Catherine Howard
Unfortunately, Catherine, though young, was far from innocent: In her early teens, she had had an affair with Francis Dereham, a young scholar employed by her family, and the pair had been unofficially engaged. After coming to court, she began a liaison with Thomas Culpeper, a member of the royal household, who was a relation of her mother, and foolishly hired Dereham as her private secretary, although their affair was over. When her activities were discovered, she confessed to adultery (which one modern historian, Dr. D. Starkey believes she did not techinically commit,) but her life was not spared. She was convicted of high treason and executed on February 13, 1542, at the Tower of London, where she was buried, at the Royal Chapel of St Peter ad Vincula. She made a "good Christian end" according to one observer. On the night before her execution, she made a strange request: She asked that the execution block be brought in her chamber so that she could rehearse her execution.
Painters continued to include Jane Seymour in pictures of King Henry VIII years after she was dead, because Henry continued to look back on her with favour as the one wife who gave him a son; most of them copied the portrait by Hans Holbein the Younger (below, left) because it was the only full-sized picture available. In the opposite situation, after Catherine Howard was executed, even the Howard family removed her picture from their family portrait gallery, because Henry never forgave her for her perfidy. Nobody dared make another portrait of her after she was dead.
For centuries, the picture above (also by Hans Holbein) was believed to be of Catherine, and some authorities said it is the only portrait of her that exists. Some historians now doubt that the woman in the picture is Catherine. Recently historian Antonia Fraser has persuasively argued that the above portrait is one of Jane Seymour's sister, Elizabeth Cromwell. The woman bears a remarkable resemblance to Jane (especially around the chin) and she is wearing the clothes of a widow, which Catherine never had occasion to wear but Elizabeth Seymour-Cromwell did. There is another picture of Catherine, a water-colour miniature (below, right); it has been dated (from details about how she is dressed and how the miniature is made) to the short period when Catherine was queen. In it she is wearing the jewels remarkably similar to those Jane Seymour was wearing in her official portrait; these were jewels the records show belonged to the crown, not to any queen personally, and there is no record of their having been removed from the treasury and given to anyone else. The only other possibility is that the portrait shows Henry's Scottish niece, Lady Margaret Douglas, the mother-in-law of Mary, Queen of Scots. So, whilst it is almost certain that the above portrait is not Catherine Howard, but rather Henry's sister-in-law, Elizabeth Seymour-Cromwell, the miniature shown below right is (possibly) Henry's unlucky fifth queen.
Is this picture really Catherine Howard?
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