• General Notes

  Catherine Parr (c.1512 – 7 September 1548), also spelled Katharine, was the Queen Consort of Henry VIII of England 1543 - 1547; the last wife of his six. She has a special place in history as the most married queen of England, having had four husbands in all.
  
  Catherine was born about 1512, either in Great Kimble, Buckinghamshire, or Blackfriars, London. She was the daughter of Sir Thomas Parr of Kendal Westmorland and his wife, Maud Green. Her father died when she was five. There is a belief in Kendal that Catherine was born in Kendal Castle itself.
  She had two siblings. Her brother was William Parr, 1st Marquess of Northampton. Her sister was Anne Parr, wife of William Herbert, 1st Earl of Pembroke.
  Their paternal grandparents were Sir William Parr of Kendal and Elizabeth Fitzhugh. Elizabeth was a daughter of Henry FitzHugh, 6th Lord FitzHugh and Alice Neville. Alice was in turn a daughter of Richard Neville, 5th Earl of Salisbury and Alice Montagu, Countess of Salisbury.
  
  At the age of about 15, she married Edward, Lord Borough, who died in 1529.
  Some time between 1530 and 1533, she married John Neville, Lord Latimer, who died in 1542. After his death, the rich widow began a relationship with Thomas Seymour, the brother of the late queen Jane Seymour, but the king took a liking to her, and she was obliged to accept his proposal instead. She had drawn the king's attention partly by interceding with him to stop her brother William from asking to have his adulterous wife executed.
  
  The marriage took place on 12 July 1543, at Hampton Court Palace. As Queen, Catherine was partially responsible for reconciling Henry to his daughters from his first two marriages, who would later become Mary I of England and Elizabeth I of England. She also developed a good relationship with Prince Edward.
  
  Her religious views were complex, and the issue is clouded by the lack of evidence. Although she must have been brought up as a Roman Catholic, given her birth long before the Protestant Reformation, she later became sympathetic and interested in the "New Faith".
  We can be sure that she held some strong reformed ideas after Henry's death, when the Lamentacions of a Sinner were published in late 1547. However, her work on commissioning the translation of Erasmus' Paraphrases shows her more as a MacConica-style Erasmian Pietist.
  She was reformist enough to be viewed with suspicion by Catholic and anti-Protestant officials such as Bishop Stephen Gardiner and Chancellor Thomas Wriothesley, 1st Earl of Southampton who tried to turn the king against her in 1546. An arrest warrant was drawn up for her, but she managed to reconcile with the king after promising to stop arguing about religion with him.
  It has been suggested that her strength of character and noted dignity, as well as her later religious convictions, greatly influenced her stepdaughter, Elizabeth I of England.
  
  Following Henry's death on 28 January 1547, Catherine was able to marry her old love, Thomas Seymour (now Baron Seymour of Sudeley and Lord High Admiral), but her happiness was short-lived. She had a rivalry with Anne Stanhope the wife of her husband's brother. Then, Thomas Seymour was alleged to have taken liberties with the teenaged Princess Elizabeth, who was living in their household, and he reputedly intrigued to marry his wife's stepdaughter.
  Having had no children from her first three marriages, Catherine became pregnant for the first time, by Seymour, in her mid-thirties, and died from complications of childbirth on 7 September 1548, at Sudeley Castle in Gloucestershire, where she was buried.
  Her only child, a daughter, Mary, born August 30, did not long survive her. Her father, Thomas Seymour, was executed before she was 1 year old, and she was taken to live with the duchess of Suffolk who operated an orphanage. After this nothing is known about her, so it is assumed by most historians that she died in childhood.
  (From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia)

Details of Catherine's family with *John Neville