Katherine the Queen: The Remarkable Life of Katherine Parr

by Linda Porter

  It has been claimed that Edward’s letter was dictated by Seymour himself. There is no firm evidence to support this contention but it seems probable that there was a discussion about the content of the king’s missive to his stepmother. Edward was accustomed to composing even personal letters after consultation with his tutors so it is unlikely that he would have resisted advice over the wording of something that affected so closely someone that he loved. The expression of his sentiments, however, is in keeping with other letters he wrote to Katherine. He began:

  We thank you heartily not only for your gentle acceptance of our suit moved unto you, but also for your loving accomplishing of the same, wherein you have declared not only a desire to gratify us, but also moved us to declare the goodwill likewise that we bear to you in all your requests. Wherefore, ye shall not need to fear any grief to come, or to suspect lack of aid in need; seeing that he, being mine uncle [here he refers to the duke of Somerset], is of so good a nature that he will not be troublesome by any means unto you; and I of that mind that of divers just causes I must favour you. But even as without cause you merely require help against him whom you have put in trust with the carriage of these letters, so may I merely return the same request unto you, to provide that he may live with you also without grief, which hath given him wholly unto you. And I will so provide for you both that hereafter, if any grief befall, I shall be a sufficient succour in your godly or praisable enterprises. Fare ye well, with much increase of honour and virtue in Christ.17

  This cynical play on a child’s emotions does Katherine Parr and her fourth husband little credit. She had evidently acted the reluctant bride to good effect. It also reinforces the historical view of her impetuosity and poor judgement in becoming Seymour’s wife in unseemly haste. That is certainly one possible explanation, but the couple may have believed that their interests were not served by waiting. Katherine was already involved in what would turn out to be a protracted dispute with Somerset over her lands and jewels. She needed a protector of her own and the fact that he was the duke’s brother perhaps seemed, to her, an advantage. Love and self-interest are powerful incentives, sufficient, in this case, for an affectionate stepmother to turn a child who greatly admired her into a pawn. But her relationships with the royal children had always been built on an element of strategic devotion, as, indeed, was her marriage to Thomas Seymour.

  EDWARD’S LETTER to Katherine shows how sensitive were the relationships within the Seymour family, for it was here, more than any other source, that rancour was felt. The duke of Somerset and his brother are recorded in history as very different men, representing the good and bad sides of the Tudor aristocracy. For hundreds of years, Somerset was ‘the good duke’, someone who had favoured the ordinary man, a Protestant reformer and benevolent ruler whose good intentions were thwarted by unscrupulous, power-hungry political foes. Thomas, by contrast, was a loud-mouthed, swaggering intriguer, an atheist struggling by all possible means for his own advancement, with no fraternal feelings or loyalties. They could not have been more different.

  And yet, in reality, they were much more alike, as siblings often are. Their physical closeness is striking. Their portraits show that they shared the same features, particularly the same nose, and the same colouring. Thomas looks more directly at the viewer, his gaze almost challenging, as befits his reputation. Edward’s eyes veer to the side and he appears paler and more effete, an impression heightened by the double stranded, rather feminine, necklace he is wearing. Not too much, though, should be read into these slight distinctions. Both were hugely ambitious and opportunistic. Somerset is now seen as a man of autocratic tendencies who disdained to rule with advice, damaged the economy, pursued an unrealistic foreign policy and sowed the seeds of his own destruction. Thomas was the infuriating younger brother with pretensions above his rank and competence. The reality, however, was that neither man was capable of the great responsibilities the elder brother had taken upon himself and the younger one so avidly sought. They had served Henry VIII well enough, but, thrust into the limelight by the accession of their nephew, they were both found lacking.

  Their relationship is a complicated one. Looking back, it is easy to discern an inevitable outcome; such vision was not, of course, available to them at the time. Thomas was an irritant, but he was still the Protector’s kin, and they saw each other frequently. Exasperation and resentment were felt on both sides, but the ties of blood were strong. If anyone was to marry the queen dowager, Somerset preferred it to be his brother. He may have disliked the deception, the way Thomas had presented him with a fait accompli, but, as his sister-in-law, Katherine could be controlled more readily (or so Somerset hoped) than if she remained independent, or even married someone else. His greed and lack of tact were already causing the queen much aggravation, as he gave away the leases on her dower lands without consulting her and deprived her of her personal jewellery collection. Her fury against him mounted by the day: ‘my lord, your brother, hath this afternoon a little made me warm’, she told her new husband. ‘It was fortunate we were so much distant, for I suppose else I should have bitten him.’18 This was not a happy introduction to the Seymour family circle. But if Katherine disliked Somerset, it was nothing to the detestation she felt for his wife.

