Her studies in Latin are demonstrated in the letters that she exchanged with her stepson, the little Prince of Wales. Her studies in theology underpin her publications. She was the first woman to publish original work under her own name in English—an extraordinary act, a breakthrough act. Earlier women writers had written in Middle English—more like Chaucer than the recognizable language of Shakespeare that Parr used. A very few published anonymously, mostly they made translations of men’s texts. No woman before Kateryn Parr had dared to write original material in English for publication and put her own name on the title page, as Parr did with her book of translated prayers and psalms. Her last work was not only translation, she wrote original material for The Lamentation of a Sinner.

Every one of her three books has survived and can be read in a new edition edited by Janel Mueller, listed in the following bibliography. We can even see original copies at Sudeley Castle in Gloucestershire. Down the centuries, remarkably, a woman of the 1500s still speaks to us.

Of course every historian must wish that Parr had chosen to write a chronicle of her times rather than prayers—think what that would have told us about the last days of the Henrician court! But for Parr as for other spiritual women, it may be that her relationship with God was more important to her than her life in this world.

That day-to-day life was filled with incident, danger, and adventure. We don’t know, even now, how close she was to the martyr Anne Askew. It looks as if Anne died to keep their connection secret. We know that Anne preached before the queen, and that they may have met when they were girls in Lincolnshire. We know that the queen used her influence to get Anne freed from her first arrest but could not liberate her a second time. We know that Nicholas Throckmorton from the queen’s rooms attended the burning and that someone paid for a purse of gunpowder so that Anne’s sufferings could be cut short. It looks very much as if the torture of Anne Askew was done to force her to name the queen as a coreligionist, a heretic, and a traitor, to expose her to arrest and death.

The plot against the queen, her quick-witted response, and her humiliation before the court is from the near-contemporary account of Foxe’s Book of Martyrs, and some of the dialogue is drawn from that account. But the private humiliation that I describe is fiction—we are rarely told what went on behind the closed bedroom doors of the past. I wanted to write a scene in which the legally permitted beating of a wife, and the symbolism of Henry’s codpiece, came together to show how men dominate women with their legal powers, with their violence, with their sexuality, and with the myth of their power, then—and now.