Katherine Howard was born around 1523, the daughter of Lord Edmund Howard and Joyce Culpeper, into a family that had the right surname and almost none of the resources that surname was supposed to guarantee. Edmund Howard was the younger brother of the Duke of Norfolk, which made him well-connected in the way that younger brothers of powerful men are always well-connected, adjacent to consequence without any of its material benefits.
The Roman Empire invented the import/export economy, concrete, central heating, and a dental hygiene industry built entirely on human urine. Three of these things are unambiguously impressive.
She was born on the 16th of December 1485 at the Archbishop's Palace of Alcalá de Henares, the fourth surviving child of Isabella I of Castile and Ferdinand II of Aragon, and the world she was born into was the most formidable political construction of the late fifteenth century.
