Katherine the Queen: The Remarkable Life of Katherine Parr (18 page)

K
ATHERINE MUST
, though, have become a regular visitor at court once she had moved from Yorkshire. Her brother and sister were both there and it was probably through them, as well as her husband’s status as a baron, that she took her place in London society. Anne Parr, in particular, would have been a good source of introduction to the ladies of the court. By about 1538 she was married herself, to William Herbert, a Welsh
soldier of somewhat dubious background and reputation. The earl of Warwick had put Herbert’s paternal grandfather, the earl of Pembroke, to death during the Wars of the Roses and the family’s influence in Wales waned thereafter. The grandson owed his place at court to the influence of the earl of Worcester, a distant relative. ‘Black Will Herbert’, as he was known to his contemporaries, had killed a man in 1527 and may have spent some time in the service of Francis I of France as a result of this transgression. He was, intermittently, a member of the king’s household during the 1530s and this, no doubt, is how he met Anne Parr. Given her brother’s connections and his good standing with the king, Anne must have seemed a good prospect. She had been one of Jane Seymour’s ladies and retained the role when Henry eventually married for a fourth time, to Anne of Cleves. We do not know exactly how Anne’s marriage came about and whether it was a love match, but it is interesting to note that both Parr sisters seem to have been attracted to dashing men of action who were slightly disreputable. This predilection was not yet apparent in Katherine but would eventually have a dramatic effect on her life.

The position of the Parrs seemed to be improving the longer Henry VIII was on the throne. Katherine’s brother was duly raised to the peerage in 1539, as Baron Parr, and Anne survived the failure of the Cleves marriage and the disgrace of Katherine Howard’s fall unscathed, still prominent among the ladies of the court. Lord Latimer, however, continued to be ordered periodically to the north. His position was eased by Cromwell’s overthrow but he was not allowed to rest. He may, though, have been relieved to stay outside the faction-fighting of the early 1540s in London, a perilous period at court as the religious conservatives wrestled with the reformers for influence. During 1542, as the king moped over Katherine Howard’s betrayal of his trust, Latimer was as much on the move as ever. He attended the first session of parliament that year but the summer found him on
military service yet again on the Scottish border. Perhaps it was this renewed campaign, as well as the first signs that his health was beginning to fail, that prompted him to make his will in September 1542.

Lord Latimer survived the dangers of warfare and came back down to the capital at some point during the latter part of the year. By then, the decline in his health was much more serious, for he did not attend the first session of the 1543 parliament. He remained at his Charterhouse residence and it was there that he died, probably towards the end of February. In his will, he had left direction that he was to be buried ‘on the south side of Well Church in the county of York, where my ancestors lie, if I should die in Yorkshire’. But as he died in London, far away from Snape, his mortal remains were laid to rest in St Paul’s Cathedral on 2 March. He made provision for his children, various relatives and, of course, Katherine herself. In addition to the manor at Stowe she was also given the estates near York and the responsibility of bringing up Margaret Neville, and providing support if the girl did not marry in five years. More poignantly, he also bequeathed her his ‘best basin and ewer of silver and my two silver flagons’.
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To his son, John, he left Snape and all its contents and his title. He also set aside sufficient funds to endow a school and pay a schoolmaster to teach ‘the sons of the tenements and inhabitants of the lordship of Snape and Well’.

It was a bequest typical of the man. Lord Latimer was a conservative noble who cared for the welfare of his tenants, who preferred to worship God in the traditions of his forefathers, and whose loyalty to the king would have gone unremarked, and probably no more than adequately rewarded, were it not for the Pilgrimage of Grace. He had been fortunate in his third wife, a caring mother to his two children and loyal spouse, and she in him, for his constancy and affection. And now Katherine, Lady Latimer, comfortable if not rich, could contemplate her future once again. At last, the prospect that she might be able to please herself in the choice of a husband seemed to beckon. On the day of her husband’s burial in early March 1543, when winter had not quite given way to spring, she had no idea that, four months later, she would be queen of England.

‘God . . . through his grace and goodness . . . made me to renounce utterly mine own will.’

