Katherine the Queen: The Remarkable Life of Katherine Parr Read Online Free Page A

magnificence. In this respect, he owed much to the flair and love of public show exhibited by his grandfather, Edward IV. The young king was determined to enjoy himself, to find outlets for his restive physicality and his love of music and composition. Inthese early days of the reign, during the summer progress of 1510, he passed his days ‘shooting [archery], singing, dancing, wrestling, casting of the bar, playing at the recorders, flute, virginals, and in setting of songs, making of ballads, and did set two goodly masses, every of them of five parts, which were sung oftentimes in his chapel and afterwards in diverse other places. And when he came to Woking, there were kept both jousts and tournays. The rest of this progress was spent in hawking, hunting and shooting.’ 9
    Henry’s court was soon provided with that other prerequisite of the medieval ideal to which he aspired: a queen and her ladies. Katherine of Aragon married Henry in a private ceremony on 11 June. Their joint coronation followed on Midsummer’s Day. The Spanish princess, marooned in England since the death of Henry’s elder brother, Prince Arthur, some seven years earlier, now became the wife of the boy who had escorted her into St Paul’s Cathedral on her first wedding day. This sounds romantic, but the truth was much less so. Katherine did not know the young king well and had been kept apart from him during the prolonged wrangling over her future between her own father, Ferdinand of Aragon, and Henry VII. There had been hard bargaining over the payment of the long overdue remainder of her marriage portion before vows were finally exchanged. She was nearly six years older than Henry VIII; not a huge difference, but he was barely eighteen when he ascended the throne and Katherine seems to have thought, with justification, that she knew more of the world than he did. She was never prepared to play the role of invisible queen consort, as Elizabeth of York, so briefly her mother-in-law, had done in the previous reign. But she was happy to wear the king’s favours as he jousted, to worry over the injuries he sustained (which were to cause him great pain many years later) and to be his consort. Petite and goldenhaired, she was an attractive young woman with an unmistakable air of regality. Katherine was the perfect foil to her husband’s exuberance. Her contentment, with just a hint of indulgence, isapparent in the letter she wrote to her father, telling him that the days were passed ‘in continual festival’.
    So these were good times for those families accustomed to serve. Both Sir Thomas and Lady Maud Parr were able to take full advantage of the openings for people of their background and social skills. They were often at court, participating in entertainments and disguisings, enjoying life to the full. Thomas and his younger brother, William Parr, were close companions of the king, part of the charmed circle surrounding the new monarch. They kept company with the Staffords and the Nevilles, the Carews and a diplomat-knight of Norfolk origin, Sir Thomas Boleyn. Amusement was constant, luxury unabashed. Henry had an innate grasp of the importance of image. The Venetian ambassador described his glittering appearance with awe: ‘his fingers were one mass of jewelled rings and around his neck he wore a gold collar from which hung a diamond as big as a walnut’. 10 The business of government he found irksome, but the possibilities of diversion were ever present. Typical of his rumbustious approach to life was his foray into the queen’s chambers in Westminster one January morning in 1510, his entourage dressed as Robin Hood’s men, bent on getting the ladies to dance. There was always about him something of the air of a practical joker (he used the same approach to impress a startled Anne of Cleves at their first meeting thirty years later, with such unfortunate results), but if the king’s determination for such good cheer was occasionally