Katherine the Queen: The Remarkable Life of Katherine Parr

by Linda Porter

  By the summer of 1544, as Edward approached his seventh birthday, his letter to his father served notice that the prince himself realized that his early childhood was soon to be left behind. His household would now become predominantly male, as befitted his position as heir. It was time to start his preparation for the throne in earnest, with the most ambitious syllabus and the finest minds that England could offer. Combining the best of the humanist approach to the classics with a study of Christianity, an approach that distilled the ideas of European reformers and presented them in the light of English experience, the education Edward received was the most excellent that could be offered in the 1540s. And, despite the impression that might have been given by his correspondence with his father, the prince was not a lonely swot. His schoolroom was shared with a group of privileged boys of noble birth, who would be his courtiers and advisers when he ruled. Healthy physical activity was also part of their daily regimen, as were music and modern languages. It was a well-balanced syllabus but also a disciplined one. Cox, who was later described by one of his pupils as the greatest teacher but also the greatest beater, used the cane to reinforce his authority. Even Edward was not exempt, though the thrashing he received when his stubbornness became too much for Cox to bear seems to have been sufficient to ensure that he knuckled down to his Latin grammar thereafter. There was no residual animosity on Edward’s part towards Cox, whom he addressed in 1546 as ‘my most loving and kind preceptor’.

  The appointment of John Cheke as Cox’s deputy in the summer of 1544 was significant for both Edward and his stepmother. At just thirty years old, Cheke was the greatest Greek scholar of the Tudor age. His pioneering work on Greek pronunciation had caused division at Cambridge and earned him the disapproval of Stephen Gardiner, bishop of Winchester and the university’s chancellor. The controversy that ensued fuelled Cambridge politics for some years but did nothing to diminish Cheke’s reputation. He was soon to develop a major influence over Edward, whose studies flourished under his direction. The child loved the world that his new tutor opened up for him and responded eagerly to a curriculum that in 1544 included memorizing passages from Erasmus and the Bible and at the beginning of 1545 moved on to Latin composition. If this sounds dry, Cheke knew how to leaven the drearier aspects of learning, by arranging visits from other scholars to share their ideas with the prince and even getting John Leland, the antiquary who had travelled throughout England, to come to talk about the country Edward was born to rule. Cheke also used his Cambridge contemporary Roger Ascham, who later taught Elizabeth, to help with day-to-day instruction in the classroom and to teach calligraphy.

  It has been said that Cheke owed his appointment to Katherine Parr. He was certainly a protégé of her almoner, George Day, and he remained close to the queen for the rest of her life. Both he and Ascham were ever-conscious of the need to have patronage at court. It was all well and good to be part of the prince’s household and to travel with him to the tranquil royal houses of southern England, but the need for royal patronage above and beyond the association was important, and Katherine’s was increasingly sought. Cheke was an important contact with Prince Edward and knew of the boy’s increasing affection for his stepmother. Her encouragement of his studies worked to everyone’s advantage.

  For, unlike with his father, Edward could write to Katherine whenever he desired. There was no need for the formality of his correspondence with Henry, the waiting for the appropriate occasion or the artificiality of tone. If Henry responded to his son’s letters the answers have not survived, but Katherine was not too remote to reply. She was a natural recipient of the prince’s efforts at composition, the mother who was always there to give praise and show an interest in his efforts. Edward seems to have kept mementos of Jane Seymour, the mother he had never known, but it was Katherine’s love that helped to shape him and provided the maternal constant that was lacking in his life.

  ‘Most honourable and entirely beloved mother,’ his earliest known letter to her began:

  I have me most humbly recommended to your grace with like thanks, both that your grace did accept so gently my simple and rude letters, and also that it pleased your grace so gently to vouchsafe to direct unto me your loving and tender letters, which do give me much comfort and encouragement to go forward in such things wherein your grace beareth me on hand, that I am already entered. I pray God I may be able in part to satisfy the good expectation of the king’s majesty, my father, and of your grace, whom God have ever in his most blessed keeping.

