Dr. Nicola Clark (3:33)

Reckless seductress or a tragic victim, I.

Professor Susannah Lipscomb (3:36)

Wanted to uncover a fuller, more human figure behind the story. A young woman whose promise was cut short by the brutal politics of Henry VIII's court. One of the highlights for me of filming that series was that I learned to play a piece of music by Henry VIII on the virginals, a type of early keyboard, exactly the sort of thing that Katherine Howard would been playing.

Dr. Nicola Clark (4:01)

So I'm gonna give it a go. It's so funny.

Gareth Russell (4:06)

It feels so different from playing on.

Dr. Nicola Clark (4:07)

A p. It sounds so lovely. I'm enchanted by the sound of it.

Professor Susannah Lipscomb (4:24)

In this episode, I'm delighted to share insights from two guests who join me on location for that series. Historian and author Gareth Russell and Dr. Nicola Clark, senior Lecturer in Early Modern History at the University of Chichester. I'm Professor Susannah Lipscomb. And this is not just the Tudors from History Hit, I think Catherine Howard remains one of the most elusive of Henry VIII's queens. We don't even have an authentic portrait of her, so we're left constantly piecing together her life and character from other people's words. Ambassadors, letters, household accounts, interrogations and the testimonies of those who, in the end, helped bring her down. To make sense of her life and her fate, I began my investigation not at the royal court, but in the far more uncertain world of her childhood in London and Sussex. Catherine Howard was born into one of the great aristocratic dynasties of Tudor England. Her father, Lord Edmund Howard, was a younger son of the Duke of Norfolk, which meant he had the name and the status, but not the money to match. His finances were chronically unstable. Catherine's mother, Joyce, died when Catherine was still small, and soon afterwards, Edwin left England for Calais to escape his mounting debts. Catherine's early years then, were marked less by the stability we might expect for a noble child, more by absence, uncertainty and financial strain. The question of Catherine's age has long shaped how historians interpret her. It was once thought she was born as late as 1526, making her only 14 when she married Henry. In 1540. But more solid evidence comes from a French ambassador who knew her personally and placed her birth around 1522. That would make Catherine about 16 or 17 when she arrived at court, and closer to 18 when she became queen. This really matters. It shifts our view of her. Not a child bride, but a very young woman thrust into a competitive adult world with very little preparation and almost no room for mistakes. Though noble by name, Catherine grew up with limited resources. As one of the younger children, she was sent to live with her step grandmother, Linda, the Dowager Duchess of Norfolk, at Chesworth House in West Sussex. She arrived there around 1531, perhaps eight or nine years old. This kind of move was entirely normal in Tudor England. Parents believed that children learned discipline, manners and character best in another household, under the eye of a great lady or lord, rather than in the indulgence of home. At Chesworth, Catherine lived among many other girls in a large and sometimes chaotic household of more than a hundred servants and wards. The young women slept together in shared chambers and bed. Sharing among the same sex was routine, a practical solution, not a moral failing. Later Victorian writers, with their own anxieties about sex and propriety, would wrongly imply that these arrangements somehow led Catherine astray. From what we can tell, she was treated as a favored grandchild, learning confidence, poise and how to perform the role expected of a Howard woman. But this environment also had its blind spots. Supervision in such a crowded household was patchy, especially at night, and a young girl's reputation could be put at risk long before she fully understood how fragile and valuable it was. It was in these semi supervised spaces, dormitories, parlours and corridors, that Catherine experienced her first romantic entanglements. Relationships that must have felt thrilling and private at the time, but which would later be dragged into the glare of royal inquiry and used to condemn her. To get a better sense of what this world looked and felt like, I went to Chesworth House with Dr. Nicola Clark and asked her to help me imagine Catherine there as a teenager, what she might have hoped for, worried about and understood or not understood about love, power and risk.

Historian (possibly Dr. Nicola Clark continuing) (8:42)

A lot of Victorian historians tended to think the Duchess is running a really lax establishment. She lets the women in her care do whatever they want. She's not there enough. And that they're almost running a brothel here.

Dr. Nicola Clark (8:56)

Goodness me. And is that partly to do with Victorian ideas about social status and sort of difference in social status between Catherine and the men with whom she has relationships?

Historian (possibly Dr. Nicola Clark continuing) (9:08)

Yes, and also between Catherine and the other women of the house. So there's only two Women here that we know for sure are aristocratic wards in the Duchess's care. And that's Catherine Howard and her cousin, confusingly, another Catherine Tilney. The other women with whom they do seem to share a bed chamber are not nobodies. They're still of gentry status and they are the Duchess's waiting maids. So they're not servants necessarily, but they're not of the same standing as Catherine is.

Dr. Nicola Clark (9:38)

And why would that have tilted the understanding of the morality of the place?

Historian (possibly Dr. Nicola Clark continuing) (9:44)

Because certainly as time went on, by the Victorian era, we get into this Downton Abbey esque, very upstairs versus downstairs, very separate, they do not mix. But that's not the case in the Tudor period. People mix much more freely. So it's not unusual to find aristocratic young women spending time with people that we might nowadays think, weren't they below her? Well, I mean, yes, but that was slightly less important in a day to day sense, in this kind of establishment.

Dr. Nicola Clark (10:12)

And I suppose what we see there is a kind of conflation of low status and low morals.

Historian (possibly Dr. Nicola Clark continuing) (10:17)

Yes, exactly. That the Victorians probably thought that these women of lower status and men of lower status are dragging Catherine down to their level. Well, in fact, the evidence does not really suggest that at all.

