Catherine Howard

Catherine Howard belonged to one of the most powerful noble families of Tudor England. Born about 1523, she was a daughter of Lord Edmund Howard, a younger and impoverished son of the second Duke of Norfolk, and Joyce Culpeper. Her uncle was Thomas Howard, third Duke of Norfolk, and she was a first cousin of Anne Boleyn, Henry VIII's second queen. She was brought up largely in the household of her step-grandmother Agnes, Dowager Duchess of Norfolk, at Horsham and Lambeth, where supervision of the young gentlewomen was lax.

In that household Catherine formed the attachments that later destroyed her: a relationship with her music teacher Henry Manox and a more serious liaison with Francis Dereham, with whom she may have exchanged promises amounting to a precontract. In late 1539 her uncle secured her a place as a maid of honour to the incoming queen, Anne of Cleves. Henry VIII's interest in her grew as his fourth marriage failed, and on 28 July 1540, less than three weeks after the annulment of the Cleves marriage, he married Catherine at Oatlands Palace. She was not yet twenty; the king was forty-nine.

Her time as queen was brief and ended in catastrophe. During 1541 she held private meetings with Thomas Culpeper, a gentleman of the king's privy chamber, arranged with the help of Jane Boleyn, Lady Rochford. That November, Archbishop Cranmer presented Henry with evidence of her conduct before the marriage; investigation then uncovered the Culpeper meetings. Dereham and Culpeper were executed in December 1541. Catherine was deprived of her title, condemned by act of attainder without trial, and beheaded at the Tower of London on 13 February 1542, along with Lady Rochford. She was buried in the chapel of St Peter ad Vincula, near her cousin Anne Boleyn.

Her fall damaged the Howards, several of whom were imprisoned for concealing her past, though the Duke of Norfolk himself survived in office. Because so little was recorded of her short life apart from the proceedings against her, Catherine remains the least documented of Henry VIII's six queens.