Femme February: Young and Damned and Fair, Gareth Russell
Back on my Tudor kick with this biography of Catherine Howard, another one of Henry VIII’s wives. The second of Henry’s Catherines is most famous for being beautiful and being executed, for adultery no less.
Catherine wasn’t meant to be a royal bride. She was the granddaughter of a duke, but a duke with a huge family, so by the time you got down to the female grandchildren, they were relatively unimportant. Her normal destiny would be serving as a maid of honor to a higher-ranking woman and marrying a courtier. However, this was the kind of woman that Henry liked. Anne Boleyn came from the same big semi-noble family, although a richer branch, and Jane Seymour was the daughter of another well-off courtier but no aristocrat.
And everything conspired to throw Catherine into Henry’s arms. Henry’s third wife had died in giving him a male heir; his fourth wife was basically a princess, but she was also a disappointment. After that he went onto Catherine, who was young and vivacious.
However, after accusing three of his previous four wives of various forms of sexual treachery, Henry managed to marry the one woman who was actually willing to cheat on him—with a younger man, no less. Catherine had had previous relationships with her music teacher and with a young gentleman who worked for her grandmother. While she was married to Henry, she secretly met with Thomas Culpeper, a man whom she had considered marrying before Henry came on the scene. Which is where the “damned” in Young and Damned and Fair comes from. Catherine’s previous lovers were executed (one by drawing and quartering) and she went to the block herself.
Modern biographies of royal or noble women tend to highlight whatever traits and actions could possibly translate into girlbossing. This is especially understandable in a Tudor context, in which Henry’s treatment of his wives as walking wombs obscured their other skills and interests. Anne Boleyn is the obvious candidate for historical reclamation as a girlboss, but Catherine of Aragon rode out in armor to prosecute war against Scotland, and Katherine Parr was fluent in three languages and wrote two best-selling books. Lucy Wooding complains about this tendency to promote a modern worldview in her review of Hunting the Falcon, but she also complains that that the book doesn’t go far enough in contextualizing Anne’s virtues within her time, focusing only on her scandalous end.
She was a complex, gifted, spirited woman in an extraordinary chapter in England’s history – yet sex, scandal and brutality continue to dominate our accounts of her.
Catherine Howard had no other skills and interests. She didn’t write essays or poetry or play the lute or read the translated Bible. As puts it,
Catherine was mediocre in everything, except her appearance and her charm. She was a girl whom many of us may known or have known.
The only thing interesting about Catherine is the sex and the scandal.
Russell really tries to flesh out Catherine’s life, but it’s a struggle. He includes a lot of interesting detail about Catherine’s court and the other women she interacted with, but there just isn’t much to work with on the biography subject herself, as Catherine was probably only 18 when she died. The quote is wrong, really; she never even had time to prove herself mediocre.
Without much material to work with, Russell spends a lot of time on the question on whether Catherine was a grooming victim or whether she just liked sex. This seems to be the one historiographical debate about Catherine, what with her extremely short life. While the abuse narrative is a necessary corrective to some readings of Catherine’s story in which she’s painted as a sexual predator herself (how exactly that would be possible I do not know, but some have managed), I don’t think it needs to be established as a historical certainty. The implication is still that the natural order of things is that there’s one powerful man and that women should withhold their sexual favors for him alone. The only reason that a woman might not be chaste for this one man is because she’s been irretrievably sexually and mentally damaged by other wicked men. The flip side of this argument is that if she hasn’t been grievously wronged, then she’s at fault and deserves the violence that she gets. In other words, it still smacks a little bit of the Henry VIII attitude—a woman must be perfectly virtuous, at least in intent, to deserve survival.
Catherine may have been groomed and sexually abused, or she may have been sexually curious and started a relationship, or both. Whatever the truth was—and there’s no way to get at it 500 years later—she was a victim of judicial murder.