Claire Ridgway, creator of The Anne Boleyn Files, is a British writer and history researcher who spends every day researching Tudor history and writing about Anne Boleyn and the Tudors. She leaves no stone unturned in her quest to find out the truth about Anne Boleyn and to educate people about Anne’s story.  

Claire freely admits to being a Tudor history addict, a real Tudor ‘nut’, and loves running The Anne Boleyn Files as it gives her the perfect excuse to immerse herself completely in the 16th century, talk Tudor all day and wear Tudor dresses and jewellery.  

Claire has written seven history books:  

The Anne Boleyn Collection (February 2012). The Fall of Anne Boleyn: A Countdown (May 2012). On This Day in Tudor History (November 2012). The Anne Boleyn Collection II (2013) George Boleyn: Tudor Poet, Courtier and Diplomat, written with Clare Cherry (April 2014) Sweating Sickness in a Nutshell (August 2014) Illustrated Kings and Queens of England (November 2014) Tudor Places of Great Britain, The Life of Anne Boleyn Colouring Book

She also leads tours with Philippa of British History Tours.

Follow her on twitter Or Facebook 

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Transcript: Claire Ridgway on the fall of Katherine Howard

Claire: Anne Boleyn is big and she’s been about, all the myths about her on the whole being successfully busted, Katherine had— I mean you go to see on the Tower of London and, if you go with Yeoman Warder Tour, certainly Yeoman Warder would call her a tart, and without question. She got executed because she was a tart and that’s how they talk about her, so the prevailing kind of feeling about her was, she was nothing but a young woman who was not suitable to be Queen at all and who was also a tart.

Heather: And then at the same time there is also this other side with the ideas of sexual abuse and just everything like that, there’s so many times with women they are put into like the Madonna-whore syndrome, and it seems like Katherine fit that too.

Claire: Yeah, definitely, yeah, I think so too. I think that in trying and attempting to rehabilitate her she’s been made into to this victim of child molestation, sexual abuse, rape, and manipulation. But then, in sort of putting her– not a pedestal– making her a victim you then malign the men in her stories, you know, Henry Mannox, who was her music teacher. 

Henry Mannox was a similar age, at most five years older than her. It wasn’t like this older man teacher taking advantage of her, you’ve got him being called a pedophile online. People all the time, whenever I mention Mannox, “He’s a pedophile, he molested her.” You’ve got Francis Dereham being made into rapist. You’ve got Thomas Culpeper being made into some kind of blackmailing manipulator who took advantage of her because, perhaps he wanted to marry her when Henry was dead. I mean, these poor men. 

Henry Mannox was lucky, he didn’t come to a bad end. But you’ve got Thomas Culpeper was imprisoned and beheaded, Francis Dereham, poor Dereham, the stuff that filtrated about his death. If you watch Gun Power, you see being hanged, drawn and quartered. So you can see exactly what hanging, drawing and quartering is. These men have gone through so much and yet their names have been blackened while we rehabilitate Catherine.

And yet, It’s recently that we’ve brought up this, popularized this idea of her… sort of run with this idea about her in her book about Catherine. But I don’t think there was much evidence to back up the idea of these men preying on the victim Catherine while also making her a victim takes from the story, it takes away from her as well.

Heather: You know it’s interesting because many times with these larger than life characters, can they just be human, people make mistakes, people do silly things. It doesn’t necessarily have to be this villain, or this Madonna, people can just be human sometimes.

Claire: Yes, There’s is this tendency, I think, with us to treat this people like fictional characters and to just sort them into goodies and baddies, and saints and sinners, or as you say, the women are either these Madonnas or whores, we either put them on a pedestal or we think they’re absolutely awful. We can’t seem to cope with in betweens and just thinking that people are normal with their good and their bad.

Heather: So what do you think of this idea that she was a victim of rape?

Claire: Well, to put it politely, poppycock [laughs] that’s the polite word for it. Mannox is painted as a man who was taking advantage of his position in the Duchess’s household, this was the Duchess of Norfolk Agnes Howard, who run her household. Catherine Howard was one of the maidens who was brought up and educated there, and slept in the dormitories, sounds like a kind of boarding school.

Heather: Can you explain a little about why she was there with her step-grandmother.

