CHAPTER ONE

A Dangerous Honour

‘The King’s Majesty was married on Thursday last to my Lady Latimer, a woman in my judgement, for virtue, wisdom and gentleness, most meet for his Highness, and sure I am his Majesty had never a wife more agreeable to his heart than she is. Our Lord send them long life and much joy together.’

THOMAS WRIOTHESLEY, SECRETARY TO THE PRIVY COUNCIL, IN A LETTER TO THE DUKE OF SUFFOLK, 16 JULY 1543.¹

Henry had always been unlucky in his women. Throughout his life, a number of wives failed him in his desperately important political mission to provide healthy, legitimate male heirs to carry on the precarious Tudor line. During those tempestuous years, some of his wives had plotted and intrigued, and others, in his eyes, had cuckolded or betrayed him. In the 1530s, full in the teeth of the Holy Catholic Church, he had annulled his union with his first wife, Catherine of Aragon, on the grounds of the uncertain consummation of her marriage with his elder brother Arthur before his death aged fifteen, from tuberculosis, on 2 April 1502, less than five months after their wedding. Henry’s reckless infatuation with Anne Boleyn ended brutally on Tower Green on 19 May 1536 with an executioner specially brought from St Omer in France to behead her with a mighty two-handed sword. After the political pain and agony of nearly three decades and his cataclysmic break with Rome, Henry finally got his long-sought-after lawful son at two o’clock on the morning of 12 October 1537 by his third wife, the modest, charming and fragile Jane Seymour. She died twelve days later, just before midnight, from a puerperal fever and septicaemia caused by an infection contracted during the arduous two days and three nights of labour in her newly decorated chamber at Hampton Court.

Despite Henry’s honest and genuine grief at his queen’s death, it was not long before his counsellors were pressing him to take a fourth wife, primarily for diplomatic reasons, but also to provide the all-important ‘spare’ male heir, a Duke of York, in case the infant Prince Edward fell victim to the constant epidemics of plague and other diseases that afflicted London. Unofficial ambassadorial enquiries, possibly without Henry’s knowledge, were immediately put in hand regarding a number of potential candidates even before Jane’s solemn burial in a vault beneath the choir of St George’s Chapel, Windsor, on 12 November.²

Initially, a French match looked politically advantageous, which might block a threatening alliance emerging between France and Spain. Reports of a voluptuous tall widow, Marie of Guise, had captivated Henry and, as he told his cronies, he was ‘big in person and have need of a big wife’.³But she had already become betrothed to James V of Scotland⁴ and Henry had bluntly told the French envoy in London that he ‘would not take the Scots’ leavings’.⁵ Other nubile French ladies were suggested, including Marie’s attractive sisters, Louise and Renée. Amongst her many other charms and allurements, the blushing Louise was known to be a virgin. The French ambassador Louis de Perreau, Sieur de Castillon, lasciviously told the king: ‘Take her! She is a maid, so you will have the advantage of being able to shape the passage to your measure.’⁶ Laughing uproariously, Henry slapped the bawdy diplomat on his shoulder and piously went in to attend Mass. Marie of Vendôme was also available, but unfortunately already professed as a nun. However, the boisterous Constable of France was ‘sure the king of England, who considers himself Pope in his own kingdom, would choose her in preference to all others’.⁷

Henry was always wary of making a physically unattractive match. Consequently, he demanded to inspect personally seven or eight French princesses within a marquee pitched on the border between France and English-held Calais before making his final choice of bride. Even though they would be properly chaperoned by the French queen, the king, Francis I, was outraged at the suggestion, and Castillon was instructed to tell Henry in August 1538:

It is not the custom of France to send damsels of noble and princely families to be passed in review as if they were hackneys [horses] for sale.⁸

More accepted methods of royal selection, involving sedate diplomatic reports about suitability and appearance, were firmly rejected in London, with Henry insisting:

By God! I trust no one but myself. The thing touches me too near. I wish to see them and know them some time before deciding.

The audacious French ambassador archly replied, to Henry’s palpable embarrassment:

Then maybe your grace would like to mount them one after the other and keep the one you find to be the best broken in. Is that the way the knights of the Round Table treated women in your country in times past?⁹

His laddish jibe hit home at the priggish monarch’s well-known fondness for chivalry and courtly love and occasional prudery over matters moral. Castillon reported afterwards:

I think this shamed him, for he laughed and blushed at the same time and recognised that the way he had taken was a little discourteous. After rubbing his nose a little, he said, ‘Yes, but since the king [Francis I], my brother, has already so great an amity with the [Spanish] emperor, what amity should I have with him? I ask because I am resolved not to marry again unless the emperor or king prefer my friendship to that which they have together.’¹⁰

The ambassador adroitly ducked the question, replying tactfully that it would take a wiser man than he to answer that. Henry’s choice of partner manifestly rested not just on sexual attraction – diplomacy was an all-important consideration, too.

Privately, some may have thought that the matter of a new wife was daily becoming increasingly unseemly – more like an ageing stallion being brought to stud with a young, prancing filly than part of a grand, sweeping diplomatic strategy and a vital means to further safeguard the crown of England for the Tudor dynasty. If anyone did think this, no one dared, at the risk of the king’s notorious and awesome rage, to mutter more than uncouth whispers amongst the swaggering courtiers in the corridors of Henry’s palaces.

But the king was not dissuaded from pursuing the arcane process of princely courtship by his French failures in love. Perhaps, his fawning advisers murmured discreetly, a Hapsburg candidate, then? They had in their sights another prospective bride: Christina, daughter of the deposed Christian II of Denmark, niece of the Spanish Emperor Charles V and great-niece to Henry’s first wife, Catherine of Aragon.

She was slim, also very tall and said to be ‘soft of speech and very gentle in countenance’¹¹ with dimples appearing on her chin and cheeks when she smiled ‘which becomes her right exceeding well’.¹² The sixteen-year-old widow of Francesco Sforza, Duke of Milan, was universally admired for her beauty and the portrait that the court artist Hans Holbein the Younger had frantically painted in just three hours and brought back from Brussels enchanted Henry and awakened joy and fresh romance in his cynical old heart.

She was, however, less than enamoured with the prospect of marital bliss with the English king, even though Thomas Wriothesley, then one of Henry’s two principal secretaries, persuasively told her that his master was the ‘most gentle gentleman that lives, his nature so benign and pleasant that I think till this day, no man hath heard many angry words pass his mouth’.¹³ No doubt he paused expectantly for her reaction to this outrageous canard. Confronted by her silence, Wriothesley hastened on: Henry, he said, was ‘one of the most puissant and mighty princes of Christendom. If you saw him, you would [talk of ] his virtue, gentleness, wisdom, experience, goodliness of person, all … gifts and qualities meet to be in a Prince’.

Truth was never at a premium amongst the sycophantic courtiers, and Christina knew it. She listened carefully to his saccharine words but giggled, Wriothesley reported afterwards, ‘like one, methought, that was tickled’.¹⁴

The duchess’s doubts mounted as her advisers talked openly of the widespread rumours of the sinister demise of the king’s previous wives: ‘Her great-aunt was poisoned, that the second wife was put to death and the third lost for lack of keeping her childbed.’¹⁵There was also the necessity (but, realistically, remote chance) of obtaining a papal dispensation to allow marriage to her great-aunt’s widower.

Henry’s reputation abroad was the real problem, however: on 2 January 1539, the Marquis de Aguilar wrote to the imperial emperor that the English king ‘is every day growing more inhumane and cruel’,¹⁶ a stark and telling accusation in the sixteenth century when life was cheap and judicial execution both uncivilised and universally practised. Henry Pole, Lord Montague, who had been caught up in Henry’s brutal and violent purge of his blood royal cousins the Courtenays and Poles (the last of the royal Plantagenet line) and executed the previous month, had prophetically told his servant: ‘Jerome, the King never made man, but he destroyed him again with displeasure or with the sword’ – a prediction that would become repeatedly true, as many were to discover at the cost of their lives or their lands. In the end, with a wit and wisdom far beyond her teenage years, Christina reportedly declared that if she had two heads, one would be at Henry’s disposal.¹⁷ She would not become his new bride.

Despite by now being well practised in the marriage stakes and in choosing a handful of mistresses in the past, Henry was finding it difficult to make a decision on a bride. Diplomatic events abroad overtook him as he continued to cast wearily about for a new wife, surrounded by portraits of eligible Continental princesses and piles of glowing testimonials to their beauty and demeanour provided by his energetic envoys. On 18 June 1538, France and Spain agreed on a diplomatic rapprochement, signing a ten-year truce in Nice. Urged on by Pope Paul III, they planned co-ordinated action against religious heresy, beginning with a trade embargo. An invasion of England by the Catholic powers now suddenly seemed likely, sparking the frantic construction of a rash of new fortifications along her vulnerable south coast. The German Protestant princely houses began to look a more attractive option, both as a source for a bride and as Continental allies to prevent Henry’s total isolation in European politics.

And so the king embarked on the farce, if not disaster, of his fourth marriage.

His fumbling choice settled on twenty-four-year-old Anne of Cleves, who came from very much a ducal backwater on the Lower Rhine. She was one of two unmarried sisters of the ambitious Duke William who had succeeded to the Clevois title in February 1539. All the warning signs, however, were apparent for those with the skill to spot them. Anne did not hunt, nor could she sing or play a musical instrument – three of Henry’s favourite pastimes – but she was an accomplished needlewoman. She was unsophisticated, unworldly and unused (if not totally innocent) in the ways of both men and love. She could command only a few words of English; indeed, she could not read or write in any language aside from her own unattractive nasal and guttural Low German dialect. When Henry’s envoy, Nicholas Wotton, complained that he could not see her face beneath her voluminous headdress, her scandalised chancellor retorted, ‘What, do you want to see her naked?’ And the full-face portrait brought back to Henry generously flattered her appearance, showing her with a solemn, almost serene countenance, an oval face, a prominent, slightly bulbous long nose and heavy-lidded eyes, demurely cast down.

