Katherine Howard and Hampton Court Palace

Above: Portrait of an unknown woman, possibly Katherine Howard (left).
The Haunted Gallery at Hampton Court Palace (right).

On 13 February 1542, two women were executed for treason within the walls of the Tower of London. On the same spot on which Anne Boleyn had been beheaded six years earlier, Katherine Howard was executed after making a short speech. Mercifully, her head was removed with a single blow of the axe. Following her death, it was the turn of her attendant Jane, viscountess Rochford. The viscountess had allegedly gone insane during her imprisonment; yet so determined was Henry VIII for her to die that he had her nursed back to health. Like the former queen, Jane was decapitated with a single strike. Both ladies were buried in the chapel of St. Peter ad Vincula. 

It is often believed that Katherine was executed for committing adultery with Thomas Culpeper, a groom of the privy chamber, but the Bill of Attainder passed against her clarified that she was condemned for having lived 'an old abominable life'. The attainder explained that Katherine's decision to appoint a former lover, Francis Dereham, to the position of secretary was 'proof of her will' to return to her 'vicious life'. In this respect, it was Katherine's unchaste childhood that counted against her. When it was discovered that she was not a virgin when she married Henry VIII, her meetings with Thomas Culpeper took on a sinister light. The Bill of Attainder became law on 11 February, a day after the queen had been taken to the Tower. Two days later, she and Jane Rochford were beheaded. Neither had been given the right to a trial, as Anne Boleyn had in 1536. The Act of Attainder was later repealed in the reign of Mary I.

Having endured imprisonment for two months, Katherine's end came astonishingly quickly. Within three days she was imprisoned in the Tower and then executed. The Spanish ambassador Eustace Chapuys reported that Katherine had to be forced onto the barge 'with some difficulty and resistance' when it arrived to transport her to the Tower. Although both she and Jane were to die with dignity, rumours abounded both then and now that Katherine Howard's spirit was restless. This idea soon became legend with the story of Katherine's ghost haunting a gallery at Hampton Court Palace.

Joanna Denny, in her biography of Katherine, explains this legend:

'There is a legend at Hampton Court Palace that Katherine Howard made one last, desperate attempt to see her husband. The story goes that, knowing Henry was at service in the Chapel Royal, she broke free of her rooms and ran down the long gallery to try and talk to him and convince him of her innocence. 

...It is said that Katherine's ghost is seen here, running and screaming in her panic as she calls Henry's name... She was presumably caught long before she came anywhere near the King and dragged away by her guards'.

Hampton Court Palace, on its website, provides 'anecdotal evidence' to confirm that the story is true: visitors to the gallery are often unsettled by a strange presence in the gallery, and some have fainted before. The story has moved into the realm of popular culture, and the link between Katherine Howard and the Haunted Gallery is well-known. 

It's not hard to see why. The image of a teenage queen, paralysed by fear and terror, running and begging for her life is a haunting one. The legend is often included in modern novels, such as Jean Plaidy's Rose Without a Thorn, and it is occasionally referenced in television, as in the Showtime series The Tudors (2007-10). But historians have, by and large, demonstrated that the myth is exactly that: a myth. There is no contemporary evidence that Katherine Howard ran down the gallery screaming for her life; none of the court ambassadors, including the well-informed Chapuys, reported it. 

Hampton Court Palace is central to the story of Katherine Howard. Its setting was the centre piece of her spectacular rise and was to prove the site of her calamitous downfall. Unsurprisingly, then, Katherine's ghost is almost never linked with the Tower of London, but it is always associated with Hampton Court. As a young maid of honour to Queen Anne of Cleves, Katherine had captivated the ageing Henry VIII; perhaps their first meeting occurred at Hampton Court. In August 1540, less than two weeks after Katherine married Henry at Oatlands Palace, she was acknowledged as queen for the first time at Hampton Court. Formerly in the hands of Cardinal Wolsey, it had become, by the 1540s, Henry VIII's main residence. 

As it had been the main setting for her rise to queenship, so Hampton Court was to be the setting for Katherine's downfall. Returning from the northern progress in the autumn of 1541, Henry VIII was confronted with a letter placed in the Chapel Royal informing him of his wife's unchaste childhood. Devastated, he departed the palace, never to see her again. The disgraced queen was eventually moved from Hampton Court to Syon, before making her final journey to the Tower of London.

In January 2016, I visited Hampton Court Palace for a ghost tour held one evening. The final stop on the tour was at the Haunted Gallery, where the story of Katherine Howard's ghost was recounted by the guide. Undeniably, the Gallery has an unsettling atmosphere, especially at night. One's imagination can run away; it is easy to imagine a frightened girl frantically running down the Gallery, screaming and begging for her life before being seized by her guards and taken back to her rooms. While the story of Katherine's ghost has no basis in reality, it does provide a poignant, chilling reminder of the speed of her downfall and death. For Katherine Howard, Hampton Court Palace was initially associated with happiness, glory and possibility, but it later became for her a site of fear, terror and destruction.

The Deaths of Katherine Howard and Lady Rochford

Above: the Church of St Peter ad Vincula in the Tower of London, where the bodies of both Queen Katherine and Lady Rochford were buried.

