Katherine the Queen: The Remarkable Life of Katherine Parr

by Linda Porter

  having traversed the garden facing the queen’s lodging, and arrived nearly at the other end close to the entrance of the king’s apartments, my own people informed me that the queen and princess were following us quickly. I hardly had time to rise from the chair in which I was being carried before she approached quite near, and seemed from the small suite she had with her, and the haste with which she came, as if her purpose in coming was specially to speak to me. She was only accompanied by four or five women of the chamber … and opened the conversation by saying that the king had told her the previous evening that I was coming that morning to take my leave of him. While on the one hand she was very sorry for my departure, as she had been told that I had always acted well in my offices, and the king had confidence in me, on the other hand she doubted not that my health would be better on the other side of the water. I could, however, she said, do as much on the other side as here, for the preservation of the amity between your majesty and the king, of which I had been one of the chief promoters.

  The queen continued in this vein, emphasizing how important was the continued friendship of Henry VIII and Charles V and asked Chapuys to ‘use [his] best influence in favour of the maintenance and increase of the existing friendship’. Nor did she forget to enquire in more detail about the ailing emperor himself: ‘She asked me very minutely and most graciously, after your majesty’s health and expressed great joy to learn of your majesty’s amelioration … I then asked to be allowed to salute the princess [Mary], which was at once accorded, she, the queen, being anxious, as it seemed to me, that I should not suffer from having to stand too long.’ Katherine withdrew tactfully, so as not to eavesdrop on what passed between the ambassador and her stepdaughter, but Mary, perhaps concerned by protocol, as well as remembrance of unhappier times, did not converse for long with Chapuys and before he went up to the king, Katherine returned to her own, highly effective brand of personal diplomacy, enquiring of the health of Mary of Hungary: ‘She said that the king was under great obligation to her majesty for having on all occasions shown so much good will towards him, and she continued with a thousand compliments on the queen-dowager’s virtue, prudence and diligence. After some other conversation, the queen returned to her lodgings without allowing me to stir from where I was.’1

  It is hard to imagine any of Henry’s other wives, with the exception of Katherine of Aragon, who was born to the role of royal diplomat, holding such a conversation. Nor did Mary of Hungary, about whom she was so pleasant, have anything like Katherine Parr’s easy manner in such matters. But though Henry’s sixth wife continued, even in difficult times, to try to soothe Angloimperial relations, it should not be supposed that her interest in foreign affairs was exclusively on the Habsburg side. For by the spring of 1545 the queen’s secretary, Walter Bucler, had been in Europe for some months, on a secret mission. He was trying, with his colleague, Dr Christopher Mont, a former ambassador to the court of Saxony, to forge a league between the German princes and the kings of England and Denmark. This diplomatic initiative was not, in itself, new; Henry VIII had been sporadically involved since the late 1530s in attempts to gain an initiative in his relations with Charles V by allying with the emperor’s troublesome German subjects. This was a major incentive in the disastrous match with Anne of Cleves. But in 1545 nothing of substance emerged, despite a flurry of despatches. Henry VIII eventually grew impatient with the vacillating Germans and, in December 1545, Bucler was finally called home. But the fact that Katherine could have been so effusive to Eustace Chapuys when a senior member of her own household was attempting to undermine Charles V in his German domains suggests a deviousness of which Henry himself would have been proud. Chapuys’s replacement, Franc¸ois Van der Delft, did pick up information about Bucler’s mission after he took up his new post in the summer. Thereafter, the emperor and his servants were much less convinced of Katherine’s benign influence, despite her fair words.

  If the queen’s hopes for a German alliance were not realized, it was a setback she seems to have taken with equanimity. She remained close to Henry and his children and her personal life was beginning to take a shape that would find her fulfilled intellectually and spiritually. Yet there was sadness as well as pleasure for Katherine in 1545 because sometime during that year her beloved stepdaughter, Margaret Neville, died, leaving the queen without the support and love of someone whose life she had shaped for more than a decade.

