Katherine the Queen: The Remarkable Life of Katherine Parr (8 page)

Katherine’s new home was in one of the most isolated of all English shires. Both topographically and culturally, Lincolnshire was a distinctive place, its agricultural flatlands, marshes and coastline contrasted with the range of hills known as the Wolds. It was the most distant county to be ruled directly from London; the rest of the north of England came under the administration of the Council of the North. To Katherine, it must have seemed a very different place from the more prosperous, populated south, a world away from the stimulation of court gossip and intrigues which she had known, indirectly through her parents, all her life. Most southerners viewed this part of the world with a prejudice based on ignorance. Inhabitants of the fenlands, for example, were thought to be slightly less than human and Henry VIII famously described the common people of his second largest county as ‘one of the most brute and beastly of the whole kingdom’.
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This attitude clearly communicated itself to his successors. There was no royal visit to Lincolnshire between 1541 and 1617. Unloved and remote, it was almost frontier territory. There was only one major overland access from the south, via the Great North Road at Stamford. Otherwise, it had to be reached by coastal voyage to ports such as Grimsby or Skegness. Two of its largest towns, Lincoln itself and Boston, were in decline during the Tudor period.

Though rich agriculturally, Lincolnshire had few major landowners at the time that Katherine Parr married into the Borough family. The Boroughs, like many of their neighbours, were knighted gentry. This absence of an obvious rallying point for royal authority added a further dimension to the area’s perceived awkwardness and isolation. Not until the mid-1530s, when Charles Brandon, duke of Suffolk, married his ward, the local heiress Katherine Willoughby, was there a great lord in Lincolnshire. Brandon’s second duchess (his first had been the king’s sister, Princess Mary Tudor), was to become, by a strange coincidence, a close friend of Katherine Parr in the next decade.

The rural landscape of Lincolnshire was not marked by major castles but it had a deep-rooted monastic heritage. Fifty-one monasteries, covering all the great orders except the Cluniacs, bore witness to the enduring importance of religion in the east midlands. The Gilbertines, the only religious order originating in England, had been founded by St Gilbert of Sempringham (a
village in the Lincolnshire fens) in 1131. Not all the houses were wealthy but most, despite the inevitable lapses into apathy and occasional sexual irregularity uncovered in visitations, were respected by local people.

Life in this part of England continued to be dominated by the cycles of the agricultural year, the need for self-sufficiency and a straightforward faith in God. These all contributed to a strong sense of local identity. The area was noted for the independence of mind of its inhabitants and their capacity for rebellion. Lincolnshire folk by no means did what they were told and they could carry much of
the rest of the north of England with them, an uncomfortable truth insufficiently appreciated by the king and government in London. From the perspective of an outsider like Katherine Parr, even though her mother owned a number of manors not far from Gainsborough, it was a very different environment from the one she had known. There was much to be learned and a great deal of adapting to do.

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of pleasure, amidst all this uncertainty, must have been her new home itself. Her surroundings, at least, were gracious, comfortable and even opulent, certainly by local standards. The mansion of the Boroughs dominated the small town of Gainsborough and today is one of the most impressive fifteenthcentury manor houses surviving in Britain. It was built of red brick and timber, a style that became increasingly popular during Tudor times, and originally it had a moat and a gatehouse, which have long since disappeared. Rebuilt after its destruction during the Wars of the Roses by a Lancastrian army that included many of the first Lord Borough’s personal enemies, the house rose up even grander than before. An inventory recorded that it consisted of ‘[a] hall, a parlour, an inner parlour, a withdrawing room, a great chamber with another next to it, a chamber in the tower and in the gallery’.
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There were further rooms originally described but part of the inventory is long since lost. The west wing had
three floors of lodgings, with brick walls at the back and a fireplace and privy for each room.
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This early version of ‘en-suite accommodation’ shows how much the Boroughs anticipated entertaining. Certainly their great, open high-vaulted hall and the well-designed kitchen were amply suited to feed even a king. The house received two royal visitors, Richard III during his brief reign and, later, Henry VIII and Katherine Howard. Gainsborough Old Hall may have been a long journey from London, but it was not lacking in sophistication. ‘Almost every room was hung with tapestries and the bed in the lower chamber had a canopy of chequered velvet and cloth of gold.’
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The Borough family themselves, distant kin of the Parrs, had a history as eventful as that of the building in which they sought to display their wealth and influence. Their rise through the turmoil of the Wars of the Roses mirrored that of Katherine’s family. The first Lord Borough, great-grandfather of Katherine’s husband, had been an esquire of the body and master of the horse to Edward IV, as well as a royal councillor, roles which had also been held at different times by Katherine’s grandfather and great-uncle. The success of the Boroughs and the Parrs was ample evidence of the truth of the old dictum about servants of the Privy Chamber: ‘theyre business is many secretes’. Like Sir William Parr, Thomas Borough was well rewarded by Edward IV and he, too, married a rich widow, was given extensive local responsibilities and negotiated the regime change smoothly when Henry VII came to the throne. In fact, in one crucial respect, he outdid the Parrs. In 1487 he became a lord and was given the title of baron of Gainsborough. So Katherine Parr was marrying into a family that had already achieved a title, with the prospect, in due course, of becoming Lady Borough herself. What the Boroughs had not done, however, was consolidate their personal standing with the Tudors by service at court.

