Catherine Parr: The Queen Who Wrote, Ruled, and Outlived Henry VIII

In 1545 a small book of prayers went on sale in Fleet Street with the queen of England's name on the title page. No English queen had done that before. The summer before, the same woman had governed the kingdom for eleven weeks while the king besieged Boulogne. The schoolroom rhyme gives her one word for all of it, and it is the wrong one.

Catherine Parr was born about 1512 into a northern gentry family and was twice widowed before she was thirty-one. When Henry VIII married her at Hampton Court on 12 July 1543 she was in the Lady Mary's household and had already been courted by Thomas Seymour, the late Queen Jane's brother; the king sent him abroad. In the three and a half years that followed she brought Mary, Elizabeth and Edward to court as one family, was in the house when Parliament restored both daughters to the succession, and put three books through the press in four years: the first in 1544 without her name, the second in 1545 with it.

In July 1544 Henry left her regent and governor of the realm, the first queen to hold that commission since Catherine of Aragon in 1513. Proclamations went out over her name. Two summers later Anne Askew was racked in the Tower and questioned about the queen's ladies, and by John Foxe's account, nearly the only source there is, a warrant for the queen's arrest was drawn up and signed, and she talked the king out of it in a single conversation. This book tells that episode as Foxe's account, sets out what corroborates it and what does not, and says why most historians still accept its outline.

Henry died on 28 January 1547 and his will kept her off the council that would govern for his son. Within four months she had married Thomas Seymour, secretly and without the council's leave. Nineteen months after the king, she died at Sudeley Castle, six days after the birth of her only child, and was buried with the first royal funeral conducted in English.

The sixth and closing volume of a series on the six queens of Henry VIII. Catherine is read from her own books and letters, and is never given a thought or motive the sources do not record. Henry's thread ends here; the reader is handed on to Elizabeth.

What you'll learn:

• Why the regency of 1544 was the high-water mark of a Tudor queen's formal power, and what the work actually was
• What her three books say, where they came from, and why the third could not have been printed while Henry lived
• How much of Edward's and Elizabeth's schooling she directed, and how much has been credited to her since
• What Foxe's account of 1546 claims, what independent evidence supports it, and where it stands alone
• Why six marriages were one problem, and why the sixth wife was the one who gathered the family it had scattered

This book is for you if:

• You have read the first five volumes and want the one that closes the set
• You know her as the nurse or the lucky last wife and want what the documents say instead
• You want a Tudor queen in her own words, from the sixteenth-century printings
• You are reading toward Elizabeth I and want the stepmother's house first

Regent at thirty-two. Author under her own name at thirty-three. Free, for nineteen months, at thirty-four.