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Historical person
1523–1542
Catherine Howard was the fifth wife of Henry VIII and queen of England from 1540 until her execution in 1542. Raised in the loosely supervised household of the Dowager Duchess of Norfolk, she had relationships before her marriage that later became the subject of investigation. Evidence of meetings with Thomas Culpeper while she was queen led to accusations of adultery and treason. Parliament condemned her by act of attainder, and she was beheaded at the Tower of London.
Alison Weir’s Katheryn Howard, The Tainted Queen and Philippa Gregory’s The Boleyn Inheritance both attempt to reconstruct Catherine’s youth and brief queenship. Fiction varies sharply over whether she was reckless, exploited, in love or trapped by men who understood the danger better than she did. The strongest portrayals recognise that her exact age, motives and degree of consent remain uncertain.
In non-fiction, Catherine Howard is discussed in Gareth Russell’s Young and Damned and Fair, Antonia Fraser’s The Six Wives of Henry VIII, and Tracy Borman’s The Private Lives of the Tudors. In Gareth Russell’s Young and Damned and Fair, Young and Damned and Fair reconstructs Catherine Howard’s upbringing in the households of the Howard family and her brief career at Henry VIII’s court.
Series
The Shardlake Series follows Matthew Shardlake, a London barrister with scoliosis whose legal work repeatedly draws him into murder investigations and affairs of state between 1537 and 1549. He begins as an idealistic supporter of religious reform and an agent of Thomas Cromwell, but the violence of the…
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The Plantagenet and Tudor novels form a chronological sequence of connected but independently readable stories about women near the English throne. They move from the Lancastrian court and the Wars of the Roses through the rise of the Tudors, Henry VIII’s marriages, the mid-Tudor religious crisis and the…
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All books in this series
The Tudor Saga follows the dynasty from Henry VII’s insecure victory through the marriages of Henry VIII and the reigns of his children. The novels place queens, courtiers and claimants at the centre of religious change, diplomatic marriage and the succession crises that transformed sixteenth-century England.
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The Queens of England novels dramatise the lives of royal women from Eleanor of Aquitaine to Queen Victoria. Each volume concentrates on a queen, consort or claimant whose marriages, loyalties and private ambitions were inseparable from dynastic politics, religious conflict and the exercise of monarchy.
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Standalone books
Non Fiction
Biographies, histories and other non-fiction are listed separately from the historical novels above.
