Episode 093 is another joint episode with Tudor Times on Katherine Parr.
Suggested links:
Visit Gainsborough Hall
Sizergh Castle
Tudor Times on Katherine Parr
Books: (with Amazon affiliate links)
Queen’s Gambit by Elizabeth Fremantle
Katherine the Queen: The Remarkable Life of Katherine Parr, the Last Wife of Henry VIII by Linda Porter
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Transcript of Tudor Times on Katherine Parr:
Heather:
Welcome to the Renaissance English History Podcast, a member of the Agora Podcast Network. I’m your host, Heather Teysko, and I’m a storyteller who makes history accessible because I believe it’s a pathway to understanding who we are, our place in the universe, and having a deeper connection to our own humanity.
This is Episode 93. It’s another joint episode with Melita Thomas from Tudor Times on Katherine Parr. She is a much-requested queen for us to cover.
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So now let me introduce you to Melita Thomas. Melita is a co-founder and editor of Tudor Times a website devoted to Tudor and Stuart history in the period from 1485 to 1625. You can find it at Tudortimes.co.uk. She is also the author of a recently published book on Mary I called The King’s Pearl. Check that out too. Melita has always been fascinated by history ever since she saw the 1970’s series Elizabeth R with Glenda Jackson, also contributes articles to BBC History Extra and Britain Magazine.
So, she was your first Person of the Month, right?
Melita:
She was, yes. We had quite a lot of thought when we first decided to do it. We wanted to look at somebody who was well enough known for people to be interested. But actually, people didn’t necessarily know that much about or perhaps had a fairly fixed view of the whole idea that Katherine Parr was practically Henry’s nursemaid. It’s been very much debunked by new scholarship, but it’s still in the popular imagination. That’s kind of where she was.
So we thought she would be a great one to do. She’s still one of my favorites actually, of the people of the month that we’ve done, because, she seems to have had a really engaging personality. I mean, some of her spiritual writings are a bit dense, shall we say. But she was interested in dancing and music, and she had family and friends and yeah, she just seems like an attractive personality.
Heather:
What can you tell me about her early life before she became Henry’s wife? Then I want to ask you about her relationship with Thomas Seymour, as well. What can you tell me about her kind of early, early life with her first marriage and her early childhood and everything?
Melita:
Well, I think one of the interesting things about Katherine is that she’s the only one of Henry’s wives who had a life outside the court. I mean, Jane Seymour did to an extent, but she was a lady-in-waiting or maid-of-honor, quite young.
Katherine Parr, her parents Maud Green, Lady Parr was her mother and her father Thomas. They were both members of the court. Maud was a lady-in-waiting to Queen Catherine of Aragon. Thomas Parr undertook quite a lot of diplomatic work for Henry. He was …Privy Council, but he was certainly in Henry’s sort of circle of advisers, although the Parrs were an old Yorkist family.
Katherine had a younger brother and a younger sister, Anne and William. Her father died when she was quite young. Unusually, her mother, although she was still very young, still only in her early 20’s I think, she didn’t really marry but she brought up her children with the help of her brother-in-law, Sir William Parr of Horton, and quite a lot of advice from a distant cousin who was Cuthbert Tunstall, the later Bishop of Durham.
Yeah, so interesting actually, because Cuthbert Tunstall was a conservative in religion, but he was also a friend of Katherine’s and clearly took a sort of fatherly role in her life.
Maud’s main job was to arrange the marriage of her son and heir William, but her sort of subsidiary job was to arrange marriages for her daughters. With Katherine, she arranged a marriage in 1528 when Katherine was about 14 to Edward Burgh of Gainsborough. It used to be thought that this was a terribly old man and Katherine at the age of 14 was married to some old man and …the country.
New research shows that it wasn’t the old Sir Edward Burgh, but his grandson the young Edward, though they probably had a similar sort of age, in their teens. We have no idea what they thought about each other. They had no children.
Katherine, first of all, went to live with his family at Gainsborough Hall, which is actually well worth visiting. It’s still there just north of Lincoln preserved by the local authority in fact. Right in the center of the town of Gainsborough. Lovely old house.
