SOURCE: James, Susan E. “‘All the Words of Angels.’” In Kateryn Parr: The Making of a Queen, pp. 220-52. Brookfield, Vermont: Ashgate Publishing Company, 1999.

[In the following essay, James examines Parr's involvement in the publication of works of humanist scholarship and the queen's own writings on religion.]

Between the spring of 1544 and the spring of 1546, the queen involved herself in a number of projects related to humanist scholarship and to the reformed religion that ultimately earned her the ire of the conservatives. Her involvement in these projects should also have earned her the interest of posterity but as she chose to keep much of her activity out of the public limelight, the bits and pieces of extant evidence connecting her with such major publications as Cranmer's Litany, the Grafton-Whitchurch primer, and the English translation of Erasmus's Paraphrases vary in strength and number. Her connection to the founding of the Trinity College, Cambridge, is also a matter of reading between the lines. ‘She was a right noble lady, and had done an abundance of good things,’ Strype informs us, ‘but yet cared not that they should be known or spoken of.’¹ This may have been a laudable display of matronly modesty, according to the canon of behaviour laid down for Renaissance women, but such reticence is frustrating for historians. The one project of which she was indisputably sole author was her final book, Lamentation of a Sinner, written in all probability in the winter of 1545-46 and later revised for publication in November 1547.

Kateryn's life during her years as queen was full of contradictions. A zealous advocate of the reformed religion, she flirted with Calvinism but also supported rapprochement with Spain. She vilified the papacy but read Italian authors. She spoke fluent French and studied the literary efforts of French writers but unsurprisingly had little sympathy with French political aspirations. An aspect of Kateryn's psychology which should be emphasized is the fact that she grew up in a household presided over not by a man but by a woman. As her later actions imply, it was impressed upon Kateryn, as the eldest surviving child, that she owed a responsibility to her younger siblings, but it was also part of the wisdom she received as a child, that a woman alone was capable of managing a great estate, of handling the business involved in such management and of establishing an individual identity apart from her father or her husband. Maud Parr had neither father nor husband alive to interfere with her running of her own affairs. Kateryn's surrogate father, her uncle William Parr of Horton, lived in another shire and maintained a respectful relationship with his sister-in-law. This early sense of perceived individual identity for women may have been the reason that throughout her life, Kateryn signed documents not with her married name but as ‘Kateryn Parr, KP’.

In a sense, growing up in an effectively functioning, female-dominated household provided a false prototype for the young Kateryn, offering her a skewed idea of how the adult world of sixteenth-century England operated. Marriage, in the forms which presented themselves to her between the years 1529 and 1547, must have come as a salutary awakening. When she described her brief period of widowhood in early 1542 in a letter, she referred to that time ‘when I was last at liberty’. Yet whatever unfortunate surprises and hard life lessons these later experiences may have had for her, they never quite eradicated the hopefulness with which a woman, raised to believe that women can accomplish much, faced the prejudices and challenges of her world. This in part accounts for the energetic eagerness with which Kateryn took on a number of important projects between the spring of 1544 and the spring of 1546.

Although religion may have been the most obvious focus of Kateryn's attention during this time, a copy of the works of Petrarch, with exposition by Alessandro Vellutello, published in Venice with her name in it, shows a continued interest in the evolving world of humanist belles-lettres, as her stepson, Edward, noted in 1546.² Petrarch's sonnets had had a seminal impact on the courtier-poet circle to which the queen's brother belonged. Sir Thomas Wyatt combined rhyme schemes popularized by other Italian poets with the subject matter of love and loss dealt with by Petrarch, such as that in Sonnetto in Vita 91, which became Wyatt's ‘The Long Love That in My Thought Doth Harbor’ as well as the Earl of Surrey's ‘Love, That Doth Reign and Live Within My Thought’. Wyatt thus introduced the sonnet form into English poetry and his friend, the Earl of Surrey, adding a more fluid standardized rhyme scheme, transformed it into the English sonnet form. Surrey also added unrhymed iambic pentameter or blank verse to the English vocabulary of poetic forms. That the queen owned and read Petrarch shows that she, too, was aware of the momentous things happening on the secular side of the English vernacular blanket. Whether she, herself, attempted to write poetry or was content to read her brother's and his friends' in the various manuscripts that circulated at court has yet to be established. But what is certain is that Kateryn did not spend all of her waking hours reading scripture alone.

As far as their wide-ranging effects on the practice of religious devotions in England, among the most important of the projects of 1544-46 with which the queen involved herself were the publications of Archbishop Cranmer's 1544 Litany, and the 1545 publication of the Grafton-Whitchurch primer. A primer was a personal prayer book meant for private devotions among members of the laity. As a private work, it was not authorized by the English Church or the English government and did not necessarily conform to any rules or regulations that those bodies might have imposed on regular church services. Heretical infection could and did creep into private worship with, so the king and others believed, detrimental effect on the English congregation as a whole.³ A standard primer, authorized by the head of the English Church, seemed advisable to insure conformity. The first steps towards such a work were taken in May 1544 with the appearance of the King's Primer, which was used for private devotions by the king himself but was not offered to the general public until May 1545.

The primer which preceded the King's Primer in common usage was written by John Hilsey, a Black Friar. It was dedicated to Cromwell and the Epistles and Gospels which appeared in it were from the Sarum Missal, that Horae ad Usum Sarum with which Kateryn Parr had grown up. The King's Primer was published under the guise of being Henry's own work. He wrote a preface and an injunction and, in the latter, explained that the book's purpose was

for the avoiding of the diversity of primer books, that are now abroad, whereof are almost innumerable sorts which minister occasion of contentions and vain disputations, rather than to edify, and to have one uniform order of all such books throughout all our dominion, both to be taught unto children, and also to be used for ordinary prayers of all our people not learned in the Latin tongue.⁴

The new primer has been judged by modern scholars as an outstanding piece of religious literature, far superior to any of its predecessors. ‘The compiler, like his predecessors, makes use of old material, but he has mastered it, and can treat it with perfect freedom.’⁵ That Cranmer wrote some or much of the primer is probable. His Litany is a central feature, and it contains prayers for the royal triumvirate—Henry, Kateryn and Edward. God is requested to keep ‘our noble queen Catherine in thy fear and love, giving her increase of all goodness, honour and children …’.⁶ Yet Cranmer was only one of the authors of the primer, and there is evidence to indicate that the queen may also have had a hand in its creation.⁷

Between May 1544, when Cranmer's new Litany appeared in the King's Primer and May 1545 when the primer was published by Grafton and Whitchurch, Cranmer's Litany had another publication. On 12 October 1544, it was published ‘at London in Paul's Churchyard at the sign of the Maiden's Head by Thomas Petyt’.⁸ Two points about this particular publication are of interest. The first is that the sign under which Petit published, the maiden's head, was the queen's own personal emblem. Petit's use of it may have predated Kateryn's but their joint use of that particular device is suggestive. The second point is that the Litany was not printed by itself alone but was issued as half of a volume designed to be used as a ‘mass book’ during religious devotions. The second half of the volume consisted of Kateryn's translation of Psalms or Prayers. Petit would hardly have undertaken to join Cranmer's work with that of the queen's without the express approval of both authors. An order for copies of the combined edition by the queen at the time of its publication indicates her involvement in its production.⁹ From this joint publication then, it can be inferred that queen and archbishop were working together, ‘adapting old forms to new uses’.¹⁰ In the following year, 1545, Thomas Berthelet, who had first published Psalms or Prayers and Prayers or Meditations, published another version of both books bound in with Cranmer's Litany, and included a new prayer, presumably by the queen, for the forgiveness of sins, thus tacitly reiterating in print the common purpose of both authors' work.¹¹

In May 1544, when the new primer first appeared at the king's devotions, the chamber accounts of the queen show that in that same month, her clerk of the closet, William Harper, recorded charges for ‘a primer for her grace in Latin and English with epistles and gospels unbounden’.¹² Additional charges were made ‘for ruling and colouring of the letters of the said primer and of her grace's testament in French … [and] for gilding, convening and binding of the two said books …’. This was undoubtedly the same book as the king's, as was the primer which Kateryn had with her at her death, ‘Item, a primer in English covered with crimson velvet garnished with silver and gilt.’¹³ These books in the queen's possession suggest that she had an interest in the development of the new primer. This suggestion is confirmed by the choice of the primer's publishers.

On 29 May 1545, the King's Primer was issued under the king's name by Richard Grafton and his partner, Edward Whitchurch. Grafton was a new religionist publisher who under Cromwell's patronage and using Cromwell's own licence had published the English translation of the Bible, known as the Great Bible. After Cromwell's death in 1541, Grafton had got into trouble for publishing certain ballads defending his late master as well as Philipp Melanchthon's attack on the Six Articles. In 1542, Grafton published Nicholas Udall's English translation of Erasmus's Apophthegmes, which recorded the sayings of Greek notables such as Socrates and Diogenes and Roman notables such as Julius Caesar, Cicero and Demosthenes. Udall joined the queen's household a year or two after this publication and it was probably he who brought the radical publisher to the queen's attention.

With the publication of the primer in 1545, Grafton was given a special licence as ‘printer and servant to our most dear son Prince Edward’, and on 22 April 1547, after Edward's accession to the throne, Grafton was made king's printer with an annual stipend of £12 and the reversion of Thomas Berthelet's £4 annuity at Berthelet's death. It has been rightly pointed out that the author of Grafton's success was in all probability the queen.¹⁴ Grafton's partner, Edward Whitchurch, was chosen to publish both her Lamentation of a Sinner and the fruits of the project on which she laboured so many years, the English translation of Erasmus's Paraphrases.

