SOURCE: Haugaard, William P. “Katherine Parr: The Religious Convictions of a Renaissance Queen.” Renaissance Quarterly 22, no. 4 (1969): 346-59.

[In the following essay, Haugaard explores Parr's religious beliefs, including her acceptance of Reformation doctrine and her desire for peace and unity, and suggests how they influenced her court, her subjects, and, likely, the future Queen Elizabeth I as well.]

Among the wives of Henry VIII, only his first and last, Katherine of Aragon and Katherine Parr, possessed both the education and the intelligence to exemplify the Renaissance ideal for a woman born to gentle life. Both Katherines took their religion seriously, and in spite of the papal loyalties of the one and the Protestant proclivities of the other, they belonged to the same tradition of Renaissance religion which J. K. McConica has most recently traced in his study of English humanists.¹ If Katherine of Aragon far surpassed her English namesake by the thoroughness of her education in the Spanish humanism of Isabella's court, Katherine Parr actually wrote and had published two books which proved surprisingly popular.² If the breadth of the first Katherine's patronage of Renaissance writers was far more extensive than that of the second, the patronage of the second was more closely related to the course of English religion and politics.

A few years ago Conyers Read wrote that Katherine Parr's Lamentation of a Sinner merited more attention than it had received, and the comment could be justly extended to the Queen's religious convictions in general.³ These convictions not only reflected an important contemporary element in English religion, but through Katherine's role in the religious formation of Edward and Elizabeth, they also influenced the distinctive character and temper of the English church. An essay towards a better understanding of Katherine's religion is in order.

It is a commonplace of histories that, for all of Henry's conservative theological convictions, he entrusted the education of his son and heir to convinced adherents of the ‘New Learning.’ Katherine Parr has usually missed her due in this matter, and McConica redresses the balance in his convincing argument that she was ‘clearly the creative force’ which brought together John Cheke, Ascham's student William Grindal, Anthony Cooke, and other reform-minded scholars to share with Richard Cox the education of the young prince.⁴ As a consequence of this training, when Edward became King, his boyish Protestant zeal eased his Councillors' task as they introduced vigorous reforming policies in his name.

Katherine Parr's influence on Elizabeth may have been even more decisive. From the time of her marriage to Henry in 1543 until her death five years later, Katherine was a mother to Elizabeth—more of a mother than any woman other than governess Katherine Ashley. These years—from Elizabeth's tenth to her fifteenth birthday—spanned her adolescence, a time when young girls are likely to choose idols with emotional fervor. The learned and gracious new Queen was a woman able to command the respect of the precocious princess. At Henry's death, the Privy Council entrusted Elizabeth to Katherine's continued care, and the princess remained with her until her designing fourth husband, Thomas Seymour, overplayed his hand by his erotic play with the maturing Elizabeth.⁵ Katherine was forced to send her stepdaughter out of her household, but their relationship seems to have survived even this crisis.⁶

Elizabeth made two successive New Year's gifts to Katherine which perhaps reflect the Queen's concern for the girl's religious nurture. At the end of 1544, Elizabeth translated Le miroir de l'âme pécheresse by Margaret of Navarre. The mildly reforming teachings in the work had caused the theological doctors of the Sorbonne to condemn it for heresy.⁷ As a gift for the next year, the princess embroidered a manuscript volume of prayers in Latin, French, and Italian which she had translated from English prayers of Katherine's choice.⁸

Elizabeth shared some of Edward's tutors whom Katherine had been instrumental in selecting. Katherine's concern for Elizabeth's education continued into the last months of her life, for when the princess in 1548 wanted to engage as tutor the talented Roger Ascham, Katherine made known her own preference for another. Eventually, she came to approve of Elizabeth's choice, who, after all, came from the same circle of Cambridge scholars from which she had drawn Edward's instructors.⁹ Katherine was influential in setting the humanistic tone of Elizabeth's education in these years, and her interest in the princess's devotional development and tastes was evident.