Dr. Nicola Clark (10:30)

So what's the truth about Chesworth House, from your opinion, in terms of its atmosphere and how it was run?

Historian (possibly Dr. Nicola Clark continuing) (10:38)

It's pretty much your average kind of aristocratic household. I mean, large, beautiful, as lots of these places are, quite a mix of people, quite a large household. You're probably looking at somewhere between 15, 100 people, probably closer to 100. They would have said the duchesses here and there, but the women probably don't have a huge amount of supervision from her directly. Catherine and her cousin, Catherine Tilney, are here to be educated. So it's almost like a finishing school sort of vibe. And this is quite common among the aristocracy to send their young people out to another aristocratic household to gain some social polish, some contacts, finish their education. Both the Catherines, we think, learn music here, things like that.

Dr. Nicola Clark (11:22)

And it's in that learning of music that Catherine first meets Henry Mannox. Tell us about him.

Historian (possibly Dr. Nicola Clark continuing) (11:28)

Yes, he is her music teacher. So there's a power imbalance there from the beginning. He's probably not necessarily as much older than Catherine as we have tended to think, maybe only five years older, which puts him around his 20s, I suppose, depending how old we're going to decide Catherine is. He's there to teach her the virginals, which is a kind of keyboard instrument, and possibly the lute as well, so he shows up around about 1536, in 1541, he says he'd been there about five years and he and Catherine, for want of a better word, seem to hit it off quite well.

Dr. Nicola Clark (12:07)

And how do you think we should interpret that relationship? What happens between them?

Historian (possibly Dr. Nicola Clark continuing) (12:12)

So it becomes a physical relationship that doesn't go all the way to full intercourse. So there's kissing, there's fondling and other things. He does pressure her to go all the way and he does it in that time honoured kind of. It makes us eye roll now, like, if you really loved me, then you would prove how much you love me. She holds out. She says, I don't think so. Because Catherine has this odd reputation as being stupid and she's not at all. She's got a head screwed on. She knows that it would absolutely not be worth losing her virginity to a man like Mannax, and she doesn't. They know that what they're doing is not allowed, is illicit, and so they try to keep it hidden.

Dr. Nicola Clark (12:56)

And how exactly do they go about hiding it?

Historian (possibly Dr. Nicola Clark continuing) (12:59)

So they choose spaces that aren't obvious. We think nowadays that if you want to be hidden, go into a bedroom and shut the door. Right. But it really depends what you're meaning by hidden or by what privacy really is. You can be private to be secret or you can be private to be alone, but they're two slightly separate things. When you're thinking about a space, the whole household would have known they were in there and then would have known what was going on. So they choose in between spaces, we might say liminal spaces, so corridors or the jakes, which is the toilets. There's a time when they are around the back of the orchard together in the dark at night. All sorts of spaces where they think they can escape without being seen.

Dr. Nicola Clark (13:42)

And what becomes of that relationship?

Historian (possibly Dr. Nicola Clark continuing) (13:46)

Catherine actually breaks it off. We tend to think that she has no agency here, but that seems really not to be the case, particularly with Mannox. He is joking crudely about their relationship and someone else says, her family would kill you if they knew. And he blows it off and says, look, I've seen things I should not have seen, touched places I should not have touched. She loves me, it's all fine. This gets back to Catherine, who says, excuse me, I don't think so. And she says, I care not for you, and calls it off. Malik then comes to Catherine crying and says, but I love you. I only said, well, I did because I love you so much. And she says, I doubt it. I don't think so and calls it off.

Dr. Nicola Clark (14:36)

Now, the other relationship with the man that she has while she's here is with Frances Dereham. How does that differ from her relationship with Henry Mannox?

Historian (possibly Dr. Nicola Clark continuing) (14:46)

Frances Dereham is not her teacher, for a start. Frances Dereham is probably also not that much older than her. He has perhaps a slightly different social standing within the household. He is in the Duchess's service, which means he probably is slightly socially elevated from Mannix, if not by a lot. He is probably around Catherine more because he's in the household with her. He also seems to be far more serious about the whole situation. This is a relationship that does progress to full intercourse. They jokingly call each other husband and wife. Jokingly. We don't know how jokingly. She says jokingly.

Dr. Nicola Clark (15:25)

He's less clear because in this period under canon law, if you promise to marry each other in words of the present tense and then consummate the relationship, you are married.

Historian (possibly Dr. Nicola Clark continuing) (15:37)

Yes. Whether there are witnesses or not, whether it's in a church or not.

Dr. Nicola Clark (15:41)

Yes.

Historian (possibly Dr. Nicola Clark continuing) (15:42)

They seem not to have promised in the present tense, so far as the evidence can tell us, but Dereham stuck to it that there was definitely a future promise.

Dr. Nicola Clark (15:52)

Okay, so they said, I will marry.

Professor Susannah Lipscomb (15:53)

You rather than I marry you.

Historian (possibly Dr. Nicola Clark continuing) (15:55)

Yeah.

Dr. Nicola Clark (15:56)

And do we know much about the quality of that relationship?

Historian (possibly Dr. Nicola Clark continuing) (16:00)

Well, again, it seems to have been two sided. There's no evidence to suggest she's being pressured here. She herself says that what he did was done by force. But at the time, Dereham, Catherine, nobody else around them who ever says anything about it suggests that she's being pressured. It's also much more open. It seems to have been an open secret around the household. And they don't hide away in spaces as much. So they're seen kissing together, hanging together by the beaks. Some of the evidence says in all sorts of places, you know, in the dining chamber, on a bed, here in this room here in broad daylight, when everyone else is around, and I mean everyone else in the household seems to have known what was going on, except for the Duchess.

