Catherine Howard's Jewellery Collection

"The King had no wife who made him spend so much money in dresses and jewels as she did."
- The Chronicle of King Henry VIII

Catherine Howard was the fifth of Henry VIII’s six queens and one of the two who ended her life upon the scaffold. A teenager when she married the King, Catherine was Queen of England from July 1540 to February 1542 - only seventeen months - and the last three of those months were spent under house arrest – firstly in a disused convent and then in the Tower of London, where she was eventually executed on a charge of adultery. A younger niece of the powerful Duke of Norfolk, Catherine was about 15 when she was sent to Court as a lady-in-waiting to Queen Anne of Cleves. There, she attracted the attention of the King, who was 49 and already massively obese. Following a speedy royal divorce, Catherine and the King were married at Oatlands Palace in Surrey on July 28th 1540.

The eventual tragedy of Catherine’s downfall and her doomed love affair with Sir Thomas Culpepper overshadows more or less everything else about this fatally clueless teenage queen. Calling her a bimbo seems a bit harsh; it’s probably fairer to say that Catherine was a fun-loving teenager, who thought only of today and never of tomorrow. "Consequences" apparently seemed an alien concept to her. It’s impossible not to feel very sorry for Catherine in the end, but also impossible to disagree with one of her biographers who wrote: “She enacted a light-hearted dream in which juvenile delinquency, wanton selfishness and ephemeral hedonism were the abiding themes.”

From the moment she became queen-consort in 1540, Catherine Howard busied herself with re-inventing female fashion at the royal Court. The influence of Henry’s late wife, Jane Seymour, could still be felt in the heavy, hair-covering English headdresses she had insisted upon (left). The French Ambassador noted with approval that the new Queen demanded a return to the Parisian fashions favoured by Anne Boleyn, meaning that the attractive bejewelled French hoods were once again in vogue. (Right)

Every day, Queen Catherine appeared in a new gown and she delighted in flaunting the gorgeous collection of royal jewels which were now hers by right. Apart from the collection itself, accumulated by past queens over several generations, Catherine also had the use of dozens of extra jewels given to her as personal presents by her smitten middle-aged husband. She was given beautifully ornamented jewellery boxes to house her new collection and clocks made of silver and gold to decorate her apartments. For her neck, Catherine was given a rope of flawless pearls at Christmas, a golden choker with her initials engraved in diamonds, four diamond necklaces, jewel-studded crosses for her bodice and beads of delicately crafted gold imported from Spain. One of the Queen’s personal favourites from her collection was a heavy golden broach her husband gave her to mark the Feast of All Saints, with scenes from the life of Noah carved in ruby and diamond upon it.

Catherine also owned a collection of breathtakingly beautiful books, which she used as fashion accessories, rather than for reading. One of the books was a pretty golden piece with a small clock set inside its cover, another was decorated with 27 rubies and 43 pearls; there was another edition bound in white, green and blue leather, with sapphires on every side and 8 decorative rubies on the cover. Generally, these books hung from the Queen’s waist upon a gold or silver chain. The only books Her Majesty owned for practical use were two for Mass, a small copy of the New Testament and another book of Scriptural verse – all essential in a Court where religious observance played such a large part of people’s daily lives.

When the winter snows came (winters in the 16th century were generally much colder than they are today, and summer was much, much hotter), Catherine’s wardrobe was enlarged accordingly. She was particularly fond of a gorgeous sable muff lined in black velvet to keep her hands warm when she and her husband went walking in the frost-covered palace gardens. The sable fur itself was decorated with dozens of bright red rubies, arranged in clusters, and it hung from the Queen’s neck on a chain of gold and pearl.

For the first eight months of her marriage, Catherine Howard lived in a world of glittering make-believe, going from one day to the next in a spirit of defiant decadence. After a childhood spent at the mercy of her father's financial mismanagement, Catherine now had unlimited funds to finance her every caprice and there was no-one to tell her when to stop. Standing in the centre of a vicious, intrigue-ridden Court, in which one queen had already been executed and two more divorced, the teenage Queen (who was essentially devoid of the will to scheme or to harm anybody else) chose to surround herself with sycophants and favourites who enabled her to live out a life of feckless, self-indulgent extravagance. Heedless to the seething resentment other courtiers felt at her family's monopolisation of royal favour, the rebellion by Papal loyalists in the north, the diplomatic crisis with Scotland and the sectarian tensions crippling England's political classes at the time, nothing mattered to Catherine beyond the next party or the style of a new dress. However, as the months wore on, Catherine could not escape the fact that, at night, when the jewels, furs, silks and satins came off, she was married to a fat, vicious, temperamental megalomaniac who was old enough to be her grandfather. She was bored, lonely, afraid and disgusted and, in the end, she tragically, stupidly but perhaps understandably chose to please herself with something much more dangerous than gorgeous jewellery.

When the time came and her liaison with Thomas Culpepper was uncovered, Catherine's magnificent jewels were taken from her and inventoried by Sir Thomas Seymour, who carried them back to the King. Eighteen months later, they would adorn the neck of Henry's sixth wife, Katharine Parr, and after that his daughters - Queen Mary and Queen Elizabeth. In the next century, Anne of Denmark and Henrietta-Maria of France, both queens of England, would wear some of the pieces that had once sat around Catherine Howard's unluckily attractive frame. But the jewel collection, in its entirety, did not survive much longer than Catherine herself - Katharine Parr had little use for the more ostentatiously Catholic pieces of Catherine's collection and she also had goldsmiths change all the initials from "H" (Howard) to "P" (Parr.) Mary and Elizabeth had many of the pieces melted down or recast into more fashionable or elegant pieces, as did Anne of Denmark and Henrietta-Maria. By the time the Civil War came in 1641 - exactly one hundred years after Catherine had last worn the Queen's Jewels - much of the collection had already been altered and during Britain's brief experiment with republicanism in the 1650s, the last pieces vanished entirely.