Claire: That’s a tough one, it was quite normal for families to send their children to other households to be brought up, that’s why you have wards in the Tudor period, like Lady Jane Grey for example, was a ward of Thomas Seymour and went to live with him and Katherine Parr.

You sent your children away to sort of be educated and brought up by someone in the family, or someone that you were friends with, there were good stakes there, and could give them perhaps more… could take them to the world.

With Catherine, she was from a quite large family and her mother had died and her father was a “waste of space” probably isn’t a kind word to use, but it wasn’t great. He wasn’t a brilliant, stable kind of man and so she was brought up in her step-grandmother’s household with other women of her… I think she had a better background than the other women, to be brought up and to have better opportunities. 

As part of that, she was educated in music and Henry Mannox was her music teacher. I think she was about 13 when she was having music lessons and this is why we kind of see her as this victim of molestation because we know, I’m not going to use the word that Mannox used about her, but he obviously had an access to her private areas and that’s seen as him molesting her, him taking advantage of his position.

But what Garrett Russell explain in his biography of Catherine Howard, he points out that Catherine wouldn’t have been alone with Mannox during her music lessons. It’s not like today where we just send our child off to music lessons and have one-on-one time with their music teacher. She had two music teachers and she had a chaperone, so there’s absolutely no way that Mannox could have taken advantage of her at their music lessons.

We know from what was said by other people in the household, and in fact we know from the Dowager Duchess herself that they met, Mannox and Catherine, they met through their flirtations outside of their lessons, I think the Dowager Duchess caught them by the chapel kissing, sitting there kissing, and Catherine was aware that she was a Howard and if Mannox was acting inappropriately in a way that she didn’t want, all she had to do was go to her step-grandmother and tell her, or tell someone else in the household and Mannox would be out the door because you don’t mess with a Howard girl. So Mannox was probably enraged by her, because it was flirtation and they did go, not all the way but you know, they were fooling around in corners around the house.

Heather: And it’s interesting because when you see that, there’s kind of two things that, we tend to forget that the age of consent then was, like, 12. So to think that she was this young, innocent girl, that’s like our modern ideas putting that on them because she would have been old enough to consent at that point, right?

Claire: Also, I think about my school days, there were girls in my year that I had seen fooling around with boys who were a few years older. Today it wouldn’t be great, if they’re parents found out, they wouldn’t like it but it happens, and yet it should only be seen in women, not a child.

Heather: And also this idea that, even though she was a Howard girl, she wasn’t right up at the top of the family; that would have really been something to her. A big part of her identity was that she was a Howard.

Claire: She used that with Mannox and, she did use her state. She was too important to the likes of Mannox, she wouldn’t have considered marrying him, he was just a simple music teacher. She was very much aware of her status. Then people back then seeing Dereham sort of coming into the household and hearing about her relationship with Mannox, and Francis Dereham was part of the Dowager Duchess household. He was employed by the Dowager Duchess and they sort of present him as hearing about this guy, fooling around with Catherine, knowing that Catherine is easy, she’s an easy prey, and he was preying on her. 

They used this one piece of evidence to back up the idea that Catherine was raped by Dereham, or at least sexually assaulted. Catherine then said, and that’s a quote of how “A woman might meddle with a man, yet conceive no child unless she would herself.” Now most historians in the past have said that that meant that Catherine knew about contraception.

Obviously contraception at the time wasn’t great, but there were various sort of methods. Various authors say that Catherine was referring to the fact of the Tudor idea that women had to enjoy sex, had to have an orgasm to conceive, that’s why there were problems with women who were actually raped, calling rape but being pregnant, “No, sorry, you couldn’t have been raped because you’re pregnant, so you obviously enjoyed it” 

Heather: And that’s because they thought that she had “seed” too and the seed wasn’t released.

Claire: It was all this Tudor weird ideas of reproduction, how it all worked. So they kind of make it that’s what Catherine was referring to, that she couldn’t get pregnant with Dereham because she didn’t enjoy it, and therefore she was saying that her encounters with Dereham were him forcing himself on her. Then you have Culpeper, they write of Culpeper bribing Lady Rochford, Jane Boleyn and then Culpeper using his knowledge of Catherine’s past to blackmail her. 

