Katherine the Queen: The Remarkable Life of Katherine Parr (28 page)

‘Most honourable and entirely beloved mother,’ his earliest known letter to her began:

I have me most humbly recommended to your grace with like thanks, both that your grace did accept so gently my simple and rude letters, and also that it pleased your grace so gently to vouchsafe to direct unto me your loving and tender letters, which do give me much comfort and encouragement to go forward in such things wherein your grace beareth me on hand, that I am already entered. I pray God I may be able in part to satisfy the good expectation of the king’s majesty, my father, and of your grace, whom God have ever in his most blessed keeping.

The letter was signed ‘Your loving son, E. Prince’.
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Since Katherine herself was embarking on studies to improve her written Latin and her general understanding of the classics, she was able to demonstrate to the prince, by example, that they were both working towards a similar goal. As his letter shows, he was greatly appreciative of her encouragement. And Katherine
knew that praise is a great motivator: ‘with what diligence you have cultivated the Muses, the letters you sent me can already be very ample witnesses – epistles which seem to me to shine both with the elegance of Latin discourse and more polished structure far surpassing all the others you sent me’. Though there has been debate about Katherine’s actual proficiency in Latin, this letter indicates that she certainly felt able to comment knowledgeably about her stepson’s style and to compliment him on his growing fluency of form and expression. She would be delighted, she said, to hear from him daily but fully appreciated that he was occupied with his studies and she would not believe him dilatory, since she knew that he was balancing his love of her with his love of learning ‘so that love toward your mother on the one hand and desire of learning on the other entirely free you from any suspicion of negligence even without a hearing’.
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The dictates of Edward’s education and the duties of a queen consort meant that Katherine did not see the prince as often as he would have liked. Her first visit to him seems to have been during the royal honeymoon in the autumn of 1543, when she and Henry saw both Edward and Elizabeth at Ashridge. The queen did, however, make sure that he was with her during his father’s absence in France, when she brought all the children together during the period of her regency. Subsequently, their paths crossed on occasions of state, at Christmas and at other times that her schedule permitted. The boy’s love of his stepmother grew over the years, though the tone of his letters was sometimes characterized by a degree of condescension and even priggishness. Katherine seems to have taken this in good part and did not reprove him for his comments on her Latin: ‘I perceive that you have given your attention to the Roman characters, so that my preceptor [Cox] could not be persuaded but that your secretary wrote them, till he observed your name written equally well.’ In what was, perhaps, an excess of honesty, he continued: ‘I also was much surprised. I hear, too, that your highness is progressing in the Latin tongue and in the
belles lettres
. Wherefore
I feel no little joy, for letters are lasting; but other things that seem so perish. Literature also conduces to virtuous conduct, but ignorance thereof leads to vice . . . Everything that comes from God is good; learning comes from God, therefore learning is good.’

Katherine would have said amen to that. Perhaps she realized that the patronizing tone of this letter was as much a product of Cox’s pen as her stepson’s; there are marked similarities between it and the earlier epistle to Henry.

Edward does not ever seem to have commented specifically on Katherine’s own religious writings, though just after he became king he praised her ‘godliness and knowledge, and learning in the Scriptures’. But whatever he felt about her literary skills, whether in English or in Latin, his love for her did not end with his father’s death. She was always, to him, his ‘dearest mother’ whom ‘I do love and admire with my whole heart’. This is a fitting testimony to Katherine’s skills as a parent.

M
ARY
,
THE KING
’
S
elder daughter, does not seem to have been at all jealous of Katherine’s success with her young brother. Her own affection for the queen was as great, in its way, as the earnest love of the little prince. Katherine’s marriage to Henry VIII gave Mary the longest period of unbroken happiness she had known since childhood. It was a much-needed interlude of peace in a life that had known extreme contrasts of light and darkness, affording Mary the opportunity to recover from a decade of turmoil in the company of a woman she liked and respected.

She was twenty-seven years old at the time of her father’s sixth marriage, petite and still attractive, with a sad smile that gave evidence, if any were needed, of what she had endured. Until the age of seventeen she had been a princess and her father’s heir, the only surviving child of the many pregnancies of her Spanish mother, Henry’s first wife, Katherine of Aragon. As one of the queen’s ladies, Maud Parr probably knew the infant
Mary, though tales of the princess and Maud’s elder daughter playing together as children are almost certainly fanciful. Mary always had her own household and it is unlikely that Maud brought Katherine to court with her, as her primary duty was to the queen and neither she nor the other ladies could cope with caring for their own children at the same time. As a small girl, Katherine may well have heard talk of Princess Mary and her progress, and while it is not impossible that they met as children, there is no firm evidence to suggest that they did.

Mary’s childhood was a happy one. She was loved by both parents and Henry spent more time with her than he did subsequently with either of his two younger children. Talented, intelligent and pretty, she was the perfect English princess. The king was very proud of her musical ability, her grace and her beautiful auburn hair. He was also quite without compunction in using her at an early age and often as a diplomatic pawn. Mary was engaged at different times to the dauphin of France, her cousin the Emperor Charles V and spoken of as a bride for James V of Scotland, not to mention numerous other more distant prospects. Nothing came of any of these marriage possibilities. Beneath the displays of parental affection, Henry was concerned at the implications of marrying his only legitimate heir outside the kingdom, envisaging a time when other European countries might have undue influence on English affairs. Katherine of Aragon did not share his doubts. Mary had been as well educated, by the standards of her day, as Prince Edward would be twenty years later. Her mother was convinced that Mary was able to rule, as her formidable grandmother, Isabella of Castile, had done in Spain at the end of the fifteenth century.

