Notorious Royal Marriages: A Juicy Journey through Nine Centuries of Dynasty, Destiny, and Desire

by Leslie Carroll

  Lord Latimer was buried on March 2, 1543, leaving Catherine at liberty to wed the man who had utterly captured her heart—but he wasn’t the king. Her inamorata was Sir Thomas Seymour, the darkly handsome, ambitious, and reckless older brother of the late queen Jane. Charismatic and cosmopolitan, Seymour cut a romantic dash at court. Being widely traveled and battle-hardened on both land and sea made him even more of a chick magnet.

  Unfortunately, he didn’t make his move in time; by the late spring of 1543, Henry had exercised his droit du seigneur and proposed to Catherine. However, she had no hunger to be Queen of England. The king’s attentions terrified her. “Better to be his mistress than his wife,” she purportedly exclaimed, having seen or heard enough about the way Henry treated his spouses to not want the job. Although an offer of marriage from the king was one she couldn’t refuse, Catherine still suffered a crisis of conscience, asking God to impart His plan for her. An “evangelical,” or proponent of the reformed religion, Catherine ultimately had an epiphany: It was the will of the Almighty that she accept Henry’s hand, becoming his wife and queen, in order to have a profound effect on completing England’s conversion to the new religion.

  So she laid aside her attraction to Thomas Seymour and accepted her destiny.

  Catherine rejoined the court at Greenwich on June 19, which is probably when she gave the king her consent. On July 11 the Archbishop of Canterbury, Thomas Cranmer, issued his license permitting the couple to wed “in any church, chapel, or oratory without the issue of banns.”

  Catherine and Henry were married in the Queen’s Privy Closet in Greenwich on July 12, 1543, in a quiet ceremony conducted by Stephen Gardiner, the Bishop of Winchester. The two most honored of the twenty or so guests were Henry’s daughters, Mary—just four years younger than her new stepmother—and nine-year-old Elizabeth.

  Omitted from the guest list was Henry’s “good sister,” Anne of Cleves, who was still angling for a second shot at being Mrs. Tudor, and was rather miffed that she had been passed over for a commoner who was “by no means so handsome as she herself is.” Perhaps the pill would have been less bitter for Anne to swallow if Henry had wed a womb again, a young and fertile teen, rather than someone who was three years Anne’s senior, a woman who “gives no hope of posterity to the king, for she had no children by her first two husbands.” Even so, Catherine was twenty-one years younger than her third bridegroom.

  Henry recited his vows “with a joyous look” as he held Catherine’s hands. When asked by the bishop if he took Catherine to be his wife, he replied with a resounding “yea.” No record has been made of what might have been going through the bride’s head at the time. Perhaps she was hoping she’d get to keep it. That day, Catherine was proclaimed Queen of England. But there was no grand procession into London or lavish coronation ceremony.

  A few days later the newlyweds embarked on a Royal Progress—a tour of the kingdom that kept them together for the next six months. For much of the time during the early part of the marriage Catherine, Henry, and all three of his children lived in one household. Although the king himself suffered from myriad ailments, his domestic situation was the healthiest it had ever been.

  Catherine may have thought of Thomas Seymour every time she gave herself to Henry, but she did her best to keep the king enticed in the boudoir. Among her first purchases as a newlywed were “eleven yards of black damask for a nightgown” and “for the making of a nightgown of black satin with two burgundian garde[s] [sleeve trimmings] embroidered and edged with velvet.” As fastidious as Henry about personal hygiene, Catherine routinely soaked in a leaden tub, indulging in milk baths scented with aromatic oils, such as cinnamon, clove, and olive. She purchased rosewater and other fragrances; groomed her eyebrows with silver tweezers; and was never without her breath mints flavored with clove, licorice, or cinnamon.

  Catherine’s relations benefited enormously from her new status. Over the Christmas holidays in 1543-44 her brother was created Earl of Essex and her uncle, Lord Parr, was made a baron. It was during that same holiday season that Henry met with the Viceroy of Sicily, an envoy of Charles V of Spain, to discuss plans for a joint invasion of France.