So you’ve got Dereham being a rapist, you’ve got Culpeper bing a blackmailer, but I don’t believe she was abused or blackmailed. Garrett Russell writes that the theory of Catherine being a victim of this repeated sexual abuse from these 3 men, how awful that would be if it were true, but he says that “It can only be sustained by either willful or accidental ignorance of any piece of relevant surviving evidence.” He’s quite scathing about it. 

So as I said, Mannox seemed to have been fooling around, and then you’ve got Dereham, we’ve got these interrogations in 1541, when Henry VIII found out that she’s got this colorful past. John Lassels had gone to the privy council to make these accusations that he’d heard from his sister. There were these investigations, members of the household were interrogated in detail and not one of them talks about Dereham raping Catherine. These girls lived in a dormitory; and not only that, they didn’t have their own bed, they shared a bed. 

You’ve got one of the girls saying how she shared a bed with Catherine and she got so fed up of Dereham and Catherine having sex and being noisy. She talks about that as being “puffing and blowing.” She was so fed up of that every night that she actually asked another girl to swap beds with her. She would have raised the alarms if a male from the household was rapinG the Dowager Duchess’ step-granddaughter. And no one complains. No one says “Catherine is being raped by Dereham.” 

Heather: So can you tell me a little bit about who Dereham was and when he comes into the picture? Because it sometimes gets confusing with these men, where does Dereham come in? And Culpeper? So who’s Dereham and where does he enter?   

Claire: He was employed by the Dowager Duchess. He’s not a man being brought up. He’s not a child, a young teen being brought up by the Dowager Duchess. He’s actually being employed by her in a kind of administrative role, but he’s having access to the dormitories with these girls, some of the girls liked to have… some of the girls were well-behaved, and some of them liked to have men from the household come into the dormitory at night for fun, so they were given keys. 

So he was an employee and Catherine was a member of the household being brought up there. So that was him. And Henry Mannox was a music teacher. Thomas Culpeper Catherine meets at court and actually she meets him when she goes to court in 1539. She leaves the Dowager Duchess’ household because she’s being appointed to serve Anne of Cleves, who of course is coming to England at the end of 1539 to marry Henry VIII, which she does in January 1540. So Catherine is chosen as a Maid of Honor. She meets Culpeper in late 1539 and they have a flirtation. 

Exactly like what Catherine Parr did with Thomas Seymour before she married Henry VIII, but after that flirtation their relationship just fizzles out because of Culpeper. He actually becomes involved with another woman and Catherine gets quite annoyed about this, Culpeper is moving on, but then Catherine marries Henry VIII, who’s always called a pedophile as well and that shows no understanding of how ages were used in Tudor times. I know Catherine was young but it’s a bit far to say that Henry VIII was a pedophile marrying her. 

So she then marries Henry VIII, and we then have Culpeper come back into play. He is a Groom of the Privy Chamber, he’s a servant of the King. Someone who was very, very close to the King, and then we have, this is why I can’t believe that Thomas Culpeper is this predator, this manipulative blackmailer, because it is Catherine who instigates their contact

I think it was Easter 1541, she’s Queen, Culpeper’s a Groom of the Privy Chamber, she actually gets Lady Rochford, Jane Boleyn to arrange a meeting between Catherine and Culpeper. So we have Catherine being the aggressor, being the instigator. And he comes to meet her and Catherine gives him a gift. She gives him a velvet cap, and begs him to hide it when he’s on his way back to his chamber so nobody would see that he’s given a gift by her.

So she flirts with him and his response is, kind of, to tease her. And he doesn’t react in the way that she wants him to, which kind of annoys her, but then it goes on and we have lots of meetings. Garrett Russell in his book points out that “This first meeting conclusively disproves the absurd reasoning that Catherine only met with Thomas Culpeper in 1541 because he was blackmailing her.” 

Culpeper had moved on, he was having a relationship with another woman. Catherine can’t stand that because she is attracted to him. She’s the one that tries to bring him back, and I think there’s so much evidence, there’s messages between them, there’s meetings, all sorts of gift-giving, I think they were just meetings of two people that were attracted to each other. I don’t think that we can make them into romantic Romeo-and-Juliet-type figures or anything, it was probably more lust than love. 

