Notes |
- According to Ann Hoffmann "Lives of the Tudor Age 1485-1603", 1977, Katherine Parr was born 1512, daughter of Sir Thomas Parr, but brought up by her unnamed mother. Her first husband was Edwin (sic) Borough, "about whom little is known except that he died in about 1529". Katherine then "married John Neville, son of Lord Latimer, a widower with two children." She does not list either of them, but says Neville died about 1542/3 at which point Parr agreed to marry the future Lord High Admiral Thomas Seymour. Henry VIII overruled that marriage for his own evil ends, and she had to delay her unity with Seymour until after the King had married her and died (of syphallis?) in Junuary 1547. Ex Queen Kate died on 7 Sept 1548 a week after the birth of a daughter to her and Thomas (now Baron Seymour of Sudely) at Sudely Castle near Cheltenham, Gloucestershire. This information provided by Alan O. Watkins (alan-o-watkins@easynet.co.uk) From Queen Katherine Parr by Anthony Martienssen, McGraw Hill 1973 "The marriage of Katherine Parr and Henry VII in the summer of 1543-his 6th and last wife, her third and penultimate husband-pleased everybody. Congratulations poured in from as far afield as Venice, Paris, and Brussell, and papists and anti-papists alike praised Henry for his choice. Katherine's father had been one of Henry's close friends, her mother had been a principal Lady-in-Waiting to Henry's first Queen, Catharine of Aragon, while she herself and been born and brought up in the full glare of Henry's Court." She had been well educated under the influence of Henry's grandmother, Margaret Beauford, well known for her Humanist ideals and patroness of New Learning. Katherine and her sibs were schooled in the Royal nursery with Princess Mary and some other highborn children and taught by the noted scholar Juan Luys Vives.
She inherited the estated in Kent that had previously belonged to Borough's first wife, Anne Cobham
Poem by son of her uncle Sir George Throgmorton:
"Oh, lucky liiks that fawned on Katherine Parr!
A woman rare like ber but seldom seen,
To Borough first, and then to Latimer,
She widow was, and then became a Queen;
My mother prayed her niece with watery eyes,
To rid both her and hers from endless cries.
She, willing of herself to do us good,
Sought out the means her uncle's lifer to save;
And when the King was in his pleasing mood
She humbly then her suit begat to crave;
With wooing times denials disagree,
She spake and sped-my father was set free.
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