He discarded Anne of Cleves, who, among other things, he considered too old and not a virgin, and took Catherine as his trophy. For the king, limping into his fifth decade, it was, Russell writes, ‘lust at first sight’. In 1539 Catherine, whose uncle was the powerful third Duke of Norfolk, was sent to court and enjoyed a flirtation with Thomas Culpeper, a gentleman of the Privy Chamber. Then there was Francis Dereham, to whom she lost her virginity. For two years, she was in a relationship with Henry Manox, her music teacher. They brought wine and strawberries and, at the hint of grandmother’s footsteps, squirrelled themselves away in a curtained gallery. It gave favoured young men access to the maidens’ chamber in the house of her father’s stepmother, where she grew up. I was reminded of this reading Gareth Russell’s biography of Henry VIII’s fifth wife, Catherine Howard, because she, too, had a spare key cut. They never got caught: where there’s a will – or perhaps just a thrill – there’s a way. She and her friends snuck off to drink, smoke and see the boys. When I was at a mixed boarding school in the countryside, one of the girls in my house pressed the back-door key into a bar of soap and had a copy made.
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