I’m not quite sure; they were just two people attracted to each other, and I think they both thought, especially with Culpeper being in the position that he was in, that the King hadn’t got long to live. I think Catherine believed they could get together after the King died. That they had to say goodbye to each other when the King latched onto Catherine. There were various times when Henry VIII to Catherine when he thought he was going to die because one of his legs, or abscesses, it healed over, he went black in the face and everything, and they thought he was going to die. 

Culpeper would have seen all that because he was the one, kind of, nursing the King, caring for the King and so he would have thought “I think Henry VIII is on his way out, I could marry the Dowager Queen,” and Catherine probably thought the same. “I could get rid of my husband and move onto this younger fella that’s much more attractive than the King and not that smelly.”

Heather: Yeah, doesn’t have an abscess on his leg.

Claire: It’s weird that Henry VIII is also blind of this. I don’t want to defend Henry VIII in any way but, you’ve got the teenage Catherine Howard, and this much older Henry VIII. Because of that age difference he’s then seen as a pedophile and that isn’t there in Tudor England, it was quite normal. Charles Brandon married Katherine Willoughby. He was so much younger, and in fact had a very successful and seemingly happy marriage. 

Girls weren’t teenagers. They were girls and then women. They didn’t have adolescence really, and for example Catherine marrying the King, he was someone who could look after her. She had security, she was a Queen, for goodness sake!

Heather: So, do you think he was unfaithful to Henry or do you think it was just this meeting and flirtation?

Claire: I find that really, really hard to answer because they were meeting. I think Jane Boleyn, Lady Rochford, thought they were having a sexual relationship. She talks something about the noises that she heard at night, she was outside the door, you know. She was obviously under the impression that they were having this sexual relationship. 

I think that when you think about those early days in the relationship where you want to know everything about them, and you’re staying up all night and just talking; and just because Catherine was looked away in, I think it was a privy at one point, looked away in her chambers with the door locked, with Culpeper in, it’s too much to believe that they were having a sexual relationship. They could’ve been chatting, fooling around.

Gareth Russell points out that the bit where Catherine said that she knew how to meddle with a man and not conceive, that could be talking about, yes, there are other ways of pleasing a man without getting pregnant, so I think possibly going so far but not completely all the way. 

Obviously I think that that is enough, if my husband was off doing that with another woman, I’d definitely call that being unfaithful, even though it’s not, technically. So I think they both denied going all the way in their interrogations, both of them denied it. I think Culpeper said that he “meant to do ill with the Queen, he intended and meant to do ill with the Queen.” So he’s saying that he hadn’t yet but it would have happened eventually.

Heather: It’s so interesting when you think about her because Anne had just had this downfall, accused of similar stuff just 5 years before and of course, Catherine was young and you think when you’re a teenager it’s not going to happen to you and all, but why on earth was Jane Boleyn helping with this? Can you talk a little bit about that?

Claire: Yeah that’s another thing that I have huge problems with. You think that, well, Jane was obviously a lot older than Catherine and she saw her sister-in-law and her husband go to their deaths for what I believe were false charges, why on earth would she help her mistress risk that? But I think that you have to remember Jane’s position, she was just a Lady-in-waiting, her job is to jump when the Queen says “jump” that was her job, and if the Queen wanted to meet with a certain Thomas Culpeper, then you’ve gotta make that happen. 

I actually asked Julia Fox about this, Julia Fox wrote this great biography of Jane Boleyn which I would really recommend, it’s one of the books where the notes section is just as important as the book itself. It’s fabulous, meticulously researched and referenced.

The question I asked her when I was lucky enough to have dinner with her on a tour that we did, the question I asked her was “Why on earth would Jane Boleyn do this?” She said it was perhaps a case of them helping them once and then saying “Well I’ve already committed treason, so I might as well carry on because I can be convicted for this.”

A little bit like when you break your diet by having a chocolate and then you said “Now it’s completely wrecked, I’ve done it so I might as well eat the rest of the bar of chocolate and start again tomorrow.” It might be a case of that, of saying “Well, I’ve hidden this treason by helping them, I might as well carry on.” Perhaps also Catherine and Culpeper might have said that to her “You helped us once, you might as well carry on.” 