The wide scope of the target audience for the new primer may reflect suggestions made by the queen. Like Cuthbert Tunstall's book on arithmetic, the King's Primer was not to be reserved to adults alone.

… every schoolmaster and bringer up of young beginners in learning, next after their A.B.C., now by us also set forth, do teach this primer or book of ordinary prayers unto them in English, and that the youth customably or ordinarily use the same, until they be of competent understanding and knowledge to perceive it in Latin.¹⁵

The king's ‘Injunction’ states the two-pronged royal provisions for the education of children, a reading primer or ABC and a religious primer. Some obscurity attaches to the ABC, except that it was published at about the same time as the King's Primer, and its purpose was to teach children to read their own language as opposed to Latin or Greek, for which a number of grammar books, particularly the popular Lily's Grammar, already existed. The same group of new religionist writers who had provided the inspiration, impetus and text for the primer must have also been the group who encouraged publication of the King's ABC. This group almost certainly included the queen. For, after all, what good was a religious primer if the commonality could not read it? Literacy was the first step on the road to salvation, and the King's ABC probably took the form of a horn book or small wooden paddle to which was attached a sheet printed with the alphabet, followed by a list of numbers and the Paternoster. The sheet was covered with a transparent slice of horn to protect it and keep it clean. Recorded versions of the horn book date to as early as 1450 yet almost no actual samples survive.¹⁶ Presumably they were used until they simply wore out. From this rudimental teaching tool, the student progressed to the intricacies of Latin as set out in books such as Lily's Grammar. An edition of this grammar book was reissued by the king's printer, Thomas Berthelet, in 1543-44, yet because the new publication to which the king refers is labelled an ‘A.B.C.’ and not a ‘grammar’, the reference seems to be to a basic form of the horn book.

This interest in the secular and religious education of the young was a major theme in the life of the queen. From her mother's will of 1529 leaving money for the founding of schools, to Lord Latimer's will of 1542 leaving money for the founding of a free school at Well, to Kateryn's interest as queen in her grammar school at Clare and her involvement in the educations of her Neville stepdaughter and her two youngest Tudor stepchildren, to her patronage of Cambridge University, provision for the teaching of the young was a predominant concern. Standard government issued textbooks for ‘young beginners’ ABCs' and for their religious instruction covered an area with which the queen was particularly involved and material to which she was particularly committed.

The King's Primer was reissued on 6 September 1545, exactly two months before the publication of the queen's Prayers or Meditations, compiled from ‘holy works’. Cranmer was thus not the only author of importance at court ‘engrossed in liturgical studies’ at this time.¹⁷ Psalm CXIX is lauded in the preface to the Commendations in the primer, yet was demonstrably tedious to the archbishop. He would hardly have chosen to include it, yet it contains much that would have appealed to the queen, and was in fact echoed in works with which she was involved. ‘And I will walk at liberty: for I seek thy precepts. I will speak of thy testimonies also before kings, and will not be ashamed,’ sings the Psalmist.

Remember the word unto thy servant, upon which thou hast caused me to hope. This is my comfort in my affliction: for thy word hath quickened me. The proud have had me greatly in derision: yet have I not declined from thy law. I remembered thy judgements of old, O Lord; and have comforted myself.¹⁸

If the queen actually did write some portion of the primer, such as any of the ‘Certain godly prayers for sundry purposes’, if would not be the only time that her work appeared under her husband's name. Her translation of Psalms or Prayers was published numerous times after 1556 as The King's Psalms and attributed to Henry's authorship. Whatever form the queen's contribution to the primer project took, the evidence implies that she did indeed have a hand in it, ‘yet cared not that [it] should be known or spoken of’.

The most demanding project with which the queen interested herself from 1545 to 1548 was the English translation of Erasmus's Paraphrases upon the New Testament. With the organization of the Paraphrases project, Kateryn took an increasingly visible role in the arena of English vernacular Protestant propaganda, designed as it was to inform and enlighten minds of both sexes, unequipped to deal with the intricacies of Latin but which sought a literary exegesis of spiritual truths defined by the Reformation and couched in England's own familiar tongue. The queen has been portrayed as a rather passive participant in this project, providing money to the assumed organizer, Nicholas Udall, and little else.¹⁹ Yet Udall in his preface to the book of ‘St Luke’, dedicated to the queen and dated 30 September 1545, remarks,

I shall turn my style somewhat to treat of Luke, whom it pleased your highness to commit unto me to be translated. Which commandment, when it came first unto me in your grace's name, although I knew how little it was that I could do in this kind, yet was I glad that your commandment did so justly concur with the determination of mine own mind and purpose.²⁰

Throughout the various dedications to the queen in the translation, written by Udall and by the translator of St Mark, Thomas Key, who said prayers daily in her oratory, are remarks on the queen's personal organization of the project. It was she who selected the project at Udall's suggestion, decided to organize the massive undertaking by dividing the translation work among several translators, and selected who those translators were to be. Thomas Key recorded how one of the king's doctors, George Owen, encouraged him to volunteer to undertake the translation of St Mark after all of the other books had been assigned, ‘affirming that I should do a thing right acceptable unto your highness’.²¹

As translator for the ‘Book of St John’, Kateryn chose her stepdaughter, Princess Mary. The reasons for this may have been more than a desire to improve Mary's Latin. Having been highly successful in championing the king's inclusion of the princess in the line of succession, Kateryn now sought to wean her from her more conservative religious convictions by drawing her into a major project for the reformed religion. Francis Mallet, who had been the queen's chaplain, joined Mary's household, charged perhaps with initiating and encouraging a trend towards reform in the princess.²² As part of this effort, Kateryn and Mallet both persuaded Mary to undertake the translation of the ‘Book of St John’, and to win her stepmother's approval, Mary agreed to the project. She began to translate a book that later as queen she would order destroyed as heretical.²³

Three of Kateryn's appointed translators are known—Mary undertook the ‘Book of St John’; Udall, himself, translated the ‘Book of St Luke’, and Thomas Key, the ‘Book of St Mark’. The work began in 1545 and continued into the fall of 1547, when the queen wrote to request Mary, who was ill, to have Mallet finish and polish the translation of ‘St John’ so that it could be included in the final publication of 31 January 1548.²⁴ If the translators of Mark, Luke and John are known, who then were the translators of the ‘Book of St Matthew’ and the ‘Acts’? On this point, Strype in his Ecclesiastical Memorials remarks, ‘But I am apt to think Queen Katharin herself might do one at least, and perhaps that upon St Matthew’.²⁵ A close examination of the translation of St Matthew and a comparison of this book with Kateryn's other known writings indicate that Strype may have been correct. It is not impossible, indeed it is highly likely, that some or all of this work was done by the queen, herself.²⁶

Udall includes Kateryn and Mary among those noble ladies who possess the ability to translate books out of Latin into English in his preface to the ‘Book of St John’. In the introduction to the ‘Book of St Matthew’, he also refers to the queen's ‘incessant pains and travails’²⁷ in the cause of true religion, which may be an oblique reference to her work on the very book he was introducing to the reading public. Udall declares in the text that he has revised and checked the two gospels of St Matthew and Acts against the Latin originals, something he does not mention having done for any of the other books. The implication must be that the translators of Matthew and Acts were not accepted Latinists of the scholarly community. Why else would Udall publicly acknowledge that he had proofed their text? An accepted scholar would have been insulted by such an announcement. Mary had Mallet to vouch for her translation but translations undertaken by other women, fluent though they might be in Latin, required in Udall's view, certainly in the king's, and probably in the queen's as well, a public stamp of approval by an accredited male scholar. This would prevent backbiting at court from those who knew what the queen was about and felt that she presumed too much in undertaking such a task. Of these, Stephen Gardiner, Bishop of Winchester, was certainly one.

A comparison of the language used in the English translation of ‘St Matthew’, with that used in Kateryn's own writings supports this thesis. The glosses on the 28 March 1548 edition of Lamentation of a Sinner show that the queen was widely read in scripture. She paraphrases or quotes from no less than 23 books of the Bible with the ‘Book of St John’, ‘Romans’ and ‘Corinthians’ being particular favourites. The most quotes, by far, however, over 36 in number come from the ‘Book of St Matthew’. The queen's familiarity with St Matthew was extensive. Her familiarity with Erasmus's paraphrase on the meaning of the text was equally thorough. ‘If men so greedily embrace a book,’ states the paraphrase in words with which the queen would have fully concurred,

which is set forth by the industry of man, concerning the preservation or restoring of health, or the way to increase husbandry, or touching any other faculty which maketh only for worldly commodities, with how much more fervent love and desire ought this book to be received of all men whose profit and commodity belongeth indifferently to all men.²⁸

The comparison of verses below shows the parallel thought and word usage in the English translation of the St Matthew paraphrase and in the queen's other work.

