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

       INTRODUCTION

      In the Great Hall at Hampton Court Palace, magnificent tapestries depicting scenes from the life of the patriarch Abraham are on display. Every day, hundreds of tourists pass these enormous works of art which cost Henry VIII almost as much as the construction of a new warship. After centuries of exposure, their colours had faded and the bright sparkle of the threads of beaten gold had worn away, until a lengthy conservation project carried out between the Historic Royal Palaces, the Clothworkers’ Company, and the University of Manchester offered a reconstruction and an academic paper conveying just how vibrant the tapestries would have been when they were first unveiled. Their detail is extraordinary, mesmeric. The reflections of mallard ducks floating on the ponds are visible, reeds sway in the wind, every face is detailed, sandals and toenails are stitched perfectly, bread in a servant’s basket is believably coloured. Crucially, part of the conservation work necessitated turning the tapestries over to look at the threads at the back and see all the ugly, confusing stitch-work that had gone into making the familiar scene on the front possible.

      My interest in the story of Henry VIII’s fifth wife, Queen Catherine Howard, began years ago and solidified in 2011 when, under the supervision of Dr James Davis at Queen’s University, Belfast, I completed my postgraduate dissertation on her household.1 As with all Henry’s wives, Catherine’s life had been written about many times in biographies and studies of her husband’s reign. In the year of Henry VIII’s death, an Italian merchant remarked, ‘The discourse of these wives is a wonderful history’, an observation that captures why the Tudors remain one of England’s most famous dynasties.2 In Catherine’s case, the circumstances of her career had already been dissected in A Tudor Tragedy: The Life and Times of Catherine Howard, first published in New York in 1961 and generally judged the standard biography of her. Written by Professor Lacey Baldwin Smith, the central contention of A Tudor Tragedy was that Catherine’s ‘career begins and ends with the Howards, a clan whose predatory instincts for self-aggrandisement, sense of pompous conceit, and dangerous meddling in the destinies of state, shaped the course of her tragedy.’3

      I intended to use Catherine’s sixteen-month period as queen consort as a useful framing device to analyse the queen’s household, one of the least-studied but most fascinating components of Henry VIII’s court: how it functioned, who populated it, who dominated it, how it was financed, and how it interacted with the wider court.4 The thesis would place one early modern queen of England, in this case the hapless Catherine Howard, in the context of a life lived not just next to the great men of the early English Reformation but amongst the servants, ladies-in-waiting, and favourites, without whom no great aristocratic lady could function and from whom she was seldom, if ever, separated. I did not, initially, expect to find anything remarkably different about her rise and fall.

      Instead, I came to the conclusion that the queen’s household had shaped the trajectory of Catherine’s career. Popular culture often presents Tudor royal households, particularly a queen’s, as beautiful irrelevances. Sumptuously dressed ladies-in-waiting whispering behind their fans, dancing or throwing coy glances, are familiar images of life in the queens’ establishments. In many works of fiction, these characters seem to spend a good deal of their time giggling over something which is not credibly amusing. The reality was far more interesting.

      Establishing who Catherine’s ladies-in-waiting were was a difficult task. The surviving list, which was for a long time incorrectly believed to be a list of women attached to the household of Catherine’s predecessor, Anne of Cleves, gives the women by their title or surname, and for a few of the figures I had to undertake some guesswork based on Tudor women with the right background, name, and family ties to court. It was, however, possible to prove that several candidates who are usually identified as her ladies-in-waiting were never in Catherine’s service – the 9th Earl of Kildare’s daughter, Lady Elizabeth Fitzgerald, was not one of her maids of honour and the ‘Lady Howard’ mentioned was neither Catherine’s stepmother nor one of her sisters, but her aunt by marriage, Lady Margaret Howard (née Gamage). Neither was the Dowager Duchess of Norfolk or the Countess of Bridgewater asked to join the household, despite their closeness to the queen. The more I researched, the more convinced I became that the influence and intentions of Catherine’s family had been exaggerated or, at least, misrepresented, and acting on the advice of a professor, I began to consider a full-length study of Catherine’s horribly compelling story.

      The result, this book, is as much a study of Catherine Howard’s world as it is a study of her personal life. Some biographies have a tendency to inflate and isolate their subjects, by endowing them with more importance or independence from the world around them than they actually possessed. The impact of religious changes, international diplomacy, and court etiquette will all be discussed in depth, not just because they are fascinating topics in their own right, but because directly or indirectly they shaped Catherine’s story. Like the Hampton Court tapestries, it is the details of the background figures and the threads weaving behind them which together produced the image.

      Putting her household, and her grandmother’s, at the centre of a biography of Catherine makes her story a grand tale of the Henrician court