The sole surviving letter written by Henry's fifth wife helped send her to the block for treason (and adultery) in her late teens. Addressed to Thomas Culpeper, her cousin and lover during her marriage to the aging King Henry VIII, the young Queen of England writes:

Master Culpeper,
I heartily recommend me unto you, praying you to send me word how that you do. It was showed me that you was sick, the which thing troubled me very much till such time that I hear from you praying you to send me word how that you do, for I never longed so much for a thing as I do to see you and to speak with you...when I think again that you shall depart from me again it makes my heart die .... that I cannot be always in your company. It my trust is always in you that you will be as you have promised me, and in that hope I trust upon still, praying you that you will come when my Lady Rochford is here for then I shall be best at leisure to be at your commandment... thus I take my leave of you, trusting to see you shortly again and I would you was with me now that you might see what pain I take in writing to you.

Yours as long as life endures,
Katheryn.

For a queen of England, remarkably little is known of this last love of Henry's life (his final marriage to Katherine Parr, his sixth wife, was largely for convenience). Born to the third son of the famous Howard family (her uncle was Thomas Howard, Duke of Norfolk, uncle of Anne Boleyn and one of the most wealthy and powerful peers in England), there is no birth register for Catherine. Her birth is variously estimated to have occurred anywhere from 1520 to 1525, but is conventionally accepted as 1521, although she was not mentioned in her father's will made in 1524. In any event, she was in her mid to late 'teens when she finally met Henry VIII.

The Lesser Nobility

Catherine's father, Lord Edmund Howard, was the third son of the second Duke of Norfolk and, not being the heir, was perennially in debt, although he married three well-off women. Catherine's mother, Jocasta Legh, nee Culpeper, was a wealthy widow. She died shortly after Catherine's birth, after which Edmund married twice more, acquiring both natural and numerous stepchildren. Romantic historians, including the extremely inaccurate Agnes Strickland, attempt to portray Catherine as having been raised on poverty, illiteracy and moral neglect. On the contrary, her father, although never in the King's particular favor, was (due to his family connections) known to Henry VIII and appeared at Court; he had been given command of a wing of the English army at the great victory of Flodden Field in 1513 and later served as Constable of Calais, dying in 1539. None of his positions, however, were either prominent or particularly well-paid; he had not caught the King's favor. Howard was also infrequently in trouble with Henry. He was hauled before Cardinal Wolsey and the Star Chamber on two occasions for for overbearing or unscrupulous legal proceedings and for "instigating riots." What is known about Edmund Howard was that he was always deeply in debt and forever begging jobs or favors from everyone from the King to Thomas Cranmer on down, frequently in written notes that complain of his constant financial debts and embarrassments. This rather ne'er-do-well son of a famous family did, however, make the best use of his family connections and the family did not know want, although there was never as much money available as Howard felt his station required. One of those connections was to send Catherine, still a child, to her step-grandmother's to be brought up, a common practice among the English nobility of the time. The lady in question happened to be Agnes Howard, the Dowager Duchess of Norfolk, who lived on her estates at Horsham in Sussex and one of the Howard's many residences at Lambeth.

The children of English nobles were treated cooly as negotiable family assets, to be expended wherever family alliance, wealth, and success required. Catherine was one of dozens of young girls and boys being trained in the Howard precincts; several of her siblings were all brought up by the Dowager at various times. Children were, after all, regularly married in their early teens - the preferred age was 14, although Catherine's own mother was first married at twelve, to a man a generation older. The Dowager ensured that Catherine received a minimal education (she could read and write, although her spelling was never dependable) and learned her most important future skill; to manage a large, noble household full of servants, family, and hangers-on. The fact that the Dowager Duchess was old, managing a great household with perhaps as many as 100 residents and servants, and that Catherine slept in dormitory-like rooms full of other frivolous young daughters of nobility, simply meant that there was plenty of room for mischief. All the Dowager apparently asked was that, whatever was going on in the girls' rooms at night, it not be flaunted in her face.

