Lady Catherine Howard was the most pitiful of all, as Anne Boleyn was the most tragic. Once again there was the inevitable see-saw of politics; Henry had got rid of Thomas Cromwell the Protestant by the simple method of cutting off his head in circumstances of unusual brutality even for the sixteenth century; and once more the Roman Catholics came on top. The result was the sacrifice of pretty Catherine Howard. That she was by far the best looking of all Henry’s wives can hardly be denied. Nobody looking at her gentle and thoughtful little face in the portrait that hangs in the National Portrait Gallery would ever dream that she was so immoral as people tried to prove. Her eyes were hazel, her hair was auburn; and she looks as virginal as though she had never been near the Court. Yet she was said to have had entanglements with at least three men. She had had a very unhappy childhood, and received due thrashings from her aunt the Duchess of Norfolk when that lady took a fancy to bestow them; but little education. She had no maternal supervision to keep her on the straight and narrow path in that sinful Court. Her music master, Mannock, boasted that she had promised to be his mistress; a kinsman named Dereham said that she was his wife; and she was reported to be engaged to her cousin, Culpepper. And now she was bestowed upon this new and dreadful suitor, His Gracious Majesty[5] himself. No wonder that Martin Hume became almost dithyrambic about it. Indeed, Catherine Howard had a hard fate.
I quote directly from Professor Pollard, who mercifully glosses over the piteous details. “Rumours of Catherine Howard’s past indiscretions had at length reached the ears of the privy council.... Twenty-four hours later Cranmer put in his hands the evidence of the queen’s misconduct. Henry refused to believe it in the rude awakening from his dreams; he ordered a strict investigation to be made. Its results left no room for doubt. Dereham confessed his intercourse; Mannock admitted having taken liberties; and finally the queen herself confessed her guilt. The king was overwhelmed with grief and vexation, and shed bitter tears. He offered his wife a pardon and she might have escaped with nothing worse than a divorce had not proofs come to hand of her misconduct with Culpepper during Henry’s recent absence in the north. This offence was high treason and could not be covered by Henry’s pardon for her prenuptial immorality.” Henry feared lest the blood royal be contaminated. In January, 1542, Parliament considerately relieved this blubbering and neurotic man of his responsibility by “passing an Act of Attainder directed against his new wife, which, to save him pain, was signed by a Commission in his stead. Catherine declined his permission to go down to the house of Parliament and defend herself in person.” In due course she was beheaded in the Tower. The story is that she said, “I had rather die a Culpepper than live a Queen.” Doubtless in confessing at the back of her mind was the thought that it were better to be dead than to be married to King Henry VIII at the moment that his mental syphilis was approximating to its greatest terrors with all its obsessions and phobias. Seemingly the Parliament of England was not always so brave as we now think it to be. But if he knew so much about women as he had professed in the case of his repudiation of Anne of Cleves, why had he not applied his knowledge to the case of Catherine Howard before?
It seems a reasonable thing to glance at the other symptoms of syphilis that occurred at the time during the reign of Catherine Howard when his greatest degeneracy was coming on.
The ulcer on his leg sometimes closed, and the pain was so intense that he sometimes became speechless with agony and went black in the face.[6] He grew more and more corpulent every day. When he went on progress to the north he cleared the Tower by issuing orders that every prisoner in it was to be beheaded. If these in an absolute monarch are not symptoms of syphilitic psychasthenia, of a frightful moral and physical degeneration, what are they? Symptoms of whooping-cough, perhaps!
Next and last came Catherine Parr, who was said to have been degraded to the royal bed by the Protestants to gain their own ends. She must have been a brave woman to tackle the task of nursing this man, whose temper by that time was like that of a wild beast owing to his obsessions and phobias. She was no beauty; she was short in stature, but gifted with amazing tact. She had already been twice a widow, so evidently she thought she understood the art of nursing and managing men, even such a man as her new husband. She is said to have been at the time in love with Sir Thomas Seymour, whom she married after Henry’s death, only to die in a short time of puerperal fever. She reconciled Henry to his daughter, Elizabeth, and is said to have kept the peace between her and the Princess Mary. We are told that she once had a theological dispute with the king; a risky thing to do. “A good hearing it is,” said Henry, “when women become such clerks; and a fine thing it is to be taught in mine old days by my wife.” Catherine explained that what she had said was merely intended to “minister talk”; so Henry answered, “Is it so, sweetheart; then we are friends again,” and when Lord Chancellor Wriothesley came to arrest her Henry called him beast, knave and fool. She must indeed have been a remarkably clever woman, whatever her religious opinions.
As to his death it is quite impossible to get at the real truth. He had sent the Duke of Norfolk to the Tower and had ordered his execution to be fixed for February 28th, 1546. But, alas, on the 27th Henry lay dying. The exact details are so squabbled over for purposes of sectarianism, that it is impossible to distinguish between truth and falsehood. It is said on the one side that he died in an agony of conscience; on the other that Archbishop Cranmer came to ask him to give some token of his belief in Jesus Christ. The king is said to have roused himself from his stupor and pressed Cranmer’s hand. While there are not sufficient details to offer an opinion it is possible that his stupor was uræmic, due to the slow degeneration of his kidneys during the many years that his body and mind had been degenerating. But one would prefer to have some independent authority for the statement that the dying man understood sufficient of what Cranmer was saying to him to press his hand at the mention of the blessed name of Christ.
To the best of my ability and in accordance with the best modern historical knowledge, I have drawn as honestly as I can the true character of Henry VIII, Defender of the Faith, as seen by a doctor. There are many stories told about him that I purposely have omitted from fear of being accused of exaggeration. But the general atmosphere of lust, obscenity, grandiose ideas, such as were noticed by Luther, and violence combined with cowardice, especially about disease, is all very typical of syphilis; one might almost call it diagnostic. He never became an indecent honest lunatic such as Ivan the Terrible, for ingenious historians who know the exact circumstances so far as anybody can know them at this time of day, are still able to find logical reasons for even the most dreadful of his actions. He did not become terrible; he became loathsome. To use the words of a witty journalist friend of mine he was not Henry the Terrible; he was Henry the Horrible. He is the one man who ever disproved Shakespeare’s vaunt:
“This England never did nor never shall
Lie at the proud feet of a conqueror.”
For if England did not lie at the proud and probably dropsical feet of this obsessional syphilitic with doubtless a gigantic blood-pressure to add to his bad temper, words have no meaning.