The Tower of London: Mighty fortress and royal palace.
Infamous prison and place of execution.
William the Conqueror built it as his English stronghold 900 years ago.
Ever since, some of the biggest and most notorious names in England's history -
from Anne Boleyn to Guy Fawkes -
have been gaoled, tortured and put to death here.
Their stories are the stuff of myth and legend,
but the truth is even more extraordinary.
I'm Dr Suzannah Lipscomb, Tudor historian and author.
And I'm Joe Crowley, journalist and investigator.
Together, we want to reveal the secret history of the Tower.
Hunting down evidence...
It's like a sweetshop for a historian.
Making some shocking discoveries...
That is quite incredible.
And coming to some very surprising conclusions.
Everyone's very sure that this was a complete stitch-up.
This must have been an inside job.
- Think you know the Tower of London? - Time to think again.
In this episode, we're investigating three tales of scandalous sex
that ended in death at the Tower.
There's the good-looking, young musician, who brought down Anne Boleyn.
She is having an affair with Mark Smeaton, the musician,
and she's also sleeping with her brother.
That's the worst.
A forbidden marriage, that threatened King and country.
Well, the worst case scenario from James' point of view was pretty bad.
It was Spanish invasion fleets in the Channel.
And the precocious Queen, who couldn't escape her sexual past.
The King calls for a sword, so that he can behead Katherine himself.
All three women scandalised their King. All three lost their lives at the Tower.
It's the 17th of May, 1536.
Outside the Tower of London, a handsome, rising musical star is about to lose his head.
This is Mark Smeaton and he has confessed to having sex
with Henry VIII's second wife, Anne Boleyn.
Two days later, Anne herself will be beheaded within the Tower's walls.
For the King, it's an incredible U-turn.
Henry divorced his wife of 23 years and quit the Roman Catholic Church,
all to wed Anne Boleyn.
Now, he's having her killed on the say-so of a musician.
But was Anne really guilty?
The case pivots on a confession of one chap, a commoner called Mark Smeaton.
So I'd like you to look into him and to find out what his relationship was with Anne,
whether someone of his status would have had access to the Queen.
- OK. - And I'm going to look at his confession
and at the reports that he was tortured into confessing.
Mark Smeaton was a humble musician and Anne Boleyn, the Queen of England.
So how plausible is it that this pair had an affair?
Who better to ask than a Tudor musician, Chris Green.
Now this is very impressive. Is this typical of the Tudor outfits?
This is the costume of a young gentleman on the make in the 1520s to the 1530s,
which is precisely what Mark Smeaton would have been, really.
He was not from a posh, aristocratic background.
He was an up-and-coming musician
and, like all musicians through the ages, he liked to look good.
How good would he have been musically, though, to be playing for the King?
He must have been pretty impressive.
Smeaton was made a groom of the Privy Chamber -
it was basically a group of people who were the King's official friends.
This Tudor Briton had talent.
But upstart commoners weren't always appreciated at court.
You have to bear in mind that Mark Smeaton was not of noble stock,
but virtually everybody else around Anne Boleyn was.
So I suspect they would have felt a certain amount of resentment at this person
who had risen quite so high, so far, with so apparently little effort.
In fact, we have a poem written by Sir Thomas Wyatt.
"Ah, Mark, what moan should I for thee make more
Since that thy death, thou hast deserved best."
The poem seems to be effectively saying,
"It's a real shame you died, Mark, but frankly you had it coming."
- Harsh, very harsh. - It is rather.
As a royal fiddler, Mark Smeaton had access to Anne Boleyn
and irritated some snobbish nobles.
This may have fuelled rumours that painted some very unpleasant pictures in Henry's mind.
But could gossip alone have brought down this marriage?
In 1533, Henry VIII declared his marriage to Catherine of Aragon void,
and married Anne Boleyn.
This was a big deal.
The Pope refused to accept the divorce and Henry turned his back on the Catholic Church.
Anne had not been easily won and married life was no walk in the park.
The marriage of Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn was tumultuous.