Queen Katherine, recalling her dilemma
in the spring of 1543

E
ASTER
S
UNDAY
fell early in 1543, on 25 March, the official start of the New Year in the old Julian calendar. For Katherine, as for the entire population of the country, this herald of a new beginning could not have come soon enough. The winter had been hard and long. It set in so early that, in the troubled northern borders where Lord Latimer had spent his last autumn, the roads soon became impassable. The news of the birth of the child, who would very shortly become Mary Queen of Scots, took four days to travel from Linlithgow in Scotland to Alnwick in Northumberland, a distance of just over 100 miles. Following on the poor harvest of the very wet summer of 1542, this was a time of intense deprivation. Frost and snow sat on the ground for weeks and the cost of firewood and fish rocketed. The situation became so bad that a proclamation was issued on 9 February allowing the eating of white meat in Lent. Just before Easter itself, the mayor and aldermen of London were feeling the pinch, too, and decided that it would be good to demonstrate some solidarity with their fellow-citizens by announcing
‘that [they] . . . should have and be served but with one course at dinner and supper’.
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Katherine had much to reflect on as winter began to release its grip. She was thirty years old, widowed for a second time but comfortable financially. Her responsibilities towards her wayward stepson were over, though she did not forget him, as we shall see, which suggests that their relationship remained cordial, if not close. Lord Latimer had particularly required her to look after the welfare of his daughter but her affection for Margaret Neville made this a pleasure rather than a duty. As Lady Latimer, residing at her late husband’s residence in the Charterhouse, Katherine was well connected, respected and independent. Once the period of mourning was over, she could consider her future. She was an attractive and intelligent woman with an enquiring mind. Her duty as a loyal spouse fulfilled, Katherine was able, for the first time, to ponder what she might want to do with her life. Two things were obvious to her at once. The first was that she wanted to stay at court; she had done with provincial life. The second was that she wanted to remarry. Both her wishes were granted, but not at all in the way that she had anticipated when she buried Lord Latimer in St Paul’s Cathedral. This, at least, was what she came to believe subsequently. But was it really true?

Disentangling the emotions of Katherine Parr in the spring and early summer of 1543 is less straightforward than has been suggested, chiefly because the main source we have to rely on is, of course, the lady herself. But it is worth the effort of unravelling what happened because it illuminates her later attitudes and behaviour. There are, inevitably, gaps in our knowledge (not least of which is the actual date of Lord Latimer’s death, which clearly has an important bearing on Katherine’s behaviour), but there are strong hints that the decision she eventually made was one that her intellect, if not her heart, had accepted sooner than she subsequently acknowledged. The key to unlocking this mystery lies in the court.

This was evidently a milieu that Katherine enjoyed but whose undercurrents and dangers she perhaps failed to appreciate at a time when she was at last able to put her personal happiness before other considerations. The pattern of her life in the years after her move south from Yorkshire suggests strongly that she liked being in London and close to the centre of events. There is no need to suppose that she had any official position of her own; her husband’s status and the contacts of her brother and sister would have given her a sufficient entrée. The belief that she sought a position in the household of Princess Mary early in the winter of 1542–3 is based on a misunderstanding of the documents among her household expenses as queen. We do not need to imagine her forsaking her ailing husband to frequent the princess’s splendid residence at Whitehall Palace, busily ordering dresses for the king’s elder daughter and gossiping with the other ladies. Apart from the inherent unlikelihood of Katherine making a very calculating and selfish move, abandoning Lord Latimer as he lay dying, Princess Mary was far too interested in fashion to allow someone else to choose her wardrobe. The dresses were in fact ordered by Katherine while still Lady Latimer, for herself and for her ‘daughter’, in this case, Margaret Neville. Katherine apparently did not pay bills promptly. This tendency may have been endemic among the Tudor aristocracy, but grew worse in Katherine’s case with time, an aspect of her character, and the running of her household as queen, that has gone largely unremarked.
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Katherine was interested in medicine and herbs and it seems likely, though we cannot know for sure, that she supervised Lord Latimer’s treatment during his final illness herself. This does not mean that she spent all her time tending to him, though she is unlikely to have socialized much during the first months of 1543 because of the freezing weather. The same may not have been true in 1542, especially when Latimer was away in the north and she could see more of her family. The court during this year was a strange place, at first in a kind of limbo until after the execution
of Katherine Howard in February. Gradually, it began to revive, as Henry VIII emerged from his depression and sense of grievance at his fifth wife’s behaviour. Despite the fact that the king was without a consort, the ladies of the queen’s household remained at court, including Anne Herbert, who had now to hand back to the Crown the jewels she had supervised for her giddy, doomed mistress. Anne, however, must have realized that she could not expect to rise further without powerful patronage, and though her husband’s career had not yet taken off, the Herberts knew enough about the court to survive and hope for better things. So, too, did Katherine’s brother, William, who was himself committed to staying in London. His northern lands did not interest him at all and he seldom went there to manage them.