Catherine Howard

Part III of III

Map of the Tower of London

Chapter IX

The story, so far, was one of Manox and Derham. When Wriothesley came from the Tower to the council, to piece Cranmer's document with his own, there could be no shadow of doubt that Lassells' sister had been absolutely justified. Derham had confessed that he had known Catherine as she had described.

The King had chosen his young bride for personal reasons. He heard this revelation not as a man of power, in whom the passion of power and the apprehensiveness of power were uppermost. He heard it as a very simple human being.

A deep silence came on the council as the disclosure of Catherine's blemish was made, a blemish that could never be hidden and that secretly pleased every one who had seen a target in her temperament.

It was a long time before Henry could utter his sorrow. He sat there, feeling old, his heart "pierced with pensiveness." Then he began to cry. It must have moved every one. "And finally, with plenty of tears, which was strange in his courage," he opened the heart that had been wounded.

Chapter X

This was the indulgent Henry that Catherine had known. And had she been behaving properly during her marriage, she might have escaped being sent to a nunnery for life. But the past treads on the present. Lassells' sister had cited the chamberer Tilney at the Duchess's. Tilney was hunted up and she mentioned Marget Morton: Morton named Culpeper.

"I never mistrusted the Queen," exclaimed this woman, "until at Hatfield I saw her look out of her chamber window on Master Culpeper after such sort that I thought there was love between them."

This was the thing Catherine had feared. Before she could warn Culpeper to save himself, he was caught and sent to the Tower.

As the council reported the scandal in a graphic letter November 11th, to Paget at Paris, they wound up significantly, "Now you may see what was done before marriage. God knoweth what hath been done since."

Chapter XI

Norfolk's thin lips curled bitterly. He first told Marillac that his niece had "prostituted herself to seven or eight persons." This was out of his imagination. Later he said that only Derham was clearly proved. He told Marillac of Catherine's state. She "refuses to drink or eat and weeps and cries like a madwoman, so that they must take away things by which she might hasten her death."

Her uncle felt no pity for her but the deepest pity for Henry. He spoke with tears in his eyes of the King's grief, who loved her much, and of the misfortune to his own house in her and Anne Boleyn. Henry was so grieved, he said, that he proposed never to take another wife.

But even the Culpeper disclosure did not turn Henry against Catherine. He did not see her again, but his heart was not hard. He bowed to the catastrophe and Chapuys learned about this time, November 19th, from sober Southampton that Henry "would show more patience and mercy than many might think - more even than her own relations wished, meaning Norfolk, who said, God knows why, that he wished the Queen was burned.'' She was, however, sent from Hampton Court to be shut up in Syon, "a late nunnery near Richmond," guarded by four women and some men. And Henry was to go for five or six days to the country "to relieve his mind."

Chapuys, whose asperity had not been softened by years and who incidentally suggested to Charles that when Anne of Cleves had a drop taken she was not so different from Catherine, admitted Henry's grief. "This King has wonderfully felt the case of the Queen, his wife," the old sinner said, "and has certainly shown greater sorrows at her loss than at the faults, loss, or divorce of his preceding wives. It is like the case of the woman who cried more bitterly at the loss of her tenth husband than at the deaths of all the others together, though they had all been good men, but it was because she had never buried one of them before without being sure of the next; and as yet this King has formed neither a plan nor a preference."

Chapter XII

With the two young men in the Tower and Catherine at Syon, there was no chance for her to warn Culpeper. The ministers continued their invaluable police work. The girl's past had been scavenged in every "foul detail," as Marillac put it, and it did not lose in official narration. A dozen servants had been examined. The Lord Privy Seal was told to "pick out from Wilkes" anything that might trip up Lord William Howard. Wriothesley wrote with zest to Sadler, "My woman Tilney hath done us good service." And he triumphantly learned that Derham had once said, "An the King were dead I am sure I might marry her." This was volunteered by another youth. "And no torture," exclaimed the minister, "could make him confess this before."

The extraordinary eagerness to hunt down every bit of evidence was due to the fearful and exciting possibilities of treason and conspiracy. The old Duchess of Norfolk had not only hidden her moneybags, fearing Henry's avidity, but had broken into Derham's coffers and destroyed ballads and letters. This raised the ogre: she, her son, her daughter, and nine servants were quickly rounded up. The divided council were watching Henry as two sides watched a football and they intended to be thorough.

Derham and Culpeper went to trial on December 1st, before a special commission at Guildhall. Catherine's young brothers and Culpeper's relations thought it better to show their indifference by riding about London, while Norfolk, one of the judges, took it on himself, during the trial, to laugh and jeer. Catherine's signed deposition was read, pleas of "Not guilty" were soon changed to "Guilty." The story had no new aspect. Derham admitted complete intimacy, justifying it as an engagement. He was sentenced to death at Tyburn, to be hanged, cut down alive, split open, his bowels burnt, and finally killed by beheading. This terrific sentence was also passed on Culpeper.

