A Seventh Wife for Henry VIII?
Henry VIII may have been angry with Catherine Parr. However, there is no real evidence that he intended to replace her with Katherine Willoughby. Aside from the fact that Gardiner’s investigations would have implicated the King’s friend as well as his wife, Henry made it all too easy for Catherine Parr to wriggle free of the heresy situation. And that was unusual, for when Henry decided to rid himself of a wife, he was inexorable. Instead, Catherine was somehow warned about the King’s intentions. When she next attended upon the King, Henry brought the conversation around to religion in an unusual and contrived way.
Forewarned, Catherine demurely stated she would not presume to instruct the King in religion and in that matter as in all others; she would defer to him. She then went on to explain that she had only argued with him previously, to “profit from his learned discourse,” – and take his mind off his leg! “And is it, even so, sweetheart? And tended your arguments no worse end?” asked Henry. Catherine assured him it was so. “Then perfect friends we are now again,” promised her husband. Henry had what he wanted- deferral and a retraction. He merely wanted to put her in her place. If he had wanted her gone, he would not even have spoken to her.
Indeed, by the time Charles Brandon died, and Katherine Willoughby was free, in August 1546 this royal drama had played itself out, and Henry and Catherine reconciled. The royal couple even took themselves off on a second honeymoon that autumn. This sequence of events makes no sense if Henry really wanted to marry the Duchess of Suffolk. If he wanted to contrive charges against Catherine it would have made more sense to do this after Charles Brandon was dead- and he had no way of knowing when that would be.
In fact, Henry’s own death probably preoccupied him more than the possibility of another wife. By the latter half of 1546, Henry weighed close to 400 pounds. He could barely walk due to his leg ulcer, and muscle weakness and his eyesight was going. He was aware his end was drawing near. All that mattered now was to put his affairs in order. Just before Christmas 1546, he parted from Catherine for the last time. He died on January 28, 1547.
The rumors that formed the basis of Van der Delft’s letter were nothing more than that. Indeed, what people were basing their assumptions on something that had existed for years between Henry and Katherine Willoughby. Perhaps at some point, they had been lovers. They may have simply have only been friends. However, that aside, as well as Katherine’s unavailability and Henry’s satisfactory marriage to Catherine Parr, if Henry had seriously intended to his queen with her lady in waiting, it is unlikely the two women would have remained friends. Which they did . For it was Katherine Willoughby who eventually took in Catherine Parr’s daughter by Thomas Seymour after the couple’s deaths.
Where do we get our stuff? Here are our sources:
A Seventh Wife for Henry VIII?, David Baldwin, History Extra/BBC History Magazine, March 2014
Katherine Willoughby, Duchess of Suffolk, Sarah Bryson, The Tudor Society, 2016
Catherine Parr in Danger, Elizabeth Norton, The Anne Boleyn Files, June 8, 2010