Catherine Parr

• 1. Introduction

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  Catherine Parr signed her name as "Kateryn" in the books and letters she left behind, not the spelling later generations settled on. That handwriting belonged to a woman who married four times, more than any other queen England has had. She also became the first woman in England to publish an original work in print under her own name, writing in English rather than Latin.

  None of that made her safe. An arrest warrant with her name on it was drawn up inside Henry VIII's own court, probably in the spring of 1546. This documentary follows how a knight's daughter from the north of England rose to become regent of the country. It follows why she published books at a time when very few women dared put their names into print. And it asks how she survived a king who had already sent two wives to the block. It asks what finally caught up with her after his death.

• 2. Family and Early Marriages

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  Sir Thomas Parr, lord of the manor of Kendal in what is now Cumbria, was Catherine's father and a close companion to Henry VIII. Thomas descended from King Edward III, and the Parr family produced generations of knights across the north of England. Catherine's mother, Maud Green, was co-heiress to Sir Thomas Green of Greens Norton, Northamptonshire, and a close friend and attendant of Catherine of Aragon. Catherine was probably named after the queen, who served as her godmother. Catherine had a younger brother, William, later created first Marquess of Northampton, and a younger sister, Anne, later Countess of Pembroke. As Sheriff of Northamptonshire, Master of the Wards and Comptroller of the Household, Sir Thomas earned income and responsibility directly from the king he served.

  In 1512, probably in late July or August, Catherine was born. Later legend placed her birth at Kendal Castle, but the castle was already in poor condition by then. Her mother, still pregnant, remained at court attending the queen, and the Parr family was living instead at their townhouse in Blackfriars. Historians now doubt that Sir Thomas would have taken his pregnant wife on a two-week journey north over bad roads. Neither of them seemed to spend much time at the crumbling castle anyway. Catherine's father died while she was still young, and she grew up close to her mother.

  Fluent in French, Italian and Latin, Catherine developed a passion for learning that lasted her whole life; she began studying Spanish only after becoming queen. She was raised Catholic but, like Anne Boleyn, turned to Protestantism at some point in her life. Biographer Linda Porter records a story from Catherine's childhood that is very likely apocryphal. In it, young Catherine hated needlework and told her mother, "my hands are ordained to touch crowns and sceptres, not spindles and needles."

  In 1529, at seventeen, Catherine married Sir Edward Burgh, grandson of Edward Burgh, 2nd Baron Burgh. Earlier biographies mistakenly claimed she married the older Baron himself. The 2nd Baron died in December 1528, and Catherine's new father-in-law, Sir Thomas Burgh, was summoned to Parliament in 1529 as Baron Burgh in his place. Catherine's husband was in his twenties and may have been in poor health. He served as a feoffee for Thomas Kiddell and as a justice of the peace. He also held a joint patent with his father for the stewardship of the manor of the soke of Kirton in Lindsey. He died in the spring of 1533, before he could inherit the title of Baron Burgh himself.

  After Burgh's death, Catherine likely spent time with the Dowager Lady Strickland, Katherine Neville, at Sizergh Castle in Westmorland, the Strickland family's home. In the summer of 1534 she married John Neville, 3rd Baron Latimer, her father's second cousin and a kinsman of Lady Strickland. The marriage made Catherine only the second woman in the Parr family to marry into the peerage. Latimer, twice widowed already, was nearly twice Catherine's age. From his first marriage, to Dorothy de Vere, sister of John de Vere, 14th Earl of Oxford, he had two children, John and Margaret. He was in financial difficulty after a lawsuit pursuing the title of Earl of Warwick. Even so, Catherine now had a home of her own, a title, and a husband with real standing in the north.

• 3. The Pilgrimage of Grace

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  Latimer opposed Henry's first annulment and his marriage to Anne Boleyn, along with the religious changes that followed. In October 1536, during the Lincolnshire Rising, Catholic rebels appeared at the Latimers' home. They threatened violence unless Latimer joined their effort to restore England's ties to Rome. Catherine watched as her husband was dragged away.

