Catherine Carey Carey of Aldenham in Hertfordshire, Gentleman of the Privy Chamber and Esquire of the Body to Henry VIII, and his wife Mary Boleyn, who had once been a mistress of the king. Catherine was Elizabeth I's first cousin. Some contemporaries also asserted that Catherine was an illegitimate child of Henry VIII, which would make her Elizabeth's half-sister. Although this was never acknowledged by the King, Catherine was given deference by the Court as she aged and came to resemble Henry. Catherine was said to be a witness to the execution of her aunt, Anne Boleyn, in 1536. But according to
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