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Young and Damned and Fair: The Life and Tragedy of Catherine Howard at the Court of Henry VIII. Gareth Russell
Читать онлайн.Название Young and Damned and Fair: The Life and Tragedy of Catherine Howard at the Court of Henry VIII
Год выпуска 0
isbn 9780008128296
Автор произведения Gareth Russell
Издательство HarperCollins
The gallery had two little rooms jutting off from it – one held a small altar and the other, separated by a lattice grille, contained a prie-dieu. The queen went there to hear Mass every day, accompanied by a few of her maids of honour. The queen’s priests were not technically members of her elite privy chamber staff, and so to prevent them or their altar boys entering the inner sanctum, a small devotional space was set aside in the gallery. It was only on holy days that the queen joined her husband to progress through the throngs of courtiers to attend Mass in one of the palace’s public chapels.55
Along with memorising the complex rules of who could pass through which door and no further, maids of honour were expected to look the part. They were to be stylish enough to complement their mistress without outshining her. Catherine’s early purchases during her time with Francis Dereham showed her appreciation for fashion, but life at court required more than a few tasteful silk flowers. The court was obsessed with appearances and everyone wanted to make sure their clothes advertised their position in the hierarchy. Pins held together the voluminous folds of noblewomen’s dresses – the king’s eldest daughter ordered 10,000 of them for her wardrobe – and the extortionate cost of the dresses meant that hand-me-downs were greatly appreciated.56 Catherine’s family were expected to provide for her when she made her debut, particularly her wardrobe, but as an unmarried girl she was also one of the few ladies in the queen’s service who received a salary. She and the other maids of honour received £10 a year, a sum she immediately used to pay back Francis Dereham what he had loaned her to buy some clothes in Lambeth.57 It was a further indicator of her desire to move on from their relationship.
Discipline was harsh in the royal household, with a warning for the first offence and dismissal for the second.58 Many of the palace’s rules were hygiene related – residents were forbidden from leaving half-eaten food or dirty dishes around, and if any were found the servants had to clear them away immediately.59 Urinals were built near most of the major courtyards, though as any attendee at a modern festival or large-scale outdoor event will know, even the most adequate provisions did not always satisfy men who were either in a rush or drunk. To combat this, palace officials at Greenwich daubed white crosses on some of the palace’s outer brickwork, counting on the fact that the symbol of Christ’s crucifixion would prevent anyone from defacing it. For Catherine, the proper toilets were called the ‘common house of easement’, a large building where the toilets were covered by a plain piece of wood with a hole over a large tank. Depending on how old the palace was, the tank’s contents were either periodically flushed away or cleared out by a gang of labourers once the court had moved on to another residence. In the newer or renovated buildings, water from the palace moat was used to flush, but pipes ensured the filth was taken away from the moat itself, which was kept clean as a breeding ground for carp and other fish that ended up on the palace tables.60
Although Catherine had grown up in the aristocracy and its households, nothing in her past could have prepared her for the splendour of palace life. In terms of size and magnificence, the English royal establishment had no peer in the British Isles. Her own family’s vast wealth paled in comparison to the king’s. One modern estimate puts Henry’s income at nearly forty times the Duke of Norfolk’s.61 The court was the great theatre of political display, and under Henry VIII it seemingly had enough funds to glitter. Foreign visitors remarked that the prettiest of the king’s houses were Greenwich Palace, Hampton Court, and Windsor Castle, but his favourite residence was also his largest, the Palace of Whitehall, which in 1539 was still sometimes referred to in courtiers’ conversations by its old name of York Place.62 A sprawling complex of buildings, Whitehall was the largest palace in Europe, and it only yielded the accolade to Versailles after an accidental fire in 1698. It stood, like nearly all of Henry’s largest homes, on the bank of the Thames, and when Catherine first arrived there as a resident in the autumn of 1539, preparations were under way for a series of renovations and expansions, including the construction of a set of riverside rooms for the king’s eldest daughter.63 The expansion of Whitehall would cost nearly £30,000. To put the scale of its expense into context, the construction of the entirety of the king’s fabulous new hunting lodge at Nonsuch had finished at £24,500. For the palace expansion 12,600 yards of land were reclaimed from the Thames via a 700-foot stone dyke that would help create the space needed for the new gatehouse, banqueting hall, outdoor preaching auditorium, orchards, and enlarged gardens. Whitehall already had the largest set of royal apartments in England, four tennis courts, two bowling alleys, and a tiltyard. An entire suburb of Westminster had been bought up and demolished to make room for its twenty-three acres – compared to six at Hampton Court. It was so large that a gatehouse was necessary to straddle the busy London street that divided the park side, with most of the palace gardens, from the public rooms, stables, and accommodations on the other side.64
Life in this splendid maze brought Catherine into more regular contact with other members of her family. Her elder half sister Isabella was also in the queen’s household, as one of the ladies of the privy chamber, an elite band of eight who helped the queen to dress and tended to her in her most intimate moments. Isabella and her husband, Sir Edward Baynton, who was to serve as vice chamberlain of the same household, were beneficiaries of sustained if restrained royal favour, having received two countryside properties in grants earlier that year.65 Catherine’s paternal uncle the duke was still a vital man at the age of sixty-six and a prominent presence at court. The Howard fortunes had admittedly stuttered after the execution of Queen Anne Boleyn and then Lord Thomas’s elopement with the king’s niece, but the duke’s military and diplomatic skills meant the government had come to rely on him again after the Pilgrimage of Grace and during the attempts to prevent an invasion. His ability to win three of the maids of honour places for members of his affinity reflected his continued influence at court, as did his pension from the French government, letters from petitioners, such as those who hoped he could use his position to save the monastery of Our Lady in western Ireland, and his regular attendance of the Privy Council.66
Catherine did not know this uncle, with his patrician nose and thin lips, as well as she knew her uncle William or her aunt Katherine, Countess of Bridgewater, but she would have been presented to him before he brought her to court. Sometimes, when it was too dark for him to travel back from any business in Lambeth safely, the duke was invited to stay at his stepmother’s house, but he was not as close to Agnes as her own children were.67 His marriage to the late Duke of Buckingham’s daughter was unhappy enough to warrant comparisons to Jason and Medea, and there were contested allegations that Norfolk had beaten his wife along with the uncontested fact that he was now living in sin with a mistress called Bess Holland.68 To his wife’s distress, their three