Thomas Burgh was quite a strong personality and dominated his children and probably Katherine as well. Too horrible to exile the daughter-in-law who he threw out of the house, back and baggage because he thought she’d committed adultery. He was also a religious reformer and became chamberlain to Queen Anne Boleyn. So it’s possible that Katherine was influenced by her father-in-law in her religious views because she was only young.
But then she and her husband, they had a home a bit north of Gainsborough at Kirton in Lindsey, I think a little town north of Gainsborough. But young Edward died when I think Katherine was still in her teens, late teens by then, so she would have been getting on for 20.
Nobody’s quite sure where she went next. But probably she went to stay with her distant cousin Katherine Strickland, whose maiden name was Neville but who had been one time married into the Burgh family, but was now remarried, and re-widowed and living in Strickland in Kendal in the rather lovely Sizergh Castle, which is another place which is well worth visiting.
It’s possible or even probable that Katherine was there for a short period, but she then remarried. Her second husband was John Neville, another of the great Neville family who were everywhere. He was Lord Latimer and was probably 20 years older than Katherine. She was his third wife, and he already had a son and a daughter. She became quite a devoted stepmother to her stepdaughter, Margaret, possibly less close to her stepson.
There’s a couple of quotes where she’s talking about, they didn’t use the word “teenagers” in those days, but about “young people taking slights everywhere and being difficult and morose and sullen.” You can think, yup, teenage boy-stepmother was always going to be a bit awkward. But later, his wife became one of her ladies-in-waiting, so they probably rubbed along all right in the end.
She and John Latimer were married for quite a few years. Again, we don’t know about their personal relationship other than that he seems to have trusted in her and he left the direction of his daughter to her in his will.
But the big event of the 1530’s when Katherine was keeping house in the country at Snape castle, which was Latimer’s home was the Pilgrimage of Grace, which the whole of the north of England erupted into rebellion. Latimer, like many of the other Gentry, was semi-forced into taking part.
Her old father-in-law, Sir Thomas Burgh had resisted being involved because he was a strong reformer, but Latimer was probably, well most historians think he was a very conservative, traditional Catholic. Dr. Starkey has pointed out that he had betrothed his daughter Margaret to a reformer. So again, perhaps not quite so clear cutters, as we might think. But Katherine had a really hard time in that Snape Castle where she was with her stepchildren, was attacked by the rebels, and they broke into the castle and sacked part of it.
We don’t know whether Katherine and Margaret were harmed. I mean, it’s not impossible. Soldiers have attacked women for a very long time, but the Pilgrimage of Grace, they did see themselves as Pilgrims of Christ. They did sign an agreement that they wouldn’t violate women. So hopefully she wasn’t subject to any personal violence. She certainly doesn’t mention it in any of her writings or gives any suggestion that that was the case, fortunately, but it must have been terrifying.
Of course, Latimer’s in a difficult position because he got involved with the rebels. The place had been that his house had been ransacked by them. Of course, King Henry and Cromwell were eyeing him with great suspicion because they thought he was involved. So he sort of was between a rock and a hard place to a degree and it transpired. He more or less had to leave the North.
So he and Katherine moved down to the south of England and they probably spent their time largely in Worcestershire with his brother Marmaduke, marvelous name, and with her cousins who are all round Northamptonshire, the Vaux of Harrowden. For those people who’ve been watching the Gunpowder Plot, the Vauxes of Harrowden were important characters in the story of the Gunpowder Plot. They were Katherine’s cousins – the Vaux family. Of course, in those days everybody was everybody’s cousin.
In 1542, there was a parliament called and Lord Latimer, of course, as a Baron of parliament, was called to London to take part and he fell ill. Katherine seems to have spent quite a lot of time at the court, in the household. Possibly as a paid member, but possibly just a visitor of Henry VIII’s daughter, the Lady Mary.
Katherine’s sister, Anne Herbert was in Mary’s household. While she was there, she caught the king’s eye. Yeah, but of course, she had already, because Latimer died in March 1543, she was already contemplating marrying somebody else altogether, Thomas Seymour, they–
Heather:
Tell me about that.
