Catherine Howard

Queen of England (r. 1540-1542)

• Born: c. 1521
• Birthplace: Probably at Horsham or Lambeth, England
• Died: February 13, 1542
• Place of death: London, England

As fifth wife to King Henry VIII, Catherine Howard briefly reigned as queen of England until revelations about her personal life brought about her sudden downfall and execution.

Early Life

Catherine Howard was born into the English aristocracy, her father being Lord Edmund Howard, a younger son of Thomas Howard, second duke of Norfolk. Through her Howard connections, Catherine was a first cousin to Anne Boleyn, Henry VIII’s second queen. Little is known about the future queen’s childhood. She grew up in a large family of ten children and received little formal education. Her mother, Joyce Culpeper, died when Catherine was quite young. Her father, Lord Edmund Howard, subsequently married two more times, but he saw little of his daughter. Being a younger son, Lord Edmund did not inherit the considerable family estates, and he experienced continual financial difficulties, even after his appointment as controller of Calais in 1534. Never a major influence on his daughter’s life, he died in 1539, a year before Catherine’s dramatic rise to power.

The most significant development of Catherine’s childhood occurred when her father sent her to live with his stepmother Agnes, the dowager duchess of Norfolk. One of the wealthiest and most influential women of her day, the duchess maintained a grand household at her country estate at Horsham in Sussex and her town house at Lambeth, across the River Thames from London. The duchess exercised only a loose supervision over her numerous charges; at Horsham, young Catherine soon engaged in a serious flirtation with Henry Manox, a musician hired to teach her to play the lute and virginal. Although the relationship did not become an actual affair, Manox followed Catherine to Lambeth and openly bragged to numerous people in the household of the liberties he had enjoyed with the duchess’s charge.

While at Lambeth, probably in 1538, Catherine became sexually active with her next serious suitor, Francis Dereham, a distant kinsman of Duchess Agnes and a pensioner in her household. The two lovers openly exchanged gifts and were heard to call each other “husband” and “wife.” Their clandestine nighttime meetings became something of a scandal and provoked the jealousy of Manox, who sent an anonymous note to the duchess informing her of the relationship. Discovering the two in an ardent embrace, she angrily struck both of them. Dereham soon left to seek his fortune in Ireland, leaving his life savings with his paramour. Catherine’s passion for Dereham quickly cooled after her uncle Norfolk used his influence in 1540 to secure her a position at court, an event that drastically transformed the fortunes of this previously obscure young woman.

Life’s Work

The Howard family used Catherine as a pawn in the dangerous political game for dominance at the court of the aging Henry VIII. The duke stood as the representative of the conservative faction of old nobility who opposed the pro-Protestant policies of Thomas Cromwell, Henry’s lord chancellor and the guiding genius behind the English Reformation. To cement an alliance with the German Protestants, Cromwell had just engineered the king’s marriage to Anne of Cleves . From their first meeting in January, 1540, Henry had openly expressed his displeasure with his new foreign bride. Sensing Cromwell’s vulnerability, the Norfolk faction brought Catherine to court and coached her on ways to attract the monarch’s attention.

Henry evidently met Catherine at a banquet hosted by Norfolk’s ally, Stephen Gardiner, bishop of Winchester; by April, the king was obviously smitten. On April 24, he granted her the lands of a convicted felon, and even more lavish gifts followed the next month. Queen Anne’s last public appearance with Henry occurred at the May Day festivities; soon thereafter, he sent her to the country so that he could court Catherine openly. On many spring nights, the royal barge crossed the Thames to visit Duchess Agnes’s Lambeth residence so that Henry could enjoy Catherine’s company.

Catherine’s triumph came swiftly. On June 10, Henry ordered Cromwell’s arrest on charges of heresy and treason. Facing death, the former chancellor agreed to supply information to enable Henry to divorce his German consort. Anne did not oppose Henry’s schemes, and the grateful monarch offered her a generous settlement. Their divorce became final on July 9. Nineteen days later, ironically on the day Cromwell was beheaded, Henry summoned the bishop of London to the royal palace at Oatlands, where he secretly married Catherine. He publicly acknowledged her as his new queen at Hampton Court on August 8.

The aging, increasingly bloated monarch initially seemed besotted by his lively teenage bride. Catherine’s youthful vigor, coupled with her submissiveness and outward virtue, rejuvenated her husband, who showered her with public caresses and worldly goods. He soon bestowed on her all the lordships and manors that had belonged to his beloved queen Jane Seymour, as well as some of Cromwell’s former properties. The new queen chose “No other wish but his” as the motto above her new coat of arms.

Although Catherine’s Howard relatives again found themselves in a position of preeminence at court, the new queen was far more naïve about court politics and factions than her two English predecessors, Anne Boleyn and Jane Seymour. Also unlike some of Henry’s previous spouses, Catherine evidently made no real attempt to preoccupy herself with politics or interfere with state affairs, except for a handful of intercessions on behalf of prominent prisoners in the Tower. Throughout her brief reign, her main preoccupation seemed to be clothes and dancing, not political intrigue. The king appeared delighted with his young bride; the two remained constantly in each other’s company until February, 1541.

Sometime in the spring of 1541, though, Catherine embarked on more dangerous behavior, which culminated in an affair with a distant cousin, Thomas Culpeper, an attractive young courtier who was several decades younger than her husband. The only surviving letter in Catherine’s hand, written in April, 1541, is a love letter to Culpeper in which she recklessly pronounced herself “Yours as long as life endures.”

Their affair evidently continued throughout the summer and autumn while Henry took his bride on a tour of northern England. Lavish ceremonies awaited the royal couple as they visited numerous towns. At Pontefract in Yorkshire, Francis Dereham reappeared in Catherine’s life and demanded a post at court. On August 27, she unwisely appointed him her private secretary, perhaps to buy his silence about their previous relationship.

