Catherine Parr is usually seen as the Queen who came from nowhere. Actually, she was the daughter of a substantial northern knightly family that–like the Boleyns–had gone up in the world as a result of royal favour and successful marriages. She was not sent to France to acquire a courtly polish, like Anne Boleyn. But she was probably better educated overall. And her family certainly had the better lineage and was more securely based at Court.
The foundations of the family fortunes had been laid by Catherine’s grandfather, Sir William Parr, in the later fifteenth century. Parr gave his support to Edward IV at the crucial moment in 1471 when Edward returned to reclaim his kingdom from the ‘Kingmaker’ Earl of Warwick. Parr never looked back. Edward made him Controller of the Household and Knight of the Garter and, no doubt, assisted his second marriage to the wealthy heiress, Elizabeth Fitzhugh.1
The career of Parr’s eldest son and Catherine’s father, Thomas, promised to be even more spectacular. Soon after his father’s death in 1484, his widowed mother, Elizabeth, married again, this time Sir Nicholas Vaux of Harrowden in Northamptonshire. The Vauxs were as committed Lancastrians as the Parrs were Yorkists and they benefited accordingly from the accession of Henry VII. Young Thomas Parr shared in their success and became very close to his step-father, Sir Nicholas Vaux. This led, after Elizabeth’s death in 1507, to a double marriage between Vaux and Parr and the sisters Anne and Maud Green, who were the daughters and co-heiresses of another leading Northamptonshire landowner, Sir Thomas Green. The resulting pattern of relationships was tangled even by sixteenth-century standards since, for example, Lady Vaux (Anne Green) was Parr’s step-mother as well as his sister-in-law.2
Parr’s marriage to Maud Green also changed the Parrs’ territorial interests. The family’s ancestral lands centred on Kendal in Westmorland. But these were dwarfed by the Northamptonshire properties Parr acquired in the right of his wife as her share of the Green inheritance, and that county now became his main residence–though his Westmorland connexions were far from forgotten.
But a more important sphere of activity for Parr than either Westmorland or Northamptonshire was the Court.
Parr had the Court in his blood: as we have seen, his father, Sir William, had been a great figure in the Yorkist Court, while Catherine Vaux (the mother of his step-father, Sir Nicholas Vaux) had been equally prominent in the Lancastrian Court as the devoted lady-in-waiting to Queen Margaret of Anjou. These ancestral ties mattered (which is why service at Court tended to run in certain families) and they explain why Parr became an Esquire of the Body to Henry VII. He was in post at the latest by 1500 when he attended on the King to his meeting at Calais with the Archduke Philip, father of the Emperor Charles V.
The position of Esquire of the Body was an ambiguous one: it could mean very little, or it could mean a lot. On the one hand, the title was given as a reward to trusted local gentlemen. They received no fee and attended Court only on special occasions. But they enjoyed the increased status that belonged to all royal servants, whatever their rank. There were dozens of these supernumerary Esquires and their importance was purely local. On the other hand, there was a much smaller group of Esquires with the Fee who were in regular attendance at Court. They were paid a fee of 50 marks (£33 6s 8d) and they held a position of real importance. Parr belonged to this latter, select group.
Under Edward IV, the Esquires with the Fee had been the King’s principal body servants, whose ‘business is many secrets’. They dressed and undressed the King, waited on him at table and attended to his other private wants and instructions. Under the Tudors, the Esquires lost this privileged place with the transfer of the King’s private service to the new, inner department of the Privy Chamber. So it is the Gentlemen of the Privy Chamber, not the Esquires, who figure so prominently in our story as the favourites of Henry VIII and the alleged lovers of his Queens.
But the Esquires with the Fee nevertheless retained a dignified (and much safer) role. They were the leading regular servants of the outer group of royal apartments known collectively as ‘the Chamber’. These apartments were the scene of most public ceremonial, in which the Esquires played a leading part. They also deputised for the frequently absentee noblemen who acted as the head officers of the Chamber. The Esquires, therefore, were well placed to catch the King’s eye and to move on, if they also caught his fancy, to higher things.3
Parr, with his wealth and his family connexions, was better placed than most to succeed. He was given the Esquire’s fee of 50 marks by Henry VIII soon after his accession. But he surrendered it within a year to his younger brother William. For already Thomas Parr was on the way up. He was knighted, and in 1513 raised and captained a hundred troops for the war with France. Like other leading courtiers, his detachment at first formed part of the Middleward under the immediate command of the King himself. But, at some point, he was assigned to the Vanguard, which was led by Charles Brandon. The following year he was nominated for the Garter. He received the support of many knights but was not elected. He was also considered for a peerage, though there were objections to giving him the title of ‘Lord Fitzhugh’ since his mother had been the younger and not the elder daughter of the fifth Baron. At an unknown date he was made joint Master of the Wards with Sir Thomas Lovell. This–since it was responsible for controlling the lands and persons of minors who had inherited their estates while under age–was an immensely lucrative and influential post. Finally, probably in 1516, he became Vice-chamberlain of Queen Catherine of Aragon’s Household.4
He now enjoyed the rank of knight banneret, which occupied a debatable ground between baron and knight. He was given a ‘great chain of gold, which is worth £140…[by] the King’s Grace’, and he figured prominently in royal ceremonial. In 1515 he took part in the ceremonies for the reception of Wolsey’s Cardinal’s Hat, and the following year he was one of the four bannerets who carried the canopy over the infant Princess Mary at her christening. On both occasions, his step-father/ brother-in-law, Sir Nicholas Vaux, figured as one of his colleagues, as did Sir Thomas Boleyn.5
Boleyn, it is now clear, was a man of similar background and aspirations to Parr. Boleyn’s daughter would become Queen first. But, at this stage, Parr was ahead of the game.
