In 1539, after four failed marriages and only one sickly son and two daughters to succeed him, Henry VIII fell in love with seductive teenager Catherine Howard, first cousin of his second queen, Anne Boleyn. However, Catherine turned out to have a hidden sexual past. In the kindly, mature Catherine Parr he seemed to have found the perfect wife, but as historians Suzannah Lipscomb and Dan Jones recall when she tried to push Henry into religious reform, she too came within hours of the executioner's block.
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