  The letter was signed ‘Your loving son, E. Prince’.4

  Since Katherine herself was embarking on studies to improve her written Latin and her general understanding of the classics, she was able to demonstrate to the prince, by example, that they were both working towards a similar goal. As his letter shows, he was greatly appreciative of her encouragement. And Katherine knew that praise is a great motivator: ‘with what diligence you have cultivated the Muses, the letters you sent me can already be very ample witnesses – epistles which seem to me to shine both with the elegance of Latin discourse and more polished structure far surpassing all the others you sent me’. Though there has been debate about Katherine’s actual proficiency in Latin, this letter indicates that she certainly felt able to comment knowledgeably about her stepson’s style and to compliment him on his growing fluency of form and expression. She would be delighted, she said, to hear from him daily but fully appreciated that he was occupied with his studies and she would not believe him dilatory, since she knew that he was balancing his love of her with his love of learning ‘so that love toward your mother on the one hand and desire of learning on the other entirely free you from any suspicion of negligence even without a hearing’.5

  The dictates of Edward’s education and the duties of a queen consort meant that Katherine did not see the prince as often as he would have liked. Her first visit to him seems to have been during the royal honeymoon in the autumn of 1543, when she and Henry saw both Edward and Elizabeth at Ashridge. The queen did, however, make sure that he was with her during his father’s absence in France, when she brought all the children together during the period of her regency. Subsequently, their paths crossed on occasions of state, at Christmas and at other times that her schedule permitted. The boy’s love of his stepmother grew over the years, though the tone of his letters was sometimes characterized by a degree of condescension and even priggishness. Katherine seems to have taken this in good part and did not reprove him for his comments on her Latin: ‘I perceive that you have given your attention to the Roman characters, so that my preceptor [Cox] could not be persuaded but that your secretary wrote them, till he observed your name written equally well.’ In what was, perhaps, an excess of honesty, he continued: ‘I also was much surprised. I hear, too, that your highness is progressing in the Latin tongue and in the belles lettres. Wherefore I feel no little joy, for letters are lasting; but other things that seem so perish. Literature also conduces to virtuous conduct, but ignorance thereof leads to vice … Everything that comes from God is good; learning comes from God, therefore learning is good.’

  Katherine would have said amen to that. Perhaps she realized that the patronizing tone of this letter was as much a product of Cox’s pen as her stepson’s; there are marked similarities between it and the earlier epistle to Henry.

  Edward does not ever seem to have commented specifically on Katherine’s own religious writings, though just after he became king he praised her ‘godliness and knowledge, and learning in the Scriptures’. But whatever he felt about her literary skills, whether in English or in Latin, his love for her did not end with his father’s death. She was always, to him, his ‘dearest mother’ whom ‘I do love and admire with my whole heart’. This is a fitting testimony to Katherine’s skills as a parent.

  MARY, THE KING’S elder daughter, does not seem to have been at all jealous of Katherine’s success with her young brother. Her own affection for the queen was as great, in its way, as
the earnest love of the little prince. Katherine’s marriage to Henry VIII gave Mary the longest period of unbroken happiness she had known since childhood. It was a much-needed interlude of peace in a life that had known extreme contrasts of light and darkness, affording Mary the opportunity to recover from a decade of turmoil in the company of a woman she liked and respected.

  She was twenty-seven years old at the time of her father’s sixth marriage, petite and still attractive, with a sad smile that gave evidence, if any were needed, of what she had endured. Until the age of seventeen she had been a princess and her father’s heir, the only surviving child of the many pregnancies of her Spanish mother, Henry’s first wife, Katherine of Aragon. As one of the queen’s ladies, Maud Parr probably knew the infant Mary, though tales of the princess and Maud’s elder daughter playing together as children are almost certainly fanciful. Mary always had her own household and it is unlikely that Maud brought Katherine to court with her, as her primary duty was to the queen and neither she nor the other ladies could cope with caring for their own children at the same time. As a small girl, Katherine may well have heard talk of Princess Mary and her progress, and while it is not impossible that they met as children, there is no firm evidence to suggest that they did.