This was made clear when, in April 1516, Parr was sent to meet Henry’s elder sister Margaret at Newcastle and conduct her to London. It was her first visit to England since she had left to become Queen of Scots in 1503. Now she was returning as a widow after Henry’s forces had killed her husband, James IV, at Flodden. Henry met her at Tottenham on 3 May. ‘The same day’, the Earl of Shrewsbury’s Court agent informed him, ‘her Grace did ride behind Sir Thomas Parr through Cheapside, about 6 o’clock, and so to Baynard’s Castle, and there remains yet.’ Parr was paid £100 ‘for the expenses of the Queen of Scots’.6
Parr’s family life was equally successful. His marriage to Maud Green seems to have been happy and it was certainly fruitful. Their first child, born in 1512, was a girl. She was christened Catherine, almost certainly because Catherine of Aragon stood as her godmother. A son, William, was born the next year, followed by another daughter, Anne.
Quite where this growing brood was based is not clear. Parr, like many courtiers, seems to have had a London house in or near the precinct of Blackfriars monastery. This was convenient for the King’s new London residence at Bridewell, which lay next door to Blackfriars to the west. It was also in easy reach by water of Greenwich, which was much the most frequently used palace at this time. Probably the Parr Household stayed at Blackfriars in the winter, with extended sojourns in the summer on the Northamptonshire estates Parr had acquired in right of his wife.
Catherine was, in short, the daughter of a coming man. Her father was well born, rich and well connected. He was blessed with children. And, above all, he enjoyed the royal favour. In the sixteenth century such men were magnets who attracted the service of others. And Parr was sufficiently powerful to number the young Francis Bryan among his clients. Bryan was a cousin of the Howards and the Boleyns. His maternal grandfather was a baron and his own father a knight and Parr’s predecessor as the Queen’s Vice-chamberlain. Nevertheless it was Parr, Bryan wrote, ‘whom I took as a special patron’. Years later he registered his gratitude to Parr’s son William, who was by then a great man himself. Bryan fondly recollected ‘the great goodness showed unto me by your most wise father’, and offered his services to William in turn.7
But in 1517 disaster struck. The ‘great plague’, as the royal Secretary Pace called it, continued its ravages far into the year and in November Parr fell victim. At the time of his death, Catherine was five and her widowed mother twenty-two. Parr left £800 between Catherine and her sister for their marriages and he gave his wife a life-interest in his whole paternal inheritance to provide an income during her widowhood.8
With her youth and wealth, Maud Parr was, once more, a highly desirable bride. But she never remarried. Instead, she continued as one of the Queen’s ladies and devoted herself to the upbringing of her children.9
Indeed, it seems clear that her Household soon established something of a reputation as a finishing school for the young–male as well as female. In 1523, for instance, Lord Dacre advised his son-in-law, Lord Scrope, that his son should live with Lady Parr for the remaining three years of his nonage. ‘For I assure you’, Dacre continued, ‘he might learn with her, as well as in any place that I know, as well nurture, as French and other language, which me seems were a commodious thing for him.’ We can see the results in Maud’s own son, William. In about 1546, Bryan reminded him, ‘I found you looking in a little book called in the French language Méprise de la Cour [An Invective against the Court]’. Parr had lent Bryan the book and eventually got him to translate it, to help it become more generally known.
Catherine also seems to have been an able pupil. Like her brother, she certainly acquired a good knowledge of French. But her skills in the ‘other language[s]’ that might have been on offer in her mother’s Household, in particular in Latin, have been much debated. On balance, however, the evidence would suggest that she got at least an elementary grasp of Latin as well.
