Materiality, Space, and the Fall of Catherine Howard Bradley J
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Early Modern Women: An Interdisciplinary Journal 2009, vol. 4 “The Secret Chamber and Other Suspect Places”: Materiality, Space, and the Fall of Catherine Howard Bradley J. Irish f Henry VIII’s many queens, it is the young Catherine Howard who Ois thought to have most enjoyed the fineries of her station. Married before twenty, Queen Catherine embraced the luxuries she was uniquely afforded; King Henry never had a wife, remarked one sixteenth-century contemporary, “who made him spend so much money in dresses and jew- els as she did, who every day had some fresh caprice.”1 As Catherine later described it, she had been at the time of her courtship “blynded with the desier of wordly glorie”—a statement that suggests the obvious allure of both the queenship and its lavish accompaniments.2 Because materiality was a central theme of Catherine’s stint as queen, it is unsurprising that her sudden fall can be equally explored through the lens of material culture. While the scandal itself has a material trail—such as the “chayne,” “crampe ryng,” and “payer of brayselettz” Catherine lavished on an alleged lover, or the royal “jewelles, and other thinges of the Quenes” 3 that were symbolically confiscated at the time of her imprisonment—even more notable are the issues of materiality that underpinned the contempo- rary construction of her crimes, and later shaped her identity as adulteress and traitor. In July 1540, Catherine Howard was wed to Henry VIII, a man still reeling from his dutiful, disastrous match with Anne of Cleves.4 The aging Henry seems to have been revitalized by the infectious energy of his young bride, who boasted an impressive courtly pedigree: after being raised in Lambeth by her step-grandmother, the dowager Duchess of Norfolk, Catherine entered the royal court as lady-in-waiting to the former Queen 169 170 EMWJ 2009, vol. 4 Bradley J. Irish Anne. The happy nuptials, however, did not last long: after barely a year of marriage, Henry was shocked by the revelation that Queen Catherine had come to his bed unchaste. In the subsequent investigation, evidence amassed about the queen’s youthful indiscretions—and more damagingly, it was alleged further that she had continued her dalliances as a married woman. The Privy Council levied two main charges: first, that unbe- knownst to Henry, Catherine had at Lambeth lived “most corruptly and sensuallye” with one Francis Dereham, a man she subsequently showed favor to as queen; and second, that after her marriage she had engaged in illicit dealings with Thomas Culpeper, a gentlemen of King Henry’s privy chamber.5 In the high court of Henrician justice, this was quite enough: for these alleged crimes, Catherine was doomed in February 1542 to the same fate as Anne Boleyn, her notorious cousin and sister-queen. One cannot read the surviving records of the scandal without notic- ing the ubiquitous concern with the material circumstances of Catherine’s indiscretions. In addition to the tokens and trinkets that concretized her crimes, even more notable is the contemporary interest in the physical set- ting of the scandal—the cloistered chambers and darkened hallways that cloaked her alleged adultery. Though these spaces, as we shall see below, would accrue a crucial ideological power, they existed first as concrete objects, serving in their materiality as silent accomplice to the queen’s damning behavior. In the course of the investigation, inquisitors and wit- nesses relentlessly reconstructed what may be called the geography of Catherine’s infidelity, mapping her comings and goings across the panoply of royal households and palaces. In one representative moment, Catherine herself recalls how Culpeper “spake with hir in a litle galery at the steyer hedd at Lyncoln when it was late in the nyght about x or xj of the clok an hower and more, a nother tyme in her bedde chamber at Pomfrett and a nother tyme in my lady Rocheford chamber at York.”6 As such “stolen interviews” came under increasing official scrutiny, Catherine’s movements became increasingly important circumstantial evidence: the queen would, one report damningly recalls, “in every house seek for the back doors and stairs herself,” despite fears that “the King had set watch at the back door.”7 Lady Rochford, the lady-in-waiting executed with the queen, played an equally crucial role in mapping the terrain of Catherine’s encounters. It The Secret Chamber and Other Suspect Places 171 was claimed that she “wold at eevery lodgyng serche the bak doores & tell [Catherine] of them if there were eny,” and on one occasion she located for the queen “an old kechyn wherin she myght well speke” with Culpeper privately.8 Accordingly, secret meetings