Hi history lovers and welcome or welcome back to the channel, where I bring you new videos
every Friday on all aspects of the past. Today on History Calling we’re asking, how old
was Katherine Howard, fifth wife of Henry VIII? We know she was the King’s youngest
consort but estimates of her birth year range from 1518 to 1525, meaning she was possibly
a 14 year old queen at the time of her marriage in July 1540. This could make her as little
as 16 when she was executed in February 1542 on charges of treason which stemmed from accusations
of adultery and hiding an unchaste past from the King. Stay tuned to hear and see the evidence
for yourself and decide when you think Katherine Howard was most likely born.
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is History Calling. I’ll leave a link for that in the description box below, along with
links to some books, documentaries and TV shows about Katherine’s life.
For someone who became Queen of England, we know surprisingly little about Henry VIII’s
penultimate wife, Katherine Howard. We aren’t sure what she looked like, where she spent
the earliest part of her life or of course, when she was born. We have a range of between
1518 and 1525 for her birth year, but where do these dates come from, how trustworthy
they are and what do we actually know for sure about Katherine’s life before she became
Queen?
Mistress Katherine Howard was the daughter of Lord Edmund Howard and his wife, Jocasta
Culpepper, who had previously been married to Ralph Legh. Her paternal aunt was Lady
Elizabeth Howard and this made her a first cousin of Queen Anne Boleyn, but we don’t
know when her parents were married and so can’t narrow down her date of birth using
that information. As you can see, her family tree (even in this simplified form) was also
very complicated due to a series of second marriages and marriages between people who
were already related in some way. This resulted in a large step-family, as well as her immediate
blood relations. The earliest record we have of her existence is a mention in the will
of her maternal grandmother, Isobel Legh, in mid-1527 in which little Katherine was
left 20 shillings. This tells us that she was born sometime before that. It also lists
her sister Mary, who in this document and all others we have which mention the Howard
siblings, is named after Katherine, strongly insinuating that she was younger. If so, that
would push Katherine’s birthdate back to the end of the summer of 1526 at the latest,
in order to allow time for Jocasta to produce Mary by the middle of the next year. Katherine
and Mary are not mentioned in the will of their step-grandfather, Sir John Legh, which
was dated 16 June 1523 with codicils added to it the following year and this is part
of the reason you will sometimes see 1524 and even 1525 given as an estimated birth
year for this future queen. In fact, if she had been very young in 1523 and 1524, she
may well not have been mentioned for that reason and it’s still possible that she
was alive at either point. These two wills are all we have in terms of official records,
but there are other written records pertaining to her date of birth.
The best contemporary account we have of Katherine’s age, or at least her apparent age, comes from
the French ambassador to England, Charles De Marillac. Writing on 7 December 1541, De
Marillac reported that Francis Derham, who was one of the men Katherine had been accused
of having an affair with prior to her marriage and while she was living with her step-grandmother,
Agnes dowager duchess of Norfolk, had ‘kept the lady from the time he violated her at
the age of 13 until 18’. This is actually inaccurate in terms of the length of their
relationship, for Katherine was previously involved with her music teacher, Henry Manox
and Derham came along later, in about 1538. However long it lasted though, this relationship
(which, like the Manox entanglement may well have been grooming and abuse), was over by
the end of 1539, for Katherine was off to court to join the household of the incoming
Queen, Anne of Cleves and Derham went to Ireland, so De Marillac is saying she was 18 at that
point and therefore born in 1521.
His evidence is given further credence by the fact that he had had the opportunity to
see Katherine up close on more than one occasion and perhaps even ask those around her how
old the new Queen was. Either way, it is unlikely that if she was only 14 or 15 at the time
of her marriage in July 1540, he mistook her for 18 or 19, as this is a significant error
to make when dealing with a person this young and Katherine was living in an era before
modern make-up existed which could have been used to make her appear significantly older.
He could have been out by a year - two at the most - giving her a birth range of 1519
to 1523, but I highly doubt it would’ve been more than that. There have been claims
that he is unreliable because he said Anne of Cleves appeared to be about 30 when she
was in fact 24, however De Marillac was not stating her age in that case, merely the age
he thought she looked and so to me, his integrity when it comes to a person he had spent time
with, such as Katherine, remains intact.
