Katherine the Queen: The Remarkable Life of Katherine Parr (48 page)

Sudeley, with its fine walks and beautiful garden, was an ideal location for the queen to pass the last three months of her pregnancy. In the spring and summer it is especially attractive. But Katherine had not skimped on her establishment when she exchanged London for Gloucestershire. Her entourage at Sudeley included her new almoner, Miles Coverdale, her doctor, Robert Huicke, a full complement of maids-of-honour and gentlewomen, as well as 120 gentlemen and yeomen of the guard. The duchess of Somerset, who was also pregnant (a coincidence, but a further competitive element between the Seymour brothers) might be the wife of the most powerful man in the land, but she could not boast such an attendance: Katherine was still a queen.

Yet as the final preparations were being made for Katherine and Thomas to go down into the country, there was the sudden threat of naval hostilities with France The prospect that her husband might be called away to fulfil his duties as lord admiral alarmed Katherine: ‘I am very sorry for the news of the Frenchmen’, she wrote to him from Hanworth. ‘I pray God it be not a let to our journey. As soon as ye know what they will do, good my lord, I beseech you let me hear from you, for I shall not be very quiet till I know.’ Fortunately, this anxiety, coupled with the continuing struggle to get her personal jewellery returned from the duke of Somerset (a dispute that was still festering nearly
eighteen months after the death of Henry VIII) did not quite overshadow her continued joy in her pregnancy. The unborn child was, she told Thomas, very active: ‘I gave your little knave your blessing, who like an honest man stirred apace after and before. For Mary Odell [one of her ladies] being abed with me had laid her hand upon my belly to feel it stir. It hath stirred these three days every morning and evening so that I trust when you come it will make you some pastime. And thus I end bidding my sweetheart and loving husband better to fare than myself.’
¹²

Thomas was delighted with her description of the active son he believed would live to take up his father’s cause and set right the injustice done to his parents. He told her:

the receiving of your letter revived my spirits, partly for that I do perceive you be armed with patience, however the matter will weigh [here he was referring to his efforts to prise Katherine’s possessions from his brother], as chiefest, that I hear my little man doth shake his poll [head], trusting if God should give him life as long as his father, he will revenge such wrongs as neither you nor I can, at this present, the turmoil is such. – God amend it!

There was, though, better news of foreign matters: ‘As for the Frenchmen, I have no mistrust that they shall be any let of my going with you this journey, or any of my continuance there with your highness.’ He would be with her at her time of travail and had some advice on how she might ease the pangs of delivery: ‘I do desire your highness to keep the little knave so lean and gaunt with your good diet and walking, that he may be so small that he may creep out of a mousehole. And I bid my most dear and well-beloved wife most heartily well to fare.’
¹³

These letters reveal a great deal about the underlying affection between Thomas and Katherine, a love that had survived ridicule, family and political pressures, as well as temptation and jealousy. At Sudeley, as the weeks passed and Katherine’s confinement drew ever closer, all that remained to complete their happiness
was the birth itself. They may have had enemies, but they also had well-wishers who had cause to remember Katherine’s friendship and pray for her safe delivery. Her elder stepdaughter, Mary, wrote from Newhall in Essex on 9 August and said that she was taking the opportunity of a visit from the queen’s brother to add another letter to the many she had already sent, as she understood that he ‘intendeth to see your grace shortly’. The next day she hoped to begin the journey to her Norfolk estates, but ill-health had delayed her. She was conscious that she would be further than ever from the queen but she hoped ‘with God’s grace, to return again about Michaelmas, by which time, or shortly after, I trust to hear good success of your grace’s great belly’.
¹⁴

While she waited for that success, Katherine fitted out a beautiful nursery for her baby. The room overlooked the gardens and Sudeley’s chapel, a fair and peaceful aspect. It was hung with tapestries and decorated in the queen’s favourite colours of crimson and gold. Beside the baby’s cradle, with its pillows and quilt, was a bed with a scarlet tester and crimson curtains and a separate bed for the nurse. The child was already provided with plate for a table service and fine furniture. As the summer of 1548 drew to its conclusion, the queen continued to follow Dr Huicke’s advice and walk regularly in the castle grounds. Yet despite the imminence of her own child’s arrival, she was still thinking about the situation of English politics and the theft, as she perceived it, of her stepson’s rightful possessions. Sir Robert Tyrwhit remembered that she had said to him during one of her perambulations: ‘Master Tyrwhit, you shall see the king when he cometh to his full age, he will call his lands again, as fast as they be now given from him.’ She assured Tyrwhit that Seymour would give up Sudeley Castle, if the day came that the king required its return.