It could be a case of her living vicariously through Catherine. I think Jane had a very unhappy time, so perhaps she wanted to see someone happy with a person they loved. Julia Fox also talks about how the one person that could’ve helped Jane was Thomas Cromwell.

He was a person that she’d gone to in the past for help. He’d brought her back to court after the fall of George Boleyn so that she could support herself financially. But of course, he was executed on the same day that Catherine married Henry VIII. He wasn’t there for Jane to go to and ask for help and say “This is the situation that’s going on.” 

So there wasn’t anyone that she trusted to be able to help her. But it’s really hard because she got herself into that mess and sadly she came to the same end that Catherine did. Even worse in a way, she went mad when she was imprisoned. Henry VIII even changed the laws to get rid of her so that if she didn’t recover, he could still execute her, I mean that’s just awful.

Heather: So in what ways is Catherine’s downfall different than Anne Boleyn’s downfall?

Claire: Obviously I’ve done my book, The Fall of Anne Boleyn: A Countdown, and I’m working on The Fall of Katherine Howard: A Countdown, I’ve kind of been, in my head, comparing them. Anne Boleyn’s fall was so, so quick, we don’t know exactly when it started.

But if you date it to those Commissions of Oyer and Terminer being set up on the 24th of April 1536, there’s less than a month between that and Anne being dead. She was executed on the 19th of May 1936. And yet we move forward to 1541-1542 to Catherine Howard’s fall and Henry VIII found out about Catherine Howard’s colorful past in a message from Archbishop Cranmer when he went to church that day, telling him that Catherine wasn’t a virgin, that there were allegations that she wasn’t a virgin and that she had this colorful past.

So Henry VIII at that point orders an investigation. I think more of an investigation to prove her innocence, to clear her reputation than it is to bring Catherine down. It was not Henry who was trying to bring the Queen down, so that happened on the second of November, and then we have these interrogations going on.

Catherine was found guilty on the 11th of February 1542 and then she was executed on the 13th of February 1524, so you had Anne Boleyn being less than a month and Catherine Howard being over 3 months. So one was very, very rapid, I mean, 3 months is still quick, but it seems to have been so much thorough and long and drawn out. So that’s one difference we have. 

There’s also another difference in the King’s behavior, the King’s reaction to the falls of his second wife Anne and his fifth wife Catherine. In 1536 following Anne’s arrest, we know from sources that Henry VIII is “off on the river gallivanting with ladies” not just gallivanting with Jane Seymour, she’s off, he’s removed her out of the way because of all the gossip about her. He doesn’t mind gossip about other ladies, but he doesn’t want Jane’s reputation being sullied, so he sends her off for a while and we have him gallivanting with ladies each night. 

Eustace Chapuys, the Imperial Ambassador states “You’ve never met Prince nor man who made greater show of his cuckold’s horns or wore them more pleasantly.” That’s a very scathing kind of reaction. The King doesn’t seem to mind having a wife that commits adultery, he doesn’t seem bothered, and his wife was said to have been doing it with five men, one of them her brother, and all of these men were close to the King. They were all his friends.

Henry Norris was his best friend, Groom of the Stool. All of these men were people that he regularly jousted with and played cards with; and yet he doesn’t seem to be upset. There’s one example of him crying in front of Henry Fitzroy, I think they were crocodile tears, there’s no other example of him being grief-stricken.

Yet, when we go to 1541 with Catherine, her colorful past and living that life that she’s been missing with Culpeper, and you have the King being completely furious and grief-stricken, you’ve got the French Ambassador writing that “This King has changed his love of the Queen into hatred and taking such grief of being deceived that, as of late, it was thought that he had gone mad that he called for a sword to slay her, he had loved so much.” So he was so angry that he wants to kill the Queen himself, he’s just furious. 

Chapuys also reports “This King has wonderfully fell for the Queen, and he has shown greater sorrow and regret of his loss than all of the thoughts, loss or divorce of his preceding wives.” So the way that he’s reacting about Catherine has been worse than his reaction to all of his other wives, their deaths, the fall of Anne Boleyn, everything, and we even have him weeping in front of his Privy Council. 

