A Tudor Contrafactum

In the May 2016 issue of Early Music, David Skinner presented a new discovery about a collaboration between Henry VIII's last wife, Katherine Parr and Thomas Tallis:

Thomas Tallis’s Gaude gloriosa Dei mater is one of the finest large-scale Tudor votive antiphons. It has long been regarded as a celebration of the short-lived return to Catholicism under Queen Mary and as a tribute to the Henrician masterpieces of the pre-Reformation years. All of the sources are Elizabethan, but one: the incomplete fragments of the Contratenor part with a hitherto unidentified English text, discovered in 1978 during building renovations at Corpus Christi College, Oxford. The author of that text has now been identified as Henry VIII’s sixth and last queen, Katherine Parr. Less than a year after her marriage to Henry, Katherine produced her first publication, Psalmes or Prayers (1544). These included 15 psalm-collages (or psalm ‘centos’) translated into English from Fisher’s Psalmi seu precationes , originally published in 1525. Katherine’s translations are followed by a prayer for the king, and another ‘for men to saie entryng into battaile’. England was at war with Scotland and France. The Ninth Psalm, ‘Se lorde and behold’, headed ‘against ennemies’ was set to an earlier version of Tallis’s Gaude gloriosa. This discovery sheds light on the circumstances behind the production of this most extraordinary English contrafactum. It is here argued that the adaptation was not only intimately bound with Psalmes or prayers but also with Cranmer’s Exhortation unto prayer and English Litany, and part of a flurry of activity leading to its first use at St Paul’s Cathedral on Friday, 23 May. It would have been a unique and short-lived event quite new to the liturgical stage including as its centrepiece an English version with stirring themes of war of the most complex early Tudor votive antiphons. More personally, the exercise seems aptly to demonstrate Katherine’s passion for reform and Henry’s growing conservatism in the final years of his reign: an elaborate meld of a hotly topical vernacular text with an established stylistic idiom. The earlier Henrician origins of Gaude gloriosa are also considered.

Here is a performance of Tallis's Gaude gloriosa dei mater. More about that piece here.

It is extraordinary, however, that Parr would translate the work of a traitor against her husband--a little like having a portrait of his first wife around--except that Parr did use the saintly bishop's works in a definitely reformist way. David Skinner and Alamire will perform the piece on Good Friday as part of the Holy Week Festival at St. John Smith's and Obsidian will release a CD by Alamire and Fretwork later this year.

Katherine Parr, RIP

Henry VIII's sixth wife and surviving widow, Catherine Parr, died on September 5, 1548. One of her biographers, Linda Porter, discusses the relationship between the monarch and his last wife for History Today:

It was noted that “the king espoused the queen privately and without ceremony”. The bridegroom was, however, enthusiastic as he took his vows “with a joyful countenance”. Henry was 52 years old and ailing. His new wife, Katherine Parr, was not quite 31, twice-widowed and an experienced stepmother. Surely this was a marriage born of common sense, where passion would play little part? The Victorians depicted it as the union of an irascible tyrant with a worthy matron. The truth, however, was very different.

Henry was looking for a wife, not a nurse or homemaker. He wanted a companion for his bed who might provide further heirs and could carry the role of queen consort impressively. Katherine, who had given up another man to marry the king, was well aware that her duties would definitely run to more than polite conversation and soothing the royal brow. Her determination to be a success led to a deep bond of affection between the royal couple which may, in 1546, have saved her life.

It is not surprising that Henry was drawn to the comely widow. She was a slim, attractive redhead whose unimpeachable reputation hid a sensual nature. Her other suitor, Sir Thomas Seymour (the king’s brother-in-law), had already realised this and probably Henry did, too.

Until now, the curtains around the marriage bed of Henry VIII and his last wife have remained firmly closed. Yet theirs was undoubtedly a sexual relationship. Katherine took seriously her vows to be “bonaire and buxom in bed and in board”. She took milk baths to keep her skin soft and the day after her wedding, she ordered “fine perfumes” for her bedchamber at Hampton Court. She was clearly determined to make her body and her bedchamber as enticing as possible.

Henry lumbering into view in his nightshirt must have been a daunting sight. A year before his final marriage it had been noted that he was “already very stout and daily growing heavier… three of the biggest men to be found could get inside his doublet”. Pain and the disease in his legs had left their mark on him. Between 1543 and 1545 he got through 300 pairs of hose a year. This was the man that Katherine had taken as her third husband. Very soon he doted on her – but could she possibly have loved him?

At the outset, almost certainly not. She married him for the advancement of her family and because he could not be refused. She was dutiful and keen to convince herself that her fate was God’s will. Yet Katherine was also a loving and optimistic woman, as well as intelligent. She knew the opportunity that had come her way and thought hard about how to turn it to her advantage.

