One episode of Katherine Parr’s life that almost never fails to be mentioned is the battle between her and Anne Stanhope, Duchess of Somerset, for precedence following Katherine’s remarriage to Thomas Seymour. Thomas was the younger brother of Edward Seymour, Duke of Somerset, Lord Protector to Edward VI. As generally reported, the Duchess of Somerset, indignant that she should have to give way to the wife of her husband’s younger brother, fumed, “If master admiral [Thomas Seymour] teach his wife no better manners, I am she that will,” and even physically forced the queen out of her appointed place.
But is there less to this dispute than meets the eye?
First, Anne never uttered the comment attributed to her. Rather, she is reported by Peter Heylyn, writing in the seventeenth century, as merely having thought it. The passage from Heylyn gets rather extravagant–so much so that it is worth quoting in full:
Thomas Lord Seimour, being a man of lofty aims and aspiring thoughts, had married Queen Katharine Parr, the relict of the King deceased; who, looking on him as the brother of the Lord Protector, and being looked on as Queen dowager in the eye of the court, did not conceive that any lady could be so forgetful of her former dignity as to contend about the place. But therein she found herself deceived; for the Protector’s wife, a woman of most infinite pride, and of a nature so imperious as to know no rule but her own will, would needs conceive herself to be the better woman of the two. For if the one were widow to the King deceased, the other thought herself to stand on the higher ground, in having all advantages of power above her:
“For what,” said she within herself [emphasis added], “am not I wife to the Protector, who is King in power, though not in title; a Duke in order and degree; Lord Treasurer, and Earl Marshal, and what else he pleaseth; and one who hath ennobled his highest honours by his late great victory? And did not Henry marry Katharine Parr in his doting days; when he had brought himself to such a condition by his lusts and cruelty that no lady who stood upon her honour would adventure on him? Do not all knees bow before me, and all tongues celebrate my praises, and all hands pay the tribute of obedience to me, and all eyes look upon me as the first in state; through whose hand the principal offices in the court, and chief preferments in the Church, are observed to pass? Have I so long commanded him who commands two kingdoms? And shall I now give place to her who, in her former best estate, was but Latimer’s widow, and is now fain to cast herself for support and countenance into the despised bed of a younger brother? If Mr Admiral teach his wife no better manners, I am she that will; and will choose rather to remove them both,—(whether out of the court or out of the world, shall be no great matter)—than be out-shined in my own sphere, and trampled on within the verge of my jurisdiction.”
Unless we are to suppose that Peter Heylyn had the gift of reading the mind of a woman who had been dead for many decades when he wrote, we must put down his account of Anne’s thoughts to imaginative reconstruction.
The companion story of Anne’s forcing the queen aside comes from a very dubious source: the Chronicle of King Henry VIII of England, or the so-called Spanish Chronicle, which also gives us the story of Katherine Howard’s unlikely scaffold declaration that she would rather die the wife of Thomas Culpepper. (Among other choice errors, it has Henry VIII marrying Anne of Cleves after the execution of Katherine Howard.) The queen/duchess feud is reported thusly:
Hardly a year had passed after the marriage of the Queen with the Admiral before there was great jealousy between the Queen and the Protector’s wife, who seeing that the Queen was the wife of the younger brother, resolved not to pay the usual honours to her. When the Queen saw it she was much annoyed, and said to her husband the Admiral, “How is this, that through my marriage with you the wife of your brother is treating me with contempt and presumes to go before me? I will never allow it, for I am Queen, and shall be called so all my life, and I promise you if she does again what she did yesterday I will pull her back myself.” The Admiral was greatly grieved at this, first that his brother should not treat the Queen with more respect, and next because he did not wish these two to be on bad terms; so he spoke to the Duke about it; but as he (the Duke) was more ruled by his wife’s desires than anything else, instead of trying to pacify the Admiral, said, “Brother, are you not my younger brother, and am I not Protector, and do you not know that your wife, before she married the King, was of lower rank than my wife? I desire, therefore, since the Queen is your wife that mine should go before her.”
Here the Protector showed his great arrogance; and it is thought when he got the Queen to marry his brother it was principally to exalt his own wife over her, as he was Protector. The Admiral was very sorry at what his brother said, and he replied, “My brother, I am sorry there should be any anger between them, but I can tell you that the Queen is determined not to allow it, so do not blame me for it.” And no more passed.
The next day, at the time when they usually went to the chapel of the palace to hear matins, the Protector’s wife came and thrust herself forward, and sat in the Queen’s place; and as soon as the Queen saw it, she could not bear it, and took hold of her arm, and said, “I deserve this for degrading myself from a Queen to marry an Admiral.”
