Katheryn Howard: The Scandalous Queen
By Alison Weir
Ballantine Books, 2020

Historian Alison Weir’s “Six Tudor Queens” project, in which she writes a long historical novel about each of the wives of King Henry VIII, began back in 2016 with Katherine of Aragon and has wended its way year by year through the intensely familiar terrain of these famous six women, from Katherine the Queen to Anne Boleyn to Jane Seymour to Anne of Cleves. Weir’s latest turns the spotlight on Wife #5, Katheryn Howard, who was a daughter of the prestigious Howard family and who married Henry in the summer of 1540 when he was nearly 50 and she was still a teenager. 

Katheryn was the youngest of Henry’s wives and the only actual dolt in the grouping. And her own dimwitted impulsiveness was knowingly abetted by the heads of her family, who pushed and angled first for her to have a place at court, first as a lady-in-waiting to Anne of Cleves and then, in an astonishing stroke of Howard luck, as Henry’s queen consort when Anne of Cleves was amicably rusticated. Blinded by power-lust, the Howard grandees rejoiced in this elevation even though it was well known to quite a few of them that Katheryn, young as she was, had already had at least two lovers. True, Henry was besotted with her, but by age 49 his passions were at best intermittent; his suspicions never slept, nor did the malice of the Howards’ enemies at Court. A voice of sanity in the family’s councils would have said: “the girl’s past will become known,” but no such voice was heard.

The girl’s past became known. She was stripped of her title, imprisoned, and finally, in February of 1542, beheaded. 

On one level, this seems thin gruel to make into a meal of a 400-page novel. Weir excels at the task, often adding descriptive flourishes that ring true, as when Katheryn is eager to lay eyes on one of the Howard family’s idyllic country estates in Sussex:

She couldn’t see the house from the road, for it was well secluded, but as soon as she passed the wildflower meadows and ancient hedgerows, populated by hordes of butterflies. The River Arun, which rose in St. Leonard’s Forest nearby, flowed through the estate and formed part of the moat. Soon at the end of the long, tree-lined approach, Chesworth House appeared before them, its older range of oak to one side, and the newer one of mellow brick, built by Katheryn’s grandfather, the second Duke, to the other; this was known as the Earl of Surrey’s Tower, because the Duke had borne that title when he began it.

But there are limits to what even a practiced historian and novelist can do with this story. Katheryn Howard was not wronged, as Queen Catherine was; she was not devious, as Anne Boleyn was; she was not gracious, as Jane Seymour was, and unlike all three of those women, she never had any kind of personal relationship with King Henry. She was a lusty teenager before she met him, a lusty teenager while she was his queen, and a lusty teenager when her head was cut off. 

This is unavoidable enough so that it exposes the ideological scaffolding of Weir’s project in ways that do it no favors. With the other wives, even poor Anne of Cleves, it was possible for this author to assert one or another variety of innocence, to elicit some kind of sympathy. But that fact that this is virtually impossible to do with Katheryn Howard serves as a bell-note reminder that it was largely fraudulent even with all the others. It shows stage-managing, an almost lethal drawback in historical fiction. 

It also prompts some of Weir’s laziest writing to date in this series. Every single Katheryn Howard novel ever written has had a paragraph like this one, in very nearly these same exact words:

And what if the King did want her? The thought of going to bed with him appalled her. He was so old. Beneath the aura of majesty and the gorgeous clothes, he was an ailing man with diseased legs. She had seen for herself that there were days when he could hardly walk, let alone ride. Could she bring herself to endure what her uncle referred to as his embraces without betraying that she was repelled by him? Maybe the gossip was true and there would be no embraces. That was a comforting thought. And yet, she had heard that he had been a great lover of women in his time. She had never seen him behave in anything other than a kindly and courteous way to Queen Anne and other ladies,and he did have a certain charm.

(And the bathos becomes downright silly with the follow-up line: “But he had had her cousin Anne beheaded!”)

“Six Tudor Queens” concludes with the next volume, naturally. Its presumed star, Cartherine Parr, was in many ways Henry’s most complex and inscrutable wife, and a narrative of blandly presumed virtue would be as much a misservice to her as it is to Katheryn Howard. Next year will see how the series concludes.

—Steve Donoghue is a founding editor of Open Letters Monthly. His book criticism has appeared in The Boston Globe, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, and The American Conservative. He writes regularly for The National, The Vineyard Gazette, and The Christian Science Monitor. His website is http://www.stevedonoghue.com.