Katherine was attached to that form of sixteenth-century Christianity known as ‘Erasmianism,’ although, as we shall see, it was not an unalloyed Erasmianism. Her attachment was most clearly expressed in her patronage of the master's Paraphrases upon the Gospels. This popular classic of Renaissance religion became uniquely significant in England, for the royal injunctions of both Edward and Elizabeth required all parish churches to purchase a copy and all parsons with educational deficiencies to study it.¹⁰ Katherine, by her encouragement and support of the work of translation, had initiated the English version while Henry was still alive. Although her patronage of the paraphrases of the Gospels is sometimes carelessly extended to include the second volume with its paraphrases of the Epistles and Apocalypse, she seems to have had nothing to do with this later work whose translators were Miles Coverdale, John Olde, and Edmund Alen.¹¹

For the work of translation of the first volume, Katherine was even able to enlist the services of the daughter of Katherine of Aragon. In addition to Princess Mary, other translators include the general editor Nicholas Udall, Thomas Key who described himself as Katherine's ‘daily oratour,’ and Mary's chaplain Francis Mallet, who finished the princess's section when illness prevented her from doing it herself. Katherine, who herself read Latin easily and had some knowledge of Greek, patronized the vernacular version of the book which was, next to the accurate text of the New Testament, the most influential single contribution of Renaissance Christianity to the English reformation.

The willingness of the staunchly Catholic Mary to assist in the production of the vernacular version of Erasmus' work strikes us as odd in the light of the book's subsequent role as an established part of the reformed Church of England and as a fixture of the Roman Index. We are well reminded of the as yet ambiguous character of the Erasmian call for reform. In the 1540's humanists who stood in the tradition of Thomas More and John Fisher could still claim as their own Erasmus' criticisms of the church; not yet were the criticisms the exclusive property of Protestants who attached them to their demands for doctrinal reform.

Mary Tudor was already twenty-seven when Katherine Parr married her father, but the new Queen seems to have drawn Mary into the family household under the spell of her own warmth. Not only did Mary help with the translation of Erasmus, but, like Elizabeth, she prepared an embroidered manuscript volume of prayers translated into various languages as a New Year's gift for her almost contemporary stepmother.¹² Erasmian Christianity is undoubtedly the foundation of a common religion of simple piety that brought together Katherine Parr and the daughter of Katherine of Aragon.

The stream of Erasmian Christianity in England did divide. Some humanists emphasized Erasmus' call for unity through a formal adherence to the traditional framework of Latin doctrine. Others emphasized his call for reform by a return to scriptural and patristic sources, and to this group Katherine Parr belonged. John Foxe reported that the Queen studied scripture and retained ‘divers well learned and godly persons to instruct her thoroughly in the same.’¹³ Historians have often named John Parkhurst, Miles Coverdale, and Hugh Latimer among these instructors. McConica, for example, describes Katherine's relationship to these men in a typical manner when he states that after the death of her conservative second husband, Lord Latimer, her household became the ‘resort’ of these three outspoken reformers.¹⁴ But we must ask if McConica and others have been justified in linking Katherine with such a group of militant clerics before she became Queen, and we must try to discover the extent of her association with them in later years.

McConica's description conjures up the image of a fully established Protestant salon which Katherine brought with her into the royal palace when she married Henry. Such a conjecture far outdistances the evidence. Lord Latimer died near the beginning of 1543, hardly leaving Katherine time to establish a coterie of reformers before she married Henry in July. More significantly, no evidence has been brought forward to suggest that Katherine knew any of the three men before she married Henry, nor that she knew Coverdale or Hugh Latimer while Henry lived, nor that she ever knew Latimer personally at all.