Paraphrase of St Matthew	Psalms or Prayers
… for God by his secret counsel which man's wit is utterly unable to search out …	O most mighty god of angels and of men: whose judgements be unsearchable …
	Lamentation of a Sinner
[The Jews] signifying and showing before by divers dark figures and shadows …	For [the Jews] lived under shadows and figures and were bound to the law.
The eternal verity doth not deceive, God the promiser disappointeth not, further man's law shall not now perceive what is to be done, but Christian charity shall plainly tell.	And, therefore, [the Lord] promiseth and bindeth himself by his word, to give good and beneficial gifts to all them that seek him with true faith …
	[That same doctrine of Christ] which never can be attained by human doctrine, wit nor reason … [but by knowing] the loving charity of God.
Yea the more earnestly they laboured to come unto innocency and felicity, trusting to man's help, the more they were entangled with vice and filthy desires …	Christ was innocent and void of all sin, and I wallowed in filthy sin and was free from no sin.
	Psalms or Prayers
	Wherefore it is a vain thing, to trust in man: For the true trust and health of man, is only in thee.
	Lamentation of a Sinner
For many [do not believe in Christ the Messiah] because their eyes be blinded with desires of worldly things …	… for I had a blind guide called Ignorance who dimmed mine eyes … Christ despised the world with all the vanities, thereof, and I made it my god because of the vanities.
[Jesus is in the world] to overcome the tyranny of death … and the sore provocations of concupiscence by the sword of the spirit …29	But let us know that Christ yet fighteth in spirit in his elect vessels and shall fight even to the day of judgement. At which day shall that great enemy death be wholly destroyed and shall be no more.30

‘The evangelical faith,’ states the paraphrase, ‘… is the heavenly seed of God's word.’³¹ This was the core of the queen's own belief. A year or so later, when Kateryn was writing clandestinely to her lover, Sir Thomas Seymour, she accused him of deliberately misinterpreting something she had said, remarking, ‘I know not whether ye be a paraphraser or not. If ye be learned in that science, it is possible ye may of one word make a whole sentence, and yet not at all times alter the true meaning of the writer …’.³² By the year the letter was written, 1547, the queen had had considerable experience of translations and paraphrasers.

One other piece of evidence that ties Kateryn's work to the anonymously translated gospel is the virulent antipathy of Bishop Gardiner to the anonymous translator of the ‘Book of St Matthew’. Writing from his prison cell in the Fleet to the Lord Protector, the Duke of Somerset, in the autumn of 1547, Gardiner excoriated both the paraphrase of the book and the translator of St Matthew. ‘By the Paraphrase,’ wrote Gardiner,

the keeping of a Concubine is called but a light fault and that were good for Lancashire … and when to have a concubine, it is called a light fault, methinks if the maid can read, it may serve well, lightly to persuade her … [for] the Translator in English wanted speech, when he turned it thus.³³

The immediate conjunction of the image of the literate concubine with a commentary on the translator is suggestive. Gardiner continues his letter in a rant against this person:

And your Grace shall further understand that he (who it is I know not) who hath taken the labour to translate Erasmus into English, hath for his part offended some time, as appeareth plainly, by ignorance, and some time evidently of purpose, to put in, leave out, and change as he thought best, never to the better, but to the worse: with specialities whereof I will not encumber your Grace, but assure you it is so.

Modern commentary on Kateryn's paraphrase of Thomas à Kempis in Prayers or Meditations makes many of the same comments but in a far less denigratory tone.³⁴

As Somerset failed to respond in anything but a tepid manner to Gardiner's objections to translator and translation, the imprisoned conservative became more virulent. In November, he continued his attack on ‘the malice and untruth of much matter out of Erasmus' pen and also the arrogant ignorancy of the translator into English’, who had shown himself ‘ignorant in Latin and English, a man far unmeet to meddle with such a matter, and not without malice’. ‘This translator,’ he continued in another tirade, ‘was asleep when [he] began, having such faults.’³⁵

Gardiner's disavowal of all knowledge of the identity of the translator seems disingenuous, a guise allowing him the liberty of attack without being accused of a libellous vendetta against a particular individual. Neither Udall nor Key could be savaged in such a way on the grounds of their ignorance of English or Latin. Nor is it likely that Gardiner would have allowed himself a venomous tirade against the Princess Mary, translator of the ‘Book of St John’, who after all had Mallet's expertise on which to rely. Gardiner had, however, already proven himself an enemy of the queen's and his opinions regarding her ‘unmeetness to meddle with such a matter’ as the tenets of religion were a matter of record. One facet of the translation that Gardiner particularly objected to was the way in which the Eucharist was treated. ‘If this Paraphrase go abroad’, he wrote to Somerset, ‘people shall be learned to call the Sacrament of the Altar holy bread, and a Symbol. At which new name many will marvel, and they be wanton words …’³⁶—the wanton words of a literate concubine. Significantly, it was this sensitive issue of the Eucharist which became the flashpoint for the persecution of the queen in 1546. Gardiner's attack of 1547 was a reprise of his attack on the queen in 1546. At the time Gardiner was writing to Somerset, Kateryn, as queen dowager, was fighting an ongoing war of attrition with the Lord Protector and his wife and was, as Gardiner must have been well aware, vulnerable to the sort of attack he was waging against the unknown translator. That it did not materially affect the distribution of the Paraphrases was due more to Somerset's own commitment to the reformed religion than any protective feelings he may have had for his royal sister-in-law.

Edward Whitchurch, partner of Grafton and Kateryn's chosen publisher, brought out ‘The 1st tome or volume of the Paraphrases upon the New Testament’ on 31 January 1548. If the queen was the translator of the ‘Book of St Matthew’, she had cause to feel satisfaction with her work. Despite the animosity of religious conservatives, the first volume of the Paraphrases had a circulation of some 20 000 volumes between 1548 and 1551. As patron or as patron/translator, her work reached during her lifetime a wide audience. Udall recognized Kateryn's patronage of the entire translation project in his preface to Matthew:

… since the time of your first calling to the estate and dignity of espousal and marriage … [you] hath never ceased by all possible means that in you might lie, to advance and to increase the public commodity and benefit of this commonweal of England … to whose benefit and edifying in true religion, all these your incessant pains and travails do finally redound.³⁷

The translation of the ‘Book of St John’, Udall dedicated specifically to Kateryn, touching those points he thought would please her.

When I consider, most gracious Queen Katerine, the great number of noble women in this our time and country of England not only given to the study of human sciences and of strange tongues, but also so thoroughly expert in holy Scriptures, that they are able to compare with the best masters as well in endicting and penning of godly and fruitful treatises to the instruction and edifying of whole realms in the knowledge of God, as also in translating good books out of Latin or Greek into English, for the use and commodity of such as are rude and ignorant of the same tongues: I cannot but think and esteem the famous learned [of] Antiquity so far behind these times, that there cannot justly be made any comparison between them.³⁸

With these words, Udall paid graceful homage to Kateryn's efforts as Latin translator (Psalms or Prayers, Book of St Matthew [?]) and as author/paraphraser (Prayers or Meditations).

Udall and Key dedicated each book in turn to the queen and in the preface of ‘Acts’, Udall informed the queen that she

deserveth no less than to be esteemed and called the chief patroness [to sew abroad the word of God, and to plant true religion in all parts of his realms and dominions], not only for diverse, most godly Psalms and meditations of your own penning and setting forth to the great admiration of all people, [but] to the notable example of other noble and public personages, and to the effectual stirring up and enkindling of the reader's devotion. …³⁹

Three months prior to the publication of the Paraphrases, Kateryn had published yet another volume, Lamentation of a Sinner, dedicated to stirring people up and enkindling their devotion. In it, the passionate outpouring of her religious fervour found a unique and final voice.

The Lamentation of a Sinner, probably written in the winter of 1545-46 shortly after the publication of Prayers or Meditations, was kept secret until after Henry's death. The reasons for this were the queen's eroding position with the king and the fear that had been instilled in her by accusations of heresy and the plots against her life during the summer of 1546. Lamentation was a far more personal work than any of its predecessors, although it had undoubtedly been written for publication, and was not published until 5 November 1547 by Edward Whitchurche. Even after Henry's death, it took the combined efforts of William Cecil, the Duchess of Suffolk and Kateryn's brother, William, then Earl of Essex, to convince the queen to allow her meditation to be made public. Yet Lamentation of a Sinner as an expression of Kateryn's religious views was fairly typical of religious attitudes among the group of reformers to which she belonged and who by November 1547 were in control of the government.

Roger Ascham voiced the scholarly reaction to it in January 1548, when he wrote from St John's College, Cambridge, to William Cecil: ‘We have read the most holy confessions of our Queen, together with your most eloquent letter. I wish that you could find it in your heart to devote some of your time to the cultivation of English, so that men might know how easily our language admits all the members of eloquence.’⁴⁰ Despite the eloquence of her English, the queen was reluctant to place herself once more on the public stage by allowing the book's publication. As Henry was dead, this reluctance must have stemmed from the notoriety that she had endured during the summer of 1547 when her secret and precipitate marriage to Sir Thomas Seymour became common knowledge. So ribald were the jests made at her expense that Seymour had attempted to get an Act of Parliament passed condemning public slander against the queen. Royal lamentations by Kateryn in November 1547 over sins she had committed would have had all too specific an interpretation for the backbiters at court and the wags in city taverns.

Fortunately for posterity she was persuaded to publication, for the last book the queen wrote carries the sound of her voice and the imprint of her mind as none before it had done. Throwing off the shackles of ‘translated by’ or ‘collected by’ or ‘paraphrased by’ which put the burden of doctrine purposefully on other shoulders, Lamentation of a Sinner belongs to the queen alone. The public voice and the private conscience have finally become one. Mild-mannered Erasmeanism has given way to a proselytizing Lutheranism central to the queen's deepest convictions, yet fragments of the more radical thinking that would produce Calvinist Puritanism are also apparent. Ironically, but unsurprisingly, the literary foundations for Kateryn's last book bearing witness to the English Reformation have their roots in continental Catholicism.

