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The Wives of Henry VIII: Katherine Parr, Part I

© Ellen McDaniel-Weissler

If Henry VIII was minded to marry again, it would be the courageous and rare lady that would take him on. The fate of his first five wives was enough of a warning to the most reckless maid to take heed, lest she follow the same fateful path. Any lady who now aspired to be the king's wife was required by law to reveal any unseemly doings from her past which might make her ineligible, and since virginity was a difficult thing to prove it was only the most secure lady who would put herself in harm's way by claiming chastitiy enough to satisfy the disillusioned Henry. The only safe candidate would be a widow, one of proven fertility and blameless character, but who obviously could be unapologetically a non-virgin. If such a lady existed, Henry was in no hurry to find her, and may have felt that his matrimonial days were over. He had one heir, who, it was to be hoped, would survive childhood, and he may have felt incapable of siring another. He was certainly in no mood to fall in love and be hurt again, for Katherine Howard's defection had robbed him of his last romantic notions. Katherine Parr, therefore, was a wonderfully astute choice for a man who was more in need of a nursemaid than a wife.

Katherine Parr, Lady Latimer, had grown up at court and had been known to Henry for many years. Her mother, Maud Parr, had been a lady-in-waiting to Catherine of Aragon, and it is possible that the young Katherine Parr had studied with the young Princess Mary under the tutelage of the Catholic humanist Juan Luis Vives. She was certainly a well-read, well-educated woman who studied scripture and the writings of the scholarly, and had several books of her own devotions and meditations published. She began her career in the only way open to a woman in those times - marriage. In Katherine Parr's case she was a fourteen-year-old marrying a widower in his sixties when she wed Lord Borough in 1525. When he died three years later, Katherine was free to lead the life of a rich widow. Instead, sometime in the early 1530s she married John Neville, Lord Latimer, a widower in his mid-forties. Katherine, with no children of her own, became a stepmother to her husband's two children, who were about half her age.

If Katherine had any reformist religious leanings at this time - and it is very possible that she might have had, considering the Protestant influence Anne Boleyn was having on the court, not to mention the influence of Katherine's own sister Anne, who was a devout reformer - Katherine kept such ideas to herself. Her new husband was a fervent Catholic, who even became involved in the Catholic uprising called the Pilgrimage of Grace, though Henry was moved to pardon Lord Latimer after the uprising had been quelled. By the time Lord Latimer went the way of all flesh, Henry was a widower again, and free to marry.

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