After Katherine became Queen, she chose John Parkhurst to be her domestic chaplain. His biographer in the DNB reports that the appointment followed upon the visit of Henry and Katherine to Oxford in 1543 when the Merton College tutor wrote Latin verses in their honor. A sturdier recommendation of Parkhurst undoubtedly came from Katherine, Duchess of Suffolk, who, with her husband, had chosen Parkhurst for their own chaplain the previous year. Evelyn Read, in her reliable biography of the reform-minded Duchess, points out that the two Katherines were close friends, and the Duke, Charles Brandon, was, of course, a favorite of Henry.¹⁵ Parkhurst seems to have remained with Katherine until her death, for he was a witness to her will, and in 1571, he wrote that he had attended her ‘as chaplain twenty-three years since.’¹⁶ We are likely to remember Parkhurst as the ineffective Elizabethan bishop of Norwich who never could quite bring himself to discipline the nonconformists with whom he openly sympathized. We forget that the Oxford tutor of John Jewel was also an accomplished humanist whose one publication was a collection of Latin epigrams which include ‘topics which bishops usually deem unfitting to notice.’¹⁷ Parkhurst's classical abilities probably attracted Katherine as much as his reforming convictions, and it may just be that during his own long service to her, it was he who, in large measure, brought her to share in his own identification of Renaissance learning and religious reform.

The notion that the Biblical translator Coverdale was associated with Katherine for a long period has no basis in fact. At the end of March 1548, just five and a half months before Katherine's death, Coverdale wrote Calvin from Frankfort, reporting that he was on his way back to England ‘after an exile of eight years.’ After his subsequent arrival home, he became Katherine's almoner and soon preached her funeral sermon. His influence was limited to the final months of the dowager Queen's fatal pregnancy.¹⁸

Katherine's association with Hugh Latimer, the martyr and sometime bishop of Worcester, is yet more tenuous. Neither of Latimer's two modern biographers found any evidence to suggest that he was even acquainted with the Queen.¹⁹ Shortly after the execution of Thomas Seymour in 1549, Latimer commented in a sermon that he had ‘heard say, when [Katherine] had ordained in her house daily prayer both before noon, and after noon, the admiral [Seymour] gets him out of the way, like a mole digging in the earth.’²⁰ The statement suggests no personal intimacy with the late Queen. Although Latimer's friendship with the Duchess of Suffolk may well have gone back at least to the early forties, and Katherine Parr could have been introduced to him through that mutual friendship, not one piece of evidence moves this out of the realm of highly speculative conjecture.²¹

Katherine's circle of reforming clerics boils down to a few firm facts: she sponsored the able group of tutors in the royal nursery; she employed John Parkhurst as her chaplain from sometime after she became Queen until her death; and she introduced Miles Coverdale into her household in the final months of her life. All this is not to say that Katherine Parr did not favor religious reform before her marriage to Henry. She most probably did, but no evidence links her directly at that time with the known leaders of the ‘New Learning.’ We will probably not go far amiss if we credit Parkhurst and some of Edward's tutors with developing Katherine's sympathy towards reform into firm convictions.

We have Latimer's evidence on his reliable ‘hearsay’ that, by the time of Katherine's marriage to Thomas Seymour, she had adopted the discipline of public household prayers twice daily. Foxe reported that at some point while she was Queen, she instituted the daily practice during Lent of hearing hour-length sermons. These were not only personal devotional exercises, for they also brought her court attendants under the influence of the selected preachers.²² Her funeral, at which Coverdale preached, was marked by a unique use of vernacular psalms and Biblical lessons, climaxed by a triumphant Te Deum in place of the usual penitential requiem mass.²³

John Foxe told how the religiously conservative Bishop Gardiner and Lord Chancellor Wriothesley attempted to turn Henry against Katherine on grounds of her religion.²⁴ Since Foxe knew Parkhurst well enough to pay him an extended visit with his family in 1560, it may be that Katherine's chaplain provided the martyrologist with the main outlines of the story.²⁵ Katherine apparently disagreed with Henry in some matter of religion, and the conservatives seized upon her foolish forthrightness to persuade the King to approve articles of heresy against his wife. Katherine, on being informed of the matter, hastened to persuade Henry of her utter submission to his will and wisdom, and the irascible King turned his ire upon those who had encouraged him in his moves against Katherine. What had Katherine said to arouse Henry's suspicion in the first place? Foxe tells us that she attempted to persuade the King

that as he had … begun a good and godly work in banishing that monstrous idol of Rome, so he would thoroughly perfect and finish the same, cleansing and purging his church of England from the dregs thereof, wherein as yet remained great superstition.²⁶

