Catherine Parr

Queen of England (r. 1543-1547)

• Born: Probably August, 1512
• Birthplace: England
• Died: September 7, 1548
• Place of death: Sudeley Castle, Gloucestershire, England

Parr, the sixth and last wife of King Henry VIII, wrote about the need to translate the Scriptures so that all people could read and interpret them without the help of priests.

Early Life

Catherine Parr was the daughter of the socially prominent Sir Thomas Parr, who served Britain’s royal family. Catherine, Maud Greene, was an heiress from Northamptonshire. The exact date of Catherine’s birth remains uncertain. In all likelihood, she was born in 1512. She was married twice before her union with King Henry VIII on July 12, 1543. Henry had already been king of England for some years before Catherine’s birth, having ascended to the throne in 1509 to begin his thirty-eight-year reign.

Catherine’s first marriage was to Edward Borough, who died in 1529, about a year after their marriage. Catherine next married John Neville, Lord Latimer, who died on March 2, 1543. Neither marriage produced children. Edward Borough, about Catherine’s age, was the son of Thomas, Lord Borough, chamberlain to Queen Anne Boleyn, Henry VIII’s second wife, who was beheaded as an adulterer. During her marriage to Borough, Catherine resided mostly on the family estates in Lincolnshire. Following her husband’s death, Catherine lived on a small income derived from some estates in Kent. She was only twenty years old and living at a time when widows had little status; thus her remarriage, which occurred in 1533, was inevitable.

When Catherine married Lord Latimer, he was about forty years old, twice Catherine’s age. He had lost two previous wives and was left with two children, John and Margaret. The marriage took place at about the time of Anne Boleyn’s coronation. Catherine, through her husband’s official connection with the queen, began to form strong social and political connections at court.

Catherine was highly competent and unquestionably intelligent, although she lacked the coveted classical education available to members of the nobility who became an increasing part of her life. At twenty-one, she was a stepmother and mistress of a large household.

A sensitive person, well attuned to the feelings of those around her, Catherine quickly gained the admiration and love of Margaret Neville, who more than a decade later wrote an encomium to her stepmother in her last will and testament. Catherine’s most salient personal characteristic was tact. She had an unerring ability to put people at ease and to understand implicitly their points of view.

Living through England’s rift with the Roman Catholic Church, Catherine was a committed Humanist who valued the sentiments of the evangelical Protestant reformers. Respected not only for her tact and compassion, Catherine was also valued for her practical intelligence and devoutness.

Catherine gained a further connection with the court when her sister Anne became a lady-in-waiting for Queen Catherine Howard, the king’s fifth wife. The king knew Catherine Parr and apparently had designs on her even before her husband died. He gave her a gift on February 16, 1543. Catherine, who was due to come into a great deal of money on Lord Latimer’s death, had fallen in love with Thomas Seymour in the preceding year, during which she faithfully attended her dying husband. Despite her attentions to Lord Latimer, Catherine planned to marry Thomas, for whom she felt considerable passion, when Lord Latimer died.

Life’s Work

Catherine Parr is remembered chiefly as the sixth and last wife of King Henry VIII. Her marriage to him lasted for the last three and a half years of the king’s life.

Despite his prominence as king of England, Henry VIII had gained an unsavory reputation by the time he was ready to marry for the sixth time. He had shed by divorce or annulment two of his wives, Catherine of Aragon and Anne of Cleves , whose marriage to him was never consummated and lasted less than six months. Two other of his wives, Anne Boleyn and Catherine Howard, were beheaded after being convicted of adultery, and one wife, Jane Seymour, died from complications twelve days after bearing Henry’s son, Edward.

The king was devastated by Jane Seymour’s death after only a year of marriage. Despite his devastation, Henry knew that he would be expected to remarry, and he soon took Catherine Howard as his fifth wife. When her adultery was uncovered, he had her beheaded, but hopelessness engulfed him. Ill and overweight, overbearing and dangerously imperious, Henry was far from the sort of person one would choose to marry. He faced the prospect of living his remaining years without a mate.

Shortly before Catherine Howard’s execution, Henry had enacted the 1542 Act of Attainder. The act stipulated that if anyone presented a prospective bride to the king and, on marrying her, the king deemed her not to be a virgin, the bride, her family, and the person who first presented her to the king would be guilty of treason, an offense punishable by death. Understandably, the king, seeking to remarry, received few recommendations of prospective brides.

Catherine Parr emerged as one of the few viable candidates to marry Henry VIII and become queen of England. Because she had been married twice before, the question of her virginity was moot. The only obstacle was that Catherine was in love with someone else whom she hoped to marry.

As the king intensified his pursuit of Catherine, however, Catherine was more responsive to the call of duty than to the inclinations of her heart. Therefore, on July 12, 1543, four months after the death of her husband, Lord Latimer, Catherine married the ailing king and became much the sort of wife/nurse she had been to Lord Latimer.

Catherine did everything she could to make Henry happy and comfortable. She sought out medicines that she could apply to his painfully swollen, gout-ravished legs. She was diligent in being a good stepmother to his three children, all of whom responded well to her. From all accounts, it was difficult for people not to like the new queen.

A year after Catherine married him, Henry went on a campaign to France. Having earlier arranged for his daughters, Mary and Elizabeth, to be in line for the throne after Prince Edward and his male offspring, Henry arranged officially for any male child he might have by Catherine to come before Mary and Elizabeth in the line of succession. On July 7, 1544, the minutes of the Privy Council declared Catherine Parr regent to serve in the king’s stead during his absence, a responsibility that had been granted previously only to Catherine of Aragon.

During Henry’s three months in France, with guidance from Thomas Cranmer, archbishop of Canterbury, Catherine reigned over England. She was the model of a conscientious regent and faithful wife, writing frequently to Henry with proclamations of how much she and England missed him. During his absence, Catherine’s signature appeared on all official documents.

