The Secret Keeper: A Novel of Kateryn Parr

AUTHOR’S NOTE

What ever happened to Lady Mary Seymour?

This is an enduring mystery. The last known facts about the child include that Thomas Seymour did ask, as a dying wish, that Mary be entrusted to Katherine Willoughby, Duchess of Suffolk, and that desire was granted. Willoughby, although a great friend of Kateryn Parr, viewed this wardship as a burden, as evidenced by her own letters. According to biographer Linda Porter,

On 22 January, 1550, less than a year after her father’s death, application was made in the House of Commons for the restitution of Lady Mary Seymour … she was made eligible by this act to inherit any remaining property that had not been returned to the Crown at the time of her father’s attainder. But, in truth, Mary’s prospects were less optimistic than this might suggest. Much of her parents’ lands and goods had already passed into the hands of others.

The five hundred pounds required for Mary’s household would amount to approximately one hundred thousand British pounds, or $150,000 U.S., today, so you can see that Willoughby had reason to shrink from such a duty. And yet the daughter of a queen must be kept in commensurate style. Many people had greatly benefited from Parr’s generosity. None of them stepped forward to assist baby Mary.

Biographer Elizabeth Norton says, “The council granted money to Mary for household wages, servants’ uniforms, and food on 13 March, 1550. This is the last evidence of Mary’s continued survival.” Susan James says Mary is “probably buried somewhere in the parish church at Edenham.”

Most of Parr’s biographers assume that Mary died young of a childhood disease. But this, by necessity, is speculative because there is no record of Mary’s death anywhere: no gravestone, no bill of death, no mention of it in anyone’s extant personal or official correspondence. Parr’s biographer during the Victorian age, Agnes Strickland, claimed that Mary lived on to marry Edward Bushel and become a member of the household of Queen Anne, the wife of King James I of England. Various family biographers claimed descent from Mary, including those who came down from the Irish shipping family of Hart. This family also claimed to have had Thomas Seymour’s ring that was inscribed What I Have, I Hold till early in the twentieth century. I have no idea if that is true or not, but it’s a good detail and certainly possible.

According to a recent article in History Today by biographer Linda Porter, Kateryn Parr’s chaplain, John Parkhurst, published a book in 1573 titled Ludicra sive Epigrammata juvenilia. Within it is a poem that speaks of someone with a “queenly mother” who died in childbirth, the child of whom now lies beneath marble after a brief life. But there is no mention of the child’s name, and 1573 is twenty-five years after Mary’s birth. It may hint at Mary, but certainly does not insist, which is odd if it was Mary Seymour. Why not simply come out and say it, as was done for dozens, or hundreds, of other children of lower birth, if indeed it was a queen’s daughter?

Fiction is a rather more generous mistress than biography, and I was therefore free to wonder. Why would the daughter of a queen and the cousin of the king not have warranted even a tiny remark upon her death? In an era when family descent meant everything, it seemed unlikely that Mary’s death would be nowhere noted. Far less important people, even young children, had their deaths documented during these years; my research turned up dozens of them. Edward Seymour requested a state funeral for his mother, as she was grandmother to the king (which was refused). Would then the death of the cousin of a king, and the only child of the most recent queen, not even be mentioned? The differences seem irreconcilable. Then, too, it would have been to Willoughby’s advantage to show that she was no longer responsible for the child if she were dead.

The turmoil of the time, in which Mary’s uncle the lord protector was about to fall; the fact that her grandmother Lady Seymour died months after Juliana would have taken the child to Ireland; and the lack of motivation any would have had to seek the child out lest they then be required to pay for her upkeep all added up to a potentially different ending for me. The lack of solid facts allowed me to give Mary a happy ending, one I feel is entirely possible given Mary’s cold trail, and one I feel both Kate and Mary deserved.

Parr’s sister, Anne Herbert, was a true courtier, having served in every one of King Henry’s wives’ households; in 1552, only two years after the disappearance of Mary Seymour, Anne Herbert died too. At that time she was attached to the household of the Lady Mary, who would soon become queen.

William Parr, the queen’s brother, was forced to set aside his wife, Elisabeth Brooke, during Mary Tudor’s reign and return to his first wife, who was one of Queen Mary’s friends. Parr had his titles and lands removed and Brooke was required to live by the kindness of her friends. When Elizabeth I became queen she restored to Parr his titles and parliament, his wife; Brooke became a close friend of the queen until Brooke died of breast cancer in 1565. Parr had a taste for witty, beautiful, highborn women and later married Helena Snakenborg.

Katherine Willoughby lost her two sons, then at Cambridge, within an hour of each other, most likely by plague, about a year after this book ends. I like to imagine that the deaths of her own sons would have given her a different, softer perspective on the orphaned daughter of her friend Kateryn Parr. Willoughby married again, for love, and had two more children.

Alas, the dynastic marriage lord protector arranged between his daughter Anne and Dudley’s son John did not bring about the protection he himself needed, nor a lasting détente between the two families. Edward Seymour was beheaded in January 1552, just eighteen months after this book ends. His rival Dudley followed him to the block in 1553. But the Dudley family would famously live on through yet another son, Robert, the great love of Queen Elizabeth’s life.

Of Kateryn Parr, Paul F. M. Zahl says, “Fortunately, providentially, a sheet of paper with the coming accusations scrawled on it somehow fell out of the pocket of one of the orchestrators. This paper was picked up by a Protestant—we have no idea by whom—and passed to Katherine. Katherine turned white, grasping the whole picture in exactly five seconds.” I believe that the warning that document offered gave her the opportunity to save her own life as well as turn Henry away from Gardiner and his faction during the last months of the king’s life. Like Zahl, I believe that was not coincidental, which is why I’ve written it within the context of a vision sent to assist her.