For the present, however, Sudeley was her home and refuge. She had endured an uncomfortable pregnancy and an emotional, uncertain time since the death of Henry VIII. But the end of her
confinement was apparently more straightforward. On 30 August, Katherine gave birth to a healthy girl. The baby was named Mary, after the queen’s elder stepdaughter. Any disappointment that the parents might have felt that this was not the anticipated little male avenger of their wrongs was completely swept away by the joys of parenthood and relief at Katherine’s safe delivery. She and Thomas were old to be having a first child, and their delight was made plain when the proud father wrote to his brother (who already had two children from his first marriage and nine from his second) about his sweet little girl. The duchess of Somerset had trumped Katherine a few weeks earlier by giving birth to yet another boy, but her husband was circumspect, even encouraging, in his response to Thomas:

We are right glad to understand by your letters that the Queen your bedfellow hath had a happy hour: and, escaping all danger, hath made you the father of so pretty a daughter. And although (if it had so pleased God) it would have been both to us, and we suppose to you, a more joy and comfort if it had been this the first son; yet the escape of danger, and the prophecy and good hansell [promise] of this to a great sort of happy sons, the which as you write, we trust no less than to be true, is no small joy and comfort to us, as we are sure it is to you and to her Grace also.

The use of the royal ‘we’, an affectation that did not endear Somerset to other members of the Privy Council, was something that his brother had come to expect. And by the time the duke’s letter, written on 1 September, reached Sudeley, Thomas Seymour had far more serious things to occupy his thoughts.

At first, it seemed as though Katherine had come through the birth well. But, alas, she had not experienced the escape of danger her brother-in-law assumed. Within a few days, she developed the fever and weakness that were the first signs of puerperal fever, the deadly bacterial complication of childbirth that afflicted so many women of her time. Lacking antiseptics and antibiotics,
newly delivered women were at the mercy of a lottery of life and death. Understanding of hygiene was very basic and Dr Huicke, as he tended to Katherine during and after the birth, did not have at his disposal the scrubs, gloves and sterilized instruments of our times. It made no difference whether you were a queen or a peasant. Katherine had been given the best of care while she carried her child, but there was nothing that could be done for her now.

Thomas may have clung, for a while, to the hope that the fever would pass and she would rally. Most probably her ladies, and Katherine herself, knew otherwise. As her condition worsened, she suffered bouts of delirium, interspersed with periods when she was calmer and collected. But, clearly, she realized, before her doctor confirmed her worst fears, that she was dying. After a troubled night, she called Robert Tyrwhit’s wife, Lady Elizabeth, to her bedside on the morning of 3 September. This lady’s recollection of the queen’s words at that time have passed down to us as a deathbed denunciation of Thomas Seymour, but it should be remembered that here was someone who disliked Seymour intensely, wanting to leave an overwhelmingly negative impression. Nevertheless, her account reveals the hidden anguish that Katherine had suppressed, but which now came to the surface as she struggled to accept what was happening to her.

