Forum Replies Created
-
February 13, 1542
Henry VIII beheaded his fifth wife two months after he discovered her adulterous (pre-adulterous?) relationship with Thomas Culpeper, and two weeks after Parliament passed the Act of Attainder that convicted her without a trial.
Catherine Howard was given only a single day to prepare herself for this moment, but she used it intentionally. Spanish Ambassador Eustace Chapuys reported to Charles V that “she asked to have the block brought in to her, that she might know how to place herself; which was done, and she made trial of it.”
This is the macabre image we are left with: this poor young woman, not yet twenty, spending hours rehearsing her death over and over again. Was it to make the process seem less terrible and foreign? Or was it to ensure that she would fulfill her last public act with all the dignity expected of the Queen of England (even though she was stripped of that rank on November 23rd)? Likely both.
Either way, she succeeded: an eyewitness to the execution confirmed that she had made “the most godly and Christian end.” And the French Ambassador Charles de Marillac’s letter to Francis I, gives us this description:
“…about nine o’clock in the morning, this Queen first, and afterwards the lady of Rochefort, within the Tower, had their heads cut off with an axe, after the manner of the country. The Queen was so weak that she could hardly speak, but confessed in few words that she had merited a hundred deaths for so offending the King who had so graciously treated her. The lady of Rochefort said as much in a long discourse of several faults which she had committed in her life. It is not yet said who will be Queen; but the common voice is that this King will not be long without a wife, for the great desire he has to have further issue.”
Having played Wordle quite a bit lately, this made us smile. We know the frustrations!