Henry was besotted with Anne
and they were described as being merry together
more than Henry and any of his other wives.
But they were also frequently at each other's throats.
Early 1536 was a particularly tough time for the couple.
Henry had a serious jousting accident and Anne suffered a miscarriage.
It was in the aftermath of these ordeals
that gossip began doing the rounds, about Anne and the musician, Mark Smeaton.
The University of Cambridge holds some of this gossip
in the Tudor equivalent of a tabloid newspaper.
So here I have something that's known as the Spanish Chronicle,
which is an account by a Spaniard living in London in the mid-16th century.
And it has some wonderful stories to tell.
One story tells how Anne asked an old serving woman
to bring a naked Mark Smeaton into her bedroom.
And then it says, "As soon as the old woman had gone,
Anne went round the back of the bed, grasped the youth's arm, who was all trembling,
and made him get into bed.
He soon lost his bashfulness," it says, "and remained that night and many others."
In April, 1536, Henry's chief minister Thomas Cromwell
reported this scurrilous gossip to the King.
Henry's reaction appears to have been dangerously rash.
Once the rumours began, Henry had reluctantly ordered an investigation,
but it seems that the dice were loaded from the start.
Thomas Cromwell was the man who'd brought the gossip to Henry.
And according to one source, Henry told him that if it turned out to be a wrongful accusation,
he would suffer the death penalty in Anne Boleyn's place.
As a result, it looks like Cromwell did whatever it took to find evidence of Anne's guilt.
Days later, Thomas Cromwell arrested Mark Smeaton.
And he had this musician singing in no time.
Smeaton admitted to sex with Anne Boleyn on three separate occasions.
So what prompted this suicidal confession?
The imaginative Spanish Chronicle certainly has a good idea.
And it says that Cromwell "called two stout young fellows of his
and asked for a rope and a cudgel and ordered them to put the rope,
which was full of knots, around Mark's head and then uses a cudgel to tighten it.
Mark cries out and says, 'I'll confess everything."'
A more reliable source also claims that Smeaton was tortured.
This time at the Tower of London and using the prison's most fearsome device, the rack.
Both are accounts of torture,
both suggest that Mark was being put under severe pressure to confess,
under an interrogation that lasted a long time, and that in the end he cracked.
The accounts differ, but some form of torture would at least explain why Mark confessed.
Because there is simply no other reliable evidence for Anne's guilt.
Suzannah is convinced that there's nothing in rumours linking Mark and Anne.
But I've heard about an historian, who disagrees.
Well, I've come down river from the Tower of London.
The Tower itself is probably about three or four miles that way
and these buildings are the old Royal Naval College,
but about 500 years ago there was something else here.
It was a palace and it's one of the places where it was alleged
that Mark Smeaton and Anne Boleyn, shall we say, had relations.
I'm here at Greenwich to meet Professor George Bernard.
He believes that there is evidence of an affair between Mark and Anne.
It's just that everyone else has chosen to ignore it.
What most intrigues me is a poem written in French by Lancelot de Carles.
Lancelot de Carles, at this time,
was serving in the household of the French Ambassador to Henry VIII
and he wrote a life of Anne Boleyn as a poem.
And it includes some very interesting details
which seem to me to offer a clue to her downfall.
This poem describes an argument in the Royal household between a courtier and his sister
about her apparently loose morals.
What she does is to say,
"Why are you having a go at me? I'm not the worst.
The Queen is much worse than I am.
She's having an affair with Mark Smeaton, the musician,
and she's also sleeping with her brother.
That's the worst."
Wow. So she's basically saying,
"You think I'm bad, you should see what the Queen's up to."
Yes.
It's difficult to see why you should make something like this up.
If this is gossip, where does it come from? How does this help anyone?
So it seems to me that it might well be true.
George had some very interesting things to say.
Crucially, he's really suggesting we should use all the information,
all the sources available to us, even if they happen to be in poem form
and in French, come to that.
It can't be proven, but George is fairly convinced that the Queen was at least flirtatious
and something may have happened.
