@somebody3487

4 years ago

Here are some facts about Catherine Howard - I will update this comment whenever I come across interesting information:
- Her birthdate is a mystery, but most recent estimates put her year of birth at about 1523 or 1522. No official documents of her birth exist, so most figures are based around the wills of her relatives or charters of the households she served in.
- There is no ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ way to spell her name, as there was no standardised system of spelling in the Tudor period. Historians have variously spelt her name as ‘Catherine’ or ‘Katherine’, but in her letter to Culpeper she herself wrote it as ‘Katheryn’.
- She could play the virginals.
- She was a lady-in-waiting to Anne of Cleves.
- Catherine was educated in etiquette. She took her duties as queen seriously and carried out plenty of kind acts, such as sending warm sheets to the imprisoned Margaret Pole and securing a pardon for Sir Thomas Wyatt. Catherine also gifted Anne of Cleves two puppies and ring, despite the presents originally being for her.
- Henry VIII probably never called Catherine his ‘rose without a thorn’. The phrase comes from a coin struck in 1526, years before the two were married, which bore the words ‘Henry VIII, the dazzling rose without a thorn’.
- Catherine never had a legal trial. She was instead condemned to death by an act of parliament.
- Her behaviour in the months leading up to her death was erratic. Eustace Chapuys recorded how she was ‘cheerful, and more plump and pretty than ever’ and that her only request was that the execution ‘be secret and not under the eyes of the world’. Later, she became hysterical and had to be forced onto the barge which took her to prison.
- According to Chapuys, she requested that the block to be brought to her so that she practice dying gracefully. It was expected that nobles would go to their execution with great dignity and die in the image of Christ - that is, forgiving the executioner and accepting one’s fate.
- She made her last confession to clergyman John White. She swore ‘upon salvation of her soul, that she was guiltless of that act of defiling the sovereign's bed’.
- She wore a black velvet gown to her execution.
- Her last words were not ‘I die a Queen, but I would rather die the wife of Culpeper’. This myth comes from a highly fictionalised and unreliable account by the writer of ‘The Spanish Chronicle’. Eyewitness Ottwell Johnson recorded how she declared her ‘lively faith in the blood of Christ only’ and then asked for ‘all Christian people to take regard unto [her] worthy and just punishment’.
- The story about her collapsing and needing help to climb the scaffold does have some historical basis, as it comes from a recording by Charles de Marillac. However, this needs to be taken with a small pinch of salt since Marillac was not an eyewitness.
- She was, mercifully, beheaded in a single blow of the axe. None of the accounts of her execution support the claim that it took more than one attempt to sever her head, or that the axe hit her back.
- She was executed alongside her lady-in-waiting, Jane Rochford, with Catherine going first. Jane Rochford had been accused of arranging meetings between Catherine and Culpeper. Jane was the widow of George Boleyn (beheaded), the brother of Anne Boleyn (also beheaded).
- Her remains (body and head) were buried in the Chapel of St Peter ad Vincula, within the walls of the Tower of London.
- There is a story that lye or quicklime was poured over her body to make it decompose faster, but this hasn’t been definitively proven.

RIP Queen Catherine Howard, c. 1523 - 13th February, 1542

465 |