In fact, the positive relationship that had benefited the first Lord Borough was already declining at the time of his death in the mid-1490s. It seems likely that the family already met
considerable problems with the fragile mental state of Edward, the second Lord Borough. He had certainly attended court, where his prowess as a horseman was noted at a tournament to honour the young Prince Henry, and he enhanced the family fortunes by marrying a wealthy Kentish heiress; but all was not well. In late 1495 he had been made to bind himself in legal recognizance to the king and was placed in the custody of the lord chamberlain. Perhaps the dispute was initially about money – Henry VII valued his aristocracy more for their purses than their equestrian skills – but, whatever the cause, Edward Borough ended up in the Fleet prison. His escape from that institution put him in debt to the Crown to the tune of £3,000, which had a catastrophic effect on his family’s immediate prospects.

If Edward Borough had been emotionally unstable at the time of his dispute with Henry VII, the outcome only made him worse. By 1510 he was judged as ‘having unsound mind with lucid intervals’. His estates were administered by the Crown and the profits from them helped to repay debts from Henry VIII’s French wars. Edward continued to live at Gainsborough Old Hall, but it fell to his eldest son, Sir Thomas Borough, to put all the effort into restoring the family’s estates and local standing. It was Sir Thomas, who, as Maud Parr acknowledged in her will, became the relatively young father-in-law of Katherine Parr less than a year after the death of his own, troubled parent.

A lot of nonsense has been written in historical novels about Katherine Parr’s first marriage. Even her most recent biographer, while making quite clear that her husband was not the elderly Lord Edward Borough but his young grandson, refers to Katherine’s life at Gainsborough Hall with ‘a lunatic rattling his chains in the attic’. It is a colourful image, but Lord Edward died in August 1528, well before Katherine’s wedding to his namesake. If there were noises of chains in the attic, they must have been from the tragic lord’s ghost.
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It was, though, a difficult situation for a young woman from a happy and stable background, dominated by a very competent
mother, to find herself in a troubled family tightly governed by a strong-willed and opinionated father. Sir Thomas Borough had been compelled to take over the day-to-day running of his family’s affairs at an early age. He had seen his father disgraced and removed from society and his own prospects compromised as a result. Not for him the courtly entertainments of Greenwich that had figured so largely in the lives of Sir Thomas and Lady Maud Parr. Though personally brave (he was knighted after the battle of Flodden) and appointed one of the king’s aristocratic bodyguards, the King’s Spears, he was not close to Henry VIII and was seldom at court. The responsibility of keeping his family together meant that he spent most of his time in Lincolnshire, where he married Agnes Tyrwhit, the daughter of another leading family in the county, produced sons of his own and devoted himself to giving his offspring the direction of a strong father-figure that he himself had never known.

That he comes across through the centuries as harsh and overbearing is not surprising. He was certainly a difficult man, but he was not some ancient tyrant. Born in 1494, he was thirty-five at the time of his eldest son’s wedding, which surely means that Katherine Parr’s bridegroom could not have been, at the most, more than a few years older than she. It must have been clear to an intelligent young woman like Katherine, right from the outset of her marriage, that if she could not establish a reasonable relationship with Lord Borough, then life at Gainsborough would be a struggle.
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Her father-in-law was a man of his times and, as master of the household, he expected obedience. He does not seem to have mellowed as he grew older. In 1537 Lady Elizabeth Borough, wife of his second son, wrote in despair to Thomas Cromwell, the Lord Privy Seal, complaining of the ‘trouble she is put to by Lord Borough, who always lies in wait to put her to shame’. She had heard that her father-in-law had complained of her to the Privy Council, declaring that her child was not his son’s. She begged Cromwell to prevent the little boy from being disinherited, adding that her husband ‘dare do nothing but as his
father will have him’.
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But Borough was implacable. Elizabeth was thrown out and her children declared illegitimate.

Katherine evidently managed the irascible Thomas Borough more successfully. What he thought of her upbringing and scholastic attainments we do not know. Perhaps she did not parade them too openly, but there is no reason to assume that her father-in-law did not value learning as such. Indeed, he was himself interested in the new religious ideas and kept a reforming chaplain in his household. He did not want his children to question him, but on spiritual matters he had a much more open mind. And he was also sufficiently proud of his wife, and sensitive to the power of the court and its connexions, to arrange for her to be painted by Hans Holbein. He became Anne Boleyn’s chamberlain after Katherine had left his care, and a dedicated supporter of the Royal Supremacy and the suppression of the Pilgrimage of Grace of 1536. His household when Katherine lived there must have been an uneasy place, but it was by no means sterile.

She did not live under his roof for long, and the fact that she escaped it at all, without recriminations, says much for her powers of persuasion. It also suggests that Thomas Borough could be flexible when he chose. About two years after their marriage, Katherine and her husband were permitted to set up their own household at Kirton-in-Lindsey, a dozen miles from Gainsborough. Perhaps Thomas Borough felt that it was appropriate for his eldest son and heir to live independently by then. If so, he must have had considerable confidence in Katherine as well. No doubt he hoped they would produce children to carry on the Borough name, but none appeared. If Katherine was ever pregnant by Edward Borough (and it is possible that she was expecting a child when the idea of a separate household was raised), then clearly none survived to full term, or certainly past early infancy. The historical record is completely silent on this point, and though her immediate family must have known, they never seem to have spoken of it and neither did Katherine herself.
The indirect evidence is contradictory but what can be said is that her subsequent husbands all seem to have believed that she could bear children. Whether this was based on optimism as opposed to her past history we cannot know, but it is, of course, indisputable that almost two decades after she and Edward Borough were married, she bore a healthy child.