Katherine the Queen: The Remarkable Life of Katherine Parr (36 page)

As queen, Katherine had wholeheartedly embraced the conviction of the aristocracy in Tudor England that study was a lifelong process. It was no mere pastime, pleasurable though it might be, but part of becoming a more rounded and complete person. In fact, it was almost a duty. To sit down with her ladies to read the scriptures was as natural as returning to the study of Latin, indeed, perhaps more so. For there was one huge difference between the Bible Katherine had read as a child at Rye House and the passages she now studied in her privy chamber. The Bible was now available in English – at least, to noblemen and their wives.

There had been various versions of the Bible, or, at least, parts of it, in English for some years. The concept of an English Bible was originally a humanist project rather than an overtly Protestant one, and this is an important point to remember in respect of the climate in which Katherine Parr began her literary career.
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The bold lines between ‘Catholic’ and ‘Protestant’ characterized by many historians are a product of hindsight. They were not so readily visible to those who were alive at the time. In fact, William Tyndale’s English New Testament had first appeared as long ago as 1526. Thereafter, further translation was slow (Cranmer himself believed at one point during the 1530s
that it would not be completed before Doomsday) and often controversial. The king’s views remained equivocal. But in 1538 Miles Coverdale, who became Katherine Parr’s almoner ten years later, was asked by Cromwell to produce a further revision. Coming just a year after the final suppression of the Pilgrimage of Grace and with the threat of a Franco-imperial crusade against the excommunicated Henry VIII, the timing is highly significant. The work was printed in Paris and appeared in England as the Great Bible in April 1540. The following year a new edition appeared, with a preface by Cranmer. Coverdale’s text omitted some of the more obvious Lutheranism of Tyndale’s earlier version, probably in order to make it more acceptable to the king.

We should not underestimate how marvellous the Great Bible must have seemed to Katherine Parr and the women of her court. Here was the word of God in the vernacular, at last, strong and direct, without the need for interpretation by priests, speaking to them as individuals. Its impact was profound. And Katherine, seized with the wonder of it, was certain that the richness of understanding and self-awareness engendered by religious study should be brought before a wider audience, in the English tongue. The intellectual stimulation, the literal soul-searching, the acknowledgement of man’s sinfulness and God’s salvation, all informed her desire to be part of the great discussions of her day. She was an expressive writer, as her letters show, and her literary projects would demonstrate her competence as an editor and patroness of learning. There was also another aim: wherever possible, she would reiterate the great achievements of Henry VIII, her husband, who had freed England from the tyranny and superstition of Rome. He was a new Moses leading his people to deliverance. In an ordered society, Henry was still the father of his country. All hope for the future sprang from the king.

Though Henry and Katherine were increasingly to discuss (and sometimes to dispute) religion, the influences on the queen came from a number of different people. Chief among these was probably Archbishop Cranmer. It is difficult to be specific about
the extent of their contact or the effect it had on Katherine directly, but this very vagueness is, as Diarmaid MacCulloch points out, revealing: ‘the relationship between the archbishop and Henry VIII’s last queen . . . is so obscure as to suggest deliberate discretion’.
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Cranmer was particularly skilled at this kind of political nuance. The early 1540s were a very difficult time for him and he would have been acutely aware of the benefits that could accrue from closeness to the queen as well as the pitfalls. Indeed, he may have been more aware of the latter than Katherine was herself. He had been an ally of Anne Boleyn and was stunned at her fall. Few men at the time knew the king’s unpredictability better than Cranmer. His own ideas on matters such as the eucharist were still taking shape. There might have been much that he hoped Katherine could achieve, but his connection with her must not be obvious. It would do neither of them any good in those trying times.