In 1536, when Catherine was about 14, Henry Manox was summoned to Horsham to teach the household children how to place the virginals and the lute. Manox was the son of one of the Duchess' neighbors and appears to have occupied a position between a servant and a gentleman in the household. A flirtation ensued (largely on Manox's part). If later events had not resurrected this old history, precisely what occurred when Catherine agreed to meet Manox late one evening in the deserted chapel chambers would be unimportant; given the fact that the Dowager chanced upon the two probably suggests that Manox was telling the truth later when he swore he had not actually gotten as far as to "know her carnally." The Duchess forbade them to meet again.

Apparently Catherine -who, given her position, was under no illusions that this was more than a delicious flirtation - tired of Manox fairly soon, particularly after the Dowager moved her menagerie household to Norfolk House in Lambeth in 1537. Although Manox followed (finding a position in a neighboring house), Catherine was now meeting the far more eligible noble sons and attendants of her uncle, the Duke, when he visited his stepmother's house. Thomas Howard was one of Henry VIII's most valuable courtiers, one of the greatest nobles in England, currently still somewhat under a cloud after the execution of his other niece, Anne Boleyn. One of the Duke's household was the extremely handsome, well-bred Francis Dereham, and Catherine apparently fell for him shortly after her return to Lambeth. She would be involved with him in ever-increasing intimacy for the next two years and, by her own admission, became his mistress no later than 1538 (a problem with dating Catherine's birth in 1525 is the conceivable, but somewhat unlikely, conclusion that she would have been 13 at the oldest when when the affair began).

Unfortunately for Catherine, Dereham's secret late-night visits to the girls' dormitory rooms - by means of secret signs and notes, and with smuggled bottles of wine and strawberries - was known to all the other girls who shared it, in an age when no bedroom was private and noble women usually slept at least two to a bed. Later, her bedfellows would complain that they were literally kicked out of Catherine's bed so Dereham could enter it, further complaining about being kept up late at night by the "puffing and blowing" going on behind Catherine's closed bed hangings. Witnesses knew and could speak of the fact that Catherine and Dereham referred to each other as "husband" and "wife" (a pre-contract or common-law marriage which, under law, could be considered binding). The fact that the affair was common knowledge would later prove deadly.

The Eye of the King

In the fall of 1539, Henry was readying to marry his fourth wife, after the death of Jane Seymour in childbirth in late 1537. Anne of Cleves, a German princess, would be surrounded by the young daughters of the English nobility at the revived Court. The Duke of Norfolk made sure that there was a place for Howard daughters among those next to the new Queen, and one of those he selected was his vivacious, petite, pretty niece. Catherine, by her own later account, bade a casual farewell to Dereham as she left Lambeth. Although he had often pressed her for marriage, she had never considered him as a husband - she was a Howard, after all. The teenager went blithely to the king's court with the specific admonitions of her uncle and the Dowager Duchess to catch the lonely king's eye, if she could.

Henry VIII was nearly 50 in an age when men died young. He had agreed to marry Anne of Cleves on the basis of a flattering portrait by Holbein and the need to make an alliance with a Protestant nation, but from the moment she arrived in England in January, 1540, the king turned from her in repulsion. Anne was far from pretty, as her portrait had implied; she spoke only German (one of the few European languages the King did not); she was drab and unexciting and apparently seldom washed, however worthy her political attachments. The King himself admitted that the marriage had not been consummated. Within weeks, Henry was struggling to free himself of Anne; an excuse for annulment was later found through her pre-contract with another man. At the same time, he discerned auburn-haired Catherine Howard among the ladies in waiting to his new Queen. The Howard family was delighted and admitted later to giving Catherine detailed hints on how to attract the king. It looked like the disgrace the Howards had suffered after Anne Boleyn's catastrophic end would be redeemed at last.

Conventional portrait of Katherine Howard, Holbein.

By April, 1540, the king was giving Catherine valuable presents; by early July, with the active cooperation of Anne of Cleves, his fourth marriage was annulled; on July 28, 1540, the King had married his new bride, probably between 15-20 years old and thus far younger than his daughter, Mary. In the whirlwind, Thomas Cromwell, Henry's extraordinarily important chief minister for a decade who had arranged the German marriage, lost his head on the same day the king married his "rose without a thorn."

