Catherine Howard

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  Catherine Howard was Queen of England for barely sixteen months, and she was probably still a teenager when the axe fell on the 13th of February 1542. She had been Henry VIII's fifth wife. She was his youngest. And she was dead before most young women of her era had even left their father's house.

  Catherine was born into the Howard family, one of England's most powerful aristocratic dynasties, yet her early years were defined not by privilege but by poverty, neglect, and exploitation. Her father, Lord Edmund Howard, was a third son and a gambling addict who hid from creditors and begged his wealthier relatives for help. Her mother died when Catherine was about five. By the time she was eight, her family had broken apart entirely.

  She would spend her adolescence as a ward in the household of Agnes Howard, the Dowager Duchess of Norfolk, where supervision was famously lax and young wards were left largely to their own devices. Two older men would take advantage of that laxity, and the details of those relationships would eventually reach Archbishop Thomas Cranmer.

  How a girl raised in obscurity and near-destitution ended up married to the most powerful monarch in England, wearing French fashions and precious jewels, and living at Hampton Court Palace, is the first question this documentary will follow. The second is how, in a matter of months, everything she had gained was stripped away, and how four centuries of historians have argued over what she deserves to be remembered as: a victim, a schemer, or something far harder to categorise.

• 2. A Father's Failures

  ›

  Lord Edmund Howard wrote a letter to Cardinal Thomas Wolsey in 1527 that survives as one of the most desperate documents from the Tudor period. In it he wrote: "Humbly I beseech your grace to be my good lord, for without your gracious help I am utterly undone." He described himself as too afraid of debtors' prison to go outside, or even to return to his own home, and confessed that he was forced to absent himself "from my wife and my poor children."

  Edmund was the third son of Thomas Howard, 2nd Duke of Norfolk, and under the rules of primogeniture, the estate passed to the eldest son, not to him. He was, as historians have noted, both overly proud and a spendthrift, and his gambling addiction kept the family in a state of near-constant crisis. The lowest point for the household fell roughly between 1524 and 1531, the years that bracketed Catherine's birth and early childhood. If Cardinal Wolsey ever responded to Edmund's plea, there is little evidence that any real relief arrived.

  Catherine's mother, Joyce Culpeper, died in about 1528, and Edmund married twice more after that. Help came to the family eventually, but indirectly, through Edmund's cousin Anne Boleyn, who was herself ascending toward the English throne. Through her influence, Edmund was appointed Comptroller at Calais in 1531. He lost the post in 1539 and died the same month he was dismissed.

  The portrait this paints of Catherine's formative years is of a girl who was, as historians have put it, likely neglected and potentially unwanted, given that her birth meant a future dowry her father had no means to provide. Catherine was broadly described as barely literate and unlearned, which is more a reflection of how little priority was placed on her education than on any lack of capacity. Her father's ruin was the foundation on which her entire life was built.

• 3. The Duchess's Household

  ›

  In 1531, when Catherine was about eight years old, her family was formally broken up. Two older half-sisters were married off, and Catherine and her brother Henry were sent to live as wards of Agnes Howard, the Dowager Duchess of Norfolk, their step-grandmother. The duchess ran two large households: Chesworth House in Horsham, Sussex, and Norfolk House in Lambeth, where dozens of attendants and wards resided.

  Sending children of impoverished aristocratic families to be trained in grander households was standard practice in Tudor England. What was not standard, by any account, was the level of supervision at Chesworth House and Norfolk House. The Dowager Duchess was frequently at court and appears to have had little direct involvement in the day-to-day lives of her wards.

  In around 1536, at Horsham, Catherine began music lessons with a teacher named Henry Mannox. Historians disagree on Mannox's exact age. The most widely accepted reading of the evidence, comparing him to his cousin Edward Waldegrave and other men in the household, places him in his early to mid-twenties at the time. The most influential theory about their relationship, first put forward in 2004 by Retha Warnicke, holds that Mannox groomed and preyed on Catherine between 1536 and 1538. Gareth Russell, in his biography, disagrees about the age gap but agrees the relationship was nonetheless inappropriate. Catherine's own words during her later interrogation were quoted as follows: "At the flattering and fair persuasions of Mannox, being but a young girl, I suffered him at sundry times to handle and touch the secret parts of my body."

