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

oppressive, his companions knew better than to criticize. All seemed set fair for the Parrs. They preferred to follow the court rather than establish their residence in any one place.
    While her husband used his charm and courtier’s training, Maud became a lady-in-waiting to Queen Katherine and served her faithfully for the rest of her life, from the heady early days of the reign through the testing time of the 1520s, until Maud’s death in 1531. Theirs was a relationship that went much deeper than giddy pleasure. Both women knew what it was like to losechildren in stillbirths and in infancy. During the first year of her marriage, Katherine had a late miscarriage, which pride and gynaecological ignorance refused to acknowledge. It began a pattern of failed pregnancies and infant deaths for which only the Princess Mary, born in 1516, was an exception. And Maud, too, suffered as many mothers did in those days. She conceived shortly after she married Thomas Parr and bore him a son. But any happiness at the arrival of an heir was fleeting; the child died young and not even his name is known. Then, between 1512 and 1515, three healthy children came in close succession. The eldest of these was a girl. She was christened Katherine, after the queen, who may also have been her godmother.

    T HE PRECISE DATE of Katherine Parr’s birth is not known but there is general agreement that it was probably some time in August 1512. The following year saw the arrival of her brother, William. Two years later a second daughter, Anne, was born. Despite their father’s northern background, the Parrs grew up in the south of England. Kendal Castle was already falling into disrepair and it is not likely that Maud Parr would have struggled to the north of England for the birth. Her husband, though mindful of his family’s origins in Westmoreland, never wanted to live there. It was too far from the centre of things. Nor does he seem to have desired to establish a pre-eminent residence among the properties he owned elsewhere. His base was very much London and the house he owned in Blackfriars, which was probably where Katherine was born.
    His reluctance to establish himself as a provincial grandee had nothing to do with monetary difficulties. At the beginning of 1512 he inherited half of the estates of his Fitzhugh cousin, Lord Fitzhugh of Ravenworth, making him a major landowner in the north-east of England as well as the north-west. Combined with the cancellation of the rest of his debt to the Crown the following year, Sir Thomas could be much more confident about hissituation than he had been a mere four years earlier. But still no hereditary title came his way. Sir Thomas Parr accepted that, if he was ever to achieve this goal, he must continue to look for office and stay close to the royal family. Opportunities would present themselves, and he had a good eye for them. In 1515 he journeyed to Newcastle, ready to accompany the king’s sister, Queen Margaret of Scotland, on her return to England. Margaret, who had a weakness for attractive men, seems to have been charmed by her gallant escort and stayed close to him throughout her month-long progress south to London. There was no hint of anything improper; Parr was merely demonstrating how perfectly he had mastered the courtier’s arts.
    He knew, however, that acting the gallant to royal ladies was only part of the secret of success for a gentleman in his position. The following year he was offered a more prosaic but potentially lucrative role by his cousin Sir Thomas Lovell, a former chancellor of the exchequer. It was a new office – associate master of the wards – and Parr took it gratefully. Family connections thus helped to tie him to the growing civil service as well as the court. He also moved in the humanist, educated circles of his day and had a direct link to Thomas More, the renowned scholar and later Lord Chancellor. Thomas More’s first wife was the daughter of Parr’s