Free Catherine Howard by Lacey Baldwin Smith Page A

reported that Dereham had been systematically corrupting the girl for five years, since she was thirteen. 65
    All the instruments of courtship were utilized; they exchanged intimate tokens of their love, Catherine receiving a shirt of fine linen in return for an armband for her lover’s sleeve. Francis Dereham was a gentleman of considerable means and evidently could gratify his mistress’s fancy, for he presented her with velvet and satin for her gown, a ‘quilted cap of sarcenet’ and an embroidered friar’s knot to symbolize their love. 66 More than once they were caught kissing in the great gallery by the Dowager, who vented her annoyance in words and blows, and caustically asked whether they thought her home was Henry VIII’s court. But the old Lady of Norfolk seems to have done little to obstruct their meetings.
    Later, when the more intimate details of their relationship became public knowledge, one witness confessed that Mistress Catherine ‘was so far in love’ that they kissed ‘after a wonderful manner, for they would kiss and hang by their bellies together as they were two sparrows.’ 67 Nor, if the evidence is to be believed, were Catherine’s heavy brocaded skirts any protection against Dereham’s experienced advances, and on the occasions when he visited her in the communal bedchamber it was inevitable that abandoned caresses carried on in doublet and hose should end in ‘naked bed’. Mr Dereham was such a constant visitor behind the heavy curtains of the bed that the other inmates of the dormitory knew exactly who he was, and would remark: ‘Hark to Dereham broken winded.’ 68 Some of the ladies, who were not so fortunate as to have their Derehams and Waldgraves, complained about being kept awake at night, while others, the married ones, were shocked. Alice Restwold later, if not quite accurately, claimed that she was disgusted by the whole affair and announced to a friend that ‘she was a married woman and wist what matrimony meant and what belonged to that puffing and blowing’ that went on in her bed. 69
    That Catherine knew exactly what she was doing is undeniable, and in response to the warning that she was taking a grave risk she retorted that ‘a woman might meddle with a man and yet concieve no child unless she would herself.’ 70 Before a more inhibited age passes judgment on a girl in her teens, it might be well to judge first the moral standards of her generation. Foreign observers were shocked by the moral laxity of the English, but exactly why they should have felt this way is something of a paradox, considering what went on in such places as the French court. Possibly it was because the English were not as adept at the game of courtly love and took their amours where they found them, in an easygoing, unembarrassed fashion, not bothering to garb their sex in a glitter of sonnets and formality. Such a code would have to wait until the golden age of Elizabeth , when an entire nation became enthralled by the fascinating game of courting its virgin queen.
    Almost every foreigner commented in wonder and with distaste at the manner in which the English treated their women, and allowed them such unchaperoned freedom. Nicander Nucius remarked that ‘one may see in the market and streets of the city married women and damsels in arts and bartering and affairs of trade, undisguisedly.’ The English displayed, he added, ‘great simplicity and absence of jealousy in their usages towards females. For not only do those who are of the same family and household kiss them on the mouth with salutations and embraces, but even those too who have never seen them.’ 71 Nucius could not understand why such behaviour appeared ‘by no means indecent’ to the English, while another traveller, later in the century, concluded that England was ‘a paradise for women, a prison for servants, and a hell or purgatory for horses’. 72
    Tudor women were regarded as valuable financial assets, sources of