Young and Damned and Fair by Gareth Russell - Simon & Schuster (2016)
I don’t exactly envy any of Henry VIII’s six wives, but which do I pity the most? The first two unfortunate women bound in matrimony to the ‘English Nero’—Catherine of Aragon and Anne Boleyn—were certainly dragged through the mud (both their names associated with the icky crime of incest) but they at least triumphed in their own steadfast beliefs. Both Catherine and Anne used their positions within the Henrician court to promote diverging religious doctrines (Anne’s devout Protestantism is too often overlooked) and in their own ways, they altered the power structures within England and its relationship to the outside world. Both women were slandered and scapegoated, but we also remember them for their resiliency and determination, and both can be viewed, to a certain extent, as martyrs. We might not agree with everything they did, but we must acknowledge their bravery in refusing to kowtow to Henry Tudor and his obnoxious entourage of codpiece-wearing wingmen. Then we have Anne of Cleves and Catherine Parr, both of whom were so innocuous and benign that they have been largely (and mercifully) forgotten. Anne of Cleves was ugly and smelly and Henry swept her under the proverbial carpet by calling her his ‘sister’ and setting her up in a posh estate in the English countryside. Catherine Parr appeared too late on the scene to develop a memorable personality of her own, and her marriage to Henry mostly involved maternal care during his final, tortuous years. These two women outlived the infamous spouse they shared and enjoyed quiet, comfortable retirements. And we certainly can’t single out Jane Seymour, that angelic ideal of female subservience, for our deepest degree of pity. Even though she died in childbirth, Jane was by far the most loved of Henry’s wives and the only one to deliver him a son and heir.
So who does that leave? Catherine Howard. Her reputation was systematically destroyed in a manner similar to Anne Boleyn and Catherine of Aragon—with an emphasis on sexual deviance and moral impurity. And yet she lacked her predecessors’ strength of character. The historical records do not suggest that she nurtured any strong cultural values, religious beliefs, or political agendas. She was as passive and unconcerned as Catherine Parr and Anne of Cleves, but she was not granted their relative anonymity. She was a flighty and uncertain individual who was condemned as a treacherous harlot—an accusation even more painful for its assumption of a fortitude she lacked. The swift downfall of Catherine Howard makes modern historians uneasy because she was undoubtedly guilty of her crimes, but the extent to which she was thrust into a life she was unprepared for cannot be denied. Every other one of Henry VIII’s wives had extensive exposure to courtly intrigues prior to their royal marriage. On the other hand, Catherine Howard was uneducated, naive, and spent only eight months at court before Henry set his sights upon her. She is seen by many as a victim of a complex social apparatus she could not understand. Thus, even her guilt attains a sheen of innocence.
In his biography, Young and Damned and Fair, Gareth Russell offers a sensitive and thorough account of Catherine Howard’s brief life. He recognizes the extent to which Henry’s fifth wife was manipulated by members of her own family and the courtiers in her midst, without losing sight of her own complicity. The portrait that emerges is one of a woman who knew what she wanted and followed her heart, but sadly was unable to understand that a queen of England could never enjoy such freedom. She seemed not to realize that her every action was scrutinized and catalogued by friends and enemies to whom she was no more than a pawn in a indecipherable game of power. Writes Russell:
…the interpretation of Anne Boleyn’s downfall as one in which a powerful but divisive queen consort was harried to her death with maximum speed, minimum honesty, and determined hatred has no bearing on her cousin’s fate five years later. What happened to Catherine Howard was monstrous and it struck many of her contemporaries as unnecessary, but it was not a lynching. The Queen was toppled by a combination of bad luck, poor decisions, and the Henrician state’s determination to punish those who had failed its king. A modern study of Henry’s marriages offered the conclusion that if “ever a butterfly was broken on the wheel, it must surely have been Catherine Howard,” and in the sense that the wheel in question was her husband’s government, then there was an inexorable quality about the way it turned to crush Catherine after November 2, 1541.
