Catherine was the wife of an esquire living in an old and impressive moated property in Suffolk. However, all her married life she had lived under the shadow of debt. Despite coming from a very well-connected family, she was merely a gentlewoman in rank. Catherine was a great-granddaughter of Thomas Cromwell on her father’s side and the granddaughter of the Marquis of Winchester on her mother’s - but this gave her no title nor much wealth. Her marriage at 23 in 1580 brought her a husband her junior by about five years and considerable housewifely responsibilities. She took personal charge of the household leaving evidence of her skill in cooking, laundry and distillery in a notebook now known as Receipts for Pastery, Confectionary, etc, which she kept from 1580 to about 1612.

An inventory of 1597 lists clothes belonging to Catherine, her husband Lionel Tollemache, Esquire and their seven children, together with furniture, food and household equipment. It is an unusual inventory because it is not associated with a death but a debt. After many years of careful housekeeping, the 1597 inventory provided a clear indication of what belonged to Catherine’s family at last. The Tollemaches were indebted to the Jermyn family for 25 years until Lionel was able to regain control of his estate in 1596. His father had died soon after ‘an ill-considered gamble’ leaving his mother a young widow in 1572. This gamble stripped the family of an estate at Bentley, near Ipswich, and greatly reduced their income - much to the disappointment of Lionel’s grandfather.

But 1597 marked the beginning of a new era because not only was their income improved, Lionel’s mother, the dowager of the family, died. Catherine’s ‘i morning gowne with a curtle and stomacher’ recorded in the 1597 inventory may well have been what she wore to her mother-in-law’s funeral in April of that year. Susanna Tollemache had been the young widow who turned to her own family, the Jermyns, for financial assistance with her late husband’s debts. Now free of Susanna’s obligations, Catherine and Lionel may have felt a new independence. Maybe this is why Catherine’s portrait was commissioned from Robert Peake the Elder – to celebrate finally calling her home her own.

The portrait shows her wearing farthingale sleeves. A letter from Roger Jones, her London tailor, a few years later in 1605, suggests her continued preference for this style, four pairs of which appear in the 1597 inventory: ‘your worships opineon be a vardingall sleve becomuthe her better, yett for fashion sake it is mette to have one cut after the new pattern

Lionel first became Sheriff of Suffolk in 1593 (and was again in 1609) but Catherine’s status as a gentlewoman did not change until she was nearly 50 years old, when her husband purchased a baronetcy from James I in 1611. His status was further enhanced with a knighthood in 1612. But the new Lady Tollemache found herself widowed later the same year, her husband having left her ‘all her jewels, my golde chaine being worth one hundreth marks onlie excepte’. She moved to a dower house for which her son paid £324 a year in rent. After her death in 1620, she was buried at the church in Helmingham. Her monument commemorated ‘her Pietie toward God, Pity toward ye Poore, and Charity in Releeving (through her Skill and Singular Experience in Chirugerie) ye Sick & Sore Wounded’.

Catherine is one of the best connected and well-to-do people in the database of over 57,000 items of dress on which The Typical Tudor is based. Nevertheless, she was firmly among the rank of gentlefolk in 1597. It was not until James I’s reign that her status improved so that at her death, she was styled Dame Catherine – a courtesy title given to the widow of a knight. She had been Lady Tollemache for just three months during her long life of more than 60 years.