Hi everyone and welcome or welcome back to History Calling, where I
bring you new videos every Friday looking at the events of the past.
Today, we’re travelling back to February 1542 to look at the death of Katherine Howard and
Jane Boleyn, Viscountess Rochford. Katherine was of course the fifth wife of Henry VIII,
while Jane (of whom there is no surviving image I’m afraid)
had been her lady in waiting. Lady Rochford was also the widow of Katherine’s cousin,
George Boleyn and therefore the sister-in-law of Anne Boleyn. A number of myths have grown up
around what happened on the day of this double execution at the Tower of London
and especially regarding Katherine and Jane’s last words, but in this video we'll go back to the
original sources to put the record straight and tell you how these women met their tragic ends.
Before we get started, a quick reminder to please like and comment on this video and subscribe to
the channel with notifications switched on. You can also find me over on Instagram, where my
username is History Calling and I’ll leave a link for that in the description box. If you like the
Tudors, this video is part of a wider series on the six wives of Henry VIII, which I’m continuing
to add to. I also have another playlist on the Tudors monarchs. Again, they’re both linked below.
Katherine Howard had initially come to court as a lady in waiting to Henry’s fourth wife,
Anne of Cleves, who married the King on 6 January 1540. She soon caught the monarch’s eye and
in July of that year, he unceremoniously dumped Anne and annulled their marriage,
claiming amongst other things that he found her too physically repulsive to sleep with
(I’ll leave a video on Anne’s life which covers this event in more detail linked on screen and in
the description box). He then married Katherine, who may have been as little as 15 years old at
the time and who wasn’t more than 22. All was well until the Autumn of 1541, when the young Queen was
accused of unchaste, pre-marital behaviour with two men named Henry Manox and Francis
Dereham and of adultery against the King with her distant relative, Thomas Culpeper. Jane Boleyn was
accused of helping to facilitate meetings between Katherine and Culpeper. Henry abandoned his wife
on 6 November and after she and her co-accused were interrogated and details of her relationships
with these men were uncovered, she was removed to Syon Abbey on 14th and degraded from the position
of Queen on 22nd. Jane Boleyn was sent to the Tower. Katherine never admitted to adultery or
to being precontracted to anyone else before she married the King, nor did her male co-accused.
Nevertheless, Culpeper and Dereham were executed on 10 December and though Katherine and Jane had
no trial, they were condemned for high treason by Bill of Attainder on 11 February 1542.
The day before her official condemnation,
Katherine had been removed from Syon Abbey and brought to the Tower of London.
The imperial ambassador, Eustace Chapuys described the event, saying:
the Queen after some difficulty and resistance was conducted to the Tower by the river.
The Lord Privy Seal, with a number of privy councillors and a large retinue of servants,
went first in a large oared barge; then came a small covered boat with the Queen and four
ladies of her suite, besides four sailors to man the boat. Then followed the duke of Suffolk in a
big and well-manned barge, with plenty of armed men inside. On their arrival at the
Tower stairs the Lord Privy Seal and the duke of Suffolk landed first; then the Queen herself,
dressed in black velvet, with the same honors and ceremonies as if she were still reigning.
Katherine likely passed beneath Culpeper and Dereham’s rotting and impaled heads as
she sailed beneath London Bridge and once she was ensconced in the Tower,
she was in a desperate state according to the French Ambassador, Charles De Marillac.
He said on 11 February that ‘as she weeps, cries, and torments herself miserably, without ceasing,
it [meaning the execution] is deferred for three or four days, to give her leisure to recover’.
David Starkey doubts this assessment of Katherine’s state of mind however and in
fact the delay was shorter, for Katherine was told on the 12th that she would die the next morning.
Her reaction was unusual and suggests that by now at least, she may well have been calmer and more
resigned to her fate than De Marillac had thought. According to Chapuys, ‘In the same evening she
asked to see the block, pretending that she wanted to know how she was to place her head on it. This
was granted, and the block being brought in, she herself tried and placed her head on it by way of
experiment.’ Both De Marillac and the chronicler, Edward Hall, confirm that Katherine and Jane did
indeed go on to be beheaded with an axe and it and the block will likely have been very much
like the 18th century examples you see here. This was different from Anne Boleyn’s famous execution
by a French swordsman, but as De Marillac noted, it was ‘the manner of the country’,
meaning it was the more usual, if less merciful, way that beheadings were carried out in England.
As for Jane Boleyn, under the strain of repeated interrogations, she had apparently suffered a
complete nervous breakdown soon after she had been placed in the Tower in November
and had therefore been removed to the home of Sir John Russell soon afterwards. She was brought back
to the Tower on 9 February however and a new law passed two days later which allowed for the
execution of the insane. Whether this illness was real or feigned, we don’t know (though changing
the law so that she could be killed indicates that she certainly convinced onlookers that she
really was mentally unstable). Chapuys recorded that ‘she had shewn symptoms of madness until the
very moment when they announced to her that she must die’, suggesting that she did quieten at that
point and regained some of her composure in her final hours. The day of the executions now dawned.
