Robert Stewart

Last but not least | 30 April 2008

Robert Stewart reviews Susan James' new book

issue 03 May 2008

‘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.

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