CHAPTER II 1546 Katherine Parr--Relations with Thomas Seymour--Married to Henry VIII.--Parties in court and country--Katherine's position--Prince Edward.

It was now three years since Katherine Parr had replaced the unhappy child who had been her immediate predecessor. For three perilous years she had occupied—with how many fears, how many misgivings, who can tell?—the position of the King’s sixth wife. On a July day in 1543 Lady Latimer, already at thirty twice a widow, had been raised to the rank of Queen. If the ceremony was attended with no special pomp, neither had it been celebrated with the careful privacy observed with respect to some of the King’s marriages. His two daughters, Mary—approximately the same age as the bride, and who was her friend—and Elizabeth, had been present, as well as Henry’s brother-in-law, Edward Seymour, Earl of Hertford, and other officers of State. Gardiner, Bishop of Winchester, afterwards her dangerous foe, performed the rite, in the Queen’s Closet at Hampton Court.

Sir Thomas Seymour, Hertford’s brother and Lord Admiral of England, was not at Hampton Court on the occasion, having been despatched on some foreign mission. More than one reason may have contributed to render his absence advisable. A wealthy and childless widow, of unblemished reputation, and belonging by birth to a race connected with the royal house, was not likely to remain long without suitors, and Lord Latimer can scarcely have been more than a month in his grave before Thomas Seymour had testified his desire to replace him and to become Katherine’s third husband. Nor does she appear to have been backward in responding to his advances.

Twice married to elderly men whose lives lay behind them, twice set free by death from her bonds, she may fairly have conceived that the time was come when she was justified in wedding, not for family or substantial reasons, not wholly perhaps, as before, in wisdom’s way, but a man she loved.

Seymour was not without attractions calculated to commend him to a woman hitherto bestowed upon husbands selected for her by others. Young and handsome, “fierce in courage, courtly in fashion, in personage stately, in voice magnificent, but somewhat empty in matter,”10 the gay sailor appears to have had little difficulty in winning the heart of a woman who, in spite of the learning, the prudence, and the piety for which she was noted, may have felt, as she watched her youth slip by, that she had had little good of it; and it is clear, from a letter she addressed to Seymour himself when, after Henry’s death, his suit had been successfully renewed, that she had looked forward at this earlier date to becoming his wife.

“As truly as God is God,” she then wrote, “my mind was fully bent, the other time I was at liberty, to marry you before any man I know. Howbeit God withstood my will therein most vehemently for a time, and through His grace and goodness made that possible which seemed to me most impossible; that was, made me renounce utterly mine own will and follow His most willingly. It were long to write all the processes of this matter. If I live, I shall declare it to you myself. I can say nothing, but as my Lady of Suffolk saith, ‘God is a marvellous man.’”11

Strange burdens of responsibility have ever been laid upon the duty of obedience to the will of Providence, nor does it appear clear to the casual reader why the consent of Katherine to become a Queen should have been viewed by her in the light of a sacrifice to principle. Whether her point of view was shared by her lover does not appear. It is at all events clear that both were wise enough in the world’s lore not to brave the wrath of the despot by crossing his caprice. Seymour retired from the field, and Katherine, perhaps sustained by the inward approval of conscience, perhaps partially comforted by a crown, accepted the dangerous distinction she was offered.

To her brother, Lord Parr, when writing to inform him of her advancement, she expressed no regret. It had pleased God, she told him, to incline the King to take her as his wife, the greatest joy and comfort that could happen to her. She desired to communicate the great news to Parr, as being the person with most cause to rejoice thereat, and added, with a suspicion of condescension, her hope that he would let her hear of his health as friendly as if she had not been called to this honour.12

Although the actual marriage had not taken place until some six months after Lord Latimer’s death, no time can have been lost in arranging it, since before her husband had been two months in the grave Henry was causing a bill for her dresses to be paid out of the Exchequer.

