The Sixth Wife (26 page)

And so now he’s over there, across the courtyard in the wing of my house that the baby and her nursery staff have practically taken over, and he’ll be keen to do what’s expected of him. Playing up to the ladies, in his awkward way, and
cajoling the little girl. Hoping to prove himself – not least in his own eyes – to be the good uncle, the family man. And in a few minutes he’ll be back over here, exhilarated by his efforts, exclaiming how she looks like one or the other of her parents. I can’t see it, myself. She might have no connection to either, for all that I can see.

Perhaps that’s how her questions will start. It’s something she’ll want to know one day, isn’t it? Do I look like my mother, do I look like my father? By then, there’ll probably be something I can say:
You have your mother’s smile;
or,
You have your father’s eyes
. She’ll want to know about her parents and it’ll be left to me to tell her. Kate: well, that’s easy; there’s plenty I can say about Kate, all of which will have her daughter feeling special and proud. Thomas, though? He felt that we understood something about each other, didn’t he. He felt that we recognised something in each other. But Thomas, I’ll tell her, I barely knew, and there’s some truth in it.

Catherine, Duchess of Suffolk was indeed Katherine Parr’s closest friend, but her relationship with Katherine’s husband as depicted in this novel is of my own imagining. In every other aspect, I have aimed for historical accuracy.

At the time of Thomas Seymour’s trial, there were rumours that Elizabeth Tudor had been pregnant and had had a miscarriage or stillbirth or a baby. She’d been ill and unable or unwilling to leave the Dennys’ Hertfordshire home during the summer of 1548. A local midwife, it was said, had claimed to have been taken to a secret location to deliver a baby of a young noblewoman who was in disguise. Such rumours persist to this day, the most recent claim (in 2006, exciting the attention of the British press) being that William Shakespeare was the child of Thomas Seymour and Elizabeth Tudor.

Thomas Seymour was indicted on thirty-three counts of
treason and beheaded in 1549, on the day his daughter was seven months old. (His brother, Edward Seymour, suffered the same fate in 1552, on trumped-up charges.) He had been described by one of his contemporaries, Sir John Hayward, as ‘Fierce in courage, courtly in fashion, in personage stately and in voice magnificent…but somewhat empty in matter.’ Hugh Latimer (Catherine of Suffolk’s chaplain, and Katharine Parr’s close friend) attended his execution and said that he died ‘very dangerously, irksomely, horribly’. There is no mention of his daughter, Mary, beyond infancy; she is believed to have died as a small child, although a popular myth held that she had survived into adulthood, married Sir Edward Bushell and had descendants. Historians consider it extremely unlikely, though, that the daughter of a dowager queen could disappear from public record.

In 1551, when they were students at Cambridge, Catherine of Suffolk’s two sons died suddenly on the same day from ‘sweating sickness’, an almost always fatal flu-like illness, specific to the Tudor period, which killed within hours of the first symptoms. Catherine reached the bedside of only one of them – the younger, Charles – in time.

In 1553, Catherine married one of her own staff, her gentleman usher, Richard Bertie, and theirs was a long and happy marriage, despite having to escape into exile in the Low Countries during Mary Tudor’s reign. Catherine had two more children, Susan and Peregrine, both of whom survived into adulthood. Peregrine grew up to be a happily married father of six and a valued member of Queen Elizabeth’s court, but he had a troubled and controversial early adulthood (not least when he backed away from a marriage with one of Bess Cavendish’s daughters in favour
of the tempestuous Lady Mary Vere) and his relationship with his mother was fraught. They were estranged at the time of her death in 1580. She is buried (with Richard Bertie, who died eighteen months later) in the fourteenth-century church at Spilsbury in Lincolnshire. Her biographer, Evelyn Read, describes her as ‘singularly modern in the midst of the sixteenth century, modern in her quiet assumption that in addition to home-making and caring for her children a woman could and should make a contribution to the spiritual well-being of her people, in her courage and outspokeness, and, above all, modern in her refusal to accept beliefs and customs simply because they had always been accepted.’ (See
Catherine, Duchess of Suffolk
, Jonathan Cape, 1962.)

Sudeley Castle was beseiged and wrecked during the Civil War, and remained ruined for two hundred years before new owners began restoration. The mediaeval buildings of the inner court, including the banqueting hall, have been left evocatively as ruins. During the Second World War, Sudeley Castle was used as a prisoner-of-war camp and shelter for part of the Tate’s collection of paintings. Nowadays, it is open to the public (Katherine Parr’s apartment only by special arrangement), and on display there – looking as good as new – is princess Elizabeth’s christening gown and cradle-canopy (discovered at Sudeley Castle, with other of Katherine Parr’s belongings).The Tudor formal garden was uncovered in front of the banqueting hall during the 1860s, and the grounds have been extensively restored.

For the ruined chapel, John Ruskin recommended ‘no restoration; a pile of mossy stones a fitter monument for Queen Katherine Parr than the most gorgeous church that wealth could erect’. In 1782, a man discovered her lead coffin
among the ruins, and opened it to find her undecayed; he took a sample of the red cloth of her dress and a lock of her auburn hair. Over the next ten years, the coffin was unearthed and opened on three occasions by curious locals, before being reburied upside down by drunken labourers. Public dissatisfaction with the situation led to a successful search for it in 1817, and a skeleton and a mass of ivy roots was discovered inside. It was placed into a vault in the restored church of St Mary’s (Ruskin’s advice had been ignored), and in 1861 a new and magnificent altar-tomb was designed by Sir George Gilbert Scott and carved by S. Birnie Philip, who were also responsible for the Albert Memorial.

Katherine Parr’s biographer, Anthony Martienssen, credits her with having rescued Elizabeth Tudor from obscurity and educating and encouraging her to develop into the politically astute young woman she became. He claims, ‘It is, I believe, no exaggeration to say that without Katherine Parr, Queen Elizabeth would not have been the Queen she was nor her reign the epic it became.’
(Queen Katherine Parr
, Secker & Warburg Ltd, 1973).

Historians have noted that despite all they shared (their protestantism, their loving memories of Katherine Parr), relations between Queen Elizabeth and Catherine of Suffolk were only ever cordial at best.

Many thanks to my agent, Antony Topping, without whom this novel would never have got off the ground in any sense; Venetia Butterfield for taking the novel on, and Clare Smith for then taking it over and making me feel so welcome as one of her writers; Annabel Wright and Essie Cousins, my editors at HarperCollins, for a job beautifully done; and Jo Adams and Carol Painter for so often lending me their cottage, which has made such a difference to my life.