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it seems that the eldest at least did so under duress.69 The eldest two were regular fixtures at court by the time Catherine joined it. Henry Howard, the duke’s twenty-two-year-old heir apparent, enjoyed the courtesy title of Earl of Surrey, but his father kept a tight control of the purse strings, which might explain why he was able to win his son’s loyalty.70 Surrey was married in his teens to the Earl of Oxford’s daughter, and she was pregnant with their fourth child when Catherine went to court for the first time.71 A superb horseman and intellectually brilliant, Surrey was a celebrated poet who helped pioneer several new verse forms in English, most notably blank verse and the English sonnet.72 Like many of his relatives, he had a flammable temper, unassailable pride in his ancestry, and the same views about the damage being done, as they saw it, to the social hierarchy by men such as Thomas Cromwell. Unlike his father, Surrey’s religious views leaned towards reform.

His younger sister, Mary, had been married at fourteen to the king’s bastard son, the Duke of Richmond, and became a widow at seventeen when her husband was left sufficiently weakened by a virus to succumb to a subsequent bacterial infection.73 Mary was as bright as her brother, which meant that her father thought she was too clever for a woman. Compared to Catherine, her education had been exhaustive. She was also attractive and tenacious – since her husband’s death, Mary and her family had been fighting to get the widowhood settlement promised to her at the time of the marriage. As Dowager Duchess of Richmond and Somerset, she was owed an annual income of £1,000 from the government, but because the marriage had never been consummated, owing to the couple’s youth, the king claimed that there was some doubt about whether Mary had any right to the inheritance.* He turned the matter over to a panel of lawyers and judges, even though all impartial experts, including the Archbishop of Canterbury, believed that Mary was owed the money as Richmond’s widow, with or without a consummated marriage.74 Since no attempt was ever made to take the titles she acquired through marriage from her, the king may have known they were right and simply did not want to part with the money. A year before Catherine left Norfolk House, there had been talk of marrying the lovely Mary to Sir Thomas Seymour, the late queen’s brother. Mary, it seems, had resisted because she suspected that a remarriage would not only cost her the rank of a dowager duchess, twice over, but also diminish her chances of getting the revenue promised to her in 1533.75 In 1539, she too was appointed to the new queen’s staff, though given her rank as a duchess she joined it as one of the great ladies, the six highest-ranking members of it after the queen. She was, at this stage at least, still far above her cousin from Lambeth.

      With Francis Dereham back at Norfolk House, Catherine enjoyed a new flirtation that winter. Thomas Culpepper was the son of a gentry family who had rebelled against Richard III, which meant they were well placed to enjoy royal favour after the Tudors came to power. Catherine’s mother had been a Culpepper, but subsequent accounts of Catherine’s career that describe Thomas as her cousin are incorrect. There were several branches of the Culpeppers, and Thomas was one of the Bedgebury Culpeppers, meaning that he and Catherine were sixth cousins. Even in the world of sixteenth-century kinship where the word ‘cousin’ was stretched to elastic limits, they hardly qualified as related.

      He was exactly her type. He served as one of the king’s gentlemen of the privy chamber, all of whom, according to the household’s ordinances, had to ‘be well-languaged, expert in outward parts, and meet and able to be sent on familiar messages’.76 He was handsome, athletic, and if he had any insecurities, they were extremely well hidden. Even some relatively prim women seemed to forget themselves in Culpepper’s company – Anne Bassett’s mother, Lady Honor Lisle, coyly sent him her colours to wear during a jousting tournament, accompanied by a letter confessing she had never done anything like that before.77 In his younger days Culpepper had served as one of Lord Lisle’s servants and apparently flirting with his master’s wives was a habit he never grew out of.

      An inventory of his possessions taken in 1541 shows that Culpepper was a dapper dresser with ‘numerous gowns, coats and other articles of apparel’.78 The king, who liked to be surrounded by men younger than himself, perhaps in an attempt to recapture something of his own vanished youthfulness, adored him, and the profitable side to royal employment ensured that the unmarried Thomas was a wealthy man by 1539. He owned several properties, including lands from a shuttered monastery in Kent, seven manors, and a fifteen-roomed townhouse at Greenwich. Like many young men, he seemed slightly more interested in clothes and other immediate outgoings such as gambling and high living than in long-term investments. He did not spend much on decorating the townhouse, which was described as having ‘hangings (mostly old) and some very scanty furniture in hall, parlour, and 13 other chambers and a chapel’.79 Given that he spent most of his time at court, perhaps he felt decorating was an unnecessary expense.

      He noticed Catherine shortly after her arrival at court. They were both young, unattached, and good-looking. They flirted and he pursued her. Catherine demurred, apparently holding Thomas at arm’s length. Thomas was persistent, and he told Catherine that he loved her. Their attraction to one another became a topic of conversation between Catherine and the other maids of honour. When she was in Thomas’s company, Catherine flirted but apparently hid the depth of her feelings. From remarks he made a year later, it seems clear that he wanted and expected a sexual relationship, which did not occur.80 Thomas, who expressed love more easily than he felt it, did not deal well with sexual frustration, and so he moved on to somebody else, an unexpected turn of events that caused Catherine to break down in tears in front of her fellow maids. The rejection certainly came as a jolt to someone who had only ever been the object of lavish, even cloying, devotion and pursuit. Prior to Culpepper, Catherine had always been the one to end her relationships, and she had never been replaced by another woman. Henry Manox had apparently even ranked his fiancée after Catherine. Thomas’s rejection was thus a new and unwelcome sensation for Catherine, made worse by the fact that she does seem to have developed genuine feelings for him.

      Courtiers, like servants and politicians, gossiped only a little less than they breathed, and rumour’s ability to report and magnify meant the news reached Francis back at Lambeth. He stormed up to court demanding to know if it was true that Catherine was going to marry Culpepper. They quarrelled, with Dereham predictably insisting that she belonged with him. Catherine, who had already shown her ability to be brutally honest when sufficiently riled, was firmer with him than she had been when they last spoke. ‘What should you trouble me therewith,’ she asked, ‘for you know I will not have you; and if you have heard such report [about Culpepper], you heard more than I do know.’81 Dereham returned to Lambeth, where he demanded to be released from the dowager’s service if it meant living there without Catherine. The dowager thought his desperation would blow over and refused his request.82

      By December, Anne of Cleves was at last on her way to England, and the king was impatient to see her for the first time. He wanted her to travel by sea, but the court in her native Düsseldorf preferred her to make the journey most of the way by land. The winter seas would be treacherous, and Anne was ‘young and beautiful, and if she should be transported by seas they fear how much it might alter her complexion. They fear lest the time of the year being now cold and tempestuous she might there, though she were never so well ordered, take such cold or other disease, considering she was never before upon the seas, as should be to her great peril and the King’s Majesty’s great displeasure.’83 Moving the princess and her retinue by land meant travelling through Hapsburg and French territory, since the Netherlands

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