Katherine the Queen: The Remarkable Life of Katherine Parr Read online

  None of this was sufficient to change Lord Scrope’s mind. Perhaps he did not care whether his son became a competent linguist. In Wharfedale, where he lived and where his son would inherit, it was much less of an attraction than in the court at Greenwich. Maud became progressively frustrated and disenchanted. Eventually, she turned to Cuthbert Tunstall for advice and his view was unequivocal: the matter should be dropped. So Maud wrote to Lord Dacre in March 1524, thanking him for his ‘manifold pains’ but saying that ‘I have taken advice of my Lord of London and divers others of my husband’s friends and mine, who think that my said Lord Scrope’s offer … is so little and so far from the customs of the country, and his demand is so great and so large of me, with short payment, that my said friends will in no wise that I shall meddle with the said bargain after my Lord Scrope’s offer and demand.’

  The matter had, she went on, ‘been so long in cogitation, I am right sorry on my part it cannot take effect’.14 She had wanted this marriage above all for Katherine and was extremely disappointed that it would not now take place.

  Lord Dacre was clearly offended by the outcome, sending a terse reply and pointing out that ‘Lord Scrope demanded nothing but it that ye were content without the meddling of any person to give’ – presumably a dig at Cuthbert Tunstall. But the truth was that he had not been able to influence the outcome to the satisfaction of either party. The following year Henry Scrope died and Maud’s concerns were fully vindicated. By this time she was turning her attention to her son’s future. His marriage, she naturally thought, was the key to ensuring the family’s fortunes. Katherine would have to wait.

  MAUD’S RESILIENT SPIRIT did not allow her to remain disheartened over the setback to Katherine’s prospects. She believed she had reason to be much more optimistic over William. In 1525, at the age of twelve, Katherine’s brother joined the household of the duke of Richmond, the six-year-old illegitimate son of Henry VIII and Elizabeth Blount. His entrée was easily arranged: Sir William Parr of Horton, his uncle, had been appointed chamberlain of the child’s separate establishment, which was to be based at Sheriff Hutton Castle in Yorkshire. Here Richmond would preside, at least nominally, over the Council of the North, an institution that existed to manage the king’s affairs in this unruly and distant part of England. It was thought desirable to include other young boys in the little duke’s entourage, and so William Parr, though much older, prepared to leave his mother and sisters, in the company of his uncle. It seemed like a stroke of good luck. William’s education would be completed by the very best tutors and he would mix with the sons of other prominent families, under the attentive eye of his uncle. Maud herself entertained the retinue on the second stage of its journey north, and it was recorded that at her house ‘his Grace was marvellously well intreated and had good cheer’.15 Lady Parr also gave Richmond a pony, a ‘grey ambling nag’, with which he was clearly delighted, preferring to ride on it rather than sit in his splendid litter and be carried to Yorkshire.

  It soon became apparent, however, that being part of the Richmond household was not the great passport to success that Parr of Horton had anticipated for himself and his nephew. Henry VIII was very fond of his bastard son but he never had any intention of naming him as his heir. The king was a stickler for legitimacy when it came to his dynasty. His determination to pursue his divorce from Katherine of Aragon took shape while Richmond was in the north, and, despite setbacks and frustrations, he held firm over a period of six years. It has been claimed that Maud Parr and her brother-in-law coached William to make sure that he ingratiated himself with Richmond, in case the duke ever became the official heir, but there is no evidence to support this.16 In fact, the family association with Richmond may have been some embarrassment to Maud in her relationship with Katherine of Aragon, who had bitterly opposed the granting of a title and personal household to her husband’s illegitimate offspring.

  Nor, as Sir William was soon to discover, were there great opportunities for financial benefit or wider influence. The household was controlled by Wolsey from London and he expected it to be run tightly. It was he, not Richmond’s chamberlain, who granted access, office and additional benefits that normally came with such a role. There were limited possibilities for supplementing Parr of Horton’s basic salary of £26 13s and 4d (about £12,500 today). And there were also other, daily frustrations. Almost from the moment that the household arrived at Sheriff Hutton, tensions developed between the duke of Richmond’s tutors and the household officers under Parr of Horton.

