Katheryn Howard, The Scandalous Queen

This sumptuous novel in New York Times bestselling author Alison Weir's Six Tudor Queens series details the life of nineteen-year-old Katheryn Howard, King Henry VIII's fifth wife.

In the spring of 1540, Henry VIII is desperate to be rid of his German queen, Anna of Kleve. Prematurely aged and with an ever-growing waistline, he casts an amorous eye on a pretty nineteen-year-old, Katheryn Howard. Like her cousin Anne Boleyn, Katheryn is a niece of the Duke of Norfolk, England's premier Catholic peer, who is scheming to replace Anna of Kleve with a good Catholic queen.

A flirtatious, eager participant in the life of the royal court, Katheryn readily succumbs to the king's attentions when she is pushed into his path by her ambitious family. Henry quickly becomes besotted, and the wedding takes place a mere fortnight after the king's union to Anna is annulled. Henry tells the world that his new bride is a rose without a thorn and extols her virtue, while Katheryn delights in the pleasures of being queen and the rich gifts her adoring husband showers upon her: the gowns, the jewels, and the darling lapdogs. She comes to love the ailing, obese king, enduring his nightly embraces with fortitude and kindness. If she can bear him a son, her triumph will be complete.

But Katheryn has a past of which Henry knows nothing, and which comes back to haunt her—even as she courts danger yet again.