KATHARINE PARR SIXTH QUEEN OF HENRY VIII. CHAPTER I. KATHARINE PARR was the first Protestant queen of England. She was the only one among the consorts of Henry VIII. who, in the sincerity of an honest heart, embraced the doctrine of the Reformation, and imperilled her crown and life in support of her principles. The name of Katharine, which, from its Greek derivation Katharos, signifies "pure as a limpid stream," seems peculiarly suited to the characteristics of this illustrious lady, in whom we behold the protectress of Coverdale, the friend of Anne Askew-the learned and virtuous matron who directed the studies of lady Jane Gray, Edward VI., and queen Elizabeth, and who may, with truth, be called the nursing-mother of the Reformation. Katharine Parr was not only queen of England, but an English queen. Although of ancient and even royal descent, she claimed, by birth, no other rank than that of a private gentlewoman. Like Anne Boleyn and Jane Seymour, Katharine Parr was only the daughter of a knight; but her father, Sir Thomas Parr, was of a more distinguished ancestry than either Sir Thomas Boleyn or Sir John Seymour. From the marriage of his Norman progenitor, Ivo de Tallebois, with Lucy, the sister of the renowned earls Morcar and Edwin, Sir Thomas Parr inherited the blood of the Anglo-Saxon kings. Ivo de Tallebois was the first baron of Kendal, and maintained the state of a petty sovereign in the north. The male line failing with William de Lancaster, the seventh in descent, the honour and estates of that mighty family passed to his sisters Helwise and Alice. Margaret, the elder co-heiress of Helwise by Peter le Brus, married the younger son of Robert lord Roos, of Hamlake and Werks, by Isabel, daughter of Alexander II. king of Scotland. Their grandson, Sir Thomas de Roos, married Katherine, the daughter of Sir Thomas Strickland, of Sizergh-castle, Westmoreland. The fruit of this union was an only daughter, Elizabeth, who brought Kendalcastle and a rich inheritance into queen Katharine's paternal house, by 1513.] Her parentage and birth. 391 her marriage with Sir William de Parr, knight. Sir William Parr, the grandson of this pair, was made knight of the Garter, and married Elizabeth, one of the co-heiresses of the lord Fitzhugh, by Alice, daughter of Ralph Neville, earl of Westmoreland and Joanna Beaufort, daughter of John of Gaunt, duke of Lancaster. Alice Neville was sister to the king's great-grandmother, Cicely Neville, duchess of York; and, through this connection, Katharine Parr was fourth cousin to Henry VIII.1 From the elder co-heiress of Fitzhugh, the patrimony of the Marmions, the ancient champions of England, was transmitted to Sir Thomas Parr, father of queen Katharine. Her mother, Matilda, or, as she was commonly called, Maud Green, was daughter and co-heiress of Sir Thomas Green, of Boughton and Green's Norton, in the county of Northampton. This lady was a descendant of the distinguished families of Talbot and Throckmorton Her sister Anne wedded Sir Nicholas Vaux, afterwards created lord Vaux of Harrowden; and, dying childless, the whole of the rich inheritance of the Greens of Boughton centred in Matilda. At the age of thirteen Matilda became the wife of Sir Thomas Parr. This marriage took place in the year 1508. The date generally assigned for the birth of Katharine Parr is 1510; but the correspondence between her mother and lord Dacre, in the fifteenth year of king Henry VIII., in which her age is specified to be under twelve,3 will prove that she could not have been born till 1513. Her father, Sir Thomas Parr, at that time held high offices at court, being master of the wards and comptroller of the household to Henry VIII. As a token of royal favour, we find that the king presented him with a rich gold chain, value 1407.—a very large sum in those days.* Both Sir Thomas and his lady were frequent residents in the court; but the child who was destined hereafter to share the throne of their royal master, first saw the light at Kendal-castle, in Westmoreland, the timehonoured fortress which had been the hereditary seat of her ancestors from the days of its Norman founder, Ivo de Tallebois. A crumbling relic of this stronghold of feudal greatness is still in existence, rising like a grey crown over the green hills of Kendal. It is situate on a lofty eminence, commanding a panoramic view of the town and the picturesque, ever-verdant vale of the Kent, that clear and rapid stream which, night and day, sings an unwearied song as it rushes over its rocky bed at the foot of the castle-hill. The circular tower of the castle is the most considerable portion of the ruins, but there is a large enclosure of ivy-mantled walls remaining, with a few broken arches. These are now crowned with wild flowers, whose peaceful blossoms wave unnoted where the red-cross banner of St. George once flaunted on tower and parapet of the sternly-guarded fortress that for centuries was 1 Dugdale. 