When the doom that seemed inevitable from the moment Thomas Culpepper brought Katherine Howard to court finally comes, it arrives as a cataclysm. Its torrent fuses the warring factions that compete for Henry VIII’s patronage. As Ford tells it, Kat Howard’s execution recalls the crucifixion of Jesus and, like it, stands as a monument to condemn the world that condemned her. To escape a world of falsehood and deceit, she perjures herself before king and council, knowing that her putative confession will long torment Henry, convinced as he must be of her innocence.
In addition to providing her with her only means of escape, it’s characteristic that she condemns herself for another reason as well, namely, to stop the torture of her ladies-in-waiting.
In the end, Katherine realizes that, whatever truth the classics she studied might have contained about the time in which they were written, they contain no truth about the world in which she lives. And so, she willingly departs. This final insight may reflect the author’s own view of the beauty and futility of learning.
It’s otiose to ask whether the Katherine Howard Ford creates is “true,” in the sense of historically accurate. Five centuries of historical consensus sees her differently. This is a novel, not a work of history, although most of the characters bear names and functions that correspond to historical personages. One can ask about the freedom a novelist has to reinterpret such figures. Hilary Mantel comes to mind, whose revisionist portrait of Thomas Cromwell in her Wolf Hall trilogy may be closer to the truth than his usual depiction as an ogre. Indeed, historians such as Diarmaid MacCulloch say it accords with the sense of the man they get when they study the relevant documents (interestingly, Ford’s portrayal of Cromwell foreshadows Mantel’s).
But with Katherine Howard, what documentary evidence did Ford draw on for his contrarian portrait? I’m not aware there is any. Instead, his Katherine seems purely to be his own literary creation. He has conjured a figure whose quixotic tilting expresses his own view about the world and the fate of guilelessness in it. So the question is, how true is this character, the product of his imagination? She is attractive, physically and mentally. I found her fascinating, and I suspect the author himself was among the men who loved her. In the end, however, I found her not only too good for this world, but ultimately too good to be believed. This doesn’t change the degree to which I enjoyed the hours in her company or how I was shaken when she met her fate. ( )