LITMIR.BIZ

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accompanying letter to the cardinal, unless Edmund received financial help he would either have to seek sanctuary in a religious institution or flee abroad. The panic and unhappiness apparent in Edmund’s letter remains uncomfortable to read. Quotations from it are usually cited in the various biographies of Catherine, but it is by reading the majority of the text – including his astonishing offer to serve on a mission to the Americas – that one can fully appreciate the depth of Edmund Howard’s desperation. Addressed to ‘My Lord Cardinal’s Grace’, in haste, it reads:

      My duty remembered, humbly I beseech your grace to [be] my good Lord, for with out your gracious help I am utterly undone. Sir so it is that I am so far in danger of the King’s laws by reason of the debt that I am in, that I dare not go a broad, nor come at mine own house, and am fain to absent me from my wife and my poor children, there is such writs of executions out against me; and also such as be my sureties are daily arrested, and put to great trouble, which is to my great shame and rebuke. Sir there is no help but through your Grace and your good mediation to the King’s Grace, in the which is my singular trust: and your gracious favour showed unto me … shall not only be meritorious but shall be the safeguard of my life and relief of my poor wife and our ten children, and set me out of debt. And humbly I beseech your Grace for such poor service as I have done the King’s Grace, and trust for to do, that I be not cast away; and if the King’s Grace or your Grace should command me to do any service I would trust to do acceptable service; and liver I had to be in his Grace’s service at the farthest end of Christendom than to live thus wretchedly, and die with thought, sorrow and care. I may repent that ever I was nobleman’s son born, leading the sorrowful life that I live, and if I were a poor man’s son I might dig and delve for my living and my children and my wife’s, for whom I take more thought than for my self: and so may I not do but to great reproach and shame to me and all my blood. Sir if there be any creature living that can lay to me other treason, murder, felony, rape, extortion, bribery, or in maintaining or supporting any of these, and to be approved on me, then let me have the extremity of the King’s laws; and I trust there shall none lay against me any thing to be approved to my reproach but only debt. Sir I am informed there shall be a voyage made in to a newfound land with divers ships and captains and sogears [soldiers or sea-goers?] in them; and I am informed the voyage shall be honourable and profitable to the King’s Grace and all his realm. Sir if your Grace think my poor carcass any thing meet to serve the King’s Grace in the said voyage, for the better passion of Christ be you my good lord there in, for now I do live a wretched a life as ever did gentleman being a true man, and nothing I have to live on, nor to find me my wife and my children meat or drink; and glad I would be to venture my life to do the King’s service, and if I be put there unto I doubt not but I shall do such service as shall be acceptable and redound to his Grace[’s] honour. And Sir I have nothing to lose but my life, and that I would gladly adventure in his service trusting thereby to win some honesty, and to get somewhat toward my living; and if it shall please the King’s Grace to have my body do him service in the said voyage, humbly I beseech your Grace that I may know your pleasure therein. Sir I ensure you there shall be nothing nor nother friend nor kin let me, but with a willing heart I will go, so it shall stand with the King’s pleasure and yours. The King’s Grace being so good lord to me through your good mediation … and assign my bill the which I now do sue for, or to set me out of debt some other ways. Sir I beseech your Grace to pardon me that I came not to your Grace myself according to my duty, but surely Sir I dare not go a broad, and therefore I have been thus bold to write to your Grace. All the premises considered I humbly beseech your Grace to be my good lord, for the passion of Christ and in the way of charity and piety. I beseech your Grace to pardon me for this my bold writing, but very poverty and need forceth me thus to do, as knoweth our Lord Jesus, who have you in his blessed tuysseone. Written with the hand of him that is assuredly yours, Edmund Howard, Knight.48

      If help did come from Wolsey, it was piecemeal. Edmund was head of a large household, which added to his financial woes. The elder girls, Isabella and Margaret, along with Catherine’s full siblings Charles, Henry, George, another Margaret, and their younger sister Mary, were all still living at home. Interestingly, a later survey also mentions Jane Howard, a sister born after Mary, who, if she existed at all, must have been born after 1527 and died in infancy, perhaps sometime after 1530.49 Catherine’s two eldest half brothers, John and Ralph, had moved out when she was a child. On turning twenty-four, John inherited a manor in Stockwell from his grandfather, and Ralph had been left a trust fund to finance his training as a lawyer in London. Her half sister Joyce was also married and out of the house.50 Even by including Jane, Edmund’s claim that he had to maintain ten children in 1527 does not seem to be entirely accurate, but debt seldom stimulates a compulsion toward honesty.

      Catherine’s early life is thus difficult to trace – one of the youngest in a large family amid a wealth of contradictions. She possessed one of the most respected surnames in the country, but at least initially it brought her little in terms of material comfort or security. Her father was theoretically one of the pillars of the local community, but in practice he spent most of her childhood hiding from his creditors and resorting to increasingly desperate methods to get his hands on the money they needed. Whether her time in her father’s household was happy or not, we have no way of knowing. It was certainly short. Her mother died in about 1528 or 1529 and her father swiftly remarried, to another widow, Dorothy Troyes. This marriage, too, seems to have been short, since Dorothy’s will was made in the early summer of 1530, by which point Catherine’s first cousin, Anne Boleyn, was firmly established at court as queen-to-be.51 Anne possessed the natural assertiveness that bordered on bossiness common in someone who was often found, or believed herself, to be more competent than those around her. She set out to find her hapless uncle Edmund a job, and when the death of Sir William Hussey opened up a vacancy for the post of comptroller to the civic authorities at the port of Calais, she pounced.52 Putting Edmund in the post of comptroller with its heavy financial duties was a little like putting the poacher in charge of the game. With unintentional irony, the decision was finalised on April Fool’s Day 1531.53

      For Edmund, the chance to get safely across the Channel could not have come at a more opportune time. Within a few months of his departure, his friend John Shookborough had been arrested as guarantor for Edmund’s debts. Realising that the net was closing around him, and horrified to discover the extent of his friend’s financial deceptions, Shookborough tried to catch the attention of Thomas Cromwell as he attended Mass at the Augustinian friary near his home in Austin Friars, hopeful that a message could be passed on to the court through him. Unfortunately, Cromwell did not see Shookborough in the crowd, and as the latter returned into the city, he was arrested for £26 of Lord Edmund’s debts. In a letter to Cromwell he admitted, ‘I am surety for more, and dare not go abroad in the city.’ To avoid prison, Shookborough had to pledge two of his family’s best items of clothing to the creditors, and he offered Cromwell a gelding ‘for your favour’ in helping him out of the mess in which friendship with Edmund had landed him.54

      Edmund arrived in Calais on St Nicholas’s Day 1531, amid the December chill, with an introductory letter from Anne Boleyn clutched in his hands. He took it to the town’s vice treasurer, Thomas Fowler, who was canny enough to realise the tacit instructions implicit in Anne’s avalanche of complimentary charm: ‘At his coming here on St Nicholas Day,’ he told his brother, ‘he [Edmund] brought me a letter from my lady Anne, directed to you and me, which my lord commanded me to open, giving us great thanks for our kindness to my lord Edmund.’55

      At some point between April and December 1531, between the announcement of Edmund’s new post and his assumption of his duties, his household in Surrey was broken up. Two of the girls were married – Isabella Leigh to Sir Edward Baynton, a widowed courtier with seven young children, and Margaret Howard to Thomas Arundell, a close friend of the Earl of Northumberland and son of a Cornish gentry family who were wealthy enough not to need a sizeable

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