"Gentlemen," he had pleaded, "do not seek to know more than that the King deprived me of the thing I love best in the world, and, though you may hang me for it, she loves me as well as I love her, though up to this hour no wrong has ever passed between us. Before the King married her, I thought to make her my wife; and when I saw her lost to me, I was like to die, as you all know how ill I was. The Queen saw my sorrow and showed me favor, and when I saw it, tempted by the devil, I dared one day while dancing to give her a letter, and received a reply from her in two days, telling me she would find a way to comply with my wish. I know nothing more, my lords, on my honor as a gentleman."

Norfolk's sneer showed how he felt.

"You have said quite enough, Culpeper," Hertford commented, "to lose your head."

Ten days of renewed cross-examination followed the death sentence; but no further admissions could be had from them. Derham begged that the extremity of his judgment should be remitted but "the King thinks he has deserved no such mercy." The council, however, sent word that Culpeper was "only to lose his head."

On December 10th, the two young men suffered at Tyburn as decreed.

Till the trials were completed Henry was calm, but as the council strummed on his nerves day by day, each bit of evidence being submitted to him, he suddenly burst out before them into such a storm of grief and rage, calling for a sword to slay Catherine, that they gripped their chairs and thought he had gone mad.

"That wicked woman!" he cried, his face tumid with hate and his eyes boiling. "She never had such delight in her lovers as she shall have torture in her death!"

These expressions exploded from him in the middle of a conference. All of a sudden he broke down and began to cry. She was to have been the wife of his old days. His ill-luck in meeting with such ill-conditioned wives was the thing with which he upbraided his ministers "I blame my council for this mischief!" In a paroxysm he started up and called for horses. No one knew where he would go.

But where would he go? England is an island. His council were willing to do anything, to pass any law, to invent any device, that might protect their master from "the lightness in a woman" which Francis had just written to deplore. To see him ride away in this wild fashion alarmed them: they did their best to make him forget his grief. But he insisted on escaping. "He is gone twenty-five miles from here," reported Marillac, "with no company but musicians and ministers of pastime."

The master's departure did not mean, however, that he had lost touch with his council. He had received a bitter lesson from the public when he committed Anne Boleyn to a criminal death. This time he showed the most masterly comprehension of the art of preparing public opinion. He himself had superintended every single detail of the case against Catherine. The young men were tried in full public. Grand juries everywhere that he and Catherine had been on progress were invited to return true bills. Every minute direction as to Catherine's detention under Edward Baynton (who had been such a good bloodhound in the Boleyn case) came from Henry himself, down to her apparel and her decent style (but "no cloth of estate"). Lady Rochford was set to spy on her, though herself under condemnation. A most complicated set of questions to be put to the Duchess of Norfolk was shrewdly revised and pointed by the King. He had his eye, moreover, on her tangible assets, which were seized and reported to him. But where he had in the earlier crisis rushed the execution of Anne Boleyn, he was now carefully placing the responsibility on his tractable parliament. Henry had made costly mistakes and fed hostility: he had reflected and mastered his lesson.

The council were well trained to carry out his work. In these sparse days of Advent, they did not fast too arduously. One day and another they had salmon and flounder, sole and turbot, white herring and bacon herring, gudgeons and pike, shrimps and baked eels and oysters, beef, mutton, veal "marybones," rabbit, snipe, plover, larks, crane, quail, geese, peas, beans, onions, cherries, strawberries, pippins, oranges, pears, chestnuts, pomegranates, and all the other food and drink that go to support the labor of statesmanship. They were on the whole a team of ample and hearty men. They had little grudge against the old Duchess and not much against Lord William. They probably rather enjoyed the fact that the Duke thought it the better part to retreat to Norfolk like a wary campaigner. The surly willingness of Gardiner to take his share in running Catherine to ground could scarcely have been lost on any one of them. The extraordinary report that the King's good sister Anne of Cleves had just made him an uncle, "for the King is informed that she has indeed had a child and imputes a default in her officers for not informing him," must have stirred urgent and amused curiosity. The rumor estopped, at any rate, the English-Cleves-French alliance, and paved the way for that reunion with the Emperor to which the world was again tending.

But for obvious reasons the council was left dominant. Henry had gone away with his ministers of pastime. He was once more a man of sorrows. He seemed to turn his back on the fearful quandary, and to leave Catherine to ministers of state and ministers of grace.