Dr. Nicola Clark (16:48)

Does that suggest an intentionality with that relationship, that they were planning to marry?

Historian (possibly Dr. Nicola Clark continuing) (16:54)

It's really hard to know. Dereham certainly seems to have thought so. He gave her gifts in the manner of somebody courting in that way. She may simply have been having fun. She's also not the only woman in the house to be having these kinds of relationships. And they are banqueting at night, picnicking in the maiden's chamber. Catherine gets the keys stolen. So Far from the Duchess being a lax carer, she actually locks the girls into their room at night, kind of ostentatiously and publicly like. And now bring me the key. Everybody's safe.

Dr. Nicola Clark (17:25)

Chastity belt, right?

Historian (possibly Dr. Nicola Clark continuing) (17:27)

Exactly. Yeah. But it turns out it's not Catherine herself who steals the key, but she gets one of the Duchess's women who's in her room with her, to steal the key, bring it to them, let the boys in, and they all start having fun. And, I mean, they're having physical fun while sharing beds with other people. So it's really quite public. There's no hiding it. They talk about, well, they're puffing and blowing down there, you know. Yes.

Dr. Nicola Clark (17:52)

It really is a different age, isn't it? Yes. Must be like teenagers on a camping trip.

Historian (possibly Dr. Nicola Clark continuing) (17:57)

Yeah.

Dr. Nicola Clark (17:59)

And what becomes of this relationship?

Historian (possibly Dr. Nicola Clark continuing) (18:01)

So this one seems to have begun around the autumn of 1538. Ish. Mannox actually gets involved. He is so jealous of Durham and he's so jealous that Catherine has moved on that he tries really hard to get them in trouble. He and another guy write a secret letter to the Duchess and they leave it in her church pew for her to find. That says, half an hour after you've gone to bed, get up and go to the maiden's room and see what you might find. They do that, but the girls hide the boys and they don't get caught. But, yeah, Mannox really tries to catch them out and it doesn't work. But then Anne of Cleves arrives in England, Henry VIII's fourth wife. She needs a household. She needs ladies in waiting. The Howards are an important family and Catherine Howard is called to court to be a maid of honour. And at that point, she breaks things off with Dereham.

Dr. Nicola Clark (18:51)

How does he take her?

Historian (possibly Dr. Nicola Clark continuing) (18:53)

Very poorly. He is angry and hurt and upset. He seems to have really thought there was something serious here, that they were promised to each other. And he goes off to Ireland inexplicably and ends up somehow involved in piracy. At one point, the Duchess later says, when he comes back, look, that's him who ran off to Ireland for her sake. So, yes, he runs off in a fit of pique.

Dr. Nicola Clark (19:16)

You mentioned that. Catherine later says that this is by force. What is the sort of evidence that we have about the nature of these relationships and how much can we trust it?

Historian (possibly Dr. Nicola Clark continuing) (19:29)

We have quite a lot of evidence by the standards of the day, I suppose. So there's a lot of different individuals who gave a statement that was written down and we have the rough copies of those and they are not in a great state. There are gaps, crossings out. It's not the fair copy, but you can still work out what's there. So there's a lot of that. There are two confessions that Catherine herself gave. A couple of those have come down to us secondhand, so not the manuscript itself, but somebody in the 17th century saw it and wrote a summary, that kind of thing. So we're at a couple of removes. She gave one confession earlier on, which is a lot of detail. The second one is far, far more polished, and that's the one where she says he did it by force. It seems to me that the second one is less trustworthy because by that point she knows what's facing her. And, well, you would try every avenue you could to try and crawl out of this. So a lot of the evidence is as reliable as this kind of thing can get, really. You've got the direct words of people who were there.

Dr. Nicola Clark (20:32)

And much of the time when Catherine spoke about in disparaging terms, these previous relationships are lumped together. And, you know, there's a sort of insinuation that she is free and easy with her favors. How should we interpret these relationships, you think so?

Historian (possibly Dr. Nicola Clark continuing) (20:51)

I think the reason they get lumped together is because legally, at the time, for what they're wanting to prove, to prove treason, you only have to prove that she is intending to have slept with someone else and then lied about it. And so they're lumping them together because it doesn't matter so much precisely what they did as what they intended to do, so they're lumping them as well. It's all much of a muchness, but in fact, they are two quite distinct episodes. The first one, clearly, certainly to Catherine, is not ever serious. Mallax is married already. That's never going to happen. It is just for her, a bit of fun. Dereham is a different kettle of fish because he took it so much more seriously. And it seems to have gone really quite a lot further. And you do wonder, if she hadn't been called to court, what might have become of that?

Dr. Nicola Clark (21:36)

You never know when these interrogations are happening. If Catherine had admitted her relationships with Malox and Durham, Henry VIII wouldn't have been best pleased. But would it have counted as treason?

Historian (possibly Dr. Nicola Clark continuing) (21:49)

Probably not, no. Not technically, not legally, because what she's done premaritally is not so much of a problem as what she did post maritally. It's the doing it and then not declaring it that was a problem, but it wasn't treason. So quite likely Henry would have put her aside. She could have ended her days in a nunnery somewhere, quietly out of the way. But no, it's the fact that the Culpepper episode post maritally, then threw these up as well. Yes. If she had denied Culpepper, she'd have been all right. That's the deciding factor.

Dr. Nicola Clark (22:21)

It seems a bit odd to us that this investigation starts on the basis of what has happened before Henry married Catherine. But basically, Henry VIII is kind of obsessed with virginity, isn't he?