So, to me, that is clear evidence that Henry VIII didn’t believe that Anne Boleyn was guilty and that he was part of the plot against her, that he was the instigator. That’s my personal view reading into the reactions; and then in 1541-1542 that his young wife, his beautiful wife he obviously adored her, he pampered her so much, had done the dirty on him. So one was very, very quick; and one very drawn-out. Very different reactions from the King.

Heather: Can you tell me a little bit about how Henry found out with that letter that Cranmer had to leave on..? they kind of had to draw straws to see who would deliver that letter.

Claire: Yes, it was a case of… sorry, my dog is having a scratch under the desk, it’s an old desk. I feel sorry for the privy council at this stage. It was while the King and Catherine were away to the North. You had John Lasells and his sister Mary Lasells who became Mary Howard when she married. She was part of that Dowager Duchess’ household, this dormitory of girls, and Mary was a very pious girl and John Lasells ends up being executed with Anne Askew. 

Mary tells her brother about Catherine’s past, she can’t keep it to herself. We don’t know exactly what she said but obviously it was something like “The Queen’s not a virgin, she’s not what she appears to be,” and he feels that it’s his duty to tell the privy council. So he goes to them and he tells them and they have this reaction like “What do we do? Who tells the King?”

And I don’t know what they do to figure it out, whether it was drawing straws or… but it was Archbishop Cranmer who drew the short straw,  and I think he didn’t have the courage to go and be face-to-face with the King, so he wrote a letter when the King went to the mass and he left it for the King to find when he went to church. So that’s how the King found out, and of course, there’s the investigation.

The investigation was very much focused on Catherine’s past. I think it’s Dereham who brings up Culpeper “She’s moved on from me now,” Then Culpeper’s name comes up and there were all sorts of investigations about that, and Henry VIII finds out that during this whole progress he was just showing off his Queen, he’d just given thanks for his Queen, he’d just told the Bishop to especially give thanks to this jewel of womanhood, this amazing wife and Queen he has, and then he finds this.

Heather: Is the story true that she was waiting for him and that he wouldn’t see her when he was leaving chapel?

Claire: That’s the idea of the Haunted Gallery of Hampton Court Palace which, if you do a guided tour of Hampton Court Palace at all, you’re kind of shown the Haunted Gallery and you’re told that Catherine’s ghost haunts this space. Of course few people have had spooky experiences.

There is this idea that Catherine managed to escape because she was guarded at Hampton Court Palace, kept to her chambers before she was moved to Syon, and then obviously to the Tower just before her execution. But she was kept to her chambers while the investigation was going on. But there is this idea that she managed to escape the chambers and go running down the hallway to get to the King who was supposedly praying because, we know, that if people managed to get to the King, things could be salvaged.  

Katherine Parr, lucky Katherine Parr, got wind of the fact that there was a plot that was set against her, managed to see the King, managed to plead her case and everything was fine. Anne Boleyn never got that chance, we think that George Boleyn was on his way to see the King but was arrested on his way to see the King. I think Cranmer was saved by being able to see the King when there was a plot against him.

If you managed to see the King and plead your case, I think Henry could see the light. So that was obviously what she was trying to do; but it doesn’t really add up to the story because the King wasn’t there, he’d already left, yeah he wasn’t there. Yes, it’s a nice legend, perhaps she does haunt the place because obviously, that’s where she was kept for a while. But anyways, I don’t think she went screaming down the corridor.

Heather: Ok, then the other story that is so famous about her is that she practiced with the block before she was executed.

Claire: This I find really poignant and The Tudors series I do love it even though it’s so distorted at times. You have Catherine being naked at every option. There’s not many scenes where she’s got her clothes on. She’s in the freezing tower of London and calls for the block. She practices naked, yeah, no, she did call for the block, not naked, but she did call for it.

We have Chapuys saying “She asked to have the block brought in so that she might know how to place herself which was done as she made trial of it.” And I find that so poignant because here is this girl and she’s so.. She is a girl, I agree with Gareth Russell’s idea that she was born in about 1523, so that makes her 19 at her death, so in our eyes, she was a girl, in their eyes she was a grown woman. 

