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with her husband, along with one of the dowager’s maids who had married a city official there. Lord William found a new job for Alice Wilkes as she prepared to marry Anthony Restwold, who planned to join the administration in Calais. The disapproving Mary Lascelles became Mary Hall after she married and moved to Sussex. Dereham’s friend Edward Waldegrave was, like Catherine, entering royal service by joining the household of the infant Prince of Wales.36 Some of the old group remained in the dowager’s service, including Robert Damport and, to his immense frustration, Francis Dereham.37

      Catherine’s enthusiasm for entering the glamorous uncertainty of palace life was not shared by everybody. Some peers, such as the earls of Arundel and Shrewsbury, were notably infrequent attendees, preferring to leave the necessary networking to their relatives. Poets like John Skelton and Thomas Wyatt, who knew the court well, mercilessly satirised its mores. One of Wyatt’s most severe criticisms of his fellow courtiers was the way in which daughters, sisters, and nieces could be farmed out for their family’s political advantage.38 In the oft-repeated narrative of Catherine’s life, this was her fate – brought to court and groomed by her relatives to seduce the ageing king, maximise their influence over him, weaken Queen Anne’s position, and in doing so destroy Thomas Cromwell, the architect of her marriage. The chronology of Catherine’s rapid rise to prominence does not support this narrative, nor do the memories of those who knew her. Rather, it seems to have been coincidence, not design, which first brought Catherine into the limelight.

      The dowager duchess did not accompany Catherine to court, but Norfolk House was close enough for the girl to visit and for the dowager to keep informed of what was going on at court.39 On several subsequent occasions, the dowager expressed variations on the remark ‘that the King’s highness did cast a fantasy [attraction or fancy] to Katharine Howard the first time that ever his Grace saw her’.40 The dowager made her claims in conversation with several of the king’s councillors in 1541 and tellingly they did not correct her – they simply wanted to know who had told her.41 Her recollections suggest that the king’s initial attraction to Catherine was a spontaneous case of lust at first sight.

      Throughout his life, Henry VIII was fascinated by the story of King David, the Old Testament hero who, while flawed, nonetheless fulfilled God’s plans for him. Over the course of his reign, Henry paid for three series of tapestries that depicted scenes from David’s life.42 According to the Bible, in middle age David spotted a young beauty called Bathsheba bathing one evening, was overcome with lust, and ruthlessly pursued her until she became his queen.43 Given his fascination with King David and his subsequent marriage to Catherine, the dowager’s claim that he ‘cast a fantasy’ on their first meeting might suggest a similarly single-minded pursuit. However, if Henry did notice Catherine when she was first presented at court in the autumn of 1539, any flirtation seems to have been obvious, if the dowager duchess is to be believed, but short-lived. After that first meeting and perhaps some subsequent slightly lecherous displays of fondness towards her when she was in his company, there are no further signs of royal interest in Catherine for several months. Considering that Anne of Cleves had not yet arrived in England and the king had such high hopes for his forthcoming marriage to her, it would be odd if the Howards had planned to put Catherine in the unenviable position of being her employer’s competition, especially when all the signs initially suggested that Anne would enjoy her husband’s support and affection.44

      Instead, Catherine settled down to life in the queen’s household, something that cannot have been too onerous considering their mistress was still on the other side of the North Sea. All the other ranks of ladies-in-waiting were either married or widowed. Catherine’s immediate companions were the other maids of honour, young and unmarried girls like herself from a noble background who had been sent to court to serve the future queen, who would act as both their chaperone and matchmaker. Catherine was joined by her second cousin Katherine Carey, the eldest child of Anne Boleyn’s sister Mary, and Mary Norris, who had been the Duke of Norfolk’s ward ever since her father was executed for treason in 1536.45 Earlier that year, Mary’s brother had managed to win back some of the estates that had been confiscated by the Crown at the time of their father’s death, and her admission to court was another sign of their reviving fortunes.46 The final maid of honour we can be certain of was Anne Bassett, who was very pretty and fluent in French and English, but struggled with writing the latter to the extent that she used a scribe for letters home.47 Anne, whose stepfather, Lord Lisle, was King Henry’s uncle, was the only one of the maids to have lived at court before – she had joined Jane Seymour’s household shortly before her death.48 Since her parents lived in Calais, Anne spent the next two years residing at court or in the homes of her well-connected mother’s many friends. That autumn, she had gone to her cousin’s house in the country to recuperate from a cold before returning to London.49 She certainly knew how to talk like a courtier – she had been part of the group of ladies invited to a banquet on some of the new warships at Portsmouth. As part of their thanks to the king, they wrote, ‘We have seen and been in your new Great Ship, and the rest of your ships at Portsmouth, which are things so goodly to behold, that, in our lives we have not seen (excepting your royal person and my lord the Prince your son) a more pleasant sight.’50 Along with the French phrases and little Latinisms with which courtiers liked to liberally pepper their conversations, Catherine was also going to have to learn the knack of laying flattery on with the proverbial trowel.

      The period between Queen Jane Seymour’s death on 24 October 1537 and the king’s marriage to Anne of Cleves on 6 January 1540 was the longest period in Henry VIII’s reign in which he was without a wife. The queen’s household was a lucrative source of aristocratic employment, and its absence in those years had been felt both by the young women who hoped to come to court and by their parents. However, when Henry began to reconvene the household in 1539, he did so after a recent batch of reforms that sought to limit its size. The aristocrats’ jockeying for places attempted to circumvent the monarch’s decision, trying everything from milking family connections to sending thoughtful personal presents to those who might help them.51 Anne Bassett was sent into the royal presence with a gift of the king’s favourite marmalade as an accompaniment to a request that her younger sister be allowed to join the household. Reading Anne Bassett’s letters to Calais, it is clear that her mother, Lady Honor Lisle, had been applying pressure to her daughter to be successful in her petition. Anne, dictating to a scribe, reported that she had ‘presented your codiniac [marmalade] to the king’s highness and his grace does like it wondrous well, and gave your ladyship hearty thanks for it’, but given the number of requests the king was receiving, Anne Bassett apologetically told her mother that she had not been able to press her sister’s suit for ‘fear how his grace would take it’.52 The palace, at least initially, stood firm and the cap on numbers was maintained.53

      The maids of honour, who were the lowest rank in the queen’s ‘above stairs’ household, bar the chamberers, were out of bed at about six or seven o’clock in the morning to supervise the chamberers, maidservants who would light the fires in the queen’s apartments and clear away the collapsible beds or mattresses that many of the servants slept on during the night. Once the queen arrived from Germany, Catherine and her colleagues were expected to accompany her to Mass and attend to her during her meals. Catherine’s place in the household gave her access to the privy chamber, the queen’s private rooms, which very few courtiers ever saw. Entry to them was controlled

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