Henry had had enough experience in his long reign to have developed a sixth sense for recognizing people who were attempting to thwart his will and to persuade him to a course of action which he did not wish to adopt as his own. He may well have sensed in Katherine's disagreement not only an unwomanly independence of mind, but also a concerted plot to introduce reforms which conflicted with his own conservative theological convictions or with his sense of proper timing. Not unlikely he was right. The reforming party, perhaps even Cranmer himself, may well have deliberately tried to influence national policy through the wifely persuasiveness of Katherine Parr. McConica surmises from Foxe's account that the undated incident took place in 1546.²⁷ In the first month of that year Cranmer had almost persuaded Henry to abolish bell ringing on the eve of All Saints', the Lenten veiling of crosses and images, and the Good Friday devotion of ‘creeping to the cross.’ Gardiner had forestalled these reforms on the grounds that they would complicate diplomatic relations with France.²⁸ Just possibly the reformers were renewing efforts to win Henry's support for such measures. Whatever the specific issues may have been, and whether or not Katherine had consciously supported a concerted plan to influence Henry, she seems to have come to hope that Henry might introduce some further measures of reform in the English church. Henry trusted Katherine's judgment and ability, for he had made her regent in 1544 when he was away in France for three months. This was an honor of trust that she, among Henry's wives, shared only with Katherine of Aragon. She came close to losing the King's confidence when she attempted to press the King too far on religious matters. Henry appreciated an intelligent wife just so long as her judgment agreed with his.

If the ambiguous word ‘protestant’ may be applied to anyone who wanted some reforms in the national Catholicism of Henry's last years, then Agnes Strickland justly described Katherine as ‘the first Protestant Queen of England’ in spite of Anne Boleyn's possible claim to the title.²⁹ But such a description must be seen in its proper context. An English ‘protestant’ in 1546 might bear little resemblance to a Continental Lutheran or Calvinist. In the last six months of Katherine's life, she probably received holy communion in the two species of bread and wine and heard the English devotions of the ‘Order of Communion’ which the Privy Council inserted into the Latin mass. This was the ‘first-fruits of godliness’ about which Coverdale wrote Calvin on his return trip to England.³⁰ Since 1544 she had heard the authorized vernacular Litany of Cranmer with its minimal emphasis on the traditional invocation of the saints. Otherwise, for all her lengthy Lenten sermons, Katherine heard the Latin mass to the very end of her life. Obedience to the King's constituted authority was a major theme of most Renaissance intellectuals in England, and Katherine's loyal conformity to the Latin liturgies may be presumed.

Fortunately we need not guess at Katherine's religion solely by the company she kept and by the second-hand reports of her contemporaries, for her two published devotional works provide a more accurate guide to her religious convictions. One, a collection of prayers, is entitled:

Prayers or Meditacions, wherein the minde is styred pacientlye to suffer all afflictions here to set at nought the vayne prosperitye of thys worlde, and alwaye to longe for the everlasting felicitie: collected out of certayne holye workes by the moste vertuous and gracious Princes Catherine Quene of Englande, France and Irelande.³¹

The collection became exceedingly popular. After the first two editions appeared in 1545, six more were printed before the end of Edward's reign.³² An edition even came out in 1556 in the midst of Mary's restored Roman Catholicism.³³ At the beginning of Elizabeth's reign an edition was published, and five more editions of the prayers bound with the ‘King's Psalms’ were issued in the subsequent fifty years.³⁴

The contents of the book could not offend Roman Catholic, Lutheran, or Calvinist. The prayers are not related to any liturgical observances but comprise a collection of purely private devotions. As the title suggests, the major theme is the traditional goal of Christian asceticism:

Graunte me above all thynges that I may rest in thee, and finally quiet and pacify me heart in the.

