The Man Who Died Worse Than A Queen

Everyone knows what happened to Catherine Howard — Henry VIII’s fifth wife, the teenage queen beheaded in the Tower at around nineteen. Almost nobody knows the name of the man who died worse than she did, for something that happened before Henry VIII had even laid eyes on her.

His name was Francis Dereham.

THE HORROR Around 1538, Catherine Howard was a girl of about fifteen, living in the household of her step‑grandmother, the Dowager Duchess of Norfolk, at Lambeth. The supervision there was famously, catastrophically lax — young men had access to the dormitory where the girls slept, and what went on in that house would later be dragged through a courtroom and used to kill people.

Francis Dereham was a gentleman of the household, then in his early thirties. He and Catherine began a relationship. They exchanged lovers’ tokens — silk violets. They called each other “husband” and “wife.” A servant later testified that Dereham had lain in bed with her a hundred nights. And here is the thing that matters: under the canon law of the time, a couple who exchanged promises and then slept together could be considered actually married — a binding pre‑contract.

Then Dereham went off to Ireland, and while he was gone, Catherine went to court. And Henry VIII — fat, ulcerated, ageing, and desperate — fell utterly in love with her. He called her his “rose without a thorn,” his perfect, pure young bride. He married her in 1540.

Dereham came back and did the stupidest thing of his life: he went to the new queen and asked her for a job. She gave him one, making him her private secretary. Whether she did it out of kindness to an old friend, or because he was quietly leaning on her, we will never know. What we do know is that Dereham could not keep his mouth shut. He had a temper, he drank, and he boasted around court that if the King were to die, he would marry Catherine — that he had been generously favoured.

In November 1541, it all came out. A man named John Lassells went to Archbishop Cranmer with what his sister knew about the Lambeth household. Cranmer — who saw a chance to destroy the Catholic Howard faction — slipped Henry a note during Mass on All Souls’ Day. The King refused to believe it, and ordered an investigation to clear her name.

It did the opposite. Dereham was arrested and interrogated, and here is the crucial fact: he told the truth. Even under torture, he admitted only what was actually true — that there had been a relationship, and a pre‑contract, before Catherine ever met the King. He denied, consistently, ever touching her after her marriage. There is no evidence he ever did.

Under torture, though, he gave them one more name. He said that a man called Thomas Culpeper “had succeeded him in the Queen’s affections.”

Culpeper was a gentleman of the King’s own privy chamber, and he had been meeting Catherine secretly, alone, at night, on the recent royal progress — the two of them locked in a chamber from eleven at night until four in the morning.

On 1 December 1541, both men were tried at Guildhall. And this is the part that should stop you cold. Neither man was actually convicted of sleeping with the queen. The charge was that they had intended to. Culpeper and Catherine, by meeting secretly, were “inciting” each other toward adultery. And Dereham — who had done nothing at all since her marriage — was found guilty because the mere fact that he had taken a job in her household was treated as evidence that he wanted to start it up again.

They were convicted of high treason for a state of mind. Both were sentenced to be hanged, drawn and quartered.

Both petitioned the King to commute it to a clean beheading. Only one got it.

Thomas Culpeper — the man who had actually been alone with the Queen at midnight — had his sentence commuted, because he had been Henry’s favourite before all this. Francis Dereham — who had slept with a teenage girl years before the King had ever heard her name, and who had confessed it honestly — was refused. Henry’s reported reasoning was blunt: Dereham had spoilt Catherine for him, so he would suffer the full punishment the law allowed.

On 10 December 1541, both men were dragged on hurdles from the Tower of London through the streets to Tyburn. Culpeper spoke to the crowd, asked them to pray for him, knelt on the ground beside the gallows, and had his head struck off. Quick. Done.

Then they did Dereham. The chronicler Charles Wriothesley, who recorded it at the time, used five words that say everything: he was “hanged, membered, bowelled, headed, and quartered.” Hanged without a drop, so his neck would not break and let him out of it. Cut down alive. Castrated. Opened up, and made to watch his own insides burned in front of him. Then beheaded, and cut into four pieces.

For a relationship that happened before Henry VIII knew Catherine Howard existed.

THE MODERN RELIC Their heads were dipped in tar to preserve them and spiked on London Bridge, and Dereham’s quartered body was displayed around the city. Two months later, on 13 February 1542, Catherine Howard herself was beheaded at the Tower, along with Jane Boleyn, Lady Rochford, who had arranged the midnight meetings.

Henry never recovered. The betrayal by his “perfect” young wife broke something in him — he became more morbid, more paranoid, more tyrannical, and the last of the romantic idealism of his early reign was gone. Politically, the fall took the Howards down with it and handed the future to the Seymours and the reformers, helping set England’s course toward Protestantism.

And the relics of Francis Dereham? He does not have any. He was cut into quarters and scattered around London, and there is no grave, no tomb, no stone. Nothing.

But Culpeper has one. The man who actually met the Queen at midnight, who got the merciful death because the King had once liked him, was given a body to bury — and it went into the churchyard of St Sepulchre‑without‑Newgate in London, where he lies to this day. You can walk into that church now; it is still there, opposite the Old Bailey. It is the largest parish church in the City of London, and for centuries it was where the bell was rung at midnight for the condemned prisoners at Newgate prison next door, the night before they hanged.

So the man who was guilty rests in a church you can visit. And the man whose only crime was loving a girl before the King did was torn into four pieces and scattered, and left nothing behind at all — except a single line in a chronicle: hanged, membered, bowelled, headed, and quartered.

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