If you saw my video last week on Anne Boleyn’s death and how it’s been portrayed on screen,
you’ll know that we have many contemporary accounts of how she died.
In the case of Katherine and Jane however, it’s interesting that there are nowhere near as many
and so we have far fewer details of what happened. I can’t tell you why this is, but perhaps it was
simply that the execution of a queen was no longer the unique spectacle that it had been in 1536.
There are also some fictitious accounts which have wormed their
way into the popular consciousness and which we’ll come to in due course.
The women were killed between 7 and 9 o’clock in the morning (different sources give different
times) and Chapuys wrote that the witnesses included ‘all the privy councillors save the
duke of Suffolk, who was indisposed, and he of Norfolk’. Also present were ‘various lords and
gentlemen, such us the earl of Sorey (Surrey), son of the duke of Norfolk, and cousin of the Queen’.
Katherine and Jane’s scaffold was erected on the same spot Anne’s had been, on the green
in between the white tower and the entrance to the modern day jewel house, as indicated here.
The only surviving eye-witness account as to what happened next was written by a man
named Otwell Johnson in a letter to his brother, John, two days later. It reads:
for news from hens, know ye, that even according to my writing on Sonday last,
I se the Quene and the Lady Retcheford suffer within the Tower, the day following, whos sowles
(I doubt not) be with God, for thay made the moost godly and christyan’s end, that ever was hard tell
of (I thinke) sins the worlds creation; uttering thayer lively faeth in the blode of Christe onely,
and with goodly words and stedfast countenances thay desyred all christen
people to take regard unto thayer worthy and just punnishment with death for thayer offences,
and agenst God hainously from thayer youth upward, in breaking all his commandements,
and also agenst the King’s royall Majesty very daungeriously: wherfor thay being justly
condempned (as thay sayed) by the Lawes of the Realme and Parlement, to dye, required the people
(I say) to take example at them, for amendement of thayer ungodly lyves, and gladdly to obey the King
in all things, for whos preservation thay did hartely pray; and willed all people so to do:
commending thayer sowles to God, and emestly calling for marcy upon him:
whom I besieche to geve us grace, with suche faeth, hope, and charite at our departing
owt of this miserable world, to come to the fruytion of his god-hed in joy everlasting. Amen.
This letter tells us that both women were calm and composed enough to make standard execution
speeches in which they confirmed their faith, said that they deserved to die and prayed for
Henry’s health. Otwell Johnson has blended their words together though, so that we can’t tell
who said what. Other sources suggest that his account is accurate however, while also allowing
us to surmise that most of the words he noted may be attributed to Jane and providing us with
a little more insight into the women’s demeanour than he offered. Edward Hall’s Chronicle says only
that they ‘confessed their offences, and died repentant’. Eustace Chapuys wrote that ‘Neither
the Queen nor Mme. de Rochefort spoke much on the scaffold; all they did was to confess their guilt
and pray for the King's welfare and prosperity.’ Ambassador De Marillac claimed that ‘The Queen
was so weak that she could hardly speak, but confessed in a few words that she had merited
a hundred deaths for so offending the King who had so graciously treated her. The lady of Rochefort
said as much in a long discourse of several faults which she had committed in her life’.
It’s interesting that unlike Chapuys, De Marillac considered Jane’s speech long, but perhaps this
was just in comparison to Katherine’s and in any case, what seems long to one person may
seem brief to another and neither ambassador was an eye witness to the women’s deaths.
According to Katherine’s biographer, Josephine Wilkinson and to Jane’s, Julia Fox, having made
her speech, the former Queen (who was executed first) paid the executioner, then had her hood,
gloves and mantle removed by the ladies who accompanied her to the scaffold. Her hair was
covered by a cap, a blindfold was tied around her eyes and she placed her head on the block.
It was removed with a single blow by an unnamed executioner. This all sounds reasonable enough,
but I have to say that other than the detail that Katherine was executed first (which
Chapuys confirms) I’m unaware what the primary source is for the rest of this information.
If anyone listening knows the answer to this, please drop me a line in the comments section.
Eustace Chapuys writes that ‘After her body had been covered with a black cloak, the ladies of
her suite took it up and put it on one side’. We don’t know the names of these women, but they may
have been the same four who accompanied Katherine to the Tower three days earlier. The scaffold was
apparently now washed down and scattered with fresh straw (again, I’d love to know what the
primary source is for that information) and Lady Rochford was brought out to meet the same fate.
Now let’s consider the more fanciful accounts of the executions and in particular of the speeches.
For Katherine, we have an anonymous account written in Spanish and often
known simply as The Spanish Chronicle. This was translated and published by Martin Hume
in 1889 and its full title is actually ‘The Chronicle of King Henry VIII of England’.
