Queen, religious writer, patron of artists and printers, musician
Katherine Parr, sixth queen of HenryVIII, was born in 1512, probably in August and probably in London. Named after Catherine of Aragon, her likely godmother, she had a close bond with her independent, widowed mother, Maud, a former devoted lady-in-waiting to Catherine. Parr received an education possibly based on the program laid out by Thomas More for his own children. She married four times, beginning in 1529 when she was a teen. Her husbands included Edward Borough, who was in his early twenties and died in 1533; John Neville, Lord Latimer, in 1534, aged forty (d. 1543); Henry VIII in 1543, aged fifty-two (d. 1547); and Thomas Seymour in 1547, aged about thirty-eight (d. 1549). When the king proposed marriage upon the death of her second husband, she could hardly refuse, although she was passionately in love with Thomas Seymour, brother of the former queen, Jane Seymour. She made her peace with the marriage by seeing it as the will of God.
Parr energetically exercised her fervent commitment to the new reformist religion. She supported projects such as the translation of Erasmus’s Paraphrases and was involved in the publication of the King’s Primer. She also participated in the founding of Trinity College, Cambridge, and at court influenced a number of women of the next generation who had outstanding intellectual accomplishments. She herself translated Bishop Fisher’s Psalms or Prayers (1544), which included one of her own
Katherine Parr, queen, religious writer, and patron of artists and printers. Painting by English School. National Portrait Gallery, London. (Corel)
Prayers. This was published many times after 1556 as The King’s Psalms and attributed to HenryVIII. Her Prayers and Meditations (1545) was a collection of devotional materials, which also included four of her own prayers. Her final work, The Lamentation of a Sinner, was probably written in the winter of 1546—1547 but was kept secret until after the king’s death and not published until 5 November 1547. This Lutheran work, with fragments of more radical thinking, revealed Parr’s own voice and showed the influence of Marguerite of Navarre’s The Mirror of the Sinful Soul. It may well have influenced the later lamentations by Isabella Whitney and Jane Grey. Parr was the first Englishwoman to publish in prose and the first queen of England to write and publish her own books and be acknowledged as an author during her lifetime.
Parr also was a significant patron of the arts in the budding English Renaissance. Her commissioning of an unusually large number of portraits of herself may have been a response to Henry’s making former queen Jane Seymour his wife in portraits of the royal family. Parr also supported printing and bookbinding and maintained a company of players. She loved music and dancing as well as luxurious fabrics, fashionable clothing, and uniquely designed jewelry. The evidence of her accomplishments and of her taste contradicts the popular view of her as a lackluster queen.
By accommodating the king’s need for sexual intimacy, nursing, and emotional support, Parr gained his trust. In 1544 she was named regent general while Henry was away and seems to have influenced his attempt to create a Protestant League in 1545. However, her success made her vulnerable to an attack by the conservative faction at court in 1546, which also encompassed the torture and execution for heresy of Anne Askew. Henry, having taken offense at what he came to consider Katherine’s lecturing him on religion and encouraged by Bishop Stephen Gardiner to doubt her orthodoxy, ordered her arrest. Thinking quickly, Parr saved herself and regained the king’s trust by reassuring and flattering him.
Parr also developed successful relationships with the king’s three children and reconciled the king with his daughters, Mary and Elizabeth, ensuring their places in the succession. When Henry died in January 1546, Katherine was surprised and angered not to have been given a place on the regency council for the minor Edward VI. And she soon risked the new king’s censure by marrying Thomas Seymour less than six months after Henry’s death. She seemed at first not to fear Seymour’s improper attention to the teenaged Princess Elizabeth, living with them in Chelsea. But by spring 1548, pregnant and cognizant of the danger Seymour’s attentions to the princess presented, she sent her away. Shortly after, Parr retired to Sudeley Castle in Gloucestershire and on 30 August 1548, gave birth to her only child, named after the Princess Mary. She died on 5 September of puerperal fever.
Martha Skeeters
See also Art and Women; Printers, the Book Trade, and Women; Religious Reform and Women.
Bibliography
Primary Work
Travitsky, Betty, Patrick Cullen, and Janel Mueller, eds. The Early Modern Englishwoman: A Facsimile Library of Essential Works, Printed Writings, 1500—1640, Katherine Parr. London: Scholars Press, 1996.
