THE BLOG
Extra material for The Confessions Of Katherine Howard
Almost nothing is known about Katherine Howard (not even how old she was – she’s estimated to have been between seventeen and twenty at the time of her execution) and there are no verified likelinesses of her. Unfortunately for Katherine, what we do know of is her sexual history, which we know in great, lurid detail from the various witness statements.
The story is that she caught the eye of the king on her very first evening at court. (She’d come to be a lady-in-waiting for Henry’s new, German wife, Anne of Cleves, and she’d probably never been to court before.) She was said to be pretty rather than beautiful, and very small. In her late teens, she’d come from nowhere: she was a nobody. Well, no, actually: she was somebody in that she was a Howard – one of England’s major families at the time – but within that vast family she was at the bottom of the heap, one of the youngest of the many orphaned children of an unsuccessful, impoverished Howard. She’d been brought up in the household of her step-grandmother, alongside lots of other relatives, family friends and the usual hangers-on.
The king very quickly managed to sideline Anne of Cleves and marry Katherine. He adored her. After all the troubles with various wives, here he was, facing his old age with a pretty, amenable (her motto was ‘No will but his’) and apparently uncomplicated (by which I mean unambitious and uneducated) teenaged wife. Henry wasn’t quite yet the incapacited ogre of his latter five years but he was heading that way, and Katherine gave him a new lease of life. He was delighted with her; he showered her with riches (particularly clothes) and she – poor little rich girl – lapped it up.
Fifteen months into the marriage, on All Saints’ Day, the king was at a special service of his own devising at which he was giving thanks to God for his wonderful wife when Archbishop Cranmer sidled up and pressed a letter into his hand. In the letter – which Cranmer had written because he couldn’t face telling the king in person – was the news that a man had arrived at court to make allegations about Katherine’s conduct in the years before she’d become queen. The man’s sister had worked in the household where Katherine had grown up. The allegations concerned sexual experimentation in the girls’ dormitory, Katherine’s relationship at the age of fourteen or fifteen with her music teacher and then with a lad called Francis Dereham who worked in the household and to whom, it seemed, she’d practically been married (to whom she’d been ‘pre-contracted’, to use the Tudor term ie to whom she’d pledged herself, which made it acceptable to have sex. Married all but in name, in other words). This was the same Francis Dereham who was now working as the queen’s secretary.
Initially, Henry didn’t give this much credence, but asked Cranmer to investigate. In the meantime, he contrived to avoid Katherine (in fact, he never saw her again). Cranmer and cronies duly investigated, whilst managing to keep it under wraps. Within just a week of questioning people (Katherine and Francis Dereham included), in which everyone rushed to dob everyone else in, (they were just kids, after all, and they were terrified), Cranmer et al had verified the story about the relationship with Francis Dereham but also, somehow, uncovered something much more serious. In the course of all the interrogations, towards the end of that week, someone let slip that the history with Francis Dereham was nothing: the queen was currently having an affair with Thomas Culpeper, a young man employed in the king’s close, personal service (a young man who slept in the king’s bedchamber, no less… and the queen’s, too, quipped the French ambassador when he heard).
All three – Katherine, Francis Dereham, and Thomas Culpeper – were convicted of treason and executed. Henry was devastated, and from this point onwards he aged considerably, becoming the foul-tempered invalid of legend.
I always said I wouldn’t write about Katherine Howard because she isn’t interesting (bless ‘er): she was just a gal who screwed around. But, then, I tend to be drawn to whatever I’ve always claimed I won’t do (!). After writing about Mary Tudor, which was grim, I went back to Katherine Howard’s story for a bit of a break – and was instantly, utterly captivated (seriously overstaying my welcome, I suspect, in a coffee shop whilst I read the story through to its horrible conclusion).