It was generally considered that the King had chosen well. Wriothesley, the Chancellor, was sure His Majesty had never a wife more agreeable to his heart. Gardiner had not only performed the marriage ceremony but had given away the bride. According to an old chronicle the new Queen was a woman “compleat with singular humility.”13 She had, at any rate, the adroitness, in her relations with the King, to assume the appearance of it, and was a well-educated, sensible, and kindly woman, “quieter than any of the young wives the King had had, and, as she knew more of the world, she always got on pleasantly with the King, and had no caprices.”14

The story of the marriage was an old one in 1546. Seymour had returned from his mission and resumed his former position at Court as the King’s brother-in-law and the uncle of his heir, and not even the Queen’s enemies—and she had enough of them and to spare—had found an excuse for calling to mind the relations once existing between the Admiral and the King’s wife. Nevertheless, and in spite of the blamelessness of her conduct, the satisfaction which had greeted the marriage was on the wane. A hard task would have awaited Queen or courtier who should have attempted to minister to the contentment of all the rival parties striving for predominance in the State and at Court, and to be adjudged the friend of the one was practically equivalent to a pledge of distrust from the other. Whitehall, like the country at large, was divided against itself by theological strife; and whilst the men faithful to the ancient creed in its entirety were inevitably in bitter opposition to the adherents of the new teachers whose headquarters were in Germany, a third party, more unscrupulous than either, was made up of the middle men who moulded—outwardly or inwardly—their faith upon the King’s, and would, if they could, have created a Papacy without a Pope, a Catholic Church without its corner-stone.

At Court, as elsewhere, each of these three parties were standing on their guard, ready to parry or to strike a blow when occasion arose, jealous of every success scored by their opponents. The fall of Cromwell had inspired the Catholics with hope, and, with Gardiner as Minister and Wriothesley as Chancellor, they had been in a more favourable position than for some time past at the date of the King’s last marriage. It had then been assumed that the new Queen’s influence would be employed upon their side—an expectation confirmed by her friendship with the Princess Mary. The discovery that the widow of Lord Latimer—so fervent a Catholic that he had joined in the north-country insurrection known as the Pilgrimage of Grace—had broken with her past, openly displayed her sympathy with Protestant doctrine, and, in common with the King’s nieces, was addicted to what was called the “new learning,” quickly disabused them of their hopes, rendered the Catholic party at Court her embittered enemies, and lent additional danger to what was already a perilous position by affording those at present in power a motive for removing from the King’s side a woman regarded as the advocate of innovation. So far their efforts had been fruitless. Katherine still held her own. During Henry’s absence in France, whither he had gone to conduct the campaign in person, she had administered the Government, as Queen-Regent, with tact and discretion; the King loved her—as he understood love—and, what was perhaps a more important matter, she had contrived to render herself necessary to him. Wary, prudent, and pious, and notwithstanding the possession of qualities marking her out in some sort as the superior woman of her day, she was not above pandering to his love of flattery. Into her book entitled The Lamentations of a Sinner, she introduced a fulsome panegyric of the godly and learned King who had removed from his realm the veils and mists of error, and in the guise of a modern Moses had been victorious over the Roman Pharaoh. What she publicly printed she doubtless reiterated in private; and the King found the domestic incense soothing to an irritable temper, still further acerbated by disease.

By other methods she had commended herself to those who were about him open to conciliation. She had served a long apprenticeship in the art of the step-mother, both Lord Borough, her first husband, and Lord Latimer having possessed children when she married them; and her skill in dealing with the little heir to the throne and his sisters proved that she had turned her experience to good account. Her genuine kindness, not only to Mary, who had been her friend from the first, but to Elizabeth, ten years old at the time of the marriage, was calculated to propitiate the adherents of each; and to her good offices it was in especial due that Anne Boleyn’s daughter, hitherto kept chiefly at a distance from Court, was brought to Whitehall. The child, young as she was, was old enough to appreciate the importance of possessing a friend in her father’s wife, and the letter she addressed to her step-mother on the occasion overflowed with expressions of devotion and gratitude. To the place the Queen won in the affections of the all-important heir, the boy’s letters bear witness.

