rds now. Even as he,
with his last breath, had confessed his love for her, and mourned that the
King's passion for her had stood in the way of their honest union, so did
she, with flashing eyes and blazing cheeks, proclaim that love was
victorious over death; and that since there had been no mercy for the man
she loved she asked no mercy for herself from the King whose plaything of
a year she had been.

On Sunday evening, 12th February, she was told that she must be prepared
for death on the morrow, and she asked that the block should be brought
to her room, that she might learn how to dispose her head upon it. This
was done, and she calmly and smilingly rehearsed her part in the tragedy
of the morrow. Early in the morning, before it was fully light, she was
led out across the green, upon which the hoar-frost glistened, to the
scaffold erected on the same spot that had seen the sacrifice of Anne
Boleyn. Around it stood all the Councillors except Norfolk and Suffolk:
even her first cousin, the poet Surrey, with his own doom not far off,
witnessed the scene. Upon the scaffold, half crazy with fear, stood the
wretched Lady Rochford, the ministress of the Queen's amours, who was to
share her fate. Katharine spoke shortly. She died, she said, in full
confidence in God's goodness. She had grievously sinned and deserved
death, though she had not wronged the King in the particular way that she
had been accused of. If she had married the man she loved, instead of
being dazzled by ambition, all would have been well; and when the headsman
knelt to ask her forgiveness, she pardoned him, but exclaimed, "I die a
Queen, but I would rather have died the wife of Culpeper;" and then,
kneeling in prayer, her head was struck off whilst she was unaware.[229]
Lady Rochford followed her to the block as soon as the head and trunk of
the Queen had been piteously gathered up in black cloth by the ladies who
attended her at last, and conveyed to the adjoining chapel for sepulture
close to the grave of Anne Boleyn.

Katharine Howard had erred much for love, and had erred more for ambition,
but taking a human view of the whole circumstances of her life, and of the
personality of the man she married, she is surely more worthy of pity than
condemnation. Only a few days after her death we learn from Chapuys (25th
February) that "the King has been in better spirits since the execution,
and during the last three days before Lent there has been much feas