In 1480, a Carthusian named Dionysius de Lewis de Rickel of Limbourg (1402-71), known as Dionysius Carthusianus, published a book entitled Speculum arrum anime peccatricia a quodam cartusiense, or the ‘Mirror of Gold to the Sinful Soul’. It was subsequently translated from Latin into French and published in Paris. In 1507, Lady Margaret Beaufort translated the work into English and had it published by Richard Pynson as The Mirror of Gold to the Sinful Soul. The second edition of Lady Margaret's translation, that of 1522, was issued simultaneously by the presses of Wynkyn de Worde and John Skot. The tone of the book and several of the themes—man as sinner, the emptiness of worldly things, false vanity, and fear of God's judgement—were carried over in each later incarnation of the work. Lady Margaret's purpose in presenting Dionysius's book to the English reading public was clearly stated: ‘I have willed to make and accomplish this present treaty, gathering and assembling many diverse authorities of holy doctors of the church to the intent that the poor sinful soul troubled by the fraud of enemy and oft overcome … May be addressed to the light of justice and truth. …’⁴¹ Yet Lady Margaret's work, Catholic though it might be, issued from the emerging world of English humanism and attempted what Kateryn Parr later attempted, to make a work of impeccable Roman Catholicism accessible to an audience soon to move in other religious directions. It is entirely possible, given the links between the Vaux-Parr ménage and Lady Margaret, that a copy of her translation stood on the shelves of Kateryn Parr's schoolroom.

Dionysius's religious beliefs were conservative in that, predating the emergence of humanism, he failed to acknowledge the humanist insistence on God's loving mercy and the totality of faith. The Day of Judgement and eternal damnation for sinners were invoked upon an errant Christianity—the fist of God upraised in wrathful threats rather than the hand of God open and extended in charitable forgiveness. It remained for that French humanist ‘pearl of the Valois’, Marguerite of Navarre, to take Lady Margaret Beaufort's intent—‘that the sinful soul soiled and defouled by sin may in every chapter have a new mirror wherein he may behold and consider the face of his soul’⁴²—and put it on a new humanist footing, focusing on God's love in such sensual and mystic images that the book was condemned for heresy by the University of Sorbonne.

Marguerite of Navarre's version of the work, The Mirror of the Sinful Soul, was originally published in rhymed French decasyllables as a long, graceful and ecstatic religious poem which first appeared in England in French in 1531, and in a second, more comprehensive, edition in 1535. In her introduction to the reader, Marguerite asks, ‘For what thing is a man (as for his own strenght), before that he hath received the gift of faith: whereby only hath he knowledge of the goodness, wisdom and power of God …’⁴³ It was not difficult to interpret this as a statement of the Protestant insistence on justification by faith alone, demonstrating one reason for the book's condemnation. Marguerite then went on to describe what was to become the standard opening statement in self-proclaimed confessional works of this type—her wretchedness as a miserable sinner and the greatness of the grace of God, which alone had the strength to break the chains from which no mortal man could deliver her. The similarity of language used in these self-abasing proclamations, found in the works of many female writers such as Marguerite of Navarre and Kateryn Parr, underscores a psychological equivalence, particular to women, between religious masochism and female submission. Given the framework of an ideal Christian society as outlined both by patristic authors and by the religious writers of the Reformation, there was inherently little difference between the total obedience a woman owed to her husband, as authorized by the Church, and the total obedience she owed to God. ‘Obedience is better than Sacrifice for nothing is more acceptable before God than to obey. Women are much bound to God to have so acceptable a virtue enjoined them for their penance.’⁴⁴ God was, after all, simply an extreme and omniscient form of the male demiurge whose power, significantly for all, extended into the afterlife.

The Mirror of the Sinful Soul is full of ecstatic assurances of God's forgiveness for every sin and mystical allusions to Marguerite's relationship in apposition to Him. In St Theresian ecstasy, Marguerite's soul begets and is begotten by God simultaneously as her heart is pierced by the flaming arrow of love. Heavily influenced by the ‘Song of Solomon’, Marguerite wrote a love play between her soul and God. ‘… [for] the soul which is in love with God … commeth for to embrace her husband … Now I have (through thy good grace) recovered the place of thy wife. O happy and desired place, gracious bed, throne right honourable, seat of peace …’⁴⁵ These same pseudo-religious, sexual images echo through Kateryn Parr's early works. In Prayers or Meditations, the queen addresses Jesus Christ as ‘my most loving spouse, who shall give me wings of perfect love, that I may fly up from these worldly miseries and rest in thee’.⁴⁶ In another sexually charged verse, she begs God to, ‘Quicken my soul and all the powers thereof, that it may cleave fast and be joined to thee in joyful gladness of ghostly ravishings.’⁴⁷

Princess Elizabeth had translated Marguerite's Mirror for her stepmother in December 1544 as a New Year's gift.⁴⁸ Whether Kateryn was aware of the book prior to this is not known. She may very well have been and that was the reason that Elizabeth selected it for translation. Marguerite of Navarre, humanist queen, sister of François I, published author and erudite élitist, was a role model for many high-born English ladies. The daughters of the Duke of Somerset published a compendium of elegies upon Marguerite's death in 1549. Whenever Kateryn became aware of Marguerite's book, she devoured it avidly and used many of its images, such as the sinful soul awakening to its wretchedness through the grace of God and finding a faith through that grace which engendered in the sinner perfect Christian charity. These images were becoming the common currency of Protestant works. Yet oddly enough, the open sensuality which is so apparent in Marguerite's writings and which Kateryn embraced so eagerly in earlier works is largely missing from Lamentation of a Sinner. This may be due to the sex scandal involving Sir Thomas Seymour and herself which occurred shortly before the book's publication. Publicly professing an appetite for ghostly ravishings after a unsettling scandal involving the real thing could have had little attraction for the queen.

Another aspect of this lack of female sexuality as religious metaphor lies in the conscious androgyny of the book. Lamentation of a Sinner is addressed to ‘all Christians’⁴⁹ and adopts a male voice through almost the entire text. Only Cecil's introduction and Kateryn's aside on ‘my most sovereign favourable lord and husband’⁵⁰ tell the reader that the author is a woman. The lack of self-constraint and exhibition of aggressive confidence in the language which addresses, for the most part, those who suffer from earthly lusts, ‘the dregs of Adam’, as well as those who call themselves the ‘children of light’,⁵¹ and relegates women as a sex to a few paragraphs on their wifely duties according to St Paul, demonstrates the mind of a queen who no longer saw herself as a woman like other women, but as Diana, half-male, half-female, particular, apart. Kateryn's pronouns are almost uniformly masculine—‘Who understandeth his faults?’ ‘Yea, if men would not acknowledge and confess the same, the stones would cry it out.’⁵² Her images deal with the world of men. ‘And I, most presumptuously thinking nothing of Christ crucified, went about to set forth mine own righteousness, saying with the proud Pharisee, “Good Lord, I thank thee, I am not like other men …”’⁵³ ‘Was it not a marvellous unkindness,’ Kateryn asks the reader, ‘when God did speak to me, and also call me, that I would not answer him? What man so called would not have heard, or what man hearing, would not have answered?’⁵⁴

Kateryn points out in painful detail ‘the faults of men, which be in the world’.⁵⁵ She has no hesitation in speaking directly and scathingly to ‘the professors of the gospel’, who although protesting their virtue, are ‘contentious disputers … foul gluttons, slanders, backbiters, advowterers, fornicators, swearers and blasphemers …’⁵⁶ By such condemnation she has assumed a mantle of male identity, speaking to the sinful not as a mere woman, not even as an equal, but as a ruler chastising the guilty of both sexes who have deserved her chastisement. She does not hesitate to spell out the duty of all Christians. ‘It were all our parts and duties to procure and seek all the ways and means possible to have more knowledge of God's words set forth abroad in the world’,⁵⁷ and by ‘us’, she means ‘all men and women’ under the spiritual captaincy of Christ.

The uncompromising androgyny of the text is underscored by Kateryn's description of Christ as one who impersonated virtues commonly bestowed upon women. ‘Christ,’ proclaims the queen, ‘was innocent … obedient unto his father … meek and humble in the heart … [who] came to serve … [and] despised worldly honour.’ Kateryn, on the other hand, describes herself as ‘disobedient and most stubborn … most proud and vainglorious … I coveted to rule over [my brethren] … [and] I much delighted to attain [worldly honour].’⁵⁸ This was a paradox which ran through most of the literature of the time. Jesus was proposed as the paradigm of Christian virtues—chaste, humble, meek, obedient, charitable, despising worldly things, submissive to his father's will, one who spoke only to a serious, divinely ordained purpose. Yet these were the virtues not of the ideal Christian man but of the ideal Christian woman. To imitate Christ, therefore, a duty enjoined on all Christians, was to imitate those qualities considered proper only for the naturally inferior sex. The courage to face death, particularly on the battlefield, a Christ-like quality enthusiastically arrogated by the male of the species, was uneasily recognized as a quality not dissimilar to the courage needed to face death in childbirth. The only difference being, seemingly, that there was greater merit for a man who chose to risk his life on the battlefield than for a woman who had no choice but to fulfil her natural function. This inversion of roles and attributes so forcefully expressed in Lamentation, granting the queen male characteristics in opposition to Christ's female ones, underscores Kateryn's interpretation of her own self-image as one who was set apart by virtue of position and understanding from her sex in general and from those restrictions commonly imposed on that sex in particular. This was the image of queenship which the young Elizabeth took as her study.⁵⁹

Patricia Crawford has commented on the ability of women at this period to ‘both accept beliefs about their inferiority and transcend them’.⁶⁰ Yet in Lamentation of a Sinner, Kateryn implicitly denies the notion of her own inferiority. It is she who speaks in the first person directly to God through the medium of the Holy Ghost and not through any male intermediary. ‘I will first require and pray the Lord to give me his holy spirit …’⁶¹ has more the tone of masculine command than of female supplication. Regarding the hypocrites who pretend repentance for themselves but call for the persecution of others, the queen states that, ‘I cannot allow, neither praise, all kind of lamentation but such as may stand with Christian charity’.⁶² Throughout the book, then, Kateryn speaks bluntly in the first person of an androgynized ‘I am’. She tacitly recognizes this, explaining that her ‘audacity and boldness’ of speech are a gift from God, that ‘marvellous man’,⁶³ whose grace of spiritual salvation includes the liberation of tongues to speak truth boldly, an imperative outweighing the discrimination of gender and overriding the ‘natural’ inferiority of sex. If God's grace supersedes the law then, for Kateryn and in her own case at least, woman's limitations decreed by that law are also set aside.

