Young and Damned and Fair: The Life and Tragedy of Catherine Howard at the Court of Henry VIII

The hill where they now stood had been the site of the finales to some of Cromwell’s worst character assassinations. It had been there, four years earlier on another summer’s day, that George Boleyn had perished before similarly large crowds after Cromwell arranged a trial that saw him condemned to death on charges of incest and treason. The details of Boleyn’s alleged treason had been kept deliberately vague during the trial, while the prosecution’s fanciful descriptions of his incestuous seduction of his sister had been excruciatingly, pornographically vivid. Boleyn, as handsome as Adonis and proud as Icarus, had defended himself so well against the accusations there had been bets that he would be acquitted.5 When he was not, when he was condemned to die alongside four other men two days later, no one could risk speaking out for a man found guilty of committing such a bestial act.

Boleyn had died in sight of the Tower’s brooding walls, its cupolas and fortifications twin testaments to the inescapably neurotic nature of power. Within the Tower’s sheltered courtyards, George’s Boleyn’s sister, Queen Anne, was executed in a more private setting, before a carefully vetted crowd of around one thousand, which was tiny in comparison to that allowed to gather beyond the walls to watch her brother perish – and now Cromwell and Walter Hungerford.6 Like Thomas More before her, another political heavyweight in whose destruction Cromwell had been intimately involved, Anne Boleyn had embraced the sixteenth century’s veneration for the ars moriendi – the art of dying.

The veil between life and death was made permeable by the teachings of Christianity. Everywhere one looked, there was proof of society’s lively fascination with the next life. Death was the great moral battleground between one’s strengths and weaknesses; the supreme test came when the finite perished and the eternal began. To die well, in a spirit of resignation to the Will of God and without committing a sin against hope by despairing of what was to come next, was a goal endlessly stressed to the Faithful in art, sermons, homilies and manuals. Within the great basilica of Saint-Denis in Paris, the tomb of King Louis XII and Anne of Brittany, his queen, showed the couple rendered perfect in the stonemasons’ marble, united atop the monument, their bejewelled hands clasped in prayer, their robes and crowns exquisitely carved; but beneath that sculpture the craftsmen had offered a very different portrait of the royal forms – there, the bodies of the king and queen were shown twisting and writhing in the first stages of putrefaction, their feet bare, their hair uncovered and their flesh pullulating with the onset of corruption.7 Throughout Europe, these cadaver tombs, the transi, were commissioned by the rich and the powerful to show their submission to the final destruction of their flesh and with it the removal of this sinful world’s most potent temptations. In corruption they had been born and so through corruption they could be born again.

In the sixteenth century, life was precious, truncated at any moment by plague, war or one of a thousand ailments that would be rendered treatable in the centuries to come, and so the people embraced it with a rare zeal. But living well, as Anne Boleyn had noted at her trial, also meant dying well.8 Christians were supposed to die bravely because of the surety of mercy that even the weakest and most sinful was guaranteed by their religion, provided he or she had respected its doctrines and honoured its God. Before they were marched to the hill, Cromwell told Lord Hungerford that ‘though the breakfast which we are going to be sharp, yet, trusting to the mercy of the Lord, we shall have a joyful dinner’.9 To the overwhelming number of Henry VIII’s subjects, Christianity was not a theory, it was not a belief system, it was not one religion among many – it was, more or less, a series of facts, the interpretation of which could be debated, but whose essential truth was inescapable and uncontested. The result of this way of accepting and experiencing their faith was that sixteenth-century Christians often behaved in ways which were paradoxically far more devout but also far more relaxed than their modern-day co-religionists. The line between sinners and the flock was not so clearly delineated, because even the worst members of society were still, in one way or the other, almost certainly believing Christians. All men were weak, all men would fail, all men would die, all men could be saved.

