Beheaded II (From the Archive)

he felt his resolve drain away. She was weeping, already frantic with grief and terror, her bloodshot eyes darting around the room as if an executioner's blade could appear at any moment. But she also looked so small, so young. She was a nineteen year old girl, and she was in a chair that looked far too big for her. Cranmer really had all the information already that his investigation really needed. Only two weeks ago, the allegations had just been a rumor, a single rumor from a single source.

The claim was this that the new Queen had been less than virginal when she had married the king. Some one had informed the archbishop that in Catherine's home growing up, she had not one but two affairs, first with her music teacher and then with her grandmother's secretary. Did you or did you not? Cranmar began as soon as Catherine had caught her breath, have a sexual relationship with your music teacher, Henry Mannox when you were living with your grandmother,

the dowager Duchess in Lambeth. Katherine wailed, no, sir, it was a flirtation, that's all. He never knew me in the way a husband knows his wife. I have only ever been true to King Henry. And what of a secretary. Some time later, a man named Francis Diurham. Did you know him intimately? Catherine's breath began to quicken erratically. Cranmer noticed her cheeks and dressed sleeves were both wet with tears. Be honest, child, Cranmar said, The Lord is merciful to

those who are honest. As almost an afterthought, he added, I have already spoken to both men. Catherine didn't respond, and Cranmar continued, you and Dearham called each other husband and wife? Did you not? Catherine nodded, Were you formally bound to Denham? The archbishop continued, still unable to quite locate the harsh tone that he had rehearsed. Did you lie with him? Once more? Catherine nodded her head. We did lie together two or three times in my bed

in the maiden's chamber when I lived in Lambeth. But I never betrayed King Henry. I never betrayed my husband or sinned against him in any way. But she had already said enough. She had betrayed the king, betrayed him by pretending to be a virgin in a lie by omission, humiliated the king by now letting the whole world know that he had been fooled by a teenager. Catherine broke down in sobs. As he left, the archbishop quietly whispered to the guards that they should remove any items from

her chamber that might allow her to commit suicide. Catherine Howard and King Henry the Eighth had only been married about sixteen months, and now with her past revealed, she knew that her time as queen was over. With Henry's history, she would be lucky to make it out with her head for a little while. It seemed as though she might. After her interrogation, Catherine was sent away from court to Sion Abbey. It seemed as though the King was going

to show her mercy. Her arrangement with Frantis Dearham could technically qualify as a pre contract, would mean her marriage to Henry was invalid, getting him off the hook easy. Catherine would have to give up her jewels and possessions and live in exile, away from court for the rest of her life. It looked as though that was what was going to happen. It looked that way for exactly

three days. Three days after Catherine Howard's interrogation, Frantis Dearham revealed, under torture something else about Queen Catherine, something that the King wouldn't be able to look upon with mercy. From that moment, Catherine's fate was sealed. I'm Danish Schwartz and this is noble blood. When Katherine Howard, motherless girl, was eight years old, she was sent to live at the estate of her father's stepmother, her step grandmother, the Dowager

Duchess of Norfolk. The Dowager Duchess seemed to collect wards. She had about a dozen or so girls under her care, mostly the daughters of poorer relations, and the idea was that under the Dowager Duchess's supervision, the girls would learn the skills of court and aristocracy, although in effect supervision was a little lax. The year Katherine Howard turned thirteen,

two major things happened. First, her cousin Anne Boleyn was beheaded for adultery during her marriage to King Henry the eighth Second, Katherine Howard began a flirtation with her music teacher, a man named Henry Mannox, who had been hired to teach the girls how to play the Virginals. Mannox was exactly the type of man Catherine would fall in love with for the rest of her life. He was every stereotype of a poetic musician, moody, romantic, wildly passionate. We

don't know how old Mannix was at the time. He could have been a teenager himself somewhere around nineteen, or he could have been approaching forty. Either way, it was not a relationship that an extremely young aristocratic woman should have been engaged in, especially not in a world in which a woman's sexual purity was her primary currency. Catherine, for her part, refused to let Mannox go all the way.

The relationship occurred mainly in the hiding spots around the estate grounds, where they could kiss each other and whisper words of love into each other's ears. That's where the Dowager Duchess found them kissing in an alcove near the chapel. The Dowager Duchess slapped Catherine twice and forbade the couple from ever seeing each other again. The warning didn't deter the pair. I don't know why you're still seeing her,

said Mary Lassal's one day to Mannox. Mary Lassles was another young woman under the Dowager Duchess's lack supervision, but lower ranked than Katherine, and so she felt a sort of kinship with Mannox, who was more or less a servant. She's much too high born for you, Mary said, she's never going to marry you. You know that right. Mannox sneered and curled his lip. He took a step closer to Mary Lassal's and told her that he already knew Catherine Howard by her private parts. And he said, she's

