The Teenage Queen Who Never Saw Him Again

Katherine Howard was approximately seventeen years old when Henry VIII — forty-nine, obese, and rotting from an ulcer on his leg that would not heal — chose her as his fifth wife in July 1540, and he called her his rose without a thorn and his very jewel of womanhood, and she was Queen of England for sixteen months, and when Archbishop Cranmer placed a letter in Henry’s hand on 1 November 1541 detailing what he had learned about her past, Henry locked her in her rooms and never saw her again, and she ran screaming down the corridor at Hampton Court trying to reach him and was dragged back, and on 13 February 1542 she was brought to the scaffold on Tower Green having spent the night before practising how to lay her head on the block because they had brought it to her room at her request, and she was so weak she had to be helped up the steps, and she was buried beside her cousin Anne Boleyn, and she was nineteen years old.

Interesting Fact: Parliament passed a specific act to kill her. The Bill of Attainder declared it treason for an unchaste woman to marry the king — meaning Katherine was condemned not for what she did after the marriage but for what had happened to her before it, including abuse at the hands of her music teacher when she was as young as twelve. She never stood trial. No jury heard her case. Parliament simply voted her guilty and scheduled the execution. Her uncle, the Duke of Norfolk — the man who had placed her at court and engineered her marriage to Henry — wrote a letter of apology to the king and retreated to the country, blaming everything on his niece. He survived. She did not.

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