Finally, she acquired the wide range of social skills comprised in Dacre’s word ‘nurture’. These included a knowledge of etiquette and good manners, an easy conversational style, the ability to sing and play music and, above all, the polish that made a gentleman or gentlewoman. Another word for these skills was ‘courtesy’ (that is, courtly behaviour) and, in the fullness of time, Catherine would prove herself an adept courtier.10
Maud’s widowed status provided no obstacle to any of this. On the contrary. Only ‘if [Lady Parr] keep her widowhood’, Dacre recommended, should young Scrope remain with her. This proviso reflected the fact that any future husband was an unknown quantity. But it was also a positive endorsement of the lady herself. For Maud had a formidable character, and was a hands-on manager of her family and her fortune. She also had a right-hand man in the shape of her ‘cousin’ and ‘steward of my house’, Thomas Pickering. ‘My…mother’, William later informed Cromwell, ‘trusted him implicitly, and admonished me implicitly to follow his advice.’11
This, then, was the world of Catherine’s girlhood. Apart from the death of one parent (which, after all, was then the rule rather than the exception), it was as secure, prosperous and loving a childhood as anything the sixteenth century could offer. But, as again was the rule in Tudor England, her childhood was destined to be a short one. Already by 1523, when she was scarcely in her teens, the negotiations for her marriage had begun. And the prospective bridegroom was the son of Lord Scrope, whom, as we have already seen, Dacre wished to place with Lady Parr.12
There was, Dacre told Scrope, much in favour of Catherine as a bride for his son and heir. ‘I cannot see’, Dacre wrote, ‘that ye can marry him to so good a stock as my Lady Parr, for divers considerations.’ He then enumerated them: ‘First, in remembering the wisdom of my said Lady, and the good wise stock of the Greens, whereof she is coming, and also of the wise stock of the Parrs of Kendal.’ Second, there were the material advantages. For Catherine, Dacre noted, was a potential heiress, since she ‘has but [the life of] one child [her brother, William] between her and 800 marks yearly to inherit thereof ’.13
Despite Catherine’s advantages of heredity and fortune, however, the marriage negotiations proved difficult. Scrope was relatively poor and his son’s marriage was his only realisable cash-asset, for which he was determined to exact a premium price. But Maud Parr would have none of it. She knew the price, as well as the value, of everything and she would pay not a penny more than the going rate. By December 1523, Dacre was starting to despair of his role as honest broker: ‘My Lord’, he informed Scrope at last, ‘the demands you have and my Lady’s demands are so far asunder that it is impossible ye can ever agree’.14
But the warning was ignored and neither Scrope nor Maud would budge an inch. Finally, in March 1524, it was the latter who broke off negotiations in a letter addressed to Dacre ‘From the Court at Greenwich’.15
Her marriage plans for her daughter thwarted, Maud now turned her attentions to her only son, William. In 1526 she bought back her son’s marriage, control of which belonged to the King during William’s minority, for the enormous sum of £1,000. She also paid other ‘great sums’ to Henry Bourchier, Earl of Essex, for the marriage of his daughter and heiress, Anne. William and Anne were married in February 1527, in the Chapel of the Earl’s country residence, Stansted Hall in Halstead, Essex. And they continued to reside there during the first six years of the marriage.16
Maud was clearly delighted–though the sums she had paid to Henry and Essex were beyond even her resources and she had put herself heavily, though not imprudently, in debt. But it seemed well worth it. Not only was her ‘well beloved son, William’ married to a great heiress; he was also in line for the Earldom of Essex itself. Noble titles could not of course, except in the most special circumstances, be directly inherited in the female line. Nevertheless, there was a custom, known as ‘the courtesy of England’, by which an extinct title might be revived for the husband in right of his heiress-wife. If this custom were to be followed, William, after his father-in-law’s death, would become Earl of Essex.
It was a glittering prospect. But it was bought at a price that went far beyond his mother’s cash. For William was ‘my Lord Parr’, the man whose marital unhappiness and whose goings-on with his mistress, Dorothy Bray, were, as we have seen, regarded as an object lesson by the not very choosy Catherine Howard and her would-be lover, Thomas Culpepper.
Would his sister Catherine’s marital history turn out any better?
At all events, Catherine was launched into matrimony by 1529, when she was seventeen. Fresh from her triumph with William, Maud–once more with borrowed money–had secured for Catherine the hand of Sir Edward Burgh. Burgh was not in the league of Anne Bourchier as a match. But he was a coup nonetheless. He was son and heir to Thomas, Lord Burgh of Gainsborough in Lincolnshire, and he numbered among his ancestors Beauchamps and Staffords. But, as a less fortunate aspect of his genealogy, there was a streak of hereditary insanity in the family. Edward’s grandfather, also called Edward, had never been summoned to the Lords, being ‘distracted of memory’. And Edward himself seems to have suffered from poor health and died in about 1533 after only four years of marriage.17
Catherine was now a childless widow at the age of twenty-one. She was also an orphan, since her formidable mother had died two years previously, in 1531. Catherine’s share of her parents’ fortune had already been used to buy her marriage. Nevertheless, she figured prominently in her mother’s will. Maud left her ‘my bed of purple satin, paned [panelled] with cloth of gold’ and ‘my beads [rosary] of lignum [a kind of hardwood] always dressed with gold, which the…Queen’s Grace [Catherine of Aragon] gave me’, as well as a third of her ample collection of jewels. These included, in addition to several hundred pearls, eighteen substantial pieces, ranging from ‘a ring with a table diamond, set with black anneal [enamel], meet for my little finger’, to a ‘tablet with pictures of the King and the Queen’. This latter was, almost certainly, another royal gift either from Henry or from Catherine’s namesake and likely godmother, Catherine of Aragon.18
It is a set of legacies that speaks of the wealth and luxury of Catherine’s upbringing, and of her family’s proximity to the Court.