A celebrated person’s execution, their final public performance, was such an exciting event that people made the journey into London especially for it. Vast crowds surged through London, converging on Tower Hill to watch the annihilation of the detested commoner who had somehow risen to become Earl of Essex – a sign of royal favour given to him only a few weeks before he was arrested at a meeting of the Privy Council and taken to the Tower. The last ascent in the life of the Englishman who had risen farther than anyone else in his century were the wooden steps to the scaffold. Thomas Cromwell had not been a popular figure, but royal advisers seldom are. Snobbery played a large role in his reputation – an English diplomat described Cromwell as a man who had been ‘advanced from the dunghill to great honour’ – but so did his actions.10 Ruthless, determined, brilliant, and utterly Machiavellian, Cromwell had overseen the destruction of many an aristocratic career and the evisceration of the old religion in England. Many of his opponents blamed him for tearing asunder the spiritual framework that they had lived, and hoped to die, by. The sacraments and liturgies of the Church had given a rhythm to the year, they had bestowed the tools for salvation on the faithful for centuries, and marked every major moment in a Christian’s life. In 1536, Cromwell had weathered the Pilgrimage of Grace, a traditionalist uprising which spread through most of northern England and which had demanded his removal from power. However, he could not survive the loss of the king’s favour four years later. His enemies surrounded him and he was condemned to death on a long list of crimes that included heresy, treason, and financial corruption.

The crowds entering the capital on 28 July 1540 came from every background, with well-born women wearing veils to shield their faces from the sun, while urchins wore battered hand-me-down cheap leather shoes which prevented their feet from being cut on the animal bones and refuse that littered the city streets. With no rain, the mud in the streets had become a dry dust that would turn into ankle-depth filth when the clouds broke in autumn. The spectators passed through the capital’s eighteen-foot high defensive walls via one of the seven gates. Those travelling in from the Hampshire and Surrey countryside entered through Newgate, while those from nearby Smithfield, home to a bustling meat market, accessed the City at Aldersgate. Smithfield also contained London’s designated red-light district, the aptly named Cock Lane. Subtlety in the assigning of place names was not a medieval strongpoint. The southwestern city of Exeter had renamed one of its rivers Shitbrook, because of the amount of faeces and waste it contained, and in Oxford, students hoping for an early sexual experience courtesy of the town’s prostitutes could find it on Gropecunt Lane, a narrow alley that ran from just opposite the university church of St Mary the Virgin down to the entrance of Oriel College.11

Rather more elegant sights awaited those who were travelling towards Cromwell’s execution via the Strand, a long straight road lined with the episcopal palaces and impressive homes of the aristocracy. The Strand had been the site of the Savoy Palace, principal residence of Richard II’s powerful uncle John of Gaunt, until it was burned down during the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381. It was eventually replaced by the Hospital of St John the Baptist, one of the most impressive medical establishments in early modern Europe, founded under the patronage of Henry VIII’s father. Near the hospital was one of the Eleanor Crosses, funerary monuments erected by a grief-stricken Edward I in 1290 to mark each of the fourteen spots where his wife’s coffin rested on its final journey to Westminster Abbey. This, the last halt before the interment, was now where professional water-sellers took advantage of the area’s excellent plumbing, which on occasion pumped the local fountains with wine or beer to celebrate an especially significant royal event – the last time had been for the birth of the heir to the throne, Prince Edward, in 1537. On a hot and busy day like this, as families and groups of friends swarmed towards the Tower, the Charing Cross water-sellers could reasonably have expected to turn a handsome profit.12

London in July 1540 was the perfect capital for Henry VIII’s domains: a broken society whose fracture lines were both reflected and grotesquely magnified throughout the city. Along the banks of the Thames, formerly semi-rural areas like Deptford and Woolwich were now shipyards for the Royal Navy, where titanic amounts of money poured into the construction of warships designed to repel the French and Spanish, if they ever came. Londoners grumbled at the despoiling of some of the few green areas left to them; they valued their leaf-dappled refuges so much that earlier in the king’s reign thousands had rioted over plans to encroach on the area of parkland around Soho, a district which got its name from a traditional hunting cry, ‘So, ho!’

