The reluctant Queen

One of the questions I am most often asked these days is why, out of all Henry VIII's wives, did I choose to write about Katherine Parr. It is true that Henry's sixth and final wife has been somewhat eclipsed by her more glamorous predecessors. 

Devout Catherine of Aragon, a woman destined from an early age to be England’s queen and set aside for her inability to produce a male heir, made way for the captivating Anne Boleyn, whose ambition led her to the block. Then Jane Seymour, who died providing the heir Henry so desperately needed.

Next came Anne of Cleves, championed by Cromwell as the answer to England’s isolation in Europe. Anne simply didn’t please Henry, but teenager Catherine Howard certainly did. She lost her heart, then her head.

Following them all was sensible Katherine Parr, not some girl pushed forward by an ambitious family, nor one born to create alliances between kingdoms, but a woman in her 30s, already twice widowed, childless and considered an uncontroversial choice for the King.

It is hard to understand, from the distance of the 21st century, the extent to which Protestant propaganda in“ uenced people’s beliefs about women. Foxe’s Book Of Martyrs, published when the Catholic and Protestant factions within England had become dangerously polarised, cited women like Lady Jane Grey and Katherine Parr as female ƒ gureheads for the Protestant cause: the godly girl martyr and the devout royal consort. This view crystallised with the Victorians, who sought representations of the perfect Protestant wife: biddable, silent and domestic. And so Katherine became cast as the dull wife who nursed her husband through his dotage, surviving by dint of her meek nature.

When you begin to dig a little deeper though, a very di˜fferent woman emerges. She was highly intelligent and actively political, supporting religious reform among the nobility at great personal risk. Indeed, she survived a Catholic plot on her life, managing to talk her way out of it, successfully employing the tropes of feminine weakness and modesty to outsmart her powerful adversaries.

An author too, she was one of the
first women to publish in English, at a time when a woman in print was at best ridiculed and at worst considered akin to whoredom. She was shrewd enough to wait until after Henry’s death to publish her second book, which was unashamedly Reformist and therefore highly political.

She was instrumental in bringing the disparate royal family back together, having Mary and Elizabeth Tudor reinstated in the succession, and she ruled as Regent when Henry was at war in France.

So there is much to admire about Katherine Parr’s dynamism, intellect and ability to survive that rejects any notion of her as a merely biddable consort. But for me as a writer of
fiction, there is more still. Behind the astute political player, the woman who negotiated the treachery of the Tudor court with aplomb, lies a passionate woman with a …flaw that makes her heart-warmingly human and which lends her story a quiet, tragic quality that is not initially apparent.
Henry VIII, c. 1540, by Hans Holbein
After the death of her second husband, Katherine was publicly courted by the King, but as the inevitability of becoming Queen loomed, she had fallen hopelessly in love with another man. This was Thomas Seymour, commonly regarded as the ‘comliest’ man at court: dashing, ambitious and part of one of the most powerful families in England. We know about Katherine’s feelings for Seymour, prior to her marriage to the King, from a subsequent letter in which she states her mind was ‘fully bent, the other time I was at liberty, to marry you before any man I know’.

But Henry, not one to sit back and watch the object of his desire wed another, had Seymour dispatched abroad on ambassadorial duties.

However, after the King’s demise, Katherine’s relationship with Seymour was revived with indecent haste: within two months they were married. Their courtship is documented in a few touching letters that give testimony to Katherine’s love. It was rare in the period for women of her rank to marry for love; marriages were alliances of power between families. But in her late 30s and thrice widowed, it is plausible to assume that this was a ‘love match’, for Katherine anyway.

With Thomas it is more complicated; there is evidence that he had already approached both Mary and Elizabeth Tudor as possible matches. From this we can assume he was after a prestigious union, and Katherine as the wealthy Dowager Queen
fitted the bill. Katherine’s ‘love match’ however, did not turn out as expected, and Seymour became embroiled in a scandalous betrayal that was to lead eventually to his disgrace and execution.

So we could see Katherine as an intelligent woman disappointingly blinded by her passion for a man, who hid a ruthless ambition behind a handsome facade. For the novelist in me it is precisely this … aw, this contradiction, in the character of such an extraordinary woman that makes her human and gives her an irresistibly enigmatic quality. This is the stu” that speaks to the 21st-century woman, the shared humanity that links us to her across the years. We all understand what it is to be driven by our passions to behave in a way that is utterly out of character, and that all the intelligence in the world cannot combat the incomprehensible nature of love.

Queen’s Gambit by Elizabeth Fremantle is published by Michael Joseph, priced £14.99.

Elizabeth Fremantle will be one of the three authors at our next Literary Luncheon on 14 May. For details, call 0207379 4717 between 9am and 5pm, Monday to Friday, or go to www.lady.co.uk/events