A teenage girl has two gentlemen visitors to her dorm in one night. One is cast off hurriedly to receive the other – her uncle, the duke. In a celluloid scene I can scarce bring myself to describe or watch, Thomas Howard inspects his niece, roughly exposing her, and decides she is suitable for the role he wants for her. I have henceforth hated Mark Strong for thus portraying Norfolk in the 2003 Henry VIII TV series. O that Emily Blunt as Katherine Howard had plunged a bosom dagger into his heart!
(Some spell her name Catherine or Kathryn)
The 3rd duke of Norfolk seems to be someone evil who got away with it – in this lifetime anyway. The miniseries ends that Norfolk, at last in the Tower that he had sent so many others to (including two nieces) awaiting trial for treason, was let off when the king died. And then he got his lands and titles back. When I saw his much vaunted, vain tomb in Framlingham church, I wanted to kick it.
Why do the wicked prosper?! Where is their satisfying downfall? I asked it with Job in January.
I’m constantly asking myself that of Norfolk’s king.
Unlike Mary Queen of Scots, where I could gleefully enlist all the evil courtiers who had died before her, quite often violently, I can’t (yet) tell you of this premiere duke’s comeuppance.
He was responsible for three of his own family’s executions, putting the rest of them at risk. One of them is our lady of the week, who’d be considered a minor today at 15*, but was considered then a ripe bride for a king three times her age, a dangerous, unlovely man.
Katherine is oft skipped over as the silly young one who palely paralleled Anne Boleyn. Apart from their fate, family, and reason for treason – adultery – wives 2 and 5 have little in common.
*They also have unknown birthdates, so Katherine’s age fluctuates with accounts; but she’s likely somewhere between 17-21 at the end of the story.
What I garner about Katherine is the huge double standards of Henry: he could have affairs where he wished, but for ‘his’ women to do so was an affront to his ego so great that they must die. Katherine was old enough to be in his bed, but that she’d (allegedly) had other lovers made her promiscuous and precocious. Note that despite her behaviour being fairly common and normative in our times, that many contemporaries continue to judge her.
Rather than being a tart, Katherine can be seen as a woman exercising her sexuality, which seems to frighten many men, especially in previous times. Again, that feminine force is feared, and so it is bound by those who see that they will be undone if it is.
Even if you saw Katherine’s sexual activities as unwise…even sinful….are they so heinous that she must be violently taken from the Earth, along with her two lovers? What harm has she really done, what threat is she? This comes from a deeply misogynous view and Henry’s inflated sense of self and his kingship. It is a very Old Testament – misread Old Testament – view, that God is jealous and avenges all those who disobey his (sometimes quite random and unreasonable) commands. If that were true of the Real God, wouldn’t Henry have been swallowed by the ground several times?
In January, I’ll tell you something I recently discovered about him which I found most satisfying.
The question isn’t: why was Katherine stupid enough to let history repeat, knowing what Henry would do to her and others…but why was he? He’d started a precedent that he seemed unable to stop; one of hatred but also judicially. But it was still his choice – he had others. He was given a similar situation and invited to do different this time: he didn’t.
I wonder if this wasn’t those Seymours at work, who’d lost their sister (read: chance for a puppet on the throne) and now sought another. For a while, they were successful…but they did get their comeuppance, although not during Henry’s reign. Both Seymour (and Pepe – a Muppet reference) brothers were executed. One of them behaved like Henry did when faced with a major rebellion (Aske/Pilgrimage of Grace to Kett/Commotion) – give false promise then butcher them anyway.
But where is justice for Katherine Howard, and Francis Dereham and Thomas Culpeper, the men who died before and for her? Do we gain any satisfaction from the interpretation, as with the 2003 TV series, that Henry was hurt, even devastated, that another chance of love ended in betrayal?
Jane, Lady Rochford, the middlewoman of the affair, also was executed – but many paint her as accessory if not mastermind to the other Boleyn deaths. Is that true and fair? Karen Lindsey says that Culpeper was a rapist and murderer, let free by Henry. Katherine petitioned him that others, including Thomas Wyatt (the only nice man in Tudor England that I’m aware of) were too, successfully. In that way, she is not unlike her cousin. Is there more that we’re not hearing?
I did hear something in my research; it saddens me that if true, it’s not better known, despite all our feminist revisionists. What if instead of freely exercising her sexuality (and thus her sovereignty), Katherine Howard was at the mercy of those exercising theirs on her, against her will? What if Culpeper and Dereham were both rapists? And her music teacher Mannox was committing child abuse on poor Katherine, separated from her family at a young age, to be preyed on ultimately by her supposed sovereign and uncle – even if he didn’t do what Mark Strong did, Norfolk was part of abusing her. What if Katherine didn’t lie, but others did, or felt compelled to acknowledge their knowledge of her alleged early affairs before they were murdered horribly for treason for keeping it secret? My ire burns more against the king and his acts of treason – pun deliberate.
I note Katherine’s motto – ‘No Other Will But His’ and how that reflects the views of kings, husbands and God….all wrongly represented and conflated.
Despite being supposedly the man presiding over the renaissance – a new era, and rebirth – I see Henry VIII as re-birthing the worst misunderstanding of God. I have been able to find out little about what Queen Katherine II understood of God. I hope that she found in Him (or Her) great comfort, especially at her end. I hope that like Mary of Scots, she found in it a beginning.
I am beginning to have an understanding…it concerns the themes of Shekhar Kapur’s Elizabeth films and really, all the Tudor enactments. But my understanding now takes a very different lens, which I will point and sharpen throughout this year. I do not wish to gaze on what so many others behind the camera have, and focus on this or any other monster, excusing their behaviour as of its time, and worst – admiring them.
My theological insight for this week is that Katherine, from a nominally Catholic family, may have like her previous namesake, represented the old way, which frightened the Protestants, who lost their ‘champion’ Cromwell on the day that Katherine married. Yet most of the cast of the Tudors were less interested in a real or right relationship with God – more in how it served them politically.
I want to leave Katherine in a delightful, apparently true tableau – dancing. Gouty Henry’s gone to bed, and ex-Lutheran ex-wife Anne of Cleves and she are romping round the room together, free of that monster, finding enjoyment in what they have endured. Don’t they both deserve a little joy?
And during a time traditionally about curtailing joy and pleasure, I especially like that image. I trust they are dancing in Heaven, where I’m sure they are. I cannot be as generous about their husband.
We’ll have a Tudor themed Maundy Thursday and Easter service.
I shall also be performing a reading of my novella for the 111th anniversary of the Titanic the following week – stay tuned for more information
Elspeth R - A skewed world view 