by Linda Porter
Nevertheless, she saw him almost daily while she was regent and his influence, while not flaunted, was pervasive. The queen’s commitment to promoting English as the language of worship mirrored Cranmer’s current preoccupations. As we have seen, his Litany in English appeared in May 1544, an important element in the propaganda effort to support Henry VIII’s war with France. The king’s subjects could attend services that were partly in English and remember him in their prayers in their native tongue.7 But this does not mean that the Mass in Latin was abandoned, and, in fact, some elements of the service had been conducted in English for a very long time. But the English Litany was highly significant. Its essence survived in the Book of Common Prayer and was a major element in the subsequent form of worship under Edward VI and Elizabeth. The Litany was reprinted in October 1544 when it appeared in a volume also containing a translation of a work originally attributed to the executed Bishop Fisher of Rochester, who had so bravely supported Katherine of Aragon. This was a slim volume entitled Psalms or Prayers, which first appeared in English in April 1544. It has been suggested that the English version of Fisher’s work, which is more a statement of Catholic rather than reformist faith, may be Katherine Parr’s first, anonymous publication.8 It is true that Katherine ordered copies of the combined work and that the following year Thomas Berthelet published Katherine’s Prayers or Meditations in one edition with the Litany and the Psalms or Prayers. This is not conclusive proof of collaboration between the queen and the archbishop but it certainly indicates that their efforts were tending in the same direction.
Yet if Katherine had worked on translating the Psalms or Prayers in the first year of her marriage to the king, then this points to an influence on her thoughts earlier than her contact with Thomas Cranmer. And it also introduces more complexity in charting her spiritual journey. The connection between the martyred Fisher and Katherine Parr is George Day, bishop of Chichester, her almoner. Day had been Fisher’s chaplain, though he had avoided the bishop’s fate. He had embraced religious reform in the 1530s but now was pulling back from more extreme evangelical views. His moderation, carefully balanced, eventually meant that he could not support the sweeping changes of Edward VI. Perhaps, as his relationship with the queen blossomed, he saw an opportunity to encourage her desire to improve her Latin with a manageable project, a translation of his deceased master’s book of prayers. It was not, however, an entirely innocent choice, nor one without risk. Fisher’s name could hardly have been welcome to the king’s ears and so it was better for the whole endeavour to remain anonymous. The extent to which Day might have helped Katherine can never be known, but the association of the Psalms or Prayers with an executed traitor and the possibility that the translation was a joint effort may explain why Katherine’s name was never directly associated with it. Without this explanation, its anonymity is rather odd. Katherine was not shy about seeing her name in print or in encouraging others (like Princess Mary) to acknowledge their own work.
Day’s influence on Katherine was not confined to this one project. A great admirer of Erasmus himself, he probably encouraged the queen to read more of the works of this giant of the humanist movement. There were others, too, who helped develop her enthusiasm for making the writings of great men available in English. Her most ambitious undertaking, the organization of the translation of Erasmus’s Paraphrases upon the New Testament, was put under the overall editorial direction not of Day but of Nicholas Udall. Quite how Udall was chosen for this task by the queen remains a mystery, but he and Day could hardly have had more contrasting personalities or backgrounds.
Udall had enjoyed, to say the least, a chequered career, and one in which religion had played little part. An Oxford graduate, he had divided his time between writing plays, publishing a textbook on conversational Latin and involvement in education. Between 1534 and 1541 he was headmaster at Eton, a post that was poorly paid, though it was prestigious. As we have seen, he acquired there a reputation for flogging that one of his pupils remembered with a shudder as late as 1575. But it was not for the brutality of his regime at Eton that he was most notorious. Several robberies at the school were investigated by the Privy Council and one of the scholars who confessed to having stolen silver and plate implicated Udall in activities that were all together more unacceptable to the mores of sixteenth-century England than the mere theft of precious objects. Hauled in to answer these accusations, Udall confessed to numerous offences of buggery, a crime punishable by death. Somehow he managed to avoid the extreme penalty, perhaps through the intervention of an influential patron. Thomas Wriothesley and Richard Cox, Prince Edward’s tutor, have both been suggested as possibilities, and either could also have suggested him to Katherine as the person to take on the Paraphrases project. The queen evidently did not hold his dubious past against him, nor, given the way gossip circulated at court, does it seem likely that she would have been completely ignorant of it.
Udall assumed direction of the work with commendable diligence and an effusive enthusiasm which sounds almost flowery to modern readers. He was especially keen to acknowledge the role of the queen as his patron and to emphasize the devotional piety of the young aristocratic women of England. Writing in the preface to the Paraphrases, which were finally published after three years of work in 1548, Udall fell over himself to praise Katherine, describing how
all these your unceasing pains and travails do finally redound. Leaving in the prosecution of so large a matter as neither my slender wit can well contrive, nor my rude pen is able to wield. I shall in this present only thank God in you, and you in God, for causing the Paraphrases of Desiderius Erasmus of Rotterdam upon the New Testament to be translated into English for the use and commodity of such people, as with an earnest zeal and with devout study do hunger and thirst for the simple and plain knowledge of God’s word; not for contentious babbling but for innocent living; not to be curious searchers of the high mysteries, but to be faithful executioners and doers of God’s bidding; not to be troublous talkers of the Bible, but sincere followers of God’s precepts therein contained; not to be irreverent reasoners in Holy Scripture … but to be humble and lowly workers of God’s glory.