He certainly thinks, well, where there's a bit of smoke there could well be some fire.
Professor Bernard thinks the French poem is evidence Mark and Anne had an affair.
But for me and the majority of Tudor historians, the accusation is just baseless gossip.
Unfortunately for Anne, Henry VIII went ahead and put her on trial.
The records are still held, here at the National Archives.
Right, let's have a look at this.
So these are trial documents from Mark Smeaton's trial and the trial of Anne Boleyn.
For Anne's trial, two thousand people packed into the Great Hall at the Tower
to hear about sex and scandal in the Royal Family.
Anne was now accused of adultery with five men, not to mention incest.
One of the things it particularly tells us about...
...is that she procured and incited her own natural brother, George Boleyn,
gentleman of the Privy Chamber, to violate her.
Luring him with her tongue in the said George's mouth and the said George's tongue in hers.
So that's rather graphic, isn't it?
Anne was presented as a voracious sexual creature, without morals.
Possibly in revenge, her brother George Boleyn read out a quote attributed to Anne,
describing her husband's sexual incompetence.
And on it, it says that Anne had said he was not skilful in copulating with a woman
and had neither vigour nor potency.
And the "he" they're talking about is, of course, Henry VIII himself.
These slurs were used to suggest that Anne wanted Henry out of the way,
so that she could marry one of her lovers.
This idea was vital to the prosecution.
Adultery alone wasn't a crime but imagining the King's death was treason.
So this finally is the statement about their guilt.
So we can see quite clearly the words, "culpable"
and crucially the word "Smeaton" here.
And here it says that he has had carnal knowledge of the Queen.
It tells us that Smeaton pleaded guilty of violation and put himself in the King's mercy.
The others plead not guilty and the jury returns a verdict of guilty.
Smeaton and the other four men would face a public execution outside the Tower of London -
on a scaffold erected on Tower Hill.
Here, on the 17th of May, 1536, Mark Smeaton lost his head.
Two days later, it was Anne's turn - this time within the fortress itself.
Henry became "morbidly concerned" with the details,
even importing a French swordsman to act as executioner at the cost of 23 pounds.
Good Christian people, I am come hither to die.
Three years after moving heaven and earth to marry Anne Boleyn,
Henry had her head chopped off.
So what are we to make of why Anne died?
I believe that she was wholly innocent, but that the scandal itself destroyed her.
The evidence suggests to me
that Henry was genuinely convinced of Anne's guilt and it devastated him.
Such betrayal by his beloved Anne blackened his outlook on life.
It is in the last decade of his reign, after Anne's death,
that Henry became the savage, ruthless tyrant we remember today.
It's the 25th of September, 1615.
At the Tower of London, a 40-year-old prisoner lies dying.
This is Lady Arbella Stuart, and her tale is worthy of Shakespeare.
It begins with a forbidden marriage,
includes a cross-dressing noblewoman and two cunning escapes
and ends with the suspected suicide of the heroine herself.
So how did Lady Arbella's wedding day spawn a Shakespearean tragedy?
And what became of her Romeo - William Seymour?
We've got epic romance, we've got a dramatic escape from the Tower,
we've got heartbroken suicide.
It has all the elements of a great story.
And it is set in the time of Shakespeare, so it's a real-life Romeo and Juliet.
- Wow. OK, so fiction and reality blurring. - It is.
If you could look into William Seymour and why they were being kept apart in the first place.
- OK, I'll do that. - And I think I'll look into Arbella
and that account of her suicide.
In June, 1610, the 35-year-old Arbella Stuart
secretly married her 22-year-old lover, William Seymour.
When the King, James I, heard the news, he flew into a frenzy,
sending William to the Tower and placing Arbella under house arrest.
I want to learn why these star-crossed lovers posed such a threat to the King.
Sarah Gristwood is Arbella's biographer.
Arbella and her possible marriage was a huge hot potato and it really did matter,
because the throne was almost still up for grabs.
Really?
It only starts to make sense, really, if you look at the family tree.
