Chapter 38 #2
Parr preferred the company of children. Children were curious and clever and surprising, and Elizabeth was no exception.
Already, Parr had grown fond of the girl who liked to read books half her size and sneak off to the stables to see the barn cats who patrolled the rafters.
Elizabeth was starting to look rather like her mother, with mischievous gray eyes and that interesting, though not classic, Boleyn-Howard beauty.
Only her red-gold hair gave her away as a Tudor.
Edward was there too, a toddler just stepping into boyhood who was doing his best to stand still in his dress clothes.
He was a sweet, serious child from what Parr had observed, and certainly enjoyed being doted upon by his father and older sisters.
This was good, for he would forever be the youngest and final child of Henry VIII.
There would be no wedding night copulating tonight, thanks to a sleeping draft Parr would slip Henry shortly before they retired.
If that didn’t work, she had another herb that made it impossible for men to get an erection—it had been oft used during her first two marriages.
Even without her preventive measures, Parr doubted Henry would be up to the task.
He was dressed richly in a silk shirt, a scarlet doublet, and black hose, but it all did little to hide that he was very unwell.
He looked like a man cursed: his skin pale and clammy, his legs swollen into tree trunks, and his mouth screwed up in a smiling grimace that belied his pain.
Parr supposed he was cursed, for Anne had told her so and who was she to doubt a witch?
“My lady love,” Henry said when she reached him by the window. “What a joy it is to be with you today.”
Parr smiled, though she wondered if Henry had said this to his other five wives when they stood at the altar. She thought it likely.
The priest began reading the traditional words, stumbling only once he got to Parr’s name.
“Do you, Lady Catherine Parr…Burgh…Latimer…” He trailed off when Henry shot him a look sharp enough to cut stone, and Parr made a mental note to watch for Henry’s temper.
“Do you, Lady Catherine, promise to be good and faithful to His Majesty the King, to love and support him, in sickness and in health, so long as you both shall live?”
“I do,” Parr replied. By now, she was very good at lying.
Soon, rings were exchanged, followed by another of the possessive, sloppy kisses Parr had come to expect from her new husband. How Lina and Anne had stood it for so many years, Parr would never know.
It was only after the feasting was over, the proclamations had gone out, and Henry was asleep on the other side of her bed that Catherine Parr—poisoner and killer and child of the forest—paused to think it was rather strange that she was now a queen.
Parr quickly learned that the English populace cared little about the women who sat at Henry’s side.
Their king had taught them that queens were replaceable, so as she and Henry toured England on progress, everyone was perfectly polite to her, but they kept their distance.
Parr remembered how the groundskeepers at Kendal Castle had told her not to get attached to the piglets born each spring, for most of them would be killed for meat by winter.
That was how Parr felt the world viewed her, like a creature raised for slaughter.
But that impermanence was balanced by pity, for who could not feel sorry for the young widow?
With the courting period over, Parr learned that Henry had been on his best behavior up until then.
He argued with everyone he met, be they dukes or priests or scholars, and bullied them into agreements or concessions they shouldn’t have made.
He was sullen when he didn’t get his way and made up for it with lavish feasts and expensive purchases.
He expected to be adored everywhere he went and would succumb to fits of fury if he felt someone had slighted him. [*2]
Henry’s latest fixation was on invading first Scotland, then France.
During their progress, he ranted on and on about how their neighbor to the north was too weak to function on its own and needed to be brought under English rule for its own good, though Parr knew Henry was just humiliated that King James of Scotland, his own nephew, had refused to break with Rome when England did.
And despite two previous (and failed, and expensive) wars with France, Henry seemed bent on breaking the peace treaty made nearly twenty years earlier simply to prove to King Francois who had the bigger codpiece.
The king was making all of his ministers nervous about war when he should have been enjoying his sixth honeymoon, often leaving poor, newlywed Parr alone for days at a time.
Parr took advantage of the pity afforded to her, making the world believe she was the best stepmother who had ever lived and breathed.
She invited Mary on progress with them, wrote daily letters home to Elizabeth and Edward, and made sure she publicly requested little gifts and trinkets for the children every chance she got.
By the end of August, every soul in court—Henry included—would have sworn up and down that the new queen was the most devoted guardian they’d ever seen.