  Mary’s childhood was a happy one. She was loved by both parents and Henry spent more time with her than he did subsequently with either of his two younger children. Talented, intelligent and pretty, she was the perfect English princess. The king was very proud of her musical ability, her grace and her beautiful auburn hair. He was also quite without compunction in using her at an early age and often as a diplomatic pawn. Mary was engaged at different times to the dauphin of France, her cousin the Emperor Charles V and spoken of as a bride for James V of Scotland, not to mention numerous other more distant prospects. Nothing came of any of these marriage possibilities. Beneath the displays of parental affection, Henry was concerned at the implications of marrying his only legitimate heir outside the kingdom, envisaging a time when other European countries might have undue influence on English affairs. Katherine of Aragon did not share his doubts. Mary had been as well educated, by the standards of her day, as Prince Edward would be twenty years later. Her mother was convinced that Mary was able to rule, as her formidable grandmother, Isabella of Castile, had done in Spain at the end of the fifteenth century.

  Henry, however, was not so minded. He believed that women were inferior and he was not prepared to seek a solution to his dynastic weakness by wedding Mary to any of his rivals, real or potential, in the hope that she would provide grandsons. He wanted a male heir of his own body, not hers. And he was also tiring of Katherine of Aragon, a woman six years his senior who, by the late 1520s, was well past childbearing age. The idea of seeking a new wife may well have been in his mind before Anne Boleyn caught his eye. The course which he followed in his determination to be rid legally of Katherine, combined with her obduracy and Anne’s fierce ambition, changed English history. Many would suffer as a result, but none more so than Mary, the princess whose life was shattered by her parents’ divorce.

  Even after the divorce was pronounced, it seemed that Mary might weather the storm. She was careful not to criticize directly her father’s new marriage. But the birth of Elizabeth in September 1533 meant that Henry could no longer procrastinate about the situation of his elder daughter. His decision was unequivocal. Mary was declared illegitimate, told that she must expect her household to be reduced, and deprived of the title of princess. This she could not accept, refusing to comply with her father’s demands and exhibiting a disdain that bordered on haughtiness. She was a proud young woman and the destruction of her expectations so completely gave her, she thought, no choice. Compromise was not possible. Encouraged by Katherine of Aragon, and supported by the imperial ambassador, Eustace Chapuys, Mary embarked on a battle of wills with her father and with Anne Boleyn, the hated ‘concubine’ who had replaced her mother. It was not a combat that she could ultimately win.

  For almost three years she remained defiant, resisting all attempts to break her spirit. Just before Christmas 1533, she was packed off to join the baby Elizabeth at Hatfield House, an unwilling appendage to the establishment run by Elizabeth’s lady governess, Anne Shelton, a member of the Boleyn family. Though not entirely friendless at court, Mary’s own household shrunk to half a dozen loyal servants. Henry reduced her allowance, so that she was forced to mend her own clothing, and he demanded the return of the jewels that she loved and the plate that had graced her table as a princess. The countess of Salisbury, her beloved governess, was removed. Throughout this period, she only saw her father once, and then she was not able to speak to him. Her encounters with Anne Boleyn, who came to see her daughter on several occasions, invariably ended with a cold rejection of Anne’s attempts at reconciliation and Henry’s second wife departing in renewed fury at Mary’s absolute refusal to acknowledge her as queen, or to accept that Elizabeth took precedence over her. When it came to calculated insults, Mary Tudor was an accomplished practitioner. In March 1534, Chapuys reported to Charles V:

  When the king’s ‘amie’ went lately to visit her daughter, she urgently solicited the princess [Mary] to visit her and honour her as queen, saying that it would be a means of reconciliation with the king, and she herself would intercede with him for her, and she would be as well or better treated than ever. The princess replied that she knew no queen in England except her mother and if the said ‘amie’ (whom she called madame Anne Boleyn) would do her that favour with her father she would be much obliged. The Lady repeated her remonstrances and offers and in the end threatened her but could not move the princess.6

