Queen Catherine Howard

Just after 7 o’clock on the morning of Monday February 13th 1542 the former Queen Catherine Howard was beheaded in the Tower of London. She was followed to the block by her lady-in-waiting Jane Lady Rockford, the sister-in-law of the other beheaded consort, and cousin of Catherine, Anne Boleyn.

I recently came across an excellent recent public lecture about Catherine Howard given by Dr David Starkey and available on his new YouTube channel at Catherine Howard: David Starkey Lectures

For all that her life and time in the limelight of power we’re so short Catherine continues to attract biographers. One of these is Gareth Russell who has written a substantial and very well received life of her in Young and Damned and Fair: The Life and Tragedy of Catherine Howard at the Court of Henry VIII. There is a long interview with him online about the biography at Young & Damned & Fair: The Life and Tragedy of Catherine Howard | An Interview with Gareth Russell

He can also be heard speaking about Catherine in a talk he gave for Six Wives which can be heard at The Life of Catherine Howard with Gareth Russell

A point which often comes up in considering her life is the absence of a recognised portrait. Some which have been identified in the past as being of her have now been reassigned to other sitters, and it is suggested that the miniature most usually said to be her in modern accounts is in fact her predecessor Anne of Cleves during her brief time as Queen. This seems quite likely to me.

More recently another portrait, now in the Metropolitan Museum in New York, has been suggested as possibly being of Catherine. Not everyone accepts the argument and the protagonists and opponents are set out in the Wikipedia life of her at Catherine Howard.

This has a useful discussion of her treatment by modern historians and the usual

Links to articles about those with whom her life interacted. There is also a piece by one of the advocates for the identification as being Catherine at Katherine Howard’s Birthday – A Guest Post by Conor Byrne

To my mind the portrait does seem to tally with what one might expect Catherine to have looked like, but that is of course a very subjective statement.

The possible portrait of Catherine Howard

School of Hans Holbein the a younger, dated to circa 1540-45

Image: On the Tudor Trail

Even if the portrait is not of the I’ll-fated Catherine it deserved to be better known.

One legacy of the downfall of King Henry’s fifth Queen is that to avoid distress to the monarch in giving his personal assent to the Act of Parliament which condemned her the device of having a Commission of five peers to give the Royal Assent was arrived at, and that system is the one which came to be, and remains, the established practice to this day.