He went on to pay tribute to Katherine’s strong guidance of the project: ‘And that in your Highness, for the most speedy expedition of your most godly purpose to bring God’s word to the more light and the more clear understanding, distributed this work by portions, to sundry translators, to the intent it might all at once be finished … ye have therein, most gracious Lady, right well declared both how much ye tender God’s honour and also how earnestly ye mind the benefit of your country.’9
Flattery aside, Udall was right to single out Katherine’s skilful approach to the translation of so massive a work. It was not, of course, unusual to divide responsibilities in this way; the work on the Great Bible, the King’s Book and other religious projects was undertaken by a team of clerics. Apart from Udall himself, who translated the Gospel according to St Luke and possibly also St Matthew and the Acts of the Apostles, the other accredited translators were Thomas Key, who was encouraged to participate by George Owen, one of Henry VIII’s doctors, and who tackled St Mark, and Princess Mary, who undertook perhaps the most challenging of all, St John, at her stepmother’s urging. They were an interesting and diverse team: the disgraced but resilient schoolmaster, the long-suffering and bastardized eldest child of the king and the lesser-known preacher in the queen’s household. Lending a keen supervisory interest, and possibly also involving herself in the translation of St Matthew, which remained unattributed, was Katherine herself. In its scope and impact, this English translation of Erasmus’s work represents the queen’s greatest literary achievement. How much she directly contributed is open to conjecture. Stephen Gardiner, who disliked the entire concept of the work, later decried both the inadequate Latin and the selective editing of the anonymous translator of St Matthew. This has been interpreted as an indirect attack on Katherine, on the assumption that Gardi
ner knew very well the identity of the person concerned, and was, by 1547, an inveterate enemy of the queen. It is not clear how he obtained a copy of the Paraphrases before publication, nor is his critique conclusive proof that Katherine Parr took an active role in translation. What is certain is that the Paraphrases was given a great deal of publicity by the Edwardian government (20,000 copies were in circulation between 1548 and 1551) and that they established Katherine as the leading patron of vernacular religious writing in England.
Until the end of 1545, Katherine Parr’s individual religious writings had been sparse, confined to a few prayers. She was becoming experienced as a collector and editor of existing material (the Prayers or Meditations was based on writings of St Thomas à Kempis), but her influences were varied and largely emanated from the European continent, the origin of all the new ideas. She studied both Catholic humanist writers and Lutheran reformers, and attended Mass regularly. Discussions with her husband on the various strands of religious beliefs and current trends seem to have formed a major element of their social relationship – perhaps almost too much so for Henry’s liking, as the months went by. But if his patience was becoming tried, Katherine was ever more eager to express herself. In this she no doubt received encouragement from her religious advisers and her closest companions in her Privy Chamber, her sister Lady Herbert and cousin, Lady Lane, as well as Lady Joan Denny, wife of Sir Anthony Denny, keeper of the privy purse, moderate reformer and a growing influence in the king’s Privy Chamber. Then there was also the more zealously reforming Katherine Brandon, duchess of Suffolk, whose friendship with the queen seems to have intensified in 1545. Attractive, outspoken and opinionated, the duchess was widowed in August of that year at the age of twentysix and it may be that her loss brought her closer to the queen, who later referred affectionately to ‘my lady of Suffolk’ in one of her letters to Thomas Seymour.
Against this backdrop of intellectual stimulation and support, Katherine embarked on the writing of a book that was entirely hers, not a compilation or a translation of existing material. It must encapsulate her own beliefs and experience and present them in a manner that would strike a chord with her readers. So was the Lamentation of a Sinner conceived, the first work of its kind in English written by a woman. The fact that the woman was a queen added immeasurably to its importance, and its success.10
The Lamentation begins on a sombre note, acknowledging the writer’s sinfulness and her ‘obstinate, strong and intractable heart’. She is well aware of the task she has set herself:
Truly, I have taken no little small thing upon me, first to set forth my whole stubbornness and contempt in words the which is incomprehensible in thought … next this to declare the excellent beneficence, mercy and goodness of God, which is infinite, unmeasurable: neither can all the words of angels, and men, make relation thereof … Who is he that is not forced to confess the same, if he consider what he hath received of God, and doth daily receive? Yea, if men would not acknowledge and confess the same, the stones would cry it out.
This early passage shows the queen at her best; the language is strong and direct, her intention clearly shown. She will hold her personal experience up for public scrutiny, describing the strong sense of unworthiness she believes that she shares with her readers. This is, however, balanced with the joyful acknowledgement of God’s goodness. But, by the end (118 pages later), she has returned to the darker theme of the judgement that awaits those who do not live by God’s word: ‘Truly, if we do not redress and amend our living according to the doctrine of the gospel, we shall receive a terrible sentence of Christ the son of God …’ In-between is an outpouring of views on death, salvation, the evils of the papacy and the debt that England owes to Henry VIII, good preaching, marriage of priests, the upbringing of children and the belief that scripture should be read by all. It is an amalgam of reforming religious ideas, based on a set of convictions that were characterized by the term ‘evangelical’ at the time. A few passages are closer to Calvinism than Lutheranism.