This is entertaining indeed, but unlikely. For one thing, the passage follows a chapter in which a match-making Protector arranges the marriage between Thomas Seymour and the queen himself–when Katherine Parr’s and Thomas Seymour’s letters to each other, and Edward VI’s journal, make it clear that the Protector opposed the marriage. For another thing, assuming that Katherine Parr’s marriage took place in May or June 1547, “hardly a year” after the marriage brings us to the spring of 1548, when Katherine Parr was not at court jostling with the Duchess of Somerset, but at her own manors, and later Sudeley Castle, preparing for the birth of her first child (born on August 30, 1548). In fact, the Duchess of Somerset was also pregnant in the spring of 1548, giving birth in July. It’s hard to believe that the fine sight of two heavily pregnant great ladies jockeying for position would have gone unnoticed at court.
Other accounts of the alleged battle for precedence are more prosaic, but also problematic. Nicholas Sander in the Rise and Growth of the Anglican Schism, published in 1585, whose anti-Protestant bias is quite apparent, writes,
The protector, the duke of Somerset, had a brother, Thomas Seymour, admiral of the fleet, who had married Catherine Parr, the last wife of Henry VIII., after the king’s death. Between her and the wife of the protector there sprung a quarrel about precedence, and the quarrel was not confined to the wives, it passed on to the husbands. And as the rivalry grew from day to day, and as the protector’s wife gave her husband no rest, matters came at last to this: the protector, who, though he ruled the king, was yet ruled by his wife, must put his brother to death, that he might satisfy his ambition without let or hindrance. But as Thomas Seymour was innocent of everything for which he deserved to die, except heresy, and as the protector, himself a heretic, could not lay that to his brother’s charge, it was necessary to have recourse to falsehood.
John Clapham, writing about Elizabeth I in 1603, picked up the theme of the battle for precedence, but I have not seen his work. The story, however, is presented in full bloom by John Haywood in The Life and Raigne of King Edward the Sixth, published in 1630, three years after the death of its author. Heywood, it is safe to say, had issues with women:
O wiues! The most sweete poison, the most desired evill in the world. . . . [T]here is no malice to the malice of a woman, so no mischiefe wanteth where a malitious woman beareth sway, a woman was first giuen to man for a comforter but not for a counsailor, much lesse a controler and directer.
For Hayward, all of the Duke of Somerset’s problems began at home, starting, of course, with the quarrel over precedence.
This woman [the duchess] did beare such invincible hate, first against the Queene Dowager for light causes and womens quarrels, especially for that she had precedency of place before her, being wife to the greatest Peere in the land, then to the Lord Sudley [Thomas Seymour]for her sake. That albeit the Queene Dowager dyed by childbirth, yet would not her malice either dye or decrease. . . . The Duke embracing this womans counsaile (a womans counsaile indeede and nothing the better) yeelded himselfe both to aduise and demuise for destruction of his brother.
John Foxe also noted a quarrel between the ladies, but did not assign a cause:
Now it happened (upon what occasion I know not), that there fell a displeasure betwixt the said queen and the duchess of Somerset, and thereupon also, in the behalf of their wives, displeasure and grudge began between the brethren; which, albeit, through persuasion of friends, it was for a time appeased between them, yet, in short space after (perchance not without the privy setting-forward of some, who were back friends to the gospel), it brake out again, both to the trouble of the realm, and especially between to the confusion of them both, as after it proved. First, to the lord admiral’s charge it was laid, that he purposed to destory the young king, and translate the crown unto himself; and for the same being attainted and condemned, he did suffer at Tower-hill the twentieth of March 1549. As many there were, who reported that the duchess of Somerset had wrought his death; so many more there were, who, misdoubting the long standing of the lord protector in his state and dignity, though and affirmed no less, but that the fall of the one brother, would be the ruin of the other; the experiment whereof, as it hath often been proved, so, in these also, eftsoons it ensued.
Now, there is no doubt that the Duchess of Somerset had a prickly personality, and also no doubt that Katherine Parr disliked her. In a letter to Thomas Seymour written early in the couple’s courtship, she wrote, “This is not his first promise I have received of [the Protector’s] coming, and yet unperformed. I think my lady hath taught him that lessson, for it is her custom to promise many comings to her friends and to perform none.” In another letter to Thomas Seymour, this one composed after the couple had married, the queen stated, “This shall be to advertise you, that my lord, your brother, hath this afternoon a little made me warm. It was fortunate we were so much distant, for I suppose else I should have bitten him. What cause have they to fear having such a wife? It is requisite for them continually to pray for a short dispatch of that hell.” In neither letter, however, does Katherine mention any quarrel about precedence; the cause of her anger in the second letter appears to have been the Protector’s handling of her dower lands. Katherine also was involved in a dispute with the Protector about his appropriation of the queen’s jewels; if some of these jewels had ended up gracing the person of the duchess, it’s easy to see how this would have angered the queen.
