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| ISBN-13: | 9780752462523 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | The History Press |
| Publication date: | 12/26/2010 |
| Sold by: | INDEPENDENT PUB GROUP - EPUB - EBKS |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 352 |
| File size: | 4 MB |
| Age Range: | 18 Years |
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Catherine Parr
Henry VII's Last Love
By Susan James
The History Press
Copyright © 2011 Susan James,All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-7524-6252-3
CHAPTER 1
The Parrs of Kendal
In 1507, a twenty-nine-year-old courtier at the court of Henry VII purchased the wardship and marriage of a fifteen-year-old heiress from Northamptonshire. Having taken his time to weigh up the character of the girl and possibly to give her time to become accustomed to him, he married her a year or so later. Such marriages were commonplace among the gentry in the sixteenth century and the heirs to large or even moderate estates, regardless of sex, were generally married, or at least betrothed, at puberty. It was considered essential to secure the succession of land within a recognized and accepted circle of families and in order to accomplish this, the heir to that land had to be used to dynastic advantage as soon as biologically feasible. Thus a year or so after having purchased the rights to both her person and her property, Thomas Parr of Kendal in Westmorland (1478–1517) wed the teenaged Matilda Green (1492–1531) of Green's Norton. The feelings of the bride on this occasion went unrecorded.
The new Mistress Parr, always known in the family as 'Maud', was the daughter of Sir Thomas Green of Green's Norton in Northamptonshire. Green was the last male heir of a family who had lived at Green's Norton since the middle of the fourteenth century. An exceedingly wealthy man, he had made an advantageous marriage with the granddaughter of Sir John Fogge, treasurer of the royal household under Edward IV. Sir Thomas Green was a man of his times, pugnaciously conservative in religion, quarrelsome, conniving, and given to taking the law into his own hands. He ended his days in the Tower on trumped up charges of treason, dying there in 1506 and leaving two motherless daughters as his heirs. The younger daughter Maud, fourteen at her father's death, was a girl of passionate nature and stubbornness of spirit, who possessed a love of learning and a self-confidence in her own abilities unusual in a woman of her day and age. These qualities were to help determine the course of her life. At the age of fifteen, ten months after her father's death, Maud Green's person and prospects were sold to Thomas Parr, a man nearly twice her age. Having married the teenaged heiress and secured her lands in the following year, he lost no time in getting her with child, thus ensuring that the Green inheritance would stay in the Parr family.
Thomas Parr, father of Catherine, William and Anne Parr, was the descendant of a rough and ready northern gentry clan, the Parrs of Kendal. They had been, after the Crown itself, the most influential presence in southern Westmorland since 1381. The paternal grandfather of the Parr children, Sir William Parr of Kendal (1434–1483), served as comptroller of the household, councillor and friend to the first Yorkist king, Edward IV, whose own grandson Catherine would later marry. When Sir William Parr died in 1483 during the tumultuous reign of Richard III, he left four small children, among them five-year-old Thomas, and a twenty-three-year-old widow – born Elizabeth Fitzhugh. Descended from Edward III and niece of Warwick, the 'Kingmaker', the widowed Lady Parr's natural orbit seems to have revolved around the court. She served as a lady-in-waiting to Richard III's queen and at the fall of the Yorkist dynasty made a second marriage with a protégé of Margaret Beaufort, mother of the new king, Henry VII, which saved the family fortunes.
Elizabeth Fitzhugh's eldest son, Thomas Parr, father of the Parrs, seems to have inherited his easy-going, pleasure-loving disposition from his mother. When the widowed Lady Parr took Sir Nicholas Vaux of Harrowden in Northamptonshire as her second husband, Thomas soon developed close bonds with his stepfather. He grew up in Vaux's household, content to live in the south where he had been raised, and less than eager to change his comfortable Northamptonshire residence for the crumbling stone walls of Kendal Castle, his ancestral home, located an inconvenient distance from court. Thomas, it seems, was a man of singular charm. When the fouteen-year-old Princess Margaret Tudor left England to become the queen of James IV of Scotland in July 1505, she began her journey from her grandmother's house at Colyweston in Northamptonshire where Thomas Parr may have spent part of his youth. When she returned to England ten years later, Thomas was a member of the party who greeted her at Newcastle. By the time the party reached York, 'her grace rode upon a white palfrey behind Sir Thomas Parr, he riding bare head ... and when the said Queen was anenst the said Mayor [of York], the said Sir Thomas Parr advanced the Queen['s] horse toward the said Mayor, saying to her grace – here is the Mayor of this city.' By the time they reached London, almost a month later, Margaret was still clearly desirous of Parr's company and 'her grace did ride behind Sir Thomas Parr through Cheapside about six o'clock, and so to Baynard's Castle ...'
