Our new Catherine Howard tour is a luxury, fully escorted, tour and the first of its kind devoted to the life of Henry VIII’s fifth, Queen Catherine Howard, for which we’ll be joined by best-selling historian Gareth Russell, author of the acclaimed Catherine Howard biography, Young and Damned and Fair.

Gareth’s book was described by Tracy Borman as “a stunning achievement in which Catherine is given a makeover so complete that she is virtually unrecognizable from the hopelessly naive girl of traditional history books.”

Every night of our tour as we re-trace the route of Catherine and Henry VIII’s tour of the North in 1541, Gareth will be giving an exclusive talk covering Catherine’s life from her childhood to her zenith as England’s queen. What went wrong? And how did this tour mark the beginning of the end?

The tour will start with meeting at our convenient pick-up point in London before heading to the sites where Catherine visited on her tour, including Lincoln Cathedral, York Minster, and the place where she allegedly held her fatal night-time meeting with Thomas Culpepper.

Using luxury hotels as our base, the tour will visit Grimsthorpe Castle and Pontefract Castle, as Gareth brings you into the glamorous but deadly world of 1541. We’ll see the same places Catherine saw as she reached the high point of her queenship, but which also marked the beginning of the end.

Like her, we will then head back to south to Hampton Court Palace, to see where Catherine was arrested and standing in the gallery still haunted by her ghost, before taking a guided trip to the Tower of London, where Catherine’s story ended on the scaffold and where she is buried.

This is a new tour about the rise and fall of Catherine Howard, with exclusive guides and talks by her biographer Gareth Russell. We will travel to the same sites she did and hear what went so catastrophically wrong for Henry’s “fair and beloved Queen Catherine.”