Henry, persuaded by the artful skills of Master Holbein and the enthusiastic reports of his ambassadors, finally assented to the marriage. So it was that, accompanied by an entourage of fifteen ladies and a 245-strong household including thirteen trumpeters and two kettle drummers,¹⁸ Anne of Cleves arrived in English-held Calais from Düsseldorf on 11 December 1539, to face the perilous and uncertain voyage across the Channel. But gales and bad weather delayed the new queen’s departure for England and the loving embraces of her egotistical bridegroom. The Earl of Southampton, then Lord High Admiral, occupied the time whilst awaiting calmer seas teaching Anne, at her request, the game of piquet, no doubt in the happy knowledge that playing cards was an enjoyable entertainment for the king. Southampton wrote enthusiastically of her to Henry, who was celebrating Christmas at Westminster, in words and phrases he was later to regret bitterly. Afterwards, he admitted, rather ruefully, that:

Upon the first sight of her, [he] considered it was no time to dispraise her there, whom so many had by reports and paintings so much extolled, [so he] did by his letters much praise her.¹⁹

But who could blame Southampton for his eagerness to please his royal master, ‘the English Nero’?²⁰ The bearer of bad tidings to the all-powerful has traditionally always paid an unenviable price and he saw no sensible reason to test Henry’s uncertain temper.

Eventually, the winds in the Channel abated and, accompanied by a fleet of fifty English ships, Anne and her English escorts landed at Deal in Kent at five o’clock on the cold afternoon of 27 December. The party pushed on by easy stages, via Dover and Canterbury, arriving three days later at the bishop’s palace at Rochester. There they would remain until their planned final ride to Greenwich, where Henry was due to welcome her officially on 3 January 1540.

The king, impatient and headstrong as ever and excited at the prospect of meeting his new bride, decided on a surprise visit to present Anne with a New Year’s gift ‘to nourish love’, as he told his chief minister, the Lord Privy Seal Thomas Cromwell. The delicate flower of romance had not yet died in his heart. Throwing aside rigid court protocol and the careful plans of state pageantry, Henry and five of his Gentlemen of the Privy Chamber, wearing gay multicoloured cloaks and hoods, rode pell-mell to Rochester, arriving on the afternoon of New Year’s Day. He was more like an ardent young lover again than a forty-eight-year-old monarch long past his prime, suffering from painful, badly ulcerated legs.

A stunning disappointment awaited the merry party.

Sir Anthony Browne, Master of the King’s Horse, politely called on Anne in her lodgings at Rochester to warn her of the king’s imminent arrival. When he clapped eyes on the new queen, Sir Anthony was ‘never more dismayed in all his life, lamenting in his heart … to see the lady so far and unlike that was reported’.²¹ He had no time to warn Henry, as the impetuous bridegroom and two of his jolly, laughing companions were hard on his heels. There must have been an awkward and embarrassed silence, with blushes and nervous smiles on the faces of Anne and her German ladies-in-waiting, after the boisterous king burst impatiently into the room, anxious to embrace and kiss his bride.

Henry’s first glimpse of his new queen left him ‘marvellously astonished and abashed’²² as she stood at a window of the palace, shyly watching the holiday entertainment of bear-baiting noisily going on down in the courtyard outside. She looked older than her years; she certainly lacked her reported beauty – and smallpox scars disfigured her sallow face.²³ Sir Anthony immediately saw ‘discontentment’ in the king’s expression, and ‘a disliking of her person’.²⁴ Henry, who could never hide or control his emotions, stayed scarcely long enough to utter twenty polite, stilted words. He snatched up his gift to her – a richly garnished partlet of sable skins to be worn around the neck – and hastily departed amid the low bows of his friends and courtiers, leaving behind a perplexed bride. The king sent his present around the next morning with as ‘cold and single a message as might be’ before hurriedly and sulkily departing Rochester for Greenwich. On the way back, Henry angrily asked his friend, Sir John Russell:

How like you this woman? Do you think her so fair and of such beauty as has been reported to me? I pray you tell me the truth.

Russell, no doubt hesitantly, told Henry that he did not think her fair, ‘but to be of a brown complexion’. The king, ‘sore troubled’, cried out:

Alas! Whom should men trust? I promise you I see no such thing in her as hath been showed me of her and am ashamed that men have so praised her as they have done. I like her not.²⁵

There was no escape from the potential dishonour of the situation. Henry had to put a brave face on events, if only for the all-important diplomatic objectives of the match. He greeted a sumptuously dressed Anne as planned at Shooter’s Hill, Blackheath, on 3 January 1540, gallantly pulling off his jewelled bonnet ‘and with most lovely countenance and princely behaviour saluted, welcomed and embraced her, to the great rejoicing of the beholders’ – an escort of 5,000 horsemen and invited luminaries from the City of London. But beneath the smiling face of regal propriety and all that pomp and circumstance lurked a burning, resentful anger and an overwhelming desire to halt the wedding.

Safely within his Privy Chamber at Greenwich Palace, he snapped, ‘What remedy now?’²⁶ to his hapless chief minister, Thomas Cromwell, adding, ‘If I had known as much before as I now know, she should not have come within this realm.’ Cromwell could only reply, rather unconvincingly, ‘I thought she had a queenly manner.’²⁷

The Lord Privy Seal, thinking hard and fast, seized on the unresolved issue of an old pre-contract of marriage between Anne and Francis, the son of the Duke of Lorraine, mooted in 1527 when she was aged twelve and he just ten. To the future queen’s continued mystification and disappointment, the marriage was suddenly postponed for two days while Cromwell’s lawyers and the king’s Privy Council wrestled with the issue in a desperate, frenetic attempt to revoke or in some way nullify the unwanted nuptial agreement. But it was all to no avail: Duke William’s taciturn ambassadors were naturally less than helpful and ‘made a light matter of it’. Unfortunately, they said, they had brought no documents with them to clear up the matter, but they emphasized, reassuringly, that there was really no problem as the pre-contract was made in Anne’s minority and had never taken effect. They promised to send over the requisite papers ‘as should put all out of doubt’.²⁸

So, to Henry’s great chagrin, the wedding went ahead. Ironically, despite the lengthy diplomatic negotiations and niceties, this match ended up just like Henry’s earlier marriages, overshadowed with doubts regarding its legal validity. Archbishop Thomas Cranmer solemnized the marriage in the queen’s closet at Greenwich on 6 January 1540, Twelfth Night – traditionally a time of merriment and laughter in Henry’s court, a coincidence that could only fuel his anger and increase his despair. For the wedding, Anne was dressed in a gown in the Dutch fashion made of rich cloth of gold, embroidered with flowers and decorated with ‘great and Oriental pearls’. She wore her yellow hair long, ‘hanging down’ beneath a golden coronet ‘replenished with a great stone and set about full of branches of rosemary’.²⁹ She must have looked rather like a Christmas tree. Her wedding ring was engraved with the motto ‘God send me well to keep’. Unbeknown to her, divine intervention would indeed be necessary to safeguard her future, as the king had lost all interest in his bride. She respectfully curtsied low, three times, as Henry came into the chapel.

The thwarted king was resentful and ‘nothing pleasantly disposed’.³⁰ His friends and courtiers were careful in their choice of words to him. The evening before, he had asked Cromwell, ‘Is there none other remedy that I must needs, against my will, put my neck in the yoke?’³¹ Before he limped towards the chapel, he growled that he had been ‘ill served [by] them’ he had trusted. The king paused before entering to tell Cromwell, ‘My lord, if it were not to satisfy the world, and my realm, I would not do that [which] I must do this day for no earthly thing.’³² Never was there a more unhappy, reluctant and bad-tempered bridegroom and Henry’s words were to bode very ill for his chief minister.

Inevitably, the wedding night was an embarrassing physical disaster. The next morning, a prurient Cromwell unwisely asked the king, ‘How liked you the queen?’ One can imagine his nudge and the leer on his coarse, heavy-jowled, almost bovine features. Glowering, Henry told him brusquely, ‘I liked her before not well, but now I liked her much worse.’³³ He added:

I have felt her belly and her breasts and thereby, as I can judge, she should be no maid, which struck me so to the heart when I felt them, that I had neither will nor courage to proceed further in other matters. I left her as good a maid as I found her.³⁴

The king then stumped grumpily off. Worse was to come: after four nights of dutiful manly effort, the king still had not consummated the marriage, and clearly now did not ever intend to.

He confided to the Gentlemen of his Privy Chamber the very intimate problems of his marital bed. Sir Thomas Heneage, Groom of the Stool, later testified:

In so often that his Grace went to bed to her, he ever grudged and said plainly he mistrusted her to be no maid, by reason of the looseness of her breasts and other tokens. Furthermore, he could have no appetite with her to do as a man should do with his wife, for such displeasant airs as he felt with her.³⁵

Henry told his Privy Chamber confidant Anthony Denny, ‘Her body was of such indisposition … that he could never in her company be provoked and stirred to know her carnally.’³⁶ Henry, ever interested in matters medical, also diligently consulted his physicians. One of the royal doctors, John Chambre, comfortingly counselled the king not to ‘enforce himself’ for fear of causing an ‘inconvenient debility’ of his sexual organ.³⁷ Word of the king and queen’s unhappy state of affairs was, no doubt, the secret, sniggering talk of the court. Henry’s all-consuming and dangerously inflated ego was threatened by these whispers, and he told another of his physicians, William Butts, that he had experienced ‘duas pollutiones nocturnas in somno’ (two nocturnal ejaculations or ‘wet dreams’) and believed ‘himself able to do the act with others but not with her’.³⁸ Ribald suggestions that he was impotent were firmly quashed by Butts’ repeating these statements around Henry’s household, as intended.

It may be, as some have speculated, that the king was always keenly aroused by the odour of a woman’s body. The queen’s ‘displeasant airs’ could hardly have spurred his husbandly duty or stimulated his physical ability to consummate the marriage.