When Elizabeth I died without children
seven years earlier,
the Tudor line came to an end.
So, who should follow?
To decide that, you need to trace the line back up to Elizabeth's father, Henry VIII,
then across to his older sister Margaret.
Follow that line back down one way
and you get the next King, James I.
But follow it another way
and you get Arbella Stuart - a potential rival.
- So where does William come from in all this? - Right.
What could Arbella do to increase, improve her own claim?
Well, she could marry someone who was descended from Henry's other sister, Mary.
So their children would have been very well placed to make a claim.
No wonder James was scandalised.
It didn't look like Arbella was marrying for love,
but simply to set her kids up as rivals for the throne.
James is clearly feeling pretty uncomfortable, but how much threat was there?
What's the worst that could have happened?
The worst case scenario from James' point of view was pretty bad.
It was Spanish invasion fleets in the Channel.
I mean, to Catholics in Europe, James, the Protestant James,
was far from being an accepted King.
And the huge fear with Arbella and William,
more even just than they had children who were a threat later down the line,
was that they'd get backing from Spanish Catholics.
So the only time James would have slept well
would have been knowing these two were under house arrest or in the Tower.
That's exactly right.
To the King, Arbella must have appeared a scheming opponent, not a lovestruck Juliet.
So is this even a love story at all?
William Seymour was thrown into the Tower just a fortnight after the wedding
and Arbella was placed under house arrest.
Now her only contact with William was by post.
On hearing that William had been unwell she writes,
"I assure you nothing that the state can do with me
can trouble me so much as the news of your being ill doth."
In letter after letter a genuine concern and growing love for William becomes apparent.
Elsewhere, for example, she writes, "Where ever you be, or in what state so ever you are,
it sufficeth that you are mine."
Even if she made the marriage for dynastic reasons,
by this point it seems that Arbella had fallen in love with William.
Smitten Arbella could not make-do with just a pen-pal romance.
By the summer of 1611, it was time for action.
Arbella was being held at a house in Barnet, some 20 kilometres north of the Tower.
On the 3rd of June, she donned a man's doublet, cloak and boots, and snuck out.
She then headed for a coaching inn on the nearby Great North Road.
When Arbella reached the inn, she met up with her trusted steward.
He'd arranged the next leg of the journey - on horseback.
Losing little time, Arbella mounted one of the horses,
but not, as was usual for women of the time, riding side-saddle.
Instead, she rode astride, like the man she pretended to be.
She made something of an incongruous sight.
One of the stable keepers was heard to remark that "the gentleman looked very sick and faint".
But crucially the disguise held and the party rode south.
Arbella made for Blackwall, a small port six kilometres east of London.
But the hardest part of the plan was still to come.
Her husband William had to escape the Tower of London itself
and meet her at their rendezvous.
At 6pm Arbella arrived here at Blackwall ready to throw her arms around her husband.
But she was to be disappointed - that husband was nowhere to be seen.
Soon the tide would turn, making escape that night impossible.
But until then, all Arbella could do was wait
and wonder what had happened to her husband's prison break?
The Tower of London in 1611 was much more than just a prison.
Within the fortress complex there were numerous homes for ordinary workers
and a royal palace.
There was the Royal Armoury, the Royal Mint
and even King James I's menagerie - the forerunner of London Zoo.
This was a teeming hive of activity - the background noise to William's escape attempt.
I have to say it is so exciting to be in here. What atmospheric setting.
These bold walls lit up.
Slightly intimidating, but extremely awesome.
William's lodgings were up these steps, in St Thomas' Tower.
All prisoners were not equal and nobleman William was given the best rooms
and the right to keep servants.
After several months, his hefty influence led to another privilege.
William had been granted the liberty of the Tower.
That meant he could wander around as he pleased within the walls.
One, that gives him the possibility of escape, because it's quite a busy place.
Two, it also means he can consort with people in order to plot that escape.
According to the most detailed account we have,
the key to William's escape attempt was one regular visitor- his barber.
On the chosen day, this barber hobbled up to the Tower
disguised with a false beard and a bandaged leg.
