Katherine the Queen: The Remarkable Life of Katherine Parr (44 page)

M
ARRY IN HASTE
, repent in leisure, so the saying goes. Once the deed was done, the back-tracking was far less pleasant than the anticipation of Seymour’s stealthy midnight creeping through the spring blossoms of Katherine’s Chelsea garden. It was all very well for the Herberts to condone the marriage. Others, whose friendship Katherine had enjoyed, or whose support Seymour needed, reacted with a mixture of cool disapproval and warm anger. One of the earliest casualties, before the marriage had even taken place, was the queen’s relationship with her elder stepdaughter. Mary continued to live with Katherine for several months after the death of Henry VIII, but she moved out of the dowager queen’s household in April. This was partly because she was now a substantial woman of property in her own right, under the terms of her father’s will. It was natural that she wished to establish her own household, to be independent, and to spend some time inspecting her new estates. Yet Katherine had been her closest companion for what would prove to be the happiest four years of her adult life and their parting should have been a matter of regret to both women. Instead, it may have come as a relief to the queen, distracted by her affair with Seymour and unwilling to recognize Mary’s disapproval of her behaviour. But disapprove Mary most certainly did. The extent of her distaste can be judged from the clinical detachment of her response to Seymour, when he tried to involve her in his quest for Katherine’s hand: ‘I have received your letter,’ she wrote, ‘wherein, as me thinketh, I perceive strange news, concerning a suit you have in hand to the Queen for marriage, the sooner obtaining whereof, you seem to think that my letters might do you pleasure.’ Apart from the carefully implied reprimand, she was determined to remind him – and Katherine herself – of the indelicacy of their actions:

it standeth least with my poor honour to be a meddler in this matter, considering whose wife her grace was of late, and besides that if she be minded to grant your suit, my letters shall do you but small pleasure. On the other side, if the remembrance of the King’s majesty my father (whose soul God pardon) will not suffer her to grant your suit, I am nothing able to persuade her to forget the loss of him who is as yet very ripe in mine own remembrance.

She asked him not to think unkindly of her and she would be glad to help him in other ways, ‘wooing matters set apart, wherein I being a maid am nothing cunning’ (a strong hint that she was aware of what had been going on at Chelsea), ‘both for his blood’s sake that ye be of, and also for the gentleness which I have always found in you’.
¹⁵
By the end, her tone had softened a little, but the overall message, that she wanted nothing to do with the personal life of her father’s last wife, is very clear. Her letter was dated 4 June, revealing that Seymour moved very quickly to get influential support for his marriage to Katherine.

If Katherine was dismayed by Mary’s answer, she wisely refrained from any further personal involvement. She may have calculated that her stepdaughter would not stay offended for long, and in this she was correct. Mary’s
froideur
was a setback, but not a major one. And Katherine had made her own first move, even earlier than Thomas’s, to give their union the ultimate respectability. The queen and her husband knew that it was the little king’s approval that mattered, and they had reason to believe that Edward’s unreserved benediction could be obtained if he was approached the right way. Opportunity soon presented itself. At the end of May, possibly within days of her actual marriage, Katherine was at court with the king. While there, she wrote him quite an extraordinary letter. This Latin epistle has not survived,
but its gist can be easily discerned from Edward’s reply, written on 30 May:

Since I was not far from you, and in hopes every day to see you, I thought it best to write no letter at all to you. For letters are tokens of remembrance and kindness between such as are at a great distance. But being at length moved by your request, I could not forebear to send you a letter: – first, to do somewhat that may be acceptable to you, and then to answer the letter, full of kindness, which you sent me from St James’s. In which, first, you set before mine eyes your love toward my father the king, of most noble memory; then your goodwill towards me; and lastly your godliness, your knowledge and learning in the Scriptures.

Her words had clearly pleased him greatly, combining the three things he valued most at that point in his young life. The boy went on to reassure her that ‘I do love and admire you with my whole heart. Wherefore if there be anything wherein I may do you a kindness, either in deed or work, I shall do it willingly.’
¹⁶

His trust was, of course, deceived. The clue is in the last line of his reply, which strongly implies that Katherine had, in general terms, asked for his support and favour. He could not have known that his beloved stepmother, while professing her continuing love for Henry VIII, was actually softening him up so that she could obtain his agreement for her marriage to his uncle.

Edward was also very fond of Thomas Seymour. The dashing sea-dog appealed just as much to his nephew as he did to Katherine Parr. Again, this affection provided an opportunity for manipulation, but the king lived in a tightly controlled environment and Seymour realized very early after the death of Henry VIII that he would need to buy his way into it if he was to have any real hope of influence. He was prepared to be liberal, and was soon bribing John Fowler, a gentleman of the Privy Chamber. Fowler was to be his conduit to Edward when he could not see him personally, or when he wanted ideas put in the
king’s mind. Chief of these was his own marital status. Fowler was to prepare the ground for acquiescence to the choice of bride. This he duly did, but Edward’s response was not what his uncle and stepmother would have wanted. On consideration, he first suggested Anne of Cleves, still very much alive and occasionally in attendance at court. The reply suggests that Edward rather liked her. But then, on mulling it over, he decided he had the perfect solution. His uncle should marry ‘my sister Mary, to change her opinions’. Apparently Thomas was amused by his nephew’s matchmaking schemes; marriage to Mary would have required the permission of the entire Privy Council and he was not going down that road. Edward needed to be steered to give the right answer. ‘I pray you, Mr Fowler,’ Thomas said, ‘if you may soon, ask his Grace if he should be contented I should marry the Queen.’ Katherine had not occurred to Edward as a likely wife for his uncle, which is hardly surprising, given her protestations of undying love for Henry VIII. Yet by 25 June the king was writing to Katherine to thank her for marrying Thomas.

