Queen consort of Henry VIII King of England Catherine Howard - Catherine Howard

At seven oclock on the morning of 13 February, 1542, a young woman stepped out into the cold of the great courtyard of the Tower of London . Slowly she was escorted across the yard and carefully helped up the steps of the wooden scaffold. Only a small group of sightseers had gathered to watch the death of a queen; there was no weeping, no remorse, only chilly curiosity. The axe rose and fell, a life ceased, an episode came to an end, and the little band of privy councillors, ambassadors and citizens dispersed to their several duties.

Such indifference poses a problem: wherein lies the drama and tragedy of Catherine Howards death? Is it to be sought for in the picture of vital youth so abruptly and mercilessly concluded? Possibly, but compassion for the unfulfilled promise of youth is dampened by the knowledge that her audience came not to mourn her death but to view it. Is the tragedy to be found in the brutality of an act of state necessity? Hardly, for few could find in the inner reaches of their hearts the conviction that Mistress Catherine Howard was undeserving of her fate. Possibly then the nature of her crime adds meaning to her death. The Queen was accused of having been a woman of abominable carnal desires who had craftily and traitorously misled her royal spouse into believing she was chaste and of pure, clean and honest living. Worse still, she had followed daily her frail and carnal lust and had actually conspired, imagined, and encompassed the final destruction of the King. Adultery can add zest to a narrative and treason lend stature to a life, but in the case of Catherine Howard the records reveal neither grand passion nor high ideals. Catherines life was little more than a series of petty trivialities and wanton acts punctuated by sordid politics. It is, however, exactly here that one senses the ultimate tragedy. It is somehow shocking to our sense of justice to perceive the naked perversity of casual relationships that can transform juvenile delinquency into high treason.

There is a disproportion about Catherines career that both repels and fascinates. She was a victim of inconsequentialities which somehow combined to produce a conclusion monstrously disproportionate to the myriad of petty causes. This book is an analysis of a life and a multitude of circumstances that culminated in violent death; a study of how chance and personality, morality and adultery, deliberate malice and good intentions, when operating within the limits set by environment, can create a single act in time the swift descent of the executioners axe.

Catherines death is not simply a lesson in Tudor morality. It is an exercise in historical causation and encompasses the entire sink and puddle of palace politics and backstairs bickering which throve so abundantly within the garden of Henry VIII s government. It stands as a grim reminder not only of the consequences of inadvertent folly, but also of the fact that all men are in some fashion victims of their age. Catherines execution attains the level of grand tragedy only in terms of her milieu that of the vast Howard dynasty and its ambitions in an age of scarcely veiled despotism, when men played the risky game of politics with their lives and women were hapless pawns in the complex scheme of dynastic ambitions. Catherine Howards lighthearted idiocy was fatal only when fostered and distorted by family greed, royal absolutism, social callousness and violence, and a political theory that stripped the individual of all defence and left him alone and unprotected to face the truth that the Kings wrath is death. Only when taken in their entirety do the random events merge into a design, which at no point was ever predetermined or even necessary, but which tempts one to ask of that final tragedy enacted in the courtyard of the Tower of London : How else could it have ended?