(Aiij-Aiv)

O lorde god, whiche arte swetnesse inspeakeable, turne into bitternesse to me all worldly and fleshely delytes, whyche mought drawe me from the love of eternal thinges, to the love of shorte and vyle pleasures.

(Cij)

Teache me Lorde to fulfille thy will, to live mekelye, and worthelye before thee, for thou arte all my wisdom and conning, thou arte he that knowest mee as I am.

(Fiv)

Send forthe the hot flowe of thy love to burne and consume the cloudy fantasies of my mynde. Gather, O Lorde, my wittes and the powers of my soule togither in the and make mee to dispise all worldly thinges and by thy grace strongely to resist and overcome al mocions and occasions of sin.

(Ei)

The reforming convictions of Katherine do not intrude except in the quite unexceptionable scriptural phrases worked into many prayers and the omission of any hint of invocation of saints which might otherwise be appropriate to a book of this character. There are no prayers for the departed, but the collection contains only a few intercessory prayers of any kind, and these seem to have been added at the end by the printer. The admission of the penitent that ‘I am a wretche and of my self always redy and prone to euyll’ expresses a sentiment as appropriate to medieval as to reformation devotion (Di). The petition for Jesus to make possible by grace what is impossible by nature is as congenial to Thomism as it is to Calvinism (Avij). The division of human virtues into ‘naturall’ and ‘supernaturall’ follows scholastic terminology (Bvij). The word ‘gospel’ is not used in its ordinary reformation sense which referred to the divine promises but simply to designate the Biblical books (Eij).

The concentration of the prayers upon Jesus reflects the devotion of St. Bernard of Clairvaux:

O Lorde Jesu most lovynge spouse who shall geve me wynges of perfect love, that I may flie up from these worldelye miseries, and rest in thee.

(Biiij)

There is an occasional Franciscan-like emphasis on Jesus' example:

For though this lyfe bee tedious, and as an hevy burden for my soule: yet nevertheles through thy grace, and by example of thee, it is now made muche more easye and comfortable than it was before thy incarnation and passion. Thy holye life is oure waye to thee, and by folowyng of thee, wee walke to thee that art oure head and saviour.

(Avi-vij)

For all its scriptural phrases and its concentration on the central redeeming work of God in Jesus Christ, the collection is so free of references to any contemporary doctrinal dispute that Christians of almost any variety might find its prayers appropriate for their own use.

Queen Katherine's other book was much more contemporaneous and controversial:

The Lamentacion of a synner, made by the moste vertuous Lady quene Catherine; bewailyng the ignoraunce of her blind life: set foorth and put in print at the instant desire of the right gracious lady Caterine duchesse of Suffolke, and the ernest request of the right honourable Lord William Parre, Marquesse of Northampton.³⁵

Katherine wrote the book during her marriage to Henry, but she did not publish it until November 1547. William Cecil, just beginning his long service in the government, wrote a preface which drew the approbation of Roger Ascham.³⁶ A second edition was published four months after the first, and a third followed early in Elizabeth's reign.³⁷

In the Lamentation, Katherine unequivocally identified herself with the followers of the ‘New Learning.’ In a variation of the classic religious ‘confession,’ she bewailed not only such sins as pride, love of riches and honor, and hardheartedness to the poor, but also the ignorance, the superstition, and the neglect of holy scriptures which had characterized her earlier years (Aij-iij and Aviij). She wrote that she had sought God's forgiveness not in the ways ‘appoynted by his Worde,’ but rather

I sought for suche … as the bishop of Rome hath planted in his tyranny and kingdom, trusting with great confidence by the vertue and holynes of them, to receyve full remission of my sinnes.