When Lady Tyrwhit arrived in Katherine’s chamber, the queen asked her where she had been so long, and then said that ‘she did fear such things in herself, that she was sure she could not live’. Seeking to reassure her despairing and frightened mistress, Lady Tyrwhit replied that she saw no likelihood of death in her. But Katherine was not placated. In fact, she became more disturbed, despite the fact that Thomas was holding her hand and trying to soothe her. ‘She then . . . spake these words,’ recalled Elizabeth Tyrwhit, ‘partly, as I took it, idly [in delirium], “My Lady Tyrwhit, I am not well handled, for those that be about me careth not for me, but standeth laughing at my grief, and the more good I will unto them, the less good they will to
me.”’ This rebuke was clearly intended for her husband but he strongly denied it, answering, ‘Why, sweetheart, I would you no hurt.’ Katherine replied: ‘No my lord, I think so’, but she pulled him closer, saying in his ear, ‘but, my lord, you have given me many shrewd taunts’. Lady Tyrwhit went on to say that the queen spoke these words ‘with good memory and very sharply and earnestly, for her mind was far unquieted. My Lord Admiral, perceiving that I heard it, called me aside, and asked me what she said, and I declared it plainly to him.’ Though there are evident contradictions concerning Katherine’s lucidity in this account, Lady Tyrwhit was determined to drive her point home. She admitted that Thomas was distressed enough by his wife’s accusations to suggest that he lie down on the bed beside her so that he could ‘pacify her unquietness with gentle communication’, but she wanted it known that Seymour’s attempts were counter-productive. Katherine had reproved him, ‘very roundly and shortly’, claiming that she would have liked a full consultation with Dr Huicke the first day she was delivered, ‘but I durst not, for displeasing of you’. In other words, the queen was so far afraid of her husband’s reaction if she had a private session with her doctor that Thomas’s unreasonable jealousy had brought her to the point of death. Too distressed to listen further, so she claimed, Lady Tyrwhit left this heartbreaking scene. But others who were there, she vowed, could back up what she had remembered.
¹⁵

None, however, seem to have done so, though that is not to say that the account is fabricated. Katherine had ample reason to lament her husband’s thoughtlessness and his outbursts of temper. Her reproofs also suggest strongly how devastated she had been by his behaviour with Elizabeth. But his own evident concern for Katherine in her extremity is quite clear and there is no reason to suppose that Dr Huicke could have done anything further that might have prevented the childbed fever that was ravaging her body and mind. In fact, he may well have caused it. Yet however distressed Katherine was on the morning of
3 September, Thomas does seem to have succeeded in calming her. She herself, accepting the inevitability and fast approach of death, remembered, in the end, only the love she had long felt for him. She sent for Huicke and John Parkhurst, the chaplain who had served her while she was married to Henry VIII, and dictated her will, being too weak to write it herself. All her property and possessions were left to her husband. The queen ‘wishing them to be a thousand times more in value than they were’, gave Thomas complete authority to dispose of them as he saw fit. Katherine made no profession of religious faith in her will, nor did she mention her baby. Of little Mary Seymour, lying in her splendid cradle, there was no word. Nor is there any record that she asked to see her daughter as her life ebbed away. Presumably she believed that Thomas would be a good father to their child and was content to leave Mary in his care.

Katherine died in the early morning of 5 September. Her body was carefully wrapped in layers of cere cloth, a waxed cloth used to help prevent decay, and encased in a lead envelope in her coffin. She was buried in the chapel of Sudeley Castle, within sight of the windows of her daughter’s nursery. Jane Grey was the chief mourner for a lady she seems to have held in great affection. The service was short, in English, as Katherine would have approved, and over in a morning. Not for Katherine the processions and funeral masses that saw her third husband to his grave. Instead, psalms were sung in English by the choir, three lessons read, and offerings made in the alms box for the living, not the dead. This point, a key element of the reformed religion that Katherine had done so much to promote, was emphasized by Miles Coverdale in his ‘very good and godly sermon’: ‘they should none there think,’ he admonished them, ‘that the offering which was there done, was done anything to benefit the dead, but for the poor only; and also the lights, which were carried and stood about the corpse were for the honour of the person, and for none other intent nor purpose’. Then he delivered his sermon, said a prayer, and ‘the corpse was buried, during which time the
choir sung Te Deum in English And this done, the mourners dined and the rest turned homeward again.’
¹⁶
This simple ceremony has been described as the first Protestant burial of an English queen. It was certainly a stark contrast to a Catholic funeral service, though the singing of the Te Deum, even in English, demonstrates that the old forms had not quite been swept away completely. But Katherine Parr, wife to four husbands, who had lived through thirty-six years of some of the greatest changes England has ever seen, was gone.