Katherine the Queen: The Remarkable Life of Katherine Parr

by Linda Porter

  Thomas probably thought that the duchess of Suffolk, known for her strong religious views, mistress of large estates in Lincolnshire and the mother of two sons, would direct his daughter’s upbringing in a responsible and loving environment. It was his dying wish that Mary should be assigned to the duchess’s protection. But, as with Latimer, so with Katherine Brandon; he had been too trusting. The duchess of Suffolk’s strident evangelical views did not encompass true Christian charity. She regarded Lady Mary Seymour as an expensive nuisance, for although the little girl came with a full complement of staff, a mini-household of her own, as befitted a queen’s daughter, there were substantial costs in supporting this establishment, and after several months, when Somerset did not pay the £500 a year pension that had been agreed for Mary by the Privy Council three days before her father’s execution, Katherine Brandon’s patience was exhausted. She wrote an exasperated letter to William Cecil, clearly believing that his influence with the Somersets might succeed where hers had not: ‘It is said’, she began, ‘that the best means of remedy to the sick is first plainly to confess and disclose the disease, wherefore, both for remedy and again for that my disease is so strong that it will not be hidden, I will disclose me unto you.’ She was, she told him, in very straitened financial circumstances: ‘All the world knoweth … what a very beggar I am.’ And her situation was rapidly worsening, for a variety of causes, but ‘amongst others … if you will understand, not least the queen’s child hath layen, and still doth lie at my house, with her company about her, wholly at my charges. I have written to my lady of Somerset at large, that there be some pension allotted unto her according to my lord grace’s promise. Now, good Cecil, help at a pinch all that you may help.’ The duchess of Somerset had promised her some months ago that ‘certain nursery plate’ should be provided for Mary. She provided a list of the items that had come with the baby – the same ones that had been intended for the crimson and gold nursery at Sudeley Castle – and also included a letter from mistress Aglionby, the child’s governess, who, she complained, ‘with the maid’s nurse and others, daily call for their wages, whose voices my ears hardly bear, but my coffers much worse’.38 Even allowing for the duchess’s pecuniary embarrassment (which may have been exaggerated, as was common at the time), it is a thoroughly unpleasant epistle. The picture it paints of an unwanted child, her anxious servants unpaid and her guardian describing her as a sickness, does the duchess of Suffolk little credit.

  Perhaps the letter did eventually stir Somerset and the Privy Council into some sort of action. On 22 January 1550, less than a year after her father’s death, application was made in the House of Commons for the restitution of Lady Mary Seymour, ‘daughter of Thomas Seymour, knight, late Lord Seymour of Sudeley and late High Admiral of England, begotten of the body of Queen Katherine, late queen of England’. She was made eligible by this act to inherit any remaining property that had not been returned to the Crown at the time of her father’s attainder. But, in truth, Mary’s prospects were less optimistic than this might suggest. Much of her parents’ land and goods had already passed into the hands of others.

  Lady Mary Seymour never claimed any remaining part of her father’s estate, and this is the last record we have of her. Her grant from the council was not renewed in September 1550, when it would have fallen due. The assumption must therefore be, in the absence of any further reference, that she was dead by the time of her second birthday. Childhood diseases produced high mortality rates in the sixteenth century, and it is likely that she succumbed at Grimsthorpe in Lincolnshire, still under the reluctant eye of the duchess of Suffolk. In the nineteenth century the historian Agnes Strickland, author of the Lives of the Queens of England, referred to a tradition that Lady Mary Seymour had survived, cared for by her governess, Elizabeth Aglionby, and that she had subsequently married Sir Edward Bushell, an Elizabethan courtier who later served Anne of Denmark, queen to James I. A Sussex family still claims to be descended from her. Such things are not, of course, impossible but it seems far more likely, in the absence of documentary proof, that Lady Mary, abandoned and unloved, left ‘this frail life’ at the mid-point of the sixteenth century, to join her parents in the ‘bliss’ that Thomas had so fervently hoped to find.