Secondary Works
Susan E. James. Kateryn Parr/The Making of a Queen. Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 1999.
Antonia Fraser. The Wives of Henry VIII. New York:Vintage Books, 1994.
Alison Weir, The Six Wives of Henry VIII. New York: Grove Press, 1991.
Patronage and Women. See Art and Women; Literary Culture and Women; Music and Women; Religious Reform and Women; Theater and Women Actors, Playwrights, and Patrons.
Pharmacology. See the subheading The Practice of Pharmacology and Laywomen (under Medicine and Women).
Philips, Katherine (1631-1664)
Public literary figure, poet, leader of a group who formed the nucleus of a women’s academy called the “Platonic Society of Friendship”
Daughter of a prosperous London cloth merchant, Katherine Fowler cultivated a love of literature and lasting friendships at a girls’ boarding school fTom 1640 until 1646, when her widowed mother’s third marriage took them to Wales. In 1648 Katherine married Colonel
James Philips, a kinsman of her stepfather and a moderate parliamentarian thirty-seven years her senior. Although raised and educated in Puritan circles, Philips espoused royalist sympathies as evidenced by the first poem in her published collections fTom about 1650, replying indignantly to a verse attacking the executed king, as if it were murdering him a second time. During the interregnum, Philips penned a considerable number of occasional poems commemorating marriages, deaths, and departures, which present an image of the poet diligently developing social, political, and literary connections. Although her elegies for her infant son and her stepdaughter betray deep maternal affection, her emotional focus seems to have been on her female friends with whom she established an ideal “society of friendship” (as she called it) by assigning literary nicknames, notably to her friends Mary Aubrey (“Rosania”) and Anne Owen, who came from an influential Welsh family (“Lucasia”), and to herself (“Orinda”). Some of these passionate poems to Rosania and Lucasia evidence a poetic debt to John Donne’s love poetry in Philips’s use of extravagant metaphors, portraying love’s bodily transcendence as a pure mingling of souls. Raising her friendships metaphorically to the level of a religion and circulating her poetry widely, Philips posed a delicate challenge to seventeenth-century gender expectations. She was apparently successful in balancing her familial obligations and friendships, her political leanings and her husband’s parliamentarian involvement, and her social and literary ambitions.
With the restoration of the monarchy in 1660, Philips’s royalism came to aid her husband’s changed political and economic situation and allowed her to hazard public recognition as a writer. Encouraged by the noble friends of Anne Owen’s husband in Ireland, where she accompanied her after her marriage, Philips completed a translation of Pierre Corneille’s heroic play, Pompey, which was performed and published in Ireland and performed again in London in early 1663. Having become a public literary figure, Philips pined for the stimulating cultural life of London, though mindful of her duty to her husband in Wales. The unauthorized publication of her poetry in January 1664 threatened to upset the honorable role of private female poet she had negotiated, although several poems since 1660 and letters to Sir Charles Cotterell (“Po-liarchus”), who had become Charles Il’s master of ceremonies, actively court the favor of aristocratic contacts but with an exceedingly deferential voice. She asked Cotterell to present a copy of her play to Charles II, but without inscribing her name. Finally allowed a stay in London in the spring of 1664, she died there of smallpox in June. Bolstered by the publication of her poems in 1667, which identified her on the title page as “the matchless Orinda,” Philips’s reputation of a virtuous and brilliant poet inspired a generation of women poets, notably Anne Killigrew and Anne Finch. Her poetry also inspired male poets, including Abraham Cowley and Henry Vaughn, to write praise poems during her lifetime and such poets as John Dryden to honor her poetic accomplishment after her death.
Nancy Hayes
See also Literary Culture and Women;Theater and Women Actors, Playwrights, and Patrons.
Bibliography
Primary Work
Philips, Katherine Fowler. The Collected Works of Katherine Philips:The Matchless Orinda. 3 vols. Edited by Patrick Thomas. Stump Cross,
Essex, UK: Stump Cross Books, 1990.
Secondary Works
Barash, Carol. English Women’s Poetry, 1649—1714: Politics, Community, and Linguistic Authority. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996.
Williamson, Marilyn. Raising Their Voices: British Women Writers, 1650—1750. Detroit, MI:
Wayne State University Press, 1990.
World History
