Catherine Parr

1512 – 1548 · Generation XXII

Catherine Parr (1512–1548). Married Henry VIII Tudor in 1543. Outlived Henry; the most-married English queen — four husbands in all. The eldest child of Sir Thomas Parr of Kendal and Maud Green, she was twice widowed — first by Sir Edward Burgh, then by John Neville, Lord Latimer, whom she had watched rebels drag from their home during the rising of 1536. Henry noticed her in Lady Mary’s household in 1543, and she set aside a courtship with Thomas Seymour to marry the king. She grew close to his children, helped secure his daughters’ return to the succession that year, and ruled as regent during his French campaign of 1544. With Prayers or Meditations in 1545 she became the first English queen to publish an original book under her own name, and her Protestant leanings nearly brought her arrest in 1546. Soon after Henry’s death she secretly married Seymour, and she died at Sudeley Castle in 1548, days after bearing her only child, Mary.

Partners

Married King Henry VIII (1491 – 1547) in 1543

Life

1512 — Born
1543 — Married Henry VIII Tudor
1548 — Died