As a result of her close association with Thomas Cranmer during her husband’s absence, Catherine began to refine some of her own religious views, which had always been slightly subversive. At about this time, Catherine also formed a close relationship with Katherine, duchess of Suffolk, a woman not yet thirty, the death of whose sixty-five-year-old husband left her with considerable wealth and prestige.

The duchess had close ties with religious reformers of her day and sided emphatically with those who wanted everyone to be able to read Scripture rather than have it interpreted for them through a priest. Catherine shared this view, although it is doubtful that Henry agreed with it. She is known to have read and been influenced by Thomas à Kempis’s The Imitation of Christ (c. 1526) and by Marguerite de Navarre’s Le Miroir de l’âme pércheresse (c. 1540; The Mirror of the Sinful Soul), which her eleven-year-old stepdaughter, Elizabeth, had translated into English for her as a New Year’s gift in 1544.

Partly as a result of these readings, Catherine published her Prayers and Meditations (1545), which went through nineteen editions in the next half century. Catherine was one of only eight women to publish during the reigns of Henry VII and Henry VIII. Her book was derivative and obviously was published largely because she was queen. That it reached an audience as large as it did and remained popular for as long as it did clearly suggests that it was well received.

Catherine also published A Lamentation or Complaynt of a Sinner (1547) shortly after Henry’s death. This book was in part an antipapist attack on the Roman Catholic Church, something that would have disturbed Henry. Its most salient plea was for biblical translation so that people could be their own interpreters of Scripture. Henry’s daughter Elizabeth, later queen of England, translated Catherine’s first book into French, Latin, and Italian when she was a mere eleven years old.

During the king’s final year, Catherine frequently entertained the religious reformers of her day in the royal residence. Although Henry was unsympathetic to their cause, he endured their presence because of his regard for Catherine. Some of Henry’s conservative followers tried to undermine the queen and went so far as to attempt to arrest her, but the king struck out against the forty guards who tried to carry out the arrest, and the queen’s position was assured.

The king’s health declined precipitously in December of 1546. On January 28, 1547, he died. By the end of May in the same year, Catherine, her passion for Thomas Seymour reignited, married him. On August 30, 1548, Catherine bore a daughter, Mary. Barely a week afterward, on September 7, she died from complications associated with childbirth. Catherine, considered unable to conceive because she had remained childless through three marriages, proved herself capable of motherhood but did not survive it.

Significance

Living in an era when men ruled and women obeyed, Catherine Parr, although compassionate and acquiescent, was a complex woman capable of considerable passion and independence. She embraced many of the Humanistic elements of the New Life, considered quite radical by the conservative ruling class in England during her lifetime.

King Henry VIII seemed truly to have appreciated Catherine, although it was clear that his first love was Jane Seymour, beside whom he is buried. Catherine’s first real love after three marriages appears to have been Thomas Seymour, whom she wed shortly after Henry’s death.

Catherine in her day was an emancipated woman. That she published set her apart, but the sentiments in her second book, A Lamentation or Complaynt of a Sinner, were extremely radical for her day.

Bibliography

Beilen, Elaine. Redeeming Eve: Women Writers of the English Renaissance. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1987. This study presents Parr in the context of her writing.

Fraser, Antonia. The Wives of Henry VIII. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1992. Fraser’s book is thorough, carefully researched, and eminently readable, devoting some sixty fact-filled pages to Parr.

James, Susan E. Kateryn Parr: The Making of a Queen. Brookfield, Vt.: Ashgate, 1999. Study argues that Parr was a more important figure in English history than is commonly acknowledged. Looks at her influence on Henry’s court, and on Elizabeth I, both as a model to the queen and as someone who protected Elizabeth’s life and made it possible for her to become queen in the first place. Includes photographic plates, illustrations, bibliographic references, and index.

Lindsey, Karen. Divorced, Beheaded, Survived: A Feminist Reinterpretation of the Wives of Henry VIII. New York: Addison-Wesley, 1995. Lindsey’s feminist assessment of Henry’s wives is particularly lucid in its discussion of the plot in Henry’s court to discredit Parr shortly before Henry’s death. Also contains good discussions of Elizabeth’s love for Parr and of Parr’s emotional involvement with Thomas Seymour.

Loades, David. Henry VIII and His Queens. Stroud, Gloucestershire, England: Sutton, 2000. This short and highly readable work by a respected British historian provides a useful introduction to the topic.

Martienssen, Anthony. Queen Katherine Parr. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1974. Dated and in some particulars inaccurate, as new information has been unearthed since its publication. Nevertheless, as the only modern full-length study of Parr, it makes a significant contribution to the scholarship on her.

Parr, Katherine. Katherine Parr. Vol. 3 in The Early Modern Englishwoman: A Facsimile Library of Essential Works, edited by Betty S. Travitsky and Patrick Cullen. Brookfield, Vt.: Ashgate, 1996. Collected volume of Parr’s essential writings, demonstrating her skill and breadth as an author. Includes illustrations and bibliographic references.

Plowden, Allison. Tudor Women: Queens and Commoners. New York: Atheneum, 1979. Despite its age, this book places Parr in an interesting context that reveals much about the social standing of women in the sixteenth century.

Starkey, David. Six Wives: The Queens of Henry VIII. New York: HarperCollins, 2003. Emphasizes the religious and political complexities of Henry’s court, and fleshes out many of the significant players in that milieu, in order better to understand the lives, careers, and deaths of each of Henry’s wives.

Weir, Alison. The Six Wives of Henry VIII. London: Pimlico, 1991. Weir offers succinct and penetrating insights into Parr and her ability to manage a marriage relationship with a man whose marital record was questionable.