had already abandoned her. The Duke of Norfolk declared that he wished to see his niece burned.

The queen’s downfall made waves that would drown the Howards. Norfolk’s mother, the Dowager Duchess of Norfolk, was held responsible for the lax regime at her Lambeth house which had allowed Katherine’s dalliances with Manox and Dereham. Despite feigning illness, the duchess was arrested and ferried to the Tower. Here, in the chilly dankness of late November, she fell genuinely ill and was in bed when interrogated by the council’s investigators.

The council threw the book at Culpeper and Dereham. They were accused of treason and, together with Katherine – described as a ‘common harlot’ – of having led ‘an abominable, base, carnal, voluptuous and licentious life’. Culpeper was charged with having had ‘criminal intercourse’ with the ex-queen after her marriage; and Jane Rochford with abetting the affair. Dereham was charged with becoming Katherine’s secretary in order to continue their illicit liaision, and concealing his unofficial engagement to Katherine so that she could marry the king. After a trial presided over by the Duke of Norfolk, both Culpeper and Dereham were condemned and sentenced to be hanged, drawn and quartered at Tyburn.

But the law wasn’t finished with Dereham yet. Because he continued to proclaim his innocence (while Culpeper changed his plea to ‘Guilty’ during the trial) and because he was not, unlike Culpeper, of noble blood, the Tower’s rougher methods were brought to bear. On 6 December, Dereham, doubtless trembling with terror, was brought into the torture chambers in the cellars beneath the White Tower and shown the instruments for inflicting indescribable pain. Then, under the personal supervision of the sadistic Solicitor General, Richard Rich – the same man who had tricked Thomas More into making his fatal confession – the torture began. We do not know exactly which methods were employed to loosen Dereham’s tongue. We do know that ‘the Breaks’, a crude but effective dental device for breaking teeth, were employed on a friend of his, William Damport, in a bid to get him to implicate Dereham, so he may have suffered the Breaks too. One source suggests that his fingernails were torn out with tongs. Or – most excruciating of all – he may have suffered the rack. Rich, as we know from the well-documented case of the Protestant martyr Anne Askew, did not scruple to operate the rack himself, and if he used it on Dereham, the young man’s resistance would have been short.

The torment achieved its purpose: a full confession was wrung from the wretched youth. He admitted canvassing the possibility of Henry’s early death with Katherine; agreed that he and everyone else at Lambeth had regarded them as betrothed; and wrote that they had regularly enjoyed sex, ‘kissing and hanging by their bellies like a pair of sparrows’. Another, and far less pleasurable, form of hanging now awaited Dereham. On 10 December he and Culpeper paid the agonising penalty for their forbidden pleasures. Drawn to Tyburn from the Tower, Culpeper, as a nobleman, was granted the swift end of decapitation. Dereham’s already tortured body suffered the additional agony of hanging, emasculation and disembowelment.

Katherine herself lingered on for a few more weeks while Parliament passed an act of attainder against her and Lady Rochford. The teenage queen, reported to be ‘plumper and prettier than ever’, now seemed resigned to her fate; Katherine requested only that she should die swiftly and in private. The king was happy to oblige. Although the rest of the Howard clan – including the old dowager duchess – were stripped of their cash and property, they were spared death and eventually released from the Tower. The ignoble, grovelling Duke of
Norfolk himself – as a special humiliation – was sent to Syon to inform his niece that the king had mercifully granted her request, and that she would die in the Tower, in the same way and place as her cousin Anne Boleyn.

On Friday 10 February the lords of the Privy Council went to Syon to conduct Katherine to the Tower. Facing the dreadful reality of her imminent fate, the girl’s courage failed. She had to be dragged and hustled to the three waiting boats. Accompanied by four ladies who would attend her in the Tower and by four burly oarsmen, and dressed in a black velvet gown against the river’s wintry chill, the ex-queen, travelling in the middle boat of the little convoy, passed under London Bridge. Mercifully, since her barge was enclosed, she was spared the sight of her lovers’ heads decomposing on the spikes above her.