  Between October 1536 and April 1537, Catherine lived alone with her stepchildren, struggling to survive in fear. The uncertainty likely hardened her opposition to the rebellion and pushed her further toward the reformed Church of England. In January 1537, during the wider uprising known as the Pilgrimage of Grace, rebels took Catherine and her stepchildren hostage at Snape Castle in North Yorkshire. They ransacked the house. Rebels warned Lord Latimer, then travelling back from London, that they would kill his family if he did not return at once. Latimer talked the rebels into releasing his family and leaving, but the ordeal left the whole household shaken.

  The King and Thomas Cromwell received conflicting reports on whether Latimer was a hostage or a conspirator. A conspiracy charge could mean treason, the forfeiture of his estates, and Catherine and her stepchildren left penniless. Henry himself wrote to Thomas Howard, 3rd Duke of Norfolk, demanding that Latimer "condemn that villain Aske and submit to our clemency." Latimer complied. It is likely that Catherine's brother, William Parr, and her uncle, William Parr, 1st Baron Parr of Horton, intervened to save Latimer's life. Both had fought against the rebellion themselves.

  No charges were ever brought against Latimer, but the episode damaged his reputation, and hers, for the rest of his life. Over the next seven years the family spent much of their time in the south. In 1542 they were in London while Latimer attended parliament, and Catherine visited her brother William, by then Marquess of Northampton, and her sister Anne, Countess of Pembroke, at court. It was there that Catherine met the man who would become her fourth husband, Sir Thomas Seymour. Court life, with its talk of fashion and jewellery alongside religion, felt very different from the rural estates she knew.

  By the winter of 1542, Latimer's health had worsened, and Catherine nursed him until his death in 1543. His will named her guardian of his daughter Margaret and put her in charge of his affairs until Margaret's majority. He left Catherine a life interest in the manor of Stowe in Northamptonshire, eleven miles from Horton, along with other properties and money for his daughter's support. Catherine kept his New Testament, inscribed with his name, until her own death, a sign she likely mourned him sincerely.

  Using her late mother's old friendship with Catherine of Aragon, Catherine renewed her own bond with the former queen's daughter, Lady Mary. By the 16th of February 1543, she had joined Mary's household, and it was there that she caught the King's attention. Catherine had already begun a romantic friendship with Thomas Seymour, brother of the late queen Jane Seymour, but she judged it her duty to accept Henry's proposal over his. Seymour was posted to Brussels, well away from the King's court.

• 4. Queen of England

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  Henry VIII married Catherine, his sixth and final wife, at Hampton Court Palace on the 12th of July 1543. She became the first queen of England to also hold the title queen of Ireland, following Henry's adoption of the Irish crown. She was the third of Henry's wives to share the name Catherine. Henry and Catherine were also cousins several times over: through Henry's mother and Catherine's father they were third cousins once removed, both descended from Ralph Neville, 1st Earl of Westmorland.

  On becoming queen, Catherine installed her former stepdaughter, Margaret Neville, as a lady-in-waiting. She also brought her cousin Maud, Lady Lane, and her former stepson John's wife, Lucy Somerset, into her household. Catherine helped reconcile Henry with his two daughters from his earlier marriages, and she built a good relationship with his son, Edward, too. She also took a direct, personal role in the education of both Elizabeth and Edward. Her uncle, Lord Parr of Horton, became her Lord Chamberlain once she was queen.

  In 1543, Catherine's influence helped secure Henry's Third Succession Act, which restored his daughters Mary and Elizabeth to the line of succession. The following year, from July to September 1544, Henry left for a military campaign in France and appointed Catherine regent in his absence. If he had died on campaign, she was to rule as regent until Edward came of age. In the event, his eventual will gave her no formal role in government at all. Her regency council included sympathetic figures such as Thomas Cranmer, the Archbishop of Canterbury, Lord Hertford, and her own uncle, William Parr, Lord Parr of Horton, whom she had specifically requested. With allies like these around her, Catherine held effective control and ruled largely as she saw fit. She managed provisions, finances and troop musters for the French campaign, and she signed five royal proclamations. She also stayed in constant contact with her lieutenant in the northern Marches, Lord Shrewsbury, over the unstable situation with Scotland. Historians believe her conduct as regent, along with her strength of character and later religious convictions, left a deep impression on her stepdaughter, the future Elizabeth I.