Historian (possibly Dr. Nicola Clark continuing) (22:36)

Yes. And suspicious. I think he was suspicious that what Anne Boleyn may or may not have done, he claims to have been suspicious about Anne of Cleves's virginity, or not virginity. So I suppose it does make sense that the minute somebody casts aspersions on this wife, he's bound to take that seriously.

Professor Susannah Lipscomb (22:56)

Those early relationships did not stay buried in Catherine's past. They traveled with her all the way to the throne. We know that when Henry VIII finally met Anne of Cleves in January 1540, his disappointment was immediate and he made little effort to hide it. He found Anne physically unappealing and quickly looked for a way out of the marriage that his ministers had arranged for him. As his marriage to Anne of Cleves unraveled, Henry's gaze wandered off. At court, one of Anne's maids of honor began to stand out. Catherine Howard. Pretty, lively, attentive and crucially, young. To an aging king who wanted both adoration and sons, Catherine must have seemed like an intoxicating promise of renewal. By spring, Henry was showering her with jewels, rich fabrics and all the signs of royal favour. People noticed. They always did at court. By June, even Queen Anne understood that the king's heart had moved on and that her own position was now impossible. Within weeks of an annulment of his marriage to Anne of Cleves, Henry married Catherine Howard. Overnight, this young woman, barely established at court, became Queen of England and stepmother to the future Edward Vill. I can't begin to imagine the scale of that change. Catherine now presided over the largest female household in the kingdom. Women who had once outranked her rose before dawn to dress her, pin up her hair, fasten her jewels and wait upon her every need. The sheer speed of that transformation must have been exhilarating, but also deeply disorienting. She was still learning how the court worked and suddenly she was meant to embody it. Henry, for his part, behaved like a man. Besotted observers commented on his public displays of affection, on the way he sought her company and basked in her Youth. Catherine represented companionship, flattery, and, he hoped, more heirs. Yet the man she married was no longer the athletic prince of his early reign. He was approaching 50, plagued by painful leg ulcers, obese and increasingly unpredictable. Someone whose moods could change with little warning. To explore how this marriage functioned in practice, the emotional dynamic between Catherine and Henry and the expectations of the Howard family pressing in on them. I spoke with Gareth Russell about that first year when the promise of the match had not yet turned deadly.

Gareth Russell (25:28)

It's mostly sunshine. Henry seems infatuated with her. It's very obvious. The ambassadors to his court say he cannot treat her well enough. The initial months are almost an extended honeymoon. So they go to Hampton Court after the wedding to have her proclaimed queen. And then there's a long hunting jaunt through the countryside for most of autumn. And the French ambassador says nothing is spoken of here except the chase and the banquets to the new queen. So after a really politically fraught time around the downfall of Thomas Cromwell, the court is in a party mood and Catherine is its party queen. They're having hunting parties, banquets, balls, dances. Catherine is really reveling in the luxury and glamour of queenship. Henry seems really pleased with how she handled Christmas. At 1540, she has her official entry into London by water. Everything seems to suggest that she is very much secure in her husband's favor and therefore on the throne. She experiences nothing of her husband's quixotic moods, his temper tantrum. She doesn't see the dark side of Henry's personality, or if she does, it's being directed against anyone but her. And then in Lent 1541, the rose tinted glasses come off for Catherine. Henry falls very ill when they're at Hampton Court, and for over a week, it is feared that he will die. And at this point, he treats Catherine in a very different way to the love and the jewelry that had come before. He locks himself in his room. He specifically states the queen is not allowed to come and see him. Whether that's because he's embarrassed by his physical ailment, we don't know. But they also shut down the number of people that can come into Hampton Court. And so you have these 10 days where Catherine is in a decreasingly populated palace, left alone with her thoughts, nervous and anxious about why her husband is shutting her out at this time of illness. And when he recovers, you see the impact this has had on Catherine's mental equilibrium because she starts listening to rumors at court that ordinarily she would have shut shrugged off one of which is that Henry is considering divorcing her to take back Anne of Cleves, which anyone who knew anything about Henry's relationship with Anne of Cleves would say there was more chance of him tap dancing on the moon than taking Anne of Cleves back as his wife. But Catherine actually goes to him and asks him, is this true or untrue? And Henry, with sledgehammer honesty says, no, it's not. If I was going to take another wife, it wouldn't be her. Not. No, no. I love you so much, I don't want to separate from you. So she is in a mood of self doubt, which is not a mood she's comfortable with. Then things start to pick up again around summer and by the time they make the progress, it seems to be back to the way it had been before his illness. She can do no wrong. One of the accounts of the progress describes her as the fair and beloved Queen Catherine and that everything seemed to orbit around her and the progress. So she has had a wobbly in the middle of a pretty triumphant year.

Dr. Nicola Clark (28:50)

And there's one other potential fly in the ointment, which is Francis Dereham, who turns up at this point. What happens there?