(Av)

It is impossible to know exactly what papal enormities Katherine had trusted, but we would probably not go far wrong to understand such devotions as Cranmer included in his Homily of Good Works which was published in this same year: ‘pilgrimages unto images, … kneeling, kissing, and censing of them,’ and also

other kinds of papistical superstitions and abuses; as of beads, of lady psalters, and rosaries, of fifteen Oos, of St. Barnard's verses, of St. Agathe's letters, of purgatory, of masses satisfactory, of stations and jubilees, of feigned relics, of hallowed beads, bells, bread, water, palms, candles, fire, and such other; of superstitious fastings, of fraternities, of pardons, with such like merchandise, which were so esteemed … that they were made most high and most holy things, whereby to attain to the eternal life, or remission of sin.³⁸

These are all peripheral to the main themes of the Continental reformation, and, except for the mention of ‘purgatory,’ they represent devotional practices which could be as easily derided and scorned by a satirical Erasmus as by a Luther or a Calvin.

Katherine repented her worship of ‘visible idoles and ymages made of mennes handes,’ but she did not become so engrossed in condemning outward superstition that she forgot the subtler idolatry of worldly goods and of ‘self’ (Aiiij). Implicitly rejecting the cults of the saints, she wrote that she had ‘no hope nor confidence in any creature, neyther in heaven, in earth, but in Christ my whole and only Sauiour’ (Bi; see also Biij).

In good Henrician fashion, Katherine compared the pope to the Pharaoh of Old Testament times and described him as the ‘head spring of all pryde, vainglorie, ambicion, hipocrisie, and fained holiness’ (Gij and Ei). She lauded King Henry as a Moses who had not only led England out of the ‘captivetie and bondage’ of Rome, but had also brought many Englishmen ‘to the knowledge of the truthe by the light of gods worde whiche was so long hidd and kept under’ (Ei). The comparison of Henry to Moses was not so ludicrous to sixteenth-century Englishmen as it seems to us today. Coverdale in the preface to his English Bible of 1535 had similarly acclaimed Henry ‘for being our Moses, and for bringing us out of this old Egypt from the cruel hands of our spiritual Pharao.’³⁹ Since, however, Coverdale's publication of scriptures at that time still contravened the royal will, the translator had made no reference to ‘Moses’ leading his people to ‘the light of Gods worde.’ Archbishop Cranmer exercised a little more restraint when he compared Henry not to Moses but to Josiah, the prototype of the reforming monarch.⁴⁰

Whether Katherine so wrote of her husband out of honest conviction or out of courtly tact, she reminds us not to underestimate the effects of Henry's authorization of the vernacular Bible. Throughout the treatise she repeatedly stresses the centrality of holy scriptures in the life of Christian devotion, and she vehemently refutes those who claimed that it was perilous to allow the people to have the Bible lest they fall into heresy (Fviij). In this stress, she was again at one with both Erasmian reformers and Continental Protestants.

Katherine left the Erasmians when she assigned a primary place to faith in the justification of men. She explained the role of faith and its relation to works in a remarkably balanced and perceptive passage:

This dignitie of fayth is no derogation to good woorkes, for out of this fayth springeth al good workes. Yet we may not impute to the worthynes of fayth or workes, our justification before God: but ascribe and geve the worthines of it, wholly to the merites of Christes passion, and referre and attribute the knowledge and perceivyng thereof only to fayth, whose very true only propertie is to take, apprehend and hold fast the promises of Gods mercy, the which maketh us righteous: and to cause me continually to hope for the same mercy, and in love, to worke all maner of wayes allowed in Scripture that I may be thankefull for the same.

(Bv)

The Queen declared that, for herself, only the apprehension of God's forgiving love in Christ had brought charity to her own heart (Bvij).

The Lamentation was not a call for further reform. It was the witness of one lay Christian, convinced that she had awakened to an understanding of the profundity of her religion within the life of the Henrician church. Katherine called on her readers not to reshape the church but to reconstitute their lives on the foundation of trust in God's love in Christ.

Katherine accepted the church as she knew it. She recognized that she had initially professed Christ at her baptism in infancy (Avij). In enumerating various vocations in the church, she set ‘ministers of God's word’ alongside married men, a division which implied a celebate clergy (Gvi-vij). She called upon her readers to ‘behold Christ crucified in spirite,’ and yet when she urged the value of ‘lokyng into the spiritual boke of the crucifix,’ she showed that she did not disdain the use of the traditional physical image in order to evoke the inner meditation (Dvi; see also Ciij-iv).