This was the date that Archbishop Thomas Cranmer left a note for Henry VIII in Hampton Court’s Chapel Royal, detailing the evidence of Catherine’s ‘dissolute living’ both before and after her marriage to the King of England. And once the seed of doubt was planted in Henry’s bloated, histrionic head, Catherine’s fate was all but certain. Whether or not she escaped with her neck intact, Catherine’s reign as Queen was finished the moment her absolute fidelity was brought into question. Henry was both insanely jealous and easily convinced. The men he trusted—Thomas Cromwell, Cardinal Wolsey, Archbishop Cranmer—all knew that the easiest way to oust a queen who failed to serve their own political aspirations was to play upon Henry’s paranoia and obvious desperation for a legitimate male heir. The atmosphere in Hampton Court was charged with fear and paranoia, a condition that did not escape the notice of visiting dignitaries like Eustace Chapuys. Writes Russell of one such horrified guest:
In the descent into the chaos described by the Prince of Salerno, the office had already seen one queen banished into internal exile after twenty-three years of marriage, a second publicly butchered on charges that would have raised eyebrows at the court of Agrippina, a third who lay dying while her husband debated whether to cancel his hunting trip to Escher, and a fourth who had been metaphorically stripped bare before the public as every fold, sag, and blemish was discussed in excruciating detail to justify why she was too grotesque to please her husband. Just over a year later, the Privy Council claimed that everyone expected Catherine to succeed where the others had failed because “after sundry troubles in marriage,” Henry had found in her “a Jewel for womanhood.”
In the prevailing pop-culture interpretation of events (I’m looking at you Showtime), Catherine Howard is groomed by her step-grandmother and her uncle, the Duke of Norfolk, in order to seduce the aging king and secure the future prosperity of the Howard dynasty. Her subsequent downfall is thus seen to be the result of Howard enemies whispering lies into the ear of the monarch. In this version of the tale, both Catherine and Henry are preyed upon by warring tribal clans and have little agency themselves. There are two problems with this assumption, as Gareth Russell makes clear. First,
If the Howards had wanted to entice Henry VIII, they would not have chosen Catherine. She was damaged goods. Had they been as Machiavellian as the usual presentation of them suggests, at some point in the vetting process either the Dowager Duchess or the Countess of Bridgewater could have pointed out that elevating Catherine would put them all at risk in the long run. Rather, the King’s infatuation seems to have caught them all off-guard, and while her family then played the hand dealt to them—they would have been foolish not to—that is not the same thing as stacking the deck.
The second reason we cannot see Catherine as merely an innocent victim of court machinations is because she did in fact commit the crimes she was accused of. Or, perhaps, we can say that she was a victim of court politics but not of false prosecution. There is, after all, incontrovertible proof that she was romantically involved with at least two men besides her husband, one of whom she met in secret during the course of her marriage. The real tragedy of Catherine Howard’s brief marriage to Henry VIII is that neither she nor her husband seemed to understand what they were getting themselves into. Catherine operated under the illusion that she could continue to live her life as an anonymous maid, and Henry continued to entertain the disastrous belief that the pure and sexless vessel he fantasized about might actually exist in the real world. In fact, Henry VIII’s ridiculous expectations for his queen (encouraged, no doubt, by groveling courtiers) are really to blame for the death of Catherine Howard. He wanted her to be beautiful but not desired. He wanted to see evidence of her infatuation with his royal person, but otherwise to be completely devoid of a sexuality. He wanted her to be pure but also to produce an heir to the throne. Writes Russell,
Capable of parroting, expanding, or critiquing another’s thoughts, but incapable of developing many that were uniquely his, Henry VIII was intellectually skilled, but not brilliant. In itself, that is hardly a great failing or even an insult, but it became a problem because Henry failed to recognize his own limitations. Throughout his life, the majority of Henry’s troubles were caused by the fact that he constantly overestimated himself.
On the other hand,
…Catherine’s childhood and adolescence at Horsham and Lambeth were to shape her subsequent career in predominantly negative ways. Her education had rendered her poised, elegant, and immaculately mannered, with a talent for music and dancing that equipped her to succeed at court with a King who loved the former and had once excelled at the latter, but it also left her woefully unprepared for a position that required her to psychologically distance herself from her daily companions. Her youthful romances and easy dominance of her friends at Horsham gave her a taste for gossip and backstairs intrigue which she never had a chance to grow out of. The examples of her friends’ behavior and the extent to which she had escaped censure at Chesworth and Lambeth had also desensitized her to the opprobrium that such behavior could elicit in other environments.
So why should we pity the fifth wife of Henry VIII? Not because she was an innocent victim of malicious prosecution. Nor because she was used in a callous attempt to boost the fortunes of scavenging courtiers. We should lament the death of Catherine Howard because she did not know what it meant to be a queen. The other five wives knew the risks and the rewards they were signing themselves up for. They knew they would be required to navigate the treacherous waters of espionage and hypocrisy, and that they very well might lose their heads in the process. Catherine Howard never received the education that would prepare her for a life among those whose true intentions were never clear or innocent. She trusted too easily and she gave too much away. She was, at the time of her death, still very much a child. This is the tragedy that lies at the heart of Gareth Russell’s phenomenal book, Young and Damned and Fair. And despite the impressive amount research crammed into Russell’s text, his thesis is not difficult to find—it’s right there in the title.
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