Excerpt from the "Young and Damned and the Fair" by Gareth Russell
Continuing in my series of short excerpts from "Young and Damned and Fair", my biography of Henry VIII's fifth wife, Catherine Howard, this extract discusses reactions to her marriage in summer 1540.
From chapter 8, "The Queen of Britain will not forget": - "Catherine’s wedding was even more private than Anne [of Cleves]’s and the formal announcement was not made until 8th August. In the meantime, there were rumours in London that Catherine was already pregnant and derogatory comments were making the rounds at foreign courts, fuelled by their respective ambassadors’ assessment of the situation, which included the guess that the wedding only took place because Catherine had found herself enceinte.
By marrying Catherine, Henry VIII achieved the dubious distinction of the most married Christian monarch in European history - the previous record had been held by Emperor Charles IV, who had managed to avoid Henry’s reputation for matrimonial misadventures by the natural deaths that resulted in three of his four wives predeceasing him. Despite their relief that Cleves had lost its most powerful protector, at the Hapsburg court, Henry’s latest matrimonial hiccup was cited as proof that murky and megalomaniacal morals had been the real reason for his rupture with Rome. In a letter to the Emperor’s secretary, a Spanish governor wrote, ‘A very good joke of the king of England again divorcing his Queen. Not in vain does he pretend and assume spiritual authority that he may at will decide upon matrimonial cases whenever he himself is concerned. Although this is a wicked and abominable thing to do, yet it must be owed that concerning - as it does the duke of Cleves - the Queen’s brother, it is not so bad after all.’" - From "Young and Damned and Fair" by Gareth Russell
Image: Lynne Frederick as Queen Catherine Howard in the 1972 movie "Henry VIII and his Six Wives". For me, Frederick corresponds fairly closely to the patchy eyewitness testimonies that we have about Catherine's appearances. I argue in "Young and Damned and Fair" that the idea that she was short and plump or curvaceous is a myth, since contemporary accounts all seem to stress that she was slender or tiny.