Catherine Howard Read Online Free Page B

son, Henry Fitzroy; his son was suggested as a worthy husband for the King’s first-born child, the Princess Mary; his niece, Mary Boleyn, became the King’s mistress, and his half-brother, another Thomas, was briefly, if disastrously, contracted in marriage to Henry’s niece, Margaret Douglas, the grandmother of James I of England. 27
    Howard sons and daughters seemed to be everywhere, at every level of society, entrenched in almost every key position. It was no easy matter to keep such a family empire together, and the Howards were forced to pay a heavy price for their matrimonial pre-eminence. Alliance with sovereignty won for them the envy of less fortunate clans, while their cherished position of acting as a stud farm for royalty, was fraught with dangers. Lord Burghley is reported to have once remarked that ‘marriage with the blood royal was too full of risk to be lightly entered into’, 28 and though union with the Tudors brought political influence and social prestige, it was rarely accompanied by security or peace of mind. The alliance between the two houses was more than once to prove itself dangerous to the Howard interests. A sixteenth-century proverb observes that ‘there is more to marriage than four bare legs in bed’, and the full significance of that dictum becomes particularly obvious when dealing with royalty, for more than one Howard was to discover that a double standard existed for those of princely blood and those of more humble clay.
    Both Anne Boleyn and Catherine Howard lost their heads because they failed in their essential function, both as Howards and royal wives; neither could cement the union with a male heir, and both ladies allowed the breath of adulterous scandal to touch their lives. As mere mortals they deserved death twice over for their double sins. The Howards learned to their cost that marriage to royalty is a public, not a private, affair. Lord Thomas, the Duke’s half-brother, died in the Tower of London in 1536 for ‘having tried in the presence of witnesses to contract a marriage’ with Lady Margaret Douglas, the King’s niece. Elopement and high romance may be permissible in the lesser sort, but for royalty, wedlock was strictly a business proposition, and Henry was justifiably annoyed at the thought of squandering such a valuable diplomatic pawn as a Tudor niece upon a mere subject, even though he was a Howard. Moreover, the royal uncle placed a dangerous interpretation upon the foolhardy actions of the young Howard gallant, and it was rumoured abroad that Thomas had been ‘led and seduced by the Devil’ and was obviously aspiring to ‘the imperial crown by reason of marriage in so high a blood.’ 29 The Lady Margaret seems to have had a persistent and fatal penchant for Howard striplings, and five years later she was again in disgrace for having had an affair with Catherine’s brother, Charles. 30
    The Tudors were constantly on the watch that the Howards limit their ambitions to Tudor women and refrain from casting greedy eyes upon the Tudor crown. Henry Howard, first cousin to Catherine and heir to the dukedom, was relieved of his head in 1546 for having ‘openly used, and traitorously caused to be depicted, mixed, and conjoined with his own arms and ensigns, the said arms and ensigns of the King.’ 31 The heraldic pretensions of the Howard family were tantamount to an assertion that Howard blood was the equal of Tudor blood, and that a Howard might yet succeed a Tudor upon the throne. The folly of young Henry Howard was twofold, for not only did he arouse the most fundamental and predatory instincts of the Tudors, but he also exposed himself and his family to the enmity of personal and dynastic hatred. The Howards were envied by those who coveted their dignity, intrigued against by those who feared their power, and detested by those who abhorred their policy. Once the artful and persuasive whisper of the opposing faction had inflamed the King’s natural