Catherine Howard was just a teenager when she married the middle-aged King Henry VIII in 1540 — and she was decapitated on his orders just two years later.
On February 13, 1542, Catherine Howard mounted the scaffold and turned to face the crowd assembled near the Tower of London. Many in the audience that day may have felt a strange sense of déjà vu. Six years earlier, they’d watched another Queen of England beheaded in this very same spot — King Henry VIII’s second wife, the controversial Anne Boleyn.
Howard, although much younger, was Boleyn’s cousin and had also been accused of adultery. It was alleged that the young queen was an “abominable, base, carnal, voluptuous, and vicious life, like a common harlot, with diverse persons.”
Howard knelt on the scaffold. The men in the crowd removed their hats. The queen’s last words are disputed; she may have claimed she’d rather die the wife of her alleged lover Thomas Culpeper than the king’s. Or, she may have prayed for the king’s welfare. Accounts differ.
But what seems certain is that Catherine Howard led a brief life dominated by men from early girlhood. Indeed, Catherine Howard had even sewn this motto onto her sleeves, No other will but his.
Doomed to live in the Tudor-era patriarchy, Catherine Howard lay her head on the executioner’s block. She was likely less than 20 years old.
Catherine Howard was born in England just as the country entered an age of turmoil. Although her exact date of birth is unknown, most historians believe she was born around 1524 — the same year that King Henry VIII stopped sleeping with his first wife, Catherine of Aragon, and shortly thereafter began his pursuit of Anne Boleyn.
Despite belonging to a powerful family, Howard’s childhood was volatile. Her father, Edmund, was nowhere near as powerful or respected as his eldest brother Thomas Howard the Duke of Norfolk. Edmund struggled with debts and when his wife died, sent his daughter to live with her step-grandmother Agnes Howard, the Dowager Duchess of Norfolk, in the early 1530s.
Howard’s step-grandmother supervised her little and she was exposed to sexual suitors at an early age. Her piano teacher, Henry Manox, was the first to take an intense interest in her. Howard was likely only 13 and Manox at least twice her age when he admitted to knowing her “secret parts.”
Howards’s loss of innocence dovetailed with England’s own sexual politics. King Henry VIII’s affair with Anne Boleyn had intensified and the king found a way to disentangle himself from his long marriage to Catherine of Aragon. He accused his first wife of lying about being a virgin when they married, an accusation that King Henry VIII would leverage against his wives again and again, including Howard.
If Catherine of Aragon had not been a virgin, then the marriage was void and if she had lied about her virginity, then King Henry was free to marry Anne Boleyn. But at this point, the truth mattered little as Henry VIII was determined to marry Boleyn in hopes of finally producing a male heir.
As the controversy raged across the country, Catherine Howard experienced her own personal dramas. Around 1538, she became involved with a young nobleman named Francis Dereham. Howard was still a teenager at this point, though she did later acknowledge that Dereham had “used her… as a man doth his wife.” Servants also claimed that they had engaged in “puffing and blowing.”