The queen, however, stops short of a declaration of generic female equality. Her text declares her own liberation through grace but she was very much aware of her special status as Henry's queen. The generality of women are encouraged in Lamentation, indeed commanded, to play their traditional submissive role as outlined by St Paul. Yet they are also encouraged on an equal footing with men to seek their own salvation through God's grace alone and not through any human intermediary, and to act in ways that would disseminate God's word. When the queen pronounces that: ‘It were all our parts and duties to procure and seek all the ways and means possible to have more knowledge of God's word set forth abroad in the world, and not allow ignorance and discommend knowledge of God's word …’,⁶⁴ she is concentrating on the spread of vernacular literature and may perhaps still intend the proper sphere of women's work in the spreading of the word to be confined to children and servants. But she does not say this. Instead, Kateryn defines the role of all Christians to spread the word by all means possible, implicitly enjoining them not to be bound by the traditions and constraints of a superseded human law. In such thought processes, it is possible to detect Kateryn's affinity for the life and works of Anne Askew.

Another belief which found expression in Lamentation of a Sinner, and one which echoed Erasmus's own beliefs, was Kateryn's distaste for torture and persecution of so-called heretics. This restraint in the face of religious excess resonates through the reign of her stepdaughter Elizabeth as well. In Lamentation Kateryn denounces false ministers of God's word who rebuke other men's faults, yet themselves are ‘an offence and a slander to the word of God’.⁶⁵ These hypocrites and self-appointed prophets, who ‘be not able to maintain their own inventions and doctrine with any jot of the Scripture … most cruelly persecute them that be contrary to the same. Be such the lovers of Christ? Nay, nay …’.⁶⁶ The queen's baptism of blood and fire during the Pilgrimage of Grace in Yorkshire had left in her mind an abhorrence of violence raised in the name of religious extremity. While understanding the occasional need for a Christian army to march off to battle in the name of Christ, she yet abhorred the shedding of any Christian blood. Kateryn believed in the ‘boke of the crucifix’ but she also believed that a tolerant and loving guidance could and would bring a world full of sinners to that same understanding and belief which she, herself, had found. Diplomacy through grace and not destruction was the divinely authorized route to conversion. The sort of extremism found in religious persecution was not in her nature.

Lamentation is a remarkable book, one of the very few volumes of original prose published by an Englishwoman in the sixteenth century. In it the queen sums up clearly and concisely her personal religious beliefs and her sense of mission to spread those beliefs. The eloquent imagery of her text gives evidence of the wide reading and intense study of Scriptures that has led to her embracing the religious tenets she enthusiastically endorses.

Therefore, inwardly to behold Christ crucified upon the cross, is the best and godliest meditation that can be. We may see also in Christ crucified, the beauty of the soul, better than in all the books of the world.

St. Paul saith, we be justified by the faith in Christ, and not by the deeds of the law … This dignity of faith is no derogation to good works, for out of this faith springeth all good works. Yet we may not impute to the worthiness of faith or works our justification before God, but ascribe and give the worthiness of it wholly to the merits of Christ's passion, and refer and attribute the knowledge and perceiving thereof, only to faith whose very true only property is to take, apprehend and hold fast the promise of God's mercy, the which maketh us righteous, and to cause me continually to hope for the same mercy, and in love, to work all manner of ways allowed in the Scripture, that I may be thankful for the same.⁶⁷

Here then finally is Kateryn's open testament to her reformed faith.⁶⁸ The text is loosely divided into eight topics: the sin of the speaker, the universality of sin, remission and salvation through the free grace of God embodied in the life and death of His Son, progression by the true believer from the sin-infected wisdom of the world to the pure wisdom of Christ, a warning against false speakers of the gospel, spiritual knowledge versus secular knowledge, charity, and the Day of Judgement. Belief in justification by faith alone, salvation by God's grace, given as a divine gift and not earned by the merits of the receiver of the gift, God's mercy and grace revealed through Christ's passion as described in the Gospels, and the preparation of a place in bliss for God's elect, ‘which was before the beginning of the world’, are the central tenets of the queen's beliefs. Condemnation of false prophets, those so-called ‘professors of the gospel’,⁶⁹ is strongly emphasized, as are scathing attacks on the papacy and the futility of a sole dependence on the law of man and worldly wisdom. ‘And where worldly wisdom most governeth, there most sin ruleth. For as the world is enemy to God, so also the wisdom thereof is adverse to God.’⁷⁰

Kateryn also embraces the Calvinist concept of the fellowship of the army of the cross, led by Christ, ‘so valiant a captain of God’. ‘We seeing then that the triumph and victory of our captain, Christ, is so marvellous, glorious and noble to the which war we be appointed. Let us force ourselves to follow him with bearing our cross, that we may have fellowship with him in his kingdom.’⁷¹ Another Calvinist metaphor, the labyrinth or maze, also emerges in Lamentation of a Sinner:

If I should hope by mine own strength, and power to come out of this maze of iniquity and wickedness wherein I have walked so long, I should be deceived. For I am so ignorant, blind, weak and feeble that I cannot bring myself out of this entangled and wayward maze: but the more I seek means and ways to wind myself out, the more I am wrapped and tangled therein … It is the hand of the Lord that can and will bring me out of the endless maze of death.⁷²

In Lamentation of a Sinner, the queen publicly parts company with mainstream Erasmeanism, with its study of classical models and its attempt to balance reason and faith. Only by a subjective washing away of all self-will, all learned knowledge, all deductive logic, in a spiritual baptism of the Passion's miraculous mysteries, from which flow the waters of everlasting life, and which both symbolize and embody God's divine mercy to an inherently evil mankind, can salvation be achieved. And this cleansing is made possible through the grace of God alone. ‘For in Christ is all fullness of the godhead, and in him, are hidden all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge.’⁷³ This was the jewel beneath the ‘cloddy earth’ that Kateryn had found, which had led to an awakening of faith, a re-energizing of intense personal passion focused in a realization of ‘new’ religious truths. Baptized through God's mercy in the blood of Christ, the queen describes herself as coming ‘as it were, in a new garment before God …’.⁷⁴

Kateryn deals with a series of ideas and topics of importance to her in Lamentation of a Sinner, and they flow seamlessly into each other in a monologue that by its very intimacy becomes a spiritual dialogue with the reader. The queen begins by stating her credentials for writing such a book—that she is a sinner who deserves damnation yet has been offered salvation through God's mercy and her faith in Christ. As a sinner, she is not alone. Although set apart in the world, in spirit she walks in a community of equals, equals in their burden of offences against God. She goes on to address release from this condition, the remission of sin and the acquiring of salvation through the free grace of God, embodied in the life and death of His Son. Yet how is this salvation to be realized? Not through the wisdom of the world nor through false speakers of the gospel nor through any accumulation of good works or secular knowledge but through the pure wisdom of Christ crucified.

How is that pure wisdom to be learned? Through vernacular translations of the Scriptures, so that all may study the words and works of God. Luther's doctrine of God, described in The Bondage of the Will, is a deity of two natures, the hidden, unknowable God of mystery and the God of grace, revealed by his word.⁷⁵ The hidden God judges man for election or damnation and there is no appeal. Only the complete acceptance of either fate, as determined by God alone, on the part of individual man demonstrates that quality of faith necessary for salvation. Kateryn echoes this when she describes that in the chosen children of God, ‘All fear of damnation is gone from them, for they have put their whole hope of salvation in his hands which will and can perform it, neither have they any past or pillar to lean to, but God and his smooth and unwrinkled church.’⁷⁶

Yet if the hidden God decrees inexorable damnation for some, innocent and guilty alike, the revealed God offers salvation for all through an acceptance of his grace. Is the revealed word of God then not absolute but contingent on a divine whim? Luther never satisfactorily answered this question but Kateryn's response to this seeming paradox was a resounding ‘no!’ The unalterable truth of the ‘boke of the crucifix’, the only absolute available within the human condition, is God's self-imposed and therefore unbreakable promise to mankind written with the blood of his son. In Lamentation, Kateryn describes those of a Lutheran persuasion who say of their fellows, ‘he that hath sinned may be one of God's elect; peradventure, the Lord hath suffered him to fall to the intent he may the better know himself’.⁷⁷ Yet there are others who chafe at such predetermined justice and others still who smugly accept it, saying, ‘God is partial, because he hath elected some and some reproved. And, therefore, they say that the elected be sure of salvation, taking by that, occasion to do evil enough, saying, whatsoever God hath determined shall be performed.’⁷⁸ Acceptance of God's will as revealed by a study of God's word and not second guessing unknowable mysteries is for Kateryn the only possible path through a deeply shadowed forest of rational paradox.

