Catherine Parr

The last of Henry VIII's six wives, Catherine Parr was already twice widowed when she married the king. Born in 1512 to Sir Thomas Parr of Kendal and Maud Green, who had served Catherine of Aragon, she received an unusually good education for a gentlewoman of her time. Her first husband, Sir Edward Burgh, died in 1533; her second, John Neville, Lord Latimer, a northern peer, died early in 1543. By then she had attracted the attention both of Thomas Seymour, brother of the late Queen Jane, and of the king himself.

She married Henry on 12 July 1543 at Hampton Court. As queen she proved capable and steady. When Henry campaigned in France in 1544 he appointed her regent, and she governed in his absence for several months — a mark of trust he had previously extended only to Catherine of Aragon. She took an active interest in her stepchildren, drawing Mary, Elizabeth, and Edward into closer contact with the court, and her influence is associated with the period in which the king's daughters were restored to the line of succession by statute.

Catherine held reformist religious sympathies and was a writer of substance. Her Prayers or Meditations of 1545 made her the first queen of England to publish a book in English under her own name; The Lamentation of a Sinner, more openly evangelical, followed in 1547. In 1546 religious conservatives at court moved against her, and according to a near-contemporary account she narrowly averted arrest by a tactful submission to the king. She survived Henry, who died in January 1547.

Within months of the king's death she secretly married Thomas Seymour, now Lord Seymour of Sudeley, uniting her again with the family of Jane Seymour. Her household at this time included the young Elizabeth and Lady Jane Grey. At Sudeley Castle in Gloucestershire she gave birth to a daughter, Mary, on 30 August 1548, and died of puerperal fever on 5 September. She was buried in the chapel at Sudeley, the only English queen with four husbands to her name.