On the 28th July in 1540 just nineteen days after the annulment of his marriage to Anne of Cleves, King Henry VIII took, as his fifth bride, the twenty-year-old Catherine Howard. Catherine was said to have been pretty - Henry's "rose without a thorn."
No doubt it never crossed Henry's mind what Catherine thought of him the fat 49-year-old - whose youthful physique had long gone.
Why did Catherine marry Henry then? The answer is quite simple, she married him because she had too.
Sadly, Catherine had let her new position as England's new queen go to her head and by the following year, she had begun a physical relationship with Henry's favourite courtier, Thomas Culpepper, which as we all know was her undoing.
While he was marrying Catherine, his friend and the fixer of his problems, Thomas Cromwell was climbing the scaffold to his execution. I have every sympathy with all of Henry's wives, each of them had to suffer this menacing tyrant in their own different ways. Poor Catherine's problem was that she was young and naive and you could argue easily lead, notably by Henry's onetime sister in law Jane Boleyn - but that's another story.
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