On February 12, the queen and Lady Rochford, her accomplice, were taken to Tower Hill and beheaded. The queen, while she confessed the offences which had preceded her marriage, protested to the last before God and his holy angels that she had never violated her faith to the king. But her previous offences gave credibility to those which were subsequent to her marriage. With regard to Lady Rochford, the confidant of the queen, she was universally hated. People called to mind the fact that her calumnies had been the principal cause of the death of the innocent Anne Boleyn and of her own husband; and nobody was sorry for her. The king pardoned the old duchess of Norfolk and some others who had been prosecuted for not disclosing the crime. [Sidenote: THE QUEEN'S GUILT.] These events did not call forth within the realm many remarks of a painful kind for Henry VIII.; but the great example of immorality presented by the English court lessened the esteem in which it was held in Europe. There was no lack of similar licentiousness in France and elsewhere; but there a veil was thrown over it, while in England it was public talk. Opinion afterwards became severe with regard to the king; and when his conduct to three of his former wives was remembered, people said of the disgrace cast on him by Catherine Howard, he well deserved it. As for the Catholic party, which had given Catherine to Henry and had cherished the hope that by her influence it should achieve its final triumph, it was greatly mortified, and it has been so down to our own time. Some Catholics, referring to these offences, have tried to lessen the abhorrence and the shame of them by saying 'that a conspiracy was hatched to bring the queen to the scaffold.' But the evidence produced against Catherine is so clear that they have been obliged to alter their tone. Catholicism assuredly has had its virtuous princesses in abundance, but it must be acknowledged that she who became its patroness in England in 1541 did not do it much honor.[408]