  The duchess and her husband had attended Katherine’s wedding to Henry VIII and she had subsequently been one of the ladies of the queen’s Privy Chamber. The only child and heiress of her father, she had been born Anne Stanhope and was a couple of years older than Katherine Parr. On her mother’s side, she could trace her lineage back to Edward III. Already the mother of seven children by Edward Seymour, she was, in fact, his second wife, having married him shortly after the death of his first wife, Katherine Fillol, probably in 1535. There were persistent rumours that Edward’s first marriage was unhappy and stories circulated about Katherine Fillol’s supposed infidelity with her own father-in-law. Whatever the truth about his first wife, with whom he had two sons, Edward Seymour’s marriage to Anne Stanhope was a solid and apparently happy union. It is possible that the knowledge of something murky in her husband’s past made Anne especially protective and fuelled her determination to support his political ambitions. She was no shrinking violet herself and she was well versed in court intrigue, having played the dutiful sister-in-law and chaperone to Jane Seymour at the time of Anne Boleyn’s downfall. Well known for her interest in the new learning, her association with Anne Askew in the last year of Henry VIII’s reign placed her in some danger, as it did her husband and, indeed, Katherine Parr. By 1547, the duchess was an established patron of evangelical writers and would become even more active in this respect during Edward VI’s reign. She was a woman of considerable intellect and strong personality, utterly dedicated to her husband’s career. But she seems not to have had many female friends. One of the most constant was, however improbably, Mary Tudor, who never forsook her, despite the growing disparity in their religious ideas. Their friendship is further proof of the fluidity of relationships at court in the mid-Tudor period and the fact that people did not take firm sides or fit neatly into the labels of Protestant and Catholic that historians have applied to them. Moreover, although she shared Katherine Parr’s religious interests, the duchess and the queen could not abide one another.

  Their personal animosity has been characterized as a rivalry for precedence at court, fuelled by the tensions between their husbands. There is no direct proof that Katherine demanded that Anne carry her train on a visit to court, or that Anne refused, saying subsequently: ‘Did not Henry VIII marry Katherine Parr in his doting days, when he had brought himself so low by his lust and cruelty that no lady that stood on her honour would venture on him? And shall I now give place to her who in her former estate was but Latimer’s widow, and is now fain to cast herself for support on a younger brother. If master admiral teach his wife no better manners, I am she that will.’19

  The sentiments may well have been harboured by the duchess of Somerset –
they have the ring of truth about them – but there is no contemporary corroboration of such a quarrel and Anne must have known what court etiquette was, even if she did not like it. Katherine’s feelings about her erstwhile attendant and new sister-in-law are clear and only served to intensify the difficulties in the relationship between Thomas Seymour and his elder brother. For Katherine assigned all the blame in her dealings with the Lord Protector to his shrill, pushy and downright deceitful wife.

  Her dislike of the duchess of Somerset was evidently of long standing. Henry VIII’s death and Katherine’s changed circumstances, her disappointment and feeling of grievance, may all have combined to exacerbate it, but the ill-will was already there. In the first of her love-letters to Thomas Seymour, the queen complained that his brother had promised on more than one occasion to come to see her so that they could discuss ‘such requests as I made to him’. Somerset kept putting her off and she was becoming impatient. But she knew who was really to blame for this casual treatment: ‘I think my lady hath taught him that lesson; for it is her custom to promise many comings to her friends and to perform none. I trust’, she continued, somewhat acidly, ‘in greater things she is more circumspect.’20

  It soon became obvious that she was not. It is all very well to play down the rivalry between the two women, as modern writers have done, and assert that Anne Somerset was merely an intelligent, committed and strong-minded woman traduced by male historians. She may have been all these things, but the fact that Katherine hated her is inescapable. And matters between them, at least for a time, would only get worse. In the same letter in which she had threatened to bite the duke, Katherine was not just venomous against the duchess, she actually stooped to obscenities. ‘What cause have they to fear having such a wife?’ she ranted. ‘It is requisite for them continually to pray for a short despatch of that hell.’ The word hell was used as slang for female genitalia in sixteenth-century England and it was not the language of well-born ladies. The earnest religious commentator had temporarily forgotten herself in this dispute with her fourth husband’s family. Nor can there be any doubt that the marriage of Katherine and Thomas added further fuel to what was already a combustible fraternal relationship.

  Katherine might let off steam by calling the duchess of Somerset names, but she soon discovered that her own image had been badly dented by her speedy alliance with Thomas. Her stepson could not protect her from the reaction of public opinion, and saucy comment began to circulate about the queen’s intemperate behaviour, her virtue compromised by more base desires. Thomas, in typically direct fashion, threatened that ‘whosoever shall go about to speak evil of the queen, I will take my fist from the first ears to the last’.21 Many people questioned the common sense of the couple in conducting an affair that, if Katherine had quickly become pregnant, would have raised questions about whether the child was Henry VIII’s or Thomas Seymour’s. Thomas was furious and talked about bringing in legislation to protect Katherine’s good name. It was, of course, much too late for that. The queen herself tried to revive her reputation by ordering dozens of copies of the Psalms or Prayers and the Prayers or Meditations from the printer Thomas Berthelet, one of which, printed on vellum, was probably a gift for the king.22 This may well have pleased him and for several months he continued to exchange affectionate letters with his stepmother. But she had used him and, as time went by, he realized that he had been manipulated. His life ever more stringently organized and access to him increasingly difficult, it was in this climate of criticism of his uncle Thomas that Edward’s childish regard towards Katherine Parr became one of the most serious victims of his stepmother’s remarriage.