Human charity, for the queen, is counterpoised against divine retribution at the Day of Judgement. Justification by faith does not release the faithful from charitable works and acts, for by such acts shall the elect of God be known and the word of God be spread. God's grace is freely given yet it must also be earned by true repentance: ‘… Christ yet fighteth in spirit in his elect vessels and shall fight even to the day of judgement’.⁷⁹ The pure in spirit are not only captains in the army of the Lord, they are the clay in the hands of the potter. And their greatest reward will be to hear ‘the happy comfortable and most joyful sentence ordained for the children of God, which is, “Come hither ye blessed of my father, and receive the kingdom of heaven, prepared for you before the beginning of the world”’.⁸⁰

Another concept of importance to Kateryn was that of the community and fellowship of Christ and that ‘continual conversation in faith’⁸¹ that can remove the scales of ignorance from the eyes of the blind and lead the world to dress itself in the new garments of evangelicalism: ‘That as we have professed one God, one faith, and one baptism so we may be all of one mind, and one accord, putting away all biting and gnawing. For in backbiting, slandering, and misreporting our Christian brethren, we show not ourselves the disciples of Christ whom we profess.’⁸² This sense of Christian community has been reinforced in Kateryn's thinking by her intensive reading of St Paul and his letters to nascent Christian communities all over Asia. Where Priscilla, Lois, Eunice, Prisca, Claudia and Apphia, women mentioned in the letters of Paul and lauded for doing the work of God, carried the Word of Truth established in Jesus Christ to their communities 1500 years before, so she, Kateryn Parr, daughter of a Westmorland knight, exalted in rank beyond all expectation like Esther, was another Christian woman doing the work of God within the community of those engaged in His service. This was heady stuff and played on the queen's personal sense of mission.

One aspect of Lamentation which helps to illustrate why the queen hid the book away during the last six months of Henry's life, is the subversive quality of a number of its passages. The impotency of worldly princes when compared to the Prince of Princes, the worthlessness of human law and the willingness of evil men to subvert it, and the paucity of charity to be found among the mighty were points of view which, however valid they may have been in Kateryn's life experience, would have enraged her dangerous and dying husband.

The Princes of the world never did fight without the strength of the world. Christ contrarily went to war, even against all the strength of the world. He would fight as David did with Goliath, unarmed of all human wisdom, and policy and without all worldly power and strength. Nevertheless he was fully replenished and armed with the whole armour of the spirit. And in this one battle, he overcame forever, all his enemies.⁸³

The conqueror of Boulogne would have ill appreciated such a comment, nor would he have relished Kateryn's metaphor for controlling sexual desire as the appointment of subjects to rule over their former lords.

When a prince fighteth with his enemies, which sometime had the sovereignty over his people, and subduing them, may kill them if he will, yet he preserveth and saveth them. And whereas they were lords over his people, he maketh them after to serve, whom they before had ruled. Now in such a case, the prince doth show himself a greater conqueror, in that he hath made them which were rulers to obey, and the subjects to be lords over them, to whom they served, then if he had utterly destroyed them upon the conquest.⁸⁴

This sort of thinking, even in metaphor, when combined with statements that assured the reader that the coming of Christ ‘hath cancelled the law, which was in evil men the occasion of sin’,⁸⁵ were statements which would have opened the queen to scurrilous attack. Any earthly king, in Kateryn's opinion, was inferior to the mercy and glory of Christ. ‘Is there any worldly prince or magistrate, that would show such clemency, and mercy, to their disobedient and rebellious subjects, having offended them? I suppose they would not with such words allure them except it were to call them, whom they cannot take, and punish them being taken.’⁸⁶ Given the queen's background of experience in civil war and Robert Aske's initial pardon and subsequent execution, this statement takes on a particularly potent meaning. While it is true that Lamentation was published nine months after Henry's death and could thus have been altered by the queen during that time, the homogeneity of the text, complete with praises of Henry as the new Moses, renders major revisions unlikely. Kateryn must have been aware that ‘such audacity and boldness’ of speech, if published, would take her into realms no Tudor queen had ever trod.⁸⁷

As to such matters of moment as the sacrificial character of the mass, clerical celibacy, a belief in Purgatory or other remnants of Roman Catholic practice, Kateryn was outspoken in her condemnation of former practices. Yet by the time the book was published in November 1547, the mass as Henry VIII had instituted it was a thing of the past. The Lord Protector was a declared Calvinist as were Kateryn's brother, her friend, the dowager Duchess of Suffolk, and even her husband, Sir Thomas Seymour, an avid patron of Hugh Latimer. There was little need by that date for the queen to flog a dead horse. Lingering contradictions, however, float through Kateryn's prose. She enthusiastically embraces the Lutheran position on predestination and the kingdom of God's elect, yet remarks: ‘Christ hath made us free, setting us in a godly liberty. I mean not licence to sin, as many be glad to interpret the same, when as Christian liberty is godly entreated of.’⁸⁸ This owes far more to Erasmus than Luther and illustrates the tangled skein of religious ideas with which the queen was trying to weave a web of truth.⁸⁹

In 1544, Parliament had passed an Act allowing the dissolution of colleges. On 24 November 1545, Parliament granted Henry VIII sovereign power over colleges, chantries and hospitals, ‘to alter and transpose and order them to the glory of God, and the profit of the commonwealth’.⁹⁰ The universities, nervous already after nearly ten years of full out royal assault on ecclesiastical prerogatives, stifled a secret groan. In accepting the gift, the king personally addressed Parliament, informing them: ‘Doubt not I pray you, but your expectation shall be served, more Godly and goodly than you will wish or desire …’⁹¹ This sent chills of terror down the body politic of the universities of Oxford and Cambridge. Facing possible dissolution and dispersal, dependent upon income from the chantry system and envisioning its eradication and the seizure of their lands, the notables of England's two great universities began to look around them for a patron powerful enough to intervene with the king on their behalf. They chose the queen. The University of Cambridge sent an official request to her, pleading for her intercession with Henry.

Taking advantage of this opportunity, Kateryn wrote on 26 February 1546 a manifesto, ostensibly to allay the fears of the university. That this statement was of great importance to her is evidenced by the draft of the final letter written and corrected in her own hand.⁹² In it she attacks ideas central to medieval Thomism, propounded by Thomas Aquinas and later scholastics, with its emphasis on Aristotle and the Greek philosophers and its required mastery of logic, rhetoric and philosophy, study that she later called the ‘subtle and crafty persuasions of Philosophy and Sophistry, whereof commeth no fruit but a great perturbation of the mind …’.⁹³ She chastises the notables of Cambridge for using a dead language, both foreign and integrally linked to the Roman Church, in which to address her, rather than conveying their wishes ‘familiarly in our vulgar tongue’. She goes so far as to deny even recognizing Latin at sight, a reformist pose which takes simplicity to an extreme limit.

In the place of the old and deceitful intellectual models, the queen proclaims Luther's ‘theology of the cross’. The principal purpose of study, she asserts, should be the ‘setting forth the better Christ's reverend and most sacred doctrine’. As she had, in Lamentation of a Sinner, dared to preach at the preachers who perverted Christ's message, and had once admonished Lady Wriothesley about her wilful stubbornness against God's ordinances, the queen now admonished the university about theirs:

That it may not be laid against you in evidence at the tribunal seat of God, how ye were ashamed of Christ's doctrine. For this Latin lesson I am taught to say of St. Paul, ‘Non me pudet, evangelii’. The sincere setting forth whereof I trust universally in all your vocations and ministries, you will apply and conform your sundry gifts, arts and studies to such end and sort that Cambridge may be accounted rather an university of divine philosophy than of natural or moral, as Athens was.

Yet humanism still survives beneath the evangelical rhetoric. Still resonating through Kateryn's text is the humanist view that man's role in the world should be as an active rather than contemplative creature, using a disciplined mind to absorb knowledge, secular as well as religious but religious above all, that might provide some future means of doing good for his fellows. She was after all at this time hard at work on the preparation of an English translation of Erasmus, and was known by reputation, as the university acknowledged, to be ‘a maintainer and cherisher of the learned state’. The queen would prove, to the university's relief, to be scholarship's good servant, if God's first.

This is an astonishing letter, uncompromising, fearless and forthright. In it the queen casts off the vocabulary of scholastic classicism, a shared given among the English intellectual élite, and strikes out with the hammer blows of Lutheran sum eritis. For a woman of Kateryn's birth and background, who had spent most of her adult life in the ultra-conservative north, this letter is the manifesto of a one-woman social revolution. It has been discussed at length in recent scholarship that society's requirements for women at this time and in this place demanded a chaste, submissive and obedient silence.⁹⁴ Yet with this letter, addressed to the minds which a decade before Kateryn had considered infinitely more knowledgeable than her own, the queen instructs, upbraids and openly criticizes their motives, their acts and their failure to meet a Lutheran-defined ideal.

Kateryn's remarks about English being the language ‘aptest for my intelligence’ are not an admission of faulty Latin scholarship but a statement of religious policy. In Lamentation of a Sinner, she comments on ‘my simple and unlearned judgement’, rhetorically identifying herself with the commons, ‘we that be unlettered remain confused without God …’.⁹⁵ This public self-identification by a Tudor queen with the illiterate commons rather than portraying herself as a royal thus remote patron of the needy is a startling innovation. Yet no matter how passionately felt the context, these were, in the end, political statements directed towards a political end; certainly they were not intended to be taken at face value by any who knew the queen. Religious re-evaluation, royal marriage and apprenticeship as regent of England had freed ‘the words of my mouth’, and given the queen a sense of personal empowerment and a supreme confidence in herself almost unheard of in a woman of the sixteenth century.

