The Slut of the Tudor Court
Kitty Howard is the child abuse survivor history loves to hate
Queen Kitty Howard lived and died a scapegoat of such epic proportions that the modern feminist musical Six paints her to be a slut who slept with men in the doomed search for love. Even revisionist histories like the television show ‘The Tudors’ liked to describe her as a pornographic fantasy come to life, a silly little bimbo cast unexpectedly and briefly in the ill-fitting role of Queen of England.
This is what happens to a woman who falls foul of patriarchal expectations. Even if she was a queen.
Queen Katherine Howard died on February 1542 of charges of adultery and treason. According to these charges, Kitty Howard slept with another man, Francis Dereham, and perhaps was precontracted to him, before marrying Henry the 8th. Dereham was arrested, convicted of treason on manufactured grounds, then given a traitor’s gruesome death. Thomas Culpepper, the man who Kitty was actually romantically involved with, was given the far easier death of a simple beheading. Culpepper was once a favorite of the king, and his higher ranking as courtier likely served to protect him somewhat, if you can call a slightly less painful death a real improvement.
