Her father's sister, Elizabeth Howard, was the mother of Anne Boleyn.

With little to sustain the family, her father often had to beg for the help of his more affluent relatives. 1476 – 1509) when she married Lord Edmund Howard, and they had another six together, Catherine being about her mother's tenth child. He was 49, and she was between 15 and 21 years old.Ĭatherine was stripped of her title as queen in November 1541 and beheaded three months later on the grounds of treason for committing adultery with her distant cousin, Thomas Culpeper.Ĭatherine had an aristocratic ancestry as a granddaughter of Thomas Howard, 2nd Duke of Norfolk (1443 – 1524), but her father, Lord Edmund Howard, was not wealthy, being the third son of his father – under the rules of primogeniture, the eldest son inherited all of the father's estate.Ĭatherine's mother, Joyce Culpeper, already had five children from her first husband, Ralph Leigh ( c. She married him on 28 July 1540 at Oatlands Palace in Surrey, just 19 days after the annulment of his marriage to Anne. Thomas Howard was a prominent politician at Henry's court, and he secured her a place in the household of Henry's fourth wife, Anne of Cleves, where she caught the King's interest. She was the daughter of Lord Edmund Howard and Joyce Culpeper, a cousin to Anne Boleyn (the second wife of Henry VIII), and the niece of Thomas Howard, 3rd Duke of Norfolk. 1524 – 13 February 1542), also spelt Katheryn Howard, was Queen of England from 1540 until 1541 as the fifth wife of Henry VIII.

But Katheryn has a past of which Henry knows nothing, and which comes back increasingly to haunt her-even as she courts danger yet again.Catherine Howard ( c. If she can bear him a son, her triumph will be complete. She comes to love the ailing, obese king and tolerate his nightly attentions. Katherine delights in the pleasures of being queen and the power she has to do good to others. He tells the world she is a rose without a thorn, and extols her beauty and her virtue.

Seated near him intentionally by her ambitious Catholic family, Katheryn readily succumbs to the courtship. Although the king is now an ailing forty-nine-year-old measuring fifty-four inches around his waist, his amorous gaze lights upon the pretty teenager. In the spring of 1540, Henry VIII, desperate to be rid of his queen, Anna of Kleve, first sets eyes on the enchanting Katheryn Howard. Bestselling author and acclaimed historian Alison Weir tells the tragic story of Henry VIII's fifth wife, a nineteen-year-old beauty with a hidden past, in this fifth novel in the sweeping Six Tudor Queens series.

Alison weir katherine howard