Poor Anne of Cleves – truly an innocent abroad. Just before midsummer, the forthright Lady Jane Rochford told her directly, ‘I think your grace is still a maid.’ The queen replied, ‘How can I be a maid … and sleep every night with the king?’ The unworldly Anne added, ingenuously:

When he comes to bed, he kisses me and takes me by the hand and bids me ‘Good night sweetheart’ and in the morning kisses me and bids me ‘Farewell darling’. Is not this enough?

Lady Eleanor Rutland said diplomatically,

Madam, there must be more than this, or it will be long [before] we have a Duke of York, which this realm most desires.

Still puzzled, the queen replied,

No, I am contented with this, for I know no more.³⁹

Henry was now counting the days before he could end the farce of his fourth marriage. Wriothesley, ‘right sorry that his majesty should be so troubled’, urged his friend Cromwell – ‘for God’s sake’ – to quickly devise some stratagem to rid the king of his unwanted wife, ‘for if he remained in this grief and trouble they should all one day smart for it.’ Cromwell could only answer hopelessly: ‘Yes! How?’⁴⁰

But time had run out for England’s chief minister. After dinner on the afternoon of Saturday 10 June 1540, Cromwell attended a routine meeting of the Privy Council at Westminster. On entering the chamber, he found the other members already seated around the table. As he walked to his chair, the Duke of Norfolk barked out, ‘Cromwell, do not sit there. That is no place for a traitor! Traitors do not sit amongst gentlemen!’ Shocked, Cromwell could only lamely retort, ‘I am not a traitor.’ Behind him, the captain of the guard had come into the Council room and he now seized Cromwell’s arm, saying, ‘I arrest you.’ Cromwell asked, ‘What for?’ The captain replied ominously, ‘That you will learn elsewhere.’ Norfolk then stepped forward: ‘Stop, Captain! Traitors must not wear the Garter.’⁴¹ He ripped the jewelled Order of St George from around Cromwell’s neck, followed by Southampton tearing the glittering Garter insignia from his robes. Norfolk repeated: ‘You are a traitor. You shall be judged by the bloody laws you yourself have made.’⁴²

They were like hyenas around the still-living carcass of their luckless prey. As the Councillors pounded the table with their fists and chanted, ‘Traitor, traitor, traitor,’ Cromwell, red-faced, his eyes starting out of their sockets with fury, threw his cap down on the floor in tearful frustration and was dragged away, still struggling, by the captain and his six halberdiers to a boat waiting to convey him to the Tower. Cromwell, arch-intriguer and architect of the financially fruitful Dissolution of the Monasteries, had tarried too long to save himself. Now he would pay with his life for one of his few failures in his dutiful performance of the king’s business.

On 24 June, Anne was dispatched to Richmond Palace, Surrey, for ‘her health, open air and pleasure’ under the guise of a convenient threat of plague in London. In reality, Henry had delicate matters to settle and in order to achieve his objective, the queen had to be absent from court. The marriage was to be nullified by his two archbishops, sixteen bishops and 139 learned academics on the legally subtle grounds that Henry did not consummate it (since he knew it to be unlawful) because of Anne’s elusive pre-contract with Francis of Lorraine. Henry had, to all intents and purposes, never agreed to the marriage: ‘I never for love to the woman consented to marry; nor yet if she brought maidenhead with her, took any from her by true carnal copulation,’ he wrote in his ‘brief, true and perfect declaration’⁴³ to the commission. The king liked such matters to be tidy and to appear legal, but there were still a few loose ends to tie up. His disgraced and discarded chief minister could provide one last faithful service before execution. Cromwell, incarcerated in the Tower, was instructed to provide testimony fully confirming Henry’s case if he wanted to avoid the traitor’s hideous death of half-hanging, evisceration whilst still living and then beheading.⁴⁴ Cromwell signed the required full statement of events, concluding:

I am a most woeful prisoner, ready to take the death when it shall please God and your majesty. Yet the frail flesh incites me continually to call to your grace for mercy and grace for my offences. And thus Christ says preserve and keep you.

Written at the Tower, this Wednesday the last of June, with the heavy heart and trembling hand of your Highness’s most heavy and most miserable prisoner and poor slave.⁴⁵

Desperation and despair then overwhelmed him and he added, as a shaky postscript, ‘Most gracious prince, I cry for mercy, mercy, mercy.’ His piteous, anguished plea inevitably fell on deaf ears, although Archbishop Cranmer had bravely pleaded with Henry for Cromwell’s life on 11 June, writing that he

much magnified his diligence in the king’s service and preservation and had discovered all plots as soon as they were made. [Cromwell] had always loved the king above all things and [had] served him with great fidelity and success.

Cranmer added that if the minister really was a traitor, he was glad he had been arrested, but he prayed God earnestly

to send the king such a counsellor in his stead who he could trust and who, for all his qualities, could serve him as he had done. I am very sorrowful: for whom shall your Grace trust hereafter, if you may not trust him?⁴⁶

But Cromwell was finished and as good as dead already, as far as the king was concerned: Henry was already seizing his considerable wealth. Only hours after the arrest, around £14,000 of moveable assets – gold and silver-gilt plate, such as crosiers and chalices, and ready cash (worth nearly £6 million at 2004 prices) – were rapidly inventoried and removed during the night from Cromwell’s home at Austin Friars, near the north wall of the City of London. The bullion and coinage were taken, escorted by fifty archers under the command of Sir Thomas Cheyney, to Henry’s secret jewel house at Westminster.⁴⁷ Cromwell’s other household goods were systematically looted soon after.⁴⁸ There were also his considerable holdings of lands and revenues elsewhere to sequester, all of it a welcome windfall for the ruthless and avaricious king.

Cromwell – ‘a person of as poor and low degree as few be within [the] realm’ – was condemned without trial by Act of Attainder on 29 June⁴⁹ for being ‘the most false and corrupt traitor, deceiver and circumventor against your royal person and the imperial crown of this realm that had ever been known in your whole reign’. He was also labelled a heretic and accused of circulating many erroneous books amongst Henry’s subjects, particularly some that contradicted the belief in the holy sacrament of communion, as well as licensing heretics as preachers. He had taken bribes in exchange for permission to export money, corn, horses and other commodities, contrary to Henry’s own proclamations. He had issued many commissions without the king’s knowledge and, being of base birth, had confidently said that ‘he was sure of the king’.⁵⁰ Cromwell’s conveniently discovered crimes knew no bounds.

After the enjoyable and profitable diversion of sequestering his chief minister’s wealth, Henry still faced two major problems in seeking his new annulment. Firstly, there was the reaction of Anne herself – her contradictory evidence could damage or invalidate his claim of non-consummation – and secondly, the continuing and pressing diplomatic need to keep the Duke of Cleves, Henry’s all-important Protestant ally in Germany, happy, even after the rejection of his sister as a wife and the queen of England. The typically Henrician solution was copious quantities of hard cash and maintenance of status. It was dire news for the always hard-pressed royal exchequer, but that was a factor that never entered the king’s head when he wanted something badly enough.

In return for remaining in England as ‘the king’s good sister’, where she would be firmly under Henry’s surveillance and control, Anne was to receive a generous annual pension of £500 for life (£216,265 in today’s values), together with a number of manors and lands, most of them, with heavy irony, forfeited by Cromwell himself, who was to pay the scapegoat’s horrific price on the scaffold for his hand in arranging the disastrous marriage. What the king taketh away, the king giveth. Anne would remain the premier lady in all England after any new queen and Princesses Mary and Elizabeth. She could keep all her clothes, jewels and plate. She was given a fifteen-strong household of German servants appropriate to her rank and station, including Schoulenburg, her own cook. No doubt she could also keep her pet parrot.

Wriothesley, Southampton and Suffolk journeyed to Richmond by river to tell her the awful news. There were wild rumours afterwards that she fainted when told of the annulment, possibly with relief at the prospect of freedom from further nights of fumbling attention by the grunting, obese and probably flatulent Henry, but these naturally do not figure in the courtiers’ report of this difficult meeting. More likely, their unexpected appearance sparked instant fears that she was to be taken to the Tower, where a violent death perhaps awaited her. The frightened queen was swiftly reassured. Anne listened to their silky, flowing phrases through an interpreter, apparently ‘without alteration of countenance’ and, with little thought, meekly agreed to the terms of the settlement. Behind that stolid, pockmarked face, she was no fool. All in all, it was not a bad deal and to turn it down, Anne must have fancied, could well lead to an appointment with the executioner, given Henry’s usual method of dispensing with inconvenient wives such as Anne Boleyn. Self-preservation was a more powerful emotion now than the remote possibility of her romantic attachment to a vindictive monarch with a known violent streak in his character. She seized the chance of freedom with a zest that speaks volumes for the absolute sterility of the royal marriage and with an alacrity strongly suggestive of her own frustrations and fears.⁵¹

There only remained some tiresome formalities. After the Clerical Convocation had ended her marriage on 9 July, confirmed by Parliament just four days later, she docilely wrote to Henry on 16 July promising to be ‘your Majesty’s must humble sister and servant’, signing herself merely as ‘Anna, daughter of Cleves’.⁵² Her surrender of the status and trappings of royalty was complete. In a letter to her brother, Duke William, almost certainly dictated by Henry’s officials, she said, ‘I account God pleased with [what] is done and know myself to have suffered no wrong or injury’ and averred that her body was still ‘preserved in the integrity which I brought into this realm’. The English king was ‘a most kind, loving and friendly father and brother’ and he was treating her ‘as honourably and with as much humanity and liberality as you, I myself, or any of our kin or allies could wish or desire’. She earnestly begged him not to be difficult about the agreement.⁵³ For his part, Duke William was ‘glad his sister had fared no worse’. And for Henry, it was the tidiest and most convenient end to any of his marriages, wrapped up not in the six uncomfortable years it took to rid himself of Catherine of Aragon, but in just six days.⁵⁴

France’s new ambassador in London, Charles de Marillac, reported disapprovingly, ‘As for her who is now called Madame de Cleves, far from pretending to be married, she is as joyous as ever and wears new dresses every day.’⁵⁵ After six months and three days of an arranged marriage choked by dark humiliation and intimate despair, a golden life now beckoned after Henry. Anne of Cleves began to enjoy drinking wine, casting aside her previous abstinence. She had metamorphosed into a rich, merry widow in all but name or title. In the very ending of the marriage, and probably for the first time, Anne had not disappointed the king.