Gareth Russell (29:00)

Yeah, he's more of a hornet in the ointment, to be honest. I mean, he's really a baffling figure. I think it's often quite difficult to make a guess like this at the distance of 500 years. But a lot of what he does, if he did it today, we would say seems quite like a narcissist. I mean, he was someone who would not accept the end of the relationship. Before she was married, he had gone to Ireland and come back. What he does when she becomes Queen is beyond baffling. I mean, it really was almost suicidally reckless. Francis is obsessed with her and can't quite believe that she moved on, even though it was with the King and she had moved on before that. Catherine's family, particularly her grandmother and her aunt, the Countess of Bridgewater, are very aware of what had happened between Catherine and Francis before the marriage. And they understand that if Frances comes forward and says, we were pre contracted and it was consummated, that that could nullify Catherine's marriage, in which case she would not only lose her royal title, but she'd probably live in disgrace for the rest of her life, shunted off to some backwater. Frances is charming, but darkly charming, and the Dodger Duchess of Norfolk tries to ARR a deal with him. He wants to join Catherine's household. They know that that's insanity. But he also has documents about him and Catherine. He has love letters, poems he wrote about her, allegedly letters she sent back to him. We know that there was at least one document that struck fear into the Duchess of Norfolk's heart, which may have been something even more serious about a potential marriage. And they hit on a compromise, which is that he will give the papers to the Dowager Duchess of Norfolk. She'll put them in a chest and lock them, but he'll have the key, so they both have sort of the red button to destroy each other. Francis thinks eventually they will get him a place in Catherine's service as Queen. And the Howards give him nothing but polite tomorrows. Oh, we'll get to it. It's not the right time. There isn't a position here. And in the summer of 1541, he, not for the first or last time, loses his temper. He argues with the dodger Duchess of Norfolk. He leaves London and he rides north, following the progress. And he catches up with Catherine when she's a Pontefract, and he's shown into her presence and he makes it very clear one way or the other, this time he wants that job. She gives him the job of gentleman usher, which is a cross between a bouncer and an etiquette expert. And so he starts in a position that seems completely acceptable to the court. Oh, he used to work for her grandmother. She's known him from before. That's a fairly standard job. But while the appointment is typical, he is not. And again, this suicidal egotism, this recklessness kicks in. He can't resist dropping thinly veiled hints that he knew Catherine.

Dr. Nicola Clark (32:01)

And when he says new, yeah, he.

Gareth Russell (32:03)

Was taught at the biblical sense. And there's one point where he, bearing in mind he's supposed to know etiquette, it's part of his job. He breaks a rule, which is that there's a sort of graded exit strategy for officers of the Queen's household after dinner. And only the more senior officers are allowed to sit down around the table after dinner and chat and drink. And Francis sits around the table too long. So one of his colleagues, called Mr. Johns, sends a servant to Francis and sarcastically asks him, are you of the Queen? Queen's council? And Frances shoots back, tell Mr. Johns I was off the Queen's Council long before he was, and she shall remember me long after she has forgotten him. So when you're saying things like that, it's sort of lighting the speculative fuse. And no one can understand how Catherine, who's usually Pretty good at keeping people in line and does not tolerate rudeness or disrespect, cannot seem to pull this rude interloper into line. And in fact, she starts passing on bags of money to him, 3 pounds here, 10 pounds there, saying, take care what words you speak. He also becomes really close again to someone called Catherine Tilney, who works at one of Catherine's maids. And she had been very close to Catherine and Frances during their time at Chesworth. So close, in fact, that at one point, she was actually in the bed when Frances and Catherine started to get intimate together. Frances and Catherine Tilney become really close again during the progress. And it seems very clear that Catherine Tilney starts filling Frances in on all the gossip he's missed in recent months, including that she has suspicions that the Queen is still too close to Thomas Culpepper, because Catherine Tilney was one of the maids who was following Catherine to her late night meetings and having to wait on the other side of the door. So Frances Dereham is the most loquacious, the least tactful member of her household, and he knows the most about Catherine from before her marriage. And thanks to Catherine Tilney, he's being fed even more information about Catherine's life after her marriage. So in Frances hands are everything that is needed to destroy Catherine's position as queen.

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Professor Susannah Lipscomb (37:22)

In 1541, Henry and Catherine set out on a grand royal progress to the north, designed to show the king in person to subjects still wrestling after the rebellion known as the Pilgrimage of Grace. The progress reached Lincoln in August. There, Catherine processed into the great cathedral beside her king and husband, every movement watched by crowds, every gesture read as a sign of royal dignity. For a girl who'd grown up in a financially strained branch of the Howard family, it must have felt like a moment of almost unimaginable triumph. But even as the pageantry was unfolding, trouble was stirring at court. Francis Dereham, Catherine's former lover from the Duchess of Norfolk's household, was talking too freely about their past. His boasts raised awkward questions. At the same time, rumors linked Catherine emotionally and possibly romantically to Thomas Culpepper, one of Henry's favored gentlemen of the Privy chamber, a man with both access and charm. The surface still looked glittering, but the foundations of her queenship were starting to tremble.

Gareth Russell (38:33)

Gareth Russell, Thomas Culpepper and Catherine have been communicating. They'd be coming a little bit flirtier with each other since Holy Week at Greenwich, just after Henry was sick. When she gives him the gift of a cup, Culpepper replies that he wished she behaved this way when she was single, before she was married. Catherine gets offended and they're sort of a non speakers until, as you say, the Progress. And then Catherine starts to initiate more and more meetings and it's really here at Lincoln that it dials up. And the person she uses as the intermediary is Lady Rochford. She's carrying messages between the Queen and Culpepper and they start to plan a meeting if they can. But they don't have an opportunity until they get to Lincoln at the Bishop's palace, where Lady Rochford discovers several seldom used back staircases that the Queen can use and Culpepper can use to meet at night.

Dr. Nicola Clark (39:25)

So the Progress kind of provides an environment that they wouldn't have had if they'd been at one of the standard royal palaces like Hampton Court. In what way is it kind of creating the environment in which they can meet?