By the time of his marriage, Thomas Parr was thirty years old. Like his mother and grandmother before him, both former royal ladies-in- waiting, he enjoyed the atmosphere of the court. Yet it cannot be said that his king, Henry VII, had proved a particularly good lord to Parr during the last decade of his reign. Between 1499, when he attained his majority, and 1509, the year in which Henry VII died, Parr's chief difficulty with the crown lay in balancing his attempts at personal enrichment against the king's notoriously aggressive policy of royal enrichment through the rigorous prosecution of his feudal prerogative, a policy that was to leave his royal heir with a full treasury at his death. Exorbitant punitive costs were imposed by the state for attaining livery of the Parr lands, for renewing long-held leaseholds, and for attaining title to his wife's inheritance. When Henry VII died in April 1509, Parr was bound to the crown for unpaid sums totaling nearly £9,000. The horrendous size of this financial obligation can be gauged by the fact that the income from the Parr estates was worth roughly £150 a year. In simple arithmetic, then, it would have taken Parr nearly sixty years to pay off the bonds if he invested the entire income from his estates as they were in 1499. Ultimately, Henry VIII cancelled much of this debt to the crown but it was the threat of demanded payment that Henry VII held over Parr's head just as he did over the heads of as many of the English upper classes as it was possible to bring into his web of control. Nor was the king content with merely the threat the bonds represented. Parr was forced to pay off at least a portion of this enormous debt (about 3,000 marks) and when he could not make the payments, various pieces of his estate were confiscated by the crown, reducing the amount of rental fees available for the repayment of the balance. Inheritor not only of his family's lands but of his family's burning ambition for position and title, by 1508 Thomas had nothing to show for his ambitions but a load of debt and an appointment as esquire for the body. Choosing the age-old solution of dissatisfied courtiers everywhere, he began to cultivate a friendship not with the present monarch but with his heir. In 1508 the old king's heir was Henry, Prince of Wales, the future Henry VIII.
Born in 1491, heir to the throne at eleven, Prince Henry was all a Renaissance prince should be – attractive, affable, intelligent, an excellent sportsman and scholar, with pretensions to musical ability. He was known for his looks, his wit and his intellectual understanding. Catherine Parr's future royal husband deplored his father's pinchpenny economies and lacklustre lifestyle. As a young man, Henry Tudor proved to be the true grandson of Edward IV, glittering with possibility and promise. The younger men at court gravitated naturally to the lively circle around the heir apparent and among these was Catherine's father, Thomas Parr. Like so many others, Parr waited impatiently for the death of the old king and the beginning of that golden age which the coming of the golden prince promised.
On 21 April 1509 Henry VII died, and Henry VIII became King of England. For nearly forty years and on through the reigns of his children, England was to ride the choppy seas into which Henry plowed his ship of state. Wives, children, ministers, religion, and political alliances were so many building blocks to the golden prince, to be piled up, tumbled down, used or discarded at will. What came between Henry and his desires was ruthlessly eliminated. But the true nature of the king, fashioned as it was by genetics, inclination and the raw clay of circumstance, had yet to be revealed in 1509. With Henry's accession to the throne, the fortunes of the Parr family improved. As part of the new king's coronation festivities, Thomas Parr was created a Knight of Bath and granted the stewardship of all the royal lands in the old barony of Kendal. Four months later, Henry cancelled debts to the crown amounting to 16,000 marks owed by Parr and his stepfather, Sir Nicholas Vaux, and by 1513, the king had cancelled entirely the remainder of Parr's huge feudal debt. In November 1509, he threw in a 50-mark annuity to Parr for good measure. With Henry VIII's accession to the throne, life for the Parr family not only presented altogether more attractive prospects for advancement but for revelry as well. Between 1509 and 1515, during the early years of Catherine and William's childhood, their father and mother became active members of a court that sought to resurrect Camelot, that delighted in lavish amusements and display, in jousts, feasts and pageants, that saw Catherine's father and uncle dressed in Kendal green playing the part of Robin Hood's Merry Men and running 'for a gladness to the Queen's grace.' The change in mood from the gloomy court of the late Henry VII could not have been more marked. The new king's marriage to his brother's Spanish widow, Catherine of Aragon, had provided the new Camelot with a queen worthy of the honour, and Catherine's mother, Maud, was soon appointed one of her ladies-in-waiting. A friendship was formed between the new queen and the young Lady Parr that lasted until Maud's death in 1531.