The reasons behind Henry’s desire for a speedy annulment of his marriage were not only those of physical revulsion, or even royal protocol and diplomatic convenience. He had another matter on his mind, one that was very much closer to his heart and dipping libido: the frivolous and vivacious eighteen-year-old Katherine Howard, a first cousin to Anne Boleyn and niece to the reactionary Thomas, Third Duke of Norfolk. The king probably saw Katherine in March 1540 at a grand banquet given by the conniving Bishop of Winchester Stephen Gardiner in the great hall of Winchester House in Southwark, his palatial home on the South Bank of the River Thames, built in the shadow of St Saviour’s Church. No more flattering portraits, no envoys’ carefully euphemistic reports now for Henry. He immediately fell in love with the diminutive, sensual, auburn-haired girl as she danced and frolicked in the rainbow light thrown down by the huge rose window above Gardiner’s feast. She was fashionably plump and considered attractive rather than beautiful.

The love match looked incongruous, if not grotesque. She was more than thirty years younger than the king; indeed, she was six years younger than Princess Mary and probably stood well over a foot shorter than the man-mountain the monarch had become as a result of frequent overindulgence at the festive board since Jane Seymour’s death. But in Katherine’s presence, Henry felt and acted like a romantic young man again – in stark contrast with the bored, empty feelings he had experienced for his unwanted queen, Anne of Cleves. Norfolk, his eyes ever firmly set on increased political power, actively and enthusiastically encouraged the relationship, praising Katherine’s ‘pure and honest condition’ to the king, whose amorous appetites were thoroughly roused.

Henry was already shamelessly showering gifts on the Howard girl by the Easter of 1540. Ralph Morice, Cranmer’s secretary, wrote that the ‘king’s affection was so marvellously set upon that gentlewoman as it was never known that he had the like to any woman’.⁵⁶ To Henry, she was a ‘blushing rose without a thorn’.⁵⁷ He had to make her his fifth wife, and his regal desires would never brook denial, once expressed. As the Spanish ambassador, Eustace Chapuys, perceptively wrote later:

For if this king’s nature and inclination be taken into account; if we consider that whenever he takes a fancy to a person or decides for an undertaking, he goes the whole length, there being no limit or restriction whatever to his wishes.⁵⁸

Although a Howard, Katherine came from a far from wealthy background. Her education had been neglected because of the poverty of her father Lord Edmund Howard, the feckless son of the Second Duke of Norfolk. Her bluff and ambitious uncle Thomas Howard, who succeeded his father to the title in 1524,⁵⁹ was a soldier, Earl Marshal and Lord High Treasurer of England, the third most important office in the realm. He was also one of the leaders of the religiously conservative party. That year, 1540, he had told a clerk in the exchequer who had married a former nun:

I never read the Scripture, nor ever will read it. It was merry in England before the new learning came up: yes, I would all things were as has been in times past.⁶⁰

He and Gardiner, the Bishop of Winchester (an even more fervent opponent of liturgical reform), could not believe the luck that Henry’s roaming eye had brought them. If Katherine became queen, they would capture greater influence at court, providing the opportunity to return the troubled realm to the traditional religion and to exploit the possibility, albeit dim, of reconciliation with Rome. They were already triumphant at the fall of Cromwell – that scorned and hated religious reformer. Their hopes that their lascivious bait would be snapped up were soon realised. With perfect timing, they led the other members of the Privy Council to humbly beg the king ‘to frame his most noble heart to love’ – indeed, to marry again and to create, they coyly added, ‘some more store of fruit and succession to the comfort of his realm’.⁶¹

Henry needed no second bidding. A bare nineteen days after the clerical annulment of his marriage to Anne of Cleves, he wed Katherine at Otelands Palace, near Weybridge in Surrey, on 28 July 1540, the same day that the unpopular Cromwell met his bloody fate, ‘barbarously’ at the hands of a clumsy and unskilled axeman at Tower Hill.⁶² Deliberately and ignominiously, his fellow victim on the scaffold was selected to be Walter, Lord Hungerford, who was beheaded for committing buggery and for raping his own daughter.⁶³ Norfolk’s arrogant son Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey, said scornfully of Cromwell’s end: ‘Now that foul churl is dead, so ambitious of others’ [noble] blood; now is he stricken with his own staff.’ These ‘new erected men [want to] leave no noble man in life’.⁶⁴

The royal couple were now sternly cautioned to use the marital bed ‘more for the desire of children, than bodily lust’, as their marriage was ‘a high and blessed order, ordained of God in paradise’.⁶⁵ Henry was almost delirious with happiness about his new bride and on 8 August, Katherine was publicly displayed as queen at a spectacular banquet at Hampton Court. The wedding seemed to have given the king a fresh zest for life, coupled with a new willingness to listen to his hard-pressed doctors’ advice to curb his overeating and control his burgeoning weight.

Marillac reported that the king, then at his house at Woking, Surrey,

has taken a new rule of living. To rise between five and six, hear mass at seven and then ride [hunt] till dinner-time which is ten a.m. He says he feels much better thus in the country than when he resided all winter in his houses at the gates of London.⁶⁶

He took Katherine on an energetic and triumphant progress that scorching summer – the hottest in living memory – through the counties of Surrey, Berkshire, Buckinghamshire and Oxfordshire, hunting and feasting, dancing and singing all the way. It was truly pastime with good company and marked one of the few periods of real settled happiness for the king. But in September, on the way south to London, at Ampthill in Bedfordshire, he fell sick with malaria and the ulcers on his legs flared up again, forcing him to take to his bed. After recovering and returning to Windsor, he discovered that his niece, Lady Margaret Douglas, senior lady of Katherine’s Privy Chamber, was involved in an affair with the queen’s brother, Lord Charles Howard. The king could sometimes be prudish over matters sexual. She was banished to Syon Abbey in Middlesex for a year for her ‘over-much lightness’. There were also fears about an outbreak of plague outside the walls of Windsor Castle: Henry ordered the sick to be taken from their beds and carried out to the fields alongside the Thames to die, to prevent the threat of infection spreading to the court.⁶⁷

In February 1541, Henry, already walking with the aid of a staff, alarmingly suffered more problems with his ulcerated legs that probably led to a dangerous infection, as he was reported feverish, with a blackened face. But following fearsome losses of temper, he recovered both his good humour and his health. Two months later, there were reports that Katherine was pregnant but these came to nothing and Henry, for the first time, seemed displeased with her.

A curious little drama was played out in London in late June 1541 that vividly demonstrates Henry’s vindictiveness and spite. It also reveals just how capricious he could be in the dispensation of his royal prerogative of mercy. Twenty-three-year-old Thomas Fiennes – Lord Dacre of the South, of Herstmonceux Castle, Sussex – was amongst ‘eight rakish youths’ who had killed ‘a poor old man’, John Busebridge, in an ‘unpremeditated affray’ in the neighbouring parish of Hellingly after they were caught poaching deer. With the others, Dacre was tried and sentenced to death. Sir William Paget reported that on 27 June, members of his jury of peers met the Privy Council in the Star Chamber in the Palace of Westminster to discuss their concerns about the case. Some ‘spoke so loud’ that the royal clerk could plainly hear their voices through the two closed doors between him and the meeting. Amongst those who could not agree to the charge of wilful murder was Lord Cobham, whose remarks, reported Paget, were ‘vehement and stiff’. After dinner, the Council passed on these concerns to Henry, together with Dacre’s humble submission to the king, ‘hoping thereby to move his majesty to pardon him’. The appeals had no effect.⁶⁸ Chapuys reported to the Queen of Hungary that despite being both of noble blood and wealthy – Dacre owned property worth more than £1,200 a year (around £450,000 in today’s money) – the youth was

hung from the most ignominious gibbet and for greater shame, dragged through the streets to the place of execution [Tyburn]⁶⁹ to the great pity of many people, and even of his very judges who wept when they sentenced him and in a body asked his pardon of the king.⁷⁰

Significantly, another youth who was present at the old man’s death had been ‘freely pardoned’ on 29 June, the day of Dacre’s execution. He was the son of Sir Thomas Cheyney, former Lord Warden of the Cinque Ports, who had been appointed Treasurer of the Royal Household in 1539⁷¹ and had organised that lightning nocturnal grab of Cromwell’s bullion. Patronage, in Henry’s England, was everything. At other times, he was also more free in the act of mercy towards those close to him: on 28 January 1538, Henry had reprieved a servant of his young favourite Thomas Culpeper (of whom we shall hear more shortly) at the very last moment ‘to the great comfort of all the people’ crowding around the scaffold in the tiltyard in front of the Palace of Westminster. The boy servant had stolen his master’s purse, containing a jewel of the king’s, and £12 in cash. ‘He was brought to the place of execution … and the hangman was taking down the ladder from the gallows, [when] the king sent his pardon and so saved his life.’⁷²

Fresh from these excitements, on 30 June 1541 the king and queen, with an escort of 1,000 soldiers, began the long-promised, glittering and stately progress to the restive North of England, reaching York on 16 September, where their subjects had hopes, subsequently unfounded, that Katherine was to be formally crowned queen. In the quiet of the early hours, after the splendid feasts and banquets had ended, it was the queen’s secret nocturnal activities on this progress that were to become her fatal undoing.

Henry returned to Hampton Court from this progress at the end of October and ordered that on 2 November – All Souls’ Day – there should be special prayers offered for ‘the good life he led and trusted to lead’ with ‘this jewel of womanhood’. Crushingly and cruelly, on that very day he was to have the veil torn from his old eyes about his young, flirtatious queen. Cranmer had received confidential information from John Lassels, a religious reformer (who would be burnt at the stake five years later for his Protestant beliefs), about Katherine’s unchaste life before her marriage to the king. Her previous behaviour now proved to have been far from ‘pure and honest’. Henry arrived in the Chapel Royal at Hampton Court to hear a Mass for the Dead and found a sealed letter from Cranmer waiting for him in his pew. The inscription on the cover urged him to read it in private. Within, the note accused the queen of having ‘lived most corruptly and sensually’.

