Katherine the Queen: The Remarkable Life of Katherine Parr (5 page)

W
HILE THEIR MOTHER
was away, the Parr children were well cared for by servants at Rye House in Hertfordshire, which came to be their permanent home not long before their father’s death. It was leased from one of Sir Thomas Parr’s many cousins and was their fixed establishment until Maud’s own death fourteen years later.
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Here Katherine and her brother and sister began their education, under the supervision of their mother but with considerable input from two people who were to play important roles in Katherine’s development. For, though fatherless, Katherine and her younger siblings were by no means deprived of male influence: Maud, very much a woman of her day, understood well the importance of male protection and involvement in her children’s lives. She was fortunate to be able to call upon her late husband’s brother, Sir William Parr of Horton, and Cuthbert Tunstall, a distant Parr kinsman who was to become one of the most prominent churchmen and diplomats of the first half of the sixteenth century. Together, they provided a powerful further resource, far beyond what Maud’s own role at court could bring, for the future of her family.

Katherine’s uncle had, like her father, flourished under the care of Sir Nicholas Vaux. His ties to Northamptonshire remained close throughout his life and were strengthened by his marriage (several years before that of Thomas and Maud Parr) to Mary Salisbury, daughter of a local landowner. Mary brought as part of her dowry the manor of Horton, and William Parr styled himself accordingly. It was a happy marriage that produced four daughters, and so Katherine Parr grew up in the company of her cousins, especially the eldest girl, Maud, who shared her lessons and was to become a lifelong friend and confidante. Combining the education of the children was no doubt appealing for both
family and financial reasons, and the younger generation of Parrs were joined by another cousin, Elizabeth Cheyney, in their studies.
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William Parr of Horton was of more military bent than his brother and had fought with distinction in both France (where he was knighted by Henry VIII in Tournai Cathedral the year after Katherine’s birth) and in Scotland. But he was less adept as a courtier and politician. Though he came to recognize that valour was admired but seldom rewarded by financial gain, he does not ever seem to have been comfortable in court circles. His lack of finesse would not have been well received there. Insecure in developing relationships with others in an atmosphere where everyone was jockeying to be noticed, he nevertheless accompanied the king at the celebrated ‘Field of Cloth of Gold’ in northern France in 1520. His awkwardness was compounded by incompetence in handling his own financial affairs. This may have been exacerbated by the additional responsibilities he took on in assisting his sister-in-law, for while Maud managed her estates in the south of England, William Parr dealt with her lands in the north.

As a family man, however, he seems to have been held in genuine affection. Katherine Parr wrote a dedication to him in her father’s Latin
Book of Hours
, used by the Parr children as a Latin primer, which shows that he was an important presence in her life as a child: ‘Uncle, when you do on this look, I pray you remember who wrote this in your book. Your loving niece, Katheryn Parr.’
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The rhyme may be rudimentary, but the sentiment is clear, and the bond between uncle and niece was to last for the rest of William Parr’s life.

The precise nature of Cuthbert Tunstall’s influence is harder to determine, but Maud Parr herself acknowledged that she consulted him on matters relating to her children and that she valued his advice greatly. The extent of their contact can perhaps be gauged by the fact that she made him the chief executor of her will and left him a ring with a large ruby. Sir William Parr of
Horton was the anchor of Maud’s fatherless family, but Cuthbert Tunstall, archdeacon of Chester when Katherine’s father died, was an international figure, a prominent humanist, churchman, educator and diplomat who was to become one of the great survivors of sixteenth-century England. Maud could not have imagined, when she made her will in 1530, that Tunstall would outlive her daughter by eleven years. He was, by then, already over fifty years old.

