Free Katherine the Queen: The Remarkable Life of Katherine Parr by Linda Porter

But Borough was implacable. Elizabeth was thrown out and her children declared illegitimate.
    Katherine evidently managed the irascible Thomas Borough more successfully. What he thought of her upbringing and scholastic attainments we do not know. Perhaps she did not parade them too openly, but there is no reason to assume that her father-in-law did not value learning as such. Indeed, he was himself interested in the new religious ideas and kept a reforming chaplain in his household. He did not want his children to question him, but on spiritual matters he had a much more open mind. And he was also sufficiently proud of his wife, and sensitive to the power of the court and its connexions, to arrange for her to be painted by Hans Holbein. He became Anne Boleyn’s chamberlain after Katherine had left his care, and a dedicated supporter of the Royal Supremacy and the suppression of the Pilgrimage of Grace of 1536. His household when Katherine lived there must have been an uneasy place, but it was by no means sterile.
    She did not live under his roof for long, and the fact that she escaped it at all, without recriminations, says much for her powers of persuasion. It also suggests that Thomas Borough could be flexible when he chose. About two years after their marriage, Katherine and her husband were permitted to set up their own household at Kirton-in-Lindsey, a dozen miles from Gainsborough. Perhaps Thomas Borough felt that it was appropriate for his eldest son and heir to live independently by then. If so, he must have had considerable confidence in Katherine as well. No doubt he hoped they would produce children to carry on the Borough name, but none appeared. If Katherine was ever pregnant by Edward Borough (and it is possible that she was expecting a child when the idea of a separate household was raised), then clearly none survived to full term, or certainly past early infancy. The historical record is completely silent on this point, and though her immediate family must have known, they never seem to have spoken of it and neither did Katherine herself.The indirect evidence is contradictory but what can be said is that her subsequent husbands all seem to have believed that she could bear children. Whether this was based on optimism as opposed to her past history we cannot know, but it is, of course, indisputable that almost two decades after she and Edward Borough were married, she bore a healthy child.
    It was not birth, but death that coloured Katherine’s life over the next few years. At the end of 1531, Maud Parr died in London. She was laid to rest beside the husband whose interests she had so ably supported all her adult life. She was only thirty-nine and her passing was a great sadness for her children. In her will she left Katherine Borough, her eldest child, seventeen different items of jewellery, including ‘a ring with a great pointed diamond set with black enamel’, a ‘pair of bracelets, chain fashion, with two jacinths [garnets] in them’ and a ‘tablet with pictures of the king and queen’. 9 At the time of her death Maud, like everyone else, must have known that the marriage of Henry VIII and Katherine of Aragon was probably beyond repair. The king was already four years into the process of seeking a divorce. But King Henry and Katherine of Aragon had been the most important people in her life after her husband and children, and the portrait of them was very dear to her. She wanted her own Katherine to have it. Typical of the kind of woman she was, Maud also left monies for the founding of schools and the marrying of maidens, the latter bequest intended to help the less fortunate members of her wider family.
    Scarcely before she had accustomed herself to life without her mother’s guiding hand, Katherine also lost her husband. Edward had begun to establish a local role for himself at Kirton-in-Lindsey, serving as a justice of the peace, but by the early spring of 1533 he was dead. Katherine, at the