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

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in their enemies, and it was often only once people quarrelled over other things that truly vicious hauteur reared its head.50

      The Howards’ return to the dukedom they had lost at Bosworth was accomplished after twenty-nine years when, in 1514, Henry VIII restored the title in recognition of Thomas Howard’s leadership of the English forces at the Battle of Flodden. Thomas Howard certainly showed no sense of snobbery towards his sons-in-law, and they seem to have been promoted and patronised alongside his own boys.51 In his old age, those men continued to rise after he effectively retired from public life, spending most of his time, in his family’s words, at the ‘Castle of Framlingham, where he continued and kept an honourable house unto the hour of his death. And there he died like a good Christian prince.’52

      At the burial ceremony itself, the priest chose to deliver his sermon on the text ‘Weep not: behold, the Lion of the tribe of Judah, the Root of David, hath prevailed.’53 Tribes, lions, and tenacity spoke to the Howards’ souls. As the padre reached the crescendo of his terrifying homily, mixing panegyric with eschatology, the individual with the eternal, several of the congregation became so unsettled and afraid that they left the chapel. Once the hardier mourners had departed at a more decorous pace, the workmen arrived to begin construction of the duke’s unique monument. From an incarcerated traitor to the king’s right hand for defence of the realm, and paterfamilias of one of the largest aristocratic networks in northern Europe, was an extraordinary trajectory for any life, yet the duke died apparently torn between pride at his accomplishments and concern that in years to come observers would assume the worst regarding his loyalty in shifting allegiance from Edward V to Richard III to Henry VII. To prevent this, his tomb boasted a lengthy carved account of his life, which constantly stressed his service to the Crown, irrespective of its incumbent. Over a year later, long after Edmund had returned to Lambeth, his wife, and their growing brood of children, work on the tomb was complete and Catherine’s grandfather rested in splendour.54

      Chapter 3

       Lord Edmund’s Daughter

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      Anger makes dull men witty, but it keeps them poor.

      – Elizabeth I (1533–1603)

      Edmund Howard cannot have been thrilled at the arrival of another daughter. Girls required dowries and Edmund was already struggling financially. Catherine had the bad luck to be born to a man who peaked long before he became a father. Edmund was a toxic combination of corrupt, unstable, and pathetic, but he had not always been that. Those who knew him in his youth described Catherine’s father as ‘a courage and an hardy young lusty gentleman’.1 One of seven sons, but the third to reach adulthood, he had his father’s and brothers’ athletic capabilities, but lacked their acute social intelligence. He had spent most of his childhood at court as a pageboy in the service of King Henry VII, like his elder brother Edward, and the upward trajectory of his family after Bosworth seemed to promise a life of plenty. During the festivities for Henry VIII’s coronation in 1509, Edmund and his two elder brothers were part of a group of ‘fresh young gallants and noble men gorgeously apparelled’ who were asked to lead a tourney at the Palace of Westminster.2 The roll call of those invited to fight alongside him suggests that only the best jousters were chosen, and with good reason, given how much had been spent.

      Jousting mingled with a pageant was a relatively new kind of entertainment at the English court, with its combination of set pieces atop moving stages, music, dialogue, and mock combat. In Europe, it had long ago been transformed into an art form, with some celebrations recreating the city of Troy or the twelve labours of Hercules, complete with mechanised monsters and giants. Artistic ingenuity rubbed uneasily with a sportsman’s zeal, and it was not always clear how choreographed the fighting should be. At a tournament performed before Pope Clement V, even the horses had been reduced to moving props manoeuvred by six men concealed beneath cloth; a recent pageant for Cesare Borgia in the city of Ferrara saw the ‘dead’ combatants fall to the ground in a beautifully executed dance, before standing to take their bows. In contrast, an entertainment in honour of Queen Isabeau of France saw real knights sparring in front of the royal party for several hours.3 In England, the men of Henry VIII’s court seemed keener to follow the French example than the Italian.

      Rather than a typical outdoor arena, like those used for a joust, the men fought in an elaborate fairy-tale set, as members of the court looked on and placed bets. A miniature castle had been built within the courtyard – miniature, at least, in comparison to its inspiration. Tudor roses and engraved pomegranates, Katherine of Aragon’s device, lined its walls, while a fountain splashed water in front of it. In the spirit of Sybaris, the little castle’s gargoyles spouted red, white, and claret wines to the delight of the audience. The entirely artificial ivy that wrapped this folie was ‘gilded with fine gold’. Edmund, by no means the least competitive of the group, rode forward from the castle to ask the king’s permission to fight for the honour of the court belle who had been given the role of Pallas Athena, the chaste embodiment of wisdom. Royal permission gave way to a testosterone-fuelled spectacle of egotism. The participants’ vitality and their determination were well matched, and the joust only halted at nightfall. The next day, the king and queen prevented the match resuming by stepping in to pre-emptively select the winners for themselves.4

      In the years to come, the court lost none of its allure for Edmund. A brief, half-hearted and failed attempt to pursue a legal career did not get much further than enrolling in London’s prestigious Middle Temple in 1511.5 Within ten days of his admission to the Temple, Edmund was back at court to participate in another set of jousts, this time to mark the birth of the Duke of Cornwall, the king’s short-lived son and heir. Henry VIII, a tall and muscular youth blessed with the good looks of his grandfather Edward IV, was, at nineteen, keen to participate rather than simply observe as he had two years earlier.6 In recognition of Edmund’s skills, he was asked to lead the defenders; his brother-in-law, Sir Thomas Boleyn, was on the same team, as was Charles Brandon, the king’s handsome and womanising favourite. Once again, the royal household spared no expense to celebrate such an important event. The queen and her ladies gazed down from a box hung with arras and cloth of gold on a forest crafted from green velvet, satin, and ‘silks of divers colours’, complete with artificial rocks, hills, dales, arranged flowers, imported ferns, and grass. In the middle of the forest, the workmen had rendered another miniature castle ‘made of gold’. A manmade lion, ‘flourished all over with Damask gold’, and an antelope clothed in silver damask were flanked by men disguised as wildlings from a mythical forest, who escorted the bejewelled beasts as they dragged the final pieces of the pageant into place in front of the queen. Horns blasted, and parts of the set fell away to reveal four knights on horseback ‘armed at all places, every of them in cloth of gold, every of them his name embroidered’. These were Edmund’s opponents, the challengers, and their captain was the young king, joined by another of Edmund’s brothers-in-law, Sir Thomas Knyvet, and a clique of companions, all of whom had been

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