Developing a good relationship with all three of the royal children was certainly important but at the heart of Katherine’s strategy was the king himself. Henry was not simply an overweight monster but a lonely and unhappy man after the disaster of his marriage to the foolish Katherine Howard. Katherine Parr recognised his need for love and attention. Circumstances permitted her to establish herself swiftly as a major influence in his life, as the plague kept them continuously outside the capital and in each other’s company for six months. It was an ideal foundation for their relationship. So the king showered her with jewels and beautiful clothes, entrusted the country to her regency while he fought the French one last time in 1544, and greatly hoped for children with her.

Porter might be ascribing a thought and decision-making process that we can't verify, but it does comport with Katherine's actions in reaching out to Mary and Elizabeth and mothering Edward.

Henry and Katherine shared many interests, from hunting and archery to music, masques and books. She was a graceful dancer and they both loved the Venetian Bassano brothers, musicians patronised by Katherine. Henry, a cultured man, was delighted to have a queen who commanded respect from ambassadors and with whom he could discourse. Both husband and wife were committed to the 16th-century belief in lifelong learning. Katherine brushed up her Latin and also began to edit and write religious books, as her commitment to advancing the cause of further reform grew. In 1545 she became the first queen of England to be published when copies of her Prayers or Meditations were produced by the king’s printers. Her influence over Henry seemed unshakeable.

Porter then goes on to describe the crisis in this marriage and its source: religious controversy in England between Catholics and Evangelicals. Read the rest there.

It seems that William P. Haugaard's 1969 article in the Renaissance Quarterly published by the University of Chicago Press, "Katherine Parr: The Religious Convictions of a Renaissance Queen" is one of the main resources for our understanding of Parr's religious beliefs and influences. I do find it fascinating that Katherine Parr's first published translation in 1544--while Henry was in France and she was Regent--was of Bishop John Fisher's Psalmi seu Precationes when Henry VIII had beheaded the holy bishop just nine years earlier. While Haugaard does not mention Fisher as the original author of the Psalms or Prayers in Latin, he does note that the private, devotional nature of the work meant it would not offend a Catholic, Lutheran, or Calvinist, and that it was popular, being reprinted during the reigns of Edward VI, Mary I, and Elizabeth I! The University of Chicago Press published Katherine Parr: Complete Works and Correspondence, edited by Janel Mueller in 2011, which includes the Psalms or Prayers and The Lamentation of a Sinner, Parr's more obviously Protestant work.

Katherine Parr, married four times and widowed three, died after bearing her first and only child, Mary. Linda Porter discussed the fate of that orphaned baby (after Parr's fourth husband, Thomas Seymour died) also in the virtual pages of History Today.

Katherine Parr's Only Baby, Another Tudor Mystery

Linda Porter wrote about Katherine Parr's baby girl, named Mary after Henry VIII's eldest daughter, for History Today in 2011. Mary's mother, died in childbed and then her father was beheaded " for treason on March 17th, 1549, leaving Lady Mary an orphan at the age of seven months." Sadly, Mary did not find a very loving guardian, even though the person selected shared her mother's religious views:

Thomas did not appoint any of his own or Katherine’s relatives as guardian to his daughter. He could scarcely have handed her to the brother who signed his death warrant and no one else among the extended Parr or Seymour families seems to have taken much interest in the child. Like most of his former ‘friends’, they were all trying to put as much distance between themselves and Thomas Seymour as possible. Instead, Katherine Brandon, Duchess of Suffolk, a close friend of Katherine Parr and a lady of seemingly unimpeachable reforming religious ideas, was appointed as guardian. It was not a charge she accepted with enthusiasm.

Despite her strong religious views, the duchess’s bosom was not full of Christian charity. Lady Mary may have been a dispossessed orphan, but she was an expensive one. As a queen’s daughter, she came with a household of her own, consisting of a lady governess, rockers, laundresses and other servants. The government was supposed to provide for her upkeep and the payment of her staff but the duchess could not get Somerset to part with the money until she appealed to William Cecil, then a prominent member of the duke’s household, to intervene on her behalf. The letter she wrote makes it clear how much she resented ‘the queen’s child’, as she frostily referred to the little girl.

