Katherine the Queen: The Remarkable Life of Katherine Parr
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Two crucial facets of the way she approached her role can be discerned from the start. The very day after her wedding, she requested ‘fine perfumes’ for her bedchamber at Hampton Court. A month later she ordered a large quantity of sweet-smelling herbs in pouches, specifically for her bed. Katherine was evidently concerned to make her boudoir enticing for the king and, given his sensitivity to Anne of Cleves (about which Katherine might well have heard from her sister and other women of the court) this was a clever move. The queen’s apartments at that time were located over the kitchens, and though this kept them warm in winter it must have been very unpleasant in the heat of the summer. Cooking odours are hardly conducive to lovemaking, and Katherine knew, literally from her wedding-night, that she must do something about this if she was to ensure frequent visits from her husband. This is not to suggest that she was overwhelmed by his attractions. Henry lumbering into view in his nightshirt and the servants all hastily taking their leave must have been a daunting prospect, but Katherine was equal to it. More alarming by far was the possibility that he would lose interest or stay away. Katherine Parr was a sensual woman herself and she understood Henry very well in this respect. In order to make sure her skin stayed soft and touchable, she took milk baths. Physical contact would be vital to the success of their marriage.
And on that success hinged the fortunes of her family, the second of her priorities in the summer of 1543. On 20 July she sent her brother, William, a letter, informing him that it had ‘pleased God to incline the king to take me as his wife, which is the greatest joy and comfort that could happen to me’. She went on to tell her brother that he was ‘the person who has the most cause to rejoice thereat’, and requested him to ‘let me sometimes hear of your health as friendly as if I had not been called to this honour’.6 This touching letter underlines her strong affection for her brother and exhibits almost a slight hesitancy about her new status. It has been suggested that her comments show bitterness towards William, but they are surely a straightforward statement of family affection, and more than a little celebratory.
Katherine Parr’s devotion to family typifies the major social preoccupation of sixteenth-century England. As queen, she chose the Parr family badge, a maiden’s head, as her own. And, unique among all queen consorts of Henry, she incorporated her family name in her signature, signing herself ‘Kateryn the Quene KP’. She might have been Lady Latimer when she married Henry VIII, but in her own mind she was always a Parr. By the end of the year, she saw her commitment fully rewarded when, two days before Christmas, the king created her brother earl of Essex and her uncle Baron Parr of Horton, in the Presence Chamber at Hampton Court. William Parr had waited seventeen years for the title that his mother hoped would be his when she limited her two daughters’ prospects by purchasing his marriage to Anne Bourchier. It had taken another, all together greater match by his elder sister to grant him the elusive earldom that his wife’s behaviour denied him. Katherine loved him dearly, as she did her uncle, and she must have felt immense satisfaction in witnessing the ceremony that raised them both high. But she, of course, was higher still.
KATHERINE WAS NOW the greatest lady in the land and also one of the richest. When she married Henry VIII she received the dower lands that traditionally formed part of the queen consort’s income. These were widely scattered over the south and midlands of England, ranging from Dorset in the west to Suffolk in the east and also encompassing substantial estates in Herefordshire and Worcestershire, on the Welsh borders. Baynard’s Castle was the official residence of all Henry’s queens in London, though Katherine did not spend much time there. It was used as storage for much of her wardrobe, especially winter items, like furs, and as the London residence of Anne and William Herbert. The manors, like most of her jewels, the chapel goods and even some books, had previously belonged to Katherine Howard. They went with the office and not the person. The 1542 inventory of Whitehall listed all the chapel stuff of the late queen; subsequently, it passed to Katherine Parr. The jewels that Anne Herbert looked after for her sister had previously adorned the shapely form of Henry’s fifth wife. Some had even belonged to Jane Seymour. Katherine seems to have enjoyed wearing them. Presumably she did not allow herself to dwell too much on their past. And the king bought her many new pieces as well as providing her with manors of her own, that would remain hers if he died. In mid-1544, she was granted Hanworth, Chelsea and Mortlake in southwest London. Of these, her favourite became Hanworth, where she was to establish her dowager household in 1547.7
The trappings of royalty were easily acquired, but what is especially interesting about Katherine Parr is how she set about developing her image and the implementation of her approach to being a queen. This is not to suggest some feminist subtext; Katherine appreciated the limits as well as the possibilities of the queen consort’s role, but she was astute at turning opportunity into advantage. The prolonged honeymoon with Henry VIII gave her unrivalled access to a man who few people knew really well and she learned quickly how to please him. And one effective way to do this was to be, in appearance and demeanour, precisely the kind of wife he wanted. She was to be an ornament, as well as a companion. What she definitely had no intention of being was a nurse. The Victorian view of Katherine Parr as a matronly lady who spent most of her time on her knees changing the bandages on Henry’s damaged legs is not someone that the queen herself would have recognized. Nor, indeed, would the king have wanted such a wife.