Nevertheless, she saw him almost daily while she was regent and his influence, while not flaunted, was pervasive. The queen’s commitment to promoting English as the language of worship mirrored Cranmer’s current preoccupations. As we have seen, his Litany in English appeared in May 1544, an important element in the propaganda effort to support Henry VIII’s war with France. The king’s subjects could attend services that were partly in English and remember him in their prayers in their native tongue.
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But this does not mean that the Mass in Latin was abandoned, and, in fact, some elements of the service had been conducted in English for a very long time. But the English Litany was highly significant. Its essence survived in the Book of Common Prayer and was a major element in the subsequent form of worship under Edward VI and Elizabeth. The Litany was reprinted in October 1544 when it appeared in a volume also containing a translation of a work originally attributed to the executed Bishop Fisher of Rochester, who had so bravely supported Katherine of Aragon. This was a slim volume entitled
Psalms or Prayers
, which first appeared in English in April 1544.
It has been suggested that the English version of Fisher’s work, which is more a statement of Catholic rather than reformist faith, may be Katherine Parr’s first, anonymous publication.
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It is true that Katherine ordered copies of the combined work and that the following year Thomas Berthelet published Katherine’s
Prayers or Meditations
in one edition with the Litany and the
Psalms or Prayers
. This is not conclusive proof of collaboration between the queen and the archbishop but it certainly indicates that their efforts were tending in the same direction.

Yet if Katherine had worked on translating the
Psalms or Prayers
in the first year of her marriage to the king, then this points to an influence on her thoughts earlier than her contact with Thomas Cranmer. And it also introduces more complexity in charting her spiritual journey. The connection between the martyred Fisher and Katherine Parr is George Day, bishop of Chichester, her almoner. Day had been Fisher’s chaplain, though he had avoided the bishop’s fate. He had embraced religious reform in the 1530s but now was pulling back from more extreme evangelical views. His moderation, carefully balanced, eventually meant that he could not support the sweeping changes of Edward VI. Perhaps, as his relationship with the queen blossomed, he saw an opportunity to encourage her desire to improve her Latin with a manageable project, a translation of his deceased master’s book of prayers. It was not, however, an entirely innocent choice, nor one without risk. Fisher’s name could hardly have been welcome to the king’s ears and so it was better for the whole endeavour to remain anonymous. The extent to which Day might have helped Katherine can never be known, but the association of the
Psalms or Prayers
with an executed traitor and the possibility that the translation was a joint effort may explain why Katherine’s name was never directly associated with it. Without this explanation, its anonymity is rather odd. Katherine was not shy about seeing her name in print or in encouraging others (like Princess Mary) to acknowledge their own work.

Day’s influence on Katherine was not confined to this one
project. A great admirer of Erasmus himself, he probably encouraged the queen to read more of the works of this giant of the humanist movement. There were others, too, who helped develop her enthusiasm for making the writings of great men available in English. Her most ambitious undertaking, the organization of the translation of Erasmus’s
Paraphrases upon the New Testament
, was put under the overall editorial direction not of Day but of Nicholas Udall. Quite how Udall was chosen for this task by the queen remains a mystery, but he and Day could hardly have had more contrasting personalities or backgrounds.

Udall had enjoyed, to say the least, a chequered career, and one in which religion had played little part. An Oxford graduate, he had divided his time between writing plays, publishing a textbook on conversational Latin and involvement in education. Between 1534 and 1541 he was headmaster at Eton, a post that was poorly paid, though it was prestigious. As we have seen, he acquired there a reputation for flogging that one of his pupils remembered with a shudder as late as 1575. But it was not for the brutality of his regime at Eton that he was most notorious. Several robberies at the school were investigated by the Privy Council and one of the scholars who confessed to having stolen silver and plate implicated Udall in activities that were all together more unacceptable to the mores of sixteenth-century England than the mere theft of precious objects. Hauled in to answer these accusations, Udall confessed to numerous offences of buggery, a crime punishable by death. Somehow he managed to avoid the extreme penalty, perhaps through the intervention of an influential patron. Thomas Wriothesley and Richard Cox, Prince Edward’s tutor, have both been suggested as possibilities, and either could also have suggested him to Katherine as the person to take on the
Paraphrases
project. The queen evidently did not hold his dubious past against him, nor, given the way gossip circulated at court, does it seem likely that she would have been completely ignorant of it.

