DEADLY AFFAIR

Wife No5: CATHERINE HOWARD

HENRY married the 17-year-old lady-in-waiting in 1540, hoping to take his mind off his now ulcerated legs, and called her his “rose without a thorn”.

Yet she had already had a liaison with her childhood music teacher and is reckoned to have lost her virginity as a teenager to a private secretary Francis Dereham – later accusing him of rape.

By 1542 the 49-year-old king accused Catherine of having an affair with her cousin Thomas Culpeper, who she sent love letters to, and ordered her execution.

She was beheaded with an axe at the Tower, apparently saying: “I die a Queen, but I would rather have died the wife of Culpeper.”