Melita:
Yes, so Thomas Seymour was the brother of Queen Jane Seymour. And oddly, even though he was well into his 30’s by now, he had never married or at least there is no record of him ever having married, which was extremely unusual in those days. No record, even of any broken engagements.
There was talk of him marrying Mary Fitzroy, the widow of the Duke of Richmond, but she wasn’t interested and probably thought he was too low in birth for her. So yes, surprising that he never married, but he and Katherine seemed to have been planning to marry when Henry came along and suggested the position of the sixth wife.
Heather:
Yeah, and she couldn’t really say no to that.
Melita:
Tricky, isn’t it? What are you going to say? “Yeah, so sorry. So sorry, Your Majesty, but I really don’t fancy you.” It’s not a winner, is it?
Heather:
So Thomas Seymour got sent away, right? And she became Henry’s wife. I’m really interested in kind of how she grew into that role. And then her writing career because that’s a very, very big part of who she was. Being the first published woman writing her Lamentations of a Sinner and all of that.
Can you tell me, I guess the first part is, how she kind of grew into the role of a reluctant Queen, I suppose.
Melita:
I think, in some way, she probably wasn’t as reluctant as all that. I mean, clearly, she seemed to have been sorry, not to marry Seymour. But this was an age when a woman’s duty was to promote her family. She could do nothing better than be Queen. It was a fantastic opportunity for her family.
Her brother, who had been very unhappily married, managed to retain his wife’s title and lands and not have to live with his wife. It was great for him. Yeah, that’s cool. Her sister’s husband, he was already doing quite well, but it was very good for her whole family. It was a marvelous, marvelous thing to be a Queen.
I know, who would want to be married to Henry VIII? But you’ve got to remember that he was considered to be a very charming man in his youth. Clearly, he had all the charisma of being a King. It probably wasn’t quite as power, I mean everybody likes a bit of power. She had all the money she could desire, all the jewelry she could want. Henry seems to have doted on her. He gave her lots of presents, and he clearly trusted her political judgment. She was–
Heather:
In between trying to kill her, right? Thinking about killing her?
Melita:
Yes and no. But he appointed her as regent in 1544. That all went very, very smoothly. But then yeah, possibly, possibly did go to her head. She became a little bit more what we say “lippy” than Henry was entirely pleased within a wife, because whether she’d been interested in religious reform before or not, isn’t certain. But now, she certainly became interested in it.
Henry, of course, had always been interested in theological debate. They started to debate about it. Katherine obviously failed to mention that she was hanging on his every word and possibly contradicted him a few times. That didn’t go down too well.
In the wider court, there was jostling between the reformist faction led by the same old more or less, and the conservative faction led by Bishop Gardiner of Winchester, Sir Richard Rich, The Howards. So, Katherine, once she’d annoyed the King, it suddenly seemed like a good idea to the conservatives that they thought they might be able to get rid of her.
Now bear in mind that all of this comes from John Foxe’s Book of Martyrs. He tells a story where Katherine irritated the King then Gardiner leapt on it and said, “You know, it’s a fine thing when wives start telling husbands what to do.” Henry always a bit sensitive about that, decided that Katherine was behaving badly. Gardiner said that he would prove to Henry that she was a heretic. So Henry said, “Okay, fine. Do your worst.”
But then Katherine found out that it was a plan to arrest her. She probably found out from one of Henry’s doctors. So it’s certainly possible he let her know in the same way that when the conservative faction attacked Cranmer, he managed to let them have their way to a degree but then turn tables on them and put Cranmer at the head of the investigation into his own heresy. It’s possible that this was meant as a warning shot to Katherine rather than intention.
Heather:
So did it really happen? The dramatic scene where they were coming to arrest her, and he kind of then yelled at the guards not to arrest her even though he had said that it was okay earlier? Like that famous scene that you hear about, that really happened?
Melita:
We don’t know. Well, probably. I mean, this all comes from John Foxe’s Book of Martyrs. Most scholars think that where his accounts can be tested, he’s accurate. But we do have to remember that he had an agenda to show that Protestants and reformers were badly treated. But he probably did. Yes, I mean, his is the only account of it. There’s no corroborating account, but I think it’s very likely because it’s similar to what happened to Cranmer. But Katherine must have had her heart in the mouth because when she saw them coming, she must have thought, yeah.