Katherine Brandon (pictured above), the widow of Charles Brandon, did get some money from the seized (attainted) estate of Thomas Seymour, but what happened to the little girl is still unclear, although there is a clue:

The answer to this compelling Tudor mystery seems to lie in a Latin book of poems and epitaphs written by John Parkhurst, Katherine Parr’s chaplain, who had previously served the Duke and Duchess of Suffolk. The discovery was made by the American academic, Janel Mueller, but has been overlooked by historians. I am grateful to Jean Bray, the archivist at Sudeley Castle, for drawing it to my attention. In Parkhurst’s Ludicra sive Epigrammata juvenilia, published in 1573, appears the following poem, which translated reads:

I whom at the cost
Of her own life
My queenly mother
Bore with the pangs of labour
Sleep under this marble
An unfit traveller.
If Death had given me to live longer
That virtue, that modesty, That obedience of my excellent Mother
That Heavenly courageous nature
Would have lived again in me.
Now, whoever
You are, fare thee well
Because I cannot speak any more, this stone
Is a memorial to my brief life

Though no name is given, this must surely be the epitaph that Parkhurst, who would have known Lady Mary Seymour, wrote on her death. It suggests, as has long been conjectured, that she died young, probably around the age of two. She may well be buried in Lincolnshire, near Grimsthorpe, the estate owned by the Duchess of Suffolk, where she had lived as an unwelcome burden for most of her short, sad life.

Perhaps the Princess Mary, for whom the little baby was named, would have been a better choice as guardian, if her Catholicism could have been overlooked. Reports are that she loved children, and might not have found little Mary "an unwelcome burden".

Queen Katherine Parr Quincentenary!

This summer Sudeley Castle will be the venue for celebrations of the 500th anniversary of the birth of Queen Katherine Parr, last and surviving wife of the notorious King Henry VIII. Beginning on 11th April 2012, the six month festival will bring to life the entwined history of the Castle and its most illustrious Tudor resident in a series of historical, literary and musical events.
The Festival’s patron is HRH the Duchess of Cornwall and the historical advisor is Dr David Starkey.

The Sudeley Castle website provides this context:

"Scandal, sadness, treason and tragedy"

Katherine Parr was Henry VIII’s last queen, lived at Sudeley and is buried in St Mary’s Church within the gardens. She is the only English Queen to be buried in a private residence.

This year is the 500th anniversary of Katherine Parr’s birth and we are celebrating the life of this extraordinary queen with a season-long festival of events. Highlights include talks from renowned historian Dr David Starkey, garden designer Sir Roddy Llewellyn, Michael Hirst –creator of the hit TV series the Tudors and author Alison Weir.

Katherine came to Sudeley for love and a future full of happiness with her first love, Thomas Seymour, after a lifetime of duty to the King. It was not to be. Within weeks of Henry’s death, she married Thomas Seymour - described by David Starkey as ‘The Stud of the Tudor times’ - in secret and she and her court move to his castle in Winchcombe. Katherine’s dream marriage began to quickly unravel. She had moved Princess Elizabeth (later Elizabeth 1) out of her household because of Seymour’s inappropriate advances to her. Katherine fell pregnant in 1548 and gave birth to a daughter, Mary, only to contract puerperal fever and die 3 days later at the age of 36.

The full story of scandal, sadness, treason and tragedy is told in a film presented by Dr. David Starkey, part of our new Katherine Parr exhibition. The festival culminates in the re-enactment of Katherine’s funeral service, the first Protestant funeral ever held. Dr Starkey will provide a live commentary to explain the significance of the ceremony.

"Katherine Parr was seen in the past as the most insignificant of Henry’s wives, the colourless one," says Dr. Starkey. "But as we learn more about her, that view is changing. She was a queen with a mission. She may well be one of the most important of Henry’s queens."

The Telegraph article linked above notes that Sudeley hopes to raise funds and Starkey hopes to change perceptions of Henry VIII's last queen:

This year, the quincentenary of the birth of Katherine Parr, Sudeley is hoping to make the most of its trump card. Her remains lie in a church in the grounds, the only private house in England to have buried a queen. On Sunday, it is reopening to the public with a new exhibition, which includes access to two of Katherine’s private rooms, her love letters, a tooth, a lock of hair, a painting from the National Portrait Gallery, two of her books (she was the first queen to be published under her own name), and a welcoming video by Dr David Starkey, the Tudor historian.
“It is a novel form of revenue-raising,” he jokes. “After 10 minutes of me, people will be thrusting soiled £10 notes into the hands of the guide to be let out.”
The reign of Henry VIII, he argues, “is the axis around which English history turns”, when the fortified garden of Shakespeare’s imagery became established and English became a major language. Euro-scepticism, he says, can be traced to the break with Rome.
And if that’s not enough, every event was “driven by the most obvious personal lusts and desires”. The Tudors, he argues, are the Greek myths of the English-speaking world. “The characters have what we would call star quality,” he says. “If history is what you remember, everyone remembers the Tudors.”
Of course, what most schoolchildren remember is the fact that Henry VIII divorced and beheaded so many wives. Katherine Parr, says Dr Starkey, is “traditionally seen as rather dull, as she survived – how very boring. But her story is actually a remarkable one.”