  The precise date of Margaret Neville’s death is unknown, as is the cause of her demise. She made her will at the end of March 1545 and probate was not granted until almost exactly a year later. The supposition must then be that she knew she was seriously ill when the will was written, but that she did not die immediately. Her will is remarkable for the devotion displayed to Katherine, her ‘only and sole executor’ and for its strong faith in reformed religious ideas. Written at a time when the term ‘Protestant’ was still not in general use in England, it is, nevertheless, unmistakably Protestant in its conviction. Margaret begins by stating:

  first, I bequeath, yield up and commit to the hands of my most merciful father my soul, yet all my whole substance, as well spiritual as corporeal, most steadfastly trusting unto his mercy that he through the mercies of my saviour and only mediator Jesus Christ will now perform his promise unto me that death may have no power over me but that through his grace I may boldly say, ‘O death where is thy victory? O hell where is thy sting?’, being above all other things most certain that trust in him shall not be confounded.

  Reiterating her faith in God’s mercy, asking forgiveness for all her sins, Margaret went on to address the arrangements for her possessions:

  And now as I have mercy of my merciful father, diverse and sundry talents which it hath pleased him to commit into my hands, that I may not be counted like unto the unprofitable servant which hid the talents of his lord in the earth, I shall most humbly beseech my dear sovereign mistress, the Queen’s highness, to take all and singular my said talents unto her hands to be disposed of to the glory of God as her highness shall think most best … and knowing furthermore that her grace is of such perfect godliness and wisdom that she can much better dispose them to the honour of and discharge of my duty than I can myself devise, I shall most humbly desire her grace to take the ordering of the same.

  After bequests to several friends and servants, Margaret left her lands at Hammerton ‘as well as the 1,000 marks which my father gave unto me to my marriage’ to her ‘dear sovereign mistress, the lady Katheryne Parr, Queen of England, France and Ireland’.2

  Her pride in her stepmother as well as her abiding affection shines through this moving avowal of personal faith and belief in redemption. She was twenty years old and unmarried, despite her father’s provision for her and her childhood betrothal to the executed traitor, Bigod’s, son. Katherine had transformed her life, providing her with maternal love, companionship and an entrée into the highest circles of the land that she could only have dreamed of as a little girl. No portrait of her survives, but in her will she has left us a picture of a young woman of grace, deep affections and simple but firm religious faith. In fact, she strongly mirrors the queen herself.

  Margaret’s loss must have affected Katherine deeply, but the queen was not a woman given to maudlin sentimentality. Indeed, she had already demonstrated this, and the view of death shared by her stepdaughter, in a letter to Lady Jane Wriothesley, wife of the lord chancellor (and one of her own ladies-in-waiting), written following the death of Lady Jane’s baby son. Even at a time when infant death was common, Katherine’s words seem unfeeling – almost lacking in basic humanity. Her commiserations begin with the far from compassionate observation that she understands ‘it hath pleased God of late to disinherit your son of this world, of intent he should become partner and chosen heir of the everlasting inheritance, which calling and happy vocation ye may rejoice’. It is perfectly apparent, however, that Lady Wriothesley was not rejoicing at all and reproof for the extent of her maternal g
rief soon followed. ‘For what is excessive sorrow but a plain evidence against you that your inward mind doth repine against God’s sayings, and a declaration that you are not contented that God hath put your son by nature, by his adoption, in possession of the heavenly kingdom?’ Only those who have doubted the message of everlasting life allow themselves to rail against death, says Katherine: ‘but those that be persuaded that to die here is life again, do rather long for death, and count it a solace than to bewail it as an utter destruction … if you lament your son’s death, you do him great wrong and show yourself to sorrow for the happiest thing there ever came to him.’ And, after all, she concluded, there was always the possibility of future offspring, particularly if the disconsolate mother calmed down and accepted God’s will, for then he ‘can at his pleasure repay your loss with such a like jewel, if gladly and quietly ye submit and refer all to his pleasure’.3