Historians, readers, and others throughout the ages have taken different positions on whether or not Thomas Seymour sexually assaulted the Lady Elizabeth or whether she was a willing participant. I firmly believe she was not. It’s my own belief that he did not have intercourse with her, but I believe his sexualized teasings, ticklings, and other intimidations did add up to harassment, and it affected her the rest of her life. Seymour wielded great power in his household and Elizabeth had no power to stop him when she tried to. That, in essence, is at the core of all abuse, isn’t it? In various circles, she’s still sharing blame as people continue to ask to what extent she complied with or encouraged him. This, sadly, is so often repeated in modern-day society for those who suffer sexual violence that innocent victims often wrongly question themselves. This is why I wrote Juliana’s thread thusly, and had Jamie rebuke that wrongheaded thought.

Upon Thomas Seymour’s death the Lady Elizabeth remarked, “Today died a man of much wit and very little judgment.” She was already precociously astute. Perhaps the questioning she underwent in this situation, no matter how uncomfortable, gave her the practice she needed to help her prevail during the much more important questioning that was to follow during her sister’s reign.

The story of Anne Askew written herein is largely true, except for her contact with Juliana, of course. However, Kateryn Parr’s friends and ladies most certainly did support Anne Askew, which was one fact that Gardiner’s faction tried to use to trip them up and perhaps have them arrested. John Knox recounts that someone provided gunpowder so Askew would die more quickly.

The Countess of Sussex’s account is also largely true, though I have fictionalized her much more than Askew for story’s sake. Like the fictional Juliana, Anne Calthorpe, the Countess of Sussex, was supposed to have a gift of prophecy and was examined by a commission “for errors in scripture,” and, toward the end of Edward’s reign, was arrested for “dabbling in treasonous prophecies (sorcery)” and sent to the Tower. It was, of course, treasonous to imagine or speak of the king’s death, so I tied those two things together in my story. Sorcery and prophecy were often confused during the age and the word prophesyings took on yet another meaning altogether during the Elizabethan years. Anne Calthorpe fled to the Continent when Mary Tudor became queen.

Those with the spiritual gift of prophetic visions share that it is not like being a fortune-teller or seeing the future, and it is not at the person’s beck and call. It may seem like the prophets of old heard a word from the Lord every day, but on closer inspection that is not so. The biblical account of the prophet Hosea covers a period of fifty to eighty years. During all that time Hosea may have had only five to ten prophetic visions or words from God. The prophetic gift is given to the prophet, but the visions are given when God chooses and normally for the benefit of others, often during times of danger or transition, and are not usually for the benefit of the person with the gift but for the body overall.

Prophecies may come in dreams, visions, or “hearing” from God in a person’s spirit and can be either symbolic or exact representations of events. True prophetic visions never contradict other parts of the Bible and come to fulfillment 100 percent of the time. It may seem like a strange or unusual gift, but it’s not. There are over 1,800 prophecies recorded in Scripture and many people, very often women, are actively using their gift of prophecy today.

I have taken a fictional liberty with Juliana as lector. During those years, the actual position of lector went to clergy-in-training, which meant men. However, the king specifically disallowed women teaching and reading Scripture in public during his 1542 Act, so it seemed to me that it was possibly happening or could possibly happen—Askew proves that to some extent.

I wanted to demonstrate that the real women in Parr’s household were actively using all of their spiritual and intellectual gifts. Parr wrote and taught; Askew reasoned and boldly spoke out, eventually being martyred; Calthorpe had the gift of the word of knowledge and prophecy and was courageous enough to speak when called to; Willoughby used her financial resources to benefit reformed causes. There were steel frames beneath those soft and marvelous gowns.

Spelling was not standardized during the Tudor years; I have chosen to spell Kateryn’s name as such because it is how she signed her own documents and because we know that Henry called her “Kate.” Because Parr was a writer, much of what we know of her, in her own words, comes from her books and her letters. I have quoted some of them as books and letters, but there are other places where I have taken her own words and put them in dialogue, for the sake of getting the reader on the scene. Sometimes I have used her exact words, and sometimes I have retained the concepts but modernized the language to match her dialogue throughout the rest of the book.

I have sometimes made accommodations for titles: for example, I continue to refer to Lady Seymour as Lady Seymour even after her husband is made an earl and a duke simply so the reader will be able to better follow the story line and characters and not confuse her with the Countess of Sussex. Similarly, I refer to Elizabeth Fitzgerald Browne as Lady Fitzgerald Browne rather than simply Lady Browne or Elizabeth, because there are many people named Elizabeth in the book and I wanted to retain her Irish heritage. The genealogy charts are accurate, but I do leave off a few connections because they are placed at the front of the book, before the story. Some readers will not have known, for example, that Kateryn Parr and Thomas Seymour did marry and have a child before reading this book, and all will not know how Jamie and Juliana’s story plays out. I did not want to spoil the surprise.

My deep desire is to add to the effort to rescue Kateryn from the only thing she is popularly known to have done: survived. She did much more than that. She was a warm and loving wife and stepmother, a generous emotional and financial benefactress, a learned and devout woman whose extraordinary books sold tens of thousands of copies and went back for many printings; they still resonate with today’s readers. She was also a beautiful woman who had a blind spot for a bad boy, had a wry sense of humor, and was known to make mistakes and lose her temper a time or two. In short, Kateryn Parr was a woman many of us would have liked as a friend.