Confusingly, he then asked to see William's barber in St Thomas' Tower.
Once there, William put on the beard and bandages.
Now, when the two emerged, it simply appeared
that the hobbling visitor had been joined by William's barber.
Together, the pair strolled back past the unsuspecting guards
and out of the Tower fortress.
And, of course, the funny thing here,
he'd have to go right past and right underneath the windows of his room,
where he'd been kept prisoner.
So you can imagine him sort of keeping his collar up at this point, keeping his head down
and trying to get as fast as possible to the far end.
Just beyond where Tower Bridge stands today,
William met a waiting boat to take him to Blackwall.
But for some unknown reason, his boat journey was delayed and he arrived too late for his wife.
As it turned out, he would never see Arbella again.
It remains a mystery to this day exactly what delayed William.
His escape seemed to go according to plan.
But here at Blackwall, Arbella waited for two long hours
before ultimately deciding that she must flee.
As the summer sun began to set, Arbella was rowed down the Thames.
There, she would meet the captain of a French ship to take her to Calais and freedom.
But by now the alarm was raised, and King James dispatched any boats he could
to intercept suspicious cross-Channel traffic.
Just a few kilometres outside Calais, Arbella's boat paused.
Arbella wanted to tarry, in case William could catch up with her.
It was a fateful decision.
It was there that their boat was intercepted, boarded and Arbella arrested.
She would never be free again.
William should have been following close behind.
But a storm blew his ship off course to Harwich, where news of his escape had yet to arrive.
From this safe haven, William hired a boat to Flanders and began the life of an exile.
Arbella now took William's place at the Tower.
Initially she made half-hearted escape plans,
but was kept under far tighter control than her husband...
...and as the years wore on, the will to live seemed to fade.
She first refused medical attention and then food,
before finally passing away on the 25th of September, 1615, aged 40.
So did the heartbroken Arbella effectively kill herself, or is there another explanation?
To find out, I'm going to delve into the records at the Royal College of Physicians.
That dates from 1608 to 1647.
This is the report of a 400-year-old post-mortem.
After a careful examination of the corpse of the most noble Lady Arbella,
they reported that her death was due to a chronic and lingering sickness.
Huh.
From a diagnosis made earlier and according to medical evidence,
it was agreed that clearly she had been suffering from a growing cachexy.
Obviously something, some disease, is making her emaciated.
That's what we must conclude here.
Illness, not suicide, killed Arbella.
To find out exactly what cachexy is, I'm meeting Professor of Medicine, Tim Cox.
We still use the word cachexia today to describe a wasting illness.
- So that means the body wastes away? - Wastes away.
Disproportion, very rapidly, that horrible wasting that you see in patients dying of cancer,
that's referred to as cachexia.
So cachexy is the effect and I have a theory on the cause,
an illness called porphyria, long associated with royalty.
Porphyria is a rare inherited disease. It's characterised by acute attacks, episodes.
They may vomit, they become constipated, they can't eat and they become rather unusual,
alienated, disorientated in time.
And a terminal porphyric illness would be a wasting illness - there's no doubt about that.
Not only does this fit Arbella's symptoms, but her family, the Stuarts,
have long been suspected of carrying the disease.
James I was one possible sufferer
and the illness is thought by many to have caused the madness of King George III.
Rather than killing herself, it's quite possible Arbella simply died of porphyria -
the Royal Family's curse.
The end, though, was rather less tragic for William Seymour.
On Arbella's death, he was no longer a threat and was permitted to return home to England.
He would later re-marry and go on to live for another 50 years.
It's the 12th of February, 1542.
At the Tower, a young woman has asked for an execution block to be brought to her room.
This is Katherine Howard, fifth and youngest wife of Henry VIII,
and tomorrow she will lose her head.
Following a court sex scandal, she's been condemned to death for having two affairs -
despite never facing trial.
So why was young Katherine Howard foolish enough to cheat on Henry VIII?
Or is this another case of trumped-up charges?
Right, so here we have the case of Katherine Howard.
