Queen Catherine Howard
Six years after Anne Boleyn’s execution upon Tower Green, another of Henry’s Queens was led out from her prison in the Tower, to a similar doom on that same spot.
In the case of Queen Catherine Howard, one cannot, alas! feel that the poor victim was innocent of the charge which the King had brought against her. Catherine Howard was an erring woman, much to be pitied. She confessed her guilt both to Archbishop Cranmer and many Lords of the Council, to Suffolk, Southampton, and also to Thirlby, the Bishop of Westminster—the only Bishop who ever occupied that see.
On the 10th of February 1542 Queen Catherine Howard was brought from Sion House, where she and Lady Rochford had passed the winter in close confinement, to the Tower, and three days later both these unhappy ladies were beheaded on the scaffold on Tower Green. Both died with courage, and both confessed their guilt before the axe fell, for on this occasion the services of the Calais executioner were not called into requisition. An eye-witness of their deaths, named Otwell Johnson, in a letter written by him (and which is undoubtedly genuine, as Sir Henry Ellice includes it in his first series of “Original Letters”), declares that both victims “made the moost godly and chrystian end, that ever was hard tell of I thynke sins the world’s creation.” So the last act in these poor women’s lives atoned for the evil of which they had been undoubtedly guilty. Weever, a contemporary, alludes thus to the Queen’s burial: “Within the choir of this chapel (St Peter’s) lieth buried near the relics of the said Annie Bollein, the body of Katherine, the fifth wife of King Henry VIII., who, having continued his wife but the space of one year, six months, and four days, was attainted by Parliament and beheaded here in the Tower upon the 13th of February 1542.” Lady Rochford shared her mistress’s place of interment. Catherine Howard was but twenty-two years of age when her life closed so tragically. Culpepper and Dereham, who were charged with being the Queen’s paramours, were hanged at Tyburn, and some of her relatives suffered imprisonment in the Tower on her account. Among these were her grandmother, “old Duchess of Norfolk,” as Shakespeare calls her; Lord and Lady William Howard, and the Countess of Bridgwater, the daughter of Thomas, second Duke of Norfolk. By a singular coincidence, the Duke of Norfolk, who had presided at the trial of Anne Boleyn, was uncle both to that unfortunate Queen and to Catherine Howard, and when the latter was attainted, he wrote thus to Henry: “The abominable deeds done by two of my nieces against your Highness have brought me into the greatest perplexity that ever poor wretch was in” (State Papers: Domestic Series). The “poor wretch” himself came within an ace of losing his own head by Henry’s orders, and the King’s death the day before that fixed for Norfolk’s execution, alone saved him from perishing on the scaffold.
An unusual occurrence happened in the Tower in this same year of Catherine Howard’s death, Arthur Lisle Plantagenet, Viscount Lisle, dying of joy, according to old Hall, on hearing that he was declared innocent of the charge upon which he had been placed in the Tower, that he had intended to betray the town of Calais. Arthur Lisle was a natural son of Edward IV., and had served in the Navy, of which he was a Vice-Admiral. He had been knighted and created Viscount Lisle in 1523, and given the Garter in the following year.
It is about this time that the first mention is made of that most uncomfortable dungeon in the White Tower, named from the smallness of its size, “Little Ease,” Hall, in his “Chronicles,” stating that one of the officers belonging to the Sheriffs of London was placed in this prison.
The disaster to the Scottish Army at Solway Moss in 1542 brought many Scottish prisoners to the Tower, thus repeating the history of the building during the reigns of the first and third Edwards. Among them were the Earls of Cassillis and Glencairn, Maxwell, Oliphant, and Somerville, together with some twenty knights; they were not long in the Tower, however, being sent to various places to undergo their terms of imprisonment.