Within a few months, Catherine had married again. Her husband, John Neville, Lord Latimer, was twenty years older than she, twice widowed and with two children, a boy and a girl.19
The principal broker of the marriage was, most likely, Cuthbert Tunstall, Bishop of Durham, and the bastard son of Thomas Tunstall, who was a cousin of the Parrs. He was an executor of Maud’s will as well as that of her late husband; he was also Latimer’s senior colleague as President of the Council in the North, of which Latimer too was a member. Tunstall even had a remote cousinship with the Nevilles. All this fitted him perfectly for the role of intermediary.20
The other likely key figure in arranging the marriage was Catherine’s uncle, Sir William Parr. Sir William, as we have seen, had stepped into his brother Thomas’s Court office of Esquire of the Body. Subsequently, after Thomas’s death, he had also stepped into his shoes as the acting head of the family during the minority of his nephew and namesake, Catherine’s brother William. He acted as intermediary for young William with Cromwell and there is every reason to suppose that he played a similar role for Catherine. Certainly, when she was in a position to do so, she showed herself eager to reward him.21
As Lady Latimer, Catherine was the wife of a rich and substantial peer. She was the mistress of a large Household which divided its time between Latimer’s magnificent country seat at Snape Castle, in the North Riding of Yorkshire, and the Charterhouse, by Smithfield in London, where Latimer had acquired a town-house. She was also the step-mother to her husband’s two children by his first wife: John, aged thirteen, and Margaret, who was much younger. Catherine never seems to have become close to her step-son, who was a tearaway, like so many Nevilles. But with Margaret her relations were warm and affectionate.
After only three years of marriage, however, the couple were engulfed in the great northern rising of the Pilgrimage of Grace. Their reactions seem to have been very different.
John Neville, Lord Latimer was one of the first peers to join the rebellion. And his defection, in view of the strategic location of his lands, was one of the most important. Snape Castle lies mid-way between Richmond to the north and Ripon to the south. To the west is the valley of the River Ure while that of the Swale is to the east. The Great North Road, known at this point as Dere Street, follows the line of the two river valleys and is commanded by Snape Castle. If Latimer remained loyal, communications between Durham and York would be difficult; if he joined the rebels, the whole strength of the north could be mustered against the King.
Archbishop Lee of York realised this. So, in early October, as news of the Lincolnshire revolt began to trigger sympathetic risings across the north, he wrote to Latimer, who was also steward of his estates in and around Ripon, to ‘stay’ (control) the Archbishop’s tenants. Latimer obeyed but was quickly overwhelmed by the popular feeling in favour of the Pilgrimage. By 14 or 15 October he was captured; required to swear the Pilgrims’ oath; and–like all captured gentry and noble leaders–compelled to assume the command of his local sector of the revolt.22
The idea of ‘being compelled to lead’ is a strange one. Were the gentle and noble Pilgrims really coerced? Or did they connive? The question has been much debated, by contemporaries and historians alike. After the event, Latimer protested that his role in the revolt was ‘a very painful and dangerous time to me’. And his fellow rebels and the Duke of Norfolk, who suppressed the rebellion, both concurred. John Dakyn, the Vicar General of York, had also found himself at Richmond on 14 or 15 October. He was intimidated by the grim determination of the rebel rank and file and guessed that Latimer was too. ‘No man’, Norfolk agreed, ‘was in more danger of his life.’23
On the other hand, once he had thrown in his lot with the Pilgrimage, Latimer showed every sign of committed and active leadership. On 20 October, riding under the banner of St Cuthbert of Durham, he entered York at the head of the rebels. Then he marched to Pontefract. There he joined Lord Darcy, who, after another charade of coercion, had assumed joint leadership of the revolt. Latimer joined in the subsequent council of war, and was assigned to the van of the rebel host. On 27 October he was one of the rebel leaders who met Norfolk on Doncaster Bridge, to present the Pilgrims’ terms. He took part in the Great Council of the Pilgrims which met at York on 21 November and in the subsequent, more important, meeting at Pontefract on 2–4 December. In the latter he was responsible for one of the most striking initiatives, when he asked Archbishop Lee and the other clergy to ‘show their learning whether subjects might lawfully move war in any case against their prince’.24
This is the doctrine of resistance, which was anathema to the Tudors and to Henry above all. Indeed, the implications of Latimer’s remark are so radical that it seems doubtful that he was the sole author of it. Instead, there must be a suggestion of discussion with a stronger, more questioning intelligence than Latimer ever showed himself to be.
