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

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      And it came to pass in an eveningtide, that David arose from off his bed, and walked upon the roof of the king’s house: and from the roof he saw a woman washing herself; and the woman was very beautiful to look upon. And David sent and enquired after the woman. And one said, ‘Is this not Bathsheba …?’

      – 2 Samuel 11:2–3

      Catherine’s arrival at the Tudor court was made possible by royal deaths and the fluctuations of international diplomacy. Two years before Catherine left the dowager’s care, Queen Jane Seymour died shortly after giving birth to a son who, to the relief of nearly everybody, survived. The queen’s funeral and the hunt for her replacement were not separated by a significant passage of time.1 English diplomats were mobilised to find the king a wife and, through her, an alliance for a country that had found itself politically isolated since the break with Rome. Several princesses were considered, with the daughters of the Hapsburg and Valois families the front runners for most of the negotiations, as a bride from one of the two continental rivals seemed like the obvious choice. Catherine’s uncle William was dispatched to France to keep an eye on Marie de Guise, the twenty-four-year-old widow of the Duke of Longueville.2 The French were increasingly offended by King Henry’s demands to see the lady before he married her, until the exasperated French ambassador in London felt the need to point out to Henry that the well-born women of his country were not accustomed to being appraised like horses at market.3 Marie eventually dropped out of the race to marry the King of Scots, and her younger sister Renée, who was also considered, took the veil.4 After her, the favourite was Christina, a seventeen-year-old Danish princess who had lived in exile since her father’s deposition. On her mother’s side, Christina was a Hapsburg, and she had been under their care since Queen Elisabeth’s death in 1526. Married at thirteen and widowed at sixteen, Christina of Denmark was still wearing mourning for her husband, the Duke of Milan, when English envoys began to court her by proxy for their master. Letters to Cromwell and the king described her as ‘a goodly personage of excellent beauty’; her dimples were lauded along with ‘the great majesty of her bearing and the charm of her manners’, as well as her faint lisp which ‘doth nothing misbecome her’.5

      Amid the dimple praising, the English diplomats seem to have underestimated Christina’s intelligence. She came from a family of clever and self-assured women. When an envoy told Christina that Henry VIII was ‘the most gentle gentleman that liveth, his nature so benign and pleasant that I think no man hath heard many angry words pass his mouth’, the princess struggled to keep a straight face.6 Like the French court before them, the Hapsburgs were left cold by Henry’s wooing techniques. His belligerence on the subject of the pope’s authority, which both the Hapsburg emperor and the King of France still acknowledged, irritated almost as much as the superior and slightly hectoring tone he used in his correspondence. Even as Henry was inaccurately claiming that his hand in marriage was desired by all the great powers of Europe, his representatives noticed that whenever they sought a subsequent audience with Christina, she had scheduled yet another fortuitously timed hunting trip with her aunt, the Dowager Queen of Hungary.7

      For most of Henry VIII’s reign, England’s foreign policy had been predicated on the assumption that France and the Hapsburg Empire would always be in a state of enmity, with England able to alter the balance in favour of one or the other. France, ruled by the womanising François I, had been alarmed by the increase in Hapsburg power when his contemporary Charles V inherited the central European territories of his father’s family and the expanding Spanish empire of his mother’s. The emperor’s attempts to dominate the northern half of the Italian peninsula as thoroughly as he did the southern became the two countries’ central point of contention, aggravated by personal rivalries and decades of hostility. Then, in the summer of 1538, the two monarchs signed a ten-year truce which received the blessing of Pope Paul III, who, a few months later, published a bull excommunicating Henry VIII for his schismatic disobedience and iconoclasm.8 СКАЧАТЬ