Katherine the Queen: The Remarkable Life of Katherine Parr

by Linda Porter

  So Katherine had married a much older man who, despite his frequent sojourns in the capital, was very much the provincial nobleman. He was, at heart, a Yorkshireman who was uncomfortable with the foetid air of intrigue that hung over court and parliament in London. He preferred the quiet life, the traditional ways of Church worship, the day-to-day challenge of managing an estate that was already in financial difficulties. In April 1534, with his new marriage very close, he wrote to Thomas Cromwell, the king’s chief minister, about the problems he was encountering in paying off family debts:

  As I have been at every prorogation of Parliament nearly these four years, which has been very painful and chargeable to me, as I have not yet paid the king all that is due for the livery of my lands, nor all the sums I am bound to pay by the wills of my father and mother-in-law, I beg you will give me leave to tarry at home and be absent from the next prorogation. I shall be in better readiness to do the king service against the Scots when we in these parts are called upon.1

  In these few sentences, Latimer summed up the problems that beset many of the Tudor nobility: the expenses incurred in inheriting a title, the duties of involvement in national legislation and the obligation to defend the monarch from foreign enemies. Cromwell received so many of these begging letters that he seldom took any notice of them, even when they were accompanied by ‘gifts’ such as the gelding that Latimer provided on this occasion. The horse may have added to Cromwell’s stable, but not necessarily his respect for Lord Latimer. In time, he would ask for considerably more.

  Latimer knew the leading politicians and noblemen of the realm but does not seem to have liked many of them, or been able to influence them. He had few friends at court beyond William Fitzwilliam, the son of a Yorkshire knight, who was a Neville on his mother’s side. Fitzwilliam grew up as Henry VIII’s companion and was very close to both the king and Cromwell; these connections may well have saved Latimer’s life in 1537 in the aftermath of the Pilgrimage of Grace. For Katherine’s husband was not very effective at pleading his own cause. He was inclined to compromise, avoiding confrontation. This may seem sensible, but it was not what was expected of the nobility; strong leadership and unquestioning devotion to the king were highly prized in the 1530s. It could only have been a matter of time before Katherine realized she had married a man who worried a lot, an endearing ditherer who viewed soldiering as a duty rather than an opportunity for heroism, though he had been knighted in Lille during the French campaign of 1513. Her new husband was also slow to make decisions. When he did, they often betrayed a lack of judgement.

  Yet Latimer had many positive attributes. He was neither cruel nor vindictive – he was no wife-beater, like the duke of Norfolk – and he was not controlling or unfaithful. He strove to be a good provider, even if he was not always a valiant protector. And in fairness to Latimer, his life was very far from straightforward. He was the eldest of fifteen children, with many younger brothers over whom he was supposed (but often failed) to exercise some degree of restraint. They were a quarrelsome tribe and gave him a great deal of difficulty. After his father’s death, two of Latimer’s brothers had wasted no time in pursuing him through the law courts for property they believed was rightfully theirs. A few years later, there was more embarrassment when another brother, William, dabbled in the occult and got himself arrested. He seems to have been looking for supernatural encouragement that the head of the family might die or be killed in battle, enabling William to replace Lord Latimer as the head of their branch of the Nevilles and thus be in line for the earldom of Warwick, vacant since the demise of the Kingmaker. It could not have been very comforting to Latimer to know that one of his siblings was resorting to the black arts to gain his title, but William’s involvement with wizards and soothsayers had also led to charges of sedition, as Henry VIII’s death was prophesied as well. In the end, nothing came of this strange episode but it was an indication of the jealousy and irrationality that pervaded the Neville family’s dealings with each other, and a further source of stress for Latimer.

