Hi history lovers and welcome or welcome back to the channel, where I bring you new videos
every Friday looking at history from anytime, anywhere. Today on History Calling we’re
looking at Henry VIII’s sixth wife, Catherine Parr, before she was Queen. Best remembered
as the woman who outlived Henry, her life before the throne is often overlooked despite
the fact that it accounted for 31 out of her 36 years on earth and was packed full of interesting
events including two marriages, imprisonment by rebels during the Pilgrimage of Grace and
the tale of how Catherine fell in love with another man (not Henry), while still married
to her second husband. This video functions as a great prequel to a video I already have
on Catherine’s life as Queen and after Henry’s death, so why not watch this one first, followed
by the other which I’ll leave linked in the description box. You’ll also find links
there to books and screen adaptations of Catherine’s life which you may find interesting, as well
as to my Instagram account. Please also remember to give this video a thumbs up and subscribe
to the channel with notifications switched on so you never miss an upload. And now, let’s
get back to the beginning of the life of Catherine Parr.
Based on a letter from her mother in which she said that Catherine was less than 12 years
old in July 1523 and the fact that her brother William was born on 14 August 1513, we know
that this future queen entered the world sometime between July 1511 and October 1512, though
the scholarship I’ve read all favours the year 1512. She was her parents’ eldest surviving
child (an older brother had already been lost) and after William, would follow a sister named
Anne, in 1514. Their father was Sir Thomas Parr of Kendal, a courtier of Catherine’s
future husband, Henry VIII. Their mother was the former Maud Greene, a lady in waiting
to Catherine of Aragon after whom little Catherine was likely named and who was possibly the
baby’s godmother. The place of her birth has been debated, but was likely the family
home in Blackfriars, London, rather than their increasingly ramshackle house, Kendal Castle
in Westmorland.
Catherine’s father died of plague in November 1517, leaving his daughters £800 between
them for marriage portions. Biographer Antonia Fraser argues that Catherine was thereafter
likely brought up in Northamptonshire, where her mother’s family were from, though Susan
James prefers Rye House, in Hertfordshire. Catherine was well educated for a woman of
her rank and era and spoke French among her other accomplishments, though she apparently
learnt relatively little if any Latin, as we know she was studying it much later in
life, whilst Queen. The story that she was educated with Princess Mary is almost certainly
untrue, both because of the difference in their ages (Catherine was 4 years older) and
because there’s no mention of her as a childhood study buddy of Mary’s in the accounts of
the Princess’s youth. There is also another great story, which may well be apocryphal
as well, that Catherine was told by a fortune teller as a child that ‘her hands were ordained
for sceptres’, rather than needles, leading her to resist doing her sewing.
Maud Parr began marriage negotiations for her eldest daughter’s hand in 1523 and had
initially hoped that Catherine would wed Henry Scrope, the son of Lord Scrope of Bolton and
grandson of Lord Dacre. These negotiations ultimately failed in March 1524 however, as
Catherine did not have a sufficiently impressive dowry to secure such a match. Instead, five
years later in 1529, at the age of about 17, she married Sir Edward Burgh, son of Thomas,
Lord Burgh of Gainsborough in Lincolnshire. Some older biographies of the Queen have confused
Edward with his grandfather of the same name, who went insane, but it was the younger man
whom Catherine married. Her father-in-law was by all accounts, a deeply unpleasant individual,
but after a spell living with him, in October 1530 he allowed the couple to take up residence
in the manor of Kirton in Lindsey in Lincolnshire. As for her religion, Catherine was born before
the English Reformation and as such, was raised a Catholic and continued to be so into her
adult life. Indeed when her mother died in December 1531, she left her daughter an array
of luxury items, including rosary beads given to her by Catherine of Aragon alongside a
jewelled portrait of Henry VIII. The young Catherine Burgh’s beliefs would change with
time however, as we’ll see shortly.
