LITMIR.BIZ

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‘how joyful tidings it must be to all Englishmen to know that such great traitors have been punished’.20 Unofficially, by the time Catherine was spending more time near the capital, the government seems to have been aware of how badly the executions had played with the public. No firm reason for the deaths had been given. Beyond warning a close relative of a plot to murder him, the Poles did not seem to have had any communication with a foreign power. The secrecy of Lord Exeter’s trial invited suspicion, as did Cromwell’s attempts to magnify their crimes beyond what they had been accused of, or even what was credible.21 No one seriously believed that Lord Exeter had been plotting to murder the king and all his children or the king’s claim that the Poles, the Nevilles, and the Courtenays had been plotting treason for a decade.22 When yet more court figures, including the king’s longtime friend Sir Nicholas Carew, were publicly executed in the aftermath of the White Rose intrigue, Cromwell had one of his employees, Richard Morrison, publish a defence of the purge, entitled An invective against the great and detestable vice, treason, wherein the secret practices, and traitorous workings of them that suffered of late are disclosed. Yet still it offered no clear details of the alleged conspiracy, beyond insisting that the accused were papists.23

      As the limbs of the Poles’ dead servants rotted in the streets, the public mood was one of thinly veiled disquiet. There was discontent about impending tax increases, preparations against the possible invasion, and continuing religious tensions.24 Food prices were rising in the west of England, the decision to cut the number of saints’ days was unpopular in dioceses in the south, and, as if to give credence to the worst fears about the international situation, the king, flanked by his courtiers, inspected parades of troops mobilised to guard the capital if the kingdom was attacked.25

      It is inconceivable that Catherine would not have heard of the White Rose Affair – the questions about the conservatism of her uncle were enough to make the Howards uneasy – but how much she knew about the rest of the problems facing the country in 1538 and 1539 is unclear. She was young, privileged, and politically sheltered. It is quite possible that many of the nuances, and much of the unhappiness, bypassed her completely. The rising cost of food in Bristol was unlikely to disturb a girl laughing, flirting, and crying behind the red brick walls of Norfolk House.

      One event that she cannot have missed was the death of the Hapsburg empress consort, which occurred during Catherine’s final irritation-filled months with Francis Dereham. Weakened by a miscarriage, the Empress Isabella had succumbed to a fever, possibly influenza, at the age of thirty-five, and one Spanish courtier observed that ‘to describe the sadness which His Majesty felt at her tragic death will need many pages’.26 Royal etiquette was inviolable, unaffected by passing trivialities like the threat of war or diplomatic crises, so when news arrived of Isabella of Portugal’s death in Toledo, the Tudor court acted as if the spouse of a cherished ally had passed away, rather than the empress of a country expected to invade within the year. Henry ordered his court to wear mourning for fifteen days, and a service was organised at St Paul’s Cathedral, which began with five heralds carrying banners of the Virgin Mary and St Elisabeth, the late empress’s patron saint. The archbishops of Canterbury and York participated, and both the country’s surviving dukes, five earls, and Thomas Cromwell attended, along with the Lord Mayor of London and all his aldermen, dressed in black robes. Their attire blended in with the dark velvet and hangings that covered the enormous church, broken only by the light of the candles, the golden letters reading Miserere mei Deus on the empty hearse, and the colourful Hapsburg coats of arms, which had been installed especially for the service. No one in the capital could escape the obsequies for the empress – every parish church in London was ordered to light candles and sing a requiem for her.27 St Mary-at-Lambeth, the church that stood less than a minute’s walk from the dowager’s town house, was not exempt.

      Beneath the façade, diplomatic tensions simmered. English councillors noted that the French and imperial ambassadors turned up to the service at St Paul’s together, a pointed display of their countries’ continued amity, and King Henry sent his Lord Chancellor to represent him, rather than attend in person. Even less tactfully, eleven days after the service the king and various members of his entourage were in public to watch a performance on the Thames in which two galleys engaged in a mock battle that culminated with actors dressed as the pope and the college of cardinals losing and being tossed into the river. The disgusted French ambassador refused to attend a spectacle he described as a ‘game of poor grace’.28

      The anti-papal river pageant took place in June 1539, probably before Catherine joined the court. Her debut and the months immediately after are the least documented part of her adult life.29 Nonetheless, it is possible to piece together a broad picture of events in the final third or quarter of 1539, beginning with the acceleration of the king’s plans to marry again that ultimately brought Catherine to court for the first time as a maid of honour.

      The invasion threat settled the choice of who would be the next queen consort. The English ambassador to Paris reported home that the Queen of France, a Hapsburg archduchess by birth, was doing everything in her power to strengthen the alliance between her husband and her brother.30 Accepting that the Franco-Hapsburg pact could not be broken for the time being, Henry decided to look for friends elsewhere. Englishmen at the imperial court noticed that the emperor could not mask his irritation at news that Henry VIII had sent a delegation to meet with King Christian III in Copenhagen – years earlier, Christian had deposed the emperor’s brother-in-law and driven the then Danish royal family into exile, including the aforementioned Princess Christina.31 Riling the Hapsburgs temporarily became the driving force behind English foreign policy, and it was in this mood that attention turned to Duke Wilhelm of Cleves, a German nobleman who was involved in a territorial dispute with the emperor over possession of the county of Gueldres. His eldest sister, Sybilla, was married to the head of the Schmalkaldic League, a federation of German rulers who were generally sympathetic to the Reformation and wary of the Hapsburg emperor who technically remained their overlord. An alliance with the league, through one of Sybilla’s unmarried sisters, meant that if the empire and France attacked, England would have allies who could distract them by starting a war in the Hapsburgs’ German territories. In the first week of October 1539, the negotiations ended with the announcement that Henry VIII would marry the Duke of Cleves’s middle sister, Anne.32

      Once the tentative timetable for the royal wedding had been established, more and more women returned to court to take, or seek, their places in the re-formed household. Catherine was still in her grandmother’s care by the first week of August, when her name is absent from a thank-you note signed by ladies of the court to the king, after they were taken to Portsmouth for a banquet and tour of the navy’s new ships.33 Further circumstantial evidence suggests that she should have been at court by 5 November, when the king announced that he expected his fiancée to arrive in the next twenty days.34 That optimistic estimate was defeated by the atrocious weather conditions which delayed the princess’s arrival by a month, but the king’s hope suggests that Catherine and many of the other ladies had already arrived in the palace. Preparations for the future queen’s numerous official receptions had started by 24 October, which supports a timeline that has Catherine ending her romance with Francis Dereham in the late summer of 1539 and arriving at court before the autumn.

      By Catherine’s own admission, she was keen to go. She later told the Archbishop of Canterbury, ‘all that knew me, and kept my company, knew how glad and desirous I was to come to the court’.35 Many of her

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