Buckden - a Huntingdonshire Village

BUCKDEN PALACE TO BUCKDEN TOWERS 104 eleven-year-old brother-in-law, Henry. They were married and crowned shortly after he ascended the throne in 1509. In twenty years of marriage she bore him six children. Only one survived, Mary. When Henry, in the hope of fathering a male heir, made up his mind to marry Anne Boleyn, he entered into protracted legal and religious arguments to enable him to divorce Katherine. They proved more difficult than those which enabled him to marry his brother’s widow in the first place. Meanwhile her presence was an embarrassment, and she was banished from court. She never ceased to declare that she was lawfully married, and refused to accept the humiliating title of Princess Dowager. To prevent her gathering support, she was moved to six different places of confinement; Buckden was the fifth. The bishop at the time was John Longland, the king’s confessor. She reached here in July 1533, and took a dislike to her latest quarters. Attempts were made to transfer her to Somersham, a place of such ill repute that the Spanish ambassador objected. Fotheringhay was equally unacceptable. It was during this time that the Duke of Suffolk was sent to remove the queen from Buckden. She locked herself inside, and the ‘Men of Buckden’, as they became known, armed themselves with their working tools, came to her support and sent the duke away disappointed. He was to try more successfully later, but accompanied by a band of armed men. This incident is recorded in the memorial window to Katherine in the Lady Chapel of St Hugh’s Church. See PlatePB2.6 In May 1534 Katherine was taken to Kimbolton Castle. It was more secure than the Bishops’ Palace, though somewhat more comfortable; even so, she would have found little sympathy there, for the mother of the young owner, Sir Charles Wingfield, was lady of the bedchamber to Anne Boleyn. There she lived out the rest her life, forbidden to see her daughter, or to write to the king. Write she did, an admirable and touching letter, the day before her death on 7 January 1536. People were not slow to blame Anne Boleyn for her death, but modern opinion is that she died of cancer of the heart. Her body was carried to Peterborough Abbey (now the cathedral). She was entombed under the title of Dowager Princess of Wales. Her daughter Mary was not allowed to attend, but Suffolk’s daughter, the king’s niece, was present. This last attempt to humiliate her was royally countered nearly four hundred years later, when Mary of Teck, Queen of George V, ordered the placing of the banners of Katherine’s parents and husband over the tomb in Peterborough. The heraldic symbols are combined with a pomegranate, just as they are in her arms that can be seen in Buckden’s memorial window. That pomegranate can also be seen on the gate of the knot garden, and miniature pomegranates grow there—in Queen Katherine’s Garden, as it is now called. From Edward VI To Queen Victoria The mid-sixteenth century was a period of religious turmoil, and the palace came into lay hands for the first time. Under Edward VI, Bishop Henry Holbeach (1547-1552) gave up all the episcopal residences, apart from the palace of Lincoln. Buckden went to the Duke of Somerset, Edward Seymour, who as the Lord Protector of the Realm and the young king’s uncle and guardian was probably the most powerful The text of Katherine’s last letter to Henry VIII “My most dear lord, king and husband, The hour of my death now drawing on, the tender love I owe you forceth me, my case being such, to commend myself to you, and to put you in remembrance with a few words of the health and safeguard of your soul which you ought to prefer before all worldly matters, and before the care and pampering of your body, for the which you have cast me into many calamities and yourself into many troubles. For my part, I pardon you everything, and I wish to devoutly pray God that He will pardon you also. For the rest, I commend unto you our daughter Mary, beseeching you to be a good father unto her, as I have heretofore desired. I entreat you also, on behalf of my maids, to give them marriage portions, which is not much, they being but three. For all my other servants I solicit the wages due them, and a year more, lest they be unprovided for. Lastly, I make this vow, that mine eyes desire you above all things. Katharine the Quene.”