  TWO HUNDRED YEARS rolled over England. Through civil war, changing dynasties and the beginnings of empire, Katherine Parr rested in her tomb at Sudeley. The castle eventually passed into the hands of the Chandos family, staunch royalists, and suffered accordingly when the civil war ended. Left unfortifiable, it was abandoned and fell into ruin. The chapel also was neglected and the burial place of Katherine Parr forgotten, save for an overlooked manuscript in the College of Arms. Then, in the spring of 1782, a new local history of Gloucestershire was published, which caught the interest of the public. A group of visitors to the romantic ruin at Sudeley included several ladies whose curiosity was aroused by the remains of the chapel. Investigating further, members of the party ‘observing a large block of alabaster fixed in the north wall of the chapel … imagined it might be the back of a monument formerly placed there. Led by this hint, they opened the ground not far from the wall.’ To their astonishment, not far from the surface, they found a lead envelope coffin with the following inscription:

  KP

  Here lyeth Queen Katheryne Wife to Kinge

  Henry the VIII and

  The wife of Thomas

  Lord of Sudely high

  Admy … of Englond

  And ynkle to Kyng

  Edward the VI

  Filled with curiosity, they cut two holes in the lead envelope. When they unwrapped the cloth covering the head, they found themselves gazing back across the centuries, into the face of Katherine Parr as she had looked on the night of her death in September 1548. The manner of her burial and the fact that she had lain all this time undisturbed meant that the queen was uncorrupted, her flesh still firm to the touch. At first awestruck by this sight, the ladies’ excitement soon gave way to consternation. Hastily reburying the body, they did not seal it properly again.39

  Much damage had already been done to Katherine’s corpse by the mere act of opening her coffin. Decay inevitably set in, and when further investigations of the tomb took place a few years later, the face was worn to bone. But a crown of ivy had wound itself around Katherine’s skull, a poignant reminder that this remarkable woman, attractive and sensual, intelligent and capable, deeply loving God as well as man, had been the last queen of Henry VIII.

  Epilogue

  HATFIELD, 17 NOVEMBER 1558

  Elizabeth Tudor had been living quietly at Hatfield for some time, watching and waiting. But since the beginning of the month there was a steady stream of visitors, despite the epidemic sweeping the country. The controller of the queen’s household and the secretary to the Privy Council had both been to see her, as had Queen Mary’s favourite lady-in-waiting, Jane Dormer, bringing some of her mistress’s jewels. Just one week earlier, Elizabeth received the count of Feria, the envoy of her brother-in-law, King Philip. He found her much changed from the obliging young woman he had seen in the summer. This Elizabeth was independent-minded, imperious even, acknowledging no great debt of gratitude to Philip or anyone, save the people of England itself. And she was full of indignation at her treatment in recent years. Any thought that she would be tractable was clearly misplaced. He got the distinct and uncomfortable impression that she knew exactly what course she would take.

  By 17 November the days were much colder, but Elizabeth believed in the benefits of fresh air. She continued to take her accustomed exercise in the extensive grounds that surrounded the old palace of Hatfield. They were familiar from her childhood, for she had spent much time there with both her brother and sister during the reign of Henry VIII. An energetic walker, she soon left the house behind. Legend has it that about a third of a mile away, in the wooded parkland that surrounded the estate, she stopped under an oak tree. Perhaps she was alerted by the sound of approaching horses. At that mome
nt, as the riders drew near, she already knew what her destiny would be.

  In the decade that followed Katherine Parr’s death, Elizabeth had grown from a flighty child-woman into a confident (if more than a little embittered) queen-in-waiting. It was a hard and perilous journey, through an England convulsed by rebellion, intrigue and religious turmoil. Many of those she knew in Katherine’s lifetime were now dead. The duke of Somerset, overthrown by social discontent and the mounting opposition of his fellow politicians, followed his brother to the block in 1552. Edward VI died after a long illness in the summer of 1553, disinheriting both of his sisters and bequeathing his throne to Lady Jane Grey. Edward’s regard for his cousin suggests that Thomas Seymour’s ambitions for their eventual marriage may not have been entirely fanciful. To everyone’s surprise, Mary Tudor had fought courageously and successfully for the throne that was rightfully hers, while Elizabeth sat on the sidelines (again at Hatfield) awaiting the outcome.