The royal entourage returned to Hampton Court on October 30, and Henry gave orders for a special thanksgiving service to be held celebrating his marriage. A sudden turn of events, though, brought an end to the marriage and death to the young queen. Shortly before their return, Archbishop Thomas Cranmer had received disturbing reports about Catherine’s clandestine life before her marriage. The initial source of this news was John Lascelles, whose sister, Mary Hall, had been in the dowager duchess of Norfolk’s service while Catherine lived with her. A zealous Protestant, Lascelles was not a personal enemy of the queen, but he did despise what she represented the triumph of the Howard faction at court. After consultations with other leading men at court, Cranmer handed the king a note with the damning information while Henry was hearing a mass for the dead.

Initially astonished and unwilling to believe the charges, Henry nevertheless ordered the archbishop to conduct a thorough investigation and to confine the queen to her apartments pending its outcome. He never saw her again, as interrogation of numerous witnesses confirmed his worst fears. On being informed by his council that the allegations against Catherine had a sound basis, the king openly broke down and cried. Subsequently, increasingly outraged at being cuckolded, he furiously called for a sword so that he could execute his adulterous spouse personally.

Whereas Anne Boleyn had immediately been sent to the Tower after allegations of her infidelity, Catherine was instead placed under house arrest at the Abbey of Syon in Middlesex. The king allowed her to have four attendants and access to three chambers during this initial stage of her confinement. He also let Cranmer hold out some hope of royal mercy to Catherine if she would fully confess.

After initially denying the charges against her and changing her story several times, the queen eventually confessed her guilt to Cranmer. As evidence accumulated, it became obvious that Catherine had been not only indiscreet before her marriage to Henry, but also unfaithful to him afterward. On November 22, a royal proclamation announced that she had forfeited her rights as queen; two days later, she was formally indicted both for having concealed her relationship with Dereham before her marriage and for having committed adultery with Culpeper after becoming Henry’s wife.

Culpeper and Dereham paid for their folly by being executed on December 1. The king decided against a public trial for his unfaithful wife. Instead, she was condemned by a special act of attainder passed by Parliament and approved by the king in early February. On two occasions, members of the council invited Catherine to come before Parliament to defend herself, but she refused, admitting her guilt and hoping for the king’s mercy.

On February 10, Catherine was removed to the Tower, and on the evening of February 12, she was told she would die the following morning. She requested that the block on which she was to be executed be brought into her room in the Tower so that she could practice how to place herself. Early on February 13, guards escorted the prisoner to a spot within the Tower grounds, the same location where her cousin had been beheaded nearly six years earlier. Catherine made a brief speech admitting her sins to both God and king, after which the executioner severed her head with a single stroke from his axe. Like Anne Boleyn’s before her, her body was interred in the chapel of St. Peter ad Vinicula within the Tower.

Significance

Catherine Howard reigned only some eighteen months as Henry VIII’s fifth queen, and fewer details about her brief life exist than for any of his other consorts. Except for a possible depiction in a stained-glass window in King’s College Chapel, Cambridge, no contemporary portrait of her survived. Nor did Catherine play a significant role in determining policy during the tempestuous final years of Henry’s reign. Rather, her powerful Howard relations used her as a pawn to forward their own ambitions at the volatile court of the second Tudor king.

Catherine became Henry VIII’s final passion. His immediately preceding marriage with Anne of Cleves had been arranged, but Henry deliberately chose the young and seemingly innocent Catherine, some three decades his junior. For a few months, she succeeded in reinvigorating her prematurely aging husband. Her fall left him an increasingly embittered and dangerous sovereign and resulted in the temporary disgrace of her family. Her uncle Norfolk managed to save his life by abandoning Catherine and joining in her condemnation, as he had done with his other royal niece, Anne Boleyn, but Howard influence at Henry’s court ended as the result of the scandal. An odd sequence of events had briefly turned this obscure young woman into the most prominent lady in the realm. Her indiscretions both before and after her marriage brought a tragically early end to her life.

Bibliography

Fraser, Antonia. The Wives of Henry VIII. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1992. Part 4 of this well-written and well-researched collective biography by one of Britain’s most popular writers provides a colorful portrait of Catherine and her contemporaries.

Lindsey, Karen. Divorced, Beheaded, Survived: A Feminist Reinterpretation of the Wives of Henry VIII. New York: Addison-Wesley, 1995. This lively collective biography examines the position of Catherine and Henry’s other wives based on recent feminist interpretations of the role of women in Tudor society.

Loades, David. Henry VIII and His Queens. Stroud, Gloucestershire, England: Sutton, 2000. This short and highly readable work by a respected British historian provides a useful introduction to the topic.

Smith, Lacey Baldwin. A Tudor Tragedy: The Life and Times of Catherine Howard. London: Clay, 1961. This sympathetic study by a leading Tudor-Stuart historian remains the standard biography.

Starkey, David. Six Wives: The Queens of Henry VIII. New York: HarperCollins, 2003. Emphasizes the religious and political complexities of Henry’s court, and fleshes out many of the significant players in that milieu, in order better to understand the lives, careers, and deaths of each of Henry’s wives.

Warnicke, Retha M. The Marrying of Anne of Cleves: Royal Protocol in Early Modern England. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000. Extended study of Henry’s fourth marriage, including its dissolution and the courtship of Catherine, Anne’s replacement. Includes photographic plates, illustrations, map, bibliographic references, and index.

Weir, Alison. The Six Wives of Henry VIII. New York: Grove Press, 1991. Chapters 13 to 15 of this collective biography complement the work of Fraser. Weir asserts that Catherine was born around 1525, making her younger than other scholars assume.