On this day in history, 13 February 1542, the teenage queen Katherine Howard and her Lady of the Bedchamber, Jane Rochford, were executed within the walls of the Tower of London on charges of high treason. The former queen suffered first, reported to be "so weak that she could barely stand or speak", but managed to make a short speech in which she admitted that her execution was just, for she was deserving of "punishment". After the axe severed Katherine's head from her body, Lady Rochford was executed, also stating that she deserved to die and exhorting the people to pray for the king. Contrary to legend, Lady Rochford did not admit her guilt in the downfall of Anne Boleyn and George Boleyn, in which she reputedly accused them of incest.

There appears to have been uncertainty among the judges as to whether or not Katherine's actions actually constituted treason. She never admitted to adultery with Thomas Culpeper, and swore that Francis Dereham had forced himself upon her without her consent. Instead, she was attainted for not having "a pure and honest living before her marriage" and desiring to return to her "abominable" lifestyle with Dereham when she employed him into her household in the summer of 1541 - actually, it is more credible that she appointed the aggressive Dereham into her household as a naive means of keeping him silent about her past. Lady Rochford was convicted for helping the queen "to bring her vicious and abominable purpose to pass with Thomas Culpeper". But as Retha Warnicke argues, and I agree with her, it is more likely that Katherine only met with Culpeper because he was blackmailing, and later manipulating, her. She was never secure as queen, surrounded by hostile and ambitious individuals who perhaps regarded her as an easy mark.


Above: Portraits said to be of Katherine are, in fact, more likely to be of Margaret Douglas.

Katherine is an enigma. We know next to nothing about her: we do not know when she was born, where she was born, her exact number of siblings, her appearance, her personality, or her personal beliefs. Indeed, the more I have researched her, the more convinced I have become that myths and legends, rather than solid historical fact, attach themselves to this queen.

Portraits said to be of Katherine (above) are probably actually of Lady Margaret Douglas, Henry VIII's niece. The prevailing depiction of the queen in modern media remains close to Tamzin Merchant's portrayal of Katherine in the Showtime series The Tudors: a flighty, not too bright bimbo who revelled in male attention, committing adultery with Thomas Culpeper while continuing to seduce and enchant an ageing king. Philippa Gregory's Katherine, in her novel The Boleyn Inheritance, similarly portrays a stupid young girl who thinks of nothing but sexual pleasure. On the other hand, Angela Pleasance in the BBC TV series The Six Wives of Henry VIII offers a darker view of Katherine as a manipulative, sadistic young woman who bullied her lovers into doing her will.


Above: A beautiful bimbo. Tamzin Merchant (left) as Katherine Howard in The Tudors. (left)
A scheming harlot. Angela Pleasance (right) as Katherine Howard in The Six Wives of Henry VIII.

All of these portrayals might be valid, we just don't know. There is virtually nothing in extant sources about Katherine, aside from her marriage to the king and her spectacular downfall in 1541-2, culminating in the gory details of her execution. Aside from that, it's free rein, for novelists, dramatists and historians alike. I personally do not subscribe to modern views of Katherine as an idiotic, sex-obsessed 'bimbo' who committed adultery with Culpeper - I think it is a very modern, twentieth/twenty-first century reading of the situation, which does not rely on any concrete fact whatsoever. As I have already explored in my article on this blog "Misconceptions of Katherine Howard", there is no evidence that she was stupid. My book rather explores the view that she took her duties as queen seriously, acting as patron and intercessor, traditional queenly roles. She also tried to act as a good stepmother, and kindly provided clothing to the doomed Countess of Salisbury shortly before that woman's grisly execution. The fragments of detail we have about Katherine suggest a kind, good-natured young woman who nonetheless was naive, but who never experienced security as queen; manipulated as she was by devious individuals from her youth while fully aware that the king expected her to provide a male heir, something she never managed to do.


Above: Left - perhaps a sketch of Jane Boleyn, Lady Rochford.
Middle - Joanne King as Jane in The Tudors.
Right - Sheila Burrell as Jane in The Six Wives of Henry VIII.

Jane Boleyn is, similarly, an enigma. Modern scholarship has not been kind to her, and she continues to be portrayed as a sadistic, sociopathic, even insane woman who plotted the downfall of her husband George, loathed Anne Boleyn, and eagerly provided evidence of incest between the two which led to their executions. But there is no historical fact to support this, and we have no way of knowing how the downfalls of the Boleyns personally and psychologically affected her in 1536, whether she was complicit or not. Why she became involved with Katherine is impossible to determine, but Warnicke suggests - and it is possible - that Culpeper blackmailed her into allowing him to meet with Katherine, and I think this theory is credible. Certainly it makes no sense why she would have initiated the meetings on her own, and there is no evidence to suggest that Katherine instigated the whole thing. But whatever the case, Lady Rochford was to pay dearly for her indiscretions, dying alongside Katherine in February 1542.

Both women deserve respect and sympathy. It is essential to recognise that modern portrayals of Katherine and Jane in a variety of media - including literature, film and TV - are often distorted, modernised, and even simplified; they do not necessarily present an accurate depiction of these figures or of the circumstances they experienced. But after 13 February 1542, they were dead and gone, forgotten at court and probably not much mourned. It has been left to a much later age to restore these women's reputations, although many continue to regard Katherine as a promiscuous wanton and Jane as a mentally deranged sociopath. Perhaps, one day, they will be portrayed in the media in a positive light, in which historical accuracy is respected while offering entertainment.