By the time she was five years old, Catherine Parr had led an itinerant childhood, the lot of many children whose parents were in service at court. Her father seemed to be content to wander from residence to residence without ever actually establishing a family seat in the south. In 1509, three years before his elder daughter's birth, Thomas listed himself as 'of Kendal, Harrowden, Carlisle and Kirkoswald', and by 1510, he had added 'of London' to the list. In 1509 he joined his stepfather, Sir Nicholas Vaux, in an investment venture in the English Pale in France and spent some time during the next few summers across the Channel at the castles of Guisnes and Hammes. How many years these summer holidays continued and whether the young Parrs ever travelled to France with their father is not recorded. Shortly before her birth, Catherine's parents had purchased or leased a house in the fashionable London area of Blackfriars. They were spending an increasing amount of time at court and wanted their own home in the city. Their family was growing as well. Their first son, with whom Maud had found herself pregnant shortly after her marriage, did not survive the vicissitudes of child mortality and the only remembrance of him was as a mourner on his parents' tomb in St. Anne's Church in Blackfriars. The Parrs' second child, Catherine, was born in 1512, probably in the month of August, and was followed by their only surviving son, William, born on 14 August 1513. Their second daughter, Anne, the future Countess of Pembroke, was born about 1515. When Catherine's father died in November 1517, her mother was pregnant again, but this child, like its eldest brother, did not survive infancy. The birthplaces of the Parr children, particularly of Catherine, have been hotly debated, with Kendal Castle edging out competitors in the mythology of Catherine's life. At the time of Catherine's birth, however, Kendal Castle was in less than sound repair and by 1572 it was derelict. That Sir Thomas would carry his pregnant wife on a gruelling two-week journey north over execrable roads to give birth in a crumbling castle in which neither of them had ever lived seems improbable.
On 25 November 1510, Sir Thomas Parr received a grant of the manor of 'Fenel's Grove or Whitingham's manor' in Great Kimble (near Aylesbury) in Buckinghamshire. He held title to this manor until November 1512, when the Crown returned it to the family of its original owner, and in all likelihood if she did not give birth to her elder daughter in her Blackfriars house, Lady Parr did so here. With the loss of Great Kimble in the winter of 1512, and until the spring of 1516, the Parrs seem to have resided mainly in London. Then in March 1516 they were granted the manor of Lillingstone Lovell in Oxfordshire, together with the castle of Moor's End at Potterspury near the Buckinghamshire–Northamptonshire border. Maud Parr's father, Sir Thomas Green, had been constable of Moor's End castle and keeper of the park, so the area was no doubt familiar to her. The Parrs' continued residence at Moor's End seems, however, to have been dependent on whether or not Sir Thomas held office in the area. In August 1517, Cardinal Wolsey notified the king that, 'Sir Thomas Parr will probably ask for [Sir Nicholas Vaux's] offices in Northamptonshire and if you grant it, he can resume the manor of Moor's End which [you] granted to him, his wife and son during their lives.' In the event, the Parrs never did return to Moor's End. Sometime in the year or so before his death, Catherine's father secured the lease of Rye House in Hertfordshire. It was at Rye House where Catherine, William and Anne spent the formative years of their childhood. For it was here after Sir Thomas' death in 1517 that Lady Parr and her children finally established a more or less permanent home, maintaining it until Maud Parr's own death in December 1531.