You have this girl who’s waiting for death. She’s been told she’s going to be executed the next day, and she so wants to die properly and with dignity, and not make a mess of that, that she asks for the block so she knows how to put her head properly on it so that she doesn’t make a fool of herself. And I just find that so, so, very sad, just so poignant and so human and, things like that give you some insight into them, some link, that really, really hit me. She was a real person who wanted to have a dignified death. 

And then, of course, she got the Yeoman who’d come along, strip all that dignity away from her by saying that she was nothing. And, of course, she went to her death shouting out “I die a Queen, but I’d rather die a wife of Culpeper,” which, no, that was another of these myths that we can just completely throw away because we have one eyewitness account of the executions of Catherine Howard and Jane Boleyn, and he talks about them going to their deaths with courage and dignity.

He said “They made the most godly and Christian’s end that ever was heard tell of (I think) since the world’s creation.” So, he’s saying they were the best. Don’t want to sound like Donald Trump there. They were the best. They had the most dignified courageous end that they could.

We take that dignity and courage away from her when we just repeat the myth that she, well, the truth is she wet herself. Which, I think makes you have empathy and sympathy with her. But that, her wetting herself, her going to her death and crying out, that just takes away from her. Can’t we actually give this woman respect? Having courage and dignity at her end.

Heather: So how did her fall affect the Howard family and Norfolk, and everything?

Claire: Yeah, I think they were ignored in all of this, I mean we think about Catherine, we think about, Culpeper and Dereham. You see that they were all executed, but we forget about the rest of the family. It had an immediate, negative impact on the family.

Agnes Tilney Dowager Duchess of Norfolk was very elderly and frail, and at this time, she was interrogated, and her stuff sort of searched and things taken from home, money taken. Her daughter, Katherine’s aunt, who was also a Katherine, Katherine Howard, it’s kind of very confusing, there’s quite a few Katherine Howards, the Countess of Bridgewater, and her children were taken as wards. They did inventories. 

Then the Countess of Bridgewater and the Dowager Duchess were accused of misprison of treason, which is hiding treason, knowing something and hiding it. But I don’t see how it can be treason to just… Catherine wasn’t even married to Henry VIII at this point, but there you go. And they were found guilty of that.

Lord William Howard and his wife, and various members under this whole list of names of the Howard and Tilney families, the Tilneys being related to Agnes Tilney the Dowager Duchess, were tried for misprision of treason and found guilty. They were sentenced to perpetual imprisonment and loss of goods. So there were lots of people. This affected Howards, Tilneys, and their households. 

Now they were later powerful, but it must have been a very scary time for them. I think various of them, the Dowager Duchess even, I think they spent Christmas in the Tower, they spent quite a few months in the Tower before being pardoned. So it must have been a scary time for them, especially when you have the news in December of Culpeper and Dereham being executed. They must have thought that they were going to follow suit, and of course, Catherine was executed.

The duke of Norfolk, however, he seems to escape because he wrote letters distancing himself from the rest of his family and so, that he knew nothing, “They’re just my relatives, I know nothing,” he managed to escape.     

Heather: He’s the slippery one, isn’t he?  

Claire: Yeah, I think he was rather slippery, so, yes, he managed to escape again. Though obviously later you have him in 1546, sort of, being imprisoned and only getting away with his life because the King died before he could be executed. I think he died in his bed as an old man, with various members of his family, including his son Henry Howard, being executed, but he got away with that.

Heather: Good for him. So you have, you kind of debunked some Catherine Howard myths here–

Claire: Yes, Can I just debunk one more?

Heather: Yes, Please.

Claire: Though this is something actually Gareth Russell has debunked really well in his book and you’ve got to get the book, I’ll just advertise Gareth Russell here. I think there was this myth as well that she was this completely unsuitable Queen. She was this empty-headed that we hear about. Yes, she was stupid, she was reckless, she did stupid things but, just because you do stupid things doesn’t mean that that is your whole persona. 

I mean, we all do completely stupid things at some time or another but I think that she still… she tried to be a good wife to Henry VIII. She tried to be a good Queen. Gareth Russell talks about how the sex and scandal of her story, which is what we think of when we hear the name Catherine Howard, we think of her fall, that takes away… it hides one of her great performances of her duty as a Queen – her role in the progress to the North.