  Mary’s accession meant ruin for the Dudley family, into which Lady Jane Grey had been reluctantly married in the spring of 1553. John Dudley, duke of Northumberland, who replaced Somerset at the head of the Privy Council, was executed for treason because he had supported Jane Grey and within a year Jane herself, her husband and father all lost their heads. None of this blood-letting seemed to aid Elizabeth, however. Her relationship with Mary, progressively cooling since their father’s death, was damaged beyond repair by implication in the 1554 rebellion that cost Jane Grey her life. Elizabeth protested her innocence, as she would do ever after, but was imprisoned in the Tower for a few months and then placed under what amounted to house arrest. Mary, consumed by love for her husband, Philip of Spain, and committed to the introduction of a reformed Catholicism in England, eventually managed to control her dislike of Anne Boleyn’s daughter, so that an uneasy peace characterized their dealings with each other in the last year of Mary’s life. When England’s first queen regnant realized, in the autumn of 1558, she was dying from a viral disease similar to influenza that had already taken so many other lives, she was finally prevailed upon to name Elizabeth as her successor.

  Now, as the messengers from St James’s Palace dismounted and knelt before her, Elizabeth had final proof that her sister was, indeed, dead: they gave her Mary’s coronation ring. The story that she dropped to her knees herself, quoting Psalm 118, ‘This is the Lord’s doing: it is marvellous in our eyes’, has no contemporary corroboration but has become part of the heritage of England. Given Elizabeth’s knowledge of scripture and her ability to quote freely, it is something that she might well have said. Certainly she did tell her lords, and probably on the day of her accession, that ‘I mean to direct all mine actions by good advice and council’.1 It was an approach that would have found favour with her stepmother.

  Despite the demands of the early years of her rule, which were far from easy, Elizabeth did not forget those who had been close to Katherine Parr and Thomas Seymour in the frivolous days of Chelsea and Hanworth, before the harsh realities of mid-Tudor England closed in upon them all. She was godmother to John Harington’s son (also named John) and when Harington’s first wife died, he married Isabella Markham, one of Elizabeth’s ladies-in-waiting. In 1567, Harington gave the queen the portrait of Thomas Seymour that now hangs in the National Portrait Gallery in London.

  Nor were Katherine’s relatives forgotten. Anne died four years after her sister, in 1552. Buried with great pomp by her husband in St Paul’s Cathedral, she founded the line of the earls of Pembroke which exists to this day. But William Parr lived on, a trusted councillor of the queen, who favoured him with many appointments. When he died in 1571, childless and far from wealthy, he was buried at Elizabeth’s expense.

  The adult Elizabeth was very much the product of Katherine Parr. Her education, her religious beliefs, her consciousness of personal image owed much to the stepmother who guided and loved her during those formative years. Katherine had brought up a talented and determined girl, open-minded by the standards of her day, who was not afraid to rule. When she unwillingly let go of the world on 24 March 1603, Elizabeth had been queen of England for forty-five years. Her long reign, with its flowering of culture and the establishment of a small country on the north-western fringes of Europe as a world power, is Katherine Parr’s abiding achievement.

  Author’s Note

  A nineteenth-century writer described Katherine Parr as one of our best but least known queens. She is the one, in the famous rhyme that schoolchildren used to learn, who survived marriage to Henry VIII. Yet despite the occasional film and television portrayal and a handful of historical novels (none of which do her justice) this judgement of Katherine’s role in English history still rings true. Her last resting place, in the chapel of Sudeley Castle in Gloucestershire, was forgotten for over 200 years until rediscovered in the 1780s, leading to a small revival of interest. For the Victorians, she was a worthy, matronly lady of unimpeachable Protestant views, who had narrowly escaped being the victim of a Catholic plot intended to add her to the list of beheaded wives of the much-married old king. In our own time, gender historians have examined her period as queen with renewed vigour, finding an all together different woman from the cosy image of the nurse who tended Henry’s damaged legs.