Yet though Katherine intended her work to set an example of how a queen could make public her private thoughts on religion, and despite its undoubted popularity as Protestantism grew in England, the Lamentation has not stood the test of time well. It is neither great literature nor compelling religious writing. No one but a specialist in the period would sit down to read it today. By turns rambling, repetitive and derivative, it is heavily based on St Paul’s teachings and epistles. Though written as prose, not poetry, the work owes a good deal to Marguerite of Navarre’s already famous personal statement of belief. There may even have been an element of competition. When Elizabeth began her translation of The Mirror of the Sinful Soul (perhaps at her stepmother’s prompting) it may also have occurred to Katherine that she might attempt a similar piece of literature. Could not an English queen rival a French one in this way? The ‘celebrity memoir’ is not a recent phenomenon, and both Marguerite and Katherine knew that there was a market for queens who went public with an account of their religious passions.
And yet the authentic voice of Katherine Parr comes strongly through in the Lamentation, despite its weaknesses. Above all, there is left the indelible impression of a woman for whom the reading of the Gospel in English has been a profound and revelatory experience:
Truly, it may be most justly verified that to behold Christ crucified, in spirit, is the best meditation that can be. I certainly never knew mine own miseries and wretchedness so well by book, admonition, or learning, as I have done by looking into the spiritual book of the crucifix. I lament much I have passed so many years not regarding this divine book, but I judged and thought myself to be well instructed in the same: whereas now I am of this opinion, that if God would suffer men to live her a thousand year, and should study continually is the same divine book, I should not be filled with the contemplation thereof.
Katherine was no theologian, nor did she claim to be. The split in Christianity clearly distressed and troubled her: ‘It is much to be lamented’, she wrote, ‘the schisms, varieties, contentions and disputacions, that have been and are in the world about Christian religion.’ She may have hoped that, in setting forth for public scrutiny her growing spiritual awareness, she could help unite the disparate elements of religious reform behind the changes her husband had brought about in England. Her desire is to glorify Henry VIII who ‘hath taken away the veils, and mists of errors, and brought us to the knowledge of the truth, by the light of God’s word’. He is likened to the great deliverer of the Jews in the Old Testament: ‘our Moses, a most godly wise governor and king hath delivered us out of captivity and bondage of Pharoah. I mean by this Moses king Henry VIII my most sovereign honourable lord and husband … and I mean by this Pharoah the bishop of Rome, who hath been and is a greater persecutor of all true Christians, than ever was Pharoah of the children of Israel.’ For Katherine the queen of England, sturdily anti-papal, is very much also the dutiful wife, as she is keen to emphasize: ‘If they be women married, they learn of St Paul to be obedient to their husbands, and to keep silence in the congregation, and to learn of their husbands, at home.’11 Henry VIII would have been delighted by such sentiments, but he did not live to see them in print. The Lamentation was published in the autumn of 1547, some nine months after his death. The reason for the gap between Katherine’s completion of the draft and its publication lay in the difficult last year of the royal marriage. Henry VIII would have expected the sentiments of praise and deference contained in the Lamentation. Unfortunately, they were increasingly ones he did not himself recognize in his sixth wife as the New Year dawned in 1546.
NOBODY CAN SAY with absolute certainty what happened to the relationship between the king and the queen in the final twelve months of Henry’s reign. The highly coloured accounts of plots, hysterics and reconciliations described by the martyrologist John Foxe are not precisely contemporary, though they may have been partly based on recollections of people close to Queen Katherine at the time. For centu
ries they were taken as a true historical record, but there is nothing to give them direct corroboration, at least in the level of detail they relay. There is, however, a great deal of indirect evidence that the queen’s views and associations were public enough for those around her to become targets in a renewed battle between conservative forces and those that sought further religious reform. And there is also the testimony of the diplomatic community that all was not well between Henry and Katherine. It is likely that these threads were interwoven and that the key to understanding them lies in the state of England and, more fundamentally, in the capricious personality and deteriorating health of the king.
At the beginning of 1546, Katherine had no immediate reason to doubt the king’s continuing devotion to her. His New Year’s gift of £66 13s 14d (about £20,000 today) was in keeping with the generosity he had always shown her, especially as it came at a time when the English economy was in tatters following the war with France. To add to the overall impression of family harmony, Elizabeth decided to continue with the theme of translation of religious works as New Year’s gifts which she had begun a year earlier. This time, however, the recipient was not Katherine, but the king himself. And the book she had chosen to translate, into French, Latin and Italian, in a virtuoso demonstration of her burgeoning linguistic skills, was none other than the queen’s own version of the Prayers or Meditations, an expanded version of which had just been published in November 1545.