Henry, however, was not so minded. He believed that women were inferior and he was not prepared to seek a solution to his dynastic weakness by wedding Mary to any of his rivals, real or potential, in the hope that she would provide grandsons. He wanted a male heir of his own body, not hers. And he was also tiring of Katherine of Aragon, a woman six years his senior who,
by the late 1520s, was well past childbearing age. The idea of seeking a new wife may well have been in his mind before Anne Boleyn caught his eye. The course which he followed in his determination to be rid legally of Katherine, combined with her obduracy and Anne’s fierce ambition, changed English history. Many would suffer as a result, but none more so than Mary, the princess whose life was shattered by her parents’ divorce.

Even after the divorce was pronounced, it seemed that Mary might weather the storm. She was careful not to criticize directly her father’s new marriage. But the birth of Elizabeth in September 1533 meant that Henry could no longer procrastinate about the situation of his elder daughter. His decision was unequivocal. Mary was declared illegitimate, told that she must expect her household to be reduced, and deprived of the title of princess. This she could not accept, refusing to comply with her father’s demands and exhibiting a disdain that bordered on haughtiness. She was a proud young woman and the destruction of her expectations so completely gave her, she thought, no choice. Compromise was not possible. Encouraged by Katherine of Aragon, and supported by the imperial ambassador, Eustace Chapuys, Mary embarked on a battle of wills with her father and with Anne Boleyn, the hated ‘concubine’ who had replaced her mother. It was not a combat that she could ultimately win.

For almost three years she remained defiant, resisting all attempts to break her spirit. Just before Christmas 1533, she was packed off to join the baby Elizabeth at Hatfield House, an unwilling appendage to the establishment run by Elizabeth’s lady governess, Anne Shelton, a member of the Boleyn family. Though not entirely friendless at court, Mary’s own household shrunk to half a dozen loyal servants. Henry reduced her allowance, so that she was forced to mend her own clothing, and he demanded the return of the jewels that she loved and the plate that had graced her table as a princess. The countess of Salisbury, her beloved governess, was removed. Throughout this period, she only saw her father once, and then she was not able to speak to
him. Her encounters with Anne Boleyn, who came to see her daughter on several occasions, invariably ended with a cold rejection of Anne’s attempts at reconciliation and Henry’s second wife departing in renewed fury at Mary’s absolute refusal to acknowledge her as queen, or to accept that Elizabeth took precedence over her. When it came to calculated insults, Mary Tudor was an accomplished practitioner. In March 1534, Chapuys reported to Charles V:

When the king’s ‘amie’ went lately to visit her daughter, she urgently solicited the princess [Mary] to visit her and honour her as queen, saying that it would be a means of reconciliation with the king, and she herself would intercede with him for her, and she would be as well or better treated than ever. The princess replied that she knew no queen in England except her mother and if the said ‘amie’ (whom she called madame Anne Boleyn) would do her that favour with her father she would be much obliged. The Lady repeated her remonstrances and offers and in the end threatened her but could not move the princess.
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There was, though, a price being paid for this contemptuous rejection of peace overtures: Mary’s health was permanently affected. Unhappy and fearful, she found it hard to sleep and lost her appetite. The stress exacerbated gynaecological difficulties she had apparently experienced since the onset of puberty. Her ‘illnesses’ were probably connected with menstruation and it seems that heavy, painful periods frequently confined her to bed. One episode was so severe that Henry sent his own doctor, William Butts. The royal physician’s diagnosis was illuminating – he thought Mary was suffering from stress and sorrow but nothing really life-threatening. His suggestion that Mary would recover if allowed to see her mother was humane but quite impermissible from Henry’s perspective. He did not want the two women together, reinforcing each other’s opposition to him and possibly plotting with Katherine’s nephew, Emperor Charles V, who had
thus far failed to take any direct action on her behalf. So Mary remained cut off from the court, at loggerheads with her father and often unwell. Given Henry’s determination to brook no opposition to his marriage or his reforms (he had, by this time, pronounced Royal Supremacy over the Church in England) it is remarkable that he allowed Mary as much leeway as he did. More and Fisher were put to death in 1535 for their refusal to take the oath to the new Act of Succession. The king’s feelings towards his daughter were more ambivalent. She was banished and subjected to harassment and threats of physical abuse, but Henry’s remarks to Chapuys indicate that he was genuinely troubled by the breakdown of their relationship. Her stubbornness, however, could not be allowed to go on indefinitely.

The breaking point came in the tumultuous year of 1536. Mary’s mother died at the beginning of January, still in love with the man she had married twenty-seven years earlier. But Anne Boleyn was far from invulnerable. She miscarried (historical tradition has it that the foetus was male, but we cannot be sure) on the day of Katherine of Aragon’s funeral, since when her position was never the same again. In truth, her marriage to Henry had been troubled for some time. Anne was clever but fiery and Henry had wearied of her rages and her strong will. She had made many enemies and not been afraid to take the fight to them. Quite what part Henry played in her downfall, one of the greatest travesties of justice in English history, we shall probably never know, but Mary, watching from a distance, was informed that Anne’s days were numbered. The false confidence this gave her, especially after Anne’s execution, is evident in the flurry of letters seeking restoration of parental favour that she wrote to her father and to Thomas Cromwell, his chief minister and architect of Anne’s demise.