Katherine Howard: A New History Page 13
However, as with Holbein’s portrait of a woman in her twenty-first year formally identified as Katherine Howard, there is no conclusive evidence that Katherine is indeed the sitter, despite Starkey’s interpretation. Although the sitter’s jewellery indicates a regal status by virtue of the fact that the large ruby, emerald and pearl jewel which she wears appears to be the same as that worn by Jane Seymour in her portrait painted by Holbein, this does not necessarily prove that the sitter is a fellow queen. For one thing, Queen Jane is known to have made gifts of jewellery to her ladies-in-waiting, including Mary, Lady Monteagle (c1510-40/4), who some have suggested is a possible candidate for the miniature under discussion because of the sitter’s resemblance with authenticated portraits of Mary. More possibly, the sitter is actually Lady Margaret Douglas. Viewed ‘as an important prize on the international marriage market’, Lady Margaret was involved in the autumn of 1538 in a series of prospective marriage alliances proposed by her uncle the king to Emperor Charles V, in an attempt to secure the emperor’s friendship against Francis I of France. Reported to be ‘beautiful and esteemed’, the features of the sitter in the miniature are strikingly similar to those of a portrait of Margaret as countess of Lennox (c. 1572).37 The sitter’s costume indicates that the portrait was painted in the autumn or winter; interestingly, Margaret may have sat for this miniature in October 1538 during negotiations for a European marriage alliance. Moreover, Queen Jane herself had made gifts of jewellery to Margaret, explaining why that lady may have worn the queen’s own jewels in a portrait miniature. In Greek, ‘margarite’ or Margaret can be translated as ‘pearl’.38
Other external evidence more convincingly suggests that the sitter is Margaret Douglas rather than Katherine Howard. While the portrait was originally owned by the Howards, as the earls of Arundel, it is unlikely that this family would have retained a portrait of their notorious ancestress for in the wake of her execution, as with Anne Boleyn, they hastily dissociated themselves from Katherine and almost certainly destroyed any images of the queen which they had once owned. The Duke of Norfolk was to remember his nieces as ‘ungrateful’ and declared that Katherine should be burnt at the stake, making it seemingly unlikely that his relatives would have desired to continue housing portraits of Katherine; particularly since several Howards had been imprisoned and harshly punished on her account. By contrast, a portrait of Margaret may have been a more desirable gift to own. There is extant evidence to clearly show her good relations and intimacy with the Howard family, particularly in her love affairs with Thomas and Charles Howard. Margaret’s relationships with two Howard men, her closeness to the English throne and her beauty and charm would have made a portrait of her a worthy possession of any noble English family. Most conclusively, this can be demonstrated by her later relationship as grandmother of King James I. In terms of physical appearance, the sitter in the portrait miniature bears little resemblance to what we know of Katherine, who was reported to be ‘slender’ rather than plump. The queen’s hair may also have been golden in colour, rather than auburn, if the figure of the Queen of Sheba in the window of King’s College Chapel at Cambridge can be viewed as a likeness of Katherine.39
Housed in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York is a portrait also painted by Hans Holbein that possibly depicts Queen Katherine (see Figure 7). Dating from c. 1540-45, the portrait was painted oil on wood, measuring 28.3 by 23.2 cm, and was acquired from the Jules Bache Collection in 1949, having been housed originally by Prince Joseph Poniatowski and was held in Vienna until at least the mid-1920s. It is noteworthy that this young woman is aged ANNO ETATIS SVAE XVII, in her seventeenth year, which was almost certainly Katherine’s age in 1540-1 during her period as queen. The sitter wears a rich gown of black lined with pearls and gold along the breast, with slashed red sleeves, gold embroidered cuffs and a brooch of gold hanging from the breast set with what appears to be a mythological or classical image. She wears a gold necklace set with diamonds and three pearls. Her French hood is embroidered with gold, trimmed in red and set with precious gold stones. The costume and headdress are probably French, which is interesting in view of the fact that Katherine was reported to favour French costume during her period as queen.40 The sitter’s complexion is rosy, with sensuous red lips, a prominent nose, brownish gold hair and blue eyes.
