Catherine Parr. When Henry died in , his widow Catherine Parr was free to remarry. This came as a shock to the dowager Queen, as she had not conceived in her first three marriages.
Rumours began to circulate that he had planned to marry Elizabeth before he married Catherine. These rumours led to Elizabeth being sent away from her beloved stepmother, and the two would never see each other again. Catherine Parr died eight days after giving birth to a daughter, it is believed of childbed fever.
Her daughter Mary was to grow up without a mother or a father, as after a plot was discovered to put the protestant Elizabeth on the throne, her father Sir Thomas Seymour was beheaded for treason. I believe not, as she outlived the King by only a year and that year that was less than happy, with a potentially cheating husband and a difficult pregnancy which led to her death. The twelve days of Christmas would have been a most welcome break for the workers on the land, which in Tudor times would have been the majority of the people.
Elizabeth I began her reign on 17th November as a young woman of only 25 years of age. But Henry was also a complex man: intelligent, boisterous, flamboyant, extravagant. Athletic, musical, a poet.
Ruthless, arrogant, passionate Interesting Facts about Catherine Parr Below are some interesting facts about this famous English monarch. She is thought to be named after Catherine of Aragon. Catherine Parr was fluent in French, Italian and Latin.
She was very well educated and had a passion for learning. When she became queen she also started to learn Spanish. Catherine was married four times. They married in and were together until he died in She attended assiduously to her duties, meeting daily with her advisers. And her loyal support for the military adventure was not confined to administrative activities in camera.
The words were written by Queen Katherine. Not only did she study the Bible and listen to favoured preachers with her ladies in the seclusion of her own chambers; and advance the careers of favoured clergy — all that was common enough. Katherine did something quite novel, something that women at the time simply did not do: she ventured into print. Her first forays, published in and , were devotional books — prayers and reflections on the Psalms.
There was a time in the summer of when Katherine came within a whisper of being executed for her faith. Henry was a semi-invalid in constant pain from the festering sores on his legs and was only able to move with the aid of servants. Leading councillors and courtiers were discreetly making plans for the accession of a minor.
Gardiner and his conservative associates needed to prevent that at all costs. Thus a campaign was launched against the queen using a formula that had been well tried in the past. They brought to trial a notoriously outspoken heretic with court connections by the name of Anne Askew, subjected her to fierce and unprecedented torture and promised that her sufferings would end if she would but name members of the royal court including the queen who shared her heretical beliefs.
But Anne did not break under pressure. Or, perhaps, the discovery was engineered by Henry himself, who never lost his sense of theatre.
For the traditionalists this was the last throw of the dice. Their failure left the advocates of reform in power when the Tudor tyrant eventually breathed his last. Katherine Parr, therefore, holds an important place in the history of the English Reformation. We may hope that Katherine was aware of this fact and took satisfaction from it, particularly because the brief remainder of her life was decidedly tragic.
She was, at last, able to marry her true love, Thomas Seymour, but it did not bring her happiness. The wedding was a clandestine ceremony and one that provoked scandal: the Seymour clan tore itself apart in rivalries and competing ambitions.
Thomas, having been granted no place on the regency council, tried to ingratiate himself with the young king and to undermine the influence of his brother, Edward, now Lord Protector and Duke of Somerset. The family feud escalated rapidly. She had brought the year-old Princess Elizabeth to live with her but Thomas soon began indulging in intimate horseplay with the teenager and the behaviour became more outrageous after Katherine became pregnant at the end of He would visit Elizabeth, clad only in his nightshirt, and tumble with her on her bed.
For a while Katherine was tolerant, even at times joining in the horseplay, but when on one occasion she came upon her husband and her royal ward embracing, she sent Elizabeth away. On 30 August Katherine gave birth to a daughter, Mary, but immediately succumbed to puerperal fever.
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