Read an Excerpt
COMPLETE WORKS AND CORRESPONDENCE
By KATHERINE PARR
THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS
Copyright © 2011 The University of Chicago
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-226-64724-1
Introduction
The first woman to publish in print a work of her own under her own name, in England and in English, was Katherine Parr, King Henry VIII's last queen, who survived him into widowhood as a royal dowager. The wording of the work's title seems implicitly to explain why Parr is identified as the author:
PRAYERS OR Medytacions ... Collected out of holy woorkes by the most vertuous and graciouse Princesse Katherine quene of Englande, Fraunce, and Irelande. Anno domini 1545. Such public acknowledgment by name accrued to her, evidently, by virtue of her rank as queen. Biography looks like destiny in registering this first for Katherine Parr as a female author in English.
A presumptive link between royal status and the naming of a female in conjunction with a work's publication is borne out by the few facts pertaining to the question for the first seventy-five years of print in England. The earliest evidence comes from William Atkynson's composite English version of Thomas à Kempis's De Imitatione Christi, published in 1503–4. Atkynson translated the first three books of the Imitatio from the original Latin but printed the fourth book, as the heading within the text states, "at the commaundement of Margarete," Countess of Richmond and Derby, mother of King Henry VII, "and by the same prynces [princess] traunslated oute of frenche." By contrast, around 1526, when Richard Hyrde saw through the press the English translation of Erasmus's Precatio Dominica made by Margaret More Roper, Sir Thomas More's superbly educated oldest daughter, its title page left her identity unspecified: A deuout treatise vpon the Pater noster, made fyrst in latyn and tourned in to englisshe by a yong gentylwoman.
Again by contrast, when John Bale somehow obtained and published in 1548 at Marburg, Germany, the English prose translation of Marguerite de Navarre's poem Le Miroir de l'âme pécheresse, made as a gift for New Year's 1545 by Princess Elizabeth for her stepmother, Queen Katherine Parr, Bale proudly identified the young royal translator three times over. His prefatory letter to Elizabeth salutes her lineage; she appears crowned and kneeling at the feet of Christ in a woodcut on the title page and again on the last page; and she and her rank (as well as her virtue and learning) are prominently credited in the title that Bale gives to her work: A Godly Medytacion of the christen sowle ... compyled in frenche by Lady Margarete quene of Nauer, and aptely translated into Englysh by the ryght vertuouse lady Elyzabeth doughter to our late souerayne Kynge Henri the viij.
Rather than the special treatment accorded to exalted rank, however, the prolific body of recent scholarship on women's writing in early modern England has tended to emphasize a generic factor—the frequent choice of religious and devotional materials—by which women writers of whatever rank secured cultural validation for themselves and strengthened their incentive to write and publish. No exceptions in this regard, the above-cited literary productions of Queen Katherine Parr, Lady Margaret Beaufort, Margaret More Roper, and Princess Elizabeth are conspicuous for their devotional cast. Devotion, moreover, remains the primary genre and referent for Parr's authorial output from first to last. Yet in proposing to account for Katherine Parr's authorship, an interpretive choice does not have to be made between devotion and royal rank. As she confides in a letter written to Henry VIII in the summer of 1544, a year after she became his wife and queen, she experiences God's grace and the king's graciousness to her as closely concurrent if not convergent sources of blessings:
I make like account with your majesty as I do with God for His benefits and gifts heaped upon me daily, acknowledging myself always a great debtor unto Him ..., not being able to recompense the least of His benefits: in which state I am certain and sure to die, but yet I hope in His gracious acceptation of my goodwill. And even such confidence I have in your majesty's gentleness, knowing myself never to have done my duty as was requisite and meet to such a noble and worthy prince, at whose hands I have found and received so much love and goodness, that with words I cannot express it.
