Six Wives (101 page)

    It was hardly the luxury she had been used to. Nevertheless, she had kept the essentials, for she was still to be treated 'in the state of a Queen'.
⁶⁵

* * *

But Catherine was aware of the fragility of her position. For she had another, much more dangerous, secret.

'The Queen', Lady Rochford later testified, 'three or four times

every day since she was in this trouble, would ask [her]: what she heard of Culpepper?' According to Lady Rochford, Catherine added: 'If that matter came not out, she feared not for no thing and said she would never confess it and willed [Lady Rochford] to deny it utterly.' Catherine was to admit that these conversations had taken place. But she turned them round. According to her, it was Lady Rochford who had encouraged her to be steadfast, and she claimed that Lady Rochford had said: 'I will never confess it, to be torn with wild horses'.
⁶⁶

    The truth, probably, is that each egged on the other. Catherine had behaved like the love-sick Juliet and Lady Rochford like Juliet's pandering Nurse.

    Some of the Council, meanwhile, were convinced that they were not yet to the bottom of their investigations. But their suspicions were not directed at Thomas Culpepper. Instead, they were convinced that Catherine's appointment of Dereham to her Household meant that this love affair had continued
after
her marriage to Henry. That, of course,
would
have been treason and Dereham was pressed brutally on the point, almost certainly with the use of torture. Finally, Marillac heard, that 'Dereham, to show his innocence since the marriage, said that Culpepper had succeeded him in the Queen's affections'.
⁶⁷

    Dereham's revelation was made on Saturday, the 11th. That day, Culpepper, oblivious to the disaster which was about to overtake him, 'was . . . merry ahawking'. On the Sunday, Catherine was questioned on the new allegations by Russell and Browne. She admitted three secret interviews with Culpepper at Lincoln, Pontefract and York, and that she had given him gifts of a cap, a chain and a cramp-ring. But she threw all the blame on Culpepper's own persistence and Lady Rochford's encouragement of it. 'Yet must you give men leave to look', Lady Rochford had said, 'for they will look upon you.'

    Lady Rochford's motives are hard to understand. She was the widow of George Boleyn, Lord Rochford, and, as such, had seen her husband and her sister-in-law, Queen Anne, destroyed by charges of adultery and incest. Those charges were a fabrication. But now she was encouraging her new mistress, Queen Catherine, to act out such follies indeed. Had Lady Rochford's been a life starved of affection? Was she living out in Catherine the romantic fantasies that she had never known?
⁶⁸

    We can only guess. But her indulgence proved fatal: to her mistress, to herself and to Catherine's lover.

* * *

The mysterious comings and goings in the Queen's apartments during the northern Progress were now explained. But had Catherine admitted everything? 'As for the act', Russell and Browne reported, 'she denieth upon her oath, or touching any bare of her but her hand.' The Councillors' suspicion, clearly, was that she was being economical with the truth as before.
⁶⁹

    What Catherine had said already, however, was quite enough to undo her. Henry's projected mercy was abandoned, and the terms of her confinement were notably tightened.

    The King, in a letter written by Secretary Sadler late at night on the 12th, showed himself especially anxious about Catherine's jewels. They were the tokens of his besotted love for her. Now that she had forfeited his love, she should go unadorned. She was to be given, Sadler instructed Cranmer, six French hoods 'with edges of goldsmiths' work, so that there be no stone nor pearl in the same'. She was also to have six gowns, 'with such things as belong to the same, except always stone and pearl'.
⁷⁰

    Culpepper was arrested on the 12th or at the latest on the 13th. He was taken straight to the Tower and on the 14th his goods were inventoried for confiscation. He was examined soon after his arrival in the Tower, and, protected by his rank and favour from the kind of duress that was freely applied to Dereham, he told a balanced and nuanced tale. He stressed that Catherine had taken the initiative. But he also admitted the strength of his own feelings, and the eagerness with which he had responded. He is, in short, to be believed.

