(Fourth Wife of King Henry VIII)

The teenage bride the Norfolks gave the king
lacked only brains and her virginity.
Henry was in no mood for questioning
his rose without a thorn.  If only she
had borne a son, he never would have doubted
her purity.  But as the months went by
her youthful dalliance with boys was outed,
then the king’s young attendant caught her eye
and there were secret meetings, hide and seek.
It all came out.  She wrote to beg for grace,
pleading that men were bold and girls were weak,
and Henry wept, but nothing could efface
her crime.  The headsman ended all her pains.
Sometimes it pays a woman to have brains.

*****

Gail Whie writes: “After reading Gareth Russell’s excellent biography of Catherine, Young & Damned & Fair, I decided to take a leaf out of Daniel Galef’s Imaginary Sonnets and give her a sonnet of her own.  I figured that any woman who would commit adultery while married to Henry the Eighth must be either desperate or spectacularly stupid.  And on the path to inevitable execution, I think she really broke the king’s heart.”

Gail White lives in the Louisiana bayou country with her husband and cats.  Her latest chapbook, Paper Cuts, is available on Amazon, along with her books Asperity Street and Catechism.  She appears in a number of anthologies, including two Pocket Poetry chapbooks, five Potcake Chapbooks, and Nasty Women Poets.  She enjoys being a contributing editor to Light Poetry Magazine.  Her dream is to live in Oxfordshire, but failing that, almost any place in Western Europe would do.

“Catherine Howard” by Stifts- och landsbiblioteket i Skara is licensed under CC BY 2.0.