Gareth Russell (39:40)

Well, it's sort of Club Med with cod pieces, to be honest. It's really these young people who are finally out and away from the strictures of palace life. They're moving to places they don't know. Approaching progress on this scale hasn't happened in a generation. A lot of the places, not just the homes, but actually the counties, the towns, the villages they're visiting, none of them have seen before. Sleeping arrangements change every time they move on. And so there seems to have been quite a bit of romantic shenanigans happening on the Progress, but none as serious as the Queen and Culpepper. And I think that is part of it. It's the sense that the rules have relaxed and that people mightn't be watching Catherine, or at least her apartment doors or where she is or where she's sleeping, as closely as they would have been watching her back at Hampton Court or Whitehall.

Dr. Nicola Clark (40:22)

Yes, everything is different. Nobody knows the routine, nobody knows the layout of these places.

Gareth Russell (40:27)

That's it. And there's things that will happen that are a bit odd, that if it happened in one of the regular palaces, a servant would know that door shouldn't be locked, or the Queen should be in this room at this time. But when you get to places like the Bishop's palace at Lincoln or Grimsthorpe or any of the places they stop. The rules aren't quite as firm as they were in the South.

Dr. Nicola Clark (40:45)

And your research has given a bit of a sense of who Thomas Culpepper was, his dark side, as it were. Tell me about him.

Gareth Russell (40:56)

The dark side of Culpepper could have been extremely dark or moderately dark. There doesn't really seem to be a light assigned to him. So the extremely dark version of him is reported by a merchant called Richard Hills. He's a Protestant, a very, very firm Protestant, so much so that he actually emigrates abroad after Thomas Cromwell's execution. And he reports later that when Culpepper was high in King Henry's favor, he sexually assaulted a park keeper's wife, and he then murdered her husband when he tried to rescue her.

Professor Susannah Lipscomb (41:27)

Goodness.

Gareth Russell (41:28)

Hills then goes on to say Henry knew about this and intervened to pardon Culpepper. So no one was punished for the rape or for the murder. The problem with Hill's account is that no one else mentions it, and he wasn't in the country when he wrote it. He'd been living abroad for a couple of years by this point. And it's quite interesting that even the French ambassador or the Spanish ambassador, who are trying to collect lots of information on Culpepper during Catherine's downfall, don't mention this or don't uncover it. There is a possible explanation that squares the circle, which is that it may have been a Thomas Culpepper that did the terrible thing Hill's heard about. Because, true to form, where there are Thomases everywhere you look in the 1500s, Thomas Culpepper had a brother called Thomas Culpepper. So I have to assume there were nicknames in the family. Certainly there weren't a lot of individual interesting names. But the elder Thomas Culpepper, the brother, may have been the one who committed the crime, in which case the younger Thomas Culpepper used his influence to have him acquitted. So that's possible as well. We don't know. If you set aside that really horrific possibility, there's still a lot about Culpepper that is tricky and murky. So he had previously worked for the Lyell family in Calais, where he'd been a bit too flirtatious with his master's wife, Leah. He was someone who had a pretty densely populated romantic life at this point. He's carrying on an affair with a woman called Bess Harvey, and he's joking about it to Catherine. He had a relationship with Catherine when she first came to court. Thomas Culpepper does not love to sleep alone, I think is the way you would summarize.

Professor Susannah Lipscomb (43:02)

He's a busy man.

Gareth Russell (43:03)

He's very, very busy. He's booked and blessed. And he is someone, I think, who can't process the possibilities of consequences because they haven't happened to him yet. If the crime did happen, he's escaped punishment for two of the worst crimes possible, even if they didn't happen. He has continually escaped from any consequences of flirting too much or pushing the boundaries. And he's a very, very ambitious man. So I don't see a lot in the sources. In fact, I see nothing, to be totally honest, that would say Culpepper was well liked. He's quite popular, which isn't necessarily the same thing. So he seems to lead a young group of men in the King's privy chamber. They're all quite good looking, athletic, a bit cocky. They all flirt quite a lot. So Culpepper is someone who's always at the party at Henry VIII's court. He likes fine clothes. The receipts from the end of his life show he spent a lot on alcohol, gambling, hunting and clothes. True to form of a lot of young men, he doesn't spend anything on furnishing his house. There's almost no furniture left. He spends the money as quickly as he can make it. He's a taste for finer things. But unfortunately, as time wears on, that confidence grows to arrogance. And it's really here at Lincoln, I think, that he takes a step beyond the point of no return.

Dr. Nicola Clark (44:18)

And it's here at Lincoln that there's a declaration of love. Who makes that?

Gareth Russell (44:24)

It seems to be Culpepper who makes it to Catherine. So there are two meetings that they have at Lincoln. The first one is very flirtatious, but there's also a bit of a risk. So Catherine goes to see Lady Rochford. That's the story she tells two of her maids, Catherine Tilney and Margaret Morton, who are absolutely enraged that they have to wait on the other side of the door and don't get to bed until close to dawn. They're both exhausted, but they can't go to bed until the Queen does. Allegedly, Catherine's on the other side of the door, visiting with her favorite lady in waiting, which is unusual. Lady Rochford's actually led the Queen out the bedroom's other door, down one of these little staircases into a large lavatory, where Thomas Culpepper is waiting for them. Catherine's a little bit jittery when he arrives, because earlier in the night a guard had spotted this unlocked door, assumed it was a mistake and locked it, which would have trapped Catherine inside. And Culpepper, as a bit of a nod to what a colorful life he'd led, turns out to be an expert lockpick. So he picks the lock and ta dahs into the bathroom. And they have this very long conversation in which they talk about their previous romances and Catherine's completely honest about her premarital romances. Culpepper talks about the woman at court he's currently sleeping with, and Catherine then makes a joke. If I had still been in the maiden's chamber, I would have tried you. So if I was still unmarried, I would have tried you out. So it's very, very flirtatious and risque. The second night, however, they meet in the same room. The tone shifts. Catherine seems much more nervous and agitated than she did the night before. There are jokes about how she should send Culpepper bejeweled bracelets and to keep his arms warm if he's not hugging another woman. And at this point, Culpepper makes a declaration of love to Catherine and says that he will end the romance with Bess Harvey. They sort of commit to each other and he vows that he is in love with her. And it ends with this quite haunting image of Catherine extending her hand and Culpepper kissing it like her valiant knight. And that, allegedly, is as far as they go that night.