The preceding quotation sets the perspective for the present edition of Katherine Parr's correspondence and complete works. The fact that all her works are religious in nature compels recognition of the importance of devotion as an incentive for female authorship in early modern England. In the latter sections of this edition, where Parr's complete works are presented in chronological order, devotion comes repeatedly to the fore. In the earlier sections, however, the sequencing and grouping of Parr's correspondence, broadly construed, aim to establish her biography as not only important but a sine qua non of her earliness as an English woman author.
To call biography a sine qua non is to gesture pointedly at the absence of any evidence of literary production (including correspondence) by Katherine Parr until she becomes Henry VIII's queen in July 1543; thereafter, the evidence in both categories is appreciable and increasingly self-assured. But if Parr's biography as the precondition of her authorship and its public expression turns crucially on her position as Henry VIII's queen, there are contributory factors from her earlier life to be reckoned with as well. Most prominent among these are her family's history of acquaintance with the court through her father's and her mother's careers of professional service, and the advantage of an educational preparation that, however irretrievable in its specifics, left decisive traces in Parr's capacity to recognize and capitalize on opportunities for authorship when they came her way.
The thorough biographical research provided by Susan E. James in Kateryn Parr: The Making of a Queen (1999) has been an invaluable resource in preparing the present edition of Katherine Parr's complete works and correspondence. The correspondence, consisting of primary materials divided into five parts, is positioned as a contextual frame for the four literary works to follow. My use of the term correspondence revives its currently less prominent sense of "connection" to encompass letters to and from Katherine Parr; documents pertaining to her marriage to Henry VIII in 1543 and to her death after bearing a daughter to Lord Thomas Seymour in 1548; proclamations and instructions that she issued as regent of the realm during Henry's military campaign in France in 1544; dedications addressed to her as the commissioning patron of a project to translate and publish for open access in English churches the first five books of Erasmus's Latin Paraphrases upon the New Testament; and verses addressed to her or describing her and her intimates. Parr's complete works, positioned to follow the correspondence, include the two publications that appeared in her lifetime and bear her name as author, Prayers or Meditations (1545) and The Lamentation of a Sinner (1547), as well as Psalms or Prayers (1544), the anonymously published English translation of Bishop John Fisher's Psalmi seu Precationes (Cologne, ca. 1525; reprinted London, 1544), which on a variety of circumstantial grounds can plausibly be ascribed to Parr as queen. Rounding out the category of "complete works" is British Library MS Harley 2342, the sizable compilation of devotional materials that I have identified as Katherine Parr's personal prayerbook, written entirely in her own hand and left unfinished in manuscript at her death in 1548. A separate introduction is provided for each of Queen Katherine's four works. To facilitate the reader's engagement with her correspondence, the remainder of this general introduction outlines significant aspects of her biography and concludes with a brief statement of editorial procedures.
* * *
Katherine Parr's parents, Sir Thomas Parr (1478–1517) and Matilda or Maud Green Parr (1492–1531), were both in service at the court of Henry VIII, who came to the throne in 1509 at the age of eighteen. Despite Parr family roots and properties in Westmorland, Sir Thomas and Maud mainly resided in the south of England within convenient reach of the court. Sir Thomas was popular with Henry VIII, serving his sovereign variously as a member of several diplomatic missions to France and as master of the king's wards. Nonetheless, political advancement and financial success eluded Sir Thomas. Maud Parr served Queen Catherine of Aragon as a lady-in-waiting; over time the two women became close friends. Prior to Katherine's birth in the summer (probably August) of 1512, the Parrs purchased or leased a house in the Blackfriars quarter of London. Katherine may well have been born in this house, as was an elder brother who died in infancy and was buried in the churchyard of St. Anne's, Blackfriars. Two more Parr children followed in quick succession—a brother, William, in August 1513, and a sister, Anne, around 1515. In November 1517, Sir Thomas Parr died suddenly in his fortieth year, leaving his twenty-five-year-old widow, Maud, to raise their three small children.
