After dinner the ball opened in earnest, Chapuys and Henry being alone and seated, with Fitzwilliam, Russell, and Browne at some distance away. The imperial ambassador began by saying that the King of France had made a determined bid to marry his second son, Orleans, with the Infanta of Portugal. This was a shock to Henry, and he changed colour; for one of his own trump cards was the sham negotiation in which Norfolk had been the tool, to marry the Princess Mary to Orleans. For a time he could only sputter and exclaim; but when he had collected his senses he countered by saying that Francis only wished to get the Infanta into his power, not for marriage, “but for objects of greater consequence than people imagined.” Besides, the French wanted the Princess Mary for Orleans, and were anxious to send an embassy to him about it: indeed, the French ambassador was coming to see him about it with fresh powers next day. Chapuys protested that he spoke as one devoted to Henry’s service; but he was sure the French did not mean business. They would never let Orleans marry a Princess of illegitimate birth. “Ah!” replied Henry, “but though she may be a bastard, I have power from Parliament to appoint her my successor if I like;” but Chapuys gave several other reasons why the match with Mary would never suit the French. “Why,” cried Henry, “Francis is even now soliciting an interview with me with a view to alliances.” “Yes, I know they say that,” replied the ambassador, “but at the same time Francis has sent an ambassador to Scotland, with orders not to touch at an English port.” This was a sore point with Henry, and he again winced at the blow.
Then he began to boast. He was prepared to face any one, and James of Scotland was in mortal fear of him. Chapuys then mentioned that France had made a secret treaty with Sweden and Denmark to obtain control of the North Sea, and divert all the Anglo-German trade to France, which Henry parried, by saying that Francis was in league with the German Protestants, and, notwithstanding the new decree of the Diet of Ratisbon, could draw as many mercenary soldiers as he liked from the Emperor’s vassals. He felt sure that Francis would invade Flanders next spring; and if he, Henry, had cared to marry a daughter of France, as her father wished him to do, he might have had a share of his conquests. This made Chapuys angry, and he said that perhaps Holstein and Cleves had also been offered shares. Henry then went on another tack, and said that he knew quite well that Francis and Charles together intended, if they could, to make war on England. Considering, however, the Emperor’s disaster at Algiers, and the state of Europe, he was astonished that Charles had not tried to make a close friendship with him. Chapuys jumped at the hint, and begged Henry to state his intentions, that they might be conveyed to the Emperor. But the King was not to be drawn too rapidly, and would not say whether he was willing to form an alliance with the Emperor until some one with full and special powers was sent to him. He had been cheated too often and left in the lurch before, he said. “He was quite independent. If people wanted him they might come forward with offers.” This sparring went on for hours on that day and the next, interspersed with little wrangles about the commercial question, and innuendoes as to the French intrigues. But Chapuys, who knew his man, quite understood that Henry was for sale; and, as usual, might, if dexterously handled, be bought by flattery and feigned submission to his will, hurriedly wrote to his master that: “If the Emperor wishes to gain the King, he must send hither at once an able person, with full powers, to take charge of the negotiation:” since he, Chapuys, was in ill health and unequal to it.
Thus the English Catholic reaction that had been symbolised by the repudiation of Anne of Cleves, and the marriage with Katharine Howard, was triumphantly producing the results which Henry and Gardiner had intended. The excommunicated King, the man who had flung aside his proud Spanish wife and bade defiance to the vicegerent of Christ, was to be flattered and sought in alliance by the head of the house of Aragon and the appointed champion of Roman orthodoxy. He was to come back into the fold unrepentant, with no submission or reparation made, a good Catholic, but his own Pope. It was a prospect that appealed strongly to a man of Henry’s vain and ostentatious character, for it gave apparent sanction to his favourite pose that everything he did was warranted by the strictest right and justice; it promised the possibility of an extension of his Continental territory, and the establishment of his own fame as a warrior and a king. We shall see how his pompous self-conceit enabled his ally to trick him out of his reward, and how the consequent reaction against those who had beguiled him drew his country farther along the road of the Reformation than Henry ever meant to go. But at present all looked rose-coloured, for the imperial connection and the miserable scandal of Katharine Howard rather benefited than injured the chances of its successful negotiation. Cranmer, Hertford, and Audley had shot their bolt in vain so far as political or religious aims were attained.