The queen's advocacy of the university took a form that the university did not expect.⁹⁶

I, according to your desires, attempted my lord the king's majesty for the stay of your possessions, in which nothwithstanding his majesty's property and interest through the consent of the high court of Parliament, his highness being such a patron to good learning, he will rather advance and erect new occasion therefore than confound these your colleges, so that learning may hereafter ascribe her very original, whole confirmation and sure stay to our sovereign lord, her only defence and worthy ornament.

The ‘new occasion’ which Henry erected three months later was Trinity College.

Henry may have already had some such plan in mind when he addressed Parliament in November, assuring them that ‘your expectation shall be served, more Godly and goodly than you will wish or desire …’.⁹⁷ Yet the queen's hand in the college's foundation may also be discerned. Roger Ascham offered the gratitude of the university in a letter of 1547, when he acknowledged to the queen that

we would certainly be guilty of the greatest offence were we ever to forget either so great a favour in coming to our aid, or your extraordinary kindness in writing. And also your services have been so acceptable to us that except for them the welfare of the University could not have been preserved. …⁹⁸

Shortly after the queen wrote to the worthies of Cambridge, the decision was made, probably in March, to incorporate the earlier foundations of King's Hall, Michaelhouse and the Physic Hostel into a new foundation to be called Trinity College. John Redman (1499-1551), the master of King's Hall, was named first master of Trinity. On 29 October 1546, the lands of the two colleges were officially surrendered and on 19 December, the charter of foundation of Trinity was issued.⁹⁹ Not everyone necessarily was pleased by the decision. Thomas Wriothesley, William Paget and Stephen Gardiner were all alumnae of King's Hall. Their feelings regarding its dissolution may not have been particularly sanguine. Another outstanding alumnus was Kateryn's cousin, Cuthbert Tunstall, who had attended King's Hall during the 1490s. Its master in 1546, John Redman, was both his cousin and the queen's.

The Redmans and the Parrs of Kendal had a long history together. The Redmans of Levens Hall were an old Westmorland family, one member of which, William Redman, had been chosen by Westmorland's hereditary sheriff, Sir William Parr of Kendal, the queen's grandfather, to serve as knight for the shire in 1478. Another Redman, Edward, had been elected, together with the queen's grandfather, as knights of the shire for Cumberland in June 1483. In the fifteenth century, the Redmans served the Parrs in a gentry feudal relationship,¹⁰⁰ and they continued to serve them well into the sixteenth century. Another William Redman was in service with Maud Parr in the 1520s and in 1534 was one of her son's servants.¹⁰¹ John Redman, a member of the prolific clan, had devoted himself to scholarship on the advice of Cuthbert Tunstall.¹⁰² Made a fellow of St John's College on 3 November 1530, he was appointed master of King's Hall in 1542. Redman was a close friend, too, of Matthew Parker's and together they were appointed commissioners to survey the property of the colleges on 16 January 1546, just a month before the queen's historic letter.¹⁰³ Another, more tenuous connection between the queen and King's Hall was the suit by Princess Elizabeth in 1545 to have John Huddleston, BA, made a fellow of the college upon the next vacancy.¹⁰⁴ Elizabeth was probably at Ashridge when she put forward this suit for a man who may have been one of her tutors at the time. Like Redman, Huddleston came from a Cumbrian family with gentry feudal ties to the Parrs.¹⁰⁵

Whatever the role Kateryn played in the founding of Trinity College, her interest in and advocacy for the university itself is attested to both by herself and by Roger Ascham. The letter which the queen wrote to Cambridge demonstrates the confidence that she had acquired in the two and a half years since her marriage to Henry and how secure she felt her position to be. She had renounced a secular love for Thomas Seymour for a religious rediscovery of Christ and had been amply rewarded not only by wealth and position, but by the comforting reassurance of the ever present grace of God. This God demanded personal sacrifice and a constant self-examination of motives and acts. He also demanded proselytizers unafraid to speak out publicly, and the queen did just that. Ultimately this exposure of Kateryn's private religious thoughts in a public arena opened her to criticism by the conservative party and gave them a weapon they could use against her. It did not help Kateryn in this struggle, about to break over her head that, in her own mind, the double duty deity that she believed in, who offered both eternal damnation and eternal salvation, bore a striking resemblance to the dying, dangerous and unpredictable king to whom she was married. Her statements to Cambridge University were to prove the last religious commentary on which she embarked during Henry's reign. At the very moment that she felt herself secure enough to speak freely to the world, the Bishop of Winchester ‘bent his bow to shoot at some of the head Deer …’¹⁰⁶ and bring the reformers down. It is thus of profound significance that the day after her revolutionary letter was addressed by the queen to the University of Cambridge, imperial ambassador Van der Delft reported to Charles V that he had heard ‘rumours of a new Queen’,¹⁰⁷ rumours that were to prove the opening shots in a campaign designed to bring the newly empowered and now irrepressibly vocal Kateryn to the block and silence her forever.

Notes

1. John Strype, Ecclesiastical Memorials of Henry VIII, Edward VI, and Mary I, 3 volumes, London, 1822, II, i, p. 203.

2. One avenue by which the queen could have come into possession of literature from Venice was through her household musicians, the Bassanos, who during her time as queen, made several licensed journeys to their home there. PRO: E179/69/37/31 May 1545 and 13 March 1546. The queen's book of Petrarch was published in Venice in 1534 by Gabriel Giolidi of Ferrara.

3. H. Maynard Smith, Henry VIII and the Reformation, London, 1948, pp. 394-9.

4. The Primer in English and Latin set forth by the King's Majesty and his Clergy, 6 September 1545, f. Bivb.

5. Smith, Henry VIII and the Reformation, p. 398.

6. The Primer in English and Latin set forth by the King's Majesty and his Clergy, f. Giiib-iva.

7. Smith, Henry VIII and the Reformation, pp. 398-9.

8. STC 300.2 Huntington Library, San Marino, California.

9. L & P, 19, ii, no. 688.

10. Smith, Henry VIII and the Reformation, p. 396.

11. STC 4818 Bodleian Library, Oxford.

12. PRO: E315/161, f. 69.

13. BL: Addit. MS 46,348, f. 208a.

14. E. J. Devereux, ‘The Publication of the English Paraphrases’, Bulletin of the John Rylands Library [hereafter BJRL], 51 (1968-69), p. 354.

15. The Primer in English and Latin set forth by the King's Majesty and his Clergy, f. Bivb.

16. William Tuer, The History of the Horn Book, vol. 1, London, 1896, pp. 5-18.

17. Smith, Henry VIII and the Reformation, p. 399.

18. Psalms 119:45-6, 49-51.

19. Margaret L. King, Women of the Renaissance, Chicago and London, 1991, pp. 208-9, and John N. King, ‘Patronage and Piety: the Influence of Catherine Parr’, in Silent But for the Word: Tudor Women as Patrons, Translators and Writers of Religious Works, Margaret Patterson Hannay (ed.), Kent, OH, 1985, p. 48.

20. Nicholas Udall, Preface to the Paraphrase of St. Luke, f. ccvi.

21. Thomas Key, Preface to the Paraphrase of St. Mark, f. ccix.

22. If this was the intent, Mary had more influence on Mallet than he on her. On 29 April 1551, he was sent to the Tower for saying mass. APC: III, p. 267.

23. Devereux, ‘The Publication of the English Paraphrases’, p. 365 and Philip Hughes, The Reformation in England, II, London, 1954, p. 243.

24. BL: Cott. MS Vespasian F.3, f. 37.

25. Strype, Ecclesiastical Memorials, II, i, p. 48.

26. Suzanne Trill, ‘Sixteenth-century Women's Writing: Mary Sidney's Psalmes and the “Femininity” of Translation’, in Writing and the English Renaissance, William Zunder and Suzanne Trill (eds), London and New York, 1996, pp. 140-58.

27. Nicholas Udall, Preface to the Paraphrase of St. Matthew.

28. Desiderius Erasmus, The 1st Tome or Volume of the Paraphrases upon the New Testament, London, 31 January 1548, f. Aia.

29. Erasmus, The 1st Tome or Volume of the Paraphrases upon the New Testament, ff. Aia-b, Aiia-b, 21a.

30. Kateryn Parr, The Lamentation of a Sinner, London, 28 March 1548, ff. E3a-b, Bviib, Bivb, Aviib, Aiiib, Divb; Kateryn Parr, Psalms or Prayers, 6 November 1547, London, f. Bviiia.

31. Erasmus, The 1st Tome or Volume of the Paraphrases upon the New Testament, f. Aiib.

32. Bodleian: Ashmolean MS no. 1729, p. 4.

33. John Strype, Memorials of Thomas Cranmer, London, 1694, p. 80.

34. Janel Mueller, ‘Devotion as Difference: Intertextuality in Queen Katherine Parr's Prayers or Meditations (1545)’, Huntington Library Quarterly, 53 (1988), pp. 175-8.

35. Devereux, ‘The Publication of the English Paraphrases’, pp. 365-7, and The Letters of Stephen Gardiner, James Arthur Muller (ed.), Cambridge, 1933, pp. 133-5.

