‘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,...
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