LITMIR.BIZ

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horses at market.3 Marie eventually dropped out of the race to marry the King of Scots, and her younger sister Renée, who was also considered, took the veil.4 After her, the favourite was Christina, a seventeen-year-old Danish princess who had lived in exile since her father’s deposition. On her mother’s side, Christina was a Hapsburg, and she had been under their care since Queen Elisabeth’s death in 1526. Married at thirteen and widowed at sixteen, Christina of Denmark was still wearing mourning for her husband, the Duke of Milan, when English envoys began to court her by proxy for their master. Letters to Cromwell and the king described her as ‘a goodly personage of excellent beauty’; her dimples were lauded along with ‘the great majesty of her bearing and the charm of her manners’, as well as her faint lisp which ‘doth nothing misbecome her’.5

      Amid the dimple praising, the English diplomats seem to have underestimated Christina’s intelligence. She came from a family of clever and self-assured women. When an envoy told Christina that Henry VIII was ‘the most gentle gentleman that liveth, his nature so benign and pleasant that I think no man hath heard many angry words pass his mouth’, the princess struggled to keep a straight face.6 Like the French court before them, the Hapsburgs were left cold by Henry’s wooing techniques. His belligerence on the subject of the pope’s authority, which both the Hapsburg emperor and the King of France still acknowledged, irritated almost as much as the superior and slightly hectoring tone he used in his correspondence. Even as Henry was inaccurately claiming that his hand in marriage was desired by all the great powers of Europe, his representatives noticed that whenever they sought a subsequent audience with Christina, she had scheduled yet another fortuitously timed hunting trip with her aunt, the Dowager Queen of Hungary.7

      For most of Henry VIII’s reign, England’s foreign policy had been predicated on the assumption that France and the Hapsburg Empire would always be in a state of enmity, with England able to alter the balance in favour of one or the other. France, ruled by the womanising François I, had been alarmed by the increase in Hapsburg power when his contemporary Charles V inherited the central European territories of his father’s family and the expanding Spanish empire of his mother’s. The emperor’s attempts to dominate the northern half of the Italian peninsula as thoroughly as he did the southern became the two countries’ central point of contention, aggravated by personal rivalries and decades of hostility. Then, in the summer of 1538, the two monarchs signed a ten-year truce which received the blessing of Pope Paul III, who, a few months later, published a bull excommunicating Henry VIII for his schismatic disobedience and iconoclasm.8 For the English government, a rapprochement between the empire and the French was as unwelcome as it was alarming. At best, there was a concern that the alliance might provide aid or encouragement to discontented aristocrats in Ireland, who were opposed to the king’s religious policies.9 At worst, there was the terrifying possibility that the former enemies would invade England themselves and punish a king who had, in one cardinal’s words, ‘rent the mystical body of Christ which is His Church’. Fear of attack produced stories that the country would be divided, with the French occupying Wales, Cornwall, and the southern shires, while the emperor annexed everything north of the Thames.10

      To defend the realm, strongholds were built along the coastline, from Berwick in the northeast to Falmouth in Cornwall. The king inspected many of them personally, while the Earl of Hertford was sent to assess the fortifications in Calais, where the French would certainly attack first.11 The suspicion that the pope had ‘moved, excited and stirred divers great princes and potentates of Christendom, not alonely to invade this realm of England with mortal war, but also by fire and sword to extermin[ate] and utterly destroy the whole nation’ helps to explain not just the nervous atmosphere in London but also the slew of arrests and interrogations, subsequently known as the White Rose Affair, which affected Catherine’s family and took place around the time she began her relationship with Francis Dereham.12

      Margaret Pole, Countess of Salisbury, was an aged grande dame of the English aristocracy when she was arrested. A niece of two kings, Edward IV and Richard III, cousin of Henry’s late mother Elizabeth of York, and godmother to his eldest daughter, she was ‘the last of the right line and name of Plantagenet’, the royal family who had ruled England in one form or another between 1154 and 1485.13 Her third son, Reginald, had never accepted the legality of the break with Rome and chose life abroad, where he became a cardinal who wrote stinging tracts criticising Henry VIII’s morals and policies. Henry knew that Reginald Pole was actively encouraging the papal initiative for a joint Franco-Hapsburg invasion, which was especially worrying given that his mother, who was the fifth or sixth richest person in England, had sizeable estates on the southern coast.14 If imperial troops landed there, Henry suspected that her loyalty could not be counted upon.

      One of the Poles’ servants betrayed the family by revealing that they were still in contact with the traitorous Reginald and that they had warned him about English plots to have him assassinated. The government homed in on the Countess of Salisbury’s youngest son, Sir Geoffrey Pole, and questioned him relentlessly. The Poles had certainly been indiscreet – at home, they had lamented the destruction of the monasteries and ‘plucking down of the Abbeys’ images’, and criticised the king’s dishonesty in how he had negotiated with the northern rebels of 1536. One of their cousins had described Henry as ‘a beast and worse than a beast’, and Geoffrey’s eldest brother, Lord Montagu, had commented hopefully on the life-shortening potential of the king’s infected leg after an ulcer had closed over earlier that year and, for ten days, the monarch writhed in agony.15

      Under interrogation, Geoffrey provided enough evidence to destroy them all except, frustratingly for the government, his mother. It was not through lack of trying on their part. An unsubstantiated contemporary rumour claimed that Thomas Cromwell threatened Geoffrey Pole with torture.16 Sir Geoffrey insisted that while his family regretted the changes to the Church, they had never imitated Reginald by plotting the king’s deposition. A particularly horrible aspect of the case was the poor man’s attempt to exonerate even as he accidentally condemned. He affirmed or confessed conversations that the government used as evidence of treason, which he relayed to prove nothing more serious than private dissatisfaction. There were more arrests, more interrogations, and on 9 December 1538, Geoffrey’s eldest brother was executed alongside their kinsmen, the Marquess of Exeter and Sir Edward Neville. Three of their servants were hanged, then drawn and quartered, their limbs displayed throughout London, and the Countess of Salisbury was attainted and imprisoned in the Tower. In an age when self-destruction was regarded as a mortal sin, a guilt-addled Geoffrey made several suicide bids – twenty days after his brother was beheaded, he attempted to suffocate himself in his cell at the Tower.17 He was pardoned in recompense for his testimony and eventually went abroad, where he was reunited with his brother Reginald, who had to take care of the broken man for the rest of his life.18

      Worryingly for the Howards, they heard later that when the Marquess of Exeter’s wife had been brought in for questioning, Cromwell had spent a great deal of time trying to get her to incriminate the Duke of Norfolk. Luckily for them, Lady Exeter held firm in denying that Norfolk had anything to do with her husband’s alleged politics, but the duke did not forget, or forgive, Cromwell’s attempts to implicate him during the White Rose Affair.19 The deteriorating relationship between the duke and Henry’s chief minister helped shape Catherine’s career when she arrived at court a few months after Lord Exeter’s execution.

      Within

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