  Stephen Gardiner, the Bishop of Winchester, and Lord Chancellor Wriothesley grew suspicious of the Queen's religious sympathies by the mid-1540s. In 1546 the two men tried to turn Henry against her, and rumours spread across Europe that the King had grown attracted to her close friend, the Duchess of Suffolk. Catherine learned of the plot against her just in time, and reconciled with Henry by telling him she had only argued religion with him to distract him from the pain of his ulcerous leg. The next day, Chancellor Wriothesley arrived with an armed guard to arrest her anyway, unaware that she and the King had already made peace. Henry angrily dismissed his own chancellor on the spot. He died on the 28th of January 1547. Without anyone yet knowing it, Catherine had just become the final queen consort the House of Tudor would ever have.

• 5. A Queen in Print

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  On the 25th of April 1544, the King's own printer produced Catherine's first book, Psalms or Prayers, though it appeared anonymously. It was an anonymous translation of a Latin work by Bishop John Fisher, itself reprinted on the 18th of April 1544. Fisher had been executed in 1535 for refusing to take the oath of supremacy, and his name did not appear anywhere on the title page. The book arrived just as England finished preparing for war, and it worked as wartime propaganda, meant to help Henry defeat France and Scotland through the prayers of his people.

  Seventeen "Psalms" fill the volume, most of them focused on defeating enemies. It closes with "A Prayer for the King," adapted from a prayer for the Holy Roman Emperor by Georg Witzel. It also includes "A Prayer for Men to Say Entering into Battle," translated from a prayer by Erasmus. Catherine paid for deluxe copies printed on vellum and handed out at court, and one surviving deluxe copy carries annotations in Henry's own hand. Thomas Tallis set the "Ninth Psalm" to existing music. It was likely performed at a special wartime ceremony at St Paul's Cathedral on the 22nd of May 1544. "A Prayer for the King" outlived them both: in 1559 it was edited into the Book of Common Prayer, probably by Elizabeth I. Anglican communities around the world still use that prayer to pray for the monarch today.

  Parr's second book, Prayers or Meditations, appeared on the 2nd of June 1545, and it sold as well as her first. She built it by reworking the third book of Thomas à Kempis's Imitatio Christi into a monologue spoken by a generic Christian voice. It circulated both as a manuscript and in deluxe print copies. Princess Elizabeth translated the whole work into Latin, Italian and French as a New Year's gift for Henry in December 1545, presenting her manuscript inside a hand-embroidered cover. The British Library has since digitised the volume.

  Catherine's third book, The Lamentation of a Sinner, appeared on the 5th of November 1547, nine months after Henry's death. It argued for the Protestant idea of justification by faith alone, a position the Catholic Church treated as heresy. Katherine Brandon, Duchess of Suffolk, and Catherine's own brother, William Parr, sponsored the book, and William Cecil, later Elizabeth I's chief minister, wrote its preface. Around 1544 or 1545, Parr had also begun organising an English translation of Erasmus's Paraphrases Upon the New Testament, a massive project finally printed in January 1548. She enlisted Nicholas Udall, Thomas Keyes and Mary Tudor to translate different sections of it, and she may have written the paraphrase of Matthew herself. In July 1547 the government ordered every parish in England to obtain a copy. Generations of parishioners would go on to read its lengthy dedications praising Parr's learning and her role in the English reformation. Parr owned a great many books, and she took part in the common practice of signing both her own volumes and those belonging to others.

• 6. Final Marriage and Death

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  A year and eight months: that is how long Catherine outlived Henry VIII after his death. Shortly before he died, Henry arranged an allowance of £7,000 a year for her. He ordered that she keep the honors of a queen of England even as a widow, and as queen dowager she was allowed to keep the queen's jewels and dresses. After her stepson's coronation as Edward VI on the 31st of January 1547, Catherine retired from court to her home, the Old Manor, in Chelsea. She also became guardian to her stepdaughter Elizabeth there, and took Henry's great-niece, Lady Jane Grey, into her household.

  Thomas Seymour, soon created 1st Baron Seymour of Sudeley, returned to court after Henry's death and quickly renewed his old courtship of Catherine. She accepted him at once. Only four months had passed since the King's death, too soon for the regency council to approve such a match. Catherine and Seymour married in secret anyway, near the end of May. Edward VI and the council did not learn of the marriage for several months, and when it became public, it caused a minor scandal. Both the young King and Lady Mary were deeply displeased. After the council censured him, Seymour wrote to Mary asking her to intervene on his behalf, but she was furious at his forwardness and refused. Mary even asked her half-sister, Lady Elizabeth, to stop associating with Queen Catherine altogether.

