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Catherine Howard's proclamation as Queen at Hampton Court, 1541

Date: 11 July 2025

Author: Gareth Russell

For anyone interested in Catherine Howard, Henry VIII’s fifth queen, Hampton Court is linked to every phase of her remarkable career.

Most famously, Catherine’s downfall commenced at Hampton Court Palace in November 1541. It was also the site of her apotheosis as queen: at Christmas 1540, Catherine won admiration (even from cynics) for her charm, elegance, and charisma. But less well known is how Hampton Court birthed Catherine’s tenure as Queen of England.

Here, historian Gareth Russell explores this key moment in Tudor history.

By the time Catherine first attracted Henry VIII’s dangerous attention in 1540, the estate encircling Hampton Court had grown so large that it could not be traversed in a single day. Used primarily for hunting and swallowing up more than its fair share of confiscated monastic land, the area was known as the Hampton Court Chase. 

To facilitate hunting trips, smaller subsidiary residences were built within the Chase. One of these junior Hampton Court palaces – Oatlands Palace – was the venue for Catherine and Henry’s wedding on 28 July 1540.

A portrait of a woman looking at the viewer, wearing Tudor clothing

Image: Portrait of a Lady, perhaps Katherine Howard, by Hans Holbein the Younger. © Royal Collection Enterprises Ltd 2025 | Royal Collection Trust

Even by Henry’s standards, his marriage to Catherine was a vigorous display of his 'chop and change' approach to relationships. That morning, Henry's disgraced chief minister Thomas Cromwell was executed on Tower Hill. Cromwell had no shortage of enemies, including Catherine’s relatives, some of whom chose to skip her wedding to instead witness Cromwell’s beheading in London.

For 10 days after the royal wedding, Catherine existed in a social limbo, in which her title had not yet been formally announced. In the absence of information, London buzzed with rumours about Henry’s relationship with Catherine. Both the speed and secrecy of their wedding invited suspicion; Henry had only annulled his marriage to Anne of Cleves, his fourth queen, earlier that month. 

When word filtered back to the capital that Catherine Howard was not Henry’s mistress but his wife, the rumour mill spun the story that the only reason the marriage had gone ahead was because Catherine was already pregnant with Henry’s child. 

However, there was another more mundane reason for marrying deep in the countryside in the relative seclusion of the Hampton Court Chase. 1540 was the hottest summer in decades. 

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No rain fell on England between spring and the end of September 1540. London sweated and stank. The plague was threatening its usual summer revival, made stronger by the sweltering weather. Farmers’ crops and herds suffered. Water supplies were dangerously low. The roads caked hard and dry. 

The distress caused by the heatwave is palpable in the surviving sources. According to a Member of Parliament, it caused pain ‘universally through the realm [and] great death, by reason of hot agues and Fluxes, and some Pestilence, in which season was a drought, that wells and small rivers were clean died, so that much cattle died for lack of water’. 

To say that this did not particularly concern Henry VIII would be an understatement. There was no attempt from his government to regulate the food supply or to ration the dwindling amount of water. While the clergy led parades through the streets begging God to send them relief through rain, Henry left London at the start of summer and did not return properly until spring of the following year.

A large room with tapestries lining the walls and a bright cold hexagonal pattern on the ceiling

Image: The Great Watching Chamber at Hampton Court Palace, where Catherine Howard arrived after her marriage to Henry VIII. © Historic Royal Palaces

By the time Catherine arrived at Hampton Court Palace, she had been married to Henry for 10 days. As far as we know, it was her first visit to the palace. She had served Anne of Cleves, Henry’s previous queen, but during Anne’s six-month tenure the royal household had not visited Hampton Court. 

Catherine was thus also the first queen consort to live in the palace’s splendid new Queen’s Apartments. Located on the site of today’s Baroque palace overlooking the Privy Garden, they were designed by Anne Boleyn but barely finished before her execution in 1536. Her successor, Jane Seymour gutted the apartments of Anne’s designs. They were still being redecorated when Jane died at Hampton Court in 1537, in temporary accommodation overlooking what is now Clock Court. 

A tall view of an old chapel looking out over the dark brown choir stalls and chequered floor, along the stone Tudor windows and blue painted vaulted ceiling.

