Katherine the Queen: The Remarkable Life of Katherine Parr (9 page)

It was not birth, but death that coloured Katherine’s life over the next few years. At the end of 1531, Maud Parr died in London. She was laid to rest beside the husband whose interests she had so ably supported all her adult life. She was only thirty-nine and her passing was a great sadness for her children. In her will she left Katherine Borough, her eldest child, seventeen different items of jewellery, including ‘a ring with a great pointed diamond set with black enamel’, a ‘pair of bracelets, chain fashion, with two jacinths [garnets] in them’ and a ‘tablet with pictures of the king and queen’.
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At the time of her death Maud, like everyone else, must have known that the marriage of Henry VIII and Katherine of Aragon was probably beyond repair. The king was already four years into the process of seeking a divorce. But King Henry and Katherine of Aragon had been the most important people in her life after her husband and children, and the portrait of them was very dear to her. She wanted her own Katherine to have it. Typical of the kind of woman she was, Maud also left monies for the founding of schools and the marrying of maidens, the latter bequest intended to help the less fortunate members of her wider family.

Scarcely before she had accustomed herself to life without her mother’s guiding hand, Katherine also lost her husband. Edward had begun to establish a local role for himself at Kirton-in-Lindsey, serving as a justice of the peace, but by the early spring of 1533 he was dead. Katherine, at the age of twenty, found herself a widow with no child or significant wealth to give her comfort in life. She had little claim on her in-laws and neither they nor Katherine seem to have wanted her to return to reside with them. Thomas Borough did not, though, just cast her aside.
He provided Katherine with a small income from three of his southern manors (two in Surrey and one in Kent), but with this his generosity was at an end. He was, in any case, probably much more concerned with the new position he had been given as Anne Boleyn’s chamberlain and in the arrangements for her coronation, in which he played a prominent part. Determined to show that he was a strong supporter of the Boleyns, he was in London for much of the heady summer of 1533. Katherine’s future could not have greatly preoccupied him.

F
ACING AN
uncertain future and with no home to call her own, Katherine Parr disappeared, briefly, from public record. But she had friends in the north, and they were people of influence. Cuthbert Tunstall, an important figure in her childhood, had been appointed bishop of Durham and president of the Council of the North in 1530. His presence must have been a comfort and she would have undoubtedly looked to him for guidance. His careful positioning on delicate matters such as the royal divorce demonstrated his grasp of political reality. By 1533 he had accepted that Katherine of Aragon’s cause was hopeless, whatever his personal disapproval of the king’s actions. This pragmatism (some would call it trimming) ensured his survival when the consciences of others, like his friend Thomas More, took them to the executioner’s block. To Katherine Parr he was of far more help alive and still exercising his influence with his contacts than he would have been as a glorious martyr.

She also had her own resilient character, inherited from both her parents, to see her through these uncertain times, and the comfort that her brother William and sister Anne were making their own way in life. Anne Parr had arrived at the court, family connections no doubt helping to find her a place, and she was to serve all Henry’s queens from the mid-1530s. William, meanwhile, was starting to move with as much assurance at court as his father had done at the beginning of Henry VIII’s reign,
helped by the people he had known as a boy in the household of the duke of Richmond. His charm and sociability brought him many friends, including the earl of Surrey and Sir Thomas Wyatt, the poet who had been in love with Anne Boleyn. It was evident that the fortunes of the Parrs were still rising and that Katherine would eventually benefit from this.

So her life had changed, but not necessarily for the worse. She was not abandoned, merely waiting to see what opportunities would present themselves. Tradition has it that she passed the twelve months after Edward Borough’s death at Sizergh Castle in Cumbria, the imposing ancestral home of the Strickland family. This beautiful castle outside Kendal would have been a wonderful place to recover from grief and consider the direction her life might take. Sizergh was already nearly 350 years old at the time of Katherine’s reputed residence there. The house and grounds were on a much larger scale than the Old Hall in Gainsborough, providing many opportunities for quiet contemplation. But it seems that the young widow was not idle during her stay; a piece of embroidery, which can still be seen at the castle, is said to be her work.

The dowager Lady Strickland, born Katherine Neville, was one of Katherine’s many cousins on her father’s side and was also related to the Boroughs. Perhaps she felt she had a double obligation to provide temporary shelter. The later appointment of William Kynyatt, Lady Strickland’s third husband, as auditor to Katherine Parr when she became queen, is evidence of the closeness of the two women. These family ties, and the way they were used, are one of the most distinctive features of sixteenth-century life. They provided a network of support and reward that went far beyond the limits of the modern, more confined family relationships to which we are accustomed. And they could be particularly valuable to a woman like Katherine, whose immediate kin were geographically distant and not yet quite well enough placed, in the case of either of her siblings, to help launch her back into the wider marriage market.

For a second marriage, and a better one, if possible, was the only option for Katherine Parr, a fact she would undoubtedly have known. She was clever, attractive and good-natured, not rich, but well born and well connected. Circumstances made it unlikely that a southern gentleman would suddenly appear to claim her. In this respect her brother could not help her. Indeed, there were already signs that he might be in need of marital advice himself, as attempts at cohabiting with his wife, now she had reached the age of sixteen, had not been successful.