Instead, he took pleasure in a woman who adapted with style and enthusiasm to the role of being queen. In every aspect of her new life, Katherine was determined to leave her mark. She loved clothes and soon possessed a wardrobe stuffed with beautiful and expensive items: gowns, sleeves, kirtles, petticoats, partlets and placards in an array of colours, though the most common were crimson, purple and black. Crimson was always the queen’s favourite colour. She dressed her footmen and pages in crimson doublets and hose and she chose to wear crimson at one of her earliest and most important public functions, the reception in February 1544 for the Spanish duke of Najera.
The textiles she chose throughout her reign were a luxurious mix of costly fabrics: cloth of gold and silver (she was particularly fond of the latter), damasks, taffetas, silks, satins and velvets. During the three and a half years she was Henry’s wife, she ordered 315 yards of black velvet and 95 yards of black satin, as well as 34 yards of orange damask. The black satin was often used to make night gowns, the informal wear of high-born ladies in the evenings and not to be confused with apparel for sleeping.8 Katherine also loved shoes and had a collection that could compete with any modern lady occupying such a highprofile position. In the first year she was queen 117 pairs of shoes were delivered, though the number fell to a more moderate 47 for the following seven months.9
Even in intensely personal matters, the crimson theme was repeated. The queen’s lavatory must have been one of the most opulent privies in the whole of Tudor England at the time. It had a crimson velvet canopy, cushions covered in cloth of gold and a seat of crimson velvet for the royal posterior. A removable commode was covered with red silk and ribbons, attached with gilt nails. Seldom can bodily functions have been performed in such splendour.10
A queen must be magnificent but also a trend-setter, and Katherine balanced her support of contemporary jewellery designers like the Dutchman Peter Richardson with continued patronage of John Skut, the tailor to all Henry’s previous queens and to Princess Mary. Apart from the fact he began his royal service for Katherine of Aragon in 1519, nothing is known of his background. Clearly, he was good enough to be in demand over a very long period. The garments Skut made for Katherine reflected the latest fashions, the same type of French, Dutch, Italian and Venetian styles that she had ordered for her stepdaughter, Margaret Neville, before becoming queen.11 The queen was also a great admirer of embroidery, which suggests that she, like her stepdaughter Mary, was highly proficient with a needle. Katherine patronized the embroiderer Guillaume Brellant, wh
o was already working for the Crown when she married Henry VIII. The young Elizabeth, with her already well-developed eye for what would please, gave her stepmother New Year’s gifts in the years 1544 and 1545 featuring beautiful covers that she had worked herself.12
The earliest portrait of Katherine as queen tells us a great deal about the image she sought to present. It is an impressive fulllength portrait (the first of an English queen) painted probably in 1544 by the Flemish court painter known as Master John. Katherine’s exalted rank and grandeur are emphasized by the sumptuousness of her French fashions and her jewels. She wears ‘a gown of cloth of silver tissue woven with a very large repeat pomegranate design. The tight-fitting bodice has a square neckline and a low-pointed waistline, while the conical shape of the skirt is created by her farthingale.’13 The sleeves also have a rich fur lining, indicating that the portrait was painted in winter. The queen is adorned with a pendant and necklace and an unusual girdle made of cameos. The girdle seems to have been a favourite, though it and the other pieces of jewellery had once belonged to Katherine Howard. The crown-headed brooch, however, seems to have been her own, possibly a gift from Henry. The pomegranates are an interesting decoration for the gown, since they were the badge of Katherine of Aragon, who was also credited with introducing the farthingale to England.14 Whether this was conscious homage to the woman who was, in all likelihood, Katherine’s own godmother as well as Henry’s first wife we shall never know. No doubt Henry would have said something if he found the reminder irritating.