From all evidence, circumstantial and textual (some extant letters in her hand), Maud Parr was a resourceful, determined, intelligent woman who made the choice, unusual for her time, not to remarry. Instead, she divided herself between sustaining her service and familiarity with Queen Catherine and providing as a single parent for the education and future of Katherine, William, and Anne. The children's formative years were spent at Rye House in Hertfordshire, the family's more or less permanent home after Sir Thomas's death, until Maud Parr's own death in late 1531. Maud was advised on the education of her daughters and son by Cuthbert Tunstall, Bishop of London and, later, Bishop of Durham—a cousin of Sir Thomas's and one of the executors of his will. A single tutor educated the three Parr children under a program of study that included Latin, French, Italian, arithmetic, and even some basic medical lore. As an adult, Anne Parr recalled that her mother had modeled her children's studies on those prescribed by Sir Thomas More for the children and wards of his household.
From this formative educational period there is a sole material remnant, the deceased Sir Thomas's Horae ad Usum Sarum, a book of hours or primer of Salisbury use in Latin, with a few appended prayers in English. In light of the broad and varied familiarity with this type of devotional collection that Katherine Parr would show in compiling her personal prayerbook as queen, the survival of this particular volume is almost too neatly fortuitous. The inkblots, doodles, and recopied words found inside it attest its use in the Parr children's schoolroom. At the bottoms of intermittent pages, there are inscriptions in English—one in Maud Parr's hand, two in young Katherine's hand, and one in young William's hand—which are reproduced as the first item in part 1 of the correspondence. The similarities to be observed between Maud's and Katherine's hybrid ("bastard") style of handwriting, a variant of the secretary hand, suggest that the mother taught her daughter—and presumably her other children—to write. Each of the inscriptions affectionately addresses the children's uncle, Sir William Parr of Horton, who acted as a father substitute for all three and continued this role into their adult lives.
Beyond ensuring the basics of a sound humanistic education for her children, Maud Parr extended to them the double agenda for advancement that she had set for herself. This consisted in cultivating court connections along a circuit of acquaintance and affiliation with well-born and well-placed persons, and in simultaneously seeking the financial means to enable such cultivation. The weight of Maud Parr's agenda made by far the heaviest personal demands on Katherine, her oldest child. In 1525 Sir William Parr contrived to launch his nephew William's future at the age of eleven by placing him in the household of Henry VIII's bastard son the Duke of Richmond; a marriage with an heiress, Lady Anne Bourchier, followed for William in 1527. Around 1531, at the age of fifteen or sixteen, Anne Parr entered court service as a maid-in-waiting and was subsequently attached to the households of Henry's successive queens—including, eventually, her sister Katherine's. Anne too would contract an advantageous marriage with the soldier-courtier William Herbert, later Earl of Pembroke, around 1538. Yet well before these placements of William and Anne, Maud Parr was determined to marry off her elder daughter as advantageously and promptly as she could contrive. She began her efforts before Katherine had reached her twelft h birthday.
Conducted in a letter exchange between the spring of 1523 and the spring of 1524, Maud's first set of negotiations, for a match with Henry Scrope, son and heir of Henry, Lord Scrope of Bolton, met with frustration. On the Scrope side, doubts about the desirability of the marriage grew, in light of the modest character of Katherine's dowry and lineage. The failure was fortunate, however, for young Henry Scrope died in 1525. If Katherine had married him, she would have been a widow before she turned thirteen.
Maud Parr's second set of negotiations can be said to have succeeded in the sense of obtaining a marriage for Katherine, with Edward Borough, grandson of Edward, Lord Borough of Gainsborough, and son of Sir Thomas Borough, of an old and well-established gentry family in Lincolnshire. The marriage probably occurred in spring 1529, when Katherine was sixteen and her husband, Edward, in his early twenties. Sent to live in the North, a region wholly unknown to her, far from her mother and her siblings, Katherine would probably have had some difficulty in adjusting to her new life even if it had been pleasant. What she found at Gainsborough Old Hall was a young husband in frail health and "an overbearing father-in-law given to violent rages." The young couple endured the vagaries of this multgenerational household for more than a year. When Maud Parr visited her daughter in summer 1530, she significantly chose to stay at her own manor of Maltby, some eighteen miles from Gainsborough Old Hall. Maud's perceptions and her presence seem to have worked to obtain a house for Edward and Katherine at Kirton-in-Lindsey, a property belonging to Edward's father, the irascible Sir Thomas Borough. There the pair maintained a separate household until Edward's death in his midtwenties in April 1533.
