William Howard, 1st Baron Howard of Effingham bride, Anne of Cleves at Calais. While on an embassy to France in 1541 William Howard was charged with concealing the sexual indiscretions of his young niece, Catherine Howard, Henry VIII's fifth wife, and was recalled to England to stand trial. On 22 December 1541 Howard, his wife, and a number of servants who had been alleged witnesses to the Queen's misconduct were arraigned for misprision of treason, convicted, and sentenced to life imprisonment and loss of goods. He and most of the others were pardoned after Queen Catherine's execution on 13 February 1542. In 1544 Howard accompanied the Earl
Blood & Thunder: The Life & Art of Robert E. Howard Conan the Barbarian, was the first major biography of Howard since "Dark Valley Destiny: the Life of Robert E. Howard" (1983) by L. Sprague de Camp, Catherine Crook de Camp and Jane Whittington Griffin. Finn's book was intended as a corrective to both the earlier biography and the various misconceptions about Howard that had accumulated since the writer's death. According to "Publishers Weekly", "Finn quietly and expertly demolishes ... misconceptions about Howard [and] discusses Howard in the context of a populist writer whose dyspeptic view of civilization was forged in the corrupt Texas oil boomtowns in which he grew up