The Ingenue Queen

Henry appears to have been completely infatuated by Catherine's youth, vivacious spirits, and (perhaps most important) the illusion she brought him that he was still virile, an eternal syndrome for aging males. She was not educated, witty, or politically perceptive; he didn't care. She loved dancing, laughter, ordering her maids about, with the wonder of a child who has just discovered that she owns the world. Rather pathetically, the elderly Henry deluged his young queen with beautiful clothes and jewels and did his utmost to keep up with her all-night balls and parties, hunting for hours as he had in youth, bringing a new, autumnal surge of energy to his Council and court. Whether he was capable of making love to Catherine is is unknown, but there are reasons for doubt based both on the King's increasing weight (he was well over 250 pounds by this time) and health problems, as well as the fact that Catherine did not become pregnant. However, he certainly tried, a fact which would be confirmed later.

The Queen showed almost unbelievable naiveté in her new position when, in the frantic race to advance the interests of Howard friends, family and supporters, she actually gave positions in her own court to four friends (Joan Bulmer, Katherine Tylney, Alice Restwold and Margaret Morton) from her days in the Horsham girls' dormitory. All knew and would later speak of her relations with both Manox and Dereham before her marriage. Her generous carelessness surpassed belief, however, when in August, 1541, she offered a position as her private secretary to the lovelorn Francis Dereham. Dereham came to court and almost immediately began hinting that he had a special intimacy with the Queen.

The Queen delighted in her ability to bestow patronage. She made efforts (at her family's behest) to beg mercy from the King for imprisoned courtiers like Thomas Wyatt. She had new dresses and jewels almost daily and was at the center of all eyes at Court. On several occasions, including Christmas, 1541, Henry's ill-assorted children and Anne of Cleves were brought together at Court. Catherine specially singled out her young cousin, Elizabeth, insisting that she be seated honorably near the Queen and treating the child generously. Edward was too young to remember, Mary too old (she disapproved of Catherine, although she was polite), but Elizabeth appeared fond of her gay new "stepmother."

Within months of her marriage, the Queen also discovered a handsome, ambitious young member of the king's Privy Chamber, Thomas Culpeper (a distant cousin) who was in his late '20's and had served the King for some time. Culpeper was of good family - all the young men who served the aging king in his Privy Chamber were sons of nobles or upper gentry - and was popular with the king. He probably knew Catherine from the Dowager Duchess' extended household. Culpeper appears to have determined to seduce the Queen, by his own later admission. With the active help of Lady Rochford, one of Catherine's oldest and most prominent ladies-in-waiting, the two started a clumsy series of secret assignations in Hampton Court and even during the Progress of the King and Queen to northern England in the summer and fall of 1541. Although there is confused testimony about whether the Queen and Culpeper passed from secret meetings and fondling to actual infidelity, she met him alone, on multiple occasions, behind locked bedroom doors and in secret alcoves. On one occasion they were alone together from midnight to 4 AM. Lady Rochford stood guard outside the door and testified later that she was sure they were having sex.

Catherine was showing Culpeper marked favors at Court by spring, 1541, less than eight months after her marriage. She presented him with private and expensive gifts together with warnings that they be kept hidden. She warned him to say nothing of their sins in Confession as the King (who was, after all, head of the Church of England) might come to hear of it. Rumors were rife among her ladies in waiting, several of whom could testify the Queen was meeting someone in secret. Others observed how she treated Culpeper and reached their own conclusions.

Probably sometime in April the Queen composed the letter which begins this article, later found among Culpeper's papers. In and of itself, it was quite dangerous enough. Worse was to come. In October, 1541, a Protestant reformer named Lassells approached the Archbishop of Canterbury with certain information. H e explained that his sister, Mary Hall, had been part of the Howard dormitory crowd at Horsham and Lambeth and had told him Catherine had lovers there. Cranmer was interested enough to take a statement from Mary Hall. This alone was enough to suggest further inquiries and discussions with the Dowager Duchess - who at one point burned Francis Dereham's letters and papers prior to being interrogated - and the story of Catherine's purity started unraveling.

