I quote directly from Professor Pollard, who mercifully glosses over the piteous details. “Rumours of Catherine Howard’s past indiscretions had at length reached the ears of the privy council.... Twenty-four hours later Cranmer put in his hands the evidence of the queen’s misconduct. Henry refused to believe it in the rude awakening from his dreams; he ordered a strict investigation to be made. Its results left no room for doubt. Dereham confessed his intercourse; Mannock admitted having taken liberties; and finally the queen herself confessed her guilt. The king was overwhelmed with grief and vexation, and shed bitter tears. He offered his wife a pardon and she might have escaped with nothing worse than a divorce had not proofs come to hand of her misconduct with Culpepper during Henry’s recent absence in the north. This offence was high treason and could not be covered by Henry’s pardon for her prenuptial immorality.” Henry feared lest the blood royal be contaminated. In January, 1542, Parliament considerately relieved this blubbering and neurotic man of his responsibility by “passing an Act of Attainder directed against his new wife, which, to save him pain, was signed by a Commission in his stead. Catherine declined his permission to go down to the house of Parliament and defend herself in person.” In due course she was beheaded in the Tower. The story is that she said, “I had rather die a Culpepper than live a Queen.” Doubtless in confessing at the back of her mind was the thought that it were better to be dead than to be married to King Henry VIII at the moment that his mental syphilis was approximating to its greatest terrors with all its obsessions and phobias. Seemingly the Parliament of England was not always so brave as we now think it to be. But if he knew so much about women as he had professed in the case of his repudiation of Anne of Cleves, why had he not applied his knowledge to the case of Catherine Howard before? It seems a reasonable thing to glance at the other symptoms of syphilis that occurred at the time during the reign of Catherine Howard when his greatest degeneracy was coming on. The ulcer on his leg sometimes closed, and the pain was so intense that he sometimes became speechless with agony and went black in the face.[6] He grew more and more corpulent every day. When he went on progress to the north he cleared the Tower by issuing orders that every prisoner in it was to be beheaded. If these in an absolute monarch are not symptoms of syphilitic psychasthenia, of a frightful moral and physical degeneration, what are they? Symptoms of whooping-cough, perhaps!