2 Baker's Northamptonshire, corrected from Dugdale. regarded as the most important defence of the town of Kendal and the adjacent country. The warlike progenitors of Katharine had stern duties to perform at the period when the kings of Scotland held Cumberland of the English crown and were perpetually harassing the northern counties with predatory expeditions. Before the auspicious era when the realms of England and Scotland were united under one sovereign, the lord of Kendal-castle and his feudal neighbour of Sizergh were compelled to furnish a numerous quota of men-at-arms, for the service of the crown and the protection of the border. The contingent consisted of horse and foot, and, above all, of those bowmen so renowned in border history and song, the Kendal archers. They are thus noted by the metrical chronicler of the battle of Flodden, "These are the bows of Kentdale bold, Dame Maud Parr evinced a courageous disposition in venturing to choose Kendal-castle for the place of her accouchement, at the time when the northern counties were menaced with an invasion from the puissance and flower of Scotland, headed by their king in person. Sir Thomas Parr was, however, obliged to be on duty there with his warlike meiné, in readiness either to attend the summons of the lord warden of the marches, or to hold the fortress for the defence of the town and neighbourhood; and his lady, instead of remaining in the metropolis, or seeking a safer abiding-place at Green's Norton, her own patrimonial domain, decided on sharing her husband's perils in the north, and there gave birth to Katharine. They had two other children, William, their son and heir, afterwards created earl of Essex and marquis of Northampton, and Anne, the wife of William Herbert, the natural son of the earl of Pembroke, to which dignity he was himself raised by Edward VI. Sir Thomas Parr died in the year 1517, leaving his three infant children to the guardianship of his faithful widow, who is said to have been a lady of great prudence and wisdom, with a discreet care for the main chance. The will of Sir Thomas Parr is dated November 7, the 9th of Henry VIII. He bequeathed his body to be interred in Blackfriars church, London. All his manors, lands, and tenements he gave to his wife, dame Maud, during her life. He willed his daughters, Katharine and Anne, to have eight hundred pounds between them, as marriage-portions, except they proved to be his heirs or his son's heirs; in which case that sum was to be laid out in copes and vestments, and given to the monks of Clairveaux, with a hundred pounds to the chantry of Kendal, He willed his son William “to have his great chain, worth one hundred and forty pounds, which the king's grace gave him." He made Maude, his 1520.] Her royal destinyoretold. 393 wife, and Dr. Tunstall, master of the rolls, his executors. Four hundred pounds, Katharine's moiety of the sum provided by her father for the nuptial portions of herself and her sister, would be scarcely equal to two thousand pounds in these days, and seems but an inadequate dowry for the daughters of parents so richly endowed with the gifts of fortune as Sir Thomas and lady Parr. It was, however, all that was accorded to her who was hereafter to contract matrimony with the sovereign of the realm. Sir Thomas Parr died in London on the 11th of November, four days after the date of his will. It has generally been said, that Katharine Parr received a learned education from her father; but, as she was only in her fifth year when he died, it must have been to the maternal wisdom of lady Parr that she was indebted for those mental acquirements that so eminently fitted her to adorn the exalted station to which she was afterwards raised. Katharine was gifted by nature with fine talents, and these were improved by the advantages of careful cultivation. She both read and wrote Latin with facility, possessed some knowledge of Greek, and was well versed in modern languages. How perfect a mistress she was of her own, the elegance and beauty of her devotional writings are a standing monument. "I have met with a passage concerning this queen," says Strype, "in the margin of Bale's Centuries, in possession of a late friend of mine, Dr. Sampson, which showed the greatness of her mind and the quickness of her wit while she was yet a young child. Somebody skilled in prognostication, casting her nativity, said that she was born to sit in the highest seat of imperial majesty, having all the eminent stars and planets in her