An incredulous king was informed that his wife had behaved improperly with Henry Monox, a lute-player who had taught her the virginals (an ironic pun) at her step-grandmother’s home when she was just fifteen. Discovering them alone together, Agnes, Dowager Duchess of Norfolk, had administered ‘two or three blows’ to Katherine and told them to behave.⁷³ Katherine had also had an affair with Francis Dereham in the autumn of 1538, when she was seventeen. Only three months earlier, in August 1541, Katherine had unwisely appointed him her private secretary and usher of her chamber. Henry’s self-belief suffered a stunning blow at this news and he initially refused to believe Cranmer’s allegations. Then he asked his old friend Southampton, now Lord Privy Seal, secretly to investigate the charges levelled against his queen.

Dereham was taken to the Tower of London and interrogated by the Privy Council. He claimed he had been betrothed to Katherine in 1538 and consequently the relationship had not been sinful in the eyes of the Church. Stunningly, he also named Thomas Culpeper, one of Henry’s especial favourites in his Privy Chamber, as having ‘succeeded him in the queen’s affections’. This ambitious courtier was a less than attractive character: two years before, he had raped a park-keeper’s wife in a wooded thicket while three or four of his companions had held her down. He later killed a villager who tried to arrest him.⁷⁴ Henry, who did not want to lose Culpeper’s jolly company or his frequent tender ministrations to his painful legs, had then astonishingly pardoned him. This time, Culpeper was arrested and questioned by Wriothesley under the threat of torture on the rack – a notorious machine in the bowels of the Tower nicknamed ‘the Duke of Exeter’s daughter’ by apprehensive Londoners.⁷⁵

Back in the Palace of Westminster, Culpeper’s rooms were being searched for evidence and his goods and chattels listed and valued. He had started his life at court as a page, later being appointed a groom and finally, two years before his arrest, he had been created a Gentleman of the king’s Privy Chamber, which allowed him privileged access to the sovereign’s person. His possessions included two caps of velvet given to him by the king, plus numerous gowns, coats and other clothing, together with swords and daggers. Other items included horses and bedroom furniture. In total, his possessions were valued at £214 18s 1d (£80,500 at 2004 prices) and were delivered up to Sir Thomas Heneage of the Privy Chamber. Culpeper’s debts, to the king and six others, amounted to £195 2s 8d (£73,050),⁷⁶ some of it probably gambling debts. A disapproving bank manager today might well say that, on paper, Culpeper was living only just above the line of penury; the figures certainly speak volumes about his fast and loose life. But the courtier also had considerable potential earnings from the positions showered upon such a favourite by a doting Henry. The inventory of his goods includes them all: Keeper of the Gallery at Greenwich Palace; Clerk of the Armoury; Keeper of the parks and houses at Penshurst and North Lye; Lieutenant of Tonbridge Castle; and Steward of Ashdown Forest. There were also substantial incomes from property holdings. His lustful dalliance with the queen had flaunted and risked all this, as well as his life.

The king’s Council sorrowfully reported the scandal to Henry’s ambassador to France, Sir John Paget, on 12 November, saying, ‘A most miserable case lately revealed … Now may[be] you can see what was done before marriage. God knows what hath been done since.’⁷⁷ Armed with his own intelligence, King Francis I of France – probably delighted at Henry’s discomfiture – wrote to his ‘good brother’ of England the same day, declaring that he felt the ‘grief of the king as his own’. Henry, he wrote, ‘should consider that lightness of women cannot bind the honour of men – and that the shame is confined to those who commit the crime.’ It was not intended to cheer Henry’s dark hours, nor did it.⁷⁸

While the interrogations were discreetly under way at the Tower, the French ambassador Marillac reported that Henry avoided Katherine’s company at Hampton Court as much as possible and that the queen

who did nothing but dance and amuse herself, now keeps her apartments without showing herself … When musicians with instruments call at her door, they are dismissed, saying it was no longer time for dancing.

The Spanish ambassador Chapuys, puzzled at what was going on at court, confirmed that Henry ‘feigned indisposition’ and was ten or twelve days without seeing his queen or allowing her to come into his room,

during which time there was much talk of divorce but owing to some surmise that she was with child, or else the means for a divorce were not arranged, the affair slept until 5 November when the king went into the Council room and remained there till noon.⁷⁹

Meanwhile, all the queen’s coffers and chests were sealed by her investigators and palace guards were stationed at the doors of her apartments to prevent any incriminating evidence from being removed.

Katherine’s brother Lord Charles Howard, another Gentleman of the king’s Privy Chamber, was also exiled from court – without being told the reason. Marillac added:

The Duke of Norfolk must be exceedingly sorry and troubled, for the queen happens to be his own niece and the daughter of his brother, just as Anne [Boleyn] was also his niece on his sister’s side and his having been the chief cause of the king marrying her.

Piece by piece, the evidence was being covertly gathered concerning the queen’s promiscuity. The Privy Council was told that while the royal party were staying at Lincoln, Culpeper had entered her chamber ‘by the backstairs’ at eleven o’clock at night and had remained there until four the next morning. Another tryst had taken place in the cramped and hardly romantic surroundings of the queen’s stool chamber. On another occasion, she had given him a gold chain and a rich cap. The allegations of adultery and betrayal continued, on and on, poured out by Katherine’s maids and ladies of her bedchamber, who were no doubt attempting to save their own necks.

Given all that had passed in Henry’s turbulent marriages, the queen must have been mad to embark on this dangerous liaison with the king’s favourite. Was her extraordinary, almost suicidal recklessness motivated by an immature young girl’s physical and emotional disgust with an old, diseased man whom she had married for duty rather than love? Did she crave affection from a virile gallant nearer her own age in compensation for a conjugal life more concerned with siring a new heir than with sexual pleasure?⁸⁰ Did she merely gain a forbidden frisson from the secrecy and incredible risks of the affair? Or was she, as some must have supposed, even planning to conceive a child with Culpeper and pass it off as a Duke of York, so safeguarding her own future as queen and fulfilling the ambitions of her uncle and Bishop Gardiner? She certainly lived up to every syllable of her reputed personal motto: ‘No other will but mine own.’

During a torrid all-night Council meeting at Gardiner’s home in Southwark on 6 November, the sordid details of the queen’s activities were revealed to a still-disbelieving Henry. Finally, after he was convinced by the tide of evidence placed diffidently before him, the expected royal reaction was terrible to behold. The king had suffered twin, numbing assaults on his vanity, his bloated egotism, his self-esteem. His queen had betrayed him – and with his trusted favourite, Culpeper. Confronted by the awful truth of the double duplicity, this, probably his last sexual love, swiftly transformed into raw, naked hatred. He called for a sword so that he could slay Katherine ‘that he loved so much’. Vengeance, as always when Henry was crossed, was uppermost in his tortured mind. That ‘wicked woman’ had ‘never such delight in her incontinency as she should have torture in her death’ he screamed at the amazed courtiers. He struck out at his Council, abusing them for ‘soliciting’ him to marry her. It was all their fault! His anguished cries of animal rage broke down into wrathful tears, and he sobbed about his ‘ill-luck in meeting with such ill-conditioned wives’.⁸¹His awestruck and frightened Councillors believed his anger had driven him insane and they shrank back, with fearful glances at each other, from his grief and rage. Henry stormed off and, like a child whose favourite toy has been broken, sought comfort and distraction in an unplanned treat: killing other defenceless quarry in the hunting field.⁸²

English ambassadors abroad were given an official sanitised description of the king’s grief for consumption at their accredited courts – that his ‘heart was so pierced with pensiveness that long was it before his majesty could speak and utter the sorrow of his heart to us and finally, with plenty of tears, which was strange in his courage, opened the same’.

Many of those close to Katherine – her family and household – ‘light young men … privy to the naughtiness of the queen and Dereham, besides advancing Dereham to her service’ were dragged off to the Tower. The lieutenant there informed the Privy Council that there were not enough rooms ‘to lodge them all severally’ unless the king and queen’s own lodgings were used. The king agreed to this, but his double keys to the royal apartments could not be found and accommodation for some prisoners had to be arranged elsewhere.⁸³

Meanwhile, Marillac set spies to watch the comings and goings at Hampton Court. They reported that the queen’s jewels and rings had been inventoried and that Cranmer arrived at the palace alone on 8 November.

He was there again to question Katherine, and the archbishop reported later that her state ‘would have pitied any man’s heart to see’. He immediately promised her mercy, if she would only confess, ‘for fear that she would enter into a frenzy’.⁸⁴ The promise calmed her and she told him, ‘Alas, my lord, that I am still alive, the fear of death grieved me not so much before, as doth now the remembrance of the king’s goodness’ and her thoughts of what ‘a gracious and loving Prince I had’.⁸⁵ At six o’clock that evening, reported the archbishop, the queen fell into another ‘pang’ which was caused, she said, by her ‘remembrance … for about that time [every day], Master Heneage was wont to bring her knowledge of the king’.⁸⁶ Was this feminine guile, or the genuine emotional outbursts of an innocent teenager? Cranmer did not mention her marriage, being interested only in the talk of a pre-contract with Dereham as a possible solution to the scandal. Stupidly, Katherine told him there was no such contract, but she admitted that Dereham had carnal knowledge of her. The queen’s statement, written after the archbishop’s interrogation, graphically describes her teenage romps. It said that many times,

[Dereham] hath lain with me, sometime in his doublet and hose and two or three times naked; but not so naked that he had nothing upon him, for he had always at the least his doublet and as I do think, his hose also. But I mean naked when his hose were put down.