  In essence these had to do with a difference of opinion on the balance between recreation and study for the duke and his schoolfellows. Sir William was a countryman who thought it perfectly natural for boys to prefer hunting and sports to the boring recitation of Latin and Greek verbs from dawn till dusk. The increasingly unruly behaviour of Richmond and the other boys, who included two of the duke’s maternal uncles and John Scrope, the only surviving junior member of the family that had rejected Katherine Parr, seems to have been viewed with amusement by Parr and his colleagues. After six months, John Palsgrave, Richmond’s first tutor, felt he could no longer take being undermined and belittled, and resigned his post. He had been schoolmaster to Princess Mary Tudor, Henry VIII’s sister, and was a prominent scholar of French, with excellent links among the leading humanists of his day. Although he understood the still-feudal attraction of leading from the front, he defended the fundamental importance of education: ‘Some think that learning doth make one cowardish but Alexander’s and Caesar’s acts prove the contrary.’17 He could not endure the poisonous atmosphere at Sheriff Hutton. His successor, Richard Croke, ran into even greater difficulties, of which he complained loud and long. An ordained priest (as were many tutors at that time), Croke encountered derision and anticlericalism. He soon found that he had no control over his charge at all. Even the threat of corporal punishment was countered with ‘Master, if you beat me, I will beat you.’18

  Such was the household over which Parr of Horton presided as chamberlain. Suspicious of schoolmaster priests, and contemptuous of anyone he considered of lesser birth, though he was not, of course, a nobleman himself, the spell in Yorkshire showed another, less amiable side of Katherine Parr’s uncle. For her brother, the experience was a far cry from the pleasant schoolroom and family atmosphere of Rye House. Though it introduced young William to a select circle whose friendship was important later in his life (Edward Seymour, brother of Queen Jane Seymour, was master of the horse to Richmond), it did nothing for the immediate fortunes of the Parr family. If Parr of Horton had spent less time in acrimonious struggles with Richmond’s tutors and devoted more attention to his own responsibilities, he might have escaped censure. A disorganized and incomplete approach to accounting could not conceal that the household was overmanned and too expensive. Reductions were made but, by the time Richmond was ordered back from Yorkshire in the summer of 1529, Sir William Parr of Horton was suitably embittered by his failure to find any personal profit or advancement out of his sojourn in the north.

  The episode was, however, less negative in its impact on young William Parr. His uncle may not have covered the family name in glory or added to its influence, but his mother was very active in pursuing a splendid marriage for him. In February 1527, at the age of thirteen, William Parr, a good-looking boy of affable disposition, was married to Anne Bourchier (pronounced Bowser), the only daughter and heiress of the elderly earl of Essex, in the chapel of Essex’s country seat, Stansted Hall. Maud Parr, who lived close to the family home of the earl’s wife, had cajoled, pressured and bought her son’s way into the English aristocracy. The earl of Essex was in debt and he asked a high price for his daughter’s hand; Maud had to borrow from Cuthbert Tunstall, several other of her late husband’s close friends, the guild of mercers and even the king himself, to meet the asking price for Lady Anne. Apart from the lands she stood to inherit, the hope must also have been that William Parr’s child-bride would bring him her father’s t
itle when the earl died.

  William Parr did, eventually, become earl of Essex in 1543, the year his sister Katherine became Henry VIII’s last queen; it was her elevation, not his marriage, that brought him the long-coveted title. By then, it was obvious that his relationship with Anne Bourchier was beyond repair. The union was one of the most unhappy marriages of the sixteenth century on record. Perhaps Anne resented being married so young – she was only nine at the time – to a boy of inferior rank; their interests and intellects were widely divergent and her childhood dislike turned into full-blown hatred as an adult. Maud Parr died before the rift between them became fully obvious, and her bequest of jewellery to her daughter-in-law to be received ‘when she lyeth with my son’, often cited as an inducement to the recalcitrant girl, is more readily explained by the fact that Anne was still only fourteen years old and a year or so below the age when she would be expected to cohabit with her spouse.