The portrait was first suggested by G.F. Waagen in 1866 as representing an English lady, confirmed by Paul Ganz as a portrait of an English lady dating from 1540.41 Duveen Pictures in Public Collections of America intriguingly suggested that the costume of the sitter indicated that it was painted during Katherine’s time as queen (1540-2).42 Possibly, as Ganz suggested, both the locket and the gold setting for the cameo were designed by Holbein himself, perhaps, if the sitter was Katherine, as a gift for the new queen. More importantly, Susan E. James and Jamie S. Franco identified the sitter as Katherine Howard based on a supposed resemblance with another portrait painted by Levina Teerlinc.43
As David Starkey suggested, ‘it would be unusual for someone [of evident youth] to sit for a miniature unless they had very high status.’44 If this portrait was painted during Katherine’s period of queenship, it seems highly likely that it does represent her, for there are no other royal women who are candidates for the sitter. The four previously mentioned royal women were significantly older than sixteen or seventeen in 1540-1: Mary Tudor was twenty-four, Margaret Douglas twenty-five, Frances Brandon twenty-three and Eleanor Brandon twenty-one. The rich costume and expensive jewellery indicate that the sitter cannot have been a mere lady-in-waiting, but in view of those facts already mentioned above, it is highly probable that the sitter is indeed Katherine. This is strengthened in relation to the fact that she was probably born in 1524, making her sixteen in 1540-1, and because of a resemblance with an engraving of the queen created by Francesco Bartolozzi after Hans Holbein the Younger. Apart from sitting in exactly the same position, both sitters have reddish-gold hair, pale skin, blue eyes, sensuous lips and a small neck. Holbein’s image confirms reports of Katherine’s appearance as beautiful, graceful and elegant. It also establishes that her appearance conformed to contemporary expectations of female beauty.
Although this tentative identification allows us to perceive Katherine’s probable appearance, her actual personality and characteristics are somewhat more difficult to deduce. Surviving source material, preserved mainly by English chroniclers at the king’s court, contains little in relation to the queen aside from references to the splendid court ceremonies in which she played her part and, inevitably, the manner of her downfall. All that we do know of her is contained only in hostile documentation produced by prejudiced individuals under extraordinary circumstances, when threatened with misprision of treason. Unsurprisingly, writers who have utilised such material to theorise what Henry VIII’s fifth queen must have been like personally have concluded that she was a ‘juvenile delinquent’,45 ‘an empty-headed wanton’,46 even ‘a natural tart who knew exactly what she was doing’.47 One rather unfairly compared Katherine with her predecessor and cousin Anne Boleyn: ‘Katherine Howard, another royal wife to die on adultery charges, mattered only a little longer than it took Henry to cheer up after he had her beheaded; by contrast, Anne triggered the English Reformation.’48
These historians seem to have failed to recognise that the only evidence for Katherine’s personal traits and behaviour exist in hostile legal documents intended on presenting her in the most abominable and shocking light, in an attempt to gain sympathy for the king and widespread revulsion at her supposed crimes. These councillors took advantage of contemporary misogyny prevalent in society, assuming that women were naturally prone to transgression and eager to entrap men in sexual encounters, to construct a scandalous portrayal of the queen and blacken her reputation irretrievably. To rely solely on such material unquestioningly and uncritically is to distort any perception of Katherine, her life and the nature of her reign, and to prevent a profound understanding of the social and cultural
values inherent in the Tudor court.
According to court observers, the summer of 1540 was the hottest in living memory, ‘so that no raine fell from June till eight daies after Michaelmas’, leading to ‘sicknes among the people’ and the deaths of cattle.49 Within the court itself, following her marriage, the queen’s family were in high favour with their monarch, and the Duke of Norfolk must surely have congratulated his niece on her personal success while emphasising to her the necessity of producing a male heir. Only Katherine herself knew whether her new husband was physically able of fathering a son on her, for his previous queens had been accused of rendering him impotent, reinforcing contemporary understandings that believed women were capable of bewitching men and damaging their fertile capabilities.