This was really, really important because this was a time where Henry VIII was going on, there had been the Pilgrimage of Grace rebellion, this was him going north as King to show his authority and to make the North bow down to him and show their allegiance to him. 

And Gareth writes that “Catherine’s job was to appear as a beautiful supporting player, a moon to her husband’s sun, reflecting the glory of the Crown.” So she was there to back up her husband, to do a performance, and she performed beautifully. She also… the role of the Queen at that time, of the Queen Consort was to be this intercessor, to mediate between the common people and the King.

I mean we see Catherine of Aragon doing it, it was in the evil May Day riots, but she’s pleading for the people to her husband, she’s like “Don’t be too ruthless or harsh, pardon them.” We see Catherine doing that and Anne Boleyn had to do some intercessing, this was the traditional medieval Queen’s role. 

And Catherine does it as well, she intercede with her husband for the local people while they were on progress. I think there was this woman, her crime is not mentioned but she did have a crime and Catherine intercedes on her behalf to get her a pardon. She’s doing what a medieval Queen is supposed to do, and I think that Gareth Russell concludes that “On the progress, Catherine was at once flawlessly well-mannered and enigmatically subservient.” She was what a Queen consort was meant to be. 

She had her failings, she was stupid and reckless. She hadn’t been brought up to be Queen but when she became Queen, she put her all into it. I think that’s another thing that we take away from her by concentrating on her fall, we don’t look at what she actually… her actions before that as Queen Consort.

I find it very sad that we just label all six wives as goodies and baddies, and good Queens and bad Queens. We don’t really… we can’t look at them as well-rounded individuals, and as you said, I don’t know whether that’s because of the ideas about women, I don’t know. 

Heather: It was probably a mix of a lot of different things.

Claire: We make caricatures, don’t we? 

Heather: We like to put things in a box that we understand, don’t we? That goes in this box, and that goes in this box.

Claire: Perhaps that we haven’t got time to research them more properly, or to look into them more properly, we just say “Oh that’s the queen that…”

Heather: So tell me where people can find more of your work and plug your stuff here.

Claire: Plug my stuff… I did this book I think it was back in 2012, The Fall of Anne Boleyn: A Countdown, I’ve been working on, as I said before, Katherine Howard: A Countdown, that was supposed to be coming out this year but with various issues and other projects, I’m not sure that it will come out this year but I’m working hard on it.

Heather: I remember when I spoke to you for the March one you said “This is the year that Katherine Howard has her own…”

Claire: I know, I’m trying because… I’ve been working… I’ve been working on it since I put out that book so it’s been like 6 years… but other things have gotten in the way which is nice really. It’s the Tudor Society, a lot of time is taken up by running the Tudor Society.

Heather: What is the Tudor Society? 

Claire: To put it briefly, it’s an online community of Tudor history. It’s done by subscription, people become members and my idea to found it was that there are so many people all over the world who love Tudor history, but they can’t get to the U.K. to see their favorite historian talk.

So what we do is we have expert speakers once a month who do a talk for us, and then they talk onto the chatroom and answer questions, which is great because you get to grill them for an hour and throw questions at them. It was to get all Tudor history learners together because always I find… when you start talking about Tudor history to people who aren’t Tudor history learners, their eyes just glazed over, don’t they? 

So it was to bring people together as well so they can debate Tudor history. We have informal chat sessions once a month where we debate, we do a monthly magazine, which is Tudor-focused. So if you’re fed up of buying history magazines hoping there was a Tudor article in them because that is obviously my interest and they’re not there, or there’s only a small part of them, so our magazine is completely Tudor-focused.

I do video chats every week, a video talk of various topics or personalities or question someone asks me. So it’s just a hub really for people that are interested in Tudor history, so that’s one of the… that’s the main thing I do which takes up a lot of time.

Of course, I run theanneboleynfiles.com and I still do that. Also because there’s nothing like getting lost in Anne Boleyn’s story for me. That is definitely my first love. So yeah, of course, all these things take time and writing, and research kind of get put on the backburner.

Heather: That makes sense, so tudorsociety.com, theanneboleynfiles.com. So great. Thank you!

Claire: Thank you.

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