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Catherine Parr: Henry VIII’s Last Love

Last but not least

Susan James
Tempus, 348pp, £20,

Robert Stewart

Wednesday, 30th April 2008

Robert Stewart reviews Susan James' new book

‘Love is but a frailty of the mind when ’tis not to ambition joined.’ So Thomas Seymour, destined to be Catherine Parr’s fourth and last husband, expressed a notion taken as read in Tudor families of sufficient standing to seek social and financial ladders to climb. Catherine understood the ways of the world.

When at the age of 30, already twice sold into marriage and twice widowed, she married the corpulent, ailing Henry VIII, she did so for her family’s sake, suppressing, but not killing, her ardour for the rakish Seymour. ‘You are,’ she wrote of her wedding to her brother, ‘the person who has most cause to rejoice.’

Susan James writes well of the strenuous, complicated negotations undertaken by Maud Parr, Catherine’s mother, to marry her son and two daughters well. Of Catherine’s life before she became queen there is so little documentary evidence that the effort to bring her into the story, and to show her to have been a well-educated and spirited young woman, seems to be the work of smoke and mirrors. But once queen, Catherine blossoms before our eyes and so does this book. Indeed, it is a strange thing but true that Catherine’s life as queen, which abundantly sustains James’ purpose to demonstrate that Catherine was not the colourless and unimaginative person that previous historians have painted her, is itself the evidence of the kind of childhood that James struggles to describe.

Maud is the central character of the first third of the book, a woman who, widowed when Catherine was five, cocked a snook at custom and disdained to remarry advantageously in order to protect her place in the world. Instead, she rejoiced at being set at liberty and went about successfully managing her estates and founding schools in defiance of the convention that the role of weak-minded women was to be submissive and obedient to men and, like children, largely silent unless spoken to. There is no accounting for the spirited, independent-minded, politically active consort that Henry welcomed into his counsels except that she grew to maturity in her mother’s image.

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