So what does that leave us with? As Retha Warnicke and Linda Porter both note, there is no contemporary evidence that the queen and the duchess battled for precedence; the source nearest in time, the Spanish Chronicle, is unreliable. The later sources each have the dispute about precedence leading to a feud between the Seymour brothers–but contemporary evidence of Seymour’s scheming against his brother, which led to Seymour’s execution in 1549, makes it clear that no help was needed from Anne Somerset. It seems most probable, then, that while the two women had no love for each other, their supposed battle over precedence was used by later writers to explain and oversimplify the much more deadly contest between the Seymour brothers.
Sources:
Stephen Reed Cattley, ed., The Acts and Monuments of John Foxe, Vol. VI. London: Seeley and Burnside, 1838.
John Hayward, The Life and Raigne of King Edward the Sixth, ed. Barrett Beer. Kent State University Press, 1993.
Peter Heylyn, Ecclesia restaurata: The History of the Reformation of the Church of England. Vol. I. James Craigie Robertson, ed. Cambridge University Press, 1849.
Martin A. Sharp Hume, ed., Chronicle of King Henry VIII of England. London: George Bell and Sons, 1889.
Susan James, Kateryn Parr: The Making of a Queen. Aldershot: Ashgate, 1999.
John G. Nichols, “Anne, Duchess of Somerset.” Gentleman’s Magazine, vol. 177, 1845.
Linda Porter, Katherine the Queen: The Remarkable Life of Katherine Parr. London: Macmillan, 2010.
Nicolas Sander, Rise and Growth of the Anglican Schism. David Lewis, trans. London: Burns and Oates, 1877.
Retha M. Warnicke, “Inventing the Wicked Women of Tudor England: Alice More, Anne Boleyn, and Anne Stanhope.” Quidditas: Journal of the Rocky Mountain Medieval and Renaissance Association, 1999.
Susan, you are in grave danger of making Ye Olde Tudor Tymes interesting… I must beg to you stop!
No! I will not stop until you are Tudorized!
Yet another historical myth elegantly demolished!
Anne Stanhope is usually portrayed as a shrew in historical fiction. And her husband is often seen as 'hen-pecked'. There must have been some sort of quarrel between Katherine Parr and Anne Stanhope, whether it was over precedence or jewels, I guess we'll never know. Practically everything Nicholas Sander says is a load of rubbish anyway. These myths/intrpretations are so often accepted as just fact.
Susan, I very much appreciated reading this blog since I just started reading Legacy by SK and I just past that episode of presidency between both women.
~Bella
Thanks, Kathryn! It's amazing how many reputable historians quote the "I will teach her better manners" thought as if the duchess actually said it!
Anerje, how true! Contemporaries do describe him as being very much under the influence of his wife, but I suspect it was more of a matter of compatibility than his being henpecked. He himself had a very sharp tongue in his own right–Paget once took him to task for having reduced one of his councilors to tears.
Bella, thanks! I have Legacy in my TBR pile–I think I had better finish my own Tudor novel before I get to it!
Interesting post!
I came across the palaver about the queen’s jewels in my MA research on Mary Tudor (who the duchess had a very good relationship with – amusing given their religious differences!). The tiff between the Seymour brothers regarding the items was still evident after Katherine Parr’s death. Thomas Seymour continued to petition for his late wife’s belongings, even resorting to asking Mary for her assistance. He apparently believed Mary could back up his claim that Henry VIII intended Katherine to have them (along with other items), for he wrote to Mary vouching such sentiments and to write ‘a brief note in 3 or 4 lines of her own knowledge’ to the Lord Protector. This must have put Mary in a difficult situation for she was good friends with the Lord Protector and the duchess (best seen in her letter to the duchess around this time in the BL).
I think it likely that the duchess, like a lot of contemporaries (including to some extent Mary) disapproved of Katherine’s actions. Katherine was certainly a figure respected by many but she had married Seymour very quickly after Henry VIII died. Fortunately for Katherine, her young stepson, the new king Edward VI, supported her and his uncle. But others regarded their marriage as distasteful, and I think the duchess can be included amongst them.
Thanks, Little Miss Sunnydale! I wonder if Anne voiced her disapproval to Katherine, and that contributed to the friction between them?
While we're on the subject of Mary, the Duchess of Somerset isn't listed by name as being present at her coronation-eve procession (unless there's a reference that I've missed). Assuming that I haven't missed something, do you know of any reason she might have been left out? Or is it more likely that no one bothered to write down her name, or that she simply missed the procession for unknown personal reasons?