  FAMILY FEUDS and ribald public comment added to the difficulties of Katherine as she embarked on her fourth marriage, but in other respects she and Thomas had reason to be pleased that they had brought off a mutually advantageous match. Living as they did in fast-changing times, there was no reason to suppose that Somerset’s position was unassailable. Besides, they believed they had an effective counter-strategy. It was not a precise balance for the duke’s power and his hold over the king, but it promised continuing influence and an attractive flexibility. For if neither Katherine nor her husband had given up on the idea of separating the function of Governor of the king’s person from the Protectorship itself, they believed they had alternative options. These centred on the young female heirs to Edward’s throne.

  The immediate successor, Mary, had left Katherine’s roof, offended by her conduct and eager to establish a household of her own. But Elizabeth, provided for equally, but still only thirteen years old, came to live with the queen at Chelsea in the spring of 1547, before Katherine was married to Thomas Seymour.23 Not long after, Lady Jane Grey, the daughter of the marquess of Dorset, came to live at Seymour Place. Thomas bought her wardship for £2,000 (more than £600,000 today) and thereby secured control of another girl with a claim to the throne. His loyal servant, John Harington, who handled the negotiations, told Dorset that the lord admiral thought very highly of Jane: ‘she was as handsome as any lady in England’. This was a generous tribute to a child of ten, whom he had probably seen from time to time at court but did not know well. Thomas was, however, well aware that Henry Grey and his wife, Frances, the niece of Henry VIII, were unhappy at the marquess’s exclusion from Somerset’s inner circle. Dorset was just the kind of ally Thomas needed and, as well as flattering comments about young Jane’s beauty, he held out a much more glittering possibility. She might, he said, be wife to any prince in Christendom, and ‘if the king’s majesty, when he came to age, would marry within the realm, it was as likely he would be there, as in any other place’.24 Buoyed up with this expectation for their eldest daughter, the Dorsets were happy to give her to Seymour’s wardship. This arrangement may seem heartless and calculating today, but at the time such provisions for aristocratic children were commonplace and thought to be highly advantageous.

  So, in the summer of 1547, Thomas Seymour effectively controlled the destiny of three royal ladies and had good grounds for believing that his quest for greater power could progress still farther. Soon, though, he was to find that maintaining a queen was an expensive undertaking and that sheltering a king’s daughter would tempt him down the path of scandal and ruin.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  ‘This frail life’

  ‘Those that be about me careth nothing for me, but standeth laughing at my grief.’

  Katherine Parr’s deathbed denunciation of her husband

  AS THE FURORE concerning Katherine’s fourth marriage began to die down, the queen was able to pick up again, with some relief, the work on her religious publications which she had put aside in the latter part of 1546. These had not been abandoned; they were waiting for a more propitious moment to reach their conclusion, to be made available to the small but powerful literate class of England whom Katherine hoped would be the vehicle for their eventual wider dissemination. She was especially keen to finish the work on the Paraphrases of Erasmus, and it was in September 1547 that she wrote to her stepdaughter Mary, encouraging her to take the credit for her translation of St John. There remained a considerable amount to be done on the overall project, and the Paraphrases did not appear in print until the last day of January 1548, three years after the work was begun. Meanwhile, Katherine’s own friends, including the duchess of Suffolk, encouraged her to press ahead with the publication of The Lamentation of a Sinner. This came out in November 1547, with a preface of more than ten pages by William Cecil, who would later become Elizabeth I’s chief minister. He was, at that time, a key member of the household of the duke of Somerset, and if it seems odd that someone close to Katherine’s brother-in-law should produce an adulatory introduction to this very personal exposition of religious faith, it serves to remind us that the community of shared belief among the reformers was sometimes stronger than family frictions.

  Cecil was keen to emphasize Katherine’s regal status, her virtue and her acknowledgement of sinfulness
. She was a ‘woman of high estate, by birth made noble, by marriage most noble, by wisdom godly, by a mighty king and excellent queen, by a famous Henry a renowned Katherine, a wife to him that was a king to realms: refusing the world wherein she was lost, to obtain heaven wherein she may be saved’.1 No mention here, then, of her fourth marriage, or the comment it had provoked. Katherine is rehabilitated by Cecil’s praise and by the fact that she had been the wife of Henry VIII. His preface struck just the tone the queen must have wanted and exhorted a wider audience to explore its revelations, for their own spiritual profit. The queen’s writings no longer needed to be concealed. They added support to the programme of religious change to which the government, now freed from the constrictions of Henry VIII’s determination to keep a middle way, was committed. By the time of the publication of the Lamentation, the imperial ambassador was lamenting that Mass was no longer heard in the house of the Lord Protector. And no more was it celebrated in the queen’s dower manors or at Seymour Place. So, while the dispute between the Lord Protector and his brother was by no means resolved, Katherine could concentrate on the more positive aspects of her life. As well as her publications, she also needed to focus on the upbringing and education of Jane Grey and Elizabeth Tudor.