Carly's Court Ep. 5: Catherine Howard - Pt. 1

SPEAKER_1 (0:11)

Hello and welcome to another episode of Carly's Court. Today, we are going to be discussing Henry VIII's fifth wife, Catherine Howard. I'm so excited about this episode. Catherine Howard was a wife who I feel like initially I didn't have a ton of interest in, but the more that I've read about her and researched her, the more this has turned into an episode that's going to have to be broken into two parts, because little Kitty Howard had quite the life, a short life, but a big life. So today we're going to be talking about Catherine Howard, and a lot of the basis for kind of what I'm going to root this in truth as is Gareth Russell's research. So Gareth Russell is a historian and a researcher who wrote a thesis paper on Catherine Howard, and then that evolved into a book called Young and Damned and Fair. And I recommend that to anybody who's interested in learning more about Catherine and her life, because I think that's the closest to true north that we have about her. There's a lot about Catherine that's been written.

I mean, from her being an airhead to her being, you know, like a tart or a slut. Like that's a lot of what you'll find if you try to do some research on your own or read historical fiction about her. It's based on a lot of Victorian era research, which the Victorians were interesting historians. They definitely painted the past based on their current life experience and what they saw as fitting in society. They also did like crazy, insane things like fix paintings.

You can look up, I believe it's a portrait of Catherine de Medici that they just completely changed based on Victorian beauty standards to make her look the way that they thought she should look based on the fact that people found her attractive during the time that she was alive. So that being said, we're not going to put much credence into the research that was done by historians, or at least their reading of historical documents from the Tudor Times. So instead, a lot of this is going to be based on Gareth Russell's research.

So starting off in Catherine's life, there's a lot of debate about when she was born. This is an important point of discussion because Catherine was very young when she married Henry VIII. So depending on the dating of her birth, that could make her as young as 14 when she married him. That's not the belief of most modern day historians. Instead, she was likely born around 1522 or 1523 The belief for that date is that that puts her in the same age range as many of the other women who were at court at her time who were serving as ladies-in-waiting to Anne of Cleves. She would have been significantly younger than the other girls, had she been born any later than that.

She's born in 1522 to Edmund Howard and Joyce Culpepper, a name that you'll become very familiar with in this story. Edmund Howard is the younger brother of a duke. So in Tudor era times, in Tudor times, if you're, the way inheritance worked was the oldest son got everything. There was no like Bridgerton version of society where like there was like a staggered inheritance. So Edmund being one of the younger brothers walked away with basically nothing but just his name. So the Howards are a very important family in Tudor history, which we know. Anne Boleyn is a Howard. Her mother's a Howard, actually. Her mother is Edmund's sister, which is how we get the relationship between Anne Boleyn and Catherine Howard, so their first cousins. But Catherine was significantly younger than Anne. When Anne was executed, she was probably like 14 years old. And again, Anne had spent most of her life at that point in court. So whether it was in England or the time she spent in France, they weren't like having family get togethers. They didn't really know each other, but they were first cousins. So her brother or her father, Edmund, is kind of a loser.

I think that's the nicest way to put it.

Not only does he not have a lot of money to his name, he never really is able to figure out his way in the world. He owes a lot of money to debtors. At one point when Anne is queen, she kind of does him a solid as her uncle, and she gets him a position in Calais just to basically get him out of dodge so that the creditors and people who were after him couldn't get to him. So not really someone that you would look up to or brag about being your father. So Catherine, like many girls of nobility, is sent to live with... They either go with a family member or a close family friend. She's sent to live with her step-grandmother, who is the Dowager Duchess of Norfolk. And she is sent to this house where her step-grandmother has... I mean, it's not just her. She is another cousin who's there. And then it's a huge household with lots and lots of people. And during this time, nobility and servants would like mix together. So that's very different again, if you think of like the Victorian era or the Edwardian era, right? Like there's not like, that's not encouraged to have nobility and servants mixing together, having social relationships. But that very much happens in the Tudor age. So she sent to co-live in this house. It's kind of like a dormitory experience. So you didn't really have your own bedroom living in this time unless you were like extravagantly wealthy. So instead, they had everybody like sleeping in one big room. So there'd be a girl's dormitory, a boy's dormitory. And she is living with the servants in the house and then also like her cousin who is like of the same class. That's important for later in the story. As far as her education goes, we don't really know like a ton about it other than she definitely had a music education, which also will be relevant to the story and you'll know why I'm laughing. She actually is like pretty gifted when it comes to music. She's an amazing dancer and she has excellent manners. So those don't really sound like things that are part of an education. But as you guys know, we talked about the differences between a typical girls education and then an education like Catherine of Aragon got, right? Where it definitely went above and beyond what girls of this age would typically get. Catherine, so we'll call her Kody. Kody's education is much more average. We don't know if she knew any other languages. It seems like she would have had learned some Latin, definitely probably some French, but it's not like notable. I don't think that anybody really talked about it. As far as like ambassadors go. And she really struggled to write.