Now he has her executed for, shall we say, playing around, adultery.
So it's really a question of the relationship between the monarch and the law.
- Could he use it as he wanted to? - Exactly. I'll check out Henry's state of mind
and see where he's at.
OK. Sounds good.
The case against Katherine Howard rests on her alleged sexual exploits.
But what do we know of Katherine's experience with men other than Henry?
Katherine spent her formative years with her step-grandmother at Norfolk House,
over the river from Westminster.
Today, where Norfolk House once stood is this modern hotel.
But that's a lot more appropriate than it may at first appear.
Norfolk House would have been a bustling hub, full of servants and guests,
with over a hundred people bedding down here each night.
As a teenager, Katherine slept in the girls' dormitory,
and what she got up to in here would come to haunt her.
The girls' dormitory at Norfolk House
was a place where young men would come to woo with wine, strawberries and flattery.
Pretty Katherine was an obvious target and she fell for a distant cousin called Francis Dereham.
According to one of the other girls in the dormitory, when Francis came to visit
the sounds of "puffing and blowing" could be heard from Katherine's bed.
This young Queen-to-be had discovered sex.
Norfolk House would later become infamous for decadence...
...yet Katherine's teenage fling with Dereham was serious.
The pair acted as if engaged,
until Katherine secured a position at court, as a lady-in-waiting.
Within a year, Henry had dumped fourth wife Anne of Cleves...
...and was taking Katherine Howard down the aisle.
What's clear from her upbringing is that Katherine Howard
was never groomed to be Queen.
For a girl brought up in genteel obscurity,
the chance to marry the King must have been like winning the lottery.
So perhaps it's understandable
that she wouldn't have revealed her past sexual relationship with Dereham.
By the 12th of July, 1540,
Henry had divorced Catherine of Aragon, beheaded Anne Boleyn,
lost Jane Seymour to childbirth
and just divorced his fourth wife, Anne of Cleves.
Two weeks later, he married her young lady-in-waiting, Katherine Howard.
And together the new couple took up residence at Henry's HQ, Hampton Court Palace.
Now I've come here to ask curator Kent Rawlinson
about the man Katherine had married.
Well, he's already been through an awful lot.
So he's moved from being a sort of young active man,
with a wife that he was married to for over 20 years,
to someone who's on his fifth wife
and getting increasingly sort of bigger and less active.
But now he has this new young wife who's certainly at least half his age.
For the first year of marriage, Henry thought himself a lucky man.
On the 1 st of November, 1541,
he had prayers read out thanking God for his new young wife.
But at the same time a scandalous rumour began to fly around court -
Katherine had a lover before Henry.
Who is it who's brave enough to break news of these rumours to the King?
It's the Archbishop of Canterbury, Thomas Cranmer.
And he really doesn't want to do it.
And he makes the choice that he doesn't want to say it to him in words,
so he writes him a letter, which he gives to him.
Henry called in his closest advisers to launch an investigation.
Days later, they report back to him with witness statements.
He completely breaks down. He can hardly speak.
And they say how hard it is for them to see him in that state.
And the fact that he can't speak
and then sort of bursts into floods of tears is highly unusual.
Is there a sense of anger mixed in with that as well?
The Council don't describe a real moment of anger, but the French Ambassador does.
He describes that the King calls for a sword, so that he can behead Katherine himself.
Just days after thanking God for Katherine Howard,
Henry now wants his young bride dead.
The Privy Council's investigations
had revealed Katherine's teenage affair with Francis Dereham.
But there was worse to come.
Three months earlier, Henry and Katherine had been enjoying
a meandering trip through England known as the Northern Progress.
In August, the Progress reached Lincoln,
accompanied by 5,000 horses and an army of servants.
Here at the Cathedral, they still have a record of Henry's royal duties on his big visit.
This letter refers to some areas where he's been caused displeasure
by the activities of his subjects.
He says to them that there are still Catholic shrines remaining in the Cathedral,
alluring our subjects to their former hypocrisy and superstition.