  At home, his own two children were also in need of guidance and stability. John Neville, then fourteen years old, had had little parental presence in his life. This was by no means uncommon in those days but his subsequent behaviour, as a violent and unpredictable adult and Katherine Parr’s own, indirect comments about young people, point to the fact that he was a very difficult stepson. There was an urgent need for direction, for proper attention to be paid to his education and for inculcating some sense of responsibility in one apparently prone to blame others for his misdemeanours. When, more than a decade later, Katherine Parr wrote Lamentation of a Sinner, she harked back to the frustrations of dealing with her stepson, though she does not, of course, name him personally:

  younglings and unperfect are offended at small trifles, taking everything in evil part, grudging and murmuring against their neighbour … when [they] see that it is reputed and esteemed holy to commit sin … they learn to do that, and worse, and wax cold in doing good and confirm themselves in evil, and then they excuse their wicked life, publishing the same with the slander of their neighbour. If any man reprove them, they say such a man did thus and worse … their affections dispose their eyes to see through other men and they see nothing in themselves …2

  Although the sixteenth century did not have a separate category for ‘teenagers’ it is very easy for any modern parent to sympathize with Katherine Parr’s experience, so eloquently expressed, in dealing with difficult youngsters. When first confronted with Latimer’s son and heir, she was not quite twenty-two. She might have been forgiven for wondering whether the confidence of this sulking, lying, over-sensitive boy could ever be won. Yet during her tenure as his stepmother, he does seem, at least, to have avoided the disgrace which subsequent allegations of rape and murder brought to the name of Latimer. Nor did she abandon him after his father’s death; the younger John Neville’s wife, Lucy, was one of Katherine’s ladies-in-waiting when she became queen.

  Thankfully for Katherine, her stepdaughter, Margaret, then a girl of nine, was all together different. Theirs quickly became a close and loving relationship. Margaret had never really known a mother but that gap in her young life was filled by her father’s third wife, who supervised her education, encouraged a love of learning and a devotion to religion which mirrored Katherine’s own journey into spiritual awareness. They were never parted for any length of time until Margaret’s premature death at the age of twenty-one. The child watched her stepmother support her father and appreciated the attention and guidance that she received. She also witnessed Katherine’s personal courage and coolness at times of crisis. Margaret was an apt pupil and her upbringing seems to have given Katherine great satisfaction. The experience undoubtedly stood Katherine in good stead when, in 1543, she became stepmother to another nine-year-old girl, Elizabeth Tudor, on whom her lasting influence would be profound.

  There is some indication that Margaret Neville may have been her father’s favourite. If so, this might partly explain her brother’s truculence. Or it may simply be that John was an awkward youth and she a biddable and intelligent little girl, eager to get on with her new mother rather than oppose her. Certainly, her father had grand plans for her, for within months of his marriage to Katherine, he paid a Yorkshire neighbour, Sir Francis Bigod, 700 marks for Margaret’s marriage to Bigod’s infant son, Ralph. This put further strain on Latimer’s finances and actually promised less than might have been apparent at the time. True, Bigod was the master of two impressive residences in Yorkshire, Settrington and Mulgrave, and he had been the ward of Cardinal Wolsey. But he was himself heavily over-extended financially, the result of mismanagement of what had been a debt-free inheritance and a reckless programme of building on his various estates. He may have looked a sound prospect as Margaret’s father-in-law, but he was also enmeshed in borrowing his way out of debt (his letters to Cromwell were even more desperate than Latimer’s) and he was already known for embracing new relig
ious ideas, though this apparently did not trouble Katherine’s more conservative husband. There was ample evidence that he could be an unpredictable ally, though Latimer could not have foreseen, in October 1534, just how dangerous and compromising his connection with this man might be.

  AS KATHERINE got to know the Latimers, she also had to accustom herself to a change of scene and a new home. Her husband lived principally at Snape Castle in Richmondshire, a name for this part of north Yorkshire only revived in the late isolated or surrounded by inhospitable terrain, Snape sits in a verdant valley, in gently undulating countryside, surrounded by fields which then, perhaps even more so than now, were full of sheep. A stream flows through the village, dividing it in two, and it is only a short distance to the market towns of Masham (whose charter was awarded in 1250), Leyburn and Bedale. Ripon, with its ancient cathedral dating back to the seventh century, is only ten miles away, and the Cistercian abbey at Jervaulx, one of the great monastic houses of the region, about the same distance.

