THE HOWARDS

KATHERINE HOWARD’S UPBRINGING:

HOW ACCURATE ARE OUR PERCEPTIONS?

Under interrogation at Hampton Court Palace, Queen Katherine Howard revealed that while still an insignificant maid of honour to Henry VIII’s fourth wife she was challenged by a besotted former lover over rumours she was to marry a young gentleman of the court, and had retorted sharply ‘You know more than I do know!’   If, via some ingenious time machine of modern technology, we could enlighten her as to today’s public perception of her circumstances and behaviour, she might well respond in the same fashion.

As the Internet readily confirms, many people of any age when asked what they know of Katherine Howard are likely to come up with one or more of the following:

She was a neglected and  abused orphan brought up by a wicked step-grandmother, an awful old woman who forced her to work as an unpaid drudge and made her sleep in a dormitory with the servants, many of whom were  unsuitable company for  a  girl so young.

Her scheming and power-crazed relatives pushed her into the king’s path, and through her hoped to gain power over him.

She was a teenager and Henry VIII was obese, in poor health and thirty years her senior when they married.

He had her beheaded because of her involvement with other men.

The last two responses cannot be disputed, but are the others really true?

The wicked step grandmother

Many of our perceptions of Katherine Howard and her life with her step-grandmother Agnes Tilney, Dowager Duchess of Norfolk are founded in large part upon what was, and is, little more than hearsay perpetuated after her death, and fuelled again 300 years later through the works of certain Victorian and Edwardian authors equipped with vivid imaginations but showing little evidence from primary sources to validate some of their material. Katherine was not an orphan: her mother had died, but her father, Lord Edmund Howard, had been dead only about eight months when she was summoned to court as a maid of honour to Anne of Cleves; a full chapter of the book Queen Katherine and the Howards: a Tudor family on the brink of disaster is devoted to him. Part of Duchess Agnes’s task would have been to find a suitable husband for Katherine, titled and, hopefully, wealthy, so it was in everybody’s interest to make sure she had raised her in a manner appropriate to her future position.

Would an insignificant and neglected girl given no formal grounding in the all-important manners, deportment and social skills have been chosen as a maid of honour to a queen consort in the first place? Is it likely that the refined and cultured Henry VIII, surrounded by the endless parade of elegant and accomplished beauties of his spectacular Court, would have been attracted to such a humble person? In reality Katherine Howard, brought up in the home of one of the greatest noblewomen in the land, was no Cinderella, and Henry VIII, although very much a Prince Charming on the surface, by 1540, when he first set eyes on Katherine, was already a very dangerous man.

And what of those power-crazed Howard relations?

Her uncle, Thomas Howard, 3rd  Duke of Norfolk, still frequently accused of flaunting her before the king, had indeed, more than a decade beforehand,  encouraged the removal of Katherine of Aragon so that Henry could marry Katherine Howard’s first cousin, Anne Boleyn. However, for the duke, as head of the Howard family, the 1530s as a whole was a fraught and disturbing period because of the dangerous misdemeanours of some other Howard family members. Added to this, the fact that he was absent for much of the second half of the decade controlling the North after rebellions, and was fully aware  that Henry VIII seriously disliked him, Thomas Howard  probably had little opportunity at the time to advance his niece Katherine.

THOMAS HOWARD, 3RD DUKE OF NORFOLK

AND HIS SON AND HEIR HENRY HOWARD,  EARL OF SURREY

Thomas Howard, 3rd Duke of Norfolk and his son Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey. Images Public domain

Thomas Howard’s fortunes were very mixed. Prominent at Court as Earl Marshal and Lord Treasurer, he was indispensible to Henry VIII, who nevertheless disliked him, and the duke’s own correspondence confirms he was at times in real fear of Henry. Involved in promoting the charms of his niece Anne Boleyn to the king, there is little firm evidence to prove he did the same with her cousin Katherine. He was, however prominent in the interrogation, trials and sentencing to death of Anne and George Boleyn, his own sister Elizabeth’s children, and the investigation into the accusations against Katherine Howard, his brother Edmund’s daughter.

Whatever dirty deeds he may have done throughout his life, including the relentless undermining and persecution of others, by his quelling of the 1536 rebellions the Lincolnshire Rising and the Pilgrimage of Grace, the duke saved Henry from the greatest threat in his reign, and he was still being brought in to lead the army against the Scots and French when he was well into his seventies. In spite of all his troubles and slights from his monarch, Thomas Howard was fiercely loyal throughout, which makes all the more appalling the cowardly manner in which Henry allowed him to be ruined in his old age and his son and heir eliminated.