Tunstall was illegitimate at birth, although his parents later married and the irregular circumstances of his background were never held against him. The connection with the Parrs was that he and Katherine’s father shared a grandmother (Alice Tunstall), as well as a northern background. Like his cousin, Tunstall was an engaging man who learned to thread his way through unpredictable times, but he rose to far greater prominence. An outstanding scholar and mathematician, he had been educated in England, spending time at both Oxford and Cambridge, before a six-year spell at the University of Padua in Italy, from which he received two degrees. His Church career began in 1505, the year after he returned to England. He was not ordained until four years later, by which time he had come to the attention of the Archbishop of Canterbury, William Warham, who sponsored his early advancement and brought him to court. He was also close to Wolsey, Henry VIII’s chief minister, who recognized in this urbane, polished man the potential to serve his country well in diplomacy. Such confidence was not misplaced, and at the time of Sir Thomas Parr’s death Tunstall had only recently returned from a mission to Burgundy, where he had met the future Holy Roman Emperor, Charles V. The knowledge that this well-connected kinsman could assist his wife and children must have been a comfort to Sir Thomas as he lay dying in the autumn of 1517.

In both the ecclesiastical and international spheres, Cuthbert Tunstall was already an influential person when Katherine Parr lost her father. But it was his distinction as a humanist, his
reputation for virtue and intellect, and the circle of friends he had known for many years that were even more important to her upbringing. He was close to all the great names of English humanism in the early sixteenth century: to Thomas More, John Colet, William Grocyn and Thomas Linacre and, on the wider European stage, to Erasmus. The Dutch thinker, so greatly revered by his contemporaries, admired Tunstall’s modesty, scholarship and charm – the latter quality apparently one that the Parrs and their relatives possessed to a notable degree. Tunstall helped Erasmus in the preparation of the second edition of his Greek Testament, with its Latin translation and notes. When it appeared in March 1519, he wrote to Erasmus: ‘You have opened the sources of Greek learning to our age, and the splendour of your achievement has for ever thrown into the shade the work of earlier scholars as the rising sun blots out the stars.’
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And there was no shortage of approbation for Tunstall himself, particularly from Thomas More, who wrote of him in the introduction to
Utopia
: ‘his virtue and learning be greater and of more excellency than I am able to praise them’. Almost twenty years after the publication of what is perhaps the best known of all humanist writings, More composed the inscription for his own tomb. By then, he anticipated the likely outcome of the stand he was taking against Henry VIII and he also knew that his old friend had made the decision to side with the king. Yet he wrote of his association movingly, describing Tunstall as ‘then bishop of London, but soon after of Durham . . . than whom the world contains today scarcely anyone more learned, sagacious or good’.
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Tunstall also seems to have had a genuine fondness for children and an interest in their progress. ‘How great is the joy of a father,’ he wrote, ‘when his little ones recognize him and come to him with smiles, when in their first attempts to speak they utter ridiculous sounds in their effort to mimic our words . . .’ Perhaps it was his interest in children, as well as his position in the Church, which caused him to be chosen to deliver the Latin oration,
In Praise of Matrimony
, at the betrothal of the
two-and-a-half-year-old Princess Mary to the Dauphin of France in 1518. The splendidly attired little Mary, whose marriageability was to become a staple of Henry VIII’s diplomacy throughout his reign (though he never did find a husband for her) apparently sat through the ceremony with remarkable patience for one so young. Tunstall had, however, anticipated a degree of fidgeting, even in a princess, for he had shrewdly built into his speech the observation: ‘See how catching sight of her father she springs forward from her nurse’s lap.’
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This allowed gave Mary’s grateful nurse to breathe a sigh of relief whilst also flattering the king’s ego.

There is, however, no evidence that Katherine Parr was educated with Mary Tudor, as has been suggested in the past.
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She was four years older than the princess, her requirements were much more modest in terms of her expectations and future role, and, tellingly, neither she nor anyone else in her family ever made mention of such a connection. But the two girls may well have benefited individually from Cuthbert Tunstall’s enthusiasm for mathematics. In 1522, shortly before he was consecrated as bishop of London, Tunstall published a treatise on arithmetic,
De arte supputandi
, which enhanced his reputation among the leading thinkers of Europe.

