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.
She sent Anne Boleyn a monkey. She sent Jane Seymour quails. She housed Anne of Cleves for a fortnight. She put her own daughter in the path of the king. None of it was kindness. All of it was survival. For seven years it worked. Then it didn't.
He lived for fifty-two days. In those fifty-two days he was the most important person in England. Everything that came after him was the consequence of his absence.
His father died carrying the Tudor flag before Charles Brandon was old enough to walk. He spent the next sixty years making sure he never had to carry anyone else's.
Henry Fitzroy was born on the 15th of June 1519 at Blackmore Priory in Essex, the son of Henry VIII and Elizabeth Blount, a lady of the court whose dancing the king had particularly admired, and he was acknowledged from the moment of his birth with a thoroughness that made his status perfectly clear and his legal position perfectly impossible simultaneously.
