Katherine the Queen: The Remarkable Life of Katherine Parr

by Linda Porter

  Failing eyesight was also bothering him, as it had his paternal grandmother, Lady Margaret Beaufort, and would, eventually, his daughter, Mary. Henry sometimes used a reading glass, set in wood with a handle, and he also wore spectacles, which were kept in a golden case engraved with the arms of England. These fitted onto the nose and could be held in place with ties – not very dignified, perhaps, but useful in helping him to read, and probably seen only by those very close to him, since reading was something he still did in the privacy of his bedchamber. There is a wonderful illustration in one of the Royal Manuscripts in the British Library that shows a younger king reading his psalter in a chair beside his bed. Although the figure of the king himself is out of proportion, with a large head atop an impossibly small body, making him look rather like a bookish gnome, the surroundings are superbly rendered. On the tiled floor, at his feet, are two more beautifully bound books. Henry collected such fine things, with more taste and less trouble than he collected wives.

  The glasses speak of the king’s determination to deal with his problems and make the necessary adjustments that come with age. Despite the agonizing bouts with his legs and the traumas of his personal life, Henry VIII had most definitely not given up on life or the business of being a king. He could no longer joust or play tennis but his cultural interests remained of great importance to him. His library of books and manuscripts had been growing throughout his reign and though the majority of them were, by the 1540s, kept in his three principal residences (Greenwich, Hampton Court and Whitehall), some also travelled with him as he visited his lesser houses in the country. During the course of his lifetime, the collection moved increasingly from manuscripts, many of which had been inherited from his father and more distant royal ancestors, to bound and printed books.

  In the absence of accurate figures for the number of volumes possessed by Henry VIII, an indication of the importance he attached to them lies in the care taken of the collection. There is no surviving catalogue of the contents of the Greenwich library at the time of the king’s death, but we do know that it was housed on one of the upper floors of the palace (to safeguard it from flooding), that it had seven desks for the reading and storing of books and a large table, under which more volumes were kept. There were 329 volumes in all at Greenwich, mostly arranged by colour rather than topic. The larger and more precious books, including ‘two great bibles in Latin’ and ‘a great book called an herbal’, were listed separately.16 By 1542, when Henry was more often at Whitehall than Greenwich, the privy councillor Sir Anthony Denny, who grew ever closer to Henry in the monarch’s final years, made an inventory of the 910 books in the upper library. By this time, a more sophisticated system of cataloguing had been developed for what was very much a working library. It contained ‘one table covered with green cloth with sundry cupboards in it to set books in with four old curtains of buckram fringed with green silk to hang afore the books’.17

  Henry’s collection was wide-ranging, covering romances, music, medical books, volumes on the conduct of warfare, genealogies showing the Tudor descent from Adam and Eve, and many French manuscripts. There were items connected with personal faith, Bibles, psalters, ordinals and many works of theology. The theological works reflected the king’s intense interest in the great debates of the Reformation and his own developing ideas as the divorce from Katherine of Aragon slowly progressed. The contents of the libraries came from different sources; some were gifts, others commissions, or dedications from writers wanting to make a name for themselves. Many more came from the dissolved monasteries. As a younger man, Henry had been an avid note-taker (always in Latin) and underliner, but in later years he tended to skim the contents, send the book out to various learned parties (often with opposing viewpoints) and then summon the readers in for discussions. His mind was still very active, even if his body was not. He enjoyed disputation, providing, of course, that his view prevailed. An educated spouse must have seemed appealing. No doubt he did not dwell on the fact that the last wife who could talk on something like equal terms with him was Anne Boleyn.