  Catherine broke off contact with Mannox in 1538, most likely in spring. Shortly afterward, she entered into a far more serious entanglement with Francis Dereham, a secretary to the Dowager Duchess. They called each other "husband" and "wife," and Dereham entrusted Catherine with keeping his money when he traveled on business. The relationship was known to many of the other maids and attendants in the household. It apparently ended in 1539 when the Dowager Duchess discovered it, though some historians believe Catherine and Dereham may have parted with a verbal precontract of marriage, a promise that, under Church law, carried significant legal weight.

• 4. The King's Jewel

  ›

  Catherine's uncle, Thomas Howard, 3rd Duke of Norfolk, was one of the most powerful politicians at Henry VIII's court, and in late 1539 he found Catherine a place in the household of Henry's fourth wife, Anne of Cleves. The Duke had reason to manoeuvre his family into proximity with the king: the Howard influence had flourished during the years of Anne Boleyn's queenship, and with the king growing visibly dissatisfied with Anne of Cleves, another opportunity was forming.

  The French ambassador, Charles de Marillac, described Catherine as "delightful." Henry himself called her his "very jewel of womanhood." A portrait attributed to Hans Holbein, which the source describes as showing an auburn-haired girl with a characteristically hooked Howard nose, depicted a "gentle, earnest face." The first administrative evidence of the king's gifts to her is a land grant dated the 24th of April 1540.

  According to Nicholas Sander, the Howard family saw Catherine as a potential figurehead for efforts to restore Roman Catholicism to England, the religiously conservative cause the family supported. The Catholic bishop Stephen Gardiner entertained the royal couple at Winchester Palace with what the source describes as "feastings." Whether or not religious politics drove the match, the results were swift: Henry's marriage to Anne of Cleves was annulled, and he married Catherine on the 28th of July 1540 at Oatlands Palace in Surrey. The ceremony was conducted by Edmund Bonner, Bishop of London. It was the same day Thomas Cromwell was executed.

  Henry was 49 years old. Catherine was about 17. She adopted the French motto "Non autre volonte que la sienne," meaning "No other will but his." The marriage was made public on the 8th of August, with prayers at the Chapel Royal at Hampton Court Palace.

• 5. Sixteen Months as Queen

  ›

  Catherine's time as queen was brief, vivid, and remarkably constrained. Every night Sir Thomas Heneage, Groom of the Stool, visited her chamber to report on the king's well-being. No plans were ever made for her coronation. She traveled by royal barge into the City of London to a gun salute, was settled by jointure at Baynard Castle, and dressed daily in new clothes in the French fashion, decorated with gold and precious jewels.

  The royal couple's honeymoon took them through Reading and Buckingham. Henry spent heavily on refurbishments at the Palace of Whitehall to mark the marriage, followed by Christmas gifts at Hampton Court. When plague hit London in August 1540, Catherine and the court left the city on progress. By spring 1541, the French ambassador Marillac was reporting the possibility of a royal pregnancy, writing on the 15th of April that, if confirmed, the queen might be crowned at Whitsuntide.

  That pregnancy never came. What came instead was Thomas Culpeper, a young man Henry VIII considered his favourite male courtier. Catherine had known Culpeper before her marriage, when both were in the household of Anne of Cleves, and the two had already entered into what the source calls a "quasi-relationship." Culpeper later wrote to Catherine calling her "my little, sweet fool." Their alleged secret meetings in spring 1541 were reportedly arranged by Jane Boleyn, Viscountess Rochford, the widow of George Boleyn, one of Catherine's executed cousins.

  At the same time, people who had witnessed Catherine's behaviour in the Dowager Duchess's household were reportedly approaching her for favours in exchange for their silence. John Lassells, a supporter of Thomas Cromwell, took his sister Mary's account of Catherine's earlier conduct to Archbishop Thomas Cranmer. Mary Lassells alleged that Catherine had engaged in sexual relations under the Duchess of Norfolk's care. Cranmer moved quickly. He interrogated Lady Rochford, who confessed to having kept watch as Culpeper slipped out of the queen's rooms. A love letter, written in Catherine's own handwriting and found in Culpeper's chambers, became the centrepiece of the case against her.