Another written source which mentions Katherine’s age is the anonymously penned Spanish Chronicle,
later translated by Martin Hume, which says she was ‘a mere child’ when Henry married
her and ‘no more than fifteen’ when they met. Assuming they met in late 1539, as Anne
of Cleves’ new household was coming together in anticipation of her arrival at the end
of December, this gives a birth year for Katherine of 1524 or later, which would tally with her
absence from her step-grandfather’s will. However, the Chronicle is notorious for its
inaccuracies. Anne Boleyn’s biographer, Eric Ives, once called it ‘garbled street
gossip, strongly laced with the picaresque’ and the story it tells of Katherine Howard
and Henry VIII is a good example of why. It presents Katherine as a maid of honour to
Henry’s daughter Mary in the aftermath of the death of his third wife, Jane Seymour,
in 1537, states that the two met at the house where Mary and her baby brother, Prince Edward,
were living and asserts that Katherine had by then been at court for about a year, which
is rubbish. Henry then supposedly immediately fell in love with her and they were married.
The Chronicle therefore has Katherine as Henry’s fourth Queen, rather than Anne of Cleves and
in saying that they met in 1537 or 1538, actually pushes the supposed 15 year old’s birth
year back to about 1522 or 1523. The best we can say of it is that it supports the general
idea that she was very young, but that’s as far as it goes. Next up, we have some equally
dubious portraiture evidence.
The supposed birth year of 1518 appears to come from this portrait. For many years it
was believed to be Katherine and because it says that the sitter is 21 and (if it was
Katherine) it could have been painted in 1540 as soon as she became Queen, this provides
an earliest birth year of 1518 or 1519, depending on what month her birthday fell in. In fact
- as I discussed in my video on what Katherine looked like, which is linked on screen and
in the description box - this is not her and is more likely Elizabeth Seymour Cromwell,
a sister of Jane Seymour. The portrait therefore does not help to pinpoint Katherine’s year
of birth.
There is in fact no confirmed image of Katherine, but this painting, which now resides in the
Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, is one of the stronger contenders to be her.
On the right hand side, it states that the sitter is 17. If it is Katherine, it would
have to have been painted in 1540 or 1541, in order to explain the exceptionally rich
attire this girl is wearing and which Katherine wouldn’t have had access to before she was
Queen. This would give a birth year range of between the second half of 1522 and the
Autumn of 1524. As we don’t know if this is her though, it doesn’t help us in determining
her age. This is all rather frustrating, but we can at least use her court career to provide
some additional circumstantial evidence as to her year of birth.
The fact that Katherine wasn’t in the royal household during the Queenship of her cousin,
Anne Boleyn, who was executed in May 1536, suggests that she was too young to be so at
that point and this is a further indication that a birth year of 1518 or even 1520 is
simply too early. When she did appear three and a half years later to join Anne of Cleves’
establishment, she was part of a group of women brought together to attend on the new
Queen. The historian Gareth Russell (whose book I’ll leave linked in the description
box), has looked at the ages of these other ladies and has noted that of those whose birth
years are known, none were born before 1521 and all were born in the early to mid-1520s,
suggesting Katherine would have been around the same age.
So - there are a lot of estimates and guesswork when it comes to Katherine’s birth year,
but if I pull it all together, what’s my final conclusion? Well, we know from her grandmother’s
will that she had been born by June 1527 and almost certainly had a younger sister, pushing
her birth year back to at least 1526. De Marillac, who actually saw her, believed her to be 18
at the end of 1539 and therefore born in 1521, but the ambassador could have been out by
a year or two, giving us a range of 1519 to 1523. I think it’s unlikely she was born
before the 1520s, as she didn’t appear at court until 1539 and a birth year of 1521
to 1523 puts her in line with the ages of the other maids of honour for Anne of Cleves.
The fact that she doesn’t appear in her step-grandfather’s will of June 1523 does
give me pause for thought, but it wasn’t unheard of to leave very small children out
of these documents. Nevertheless, perhaps she was born just after it was made. As for
the assertions of the Spanish Chronicle, this source is so suspect and riddled with errors
that I don’t place any faith in it and no paintings of her are confirmed portraits,
rendering them useless for this question. On balance, I think it most likely she was
born between 1521 and the Autumn of 1523, making her between 16 and 19 when she married
Henry and between 18 and 21 when she died.
What do you make of my reasoning though and when do you think Katherine was born? Let
me know in the comments below and if you enjoyed this video, please remember to hit the like
button, share the video with your friends and subscribe to the channel. If you’d like
to learn more about Katherine, I’ll leave some other videos I’ve made linked in the
end cards which I think you’ll find interesting. Whatever you choose, please enjoy and until
next time, keep learning.