Though Edward was only a few years older than his wife, he was in poor health and though
records show that he was still alive in 1532, by April 1533, he was dead as well, leaving
Catherine a childless, parentless widow barely out of her teens and with a modest jointure
(which is the money a widow was granted from her husband’s estate to live off). She didn’t
stay that way for long. Either that year or the next (different sources give different
dates), she married again, this time to a much older man, John Neville, third Baron
Latimer, who had been born in 1493 and who was already twice widowed and with two children,
Margaret and John. This was a step up for Catherine, as Latimer was a peer and the marriage
gave her a higher status, a large home to run and step-children to oversee the care
of. The family lived at Snape Castle (I can already feel the Harry Potter jokes coming)
in North Yorkshire and at Charterhouse in London. Just as with her later step-children
through her marriage to Henry, she did well in this role, at least with Margaret Neville,
who later wrote in her will of 1545 that ‘I was never able to render her Grace sufficient
thanks for the godly education and tender love and bountiful goodness which I have ever
more found in her’.
Life as Lady Latimer was dangerous on occasion however and one of the most trying times during
Catherine’s second marriage came during the Lincolnshire rising of October 1536 and
the subsequent Pilgrimage of Grace, both revolts against Henry VIII’s religious policies.
Lord Latimer was captured by the rebels in October 1536 and taken into the custody of
their leader, Robert Aske, in front of Catherine’s eyes. He soon swore allegiance to them. According
to his entry in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, ‘he subsequently acted as a captain
of the contingent from the bishopric of Durham and Richmond, and was one of the representatives
of the insurgents who put the latter's case to the duke of Norfolk at Doncaster on 27
October. He was similarly among the leaders of the rising when they gathered at York on
21 November and at Pontefract early in December.’ Later he would say he acted under duress and
had hoped to persuade the rebels to cease their operations. He convinced Norfolk, who
was loyal to the King, that this was the case, but whether or not it was true is still debated.
In December 1536 he went to London to explain himself and in his absence rebels (who interpreted
his decision to leave as a betrayal), attacked Snape Castle in January 1537 and imprisoned
Catherine and the children there in order to force his return. Return he did and managed
to talk himself and his family out of danger, but this only meant that suspicions remained
about his loyalties in court circles. Poor Latimer just couldn’t win!
The rising was put down with force by Henry’s men and when Latimer came back to London in
the summer of 1537, he was locked up in the Tower. He probably only survived because he
bribed Henry’s then favoured minister, Thomas Cromwell and because Catherine’s family
were conspicuously loyal to the Crown during the whole affair and therefore increasing
in political influence. Her uncle, Sir William, had helped to put down the Lincolnshire revolt.
Her brother, also called William you’ll remember, helped to suppress the Pilgrimage
and their sister Anne was one of Queen Jane Seymour’s ladies in waiting (in fact Anne
actually served all of Henry’s wives, including, eventually, Catherine). It can only have helped
that it appears Catherine herself took no part in supporting the revolts, though other
women did and David Starkey and Susan James have mused on whether this might be an indication
that she had already converted to, or was at least flirting with, evangelicalism, for
the rebellions were soundly rooted in Catholicism. There’s no real evidence to tell us when
her religious conversion took place however, except that it seems to have been complete
by the mid-1540s when she was urging Henry to complete the Reformation of the church
in England.
Lord and Lady Latimer spent much of the next few years living in the south of England and
Latimer’s reputation recovered somewhat as time went by. He attended Parliament in
1539, 1540 and 1542 and he and his family spent increasing amounts of time in the capital.
By Christmas 1542, Catherine had joined the household of the King’s daughter Mary, at
court, a turn of events which would have huge repercussions on the rest of her life, as
it brought her into the King’s orbit. At the same time, Lord Latimer’s health had
begun to fail and on 2 March 1543 he died. He was buried in St Paul’s Cathedral and
left to Catherine a valuable jointure and custody of his daughter Margaret.
We might pause at this point and wonder why Catherine had no children of her own. She
was clearly able, given that she would go on to fall pregnant in 1547 by her final husband
and John Neville, Lord Latimer already had two children by a previous wife, so there
were apparently no issues there. It’s possible that she had pregnancies and even short-lived
children, of whom no information has survived, or that her first husband was too unwell during
their marriage for the couple to conceive. As for Lord Latimer, he too was ill during
the later part of their marriage and travelling or imprisoned without Catherine for other
parts of it. Perhaps, like Henry VIII, he was afflicted with impotency problems later
in life which prevented he and Catherine conceiving. We’ll never know for sure.