  We can make allowances for a profound difference in outlook between the mid-sixteenth century and our own times where reactions to infant mortality are concerned. Nor are the religious sentiments expressed in any way heretical. But the uncompromising tone of Katherine’s letter to a bereaved mother still jars. She had never known such a loss herself, but this did not stop her from lecturing someone who was still trying to come to terms with a very painful experience. Perhaps she felt it was her regal duty to provide very clear and definite guidance, in the hope it would speed Lady Wriothesley’s recovery. Katherine was a woman who had learned well, by this time, to keep her emotions in check. She may also have reasoned that she had made sacrifices herself and that dwelling on the past was unhealthy. There is a further possibility that she did not much like Jane Wriothesley. It is certainly a very chilly letter. The recipient’s reactions are unknown, but it is hard to imagine that she took a great deal of comfort in what her royal mistress had written. It is quite possible, however, that Thomas Wriothesley took umbrage at Katherine’s reproof of his wife. He would wait a while, until the right circumstances presented themselves, before he moved to take revenge.

  Margaret Neville’s will and her own thoughts on death give us a flavour of Katherine’s developing views on religion. So, too, does Princess Elizabeth’s New Year’s gift at the end of 1544, her translation of The Mirror of the Sinful Soul,4 which describes the author’s journey from acute awareness of her own sinfulness to acceptance of God’s love and justification by faith. ‘Trusting also,’ as Elizabeth wrote in her prefatory letter to her stepmother, ‘through His incomprehensible love, grace and mercy, she (being called from sin to repentance) doth faithfully hope to be saved.’ For Katherine herself was undergoing such an epiphany, one which, driven on by a formidable determination, an intelligent mind and ability to use her own position as queen to maximum effect, would make her among the most successful writers of the sixteenth century, and an important influence on the history of England.

  WE DO NOT KNOW precisely when Katherine first decided to turn her study of scripture and her growing interest in religious ideas into published works of her own. The process was probably more the result of a combination of deepening faith, and the opportunity that her position gave her to express that faith publicly, than any sudden revelation. The queen’s first work appeared in June 1545. Produced by the royal printer, Thomas Berthelet, it was entitled Prayers Stirring the Mind unto Heavenly Meditations and was so successful that an enlarged version was brought out as early as November the same year. By 1548, this book, its contents ‘Collected out of holy works by the most virtuous and gracious Princess KATHERINE, Queen of England, France and Ireland’, so its title page proclaimed, was in its fifth edition. As an author, Katherine was an overnight success. But what were the influences on her and what was she trying to achieve, beyond the satisfaction of seeing her name in print?

  Katherine lived in a world that can seem very similar to our own, peopled by power-hungry, greedy men and women who lived for the moment. People at court were highly competitive, displaying conspicuous consumption, in the form of jewels, clothes, property and entertainment. It was a time of economic uncertainty and rising debt, warfare and strange new diseases that could have catastrophic impact. But appearances are deceptive, and life in mid-sixteenth-century England was also fundamentally different from that of today. The view of family as the root of a stable and thriving system was deeply ingrained, as was the accepted order of social division, with the king as its head. The citizens of England in the 1540s knew their place because they wanted the assurance of stability that came with such knowledge. And they lived in a country where belief in God pervaded daily life. Secularism would have horrified them. Yet this was a world also riven by increasing doubt, as the abstractions of Martin Luther’s initial arguments with the authority of the Church took on much more painful immediacy. Katherine’s husband had removed his country from the centuries-old allegiance it owed to the pope in Rome and had begun, with the help of politicians and churchmen who favoured reform, to forge his own Church of England. At the time Katherine Parr became the king’s sixth wife, the struggle for what would constitute the essential content of that Church’s beliefs, and its form of worship, was still continuing. Katherine, as queen of England, found herself in contact with a ferment of ideas. She was exposed to the great debates, the key questions that occupied the minds of the literate governing class of England. That she decided to make her own contribution is entirely in keeping with her background and character. She realized the unique opportunity her position afforded. The possible disadvantages, even dangers, did not, apparently, occur to her.