Sir John Gage, who had recently replaced Sir William Kingston as constable of the Tower, was waiting at Traitor’s Gate to meet Katherine and escort her to her rooms in the Lieutenant’s Lodgings – the same lodgings where her cousin Anne had stayed prior to her execution. Gage was perturbed by his young charge’s condition, reporting to the council that she ‘wept, cried and tormented herself miserably and without ceasing’. At least Katherine was spared the weeks of waiting in the Tower that her cousin had endured – she only spent a weekend in the fortress, since her execution was fixed for Monday 13 February.

Katherine passed much of that weekend in prayer. She made her last confession to John Longland, Bishop of Lincoln, regretting her youthful follies but swearing that she had not abused her sovereign lord’s bed. On the Sunday night, Katherine made a strange request to Gage. She asked that the execution block be brought to her chamber so that she could practise placing her neck across it in readiness for the morning’s ordeal. Gage had the gruesome object taken to Katherine’s room for the grim dress rehearsal.

Monday morning dawned dank and misty. It was an early start for the members of the Privy Council who had been summoned as official witnesses to the execution. They arrived by river and, dressed in fur-lined gowns against the cold, took their places on the wooden benches surrounding the black-draped scaffold to the north of the White Tower. It was the same structure on which Anne Boleyn had died, as if Henry
had left it standing with the knowledge that he would kill another queen there some day. A group of more humble spectators, with connections to the condemned woman, were allowed in through the Tower’s landward entrance to see the spectacle. One of these, a confectioner named Otwell Johnson, who had supplied dainties and sweetmeats to the queen, left us the only eye-witness account of the proceedings, in a letter written soon afterwards to his brother.

At 7 a.m., Gage rapped on the door of Katherine’s chamber. The victim was ready to be offered up. Dressed in black velvet, with a cloak covering her gown, Katherine and her ladies were led down to the Inner Ward and around the corner of the White Tower to the scaffold. The spectators were not as numerous as the crowd which had seen Anne Boleyn die, and watched in silence as the tiny figure mounted the scaffold and tipped the masked headsman who knelt to ask her forgiveness. Katherine’s speech from the scaffold, as noted by Johnson, was equally traditional. She had finally mastered her fears and met death with dignity.

In Johnson’s account, there is no mention of the legend that Katherine said that she died a queen, but would rather have died ‘the wife of Thomas Culpeper’. Instead, he said, she made a conventional affirmation that her death was a just punishment for her ‘heinous offences’ against God and the king. She concluded by asking people to pray for Henry – and for herself – before allowing her ladies to bandage her eyes and shut out the light for the last time. She knelt in the straw and laid her head on the block as she had practised the night before. The executioner severed her neck with a single stroke, holding it up by her auburn hair with the cry, ‘Behold the head of a traitor!’

As Katherine’s head and body were bundled up in a black shroud by her weeping ladies, ready to be taken away for burial next to her cousin Anne in St Peter’s chapel, Lady Rochford was brought to the scaffold in her turn. When Katherine’s blood was sluiced away with buckets of water, and fresh straw strewn, the grim ritual was repeated for the woman who had helped condemn her. Jane Rochford too admitted her offences and declared her death to be just and merited. She too exhorted her audience to treat her death as an awful example and amend their own sins. She too knelt in the damp straw and received her death in a single stroke. Otwell Johnson was mightily impressed by the grace shown by the two women in death. ‘Their souls are with God,’ he told his brother. ‘For they made
the most Godly and Christian end that ever was heard tell of (I think) since the world’s creation.’

One of those who had watched Katherine Howard’s end – as he had observed that of his other cousin, Anne Boleyn – was the Duke of Norfolk’s son and heir, Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey. He was the great white hope of his ambitious, grasping family. Dashing, daring, good-looking, impetuous – a man who combined love of the arts with the talents of a warrior – Surrey was a gifted poet who reputedly introduced the sonnet form from the Italian into English verse. A crony and drinking buddy of his fellow poet Sir Thomas Wyatt, Surrey shared the driving ambition that was his dynasty’s defining characteristic. Unlike his despicable father, however, he lacked the sycophantic skills necessary to survive in Henry’s murderous court. And his recklessness would finally bring the old duke to the Tower – and himself to the scaffold.