36. Muller, The Letters of Stephen Gardiner, p. 135.

37. Udall, Preface to the Paraphrase of St. Matthew.

38. Nicholas Udall, Preface to the Paraphrase of St. John, f. cccxcix.

39. Nicholas Udall, Preface to the Paraphrase of Acts, f. cccccxx.

40. Maurice Addison Hatch, ‘The Ascham Letters: an Annotated Translation of the Latin Correspondence’, unpublished PhD thesis, Cornell University, New York, 1948, p. 278.

41. Lady Margaret Beaufort, the Preface to The Mirroure of Golde to the Synfull Soule, 1522.

42. Ibid.

43. Marguerite of Navarre, Mirror of the Sinful Soul, translated into English by Princess Elizabeth Tudor (1544), p. 40 of the Introduction by Percy W. Ames, London, (1897).

44. Esther Sowernam, Esther Hath Hanged Haman, 1617, quoted in Katherine Usher Henderson and Barbara F. McManus, Half Humankind: Contexts and Texts of the Controversy about Women in England, 1540-1640, Urbana and Chicago, 1985, p. 27.

45. Marguerite of Navarre, Mirror of the Sinful Soul, translated into English by Princess Elizabeth Tudor (1544), p. 40 of the Introduction by Percy W. Ames, London, (1897), p. 39 ff of the text.

46. Parr, Psalms or Prayers, f. Aviia.

47. Ibid., f. Bvb.

48. In 1548, John Bale published what he claimed to be Elizabeth's translation, but was probably in reality his own version of the book. He retitled it A Godly Meditation of the Inward Love of the Soul, and it is this title which was subsequently used for all later English editions. Bale's version is what might be described as a fleshed out version of the book constructed on the bare bones of Elizabeth's prose. In 1570, another version was published, again claiming to be Elizabeth's work. Its florid, rhetorical style is typical of much popular devotional literature of the period. For a commentary on Elizabeth and Marguerite of Valois, see Anne Lake Prescott, ‘The Pearl of the Valois and Elizabeth I’, in Silent but for the Word: Tudor Women as Patrons, Translators and Writers of Religious Works, Margaret Patterson Hannay (ed.), Kent, OH, 1985, pp. 61-75.

49. Parr, The Lamentation of a Sinner, ff. Aia-b.

50. Ibid., f. Eia.

51. Ibid., f. Cvib and f. Giia.

52. Ibid., ff. Aib-iia.

53. Ibid., f. Avia.

54. Ibid., ff. Aiiia-b.

55. Ibid., f. Gviiib.

56. Ibid., ff. Fvb-vib.

57. Ibid., f. Fviiia.

58. Ibid., f. Aviib.

59. Plowden comments that Kateryn Parr's influence on Elizabeth had ‘incalculable consequences for England’. Alison Plowden, Tudor Women: Queens and Commoners, New York, 1979, p. 104.

60. Patricia Crawford, Women and Religion in England, 1500-1720, London and New York, 1993, p. 1, and Suzanne Trill, ‘Religion and the Construction of Femininity’, in Women and Literature in Britain, 1500-1700, Helen Wilcox (ed.), Cambridge, 1996, p. 32.

61. Parr, The Lamentation of a Sinner, f. Biib.

62. Ibid., f. Evb.

63. Kateryn Parr to Sir Thomas Seymour, 1547, Dent-Brocklehurst MS at Sudeley Castle.

64. Parr, The Lamentation of a Sinner, f. Fviiia.

65. Ibid., f. Fvia.

66. Ibid., f. Eva.

67. Ibid., ff. Ciia and Bva-b.

68. It has been suggested that the queen's Lamentation of a Sinner circulated in manuscript form at court before Henry's death and that it was part of a package of suspect books sent by Sir William Paget to Stephen Gardiner, while the latter was on the Continent (Janel Mueller, ‘A Tudor Queen Finds her Voice: Katherine Parr's Lamentation of a Sinner’, in The Historical Renaissance: New Essays on Tudor and Stuart Literature and Culture, Heather Dubrow and Richard Strier [eds], Chicago, 1988, p. 28, and Anthony Martienssen, Queen Katherine Parr, London, 1973, p. 201). An examination of the text of Gardiner's letter to Paget, dated 5 November 1545, however, makes no mention of the queen or of her book (L & P, 20, ii, no. 733). The Lamentation mentioned in the letter is a work (probably written in 1543), entitled The Lamentation of a Christian Man against the City of London, by Henry Brinklow, who died that same year, under the pseudonym Roderyck Mors. This volume may have been known to the queen as Brinklow's widow subsequently married Stephen Vaughan, the king's financial agent in Antwerp, whose first wife was Kateryn's silkwoman. It is highly unlikely that Kateryn's Lamentation of a Sinner was written before 1546, or that, having escaped arrest by a hair's breadth in that year, she would have risked further peril by circulating what was a far more radical religious work than any she had so far published.

69. Parr, The Lamentation of a Sinner, f. Fvb.

70. Ibid., f. Diia.

71. Ibid., f. Dva.

72. Ibid., ff. Biia-b.

73. Ibid., f. Dvib.

74. Ibid., f. Bvia.

75. Paul Althaus, The Theology of Martin Luther, translated by Robert C. Schultz, Philadelphia, 1966, pp. 274-86.

76. Parr, The Lamentation of a Sinner, ff. Giva-b.

77. Ibid., f. Fia.

78. Ibid., f. Fva.

79. Ibid., f. Divb.

80. Ibid., f. Hiib.

81. Ibid., f. Ciiib.

82. Ibid., f. Gvb.

83. Ibid., f. Civb.

84. Ibid., ff. Cvib-viia.

85. Ibid., ff. Cvia-b.

86. Ibid., ff. Biiib-iva.

87. Ibid., ff. Biiia-b.

88. Ibid., f. Eiiib.

89. Jean Bellemain, Edward VI's French tutor, translated The Lamentation of a Sinner into a French poem for the king, including Cecil's preface. Two copies of Bellemain's translation are known to exist. One is in the British Library, and the other is among the Cecil Papers at Hatfield House (BL: Royal MS 16 Exxviii and Cecil Papers no. 314). The gift of a copy of the poem to Cecil as co-sponsor of the original project would have been a politic gesture. In addition to French, Lamentation was translated into Latin by John Radcliffe of Cleeve, the son of Robert Radcliffe, first Earl of Sussex (BL: Royal MS 7D.IX).

90. Hall's Chronicle: Containing the History of England (1548-1550), H. Ellis (ed.), London, 1809 edition, pp. 864-5.

91. Ibid., p. 865.

92. BL: Lansdowne MS 1236, f. 11.

93. Parr, The Lamentation of a Sinner, f. Fviiia.

94. See Mueller, ‘Devotion as Difference’, pp. 191-7, particularly notes 9-11.

95. Parr, The Lamentation of a Sinner, ff. Eivb, Eia-b.

96. Diarmaid MacCulloch comments on the important role Kateryn played in lobbying for Cambridge University in Thomas Cranmer, A Life, New Haven and London, 1996, p. 326.

97. Hall's Chronicle, p. 865.

98. Hatch, ‘The Ascham Letters’, p. 221.

99. I am indebted to Jonathan Smith, manuscript cataloguer of Trinity College Library, for pertinent information regarding the founding of the college.

100. Susan E. James, ‘Sir William Parr of Kendal: Part I, 1434-1471’, CW2, p. 104.

101. L & P, 5, no. 951 and L & P, 7, no. 432.

102. Dictionary of National Biography, XVI, Sir Leslie Stephen and Sir Sidney Lee (eds), London, 1917, p. 825, article on John Redman.

103. Other members of the Redman clan, John Redman and Robert Redman (active 1517-40) and his wife, Elizabeth Pickering, were printers in London. Robert, whose press was near Greyfriars, died in 1540 and his widow continued the business under her own name until she remarried a year later. John Redman was active between 1534 and 1541 in Southwark. Katharine F. Pantzer, Short Title Catalogue, III, London, 1919, p. 143.

104. L & P, 20, ii, no. 909 (50).

105. The Huddlestons were an ancient Cumberland family related to both the Parrs and the Redmans. Sir John Huddleston of Millom, Penrith and Blennerhasset, died in 1493, leaving as his heir, his 17-year-old grandson, Richard, under the guardianship of his uncles, Sir John Huddleston, the younger, and William Huddleston, and Edward Redman among others. Richard eloped before 1497 with Elizabeth Dacre, daughter of Kateryn Parr's great-aunt, Mabel Parr, Lady Dacre, and sister of Thomas, Lord Dacre, who in 1523-24 tried unsuccessfully to arrange Kateryn's first marriage. Princess Elizabeth's fellowship candidate was a member of this family.

106. Strype, Memorials of Thomas Cranmer, p. 109.

107. L & P, 21, i, no. 289.

List of Abbreviations

APC: Acts of the Privy Council

BIHR: Bulletin of the Institute of Historical Research

BJRL: Bulletin of the John Rylands Library

BL: British Library

CIPM: Calendar of Inquisitions Post Mortem

CPR: Calendar of Patent Rolls

CSP: Calendar of State Papers

CUL: Cambridge University Library

CW2: Transactions of the Cumberland and Westmorland Antiquarian and Archaeological Society, New Series

EHR: English Historical Review

HMC: Historical Manuscripts Commission

L & P: Letters and Papers, Foreign & Domestic of the Reign of Henry VIII

NPG: National Portrait Gallery

PCC: Prerogative Court of Canterbury

PRO: Public Records Office

SP: State Papers

STC: Short-title Catalogue

TRHS: Transactions of the Royal Historical Society

V & A: Victoria and Albert Museum