Chapter XIII

She was now cut off at Syon till parliament met in the middle of January. During the first weeks a feverous madness overwhelmed her, but gradually, with the verve of a girl under twenty, she recovered her spirits.

She could hope for nothing from the Howards. Norfolk had written to Henry of "the abominable deeds of his two nieces," fearing "his Majesty will abhor to hear speak of one of my kin again," but shrewdly reminding Henry of the small love that his stepmother or his nieces bear him, and praying for a comfortable assurance of that favor "without which I will never desire to live."

This was an appeal that Henry could grant to the best soldier in his realm. Catherine, however, was of a new generation. She could ask nothing of Henry. She made no appeal.

"Very cheerful and more plump and pretty than ever." So Chapuys, reported her at the end of January, saying she was just as careful about her dress, and just as willful and imperious, as when at court. But her cheerfulness had depths. She expected to be put to death. She said she deserved it. She only asked that "the execution shall be secret and not under the eyes of the world."

This acceptance of her fate seemed to arise from her wealth of feeling. She could not excuse her own insincerity. She had given Culpeper tokens of her love: she had wanted to give him herself: and, still living in her young imagination, she felt in a sense she was giving him her life.

For the elders whose imagination had long been paved for the pursuit of power and the responsibility of the state, the solid men who ate the larks instead of listening to them, the spontaneity that had ruled Catherine was impossible. She was too young to understand the complex laws of self-preservation and not old enough to apprehend the dangers of sincerity. Even Henry, who had cried so much, was returning to social solace, and planning a huge banquet for young people, with bevies of fresh girls, nearly fifty of them, to entertain and distract him. Southampton had credited his master with the inclination, so magnanimous but so intolerably expensive, of indulging his feelings. But, his tears dried, Henry was employing a cheaper method of soothing his nerves. Catherine had not lived long enough to master these economies and was even willing to take the consequences of her dishonesty.

When word came to her that both Lords and Commons had passed the act of attainder and that the King would allow her to plead before parliament, she did not ask to defend herself. She submitted entirely to the King's mercy and owned that she deserved death. She was resigned, or thought herself resigned.

But when Sir John Gage came out I to Syon, a blond-bearded man with mercilessly direct eyes, to tell her to pack up and make ready for the Tower, an anguish wrung her nerves. At the actual moment for leaving, as she came to it) her body recoiled, her hands clenched, she fought back and said, "No, no." But the barges were ready. Engulfed in sobs she went down to embark at Isleworth. By the time she had reached the Tower, however, her cheeks in the fever of excitement, she had captured her composure. Southampton was first in a great barge, with other councilors; Suffolk with his men came last in another great barge; and she in a small barge with a few ladies and guards. The lords landed first: then Catherine, in black velvet: "and they paid her as much honor as when she was reigning."

Gage wits the new governor of the Tower, since William Kingston's death. Lady Rochford had been out of her mind, off and on, since learning she was to be condemned, but she had at last come to her senses and was with her mistress. Catherine again broke down in the Tower, on the afternoon of February tenth. Culpeper had been here before her. "She weeps, cries, and torments herself miserably without ceasing. To give her leisure to poise herself and "reflect on the state of her conscience," her execution was deferred for a few days.

This was on the Friday. On Sunday, towards evening, Gage came to her and told her to prepare for death, for she was to die next day.

That evening she asked to have the block brought in to her that she might know how to place herself. This was done, and the young woman made trial of it.

When she came to the block the next morning, February 13th, it was set on the spot where her cousin Anne Boleyn had been executed. The council, except her old uncle, had collected in the shiver of the winter morning, with the trees bare, the stars hardly gone out, and the air wraithed with the nearness of the Thames. A large number of people had gathered at the scaffold.

She spoke a few breathless words. A Spaniard heard them and wrote them.

"Brothers, by the journey upon which I am bound, I have not wronged the King. But it is true that long before the King took me, I loved Culpeper, and I wish to God I had done as he wished me for at the time the King wanted to take me he urged me to say that I was pledged to him. If I had done as he advised me I should not die this death, nor would he. I would rather have had him for a husband than be mistress of the world, but sin blinded me and greed of grandeur; and since mine is the fault, mine also is the suffering, and my great sorrow is that Culpeper should have had to die through me."

At these words she could go no farther. She turned to the headsman and said,

"Pray hasten with thy office."

He knelt before her and begged her pardon.

She said wildly,

"I die a Queen, but I would rather die the wife of Culpeper. God have mercy on my soul. Good people, I beg you pray for me."

Falling on her knees she began to pray. Then the headsman severed her bent neck, and her young blood gushed out in a terrible torrent. Lady Rochford was then brought to the block, but before she was led out her mistress's little body, covered with a black cloth, was lifted up and borne to the chapel, where it was buried near Anne Boleyn.