So I was looking at Six the Kids art and I realized Eddie mentions Thomas,who tried to kidnap him. Then something hit me,is it the same Thomas that K.Howard mentions in her song?
No. The Thomas in Katherine’s song is Thomas Culpeper. He was executed along with Katherine Howard , Henry Mannox, Francis Dereham and Lady Rochford (George Boleyn’s wife)
Edward’s uncle was Thomas Seymour and he was bad. He was also the one who had been engaged to Catherine Parr before Henry stepped in. After Henry died he married Parr. He also did some shitty things to Elizabeth when she was living with Catherine when she was 14. His downfall was when he tried to kidnap Edward and shot his dog. He was beheaded soon after.
All You Wanna Do, Katherine Howard’s song from Six the Musical hit me in the face with how the narrative on Katherine Howard, Henry VIII”s fifth wife, has been mishandled through the centuries.
Admittedly, I haven’t read much on her, other than Alison Weir and Antonia Fraser’s accounts of her life in their anthologies on Henry VIII’s wives and having her pop up in biographies of other figures from the time that I have read, and when I visited London and toured the Tower of London the tour guide believed that she was guilty. Alison Weir’s and Antonia Fraser’s portrayals of Katherine Howard were so different that it left me without a good feel for what happened. And I’ve since heard so many conflicting things about whether or not she was guilty of adultery that it’s hard to know what to believe.
Yet there are some facts, as this song shows, that makes the true horror of Katherine Howard’s story obvious, though admittedly it’s only in our very recent modern times that we can even begin to describe what happened to her. And the facts are that from the time Katherine was 13, she was groomed and molested by men who were much older than her and eventually executed for it.
Katherine Howard was a cousin of Anne Boleyn but from much less fortunate circumstances (she was also a more distant cousin of Jane Seymour). Her parents had so many children that her father could not afford to provide for them and had to send her away to live with a Dowager Duchess who neglected her, and she was poorly supervised and protected as a result. When I’d read accounts of her life before she was married the age of Mannox never came up. It was only in 2005 that a biographer posted the idea that he’d groomed and abused Katherine, and given how young Katherine was and how she describes Mannox’s behavior towards her, I have to agree.
Katherine later became involved with Francis Dereham and may have had a marriage contract with him. The details of what happened, though, are murky, though I have read reports that Katherine said that Dereham raped her.
When Henry met Katherine, he was entranced and infatuated. He was 49 when he married her. She could not have been more than 17, and possibly she was as young as 15. And like any young woman who attracted his attention, her ability to say no was limited. I’ve never really gotten a feel for how she felt about marrying him in the sources I’ve read, but Henry was past his prime, old, with hideous leg ulcers and rather obese. By then his temper was violent and unpredictable. Draw your own conclusions about how likely it was that Katherine Howard desired the match.
Once married, Katherine supposedly became intimate with a courtier named Thomas Culpepper. Here I don’t know what to believe. I’ve read accounts that she slept with him, accounts that said she didn’t, I’ve read that Culpepper raped her, I read that she refused to sleep with him so Culpepper went to Henry and told him Katherine was in love with him (this one I have a hard time believing. Culpepper was also executed, and Culpepper would have had to know that if Henry found out that he was involved with his wife then it would have been a death sentence for him, so if this one is true then Culpepper was extremely stupid). I’ve also read that the issue was not whether or not Katherine had sex with someone after she married Henry, but that she had sex with Francis Dereham before she married Henry and that it was considered treasonous that she did not reveal that to Henry. In fact, Katherine’s history with Dereham lead to people blackmailing her for their silence, which lends credence to this. Further, Dereham was also executed, even though as far as I know his contact with Katherine happened before she married Henry.
Whatever happened, the facts that we do have show that from a very young age, Katherine was groomed, molested, possibly raped, married to a much older man and thrust into a role she was never prepared for, and then beheaded when she was no older than 19 by her fifty year old husband.
Whatever happened, this time it seems as if Henry believed the charges against his wife as he was completely distraught that his newest plaything had been touched by another pair of hands (here is the world’s tiniest violin...)
As for Katherine, she was hysterical in proclaiming her innocence. Yet she came to accept the inevitable. She asked to have the block she would be executed on put in her chambers so she could practice placing her head on it just right.
While in the context of the time that Katherine Howard lived in we can understand the treatment she received and how it was sanctioned in the time she lived in. It does not mean that it was right. While we still have a long way to go in terms of protecting children from predatory adults, this shows how far we’ve come. And I also think that whether than debating whether or not Katherine was innocent or guilty, the focus needs to be on how impossible, harmful and unfair her situation was. There was no justice in beheading a teenager who had been mistreated by a series of much older men.
All You Wanna Do is a powerful song that challenges the narrative that asks the question: was Katherine innocent or guilty? The true narrative is how Katherine was molested and abused her whole life and then executed for it. I hope that future historians and biographers will be mindful of this when telling her story. There’s another animatic for this song that is rather good, so I will include it here.