house. This she heard and took such notice of, that when her mother used sometimes to call her to work, she would reply— 'My hands are ordained to touch crowns and sceptres, and not spindles and needles.""1 This striking incident affords one among many instances in which the prediction of a brilliant destiny has insured its own fulfilment, by its powerful influence on an energetic mind. It is also an exemplification at how precocious an age the germ of ambition may take root in the human heart. But, however disposed the little Katharine might have been to dispense with the performance of her tasks, under the idea of queening it hereafter, lady Parr was too wise a parent to allow vain dreams of royalty to unfit her child for the duties of the station of life in which she was born; and, notwithstanding Katharine's early repugnance to touch a needle, her skill and industry in its use became so remarkable, that there are specimens of her embroidery at Sizergh-castle which could scarcely have been surpassed by the far-famed stitcheries of the sisters of king Athelstan. The friend and companion of Katharine's childhood and early youth was her young kinswoman Elizabeth Bellingham, daughter 1 Strype's Mems., vol. ii. part 1, p. 206. and co-heiress of Sir Robert Bellingham, of Burneside, a beautiful village near Kendal. This young lady, who was nearly related to Katharine, both through the Parrs and Stricklands, was brought up at Kendalcastle under the maternal auspices of dame Maud Parr, and shared the studies of the future queen of England, who formed so tender a regard for her, that when the wild dreams of childhood touching her royal destiny were strangely realized, one of her first exercises of queenly influence was to send for her cousin Elizabeth Bellingham to court, and bestow an appointment in her royal household upon her.1 Though dame Maud Parr had scarcely completed her twenty-second year at the time of her husband's death, she never entered into a second marriage, but devoted herself entirely to the superintendence of her children's education. In the year 1524 she entered into a negotiation with her kinsman, lord Dacre, for a marriage between his grandson, the heir of lord Scrope, and her daughter Katharine, of which the particulars may be learned from some very curious letters preserved among the Scrope MSS. The first is from dame Maud Parr to lord Dacre, and refers to a personal conference she had had with his lordship at Greenwich on the subject of this alliance : "Whereas it pleased you at your last being here to take pains in the matter in consideration of marriage between the lord Scroop's son and my daughter Katharine, for the which I heartily thank you, at which time I thought the matter in good furtherance. Howbeit, I perceive that my lord Scroop is not agreeable to that consideration. The jointure is little for 1100 marks, which I will not pass, and my said lord will not repay after marriage had; and 200 marks must needs be repaid if my daughter Katharine dies before the age of sixteen, or else I should break master Parr's will [meaning the will of her husband Sir Thomas], which I should be loath to do; and there can be no marriage until my lord's son [lord Scroop] comes to the age of thirteen, and my daughter to the age of twelve, before which time, if the marriage should take none effect, or be dissolved either by death, wardship, disagreement, or otherwise, which may be before that time notwithstanding marriage solemnized, repayment must needs be had of the whole, or else I might fortune to pay my money for nothing. The conversation I had with you at Greenwich was, that I was to pay at desire 1100 marks, 100 on hand-and 100 every year, which is as much as I can spare, as you know; and for that my daughter Katharine is to have 100 marks jointure, whereof I am to have 50 marks for her finding till they live together, and then they are to have the whole 100 marks, and repayment to be had if the marriage took not effect." Lord Scrope, of Bolton-castle, did not choose to submit to the refunding part of the clause, and was unwilling to allow more than forty marks per annum for the board or finding of the young lady till the heir of Scrope came to the age of eighteen. Lord Dacre, after some inconsequential letters between him and dame Maud, proved his sincerity in the promotion of the wedlock by the following pithy arguments, contained in an epistle to lord Scrope, his son-in-law : "MY LORD, "Your son and heir is the greatest jewel that ye can have, seeing he must represent your own person after your death, unto whom I pray God grant many long years. And if ye be 1 Burns' Westmoreland and Cumberland, vol. iv. p. 366. 2 Quoted in Whittaker's History of Richmondshire. |