Dr. Nicola Clark (46:34)

It feels like a lot of play acting. It's hard to judge from this distance, of course, but the picture you've built up is not of a man who is sincere in his ardent declaration.

Gareth Russell (46:44)

No, I don't think he is. There's definitely a tale of two nights. The first night feels much more authentic when they're joking about their sex lives and Catherine makes that quite dirty joke to him. They seem relaxed and flirtatious and funny. The second, where it's all of a sudden a passionate declaration of love. And him kneeling like Lancelot in front of Guinevere does feel like he's acting out a medieval romance in terms of how he felt. It's really tricky. I don't doubt from having researched it that Catherine felt really, really strongly about him. And everything she does, I think, is that sort of lunacy you get when you have a full, passionate love for someone and you're quite young. And even though they're not very appropriate, you're sort of taking risks and to see them and all of that with Culpepper, I never quite get the sense that he loses control of himself romantically in the way that maybe Catherine does. I think it's unlikely that she was trying to use him to get a son. That's suggested all the time. Firstly, there's not great evidence that they're sleeping together at this stage. So if that was the goal, she doesn't seem to be pursuing it that ruthlessly. I think we have to look back to Lent and this is speculation on my part, but I think everything in the evidence backs it up. We know that Henry lives to 1547, but they don't. They have seen him come within a hair's breadth of dying at Lent. Catherine was very nearly a widow. And there's a long track record in English history of wealthy upper class widows marrying slightly beneath them in the social pecking order. And that way gender and class offset each other quite nicely. Henry VIII's sister did that. Anne Boleyn's sister did it. Even going right the way back in Catherine's family, Henry I's widow, Adelisa of Louvain had done it and had married a man of a pretty similar status in her husband's household to culpepper and Henry VIII's. I think both of them are looking forward to a time when Catherine will be the Dowager Queen. She'll probably be one of the richest women in the world, certainly in Europe at the time, and Culpepper will be able to marry her and have access to the finer things for the rest of his life. I also think Lady Rochford might have had a little bit of an eye to that too, because after her husband's execution in 1536 and her father in law's death in 1539, financially and socially, Lady Rochford's whole future is tied up to the Queen's household. Had George Boleyn not been executed in 1536, the future that Lady Rochford had as his wife was glittering. George would have inherited the Earldom of Ormond, which is one of the the wealthiest in the British Isles and deep northern Europe. Their income would have been about £3,000 a year. So they would have been stratospherically wealthy. She would have been a great lady of the nobility.

Dr. Nicola Clark (49:25)

And that's how much Henry VIII leaves to his daughters.

Gareth Russell (49:27)

Yeah, it's absolutely enormous. And also the political influence it has in Ireland would have made them heavy hitters on both sides of the Irish Sea. She really would have been a prominent figure of English high society that is then taken from her by his execution. She also doesn't have children. Her father in law dies in 1539 and at this stage she is left with a pension of £100 and that's all that she'll be existing on. So if the Queen's household ends with Henry's death, Jane has nowhere to live. Her income will be all that she has to get by. But if she is Catherine's go to her confidant, the woman she relies on, she might segue into a position as chief lady and wedding of the Dowager Queen's household. So Jane's later years and her retirement plan are set in stone. And I think that explains credibly why she did what she did.

Dr. Nicola Clark (50:19)

It's so interesting as well, because we're so often told that Catherine is young and stupid, that she's foolish. I mean, who would do this if you're married to Henry viii, he's already got form, he's killed one wife, so why would you have this relationship? But actually what you're suggesting is if we think about it as a counterfactual, if we think about the fact that everyone suspects he's going to die anytime soon, this is just looking to the future.

Gareth Russell (50:45)

I think it is. And I think, look, you have to remember that at 18 or 19, you tend to fall in love quite hard. So there can be a risk factor to it. I mean, it's not riskless behavior by any stretch of the imagination. I think the comparison to Anne Boleyn is a really interesting one because people will often ask, how could she not have drawn that comparison? And then I wondered, was she told by someone? By the way, she didn't actually do it. Bear in mind they were cousins. She would have known a lot of people who knew Anne. And Henry had told his third wife in a moment when he was caught off guard in his temper, that Anne lost her head for meddling in affairs of state. So was Catherine told that by someone? Oh, actually the thing to do is not to meddle in government. And if you look at her behavior as Queen, she doesn't touch politics. So I wonder, was there an element of her thinking, I'm not really doing anything wrong publicly, I can maybe in private start to set up for a life after Henry.

Dr. Nicola Clark (51:41)

And of course Catherine and Thomas say that they don't have a sexual relationship. That's their defense.