Riots were rare in Henrician England, but tensions were constant and none were more intense than those caused by the country’s break with Rome. Seven years before Cromwell’s execution, the king had repudiated papal authority and embarked upon his own version of the Reformation in what rapidly became one of the least articulate government policies in British history. There was absolutely no clear strategy for where the Church of England should go once it was commanded from London rather than Rome. The king, who had harnessed anti-clericalism in Parliament to secure his dream of annulling his marriage to Katherine of Aragon, had then hurled himself into what initially looked like the wholesale dismemberment of English Catholicism. The severing of obedience to the Vatican was the initial step in a legal, cultural, and economic revolution. The monasteries were dissolved, or pressured to surrender, first the smaller abbeys, then the larger and wealthier. On the eve of the Reformation, about one-third of the land in England belonged to the Church and so the seizure of its assets became an unsavoury bonanza for the government and its supporters, whose loyalty to the regime was often bought with gifts of land taken from the religious orders.

The first human casualties after the break with Rome had been the conservatives who could not in good conscience abjure their oaths of loyalty to the pope. There were some among them who, despite their misgivings, were prepared to acknowledge that canon law just about permitted the king’s banishment of Katherine of Aragon and marriage to Anne Boleyn, whom even Thomas More had acknowledged as ‘this noble woman royally anointed queen’, but under no circumstances could they accept that Henry had the right to make himself Supreme Head on Earth of the Church of England and Ireland.13 Thomas More, the country’s former Lord Chancellor, and the esteemed scholar Cardinal John Fisher went to the block in 1535. The leaders of the Carthusian order of monks were hanged until they were half dead, cut down to be castrated, disembowelled and only then beheaded. The country folk coming into London through Newgate for Cromwell’s death had to pass by the looming, grey-stoned edifice of Newgate prison, where three hermits, one deacon and six monks had been stripped, chained to posts with their hands tied behind their backs and simply left to starve to death in their cells, rotting towards martyrdom in excruciating pain and their own gathering excrement. One plucky Catholic lady, a doctor’s wife, disguised herself as a milk maid, bribed the guards to let her into the cell and fed, watered and bathed the condemned gentlemen. The gaolers tightened security after the king irritably asked how the condemned men had remained alive for so long.14

A few miles to the west of the prison was Tyburn, the site of near-daily executions of criminals – rapists, horse thieves, forgers and murderers. It was here that many of the Carthusian monks met their end after being processed through the streets tied to a wicker hurdle pulled by a slow-moving horse. Back at Smithfield, within sight of the grubby walkways of Cock Lane, Father John Forest had been burned to death atop a pyre that consisted of religious statues, including one of Saint Derfel, taken from a pilgrimage centre in north Wales. There was a hideous poetic irony in using the symbols of pre-Reformation Christianity to incinerate one of its most vocal sympathisers.

For the poorest of the poor, the Reformation initially brought a different kind of martyrdom. Admittedly, the Church had not always done all that it could to alleviate poverty, but as medieval Catholicism’s emphasis on charity as a means to secure salvation came under attack by reformers, beggars would have been a depressingly and increasingly familiar sight for the spectators. This was especially true for those from Smithfield whose monastic hospital and poorhouse, St Bartholomew’s Priory, had been shut down during the dissolutions, leaving the local poor and invalided defenceless, friendless and often homeless. Throughout London it was the same, with those who had relied on the Church either for charity or work, wandering the streets, joined by the hundreds who poured in from the countryside where the dissolutions had closed off many traditional forms of employment or benefice. Nor were the seized properties being put to edifying use in the post-monastic world. Courtiers, lawyers and merchants who benefited from the government’s liberality often turned the former abbeys and churches into stinking tenements, overpacked and overpriced, where families lived in pathetically cramped quarters with rampant disease and indifferent landlords. The church of St Martin-le-Grand was demolished to make way for a tavern; Bermondsey Abbey, where Henry VIII’s grandmother Elizabeth Woodville had spent the final few years of her life, became a bull-fighting arena, before it was demolished to make way for the private home of a lawyer who worked on the Court of Augmentations, the legal body set up to deal with former monastic lands; the Priory of St Mary Overy became a bear-baiting pit. Statues of saints and angels had been torn from their niches and burned in a crusade against the old ways; yet even with such zeal from the iconoclastic reformers, clear religious policy, vital in an age which still carried the death penalty for heresy, proved elusive.

