Henry VIII, the king famous for having six wives, was on wife number five when he married Catherine Howard in the summer of 1540. He was forty-nine, portly, and nursing a leg that never healed. She was about seventeen, and nobody is quite sure of her exact age. He had annulled his previous marriage after six months, so he was in the mood to be pleased, and he was. He called her his jewel and gave her the actual jewels to match.
Have You Been Told About London?
The longest sprint in Tudor England
Fifteen months later, on the second of November 1541, a letter reached him in the Chapel Royal at Hampton Court, delivered by Thomas Cranmer, Archbishop of Canterbury. It reported that Catherine’s girlhood, spent in her step-grandmother’s household, had been considerably livelier than anyone had mentioned, and that she had lately been spending a lot of late evenings with a courtier called Thomas Culpeper. For an ordinary wife this would have been a scandal. For a queen it counted as treason, because her entire job was to produce children who were beyond doubt the King’s.
Henry left for London. Catherine was shut in her rooms at Hampton Court while the case was put together.
What happened next is tradition, and it appears in no account written at the time. The story says she slipped past her guards and ran. Down the long gallery she went, towards the chapel where Henry was hearing Mass, screaming his name and quite sure that if she could just get through that door and be seen, everything could still be put right. She was caught before she reached it and dragged back. The King, by the tale, stayed exactly where he was and kept on praying.
She was beheaded at the Tower of London on the thirteenth of February 1542. The imperial ambassador reported that the night before, she asked for the block to be brought to her room so she could practise laying her head on it. It is hard to think of anything more Tudor than a teenager rehearsing her own execution so as not to make a fuss on the day.
The gallery has been called the Haunted Gallery ever since. Staff and visitors talk of cold spots and the sense of someone hurrying past. In October 2003 a security camera trained on a fire door nearby recorded it flying open on consecutive nights, and on one of them a figure in long robes stood in the doorway. The guards nicknamed it Skeletor. Nobody has ever owned up to a prank, which is quite something in a palace with staff who love a costume.
The Chapel Royal is still there at the end of that gallery, still in use, with its blue and gold ceiling overhead, and exactly as far away as it was that day.