Sir Thomas' career at court acquired a new lustre in January 1512 when his first cousin, Lord Fitzhugh of Ravensworth, died, leaving Parr heir to a moiety of the vast Fitzhugh estates. At a stroke, Sir Thomas became master of half the Fitzhugh lands in seven counties, which included twenty-three manors in the North Riding of Yorkshire and the palatinate of Durham alone. Yet the baronies associated with Fitzhugh's lands – Marmion, St. Quintin and Fitzhugh of Ravensworth – eluded him, the titles going to the senior heir, Thomas Fiennes, Lord Dacre of the South. Influence and income, if not title, both increased, Parr continued to look for ways to enhance his power at court. In the summer of 1516, he joined the nascent Tudor civil service when his cousin Sir Thomas Lovell, made him an associate master of the wards, a hitherto unknown office. In 1513, Lovell followed Sir John Hussey as the second master of the Court of Wards and Liveries, founded in 1503 by Henry VII to regulate the income from these lucrative sources of feudal revenue. At the beginning of his tenure as master, Lovell was a busy royal servant, but by the summer of 1516, he had begun to withdraw from royal affairs. It may have been the onset of the unknown illness which killed him eight years later or an inability to accommodate himself to Thomas Wolsey's rising star that caused his partial retirement to his house at Elsing, near Enfield in Middlesex. He did not, however, give up the mastership of the wards entirely but continued to hold it until 1520. Nevertheless, Lovell apparently desired to share the duties of the office with an associate master and his choice fell on Sir Thomas Parr. One document, a signet bill, bearing the joint signatures of Lovell and Parr, indicates the establishment of this new office, and the inscription on Parr's tomb in St. Anne's, Blackfriars, read, 'Pray for the soul of Thomas Par, knight of the king's body, Henry the eighth, master of his wardes ... and ... sher[iff] ... who deceased the 11th day of November in the 9th year of the reign of our said sovereign lord at London, in the ... (Black)Fryers ...'
By the fall of 1517 Sir Thomas Parr was thirty-nine. He had been married for nearly a decade to a dynamic and intelligent woman half his age and was the father of three young children. He maintained homes in London and Hertfordshire. He was popular with the king, a master of his wards, and had served at court with such men as Sir Thomas More, but his career had not prospered as much as it might have done. Although rich in land, the title of baron had eluded him. At the beginning of November, Parr fell ill and quickly got worse. On 7 November he wrote his will leaving £400 apiece as marriage portions for his six-year-old daughter, Catherine, and his baby daughter, Anne. He provided for a younger son if the child with whom Maud Parr was pregnant should be a boy. If Maud produced 'any more daughters', Sir Thomas states rather humourlessly, 'she shall marry them at her own cost.' The bulk of his considerable estate descended to his only son and heir, four-year-old William, with Maud, Cuthbert Tunstall, Bishop of London, Sir William Parr of Horton, and Dr. Melton as executors.
Sir Thomas Parr died at his London house on 11 November and was buried in St. Anne's Church, Blackfriars, beneath an elaborate table tomb overlooked by images probably in stained glass depicting his wife, himself and their four children kneeling in prayer. He died in a year that was to have overwhelming consequences not only for the history of Sir Thomas' children, but for the history of Western civilisation as well. For it was in 1517, less than two weeks before Parr's death, that Martin Luther pinned his 95 theses to the church door in Wittenberg and tore the first rent in the seamless garment of European Christendom. For the moment, however, it was Sir Thomas' death that was of primary importance to the Parr family.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Catherine Parr by Susan James. Copyright © 2011 Susan James,. Excerpted by permission of The History Press.
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Table of Contents
Contents
Title Page,Dedication,
Genealogy,
Part 1: The Parrs of Kendal,
Introduction,
1 The Parrs of Kendal,
2 'Ripe and Seasonable Knowledge',
3 Civil War in the Household of the Duke of Richmond,
4 In Search of a Title,
5 The Parrs and the Pilgrimage of Grace,
6 'All Our Immoderate Affections',
Part 2: 'Kateryn, The Quene',
7 'The Quene's Grace',
8 'Most Honourable and Entirely Beloved Mother',
9 Patronage and the Queen's Household,
10 Regent-General of England,
11 'The Boke of the Crucifix',
12 'All the Words of Angels',
13 Fall From Grace,
14 'Very Shadows and Dreams',
15 'Requests and Desires',
16 Lord Seymour of Sudeley,
17 'The End of Summer',
Abbreviations,
Bibliography,
Acknowledgements,
List of Illustrations,
Copyright,