Whatever grief widowhood might have entailed for Katherine, she had already lost the first object of her love, her mother. Like Sir Thomas Parr, Maud Parr died in her fortieth year, on December 1, 1531, leaving Katherine "a cross of diamonds with a pendant pearl, a cache of loose pearls, and, ironically or propheticallly, a jewelled portrait of ... Henry VIII." A year and a half later, with the death of the frail Edward, Katherine Parr Borough found herself altogether alone, far from her brother and sister, with little money, no home, and no maintenance forthcoming from her late husband's family because she was childless. How the twenty-one-year-old widow felt or how or where she contrived to live remains uncertain. There is a tradition to the effect that Catherine Neville, dowager Lady Strickland, a relative of Katherine's by blood and by marriage, invited her to live for the time being at Sizergh Castle in Westmorland.
It is certain, however, that sometime during the summer of 1534 Katherine Parr married a second cousin of her father's, the forty-year-old John Neville, Lord Latimer, of Snape Castle in Yorkshire. Twice widowed himself, Lord Latimer had two children, John (born in 1520) and Margaret (born around 1525). In contracting this marriage for herself, Katherine advanced as her mother never had on the agenda for her and the other Parr children. Katherine now had "a home of her own at Snape Castle, a husband with position and influence in the north where her own family's lands lay, a ready-made family and a title." Yet the information surviving from the period of this nine-year marriage centers on Lord Latimer's acute financial troubles, sums requisitioned by the king that he was unable to pay, and his no less acute political difficulties. Three of Lord Latimer's brothers incurred charges of treason in the 1530s for their overt unwillingness to support Henry VIII's wars with Scotland. During the so-called Pilgrimage of Grace (1536), when religiously conservative northeners took up arms to impress on Henry VIII their opposition to the dissolution of the monasteries and other religious reforms, as well as their aversion to Thomas Cromwell, chief minister and executor of these reforms, Lord Latimer attempted to mediate between the crown and his insurgent countrymen, whose cause had his sympathy short of committing him to treason. In his efforts to placate all parties, he failed to placate anyone. On the one side, Katherine's husband brought upon himself the king's distrust and Cromwell's settled animosity. On the other side, the suspicions of the northern nobility that Lord Latimer was betraying them and their cause drove an armed mob to storm Snape Castle in mid-January 1537, while he was en route to London to treat with the king. Katherine and the two Latimer children were taken hostage, and the castle was ransacked. A summons went out to Lord Latimer to return to Yorkshire immediately or his family would be killed and his house burned to the ground. Returning in haste, he somehow persuaded the insurgents to release his family and vacate his house. But after royal force, both military and judicial, put an end to the uprising, Latimer was unable to repair either his reputation or his fortunes.
Lord and Lady Latimer moved south with the two children, first to Latimer's lands in Worcestershire, then to Northamptonshire, where he acquired the manor of Stowe as a likely favor to Katherine, whose uncle and aunt lived only a few miles away. Between 1538 and 1542, the Latimers divided their residence between their southern manors, two properties near York acquired in an exchange with the crown, and a leased house in London, probably in Blackfriars—the quarter where Katherine had lived as a small child. Latimer was kept relentlessly busy during this period with assignments to serve on royal commissions that continued to prosecute and execute rebels and other malefactors. Shuttling between York, London, and his southern manors, he conscientiously applied his energies to carrying out the king's and Cromwell's behests.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from COMPLETE WORKS AND CORRESPONDENCE by KATHERINE PARR Copyright © 2011 by The University of Chicago. Excerpted by permission of THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
