LITMIR.BIZ

      But oh, young babies, whom blood … hath endowed with grace, comeliness, and high ability … it were great pity but that ye added to sovereign beauty virtue and good manners.

      – Dr Furnivall, ‘The Babees’ Book or A Little Report on how young people should behave’ (c.1475)

      When Catherine Howard arrived in the Sussex village of Horsham in 1531, she had every reason to feel thankful for the fact that her gender had spared her a grammar school education similar to those endured by her grandfather and many of her peers.1 Contemporary gossip was rife with horror stories of how young, upper-class boys were disciplined at their boarding schools – the philosopher Erasmus of Rotterdam relayed tales of students beaten nearly to the point of unconsciousness by their masters, forced to swallow salt, vinegar, or urine as a form of punishment, and how the schools ran on ‘howling and sobbing and cruel threatenings’.2 When Elizabeth I, ‘being a learned Princess’, visited Westminster School a few decades later, schools’ reputation for unchecked corporal punishment was so widespread that she bypassed the official meet-and-greet to talk directly to one pupil ‘of a fair, and ingenious countenance’. The queen stroked the young man’s head and ‘demanded him to tell her how often he had been whipped’. The boy paused, but ‘being witty’ he answered the royal query by quoting Virgil’s Aeneid, ‘Most gracious Queen, you do desire to know, / A grief unspeakable and full of woe.’3

      Instead, Catherine, about eight or nine years old in 1531, could expect her education to be conducted privately through a set of tutors chosen by her grandmother, whose principal manor, Chesworth House, sat on the edge of Horsham village, where life continued in much the same way as it had for decades. The Howard influence in Horsham remained strong. They hand-selected its Member of Parliament, often predictably picking a member of their extended family. The provisions needed to feed, clothe, and heat the dowager and her staff accounted for a significant chunk of the area’s economy, a relationship replicated across Tudor England, where the nobility stimulated and sustained the employment of tens of thousands of people – not just those who farmed and traded in the supplies they needed, but also those who served them. From the figures available to us, it seems that nearly two-thirds of people aged between fifteen and twenty-four worked as servants in this period, either to the aristocracy or to the middle classes, and somewhere between a quarter and half of the total population were in domestic service at some point in their lives.4

      Like most girls with a similar background, Catherine had grown up with servants, but the sheer number she saw as she was led across the drawbridge of her grandmother’s pretty moated manor at Chesworth could not have been a familiar sight.5 Even if widows usually kept smaller households than a married noblewoman, the scale of the dowager’s establishment would have been difficult to comprehend for a young girl who had spent her infancy at the mercy of her father’s financial fluctuations. As the fourth highest-ranking woman in the kingdom, Agnes Howard did not keep a small household.6 It would have been considered unseemly for her to do so. Etiquette guides from the time suggested it was appropriate for a duke or duchess to have about 240 servants.7 As with most manners manuals, this was only a guideline, and some peers, such as the late Duke of Buckingham who employed nearly 500, preferred to live on the larger side.8

      In the courtyard at Chesworth House, or Chesworth Place as it was sometimes known, Catherine got her first sight of the dozens of men and women who attended her grandmother.9 The chief household officers, like the steward who essentially ran the establishment, the treasurer, and the chaplain, Father Borough, who looked after the house’s religious valuables and spiritual needs, wore cloaks sporting the dowager’s personal coat of arms in bright threads as they walked to or from their offices, all of which were located within the house proper. The chaplain’s deputy, the almoner, was in charge of arranging for charity to be given to the local poor and for any food that was left uneaten to be distributed at the manor gates. Valets, whose job was very different to their more famous Edwardian counterparts, might be on their way to check on the grain stock in the stables, while young grooms cleaned out the stalls nearby. Little pageboys, the only servants likely to be on a pittance of a salary or none at all, ran through the house carrying messages, fulfilling errands from their superiors, and trying to find time to attend training to work in another part of the household once they were older. The servants certainly had enough tasks to keep them occupied. Chesworth had its own orchard, slaughterhouse, large kitchens, a pantry to oversee the production and storage of bread, a buttery that stored the manor’s ale, beers, and wine, and a great hall where the household dined and the dowager could entertain her guests. A career in service was not considered in any way demeaning – society was hierarchical, and the rewards and security offered by employment with the aristocracy were substantial. All the servants wore uniforms and they were expected to conform to expectations that a good servant should be ‘neatly clad, his clothes not torn, hands and faces well washed and head well kempt’.10

      As Catherine was ushered down Chesworth’s long corridors, the signs of her grandmother’s fortune were everywhere. This was a woman so wealthy that she kept £800 in silver around the house in case of an emergency; to give an idea of the scale of that hoarding, one of Catherine’s aunts had been expected to maintain a family and a household on about £50 a few years earlier, another lived comfortably on £196.11 Cleaners bustled around placing reeds and rushes on the floor or sweeping them away for hygiene’s sake once they became too dirty. When they entered the dowager’s presence, Catherine and her brother were expected to bow or curtsey and to repeat that action in miniature every time she asked them a question, ‘otherwise, stand as still a stone’.12 Like their servants, they were taught that it was impolite to sigh, cough, or breathe too loudly in the lady of the house’s presence.13

      The abundance on display at Chesworth underscored why Edmund Howard was considered such a failure by his contemporaries. Consumption and display were part of the nobility’s duty, a clause in the social contract, by which they generated work for those around them and upheld the class system whose origins were believed to mirror Heaven’s. As part of his Christmas celebrations a few years earlier, Catherine’s uncle Thomas, Duke of Norfolk, had hosted a dinner for 580 guests one night and then another for 399 five days later.14 A frugal aristocrat was a source of universal contempt in the sixteenth century; an indebted one even more so.

      The Dowager Duchess of Norfolk was only fifty-four years old when Catherine first came into her care. The daughter of two gentry families from Lincolnshire, Agnes had come to the late duke’s attention when his first wife, Agnes’s kinswoman, passed away. Agnes’s brother Philip had then been the duke’s steward, a position often given to members of one’s extended affinity, and despite – or because of – the fact that he was nearly thirty-five years older, the duke was sufficiently smitten with Agnes’s charms to marry her regardless of the fact that she brought him little in the way of a dowry. She was thus technically Catherine’s step-grandmother,

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