  The development of his library bears witness to the progression of his own views during his reign but it still took second place to his main cultural interest, music. Henry was more than just a competent musician. He could perform on the lute and virginals, and he studied the organ. At his death, he possessed over 300 musical instruments, a collection that rivals his library in its different way. Music was an important part of Henry’s daily life and he had, certainly when younger, been no mere listener but a keen participant, playing the recorder and singing with his courtiers. More than thirty pieces written by him survive. Many were arrangements of continental compositions but he was clearly proficient enough to undertake such work and he also wrote several Masses, though these have subsequently been lost. He employed sixty professional musicians, a number of whom performed regularly in his Privy Chamber. As the reign went on, he tended to follow the fashion for Italian musicians, among whom were the Bassano brothers, Venetian singers who lived in the Charterhouse, near Katherine Parr. As queen, she would become an enthusiastic patron of the brothers. It is even possible that they were a link between Katherine and Henry VIII before she married the king.

  He was less devoted to the fine arts. Of course, he collected many fine things but there was no one area of concentration. He expected to have his portrait painted and for the result to send out inescapable messages about his earthly power, but his patronage of painters was rather half-hearted. It had been Anne Boleyn who introduced Hans Holbein the Younger to Henry’s court and the king himself does not seem to have viewed Holbein with any great enthusiasm. Perhaps the famously controversial portrait of Anne of Cleves did not help Holbein’s cause. By the 1540s, Henry was patronizing the Flemish artists Scrots and Master John as well as the miniaturists the Horenbouts. Holbein never, so far as we know, painted Katherine Parr.

  The king was a complex man. In any consideration of Henry at this stage of his life, it is easy to concentrate on his gigantic frame and reduce the man inside to a series of well-worn clichés. In this way the king becomes a cruel, fat, much-married tyrant, who, as the old saying goes, spared no man in his anger and no woman in his lust. This cut-out Henry has become an historical legend, the stuff of blockbuster television series. Like all legends, it contains elements of truth. But there was more to him than this enduring reputation suggests. As he looked at the condition of his kingdom in 1543 and weighed the threats to it, both internal and external, he was determined to maintain his power and authority in the face of a storm that he, as much as anyone else, had unleashed more than a decade earlier.

  His personal beliefs were firmly fixed on a ‘middle way’ in religion. This had been made clear in a letter written to the ambassador in France in 1540. The occasion was the fall of Cromwell (who had been accused of fomenting heresy) but the message was clear: ‘the king’s majesty hath of long season travailed, and yet most godly travaileth, to establish such an order in matters of religion, as, neither declining on the right hand nor on the left hand’.18 To underline this approach, three religious radicals and three Catholics were executed at the same time. One of the Catholics was Richard Featherstone, tutor to Princess Mary since she was nine years old. The following year, the princess’s former Lady Governess, the countess of Salisbury, was beheaded in the Tower, as the king made sure that all those who had supported his elder daughter, and the Catholic opposition she represented, were eliminated. Politics and religion were inextricable, for above all else, the king wanted unity and the maintenance of an orthodoxy that was unique to Henrician England. His was ‘a middle way neither Lutheran nor traditionally Catholic’. The king had fully endorsed the destruction of shrines, removal of images, cessation of pilgrimages and the assault on superstition that characterized the first phase of the Reformation in England. He had dissolved the monasteries and, through the wholescale distribution of their lands, set in motion a major change to English society.

 
Yet Henry could not be reconciled to the teaching of Martin Luther. The distaste he had felt as a young man for the German reformer never faded. The king maintained the straightforward piety in religious observance that was so important to his daughter Mary – a vital link between the two of them that has often been overlooked. Henry heard Mass regularly. It was an important part of his daily life and he could not be shaken in his belief in transubstantiation. This belief in the Real Presence of the body and blood of Christ in the bread and wine of the Mass was a fundamental point of difference between Henry and the reformers. But it was not the only one. Justification by faith alone did not convince him, either. He believed there must be more to salvation and would not accept that good works and charity did not play their part in the redemption of the soul.

