Free Catherine Howard by Lacey Baldwin Smith Page B

obvious pleasure, and the mothers of lusty children to ensure family succession. That old warrior the Duke of Norfolk did not hesitate to offer Thomas Cromwell, by way of hospitality, the wife of one of his minions with whom he could ‘be sure of a welcome’, and if the Vicar- General lusted ‘not to dally’ with the wife, why then Norfolk knew of ‘a young woman with pretty proper tetins’. 73 Thomas Howard was not the man to bestow what he himself had failed to savour, and he infuriated his wife and shocked his stepmother by publicly flaunting his own mistress in their faces. What filled the Duchess with rancour, however, was not that Bess Holland was her husband’s concubine, but that she was a ‘churl’s daughter’ and laundress in her nursery. The outraged lady complained that when she had grown violent over the duke’s infidelity, she was seized by common serving-girls and bound and sat upon till she spat blood. The Duchess complained bitterly that she was ‘a gentlewoman, born and brought up daintily’, and had been forced to flee her home in self-defence. 74 How much of this is true it is difficult to discern, for Elizabeth Howard tended to be more imaginative than truthful, and the Duke dismissed her claims as great and ‘abominable lies’. 75
    The lady seems to have been willing to pass over the extra-marital activities of her husband, but what she could not forgive was that her own children ignored her plight. ‘Never’, she wept, had a woman conceived ‘so ungracious an eldest son and so ungracious a daughter and so unnatural.’ 76 These unsympathetic children were Catherine’s first cousins. The elder of them, the Earl of Surrey, once suggested to his sister Mary that she should seek the King’s ‘fantasy’ and strive to become his mistress, so as to foster the Howard interests at court. Mary Howard indignantly refused, claiming that she would rather cut her own throat than Consider the bed of that obese and dying monarch. 77
    The girl who vigorously and successfully defended her virtue was an exception in early Tudor England, and the Imperial Ambassador thought it unlikely that Henry’s third wife could still be a virgin at twenty-five. ‘You may imagine’, he satirically remarked of Jane Seymour, ‘whether being an Englishwoman, and having been so long at court, she would not hold it a sin to be still a maid.’ 78 The educational theory may have been given lip service – that ‘a woman who giveth a gift, giveth herself; a woman who taketh a gift, selleth herself,’ but in actual practice ladies of Catherine’s station both gave and received gifts to the full. All that was required was that a certain minimum of decorum be maintained and the necessary precautions taken. Only when the unmistakable signs of unfaithfulness were perceived did society feel constrained to take a stand, and when Mary Boleyn, after four years of widowhood, did the one thing a lady of breeding could not explain – that is, become pregnant – the Howard family was justifiably annoyed and disowned her, if only because of her foolish neglect. 79 In the circumstances it was just as well that Catherine Howard appears to have known something about the rudiments of birth control.
    Nor is there any evidence that when Catherine’s amour with Francis Dereham was finally brought to the attention of her elders, they were particularly shocked. The agent of revelation was that discarded and neglected gentleman, Henry Manox, who grew frantic at the thought of Dereham and Waldgrave’s admission to pleasures of which he was deprived. In a burst of righteous indignation, he announced that the Duchess’s household was being ‘dishonoured’ by such activities, and sanctimoniously he and his friend, Barnes, took it upon themselves to warn the Dowager. They composed a letter which they left in the old lady’s church pew, suggesting that the Duchess inspect the activities of her gentlewomen. ‘For if it shall like you,’