Catherine Carey Francis and Lady Knollys produced a number of offspring who survived to maturity. Of the children listed, only the last, Dudley, is known to have died in infancy: The possibility that Catherine, and perhaps her brother Henry, were illegitimate children of Henry VIII, appears in many works of fiction, including Philippa Gregory's "The Other Boleyn Girl". Catherine Carey is also a character in Gregory's "The Boleyn Inheritance", where she is sent to the royal court during the time of Queens Anne of Cleves and Catherine Howard, and in "The Virgin's Lover", where, as the mother of the seventeen-year-old Lettice Knollys,
Catherine Howard words, asking for forgiveness for her sins and acknowledging that she deserved to die 'a thousand deaths' for betraying the king, who had always treated her so graciously. Catherine was beheaded with a single stroke of the executioner's axe. Lady Rochford was executed immediately thereafter on Tower Green. Both their bodies were buried in an unmarked grave in the nearby chapel of St. Peter ad Vincula, where the bodies of Catherine's cousins Anne and George Boleyn also lay. Other cousins were also in the crowd, including the Earl of Surrey. King Henry did not attend. Catherine's body was not one