    The result reads like a piece of romantic fiction. The predominant tone is tender and wistful. But it is enlivened with flashes of humour and coarse directness and moments of unintended bedroom farce. It is also a story that, again because of the illegibility of the original, has lain largely untold for four and a half centuries.
⁷¹

* * *

It was 'on Maunday Thursday last [14 April 1541] at Greenwich', Culpepper recalled, that Catherine had renewed their acquaintance. He was summoned by her servant 'Henry Webb, [who] brought him to the entry between her Privy Chamber and the Chamber of Presence'. There he found the Queen herself, who 'gave him by her own hands a fair cap of velvet garnished with a brooch and three dozen pairs of aglets (decorative pins) and a chain'. 'Put this under your cloak,' she said, '[and let] nobody see it!' 'Alas, Madam,' he replied, 'why did not you this when you were a maid?'

    This was not at all the response that Catherine had intended to provoke and at their next meeting she made her dissatisfaction plain. 'Is this all the thanks ye give me for the cap?' she demanded. 'If I had known ye would have [said] these words you should never have had it.'
⁷²

    Nevertheless, her attentions continued and 'at Greenwich [she] sent to him, being sick, at diverse times flesh or the fish dinner by Morres the Page'. Perhaps it is to this period that Catherine's only surviving letter belongs. 'Master Culpepper', it begins, 'I have heard you are sick . . . the which thing troubled me very much till such time that . . . you . . . send me word how that you do, for I have never longed so much for [a] thing as I do to see you and speak with you, the which I trust shall be shortly now . . . It makes my heart to die to think what fortune I have that I cannot always be in your company . . . Yours as long as life endures – CATHERINE.'
⁷³

* * *

    The assignation nearly turned into a disaster. As we have seen, one of the watch, noticing the open door of the backstairs, had locked it shut. But Culpepper and his servant managed to pick the lock.

    When Culpepper finally arrived in the stool house, he found the Queen and Lady Rochford 'and no other body'. It was about 11 o'clock at night and he and Catherine talked till three in the morning. 'They had there', he said, 'fond communication of themselves and of their loves before time and of Bess Harvey.'

* * *

Elizabeth ('Bess') Harvey was a well-known, even perhaps a notorious, figure at the Tudor Court, where she had been in and out of employment in the Queen's Household. She had been in service to Anne Boleyn, during which time she got on friendly terms with Sir Francis Bryan. But in 1536 she was dismissed in circumstances which, she claimed, were a mystery to her. By 1539, however, she was once more a member of the 'shadow' Queen's Privy Chamber, and, as such, accompanied Anne Basset and the rest on the outing to view the fleet at Portsmouth. But she was not appointed to Catherine's own Household and in March 1541 was retired with a life annuity of £10 a year.

    Had Culpepper broken Bess's heart, as he broke so many others? At any event, Catherine felt that he had treated her badly and left her shabbily dressed. So, after the conversation at Lincoln, she 'gave a damask gown [to Bess]' and sent Culpepper a message of reproof by the ubiquitous Lady Rochford. 'He did ill', the message went, 'to suffer his tenement to be so ill repaired and that she, for to save his honesty, had done some cost over it.'

    The remark, which characterises Bess as a rented building ('tenement'), ill-maintained by Culpepper as its lessee, is saucy and mocks both Culpepper and his former mistress. But, typically, Catherine made up for the hurt by the kindly gesture of the gift of the gown.

*

But, now, in the stool house at Lincoln, Catherine had been thoroughly unsettled by the incident with the watch. '[She] always at that time', Culpepper recalled, 'started away and returned again as one in fear lest somebody should come.'

    Nevertheless, as the hours went by, and they talked of old times, their love returned. 'Now she must indeed love him,' Catherine said. 'She had bound him', Culpepper gallantly replied, 'both then and now and ever that he both must and did love her again above all other creatures.'