  On July 7, 1544, the Privy Council convened at Whitehall to hear and endorse Henry’s plans for Catherine’s regency in his absence. She would be responsible for “His Highness’s Process,” which included all governmental, financial, and legal business, and which “shall pass in her name.” A five-man council was appointed to assist her.

  Henry departed for France on July 11 and Catherine rode with him as far as Greenwich. Soon after they said farewell, Catherine wrote to her husband, to tell him,

  Although the . . . time . . . of days neither is long nor many of your Majesty’s absence, yet the want of your presence [is] so much . . . desired of me . . . that I cannot quietly pleasure in anything until I hear from your Majesty . . . and thus love maketh me in all things to set apart mine own commodity and pleasure to embrace most joyfully his will and pleasure whom I love. God, the knower of secrets, can judge these words not only to be written with ink, but most truly impressed in the heart.

  Her words show how adept Catherine had become at managing her often difficult husband, playing to his vanity, assuring him of his supremacy in their relationship, and being artfully female while remaining heartfelt. If nothing else, they were intellectually compatible, and Catherine had entered the marriage with her eyes wide open. Although she hadn’t been in love with Henry at the time she accepted his hand, time and proximity had metamorphosed her feelings into an affectionate and respectful, if not wholly ardent, love.

  But Catherine’s personality was not as placid as her champions would lead us to believe. She shared the king’s passion for such lively recreational pursuits as hunting and dancing, and no doubt her quick wit and her outspokenness helped divert Henry from his troubles. She was indeed loyal and affectionate to a fault—but she also had a fiery temper.

  During Catherine’s regency she was the de facto head of the royal family. Aware of the precariousness of her husband’s health and the possibility that he might not return from the war, she went on Progress with the three royal children in order to present to the country a show of unity and continuity. She considered it vital to familiarize herself with the needs of her subjects throughout the kingdom in addition to proving that she could handle the regent’s responsibilities, should the job become a permanent one. Catherine also managed the council and oversaw the supplies of troops, materiel, and money for Henry’s multifronted military campaigns, as well as rendering decisions on issues that affected northern England, signing five royal proclamations during her regency. Her formal signature, “Catherine the Queen KP,” radically included the initials of her maiden name.

  Catherine had adopted as her royal motto To Be Useful in All I Do, and indeed she was. Before her patience was required to help nurse Henry during his final illnesses, she reconciled him to his two daughters, leading to the 1544 Act of Succession that permitted Mary and Elizabeth to accede to the throne—although the act did not relegitimize them. Despite their widely divergent religious views, Catherine and Mary got along very well, as they were both among the increasing number of noblewomen described by the scholar Nicholas Udall as “given to the study of devotion and of strange [that is, foreign] tongues.”

  Catherine also had a profound influence on her younger stepdaughter. While Henry was in France, the eleven-year-old Elizabeth wrote Catherine a warm and articulate letter in her newly learned language of Italian, reminding the queen that it had been “a whole year” since they’d seen each other. She missed Catherine, hoped to see her again soon, but also eagerly anticipated a reunion with her father on his return from the Continent.

  So Catherine brought Elizabeth to court for the summer, where the young princess received an up-close-and-personal object lesson in her stepmother’s evangelical convictions as well as in Catherine’s prodigious competence, efficiency, capability, and the respec
t she commanded in a man’s world. During those few months Elizabeth also established relationships with members of Catherine’s household. Fourteen years later, as Queen of England, she would tap some of the same talent.

  Catherine was the epicenter of a literary circle focused on evangelical tracts written or published in the vernacular. At a time when most women of the gentry were barely educated, Catherine was the author of at least one devotional work. One of only seven early-Tudor-era females to be a published writer, her intellectual accomplishments were rare for her day. Catherine’s first book, The Prayers Stirring the Mind unto Heavenly Meditations, was published by the royal printer in June of 1545 and became an immediate best-seller. It was reprinted that November, and went through nineteen editions during the sixteenth century. Another of Catherine’s books, Lamentation of a Sinner, was published nine months after Henry’s death; the queen had kept her manuscript hidden from her husband because of its subversive ideology, which included the concept that worldly princes were impotent in comparison to the heavenly prince, Jesus Christ. Catherine also commissioned translations of works that required more scholarship than she possessed; the Princess Mary, with her superior knowledge of Latin, was persuaded to be one of the translators.

