A day for Observing the Obscure in history

On February 13, 1542, Catherine Howard ascended the stairs of a scaffold and laid her neck upon the cold wooden surface of the chopping block. Over 460 years later, I went to visit the place of Catherine's execution at the Tower of London, and her burial site in the Chapel of St. Peter ad vincula. There was no special mention of this being the anniversary of her execution, and I was struck by the sight of Catherine's bare crest beside Anne Boleyn's flower-laden one.

There is a reason for this, of course: Catherine Howard did not have a lasting impact on history. She was not the provocateur that Anne was, resulting in the king's divorce of his first wife and breaking from the Catholic Church. Catherine came years after all of that drama, when Henry was still casting around for a wife to love him and bear him what he most wanted: another son to stand in line for the throne of England. Her 18 months of marriage to King Henry had few lasting effects. Lacey Baldwin Smith puts it so beautifully – and rather heartbreakingly – in A Tudor Tragedy: "Even in doing her royal husband wrong, Catherine is strangely inconsequential; Henry would surely have grown old and senile, even without the knowledge that he had been cuckolded and cheated."

Catherine's marriage did have a lasting effect for her: let's not forget that neck upon the block, and the fall of the ax that swiftly followed. Catherine was young when this happened – by all accounts either a teenager or in her early twenties – and undeniably immature and naive, if not entirely innocent of all wrong-doing. History is filled with such people – many of them young, immature, naive – caught in the sticky web of politics and power. On this February 13, lets take a moment to ponder the fate of those barely named, barely accounted for in history. The ones who rarely escaped with their lives.