What captivated me?.. First, the swiftness of her downfall (as with so many of these Tudor stories). It’s a highly dramatic story, a lot happens in a very short space of time and it seems to come out of nowhere (it was all done and dusted within a week – she went from fairytale princess to whore within a week)
Secondly, the character of Katherine. Which is ironic, because she’s always portrayed as having no character: that’s usually seen as her defining characteristic, as it were; she’s often described by historians as having been ‘a silly little girl’ (and that’s a quote). Her major biographer suggests that because no one pleaded for her at the end, she was probably a ‘shallow’ girl (whereas I suspect it was because there was no one – not of any influence – to plead for her; she was a nobody, she’d come from nowhere). What was strikingly clear to me, though, from reading the various accounts, that she was a much more complex character. These readings of her as ‘unsophisticated’ are themselves unsophisticated. The historians have her as ‘sweet-natured’, presumably on the evidence of her many friends of around her own age and the light-hearted atmosphere in her household (lots of partying), but I think ‘popular’ is more like it, and I do think the two are different. And Katherine was clearly sexually curious and sexually confident, relishing the intrigue of romance and sex and damn good at it. She wasn’t taken advantage of by boys, as the conventional accounts tend to have it. If anyone was ‘using’ anyone else, she was ‘using’ these young men. By all accounts (including her own), she was the one who initiated these relationships and who ended them when she wanted to move on (as she always did). Yet despite this perhaps rather cavalier behaviour, people stuck around for her. She kept people in thrall to her.
My impression, upon reading about her, was an overwhelming, unequivocal, ‘I know you!’. I was at school with a girl so like this Katherine whom I was seeing as I read between the lines. Dangerous. Damaged, if you looked closely enough. I watched that girl from very close quarters all through our formative years; I watched her reign supreme in that small world despite being-secretly-vulnerable-inside-blah-blah (ie cliché but – as cliches so often are – true), just as Katherine Howard did and was. I suspected I could get that character down on paper very well.
And whilst we’re on the subject of revision: Francis Dereham, character of. He’s always portrayed as a seducer and an opportunist. Rather sinister. It’s always speculated that he was offered employment in the queen’s household in an attempt to keep him quiet about the past. But nowhere in my reading did I find any evidence of this. Katherine notoriously surrounded herself with her own people, people from her own small world, from her previous life: it was how she operated, although ultimately it became her downfall. I think Francis Dereham was very loyal to her – despite having been dumped by her when she found she could move on to better things (Thomas Culpepper was older – late twenties – and of much higher social status, and he was also much sought-after by the ladies…), and despite his still (by several reliable accounts) holding a torch for her. He gave her all his money to safeguard when he went off on business to Ireland, with instructions to keep it for herself should he fail to return. He trusted her. They were old friends as well as ex-lovers. ‘My’ Francis Dereham is quite a sweet guy. Unlike Thomas Culpeper, who was all swagger.
My novel is told from the point of view of one of Katherine’s close friends, one of the girls who grew up alongside her and came to court to work for her when she became queen: Katherine Tylney. The chief interrogator on the Katherine Howard case remarked of a certain Katherine Tylney that she’d been very useful to him. ‘Cat’, as she’s known in my novel, has a bit more about her than Katherine Howard does, and her relationship with Katherine Howard, although close, is ambivalent. She’s in Katherine Howard’s shadow – because everyone who was close to Katherine always was – but she’s a stronger, sharper yet also warmer character.
Her recollections start with that seemingly-blissful evening on 1st November, when all seems right with the world, when England seems to have gone back twenty years to before all the troubles of the Reformation, and when these young people seem to have-it-made… but Francis then disappears for a day or two. Cat is in a relationship – is in love – with Francis Dereham. From him, she learns that he was taken in for questioning, and that the questioning was about Katherine’s adolescent days.
Although the exposure of Katherine’s past would do her reputation a great deal of damage, and probably enrage the king and alienate him from her (it looked likely that she’d be sent to a nunnery), it wasn’t life-threatening for anyone concerned. When she herself was questioned, she was adamant that she was never pre-contracted to Francis Dereham, and therefore was no bigamist in later marrying the king. And as for lovers before she ever met the king: well, he might not like the idea of it, but there was no law against it (nor was it particularly unusual – the Tudors were an earthy lot). Likewise for Francis: his life might be made unpleasant – if not impossible – at court, by the king, but it wasn’t in danger.
However, within a matter of days, it became clear that Archbishop Cranmer was set on making something much more of all this. His reasons were political: the Howards were conservative and catholic, and Cranmer – with his fledgling Reformation stalled after the death of Anne Boleyn – wanted to see them discredited, disgraced, gone from the position of influence and power that they had attained due to one of their girls being queen. He began to make much in his interrogations of the fact that Francis Dereham was in the queen’s service: the implication was that the relationship was on-going.
‘My’ Cat Tilney knows that this is untrue, and that if Cranmer was told the truth – that the queen was in fact having an affair with Thomas Culpeper – then Francis’s past misdemeanours would pale into insignificance and he would walk free. The problem is, her old friend Katherine most definitely wouldn’t…