In a letter to Thomas More, Tunstall explained that he had begun the work some years earlier, after he suspected that he was being swindled by money-changers: ‘I was forced to look rather more closely into methods of ready reckoning and to apply myself again to the art of arithmetic with which as a youth I had made some acquaintance.’ He had, he said, struggled to complete his treatise over several years – it had not come easily – and he had more than once thought of abandoning his efforts all together. Now, the responsibilities he would face as bishop of London had spurred him on to consider what to do with ‘the labours of so many nights’, and, in the hope that ‘something not without value might be found in these writings for those intending to study arithmetic’, he dedicated the work to his friend More, ‘you who can also pass the book on to your children for them to read . . .
for them it might be most specially beneficial . . . since by nothing are the abilities of young folk more invigorated than by the study of mathematics’.
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Here Tunstall revealed that the
De arte supputandi
was intended above all to be a practical aid to young people. He believed that facility with arithmetic helped train the mind, and his book was the first that dealt with the subject in the modern sense, in contrast to earlier, more abstract studies of the properties, rather than the applications, of numbers. The uses of such guidance in the real world were obvious. In the running of a household, a good grasp of arithmetic played an important part. Later, both Mary Tudor as princess and Katherine Parr as queen would sign their own accounts.

Like their fellow humanists, Tunstall and More shared a keen interest in education, and the wider influence of both men can be seen in the schoolroom of Katherine Parr. Anne Parr, Katherine’s younger sister, herself later said that the children’s education was based on the approach used in the family of Thomas More.
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Here boys and girls were educated together, as was the case with the Parrs until William left home in 1525 to join the household of Henry VIII’s bastard son, the duke of Richmond. By that time he was twelve years old and the foundation of his education was already laid.

More’s views on the education of women were eloquently expressed to his children’s tutor:

Though I prefer learning joined with virtue to all the treasures of kings, yet renown for learning, when it is not united with the good life, is nothing else than splendid and notorious ignominy; this would be especially the case in a woman. Since erudition in a woman is a new thing and a reproach to the sloth of men, many will gladly assail it, and impute to literature what is really the fault of nature, thinking from the virtues of the learned to get their own ignorance esteemed as virtue. On the other hand, if a woman (and this I desire and hope with you as their teacher for all my daughters) to eminent virtue should add an outwork of even
moderate skill in literature, I think she will have more profit than if she obtained the riches of Croesus and the beauty of Helen.

He went on to emphasize his belief that there should be no distinction between the education of daughters and sons:

Nor do I think that the harvest will be affected whether it is a man or a woman who sows the field. They both have the same human nature and the power of reasoning differentiates them from the beasts; both, therefore, are equally suited for those studies by which reason is cultivated, and is productive like a ploughed field on which the seed of good lessons has been sown.
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This mix of classical allusion and agricultural metaphor was typical of the man and his times, and More’s insistence that learning, especially in women, was not an end in itself but could only be fully effective as part of a morally centred approach to life, was a theme found generally among writers on the education of women. The Spanish humanist Juan Luis Vives, in
The Education of a Christian Woman
, a work dedicated to Katherine of Aragon and offered as a blueprint for the upbringing of Princess Mary, emphasized the importance of virtue, domestic skills and womanly restraint, while sharing More’s views that women could – and, indeed, should – learn as effectively as men. He held that it was the roles of men and women in society, not their basic intellects, that were different.

In our age, where women’s view of themselves has been greatly influenced by the debates on feminism of the second half of the twentieth century, these views sound patronizing rather than progressive. But the sixteenth century had never heard of feminism, and though much has undoubtedly been learned from studying women of the period, ‘gender studies’ is a modern invention and has become a growth industry. Like all constructs projected on to the past it can be enlightening but also misleading. Maud Parr’s approach to the education of her family was
evidently admired by Lord Dacre, who thought it would benefit his grandson, but the mixed schoolroom at Rye House was also a product of Maud Parr’s situation as a widow who needed to live within her means. By including pupils from the wider family, better quality tuition was more affordable and ties of kinship were reinforced. Families with the right combination of wealth and social standing had long been able, if they so desired, to educate their daughters, at least to competent standards of literacy. Much depended on the aptitude of the girls themselves and the attitude of the head of the family, who, in Tudor times, was almost always male. Maud Parr was an exception – not unique, for other women of her time recognized the benefits of widowhood – and she undoubtedly wanted the best for her daughters, within the framework of the society in which she lived. But her son, as we shall see, was always her priority.