  We do not know whether Katherine Parr attended her brother’s wedding in Essex. They were always close and she would, no doubt, have wished him well. But she must also have known that her mother had nothing left to find her a husband of comparable rank. She could expect to be married respectably, but nothing more. Two more years passed before her future was decided. Then, in the spring of 1529, at the age of nearly seventeen, Katherine Parr took the long road north, to become the bride of Edward Borough, eldest son of Sir Thomas Borough of Gainsborough Old Hall, in the county of Lincolnshire. For most of the next decade, her life would be spent away from the proximity of the court and the comforts of the south.

  Part Two

  Wife and Widow

  1529–1543

  CHAPTER THREE

  The Marriage Game

  ‘I am indebted to Sir Thomas Borough, knight, for the marriage of my daughter.’

  Maud Parr’s will, May 1529

  GAINSBOROUGH WAS a port on the river Trent, already steeped in history when Katherine Parr arrived there as a young bride. ‘Then runneth the Trent down to Gainsborough, a town ennobled by reason of the Danes ships that lay there at rode,’ wrote the celebrated sixteenth-century antiquary William Camden. It was also, he added, notorious for the death of the colourfully named Danish tyrant Sweyn Tings-Kege, ‘who after he had robbed and spoiled the country … being here stabbed to death by an unknown man, suffered due punishment … Many a year after this it became the possession of Sir William de Valence, Earl of Pembroke, who obtained for it of King Edward I the liberty to keep a fair. From which earl by the Scottish earls of Athol and the Percies, descended from the Barons of Borough who here dwelt …’1

  Katherine’s new home was in one of the most isolated of all English shires. Both topographically and culturally, Lincolnshire was a distinctive place, its agricultural flatlands, marshes and coastline contrasted with the range of hills known as the Wolds. It was the most distant county to be ruled directly from London; the rest of the north of England came under the administration of the Council of the North. To Katherine, it must have seemed a very different place from the more prosperous, populated south, a world away from the stimulation of court gossip and intrigues which she had known, indirectly through her parents, all her life. Most southerners viewed this part of the world with a prejudice based on ignorance. Inhabitants of the fenlands, for example, were thought to be slightly less than human and Henry VIII famously described the common people of his second largest county as ‘one of the most brute and beastly of the whole kingdom’.2 This attitude clearly communicated itself to his successors. There was no royal visit to Lincolnshire between 1541 and 1617. Unloved and remote, it was almost frontier territory. There was only one major overland access from the south, via the Great North Road at Stamford. Otherwise, it had to be reached by coastal voyage to ports such as Grimsby or Skegness. Two of its largest towns, Lincoln itself and Boston, were in decline during the Tudor period.

  Though rich agriculturally, Lincolnshire had few major landowners at the time that Katherine Parr married into the Borough family. The Boroughs, like many of their neighbours, were knighted gentry. This absence of an obvious rallying point for royal authority added a further dimension to the area’s perceived awkwardness and isolation. Not until the mid-1530s, when Charles Brandon, duke of Suffolk, married his ward, the local heiress Katherine Willoughby, was there a great lord in Lincolnshire. Brandon’s second duchess (his first had been the king’s sister, Princess Mary Tudor), was to become, by a strange coincidence, a close friend of Katherine Parr in the next decade.

  The rural landscape of Lincolnshire was not marked by major castles but it had a deep-rooted monastic heritage. Fifty-one monasteries, covering all the great orders except the Cluniacs, bore witness to the enduring importance of religion in the east midlands. The Gilbertines, the only religious order originating in England, had been founded by St Gilbert of Sempringham (a village in the Lincolnshire fens) in 1131. Not all the houses were wealthy but most, despite the inevitable lapses into apathy and occasional sexual irregularity uncovered in visitations, were respected by local people.