Thomas Cromwell, rising to power during the break with Rome and then securing his position at the king’s side thanks to his indefatigable work on the dissolutions, was seen as the Reformation’s henchman by its opponents and ‘an organ of Christ’s glory’ by its supporters; he seems to have believed in the Reformation’s mission and to have risked much to support those who shared his spirituality.15 Whether he was as indifferent to its human cost as is usually supposed is unclear, but that he never shirked from unpleasant tasks is certain. The quartered limbs and parboiled heads of dead traitors were on prominent display throughout the capital, with the skulls of the most famous offenders sitting atop pikes that jutted out over the nineteen arches of London Bridge. They would stay there until they had been stripped clean by birds and the elements.

Bile and viciousness increased on both sides of the confessional divide as the king, with God in one eye and the Devil in the other, brooded like Shelley’s Ozymandias over a kingdom riven by divisions. Who was in and who was out at the centre of government changed constantly and, unlike most of his predecessors, Henry VIII seemed to want his fallen favourites to vanish into the vast silence of mortality rather than simply leave the sunlight of his presence. Cromwell had previously helped arrange the exits of other favourites, now he was enduring the same agony.

We may know now that the Tudor dynasty was successful in holding on to power, and in preventing both civil war and foreign invasion, in the same way we know that the United States and her allies prevailed in the Cold War, but those attending Cromwell’s execution had no such assurances, and paranoia was rampant, a communal insecurity for which the king’s glamorously bizarre behaviour must bear a large portion of the blame. To have embarked upon something as seismic as the schism with the Vatican without having a clear strategy for the years ahead was foolish, but to then change his mind as often as he did with something as sacred and vital to his people’s understanding of themselves was criminally incompetent. When Henry VIII had exhausted the wealth of the Church, he began to lose interest in the Reformation; his natural conservatism reawakened and he was appalled by the many Protestant sects that were using the newfound availability of the Bible to interpret God’s Word for themselves, in many cases reaching conclusions that Henry regarded as rank heresy. The pendulum began to swing in the opposite direction, with legislation known as the Six Articles reaffirming the government’s commitment to Catholic theology. Protestants nicknamed the laws ‘the whip with six strings’ and the arrests of religious radicals began once their patron, Cromwell, was no longer in a position to protect them. At Smithfield, the local authorities were busy setting up another pyre to burn three Lutherans, Robert Barnes, Thomas Gerard and William Jerome, who had once preached their gospel with Cromwell’s support. They were to die on the 30th, two days after Cromwell. With intimidation, espionage, cancerous fears of enemies foreign and domestic, and bitter sectarian tensions, Henrician England and Ireland were countries tottering permanently on the edge and many blamed Thomas Cromwell for organising the march to the precipice.

In the countryside, beyond the stench and sweat of the crowd assembled to watch Cromwell’s and Hungerford’s deaths, Edmund Bonner, Bishop of London, prepared to preside over the king’s wedding service to Catherine Howard. The pretty palace of Oatlands sat in a rolling deer park, its loveliness marred only by the building work that the king, with his passion for architecture, had ordered three years earlier when the manor had come into his possession.16 A fortune was spent on transforming the seldom-used Oatlands into a retreat fit for the sovereign – an octagonal tower, still a work in progress on the day Cromwell was struck down, was added to the courtyard. Terraced gardens were constructed with multiple fountains, each one an enormous extravagance splashing cooling streams of water. An orchard, its mature trees groaning under the weight of fruit, offered shade to the heads of courtiers and servants, as they endured the stifling heat. The trees were old, but the orchard was not. They had been uprooted from St Peter’s Abbey at nearby Chertsey, a nine-century-old monastery founded by Saint Erkenwald, one of the earliest bishops of London, and brought to grace the king’s gardens when the abbey was shut down, its brothers expelled and its possessions stripped by Cromwell’s inspectors. The stones that built the little palace’s extension had come from the Augustinian priory at Tandridge as it was pulled down to make way for aristocratic demesnes. The price paid by many of his subjects for the king’s religious revolution weighed heavily and silently on Oatlands, but as thick carpets from the Ottoman Empire, chairs upholstered in velvets and cloth of gold, gilt cups, bejewelled table services, and beds hung with cloth of silver were all processed into Oatlands, there was little outward sign of the stresses and tribulation that had gone into making it suitable for the royal household.17

An Oxford graduate in his early forties, Edmund Bonner had risen from relative obscurity, which encouraged accusations that he had been born out of wedlock, to become England’s ambassador to France and, after that, Bishop of London.18 He had secured both his ambassadorship and episcopacy through Thomas Cromwell’s patronage, yet like everybody else he had abandoned Cromwell in his hour of need. The latter’s frantic letters from prison, entreating royal mercy from Henry, written in a disjointed and panicky mess compared to his usual precise calligraphy, had gone unanswered, as Cromwell’s former dependants turned their faces from him, as if he had never existed.