It claims that after mounting the scaffold Katherine said:
Brothers, by the journey upon which I am bound I have not wronged the King, but it is true that
long before the King took me I loved Culpepper, and I wish to God I had done as he wished me, for
at the time the King wanted to take me he urged me to say that I was pledged to him. If I had done as
he advised me I should not die this death, nor would he. I would rather have him for a husband
than be mistress of the world, but sin blinded me and greed of grandeur, and since mine is the fault
mine also is the suffering, and my great sorrow is that Culpepper should have to die through me.
The Spanish Chronicle goes to claim that:
Then she turned to the headsman and said, “Pray hasten with thy office.”
And he knelt before her and asked her pardon, and she said,
“I die a Queen, but I would rather die the wife of Culpepper. God have mercy on my soul. Good people,
I beg you pray for me”. And then, falling on her knees, she said certain prayers,
and the headsman performed his office, striking off her head when she was not expecting it.
Gang, this may make for good TV, but I’m afraid in reality, it’s pretty much all tripe. The Spanish
Chronicle is notorious for its inaccuracies and this is no exception. It has Culpepper
still alive at this point and executed the day after Katherine, even though as we’ve seen,
he’d actually been dead since December and it also misrepresents Katherine’s relationship with him.
There was never any talk of marriage between the pair before her union with Henry and it has her
declare that she was still a Queen, when in fact she’d lost that title back in November and was,
at the time of her death, officially known as Lady Katherine Howard. The Chronicle also seems to be
borrowing elements of its account of Anne Boleyn’s execution here (that account is likewise of very
dubious reliability by the way – again, see last week’s video for more information). It insinuates
that she died kneeling upright for instance, as Anne had done, rather than prostrate on the block
and that she was somehow distracted so that she didn’t expect the blow. I hope I’ve demonstrated
to you with the contemporary accounts that that isn’t what happened. The speech is by far the
worst deviation from historical accuracy however. There’s no way Katherine said anything like this.
It would have caused a scandal had she made all these references to Culpepper and would
absolutely have appeared in other accounts of the execution. Nor does this defiance tally with the
accounts of her speaking very briefly and weakly. Other sources as we have seen, also say that she
explicitly acknowledged that she had wronged Henry, rather than denying it as she does here.
All in all, I think we can safely disregard this as a reputable source for the 1542 executions.
We can also disregard the more lurid account of how Jane Boleyn met her end.
If you Google her scaffold speech, you’ll find, all over the internet,
people asserting that once upon the scaffold, she said:
God has permitted me to suffer this shameful doom as punishment for having contributed to
my husband’s death. I falsely accused him of loving, in an incestuous manner, his sister,
Queen Anne Boleyn. For this I deserve to die. But I am guilty of no other crime.
Again, a great story, worthy of a TV show or movie, but with little connection to the truth.
Though we know that Jane mentioned ‘several faults which she had committed in her life’,
had she declared that she’d lied about George and Anne, insinuating that the King had had them
unjustly killed, (which he had of course, but no one openly said that at the time),
the story would have been the talk of London and indeed Europe.
In fact, this fabricated speech comes from the much later work of an Italian man named Gregorio
Leti, who wrote it in his book The History or True life of Elizabeth, Queen of England,
which was published in Amsterdam in 1693, as you can see by this cover page. There’s no suggestion
that he had some source available to him that no one else had ever seen or written about
and again, I’m very comfortable jettisoning this so-called account of the execution speech.
Now that we’ve dealt with these fictionalised accounts of Katherine and Jane’s final moments,
let’s return to more reliable sources to finish the story. With both women dead,
their bodies were removed to the nearby Chapel of St Peter Ad Vincula and buried beneath the floor,
near Anne and George Boleyn. When the Chapel was excavated during the Victorian period,
no bones thought to belong to Katherine were found and it was assumed by the
excavators that her youth, combined with the use of lime in her burial,
had caused her remains to completely disintegrate by that point. The remains of Jane Boleyn were
thought to have been found with those of Margaret, Countess of Salisbury, another of Henry’s female
relations who he had had executed on trumped up charges. Many of their bones were missing,
but those believed to be Jane’s were described as being ‘of rather delicate proportions’.
Katherine’s story and to only a slightly lesser extent Jane’s were just the latest
additions to the many tragedies the Tudor era brought to the extended royal family
and they wouldn’t be the last people interred in the Tower’s Chapel. Henry wasn’t much given
to looking back though and he went on to marry Catherine Parr the following year,
dying himself in 1547. As with her cousin, Anne Boleyn, he did an excellent job of obliterating
Katherine Howard’s image from history so that we have no confirmed paintings or drawings of her,
however if you’d like to watch my video entitled ‘What Katherine Howard looked like’, it will take
you through all the supposed portraits of her and reveal which one I think is most likely to be her
and why. Before you go though, let me know in the comments section if I’ve changed your view
in any way of how Katherine and Jane’s executions played out and until next time, keep learning.