already promised her maiden had to me. From Mary Lassal's word got around and back to Catherine Howard what Mannix had said. She ended their relationship. The next day in the estate's orchard. Mannix pleaded that he was just so far in love with her that he didn't know what he said, but Catherine didn't care. Besides, Mary Lassell's had been right. She was too high born for him. That's why teenage Catherine felt as though she was a much

better fit for Francis Dearham, the Dowager Duchess's secretary. Durham already had a reputation and seduced a good percentage of the women at the estate, including Catherine's own secretary. In fact, it was she who recommended Dearham to Catherine, praising him so highly that Catherine couldn't help but be intrigued. It was the type of whirlwind passion that only a teenager can have. Within months, they were calling each other husband

and wife, planning for an imaginary future together. They sent each other gifts and wrote each other letters. Katherine, still under her grandmother's custody, didn't have the income to buy the dresses she wanted, and so Dearham bought her beautiful fabric and taught her which dressmaker to go to. I'll pay you back, I promise, Catherine said. Durham just smiled.

Though the girls at the dowager Duchess's estate slept in a single room, the maiden's chamber, and though the girls usually slept to a bed, there were still ways for girls to entertain male visitors. The maiden's chamber was locked every night, to preserve the girl's virtue, of course, but Catherine had an answer for that. While her friends giggled and encouraged her, Catherine snuck into the dowager Duchess's chamber while her stepgrandmother was sleeping and stole the key, quickly

making a copy and replacing it. Men snuck into the room. Then Katherine wasn't the only one of the Wards who had an illicit boyfriend. The men brought with them wine, strawberries, and d apples, and the boys and girls would laugh and talk or sneak off to beds together until one or two in the morning. We can be almost certain that Dearham and Katherine, who by this point had been

spending every moment together, were having sex. Durham privately assured his friends that he knew enough to ensure that Katherine wouldn't get pregnant. Meanwhile, Mannox, bitter music teacher, was furious at Katherine and her new paramore. In his neatest script, he wrote a letter to the Dowager Duchess informing her that if she were to come to the Maiden's chamber an hour or so after she normally went to bed, she would see something she wouldn't like very much, involving

a certain one of her secretaries. Mannix anonymously left the note in the Dowager Duchess's pew in the chapel so she would find it. That night, she stormed into the Maiden's chamber to catch not Catherine and Dearham, but a man named Hastings, another one of her secretaries, who had already been caught once flirting with one of the other girls. Catherine was in the clear, but Catherine knew who the note had been written by, and she knew that it

had been intended for her, and Dearham agreed. Puffing out his chest. Dearham confronted Mannox, telling him that his behavior made it appear as though he'd never loved Catherine at all. Mannox called him a cab. Two jealous men dressing each other down over their secret love affair. It was like a scene from Gossip Girl, half a millennium before its time. People knew that Dearham and Catherine were having an affair people other than the Dowager Duchess. But people also liked Catherine.

She was vivacious and funny and entertaining. Plus she was high ranking. They had no reason to rat her out or risk incurring the wrath of her grandmother for being the ones to deliver the bad news. But like almost all wildly passionate love affairs, the one between Dearham and Catherine became less exciting. Catherine stopped being entranced by Dearham

when she was presented with a new gilded opportunity. Her family connections had secured her a position as a lady in waiting for the new Queen Anne of Cleaves, who would be arriving to England later that fall. In the same apple orchard where she had broken up with Mannix, Katherine Howard told Dearham that she was leaving. His version of the story involves her weeping with sorrow. Her version is her losing her temper at his insistence that they

stay together. It's possible both occurred. She cried, and she lost her temper, and she left Dearham, thinking that there was still a chance they were going to end up together. But there wasn't. She was just going. Catherine had grown up thinking her house in Lambeth was grand. She had no idea what would await her at the court of Henry the Eighth. So many people, so many dances, so much food, so much to learn for the confident girl who had only ever been the queen Bee of the

band of teenagers in the maidens Chamber. She was paid ten pounds a year. With her first paycheck, she sent money back to Dearham to repay him for the fabric he had bought her. The new Queen of England, Anne of Cleaves wasn't set to arrive for another few months. In the meantime, the new ladies got to know each other and got to know the men of court. For Katherine, that meant being instantly drawn to a gentleman named Thomas Culpeper. Culpeper was tall and athletic, the type of man that

Henry kept around him because he made him feel young again. Culpeper, for his part, had an incredibly checkered past. There was a rumor about him being convicted of raping a woman in the village and murdering a villager who saw them, only to get off without consequences with a royal pardon. Catherine knew none of that. She only saw the handsome, charismatic man that women seemed to gravitate towards, like hummingbirds to a flower, and Culpeper saw Katherine a stunningly gorgeous

girl of sixteen. Every contemporary description of Catherine Howard has that in common, the understanding that Catherine was uniquely pretty. For a few weeks, Culpeper and Catherine engaged in a typical court flirtation. Catherine would report back to her fellow ladies in waiting, giggling helping to decipher everything that Culpeper

had said to her that day. Catherine knew that her virtue at court would be essential in ensuring that she make an advantageous marriage, and so when Culpeper started making sexual overtures expecting her to come to bed, she declined, even as he professed his courtly love. If he loved her, Catherine believed he would understand, but Culpeper wasn't a man accustomed to sexual rejection or even delay. With Catherine's refusal, he shrugged and set his sights upon a new girl.

