[“Henry’s pain was never only his own; he made it into a problem for those around him. To distract him, Queen Kathryn did what she did best, discussing religion and disputing with the king on knotty theological points. After one sharp discussion in the presence of Stephen Gardiner, Henry waited until Queen Kathryn had left and exclaimed sarcastically, ‘A good hearing it is when women become such clerks, and a thing much to my comfort, to come in mine old days to be taught by my wife.’
Gardiner was never one to lose an opportunity. He stoked the king’s rage, and obtained his permission to draw up articles charging the queen with heresy. Well aware of the religious activities of her ladies-in-waiting and confident of finding illegal texts, he also ordered a search of the belongings of three of her women ‘who they knew to be great with her, and of her blood’: the queen’s sister Lady Anne Herbert, her cousin Lady Maud Lane and Lady Elizabeth Tyrwhit, all reformist sympathisers. This, along with their arrest, ought to provide enough ammunition to justify an arrest of the queen herself. Like a spider in its web, the king rarely left his chambers, and so Queen Kathryn continued to visit with him and to debate religious matters. Now keen to see how far she would go, the king encouraged her. He even told his physician Dr Wendy about it. While the queen suffered a bout of illness brought on by discovering the articles against her, Dr Wendy confided the king’s plot to her.
Katherine, Duchess of Suffolk and the rest of the queen’s women were immediately ordered by her to ‘convey away their books, which were against the law’. On her next visit to the king Queen Kathryn discussed instead the inferiority of women, and declared that she had only ever seemed to dispute with Henry to distract him from his pain, and because she sought to learn from his wise answers. Forgiven, she concocted a new plot with the king: on the next day, the day on which she had been due to be arrested, she came to the king’s privy garden with the three women who had likewise been in danger. When the lord chancellor arrived to arrest them the king shouted at him, calling him ‘arrant knave, beast and fool’.
The story comes to us from John Foxe, writing during Mary’s and Elizabeth’s reigns. Its veracity has been a matter for debate, not least because it’s the earliest account of these events, which were not mentioned by anybody writing contemporaneously. But Foxe’s source, he stated, was ‘certain of her ladies and gentlewomen being yet alive, which were then present about her’. Of the three women specifically targeted in this episode, Elizabeth Tyrwhit is the most likely source, since she was the only one still alive when Foxe published his account in 1570, and was linked to him through John Field, another Protestant writer. But Foxe spoke of ladies in the plural. This could easily have been Katherine, Duchess of Suffolk, in whose household Foxe sojourned during 1550, and who would most certainly have known of these events from the queen.
Where once the queen’s ladies-in-waiting had been mere scenery, important in their role as the queen’s confidantes and companions but perceived merely as window-dressing, they were now understood as political players in their own right. They functioned as a route to the queen for patronage purposes; but, more nefariously, they were now also perceived to be legitimate targets for arrest, questioning, even execution. Where once employment in the queen’s service had been merely a route to a better marriage, now it was, quite literally, a matter of life and death.”]
nicola griffith, from the waiting game: the untold story of the women who served the Tudor queens, 2025
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