Following the king’s new marriage, he shortly afterwards set out on progress with his queen, who by virtue of her beauty, youth and, most importantly in his eyes, her chastity, he was eager to show off to his subjects. On 22 August, exactly two weeks after Katherine was first presented as queen to the court at Hampton Court, the royal couple departed from Windsor Castle to Reading, before travelling to Ewelm, Rycott, Notley, Buckingham and Grafton (associated with the family of Elizabeth Woodville). In September, the court journeyed to Ampthill and to the Moor in Hertfordshire, the former residence of Cardinal Wolsey and later Katherine of Aragon. What Katherine Howard and her new husband spent their time doing at these residences is unknown, although the French ambassador reported that there was nothing to speak of at court ‘but the chase and the banquets to the new Queen’.50 Henry appears to have been entirely besotted with his new wife. Although he was undoubtedly enchanted by her beauty, her youth and her pleasing personality, it was almost certainly her apparent fertility that demonstrated in his eyes her suitability as a consort. Her mother had given birth to at least ten children, six of whom had been fathered by Edmund Howard, and the king was surely aware that three of those were sons. Marillac confirmed Henry’s love for the queen when he attended the court on progress: ‘The new Queen has completely acquired the King’s Grace and the other [Anne of Cleves] is no more spoken of than if she were dead.’51 He also stated that the king caressed her openly more than he had his other queens.
Despite this marital happiness, damaging rumours about the queen had already begun to surface, threatening both her personal and political security months into her marriage. While the court was at residence in Grafton in late August, a Windsor priest had allegedly ‘spoken unfitting words of the Queen’s Grace, questioning her moral integrity’.52 The exact circumstances that provoked this criticism remain unknown, but the likeliest of explanations relies on the events of June 1540, when the king first openly demonstrated his love for Katherine and his desire to marry her while still married to Anne of Cleves. There is no evidence to suggest that this priest was aware of Katherine’s childhood and the scandalous experiences she had been forced to undergo.
It is interesting, however, to speculate that Francis Dereham may have had some connection with the affair. Following Katherine’s appearance at court, Dereham had apparently vanished from the scene, leading her step-grandmother the dowager duchess to speculate as to his whereabouts. When she asked Katherine, she was informed that Katherine did not know.53 However, when Dereham returned from Ireland shortly after the king’s marriage to Katherine, he sought appointment at court and there made the unguarded claim that, were the king to die, he believed he might still marry Katherine. If his remarks had been made public, and observers such as the Windsor priest had become aware of them, it might have been concluded that the new queen was unfit for her position since rumours connected her with marital alliances advanced by other men. More simply, slandering powerful women through sexual insults such as ‘whore’ was a common practice in early modern Europe utilised by jealous male contemporaries who sought to damage their reputations irretrievably. If the Windsor priest was hostile to the Howards, he could have sought to damage the queen’s reputation by spitefully questioning her moral integrity.
How this gossip personally affected Katherine is unknown, but it is likely that both she and her family were disturbed, since the position of the queen consort was expected to be utterly safeguarded from any type of scandal. It also cast doubt on the king’s honour, for as the author of the Court of Good Counsell (1607) advocated, there was ‘no greater plague [or] torment’ than an ‘untoward, wicked and dishonest wife’. Undoubtedly, women were believed to ‘confirm’ male honour and, if they were then associated with promiscuity and scandal, this substantially damaged the reputation of their husbands.54 Norfolk himself may have been greatly concerned, for without knowledge as to his niece’s childhood, it was probably the first time he had been acquainted with a connection between his niece and sexual immorality, despite her probable blamelessness.