  Catherine soon clashed with her brother-in-law, Edward Seymour, 1st Duke of Somerset and Lord Protector to the young King. His wife, Anne Seymour, Duchess of Somerset, had once served as Catherine's own lady-in-waiting, and the two women became rivals, especially over Catherine's jewels. The Duchess argued that Catherine, now only a queen dowager, had no right to wear jewels belonging to the wife of the reigning king. She believed that as the Protector's wife, she should wear them instead. The dispute permanently damaged the two women's relationship. It also worsened the standing between the Seymour brothers, since Thomas took it as a personal attack on his own status.

  At thirty-five, Catherine became pregnant for the first time, a surprise after three earlier childless marriages. Around this time, Seymour began paying close attention to Lady Elizabeth. He had reportedly plotted to marry her before he married Catherine, and it was later reported that Catherine once discovered the two of them in an embrace. According to the deposition of Kat Ashley, Elizabeth's governess, Catherine seemed at first to tolerate, and even join in, episodes of horseplay between Seymour and her stepdaughter. In May 1548, before things went too far, Elizabeth was sent away to live with Sir Anthony Denny's household at Cheshunt. She never saw her stepmother again, though the two kept up a correspondence, and she wrote a letter to the Queen and Seymour immediately after leaving Chelsea that reads as remorseful.

  Kat Ashley gave her deposition only after Catherine had died and Seymour had been arrested for a second attempt to marry Elizabeth. Ashley admitted she had developed a crush on Seymour herself during their time at Chelsea, and had encouraged Elizabeth to "play along" with him. She once told Elizabeth how lucky she would have been to marry a man like Seymour, and revealed that he had confided wanting to marry her before he married Catherine. After Catherine's death, Ashley urged Elizabeth to write Seymour her condolences, "to comfort him of his sorrow...for he would think great kindness therein."

  In June 1548, Catherine moved to Sudeley Castle in Gloucestershire, taking Lady Jane Grey with her and promising to oversee her education. There she spent the final months of her pregnancy and the last summer of her life. On the 30th of August 1548, Catherine gave birth to her only child, a daughter she named Mary Seymour after her stepdaughter Mary. Catherine died on the 5th of September 1548 at Sudeley Castle, from what was then called "childbed fever," a common illness caused by poor hygiene around childbirth. Her funeral on the 7th of September 1548 was the first Protestant funeral held in English anywhere in England, Scotland or Ireland. Lady Jane Grey served as chief mourner, and Catherine was buried in St Mary's Chapel on the grounds of Sudeley Castle.

• 7. The Lost Grave

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  Sudeley Castle became a base for King Charles I during the English Civil War, which led Parliamentarian forces to besiege and sack it in January 1643. Catherine's grave was probably disturbed in the attack, and her monument destroyed. The contemporary writer Bruno Ryves recorded what happened inside the chapel: "here they dug up the graves, and disturb the ashes of the dead, they break down the monuments of the Chandoses." The castle changed hands several more times during the war, survived a second siege, and was deliberately slighted in 1649, leaving it largely abandoned and Catherine's royal grave lost.

  An antiquarian named Rev. Huggett first rediscovered evidence of Catherine's presence at Sudeley while researching at the College of Arms. He passed his findings to George Pitt, 1st Baron Rivers, who owned the castle by 1768. Joseph Lucas, a local gentleman renting the castle's outer court from Baron Rivers, knew of Huggett's research and searched for the lost grave himself. He found it among the ruins of the chapel in 1782. The daughter of a Mr. Brooks, who had witnessed the discovery, later published an account of it in Notes and Queries.

  Mr. Brooks's daughter recorded exactly what Lucas found when he broke into the coffin: "In the summer of the year 1782 the earth in which Qu. K. Par lay inter'd was removed, and at the depth of about two feet (or very little more) her leaden coffin or coffin was found quite whole... Mr. Jno Lucas had the curiosity to rip up the top of the coffin, expecting to discover within it only the bones of the deceased, but to his great surprise found the whole body wrapped in 6 or 7 seer cloth linen, entire and uncorrupted... his unwarranted curiosity led him to make an incision through the seer cloth which covered one of the arms of the corpse, the flesh of which at the time was white and moist."