And diverse times, he would bring wine, strawberries, apples and other things to make good cheer after my lady [Agnes, Dowager Duchess of Norfolk] was gone to bed.⁸⁷

After the archbishop left, Katherine’s vice-chamberlain, Sir Edward Baynton,⁸⁸ told the king that she began to excuse her actions and water down the things she had admitted to Cranmer. She claimed, he wrote, that what Dereham had done to her had been achieved by force.⁸⁹

On 13 November, Wriothesley went to Hampton Court and, summoning all the members and servants of the queen’s household into the great chamber, ‘there openly afore them declared certain offences that she had done in misusing her body with certain persons afore the king’s time, wherefore he there discharged all her household’.⁹⁰

Katherine naïvely believed that she would be left alone after making her free confession. When she discovered that her inquisitors were far from finished with her, she refused ‘to drink or eat and weeps and cries like a madwoman, so that they must take away things by which she might hasten her death’, according to her uncle, Norfolk.

The duke cuts an unappealing figure during this cause célèbre that struck so close to home and to his political ambitions. Now perhaps fearing the loss of his head, he was at some pains to distance himself from his niece, telling Marillac ‘with tears in his eyes, of the king’s grief’, who had loved Katherine ‘much, and the misfortunes to his [Norfolk’s] house in her and Queen Anne [Boleyn], his two nieces’.⁹¹ All this, of course, was faithfully reported to Francis I. Later, Norfolk confided to Chapuys, ‘I wish the queen was burned.’⁹²

What was to be done with her while her fate was decided? Her new domestic arrangements demonstrate the cold efficiency of Henry’s administration. On 14 November, she was sent to the former Bridgettine nunnery at Syon House, Middlesex, under the charge of Sir Edward and Lady Isabella Baynton and three gentlewomen.⁹³ The accommodation was to be furnished ‘moderately as her life and condition deserved’. Rich, ornate hangings were firmly denied; instead, they were to be ‘mean stuff, without any cloth of estate’. Katherine was allowed six of her favourite dresses, edged with gold and in the fashionable French style. Her jewels were all removed, carefully inventoried and returned safely to the king’s jewel house. At Syon, on the banks of the Thames, in the two rooms allotted to her, she waited anxiously for news of her fate amid constant rumours that Henry would show clemency. Her moods swung between utter despair and adolescent hope. During her wilder optimistic moments, perhaps she fancied that some kind of settlement like that enjoyed by Anne of Cleves could save her head. Her composure certainly returned, for she made ‘good cheer, [and was] fatter and handsomer than ever’ and ‘more imperious and commanding and more difficult to please than ever she was when living with the king’.⁹⁴ Katherine, in her heart, knew her time to enjoy the trappings of royalty was limited and perhaps she wanted to savour them while she could. She put out of her mind any thoughts of the king’s retribution.

In truth, Katherine was as guilty as sin itself. She was also particularly dim-witted. As her passionate affair raged, she had sent a number of love letters to Culpeper via one of her servants. One billet-doux, no doubt found during searches of Culpeper’s rooms at Westminster, survives today amongst the state papers in the National Archives. It leaves little doubt as to where her affections really lay:

I heartily recommend me unto you, praying you to send word how that you do. I heard you were sick and never longed [so] much for anything as to see you. It makes my heart die to think I cannot always be in your company.

She signed herself, ‘Yours, as long as life endures, Katheryn.’ She may as well have been signing her own death warrant.⁹⁵

Meanwhile, Anne of Cleves travelled to Richmond to be near Henry – she nurtured hopes of reconciliation in the disgrace of her successor⁹⁶ – but these, inevitably, came to naught. Pathetically, her only contact with the court was a messenger who claimed back a ring given to Anne by the fallen queen.

Lady Jane Rochford, one-time lady-in-waiting to Anne Boleyn and widow of George Boleyn (who was executed in May 1536 for an alleged incestuous relationship with his sister Anne Boleyn), had acted as a procuress for Culpeper. She was too deeply embroiled in the scandal to escape and, inevitably, was one of those arrested and cross-examined at Hampton Court before being taken to the Tower. Lady Rochford was seized with a fit of madness on the third day of her imprisonment ‘by which [her] brain was affected’. Chapuys noted that ‘now and then she recovers her reason and that the king takes care that his own physicians visit her daily, for he desires her recovery chiefly that he may afterwards have her executed as an example and warning to others’.

Katherine’s anxious wait for the king’s verdict lasted less than ten days. On 22 November she lost the title of queen and two days later she was indicted for having led ‘an abominable, base, carnal, voluptuous and vicious life’ before the royal marriage and behaving ‘like a common harlot with diverse persons, as with Francis Dereham of Lambeth and Henry Monox of Streatham, at other times maintaining … the outward appearance of chastity and honesty’. She had misled the king ‘by word and gesture to love her’ and ‘arrogantly coupled herself with him in marriage’. The marriage pre-contract with Dereham had been concealed from Henry ‘to the peril of the King and of his children to be begotten by her’ and after the royal wedding, she had shown Dereham ‘notable favour’ and had incited Culpeper to sexual intercourse, telling him she loved him above the king.⁹⁷

On 1 December 1541, Culpeper and Dereham were arraigned before the Lord Mayor, Sir Michael Dormer, at the Guildhall, London, for high treason, with Norfolk sitting uncomfortably at his left hand. Culpeper cravenly maintained that he had secretly met the queen only because of her royal commands. Katherine had made all the running in the affair. She was, he alleged, ‘languishing and dying of love for him’.⁹⁸ Hardly the words or actions of a chivalrous gallant. After a hearing lasting around six hours, Dereham and Culpeper were unsurprisingly found guilty. Both were executed at Tyburn on 10 December, with the king unexpectedly commuting the sentence to simple decapitation for Culpeper alone, rather than the hanging, drawing and quartering⁹⁹ that Dereham cruelly suffered. It was the last and least act of mercy that Henry had shown Culpeper.

Norfolk, his ambitions now in ashes and facing the prospect of a second niece being executed while queen, wrote to Henry from the safe isolation of his estates at Kenninghall, near Norwich, eloquently deploring the roles played by his family in the scandal and firmly denying any involvement in their ‘false and traitorous proceedings against your royal majesty’. After writing of ‘the abominable deeds by two of my nieces’, with breathtaking temerity he sought reassurance that he still remained in good standing with the king, writing obsequiously:

Prostate at your royal feet, most humbly I beseech your Majesty that by such, as if it shall please you to command, I may be advertised [told] plainly how your Highness doth weigh your favour towards me.

Assuring your Highness that unless I may know your Majesty to continue my good and gracious Lord, as ye were before their offences [were] committed, I shall never desire to live in this world any longer …¹⁰⁰

Henry’s reaction to the letter is not known, but the noble house of Howard suffered grievously. Norfolk was soon to discover that his influence at court had waned for ever. For hiding Katherine’s promiscuity, his step-brother Lord William Howard and his wife Margaret, Lady Katherine Bridgewater (the queen’s aunt), Anne Howard (wife of her brother Henry), and her step-grandmother Agnes (the ‘old and testy’ dowager Duchess of Norfolk) were found guilty at Westminster Hall on 22 December of misprision¹⁰¹ of treason and forfeited their estates and possessions. They were also sentenced to perpetual imprisonment – although within a year, all were pardoned and released.

Chapuys wrote on 3 December that Henry ‘wonderfully felt the case of the Queen … and that he has certainly shown greater sorrow and regret at her loss than at the faults, loss or divorce of his preceding wives’. The ambassador added shrewdly:

I should say that this king’s case resembles very much that of the woman who cried more bitterly at the loss of her tenth husband than she had cried on the death of the other nine put together.¹⁰²

On Saturday 11 February 1542, Royal Assent was given by a commission, appointed by letters patent, to an Act of Attainder¹⁰³ condemning Katherine to death for treason, to spare Henry the pain of having to hear ‘the sorrowful story and wicked facts’ all over again.¹⁰⁴ Henry wasted no time. The previous day she had been transferred to the Tower of London. The cold light of reality had hit her like a douche of icy water and she had panicked, resisted and had to be forced, screaming, into a small covered boat at Syon. Four of her ladies, with four sailors to man the vessel, accompanied her. She was brought down the river in a sombre little procession, escorted by the Duke of Suffolk and a troop of armed soldiers in a large barge and the Earl of Southampton, Lord Privy Seal, in another, all propelled by oars. Nearing the end of her journey, Katherine’s boat would have shot the narrows beneath London Bridge where the severed heads of her former lovers had been impaled. One hopes that, in the fading light of that grim afternoon, she was spared the gruesome spectacle. A few minutes later, dressed appropriately in black velvet, she landed at the steps of Traitor’s Gate ‘with the same honours and ceremonies as if she was still reigning’,¹⁰⁵ before being taken to the comfort of the queen’s lodgings within the Tower.

On Sunday 12 February, Katherine was finally told that she was going to die the following day and should therefore ‘dispose her soul’. That night she asked, with a curious morbid fascination, to see the headsman’s block, ‘pretending that she wanted to know how she was to place her head on it. This was granted and the block being brought in, she herself tried and placed her head on it by way of experiment,’ reported Chapuys.¹⁰⁶ The next morning at a little after seven, she was swiftly beheaded on Tower Green. ‘After her body had been covered with a black cloak, the ladies of her suite took it up and put it on one side.’¹⁰⁷ Lady Rochford immediately followed her on to the bloodstained straw of the scaffold, her madness apparently calmed. Always anxious to cover his actions with the cloak of legality, the king had hurried an Act through Parliament permitting the execution of insane persons who had committed treason.¹⁰⁸

Both women were acquiescent in their fate. Neither spoke much on the scaffold, merely confessing their guilt and dutifully praying for the king’s welfare and prosperity. This reticence was not just mere misplaced loyalty or tradition (although it satisfied the onlookers from the Privy Council).¹⁰⁹ The queen was absolutely terrified. Katherine, reportedly ‘so weak [from fear] that she could hardly speak’, died, mercifully, with one sweep of the axe severing her once frivolous, dizzy head cleanly from her young body. Henry’s fifth marriage was over and his wife’s corpse was buried in the Church of St Peter ad Vincula within the Tower of London – alongside that of Anne Boleyn, Henry’s second wife, who had been executed almost six years earlier.