In the meanwhile the evidence against Katharine and her abettors was being laboriously wrung out of all those who had come into contact with her. The poor old Duchess of Norfolk and her son and daughters and several underlings were condemned for misprison of treason to perpetual imprisonment and confiscation,[225] and in Parliament on the 21st January a Bill of Attainder against Katharine and three lady accomplices was presented to the Lords. The evidence presented against Katharine was adjudged to be insufficient in the absence of direct allegations of adultery after her marriage, or of specific admissions from herself.[226] This and other objections seem to have delayed the passage of the Bill until the 11th of February, when it received the royal assent by commission, condemning Katharine and Lady Rochford to death for treason. During the passage of the Bill, as soon, indeed, as the procedure of Katharine’s condemnation had been settled, Henry plucked up spirits again, and with characteristic heartlessness once more began to play the gallant. “The King,” writes Chapuys, “had never been merry since first hearing of the Queen’s misconduct, but he has been so since (the attainder was arranged), especially on the 29th, when he gave a supper and banquet with twenty-six ladies at the table, besides gentlemen, and thirty-five at another table adjoining. The lady for whom he showed the greatest regard was a sister of Lord Cobham, whom Wyatt, some time ago, divorced for adultery. She is a pretty young creature, with wit enough to do as badly as the others if she were to try. The King is also said to fancy a daughter of Mistress Albart(?) and niece of Sir Anthony Browne; and also for a daughter, by her first marriage, of the wife of Lord Lisle, late Deputy of Calais.”[227]
Up to this time Katharine had remained at Sion House, as Chapuys reported, “making good cheer, fatter and more beautiful than ever; taking great care to be well apparelled, and more imperious and exacting to serve than even when she was with the King, although she believes she will be put to death, and admits that she deserves it. Perhaps if the King does not wish to marry again he may show her some compassion.”[228] No sooner, however, had the Act of Attainder passed its third reading in the Commons (10th January) than Fitzwilliam was sent to Isleworth to convey her to the Tower. She resisted at first, but was of course overpowered, and the sad procession swept along the wintry river Londonward. First came Fitzwilliam’s barge with himself and several Privy Councillors, then, in a small covered barge, followed the doomed woman, and the rear was guarded by a great barge full of soldiers under the aged Duke of Suffolk, whose matrimonial adventures had been almost as numerous as those of his royal brother-in-law. Under the frowning portcullis of the Traitors’ Gate in the gathering twilight of the afternoon, the beautiful girl in black velvet landed amidst a crowd of Councillors, who treated her with as much ceremony as if she still sat by the King’s side. She proudly and calmly gloried in her love for her betrothed Culpeper, whom she knew she soon would join in death. There was no hysterical babbling like that of her cousin, Anne Boleyn; no regret in her mien or her words now. Even as he, with his last breath, had confessed his love for her, and mourned that the King’s passion for her had stood in the way of their honest union, so did she, with flashing eyes and blazing cheeks, proclaim that love was victorious over death; and that since there had been no mercy for the man she loved she asked no mercy for herself from the King whose plaything of a year she had been.
On Sunday evening, 12th February, she was told that she must be prepared for death on the morrow, and she asked that the block should be brought to her room, that she might learn how to dispose her head upon it. This was done, and she calmly and smilingly rehearsed her part in the tragedy of the morrow. Early in the morning, before it was fully light, she was led out across the green, upon which the hoar-frost glistened, to the scaffold erected on the same spot that had seen the sacrifice of Anne Boleyn. Around it stood all the Councillors except Norfolk and Suffolk: even her first cousin, the poet Surrey, with his own doom not far off, witnessed the scene. Upon the scaffold, half crazy with fear, stood the wretched Lady Rochford, the ministress of the Queen’s amours, who was to share her fate. Katharine spoke shortly. She died, she said, in full confidence in God’s goodness. She had grievously sinned and deserved death, though she had not wronged the King in the particular way that she had been accused of. If she had married the man she loved, instead of being dazzled by ambition, all would have been well; and when the headsman knelt to ask her forgiveness, she pardoned him, but exclaimed, “I die a Queen, but I would rather have died the wife of Culpeper;” and then, kneeling in prayer, her head was struck off whilst she was unaware.[229] Lady Rochford followed her to the block as soon as the head and trunk of the Queen had been piteously gathered up in black cloth by the ladies who attended her at last, and conveyed to the adjoining chapel for sepulture close to the grave of Anne Boleyn.
Katharine Howard had erred much for love, and had erred more for ambition, but taking a human view of the whole circumstances of her life, and of the personality of the man she married, she is surely more worthy of pity than condemnation. Only a few days after her death we learn from Chapuys (25th February) that “the King has been in better spirits since the execution, and during the last three days before Lent there has been much feasting. Sunday was devoted to the lords of his Council and courtiers, Monday to the men of the law, Tuesday to the ladies, who all slept at the Court. The King himself did nothing but go from room to room ordering and arranging the lodgings to be prepared for these ladies, and he made them great and hearty cheer, without showing special affection for any particular one. Indeed, unless Parliament prays him to take another wife, he will not be in a hurry to do so, I think. Besides, there are few, if any, ladies now at Court who would aspire to such an honour; for by a new Act just passed, any lady that the King may marry, if she be a subject, is bound, on pain of death, to declare any charge of misconduct that can be brought against her; and all who know or suspect anything against her must declare it within twenty days, on pain of perpetual imprisonment and confiscation.” Henry, with five unsuccessful matrimonial adventures to his account, might well pause before taking another plunge; though, from the extract printed above, it was evident that he had no desire to put himself out of the way of temptation. The only course upon which he seemed quite determined was to resist all the blandishments of the Protestants, the German Lutherans, and the French to take back Anne of Cleves, who, we are told, had waxed half as beautiful again as she was since she had begun her jolly life of liberty and beneficence, away from so difficult a husband as Henry.