It was Catherine Howard's first time getting her heart broken. The other ladies in waiting saw her her spend days crying and ripping up his letters. Luckily, Catherine wouldn't have to wallow too long in heartbreak. Almost immediately after Anne of Cleaves arrived in England, Henry the eighth decided that he didn't care for her and set about trying to arrange an end to their arranged marriage. In the meantime, the king began doting on his new brides, very pretty,

very young lady in waiting Katherine Howard. He sent gifts and gave her land. Everyone saw, including Anne, of Cleaves, but she hoped it was just an affair. It wasn't. Henry secured the annulment from Anne of Cleaves within a few months and married Catherine Howard so quickly afterward that people assumed that she must be secretly pregnant. In fact, Henry was just absolutely besought it with his new bride, who was just sixteen or seventeen years old. Henry was fifty.

They were married the very same day that Henry's former minister, Thomas Cromwell was executed for securing the disastrous marriage to Anne of Cleves. The middle aged Henry was so amorous to Catherine Howard that it almost embarrassed the rest of court. He didn't take his hands off of her in public, caressing her almost constantly, to the point where ambassadors noted that he had never been this publicly affectionate with any

of his wives to this extent before. Of course, Henry believed that his young bride was a virgin and that he was the only man she had ever laid with. Catherine was so young and so beautiful that she made Henry feel as though he were back in his prime, even as it became exceedingly obvious that he was not pain in his legs from his long troublesome ulcers kept getting worse. Henry had difficulty with impotence in the bedroom, even as he made his attraction to Catherine increasingly obvious

outside the bedroom. Henry's doctors advised him to spend time away from his new bride so that he could recuperate. In the meantime, they put him on a weight loss regimen and wrapped his injured leg in boiled olive leaves and mirth. Henry's ill health and generally mercurial nature, combined with his shame at his inability to perform in the bedroom, meant that he spent most nights away from Catherine. A year into their marriage, Catherine had no pregnancy to show

for it. Catherine knew full well what happened to queens who didn't give Henry sons. As her relationship with the king continued to strain, Catherine began to shut herself away, unhappy and anxious, refusing to go to dances. Uncertain of her future position. That summer, strain or not, Catherine was to accompany Henry on the Northern Progress, a show of

force and majesty to the rebellious northern parts of the country. Catherine, as the beautiful young Queen, was an essential prop for the outing, to make Henry look all the more vital and powerful with her at his side. But Catherine took ill on the journey, spending days and nights alone in her room. When the King sent a servant to her

chamber one night, he found it bolted. The queen's ladies fretted about her listlessness, but they also whispered about the way she gazed down from her window at Thomas Culpeper, the young handsome man in the King's entourage, who had caught her eye from the moment that she had arrived at court. The way she looked at him with her hand cupped in her palm, it was almost like love.

When the trip to the north of the country ended and they all returned to Hampton Court on October twenty ninth, Henry gave a speech giving hearty thanks for his good life with Catherine and his trust in their happy future together. The very next day everything would fall apart. Do you remember Mary Lassal's the girl from Catherine's time with the Dowager Duchess Away from court. Mary Lassell's brother John was reprimanding her for not being able to secure a position

in the new queen's household. Didn't you two know each other? John scoffed at her. Mary Lassal's bristled at her brother's derision. Yes, I knew her. I wouldn't even want to be in that household under a queen like her. I remember how she behaved back when she was in the Lambeth. John paused and asked for more details. Mary Lassal's told him about Henry Mannox and Francis Dearhan. Everybody knows the queen wasn't so pure when she married the king, Mary said.

