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.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Here is a list of the most helpful books and journals I consulted for this fiction. With special thanks to Susan James for her biography and Janel Mueller for her scholarly edition of Kateryn’s writing.
Alexander, Michael Van Cleave, The First of the Tudors: A Study of Henry VII and His Reign (London, Croom Helm, 1981, first published 1937)
Askew, Anne, and Beilin, Elaine V., editor, The Examinations of Anne Askew (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1996)
Bacon, Francis, The History of the Reign of King Henry VII and selected works (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1998)
Baldwin, David, Henry VIII’s Last Love: The Extraordinary Life of Katherine Willoughby, Lady-in-Waiting to the Tudors (London, Amberley, 2015)
Bernard, G. W., The Tudor Nobility (Manchester, Manchester University Press, 1992)
Besant, Sir Walter, London in the Time of the Tudors (London, Adam & Charles Black, 1904)
Betteridge, Thomas and Lipscomb, Suzannah, Henry VIII and the Court: Art, Politics and Performance (Aldershot, Ashgate Publishing, 2013)
Bindoff, S. T., editor, The History of Parliament: The House of Commons 1509–1558 (Haynes Publishing, 1982)
Childs, David, Tudor Sea Power: The Foundation of Greatness (Barnsley, Seaforth Publishing, 2009)
Childs, Jessie, Henry VIII’s Last Victim: The Life and Times of Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey (London, Jonathan Cape, 2006)
Chrimes, S. B., Henry VII (London, Eyre Methuen, 1972)
Cunningham, Sean, Henry VII (London, Routledge, 2007)
Denny, Joanna, Katherine Howard: A Tudor Conspiracy (London, Portrait, 2005)
Doner, Margaret, Lies and Lust in The Tudor Court: The Fifth Wife of Henry VIII (Nebraska, iUniverse, 2004)
Duggan, Anne J., editor, Queens and Queenship in Medieval Europe (Woodbridge, Boydell Press, 1997)
Elton, G. R., England Under the Tudors (London, Methuen, 1955)
Fellows, Nicholas, Disorder and Rebellion in Tudor England (Bath, Hodder & Stoughton Educational, 2001)
Fletcher, Anthony, and MacCulloch, Diarmaid, Tudor Rebellions: Revised Fifth Edition (Harlow, Pearson Education, 2008, first published 1968)
Guy, John, Tudor England (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1988)
Hare, Robert D., Without Conscience: The Disturbing World of the Psychopath (New York, Pocket Books, 1995)
Hay, Denys, Europe in the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Centuries: Second Edition (New York, Longman, 1989, first published 1966)
Howard, Maurice, The Tudor Image (London, Tate Gallery Publishing, 1995)
Hutchinson, Robert, House of Treason: The Rise and Fall of a Tudor Dynasty (London, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2009)
Hutchinson, Robert, The Last Days of Henry VIII: Conspiracies, Treason and Heresy at the Court of the Dying Tyrant (London, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2005)
Hutchinson, Robert, Young Henry: The Rise of Henry VIII (London, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2011)
Innes, Arthur D., England Under The Tudors (London, Methuen, 1905)