The Wife Who Survived Henry But Not Childbirth

Katherine Parr had survived being Henry VIII’s sixth wife, survived a plot to have her arrested for heresy that came within hours of success, survived Henry himself, and in the spring of 1547 she married the man she had actually wanted before Henry had intervened — Thomas Seymour — and at thirty-five she became pregnant for the first time in four marriages, and on 30 August 1548 she gave birth to a daughter at Sudeley Castle and appeared well, and three days later she became convinced she was dying and in her final hours accused Thomas Seymour of hastening her end, and on 5 September 1548 she died, and Seymour left Sudeley almost immediately, and she was buried within 48 hours in a funeral held in English — the first Protestant royal funeral in history — and the court in London likely did not know she was dead before she was already in the ground, and her daughter Mary was left an orphan when Seymour was beheaded for treason the following year, and historians ever since have debated whether Katherine Parr was poisoned by the man she gave up everything to marry.

Interesting Fact: When Katherine’s coffin was rediscovered at Sudeley in the 1700s it was opened multiple times over the following century by curious visitors and souvenir hunters. On one occasion a party of tourists cut locks of her hair and pieces of her funeral robes as keepsakes. When her body was examined in 1817 it was reportedly still perfectly preserved — her skin intact, her features recognisable — but within hours of exposure to the air the flesh collapsed entirely and disintegrated. She was reburied and her tomb sealed. Lady Jane Grey, then eleven years old and living in Katherine’s household, was her chief mourner at the funeral. Katherine was the only one of Henry’s six wives to outlive him. She was also the first English queen to be published under her own name. Her daughter Mary Seymour disappears entirely from historical records by 1550. No one knows what happened to her.

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