We cannot say for certain where in Oatlands Catherine Howard resided during her wedding visit. Recent excavations of the palace have given us a better picture of its layout and the safest guess would be that her rooms were in the queen’s apartments, located in the palace’s southern towers between the inner and outer courtyards. From any eastern- or western-facing windows above the quadrangle, she would have had beautiful views of either the orchard with its purloined apple trees, the octagonal dovecote or the ornamental gardens circling the fountains. From just above the entrance to the inner courtyard, she would have been able to see the ramp that had recently been installed to help her husband-to-be mount what must have been a particularly sturdy steed. Beyond the walls lay the deer park where she and the king would spend a few days of hunting as part of a ten-day honeymoon.

She was in her late teens, slender, like most of the Howard women, with a ‘very delightful’ appearance, according to the French ambassador.19 The court’s temporary reduction in size and then its removal to the relative obscurity of Oatlands fuelled speculation that she was already pregnant; Catherine’s petite frame gave the lie to the story, but it would be weeks before she was unveiled to the public again and the stories could finally be put to rest.20 Sixteenth-century weddings were not usually romantic occasions and the modern idea of writing one’s own vows or of putting the couple’s affection for one another at the centre of the ceremony would have struck Catherine and her contemporaries as bizarre. It was, like an execution, a formal occasion governed by established precedent; there was a proper way of doing things and as she made her way down to the recently renovated chapel near her husband’s tower to stand in front of Edmund Bonner, Catherine, keen to adhere to etiquette after a lifetime spent learning its nuances, had no intention of making a mistake.

The king had arrived at Oatlands earlier that day. Lucrezia Borgia’s twenty-three-year-old son Francesco, Marquis of Massalombarda, had been visiting London for the last week and he was due to leave that evening; the king had entertained him with visits to his palaces at Greenwich and Richmond and given him two fine horses as a parting gift.21 It was unusual for a traveller to begin a journey in the evening when visibility was poor, so perhaps the marquis had delayed his departure to make sure he witnessed the executions on Tower Hill. If he did attend, his status would have vouchsafed for him a place at the front of the crowd.

Much as a hush falls when a bride enters a church, a silence settled over the spectators as Cromwell began his final speech.22 He delivered it perfectly, thanking God for allowing him to die this way, in full knowledge of what lay ahead, and confessing readily that he was a wretched and miserable sinner who had, like all Christians, fallen short of the standards hoped for by Almighty God: ‘I confess that as God, by His Holy Spirit, instructs us in the truth, so the devil is ready to seduce us – and I have been seduced.’ Then he began to pray – for the king, for ‘that goodly imp’ the heir apparent – and to ask for prayers for himself, though as a reformer he was careful not to ask for prayers for his soul after he was dead but solely ‘so that as long as life remaineth in this flesh, I waiver nothing in my faith’.23

As Catherine, her throat now glittering with pieces from the royal collection, knelt before Edmund Bonner, Cromwell knelt in the sawdust of the scaffold and prayed aloud, ‘O Lord, grant me that when these eyes lose their use, that the eyes of my soul might see Thee. O Lord and father, when this mouth shall lose his use that my heart may say, O Pater, in manus tuas commendo spiritum meum.’24 Hungerford, his sanity now snapped entirely, kept interrupting, writhing and screaming at the executioner to get on with his bloody business.25 Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey, stood at the forefront of the crowd and watched the scene without pity. He was missing his cousin’s wedding to be here to see his family’s bête noire finished off. Later that day, he could not conceal his good mood. It felt to him like a settling of scores: ‘Now is the false churl dead, so ambitious of others’ blood.’26