My life in books

One of the few novels about Katherine Howard in print is Diane Haegar’s The Queen’s Mistake. Having recently gone on a binge read about some of Henry VIII’s other wives, but never having read anything written about Katherine Howard other than some of the history books that cover all of the wives, I decided to find whatever I could about Katherine and see how at least one author has decided to interpret the known facts.

Most historians seem to agree that, while Katherine was a Howard and thus a member of a powerful family, she herself was not seem as an important or valuable member of that house until Henry VIII began to show his displeasure at being married to Anne of Cleves. Seeing another chance to control the king through his women, the Earl of Norfolk, head of the Howard family, uncle of Henry’s second queen Anne Boleyn, went looking among the various young women of the family in the hopes that they might find someone pretty enough to catch the king’s eye. The prospective mistress, perhaps bribe, he found was Katherine.

Katherine’s father was a younger Howard son among 21 children, and had no inherited wealth or lands. Her mother died when she was five, having borne six children to Katherine’s father and five to a previous husband. The children were parceled out as wards to various relatives; her father remarried and took a position at Calais.

Katherine was given into the care of her father’s stepmother, the Dowager Countess, who had a rather large number of poor relations and young female wards and attendants and seemed rather lax in watching over and educating them. By courtly standards, Katherine was poorly educated. What she had, however, was beauty. And a history to be hidden.

Looked at through modern sensibilities, Katherine was the victim of sexual abuse at the hands of her music teacher, Henry Maddox, when she was around 13, and was later seduced at 15 by an older man, Francis Dereham, her guardian’s secretary, with whom she may have entered into a precontract to marry - witnesses at her trial agreed that they called each other husband and wife, and were fully sexually intimate. In Tudor times, a girl of 13 might be seen as old enough to marry, and a girl of 15 would be deemed capable of consent, so these sexual experiences were generally seen as proof of her unchaste character and not manipulation or abuse of a young girl by older men.

She, however insisted that she had not consented to either. Ironically, had she agreed that she had been precontracted to Dereham, she might have lived - that would have rendered her marriage to the king null and void, and made the charge of adultery with Thomas Culpepper irrelevant, at least as far as the king was concerned.

Interpretations of Katherine’s character and behaviour tend to be connected to how her early sexual experiences are viewed. Those who see her as the victim of older men tend to see her as a tragic figure, one who perhaps, as victims of sexual abuse often can be, was too prone to interpret sex as love, and to seek sex inappropriately because that’s what she was used to. Those who blame her for her early experience see her as deceitful, deliberately unfaithful, hedonistic and immoral. We’ll likely never know, as she left very little behind to tell us who she was, beyond her testimony and confession. She was barely 18 when she died.

Diane Haeger has resisted taking the easy way out, of presenting Katherine as all victim or all whore. Instead, she shows us a young girl bereft of love and affection at an early age, who takes what she can get, but doesn’t trust that what she is given is honest. In her own mind, is she seducer or seduced? A bit of both. The men who claim her while she is still a young girl at the Dowager Countess’s estate of Horsham as a mere girl at least give her a sense of being wanted, and with Dereham, to some extent, Haeger has her return his affection. But she doesn’t take his protestations of wanting to marry her seriously, especially once her uncle Norfolk announces his plans to bring her to court. She hopes to reach higher than a mere secretary, a servant - she dreams of attracting the attention of a nobleman. The thought that she might capture the king is not really in her mind. And Haeger proposes the possibility that the liaisons were not just known of, but arranged by the Dowager Countess as part of a plan to turn Katherine into a courtesan, the perfect mistress. It’s an interesting idea, and allows her to present Katherine as a wanton - she gives her sexual favours freely and carelessly once she arrives at court - and still maintain her as essentially a victim. If she was programmed to respond sexually to any man who showed her interest or affection, then it’s arguably not wholly her fault if she did succumb to attention, even love, from Culpepper.

Once it becomes clear to her that the king desires her, poor Katherine is trapped. Her family is pressuring her to acquiesce to his wishes, and the blackmailers - servants from her former life at Horsham who know all about Maddox and Dereham - have begun to demand favours and positions at court. Her uncle Norfolk and the Dowager Countess have both assured the king of her virginity, even though both know of her past, and that she is now having an affair with Culpepper. The only way out now would be to tell the truth, but that would put Culpepper beyond her reach forever. And so the tragedy move inexorably towards its end.

I liked this interpretation of Katherine as a young woman trapped and betrayed by almost everyone who should have taken care of her, from her early days as an orphaned and penniless unwanted relative to the pawn of powerful forces beyond her control - her family’s ambition, the king’s desires, the intrigues over religion that saw poor Katherine not as a girl in above her head, but a possible resurgence for the Catholic faith. She never had a chance, and all she really did wrong was take what comfort she could from perhaps the only person who truly saw her, cared for her, loved her.