With a new law making it treason for any future queen to conceal her pre-marital affairs, it would have taken a very bold or modest woman to become 52-year-old Henry VIII's wife.
When, in 1543, 32-year-old widow Katherine Parr came to court, she had been married twice and was independently well off and unencumbered, with neither parents nor children.
A dutiful marriage
Immediately Sir Thomas Seymour, brother of the late queen Jane Seymour and one of the most eligible bachelors at Henry’s court, was attracted to the wealthy, attractive widow who had been named after the first of Henry’s queens, Catherine of Aragon. The feeling was mutual, but by then Henry had also fallen in love with Katherine and showered her with gifts.
In May, the king cleared his path by sending Seymour to Brussels as resident ambassador. He then proposed marriage to Katherine, who accepted not for personal reasons or political or dynastic ambitions, but because she felt it was her duty. They married on 12 July 1543 at Hampton Court.
Both of Henry’s daughters, Mary and Elizabeth, were present at the wedding. Katherine was close to them and to the six-year-old heir apparent Edward. She also took a keen interest in Elizabeth and Edward’s education.
A radical Protestant?
Katherine believed it was her task to complete the conversion of the king and the country to the reformed religion, an ambition to which the archbishop of Canterbury Thomas Cranmer was sympathetic. Her religious beliefs are known in depth because, most unusually for a 16th-century woman and still more remarkably for a queen, she was a published writer. Her first book, Prayers and Meditations, came out in 1545.
However, Stephen Gardiner, bishop of Winchester, disliked nothing more than a woman with opinions, especially Protestant ones, and in 1545 his hunt for heretics began to close in on the queen. He got Henry to agree to sign a warrant for her arrest, which would be enacted once Gardiner had proof of the queen’s radical Protestantism.
Katherine knew that, if she followed her conscience, she would face death, but if she subdued it, she would survive. When she discovered that there was an arrest warrant out for her, she told the king, ill with an ulcerated leg, that the only reason why she had debated religion with him was to distract him from his pain. The king was convinced of his wife’s innocence, and his death in January 1547 ended the debate.
Clandestine romance
In April, Katherine and her earlier love Thomas Seymour married in secret, which outraged the court and Princess Mary. However, it did not stop Elizabeth from joining the Seymour household in early 1548. Unfortunately, the happy home life that the former queen, now pregnant with her first child, had sought became impossible when she discovered that her fourth husband was clandestinely romancing the 14-year-old princess. Elizabeth was sent away.
Katherine gave birth to a daughter Mary on 30 August 1548. Eight days later she was dead from widespread infection. She was buried as Henry’s widow, but not in a fashion of which he would have approved: it was the first Protestant royal funeral.
