So, what was Katherine Howard thinking to cheat on the man she knew had, only a few years before, put her very own cousin Anne Boleyn to death on charges of adultery that even Anne's enemies regarded as trumped up? Before I get more specific, I don't believe any of the authors would disagree that Katherine had been truthfully told that Anne Boleyn was tart, jealous, demanding, moody and oppositional. She may have believed, and been persuaded by her ambitious relatives, that if she just looked cute, smiled a lot, and said, "Oh, Your Majesty is always right!" the same fate might never befall her. Not a chance I'd take, but I have the benefit of all these novels and miniseries.
With that background, what made her overcome the fear any sentient being surely would have? Different writers, different scenarios. The King wasn't up for any reproductive sex in Six Wives. He was just barely maybe in the ballpark in The Boleyn Inheritance. He was functional if not fun for Katheine in The Tudors and The Last Wife. Ascribed m otives for taking the dangerous step of outside lovin': desire for a better sex life plus infatuation with Culpepper plus being egged on by Lady Rochford (The Tudors); infatuation with Culpepper plus desire to become pregnant so that the King wouldn't put her aside or worse, egged on the Duke of Norfolk (Boleyn Inheritance, Last Wife) or Culpepper lust plus pressure from the Duke of Norfolk to get pregnant (Six Wives). Needless to say each puts a slightly different spin on the mix.
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The Six Wives idea that the King was a non performer in the realm of baby making endeavors doesn't make a lot of sense combined with the same teleplay's plot line that the Culpepper affair was motivated in part by Katherine's desire to get pregnant. Henry may have been vainglorious and subject to flattery, but he knew where babies came from and Katherine and the Duke of Norfolk knew that he knew. Even if Katherine had become pregnant and somehow convinced an E.D. ridden Henry that intense spooning got them there, AND she had produced a fine healthy son, would not the child's likely resemblance to the legendarily handsome Culpepper have revived the King's initial skepticism? So… I'm not able to buy that one. If the King was even marginally succeeding, the baby making motive is still puzzling. Katherine had been with her young lover Dereham many times and never become pregnant, so would she not question her own fertility? I have to go with the idea that she as unhappy with her royal sex life, infatuated with Culpepper, not that smart, egged on by Lady Rochford, and perhaps had a strong hope that if caught, she could work her wiles on the King and limit the damage to divorce.
So fiction has not given me a clear indication of what KH was thinking, but I have my theories. More puzzling is: what was Thomas Culpepper thinking? I know he was a hormonal young man, and clearly he was attracted to the Queen, but is little brain strong, big brain weak sufficient? After all, once she was married to the King, Katherine was kind of stuck being the only Queen, but Culpepper is universally described as a hottie. He could have and very likely did fool around with adulterous Court wives, adventurous maids of honor, and any number of working class wenches who would have enjoyed a nice gift or two plus the attentions of a good looking young gentleman. Hmmm. In The Tudors Culpepper, as a favorite of the King, readily got out of well-founded charges of rape and murder, so possibly he, like his lady friend, overestimated the reach of the King's fond regard.
OK, then, what was Lady Rochford, go-between and door guard thinking? When in later posts I go back on the time line and talk about Lady Rochford during the fall of Ann Boleyn, it will be clear that LR had a lot of emotional baggage. That aside, in Six Wives and The Boleyn Inheritance, she was heavily influenced and tricked into being the fall guy by her kinsman-by-marriage Thomas ""Snakey" Howard, Duke of Norfolk. In The Last Wife, Katherine bribed her. In The Tudors, and to a lesser degree in all the fictional accounts, she got sexual jollies through voyeurism. She took equal risk for a small fraction of the pleasure and ended up on the block, but she was a complicated woman.
In Six Wives, Thomas Howard, Duke of Norfolk, always the nastiest of underhand villains has the nerve…da noive! to be the one run tattling to the king when he decides that rumors are out of control and the King will find out anyway. Not only that, Norfolk persuades the King that death, not divorce and disgrace, is the only remedy. Bad bad Six Wives Duke! All the versions paint this high born gent as quite evil, but Six Wives makes me want to step into my laptop and kick him a few times. Needless to say, Dereham and Culpepper got the royal torture and eventual execution, while the Duke, one of life's evil survivors, bounced back.
Back before my fictional Tudor education had reached its present depth, I felt very sorry for Francis Dereham: how could he have known that it would be after the fact treason to have non-adulterous sex with a girl who didn't live at court and wasn't on the King's radar at all. I'm a little less sympathetic now because it appears that (in everybody's version) by weaseling his way into the Queen's service, he was the architect of his own downfall, if not everyone's.
With the next post, I'll look at Katherine's execution and look at her successor Catherine Parr, one of the most interesting and admirable of Tudor era characters. I'll also throw in my fictional education on the great royal progress to York, the big event of the Howard era, and the ill-starred invasion of France during the Parr years.