  But Catherine became overconfident in Henry’s affections. Evincing a surprising insensitivity to the right time and place for evangelizing in his presence, she was not attuned to Henry’s sudden and volatile mood swings and his capacity for unrepentant cruelty, which intensified in his final years. Not having been at court when other royal favorites, including Thomas More, Cardinal Wolsey, Anne Boleyn, and Thomas Cromwell, had fallen from the king’s grace and met their grisly ends, Catherine overestimated Henry’s tolerance.

  Therefore, her spirited sparring with Henry over the hot-button theological issues of the day nearly cost her her head. She didn’t merely debate with her husband; she contradicted him and presumed to correct and instruct him. According to a contemporary, John Foxe, Catherine’s regular prayer meetings and religious discussions in her Privy Chamber “were not secretly done, so neither were their preachings unknown to the King . . . whereof at first, and for a great time, he seemed very well to like.” But Foxe felt that Catherine pushed the envelope just a smidge too much and this hubris presaged her downfall.

  The winter of 1545-46 marked a sea change in the royal marriage. By January 1546, a full year before Henry’s death, he and Catherine no longer enjoyed lighthearted pleasures together. Henry’s immense girth and numerous ailments rendered him practically immobile, and rather than wait for him to visit her, Catherine spent long hours in his apartments in order to share quality time with him. Their conversations invariably turned to the subject of religion, but one day, plagued by pain from the ulcerated wound on his leg, Henry nearly lost his temper in her presence. He bid her a hearty “Farewell sweetheart,” but no sooner had her footsteps become a distant echo than the king exclaimed, “A good hearing it is when women become such clerks; and a thing much to my comfort, to come in mine old days to be taught by my wife.” Testy and cranky, Henry had no desire to hear Catherine’s moralizing and sermonizing. The tenets of the new religion—which he had enthusiastically embraced in order to justify his divorce from Katherine of Aragon and his marriage to Anne Boleyn—now got on his very last nerve. All too aware that the meeting with his Maker was on the horizon, Henry flirted with reverting toward his former, more traditional convictions, although he thoroughly enjoyed his religious autonomy and would never have considered reconciling with Rome.

  Eager to bring Catherine down, Stephen Gardiner, Bishop of Winchester—who had officiated at her wedding to Henry—in concert with the Lord Chancellor Sir Thomas Wriothesley, conspired to turn the king against her. It was forbidden for most of Henry’s subjects, especially women of all social strata, to possess religious tracts—including the Bible—that were written in the vernacular (English), because it gave them a measure of power that made both crown and clergy uncomfortable. Wriothesley and Gardiner aimed to convince Henry that his wife’s ambitious religious goals should be viewed as treacherous. Their plans for a coup included arresting the queen’s three leading ladies-in-waiting, seizing the contraband books in their possession, and sending Catherine to the Tower.

  On the surface, Henry appears to have been a key player in this scheme, confiding to one of his physicians—both of whom were closely tied to Catherine—how he intended to rid himself of such a “doctress” as his wife. But if he had really been on board with the plan, wouldn’t it have been an odd thing to discuss it with his doctor? The king swore the medical man to secrecy “on peril of his life,” which he must have done with a nudge and a wink, knowing that the doctor would probably go straight to the queen with the news.

  So maybe Henry was not quite as keen to be rid of Catherine as it seems. Perhaps he had not been entirely convinced that her actions were treasonous and was appearing to appease his councilors by permitting them to go ahead with their scheme, all the while knowing that he would personally abort it. What seems to have taken place is that Henry outgamed the gamers, as he had done once before on a similar occasion. The king had rescued Archbishop Cranmer from imminent arrest by his conservative enemies, by giving him his ring to show to the Privy Council as a mark of royal protection. Therefore, by informing the doctor of Gardiner and Wriothesley’s plans Henry may have deliberately intended for the plot to be leaked to Catherine or her supporters.

