Catherine Howard's last night

There are deaths a person submits to, and there are deaths a person prepares for. The difference is small, almost technical, a question of which muscles are used and in what order. It is the difference between being carried and walking. On the night of the twelfth of February 1542, in an upper chamber of the Lieutenant's Lodging at the Tower of London, a girl of nineteen, who had been Queen of England for one year and four months, decided which of the two she would do.

THE NAMESAKE

Catherine Howard was a daughter of the second-largest noble house in England, raised at Lambeth in the dowager Duchess of Norfolk's crowded household, schooled in the virginal and in deportment and in very little else. Her uncle was Thomas Howard, third Duke of Norfolk, the most powerful peer in the kingdom and the most adept survivor in it. Her cousin was Anne Boleyn, beheaded for treason on the same Green six years earlier by the same king on substantially the same kind of charge. The Howards were a family who put their daughters forward to kings, and the kings used them up; this was understood, on the Howard side, as the cost of being near the throne, and on the king's side as a household matter. Henry VIII had married her in July 1540, calling her his rose without a thorn. She was, by the best surviving estimate, sixteen at the wedding.

THE EXAMINATIONS

In November 1541 the Council laid before the king depositions concerning Francis Dereham, who had known the queen carnally before her marriage in the dowager's house at Lambeth, and Thomas Culpeper, gentleman of the king's privy chamber, with whom she had met in private chambers on the northern progress of the previous summer. Dereham was racked at the Tower and confessed; Culpeper, who was not racked, confessed enough. Both were hanged at Tyburn on the tenth of December, Culpeper beheaded as a courtesy of his rank. The queen was kept four months at Syon, the dissolved Bridgettine house upriver, in three rooms hung with mean stuff, attended by four women of the Council's choosing. On the eleventh of February 1542 Parliament passed the Act of Attainder against her without trial, and the Lords sent a deputation to ask whether she wished to come before them to answer. She declined. On the morning of the tenth she had been brought downriver by barge to the Tower. She had been a prisoner there two nights when the Lieutenant came up the stair.

THE CHAMBER

The chamber given to women of quality awaiting the morning was on the upper floor of the Lieutenant's Lodging, a beamed room with a fire and a window onto the inner ward. There were four women against the far wall, two of them weeping quietly, two of them composed because she had asked them to be composed. The chaplain, John White, had been with her the better part of an hour and was now seated with his stole folded over the chairback, drinking a cup of wine. She was wearing a black velvet gown over a kirtle of white satin. Her hair was loose, because in the morning the man would need to take it back from the neck. Sir John Gage, Lieutenant of the Tower, fifty-three years old, soldier, came up the stair to ask whether she had any further request. He had stood in the room with her at the proceedings of the Council and had nothing of his own to add. He stood by the door and waited.

A SECOND OF TIME

She had not slept for three nights and would not sleep this one. There were nine hours until first light. The thing she was most afraid of was not the axe, which would be one stroke and dark; the thing she was most afraid of was the ground between the door of the lodging and the foot of the scaffold, the cobbles of the Green, the possibility that her knees would not carry her, the possibility that she would be lifted as Jane, Lady Rochford, who was mad with terror in the next room, would have to be lifted in the morning. She had to take it down to the part she could do. She had been raised to manage a household, to hold a posture through a long Mass, to keep a face through an audience; she had not been raised for this, but the instruments were the same. A posture. A breath. A position held until it was no longer strange. She turned her head a little and considered the chaplain, who had a prayer in his mind he could not say aloud, and the women at the wall, and the Lieutenant in the door, and she said, in a voice that was small but steady, that she would have the block of the morning brought to this chamber tonight, that she might lay herself upon it as she should do then, that she might not, in the morning, falter. By the dispatch Eustace Chapuys sent to the Emperor Charles V some days later, the request was granted.

THE REHEARSAL

Two yeomen warders fetched the block from the storehouse beside the chapel of St Peter ad Vincula and laid it on the floor of the chamber by the foot of the bed. It was a low frame of waxed wood about two feet long, with a half-round groove cut for the throat. The yeomen were sent out. Gage stood in the doorway with his hand on the frame. The chaplain stood at the side of the bed. The four women remained at the wall. She knelt down beside the block. She put her hands behind her back, the way the man would tell her in the morning to put them. She laid her chin on the upper edge and adjusted, twice, the angle of her neck against the curve of the wood, and breathed through her nose, slowly, twice, three times, and held the position. Nobody in the room spoke. The chaplain, who wrote afterwards to the Bishop of Lincoln, had the prayer in his mind and could not say it. The two women who had been weeping had stopped weeping. She held the position a long time. Then she got up, and straightened the gown, and said that she was ready, my lord lieutenant. Gage withdrew.

THE MORNING

She was 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 did not falter on the cobbles. She mounted the scaffold composed. She made the standard scaffold confession of a Christian sinner, asked the people to pray for the king, commended her soul to God, and laid her head on the block. The single stroke took her cleanly. Jane, Lady Rochford, who had carried letters between her and Culpeper, was beheaded after her on the same scaffold, and was, as feared, scarcely able to stand. The bodies were taken into the chapel of St Peter ad Vincula and laid under the pavement, two yards from where Anne Boleyn had been laid in 1536. 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; it was first put into print by an English Catholic exile in Italy a generation later and is almost certainly invention.

THE COUNCIL CHAMBER

The men who had brought her to the block went on as men in such places do. Her uncle Norfolk wrote a careful letter disavowing the whole branch of the family that had raised her and kept his head and his offices for another five years, until his own attainder in 1546, which he also survived because the king died first. The dowager Duchess of Norfolk and several Howards were committed to the Tower and pardoned in the summer. The king mourned, and within eighteen months married Catherine Parr, who outlived him. Parliament passed the act making it treason for a woman to marry the king without first confessing her unchaste history; the legislators did not, in framing it, dwell on the position of the woman so required to confess. Eustace Chapuys, who had reported the request for the block to the Emperor in measured Castilian, lived to retire to Louvain.

THE GREEN

The block did not survive. The room did not survive; the Lieutenant's Lodging was rebuilt in the Tudor style after her time and rebuilt again. The chapel of St Peter ad Vincula stands. The pavement was lifted in 1876 and the bones beneath it sorted as well as the Victorian anatomists could sort them, and Catherine Howard's were not found, or not identified, in the relaying. There are deaths a person submits to and deaths a person prepares for; she had been given, by an accident of custom and the courtesy of a Lieutenant who was a soldier, the chance to do the second, and she had taken it. The Green at the Tower in the early morning, before the visitors come, is a small paved yard with a brass marker set into the stones and the chapel door on the north side, and it is, at that hour, very quiet.