A year or so later, Queen Katherine was painted by William Scrots in more informal dress but still exhibiting the demeanour and style of a king’s wife. She appears, if anything, rather more serious and her brown eyes are looking slightly to the right. Her jaunty black velvet cap sports a white ostrich feather and gold tassels and is bordered with white satin and pearls, neatly offsetting its otherwise rather mannish character, and her auburn hair. The rest of Katherine’s attire that is visible is richly embellished, with four bands of metal thread embroidery (which the queen loved) down the front of the beautifully shaped bodice and double bands of the same work on the full sleeves. The embroidery is of Tudor roses and lovers pinks. But it is the collar, V-necked and in the very latest Italian whitework, that shows how closely Katherine followed continental fashion. The pendant worn in the slightly earlier, fulllength portrait, has been attached in this painting to a ruby, pearl and diamond necklace also worn by Katherine Howard. The contrast between the more plainly dressed young minor aristocrat of the early 1530s portrait in Lambeth Palace and the jewelled, burnished queen of the mid-1540s could not be more marked.
Katherine chose her clothes and jewels for these portraits to underline her rank and to present herself to the world as queen of England. Yet she was also presenting herself to Henry in a way she thought he would want and establishing herself strongly as a regal figure in her own right. He does not appear to have commissioned the portraits of Katherine himself; they were undertaken on her initiative, and were very much about image-building. There were more portraits of Henry VIII’s sixth wife than any other sixteenth-century queen of England, except for Elizabeth. And they formed part of Katherine’s wider development of her role as queen, since they also demonstrate her patronage of the arts.
As queen, Katherine was able to pursue her existing cultural interests and to develop new ones. She was a patron of as many as half a dozen artists and miniaturists working at the court, less well known to history than Hans Holbein but popular with the English aristocracy at the time. They included Scrots, Giles Gering, John Bettes and possibly Levina Teerlinc, the female miniaturist who worked at the courts of all three of Henry VIII’s children. Teerlinc was given an annuity of £40 per annum in 1546, the start of a long and prestigious career that saw her rise to be one of the women of Queen Elizabeth’s Privy Chamber. They would have met when Elizabeth was a girl at her stepmother’s court. Holbein himself died at the end of 1543, but not before Katherine had commissioned from him two covered cups and a brooch.
If painting was Katherine’s first love among the arts, she was also a keen supporter of the Bassanos, the court musicians, and a great lover of dancing. As was common at the time, some of her household staff were more than competent musicians. John Cooch, the steward of the queen’s wine-cellar, was later described by Bishop Parkhurst, her chaplain at the time, as ‘well-skilled in music’. The combination of good music, and, presumably, a good choice of wines by Cooch, again paints a picture of a woman who was highly convivial and at home in her environment.
Books were another pleasure, harking back to the education she had received as a child. Katherine clearly loved them for their beauty as well as their contents and, like the king, she built up a collection. Perhaps the most magnificent of all Katherine’s books was one described as ‘a book of gold, enamelled black, garnished with twenty-eight small table rubies and one rock ruby upon the clasp and on each side of the book a table diamond’. The contents of this gorgeously bound volume are not given. At the time of her death, among the books she possessed were a Book of Psalms covered with crimson velvet and garnished with gold, a little book covered with green velvet with stories and letters finely cut, two books of the New Testament, both covered with purple velvet and garnished with silver and gilt, one in English and one in French, and a dozen or so other books, covered in blue, black and crimson velvet, or with leather. The queen’s copy of the 1542 English translation of A Sermon of St Chrysostome by the Oxford scholar John Lupset can still be seen at Sudeley Castle, bearing her signature, ‘Kateryn the Quene, KP’ on the title page. And to lighten the otherwise serious and reflective tone of the queen’s library, there was also an Italian printed copy of Petrarch’s Canzoniere e Trionfi.