  Catherine discovered the warrant when it accidentally fell from the pocket of a councilor’s robe—literally hours away from being arrested on charges of treason for her political and religious opinions. Her hysterics brought Henry’s doctor to her chamber; he told her about the plot and persuaded the queen to muster every shred of dignity and immediately appeal to the king, begging his forgiveness. “If she would do so, and show her humble submission into him . . . she should find him gracious and favorable unto her.”

  A terrified Catherine took to her bed and pled mortal illness. Henry usually avoided his wives after taking the decision to dump them, but fearing that she was at death’s door, he rushed to Catherine’s chamber, where she confided her terror at having unintentionally displeased him, assuring Henry that she was eager to atone for her errors. She was heartened by his invitation to talk things over in his room; it was an indication that the door was open to reconciliation, something that had not been the case when Henry had wished to terminate his previous marriages.

  That evening, Catherine visited Henry alone. She began to mollify him with endearments, protesting that she had no opinion worth having since “must I, and will I, refer my judgment in this, and all other cases, to your Majesty’s wisdom, as my only anchor, Supreme Head and Governor here on earth, next under God.”

  “No so by St. Mary,” Henry demurred, not so easily appeased. “You are become a doctor, Kate, to instruct us (as we take it) and not to be instructed or directed by us.”

  The queen saved herself only by putting a quick and clever spin on her words, playing the weak and feeble-brained female who needed schooling by her worldly husband—explaining that she took an opposite view to Henry’s in order to reinvigorate the ailing king’s mind, giving him the chance to exercise his mental faculties by rebutting her.

  “Is that even so, sweetheart?” Henry asked her. “And tended your arguments to no worse end?”

  No doubt, Catherine’s head nodded vigorously.

  “Then we are perfect friends again,” he added.

  Their quarrel repaired, a reconciliation was sealed with several grateful kisses.

  The following day, when Catherine’s arrest was to have taken place, she and Henry were enjoying a constitutional in the garden when Wriothesley crossed their path with a detachment of the Guard, undoubtedly the very men who were conscripted to convey her to the Tower. As Wriothesley fell to his penitent knees, Henry royally chewed out his chancellor with a few choice words—most notably “Knave! Arrant knave, beast, and fool!”—at which poin
t Catherine sweetly interceded on Wriothesley’s behalf for Henry’s clemency.

  Henry would continue to make it up to Catherine by showering her with “all manner of pearls and precious stones . . . of skins and sable furs . . . clothes and new gentlenesses of fashion . . . for the pleasure of us [and] our dearest wife the queen.” As a mark of his trust and favor Henry also gave little Edward into Catherine’s care from midsummer until the onset of winter.

  Yet that year brought another scare for Catherine. Henry’s longtime friend Charles Brandon, Duke of Suffolk and former husband to the king’s younger sister Mary, died. He was survived by his much younger widow, and rumors swirled that the king was showing the dowager duchess—another Katherine, and another evangelical intellect—“great favor” during her grief and that he was considering making her wife number seven.

  But Henry was in no shape—literally—to even think about putting aside Catherine for another woman. His bulk was so immense that he had to be wheeled about or carried from place to place in purpose-built chairs that resembled iron baskets, winched up by chains when he needed to move from one floor of the palace to another. By the middle of January 1547, his various ailments and illnesses had finally caught up with him. After languishing for several days, on January 26, according to some sources, he summoned Catherine to his side for a tearful farewell, telling her, “It is God’s will that we should part.”

  The fifty-five-year-old Henry died at Whitehall in the wee hours of January 28, 1547. His death was kept secret for three days so that matters regarding a smooth succession could be put in order. On February 14, Henry VIII was buried at Windsor beside his beloved third wife, Jane Seymour. Their nine-year-old son succeeded him, to become Edward VI.