The downfall of Katherine Howard dealt a severe blow to the Howard family’s hopes of controlling the king and the succession. It had not, however, utterly destroyed them. The final years of Henry’s reign were dominated by the see-saw struggle between the radical Protestants and conservative Catholics, led politically by Norfolk, and theologically by Stephen Gardiner, the hard-line Bishop of Winchester, a cleric with a nose like a buzzard’s beak, and a penchant for burning heretics whenever he could smell them out.

The Protestants, under the guidance of the deceptively mild-mannered Thomas Cranmer, Archbishop of Canterbury, included a cluster of thrusting new men who, while not particularly devout themselves, were happy to ride the wave of the Reformation to propel themselves into power. The reformers included the uncles of Henry’s heir, Prince Edward, brothers of the late queen, Jane Seymour: Edward Seymour, Earl of Hertford, and his even more ambitious younger brother Thomas Seymour. Allied with the Seymours was John Dudley, Lord Lisle, son of Edmund Dudley, the grasping finance minister whose execution had been one of the first acts of Henry’s reign; and the king’s fixer, Sir Anthony Denny, a secretary of state who controlled access to the monarch.

The balance of power on the council between Catholic conservatives and Protestant reformers was held by men like Thomas Wriothesley and Richard Rich – ambitious, time-serving opportunists, who while officially
orthodox Catholics, were happy to swing with whichever wind was blowing, so long as it kept them in wealth and power. Unlike Norfolk, Surrey, the Seymours and Dudley, these men’s visits to the Tower were confined to their official duties as interrogators and torturers, and they both died in their beds and kept their heads.

The two rival factions waged a constant proxy war on each other by making martyrs out of the fervent followers of their faiths from lower social stations. Their hope was that these humble folk would implicate their co-religionists in more influential positions. The Tower was thus often crowded with prisoners whose only crime was too loud a proclamation of their faith, or those who had stubbornly clung to doctrines that had passed out of favour. During the king’s divorce from Katherine of Aragon, the dissolution of the monasteries, and the Pilgrimage of Grace, the full weight of official persecution had fallen heaviest on Catholic monks, friars and priests. After the fall of Cromwell, it was Protestant heretics who suffered torture and death – often the agonising deaths of burning at the stake. And even after the execution of Katherine Howard and the decline of her family, it took the death of the king and the advent of his staunchly Protestant young son, Edward VI, before the wind shifted definitely towards reform once more.

Though he had displaced the Pope as head of the Church and dissolved the religious houses, Henry remained a doctrinal conservative. Even after the reformers on the council, taking a leaf from the Howards’ book, had succeeded in engineering Henry’s sixth marriage in 1543 – to one of their number, Thomas Seymour’s mistress, a Cumbrian widow named Catherine Parr – Protestants continued to be persecuted, although the kindly Catherine did what she could to ameliorate their suffering. One martyr she was unable to save was a fellow north country gentlewoman, Anne Askew.

Askew, a feisty young woman in her early twenties, was a sixteenth-century proto-feminist, who had embraced Protestant doctrines and been thrown out of her Lincolnshire home by her husband, Thomas Kyme, for her hot gospelling. Coming to London, she had drawn unwelcome attention by her Protestant preaching. In the chauvinist eyes of the Church, to quote Samuel Johnson, witnessing a woman preacher was like seeing a dog walking on its hind legs. ‘It is not done well, but you are surprised to see it done at all.’ Being a Protestant was bad enough,
but being a young and beautiful woman preacher was a near obscene sacrilege.

Askew was repeatedly arrested, sent back to her husband, and, when she returned to London, put in the Tower on charges of heresy. Specifically, she had denied the ‘Real Presence’ – the Catholic dogma that the consecrated wafers and wine consumed during Mass miraculously constituted the actual body and blood of Christ. Anne held that ‘God made man, but that man can make God I never yet read’. Hearing rumours that this bold Protestant had contacts with the court circle surrounding the new queen, the council’s Catholics resolved to extract such incriminating information from Anne by force. In this way, they could bring down their reforming rivals along with their royal patron. They decided to do what had never been done before – to torture a woman in the Tower.