Thomas Culpeper Sepulchre-without-Newgate church in London. Queen Catherine Howard and Lady Jane Rochford were both subsequently executed on 13 February 1542. In popular fiction, very little is told about Thomas Culpeper, save his association with King Henry VIII's fifth wife. He is portrayed in several plays and several writings, always closely associated with Catherine. In the book "A Tudor Tragedy; The Life and Times of Catherine Howard", by Lacey Baldwin Smith, the author writes that there were rumours during the time period that Thomas Culpeper and Catherine Howard intended to be married, before Henry VIII set his sights on her. The book
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