During her time as queen of England, Katherine would not merely collect and read books, but also write them herself.15 As an author, she was keen to order and distribute copies for her ladies and friends and her accounts show how she patronized the royal printer, Thomas Berthelet, in this respect: ‘Delivered to my lord of Chichester [George Day, the bishop of Chichester and the queen’s almoner by 1545], for the queen’s grace, the first day of May, 6 books of the psalms prayers, gorgeously bound and gilt on the leather, at 16 shillings the piece.’16 This is about £250 a copy in today’s money. Copies of Katherine’s books of prayers can still be seen at Stonor House at Oxfordshire and in the Mayor’s Parlour at Kendal in Cumbria.
The possession of books was only one aspect of the queen’s intellectual interests. In order to read and understand, as well as to keep her mind sharp and ensure that she was properly fitted for her place at Henry’s side, Katherine decided to improve her own skills, particularly in the area of Latin. French appears to have been a language she could handle with ease, no doubt as a result of her own mother’s proficiency in the language, but her Latin was rusty. There could not have been much call for it in Yorkshire and her sister Anne, by her own admission, needed to brush up her Latin when she became a patron of the scholar Roger Ascham. Writing from Cambridge in 1545, Ascham told the queen’s sister: ‘At last, I send you your Cicero, most noble lady; since you are delighted so much by his books, you do wisely to study them. You will study most diligently and not need any exhortation.’17 The same approach to her studies of Latin and its great writers was no doubt followed by the queen herself, though there is debate about how much of the language Katherine actually knew before she married Henry. However, if, by 1545, Anne (then countess of Pembroke) was an admirer of Cicero she must have started from at least a base of familiarity and there is no reason to believe that Katherine’s knowledge would have been inferior. Katherine was evidently a good linguist and a quick learner in all she did. The opportunity for improving her Latin was one she eagerly embraced. She had, of course, secretaries at her disposal who could help her in Latin composition, and the evidence points to the fact that her main interest was in translation of well-known texts from the original Latin into English vernacular.
Significantly, she chose the Eton schoolmaster and playwright Nicholas Udall to work with her on one of the major literary endeavours of her time as queen, the translation of the Paraphrases of Erasmus. Udall had a louche reputation (he had been accused of sadistic corporal punishment and buggery while at Eton, though evidently this was no impediment to employment at court) but he had also produced, in the 1530s, a textbook called Flowers for Latin Speaking. It may be that Katherine’s Latin bloomed again with his help and the opportunity for mutual study with her stepdaughter, Mary, who had continued her own Latin tuition into adulthood.
KATHERINE HAD showed from the outset of her reign that she was dynamic, full of ideas and able to handle the process of becoming queen with aplomb. One fascinating insight into this sophisticated transition is in the report of the visit of the duke of Najera in the mid-winter of 1544 – for it is easy to overlook that Katherine had to perform on an international stage as well as an English one. And on this particular occasion she had a starring role.
The duke had been serving Charles V at the court in Brussels and decided, for reasons that are not clear, to return home via England at the beginning of 1544. His visit was therefore private rather than official, in the sense that he did not have a diplomatic mandate, but since it was undertaken at a time of improved relations between the emperor and Henry VIII, when there was talk of an alliance against France, it may well have had an ulterior motive. Certainly, Charles V had no objection to one of his aristocrats stopping off in England and being received by the king and queen. No doubt Henry did not attach to it the same importance as did the duke’s secretary, Pedro de Gante, but we should be grateful to de Gante, nevertheless, for the description he has left us of how his master was received by Queen Katherine.