Catherine Howard

Catherine Howard was married to Henry VIII on the day Thomas Cromwell was beheaded and executed herself eighteen months later, at about nineteen. She was a niece of the Duke of Norfolk and a cousin of Anne Boleyn, from the poorer branch of a great family, and was raised in the crowded household of the dowager duchess at Lambeth and Horsham with minimal supervision. Two relationships there - with her music teacher Henry Manox when she was perhaps thirteen, and with a household gentleman named Francis Dereham, who called her his wife and to whom she may have been contracted - were what destroyed her, because a precontract would have made the royal marriage void and a concealed one was treason. The Howards put her at court to catch the king, and it worked; Henry was forty-nine, in poor health and increasingly unwell in the leg, and called her his rose without a thorn. After the marriage she appointed Dereham her secretary, which was reckless, and began meeting Thomas Culpeper, a gentleman of the privy chamber, in the company of Lady Rochford. A letter in her hand to Culpeper survives. Archbishop Cranmer was given the information in late 1541 and passed it to the king in writing because he could not say it aloud. Culpeper and Dereham were executed in December, and she was attainted and beheaded at the Tower in February 1542, having asked for the block the night before to practise. Lady Rochford was executed immediately after her. The Howards lost most of their standing for a decade afterwards, and Norfolk himself was condemned in 1547 and saved only by the king dying first. Henry married Catherine Parr eighteen months later. The dowager duchess was imprisoned for concealment.

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