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stitched into it, but Catherine was less enthused.

      She was starting to withdraw from him. Francis’s ardour was suffocating, his attentiveness more possessive than protective, and his volatile temper now struck Catherine as a predictable and irritating liability. After their few months together, Francis Dereham was stripped of his appeal. To his frustration, she evaded giving him a firm answer about a wedding. Their marital pet names for each other fell by the wayside, as Catherine tried to slow down Francis’s march to the altar. At the time, a pre-contract referred to a commitment between two people who were pledged to marry at a future date. With it in place, many couples began to sleep together, partly because of the belief that sex created a bond as unbreakable as marriage. Obviously, in practice it did not always work that way, but pre-contracts were a serious business, especially for the upper classes. One could be disinherited if evidence was found or manufactured suggesting a parent had been pre-contracted to someone else before their marriage, thus rendering their future children bastards in the eyes of the law.44 A real problem lay in the fact that the details of what constituted a pre-contract were infamously blurred, not least because there was no real requirement for them to be written down. At what point did talk of marriage become an unbreakable pledge? As far as Francis Dereham was concerned, he and Catherine were bound to one another. She, it seems, did not view the situation in quite the same way.

      On 19 March 1539, her father died.45 After his second wife’s death, Edmund had married Margaret Jennings, a forceful lady who rather ruled the roost at their home in Calais.46 His last few years had been plagued by bad health and the monetary problems he had tried so hard to escape. One evening, shortly before he was due to arrive as a dinner guest of Lord and Lady Lisle, he had to send a letter to his hostess, addressed with the words, ‘To the Right Honourable the Viscountess Lisle this be delivered – Haste, post haste, haste, for thy life.’ In it, he confessed that he could not attend because the medicine he was taking to cure the pain of kidney stones ‘made me piss my bed this night, for the which my wife hath sore beaten me, and saying it is children’s parts to bepiss their beds’. There is a commendable sense of undaunted humour in Edmund’s letters, perhaps a clue to some of the qualities that had won his contemporaries’ praise so many years ago. It was Lady Lisle who had recommended the medicine that made him so ill – ‘You have made me such a pisser,’ he joked, ‘that I dare not this day go abroad [outside], wherefore I beseech you to make mine excuse to my lord … for I shall not be with you this day at dinner.’47 Two years before he passed away, his colleagues in Calais had voted to elect him their mayor, a move that surprised everyone and raised a few eyebrows in London. Those on the ground in the town advised the government to approve the election, as they customarily did, because the result had been a popular one with ‘the Caliciens’.48 Evidently, in his new home Edmund had managed to build up a decent supply of goodwill, but when the letter announcing the election was read out to the king, he ‘laughed full heartily’ and vetoed it. Thomas Cromwell was ordered to write to the burgesses and aldermen of Calais to inform them ‘that the King’s Majesty will in no wise that my Lord Howard be admitted unto the Mayoralty’.49 A few months after the king torpedoed his career, Edmund’s religious conservatism got him into trouble.50 Then, on St Joseph’s Day, a long and frustrating life came to its end.

      Catherine almost certainly saw her father again shortly before his death. The previous spring, he had returned to England, and Lambeth, to act as one of the chief mourners at the funeral of his younger sister Elizabeth Boleyn, Countess of Ormond.51 Elizabeth was buried in the Howard crypt in St Mary-at-Lambeth, so it is highly probable that Catherine and others from Norfolk House made the short journey to attend. This would have been the first time father and daughter had seen one another in nearly seven years, and it does not seem as if Edmund permanently relocated, firstly because the hoped-for job at court never materialised and secondly because he could not stay while he remained in debt to so many people. His death in 1539 made Catherine an orphan, and the responsibility to find her a good position in life rested even more with the other Howards. Luckily, an opportunity presented itself, which would also have the added advantage of getting her away from Francis Dereham. Her uncle William had been involved in several missions abroad to scout eligible princesses for Henry VIII. By summer 1539, he was well placed to know that the queen’s household was going to be revived to serve the Duke of Cleves’s younger sister, Anne, who would arrive in England for her wedding within the year. The Duke of Norfolk and his allies at court were unenthusiastic about the king’s choice. Many of them would have preferred an alliance with the French or the Hapsburg Empire, whereas the queen-to-be’s relatives were part of a German cabal against Europe’s most powerful family. Even more upsettingly, the match was seen as a victory for its chief architect, Thomas Cromwell. Politics aside, the queen’s household was an ideal place for a well-bred young girl, particularly if she still needed a husband, since she would be introduced to the most eligible men in the country. Catherine’s uncle Norfolk sent word to Norfolk House that Catherine had been selected to join the court as a maid of honour.

      The fantastic new life opening up in front of her gave Catherine the push she needed to break things off with Francis. As with Manox, the two talked things over in the orchard at Lambeth. Francis claimed later that Catherine wept hysterically, sobbing that she had to obey her family’s orders. In her memory, she lost her temper at his numerous agonised questions about his future – she replied that he ‘might do as he list’, since his plans were no longer her concern.52 Both versions of their conversation may contain some element of truth. Perhaps Catherine did weep at seeing how upset he was – it is entirely possible to feel grief for a relationship that one nonetheless intends to end. The hesitation or mixed emotions resulted in another failure to drive the point home. She did not make clear to Francis that she considered this a permanent goodbye, nor did she state firmly that she had never considered their talk of marriage to constitute a binding pre-contract. Francis, who was both enraged and devastated by this turn of events, still believed there was a chance he would one day be Catherine’s husband.

      Chapter 6

       The King’s Highness Did Cast a Fantasy

      And it came to pass in an eveningtide, that David arose from off his bed, and walked upon the roof of the king’s house: and from the roof he saw a woman washing herself; and the woman was very beautiful to look upon. And David sent and enquired after the woman. And one said, ‘Is this not Bathsheba …?’

      – 2 Samuel 11:2–3

      Catherine’s arrival at the Tudor court was made possible by royal deaths and the fluctuations of international diplomacy. Two years before Catherine left the dowager’s care, Queen Jane Seymour died shortly after giving birth to a son who, to the relief of nearly everybody, survived. The queen’s funeral and the hunt for her replacement were not separated by a significant passage of time.1 English diplomats were mobilised to find the king a wife and, through her, an alliance for a country that had found itself politically isolated since the break with Rome. Several princesses were considered, with the daughters of the Hapsburg and Valois families the front runners for most of the negotiations, as a bride from one of the two continental rivals seemed like the obvious choice. Catherine’s uncle William was dispatched to France to keep an eye on Marie de Guise, the twenty-four-year-old widow of the Duke of Longueville.2 The French were increasingly offended by King Henry’s demands to see the lady before he married her, until the exasperated French ambassador in London felt the need

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