• 6. Arrest and Execution

  ›

  On All Saints' Day, the 1st of November 1541, King Henry arranged to be found praying in the Chapel Royal when he received the letter outlining the allegations against his wife. On the 7th of November, Archbishop Cranmer led a delegation of councillors to Winchester Palace in Southwark to question her. Even Cranmer, a man not given to easy sympathy, was moved. He wrote that he found her "in such lamentation and heaviness as I never saw no creature," and ordered guards to remove any objects she might use to harm herself.

  Catherine was stripped of her title on the 23rd of November 1541 and imprisoned at the new Syon Abbey in Middlesex, a building that had formerly served as a convent. A Privy Councillor forced her to return a ring that had once belonged to Anne of Cleves, which Henry had given her at their marriage. She would never see Henry again.

  Culpeper and Dereham were arraigned at the Guildhall on the 1st of December 1541 and executed at Tyburn on the 10th of December. Culpeper was beheaded; Dereham was hanged, drawn and quartered. Their heads were placed on spikes on London Bridge, where they remained until 1546. Many of Catherine's relatives were detained in the Tower, convicted of concealing treason, and sentenced to life imprisonment with forfeiture of their goods. Her uncle, the Duke of Norfolk, retreated to Kenninghall and wrote a letter of apology laying all blame on his niece and his stepmother.

  Parliament introduced a bill of attainder on the 29th of January 1542, which passed on the 7th of February. The Royal Assent by Commission Act 1541 made it treasonable, punishable by death, for a queen consort to fail to disclose her sexual history to the king within twenty days of marriage. No formal trial was held. On the 10th of February 1542, Catherine's flotilla passed under London Bridge, where the severed heads of Culpeper and Dereham were still displayed. She entered the Tower through the Traitors' Gate.

  The night before her execution, she reportedly spent hours practising how to lay her head on the block, which had been brought to her at her own request. On the morning of the 13th of February 1542, Catherine Howard was beheaded. She looked pale and terrified and required help to climb the scaffold. Her actual last words, as reported by eyewitnesses, asked for forgiveness for her sins and acknowledged that she deserved to die "a thousand deaths" for betraying the king. Lady Rochford was executed immediately after her. Both were buried in unmarked graves in the Church of St Peter ad Vincula, alongside the remains of Anne and George Boleyn. Catherine's body was not among those identified when the chapel was restored during Queen Victoria's reign.

• 7. How History Has Judged Her

  ›

  Lacey Baldwin Smith, in his 1961 biography A Tudor Tragedy, described Catherine as living a life of hedonism and characterised her as a "juvenile delinquent." Francis Hackett used similar language in his 1929 biography of Henry. Alison Weir, in The Six Wives of Henry VIII published in 1991, described her as an "empty-headed wanton." David Loades, in Tudor Queens of England, called her a "stupid and oversexed adolescent" while simultaneously noting she died when she was "just 20 years old, a mere child." Tracy Borman, in Elizabeth's Women, blamed Catherine almost entirely for her own fate.

  The general trend among more recent scholars has moved in the opposite direction. Antonia Fraser, Joanna Denny, Conor Byrne in his 2019 book Katherine Howard: Henry VIII's Slandered Queen, and Gareth Russell in his 2017 Young and Damned and Fair have all been more sympathetic. Lucy Worsley, in her BBC miniseries Six Wives, argued that by modern standards, rather than being called the "good-time girl" some historians have labelled her, Catherine would be recognised as an "abused child."

  The scholarly disagreement tracks a genuine interpretive problem. Catherine's relationships before her marriage began in a household where a young teenager was left without supervision, in the company of older men with authority over her. The act of Parliament passed to secure her conviction retroactively made it a capital offence not to disclose her past to the king. No formal trial was ever held. As Nicola Clark has argued, any serious reading of Catherine's life requires a more nuanced understanding of women's agency, dynastic identity, and politics in the Howard world.

  For anyone trying to know what Catherine looked like, one more difficulty remains: there is no authenticated contemporary portrait of her. The two miniatures by Hans Holbein the Younger, long accepted as her likenesses, are both now disputed. Art historian Franny Moyle, writing in The King's Painter published in 2021, argued that the Royal Collection miniature at Windsor Castle is more likely a depiction of Anne of Cleves, noting Holbein's known use of symbolism and the fact that he mounted the miniature on a Four of Diamonds playing card. A Portrait of a Young Woman at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, attributed to the workshop of Holbein, has more recently been proposed as a possible likeness by Susan James, Jamie Franco, and Conor Byrne, though the identification remains inconclusive.