Katherine was not uncritical of some members of the reforming party; she wrote that some ‘professours of the Gospel’

make not Christ their chiefest foundation, professyng his doctrine of a sincere, pure, and zelous mynde, but either for because they would be called gospellers to procure some credits, and good opinions of the true and very favourers of Christes doctrine, either to finde out some carnal libertie either to be contencious disputers, fynders, or rebukers of some other mennes faultes, or els finally to please and flatter the worlde: suche gospellers are an offence and a slaunder to the worde of God.

(Fv-vi)

In a characteristic Erasmian call for ecclesiastical peace, Katherine expressed her impatience with theological bickering:

It is muche to be lamented the scismes, varieties, contencions and disputacions that have ben and are in the world about Christen religion, and no agrement nor concord of the same emong the learned men.

(Eij)

Katherine's two books reveal a woman of intelligent and discerning piety. She stood with the reformers, and yet just as she herself conformed to the traditional rites, she expected others to find their faith in the context of the Henrician church. Undoubtedly she would have wanted changes, and probably she welcomed those that came in Edward's first years, but she was willing to wait until national and ecclesiastical leaders deemed the time right to introduce them. She had not become so enamoured of reformation doctrine that she lost sight of the Erasmian ideal of peace, unity, and understanding in Christian society. The religion of Katherine Parr provides a clue to the surprising stability and continuity of English religion through the hectic changes of the sixteenth century. Both by her influence in the choice of tutors for her stepchildren and by her own example, Katherine played some part in imparting the traditions of Renaissance Christianity to England. The acceptance of reformation doctrine, a distaste for theological bickering, and the whole-hearted acceptance of conformity in the furtherance of peace and unity all became cornerstones of the religious policy which Elizabeth adopted when she became Queen. We can never expect to know to what extent Katherine Parr, who shared these convictions, instilled them in Elizabeth's mind and heart, but the similarities seem more than fortuitous. This Renaissance Queen, the surviving wife of Henry VIII, was a minor figure in the turmoil of religion in the sixteenth century, but she was a figure whose integrity and influence merit the serious notice of the student of Tudor England.

Notes

1. English Humanists and Reformation Politics under Henry VIII and Edward VI (Oxford, 1965).

2. For a description of the education of Katherine of Aragon, see Garrett Mattingly, Catherine of Aragon (New York, 1960), pp. 7-11. Although sixteenth-century usage was indifferent to the spelling of the name Katherine with a ‘C’ or a ‘K,’ I have used the ‘K’ consistently for the name since this seems to be the form preferred by Katherine Parr.

3. Mr. Secretary Cecil and Queen Elizabeth (London, 1955), p. 40.

4. English Humanists, p. 216.

5. Documents relating to the incident are found in Samuel Haynes, A Collection of State Papers … left by Lord Burghley (London, 1740), pp. 82-109.

6. Patrick Fraser Tytler, England under the Reigns of Edward VI and Mary (London, 1839), I, 70.

7. This translation was published in April 1548 under the title A Godly Medytacyon of the Christen Soule (STC No. 17320); its editor John Bale gave the book a far more distinctly Protestant flavor in his introduction and concluding words. In Frederick Chamberlin's erratically unreliable, but occasionally useful volume, The Private Character of Queen Elizabeth (London, 1922), the complications of Elizabeth's MS copy and its dedicatory epistle are neatly untangled (pp. 288-290).

8. Agnes Strickland describes the volume in The Life of Queen Elizabeth (Everyman ed., London, 1906), p. 15. Once again Frederick Chamberlain traces the confusion of the MS with a fictitious Italian notebook (Private Character, p. 287).

9. The Whole Works of Roger Ascham, ed. J. A. Giles (London, 1864-65), I, pt. I, lvi and 160; Lawrence V. Ryan, Roger Ascham (Stanford, 1963), p. 103.