  The coffin was reopened again in 1783-1784 and 1786. In 1792, local vandals broke into the coffin and threw the corpse onto a rubbish heap, forcing Lucas to rebury the body in a hidden, walled grave. That very first opening had already left Catherine missing a piece of her hair, a tooth, and parts of her clothing's fabric. Lucas used this evidence to tell locals about his discovery, which led to the tomb being reopened again and again. The last time anyone opened the coffin was in 1817, when the local rector decided to move it into the crypt beneath the chapel. By then the body had been reduced to a skeleton, and much of the coffin had filled with ivy.

  Fragments of Catherine's dress and locks of her hair were collected across these various openings, one lock later gifted to Elizabeth Hamilton. Most of these relics are now on display at Sudeley Castle. The coffin was moved for the last time in 1861, into its present resting place in the fully restored chapel. There it lies beneath a canopied neo-Gothic tomb designed by Sir George Gilbert Scott, topped with a recumbent marble figure carved by John Birnie Philip.

• 8. Portraits and Legacy

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  A full-length portrait by the painter Master John, now in the National Portrait Gallery, was for many years believed to depict Lady Jane Grey. It has recently been re-identified as Catherine Parr, the name originally attached to the painting. Full-length portraits were rare for this period and were usually reserved for only the most important sitters. Lady Jane Grey, though of royal blood, was a relatively obscure eight-year-old when the painting was made around 1545, eight years before her brief attempt at the throne. The crown-shaped jewel the sitter wears in the portrait can be traced to an inventory of jewels that belonged to Catherine Parr. The cameo beads she wears appear to have belonged to Catherine Howard before passing to her successor as queen.

  A second contemporary portrait by Master John, likely painted around 1547 or 1548, was once mistakenly labelled as Mary I or Lady Jane Grey too. It belonged to the collection of the earls of Jersey and was believed lost in a fire by 1969. In July 2023, however, it turned up and was auctioned at Sotheby's.

  A popular myth holds that Catherine acted more as Henry's nurse than his wife, a story that took shape in the 19th century through the work of the Victorian writer Agnes Strickland. The historian David Starkey challenged this idea in his book Six Wives. He pointed out that such an arrangement would have struck the Tudors themselves as strange, given that Henry had a large staff of physicians attending him, and Catherine was expected to uphold the full dignity of a queen.

  Historians including Starkey, feminist activist Karen Lindsey, Lady Antonia Fraser, Alison Weir, Carolly Erickson, Alison Plowden, Susan James and Linda Porter have all praised Catherine's good sense, moral rectitude, compassion, and strong sense of loyalty. Biographers describe her as strong-willed and outspoken, physically desirable, and, like Elizabeth after her, susceptible to roguish charm. Some accounts even suggest she was willing to use coarse language when the occasion called for it.

  Everley Gregg played Catherine opposite Charles Laughton's Henry VIII in Alexander Korda's 1933 film The Private Life of Henry VIII. Rosalie Crutchley played her in the BBC's 1970 series The Six Wives of Henry VIII, alongside Keith Michell as Henry. She reprised the part in the sequel, Elizabeth R, in 1971. Barbara Leigh-Hunt played Catherine in the 1972 film Henry VIII and His Six Wives, again opposite Michell. Julia Sawalha played her in the 2000 sketch collection The Nearly Complete and Utter History of Everything. Clare Holman played the role opposite Ray Winstone in the 2003 ITV drama Henry VIII. Joely Richardson took the part in the fourth season of Showtime's The Tudors in 2010. Jessica Raine played her in the Starz series Becoming Elizabeth in 2022.

  Caroline Lintott played Catherine in David Starkey's 2001 documentary series The Six Wives of Henry VIII. Alice Patten played her in the 2016 series Six Wives with Lucy Worsley. Kate Holderness took the role across two more Channel 5 documentaries presented by Suzannah Lipscomb and Dan Jones, Henry VIII and his Six Wives in 2016 and Elizabeth I in 2017. Firebrand, the 2023 film starring Alicia Vikander as Catherine and based on Elizabeth Fremantle's 2013 novel Queen's Gambit, breaks from that pattern: the film focuses on Catherine Parr herself.