Hampton Court Palace (Tudor Wing)

No one privy to the investigations wanted to alert Henry, who was still deeply fond of his young wife, but Cranmer finally found the courage to write a letter outlining the facts of the investigation to date concerning Manox and Dereham, which he gave to Henry on November 2, 1541. The King could not believe it, but still ordered further investigation to quench, as he believed, slanders against his wife. Unfortunately, the more people interviewed, the more confirmation appeared. Witnesses from the merry days at Horsham and Lambeth revealed all and hinted at worse. Dereham was arrested, and Manox. Their initial denials did not survive torture. As Eustace Chapuys reported to his master, the King of Spain,

"This year on 13 November Sir Thomas Wriothesley, secretary to the king, came to Hampton Court to the queen, and called all the ladies and gentlewomen and her servants into the great chamber, and there openly before them declared certain offenses she had committed in misusing her body with certain persons before the king's time, because of which he there discharged all her household; and the morning after she was taken to Sion, with my Lady Bainton and two other gentlewomen and certain of her servants to wait on her there until the king's further pleasure. And various people were taken to the Tower of London, such as my Lady Rochford, Master Culpepper, one of the king's privy chamber, and others."

The romantic tale is told that, screaming, Catherine tried to reach the king in the Royal Chapel at Hampton Court to try to beg forgiveness, but was taken away by the guards. She never saw the King again, who moved back to London on November 6.

When Henry was presented in London with written evidence against Catherine, his rage was terrible but it subsided into the broken despair and tears of an old man whose illusions have been destroyed. The boundless sexual energy and flamboyant conceits of his youth were gone and never returned. His distress and humiliation was evident to the whole Court. The Spanish ambassador, Chapuys, cynically wrote his King that Henry grieved more for this queen because he knew there would not likely be another to follow her.

From November 7, Cranmer and the Duke of Norfolk interrogated Catherine Howard, who was quite well aware of her danger and almost entirely hysterical in the days after her detention. Everyone in her family and the Court distanced themselves from her without compunction. The Duke, horrified, suggested she be burned alive. The priority was to save the family and its estates by throwing Catherine to the wolves of the king's justice; if the Queen was found guilty of treason, the family estates would be confiscated. The Duke blamed his stepmother - now imprisoned - and vanished to his country estates after writing the king penitent letters disowning Catherine.

Catherine was offered one loophole of escape and she was too frightened and arrogant to take it. She was pressed to confirm Dereham's statement that he had only slept with her because she had agreed to a pre-contract in which they had called each other husband and wife. If this were true, her marriage to the king was invalid from the start because of the pre-contract and she would, at most, be guilty of bigamy. Whether from family or personal pride, Catherine denied to the end that she would contracted with a man of Dereham's modest social standing. If she had, she could never have legally become Queen. She did write Henry an abject confession and begged for mercy, admitting she had permitted Manox to intimately feel her body and that Dereham had "...used me in such sort as a man doth his wife many and sundry times, but how often I know not...although she claimed their affair had only lasted three months. She excused her errors on the grounds of youth, ignorance, and weakness, having been talked into it by men of "vicious purpose."

An Queen who had been immoral in her youth could be put aside; a Queen committing adultery after her marriage would die. During the early weeks of November, Dereham began by denying any sexual connection with the Queen; broken, he admitted everything and implicated Thomas Culpeper as her current lover(he had, after all, been there at Court, jealously watching). Catherine's letter to the King had, fatally, sworn that all her errors had occurred before her marriage.

The accused had all been separated by the time Culpeper was arrested and questioned by Privy councilors. Catherine would soon be moved with a reduced household to the buildings of a suppressed monastery at Syon. Additional pressure was placed on the Queen, Culpeper, and Lady Rochford to confess to adultery. For some time there was the confusing spectacle of the three energetically exonerating themselves by blaming the others, the Queen and Culpeper denying while Lady Rochford accused both and claimed she was an innocent victim of the Queen's orders. Lady Rochford, unbalanced to begin with, appears to have actually become delusional during her interrogation and imprisonment in the Tower.

There was enough to suspect the Queen of adultery, but treason was brought into the mix by the fact that Culpeper admitted that he had "intended" to have sex with the Queen. The Queen was doomed not only for her alleged behavior but because she had deliberately surrounded herself at court with the "light" women of her childish escapades, as well as her ex-lover. The seriousness of Catherine's offense lay in the fact that, by taking a lover, she could have polluted the true succession of the kings of England by presenting the king with Culpeper's bastard. By the end of November, enough evidence had been wrung from the three to ensure their deaths. Under the standards of the Tudor world, they had risked, blundered, and been caught: they deserved neither pity nor sympathy, and received none.