Heather:
Yeah. So then, can you tell me a little bit about her writing and that side of her?
Melita:
She was obviously of an intellectual turn of mind. We don’t know the details of her education. She was educated as women were. She read. She wrote. She spoke French. She played musical instruments. She knew how to run a great household. Whether she learned Latin in her youth is questioned. She certainly was learning it once she was Henry’s wife because from a diplomatic point of view, it was useful to know as she also studied Spanish and Italian later in life. So she was clearly of a studious bent.
Her first writings were some prayers, which she created. A prayer for people to say when Henry was abroad in France, so that was very positive. Then she translated some works by quite traditional theological works like The Imitation of Christ, which had been the runaway bestseller of the 15th century. She also translated some works of Bishop of Rochester, fairly conservative stuff, not the sort of thing to make Henry’s eyebrows rise in any way.
Other work, The Lamentations of a Sinner, which I have to say is, I did try sort of reading some of it, but just to give you a little flavor of it, so she talks about her journey from being mired in “foul, wicked, perverse and crooked ways.” Then she utterly rejects the Bishop of Rome as “a persecutor of the gospel and grace, a setter forth of all superstition and counterfeit holiness and bewails the miserable ignorance and blindness of men”. So quite prolix, I think is the word.
That was The Lamentations of a Sinner which she wrote probably during Henry’s reign, but it wasn’t published until the reign of her stepson. After that, she was also very closely involved in the translation of Erasmus’ Paraphrases on the gospel, which was a project by Nicholas Udall, (never quite sure how to say that), which involved her stepdaughter, the Lady Mary who did one of the Paraphrases.
It’s unlikely that Katherine did any of the translation because her Latin wouldn’t have been of sufficient level but she did promote the work and sponsor it. She doesn’t seem to have written anything after Henry died or within The Lamentations of a Sinner or completing that. It’s possible that a new life with a new husband and new interests may have taken her mind in more what we say secular avenues than then being married to Henry did.
Heather:
Yeah. So can you tell me a little bit about the time she spent after the scare, as it were? How her relationship with Henry was towards the end?
Melita:
After that, again, he seems to revert to doting on her and he was generous to her. She obviously, having had a scare, was very careful in her ways and perhaps became a bit more of a submissive obedient wife that he thought she should be.
In late 1546, he fell into some sort of a depression and he probably didn’t see Katherine. She didn’t spend that Christmas with him. There’s no evidence that she was with him at the time of his death. Possibly, he did lose some faith in her.
Although in 1544, when he went to France, she was appointed as regent, and in his will of that year, she was appointed to be regent for Edward should he die. In his final will, she wasn’t named as regent. He provided very generously for her and wanted her to continue to be treated as a Queen, but she was given no political power.
Heather:
And that led to like a fight, wasn’t it? There was some drama–
Melita:
Oh, yes. Now her sister-in-law, Anne Stanhope was married to Edward Seymour. So Henry died, and Katherine lost no time, it has to be said, in remarrying. Henry died towards the end of January, and sometime in May, she secretly married Thomas Seymour.
Thomas Seymour’s brother, Edward was in theory only one amongst the Regency Council but within days of Henry’s death, he was the kingpin. He was Duke of Somerset, leader of the council, and king all but in name. Thomas was very upset about this because he felt he should have some share of the goodies that were being handed out. But he didn’t get very much.
Edward Seymour, Duke of Somerset now, his wife, Anne Stanhope who had previously been one of Katherine’s ladies-in-waiting, and she too, was a firm Protestant by now or a reformer, but whether they quarreled previously or whether they never liked each other, they certainly fell out now because the Duchess of Somerset felt she should take precedence as the Protector’s wife.
Katherine was saying, “No, no, no. I’m still the Queen.” Somerset would say, “No, no. You’re just the wife of my younger brother-in-law.” These things really mattered in those days. Anne Somerset is jostling Katherine out to the doorways trying to take first place, and the Duke of Somerset is withholding Katherine’s jewels. So there’s a big family brouhaha.