    When he finally left, he kissed her hand, 'saying he would presume no further'.
⁷⁴

* * *

On another occasion, the Queen's worst fears were fulfilled and 'Lovekyn, one of her Chamberers, came down when he was with the Queen, and the Queen put her out'. Catherine never forgave the woman for her tactlessness and threatened to dismiss her from her service.
⁷⁵

    These problems with her servants and the lack of suitable retreats in the little houses where she and Henry were staying on the Progress meant that it was almost a fortnight before Culpepper and Catherine were able to have another nocturnal tryst. Even then, it was postponed for a night as 'the Queen feared lest the King had set watch' on the door to the backstairs. But the coast turned out to be clear and on 31 August, Culpepper was summoned once more 'and talked with her till the King went to bed'.

    At this meeting, in Pontefract Castle, Catherine began by reproaching him for his previous unfeeling conduct in abandoning her. 'I marvel', she said, 'that ye could so much dissemble as to say ye loved me so earnestly and yet would and did so soon lie with another.' Culpepper's reply was unanswerable. Catherine, he retorted, 'was married [to Henry] afore he loved the other'. Moreover, he continued, she had only herself to blame. 'He found so little favour at her hands at that time', he said, 'that he was rather moved to set by other.'

    Catherine now changed tack and became frankly vampish. 'If I listed [wished]', she said, 'I could bring you into as good a trade as Bray hath my Lord Parr in.' Culpepper replied indignantly. 'He thought her no such woman as Bray.' 'Well', answered Catherine, 'if I had tarried still in the Maidens' Chamber I would have tried you.'
⁷⁶

    All this casts light on another unhappy Tudor aristocratic marriage. Sir William Parr, ennobled in 1539 as Lord Parr of Kendal, had married Anne Bourchier, daughter of the Earl of Essex. The marriage was a great catch, as Anne was her father's only child and heiress, but it turned into a personal disaster and both parties sought comfort elsewhere. Anne 'eloped' from her husband and refused to return, while Parr, Catherine's reference makes clear, had taken a mistress called Bray. She was, almost certainly, Dorothy Bray, the next to the youngest of the six sisters of John, Lord Bray and Catherine's colleague as one of Anne of Cleves's maids. Parr clearly developed a taste for women of the Bray family and in 1548 went on to marry Elizabeth Brooke, who was Dorothy's niece as the child of her eldest sister Anne. As Parr was separated but not divorced from his first wife at the time, this second marriage was bigamous. Subsequently, it became a plaything of religious politics: its validity was asserted by Protestants and rejected by Catholics.
⁷⁷

    Stories like this, in which both men and women of Catherine's acquaintance flouted conventional morality to pursue their own sexual happiness, make her own behaviour seem almost commonplace.

    But these other women were not married to the King.

* * *

It was also at Pontefract that Catherine sent Culpepper a note to make another assignation. 'As ye find the door', she wrote, 'so to come.'

    By York, she was confident enough to make a joke about their clandestine meetings. 'She had store of other lovers at other doors as well as he,' she said. 'It is like enough,' he replied in the same spirit. But then she became more serious. 'She had communication with him how well she loved him.' She also 'showed him how when she was a maiden how many times her grief was such that she could not but weep in the presence of her fellows'.

    And, it is clear, she had a similar 'grief' about the promiscuous and popular Culpepper. At Sheriff Hutton, he testified, he sent a ring by Lady Rochford and, in return, the Queen sent him two bracelets. They were accompanied with the message that 'they were sent him to keep his arms warm' – for normally, she knew, he kept them snug in the embraces of other women.

    Her other fear, of course, was of the mighty monarch who was her husband. 'She doubted not', she told Culpepper, 'that he knew the King was Supreme Head of the Church and therefore the Queen bade him beware that whensoever he went to confession he should never shrive him of any such things as should pass betwixt her and him.' 'For, if he did', she added, 'surely the King, being Supreme Head of the Church, should have knowledge of it.'