  As queen, Katherine had wholeheartedly embraced the conviction of the aristocracy in Tudor England that study was a lifelong process. It was no mere pastime, pleasurable though it might be, but part of becoming a more rounded and complete person. In fact, it was almost a duty. To sit down with her ladies to read the scriptures was as natural as returning to the study of Latin, indeed, perhaps more so. For there was one huge difference between the Bible Katherine had read as a child at Rye House and the passages she now studied in her privy chamber. The Bible was now available in English – at least, to noblemen and their wives.

  There had been various versions of the Bible, or, at least, parts of it, in English for some years. The concept of an English Bible was originally a humanist project rather than an overtly Protestant one, and this is an important point to remember in respect of the climate in which Katherine Parr began her literary career.5 The bold lines between ‘Catholic’ and ‘Protestant’ characterized by many historians are a product of hindsight. They were not so readily visible to those who were alive at the time. In fact, William Tyndale’s English New Testament had first appeared as long ago as 1526. Thereafter, further translation was slow (Cranmer himself believed at one point during the 1530s that it would not be completed before Doomsday) and often controversial. The king’s views remained equivocal. But in 1538 Miles Coverdale, who became Katherine Parr’s almoner ten years later, was asked by Cromwell to produce a further revision. Coming just a year after the final suppression of the Pilgrimage of Grace and with the threat of a Franco-imperial crusade against the excommunicated Henry VIII, the timing is highly significant. The work was printed in Paris and appeared in England as the Great Bible in April 1540. The following year a new edition appeared, with a preface by Cranmer. Coverdale’s text omitted some of the more obvious Lutheranism of Tyndale’s earlier version, probably in order to make it more acceptable to the king.

  We should not underestimate how marvellous the Great Bible must have seemed to Katherine Parr and the women of her court. Here was the word of God in the vernacular, at last, strong and direct, without the need for interpretation by priests, speaking to them as individuals. Its impact was profound. And Katherine, seized with the wonder of it, was certain that the richness of understanding and self-awareness engendered by religious study should be brought before a wider audience, in the English tongue. The intellectual stimulation, the literal soul-searching, the acknowledgement of m
an’s sinfulness and God’s salvation, all informed her desire to be part of the great discussions of her day. She was an expressive writer, as her letters show, and her literary projects would demonstrate her competence as an editor and patroness of learning. There was also another aim: wherever possible, she would reiterate the great achievements of Henry VIII, her husband, who had freed England from the tyranny and superstition of Rome. He was a new Moses leading his people to deliverance. In an ordered society, Henry was still the father of his country. All hope for the future sprang from the king.

  Though Henry and Katherine were increasingly to discuss (and sometimes to dispute) religion, the influences on the queen came from a number of different people. Chief among these was probably Archbishop Cranmer. It is difficult to be specific about the extent of their contact or the effect it had on Katherine directly, but this very vagueness is, as Diarmaid MacCulloch points out, revealing: ‘the relationship between the archbishop and Henry VIII’s last queen … is so obscure as to suggest deliberate discretion’.6 Cranmer was particularly skilled at this kind of political nuance. The early 1540s were a very difficult time for him and he would have been acutely aware of the benefits that could accrue from closeness to the queen as well as the pitfalls. Indeed, he may have been more aware of the latter than Katherine was herself. He had been an ally of Anne Boleyn and was stunned at her fall. Few men at the time knew the king’s unpredictability better than Cranmer. His own ideas on matters such as the eucharist were still taking shape. There might have been much that he hoped Katherine could achieve, but his connection with her must not be obvious. It would do neither of them any good in those trying times.