Young and Damned and Fair: The Life and Tragedy of Catherine Howard at the Court of Henry VIII
England July 1540: it is one of the hottest summers on record and the court of Henry VIII is embroiled, once again, in political scandal. Anne Cleves is out. Thomas Cromwell is to be executed and, in the countryside, an aristocratic teenager named Catherine Howard prepares to become fifth wife to the increasingly unpredictable monarch…In the five centuries since her death, Catherine Howard has been dismissed as ‘a wanton’, ‘inconsequential’ or a naïve victim of her ambitious family, but the story of her rise and fall offers not only a terrifying and compelling story of an attractive, vivacious young woman thrown onto the shores of history thanks to a king's infatuation, but an intense portrait of Tudor monarchy in microcosm: how royal favour was won, granted, exercised, displayed, celebrated and, at last, betrayed and lost. The story of Catherine Howard is both a very dark fairy tale and a gripping political scandal.Born into the nobility and married into the royal family, during her short life Catherine was almost never alone. Attended every waking hour by servants or companions, secrets were impossible to keep. With his research focus on Catherine’s household, Gareth Russell has written a narrative that unfurls as if in real-time to explain how the queen’s career ended with one of the great scandals of Henry VIII's reign.More than a traditional biography, this is a very human tale of some terrible decisions made by a young woman, and of complex individuals attempting to survive in a dangerous hothouse where the odds were stacked against nearly all of them. By illuminating Catherine's entwined upstairs/downstairs worlds, and bringing the reader into her daily milieu, the author re-tells her story in an exciting and engaging way that has surprisingly modern resonances and offers a fresh perspective on Henry's fifth wife.YOUNG AND DAMNED AND FAIR is a riveting account of Catherine Howard’s tragic marriage to one of history’s most powerful rulers. It is a grand tale of the Henrician court in its twilight, a glittering but pernicious sunset during which the king’s unstable behaviour and his courtiers’ labyrinthine deceptions proved fatal to many, not just to Catherine Howard.
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William Collins
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This eBook first published in Great Britain by William Collins in 2017
Copyright © Gareth Russell 2017
Maps and family trees by Martin Brown
Extract from Die Lorelei from Collected Poems and Drawings by Stevie Smith, London, Faber and Faber Ltd, 2015. Kind permission granted by the publishers.
Cover image shows ‘Portrait of a Young Woman, 1540–45, oil on wood’, Holbein, Hans the Younger (1497–1543). New York, Metropolitan Museum of Art. The Jules Bache Collection, 1949 (49.7.30) © 2016 The Metropolitan Museum of Art/Art Resource/Scala, Florence.
Gareth Russell asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
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Source ISBN: 9780008128289
Ebook Edition © January 2017 ISBN: 9780008128296
Version: 2017-12-06
An antique story comes to me
And fills me with anxiety,
I wonder why I fear so much
What surely has no modern touch?
… There, on a rock majestical,
A girl with smile equivocal
Painted, young and damned and fair
Sits and combs her yellow hair.
– Stevie Smith, Die Lorelei
CONTENTS
2. Our Fathers in Their Generation
6. The King’s Highness Did Cast a Fantasy
7. The Charms of Catherine Howard
8. The Queen of Britain Will Not Forget
9. All These Ladies and My Whole Kingdom
11. The Return of Francis Dereham
14. For They Will Look Upon You
15. The Errands of Morris and Webb
16. The Girl in the Silver Dress
18. Waiting for the King of Scots
19. Being Examined by My Lord of Canterbury
21. The King Has Changed His Love into Hatred
Appendix I: The Alleged Portraits of Catherine Howard
Appendix II: The Ladies of Catherine Howard’s Household
In the Great Hall at Hampton Court Palace, magnificent tapestries depicting scenes from the life of the patriarch Abraham are on display. Every day, hundreds of tourists pass these enormous works of art which cost Henry VIII almost as much as the construction of a new warship. After centuries of exposure, their colours had faded and the bright sparkle of the threads of beaten gold had worn away, until a lengthy conservation project carried out between the Historic Royal Palaces, the Clothworkers’ Company, and the University of Manchester offered a reconstruction and an academic paper conveying just how vibrant the tapestries would have been when they were first unveiled. Their detail is extraordinary, mesmeric. The reflections of mallard ducks floating on the ponds are visible, reeds sway in the wind, every face is detailed, sandals and toenails are stitched perfectly, bread in a servant’s basket is believably coloured. Crucially, part of the conservation work necessitated turning the tapestries over to look at the threads at the back and see all the ugly, confusing stitch-work that had gone into making the familiar scene on the front possible.
My interest in the story of Henry VIII’s fifth wife, Queen Catherine Howard, began years ago and solidified in 2011 when, under the supervision of Dr James Davis at Queen’s University, Belfast, I completed my postgraduate dissertation on her household.1 As with all Henry’s wives, Catherine’s life had been written about many times in biographies and studies of her husband’s reign. In the year of Henry VIII’s death, an Italian merchant remarked, ‘The discourse of these wives is a wonderful history’, an observation that captures why the Tudors remain one of England’s most famous dynasties.2 In Catherine’s case, the circumstances of her career had already been dissected in A Tudor Tragedy: The Life and Times of Catherine Howard, first published in New York in 1961 and generally judged the standard biography of her. Written by Professor Lacey Baldwin Smith, the central contention of A Tudor Tragedy was that Catherine’s ‘career begins and ends with the Howards, a clan whose predatory instincts for self-aggrandisement, sense of pompous conceit, and dangerous meddling in the destinies of state, shaped the course of her tragedy.’