The dowager Lady Latimer wasn’t one for long gaps between marriages and at the time
of her second husband’s death, she already had two other suitors in the offing. One was
Thomas Seymour, brother to the late Queen Jane Seymour. We don’t know how they met,
but Catherine’s presence at court and the connections she had there through her siblings
may help to explain it. We know from a later letter to him which I’ll be showing you
in a minute that Catherine was in love with him and wanted them to be married at this
point. Her biographer, Susan James, also argues that to want to wed her in 1543, when she
was destined to be the dowager Lady Latimer, rather than the dowager Queen of England,
Seymour must have had genuine feelings for her too. This is because at about thirty years
old, with good, but not outstanding jointure incomes and potentially unable to produce
heirs, she wasn’t the kind of catch that she would be in later years as one of the
wealthiest people in the Kingdom.
The relationship must have moved fast (though there’s no suggestion that Catherine committed
adultery), for Thomas had only returned from conducting the King’s business on mainland
Europe in January and the fact that their interest in one another overlapped with the
tail end of her marriage to Latimer demonstrates that Catherine was not the prim, proper and
pious woman she is sometimes made out to be. Her plans to marry him would be thwarted however,
at least for the time being, by her other suitor, who was no less than the King himself.
Henry’s interest in Catherine also started while she was still a married woman, for he
was sending her gifts, of sleeves and pleats for dresses, at least a fortnight before Latimer
died and visiting his daughter Mary’s apartments several times a day in February 1543, though
hardly to see his long suffering offspring. Catherine now faced an unenviable choice;
marry the man she loved, or marry the King, who offered her his hand in the latter part
of the spring. Catherine ultimately chose Henry (in as much as she really had a choice
– he wasn’t the type to take no for an answer after all) but it was an incredibly
hard decision, as she explained to Seymour in this letter written shortly after Henry’s
death four years later, in which she said:
I wold not haue yow to thynke that thys myne onest God Wyll towarde yow to procede of any
sodayne motyon or passyon for as truly as god ys god my mynd was fully bent the other
tyme I was at lybertye to marye yow before any man I knewe howbeyt god withsode my wyll
theryn moost vehemently for atyme and through hys grace and goodnes made that possible wyche
semeth to me moost vnpossible that was made me to renownce utterly myne one wyll, and
to folowe hys wyll most wyllyngly
As this letter shows, Catherine would continue to harbour feelings for Thomas throughout
her marriage to Henry (who I don’t believe she loved, at least not romantically) and
in fact she went straight back to him with scandalous alacrity as soon she was able.
Again, this is hardly the model of pious behaviour, but I love that it shows so much of Catherine’s
personality. Far from being a cookie-cutter 16th century wife, dedicated solely to God
and her husband, she was evidently much more complicated than that, with a strong faith
and sense of duty, but also much more earthly desires which couldn’t always be easily
reconciled with her religion. Reconcile them she did however in 1543, for the throne beckoned.
On 10 July a license was granted for the King’s sixth wedding and Catherine’s third and
it took place 2 days later in the Queen’s Closet in Hampton Court Palace in the presence
of Henry’s daughters and Catherine’s sister, among others. The former Catherine Parr was
now Queen and the rest, as they say is history!
If you’d like to know what happened next, remember to watch my other video on Catherine’s
life which covers her Queenship, final marriage to Thomas Seymour, his scandalous behaviour
with her teenaged step-daughter, the future Elizabeth I and Catherine’s death. You can
access this either through a link in the description box, or the link which is just about to pop
up in the end cards. You can also learn more about Henry and his wives by watching my Six
Wives and Tudor Monarchs’ playlists. Let me know in the comments below what you find
most interesting about Catherine’s life prior to becoming Queen and until next time
I’ll leave you with my standard sign off phrase which I think Catherine (who was an
advocate of lifelong education) would have approved of; keep learning.