But wild, tempestuous Catherine was not long content with a husband nearly thirty years older than herself. Her reckless love for her cousin, Thomas Culpeper, was discovered, and she was executed in the Tower in February 1542 on the same spot as Anne Boleyn. The night beore the excution she asked for the block so that she could practise laying her head upon it, and as she mounted the scaffold said, "I die a Queen, but would rather die the wife of Culpeper. God have mercy on my soul. Good people, I beg you to pray for me."
          —Winston Churchill, A History of the English-Speaking Peoples, Vol 2: The New World