It has been claimed that Edward’s letter was dictated by Seymour himself. There is no firm evidence to support this contention but it seems probable that there was a discussion about the content of the king’s missive to his stepmother. Edward was accustomed to composing even personal letters after consultation with his tutors so it is unlikely that he would have resisted advice over the wording of something that affected so closely someone that he loved. The expression of his sentiments, however, is in keeping with other letters he wrote to Katherine. He began:

We thank you heartily not only for your gentle acceptance of our suit moved unto you, but also for your loving accomplishing of the same, wherein you have declared not only a desire to gratify us, but also moved us to declare the goodwill likewise that we bear to you in all your requests. Wherefore, ye shall not need to fear any grief to come, or to
suspect lack of aid in need; seeing that he, being mine uncle [here he refers to the duke of Somerset], is of so good a nature that he will not be troublesome by any means unto you; and I of that mind that of divers just causes I must favour you. But even as without cause you merely require help against him whom you have put in trust with the carriage of these letters, so may I merely return the same request unto you, to provide that he may live with you also without grief, which hath given him wholly unto you. And I will so provide for you both that hereafter, if any grief befall, I shall be a sufficient succour in your godly or praisable enterprises. Fare ye well, with much increase of honour and virtue in Christ.
¹⁷

This cynical play on a child’s emotions does Katherine Parr and her fourth husband little credit. She had evidently acted the reluctant bride to good effect. It also reinforces the historical view of her impetuosity and poor judgement in becoming Seymour’s wife in unseemly haste. That is certainly one possible explanation, but the couple may have believed that their interests were not served by waiting. Katherine was already involved in what would turn out to be a protracted dispute with Somerset over her lands and jewels. She needed a protector of her own and the fact that he was the duke’s brother perhaps seemed, to her, an advantage. Love and self-interest are powerful incentives, sufficient, in this case, for an affectionate stepmother to turn a child who greatly admired her into a pawn. But her relationships with the royal children had always been built on an element of strategic devotion, as, indeed, was her marriage to Thomas Seymour.

E
DWARD
’
S LETTER
to Katherine shows how sensitive were the relationships within the Seymour family, for it was here, more than any other source, that rancour was felt. The duke of Somerset and his brother are recorded in history as very different
men, representing the good and bad sides of the Tudor aristocracy. For hundreds of years, Somerset was ‘the good duke’, someone who had favoured the ordinary man, a Protestant reformer and benevolent ruler whose good intentions were thwarted by unscrupulous, power-hungry political foes. Thomas, by contrast, was a loud-mouthed, swaggering intriguer, an atheist struggling by all possible means for his own advancement, with no fraternal feelings or loyalties. They could not have been more different.

And yet, in reality, they were much more alike, as siblings often are. Their physical closeness is striking. Their portraits show that they shared the same features, particularly the same nose, and the same colouring. Thomas looks more directly at the viewer, his gaze almost challenging, as befits his reputation. Edward’s eyes veer to the side and he appears paler and more effete, an impression heightened by the double stranded, rather feminine, necklace he is wearing. Not too much, though, should be read into these slight distinctions. Both were hugely ambitious and opportunistic. Somerset is now seen as a man of autocratic tendencies who disdained to rule with advice, damaged the economy, pursued an unrealistic foreign policy and sowed the seeds of his own destruction. Thomas was the infuriating younger brother with pretensions above his rank and competence. The reality, however, was that neither man was capable of the great responsibilities the elder brother had taken upon himself and the younger one so avidly sought. They had served Henry VIII well enough, but, thrust into the limelight by the accession of their nephew, they were both found lacking.

Their relationship is a complicated one. Looking back, it is easy to discern an inevitable outcome; such vision was not, of course, available to them at the time. Thomas was an irritant, but he was still the Protector’s kin, and they saw each other frequently. Exasperation and resentment were felt on both sides, but the ties of blood were strong. If anyone was to marry the queen dowager, Somerset preferred it to be his brother. He may
have disliked the deception, the way Thomas had presented him with a
fait accompli
, but, as his sister-in-law, Katherine could be controlled more readily (or so Somerset hoped) than if she remained independent, or even married someone else. His greed and lack of tact were already causing the queen much aggravation, as he gave away the leases on her dower lands without consulting her and deprived her of her personal jewellery collection. Her fury against him mounted by the day: ‘my lord, your brother, hath this afternoon a little made me warm’, she told her new husband. ‘It was fortunate we were so much distant, for I suppose else I should have bitten him.’
¹⁸
This was not a happy introduction to the Seymour family circle. But if Katherine disliked Somerset, it was nothing to the detestation she felt for his wife.