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(1522-1542)

 

Wishing to avoid a trial such as had taken place with his second wife, Henry VIII was willing to have Catherine Howard removed by an Act of Attainder, which accordingly passed Parliament on February 7, 1542. The king dispatched Thomas Howard, Duke of Norfolk, to Syon House, where Catherine remained under house arrest, to inform his niece of her fate on February 9. The following day, the lords of the Council came to Syon with orders to convey the queen to the Tower of London.

All Catherine’s calm deserted her upon realizing that Henry really meant to have her executed, and she refused to go. Finally, kicking and screaming, she was bundled into a waiting barge for transport. Thankfully, the barge was enclosed, as the rotting heads of Thomas Culpepper and Francis Dereham were still to be seen above London Bridge. At the Tower stairs, Catherine’s four ladies disembarked, followed by the hysterical queen, who was weeping so hard it was feared she was on the verge of a collapse. John Longland, Bishop of Lincoln, was sent to her that evening to hear her confession and offer spiritual comfort. Catherine swore to him “in the name of God and His holy angels, and on the salvation of my soul�?that she was innocent of the crimes for which she was about to die.

Meanwhile, the execution could not proceed without the king’s signature on the Act of Attainder; to spare Henry further distress, the Council merely attached the Great Seal to signify royal consent, writing “The King Wills It�?across the top of the Act. Catherine’s execution could now go ahead, but as the following day was a Sunday, she received a brief reprieve. Calmer and more accepting of her fate, she was anxious about making a good impression on the scaffold, and requested that the block should be brought to her room, so that she might practice how to place herself. The block was brought and Catherine spent her last evening doing just that.

At seven on the frosty, cold, overcast morning of Monday, February 13, the King’s Council, excepting Norfolk, who had been excused, and Charles Brandon, Duke of Suffolk, who had been ill, arrived at Tower Green to witness Catherine’s execution. She was led by her warders to the straw-strewn, black-draped scaffold, appearing to the onlookers to be so weak that she could hardly walk. Nevertheless, she recovered a measure of composure for her speech, in which she admitted she had been justly condemned, and urged those present to obey the king in all things; she then prayed for Henry, asking all to do the same, before commending her soul to God and “earnestly calling for mercy upon him�? Catherine, unlike her cousin Anne, received her punishment with a single stroke of an axe.

Catherine’s attendants placed her remains in a waiting coffin, which had been remembered to be provided for this queen, and carried it into the Tower’s Chapel of St. Peter ad Vincula, where she was interred near Anne Boleyn. Ironically, in 1553, Mary Tudor reversed all Acts of Attainder which did not bear the royal signature as illegal; too late for Henry’s “Rose Without A Thorn�?