Yet in Tudor England, a woman of Katherine Parr’s quality was unlikely to remain single for long. By the summer of 1534 a suitable husband had been found for her, probably through the combined efforts of Lady Strickland and Bishop Tunstall. The man was John Neville, Lord Latimer, a relative of both Katherine and her hostess at Sizergh. Twice married and twice widowed, he had a title, a castle at Snape in North Yorkshire and an established role in northern politics. And he was also father to a fourteen-year-old son and nine-year-old daughter, who had been without a maternal figure in their lives for four years, following the death of a previous stepmother in 1530. Now they were to have an even younger woman to fill that role. Katherine Parr was barely twenty-two when she became Latimer’s third wife and moved to a new life in the pleasant countryside of the Yorkshire Dales.

‘I am never able to render to her grace sufficient thanks for the godly education and tender love and bountiful goodness which I have ever more found in her highness.’

Margaret Neville’s generous tribute to her stepmother,
Queen Katherine Parr, in her will of 1545

I
T WOULD BE EASY
to be cynical, to say that it could not possibly have been a love match, this alliance between a very young and financially insecure widow and a northern baron twice her age who needed companionship and wanted a woman’s presence in the lives of his two children. In the Tudor age, love was a relatively minor consideration where marriage was concerned. The cementing of family ties, the enhancement of wealth and social prospects, these all figured much more prominently. In balancing decisions on such an important step, romance seldom figured. A sensible marriage, based on a proper understanding of what both parties brought to the union and their shared values, was more desirable than the unpredictable consequences of falling in love, which seldom fitted into the scheme of things in the sixteenth century.

This does not mean, however, that love was not a factor at all in the marriage of Katherine and Lord Latimer. She may have felt little more than a fondness tinged with gratitude at the
outset, but Katherine developed a genuine affection for her husband over the nine years of their marriage. When she died, she still had a copy of his New Testament with his name inscribed in it. On his side, in particular, the attractions of his third bride seem to have outweighed any concerns he might have harboured about her ability to manage his home and help shape the lives of his son and daughter.

The earliest known portrait of Katherine dates from the period of her marriage to Lord Latimer. It is a striking image. The young woman in the picture is blessed with good features, an oval-shaped face with a firm jawline and a clear complexion. But it is the overall impression of intelligence and intensity that is so compelling. She is not quite beautiful but there is an inner strength in the face that commands attention. Katherine looks confident and resolute without seeming imperious. This is no giddy girl, rather a woman of grace and a maturity that belies her years. The portrait is carefully composed and Katherine evidently gave a great deal of thought to how she wished to look and what she would wear. The final result must have met with the approval both of Katherine and her husband. She is very much the aristocratic lady, expensively dressed and already demonstrating a love of jewels and fashion that was to develop over the years. Her clothing is red and gold, with the hood perfectly matching the gown. Interestingly, although the gown has fashionable slashed undersleeves and a gauzy partlet, covering the throat and chest, the coifed gable hood that Katherine is wearing was a more conservative choice. Anne Boleyn had made popular the French hood, which showed more of the hair, but in some circles it was still considered rather unseemly. Jane Seymour favoured the gable hood, though this may have been less a personal preference than a conscious decision to differentiate herself from her more flighty, disgraced predecessor. In Katherine Parr’s case, she had married a man whose overall outlook was conservative and it is possible that her head-wear reflected his taste. Her jewels, three ropes of pearls and a large, round gold, pearl and ruby brooch, are also a
sign of wealth without ostentation. In this portrait, Katherine is very much the elegant nobleman’s wife.

Yet she is clearly also a woman of depth of character, and it was this, as much as her undoubted style, that Latimer had perceived. Perhaps he detected in her what others were to remark upon later, a serenity that was not without passion when aroused, a good mind and a steadiness of purpose that would serve their relationship well. He knew that the Borough marriage and life at Gainsborough Hall could not have been full of merriment, but Katherine’s essential vivacity had survived a stern test. She would undoubtedly face other trials in her new life at Snape Castle, Latimer’s principal residence.

He had certainly not rushed into finding a new wife. Elizabeth Musgrave, his second spouse, had died in 1530 after barely two years of marriage. The gap between her death and Latimer’s wedding to Katherine suggests that he was more concerned to find the right woman than merely to fill the empty place in his bed. It must have been a difficult time, as political duties called him away frequently, sometimes to attend meetings of the Council of the North and sometimes further afield, to London, where attendance at parliamentary sessions was required. His children were left at home in Yorkshire, presumably under the care of tutors and household staff. We know little of his family arrangements during the early 1530s, but as one of two members for Yorkshire in the House of Commons during the Reformation Parliament in 1529 and then as a member of the House of Lords two years later, after he had succeeded to the Latimer barony he was not always present in person to supervise his home and family. A new wife could be a proper helpmate to him and Katherine Parr’s reappearance on the marriage market provided him with the opportunity to fill that role.