10. Edward Cardwell, Documentary Annals of the Reformed Church of England (Oxford, 1839), I, 9; 13; 181; and 186; The First Tome or Volume of the Paraphrases of Erasmus upon the Newe Testamente, ed. Nicholas Udall (Edward Whitchurche, London, January 31, 1548; STC No. 2854); Katherine's patronage and the work of the translators is described in the section ‘To the Reader’ and in the dedicatory prefaces to Mark, Luke, and John.

11. The Second Tome … (Edward Whitchurche, London, August 16, 1549).

12. Agnes Strickland, Lives of the Queens of England from the Norman Conquest (London, 1864, rev. ed.), II, 413; see also H. F. M. Prescott, Mary Tudor (New York, 1962), pp. 98-99.

13. The Acts and Monuments of John Foxe, ed. Stephen Reed Cattley (London, 1839), 8 vols., V, 553-554.

14. English Humanists, p. 215.

15. Catherine, Duchess of Suffolk, A Portrait (London, 1962), p. 60.

16. Strickland, Queens, II, 461; The Zurich Letters, ed. Hastings Robinson, 2 vols. (Cambridge, 1842-43), I, 257, Parkhurst to Bullinger, August 10, 1571.

17. DNB, see under John Parkhurst.

18. Remains of Miles Coverdale, ed. George Pearson (Cambridge, 1846), p. 526, Coverdale to Calvin, March 26, 1548; according to Strickland, Coverdale was identified as almoner in an account of Katherine's funeral from a MS in the College of Arms, London, entitled ‘A Book of Buryalls of Trew Noble Persons,’ No. 1-15, pp. 98-99 (Queens, II, 462-463).

19. Allen G. Chester, Hugh Latimer, Apostle to the English (Philadelphia, 1954), p. 156; Harold S. Darby, Hugh Latimer (London, 1953), passim.

20. Sermons of Hugh Latimer, ed. George Elwes Corrie (Cambridge, 1844), p. 228, April 19, 1549.

21. For the relationship of Latimer to the Duchess of Suffolk, see Read, Catherine, pp. 53-57, and Chester, Latimer, pp. 185-187.

22. Foxe, Acts and Monuments, v, 553-554.

23. See note 18.

24. Foxe, Acts and Monuments, v, 553-560.

25. William Haller, Foxe's Book of Martyrs and the Elect Nation (London, 1963), p. 117.

26. Acts and Monuments, v, 554.

27. English Humanists, p. 224.

28. Miscellaneous Writings and Letters of Thomas Cranmer, ed. John Edmund Cox (Cambridge, 1846), pp. 414-415, Cranmer to Paget, January 20, minute prepared for Henry to send to Cranmer, and Cranmer to Henry, January 24, 1546; notes from Foxe.

29. Queens, II, 390.

30. Remains, pp. 525-526, March 26, 1548.

31. This is the form of the title in the 1546 edition to which subsequent folio numbers refer (STC No. 4820; University Microfilms No. 876); abbreviations and contractions have been expanded and modern typographical conventions followed.

32. STC Nos. 4818-24, 4824a.

33. STC No. 4825.

34. STC Nos. 4826 and 3009-13; of these various editions, I have examined microfilm prints of STC Nos. 4819-20, and 4822-24 (University Microfilms Nos. 875-879).

35. This title is taken from the second edition printed on March 28, 1548, by Edward Whitchurche (STC No. 4828; University Microfilms No. 881); all subsequent citations refer to this edition. The first edition of November 5, 1547, has a similar title page, varying only in spelling and arrangement (STC No. 4827 and University Microfilms No. 880).

36. Ascham, Works, 1, pt. 1, li and 157-158, Ascham to Cecil, January 5, 1548.

37. The third edition was printed by J. Alde in 1563 (STC No. 4829).

38. Cranmer, Miscellaneous Writings, pp. 147-148.

39. Remains, p. 11.

40. Miscellaneous Writings, p. 127, speech at Edward's coronation.