In the Tudor courts, to be accused of crimes by the king's own ministers automatically suggested a guilty verdict, as it was unthinkable that innocent persons would ever have been accused in the first place. There was no question that the trials of those involved could have any other outcome than affirmation of the King's justice, and death for the accused. Indeed, Thomas Culpeper's estate was broken up and distributed before he even attended his "trial." Both Culpeper and Dereham were arraigned on December 1 and both were executed on December 10, 1541, at Tyburn. Culpeper, as a gentleman, was permitted by die by decapitation, but Dereham underwent the full horror of the traditional traitors' death, hanging, drawing, and quartering.

Meanwhile, Catherine was publicly declared on November 22 to have forfeited her honor and was no longer Queen of England. Living at Syon, Catherine alternated between hysterics and an attempt to act as if nothing had changed. She appears to have been too stupid or too terrified to realize the implications of her actions until the end, and was described during her arrest as being "more imperious and commanding, and more difficult to please than she ever was when living with the King, her husband."

She may not have known that, with the exception of the Duke of Norfolk, her entire immediate family, ladies in waiting, the Dowager Duchess of Norfolk, and almost anyone who had known her in her misspent youth was imprisoned in the Tower; in fact, so many were arrested that additional housing had to be arranged. Although the Howards' estates were confiscated, most of them were eventually released and their properties largely reinstated, although the family as a whole never again found full favor with the King. However, it required an Act of Parliament to destroy the former queen. Parliament met in January, 1542, and arrangements were made to try Catherine in absentia. In addition, a law was quickly passed specifically making it High Treason for any future woman to marry the king when not a virgin, which was sardonically noted to reduce the future number of available candidates.

Catherine and the hysterical Lady Rochford were both attained for treason in late January and condemned in February.

On February 10, Catherine joined Lady Rochford at the Tower and, on Monday, February 12, 1542, they were executed; Catherine had pulled herself together in the month since Culpeper's death and intended to die bravely. She confessed all her faults to the Council and, bizarrely, had the block brought to her prison chamber prior to the execution so she could practice laying her head upon it. On the day of her execution, she was so weak she had to be helped up the scaffold and could barely speak the conventional words of repentance in which she acknowledged the King's justice in putting her to death for her crimes. Lady Rochford followed after her, apparently restored to her senses after a period of insanity. As she had been instrumental in testifying against her own husband, Lord Rochford (brother of Anne Boleyn) and sending him to the block in 1536, there was a savage irony in her death. The scaffold was cleared and the bodies removed.

Henry VIII, artist unknown, c. 1542

The tragedy of Catherine Howard's life is perhaps the fact that her death made hardly a ripple in history. Those who wish to portray her as the tragic victim of injustice forget her vanity and thoughtlessness, her complete inability to take responsibility for her actions at any period of her young life. It is distasteful to read the frantic efforts she made, in the end, to blame everyone else for her predicament. But in a very real way, she had been a dispensable tool of her family's pride and arrogance and she was indeed abandoned when she could no longer serve. Catherine promptly became a "non-person" and the Tudor world went on with its own affairs, salvaging what could be saved from the wreck. Perhaps there were only two important effects of her brief reign and death. One was a king, suddenly elderly, without illusion, and isolated. One was a child who had seen her cousin Catherine so awfully mirror her own mother's fate. Robert Leicester, 30 years later, recalled that Elizabeth Tudor had told him emphatically that she would never marry when she was only eight tears old; the year Catherine Howard disappeared.

Sources:

Holbein miniature of Catherine courtesy of The Six Wives of Henry VIII. Disputed portrait of Catherine Howard (after Holbein) courtesy of The Culpeper Family History Site. There is controversy about the identification of any portrait as that of the King's fifth wife; the second portrait was identified as authentic but has been recently questioned. ; this one has been traditionally so identified. The letters of Katherine Howard are both cited from A Tudor Tragedy by Lacy Baldwin Smith. The image of Hampton Court Palace (where Katherine reigned and was arrested) courtesy of The Arts in Tudor England. Portraits of Thomas Howard, Duke of Norfolk, and of Henry VIII courtesy of Tudor and Elizabethan Portraits.