And, as we shall see, his likely interlocutor, and the key to much that is puzzling about Latimer’s behaviour, is Sir Francis Bigod.
So much, for the moment, for Lord Latimer. But what of Lady Latimer? For the Pilgrimage was a movement in which women showed themselves at least as active as their menfolk. Indeed, it was often the wife who took the lead, and the husband who vacillated prudentially–as with Mr and Mrs Christopher Stapleton. Stapleton, an elderly and valetudinarian gentleman, was in the habit of spending his summers in the Grey Friars at Beverley for a change of air. This meant that he was caught in the town when Beverley declared for the rebels on 8 October. Stapleton ordered his people to remain within the Friary. But his wife defied him and went outside to greet the crowds: ‘God’s blessing have ye’, she cried, ‘and speed you well in your good purpose.’ Still worse, she betrayed the hiding place of her husband and his servants. ‘They be in the Friars’, she volunteered, ‘go pull them out by the heads!’ ‘What do you mean’, the wretched Stapleton exclaimed when the virago returned indoors, ‘except ye would have me, my son and heir, and my brother cast away?’ ‘It was God’s quarrel’, she replied simply.25
Lady Hussey, the Dowager Countess of Northumberland, and Margaret Cheyney, the mistress-cum-wife of Sir John Bulmer, all behaved similarly. But not, apparently, Lady Latimer. Not one scrap of evidence was produced against her and her name appears in none of the multitude of depositions which were gathered after the event.26
At first sight, this is surprising. As we have seen, Catherine’s mother, born Maud Green, had been one of Catherine of Aragon’s ladies-in-waiting and had left her elder daughter a rosary of the Queen’s gift as an heirloom. Catherine herself was probably the old Queen’s god-daughter. And Catherine Parr was, or soon became, close to Catherine of Aragon’s daughter Mary. It was ties of this kind which turned Lady Hussey into a more or less open partisan of the Pilgrims. And nothing, not even an earlier spell in the Tower for continuing to refer to Mary as ‘Princess’ after she had been stripped of her title, seemed to deter her.
But somehow Lady Latimer remained immune. Was it the combined ‘wisdom’ of the Greens and the Parrs, to which Lord Dacre referred so appreciatively, which led her to keep her distance? Or had she already begun to lose sympathy with the ‘old religion’, which provided the driving force of the Pilgrimage?27
Here we enter a minefield. We know, because Catherine herself later lamented the fact, that she had once been an enthusiastic Papist. ‘I sought’, she confessed, ‘for such riffraff as the Bishop of Rome had planted in his tyranny and kingdom, trusting with great confidence by the virtue and holiness of them to receive full remission of sins.’28
That she underwent conversion, as all the first generation of Reformers did, is therefore clear. The question is when?
Recent fashionable academic opinion has tended to place the moment as late as 1544, when she was in her mid-thirties. I followed this, without much thinking about it, in my Elizabeth. But what if her conversion was much earlier, while she was in her twenties? It was, after all, the young who were most susceptible to Reform, as the young always tend to be to extravagant new doctrines. But, it will be objected, she spent her twenties in the north, which was Catholic and conservative. Actually, Yorkshire in the mid-1530s was far from this caricature of homogeneous conventionality. There were passionate Reformers and outstanding preachers and Catherine, as we shall see, had close family ties with the most radical of them.29
What if she had begun to listen to them? What if she had begun to believe them?
But, despite Catherine’s caution and whatever the nature of her religious belief, the Pilgrimage finally caught up with her. It did so in a particularly ugly way.
Like the other chief leaders of the Pilgrimage, Latimer had been summoned to Court at New Year 1537. But when he reached Bunting-ford in Hertfordshire on his journey south, he was informed that he had been countermanded because, on 16 January, Norfolk had been redespatched to the north with orders to pacify the countryside and punish offenders. Latimer was to return home and assist him. He can only have been away a week or two at most. But the damage had been done. The common people were now suspicious that the gentry and nobility were preparing to double-cross them with a covert deal with the King. Latimer’s sudden departure for the Court seemed to confirm these fears, and his home and family became a target. ‘The Commons in coming forward’, Darcy heard on about 18 January, ‘have been at the houses…of…the Lord Latimer and other gentlemen who have been with your Highness in London and taken inventories of all their goods’.30
Latimer himself learned the news two days later at Stamford on his return journey and he poured out his distress in a letter to Admiral Fitzwilliam. ‘I learn’, he wrote, ‘that the commons of Richmondshire, grieved at my coming up, have entered my house at Snape, and will destroy it if I come not home shortly.’ ‘If I do not please them’, he continued, ‘I know not what they will do with my body and goods, wife and children.’
