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The Wives of Henry VIII: Katherine Howard, Part I

© Ellen McDaniel-Weissler

He rose daily between 5 and 6 AM, heard mass at seven, went out hawking until dinner at 10 AM. His evenings were filled with feasting and dancing, as in the old days. Even his ulcerated leg seemed to have healed, allowing him to indulge his favorite pastimes of riding and hunting. Katherine had indeed made him young again. And he in turn gave her a fortune in jewels and gifts, and lavished his attention on her in a way which hadn't been seen since the early days of his pursuit of Anne Boleyn. He does not seem to have been at all put off by the fact that she was the cousin of his executed second wife.

By February of 1541, however, the king's schedule switched to the necessary routine of working with his council and ministers once more, and he seems to have fallen into a melancholy partly brought on by the reappearance of the weeping ulcers in his leg. Unable to walk, he sat apathetically chair-bound day after day, while his young wife presided at court alone and tried to care for the irascible, crotchety older man. Henry began to eat and drink to huge excess, and his added weight increased his physical problems to the point where his doctors began to fear for his life. He became a recluse for a time, shutting his door even on Katherine and turning his back on the merry public social life he had always led. However, his leg began to heal, and by mid-March he was back on his feet and much restored in mind and spirit, coming out of his seclusion and taking up his court life once again, much to the relief of all concerned.

In a surprising move in one so universally described as selfish, Katherine undertook in the spring to plead the cause of three prisoners in the Tower of London. The first, the 68-year-old Margaret Pole, Countess of Salisbury, was one of the few remaining descendants of the House of Plantagenet. She had always been a loyal subject of Henry's and had served him faithfully, never evincing any interest in having the throne herself, but her sons had taken a different tack, and it was because of their actions that she was imprisoned. This poor elderly woman had languished in the Tower for two years, freezing in the cold stone cells in the winter and without enough warm clothing to protect her aging body. Katherine begged the king's permission to provide some new clothing out of her own privy purse, and instructed her own tailor to make for the Countess a furred nightgown, a kirtle of worsted, a furred petticoat, a satin-lined nightgown, a bonnet and frontlet, four pairs of hose, four pairs of shoes and one pair of slippers.