When was Catherine Howard born?

In contrast to his first and fourth wives, the years of birth for Henry VIII’s English queens are unclear. The margin is at its narrowest for Henry’s last wife Katherine Parr. In her case, although the date and month are unknown, it is generally accepted now that Parr was born in 1512. It is at its widest for his second wife Anne Boleyn – by the seventeenth century, 1499 and 1512 established a thirteen-year spectrum that could have made Queen Anne anywhere between thirty-seven and twenty-four when she was executed.[1] Both extremes have since been debunked and academic consensus is currently divided between a minority for 1507 and a majority for 1501.[2]

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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However, the complicating factor is that the Queen’s household had not existed between late 1537 and late 1539. Queen Jane Seymour, Henry’s third wife, died in childbed in October 1537, after which the household was disbanded until a new queen was found. The two-year hiatus for the household means that we cannot know for certain if Catherine first became eligible to serve in 1538, but had to wait until 1539 when the household was revived.

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The same problem exists for the evidence provided by the will of a male relative, which went to probate in mid-June 1523.[7] Catherine is not mentioned in the will, unlike several of her siblings. Two conclusions are equally credible – either that Catherine had not yet been born by June 1523 or that, because she was either a girl or an infant, it was left to the man’s wife to provide for her, which she did.

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The suggestion that she was born as late as 1527 enjoys minimal support, specifically because of that will from a female family member, which went to probate in May 1527. It shows that Catherine was not only already alive, but that she had a younger sister.[8]

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The rules governing the Queen’s household again becomes relevant in regard to 1525 as a possible year of birth. Had she been born in 1525, she would have been too young to join the Queen’s household. Even her ancestry as a Howard would not have helped her overcome the rules. Two years earlier, Henry VIII’s uncle had been unable to have them bent in favour of his stepdaughter and, in 1539, Thomas Cromwell, who was tasked with forming the household, was unlikely to go out of his way to help Catherine Howard, given his political rivalry with her uncle the Duke of Norfolk. The suggestion that she may have been born as early as 1518, or perhaps even earlier, originated in the Victorian and Edwardian periods.[9] This was primarily a result of guesswork and acting on the assumption that, with the exception of his last consort, all of Henry’s wives had been in their early-to-mid-twenties when they married him, therefore Catherine Howard must have been, as well. 1518 also found some proponents in defence of a portrait that was misidentified as Catherine by an art historian in 1909.[10] The portrait gives its sitter’s age as 21. However, it has since been conclusively debunked as an image of Catherine.[11] There is no contemporary evidence suggesting a date of birth in 1518, let alone earlier than that.

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The two extremes of the nine-year spectrum are thus both unsustainable. The lack of contemporary evidence rules out a date of birth as early as 1518 or 1519, while her maternal grandmother’s will disproves 1526 and 1527. The rules governing membership of the Queen’s household renders 1525 extremely unlikely and 1524 somewhere between possible and unlikely.

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The combined evidence of de Marillac’s statement that Catherine was eighteen in 1540 and her admission to the household in 1539 does not satisfactorily resolve whether she was born in 1522 or 1523, but they do render any other year highly unlikely. While both have details that leave their credibility intact, their specificity is undermined. In de Marillac’s case, his ability to determine whether it was 1522 or 1523 is undermined by the fact that he was applying what he knew of Catherine’s age to an event in her life when he had not known her – her alleged betrothal to Francis Dereham. In the case of the household, its non-existence in 1538 means that we cannot know for certain if Catherine turned sixteen in 1538, but was not eligible to join the household until the King’s betrothal to Anne of Cleves in 1539. While both sources offer compelling contemporary evidence that Catherine Howard was born in either 1522 or 1523, neither definitively settles the debate in favour of either year. The tantalising evidence from her male relative’s will in June 1523 may nudge a conclusion more in favour of 1523 than 1522, but in the final analysis, 1522-3 remains the strongest and safest conclusion based on contemporary evidence for Catherine Howard’s birth.