Latimer was now caught between the King and the common people. He was mistrusted by both and whatever he did would give offence to both. Faced with this impossible situation, he desperately sought a way out. ‘If it were the King’s pleasure that I might live upon such small lands as I have in the South’, he concluded, ‘I would little care of my lands in the North.’31
But he was to be allowed no such easy escape. Nor was Catherine. She had already faced the fury of the commons, who had burst into her house and (taking a leaf out of the King’s book) had listed its contents for seizure. They had also, or so Latimer believed, threatened her and her step-children. All that was bad enough. But worse was to come since she would now have to try to protect her husband from the slower, but more terrible, wrath of the King.
Henry, as we have often seen, was capable of dissimulating his anger until the moment was ripe to strike. By June 1537, Latimer’s turn had come, and he seemed particularly exposed. For in 1534, the year after his marriage to Catherine, he had entered into an agreement for the marriage of his daughter and Catherine’s favourite, Margaret Neville, with Ralph, the son and heir of Sir Francis Bigod. Bigod was a substantial knight of the East Riding, with his seat some forty-five miles to the east of Snape at Mulgrave Castle, on the coast near Whitby.32
A marriage agreement between neighbouring county families was of the most commonplace. But Bigod was not. Instead, though aged only thirty, he had already emerged as one of the most singular men of his age. He was a scholar and a gentleman, an MP and a published author, an Henrician loyalist and–at the last–a rebel. But, above all, he was an ardent believer in Reform. This he worked for, at every level: in Parliament, where he was an activist MP; at Court, where he lobbied Cromwell; in his Household, where he maintained distinguished (and very radical) chaplains; and in his ‘country’ of Yorkshire, where he mounted a one-man campaign ‘in setting forth the word of God, having there preachers of my own cost, and rode all over the country with them’.33
He even, he told Cromwell, who was his friend and confidant since their days together in Wolsey’s Household, aspired to be a priest himself. ‘Specially, afore anything’, he begged the minister, ‘help me to be a priest, that I may preach the Word of God, or else dispense with me, that being no priest I may do it.’34
A priest–especially perhaps a priest manqué like Bigod–requires a congregation: to move, to convert and eventually to answer and echo his certainties with their own. And it seems likely that Bigod found a willing listener in Catherine and probably in her husband too. For connexions between the two families were close. Apart from the marriage agreement, for which ‘Mr Parr’ (probably Catherine’s uncle, Sir William) acted as a trustee, Latimer had helped out the perpetually indebted Bigod by buying a large chunk of his lands for £600 cash, payable in instalments. Latimer’s servants evidently frequented Bigod’s house and Latimer’s brother William Neville and his wife spent Christmas 1536 with the Bigods at Mulgrave.35
The result of this intercourse was that the Latimers’ Household borrowed some of the features of Reform. Robert Plumpton of Knares-borough, about twenty miles to the south-west of Snape, who had been won over to Reform by Tyndale’s translation of the New Testament, was eager ‘not only to be [Latimer’s] servant, but of his household and attending unto him’. And Margaret Neville, Catherine’s step-daughter and Bigod’s intended daughter-in-law, received a ‘godly education’ at Catherine’s hands, for which, as she later acknowledged, ‘I am never able to render to her…sufficient thanks’.36
The mystery of Catherine’s refusal to endorse the Pilgrimage is now on the way to a solution. She held aloof because she was already converted to Reform–perhaps by Bigod or perhaps by one of his chaplains, such as the charismatic Thomas Garrett. It was Garrett, then a missionary-cum-bookseller, who had ‘infected’ Oxford with heresy in 1527. One of his converts, then or soon after, was Bigod, who had studied at Oxford though without taking a degree. Was Catherine, as now seems possible, another of Garrett’s conquests for Reform?37
But the strange saga of Bigod’s life was not yet complete. As a convinced Reformer, his first reaction to the Pilgrimage had been to try to flee. He took ship at Mulgrave and set sail for London. But the treacherous winds of the North Sea in autumn drove him back to land. Eventually, he was captured by the rebels and, like others of his class, forced to swear the Pilgrims’ oath and to ‘lead’ a detachment of the rebellion.38
There is no doubt that the process was even more fraught in Bigod’s case than most: he was contemptuous of the rebels as Papist reactionaries; they were suspicious of him as a meddling Reformer. But the chemistry of revolt wrought a remarkable change in Bigod’s opinions. He, unlike Henry and Cromwell, had never seen the Supremacy as an end in itself. Instead, he acclaimed it as a historic moment, in which ‘we be delivered from the hard, sharp and ten thousand times more than judicial captivity of that Babylonical man of Rome, to the sweet and soft service, yea, rather liberty, of the Gospel’.39
But what had happened to these extravagant, almost Millennarian, hopes? They had been dashed. Indeed, as Bigod was one of the first to see, the Supremacy, as interpreted by Henry and enforced by Cromwell, was leading not to liberty, of the Gospel or anything else, but to servitude and tyranny.
