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

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СКАЧАТЬ rel="nofollow" href="#litres_trial_promo">1 Contrary to the still-repeated tradition that she was ‘small, plump and vivacious’, the few surviving specifics about Catherine’s appearance describe her as short and slender.2 A former courtier subsequently described her as ‘flourishing in youth, with beauty fresh and pure’.3 She was comfortable with admiration and attention. Manox was not the only servant who was smitten; a young man called Roger Cotes was also enamoured.4 As she got older, Catherine was given servants of her own, including her roommate Joan Acworth, who became her secretary. How much correspondence Catherine actually had at this stage in her life is unknown, but it clearly was not enough to create a crushing workload for Joan.

      It was through her secretary-cum-companion that Catherine found Manox’s successor. Francis Dereham was good-looking, confident to the point of arrogance, and a rule breaker who possessed a blazing temper which Catherine initially chose to regard as thrilling proof of his affection for her. He was also a ‘ladies’ man’, who had already notched his bedpost with several fellow servants, including Joan Acworth.5 Their fling had since ended, and Joan cheerfully moved on, even singing his praises to Catherine, who began to show an interest in him in the spring of 1538 – at the very most within a few weeks of ending things with Manox.6

      By then, Francis had been in the dowager’s service for nearly two years.7 Distantly related to her, he was the son of a wealthy family in the Lincolnshire gentry where he learned the upper-class syntax and mannerisms necessary to pass as one of the club.8 The dowager was fond of Francis, and he eventually carried out secretarial work for her. When he first arrived at Chesworth House, he and his roommate Robert Damport were given tasks like buying livestock for the household, perhaps a boring pursuit but an important one considering that many aristocratic households spent nearly one-quarter of their expenditure on food.9 Dereham and Damport were sent to get animals ready for the annual cull on Martinmas, a religious festival that fell every year on 11 November. Not all the livestock were killed then, and it is not true that most meat served in winter was heavily salted or covered in spices to hide its decay; households generally fed the animals intended for table with hay throughout the colder months to keep the food as fresh as possible.10

      One of Francis’s closest friends in the household was his wingman Edward Waldegrave, who gamely chased the friends of Francis’s lovers and helped organise nighttime visits to the maidens’ chamber, arriving with wine, apples, strawberries, and other treats pinched from the kitchens. Talking, drinking, and flirting continued into the small hours, often to two or three o’clock in the morning, and if anyone from downstairs unexpectedly came to inspect, there was a small curtained gallery at the end of the maidens’ chamber where the men could hide until danger had passed. The idea to hide them in there was Catherine’s.11 She was not the only girl with a sweetheart – for instance, Francis’s friend Edward was courting one Mistress Baskerville. To make the numerous rendezvous easier, Catherine took the initiative and sneaked into her grandmother’s room one evening, stole the relevant key, had a copy made, and then ensured the door to the staircase that led to the maidens’ chamber was unlocked after the dowager went to bed.12

      Within a couple of months of seeing Dereham, the reluctance Catherine had expressed to Manox about losing her virginity had evaporated. She and Francis began lying on her bed during the clandestine parties; this progressed to kissing, foreplay, and then sex. There was not much privacy in the maidens’ chamber, but Catherine was ‘so far in love’ that it did not seem to deter her.13 One of the dowager’s maids, Margery, who later married another servant in the household called John Benet, spied on them and saw Francis removing Catherine’s clothes. Later, Francis told Margery that he knew enough about sex to make sure Catherine did not end up pregnant.

      In much the same way as life in university halls can erode a sense of propriety, years in the maidens’ chamber left the girls feeling extremely comfortable in one another’s presence. When the bed hangings were pulled shut, the noises the couple made left no doubt about what they were doing. Their lovemaking was so energetic that their friends took to teasing Francis about being ‘broken winded’ once it was over.14 The pair were drunk on one another, kissing and cuddling like ‘two sparrows’, and the memories of the people who saw them in 1538, written down in 1541, prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that their relationship was consensual.15 It has already been mentioned that it was customary for young people of the same sex to share a bed – in the way Francis did with Robert Damport – and on several occasions, perhaps after too much of the purloined wine, another girl was in the bed when Francis and Catherine began foreplay.16 Alice Wilkes was so irritated by the couple’s ‘puffing and blowing’ that she insisted on switching beds to get a better night’s sleep.17 Alice, who was soon to marry another member of the household called Anthony Restwold, tried to speak to Catherine about the terrible risks she was taking. Any girl would find herself ruined by a pregnancy out of wedlock, let alone the Duke of Norfolk’s niece. Catherine dismissed her concerns by pointing out that ‘a woman might meddle with a man and yet conceive no child unless she would herself’, much the same stance taken by Francis in his earlier conversation with Margery.18 A rebuffed Alice then shared her fears with Mary Lascelles, who had held a low opinion of Catherine ever since she found out about her involvement with Henry Manox. ‘Let her alone,’ she advised, ‘for [if] she hold on as she begins we shall hear she will be nought in a while.’19

      Mary Lascelles’s sour-sounding reflection on Catherine’s impending comeuppance was based as much on hard-nosed pragmatism as on religious sensibility. Lascelles’s advice to Henry Manox about the consequences of becoming involved with a noble girl showed that she appreciated the practical dangers implicit in these kinds of upstairs–downstairs romances. The potential consequences of sin were awful, particularly in a society where God was liable to prove far more forgiving than His earthly flock. Religion was omnipresent in Catherine’s world. It was not separated from the world, but rather it influenced everything in society, from the ecstatic to the banal, and was in its turn influenced – sixteenth-century villagers playing football after Mass sang songs celebrating the skills of Saint Hugh of Lincoln in bouncing the ball up and down from the tips of his toes.20 Eroticism and sexuality could be incorporated into the Divine as much as the mundane. Christianity’s blushes about nudity were at least a century away – prayer books handed out to children might show a naked Bathsheba bathing in the moonlight; icons of pure and brave Saint Agatha often depicted her bare breasts seconds before the pagan Romans tore them from her as part of her martyrdom; the loincloth-wearing Saint Sebastian was usually shown as lean and muscular as the arrows of the unbelievers pierced him for his faith in Christ.21

      None of these devotional images were supposed to excite lust, of course, but nude images, no matter how holy their intent, at the very least ran the risk of provoking impure thoughts in some of their audience, and this reflected a society in which theological teachings on sexuality were often torturously contradictory. There were tensions between, and within, theological writings on sex and medical thoughts on the same subject. Views on what constituted a danger to one’s spiritual or physical health swung depending on which writer you consulted: a monk from the Franciscan order, СКАЧАТЬ