Katheryn Howard, The Scandalous Queen

Praise

“Absolutely stunning . . . I was completely gripped from the first page to the last. Katheryn emerges from the pages of this beautifully realized portrayal as beguiling, vivacious, and, in the end, tragically naive.  Her story, as a young woman who fell prey to the ruthless scheming of the men around her still resonates today, and Alison Weir tells it with characteristic verve and stunning period detail.”—Tracy Borman, author of The Private Lives of the Tudors and Henry VIII and the Men Who Made Him

“A wonderful book . . . Katheryn Howard is, for me, the most tragic of Henry VIII’s wives, and in her latest novel, Alison Weir covers her life from its early beginnings of impoverished nobility, her family wholly dependent on royal patronage, to her short period as queen, a position she had been pushed into, used as a pawn by her power-hungry family, though she lacked the intellect or sophistication to negotiate its pitfalls. The novel conveys the heart-rending pathos of a young woman executed, whose only real crime was her naïveté and her desire to be loved. It is a profoundly moving story that lingers long after the last page is turned.”—Elizabeth Fremantle, author of Queen’s Gambit and The Poison Bed

“This series is a serious achievement.”—The Times (London)
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“A vivid re-creation of a Tudor tragedy.”—Kirkus Reviews

“Katheryn Howard . . . not only deceived the king about her previous lovers but dallied with another man during their marriage. What on earth was she thinking? In the fifth novel in her Six Tudor Queens series, Weir convincingly imagines the answer to that question. Incorporating period sources about Katheryn (which weave smoothly into the narrative), she plunges readers into the viewpoint of a fun-loving, naive young woman whose unorthodox upbringing and poor choices precipitated her downfall. . . . It’s fascinating and disquieting to see how she justifies her decisions. Though Katheryn lacks the intellectual depth of Weir’s previous heroines, her character portrait is similarly astute.”—Booklist