One of the most tragic figures of the Tudor Period has to be the fifth wife of King Henry VIII, Catheirne Howard. Historians believed that when she was roughly 19 years old in 1542 she was led to the scaffold inside of the Tower of London and that she was then executed by an axeman who performed the job in one swift strike of his sharp weapon. Catherine was executed for allegedly cheating on Henry VIII with one of his close courtiers Thomas Culpeper, who was actually one of her distant cousins. But Catherine was a woman who today has experienced a slightly reformed reputation as she is considered an abused woman who was taken advantage of by a number of men, including Henry VIII who only wanted one thing from her, to sleep with her. But another shocking part of her story is that Henry VIII ordered her remains to be covered in lime sparingly after her execution. The reason this was done was to ensure that her body was literally wiped off the face of the earth, and the King may have believed by doing this that he was ridding himself of his terrible fifth marriage. But one piece of evidence that sent the young Queen to the execution scaffold was a love letter she wrote to Thomas Culpeper, and this was damningly used to condemn her.