Heather:
Christmas dinner was awkward that year.
Melita:
Yes, it probably was. Yes. And Katherine also upset her stepdaughter Mary by her rapid marriage to Thomas Seymour, which Mary thought was disrespectful to the memory of her father.
Heather:
So that brings me into, what was her relationship like with Mary and with Elizabeth? Elizabeth was in the household, there’s drama to get into too. There’s so much drama.
Melita:
Yes. Katherine and Mary have been very good friends. Looking at their relationship, obviously, it’s an area I’ve looked at quite a lot for my book about Mary, they were good friends. Before–
Heather:
Even though they differed religiously, they were still close, weren’t they?
Melita:
They were, because again, we’ve got to be careful not to look back. It wasn’t until certainly the 1549 prayer book, which was two years after Henry’s death, the central point of religion, the mass was changed. Throughout Henry’s life, there was nothing in day-to-day religious observance that Katherine and Mary didn’t share, whatever might have been going on in their respective heads. So yeah, we’ve got to be careful not to look back.
I mean, whether Mary has ever seen The Lamentations of a Sinner in draft, it didn’t come out until after Henry’s death. So they were on good terms. Yeah, and Mary lived with her. They were seen together and ambassadors would visit them together. They were close friends.
Elizabeth was much younger. Mary was four years younger than Katherine. Elizabeth was 20 plus years younger. So she really was like her daughter, and she came to live with her. Elizabeth, she was 13 and a half. And there she was with a stepfather, Thomas Seymour, who took more of an interest in her than he should have done.
Again, you got to be careful here to remember that 12 was marriageable age in those days. They didn’t think of it the way we do. Now clearly those outrage was more about him obviously being unfaithful or potentially. I’m sure he and Elizabeth never actually committed adultery or anything like that. But she was at marriageable age, but it was more the outrage of him laying his hands on the King’s daughter that was horrifying everybody rather than necessary an age thing.
Heather:
Right, sure. And so, what’s the record? I mean, she sent Elizabeth away then, and then she was pregnant at this time too, right? Like did they ever repair their relationship?
Melita:
Well, yes. Not in the flesh. I mean it started off with Thomas Seymour, too much horseplay with his stepdaughter, slapping and tickling, and that sort of thing going into her bedroom early. To begin with, Katherine appears not to have known about it when Elizabeth’s governess, Mrs. Ashley brought it to the Queen’s attention. Then Katherine thought, well, she started to take part as well to make it all seem a bit more family-friendly.
But allegedly, and again we can’t ever know these things, she caught Thomas and Elizabeth embracing and possibly kissing. So she sent Elizabeth away to protect Elizabeth’s reputation. Because if Elizabeth had been shown to have had a physical relationship with a man, she would have lost her place in the succession. There’s no possibility she could have been Queen if she’d had been known to have an affair with Seymour. Of course, if Katherine had allowed it to go all under her roof, it’s possible that she would have been punished as well. So she sent Elizabeth off.
Heather:
So she sent Elizabeth off and how long in her pregnancy was that?
Melita:
Fairly early on. So she must have been through maybe three or four months? She knew she was pregnant, but she wasn’t sort of right at the end. Elizabeth obviously understood that her stepmother had done it for her own good and she wrote a letter of thanks to Katherine saying, “I know you spoke very frankly to me, but I appreciate it because I know you wouldn’t have done that if you didn’t really care about me,” or Tudor words to that effect.
Then Elizabeth stayed in Cheshunt with the Denny family and Katherine then went I think, in May or June of 1548 to Sudeley Castle and she took with her the young Jane Grey and all seem to be going swimmingly. She didn’t seem to have had a difficult pregnancy.
She seems to have made it up with Seymour who probably persuaded her that it was all nothing but fun and games and probably she wanted to believe that. Then poor Katherine died of probably a puerperal fever or childbed fever without having seen Elizabeth or Mary again, although they had both written to her.
Heather:
Yeah. And then her child, there’s a bit of a mystery about whether she died, if there’s like a grave that’s maybe hers. Can you tell me a little bit about that?
