Catherine Howard Read Online Free Page A

Sir Francis Knollys, later to be vice-chamberlain and privy councillor to Queen Elizabeth, and Sir Thomas Arundel, the grandfather of the first Baron Arundel, and himself an important Tudor work-horse, who, like so many of his contemporaries, ended his career upon the scaffold. 23 The Culpeper family were important Howard allies both at court and in the country, and the Culpepers will play a considerable role in this story, since Catherine’s mother was one of that clan, and another member was to go to his death as a consequence of Catherine Howard’s matrimonial indiscretions. 24 Finally, both the Boleyns and the Norrises are to be numbered among the widening Howard galaxy. Catherine’s first cousin was Anne Boleyn, Henry VIII’s second wife, while her cousin by marriage, Sir Henry Norris, was executed in 1536 for his presumed intimacy with the ill-starred Anne. All of these were the new men and women of the century, individuals who had sampled the heady intellectual wines of the Renaissance, many of whom had travelled in Italy or France , and who were more at home in the gaudy costumes of the court than in the bulky plate of feudal armour. The Howards did well to fortify the ancient blood of the Mowbrays with the strength and vigour of the nouveaux riches , the men of the future and not of the past.
    The family did not content itself with creatures of the royal bounty and social upstarts; the stiff and uncompromising pride of the feudal past was also allied to their family pattern. Catherine’s aunts, who are to be reckoned by the dozen, were all married to peers of highest station, most of whom could claim the dubious distinction of having played at the risky game of treason, and who could count their rightful share of impaled heads above the tower gate of London Bridge . The Howards could boast alliance with earls of Sussex , Bridgewater , Oxford , and Derby . More distantly they were connected with John Grey, Viscount Lisle, Lord Dacre of the South and John Bourchier, Lord Berners. Even more distinguished, Thomas Howard, the third Duke of Norfolk, was married to Elizabeth Stafford, the daughter of the Duke of Buckingham, a direct descendant of Edward III, whose blood rights to the throne cost him his head in 1521. 25 The oldest and the youngest blood of the century were united in the Howard veins, and both family and political position conspired to place the Duke, both as a grandee of the realm and as the head of a family empire, at the pinnacle of a veritable dynasty.
    Like many houses of ancient lineage, the Howards were ‘puffed up with insatiable pride’ and their dynastic ambitions did not stop with the daughters of dukes and earls. As the representatives of the Mowbray line, they had little use for the Plantagenet blood of the dukes of Buckingham, for their Mowbray ancestors had laid claim to royal descent. As the descendants of kings and in their own dignity as dukes of Norfolk , the Howards regarded it as their just deserts to sit as councillors to kings, ride as earl marshals of the host, and supply husbands and wives to royal progeny. The sixteenth-century author Cornelius Agrippa once suggested that there were at least three roads to political advancement in his age. You could win a peerage in war, you could purchase it with money, or, in extremity, you could become ‘a royal parasite, or marry a discarded mistress or illegitimate child of a prince’. 26 The Howards regained their dukedom on the battlefield of Flodden , but it was along the last road that they advanced farthest, for above all others, the Howards were the clan from which Henry VIII selected spouses for himself and his family. Two of the third duke’s nieces, Anne Boleyn and Catherine Howard, became Henry’s queens, and though both ended their lives upon the scaffold, the former gave birth to a reigning monarch and England ’s greatest queen. But this was only the beginning. Norfolk ’s daughter was wedded to Henry’s illegitimate