It is unclear how much Thomas Culpeper truly cared for Katheryn Howard. Certainly, she was young and attractive, but the very real chance that she might soon be the King’s widow seems unlikely to have been far from his calculations. For her part, it appears that Howard did care for Culpeper, to the extent she wished she had married him instead of King Henry.
Carrying on an affair, under the nose of a notably short-tempered and suspicious king – and one who had literally had your own cousin executed for her supposed adultery – was not a wise course of action for Katheryn Howard. It would end very poorly for her, Culpeper and her former lover Francis Dereham, less than a year later.
