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Catherine with much solemnity and heraldic pomp, accompanied by a numerous train of noblemen, gentlemen, and ladies. At night on the 27th the body rested at Sawtry Abbey, about midway between Kimbolton and Peterborough. The rest of the journey was accomplished next day. The interment itself took place on the 29th. Her own daughter was not allowed to attend the ceremony, and the place of chief mourner was filled by Henry's niece, Eleanor, the daughter of the Duke of Suffolk.

Catherine was of a fair complexion and, to judge by her portraits, the best known of which is by Holbein, somewhat plump. Her constitution must have been naturally strong, but her tastes do not appear to have been such as commonly go with a vigorous habit of body. She seems to have cared little for hunting and field-sports, and loved to occupy herself with her needle. Her piety, which she inherited from her mother, was nursed by misfortune and neglect from her earliest years. She relied mainly for spiritual advice on the counsels of Franciscan friars of the reformed order called Observants, from whom during her early life in England she chose a confessor, and among whom, as we have seen, she desired to find a place of sepulture. That she was a devoted student of the Bible we know from Erasmus. It is remarkable that the great scholar dedicated to her in 1526 (just a year before the king's project of a divorce was talked about) his work on 'Christian Matrimony,' which he probably wrote at her suggestion.

[Mariana, Historia General de España; Bernaldez, Historia de los Reyes Catolicos D. Fernando y Doña Isabel; Leland's Collectanes, v. 352-73; Brewer and Gairdner's Cal. of State Papers, Henry VIII; Bergenroth and Gayangos's Cal. of State Papers (Spanish); Gairdner's Memorials of Henry VII, and Letters, &c., of the Reigns of Richard III and Henry VII; State Papers, Henry VIII; Hall's Chronicle; Cavendish's Life of Wolsey; Harpsfield's Treatise on the Pretended Divorce between Henry VIII and Catherine of Arragon; Forrest's History of Grisild the Second (Roxburghe Club); Transcripts from Vienna Archives in the Public Record Office. Of modern lives of Catherine, even the best, that of Miss Strickland, has become obsolete owing to the large amount of new information, supplied chiefly from the archives of Spain and Vienna, which will be found in Calendars. There are, indeed, more recent studies by Albert Du Boys and the late Mr. Hepworth Dixon, but even these are founded on imperfect knowledge, and many of the statements of the latter in his History of Two Queens are utterly unsupported by the authorities he himself adduces.]  CATHERINE (d. 1542), fifth queen of Henry VIII, was the daughter of Lord Edmund Howard, a younger son of Thomas, second duke of Norfolk, the victor of Flodden Field. Her mother was Lord Edmund's first wife, Joyce or Jocosa, daughter of Sir Richard Culpepper of Kent, one of that family who afterwards became lords of the manor of Holingbourne. According to her latest biographer, she was widow of Sir John Leigh of Stockwell, but this is certainly a mistake, for not only was she Lord Edmund's wife long before Sir John Leigh's death in 1523, but it appears by the inquisition on Leigh's lands (15 Hen. VIII, No, 69) that he willed certain property after his decease, in the event of two nephews dying without issue, to Lord Edmund and this very Jocosa his wife, who therefore could never have been the wife of Sir John Leigh, but, as it appears by other evidence, had been the wife of his brother Ralph Leigh (Archæologia Cantiana, iv. 264; and, Surrey, iii. 497). Further, as regards the date of Catherine's birth, it is said that she was the fifth child in the family, and Miss Strickland infers that, she could not have been born before 1521 or 1522, because, as she informs us, Lord Edmund Howard was one of the bachelor noblemen who accompanied Mary Tudor to France in 1515. It is unfortunate that we are not told the source of this information. Mary Tudor really went to France in 1514, but we have sought in vain for evidence that Lord Edmund went thither along with her, or that he was a bachelor at that date. On the other hand, as Lord Edmund is believed to have been born between 1478 and 1480 (Howard Memorials, 12), and we know for certain that his father-in-law, Sir Richard Culpepper, died in 1484 (, Kent, ii, 188, 223, &c.), it is not in itself a very probable thing that he waited till he was over thirty-five to marry a woman who was over thirty.

Whatever the truth may be on this point, it is certain that she had a very bad education. Her father was wretchedly poor. For services at Flodden the king rewarded him with a grant of three shillings and fourpence a day, to continue for three years (Cal. Hen. VIII, ii. 1463), at the end of which time he was allowed 'diets for taking thieves' at twenty shillings a day, for about a year and a quarter (ib. pp, 1473-4, 1478). But with a family of ten children he found it hard to maintain himself, and he was compelled at times to avoid his creditors, and those who had stood surety for him were arrested in his stead (, Letters, 3rd series, i. 160; Cal. Hen. VIII, vol. iv. Nos.