  These convictions were incorporated into new instructions for the clergy of England issued in spring 1543. Known as The King’s Book, they had been commissioned in 1540 as a replacement to The Bishop’s Book of 1538. Often seen as a setback for the cause of reform, The King’s Book (or A Necessary Doctrine and Erudition for any Christian Man, to give the work its proper name), was, in fact, the result of lengthy discussions among all Henry’s bishops. The work did not diverge so far from its predecessor as has been supposed but there were those, including Archbishop Cranmer, who wanted further reform and hoped that the process started in the 1530s would be an evolving one. The king saw things differently in 1543 and was committed to safeguarding the equilibrium in religious matters that he had striven so hard, and so bloodily, to effect. This was made clear in the preface to The King’s Book, which begins:

  Like as in the time of darkness and ignorance, finding our people seduced and drawn from the truth by hypocrisy and superstition, we by the help of God and his word have travailed to purge and cleanse our realm from the apparent enormities of the same; wherein, by opening of God’s truth, with setting forth and publishing of the scriptures, our labours (thanks be to God) have not been void and frustrate; so now, perceiving that in the time of knowledge the Devil (who ceaseth not at all times to vex the world) hath attempted to return again … into the house purged and cleansed … we find entered into our people’s hearts an inclination to sinister understanding of scripture, presumption, arrogancy, carnal liberty and contention; we be therefore constrained, for the reformation of them in time, and for avoiding of such diversity in opinions as by the said evil spirits as might be engendered, to set forth, with the advice of our clergy, such a doctrine … with the principal articles of our religion, as whereby all men may uniformly be led and taught the true understanding of that which is necessary for every Christian man to know …’19

  He did not mention that Christian women could be similarly contaminated by a ‘sinister understanding’ of the scriptures but the italicized phrases are eerily prescient of his alleged reaction to Katherine Parr’s religious interests three years later. Katherine’s personal beliefs in 1543 were still developing and there was nothing about this aspect of her life that troubled the king.

  Henry knew that the issue of further reform divided his churchmen and the shifting groupings of those around him at court. Perhaps that did not displease him; and if the conservatives wanted to think they were in the ascendant, he would humour them, for a while. But while the year of his marriage to Katherine Parr was for a long time viewed as the nadir of the evangelicals, recent scholarship has shown that this is too simplistic an interpretation.20 It amused Henry to keep people in check, and possibly the choice of his new wife figured in these considerations. She was the widow of a staunch supporter of the old faith but her brother was aligned with the reformers. It was not obvious where Katherine herself stood, but her character, unostentatious piety and virtue were unassailable.

  English religious policy remained fluid throughout the 1540s and it should be remembered that the overwhelming majority of the king’s subjects were content to follow his lead and to acknowledge him as Supreme Head of the Church. And in 1543 religion was far from being the king’s only preoccupation. He still kept a very close eye on international developments. The Reformation had long since become a major factor in European affairs, complicating traditional rivalries. Henry (a heretic, but at least a Christian one, unlike the Turks with whom France had sided against Emperor Charles V) sat on the sidelines for much of his reign, courted from time to time by both sides but trusted by neither. He liked to think of himself as an important player in Europe, but in truth he was not. England had not been involved in a war on the Continent for many years, though there were scares of an invasion in the late 1530s, when it was feared that France and the Holy Roman Empire might unite to impose the old Catholic order on England. This threat receded, but relations with France remained uneasy, in part because of the situation in Scotland. The northern border was a constant headache for Henry. His dealings with his nephew, the flamboyant, promiscuous but still very Catholic King James V, were always difficult. He may have physically borne a strong similarity to the young Henry VIII but James was keen to govern Scotland well after the inevitable difficulties of his long minority and he meant to do so without interference from his relatives. The Scottish king resented English bullying and his uncle’s ill-disguised aim of imposing his will on the Stuart monarchy. He would not agree to become a client of the Tudors, despite the fact that his mother, Margaret, was Henry VIII’s elder sister. But she died in 1541 and James was not, in any case, on good terms with her.