John stopped in his tracks and demanded that Mary tell him everything she knew, and John Lassal's, a devout Protestant reformer, went to tell the Archbishop, Thomas Cranmer. Cranmer was in a delicate position. On one hand, this was just a rumor, and he didn't want to incur Henry's wrath over nothing. But on the other hand, if he didn't tell Henry

and somehow word got out, he would be responsible. And so on November two, in incredibly measured words, Cranmer put the delicate claims in writing in a letter and left it on Henry's seat in chapel. Henry was, of course outraged. He didn't believe the rumors for a moment, but still he demanded a full investigation. Mannix and Dereham both confessed. On November sixth, Without telling Catherine, Howard Henry the Eighth left Hampton Court and rode to Greenwich. She would never

see him again. Once Henry was done with a wife, he wanted her out of sight. At Greenwich, Henry held a midnight meeting that lasted for six hours, in which he and his ministers decided what to do. At one point, Henry broke down in tears. Why have I had such bad luck in meeting these ill conditioned women, he cried. He grabbed a sword. Maybe I should just go and kill her myself. However much play measure she had in her sins, it won't be half as much as her

torture in death. Henry's men subdued him. He really had been in love, he thought, with his beautiful young fifth wife. The next day, Catherine knew something was a mess. No one had told her anything. The investigation had been completely secret, but Henry was gone and had left no word about where he was. She could sense something in the air. When her musicians started to play, she silenced them. It's no time for dancing, she said. That night she was

brought before Thomas Grandmar where she confessed. Henry showed mercy enough that Catherine should be spared death and a real imprisonment in favor of a life of exile at Cyan House. But then, on November eleventh, under torture, Francis Dieham said something knew. No, he promised he had never slept with the Queen while she was married to the king, but everyone knew Thomas Culpeper did. Now there is no part evidence to prove that Thomas Culpeper and Catherine actually slept together.

She went to the grave denying it, but soon details began to emerge. In the spring after her wedding, feeling distant from Henry and lonely at court, Catherine and Thomas began exchanging love letters. They sent little gifts back and forth. Their letters became more and more emotional and personal. I trust in you that you will always be as you

have promised me, Catherine wrote. She signed the letter yours as long as life endures, and that summer Culpeper had been in the large group of courtiers accompanied Henry and Catherine on the northern progress. Had she really been sick when she insisted on staying alone in her room? Ladies were interrogated. Jane Rockford confessed that at one of the stops, Culpeper used a secret door that led up backstairs directly to Queen Catherine's bedchamber. Other ladies were interrogated about whether

Katherine and Culpeper were having an affair. I don't know for certain, when lady said, I am inclined to believe the Queen except accept the Archbishop prompted, except the way she looked at Culpeper from her window. I would have believed her if I hadn't seen the way she gazed at him. Catherine had been in love, and she hadn't been able to hide it. Derham was hanged, quartered and disemboweled. Culpepper, as a gentleman, was simply beheaded. Meanwhile, Catherine waited at

Sion House, knowing her fate would be arriving swiftly. In January. An act of attainder made it treason for a woman to marry the king without plain declaration of having previously lived an unchased life. That was it. The final peace had been put into place to ensure that Catherine would receive the death that Henry wanted for her. Anne Boleyn had been taken to the Tower of London under full

light of day. Katherine had the privilege of arriving at night, although when the guards arrived at Sion House to take her to the barge, she collapsed in a fit of panic. Lucky it was dark during her boat ride down the Thames, or else she would have seen the rotting heads of Francis Dieham and Thomas Culpeper leering down at her from London Bridge. That night, locked in the Tower of London, she heard the gates clang shut and the locks on the doors turn. She was told that she would be

killed two days later. After her final confession, Catherine made a request that the guard taken aback couldn't refuse. She asked for the block that she would be beheaded on to be brought to her chamber so that she could practice.

Catherine wanted to at least die with grace or as little humiliation as possible, and she had heard stories of botched executions, including the execution of Thomas Cromwell, on which it took four or five, even as many as ten strokes for the head to fully come off, and so for hours. On her last day on earth, Katherine Howard kneeled in her cell at the Tower of London and raised and lowered her pretty neck on the black block.

When the time finally came and she was escorted to the very spot where her cousin Anne Boleyn had died only six years earlier, Catherine knew exactly what to do. Though she shook, she lowered her head into the valley of the block with well practiced ease, and the executioner took her head off with a single blow. She had gone from orphan to lady, to queen to dead in two years. Catherine Howard hadn't yet reached her twenty first birthday.

That's the very short, tragic life of Catherine Howard. Stick around after a brief sponsor break to hear a little bit more about the consequences of the investigation of Catherine's infidelity. Dearham Culpepper, Jane Rockford, and of course Katherine lost their lives in the aftermath of the investigation of Catherine's affairs, but there are two ladies whose fates fascinate me. During the course of the investigation, two of Catherine's ladies were

caught gossiping idly about the king. What kind of man is this king?

historical figures. In the sixteenth century, five hundred years ago, a girl was considered a woman as soon as she began having her period, and a teenager marrying a man twice or even three times her age, far from being seen as an active abuse or pedophilia, was unfortunately incredibly common. Still, it's important to understand that these are real people, that Catherine was a teenager, and her decision making and experiences were those of someone incredibly young. Personally, I find it

most helpful. Not to make broad declarations about Catherine as a villain or a victim, but just to do my best to try to understand her with the most empathy I possibly can.

Matt Frederick. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.