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in 1541, prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that their relationship was consensual.15 It has already been mentioned that it was customary for young people of the same sex to share a bed – in the way Francis did with Robert Damport – and on several occasions, perhaps after too much of the purloined wine, another girl was in the bed when Francis and Catherine began foreplay.16 Alice Wilkes was so irritated by the couple’s ‘puffing and blowing’ that she insisted on switching beds to get a better night’s sleep.17 Alice, who was soon to marry another member of the household called Anthony Restwold, tried to speak to Catherine about the terrible risks she was taking. Any girl would find herself ruined by a pregnancy out of wedlock, let alone the Duke of Norfolk’s niece. Catherine dismissed her concerns by pointing out that ‘a woman might meddle with a man and yet conceive no child unless she would herself’, much the same stance taken by Francis in his earlier conversation with Margery.18 A rebuffed Alice then shared her fears with Mary Lascelles, who had held a low opinion of Catherine ever since she found out about her involvement with Henry Manox. ‘Let her alone,’ she advised, ‘for [if] she hold on as she begins we shall hear she will be nought in a while.’19

      Mary Lascelles’s sour-sounding reflection on Catherine’s impending comeuppance was based as much on hard-nosed pragmatism as on religious sensibility. Lascelles’s advice to Henry Manox about the consequences of becoming involved with a noble girl showed that she appreciated the practical dangers implicit in these kinds of upstairs–downstairs romances. The potential consequences of sin were awful, particularly in a society where God was liable to prove far more forgiving than His earthly flock. Religion was omnipresent in Catherine’s world. It was not separated from the world, but rather it influenced everything in society, from the ecstatic to the banal, and was in its turn influenced – sixteenth-century villagers playing football after Mass sang songs celebrating the skills of Saint Hugh of Lincoln in bouncing the ball up and down from the tips of his toes.20 Eroticism and sexuality could be incorporated into the Divine as much as the mundane. Christianity’s blushes about nudity were at least a century away – prayer books handed out to children might show a naked Bathsheba bathing in the moonlight; icons of pure and brave Saint Agatha often depicted her bare breasts seconds before the pagan Romans tore them from her as part of her martyrdom; the loincloth-wearing Saint Sebastian was usually shown as lean and muscular as the arrows of the unbelievers pierced him for his faith in Christ.21

      None of these devotional images were supposed to excite lust, of course, but nude images, no matter how holy their intent, at the very least ran the risk of provoking impure thoughts in some of their audience, and this reflected a society in which theological teachings on sexuality were often torturously contradictory. There were tensions between, and within, theological writings on sex and medical thoughts on the same subject. Views on what constituted a danger to one’s spiritual or physical health swung depending on which writer you consulted: a monk from the Franciscan order, for instance, was historically likely to be less censorious than one from the Dominican tradition. Medical wisdom held that ‘men fall into various illnesses through retaining their seed with them’, while in Catherine’s lifetime the Bishop of Rochester argued that an orgasm damaged a man’s health more ‘than by shedding of ten times so much blood’.22 A large part of the dichotomy stemmed from the age-old question of whether sex was something to be enjoyed or endured and if, in circumstances such as marriage or procreation, it might become something praiseworthy. The philosopher Sylvester Prierias Mazzolini, who died around the time of Catherine’s birth, argued that any deviation from the missionary position was a contraceptive, itself a sin, and that the pursuit of sexual pleasure, even within wedlock, was fundamentally dangerous. Couples who were engaged often began a sexual relationship before the actual wedding service, a custom with which certain members of the priesthood had no quarrel but others found to be objectionable.

      Almost none of Catherine’s contemporaries disregarded the Church’s teachings on sex in their entirety, but equally there is plenty of evidence that very few accepted them in full. Moralists noted with concern, disappointment, and apparent surprise that very few men admitted to masturbation when they confessed their sins.23 The suggestion that couples should wait three days before consummating a marriage was almost universally ignored.24 Clerical tomes lambasted homosexual activity, masturbation, foreplay, oral sex, and anal sex, lumping them all together as sodomy, but even here there were inconsistencies. For every morality guide that ranked homosexual sex in the same category of vice as masturbation, there were others that ranked it just above bestiality, such as the manual written to help confessors in the assigning of penance which carefully ranked every sexual transgression from the least severe (an unchaste kiss) to the worst (bestiality). In the same list of ascending vice, incest was number eleven, while masturbation was jarringly ranked as number twelve, which was four ranks worse than the rape of a virgin, itself classed as marginally worse than the rape or abduction of a married woman. Many lay Christians found these debates absurd and correspondingly ignored thundering assertions like the one that claimed that if a sinner ‘has foully touched his own member so that he has polluted himself and poured out his own semen, this sin is greater than if he had lain with his own mother’.25

      However, even if people did not always pay attention to the obsessively detailed denunciations from the guardians of sexual morality, there was still widespread acceptance of the importance of chastity, especially in women, and a belief that sexual intercourse created a bond between two people that could not easily be broken. Medicine taught that women were more lustful than men, more illogical, more emotional, and more susceptible to biological impulses. Female orgasm was believed to be desirable in securing a conception, perhaps one of the few pieces of medical advice that worked in a woman’s favour in the 1530s. The rest seemed to focus either on their emotional volatility or the horrors that sex could inflict on them – childbirth, after all, killed many, and contemporary textbooks acknowledged that some women endured great pain during sex itself, perhaps because of a prolapsed uterus or some other infirmity, when ‘such women cannot endure a man’s penis because of the size of it, and sometimes they are forced to endure it whether they would or not’.26

      A woman’s life could be ended or ruined by the consequences of sex, a point which was constantly stressed in the hope of encouraging restraint. Virginity, or perhaps more accurately an unsullied reputation, was the most valuable part of an aristocratic lady’s social armour. Without it, she was a defenceless and easy target. Catherine was clearly enjoying her sexual relationship with Francis, while doing her research in how to avoid becoming a mother. Her boast that she knew how to ‘meddle’ with a man without risking pregnancy suggests that she knew something about oral sex – number fourteen in the aforementioned confessors’ manual, between having sex outside the missionary position and homosexuality – or the other rudiments of sixteenth-century contraception. In the rural idyll at Horsham or behind the walls of her grandmother’s London mansion, it was easy to make the mistake of thinking that biology and the disapproving stares of Mary Lascelles were her greatest threats.

      Before the dowager arrived at her pew for morning Mass, her servants gathered the usual pile of letters left there as petitions for her. After a service at Lambeth, one note brought a nasty surprise: it claimed that if the dowager went up to the maidens’ chamber half an hour after her usual bedtime ‘you shall see that which shall displease you’.27 The dowager ‘stormed’ in a rage and only through sheer luck did the girls manage to hide the worst from her. Perhaps it was one night where only a few couples were meeting or most of the men managed to make it into the curtained gallery in time. In any case, the duchess did not discover that Catherine was seeing Dereham. The note was opaque enough for the dowager to think that it referred to another young man

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