Udall assumed direction of the work with commendable diligence and an effusive enthusiasm which sounds almost flowery to modern readers. He was especially keen to acknowledge the role of the queen as his patron and to emphasize the devotional piety of the young aristocratic women of England. Writing in the preface to the
Paraphrases
, which were finally published after three years of work in 1548, Udall fell over himself to praise Katherine, describing how

all these your unceasing pains and travails do finally redound. Leaving in the prosecution of so large a matter as neither my slender wit can well contrive, nor my rude pen is able to wield. I shall in this present only thank God in you, and you in God, for causing the Paraphrases of Desiderius Erasmus of Rotterdam upon the New Testament to be translated into English for the use and commodity of such people, as with an earnest zeal and with devout study do hunger and thirst for the simple and plain knowledge of God’s word; not for contentious babbling but for innocent living; not to be curious searchers of the high mysteries, but to be faithful executioners and doers of God’s bidding; not to be troublous talkers of the Bible, but sincere followers of God’s precepts therein contained; not to be irreverent reasoners in Holy Scripture . . . but to be humble and lowly workers of God’s glory.

He went on to pay tribute to Katherine’s strong guidance of the project: ‘And that in your Highness, for the most speedy expedition of your most godly purpose to bring God’s word to the more light and the more clear understanding, distributed this work by portions, to sundry translators, to the intent it might all at once be finished . . . ye have therein, most gracious Lady, right well declared both how much ye tender God’s honour and also how earnestly ye mind the benefit of your country.’
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Flattery aside, Udall was right to single out Katherine’s skilful approach to the translation of so massive a work. It was not, of course, unusual to divide responsibilities in this way; the work on the Great Bible, the King’s Book and other religious projects was
undertaken by a team of clerics. Apart from Udall himself, who translated the Gospel according to St Luke and possibly also St Matthew and the Acts of the Apostles, the other accredited translators were Thomas Key, who was encouraged to participate by George Owen, one of Henry VIII’s doctors, and who tackled St Mark, and Princess Mary, who undertook perhaps the most challenging of all, St John, at her stepmother’s urging. They were an interesting and diverse team: the disgraced but resilient schoolmaster, the long-suffering and bastardized eldest child of the king and the lesser-known preacher in the queen’s household. Lending a keen supervisory interest, and possibly also involving herself in the translation of St Matthew, which remained unattributed, was Katherine herself. In its scope and impact, this English translation of Erasmus’s work represents the queen’s greatest literary achievement. How much she directly contributed is open to conjecture. Stephen Gardiner, who disliked the entire concept of the work, later decried both the inadequate Latin and the selective editing of the anonymous translator of St Matthew. This has been interpreted as an indirect attack on Katherine, on the assumption that Gardiner knew very well the identity of the person concerned, and was, by 1547, an inveterate enemy of the queen. It is not clear how he obtained a copy of the
Paraphrases
before publication, nor is his critique conclusive proof that Katherine Parr took an active role in translation. What is certain is that the
Paraphrases
was given a great deal of publicity by the Edwardian government (20,000 copies were in circulation between 1548 and 1551) and that they established Katherine as the leading patron of vernacular religious writing in England.

Until the end of 1545, Katherine Parr’s individual religious writings had been sparse, confined to a few prayers. She was becoming experienced as a collector and editor of existing material (the
Prayers or Meditations
was based on writings of St Thomas à Kempis), but her influences were varied and largely emanated from the European continent, the origin of all the new ideas. She studied both Catholic humanist writers and Lutheran
reformers, and attended Mass regularly. Discussions with her husband on the various strands of religious beliefs and current trends seem to have formed a major element of their social relationship – perhaps almost too much so for Henry’s liking, as the months went by. But if his patience was becoming tried, Katherine was ever more eager to express herself. In this she no doubt received encouragement from her religious advisers and her closest companions in her Privy Chamber, her sister Lady Herbert and cousin, Lady Lane, as well as Lady Joan Denny, wife of Sir Anthony Denny, keeper of the privy purse, moderate reformer and a growing influence in the king’s Privy Chamber. Then there was also the more zealously reforming Katherine Brandon, duchess of Suffolk, whose friendship with the queen seems to have intensified in 1545. Attractive, outspoken and opinionated, the duchess was widowed in August of that year at the age of twentysix and it may be that her loss brought her closer to the queen, who later referred affectionately to ‘my lady of Suffolk’ in one of her letters to Thomas Seymour.