Howard · 1542
Catherine Howard's last night
Catherine Howard, fifth wife of Henry VIII, was the niece of the Duke of Norfolk and a cousin of Anne Boleyn, who had been executed for treason at the same end of the same Tower yard six years earlier. She had been queen for fifteen months. She was, by the historical balance, between sixteen and twenty years old, and very probably nineteen. Charges of pre-marital intercourse with Francis Dereham and adulterous intent with Thomas Culpeper had been brought before the Council in November 1541. She was attainted by Parliament in February 1542 without a trial. On the evening of the twelfth of February 1542, by Eustace Chapuys's account written to Charles V, she asked the Lieutenant of the Tower, Sir John Gage, to have the executioner's block brought to her room so that she might rehearse the laying of her head upon it. The request was, by the practice of the Tower, granted. She was beheaded the next morning at seven o'clock on Tower Green by a single stroke of the axe.
It is the evening of the twelfth of February in the year of our Lord one thousand five hundred and forty-two, in the lieutenant's lodging at the Tower of London, in the upper chamber given to women of quality awaiting the morning. She is, by the best evidence of her age at marriage, nineteen years old. She has been queen of England for one year and four months. She has been a prisoner of the Tower for two days; before that, four months at Syon. She is wearing a black velvet gown over a kirtle of white satin, hands folded, hair loose because in the morning the executioner will have to take it back from the neck. There is a fire. There are four ladies-in-waiting sitting against the wall opposite, two of them weeping, two of them composed because the queen has asked them to be composed.
Sir John Gage, the lieutenant, has just come up the stair to ask whether she has any further request. The chaplain, John White, has been with her this last hour, and is sitting now with the priest's stole over the back of his chair, drinking a cup of wine.
She thinks: Jane Boleyn, who used to be my cousin's lady, is in the next room, and she will be on the scaffold beside me in the morning. Jane has been mad for a fortnight. They will have to lift her onto the block.
She thinks: I have not slept for three nights. I will not sleep tonight. There are nine hours until first light.
She thinks: the part of the morning that I am most afraid of is not the axe. The part I am most afraid of is the walk from the door of this lodging across the Green to the scaffold and not falling on the cobbles.
She thinks: I have to take it down to the part I can do.
She says to Gage, who is still standing by the door, in a voice that is small but steady: Sir John, I have one further request. I would have the block of the morning brought to this chamber tonight that I may, before tomorrow, lay myself upon it as I shall do then, that I may not, in the morning, falter.
Gage is fifty-three years old and a soldier. He has stood in the room with her at the trial. He has nothing of his own to add. He says, by Chapuys's letter, that the request shall be granted. He goes down the stair. The block, a low waxed wooden frame about two feet long with a half-round groove for the throat, is brought up by two yeomen warders from the storehouse beside the chapel and laid on the floor of the chamber by the foot of the bed. The yeomen are sent out. Gage stands in the doorway. The chaplain stands at the side of the bed. The four women are at the wall.
She kneels down beside the block. She puts her hands behind her back, the way the executioner will tell her tomorrow to put them. She lays her chin on the upper edge of the block, and adjusts, twice, the angle of her neck against the curve of the wood, and breathes through her nose, slowly, twice, three times. She holds the position for a long time. Nobody in the room speaks. The chaplain, by his own letter to the Bishop of Lincoln two months later, has the prayer in his mind but cannot say it aloud. Gage in the doorway has his hand on the doorframe. The two women weeping have stopped weeping.
She gets up. She straightens the gown. She says: I am ready, my lord lieutenant.
Gage, by Chapuys, withdraws.
She is taken from the lodging at seven in the morning of the thirteenth of February 1542 and walked across the Green between two yeomen of the guard. She does not falter on the cobbles. She is composed on the scaffold. She speaks briefly. The tradition, that her last words were I die a queen, but I would rather have died the wife of Culpeper, is not in any contemporary source and was first written down by an English exile in Italy a generation later, and is almost certainly invented. The contemporary letters say only that she made the standard scaffold confession of a Christian sinner, asked for prayers for the king, and laid her head on the block. The single stroke of the axe took her cleanly. She was buried, by the practice of the Tower, in the chapel of St Peter ad Vincula on the same Green, two yards from her cousin Anne Boleyn. Her age is not certain, the registers are not certain, but the best modern estimates place her at nineteen, and possibly seventeen. The Tower of London still has a record of the bringing of the block to her chamber on the night of the twelfth of February. The block has not survived. The room has not survived. The Green is paved over the chapel side now and is, in the early morning before the visitors come, a quiet stone yard.