On 28 July 1540, King Henry VIII married Catherine Howard, the same day as the execution of Thomas Cromwell, Earl of Essex, his chief minister, who had orchestrated his disastrous fourth marriage to Anne of Cleves. Catherine was the niece of Cromwell’s bitter political rival, Thomas Howard, Duke of Norfolk. Sixteen months later the much-married monarch was informed that his beautiful fifth wife had been accused of dalliances, before and after the royal marriage.

At Hampton Court on 6 November 1541 Queen Catherine was informed of the allegations against her and subsequently questioned by Archbishop Cranmer. The king then left Hampton Court, never to see his wife again. In her confession, Catherine admitted that when she was “but a yong gyrle” living in the household of her step-grandmother, the Dowager Duchess of Norfolk, she had permitted Henry Manox (her music teacher, who had arrived in the Duchess’s household in 1536), to “handle and towche the secrett partz of my body”, and that in the late autumn-winter of 1538-9, Francis Dereham (a kinsman and formerly a gentleman pensioner of her uncle, the Duke of Norfolk, who had entered the dowager’s service in 1537) had “used me in suche sorte as a man doith with his wyff many and sondry tymez”. It was soon discovered that after her marriage, Thomas Culpeper, a gentleman of the privy chamber, had replaced Dereham in her affections, but they were both adamant they had not proceeded beyond words.

The queen’s coffers and chests were sealed, the doors guarded and her jewels were placed in the custody of Henry Seymour (Lady Cromwell’s brother). On 14 November Queen Catherine’s household was disbanded and she was moved, with several carefully chosen royal servants and four of her ladies, to the former monastery of Syon. The Imperial ambassador, Eustache Chapuys observed that she was “making good cheer, fatter and more beautiful than ever, taking great care to be well apparelled and more imperious and troublesome to serve than even when she was with the King.” Later that month she was stripped of her title as queen and on 13 February 1542 Catherine, and her accomplice, Lady Rochford, widow of George Boleyn, would die on the scaffold.

In September 1540 the French ambassador, Charles de Marillac described Queen Catherine as “a young lady of mediocre beauty but of greater grace, small and slender in stature; her countenance is modest, soft and gentle”. Catherine’s contemporaries and near-contemporaries commented on her beauty and grace, but especially her youth. The majority of the maids of honour from 1539-41 were born c. 1524, except for Anne Bassett (born c. 1521), whose stepfather was imprisoned in the Tower following accusations of treason and Mary Norris (born c. 1521-2), whose father had been executed in 1536. Anne and Mary had both served Queen Jane Seymour, but their marital prospects were hampered by their family misfortunes.

Estimates of Catherine Howard’s year of birth range from 1518 to 1525, but if she were significantly older than her fellow maids of honour, she could hardly be described as youthful! The anonymous and “occasionally accurate” writer of the Spanish Chronicle claimed that Catherine was “not more than fifteen” when she arrived at court. The French ambassador stated that Dereham “kept the lady from the time he violated her at the age of 13 until 18”. The ambassador was not in possession of all the facts, however, and his comment is open to interpretation; he was unaware of the “furtive fondling” of Henry Manox, assuming that the queen’s relationship with Dereham had lasted five years (from 1536- 41) and that it had continued after the royal marriage. It seems likely that Catherine was born in late 1524: her affair with Dereham commenced in the autumn of 1538, before her fourteenth birthday and she arrived at court in the late autumn of 1539, shortly after her fifteenth birthday.