By the time of the Pontefract Council of 2–4 December, Bigod’s fluent pen had expressed these doubts in a thesis. It examined, from first principles, ‘what authority belonged to the Pope, what to a Bishop, and what to a King’. And it concluded that ‘the Head of the Church of England might be a spiritual man, as the Archbishop of Canterbury or such’. ‘In no wise’, however, might the Headship belong to the King, ‘for he should with the sword defend all spiritual men in their right’.40
Bigod, though starting from the opposite religious position, had now reached the same conclusion about the Royal Supremacy as Aske and Darcy. It was wrong and illegitimate, and Henry must be made to give it up. But having come to agree on ends, they now differed on tactics. Aske and Darcy were confident that their demonstration and Henry’s apparent surrender to it were enough. Bigod was shrewder. Only force, he argued, would compel Henry to give up what he had acquired. The common people in the north felt the same and Bigod, with a series of bold and impassioned speeches, put himself at their head in a new uprising in January 1537.41
The uprising fizzled out quickly, largely because Aske and Darcy refused their support. Instead, they persisted in trusting to Henry’s promises, and acting as good subjects meanwhile. In vain. Henry used Bigod’s rising as an excuse comprehensively to break his word with the Pilgrims. His lawyers twisted Aske and Darcy’s careful distancing of themselves from Bigod into evidence of treasonable intent and they and the rest were executed.
Would Latimer meet the same fate?
It seemed very likely. On 2 June, Norfolk thanked Cromwell ‘for his information that the King does not much favour Lord Latimer’. But what if Latimer made the short journey from Snape to consult Norfolk at his headquarters at Sheriff Hutton? How, the Duke of Norfolk wanted to know, should he deal with him? Cromwell’s instructions were that the Duke should trick Latimer into coming to London. Norfolk obeyed. He had ‘contrived’, he wrote to Cromwell on 16 June, ‘to make him go to London as a suitor on his own affairs’.42
Latimer, aware that it might be his last journey, travelled at a fairly leisurely pace and stopped off en route to visit his brother Thomas, who lived at Aldham near Colchester in Essex. There Latimer was arrested by the neighbouring magnate, the Earl of Oxford, and sent to London. He arrived by the end of the month and was promptly clapped in the Tower.43
Latimer had, semi-voluntarily, placed himself in the King’s power. Was this suicide? His brother Thomas Neville certainly thought so. ‘Alas, Mary’, he said to his wife, ‘my brother is cast away.’ ‘By God’s Blood’, he added, ‘if I had the King here I would make him that he should never take man into the Tower!’ Thomas was also sure that it was Latimer’s great wealth that made him such tempting prey. Would her master, the Parson of Aldham, who had been arrested on suspicion of treason, be put to death? Margaret Towler asked Thomas on 4 July. ‘No, Margaret’, he replied, ‘he shall not be put to death, for he hath no lands nor goods to lose.’ ‘But’, he added bitterly, ‘if he were either a knight or a lord that had lands or goods to lose, then he should lose his life.’ Surely, Margaret remonstrated, ‘the King’s Grace will put no man to death neither for goods nor lands?’ ‘Yes, by God, Margaret’, Thomas Neville countered, ‘but he would.’44
Thus Latimer’s brother. But what of Latimer’s wife?
Once again, as six months earlier in the Pilgrimage, Catherine was silent. And once more the silence is eloquent. For Catherine never wavered in her judgement of Henry. She followed neither Bigod nor her brother-in-law into a cynical reading of Henry’s motives. Always, for her, whatever the King did was for the best. He was just. He was virtuous.
But being just and virtuous are merely human qualities. The Henry she saw was more than that. He was God’s chosen instrument. He was ‘our Moses’, as she put it in her posthumously published Lamentations of a Sinner, ‘[who] hath delivered us out of the captivity and spiritual bondage of Pharaoh (that is, the Pope)’. He was even, she seemed to suggest, a Messiah, who ‘hath taken away the veils and mists of errors, and brought us to the knowledge of the truth by the light of God’s Word’.
One Messiah had been King of the Jews; the other was King of England, sent ‘in these latter days to reign over us’–by God and for God’s purposes.45
It was a conviction which stood Catherine in good stead in her first brush with royal power on the arrest of her husband. And it would be her rock in her relations with Henry thereafter.