The king was now aged fifty-one, in poor health and grown very stout. For the first time after ridding himself of a wife in thirty tempestuous years of wedlock, there were no plans to find him another, even though Parliament had now passed an Act making it a treasonable offence for a woman to marry the king without disclosing her unchaste past. This measure was, in the bland words of today’s Whitehall civil servants, intended purely as an enabling measure ‘to avoid doubts for the future’, as well as providing Queen Katherine’s demise with a more substantial veneer of legitimacy, albeit retrospective. Chapuys, in a thinly veiled comment on the notoriously loose morals of Henry’s household, wrote: ‘Few, if any, ladies of the court nowadays [are] likely to aspire to such an honour of becoming one of the king’s wives or to desire that the choice should fall on them.’¹¹⁰

It was not that Henry did not feel the need for female company in his declining years. There were some who believed that Henry’s amorous habits would die hard and that he would swiftly seek another wife; some hopefuls even suggested, vainly, that Anne of Cleves, now apparently grown ‘half as beautiful again since she left court’, could attempt a return match with the English king. Elizabeth Basset and Jane Rattsey, two of her ladies-in-waiting, were hauled up before Henry’s Council on 4 December 1541 and jailed for adding fuel to the fire of rumour by indiscreetly asking, ‘What! Is God working his own work to make the Lady Anne of Cleves queen again?’ and ‘What a man is the King! How many wives will he have?’¹¹¹ No doubt, many of his 2.7 million subjects may have pondered the same question.

In truth, he now required a consort to look after his three children by different mothers: Mary, aged twenty-six and still without a husband, Elizabeth, eight-and-half, and Edward, approaching five. He also needed a woman’s tender touch in dressing his painful and debilitating ulcerated legs, to comfort him in the loneliness of his old age and to distract him from the daily problems of kingship. The idea of further procreation to produce a Duke of York may have finally disappeared from Henry’s mind with his poor health, increasing corpulence and the searing pain of Katherine Howard’s betrayal. For the king had again taken to food as a solace in his grief: Marillac, in his diplomatic dispatches, talks openly of the monarch’s ‘marvellous excess’ in eating and reports him ‘daily growing heavier’. Henry’s weight had increased so substantially that his great bed of walnut in the Palace of Westminster had to be widened and strengthened to support his growing bulk.

Chapuys, the mischievous Spanish ambassador, suggested to William Paget, then clerk of the king’s Council (who for ‘a long time [has] been on intimate terms with me’), that if Henry cast Katherine aside

on account of her having had connexion with a man before her marriage to him, he would have been justified in doing the same with Madam dé Cleves, for if the rumour current in the Low Countries was true, there were plenty of causes for a separation considering the queen’s [Anne of Cleves’] age [and] her being fond of wine, as they [the English] might have had occasion to observe, it was natural enough to suppose she had failed in the same manner. The Clerk did not deny the strength of my argument, but said he did not believe the King would again retake her or marry another woman until Parliament positively forced him to it.¹¹²

Ambassadors always deal in rumours, and here the gossipy Chapuys was being unkind to Anne of Cleves, as the talk of her lack of chastity seems totally unfounded. There were, however, some official attempts by the Duchy of Cleves to reinstate Anne to the unlikely royal affections. Its ambassador sought to speak to Henry about Anne, ‘but as the king’s grief did not permit it’ he had to make do with addressing the Privy Council in the middle of December 1541. After passing on the Duke of Cleves’ thanks for Henry’s ‘liberality to his sister, he prayed them [to find] means to reconcile the marriage’ and restore Anne as queen. The Council, on the king’s behalf, answered ‘that the separation had been made for such just cause that he [Henry] prayed the duke would never make such a request’. The ambassador, perhaps experiencing difficulty with his English, asked for this very definite statement to be repeated. Bishop Gardiner ‘with every appearance of anger, said that the king would never take back the said lady and that what was done was founded on great reason, whatever the world might allege’. The man from Cleves dared not reply, Marillac reported to Francis I, ‘for fear that they might take occasion to treat [Anne] worse’.¹¹³

Aside from mischief-making in the corridors of Westminster, Chapuys meanwhile had more important diplomatic imperatives: the envoy was at some pains to dissuade Henry from the possibility of seeking a sixth wife in France. Chapuys reported to his imperial master how the English king had told him that

the French were continually presenting him ladies to marry [but] I answered that no doubt they would do as they had done when he himself pursued the princess who is now the queen of Scotland¹¹⁴ and that in point of marriage, the French had always employed their usual tactics, and gone against the treaties between England and France … Since the French had not been ashamed to do such things openly and to his very face, they must all the time have played him in secret more devilish tricks still; adding, the more to darken the picture, many anecdotes I knew of King Francis and his ministers.¹¹⁵

Henry’s spirits were dramatically lifted by a new English victory against the Scots at Solway Moss on 24 November 1542,¹¹⁶ quickly followed by the death of their king, James V, on 14 December from a fever and despair that his wife had delivered a daughter. On 15 January 1543, Chapuys wrote that

ever since his late queen’s misconduct [Henry] has been sad and dejected, showing no inclination for carousels and pageants or paying his court to ladies. No sooner did the news from Scotland arrive than he began to invite and entertain them at court.¹¹⁷

Princess Mary was recalled from her quarters at Hunsdon, Hertfordshire, to act as hostess at her father’s palaces. She was greeted warmly and was given rings, silver plate and other jewels including two rubies of ‘inestimable value’ by Henry as New Year gifts. Chapuys added:

Many here think that in the midst of all this feasting and carousing, the King may well take a fancy to some lady of the court and marry her, but I must say I see no appearance of that.¹¹⁸

Henry returned to staging the grand court occasions he had loved so much. At the end of January, he threw a great supper for sixty-one ladies at the Palace of Westminster, having personally stumped around their lodgings beforehand, fussily checking that everything was in pristine readiness for his guests. The king’s rheumy old eyes dwelt upon a number of the laughing company around him, including Anne Basset, a girl reportedly of very limited intellect. Marillac afterwards described her as a ‘pretty creature with wit enough to do as badly as the other [Katherine], if she were to try’. While watching Anne Basset’s silly, giggling frivolity at his dinner table, Henry was perhaps painfully reminded of his last executed queen.¹¹⁹ Youth, beauty and gaiety were not now requirements for a king’s consort; morality, companionship and kindness would be more proper attributes in anyone else Henry sought to keep him warm at night. Although he received the ladies ‘with much gaiety’, he showed no ‘particular attention for any of them’, according to Chapuys.

At this time, a central character in the last days of Henry VIII emerged: Katherine Parr, who was to become his sixth and final wife.

The king would have known her for much of her life; indeed, her brother William was a long-time favourite of his. Probably born in 1512, she was the eldest child of a powerful northern magnate, Sir Thomas Parr of Kendal in Cumberland, who was knighted at Henry’s coronation in 1509 and fought at the Battle of the Spurs against the French in 1513. Her mother had been a lady-in-waiting to the king’s first wife, Catherine of Aragon. Katherine Parr had been married at fifteen to the ailing Edward, Lord Borough of Gainsborough, Lincolnshire, who suffered from a ‘distracted memory’, and she was widowed, childless, in 1529. In the late spring of 1532, she had married the rich widower John Neville, Baron Latimer of Snape Castle, Yorkshire. He was forty-two, more than twenty years older than his bride, had been married twice before and had two children, a son and a daughter. The Latimers were to be caught up dangerously in the northern Pilgrimage of Grace rebellion in 1536. Katherine’s husband was taken hostage by the ringleaders and became their spokesman to the king’s Council in London, before switching sides to rescue Katherine and her stepchildren unharmed from the hands of the rebels at Snape. During Thomas Cromwell’s subsequent virulent witch-hunt for those in any way involved in the rebellion, the Duke of Norfolk came to the Latimers’ aid, pointing out that he was unable to find any evidence that Katherine’s husband had done anything wrong, except when under the duress of violence. He added, ‘No man was in more danger of his life,’ and so they were spared from the heavy hand of Henry’s chief minister’s retribution.

Katherine was frequently at court: her sister, Anne, married William Herbert, one of Henry’s confidants amongst the Gentlemen of his Privy Chamber, then an esquire of the king’s body, whose father was an illegitimate son of the 1st Earl of Pembroke.¹²⁰Latimer, sick and infirm, died in London, probably in December 1542, and Katherine arranged for him to be buried in St Paul’s Cathedral beneath an impressive tomb, recorded as having been ‘broken all in pieces’ seventy years later.¹²¹ His will was proved in March 1543.

The previous month, Henry cautiously began to pay her court.

Despite the widow insisting on a seemly period of mourning, the king had decided to pursue her as his sixth wife. She was the ideal candidate. Her personal motto – ‘To be useful in all I do’ – has the ring of a sensible, practical and dutiful Girl Guide captain. After nursing two older men, she was experienced in the ways of the sick room, as well as being gentle and kind. As the childless widow of two dead husbands, there could be no question of unpleasant surprises lurking in her past; indeed, her virtue was one of her proudest and most praised assets.¹²² Portraits of her show a dignified and graceful matron of some strength of character, with a fashionably pale complexion, tightly brushed-back auburn hair and light-brown eyes. She was slim, around 5 ft. 2 in. tall,¹²³ lively in conversation and, for the time, very well educated. She enjoyed intellectual discussion – and could be very forthright in her views. Some have portrayed her as a kind of sixteenth-century bluestocking; true, Katherine could speak fluent French and Italian and later learnt to both read and write in Latin, but she also loved music and dancing, lavish jewels and expensive, fashionable clothes. She was known to be pious, but not overtly associated with either the religiously conservative or reformist groups still slugging it out brutally for dominance at court. Katherine Latimer, née Parr, Henry concluded, would make the ideal wife and stepmother in his declining years. With the king’s self-belief now restored, he convinced himself it might even be possible that she could bear him a Duke of York, despite the fact that the first flush of youth had long departed her. Finally, there was a political dimension, a factor never lost on the canny Henry: marriage to the daughter of such a powerful and respectable northern family would bring him benefits in that traditionally most troublesome region of his realm. What the king desired, the king would get.