  Life in this part of England continued to be dominated by the cycles of the agricultural year, the need for self-sufficiency and a straightforward faith in God. These all contributed to a strong sense of local identity. The area was noted for the independence of mind of its inhabitants and their capacity for rebellion. Lincolnshire folk by no means did what they were told and they could carry much of the rest of the north of England with them, an uncomfortable truth insufficiently appreciated by the king and government in London. From the perspective of an outsider like Katherine Parr, even though her mother owned a number of manors not far from Gainsborough, it was a very different environment from the one she had known. There was much to be learned and a great deal of adapting to do.

  ONE SOURCE of pleasure, amidst all this uncertainty, must have been her new home itself. Her surroundings, at least, were gracious, comfortable and even opulent, certainly by local standards. The mansion of the Boroughs dominated the small town of Gainsborough and today is one of the most impressive fifteenthcentury manor houses surviving in Britain. It was built of red brick and timber, a style that became increasingly popular during Tudor times, and originally it had a moat and a gatehouse, which have long since disappeared. Rebuilt after its destruction during the Wars of the Roses by a Lancastrian army that included many of the first Lord Borough’s personal enemies, the house rose up even grander than before. An inventory recorded that it consisted of ‘[a] hall, a parlour, an inner parlour, a withdrawing room, a great chamber with another next to it, a chamber in the tower and in the gallery’.3 There were further rooms originally described but part of the inventory is long since lost. The west wing had three floors of lodgings, with brick walls at the back and a fireplace and privy for each room.4 This early version of ‘en-suite accommodation’ shows how much the Boroughs anticipated entertaining. Certainly their great, open high-vaulted hall and the well-designed kitchen were amply suited to feed even a king. The house received two royal visitors, Richard III during his brief reign and, later, Henry VIII and Katherine Howard. Gainsborough Old Hall may have been a long journey from London, but it was not lacking in sophistication. ‘Almost every room was hung with tapestries and the bed in the lower chamber had a canopy of chequered velvet and cloth of gold.’5

  The Borough family themselves, distant kin of the Parrs, had a history as eventful as that of the building in which they sought to display their wealth and influence. Their rise through the turmoil of the Wars of the Roses mirrored that of Katherine’s family. The first Lord Borough, great-grandfather of Katherine’s husband, had been an esquire of the body and master of the horse to Edward IV, as well as a royal councillor, roles which had also been held at different times by Katherine’s grandfather and great-uncle. The success of the Boroughs and the Parrs was ample evidence of the truth of the old dictum about servants of the Privy Chamber: ‘theyre business is many secretes’. Like Sir William Parr, Thomas Borough was well rewa
rded by Edward IV and he, too, married a rich widow, was given extensive local responsibilities and negotiated the regime change smoothly when Henry VII came to the throne. In fact, in one crucial respect, he outdid the Parrs. In 1487 he became a lord and was given the title of baron of Gainsborough. So Katherine Parr was marrying into a family that had already achieved a title, with the prospect, in due course, of becoming Lady Borough herself. What the Boroughs had not done, however, was consolidate their personal standing with the Tudors by service at court.

  In fact, the positive relationship that had benefited the first Lord Borough was already declining at the time of his death in the mid-1490s. It seems likely that the family already met considerable problems with the fragile mental state of Edward, the second Lord Borough. He had certainly attended court, where his prowess as a horseman was noted at a tournament to honour the young Prince Henry, and he enhanced the family fortunes by marrying a wealthy Kentish heiress; but all was not well. In late 1495 he had been made to bind himself in legal recognizance to the king and was placed in the custody of the lord chamberlain. Perhaps the dispute was initially about money – Henry VII valued his aristocracy more for their purses than their equestrian skills – but, whatever the cause, Edward Borough ended up in the Fleet prison. His escape from that institution put him in debt to the Crown to the tune of £3,000, which had a catastrophic effect on his family’s immediate prospects.