  But the real interest of Katherine Parr lies beyond any stereotypes of Protestant icon or proto-feminist. It is not exactly a rags-to-riches story – Katherine was the daughter of courtiers, but so were three of Henry’s other wives – yet it is one of great drama, reflecting the extraordinary times in which Katherine Parr lived. She was a remarkable woman, who had survived much even before she married Henry VIII as his sixth queen. Like Henry, she viewed marriage as a natural and desirable state and so she married once more, finally, for love, with tragic results. She deserves to be better known and appreciated and I hope this biography will bring her to life for a wider audience.

  One of the great pleasures of writing about Katherine Parr has been the opportunity to visit the places she lived and to meet the people associated with them. I should particularly like to thank Geoff and Carole Brooks for letting me visit Stowe Manor in Northamptonshire, left to Katherine by her second husband, Lord Latimer. The house is much altered but some Tudor aspects still remain and Geoff and Carole are rightly proud of their lovely home. Their kindness and hospitality was much appreciated. Similarly, Charles Hudson let me visit Wyke Manor, near Pershore in Worcestershire, which has been in his family now for hundreds of years. The lock said to be of Katherine’s hair which he allowed me to see is very beautiful. I must also thank Jean Bray, the archivist at Sudeley Castle, for her support and interest, and for the private tour she gave me of the castle.

  John Guy and Maria Hayward gave prompt and helpful replies to requests for advice and information, and Leanda de Lisle and Susan Ronald have both talked with me about Katherine and her place in Tudor history. My thanks to all of them and to Dr Susan E. James, whose twenty years of research on Katherine and the Parr family is an important source for anyone writing about Henry VIII’s last queen.

  Finally, my gratitude to the team at Macmillan and my editors, Georgina Morley and Lorraine Green, for their enthusiasm and support. My agent, Andrew Lownie, is always there for his authors and, as ever, my husband, George, provided a willing ear and eye as I wrote.

  Notes

  Abbreviations

  BL British Library

  Cal SP Spanish Calendar of letters, despatches and state papers relating to the negotiations between England and Spain, preserved in the archives at Vienna, Simancas, Besancon and Brussels, ed. R. Tyler et al. (London, 1867–1954)

  L&P Letters and Papers, Foreign and Domestic, of the Reign of Henry VIII, 1509–47, ed. J. S. Brewer et al., 21 vols and addenda (London, 1862–1932)

  NA National Archives

  ODNB Oxford Dictionary of National Biography

  One – The Courtiers of the White Rose

  1 Both the Percys and the Nevilles originally had strong Lancastri
an connections which had seen them rise to become earls of Northumberland and Westmoreland respectively. Henry IV’s usurpation and the difficulties of the reign of his grandson, Henry VI, brought them into conflict with the Crown. This uneasy relationship continued throughout the Tudor era.

  2 Sir William Parr, founder of the family, was a member of John of Gaunt’s retinue. He married Elizabeth de Roos in about 1380, gaining, through her, one-quarter of the barony of Kendal and lordship of Kendal Castle. The title of baron, however, eluded the Parrs until it was conferred on Katherine Parr’s brother, William, in 1539. See ODNB entry for the Parr family.

  3 Precise details of how Edward of Westminster, Prince of Wales, met his death are lacking. He probably died in the fierce fighting as his broken forces fell back towards the town of Tewkesbury itself. Though his end may not have been at the hands of the brothers of the king, as Shakespeare depicts, it was undoubtedly violent.

  4 In 1464, Edward IV had required all recipients of lands, offices and annuities to pay one-quarter of their income to the Crown. This would have been a swingeing tax in times of peace but during the civil wars, when it was difficult to manage lands effectively, it was even more harsh.

  5 George, duke of Clarence, the king’s traitorous younger brother, had died in the Tower of London in 1478, almost certainly on Edward IV’s orders.

  6 Ingulph’s Chronicle of the Abbey of Croyland, transl. Henry T. Riley (London, 1854).

  7 C. L. Scofield, The Life and Reign of Edward IV (London, 1923).

  8 D. A. L. Morgan, ‘The House of Policy: The Political Role of the Late Plantagenet Household, 1422–1485’, in D. R. Starkey, ed., The English Court from the Wars of the Roses to the Civil War (Harlow, 1987).