with Rochford were equally sus- pect: in one deposition, the witness is quick to note the time Catherine spent in “lady Rochford’s chamber, which was up a little pair of stairs by the Queen’s chamber.”9 More perversely, Thomas Culpeper was himself a member of the king’s most immediate circle; as a gentleman of the privy chamber, he shared intimate living space with Henry—including a mutual bed.10 This humiliating irony was not lost on contemporary observers: one ambassadorial dispatch records that “Colpepre, who had been from child- hood brought up in the King’s chamber, and ordinarily shared his bed . apparently wished to share the Queen’s too, to judge by their manner of meeting at Lincoln and other places.”11 Shared beds, shared chambers, and shared moments dominate the surviving records, which insistently present the Howard scandal in spatial and material terms. As the governing trope of Queen Catherine’s scandal, the “secret and suspect place” thus contains both a material and a conceptual force.12 Hidden hallways and dark stairwells were ripe terrain for a royal affair; it was in such space at Lambeth that Dereham “used [Catherine] in suche sorte as a man doith his wyff,” and it was in such space that Catherine was presumed to have done the same with Culpeper.13 But more importantly, the notion of the queen’s private chamber—which, as the records make clear, is a rhetorical construction flexible enough to encompass all manner of palatial nooks and crannies—had a crucial ideological valence: shielded from the prying eyes of the royal council, it was the figurative space of limitless transgression, in which Catherine’s actions and motives could be construed in the harshest of terms. Under a statute of 1534, to “malicy- ously wyshe, will, or desyre by wordes or writinge, or by crafte ymagen, invent, practyse, or attempte” any harm against the king was to incur the harshest of penalties; as Lacey Baldwin Smith observes, it was this abil- ity to prove treason by inference that finally doomed Catherine and her associates, who “were all caught on the basis of intent, on the secret mal- ice that lay concealed within their evil hearts and the presumptive carnal desires that lay hidden in their imagination.”14 Catherine’s guilt derived not 172 EMWJ 2009, vol. 4 Bradley J. Irish simply from her actions, but from the uncertain imaginings those actions implied—two strands that importantly converged in the “suspect place,” the liminal space that concealed the physical enactment of the queen’s crimes even as it provided the very terms through which they would be subsequently construed. While the king’s privy chamber was the court’s symbolic center of power, the queen’s chamber—at least in the later months of 1541—was a center of disorder and unruliness, hiding untold acts and desires from the omnipotent royal gaze. This very opacity, however, made such “suspect spaces” a site of elaborate fantasy, in which a jealous and wounded king could impart the most sinister motives to a once-beloved wife. According to contemporaries, Henry was gravely affected by the revelations about the queen: Chapuys, ambassador to the Holy Roman Empire, reported that the king “has certainly shown greater sorrow at her loss than at the faults, loss, or divorce of his preceding wives,” while the French diplomat Marillac records that Henry had “taken such grief at being deceived that of late it was thought he had gone mad.”15 As the surviving records indicate, it is in secret places—both material and conceptual—that such faults and deception breed, and it is in secret places that Catherine sowed the seeds of her undoing. The materiality of Catherine Howard’s downfall is a crucial dimension of her tragedy, and the geography of the scandal underpins the larger cultural and ideological forces that culminated in its bloody resolu- tion. Notes 1. Chronicle of King Henry VIII of England, ed. Martin A. Sharp Hume (London: George Bell and Sons, 1889), 77. This variously reliable account of Henry’s reign was recorded in Spanish by an anonymous hand. 2. Calendar of the Manuscripts of the Marquis of Bath, Preserved at Longleat, Wiltshire, 5 vols. (London: Historical Manuscripts Commission, 1904–1980), 2: 9. (Hereafter cited as M.M.B.) 3. Ibid., 2: 10; State Papers, Published Under the Authority of Her Majesty’s Commission: King Henry the Eighth, 11 vols. (London: 1830–52), 1: 695. 4. For Catherine’s life, see Lacey Baldwin Smith, A Tudor Tragedy: The Life and Times of Catherine Howard (New York: Pantheon Books, 1961); and Retha M. Warnicke’s entry in the new Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. The Secret Chamber and Other Suspect Places 173 5. Proceedings and Ordinances of the Privy Council of England, ed. Harris Nicolas, 7 vols. (London: 1834–7), 7: 353. 6. M.M.B, 2: 9.