(Can't post my comment in one go – I ramble on too much! – so I'll post in two messages.)
I think it unlikely that there was a face to face argument, but I suspect the duchess made her disapproval known somehow. She would not have been the only one; Mary was also not thrilled about Katherine’s hasty remarriage so quickly after her father’s death.
Have you read Jennifer Loach’s study on Edward VI? She pointed out that one the charges used against the Lord Protector at his trial was that ‘he hath robbed and embesselled from the kinges majestie the tresure and Jewells left by his majesties father’ (BL Add. MS 48136, f. 2). In other words he took various jewels that were the rightful property of Edward VI, and it is implied that he wore them during his time governing the realm. Despite his position, this was unacceptable. If we accept this charge as true (and the Lord Protector’s arrogance and love of finery is well supported in my opinion), then did he perhaps encourage his wife to act in a similar fashion? To dress as a suitable consort for the man who held the power of the monarch? That’s not to say the duchess was an unwilling party. Clearly she realised the advantages that came with being the Lord Protector’s wife (including helping individuals – even Mary petitioned her). So maybe she truly believed that she deserved these items?
“While we're on the subject of Mary, the Duchess of Somerset isn't listed by name as being present at her coronation-eve procession (unless there's a reference that I've missed). Assuming that I haven't missed something, do you know of any reason she might have been left out? Or is it more likely that no one bothered to write down her name, or that she simply missed the procession for unknown personal reasons?”
I had a check with the few sources I have on hand and I also cannot spot her name. But some of the sources are very vague about who attended. Robert Wingfield’s Vita Mariae, states:
‘There was also a flock of peeresses, gentlewomen and ladies-in-waiting, never before seen in such numbers, who accompanied their queen in all her glory in the ancient fashion at the splendid palace of Westminster’. (McCulloch eds, pp. 275-6.)
Nichols’s Chronicle of Queen Jane is equally unclear (names several of the male peers, but little detail on the women).
Did the duchess perhaps attend and her name was omitted? The marchioness of Exeter definitely accompanied Mary, but she is not mention in either source.
If the duchess was not there, then why? Mary had released her from the Tower and provided some financial assistance later on. Clearly she remembered the duchess’s ‘earneste gentylnes towards me’ (TNA SP 10/1, f. 122). The duchess had also helped out some former members of Katherine of Aragon’s household, which she was once part of, which Mary was very grateful for. But the duchess had still been a prominent patron of religious reform during Edward’s reign. It is even possible that she amassed a great library of ‘heretical’ religious works (John Strype mentions that the duchess acquired most of Martin Bucer’s books after his death. There is some ambiguity about which duchess he was referring to. Some, including Warnicke, argue it is the duchess of Somerset, others say it is Katherine Brandon, duchess of Suffolk. Both are likely. Even if it wasn’t the duchess of Somerset, it is still is undeniable that she had excellent connections with various reformists and had numerous works dedicated to her). Mary of course was highly critical of the Edwardian Reformation. In fact, she regarded the majority of the reforms as sacrilegious, and was very angry about the attempts to make her, and her household, conform. This did not completely destroy Mary’s relationship with Anne; had this been the case, Mary would never have freed her and shown her various acts of kindness. She still sends the duchess sumptuous items for New Year including a smock wrought all over in 1557 (and the fact that Mary does not send items of clothing to everyone is telling I think). But I suspect the duchess’s decision to lead a more retired life during Mary’s reign was a decision agreeable to both. Mary could certainly be a benevolent individual, but her generosity had its limits. She was fond of the duchess and very mindful of their history. But the duchess’s committed stance of religion was an ‘embarrassing’ issue, so they stuck to the usual pleasantries and never enjoyed such a close relationship.
btw (final post I promise!) – have you read A. Audrey Locke’s The Seymour Family (London, 1911)? It mentions a pretty heated letter Katherine allegedly wrote about the duchess. Unfortunately it gives no reference aside from saying it is in the collection at Sudeley Castle compiled by Mrs Dent in Annuals of Winchcombe and Sudeley. In it Katherine states that it is the duchess’s ‘coustome to promys many comynges to her frendes and to performme none’. Would love to know if the letter is genuine and where it is now!
Thanks for your comments, LMS! Susan James in her book Kateryn Parr includes the letter in her appendix of the letters exchanged between Parr and Thomas Seymour; she lists the source as being the Dent-Brocklehurst MS, Sudeley Castle. I can't tell whether James has seen the letter in person or not.
There's a list in John G. Nichols, "Anne, Duchess of Somerset." Gentleman's Magazine, vol. 177, 1845, of the jewels the Duchess of Somerset had at her death. Judging from the huge collection there, I think she would have been more than happy to bedeck herself with the crown jewels if she could come up with any excuse to do so.