  By the autumn of 1542, James V’s determination to push the English away from his borders led to the campaign that had called Lord Latimer back to the north. It was to prove a disaster for the Scots. On 24 November a raiding party of Scots, consisting of many of the nobility who had joined James’s 18,000-strong army, found itself cut off amid the salt marshes and rising tide of the river Esk, in the aptly named ‘debatable lands’ of the border. Facing them was a force of experienced English lancers under Sir Thomas Wharton.21 Though Wharton’s force was much smaller, amounting to no more than 3,000 men in total, it wreaked havoc on those involved in an ill-considered advance. At the ensuing battle of Solway Moss many Scots were captured and their army put to flight. James V, who was not actually at the battle, retired to Edinburgh, with a view to re-grouping. He had certainly not given up and was hopeful that his French queen would produce an heir. At the beginning of December, his wife, Mary of Guise, gave birth to a daughter. James never saw the child. By that time he was already unwell with a disease that progressed at shocking speed. Following swiftly on the news of Wharton’s success against the Scots, Henry VIII soon learned, presumably without much real sorrow, of the death of his nephew.

  The story that James, on his deathbed, had observed of the state of Scotland and his baby daughter’s arrival, ‘It began with a lass and it will end with a lass’ is probably apocryphal. But, for Henry VIII, the birth of Mary Queen of Scots, in a mourning and deeply divided kingdom, was an unlooked-for opportunity and one he meant to use to good effect. His plan, to marry the little girl to his own son, Prince Edward, amounted to an annexation of Scotland. As a ploy, it was ahead of its time. Though uniting the two crowns was an obvious solution to centuries of low-level but wearingly destructive combat along the border, the French were not yet ready to lose their influence in Scotland. Mary of Guise was from a powerful faction at the French court and though many Scottish nobles disliked her, there was insufficient support for Henry VIII among the Scottish aristocracy for the king to be able to gain control immediately of the infant Queen of Scots. He knew that he needed to consolidate and extend his influence in Scotland before his policy could be brought to successful fruition. A massive military invasion and occupation was simply out of the question.

  As the frigid weather lifted, Henry had much to keep him occupied. He was accustomed to upheaval, opposition, foreign threat, obloquy, failed marriages and unreliable nobles. He knew that, for all his efforts, he had only one male heir, who was still a child. The likelihood of a lengthy minority, such as the Scot
s now faced, was impossible to ignore. The question of the succession had to be addressed, and his personal life stabilized. He wanted to marry again. At some point unknown, but probably not later than April, he asked Lady Latimer to be his wife. She did not give him an immediate reply and so he waited, while she grappled with her emotions, though it is unlikely that he ever gave any serious consideration to the thought that she might refuse him.

  Katherine was faced with a truth that must have seemed overwhelming at first. Thomas Seymour was exciting and promised a personal happiness quite different from her previous husbands. But the king was the king. He offered Katherine and her family power and wealth undreamed of when the Parrs of Kendal set out on their tortuous road to advancement eighty years before. Ultimately, he could not be denied. In fact, he was so convinced that he had made the right choice that he allowed Katherine a lengthy period to respond to his proposal of marriage. During that time, probably spent at her home in the Charterhouse, she had ample opportunity to contemplate what she would lose and also what she would gain. Subsequently, she acknowledged her anguish, but at the time she was prudent enough to keep it well within the circle of her immediate family.

  Thomas Seymour, whose attentions to Katherine may have heightened the king’s own interest, was wise enough to know that he should leave the field clear. Katherine would not be his, or, at least, not yet. If he had to give her up, losing her to Henry was less of a disappointment than if she had chosen anyone else. Perhaps Seymour looked to the future. The king was elderly, in progressively bad health and his wife would probably survive him, unless unexpected illness or death in childbirth intervened. If the king should pass away first, she would not be merely Lady Latimer, the widow of a provincial lord who had displeased his monarch, but Queen Katherine, and would retain her royal status. His disappointment may well have been leavened somewhat by the realization that Katherine was worth waiting for, in more ways than one.