I will raise my stepchildren in the reformed faith, and I will pray to God in English. I will see Thomas Seymour walk across the room and kiss my hand without being fearful that someone notices the gladness in my face and the desire in his eyes. I will kiss his smiling mouth, I will lie in his bed. I will live like a passionate intelligent woman and I will bring my passion and my intelligence to everything that I do.

I believe that to be a free woman is to be both passionate and intelligent; and I am a free woman at last.

AUTHOR’S NOTE

It is extraordinary to me that Kateryn the Quene KP (as she signed herself) is not better known. As the last of Henry’s queens she survived a wife killer who saw four of her five predecessors into the grave, which must make her one of the most tenacious survivor wives in history. She faced and defeated a series of plots from supporters of the papist side of the English Church who were determined to restore their faith to England, she raised the king’s two younger children in the Protestant faith that would be the core of their own reigns, and yet she befriended the king’s papist oldest daughter, Lady Mary, and supported her return to royal status. She served the country as regent—the most important person in England—and kept the peace in the absence of the king.

In many ways one can see her similarities to the other wives: she was made regent like the Spanish royal, Katherine of Aragon, she was English born and bred like Katherine Howard, an educated and highly intelligent reformer in religion like Anne Boleyn, and—as a northerner—an outsider like Anne of Cleves. She raised Jane Seymour’s son and loved her brother; perhaps if Jane had lived, she would have been Jane’s sister-in-law.

But the most interesting thing about her was her scholarship. We don’t know the extent of her education when she first came to Henry’s court as the young widow of the northern Lord Latimer. It is likely that she had studied Latin and French with her brother’s tutor but probably her lessons finished when he left home. So when she came to a court which was alive with debate about the Bible: English or Latin, about the Mass: bread or flesh, about the church: reformist or papist, she set about educating herself.