Catherine’s unimpeachable loyalty and her steadying influence were, no doubt, part of the reason that Latimer, contrary to his brother’s expectations, survived his sojourn in the Tower. But other things came into play as well. Latimer used some of his wealth to bribe Cromwell: with an annual fee, with the lease of his London house, and with the sale, doubtless on advantageous terms, of one of his southern manors. He also re-invented himself as a model citizen: loyal and dependable, yet never pushing himself forward. But the most important reason for his survival, I would guess, was the increasing political weight of his wife’s family.46
For this, the Parrs had, in the first instance at least, to thank the Pilgrimage. In the case of most of the northern élite, of course, the Pilgrimage was a disaster. For the Parrs, on the other hand, it was an opportunity. They were a leading northern family. But, having followed the high road to London, their absenteeism in the south preserved them from the local pressure which had turned even Reformers, including Bigod, into potential traitors. Instead, the Parrs could be loyal without risk and they took advantage of their good fortune by a display of conspicuous activism on the King’s behalf. Catherine’s uncle, Sir William, was the right-hand man of the Duke of Suffolk in suppressing the Lincolnshire revolt; while her brother, young William, gained his first practical experience as a member of the suite of the Duke of Norfolk on the mopping-up operation in the north in 1537.
William’s assiduity caught the eye of the Duke of Norfolk, who recommended him to Cromwell for having ‘wisely handled himself in this business’. Nothing seems to have come of the Duke’s hint. Nor did Cromwell take up Sir William’s suggestion in January 1539 that, ‘considering the late change’ (that is, the fall and execution of Exeter and Sir Nicholas Carew), the minister should ‘procure a place in the King’s Privy Chamber for his nephew’. But William did not have long to wait for even better things. Two months later, on Sunday, 9 March 1539, he was created Baron Parr in a splendid ceremony in the Presence Chamber at Whitehall. And four years later still in 1543, he was made Lord Warden of the West Marches and a Knight of the Garter.47
He was barely thirty and already most of his mother’s ambitions for him were fulfilled.
Meanwhile, it fell to Catherine’s young sister, Anne, to step into her mother’s place as one of the Queen’s ladies. By 1537, as ‘Mrs Parr’, Anne had become one of Jane Seymour’s maidens. She was barely sixteen, sweet and, thanks to her mother’s foresight, eminently marriageable. As we have seen, her father had left her a substantial marriage portion, to which her mother’s will added 400 marks in plate and a third share of her jewels. The whole fortune, Lady Parr had directed, was to be securely chested up ‘in coffers locked with divers locks, whereof every one of them my executors and my…daughter Anne to have every of them a key’. ‘And there’, Lady Parr’s will continued, ‘it to remain till it ought to be delivered unto her’ on her marriage.48
And the marriage, everyone thought, would not be long delayed and there were repeated rumours of its imminence in the summer of 1537. ‘I think Mrs Parr shall shortly fall [into marriage]’, John Husey reported to Lady Lisle in June. ‘Men thinketh Mrs Parr shall shortly marry’, he wrote again in August. In the event, Anne was still unmarried at the time of Jane’s funeral in October and she may have remained so for another year or more. But by January 1539 she had married the up-and-coming courtier William Herbert. She had also become the Chief Gentlewoman of the Privy Chamber to the new Queen, Anne of Cleves. And she was to retain the office when Anne of Cleves in turn gave way to Catherine Howard.49
As her siblings were launched on glittering careers of their own, Catherine almost disappears from view. Historians, indeed, imagine they glimpse her and write vivid accounts of her Protestant salon in her husband’s house in the Charterhouse. It became, they claim, a centre of advanced doctrine and was frequented by such luminaries as John Parkhurst, Hugh Latimer and Miles Coverdale. But, alas, it is all a mirage. In the early 1540s, Parkhurst was at Oxford, Latimer was in disgrace and Coverdale was in exile, where he remained till 1547. If Catherine ever hosted such a salon, which I rather doubt, she could not have done so till the reign of Henry VIII’s son, Edward VI.50
But on 2 March 1543, her husband, Lord Latimer, died, having made his will the previous 12 September. There is nothing in his will to suggest (as some historians have guessed) that there had been any open rupture or disagreement with Catherine. On the contrary, he left his wife two manors in her own right as well as money for four years, ‘for the bringing up of my daughter (Margaret)’. This bequest must only have regularised the existing position, as a tailor’s bill addressed to Catherine on 16 February (a fortnight before her husband’s death) charges her for a ‘kirtle’ (a dress) provided ‘for your daughter’.51
Catherine was now a widow for the second time: still pretty, still unblemished by childbearing, and well-off. She was desirable, and, it is clear, she desired in return.
The individual on whom she had set her heart was Sir Thomas Seymour, the late Queen Jane’s younger brother and uncle to Prince Edward. Seymour was dashing and rather dangerous. That Catherine found him so attractive suggests hidden emotional depths. Or rather, perhaps, very human shallows: after a lifetime of doing what she ought, as a daughter and a wife, a little of what she fancied might have seemed irresistibly appealing. ‘My mind’, she wrote to Seymour some years later, ‘was fully bent…to marry you before any man I know.’52
We do not know when they met, or when their evidently mutual attraction began. Probably it was before Latimer’s death. If so, she handled her feelings with her usual ‘wisdom’ and discretion.
The feelings were strong nevertheless. ‘I was at liberty to marry you’, she reminded Seymour. And it is evident that she revelled in her freedom.
But a force more powerful still intervened: the King himself.