There is no need to assume that Katherine’s course of action was wholly dictated by interested motives. Yet in this case principle and prudence went hand in hand. Henry was becoming increasingly sick and suffering, and, with the shadow of death deepening above him, the gifts he asked of life were insensibly changing their character. His autocratic and violent temper remained the same, but peace and quiet, a soothing atmosphere of submissive affection, the absence of domestic friction, if not sufficient to ensure his wife immunity from peril, constituted her best chance of escaping the doom of her predecessors. To a selfish man the appeal must be to self-interest. This appeal Katherine consistently made and it had so far proved successful. For the rest, whether she suffered from terror of possible disaster or resolutely shut her eyes to what might have unnerved and rendered her unfit for the part she had to play, none can tell, any more than it can be determined whether, as she looked from the man she had married to the man she had loved, she indulged in vain regrets for the happiness of which she had caught a glimpse in those brief days when she had dreamed of a future to be shared with Thomas Seymour.

In spite, however, of her caution, in spite of the perfection with which she performed the duties of wife and nurse, by 1546 disquieting reports were afloat.

“I am confused and apprehensive,” wrote Charles V.’s ambassador from London in the February of that year, “to have to inform Your Majesty that there are rumours here of a new Queen, although I do not know how true they be.... The King shows no alteration in his behaviour towards the Queen, though I am informed that she is annoyed by the rumours.”15

With the history of the past to quicken her apprehensions, she may well have been more than “annoyed” by them. But, true or false, she could but pursue the line of conduct she had adopted, and must have turned with relief from domestic anxieties to any other matters that could serve to distract her mind from her precarious future. Amongst the learned ladies of a day when scholarship was becoming a fashion she occupied a foremost place, and was actively engaged in promoting educational interests. Stimulated by her step-mother’s approval, the Princess Mary had been encouraged to undertake part of the translation of Erasmus’s paraphrases of the Gospels; and Elizabeth is found sending the Queen, as a fitting offering, a translation from the Italian inscribed on vellum and entitled the Glasse of the Synneful Soule, accompanying it by the expression of a hope that, having passed through hands so learned as the Queen’s, it would come forth from them in a new form. The education of the little Prince Edward too was pushed rapidly forward, and at six years old, the year of his father’s marriage, he had been taken out of the hands of women and committed to the tuition of John Cheke and Dr. Richard Cox. These two, explains Heylyn, being equal in authority, employed themselves to his advantage in their several kinds—Dr. Cox for knowledge of divinity, philosophy, and gravity of manners, Mr. Cheke for eloquence in the Greek and Latin tongues; whilst other masters instructed the poor child in modern languages, so that in a short time he spoke French perfectly, and was able to express himself “magnificently enough” in Italian, Greek, and Spanish.16 His companion and playfellow was one Barnaby Fitzpatrick, to whom he clung throughout his short life with constant affection. It was Barnaby’s office to bear whatever punishment the Prince had merited—a method more successful in the case of the Prince than it might have proved with a less soft-hearted offender, since it is said that “it was not easy to affirm whether Fitzpatrick smarted more for the default of the Prince, or the Prince conceived more grief for the smart of Fitzpatrick.”17

Katherine Parr is not likely to have regretted the pressure put upon her stepson; and the boy, apologising for his simple and rude letters, adds his acknowledgments for those addressed to him by the Queen, “which do give me much comfort and encouragement to go forward in such things wherein your Grace beareth me on hand.”

The King’s latest wife was, in fact, a teacher by nature and choice, and admirably fitted to direct the studies of his son and daughters, as well as of any other children who might be brought within the sphere of her influence. That influence, it may be, had something to do with moulding the character and the destiny of a child fated to be unhappily prominent in the near future. This was Lady Jane Grey.

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