LITMIR.BIZ

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lull was temporary. Chaos began to spread in the region. Servants of the two factions were ambushed and killed, Rhys was freed, only to be taken once more, Katherine and her men attacked one of Ferrers’s homes, lives were lost and property ruined. In his letters to his superiors in London, Lord Ferrers described Katherine and Rhys as leaders of a ‘great Rebell[ion] and Insurrection of the people’.42

      Eventually, Rhys was arrested one last time and brought to London to stand trial for treason. He was accused of discussing prophecies that concerned the downfall of the king and of conspiring with Scotland to foment another invasion. One of his own servants provided evidence against him. The case, which resulted in a conviction, was overseen by an on-the-rise Thomas Cromwell, who also helped to arrange some of the logistics of Rhys’s execution on 4 December 1531. It is unclear to what extent Rhys had been driven to contemplate allying with a foreign power in order to recapture his family’s position in south Wales; the common view at the time seems to have been that he was ‘cruelly put to death, and he innocent, as they say, in the cause’.43 Allegations of financial corruption, his feud with Lord Ferrers, and the resultant threat to peace in Wales made his destruction a matter of convenience for the central government.

While we may never know exactly how much his own actions brought about Rhys’s death, we can be certain of the devastating effect it had on his widow. She had been intimately involved in her husband’s quarrel, and so the possibility that she would be accused of complicity in his alleged treason was tangible. Left to forge prospects for their three young children – Anne, Thomas, and Gruffydd – and fearful for herself, Lady Katherine followed in the footsteps of her elder brother Edmund and flung herself on the mercy of their niece, Anne Boleyn.44 Once again, the family’s dark-eyed golden girl did not disappoint.45 She may even have tried to limit the damage for her aunt and young cousins shortly before Rhys’s execution. Rhys had been attainted at the time of his conviction, meaning that the Crown could seize his goods and property, but his act of attainder specifically and unusually made provisions for his widow, who was left with an annual income of about £196.46 If Anne could not save Rhys, she worked hard to salvage his family’s situation. It is incorrect that his two boys, both under the age of seven, were packed off to live in the care of another family, as has been stated. All three of the siblings stayed in their mother’s care, and she swiftly married Lord Daubeney, a widower nearly two decades her senior. Anne Boleyn had not had much time to deploy her matchmaking skills, and the sickly Daubeney was hardly as easy on the eye or heart as Rhys had been, but he enjoyed royal favour, and in such pressing circumstances that was more important than personal preference.47 A few years later, Daubeney was created Earl of Bridgewater by Henry VIII, making Katherine a countess, but the marriage that saved her from going under with her first husband was not a happy one.* It was mutually miserable to the point that within three years the pair were living apart and complaining about one another to anyone who would listen.48 The countess’s sons joined Catherine as their grandmother’s wards, though they had ample opportunity to see their mother who, accompanied by her maid, Mistress Philip, began to spend much of her time residing with her mother.49

      The countess’s case showed the extent to which the new queen’s loyalty to her family could prove invaluable. It was not the same thing as infallible – she had saddled Edmund with a job for which he was manifestly unqualified and Katherine with a husband she came to loathe – but in difficult circumstances, Queen Anne was a worthwhile ally. Young Catherine was one of dozens of the queen’s cousins, nieces, aunts, uncles, and extended relatives who would look to her for advancement, especially in bringing them to court to serve her in lucrative obedience. In Calais, rumour had it that Catherine’s father did not plan to live out his life as a comptroller but ‘hopes to be here in the court with the King or the Queen, and have a better living’.50 But court gossip was vicious and mercurial, savaging those it had once nurtured. Just as an anonymous letter years earlier had damaged Edmund’s standing in the aftermath of the Battle of Flodden, whispers on the court grapevine tried to harm the countess. ‘I have none to do me help except the Queen,’ she wrote in a letter, ‘to whom am I much bound, and with whom much effort is made to draw her favour from me.’51 The more Howards around Anne, the better, and even if she was not destined to serve at the queen’s side, Catherine needed to continue learning the courtly graces. She was not going to spend her whole life at Chesworth House.

      On 2 May 1536, the ground shifted beneath the family in the most devastating fashion since their defeat at Bosworth. Shortly after lunch, Queen Anne Boleyn was arrested and rowed upriver to the Tower of London, where, seventeen days later, she bowed off the earthly stage after tucking the hem of her dress under her shoes, hoping to preserve her dignity once her body collapsed forward into the straw.52 Two days earlier, another of Catherine’s cousins, Lord Rochford, perished as collateral damage in the quest to ruin the queen, along with Sir William Brereton, a Welsh landowner who had once been supported by the countess’s first husband.53 In seventeen days, the Howard women had been robbed of their most celebrated kinswoman, and while it is tempting to think that the people at Chesworth spoke of Anne’s fate in much the same horrified, incredulous way as distant relatives like the Ashleys or the Champernownes seem to have, it is equally possible that Catherine’s friends discussed the events of 1536 with the same unthinkingly gleeful acceptance that greets so many political or royal scandals, no matter how improbable their details.54 The government’s version of events that had Anne as a bed-hopping, murderous adulteress certainly made for a good story, so good in fact that its manifest falsities still cling to popular perceptions of its victims, almost five hundred years later.

If the family was not already nervous enough, within weeks of the queen’s execution Catherine’s younger uncle Thomas was also sent to the Tower, after his secret betrothal to the king’s niece, Lady Margaret Douglas, was discovered.* The king was apoplectic and chose to see the romance as part of a plot to place the Howards closer to the throne.55 The couple were separated and while Margaret was eventually released, Thomas died of a fever after eighteen months in prison. His body was handed back to the dowager, who was granted permission to bury her son next to his father at Thetford on condition that ‘that she bury him without pomp’.56

      Throughout the scandal caused by Thomas’s elopement, the Pilgrimage of Grace rebellion convulsed the north of England. Thousands rose in protest at the closure of the monasteries and the gathering pace of religious revolution. Even a young girl growing up in a country house in the south cannot have missed the changes affecting England after the break with Rome. Catherine’s family were initially sympathetic to the king’s quarrel with the pope, but by 1536 they were beginning to feel a mounting sense of dread. Edmund Howard had sworn the mandatory oath acknowledging the king as head of the Church in 1534, yet a few years later he and his colleagues in Calais were accused of failing to implement the king’s latest spiritual policies.57 Even the late queen, the alleged harbinger of the English Reformation, had shown signs of swinging towards theological conservatism in the months before her death.58 When news of the northern uprising reached Horsham, the dowager showed herself supremely reluctant to honour her feudal obligations and provide men to help suppress it.59 Her sons and stepsons felt differently, perhaps mindful of their precarious position in the king’s favour after the events

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