Gareth Russell (51:49)

Yeah, Thomas says, yet it's really, and I think to be honest, he was telling the truth. That's my instinct. I know some people think it was a really clever lie, that if you said, oh, I didn't do it yet, it might make the interrogators think that you were being really honest. But I think he was sort of caught when he was being questioned and he blurted it out. Because there's a moment that they describe in that interrogation where everyone's shocked and Culpepper admits that they hadn't slept together yet, that they would have at some point. And Edward Seymour is the one who says that is already too much. So I don't know whether Thomas Culpepper just didn't understand how Henry had really amped up the treason laws so even your thoughts were criminalized. But the fact that he met with her with the credible intention of sleeping together was enough. Because Catherine isn't condemned to death for adultery, she's condemned to death for her intention to commit adultery, which was by then an act of treason.

Dr. Nicola Clark (52:47)

By then. And when they were meeting with each other, nothing they were doing was treasonous.

Gareth Russell (52:53)

No, nothing at all. People often say Catherine was so stupid, how could she not have known it was treason? She didn't know because it wasn't. And one of the most surprising things I find about the public reaction to her downfall is that the House of Lords tries to stop it at some point simply because they are not sure that what she has done meets the criteria. So if you have the Lord Spiritual and Temporal saying, I don't think this meets the criteria and it's Henry VII who has to push the death warrant through, I think it's fairly understandable why Catherine thought her behavior, yes, was unwise and risky, but it wasn't criminal.

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Professor Susannah Lipscomb (54:54)

By November, everything accelerated. At Hampton Court, Henry found a folded letter left on his chair before Mass. It was from Archbishop Thomas Cranmer and its contents were explosive. In cautious, careful language, Kramer raised the possibility that Catherine had been involved with other men before her marriage, and even hinted at something far more dangerous a possible pre contract of marriage to Francis Dereham. We can almost feel the shock. Henry had believed Catherine to be a virgin when she married him, the pure, fresh bride who would restore his sense of potency and legitimacy. If she'd lied about that, what else might she be hiding? And if she were to bear a child fathered by someone else, passing it off as the King's, the entire succession would be thrown into question. That was not just personal betrayal, that was treason. A brutal, methodical investigation followed. Members of Catherine's household were rounded up and questioned. Old acquaintances were summoned. Servants, friends and former companions testified under immense pressure, trying to save themselves while reconstructing conversations from years before. On 6 November 1541, Cranmer questioned Catherine in person. She was told that honesty would bring mercy, and so she admitted to her earlier relationship with Francis Dereham, perhaps believing that if she owned up to her past, her presentation and future might still be salvaged. But the more Catherine tried to limit the damage, especially where Thomas Culpepper was concerned, the worse it became. Searches of Culpepper's rooms produced a letter from Catherine overflowing with expressions of romantic affection, which made any attempt to downplay their connection ring hollow. Under interrogation, Culpepper denied that the affair had been consummated, but admitted that he and the Queen had talked about meeting in ways that strongly implied intent under Tudor law. And in the climate of Henry's anger and paranoia, that was enough. On 1 December, Culpepper and Dereham were tried for treason at the Guild hall in London. They denied outright adultery, but their fates were sealed before they entered the courtroom. They were found guilty and sentenced to the horrific traitor's death that would write them into the bloody story of Henry's reign. Catherine, meanwhile, was stripped of her title and removed from court to a former convent, her queenship erased while she still lived. Unlike Anne Boleyn, she did not face a public trial where she could speak in her own defence. Henry instead opted for an act of attainder legislation that declared her guilty without a hearing and also changed the law so that consensual adultery by a queen, or even the intention to commit it, counted as treason. It's hard to avoid the sense that the law was literally being reshaped around her and against her. Interestingly, Catherine was offered the possibility of a trial but refused it, perhaps out of fear, perhaps because she still believed that Henry might yet relent if everything stayed behind closed doors. That hope, if it ever truly existed, was misplaced. On 10 February 1542, she was taken by barge along the Thames to the Tower of London, a journey that must have been heavy with the memory of Anne Boleyn's fate only a few years earlier. Three days later, at dawn, she walked to the scaffold on Tower Green. Contemporary reports suggest that she behaved with composure and dignity. She did not claim innocence, nor did she publicly declare a grand love story. With a single stroke of the axe, her life and her brief experience in queenship was over. For me, Catherine Howard deserves far more than the crude labels history has stuck to her. She was neither a simpleton nor a cold blooded schemer, neither saint nor siren. She comes into focus instead as a young woman trying to navigate desire, ambition and vulnerability in a court that both rewarded and punished female sexuality with equal ferocity. Her tragedy exposes not only her own misjudgments, but also the ruthless reach of Tudor power and a culture that could turn private intimacy into public treason whenever it suited the Crown. In the end, Catherine did not fall because she was reckless alone. She fell because Henry viii, backed by his counsellors and Parliament, chose to make her past and her private life a capital offense to turn her into a warning. Her youth was her crime and she paid for it with her life. If you'd like to delve deeper into Catherine's story and see the places that shaped her, from Chesworth House to Hampton Court and beyond to Lincoln Cathedral to Sion House, which is where she was sent after she was accused, and of course, to the Tower of London. Do join me for my new two part documentary series, Catherine Howard Victim or Vixen, available now on History Hit. Subscribers can also enjoy hundreds of documentaries and ad free podcasts@historyhit.com subscribe. Thank you for listening to Not Just the Tudors and to my producer Rob Weinberg. Remember to follow us wherever you get your podcasts to get each new episode dropping straight into your feed. I look forward to welcoming you back next time for another episode of Not Just the Tudors from History hit.

Gareth Russell (61:14)

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