This means that for Henry the Northern Progress was really a working holiday.
He was going to check on the state of his kingdom.
But for Katherine, it seems to have been much more about pleasure than work.
According to the Privy Council's detective work,
Katherine Howard was having an affair right under the King's nose.
The King and Queen were staying here, at the Bishop's Palace.
One night a royal courtier called Thomas Culpepper
was seen entering the Queen's chambers
and not emerging until the early hours of the morning.
For Katherine's part, this was stunningly reckless behaviour.
Henry VIII had beheaded the last woman he thought had cheated on him.
So just what was Katherine thinking in carrying on with Thomas Culpepper?
Perhaps her affair with Dereham at Norfolk House
left Katherine thinking that sex didn't have consequences.
Or perhaps her new husband - twice her age, obese,
and with a foul-smelling, weeping sore on one leg -
wasn't physically quite to her taste.
But either way, Katherine was certainly very daft indeed
to think that she could cheat on Henry VIII.
Henry was now set on killing Katherine, but even a King was meant to obey the law.
That put Henry in a tight spot.
Consensual adultery wasn't a crime.
Plus the last thing he wanted was a repeat of the embarrassing Anne Boleyn trial.
The solution was ingenious -
a legal loophole that I'm hoping to hunt down at Westminster's Parliamentary Archives.
It's like a sweetshop for a historian.
These archives hold 60,000 Acts, stretching back half a millennium.
Here we go - bill to attain Katherine Howard.
Rather than try Katherine for breaking a law,
Henry would simply pass a brand-new law in Parliament called an Act of Attainder.
And in the very Act that created the crime, Katherine was declared guilty.
The extraordinary thing about an Act of Attainder
is that it means you can get rid of someone without them having a trial.
Traditionally being used for fugitives who are fleeing the law,
but now Henry uses it to get rid of people who are there, who are available to be tried.
And the beauty of the system is you don't need to cite specific evidence,
you just pass an Act of Attainder and suddenly they're declared guilty
and they can be convicted of treason.
Through this act, Katherine Howard was legally sentenced to death,
without ever having a chance to defend herself.
Once the Act of Attainder was passed, Henry swiftly made execution plans.
On the 10th of February, 1542,
a boat arrived to collect Katherine from her prison on the Thames
and take her down river to the Tower.
I'm meeting up with historian Elizabeth Norton to retrace the final journey of Katherine Howard.
When the boat arrived, she completely went to pieces
and she had to be carried onto the boat forcibly.
I mean, it's the finality of going to the Tower then she realised, actually, she was going to die.
Sailing down the river in the middle of a boat flanked by guards on one side
and members of the Council on the other side, she must have been terrified.
But there was worse to come on her boat trip to death.
On London Bridge, a terrifying reminder of the men she'd lost.
Her lovers Francis Dereham and Thomas Culpepper had been executed
and their heads were placed above the bridge on spikes.
Wow. And she'd have been aware that she was going under London Bridge.
- It was the major bridge at the time, wasn't it? - Absolutely.
And she can't have avoided having to think back to those lovers
and their heads right there above her.
No, exactly, it was very much a reminder of what was going to happen to her
and where she was going.
Katherine's short life was nearly at an end - and however foolish her actions -
it's impossible not to have some sympathy.
I mean, this is a young girl, 20 at her death, may well be a few years younger,
she'd not had a stable upbringing.
She suddenly finds herself the object of the King's affections.
She would be ruined if she revealed her past,
so she takes the flattering option and becomes Queen.
She then does something stupid, but probably with a man that she had strong feelings for,
and ultimately she paid with her life.
Katherine would spend her final three nights alive at the Tower.
Determined to die with dignity, she asked that an executioner's block be brought to her room,
so she could practise her posture and composure.
At 7 am on the 13th of February, Katherine was beheaded on Tower Green
and buried, like Anne Boleyn before her,
in the chapel of St Peter ad Vincula inside the Tower's walls.
Ripped & Corrected By mstoll May 2017
Ripped & Corrected By mstoll Released on www.Addic7ed.com