Although the matter was quickly dealt with - the Windsor priest was warned to remain within his diocese and be ‘more temperate in the use of his tongue’ - the slander upon her honour must have brought home to Queen Katherine the necessity of maintaining a modest and chaste appearance and the need for her past to be irrevocably forgotten. In an age in which powerful women were regularly slandered by rivals through the medium of sexual insults, Katherine’s position as queen remained insecure and fragile. Only by bearing the longed for second male heir would she survive as Henry’s fifth queen consort.
7) Patronage and Power
From her marriage to the king in July 1540, Katherine Howard was well aware that, amidst the luxury and splendour of the court, political and religious rivals surrounded her, eager to utilise scandalous gossip against her for their own advantages, in an age when female consorts were identified with promiscuity and misbehaviour. It was essential for her to bear the king a second male heir, for while only one prince survived, the English succession would always remain somewhat uncertain should that prince suddenly die. Moreover, the man whom Katherine had married was intensely focused on preserving a stable dynasty, destined for long-term success well after his own death. In light of this, the brutal downfall of Anne Boleyn and the humiliating dismissal of Anne of Cleves made sense from Henry’s perspective, for a fertile bride was essential in order to remedy the uncertainty of the Tudor dynasty. Already in 1532 the king had lamented that ‘I am forty-one years old, at which age the lust of man is not so quick as in lusty youth’.1 His personal insecurities were evident in an insistent response to the imperial ambassador in 1533, when questioned as to whether or not he could sire a son with his new queen: ‘Am I not a man like other men? Am I not? Am I not?’2 In light of her predecessor’s uncomfortable experiences and dismissal, Katherine cannot have failed to have been aware of the pressing expectations she faced regarding her duty to provide a second male heir.
While this study seeks to shed new light on Katherine’s character, it is also essential to understand the nature of the man she married in 1540. Henry VIII began his reign as a golden prince and was beloved by his subjects. William Blount Lord Mountjoy described the king in the first year of his reign thus:
When you know what a hero [Henry VIII] now shows himself, how wisely he behaves, what a lover he is of justice and goodness, what affection he bears to the learned, I will venture that you will need no wings to make you fly to behold this new and auspicious star. If you could see how all the world here is rejoicing in the possession of so great a prince, how his life is all their desire, you could not contain your tears of joy. The heavens laugh, the earth exults, all things are full of milk, of honey, of nectar. Avarice is expelled from the country. Liberality scatters wealth with bounteous hand. Our King does not desire gold or gems or precious metals, but virtue, glory and immortality.3
English subjects were confident and hopeful about their new king, and for the first twenty years or so of his reign they were not disappointed. However, as Suzannah Lipscomb convincingly argued, the year 1536 profoundly changed Henry VIII’s character due to a series of ground-breaking personal, political and physical crises
that encompassed the deaths of two wives, the deaths of two sons, a serious fall in a joust and the largest rebellion ever faced by an English monarch. Lipscomb suggested that this year catalysed Henry’s development into a suspicious, irascible and brooding tyrant who reacted brutally and violently to betrayal, as evidenced in Anne Boleyn’s downfall in that tumultuous year of 1536.4
There is evidence to support Lipscomb’s interpretation. The French ambassador described the king a few weeks after his marriage to Katherine Howard thus:
This Prince seems tainted, among other vices, with three which in a King may be called plagues. The first is that he is so covetous that all the riches in the world would not satisfy him... Everything is good prize, and he does not reflect that to make himself rich he has impoverished his people, and does not gain in good what he loses in renown... Thence proceeds the second plague, distrust and fear. This King, knowing how many changes he has made, and what tragedies and scandals he has created, would fain keep in favour with everybody, but does not trust a single man, expecting to see them all offended, and he will not cease to dip his hand in blood as long as he doubts his people. Hence every day edicts are published so sanguinary that with a thousand guards one would scarce be safe... The third plague, lightness and inconstancy, proceeds partly from the other two... and has perverted the rights of religion, marriage, faith and promise.5