  It is certainly dramatic to imagine Katherine stuck in the wilderness of the more remote dales, but it is also completely inaccurate. Defensive castles might be found in outlying locations, but Lord Latimer, like others of his class, preferred to live in more comfortable, accessible surroundings. There would certainly have been good hunting, a pastime Katherine always enjoyed, nearby, and Snape (which means boggy pasture) was not an uncivilized place. It was within a day’s ride of York, then the second city in England and very much its northern capital. The social life of north Yorkshire could not, of course, match that of the court in London, but as the wife of a prominent local nobleman, Katherine had a certain position to occupy, and a role that was all together grander, and offered far more opportunities for meeting people of her own class, than that of her first marriage.

  The grey stone castle in which Katherine lived as Lady Latimer probably dated from the 1420s, though there had been a manor house on the same site as far back as the mid-thirteenth century. It is not in any way a forbidding edifice, of the sort that inspires stories of prisoners languishing in dungeons. It was intended as a home, rather than a military outpost against the marauding Scots, and though there was a long association with the Neville family, the ill-fated Richard III was briefly its overlord. No details of its interior survive from this period, but we can assume that it was comfortably appointed, if perhaps somewhat lacking a feminine touch in the years that Lord Latimer had been a widower. Katherine’s later interest in making alterations to her accommodation as queen suggests that she could have made changes at Snape, if money permitted.

  Today, Snape Castle is privately owned but its chapel continues to serve the village. This little-known, rare example of a pre-Reformation chapel was first mentioned in the early sixteenth century and is marvellously evocative of the past. It occupies an upper floor on the south side of the castle, reached nowadays by a flight of steps from an outer door. In the 1530s, however, direct access from within the castle would probably have existed. Prayer and the offices of the Church shaped the lives of everyone in those days, in ways which our secular society can no longer appreciate. Their lovely chapel would have been an integral part of family life for the Latimers. One can easily picture Katherine and her husband worshipping in its peace and stillness, perhaps finding solace there from the cares of the world.3 For cares there were aplenty. Katherine’s life at Snape was peaceful, even gentle, for a brief period, despite John Neville’s tantrums. But in the wider context of English politics and society there were great changes with each passing year. The Latimers may have lived far from London, but they were not immune to the effect of what was happening at the centre of power.

  WHEN KATHERINE and Lord Latimer were married it was already apparent that major change was sweeping England. At the heart of the transformation was Henry VIII himself. The king’s worries about the future of his dynasty had been fuelled, in the late 1520s, by his obsession with Anne Boleyn. He wanted a new wife, one who could provide him with male heirs, and Anne was determined that she would be that woman. Henry was equally determined that the process of freeing himself from Katherine of Aragon, and making Anne his queen, should follow the proper legal course. It is ironic that a monarch who began isolated or surrounded by inhospitable terrain, Snape sits in a verdant valley, in gently undulating countryside, surrounded by fields which then, perhaps even more so than now, were full of sheep. A stream flows through the village, dividing it in two, and it is only a short distance to the market towns of Masham (whose charter was awarded in 1250), Leyburn and Bedale. Ripon, with its ancient cathedral dating back to the seventh century, is only ten miles away, and the Cistercian abbey at Jervaulx, one of the great monastic houses of the region, about the same distance.

  It is certainly dramatic to imagine Katherine stuck in the wilderness of the more remote dales, but it is also completely inaccurate. Defensive castles might be found in outlying locations, but Lord Latimer, like others of his class, preferred to live in more comfortable, accessible surroundings. There would certainly have been good hunting, a pastime Katherine always enjoyed, nearby, and Snape (which means boggy pasture) was not an uncivilized place. It was within a day’s ride of York, then the second city in England and very much its northern capital. The social life of north Yorkshire could not, of course, match that of the court in London, but as the wife of a prominent local nobleman, Katherine had a certain position to occupy, and a role that was all together grander, and offered far more opportunities for meeting people of her own class, than that of her first marriage.

