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

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      An Oxford graduate in his early forties, Edmund Bonner had risen from relative obscurity, which encouraged accusations that he had been born out of wedlock, to become England’s ambassador to France and, after that, Bishop of London.18 He had secured both his ambassadorship and episcopacy through Thomas Cromwell’s patronage, yet like everybody else he had abandoned Cromwell in his hour of need. The latter’s frantic letters from prison, entreating royal mercy from Henry, written in a disjointed and panicky mess compared to his usual precise calligraphy, had gone unanswered, as Cromwell’s former dependants turned their faces from him, as if he had never existed.

      We cannot say for certain where in Oatlands Catherine Howard resided during her wedding visit. Recent excavations of the palace have given us a better picture of its layout and the safest guess would be that her rooms were in the queen’s apartments, located in the palace’s southern towers between the inner and outer courtyards. From any eastern- or western-facing windows above the quadrangle, she would have had beautiful views of either the orchard with its purloined apple trees, the octagonal dovecote or the ornamental gardens circling the fountains. From just above the entrance to the inner courtyard, she would have been able to see the ramp that had recently been installed to help her husband-to-be mount what must have been a particularly sturdy steed. Beyond the walls lay the deer park where she and the king would spend a few days of hunting as part of a ten-day honeymoon.

      She was in her late teens, slender, like most of the Howard women, with a ‘very delightful’ appearance, according to the French ambassador.19 The court’s temporary reduction in size and then its removal to the relative obscurity of Oatlands fuelled speculation that she was already pregnant; Catherine’s petite frame gave the lie to the story, but it would be weeks before she was unveiled to the public again and the stories could finally be put to rest.20 Sixteenth-century weddings were not usually romantic occasions and the modern idea of writing one’s own vows or of putting the couple’s affection for one another at the centre of the ceremony would have struck Catherine and her contemporaries as bizarre. It was, like an execution, a formal occasion governed by established precedent; there was a proper way of doing things and as she made her way down to the recently renovated chapel near her husband’s tower to stand in front of Edmund Bonner, Catherine, keen to adhere to etiquette after a lifetime spent learning its nuances, had no intention of making a mistake.

      The king had arrived at Oatlands earlier that day. Lucrezia Borgia’s twenty-three-year-old son Francesco, Marquis of Massalombarda, had been visiting London for the last week and he was due to leave that evening; the king had entertained him with visits to his palaces at Greenwich and Richmond and given him two fine horses as a parting gift.21 It was unusual for a traveller to begin a journey in the evening when visibility was poor, so perhaps the marquis had delayed his departure to make sure he witnessed the executions on Tower Hill. If he did attend, his status would have vouchsafed for him a place at the front of the crowd.

      Much as a hush falls when a bride enters a church, a silence settled over the spectators as Cromwell began his final speech.22 He delivered it perfectly, thanking God for allowing him to die this way, in full knowledge of what lay ahead, and confessing readily that he was a wretched and miserable sinner who had, like all Christians, fallen short of the standards hoped for by Almighty God: ‘I confess that as God, by His Holy Spirit, instructs us in the truth, so the devil is ready to seduce us – and I have been seduced.’ Then he began to pray – for the king, for ‘that goodly imp’ the heir apparent – and to ask for prayers for himself, though as a reformer he was careful not to ask for prayers for his soul after he was dead but solely ‘so that as long as life remaineth in this flesh, I waiver nothing in my faith’.23

      As Catherine, her throat now glittering with pieces from the royal collection, knelt before Edmund Bonner, Cromwell knelt in the sawdust of the scaffold and prayed aloud, ‘O Lord, grant me that when these eyes lose their use, that the eyes of my soul might see Thee. O Lord and father, when this mouth shall lose his use that my heart may say, O Pater, in manus tuas commendo spiritum meum.’24 Hungerford, his sanity now snapped entirely, kept interrupting, writhing and screaming at the executioner to get on with his bloody business.25 Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey, stood at the forefront of the crowd and watched the scene without pity. He was missing his cousin’s wedding to be here to see his family’s bête noire finished off. Later that day, he could not conceal his good mood. It felt to him like a settling of scores: ‘Now is the false churl dead, so ambitious of others’ blood.’26

      More of the Howards may have been at Oatlands to help Catherine, steady any nerves and, as ever, offer advice. A few days earlier, in preparation for the wedding, the king had granted Catherine’s eldest brother Charles five properties in London, while their half sister Isabella got a manor house in Wiltshire and all the lands that had once belonged to Malmesbury Abbey. As a gift for performing the service, Bishop Bonner’s debts were paid off by the royal household and he was given a set of gold dining plate that had been confiscated from his predecessor during the dissolutions.27 The newly enriched Isabella, wife to the queen’s vice-chamberlain, was almost certainly in attendance in her capacity both as Catherine’s sister and lady-in-waiting. This was the second queen Isabella would serve and her husband’s fifth. Both were too clever to give any thought to the merry-go-round of queens consort, or rather, any voice. A woman would soon be imprisoned for asking of the king: ‘How many wives will he have?’28

      At the Tower, Lord Hungerford’s wish that the headsman should acquit his task quickly was not to be fulfilled. Edward Hall described Cromwell’s executioner as ‘ragged [and] butcherly’, who ‘very ungoodly performed his office’.29 No more details are provided about what went wrong with the beheading, but rumour began with the claim it had taken three strokes to cut through the minister’s thick neck. By the end of the month, entertainment had triumphed over plausibility with stories that it had taken two headsmen half an hour to kill him and allegations that Cromwell’s enemies, who had been seen banqueting and celebrating throughout the week preceding his death, had taken the executioner out to feast him the night before, to get him drunk and hope that with a hangover he would give Cromwell as painful a death as possible. All we know for certain is Edward Hall’s remark that the executioner had carried out the task in an ‘ungoodly’ manner and that afterwards Cromwell’s head was taken with Lord Hungerford’s to gaze and rot from the top of the pikes at London Bridge.

      From the little chapel at Oatlands and the imposing towers of London, bells tolled out to mark a wedding and a death. Bells still tolled too every second day of November, the Feast of All Souls, the Catholic Day of the Dead, when Christ’s flock on earth were compelled to remember their brothers and sisters in the faith who had gone before them. They would toll again on the fifteenth day of August, the Feast of the Assumption, to mark the entry of the Virgin Mary into Heaven, there to be crowned its queen, as foretold, so the Church taught, in the visions of Saint John in the Book of Revelation.30 Celestial queens had not yet been abolished, despite the best efforts of the Protestant evangelicals and the man who had fallen on Catherine’s wedding day. But in a world where statues of Our Lady could be taken from Norfolk and torched in front of large London crowds with Cromwell watching on, it did not seem as if the Virgin Mary was any more secure on her throne than Katherine of Aragon or Anne Boleyn had been on theirs. It was an age of uncertainty and terrifying possibilities, and Catherine Howard was now its queen.