Melita:
Yeah, Dr. Porter did quite a lot of research into it. And I would definitely agree with her conclusions that Mary Seymour died young. What’s quite upsetting about the poor little girl is first of all, of course, her father was there to look after her, but within months of Katherine’s death, Thomas Seymour was executed for treason.
The little girl, I mean, you would have thought that Katherine’s brother or sister would have taken their niece, Katherine has been very good to her siblings, but no, she went off to live with Katherine Willoughby, the Dowager Duchess of Suffolk, who had been one of Katherine’s closest friends.
But a year or two later, there’s a letter from Katherine Willoughby complaining about the expense. The council made an order for some money, and then nothing is ever heard of her again. So I tend to think she must have died because apart from anything else, it’s likely that had she still been living when either Mary or Elizabeth came to the throne, that they would have done something for her, I would have thought.
Particularly Mary who certainly likely that Mary Seymour may have been named for her. So yeah, poor little girl. Yeah, so she probably died, I mean, a lot of children did.
Heather:
Yeah. So what’s kind of the takeaway that you have of Katherine and her life? What should we remember her for?
Melita:
Well, I really liked her sort of intellectual curiosity. She clearly was somebody who was interested in different things and liked to learn. She seems to have made friends wherever she went to. All her stepchildren, the possible exception of her eldest stepson, seem to have been very attached to her. Henry was attached to her.
Other than the quarrel with Anne Somerset, which is actually quite fun, because Katherine writes about how she calls her “that hell”, which was fine to say that now, but in those days, it meant something really, really bad. She sort of comes to life in her letters to Thomas Seymour. She’s somebody probably among Henry’s wives, perhaps her and Anne of Cleves would be the most likely you’d want to be friends with, I think. Sort of fun without overdoing it.
Heather:
Yeah. So where can we go to learn more about her?
Melita:
Well, there we have got quite a lot on about her on the Tudor Times site. The scholarly biography of her is by Dr. Susan James and it is exhaustive. It covers absolutely everything. So if you want to know anything about Katherine, that’s a place to go.
If you want to see Katherine more in the context of the court and the times and her relationships, Dr. Linda Porter‘s book Katherine the Queen is superb. Absolutely superb.
Elizabeth Norton not probably as detailed as the other two but slightly different take on it. Very strong in her relationship with Elizabeth. She pops up at Agnes Strickland’s the good old Lives of the Queens of England. She loves Katherine as the first Protestant queen also because she was a relation, a far, far distant of the Strickland family of Sizergh Castle where Katherine may have lived for a bit with her cousin. So always lovely. She pops up in all of the Six Wives books.
For a novel, Elizabeth Fremantle, her book The Queen’s Gambit. Interestingly, The Sixth Wife by Suzannah Dunn, which is very different from the usual type of historical fiction, and it’s written in very modern language, which takes a bit of getting used to.
Heather:
Okay, great. Well, that is all really wonderful. I love hearing more detail to her story and just like we talked about with your talk at the Tudor Summit about Mary with nuance, it’s so easy to put these women into boxes, and Katherine is certainly one that gets put into the nursemaid box a lot and there’s so much more to her than that. So thank you for bringing her more to life.
Melita:
Thank you.
Heather:
Well, thanks again, Melita for taking the time to talk to us more about Katherine Parr. For more information on her go to tutortimes.co.uk or see the resources on the Englandcast site at Englandcast.com.
Remember, if you like this show, the biggest way you can help it is to leave a review on iTunes or tell a friend about it. Seriously, talk to your friends about the show if they love the Tudors, right? They’re missing out.
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Thank you so much for listening. Thank you for your listenership and for all your support, and I will talk with you again very soon. Bye, bye!
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Heather Teysko is the creator, writer, and producer of The Renaissance English History Podcast, the original Tudor history podcast, started in 2009. She's been writing about history online for over 25 years, since her first site on Colonial American history became number one in history on Yahoo in 1998. In 2019 she created Tudorcon, which is now a yearly event, in addition to writing books, and running TudorFair.com - a whimsical Tudor Merch shop. She has been passionate about Tudor England since she first read Alison Weir's The Six Wives of Henry VIII 20 years ago, and subsequently moved to London after college to spend her time immersed in Tudor history.