Katherine the Queen: The Remarkable Life of Katherine Parr (31 page)

‘The King’s Majesty hath resolved that the Queen’s Highness shall be Regent in his absence . . .’

Minutes of the meeting of the King’s Council,
Whitehall, 7 July 1544

O
NE WEEK AFTER
the council recorded that Henry VIII had made his wife of barely a year regent of England, the king set sail for France. He had not crossed the Channel since the end of 1532. On that occasion Anne Boleyn, confident, magnificent but not yet queen, had accompanied him to a meeting with Francis I at Calais. Anne’s star at the time was in the ascendant (she married Henry secretly within a couple of months) but she was never required to govern in his name. Before Katherine Parr, only his first queen, Katherine of Aragon, had performed such a role. Then, as in the summer of 1544, Henry was an ally of the Holy Roman Emperor and at war with France and Scotland. And on both occasions Henry was fortunate to have a capable and intelligent wife who proved herself not merely equal to the task, but who relished the responsibility.

This was an age when it was believed that women were inferior to men in all matters of judgement; yet Katherine did not have far to look for examples of women rulers who were effective. In Scotland, Mary of Guise, the French mother of the infant
Queen of Scots, was, like Katherine Parr, twice-widowed, handsome, red-headed and charming. Mary needed all her wits and allure to protect her daughter amid the treachery and violence of Scottish politics. And across the North Sea, in the Netherlands, Mary of Hungary, the Habsburg princess who was the younger sister of Emperor Charles V, had been his regent since 1531. As austere and Flemish in appearance as Mary of Guise was Gallic and captivating, Mary of Hungary daily confronted a task that was more complex than anything Katherine would know. Squeezed dry by years of war, increasingly troubled by religious and social divisions, the Low Countries were in constant upheaval and exceptionally difficult for anyone to govern, let alone a woman. Mary of Hungary’s demanding life was not entirely lacking in pleasure (in 1544 she had a beautiful palace built at Binche in what is now Belgium), but her frustration at the responsibilities of government, which she took very seriously, occasionally spilled over in her letters to her brother. Doing business with ‘these people’, as she referred to the Estates or parliament of the Netherlands, was enough to drive one mad, she lamented.

Whatever the merits of these two ladies, there were very few men in the sixteenth century who welcomed government by a female. ‘To promote a woman to bear rule, superiority, dominion or empire above any realm, nation or city’, proclaimed the Scottish religious reformer John Knox, ‘is repugnant to nature, contumely to God, a thing most contrarious to his revealed will and approved ordinance, and finally it is the subversion of good order, of all equity and justice.’
¹
By the time of writing this uncompromisingly shrill assessment of women rulers in his polemical tract
The First Blast of the Trumpet against the Monstrous Regiment of Women
, Knox had seen enough of female power, above all, power wielded by Catholic women, that he could no longer hold back his disgust. Yet the mere fact of his being compelled to write could be viewed as an indirect acknowledgement of the achievements of Mary of Guise and Mary of Hungary and, later, Mary Tudor as well.

Like the two Marys, Katherine was not, of course, acting alone. Henry had ensured that her council was composed of an effective mix of churchmen, soldiers and administrators. So when she sat down to discuss the business of the day she was supported by Thomas Cranmer, archbishop of Canterbury, and Thomas Thirlby, bishop of Westminster, who were both seasoned politicians. Edward Seymour, earl of Hertford, an experienced soldier and diplomat who led the English armies on the Scottish borders, provided military expertise, while Thomas Wriothesley, recently appointed lord chancellor, was responsible for the financing of the war. Sir William Petre, clerk to the council, supervised its administration and day-to-day running. Katherine also added an appointment of her own, her uncle, Lord Parr of Horton. He seems to have been too ill to attend actual meetings but the fact that she nominated him betrays perhaps a hint of nervousness, despite the public face of quiet confidence that Katherine presented. Her brother was with the king’s army in France, excited by the prospect of action and hoping for glory. He was not available for consultation and it may be that the queen felt more comfortable with the knowledge that she could at least contact her uncle and bring his views into decision-making should the necessity arise.

If there were differences of opinion that emerged during Katherine’s nearly three months as regent they could not have been material; no evidence of dissension survives. Moreover her councillors had some things in common. None was of the old nobility. Their immediate forbears were royal servants, not aristocrats with long family trees. All had prospered as a result of Henry VIII’s changes in government and the redistribution of wealth and power brought about by the Reformation in England. The duke of Norfolk was the premier noble, but his family (as his estranged duchess liked to remind him) was not an old one and the king, who viewed Norfolk with displeasure after the fall of Katherine Howard, wanted him as a military commander in France. Henry believed that he could count on the men he had
appointed to advise his wife, who were professionals rather than rivals in a power struggle. Yet the men who supported Katherine Parr were very different in personality and did not by any means have the same personal goals. For in the regency council of 1544 can be detected some early pointers to the divisions that would characterize English politics after Henry’s death.

Hertford was less flamboyant than his brother, Thomas Seymour, Katherine’s former suitor, but he was ambitious and could already see his way to a much more powerful role. Although no one dared speak of it, the likelihood that Henry VIII would survive many more years seemed remote. As the elder uncle of Prince Edward, Hertford could expect much more, in the not so distant future, than heading a force of marauders laying waste to southern Scotland. Wriothesley, on the other hand, was a career civil servant who controlled the purse strings and contemplated a successful future in which he, too, would play a central role in English government. Their religious differences in 1544 were less obvious than they would become a few years later, but Hertford tended to the new ideas and Wriothesley to a more conservative set of beliefs. Probably there was not much love lost between these two ambitious men, whose wives both served in the queen’s household. Anne Hertford and Jane Wriothesley each had their own reasons for resenting Katherine Parr, Anne because she viewed the queen as an upstart and Jane because Katherine had written her an unsentimental letter about the death of an infant son. But in the summer of 1544 these negative feelings did not intrude on their husbands’ ability to work with the queen regent.

