'England: firelight and fireblush; wine-dark, winking gemstones and a frost of pearls.

'Wool as soft as silk, in leaf-green and moss; satins glossy like a midsummer night or opalescent like winter sunrise. Little did we know it but that night we were already ghosts in our own lives.' When twelve-year-old Katherine Howard comes to live in the Duchess of Norfolk's household, poor relation Cat Tilney is deeply suspicious of her. The two girls couldn't be more different: Cat, watchful and ambitious; Katherine, interested only in clothes and boys. Their companions are in thrall to Katherine, but it's Cat in whom Katherine confides and, despite herself, Cat is drawn to her. Summoned to court at seventeen, Katherine leaves Cat in the company of her ex-lover, Francis, and the two begin their own, much more serious, love affair. Within months, the king has set aside his Dutch wife Anne for Katherine. The future seems assured for the new queen and her maid-in-waiting, although Cat would feel more confident if Katherine hadn't embarked on an affair with one of the king's favoured attendants, Thomas Culpeper. However, for a blissful year and a half, it seems that Katherine can have everything she wants. But then allegations are made about her girlhood love affairs. Desperately frightened, Katherine recounts a version of events which implicates Francis but which Cat knows to be a lie. With Francis in the Tower, Cat alone knows the whole truth of Queen Katherine Howard - but if she tells, Katherine will die.

Paperback: 320 pages
Publisher: HarperPress (12 May 2011)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0007258305
ISBN-13: 978-0007258307

'Suzannah Dunn weaves a love story that is both moving and believable of second chances at love, and passion reawakened.' Telegraph

'A remarkable writer, a lyricist of ordinary life and ordinary people transfigured by extreme emotions.' Daily Telegraph

'Suzannah Dunn is that rarity among contemporary novelists: a genuine stylist. Her prose is like truffles -- rich, rare, dark, but never cloying.' Wendy Perriam

'Her ear for the rhythms of speech is unerring, her feeling for the minutiae of experience acute. It takes a good deal of artistry to create the illusion of real life, and she has managed something more difficult still, which is to show who us how strange real life can be.' The Times

Very little is known about Katherine Howard – not even when she was born – and there are no verified likelinesses of her.

What we do know of Katherine - unfortunately for her - is her sexual history, which we have in lurid detail from the meticulously documented interrogations of her and her friends, and from her own written confession.

Comments made by diplomats in their letters reveal her to have been considered pretty rather than beautiful, and very small. In a sense, she was a nobody, she’d come from nowhere. Well, no: she was definitely someone in that she was a Howard – perhaps England’s most powerful family at this time – but within that vast family she was at the bottom of the heap, one of the youngest of the many children of the disappointing second son and the second of his three successive wives. From around the age of twelve, Katherine followed the traditional route for girls of her class during this era, in being raised away from home: in her case, in the old-fashioned household of her step-grandmother, the doughty Dowager Duchess of Norfolk, along with other girls of a similar age who were relatives or the children of family friends and various Howard-hangers-on. There, it seems, those girls were left very much to their own devices.

When the king married for the fourth time (following the death of his third wife in childbirth), the Howards were able to secure places in the new queen’s household for a few of their girls, one of whom was Katherine. This was her big break: the intention would have been to make friends in high places, end up with a wealthy, well-connected husband. In the event, though, she caught the eye of the king, who was desperately unhappy with his bride. This fourth marriage, to Anne of Cleves, was the only one that was arranged for him (by Thomas Cromwell), and was a dismal failure from the start. Such a failure, in fact, that it remained unconsummated, which made it easy for the king to set Anne of Cleves aside – she was happy to go with a sizeable pay-off and the honorary title of ‘the king’s sister’ – and marry Katherine, which took everyone by surprise (including the Howard family, the usually on-the-ball Cromwell, and, indeed, one imagines, Katherine herself).

This marriage, by contrast, was a great success. Henry adored Katherine: he revelled in her company and greatly indulged her. On the brink of becoming the obese, paranoid Henry of popular legend, he briefly retreated, regaining some of his vigour and high spirits: he felt young again. For her part, Katherine partied relentlessly, surrounding herself with young people, insisting on bringing with her the friends from her previous, low-key life. She’d been rather neglected as a girl – benignly neglected – and now she was making up for it. The king’s marital history was lamentable – the long years of the Catherine of Aragon/Anne Boleyn debacle followed by the rancorous marriage with Anne, then the near-silent, ever-embroidering Jane Seymour and her death after the birth of her first baby, then the Anne of Cleves disaster – but now life at the palace was fun again and everyone was delighted.

