The Taming of the Queen

AUTHOR’S NOTE

It is extraordinary to me that Kateryn the Quene KP (as she signed herself) is not better known. As the last of Henry’s queens she survived a wife-killer who saw four of her five predecessors into the grave, which must make her one of the most tenacious survivor-wives in history. She faced and defeated a series of plots from supporters of the papist side of the English Church who were determined to restore their faith to England, she raised the king’s two younger children in the Protestant faith that would be the core of their own reigns, and yet she befriended the king’s papist oldest daughter, Lady Mary, and supported her return to royal status. She served the country as regent – the most important person in England – and kept the peace in the absence of the king.

In many ways one can see her similarities to the other wives: she was made regent like the Spanish royal, Katherine of Aragon, she was English born and bred like Katherine Howard, an educated and highly intelligent reformer in religion like Anne Boleyn, and – as a Northerner – an outsider like Anne of Cleves. She raised Jane Seymour’s son and loved her brother; perhaps, if Jane had lived, she would have been Jane’s sister-in-law.

But the most interesting thing about her was her scholarship. We don’t know the extent of her education when she first came to Henry’s court as the young widow of the Northern Lord Latimer. It is likely that she had studied Latin and French with her brother’s tutor but probably her lessons finished when he left home. So when she came to a court which was alive with debate about the Bible: English or Latin, about the Mass: bread or flesh, about the church: reformist or papist, she set about educating herself.

Her studies in Latin are demonstrated in the letters that she exchanged with her stepson, the little Prince of Wales. Her studies in theology underpin her publications. She was the first woman to publish original work under her own name in English – an extraordinary act, a breakthrough act. Earlier women writers had written in Middle English – more like Chaucer than the recognisable language of Shakespeare that Parr used. A very few published anonymously, mostly they made translations of men’s texts. No woman before Kateryn Parr had dared to write original material in English for publication and put her own name on the title page, as Parr did with her last book: The Lamentation of a Sinner.

Every one of her three books has survived and can be read in a new edition edited by Janel Mueller, listed in the following bibliography. We can even see original copies at Sudeley Castle in Gloucestershire. Down the centuries, remarkably, a woman of the 1500s still speaks to us.

Of course every historian must wish that Parr had chosen to write a chronicle of her times rather than prayers – think what that would have told us about the last days of the Henrician court! But for Parr as for other spiritual women, it may be that her relationship with God was more important to her than her life in this world.

That day-to-day life was filled with incident, danger and adventure. We don’t know, even now, how close she was to the martyr Anne Askew. It looks as if Anne died to keep their connection secret. We know that Anne preached before the queen, and that they may have met when they were girls in Lincolnshire. We know that the queen used her influence to get Anne freed from her first arrest but could not liberate her a second time. We know that Nicholas Throckmorton from the queen’s rooms attended the burning and that someone paid for a purse of gunpowder so that Anne’s sufferings could be cut short. It looks very much as if the torture of Anne Askew was done to force her to name the queen as a co-religionist, a heretic and a traitor, to expose her to arrest and death.

The plot against the queen, her quick-witted response, and her humiliation before the court is from the near-contemporary account of Foxe’s Book of Martyrs, and some of the dialogue is drawn from that account. But the private humiliation that I describe is fiction – we are rarely told what went on behind the closed bedroom doors of the past. I wanted to write a scene in which the legally-permitted beating of a wife, and the symbolism of Henry’s codpiece, came together to show how men dominate women with their legal powers, with their violence, with their sexuality and with the myth of their power, then – and now.

We also don’t know how intimate Kateryn was with Thomas Seymour while she was queen. Certainly they look as if they were promised to each other – they were writing love letters and making assignations to spend the night together only weeks after the death of the king, and they were married, despite their initial decision to wait, within four months of Henry’s death. It may be that their marriage was loving and happy. It is well known that Princess Elizabeth left her stepmother’s house after sexualised play with her new stepfather Thomas Seymour. There were spiteful quarrels with his family about the dowager queen’s dower and the royal jewels; Thomas was a jealous and possessive husband. Kateryn and Thomas were to be married for less than a year and a half before she died in childbirth. There were reports of her reproaching him for not loving her, but he was at her deathbed and he seems to have been stunned by her loss, giving up their house and leaving their child to be cared for in the household of Edward Seymour and his wife.

Writing a fictional version of a medieval woman’s life has been, as it always is, strangely moving and relevant to my own times. Although she lived so long ago, when I think of the fear she faced and the courage she must have drawn on, I cannot help but admire her. Her careful, mostly self-taught scholarship must resonate with any woman who has tried to enter the exclusive circles of male power: industry, politics, churches, learning. Anyone who loves words will admire Kateryn Parr, thinking of her poring over manuscripts in Latin and Greek trying to find the perfect English word for translation, and anyone who likes women must warm to her: in love with one man and forced to marry another, a tyrant, but – hurrah – surviving him.

This novel, about a scholarly woman, is dedicated to two great scholars who taught me: Maurice Hutt at the University of Sussex and Geoffrey Carnall at the University of Edinburgh. To me, they exemplify those many teachers throughout the centuries who have knowledge and the grace to share it, who occupy the bastions of male learning and open the gates.

No words can express my gratitude to them – which they would immediately remark is both a cliché and a paradox. Heavens! I miss them both so much.