  There was, though, a price being paid for this contemptuous rejection of peace overtures: Mary’s health was permanently affected. Unhappy and fearful, she found it hard to sleep and lost her appetite. The stress exacerbated gynaecological difficulties she had apparently experienced since the onset of puberty. Her ‘illnesses’ were probably connected with menstruation and it seems that heavy, painful periods frequently confined her to bed. One episode was so severe that Henry sent his own doctor, William Butts. The royal physician’s diagnosis was illuminating – he thought Mary was suffering from stress and sorrow but nothing really life-threatening. His suggestion that Mary would recover if allowed to see her mother was humane but quite impermissible from Henry’s perspective. He did not want the two women together, reinforcing each other’s opposition to him and possibly plotting with Katherine’s nephew, Emperor Charles V, who had thus far failed to take any direct action on her behalf. So Mary remained cut off from the court, at loggerheads with her father and often unwell. Given Henry’s determination to brook no opposition to his marriage or his reforms (he had, by this time, pronounced Royal Supremacy over the Church in England) it is remarkable that he allowed Mary as much leeway as he did. More and Fisher were put to death in 1535 for their refusal to take the oath to the new Act of Succession. The king’s feelings towards his daughter were more ambivalent. She was banished and subjected to harassment and threats of physical abuse, but Henry’s remarks to Chapuys indicate that he was genuinely troubled by the breakdown of their relationship. Her stubbornness, however, could not be allowed to go on indefinitely.

  The breaking point came in the tumultuous year of 1536. Mary’s mother died at the beginning of January, still in love with the man she had married twenty-seven years earlier. But Anne Boleyn was far from invulnerable. She miscarried (historical tradition has it that the foetus was male, but we cannot be sure) on the day of Katherine of Aragon’s funeral, since when her position was never the same again. In truth, her marriage to Henry had been troubled for some time. Anne was clever but fiery and Henry had wearied of her rages and her strong will. She had made many enemies and not been afraid to take the fight to them. Quite what part Henry played in her downfall, one of the greatest travesties of justice in English history, we shall probably never know, but Mary, watching from a distance, was informed that Ann
e’s days were numbered. The false confidence this gave her, especially after Anne’s execution, is evident in the flurry of letters seeking restoration of parental favour that she wrote to her father and to Thomas Cromwell, his chief minister and architect of Anne’s demise.

  Nature and judicial murder had removed both Henry’s wives in the space of five months. Only one major obstacle remained to the complete authority that he was determined to exercise – Mary herself. In the space of three terrible weeks Mary was browbeaten into submission. She was told that the lives of her supporters were endangered and that she might also go the way of Anne Boleyn if she did not acknowledge the invalidity of her parents’ marriage, her own illegitimacy and her father’s position as Head of the English Church. Distraught and isolated, Mary was compelled to face up to the reality of what the king might do. On 22 June 1536 she signed the statement Cromwell had drafted for her. Utterly weary in body and spirit, her capitulation cost her dearly and she never forgave herself for what must have seemed like a pact with the devil.7

  In the years that followed, Mary’s relations with her father were smoothed over, but there remained a current of unease that afflicted them both. Henry wanted, indeed required, her love but he knew that she had met his demands under duress. The past could not be rewritten and her affection must always be qualified. She would never love him as she had done in childhood; he had hurt her too much. But could he even trust her? That remained the unspoken question. To love him was Mary’s duty as a daughter and that is probably how she saw it, while he lived. By the end of 1536, Mary already had a moderate-sized household again and an increased allowance, though it was adequate rather than generous. Relations with Jane Seymour were good and she derived brief comfort from that until Jane died, after giving birth to Prince Edward. The arrival of a male heir at last clarified her position in England, though not necessarily outside it. At home she was no more than the king’s elder daughter, the Lady Mary, a privileged royal bastard with no role in England’s future and entirely dependent on the king. But duty did not equal affection and Mary’s thoughts turned to her Habsburg relatives, to Charles V, her cousin, who became a kind of surrogate father. He never gave her more than fair words but it was to him she looked for succour. And to Charles she was still a princess and rightful heir to the throne of England, since Henry had been excommunicated when Edward was born.