peremadeleine:K a t h r y n  H o w a r d  was the queen consort of England for sixteen brief months

peremadeleine:K a t h r y n  H o w a r d  was the queen consort of England for sixteen brief months from the summer of 1540–when she was perhaps as young as fifteen or sixteen–to the autumn of 1541. Although history remembers her as a foolish young girl, a spoiled child, a wanton adulteress, Kathryn was in fact a vivacious, charming teenager who had little time or opportunity to make a significant historical impact. She belonged to one of the most powerful noble families in England, but until 1540, few of her family members gave her much thought: her father was a disgraced poor relation, and her mother died before she turned ten. The people who ought to have protected her–from exploitative teachers and lecherous monarchs alike–not only neglected her; their ambitions were what thrust her into the dangerous world of court for which she was ill-prepared.After her mother’s death, Kathryn was sent to her step-grandmother’s household, where she learned to read and write and likely little else. Unfortunately, there Kathryn also fell victim to her music teacher, Henry Manox. He eventually admitted to molesting her beginning around 1536, when she may have been just twelve or thirteen. Kathryn’s society lacked the modern concept of adolescence, and noblewomen often married young, yet it’s difficult to see her as anything but the victim of a negligent guardian and a sexually predatory older man. This makes her historical reputation as an empty-headed nymphomaniac especially tragic and unfair.Kathryn’s uncle the Duke of Norfolk brought her to court in early 1540, and within months Kathryn–pretty, cheerful, eager to please–became the king’s fifth wife. As queen, Kathryn proved herself to be naive but kind and well-intentioned. She interceded with the king on behalf of convicted criminals, was affectionate to her stepdaughter Elizabeth, and befriended her predecessor, Anne of Cleves. Her charity for the elderly and imprisoned Margaret Pole, to whom she sent warm clothing, is particularly touching. Yet Kathryn was, for all the luxury her status afforded her, still the teenage bride of a morbidly obese fifty-year-old prone to fits of temper. Perhaps as a result, at some point in 1541 she became involved with one of Henry’s grooms, Thomas Culpeper. The actual nature of their relationship remains unclear, but as a result of it, Kathryn was revealed not to be the pure “rose without a thorn” that the king had imagined. Before she married the king, Kathryn had been “known” carnally by another man, Francis Dereham. Both Dereham and Culpeper were eventually executed; Manox, who had taken advantage of Kathryn at her most vulnerable, escaped with his life. Kathryn herself, however, was stripped of her title and also condemned to death.When she climbed the scaffold steps on 13 February 1542, Kathryn was probably no older than twenty-one and possibly several years younger. Her body was interred without a marker beneath the same chapel floor in the Tower of London where her cousin Anne Boleyn, another ill-fated consort of Henry VIII, had been laid to rest just six years earlier.  -- source link

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