The churchmen also held different views. Cranmer, having survived the dangerous struggle for power between religious conservatives and reformers in 1543, was known to have the king’s support and, if not entirely unassailable, was in a stronger position than he had been for some years. He was convinced of the need for further reform, and in these crucial weeks of war, when he was frequently in the queen’s company and acted as her personal confessor, it may be that he influenced her own
developing ideas on religion.
²
His Litany in English was published in May 1544, and much of it survived in the later
Book of Common Prayer
. But Cranmer believed there was still work to be done to move forward the Reformation in England. Thirlby, however, was not so convinced, and his closeness to the conservative Stephen Gardiner demonstrates, once again, Henry VIII’s desire for balance among his advisers. An able diplomat, Thirlby had already conducted missions to Charles V and became resident ambassador at the imperial court in 1545. His religious reservations, though, had not alienated Cranmer on a personal level and it was said that ‘there was no man living could more friendly esteem any man of himself’ than Cranmer did of Thirlby.
³

William Petre was a Devon man, of wealthy but certainly not high-born background. His father was a successful cattle farmer and tanner, with sufficient money and standing to send his son, one of several brothers, to study law at Oxford. He had risen quietly with Thomas Cromwell, being actively involved in the great work of the dissolution of the monasteries and on a number of diplomatic missions. His skill as an administrator meant that he continued to prosper after Cromwell’s fall and, as secretary to Katherine’s regency council, he found himself responsible for running the entire bureaucracy of the country while his superior, the new royal secretary, William Paget, was away with the king in France. Capable and confident when it came to dealing with the demands of extensive paperwork, Petre was a safe pair of hands.

Katherine’s first year as queen had given her time to get to know this small group appointed to stay with her in England, and she worked well with them. Her actions and letters show that she was a practical and energetic ruler with a good grasp of the essentials of her situation. It was her role to maintain peace and stability at home while the king was on campaign, to aid the military effort with supplies of money and materiel and to communicate the king’s success when it came. She was also responsible for the welfare of the heir to the throne, an important consideration should Henry die suddenly. As regent, she possessed
considerable powers. Five proclamations were issued during her tenure of office, covering a range of issues, such as the price of armour, the arrest and trial of deserters and the prohibition from appearing at court of anyone exposed to the plague. Where financial matters were concerned, Katherine was granted the right to disburse monies from the Treasury, though this had to be countersigned by two other members of the council. Her frequent letters to Henry VIII kept him informed of what she was doing, exhibiting a nice balance of wifely concern for his welfare and queenly command of the government he had entrusted to her direction. On 25 July she wrote: ‘Letters from the Council . . . at Calais . . . informed me of your good health and the prosperous beginning of your affairs, for which I thank God. The Council here have ordered
£
40,000 to be on Monday next conveyed to you . . . Here they will be diligent to advance . . . against the beginning of next month, as much money as possible.’ Nor was it just money that she was sending: ‘4,000 men are to be put ready at one hour’s warning, the Lords of the Council here, who have already ordered the general musters throughout the realm, have eftsoons written to the commissioners in parts near the sea most meet to have men transported from . . .’ And a postscript in her own hand added: ‘I feel bound to advertise your Grace of the diligence of your councillors here.’
⁴
This sounded just the right note of cooperation while reinforcing her own position, and is typical of Katherine’s skill in such matters.

All this gives the impression of activity, efficiency and optimism. But it is not the real story of the war of 1544. Katherine was ably fulfilling her husband’s expectations but the reality of the situation was influenced by wider international considerations over which Henry had no direct control. And what, in any case, was he doing leading an army of over 40,000 men into northern France when he was old by the standards of his day and in poor health?

T
HE ANSWER
to this question lies in the long-standing rivalry for supremacy in western Europe that dominated the first half of the sixteenth century. The Emperor Charles V ruled, with the help of his family, a huge swathe of lands, from the Netherlands, through Germany to Austria and central Europe in the north of the Continent, and the Iberian peninsula and much of Italy in the south. The Holy Roman Empire dated from the days of Charlemagne and if, as has famously been said, it was neither holy nor Roman, in the year 1544 it remained a formidable territorial mass. The only major power that stood against it was France, whose king was so determined to counter imperial influence that he had given support to the rising swell of religious rebellion in Germany and actually allied with the Turks, who were harassing the eastern borders of Charles V’s empire. Such a move would seem, on the face of it, much more scandalous than Henry VIII’s schism with the pope, but Francis I escaped excommunication, in part because the papacy never forgave Charles V for the sack of Rome in 1526.

Henry liked to think of himself as a power-broker in European politics, the strong king of England whose support could tip the balance in favour of either the empire or France. But, in truth, he was largely an observer of events. The high standard of English diplomats sent to the European courts spoke well for his interest but the course of his own reign made it difficult for him to translate intelligence into action. There was, however, one underlying theme. Although centuries of warfare with France made the emperor the more natural ally for England, Henry resented the power of Charles V. The king also had to consider, as he weighed up his foreign policy aims, that France menaced him on two fronts – across the Channel, in Calais, but also in Scotland, where the pro-French party would try to establish control and thwart his plans for bringing the two crowns together.