The Tudors [Imaginary/Katherine Howard]

After watching the final season of the Tudors I became overwhelmed with pity for young Katherine Howard, Henry's fifth queen. I know that Katherine gets a lot of flak - both the historical woman and the television portrayal by Tamzin Merchant but I personally feel sorry for her. I feel that critics of Katherine Howard are too quick to judge her without realizing that we have the benefit of hindsight - i.e. we know what is going to happen to her. At the time, Katherine was a very young (sources vary as to how old she actually was but she was definitely somewhere in her mid to late teens) girl with little education and decidedly not very bright. While we would think that any logical person would have kept their cousin's deadly fate in the back of their mind - knowing that a husband capable of killing one wife was certainly capable of killing another, Katherine was not the most forward thinking of people. Undoubtedly she was frivolous and a bit silly but she had no political ambitions and was never intentionally malicious towards anyone, save her little spat with Lady Mary. And for those who revile her for only marrying the king for material advantage... well...what exactly could she do? Stand up to her family? Perhaps, if she was as spunky as Anne Boleyn. But stand up to the king? "I thank your gracious majesty for the honor of bestowing upon my humble person your noble hand but as you have previously dispatched one of your wives by sword, she being mine own cousin Anne Boleyn and others the Lady of Aragon and Jane Seymour through neglect, I think I shall take the example of the good Lady of Cleves and settle for a castle and a pension. Let's be platonic friends." Yeah....right.

The sequences are pretty self-explanatory. The only one that might get confusing is toward the end when Katherine is practicing laying her head on the block and has several flashbacks of the Lady Elizabeth. I meant by this to express how deeply Katherine's fate affected the young Elizabeth and might very probably have turned her against matrimony after seeing what her ruthless father did to his beautiful young wife.

Clips: The Tudors [Showtime, Season 4, Episodes 1-5]
Song: "Imaginary" (Paper Flowers), by Evanescence

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