Catherine Howard by Lacey Baldwin Smith

good manners and accomplishments. It was important for children to know that they were expected to ‘rise when their elders and betters’ entered the room, stand while their superiors sat, and curtsy to the Duchess ‘in token of humility and subjection’. These were considered to be social graces best inculcated by treating children as indentured domestics and keeping them from idleness. 24 Menials were customarily viewed as being part of the family, and there tended to be little distinction between those of gentle and humble birth. Anyone who served in the household appeared on the account books as servants, and this applied to the chaplain, the chamberlain, and the secretary, as well as to the scullery urchin. It made little difference that more often than not, the dowager’s ladiesin- waiting were as well-born as their mistress and that her steward might be a close relative. As for the children, they were expected to help their elders’ dress, to wait at table and to fetch and carry on command, and when they failed in their social and educational duties they were beaten with as much vigour as any village maid.
    Secondly, on closer inspection, Catherine appears to have been no better born than those ‘abandoned persons’ who presumably took such ‘fiendish delight’ in systematically corrupting her innocent mind. Her brothers and sisters were all under the Dowager’s care at various times, and the children of her aunt, the Countess of Bridgewater, were her constant associates. 25 It emerges that her bedmates, those immoral temptresses, were her cousins, for both Katherine and Malyn Tylney were relatives of the Duchess, while Dorothy Baskerville, Margaret Benet, and Alice Restwold were of lesser but eminently respectable landed stock. As for her paramours, one was a neighbour, the other a distant kinsman. Henry Manox, who taught her to play on the virginal, and possibly a good deal else, came from a neighbouring gentry family, and Francis Dereham was a cousin. Both gentlemen formed part of the Howard ménage – the former as music teacher to the Howard children, and the latter as one of the Duke’s pensioners and later as a member of the Dowager’s service at Lambeth. 26 Even that ‘drab’ Elizabeth Holland, who carried the doubtful title of laundress and was for years the Duke’s mistress, was sister to the Duke’s secretary and related to Lord Hussey of Sleaford. 27
    The effect of sending children away from home at an early age was fatal to any sense of family solidarity, since the progeny of the upper classes might live to manhood without laying eyes on their parents, and the relationship between father and son was often one of bitter enmity and rivalry. Even when the educational process took place in the home, the pedagogical maxim of the age was spare the rod and spoil the child. Not for nothing did one mother mention as a normal occurrence that her daughter had been beaten ‘twice in one day and her head broken in two or three places’. 28 Children were generally regarded as being important financial assets, and it was in no way remarkable that Sir John Fastolf sold the marriage rights of his stepson to Sir William Gascoigne for 500 marks and then bought them back again. 29 In a very real sense, children were considered as being the goods and possessions of their parents, to be disposed of as their elders saw fit. Romance and courtly love may have been suitable for chivalric tales of the past, but neither was in the least concerned with marriage. Throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, society was generally convinced that love marriages led only to trouble, and one lady quite honestly asked whether there was ‘any thing thought so indiscreet, or that makes one more contemptible’ than marrying for love. 30 Land and financial settlements were the considerations at stake, and slight value was placed upon the wishes or sentiments of the bride or bridegroom. The Duke of Norfolk’s daughter