Katherine the Queen: The Remarkable Life of Katherine Parr (45 page)

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.

F
AMILY 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.

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

Katherine Parr’s deathbed denunciation of her husband

A
S 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.