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of making a mistake.

      The king had arrived at Oatlands earlier that day. Lucrezia Borgia’s twenty-three-year-old son Francesco, Marquis of Massalombarda, had been visiting London for the last week and he was due to leave that evening; the king had entertained him with visits to his palaces at Greenwich and Richmond and given him two fine horses as a parting gift.21 It was unusual for a traveller to begin a journey in the evening when visibility was poor, so perhaps the marquis had delayed his departure to make sure he witnessed the executions on Tower Hill. If he did attend, his status would have vouchsafed for him a place at the front of the crowd.

      Much as a hush falls when a bride enters a church, a silence settled over the spectators as Cromwell began his final speech.22 He delivered it perfectly, thanking God for allowing him to die this way, in full knowledge of what lay ahead, and confessing readily that he was a wretched and miserable sinner who had, like all Christians, fallen short of the standards hoped for by Almighty God: ‘I confess that as God, by His Holy Spirit, instructs us in the truth, so the devil is ready to seduce us – and I have been seduced.’ Then he began to pray – for the king, for ‘that goodly imp’ the heir apparent – and to ask for prayers for himself, though as a reformer he was careful not to ask for prayers for his soul after he was dead but solely ‘so that as long as life remaineth in this flesh, I waiver nothing in my faith’.23

      As Catherine, her throat now glittering with pieces from the royal collection, knelt before Edmund Bonner, Cromwell knelt in the sawdust of the scaffold and prayed aloud, ‘O Lord, grant me that when these eyes lose their use, that the eyes of my soul might see Thee. O Lord and father, when this mouth shall lose his use that my heart may say, O Pater, in manus tuas commendo spiritum meum.’24 Hungerford, his sanity now snapped entirely, kept interrupting, writhing and screaming at the executioner to get on with his bloody business.25 Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey, stood at the forefront of the crowd and watched the scene without pity. He was missing his cousin’s wedding to be here to see his family’s bête noire finished off. Later that day, he could not conceal his good mood. It felt to him like a settling of scores: ‘Now is the false churl dead, so ambitious of others’ blood.’26

      More of the Howards may have been at Oatlands to help Catherine, steady any nerves and, as ever, offer advice. A few days earlier, in preparation for the wedding, the king had granted Catherine’s eldest brother Charles five properties in London, while their half sister Isabella got a manor house in Wiltshire and all the lands that had once belonged to Malmesbury Abbey. As a gift for performing the service, Bishop Bonner’s debts were paid off by the royal household and he was given a set of gold dining plate that had been confiscated from his predecessor during the dissolutions.27 The newly enriched Isabella, wife to the queen’s vice-chamberlain, was almost certainly in attendance in her capacity both as Catherine’s sister and lady-in-waiting. This was the second queen Isabella would serve and her husband’s fifth. Both were too clever to give any thought to the merry-go-round of queens consort, or rather, any voice. A woman would soon be imprisoned for asking of the king: ‘How many wives will he have?’28

      At the Tower, Lord Hungerford’s wish that the headsman should acquit his task quickly was not to be fulfilled. Edward Hall described Cromwell’s executioner as ‘ragged [and] butcherly’, who ‘very ungoodly performed his office’.29 No more details are provided about what went wrong with the beheading, but rumour began with the claim it had taken three strokes to cut through the minister’s thick neck. By the end of the month, entertainment had triumphed over plausibility with stories that it had taken two headsmen half an hour to kill him and allegations that Cromwell’s enemies, who had been seen banqueting and celebrating throughout the week preceding his death, had taken the executioner out to feast him the night before, to get him drunk and hope that with a hangover he would give Cromwell as painful a death as possible. All we know for certain is Edward Hall’s remark that the executioner had carried out the task in an ‘ungoodly’ manner and that afterwards Cromwell’s head was taken with Lord Hungerford’s to gaze and rot from the top of the pikes at London Bridge.

      From the little chapel at Oatlands and the imposing towers of London, bells tolled out to mark a wedding and a death. Bells still tolled too every second day of November, the Feast of All Souls, the Catholic Day of the Dead, when Christ’s flock on earth were compelled to remember their brothers and sisters in the faith who had gone before them. They would toll again on the fifteenth day of August, the Feast of the Assumption, to mark the entry of the Virgin Mary into Heaven, there to be crowned its queen, as foretold, so the Church taught, in the visions of Saint John in the Book of Revelation.30 Celestial queens had not yet been abolished, despite the best efforts of the Protestant evangelicals and the man who had fallen on Catherine’s wedding day. But in a world where statues of Our Lady could be taken from Norfolk and torched in front of large London crowds with Cromwell watching on, it did not seem as if the Virgin Mary was any more secure on her throne than Katherine of Aragon or Anne Boleyn had been on theirs. It was an age of uncertainty and terrifying possibilities, and Catherine Howard was now its queen.

      Chapter 2

       Our Fathers in Their Generation

      Let us now praise men of renown, and our fathers in their generation.

      – Ecclesiasticus 44:1

      The first recorded mention of Catherine Howard, born as she was in the decade before the government made mandatory parish-level records of each baptism, comes from a will.1 Her maternal grandmother, Isabel Worsley, left a bequest, ‘To Charles Howard Henry George Margaret Catherine Howard XXs [twenty shillings] each.’2 It is a very quiet entrance for a future queen of England – Catherine is even upstaged in the concluding half of the sentence by her younger sister Mary, who, as Isabel’s goddaughter, received a more substantial bestowal of £10.3 Yet it is from the Worsleys and their kin that much of the relevant evidence about Catherine’s early years originates.

      Beyond its object as a matter of general historical interest in showcasing how prosperous members of county society chose to dispose of their earthly possessions on the eve of the Reformation – rather touching is Isabel’s stipulation that every housewife in Stockwell, part of Isabel’s home parish of Lambeth, should receive a gift of linen worth twelve pence or, failing that, a monetary gift of the same amount; likewise her decision to set aside £6 to repair a local highway – the will, which went to probate on 26 May 1527, proves that Catherine had been born, with time to spare for a younger sister, by the spring of that year.4 As with all four of Henry VIII’s English-born wives, and many of their contemporaries, we are left to guess when they arrived in the world using fragmentary evidence provided by throwaway or contested remarks from those who knew them or saw them, personal letters, family wills, and comments in contemporary memoirs or chronicles. The analysis of these documents has thus produced a broad spectrum of supposition. In Catherine’s case, suggestions for her birthdate have run the gamut from 1518 to 1527. The promotion of the former date seems motivated mainly by a desire to rehabilitate a particularly dubious portrait, which will be discussed subsequently, while support for the later years partly derives from the account of a Spanish merchant living in London late in Henry VIII’s reign, who described Catherine as ‘a mere child’ at the time of her

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