  The grey stone castle in which Katherine lived as Lady Latimer probably dated from the 1420s, though there had been a manor house on the same site as far back as the mid-thirteenth century. It is not in any way a forbidding edifice, of the sort that inspires stories of prisoners languishing in dungeons. It was intended as a home, rather than a military outpost against the marauding Scots, and though there was a long association with the Neville family, the ill-fated Richard III was briefly its overlord. No details of its interior survive from this period, but we can assume that it was comfortably appointed, if perhaps somewhat lacking a feminine touch in the years that Lord Latimer had been a widower. Katherine’s later interest in making alterations to her accommodation as queen suggests that she could have made changes at Snape, if money permitted.

  Today, Snape Castle is privately owned but its chapel continues to serve the village. This little-known, rare example of a pre-Reformation chapel was first mentioned in the early sixteenth century and is marvellously evocative of the past. It occupies an upper floor on the south side of the castle, reached nowadays by a flight of steps from an outer door. In the 1530s, however, direct access from within the castle would probably have existed. Prayer and the offices of the Church shaped the lives of everyone in those days, in ways which our secular society can no longer appreciate. Their lovely chapel would have been an integral part of family life for the Latimers. One can easily picture Katherine and her husband worshipping in its peace and stillness, perhaps finding solace there from the cares of the world.3 For cares there were aplenty. Katherine’s life at Snape was peaceful, even gentle, for a brief period, despite John Neville’s tantrums. But in the wider context of English politics and society there were great changes with each passing year. The Latimers may have lived far from London, but they were not immune to the effect of what was happening at the centre of power.

  WHEN KATHERINE and Lord Latimer were married it was already apparent that major change was sweeping England. At the heart of the transformation was Henry VIII himself. The king’s worries about the future of his dynasty had been fuelled, in the late 1520s, by his obsession with Anne Boleyn. He wanted a new wife, one who could provide him with male heirs, and Anne was determined that she would be that woman. Henry was equally determined that the process of freeing himself from Katherine of Aragon, and making Anne his queen, should follow the proper legal course. It is ironic that a monarch who began the painful process of t
he divorce with a wholly unjustified confidence that the pope in Rome would grant him a speedy end to his first marriage, finished six years of convoluted disputation with the religious authorities by declaring the Church in England independent of Rome and nominating himself as its Supreme Head. There had been rulers who clashed with the papacy before, and not just in England. It was quite possible to consider oneself a good Catholic and to defy the pope. The Emperor Charles V did so constantly, and, for good measure, his troops had sacked Rome in 1526. But he was not excommunicated, and he was never accused of fomenting heresy. Henry’s search for a male heir was both convulsive and divisive, opening doors to new religious ideas that the anti-Lutheran monarch himself had never anticipated. Events unfolded at a frightening speed, and, as the power of the monarchy increased, so new men appeared to uphold Henry VIII, hoping for advancement. In such an unpredictable climate, political and Church careers were put in jeopardy, consciences examined and lives sacrificed for what some men saw as a higher ideal and Henry viewed as treachery. By this time his own religious beliefs were probably developing along reforming lines; he disliked superstition, idolatry and anything that came between him and those he governed. For a while, until he realized its implications, he supported the translation of the Bible into English and a more straightforward form of religious service. Thus were the doors opened for the word of God to be brought to all men – and, indeed, to all women who were literate, including educated ladies like Katherine. For some, it was an exhilarating time of much-needed change, promising an end to the primacy of the priesthood and the beginning of a direct relationship with God. The slavish subjection to the papacy was at an end. But many others, perhaps the majority of the population, felt a profound sense of dislocation. Their doubts could not be assuaged by legislation, no matter how far-reaching it might be.