As a lame and sick man with five unfortunate marriages behind him, Henry resorted to his most powerful asset in pursuing her affections. He used hard cash to woo her, placing an order on 16 February 1543 with his tailor, John Skutt, for a generous package of pleats and sleeves, followed by gowns in the latest Italian, Dutch and Venetian fashions and ‘French hoods’, all valued at a total of £8 9s 5d (just over £3,000 in today’s money). Although grotesquely obese and afflicted with painful and stinking leg wounds, Henry still vainly believed that he knew how to turn a woman’s head.

He also had patronage to employ as a telling weapon: it can be no coincidence that a string of honours and appointments were pointedly awarded to Katherine’s brother William, Baron Parr of Kendal, at the same time as Henry was courting her, although William had long been a favourite of the king, called ‘his Integrity’ by Henry. In March, he was made a member of the Privy Council¹²⁴. This was followed by his election in April as a Knight of the Garter and his appointment as Warden of the Scottish Marches, the border territories where he had shone in the latest military campaigns against England’s intractable neighbour.

The king faced another strong contender for the hand of the rich widow: his brother-in-law by marriage to Jane Seymour, the debonair and roguish Sir Thomas Seymour, who had returned to court that month after eight months based in Vienna, serving as a military observer studying the tactics and weaponry employed in the wars against the Turks. Katherine had fallen heavily for his piratical good looks, his renown as a courageous soldier and his courtly manners and dress. Her head had been turned by his glamour, dash and derring-do; her prim heart excited, after a dull life with two sick husbands, by his wild reputation. She was not even deterred by his notorious bad temper. Henry, however, was apparently aware of their developing relationship. In order not to be outdone and to ensure that the way remained clear for an acceptance of his proposal of marriage, he appointed Sir Thomas, within two weeks of his return, special ambassador to the queen regent in Brussels.

Katherine was clearly deeply in love with Seymour. Four years later, in a letter, she admitted to him:

For as truly as God is God, my mind was fully bent the other time I was at liberty, to marry you before any man I know. Howbeit, God withstood my will … most vehemently for a time and through His grace and goodness made that possible which seems to me most impossible; that was, made me to renounce utterly my own will and to follow His will most willingly.¹²⁵

Perhaps Katherine weighed up how long the king had to live and realistically calculated that if Seymour would be patient, their love might not have to wait many years before being sanctified by marriage. Henry, for his part, cunningly made it his business to see that Sir Thomas was almost continuously out of the country during the remaining years of his reign. Seymour later served under Sir John Wallop in the English military operations in the Low Countries, and at sea with the fleet under John Dudley, Viscount Lisle who was appointed Lord High Admiral in 1542.

Lisle wrote to William, Lord Parr, on 20 June 1543 that after Henry had inspected two new havens at Harwich, he returned to London, where ‘none but my lady Latimer, your sister, and Mrs Herbert be both here in the Court’ with Princesses Mary and Elizabeth.¹²⁶

Henry was certainly in a hurry to marry his widow woman. Cranmer issued a special licence in Latin on 10 July at Lambeth Palace, authorising the marriage to take place between Henry and ‘Lady Katherine Latimer, late wife of Lord Latimer, deceased’¹²⁷without the need for banns being said in any church, oratory or chapel. No time was wasted in arranging the king’s sixth wedding. And this was not to be a hole-in-the-corner, secret ceremony, like those to Anne Boleyn, Jane Seymour and Katherine Howard.

The wedding, held two days later, was – unusually for Henry – a family affair. Crammed into an upper oratory – ‘the Queen’s privy closet’ – within Hampton Court were Prince Edward, Princesses Mary and Elizabeth and the king’s niece Lady Margaret Douglas (who carried Katherine’s train), as well as a bevy of twenty senior and close courtiers and their wives. Of those attending, only John, Lord Russell, now Lord Privy Seal, and Sir Anthony Browne, Captain of the King’s Pensioners,¹²⁸ were members of the religiously conservative faction at court. The others were firmly in the reformers’ camp.

Gardiner conducted the marriage in English, putting the statutory questions to the couple. Henry impatiently answered each with a loud ‘Yea’ and, taking Katherine’s right hand in his, repeated after the bishop:

I, Henry, take thee, Katherine, to my wedded wife, to have and to hold, from this day forward, for better for worse, for richer for poorer, in sickness and in health, till death us depart, and thereto, I plight thee my troth.

Katherine then said her vows, adding after ‘sickness and in health’:

to be bonair¹²⁹ and buxom in bed and at board, till death us depart, and thereto I plight thee my troth.¹³⁰

With that, the wedding ring was slipped on to her finger and gifts of gold and silver proffered. After Gardiner blessed the marriage, Henry commanded his notary, Richard Watkins, to make the promises public.

Strangely, history had repeated itself. It was like the king’s first marriage all over again. In both cases, the bride had declared for a close relative – Henry’s elder brother Arthur in the case of Catherine of Aragon, and the king’s brother-in-law – Thomas Seymour – in the case of Katherine Parr. The Christian name of the king’s bride was the same in both cases. Psychologists have read much into this, claiming that Henry had an unconscious desire for an incestuous union.¹³¹ Whatever his motives, the marriage turned out a happy one despite a very bumpy patch in 1546, as we shall see later.

Edmond Harvel, the English ambassador to Venice, rejoiced in a letter to Russell at the king’s marriage to ‘so prudent, beautiful and virtuous a lady, as is by universal fame reported’. The Venetian government had declared ‘no mean congratulations on this marriage’, he added.¹³²

Chapuys reported the royal wedding to the crown prince of Spain and described Katherine as possibly being ‘about thirty-two years of age. May God be pleased that this marriage turn out well and that the king’s favour and affection for the princess [Mary] continue to increase’.¹³³

The plague was meanwhile raging in London, and a proclamation was issued on 15 July from Hampton Court forbidding Londoners from entering any house occupied by the king and queen, and banning any servant of the household from visiting the capital.¹³⁴The court then beat a hasty retreat a few miles further west to the manor of Otelands. From there, on 20 July, the new queen, writing to her brother, talked of the marriage being ‘the greatest joy and comfort that could happen’ to her. She prayed that he would write and visit her ‘as frequently as if she had not been called to this honour’. The letter was enclosed in another to Lord Parr by Wriothesley, who told him rather prissily that he should frame himself to be ‘more and more an ornament to her majesty’.¹³⁵

The royal party then embarked on the traditional summer progress through the Home Counties – Buckinghamshire, Bedfordshire and Hertfordshire. It was just another honeymoon for Henry, but the first taste of royal rank and privilege for Katherine.

Anne of Cleves’ prominent nose was put out of joint by the marriage. On 27 July, Chapuys wrote to the queen of Hungary that he had heard ‘from an authentic quarter’ that Anne

would greatly prefer giving up everything that she has … to remaining any longer in England, treated as she is and humiliated and hurt as she has lately been at the King marrying this last lady, who is by no means so handsome as she herself is.

Besides which there is no hope of her [Katherine] having children, considering that she has been twice a widow and has borne none from either of her deceased husbands.¹³⁶

Anne’s reported comments are full of childish pique. ‘A fine burden Madam Katherine has taken upon herself!’ she is supposed to have remarked acidly, for she was marrying a king ‘so stout, that such a man has never been seen’. Moreover, ‘three of the biggest men that could be found could get inside his doublet’.¹³⁷ Perhaps her situation should excuse her outbursts. Her beloved mother had died and she was trapped, bereft of any man’s affection, in a foreign country. She was locked out of the glittering society of the royal court, now presided over by yet another of Henry’s wives. She could only watch from the sidelines, albeit very comfortable sidelines. Who could begrudge her the outpourings of a little jealousy? All her plans to return to the limelight of society had failed. The Duke of Cleves’ ambassador, whom Henry’s Council suspected was merely Anne’s agent, had been living meanly in a room above a tavern with one manservant and had been called to court twice or three times in the early part of 1543, probably on business connected with the discarded queen. All came to naught, however, and although Chapuys tried hard to obtain an exit passport for him, he remained stranded in London: ‘The poor devil … must very much wish to get out of this country for he does nothing here and gets no assistance in money.’¹³⁸

Katherine now began to enjoy life as a queen. She had a pet dog, a small spaniel named ‘Rig’ that wore a collar of crimson velvet embroidered with gold.¹³⁹ Henry showered jewels upon her. The inventory of her jewels taken after the king’s death includes several very personal bespoke items:

A brooch containing the image of king Henry the eight with the queen’s image, a crown of diamonds over them and a rose of diamonds under them …¹⁴⁰

A tablet the one side with ‘H’ and ‘K’ a rose and G[arter] all of diamonds with ostrich feathers and five small rubies and on the other side, a fair diamond holden by an image with four other diamonds.¹⁴¹

A tablet of gold having on the one side the king’s picture painted and on the same side is a rose … containing therein five diamonds and six rubies. On the border thereof is five very small diamonds and one ruby in the top and another underneath and in the border … four very small diamonds. On the other side is two men lifting of a stone, being a diamond, containing on that side twenty-two diamonds, two rubies and a fair emerald.¹⁴²

More than 120 items are listed, contained in a coffer ‘having written upon it “the Queen’s Jewels”’,¹⁴³ held in the king’s jewel house in the Tower.

For all the splendour and new riches around her, Katherine did not forget her duties as stepmother to the royal children: already she was being reported as behaving ‘very affectionately’ towards Princess Mary. Nor did she forget her other responsibilities: some of the first articles ordered after her marriage were eleven yards ‘of black damask for a nightgown’ and ‘for making a nightgown of black satin with two burgundian gardes [sleeves] embroidered and edged with velvet’.¹⁴⁴ On 13 July she ordered perfume for her bedchamber at Hampton Court from the court apothecary, although this may prosaically have had more to do with the smell from the kitchens positioned beneath her room than with the wiles of an affaire de coeur. Katherine knew well how to handle elderly husbands and was not going to make the same mistakes as poor Anne of Cleves.