Katherine the Queen: The Remarkable Life of Katherine Parr (37 page)

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.

N
OBODY 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 centuries 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 13
s
14
d
(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.

The Latin preface to this trilingual translation begins with a fulsome tribute to her fathers importance and benevolence and describes how she came to choose the subject of her gift: ‘so I gladly asked (which it was my duty to do) by what means I might offer to your greatness the most excellent tribute that my capacity and diligence could discover. In the which I only fear lest slight and unfinished studies and childish ripeness of mind diminish the praise of this undertaking . . . for nothing ought to be more acceptable to a king, whom philosophers regard as a god on earth, than this labour of the soul.’

Continuing in this vein, she waxed lyrical about the merits of her stepmother’s achievements, describing the ‘pious exertion and great diligence of a most illustrious queen’, who had composed the work in English, ‘and on that account may be more desirable to all and held in greater value by your majesty’.
¹²

It may well have been his daughter’s gift, so earnestly addressed, that first brought home to Henry VIII the extent of Katherine’s involvement in religious writing.
¹³
It is hard to believe that he knew nothing at all about it, since the queen does not appear to have deliberately concealed her interests from her husband. Despite the fact that they had separate households, there was much commonality of outlook between the two establishments, and many of the queen’s ladies were married to men who were close to the king, either as members of the Privy Council or in his Privy Chamber. A considerable number of people were aware of Katherine’s projects, and gossip was the lifeblood of the court. Henry was always occupied by the business of government yet he still saw his wife frequently. It is true that his increasing immobility meant that she more often came to him by this time. At the beginning of their marriage it had been his custom to visit the queen in her apartments, but by early 1546 the situation was largely reversed. Perhaps this did give her a degree of autonomy she had not previously experienced – and this may not have ultimately worked in her favour.

It does, though, seem highly plausible, that the king had paid scant attention to Katherine’s developing literary career. With all the difficulties he faced at home and abroad (he had still not made peace with France), his priorities lay elsewhere. In so far as he gave Katherine’s religious interests any thought at all, he probably dismissed her activities as a worthy hobby, rather like the study of Latin. But the realization of Katherine’s success as an author, and the influence she undoubtedly exercised over his children, must have been forcibly brought home to him when Elizabeth’s gift was perused. Henry had amply displayed his affection for his wife. She was no mere adornment but a helpmate, intelligent and committed. But the king had a monstrous ego and he did not appreciate being upstaged. Determined as he was to tread the path of moderation in his reformation of the Church, he was also concerned about the spread of books and study in the vernacular, fearing that too much discussion spread dissension, especially
among the unlearned and the ill-intentioned. Elizabeth, pouring over her copy of the
Prayers or Meditations
at Hertford Castle, may not have been aware of this, but Katherine must surely have been familiar with the great speech that Henry VIII made to parliament at its prorogation on Christmas Eve 1545.

This was to be his last appearance before the lords and representatives of the realm of England. He had dominated them throughout his reign and they helped him, in the previous decade, impose a new religious order on the country. But now, despite age, despite declining health, he was so out of patience with the splits disfiguring the Church he had created, that he decided to appear in person to answer the Speaker’s loyal address. Normally this was done, on the monarch’s behalf, by the lord chancellor, but Thomas Wriothesley had been the subject of a hate campaign by those who opposed his efforts to search out forbidden books and the king probably realized that Wriothesley’s unpopularity would undermine the message that needed to be put across. Besides, he wanted to deliver it himself. Heartfelt, direct and eloquent, there is no reason to suppose that anyone else wrote it for him. Like his children, Henry was a splendid orator when he chose to be. His 1545 speech is one of the greatest of the Tudor era.

He did not start by berating his audience. Instead, he thanked them for their support in the war against France, describing the necessity of taking Boulogne and acknowledging the subsidy they had voted him. He also praised them for passing the recent Chantries Act, a piece of legislation that completed the suppression of religious houses begun a decade earlier, saying ‘firmly trusting that I will order them to the glory of God and the profit of our commonwealth . . . doubt not, I pray you, that your expectation shall be served’. On this matter, he and his parliament were at one. But there were other matters that troubled him mightily: ‘Yet,’ he continued, ‘although I with you, and you with me, be in this perfect love and concord, this friendly amity cannot continue, except you, my lords temporal, and you my
lords spiritual, and you my loving subjects, study and take pains to amend one thing, which is surely amiss, and far out of order, to the which I most heartily require you; which is that charity and concord is not among you, but discord and dissension beareth rule, in every place.’ St Paul’s epistle to the Corinthians emphasized the importance of charity and love. So what was the reality in England, as Christmas time drew near? ‘Behold, what love and charity is amongst you, when the one calleth the other heretic and anabaptist, and he calleth him again, papist, hypocrite, and pharisee? Be these tokens of charity amongst you? Are these the signs of fraternal love between you?’ The blame he laid clearly at the door of ‘the fathers and preachers of the spirituality . . . Alas, how can the poor souls live in concord, when you, preachers, sow amongst them, in your sermons, debate and discord?’ Warming to his theme, the king did not mince words: ‘Amend these crimes, I exhort you, and set forth God’s word, both by true preaching and example-giving, or else I, whom God hath appointed his vicar, and high minister here, will see these divisions extinct and these enormities corrected.’ He went on to highlight one area that troubled him exceedingly – the misuse, as he saw it, of the scripture in English. This had opened up contention that he had never anticipated and his anger against it was magnificently expressed: