Tea at Trianon: When Was Catherine Howard Born?

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Tuesday, January 27, 2026

When Was Catherine Howard Born?

From Gareth Russell:

Henry’s fifth wife Catherine Howard had, at one point, a date of birth that was almost as imprecise as Anne Boleyn’s. In Catherine’s case, the traditional date was c. 1522, but this was contested by later generations of historians until, by the twentieth century, there was a nine-year window between 1518 and 1527.[3] This would have made her in her early twenties or twelve-thirteen at the time of her marriage to Henry VIII in 1540 and about twenty-three or fourteen when she was executed in February 1542. An argument will be made here that the traditional date of birth for Catherine is almost certainly the correct one and that she was born in c. 1522-1523, making her about seventeen at the time of her marriage and about nineteen when she was executed.

The mystery of Catherine’s age is, to some degree, perplexing, in that, unlike Henry’s other three English wives, we do have a specific statement on the subject from a contemporary, who met Catherine on numerous occasions. Charles de Marillac, who served as the French ambassador to England throughout Catherine’s time as queen, wrote that Catherine was eighteen.[4] The letter’s utility is admittedly complicated by the fact that de Marillac was referring to an incident earlier in Catherine’s life, before he knew her. We know that the referenced incident occurred in late 1539, but de Marillac, writing in 1541, seemed to think it had happened in 1540. This places Catherine’s birth to 1521, if de Marillac was correct about the timing of the incident, but to 1522 if, as seems likely, he had misdated the incident to a few months later.

The incident in question – Catherine’s alleged betrothal to Francis Dereham – was something about which de Marillac heard for the first time in late 1541. While it is understandable that the rumours he was hearing were incorrect in their details, it is not credible that de Marillac would have stated that Catherine was eighteen when it happened, if she was in fact several years younger. De Marillac had spent weekends as Catherine and Henry’s guest in 1540 and 1541, he knew her personally, and it stretches credulity that he could have gotten wrong such a basic fact as the Queen’s age, particularly by such a margin.

Another specific complicated by context are the details of Catherine’s debut at the Tudor court in late 1539. She joined the royal household as a maid of honour to Henry’s fourth wife Anne of Cleves, whose arrival in London was anticipated in late 1539, only to be delayed to January by the weather. Maids of honour were a queen’s unmarried ladies-in-waiting and fourteen was too young to serve. Even young women from prominent and well-connected families were not permitted to take their oath as a maid of honour until they were sixteen.[5] When the household was reconvened in 1539 for Anne of Cleves, we know that it stuck rigorously to the rules about composition.[6] This would date Catherine’s year of birth to 1523, likely in the second half of the year. (Read more.)

My review of Gareth's book on Queen Katherine, HERE.