Well, not everyone. Fifteen months into his happy marriage, on All Saints’ Day, the king was in chapel at a special mass to give thanks to God for his lovely young wife when Archbishop Cranmer sidled up to him and pressed a letter into his hand. The letter detailed what Cranmer simply couldn’t bring himself to say to the king: a man had arrived at court to make allegations about Katherine’s sexual conduct in the years before she’d become queen. The man’s sister had lived alongside Katherine in the Duchess’s household; she’d told her brother of Katherine’s affair with her music teacher when she was about thirteen, and then later with a lad named Francis Dereham to whom, it seemed, she’d been practically married (‘pre-contracted’, to use the Tudor term – meaning something between ‘promised to’ and ‘committed to’). This was the same Francis Dereham whom Katherine had recently appointed as her private secretary.

This man’s motivation was political. Like Archbishop Cranmer, he was an ardent protestant (later to die at the stake, as did Cranmer, for his beliefs) - and now that the staunchly-catholic Howards were so favoured by the king, reform had all but ground to a halt.

To give Henry his due, he didn’t initially give the informant’s allegations much credence, but he did ask Cranmer to investigate. In the meantime, he contrived to avoid Katherine (in fact, he never did see her again).

Cranmer and cronies duly investigated, whilst managing to keep it under wraps. Within just a week of questioning the key characters and others, a week during which everyone seems to have rushed to implicate everyone else, (they were just kids, after all, most of them, and were understandably terrified), Cranmer et al had verified the story about the relationship with Francis Dereham but also uncovered something so much more serious. In the course of all the interrogations, towards the end of that week, someone let slip that the history with Francis Dereham was, in fact, nothing: crucially, the queen was currently having an affair with Thomas Culpeper, a young man greatly favoured by the king and employed in his personal service (a young man who slept on duty in the king’s bedchamber… and the queen’s, too, quipped the French ambassador when the story broke).

Katherine, Francis Dereham and Thomas Culpeper were executed, although the precise grounds for their convictions remain problematic because the affair between Katherine and Dereham was over before she was married, and she and Culpeper denied that they were having a sexual relationship (and, despite all the allegations and circumstantial evidence gathered from a variety of sources, no hard proof of it was ever found). Henry was devestated by the end of this marriage - crying in front of his Council – and from then onwards he declined, ageing rapidly to become a foul-tempered invalid.

I’d been avoiding the story of Katherine Howard because it seemed too obvious a choice: too easy; nothing complex going on, there. It seemed to me that Katherine wasn’t very interesting. But that was because I’d swallowed the historians’ line: Katherine as ‘a silly little girl’ (more than once I’ve come across that exact phrase). When I returned to the few accounts of her life, to read closely and think hard, I realised how naïve an interpretation this was, how those accounts of Katherine as ‘unsophisticated’ are themselves unsophisticated.

Her major biographer (Lacey Baldwin Smith) suggests that because no one pleaded for her at the end, she was probably a ‘shallow’ girl – whereas I suspect that it was because there was no one to plead for her, in that she was a nobody, she’d come from nowhere. Other historians have her as ‘sweet-natured’, presumably on the evidence of her many friends of around her own age and the light-hearted atmosphere in her household, but I think ‘popular’ is more like it, and I do think the two are different. And Katherine was clearly sexually curious and sexually confident, relishing the intrigue of romance and sex and damn good at it. She wasn’t taken advantage of by boys, as the conventional accounts tend to have it. If anyone was ‘using’ anyone else, she was ‘using’ these young men. By all accounts from the time (including her own), she was the one who initiated these relationships and who ended them when she wanted to move on (as she always did). Yet despite this perhaps rather cavalier behaviour, people stuck around for her. She kept people in thrall to her.

I’ve re-told Katherine Howard’s story from the point of view of one of those people. I chose Katherine Tilney – choosing another common Tudor spelling of the name, ‘Catheryn’, for her, so as to avoid confusion. Katherine/Catheryn Tilney was a distant relative of Katherine Howard’s, and she grew up alongside her in the Duchess’s household before joining the royal household when Katherine became queen. She was questioned when the scandal broke, and there’s a note in the records of the time to the effect that she’d served her interrogators well. In my novel, I have imagined her relationship with Katherine and with Francis Dereham.