[In the following excerpt, Dowling surveys Parr's intellectual and religious activities.]

Henry's sixth wife tried to revive something of the pious and cultured atmosphere that had formerly characterised the queen's household. Catherine Parr's religious and political importance should not be exaggerated. She was neither the director of a ‘royal nursery’ where the king's three children embarked on a novel course of humanist study: nor was she the head of the reform faction at court, only one of its more vulnerable members and as such open to attack. Yet within her limitations Catherine made an important contribution to court culture.

Contrary to legend, Catherine Parr did not receive a thorough education in her youth. It was only after her marriage to Henry that she began to learn Latin and to write the Italian hand which was valued by humanists. As late as 1546 Prince Edward (who wrote to her in Latin as to all his correspondents) praised her progress in Latin grammar and literature as well as her handwriting Catherine did correspond with Edward in Latin, but the only reply of hers extant is a corrected draft not in her hand.

Despite these learned pursuits, Catherine sometimes displayed a suspicion of scholarship and even a somewhat anti-intellectual streak. ‘I have certainly no curious learning’, she wrote, ‘but a simple love and earnest zeal to the truth inspired of God’. Equally, she warned the learned of Cambridge not to let arrogance blind them to Christian truth:

forasmuch as I do well understand all kind of learning doth flourish amongst you in this age as it did among the Greeks at Athens long ago, I require and desire you all, not so to hunger for the exquisite knowledge of profane learning that it may be thought the Greeks' university was but transposed or now again in England revived, forgetting our Christianity.

In fairness to Catherine it may be said that rejection of the pagan classics and rigid concentration on Christian literature was also characteristic of John Colet, the humanist dean of St Paul's London and founder of the school there.

If she was not learned in the academic sense, Catherine Parr was one of only a handful of female authors published in Tudor England. She produced two books: Prayers or Meditations, wherein the mind is stirred patiently to suffer all afflictions: and The Lamentation of a Sinner. The former is an innocuous, noncontroversial collection largely derived from Thomas à Kempis and Erasmus, and it enjoyed many editions after its initial publication in 1545. The latter, however, is explicitly Lutheran, and so it remained unpublished until after Henry VIII's death.

This is a pointer to Catherine's lack of religious influence with the king, but nonetheless she tried to persuade him to more evangelical opinions. It was she who planned and supervised the translation of Erasmus' paraphrases of the New Testament into English. Nicholas Udall, dedicating Luke's gospel to Catherine, hoped that the king:

will not suffer it to lie buried in silence, but will one day, when his godly wisdom shall so think expedient, cause the same paraphrase to be published and set abroad in print, to the same use that your highness hath meant it, that is to say, to the public commodity and benefit of good English people now a long time sore thirsting and hungering the sincere and plain knowledge of God's word.

Henry was unmoved, and this was another project which had to wait for publication until the following reign when, by contrast, law required that copies should be placed in all parish churches.

Catherine's attempts to make Henry more evangelical nearly proved to be her downfall. Possibly with the example of Anne Boleyn in mind, Catherine tried to argue theology with the king. Since she was somewhat tactlessly persistent, and he was both dogmatic and ill-tempered, Henry became exasperated enough to listen to accusations of heresy from her conservative enemies. Only warnings from ‘godly persons’ at court and a timely capitulation to Henry's judgment saved the queen.

If Catherine's influence on policy was small, her household was certainly a centre of piety and culture. Her chaplain, Francis Goldsmith, said that she made every day like a Sunday. The reformers, John Parkhurst and Anthony Cope, entered her service. Her ladies were noted for learning and religious devotion; many of them, such as Lady Jane Denny, were married to members of the evangelical faction in the king's privy chamber. Roger Ascham praised the queen's sister Anne, Lady Herbert. Parkhurst's early poems lauded Catherine herself, her maid, Anne Carew, Catherine, Duchess of Suffolk and Lady Jane Grey. This last entered the queen's household at the age of nine and remained with Catherine until her death in 1548. It is probable that Catherine's was one of the influences which encouraged Jane's enthusiasm for study.