Image: The Chapel Royal at Hampton Court looks much as it did when Catherine was pronounced Queen of England at Hampton Court. © Historic Royal Palaces

Hampton Court was where the business of Catherine’s queenship truly began. As Queen, Catherine was head of the largest female-run establishment in England, with a substantial income and a large number of staff. 

On 8 August 1540 – the same day as Catherine reached Hampton Court – the government announced that Catherine was the lawful Queen of England. According to the contemporary chronicler Edward Hall, Catherine was also ‘showed openly as Queen at Hampton Court.’ This meant that she was presented to the entire court with the honours and titles of a queen. Hall does not specify but, very likely, there would also have been a quasi-public component to this, whereby Catherine walked in procession from the Queen’s Apartments to hear Mass in the Chapel Royal.

With protocol satisfied, Queen Catherine and King Henry left Hampton Court for an extended hunting trip that would last until October. Moving through the sweltering countryside, they stayed at smaller royal homes at Reading, Grafton (where Henry’s grandparents Edward IV and Elizabeth Woodville had married), Ampthill, Dunstable, and St Albans.

The public presentation of Catherine as Queen at Hampton Court did not, however, have the desired effect of silencing rumours about her. Rumours still spread that she was pregnant, with the insinuation that it explained why the King had married her. This continued until autumn, when her rural hunting trip ended. 

After that, Queen Catherine resided in larger royal homes, where more people could see that she quite clearly was not pregnant. Comments from those privileged enough to be invited on the hunting trips also confirm that there was never any suspicion that she might be pregnant – the horse-riding, dancing, and banquets that she and Henry participated in show that neither of them thought that she was pregnant in the summer of 1540.

It was a happy summer for Queen Catherine. Along with the festivities of the reduced summer court and her triumph at Hampton Court, she was surrounded by family and favourites.

She could also avoid those she did not care for. She was never particularly close to her most powerful uncle, the Duke of Norfolk, and, according to her ladies in waiting, she later came to dislike him intensely. Having retreated to his estates for the summer, Norfolk did not return to court until November. 

Catherine had seen precious little of her uncle during her rise. Despite the enduring legend that Norfolk plotted Catherine’s relationship with Henry, the Duke was not even in the country when Henry first displayed a romantic interest in Catherine. Instead, Norfolk was on an extended diplomatic mission to France. Catherine would have preferred he stay there, especially since, having done very little to help her on the way up, Norfolk nonetheless expected a lion’s share of the prizes once she was queen. Few people played the hard-done-by victim more enthusiastically than Norfolk, whose ability to complain was eclipsed only by his inability to do so quietly. 

As the ambassadors’ respective correspondences make clear, the Queen proclaimed at Hampton Court in August 1540 was confident, celebrated, and secured. Henry ‘cannot treat her well enough,’ observed an ambassador. 

Looking back on her halcyon days at Hampton Court, the MP Edward Hall wrote in his chronicle: ‘The eight[h] day of August, was the Lady Catherine Howard, niece to the Duke of Norfolk and daughter to the Lord Edmund Howard, showed openly as Queen at Hampton Court, which dignity she enjoyed not long, as after ye shall hear.’

It is understandable why Hall wrote his account of Catherine’s rise with such an obvious link to her downfall, which began at the same palace a mere 15 months later. Catherine Howard’s story is so often defined by her downfall. Removing her from its shadow allows us to see her as she was when, in the middle of a heatwave and the splendour of Hampton Court, she was proclaimed Queen of England.

Discover more about Catherine Howard

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Listen to the podcast

The Six Tudor Queens: Catherine Howard

In this episode of the Historic Royal Palaces Podcast, Tracy Borman is joined by historian and author Gareth Russell, to bring Catherine Howard to life.

Catherine Howard has been judged by generations as promiscuous, a silly girl, a victim. But of course, there is more to her story than these assumptions allow for. In this episode, Tracy and Gareth paint a picture of a vivacious young woman whose life deserves to be revealed without the layers that centuries have placed upon her.

More episodes
A woman records a podcast in a large Tudor banqueting hall decorated with tapestries

Image: Tracy Borman with historian Gareth Russell at Hampton Court Palace. © Historic Royal Palaces

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